No Help Coming

Written by Sloan Baux

Edited by Kelsey Winsor

Cover by chrisfroot @chrisfrootart

This is a non-commercial fan work set in the world of League of Legends and Arcane, which are properties of Riot Games, Inc. I am not affiliated with or endorsed by Riot Games.

Honour. Duty. Justice.

For centuries, these were the principles by which Demacia stood.

But fear corrupts even the noblest ideals.

…

In this land, magic is as natural as the soil we walk on. But mages are not free.

In the kingdom of Demacia, Mageseekers hunt for those with magical abilities, locking them in the dark.

The Mageseeker: A League of Legends Story

 Demacia was not built on a dream.

Demacia was built on a lie.

All those noble ideals and promises of a brighter future, they were never meant for the likes of us. We have been stripped of our freedom, our dignity, our very lives.

I say no more! Mages of Demacia, the day has come! It’s time we fight back.

Sylas of Dregbourne

Magic is Rising: Stand With Sylas | League of Legends

To my brothers and sisters.

Prologue

“What do you see?”

The priestess’s question encroached upon his trance-lulled mind like the first wash of tide on dry, pebble-strewn shores. He opened his eyes. Before him, the full moon bloomed bright, enveloped by the congregation of a million stars—an undulating image adrift across the mirror face of the pools. Doubts threatened to rise, fashioned in his father’s old heeds, of a curse of ill-fate. A malediction that invisibly coaxed  his family onto a path of woes—its methods as unfathomable as inescapable—ailed his ancestors for as long as remembrance served them. He lied to himself insistently that the curse was just a story, that he never believed in it; still the thought of it brought unease. He quelled it under sharp focus.

A breeze swept down from the mountain with the scent of fresh snow and night, nudging the pools and scattering petals along their crystalline surfaces.

“What do you see?”

He saw nothing. The waters deigned not to show him anything but an inert reflection of a star-filled sky and his own dismayed visage, silhouetted under a corona of pale moonlight. He shook his head.

“I see … there’s …” He trailed off. Something stirred on the facsimile vista of the heavens, a soaring speck, a snowflake, perhaps. No, not a snowflake. Ash.

The bitter tang of smoke spiced the crisp air, and the image of the moon was no more. Whispers of the mountain winds ceased in an instant, rigid silence left in their wake as though he were underwater. He gasped but swallowed only choking heat, his pulse racing.

A carriage was on fire, belching surreal lavender flames and swathes of black smoke into the night sky. Drifting motes of soot clung to the air and caked the land in false snow. A woman writhed on her knees in the ashen mud, the snarled ruin of her golden hair stuck to her cheeks in bloodied clumps. He knew this woman. She held the body of a girl in her arms. The girl was unconscious. Her head sagged at an awkward angle, her hanging black tresses sweeping the befouled slush. The woman was screaming at someone, her mouth formed words of imploring with a horrific desperation that made him shiver, but no sound would pass from her reality into his. A shadow fell over her, then the silence was pierced by a single sharp, wet hiss, that of a blade when it slithers through flesh. Black warmth washed down the woman’s delicate neckline, vapour bleeding off into the cold.

He wanted to howl in rage, he wanted to turn away. Both appeared to be impossible.

The windows of the carriage multiplied. It was a large mansion on fire now. He knew the mansion too. Countless little hands pounded from the inside on the heat-hazed glass as they cooked alive. The inferno came to life around them and vomited a burst of sick laughter, gloating, revelling in the havoc it wrought. With it, the sensations came to an abrupt end, reality restored with the vehemence of an iron bolt hammered back in place.

He sprang to his feet and started towards the exit of the enclave.

“What did you see?”

“I have to go back. I have to go back to Demacia.” He tried to sweep past the priestess but she caught his wrist and pulled him to a halt. The force of his momentum jerked her back, making her countless moonstone jewels clack and tingle like a flurry of pebbles after a landslide.

“What did you see, boy?” she demanded.

He scowled at her but darted his eyes away almost at once, unable to bear her soul-permeating gaze, and fell silent. He inhaled to speak, yet his voice failed to put his experience into words. No wonder. After all, what he had seen was the tides of fate finally catching up to him, despite having spent his whole life running from them.

One

15 Years Ago

Demacia, Idryja County

Idryja was claimed by one of the hottest summers in memory. Soothing winds from the north petered out, unable to penetrate the barrier of the Ardent Mountains’ soaring ridges, and the small southern county was consigned to the unrelenting fervour of the sun. Ploughs turned up huge lumps of hard-packed earth in cloying banks of dust, wells ran dry, townsfolk sequestered indoors as they lost ground to the scorching sun. Despite the sweltering heat, Khyrr was shivering.

He retreated to his room on the second floor of the mansion’s western wing, tore open the scrupulously made bed cover, and hid under it, tucking himself in on all sides with pillows and feather-stuffed spumes of bedding. The shivers did not relent. Whatever he did, his body was unable to retain heat, only bled it with the futility of a hot ingot cast from a furnace. His breath was warm against his nostrils, and he swallowed bile rising in his throat. The sickness was temporary, he knew the symptoms of the elixir would ebb in due time, but that was not his only reason to worry.

Upon fleeing back to his room, he had foolishly left his door ajar and now sounds of bickering poured through the gap from the foyer downstairs. The raised voices made him quail. In truth, he didn’t understand the extent of the adults’ heated debate, and yet possessed of the keen emotional awareness of a child, his instincts granted him a measure of insight. Enough to know that the quarrel was all about the circumstances of his father’s passing. Khyrr had a creeping fear that one of those circumstances might have been him.

It was all so fresh, his grief hadn’t even had the chance to rise to the surface before it became buried beneath layers of guilt and shame.

The shouting grew unbearably loud. Khyrr whimpered and scrunched his eyes closed, shaking his head in a desperate struggle to fend off phantom images of faces warped in anger conjured unbidden by his addled mind. He felt as if they were already at his doorstep, their chastisement aimed directly at him. Still, he was too daunted by the task of resigning his stronghold of blankets and braving the distance to close his door. Instead, he plugged his fingers into his ears, which robbed him of any sound but the deep murmur of his bloodstream. This, however, did nothing to quiet his thoughts.

It was him who his father had shared his last living moments with that same morning. Dawn was still young, the air outside still mellow and tame, when Khyrr came upon his father’s bedroom door and sneaked in through the gloom. He found shelter in the parental bed occasionally, despite having been deemed too old for such infantile whims on the cusp of his tenth birthday. And though his brother’s playful mocking made him bashful about the habit, even that could not deter him from allowing himself this last childish indulgence before the onset of his manhood—or something worse—took it away irreversibly. That morning too, he sought to find escape from a particularly vivid nightmare, one he could recall nothing of save the taste of despair that remained in its wake.

The bedchamber welcomed him with a warm embrace of stale air, its opulently furnished facade rendered indistinct by the shadows. His father lay in his bed just the same as he had done for so many weeks since the affliction of the lungblaze had had him in its clutches. Daybreak gave his sunken features a bluish cast, making the shape of his skull even more apparent under a layer of parchment-thin skin. His overgrown beard and dishevelled hoary mane had a greasy sheen, bearing testimony to many nights spent in cough-choked, cold-sweated vigil. Now he seemed peaceful, for coughs did not suffocate him. In fact, his breathing was so shallow it was lost in the warble of birds greeting the first light. He smelled of unwashed skin, but Khyrr did not mind. He burrowed himself into the thick cloud of blankets beside him—the bed easily wide enough for the two of them—then lay on his side and pulled his legs up, knees to chin. Right away, the bitter aftertaste of his nightmare began to dissipate. His father’s proximity seemed to temper even his fever.

It was his mother’s side of the bed, the spot he occupied, he had been told on many occasions. Khyrr had known her only by old paintings of muted colours and by vaguely shared recollections; she had given life to him at the price of her own. Still, every time he lay there he imagined a tiny measure of her essence was still within reach.

On the night before, his father had summoned them, both him and his brother Tymotheus, to recite a story—one they’d heard a dozen times, about virtues, a dark past, and a curse of ill-fate—but the late hour had found Khyrr dulled and weak with his ailment. He just lay there, watching the washed-out shapes of old murals upon the ceiling through hooded eyes, letting the words of his father slip away into oblivion as sleep claimed him. When his brother took him back to his bed, he awoke but feigned sleep, content with being carried.

That morning he looked up to the murals again. Depicted was an enormous mountain, cloaked in fathomless violet night, its crown bathed in the silver glow of an upward curving sickle moon. The constellations themselves were made flesh, crawling out of the heavens to take shape as mythical creatures, chasing dragons along snow clad ridges.

This mountain was the old home, his father had told him. Targon. The cradle of their ancient faith at the very doorstep of the heavens themselves. Or at least it had been long ago, before their people had been forced to abandon its grounds, condemned as heretics by their own kin. Legends say many had stayed and hidden, making the dark recesses of Mount Targon their home, but Khyrr’s ancestors had chosen to escape the terrible wrath of zealous fanatics and looked for better, safer lands. Demacia became their new home, their stigma of heresy exchanged for one of estrangement, resorting to bury the very faith they sought to keep. Khyrr had heard that Demacians knew the mountain only as a place of exile and atonement, but his family had an entirely different outlook. It was a haven of worship and revelations. Their ancestral memories of the old home had endured the throes of time, and so his father indulged them with those memories, spun into tales where colossal hills and abyssal depths played host to the feuds of mighty gods and their disciples. Khyrr wished he’d paid attention last night, to hear one of those tales again.

His wish was granted in the form of a morning dream.

Just like the night before, he succumbed to sleep soothed by his father’s closeness, where nightmares assailed him no more, and he dreamt instead of a mountain landscape. Shooting stars streaked the indigo skies and a cool breeze ruffled his hair, soft as if fingers caressed him. His father was there with him, too. Unseen. Absent by any physical means but for his closeness in the air and the warmth of his reassuring smile that saturated the light enveloping Khyrr.

He awoke when the maid entered the bedchamber. She stood rooted at the doorstep, pale like a statue, holding swathes of fresh poultice that almost tumbled down from the silver tray she hadn’t been able to keep level with the floor. Khyrr peered at her through narrowed eyes. It took some time for the weight of slumber to melt from his thoughts. As he lay there he became aware of a lack of heat next to him.

A curious dread swelled in his throat, and he was suddenly wide awake. He slid out of the bed, helpless against the stab of shame he felt without understanding why he was feeling so, and scurried from the room. The maid regarded Khyrr with a haunted look and circled out of his way, keeping her distance from him like someone confronted with a loathsome vermin of poisonous bite. Khyrr dared make no attempt to look at his father as he fled.

The subsequent hours offered little solace. He skulked around the mansion, on tiptoes to endure the cutting cold of the marble floor, and trailed the dismayed adults who had woken to the terrible news. After some time, guests came to the house, but Khyrr had no chance to see who. Once he became too much of an encumbrance, the head of staff urged him to retire to his bedroom until the ordeal was sorted.

In his room and left without explanations, Khyrr was consigned to his own dark thoughts. Unintelligible rumbling filtered through the painful throbbing that filled his head with his fingers pressed into his ears, remnants of a faraway conversation that his mind couldn’t help but endow with meaning. The memory of rumours and suppositions hastily whispered across the old walls, aimed not at him but nevertheless overheard, came rushing back, ringing like shouted accusations: Poor lad, his horrific ailment now claims another life. Sorcerous whelp, as if sucking on his mother’s life wasn’t bad enough, now he taints his father.

A sensation of falling took over Khyrr and he failed to hold back a sob. Then he heard door hinges squeak. Khyrr swallowed against the lump in his throat. He uncorked his ears, relishing the hot pressure easing in them, and listened for the source of the sound. Someone was at his door, and they must have been opening it wider because the conversation downstairs became more discernible. It bore no semblance to his imagined upbraids, although it was still somewhat disconcerting. The first voice he recognised was of Master Kyberion. The ancient head of staff had a cadence tremulous with age, but his usual patronizing calm was nowhere to be found in his plaintive exclamations.

“Time is a luxury we do not have anymore! Our rivals have been gathering their strength ever since they caught a whiff of my lord Oltharion’s malady. This union cannot wait!”

“Beg your pardon, ser, but the girl is barely of age,” announced another voice with the bland tonelessness of a court solicitor. “As had Lady Keephart formerly said, tradition dictates ...” The man trailed off when a third voice—a woman’s—interrupted him, one Khyrr also knew but did not expect. He flinched with the surprise of recognition.

“I’m perfectly able to speak for myself, Lyonel!” The woman cleared her throat. She spoke with the stark majesty of a queen, her timbre deep and solemn. “Our families may not see eye to eye, but we’re under no illusion about our list of options. And, though reluctantly, I must agree with Ser Kyberion. The marriage must be arranged, the sooner the better.”

“There’s still the matter of the younger child,” probed the soulless solicitor again with a tint of disdain. “How do we know that it wasn’t his arcane touch that befouled the lord with its malignancy?”

“How dare you even suggest that! My brother is not some contagious beast.”

Khyrr shrunk at the furious retort by his own brother, then shrunk even more when he heard a rasping voice cutting him off.

“Your misgivings are ill-founded counsellor! The boy is perfectly safe in our care. Furthermore, our experiments on him provided essential …”

With a quiet click, the door closed, the voices of conversation locked away once more. Someone might have just checked on him, seen the bump under the bed cover, and closed the door. Or someone was in the room with him in silence. Khyrr listened, frozen, straining to make out if the sounds he heard were quiet steps sinking into the thick carpet, or just the warm winds fumbling with his curtains. He was sure he’d heard the lady Keephart outside. If they indeed had come, then that meant …

In a merciless flood of cold and blinding light, the bed cover was suddenly torn away from him. Khyrr cried and threw himself back, crawling away frantic from the unseen attacker until the bed ran out from under him. He found himself grasping for support in thin air and tumbled to the floor, while his assailant burst into jingling laughter. Simultaneously it gave her away, and Khyrr blushed with righteous pique, shamefully aware that he again had fallen prey to his brash friend’s vagaries.

“Khyrr Oltharion Volosh! You’re such a wuss!”

Khyrr clambered to his knees using the side of his bed as support and watched a figure rise into view on the other side. The girl was about his age and wore a sleeveless sea green kirtle of exquisite linen rich with embroidered trimmings, the padded shoulder line giving her a royal look that suited her not at all. Maids must have taken great pains to restrain her torrent of honey-brown tresses into a tight crown of braids, but all for nought, as it was already loosened and bleeding tangled curls. She wore a delicate smile in which concern warred with delight. The bed cover lay discarded next to her on the floor.

“Ria?” Khyrr blurted. “You’re here?”

“Yes.” The girl paused. Her expression darkened, leaving just the hint of her former smile. “We came as soon as we heard.”

Khyrr’s stomach shrunk at the notion, grief again swelling in his throat. He let out a sigh of understanding that was more of a tired grunt, and looked away. Before sadness swallowed him, Ria snapped.

“I think they’ll finally arrange the marriage!” she exclaimed with a burst of joy.

Khyrr humphed his assent. He climbed up to the bed, and with his bed cover cast aside, undid the bedding proper to wrap himself up in its sheets against his unrelenting shivers. He was still queasy and weak with fever, but having his friend around improved his mood considerably.

Ria—formally Demetria Keephart, the daughter of Adriana Keephart, whose voice Khyrr recognised a minute ago—was the younger sister of Lilyenne Keephart, whom his brother was supposed to wed. The union of their families had been in preparation for several months now. Formal dinners and courtly get-togethers provided occasions for his brother Tymotheus to court the older Keephart girl. Being the younger sibling, Khyrr found himself cast aside during these events, made to sit at the end of tables and wait in boring side rooms away from the affairs of the adults. In this, Demetria had shared his fate and so their entanglement came naturally. Their friendship, after it bloomed, was fed by every mischief and occasional squabble they shared.

“Protector’s grace! You had it repaired?” Demetria galloped over to his bedside table and lifted a toy crossbow with solemn reverence. The mock weapon was only half the size of the real thing and held little strength, but was strong enough for a close shot to leave behind a bruise. She stuck her tongue out in fleeting effort as she pulled back and latched the string bare-handed. Three wooden bolts with blunt tips of sand-filled leather bundles lay beside it, which she quickly gathered, fixing one on the weapon’s bolt groove.

“Yes, Tymotheus fixed it for me.”

Khyrr didn’t own many toys anymore, his tutors having decided that at his age his attention was better employed browsing books and attending lectures on history, law and heraldry. What little he had in his possession, however, were almost all martial in nature—wooden swords, shields, makeshift army tabards and battle standards, all tucked under his bed. Of those, the toy crossbow was the most valued piece of his collection. Until Demetria had broken it. On the head of a noble boy, of all places.

Demetria brought the butt of the crossbow up into her shoulder pocket, levelled the weapon at the door, aiming one-eyed, and swept it around the room in a half circle like she was trailing an unseen enemy. A condescending chortle escaped her, and she gave Khyrr a sly look.

“Remember what face Roen made when I gave him a lesson with it?”

Khyrr remembered. He made no face, his eyes simply rolled back, and the poor boy outright fainted on the floor of the drawing room. Khyrr folded his arms. “You’re a loose cannon, Demetria Keephart!”  

Demetria’s mouth fell open aghast and arms dropped to the side—cocked crossbow in one hand and bolts in the other— expression so exaggerated it betrayed the pleasure behind her feigned indignation. “Hey! He kept shooting at you like you were a practice dummy. I had to do something. You know what we say. No Keephart leaves a scale unbalanced.”

Khyrr scrunched up his face. He forced a sour smile, but inwardly he was ashamed.

Demetria painted him as a victim, which he was not. It had been him who fetched the crossbow, despite his father’s explicit instructions that he was to play with it only alone, to avoid someone getting hurt. Then it had been him making the first shot as well. Demetria only found them when the tables eventually turned and he had already been cornered by Roen—a boy of similar age from a family of distant relatives—who took the toy from him and laughed every time a pecking shot found its mark and made him cry out. Without hesitation, she strode to the boy, who probably didn’t even consider her a threat, pried the pretend weapon from his hands and hit him on the head with it so hard that the bow staves dislocated from the body. Khyrr’s brother Tymotheus fixed the crossbow while both Demetria and he were seriously reprimanded for the incident. Khyrr hadn’t played with it since. It wasn’t that the toy broke, nor that Demetria lost her temper that really hurt him. Rather, it was his own inability to protect himself. He was never a particularly strong boy, but ever since he had begun taking the medicine, things had taken a turn for the worse.

“I don’t need a girl to protect me.”

“No?” Demetria looked through the crosshair of the crossbow again, bearing down on her invisible targets. The weapon was not turned on Khyrr, but that, he suspected, was about to change soon.

Khyrr sunk his head between his shoulders and asked, “Are you going to shoot me too?”

Demetria stiffened, wide-eyed, evidently offended. “Your crossbow when it is cocked shall not in any case be trained on anyone but foe, regardless of your intent,” she recited, the stern cadence of her words a clear indication that it was verbatim from a martial codex.

Khyrr sighed, crestfallen. “I just hate to be weaker than most. I can’t fend for myself. I’m not well since I’ve been taking that medicine from the masters. I just … I hate to be ... a mage.”

“You are not a mage!” Demetria burst out so loud that it made Khyrr jerk backwards. She made a step towards him, her gaze like a pair of blades. It was a look that scolded, but deep in her stormy green eyes, Khyrr discerned a shadow of something else, a repressed fear wrapped in denial, that scared him way more than her fit of anger. “You’re just sick! You hear me? You’re not. A mage,” she repeated, then took a deep breath, letting her emotions settle.

Khyrr stared at her wordless, breath caught in his throat.

His obvious fright must have humbled Demetria, because she blushed and gave him an awkward little shove in the shoulder to break the tense air between them. “Hey, chin up!” she said, then walked to the bedside table to set the crossbow down, adding, “Believe me. If you were a mage I’d have killed you already.”

Khyrr swallowed. He believed it.

“You just have to take your medicine, and you’ll eventually be fine. Otherwise, you’ll end up like that poor boy the rumours talk about.”

“What rumours?”

“Well, you see,” Demetria said after a pause during which  she clambered up the bed to join Khyrr among the jumbled mess of pillows and sheets, careless about the faint footmarks the soles of her smart shoes left on the cream-white fabric.

Khyrr dragged himself aside to give space, his former unease surpassed by his piqued curiosity.

 Demetria sat between her heels with bent knees, feet tucked under. She blew upward to chase stray hairs out of her face. “So this boy, his family name I don’t remember, but they say he was kept hidden from the Mageseekers. And his powers just grew unchecked until there was an accident!” Demetria paused, seemingly to allow her words to sink in.

All Khyrr offered her was a daft, motionless gawk of anticipation.

With a series of blinks she resubmerged herself in her story, her account loaded with delicious scandal. “They say the boy had a fight with his sister and his magic broke free, and boom! All hell broke loose and his mother and sister died! He killed them both.”

Khyrr shuddered with revulsion. His first thought went to his brother, the idea of hurting him so utterly disturbing it made his stomach twist. Could there ever be such bad blood between siblings that a heinous crime like that would take place?

“How?” he asked.

Demetria leaned closer and cupped his face between her clammy hands. Her fingers were distinctly cool on his fever-heated skin. “He didn’t take his medicine, that’s how! His condition was not treated, that’s how, Khyrr!”

Khyrr rolled his eyes and pulled his head away. “But what happened to the boy?”

“Oh yeah.” Demetria giggled. “His father was furious. They say he gave him to the Mageseekers.”

Khyrr pouted, then said, “Then we’re not so very different.” With a hunched back he put his elbows on his knees and let his head fall into his palms, squashing up his cheeks between the heels of his hands.

Demetria rolled her eyes. “No, Khyrr. You’re not locked away in an underground dungeon of a Mageseeker compound. You are being cured! You should be thankful. Not many can say they struck such a deal with the Seekers.”

The deal. Khyrr knew the deal well. Knew also how rare it was. After his forbidden talents were discovered, his father, in order to forego inevitable censure, went ahead and approached the Mageseekers’ Order—the Demacian organization that kept the ubiquitous dangers of magic in check throughout the country. The masters, in honour of this sincere conduct, had graciously allowed him to remain in the custody of his parents, provided the Mageseekers were allowed to treat him. It was better than the other two options—imprisonment or banishment—although Khyrr would have disputed calling their methods ‘treatment’. It was more like torture.

“I know. And I’m grateful. It’s just this potion they’re giving me. It hurts. Master Caeto says it’s burning the magic out of me.”

Demetria made a preoccupied groan. She picked at an embroidered flourish on her dress, already somewhat frayed. “It doesn’t burn. Not exactly. Petricite absorbs magic.”

“Petri-what?”

“Pe-tri-cite,” Demetria echoed, exaggerating the three syllables. “The white stuff that’s in the citadel walls, and the Mageseekers’ greymarks, and so many things. Demacia is built upon it. It’s from the stone trees. That’s in your elixir too.”

Khyrr made a puzzled frown. “How do you know this?”

“We’re a family of stonemasons. Keephart hands built many of the southern strongholds centuries ago in our house’s heyday,” she said matter-of-factly, clearly bored to recite her lessons of family history. “They say even the great Arcturus Durand endorsed our ancestors.” Still not looking up as she fidgeted with her dress, Demetria hesitated and lowered her voice. “... And, I overheard my father talk about these things at his conferences with the stonemasons’ guild.”

Khyrr considered her words with reticence. The Volosh had no such fancy origins to boast about. Even at his family’s zenith, they were considered unremarkable compared to the other noble houses, with negligible wealth and influence at their command, and regarded as irrelevant by their advocates, or worse, as pretenders of wrongly awarded nobility, by their adversaries. And before that in ancient times, they were even less; little more than refugees, exiled even from the place of exile. To that day, centuries after the deed, some still questioned the edicts that endowed them with land and title, while the merits that warranted those benefits were long forgotten.

Khyrr let himself fall back on the bed. He was starting to feel better. The last serving of elixir was given to him last night and the unpleasant side effects had begun to dissipate. The shivers of fever racked him no more, and the strange fatigue that made his limbs heavy eased into a faint buzzing sensation. Demetria slumped down beside him slack like a sack of flour. She made the bed wobble. Her move elicited a little mirthful snicker from Khyrr.

Reflected sunlight from the open windows cut the room in half with a hard-edged streak of gold. It ran through the bed right where Demetria’s mellow bouquet of braids sunk into the pillows, giving her a crown of dazzling amber light. Brightness unravelled a wealth of yet unseen colours in the green vortex of her irises and made her summer freckles even more prominent. Her gaze made Khyrr squirm, ill at ease. He looked at their hands next to each other, the tanned oil-brown colour of his skin appearing utterly dark compared to her fair complexion, almost as white as Khyrr’s milky hair, a rare quality he’d inherited from their distant Targonian ancestors.

“Hey, don’t worry! We’ll be one family soon,” Demetria said.

“Well, not you and me. Just your sister and my brother.”

They searched each other’s gazes for a moment. A shadow of a thought seemed to cross Demetria’s face, which brought colour to her cheeks. She sat up and delved into the pockets of her kirtle.

“What are you doing?” Khyrr rose to his elbows.

“Let us make a bond too!” She beamed and fished something out of her pocket. Tangled in her fingers was a thin silver chain, connected to a small pendant in her open palm, its filigree shapes tarnished ashen grey around the edges and recesses. It depicted a figure draped in a cloak. Angelic wings sprouted from the figure’s back, but they were bound with chains. Demetria spread the necklace and wiggled closer to hang it on Khyrr’s neck. He did not resist.

“What’s this?” Khyrr pinched the little figure between his thumb and index finger and held it up to inspect it. He recognised it before Demetria proved his suspicion.

“It’s the Veiled Lady. Now you give me something!”

“Why would you give me this? It’s the one your mother gave you, right?”

“Yes, but I’m not praying to her anymore.”

Khyrr pondered for a moment and scrutinised his friend as she regarded the trinket with a cold glare. He caught sight of something in her expression he couldn’t put a finger on. It took a heartbeat or two for the epiphany to wash over him like a warm tide, that what he discerned was the echo of the same sorrow—the one that grieved him, too—hidden deep within Demetria’s eyes. He almost missed it, so unrecognizable it was, wrapped in layers of anger, hatred, and guilt. Khyrr knew exactly why she had given up on her prayers.

Last summer, before the two of them got close, Demetria had lost her father and both of her twin brothers. Khyrr had met her father only briefly, and he'd seemed an austere creature; unkind, possessed of a crude methodical disposition. He imagined the man never offered much in the way of love, and doubted Demetria ever held him in much regard. On the other hand, he was sure that of all the people in the world, she admired her knight brothers the most. Demetria often entertained Khyrr with second-hand accounts of their adventures from the past. Khyrr had never met them in person, but thanks to the stories he had a distinct image of them in his mind: two identical boys with messy brown manes, resplendent in battle plate and the livery of their battalion, braving various borderline forests and steep hills in search of hideous beasts and foreign spies. Khyrr knew the circumstances of their deaths only by rumours.

One day a year ago, their battalion returned in tatters. It is said they had been posted in a remote mountain fort that was attacked by northern tribes, their raid instigated by Noxian mages who lurked in the wildlings’ midst. The battle had been brutal, the casualties dire. Demetria’s father and the twins fell prey to the mages’ ruthless malice. Nothing remained of them. There were no bodies to bury. Demetria would have broken down under the weight of the tragedy, had she not had a mother of singular will, blessed with an unshakeable emotional endurance, who kept her and their endangered family above water.

Her mother gave the necklace to Demetria to pray for the Veiled Lady, the patron of the ill-fated who offered redemption through revelations and a safe passage to the afterlife for the dead. But Demetria had never been one to be appeased by such benign fetishes. Disillusioned, she cast the Veiled Lady aside and chose her father’s preferred patron—the Winged Protector, a manifestation of ardent, relentless judgement—to offer her solace. Or rather, a promise of vengeance. Khyrr seldom had seen Demetria cry, but he fancied the tears were still within her, bottled up like mordant poison, fermenting slowly into a deep-seated hatred.

Demetria had every reason to loathe mages, and Khyrr wanted nothing less than to stop being one.

He crawled to the edge of the bed and pulled open a drawer in the nightstand. He returned with a silver necklace of his own.

“This was once my mom’s. Dad gave it to her. Then to me. Now I’ll give it to you.” The simple chain bore a thin circular medallion akin to a small coin. Engraved on it was a crescent moon, its horns pointed upwards, embracing a smaller orb. The two shapes completed each other in a perfect circle. Demetria sat up straight as Khyrr strung it round her neck, giving the impression of a soldier being decorated.

“It’s the symbol of the Silver Sister. My ancestors’ deity. And I don’t pray much to her either. I don’t even know how.”

She peered down at the pendant as if to make sure it was indeed on her neck, and slapped her knees. “It is done! Bound forever!”

“Bound forever,” Khyrr echoed with a bit less theatrics.

Demetria pushed herself off the bed and wheeled around. She leapt to poise herself in the straddle of a swordsman, mimicking ripostes and thrusts towards Khyrr with an imaginary sword. “Now all you have to do is get better, then we can join the vanguards to fight for Demacia!”

“Sure.” Khyrr sighed, suddenly deflated. He realised there was one more thing that plagued him, something he wanted to share with his friend.

“Ria. It’s not just the elixir and the pain that troubles me. I wanted to tell you about it.”

“About what?”

“They make me do things.”

“What things?” Demetria asked, still delighted with her antics.

The door of the bedchamber clicked open and Khyrr felt the warmth of life empty from the world around him.

“Lady Keephart! You’re not supposed to be here!” barked the newcomer. Demetria stood bolt upright, and like any child who endured under rigorous parenting and harsh reproaches, did not waste time. She adopted a docile, sombre countenance faster than Khyrr could blink.

“Yes Master Caeto.” She shot a hidden half-smile at Khyrr and fled from the room, little feet sending blunt echoes through the corridor.

The man closed the door and walked to the bed. He was a flimsy thing, a man well beyond his prime, wrapped in rich white robes ornate with gold and cerulean trimmings. A half-circle rim of snowy clumps was all he had for hair. Deep crevices grooved his sagging features as if his skin was too large for his face. In his deep-set eyes glowed a predatory light of keen intelligence and ruthless cunning that belied his cordial demeanour. There was an additional peculiar detail about his looks: the right side of his face was obscured behind a silver half-mask. The man stirred the inside pockets of his garb and produced a finger-length vial filled with a cloudy white fluid. He gave it a little shake.

Khyrr pulled up his blankets to his throat.

“You were not blabbing about our procedures, boy?” The man cocked his brow, at least the one that was visible.

Khyrr shook his head so fast it felt like trembling.

“Good. Good. Now lie down.”

Khyrr made a puzzled look but did as he was asked, unable to separate his gazes from the vial in the old man’s hand. “Isn’t it too early for this, master?”

“This day must have been difficult for you, I gather. Dark times breed dark thoughts, and harbouring dark thoughts can bring the worst of your condition to the fore. With that in mind, I believe an earlier, and alas, slightly increased dose will be necessary.”

Khyrr did not fear the Mageseeker, but rather the bottled-up torment he was about to make him ingest.

There were times in the past when Khyrr had resisted taking it, but all he achieved was adding more pain to the procedure. He did not resist anymore. As Master Caeto pressed the cold neck of the vial to his lips, he thought of Demetria, and a future where they braved distant lands clad in armour with swords in hand, fearing nothing the world tested them against.

The first gulps did not hurt at all, having only a chalky aftertaste and generating a tingling sensation on his tongue and at the roof of his mouth. He swallowed hard, downing not just the potion but the bile that rose in his throat against it. Then the liquid reached his stomach; heat distended in his body, spreading through his veins like searing tentacles that stretched his insides, his blood vessels filling with molten iron. He felt a visceral, inner crawling, an itching ache in his flesh he could not reach regardless of how strong he clawed against his chest. Then the fire reached his mind and reality exploded in excruciating, white-hot pain. Breathing became almost impossible, as his muscles and spine jerked and stretched by flesh-wrecking convulsions.

“It hurts,” he rasped, rendered blind by the overwhelming flare-up of nerves. “It burns.”

A whiff of the man’s rancid breath reached him. Master Caeto offered him his usual sermon, no more, no less. One he had heard a hundred times over, and would be hearing a hundred times again, and more. “Don’t be afraid! When the cleansing flames of penance burn through your heart, just close your eyes and take deep breaths.”

Oblivion swallowed everything else in the violence of the mounting seizure. Khyrr never remembered much of the procedure beyond forcing the elixir down. His hours spent in torment were so inimical to comprehension that his mind proved incapable of committing them to memory. Later the Mageseekers would come back as he came to his senses, making him employ his pain-ridden faculties of magic, while they jotted down notes and shared their learnings in hushed voices. All to the expense of his torment. But not that day, not after that big of a dose.

Even when night fell, and Tymotheus lay beside his cold, sweat-wrecked form, he was aware of little but for the familiar scent and voice of his brother, sounding like he spoke from a dream.

“Don’t worry, little one.” Tymotheus brushed his hair, tucking strands carefully behind his ears. “Soon, everything will be fine. This marriage will bring us prosperity and peace. You will soon heal. And you won’t have to be afraid of anything, ever again.”

Two

Present: 6 Years Before the Mage Rebellion

Demacia, Idryja County

Tymotheus jerked awake, and the oblivion that was granted to him by unconsciousness abruptly vanished, excruciating pain and harsh cold taking its place. His head swam. A high-pitched whir filled his ears. When he opened his eyes, his vision failed him for a few heartbeats and presented only a kaleidoscope of harsh lights and stark shadows that grew clearer with every blink.

He sat in a chair, in a circle of moonlight that shone through a circular aperture in the domed ceiling. Through it, sparse snowfall penetrated the room, a slow sift of flakes in the sharp light. It gathered in patches and drew feathery outlines on piles of empty pots and withering house plants. Tymotheus felt the snow’s weight as pinpricks in his hair and lashes, and he shivered hard in the icy draft that descended with it. As his vision further cleared, his attention latched onto a narrow, smudged trail of red on the stone floor tiles, connecting him to a door across the room. The blood had served as a palette for boot prints.

He was in the northern anteroom of his estate, Tymotheus established. They used this room as a winter garden, for its round opening atop the domed ceiling allowed in more air and light, yet kept the worst of the winter at bay. He sat towards the door that led back to the estate, while the glass-panelled gates that provided access to a rear, colonnaded portico were behind him. The abundant plants that furnished the anteroom he could perceive only as ghastly suggestions of vines and leaves tumbling over one another. Except for the silver radiance of the moon, the only source of light was a thin, brazen shaft that seeped from under the two-winged door in front of Tymotheus, a hint from the sconce-lit corridor beyond.

The blood on the floor was his own. It was in his mouth and the stench of it overwhelmed his palate. He felt its heat trickle from his hairline, down his temples, making his eyes itch. He ventured to rub it out, but his arms did not obey, his sore wrists straining futilely against thick knots of coarse rope. A prickling sensation played in his fingers, so tight was the bond that restrained him to the armrest of the chair. His heartbeat picked up with a jolt, and as he looked down on his battered, bloodstained shirt and tied hands, there came a flash of realization that he had no recollection of how this had befallen him. Pain flared in the back of his skull as he searched his racing thoughts. Memories came to him in tatters.

It was late. He was about to retire to his bedroom. He pulled on his robe when a distant shout made him look out the windows and watch as several dozen mounted knights rode through the gatehouse and flooded his yard. The door of the foyer opened; Lilyenne came through.

No. Lilyenne was away, she had travelled to her family’s home in Idrija City. She had taken their oldest foster daughter too, Danica, hidden amongst her cadre of handmaidens. There was no way they’d got back already. It was somebody else. But who?

A pleading scream startled him, and Tymotheus found that his hearing had returned, the keen shrill of false sound ebbing in his skull. Noises of turmoil came from somewhere outside, words of quarrel mixed with bellowed orders and the rolling thud of hooves. He turned his head towards the sounds, but his nerves lit up with pain as the movement strained his wounds. Apparently, he had many wounds and bruises, each announcing itself with a sharp stab, and the more he regained his senses, the more his aches vied for his attention. Wincing, he tried to wrench his head towards the windowed doors behind him. But when he managed it, all he saw was the cloudy glass, coloured orange and yellow by the fires beyond.

Fire. Suddenly he was aware of its deep rumble, a sustained undertone below all sounds. The estate was burning. Tymotheus’s mouth turned sour with the first taste of panic.

“Somebody ...”

His voice broke off, unfit to fully utter a cry for help with a throat too dry, lips too parched. A shriek of suffering answered him. This time it came from somewhere in the house. His people were in danger. His children. Desperately he wrestled with his bonds and cussed at them in anguish, but the effort only chafed and reddened his wrists further, the knots holding fast.

He heard steps. Someone strode towards him outside in the corridor, blunt knocks against the marble tiles, louder with every step. Finally, the golden slit of light that stretched under the door faded from the inside out. Tymotheus swallowed hard with a stone-dry throat, the effort making him tear up. At the left wing, the handle pressed down with a dull clack, the door swung open, and a dark figure appeared silhouetted on the threshold. Tymotheus squinted. Then without hesitation the newcomer crossed into the winter garden and closed the door, restoring the shroud of darkness.

For a few seconds, neither of them moved or spoke. The first sound was a creak that Tymotheus’s chair made as he leaned forward, straining to determine his visitor’s identity, but all he could make out was a black outline. They were well beyond the reach of the moonlight that encased him. Was this person his saviour, or the architect of his destruction? What bedlam betided his home, and whose agenda was it to bring it to his doorstep? When he drew a sharp breath to do so, the visitor spoke up.

“My mother always had a soft spot in her heart for the banished and the broken.”

The voice paralysed him. It was of a woman, so much akin to his wife’s, yet its timbre rang deeper, its cadence more rigid and stern and nowhere near as melodic as Lilyenne’s. The figure moved forward. Not straight, but in an arc around him, like a circling predator.

“I defied her of late, calling her a fool for allowing outcasts into the family. Sharing land, wealth, blood.”

“Ria? Demetria?” Tymotheus gasped in disbelief. “Is that you? What is this?”

His guest didn’t waver in her sermon, continuing with the same detached, patronising manner. “My father had been more ... pragmatic.” She took her time to find the right word. “He would never have allowed us to squander our wealth in such a misbegotten union. There were other contenders. The Laurents. The Armstrongs.”

Righteous anger stole into Tymotheus. It lifted him above his fears, and pain-induced nausea. “Did … did you do this to me? Let me go!” he rasped, until his words devolved into spasmodic coughs.

“In the end,” she continued unperturbed, “I was a fool, not to know her. The self-made woman, the once lady-in-waiting of a forgotten lineage, simply saw her own past reflected in your misfortune. She so desperately wanted to believe that by joining two ruined half-families she could forge a new, whole one. Hope blinded her, and she saw potential where there was none.” She came to a halt somewhere on the periphery of Tymotheus’s vision, still wrapped in shadows, her presence implied only by puffs of steamy breath wafting out into the light.

Her voice became soft; one could almost have mistaken it for gentleness. “She was just like you, in that regard. But even she could draw a line between charity and insanity.”

“Demetria, what is going on? You show up here after—how many years?—and ... and you attack us? I-I don’t understand.”

But Tymotheus understood. Even as muddled complaints spilt from his mouth, deep down he knew why she had come. His throbbing wounds robbed him of clarity, his confusion made it hard to piece the whole picture together, and so he had some leeway to delude himself, like he had nothing to hide. But Tymotheus did have things to hide. He also understood what Demetria was; what she had become. Gone were the days when the possibility of allowing her close to the family was still sensible. There was only one reason for her to be here. She cut off his mumbling.

“You know, I always had my suspicions about your adopted children, but I turned a blind eye. I allowed you to operate your sick zoo”—she spat the last words like bile—“only because I knew my sister took pleasure in it. But I was a fool again. Hope has blinded me too, blinded all of us, and for your irresponsibility—for your transgression—we had to pay the ultimate price.”

She knew, Tymotheus thought, as the horror of realization took hold. How could things have gotten to this? He must have made a mistake. Or had it been his wife? Impossible. Tymotheus shivered at the sheer insanity of the thought. Lilyenne could never have allowed this to happen.

“Demetria, this is wrong! Let me go. You cannot do this, we are family!” he wheezed, his voice quavering as he fought back pain and the biting cold.

At that, for the first time that night, she deigned to finally throw him a reply. “You are nothing to me.” She stepped out into the column of moonlight on his left.

Toe to neck, Demetria was clad in Demacian brightsteel. Polished surfaces of the rare, white-hued metal ran with gilded trimmings, and embossed filigree depicting glorious scenes of war all across her armour. From under her pauldrons cascaded the rich, sea-green fabric of a mantle that trailed behind her like a poisoned river. Belted at the waist, a magnificently wrought claymore—the kind Tymotheus suspected would certainly have been given a name—hung as a silent threat in its scabbard.

Even with him on his feet, Demetria would’ve measured taller. Now she towered over him. She wore no helm, but a crown of braids woven from her honey-brown tresses. No man of sober sense would have underestimated her physical prowess, evident at first sight in her formidable build, robust neckline, and stern, hard-edged features, which—despite the years of hardship—still possessed the ghost forms of her mother's delicate, aquiline mien. Her eyes shed their colour in the gaunt, white light and offered nothing but disdain.

There was horrible strength chained within her that bled intimidation, and the mere prospect of violence from someone so much of kin— so much the blood of his love, the absurdity of it—broke something in Tymotheus. His eyes misted over. His lower lips trembled.

Demetria’s query came like a death blow. “The children. Where did you hide them?”

Tymotheus recoiled, his blood chilled. He stretched his spine against the chairback in a futile attempt to increase his distance from her. As he looked up, his eyes settled on the Demacian crest, emblazoned on Demetria’s chest plate with countless grooves and scores to adorn it, a vicious chronicle of its owner’s martial past. He wondered how his country could endorse such merciless prosecution. He wasn’t alone.

Demacia’s battalions were famous for their honourable conduct of war and righteous ethos throughout the continent. Even abroad, the reputation of the Dauntless Vanguard, and other similarly valiant groups of Demacian elites, commanded esteem. Demetria’s was not such a battalion. While her quick ascension through the ranks had been both admirable and unprecedented, she had rapidly become infamous for her ruthless martial spirit, as most had found it hard to stomach her crude methods and flagrant hatred of mages.

But not the Mageseekers’ Order. Only after their petition to employ her battalion as their own military branch had been granted, was Demetria’s cruelty fully unleashed.

The battalion was a nameless one originally, designated only by a number, but people liked to put labels on the objects of their fears, and so they had promptly found a name for it nonetheless.The Witchbane Vanguard. In the fold of the army, Demetria and her like-minded warriors were kept on a short leash. No more. Now she was the Mageseekers’ unbridled executioner, a law unto herself. She was a menace, and because of that Tymotheus and Lilyenne had lived their life always looking over their shoulder. Tymotheus felt like a gardener, who in lack of space, resorted to keeping his precious exotic plants near the fireplace, perpetually afraid that a snapping ember might singe them. Now the flames were licking at the flowers, and he had no way to help.

Tymotheus was, however, no fool. He had prepared for this occasion. The only question was, had his emergency measures proven enough? Demetria was still looking for his children. That meant at least some of them had reached the hideout. There was still time. There was still hope.

Tymotheus steeled himself as indignation drew deep wrinkles on his face. “Why would I tell you anything? Why? When all you bring here is destruction.”

Demetria was suddenly right next to him. She sunk her gauntleted claws in his hair and yanked his head back. Boldness left Tymotheus with an involuntary sob. He clenched his teeth and squeezed one eye shut at the rush of ripping pain. With the other, he looked into the stretched reflection of his terrified features on Demetria’s polished vambrace. Blood and molten snow drenched his long black hair, which stuck to his forehead and temples in disheveled clumps. Bruises adorned his sharp, elongated features, and he was unsure if his nose was broken, or if simply the curved surface of the metal made it look crooked. His right eye was bloodshot to the point that he couldn’t make out the steel-grey of his iris. Even his sand-brown complexion couldn’t hide how blanched he was, only a slick of blood lending colour to his cracked, grey lips. From up close he could smell the overwhelming saline tang of wool-flavored perspiration that soaked Demetria's gambeson, mixed with the sweet aftertaste of burnt wood.

“I bring judgment!” she whispered. “I know that they are mages. At least some of them,” she added with a measure of distaste, then let go of his hair.

Tymotheus turned his head away, unable to hold her gaze.

It was true. It had happened inevitably. People knew his history with his brother. Some of them, especially the ones close to the circle of his servants and maids, even knew the truth about his daughter. It was only a matter of time before villagers and townsfolk began to show up at their doorstep, asking, begging them to take in their children lest they fell pray to the Mageseekers’ incessant scrutiny. Many relinquished their offspring, some out of fear of sanction, some merely to grant a promise of life for them. Tymotheus and Lilyenne rejected none. He couldn’t allow anyone to suffer the fate that his brother had had to endure, or worse. They adopted them all, fully aware of the repercussions their discovery would entail. After the childrencame refugees, poor souls exiled by their own loved ones, and they hadn’t the heart to deny them shelter. Tymotheus had had his reservations at first, but from Lilyenne he learned to love them and care for all just the same as he did for their only daughter.

The remote clamour grew faint, drowned out by the relentless murmur of fire; not just a vague baritone anymore, its snaps, pops, and hisses were clearly audible from throughout the mansion. From the rear portico’s glass-panelled doors, an insidious glow crept into the winter garden and shifted all the washed-out hues towards red. Rippling phantom lights reflected on the mirror sheen of Demetria’s armour.

Instincts shouted that he yank at his bonds to stand up and run, to do something. His mounting exasperation finally eclipsed his dismay and trepidation, and with that, he found his father’s disciplined firmness in his own raspy voice, a quality instilled by strict tutoring due to a family’s firstborn.

“Is this what you swore alliance for? To round up children? To lock them away in the dark?”

Demetria breathed out her nose, wordless, her face a mask of dour indifference.

“Why am I held prisoner by my own family?” Tymotheus continued. “Because I offered sanctuary for the innocent, whose only sin is that they were born different?”

“You are held prisoner because there’s blood on your hands.”

Tymotheus winced, briefly silenced by bewilderment. “What? Nonsense! I demand that you immediately ...”

“Don’t you dare make demands!” Demetria jabbed at him with her index finger in a fit of rage. A thin curl unhooked from her braids and hung loose in front of her eye. “Not after what I have done! What I have seen! I paid with the blood of my men to find you. They gave their lives fighting through the wicked fiends of this den of evil, and for what? A fool who’s not even aware of the extent of his transgressions.” Demetria cut herself off and let out a frustrated cry, a stifled scream through clenched teeth.

Tymotheus jumped, scooting backwards an inch with the chair. “Are you out of your mind? This house is a sanctuary of peace and healing.”

Demetria’s eyes grew wide. “Imbecile! All this time, you knew nothing? Nothing at all?”

“I-I ...”

“Tymotheus. Why were you unconscious? Why were you unconscious and beaten half dead when we found you?”

Tymotheus fell silent. Despite the fierce cold, a surge of heat rose to his throat, his heart pounded a furious rhythm, his eyes flickered left and right hunting for segments of fickle memory as fragmented images of his recollection superimposed themselves on his reality.

It was late. He was about to retire to his bedroom. He pulled on his robe when a distant shout made him look out the windows and watch as several dozen mounted knights rode through the gatehouse and flooded his yard. The door of the foyer opened and Illka came through, one of their maids. His head of staff, Bellard, was one step behind her, still dressed in his smart brocaded tailcoat and white gloves regardless of the late hour. Tymotheus only caught a curt piece of their discussion before they trailed off and saw him. “... discovered, we must act now. Gather the others.”

Tymotheus gestured towards the windows. ”Bellard! What is the meaning of this? Who intrudes upon us?”

“My lord, it would be best for you to wait in your chambers while we sort out this ordeal.” Something was awry in his servant’s habitually composed and proud bearing. Illka merely walked by him, eager to make some arrangements in his bedrom.

“I think not.” Tymotheus scowled. “I should like to see these intruders, too, and hear what matters bring them here.”

Tymotheus heard the deep metallic resonance of a heavy object hastily snatched up, and spun to the sound. In a final flash, he saw Illka's face with teeth bared, eyes lambent with a feral ire, and a swish of brass, the hefty boot of a candelabra blurred by the momentum of the strike.

The ghost of the skull-wrecking pain still throbbed in his temples. Tymotheus reeled, as a sinking sensation took hold of him.

“What is going on?” he breathed. “And where is my wife?”

Three

In the southern wing of the burning mansion, at the corner of the main foyer, a small service door left ajar flung open, and Minerva blasted through. She was running for her life. Her chestnut brown hair stuck to her face, soggy with sweat and blood. The white of her night suit was dappled grey and black with soot. Barefoot, she ran, despite the scattered shards of window glass crackling under her feet, leaving red smears on the flagstones. Panting desperately, she recognised the main entrance at the far end of the hall, its doors gaping towards the snow-choked gardens. Boot-marked slush soiled the floor around the threshold, cold air rich with sleet bursting in from the roiling night with every lash of the gale. She sprinted for the exit. The only thought in her mind was to increase the distance between her and the conflagration. The slaughter. If she could reach the forest, she could hide, or call for help.

Silhouettes stirred beyond the door in the outer darkness. Minerva halted as two knights appeared on the threshold, blocking her exit. Both men wore garb reminiscent of the standard livery of Demacian regiments: mail and plate armour over thick undergarments against the cold, but with the usual sapphire blue of their cloaks exchanged for a dark sea-green one.

A frantic voice bellowed from somewhere behind her. “Get the bloody witch!”

The men drew their swords, smiling menacingly under the shadow of their helmets. Minerva froze, desperately looking for a way out. The foyer around her was in disarray, its maroon carpet sodden, rosewood sideboards and marble daises overturned, muddy tracks littering the floor. Her great-great grandfather’s limestone statue that had perched for decades atop the stairway landing now lay broken on the stairs, split in half at the waist. There was only one way—back into the burning house.

The two armed men pounced at her before she could break away. “Come here!”

Minerva reeled backwards just in time, her enemy, a man almost twice her size, grasping only thin air a hand's breadth from her face. She wheeled around and ran, but slipped in the slush and stumbled. The second guard caught up and seized her by the hair, halting her with a hard yank. She shrieked involuntarily out of pain, so loud it made the guards squint.

“Don’t be such a wimp!”

The man who captured her swapped his grasp from her hair to her wrist and raised her in the air like hunted game. He didn't even seem to struggle, Minerva was thin and light as a newborn sheep. She winced in pain as her whole body stretched, her bleeding toes slipping on the floor as she fumbled for a foothold.

“We have her, all right,” snickered the other one.

From the service corridor where she’d come from, the hurrying steps of her original pursuer became louder. It was a creature of her nightmares, and she feared it a hundred times more than the mere footmen who had caught her. It couldn’t reach her. It simply could not!

With both hands and with all the panic-born strength she could muster, Minerva pulled down the arm that was holding her and bit it hard. A throaty scream shook the room as her capturer cried out raging, instinctively trying to shake her off, dropping even his sword in the process.

Before his companion could realise what was happening, Minerva broke loose and kicked him in the balls. She was already running when the man fell to his knees with a bitter grimace on his face. Up the stairs she ran, vaulting over the cracked rubble of her grandfather’s memorial, forced to escape back to the havoc she had spent desperate minutes breaking out from.

She ran through drawing rooms and antechambers, thrusting open heavy doors one after another, desperately searching for a way out. Her heart beat a furious rhythm, and her head pounded with it. Fear was a thick knot in her throat and each sharp intake of air cut her lungs as panic devolved her breathing to convulsive gasps.

She came across several south-facing windows and considered them despite the height, but a peek outside convinced her to abandon the idea. Beyond the hazy glass, the yard was teeming with armoured men. Marks of ruination littered the path she trod. A toppled cupboard lay in a berth of jumbled books that had neatly filled its shelves just an hour ago. Tables were overturned; fallen ewers and broken cups expelled their contents, drawing dark blotches on the mud-soiled carpet.

Minerva kept looking over her shoulder. Her pursuers were close. She heard them bursting through the doors just a few rooms behind. In front of her, the inferno swelled. The deeper she went, the hotter and more surreal everything became. The levels above her were fully engulfed in flames, the air throbbed with the guttural roar of the fire. Black smoke seeped from the smouldering cracks on the ceiling, raining orange specks of cinder and ash. Wallpaper was melting off the walls to roll down sluggishly in scorched grey reels.

Choked by the heat and the smoke, Minerva faltered. Her heaving worsened, her lungs hot. Tears flooded her burning eyes. In front of her beyond the final doorway, the library was an impenetrable crematorium, belching flames and thick dark smoke. There was no going further. The parlour where she had stopped was oven-hot, its furniture and floorboards blackened by soot that drizzled down from above.

Her head swam. When she wheeled around, her two pursuers were already at the doorway, snarling viciously.

“Leave it. She’s mine.”

A third man pushed them aside and entered the ruined parlour. He was a wizened short fellow, ancient compared to his armed companions, wearing no armour but an ornate white tabard over his blue garment, which was rugged and torn by the chase. His stooped frame shuddered as he wheezed in the heat, coughing and croaking. The remains of his grizzled hair hung in dishevelled chunks on his sweaty skull. And one thing set him apart: his silver half-mask, sinking into his coarse skin.

Through the eye hole, his gaze glowed with unquenchable madness. A Mageseeker. Minerva had nowhere to run. Her throat closed as the old man strode towards her. She could not retreat further; the heat radiating from behind was already intolerable. Again, her only option was to fight.

Minerva swallowed, clenched her fists, and stood her ground. Her dread gave way to anger, and as so, an aura of eerie white light lit up around her, alive with tiny blue sparks, crackling and popping.

The mercenaries stiffened at the expression of arcane aptitude but the old man just smirked and licked his dry lips.

“Oh we’re being nasty now, are we? Is that how your father taught you manners?” he rasped, and with his tremoring left hand withdrew his greymark that hung on a silver chain in his neck, concealed by the tabard. As he held it out, the light around Minerva blurred and slowly began to leak towards the stone-grey, magic-absorbing amulet in a dim, swirling stream.

Minerva felt a sense of strange hollowness envelop her as the dynamic vigour that interlaced the fabric of the cosmos emptied out. A prevalent, ever-buzzing potential she wasn’t even aware of, so accustomed she was to its presence, was sucked away. Bereft of its undulating embrace, she felt cold and breathless as a fish plucked from a stream.

She laboured against the sucking force nonetheless, teeth clenched, her frail body shaking with effort as the greymark’s disruptive presence clawed at her soul. Despite her strain, the light around her eventually flickered out.

The ancient Mageseeker tutted twice with imitated pity, a leering grin drawing deep wrinkles on his devilish face. “Your powers are spent, little bird.”

Despair and fatigue finally set in, and Minerva collapsed under the weight of defeat. Sobbing, she fell onto her hands and knees.

The old magehunter closed the gap, leaned down and grabbed her by the elbow. His parched touch was grating; his cracked nails sank mercilessly into her soft skin. He wrenched her halfway upright with tremor-wracked hands so that he could stare into her face from up close. His breath tasted like ash and vinegar.

“Now tell me, where are they hiding? The little freaks.”

A spasmodic sobbing took hold of Minerva. With eyes screwed shut, she shook her head, a quiver set in her lower lip.

“No?” He gave her a shake. “I’ll teach you obedience!”

As he raised his hand to strike, an unfamiliar voice came from the doorway behind him. “Release her.”

The Mageseeker wrenched his neck with a prying groan, looking over his shoulder. His men did the same, but for them, it was already too late. Their attacker was right behind them and moving fast, punching the knight on his right with a swift hook under the chin, sending him sprawling on the floor with a rattle of armour plates, unconscious.

The other one reacted faster and swung at the ambusher, longsword in hand, but his foe spun and heeled over, avoiding the strike. Then with a nimble step, he closed the gap and grabbed the knight’s gauntleted hand around the hilt. He twisted it hard into an unnatural angle, eliciting a strident howl, and in the same move knocked the staggered knight out with an elbow slam that was given force by a swift torso twist.

In three heartbeats, both armsmen lay disarmed on the floorboards. The Mageseeker’s eyes widened, but despite his age he caught up fast. He drew his dagger, and stepped behind Minerva, pushing the blade against her throat.

“Stop right there!” he spat, grinding his crooked yellow teeth in wrath. Minerva lifted her chin involuntarily. Blood retreated from her limbs at the sharp touch of cold steel against her neck. With her view no longer blocked, her gaze shifted to the doorway, and the newcomer.

It was a tall man, still dressed in thick garb against the winter. His oval face, though it was austere now, had a certain kindness about it, with subtle patrician qualities picked out by high cheekbones and the prominent cut of his sharp chin. Thin hair white as milk cascaded in weightless ease down the nape of his neck from a negligently tied bun. He wore a raiment of heavy indigo damask, complemented with black leather armour at the legs, arms, and chest. At his waist, a pair of curved sabres dangled, sheathed in their scabbards, neglected. A pair of unflinching steel-grey eyes held the Mageseeker’s attention and showed little to no trepidation. Rather, they emanated a silent threat. In the heat of the moment, choked by panic and the thick smoke, Minerva failed to gauge the man's identity. He definitely looked foreign to her, but she also felt a warm pang of familiarity. For a moment none of them spoke.

“Make one more step and the girl dies! You hear me, lad?” the Mageseeker broke the silence eventually.

The man tilted his head, giving the impression of a wolf who spied for its prey’s footsteps among the susurrus of the forest floor, then he said, “It won’t take a step.”

In an instant, his figure went ablaze with silver light and evaporated, leaving only a mist of phantasmal glitter drifting in the air.

“What ...” The Mageseeker could hardly stutter out a word before a flash of light blinded him, accompanied by a low whoomph as his opponent materialised from the aether a mere arm's length away from him and Minerva.

With a quick move, one that Minerva couldn’t even comprehend, the Mageseeker's hand was caught, the dagger he held wrenched away from him. It landed on the floorboards with a knock, skittering several feet to the wall.

Minerva shrieked and dropped to the floor, and with her arms finally free, she crawled away, her knees and palms making hectic marks in the thick layer of ash that had accreted on the parquet. Still, despite the fear, she couldn't help looking over her shoulder at the confrontation.

Defeated, the old man took a step backwards but recoiled as intense heat stung his back. He looked back towards the inferno raging in the room behind. Now it was him driven into a corner. Frantic, he grabbed his greymark and held it up as a last resort.

To Minerva's surprise, the man stepped closer, reached out and clenched it together with the Mageseeker's withered hand. As they stood there face to face, the greymark started to vibrate and luminesce. Strangely, the terror seizing the old man seemed to somewhat dissipate, and his eyes widened with revelation.

“Wait. Wait! I recognise you! Spare me!”

His subduer tightened his mighty grip, and several wet pops announced the snapping of decrepit, thin finger bones as they were crushed against the hard edges of the trinket. The Mageseeker whined. His legs shook and gave up on him. The old petricite amulet began to blacken in his grip. Simultaneously, Minerva felt a lurch of motion in the aether, and the world became brighter as if colours began to repopulate it. The power of the old trinket guttered, its potency falling short against the assailant’s terrible arcane vigour.

The white-haired man raised his chin, his irises glimmering with a supernal opalescent light overflowing with disdain.

“Don’t be afraid, Master Caeto.” His voice rang with a myriad of otherworldly reverberations. “When the cleansing flames of penance burn through your heart, just close your eyes and take deep breaths.”

With a wrathful flinch, the white haired man unleashed his magic as a wash of destruction, a churning torrent of blue-green flames that made Minerva recoil. The chaotic energies ruptured into reality with a blast that shook the room and flung the Mageseeker into the raging firestorm beyond the doorway. Smouldering beams of wood fell as the burning library collapsed, burying him alive.

Four

Khyrr shook his head and blinked the dizziness away. He was kneeling on the darkened floor, fires raging all around him. Blood trickled from his nose, the aftertaste of magic sour in his stomach. His skin still prickled with it, but the excruciating pain finally waned. To combat his past tormentor with magic was a risky gambit—he easily could have swooned under the exertion, and the crippling backlash the spells meted out on his body could have robbed him of his senses. But it was an end that befitted the old bastard. He wouldn’t have it done any other way.

“Uncle Khyrr!” Minerva sprang to him, and he embraced her tightly with a relieved gasp.

“My fledgling stellacorn! Are you all right?”

Minerva sobbed hysterically, her indistinct stammering muffled by the fabric of Khyrr’s clothes as she jammed her face against his arms. There was a loud crack and the parlour’s ceiling shuddered, plummeting an inch as though it was about to burst and showering them with a torrent of hot ash and embers. Khyrr cradled up the girl and ran. Behind him the two warriors crawled on their hands and knees from the room, more concerned with saving their hide than with giving chase.

Tucked in his arms, Minerva curled up and clutched onto him like a newborn child with eyes squeezed shut. She was so much older than when he’d last seen her six years ago, a little adult no less; still, the horrors of the past hour had gotten the better of her.

As Khyrr scaled the fire-chewed halls, taking in the destruction and the chafed, soot-smeared form of his niece in his arms, he considered that he might already be too late. The present that he trod was the undeniable realisation of the vision he had seen in the pools. Back then, it was just a dubious mirage, but it had made him cross half the known world to get here, only to see an element of it manifest as immutable truth: his home devoured by flames.  And that was not the only divination the pools had gifted him with. He had seen Lilyenne, too. Had that already passed as well? Was she lying somewhere cold in the half frozen slush of her own mud-soiled blood, lost under a blanket of snow? Did the girl in her arms share her fate, or worse?

Fear brought Khyrr here, but oddly, despite the harrowing prospects his imagination alarmed him with, he harboured none now. There was no time to be afraid; he was too disturbed and worked up, every muscle in his body, every nerve in his mind on edge, fully engrossed in the effort to salvage as much as he could from the inferno.

Through a side gate, Khyrr left the mansion and sprinted for cover in a row of lush winter laurels that streaked the garden from the west, boasting thick, evergreen leaves despite the winter. His heart drummed a stronger beat every time an attacker’s bellow resounded from the distance, in suspicion that any one of those voices could have been his pursuers. He sank to his knees as soon as he flew into cover. A cold gust sent shivers rippling along Minerva’s limbs, and she looked out from the sanctuary of his cloak. Darkness and snowy foliage surrounded them, the red silhouette of their home still flickering in the distance. With a heaving chest, Khyrr set her down on the snowy grass. She seemed reluctant to sink her naked feet into it.

“Minerva, look at me,” he said between sharp breaths as he held her shoulders.

“Uncle Khyrr,” she squeaked in a tremulous voice laden with recent tears. “Did you come back to take us? To take us to the old home?”

Khyrr sighed. He fought to compose a mounting sorrow in his heart. He stroked ash out of Minerva’s greasy hair. “Do you know what happened? Do you know where your mom and dad are?”

His deflection of her question must have been apparent to Minerva, for she teared up again. “Mother left this morning for Idryja City. Pa, I don’t know. The Seekers came. Pa told us to hide if they came. The others perhaps did, but I couldn’t, and they ... they …” Convulsive sobs robbed her of speech.

All that she said boded ill, but Khyrr could not let himself dwell on the details, lest she be allowed to fall further into despair and panic. Khyrr gave a little shake of her shoulders.

“It’s fine stellacorn, you’re fine, you’re safe!” Khyrr scrutinised her face for a moment. A dark premonition descended upon his thoughts. “The others? Who are the others?”

“My sisters and brothers.”

“You have siblings?”

Minerva swallowed her sobs. “Yes, the foundlings. My foster-sisters and -brothers.” Snot leaked from her nose to glisten on her upper lip. Tears trailed on her cheeks, drawing fair marks on the soot-stained skin. She wiped her face on the sleeve of her nightgown.

Khyrr felt frost creep into his bloodstream as his earlier suspicions gained shape and substance. Even as he snuck into the mansion and first recognised the Mageseekers’ insignia on some of the horses left at the courtyard, the idea had sprung up unbidden. Why else would the Mageseekers raid the place if not for that they had learned of the presence of mages? Minerva could not have been the only reason for all this destruction and bloodshed. Was his brother sheltering others, perhaps even children cursed with the arcane? If he was, then he might have brought this doom onto himself, jeopardising the lives of hapless children in the process.

But it wasn’t that simple. Perhaps his good heart hadn’t left him a choice, even considering the possible repercussions. As for the unfortunate, they hadn’t had much in the way of freedom. For them, even a little time harboured in safety was better than immediate imprisonment or exile, and those were the better options. The Mageseekers had many, much more terrifying prospects to offer.

Khyrr couldn’t help but shudder at his memories of the spiteful order as they rose to the surface once more, regardless of how tightly he had tucked them away in the far recesses of his recollection. He knew them and the tools they employed from personal experience, yet he couldn’t help but feel that something was not adding up. The Mageseekers were merciless and unrelenting, but even so, the extent of destruction he’d witnessed went far beyond the usual measures one would expect from those fanatics. Rounding up children was nothing new, but ransacking and burning a family home with such abandon in the process—especially when that family home was the mansion of a Demacian noble? It was all too uncharacteristic of them. The force they marshalled here also seemed far too large to merely gather a bunch of mage-born children. Something more was afoot here. He drew a deep breath, trying to steady his wits.

“All right. So, where would your siblings hide?”

“In the hideout, in the kitchen. It was made after you left. It’s behind the old tapestry.” Minerva pointed back towards the house. To alleviate some of the scorching soreness induced by the cold, she started balancing one leg while pressing her other foot against her shin for warmth. Red pinpricks remained in the snow under her injured feet.

Khyrr bit his lower lip, weighing his options. While each a poor compromise, their number reduced by the minute. Should he run straight for the children? Should he first find his brother, or explore what the Mageseekers’ agenda was? Was it beyond hope to negotiate with them? Time was an inexorable constraint, choking him, denying him the chance to properly take stock of the circumstances and make a calculated decision. He had to act on instinct alone.

“Listen to me, doll, you have to run up to the gardener’s shed.” He gestured towards the dark path along the hedge behind Minerva. “Do you know where it is?”

Minerva nodded, acquiescent.

“Run there and hide, best as you can!”

“Are you not coming?” she sobbed.

“I am. I just have to get the others.” He stood up, but before he could leave, his niece ran up to him, locking her arms around his waist.

“I don’t want to be alone!”

“You have to, just a little while.” He pushed her away and bent down a little so their eyes would be level. “Look!” he pointed towards the foliage above, permeated by the silver light of the moon. “The Silver Sister will shepherd you while I’m away! Now go!”

His spirited look must have given her some courage. She made a few steps on the path but faltered to look back one last time. Khyrr nudged her with a nod and watched as she disappeared down the unlit path. Then he sprang to his feet and darted off.

As he was speeding towards the house, grim eventualities were already running through his head. He could take up the fight with a couple of soldiers, but not all of them. And even if he prevailed with the blade, he might not be fast enough to save his loved ones from a single strike. There was a solution for even those eventualities, but the thought of it filled Khyrr with dread, bringing dark memories to the fore. Some things not even the mystiques of Targon could teach him.

***

Even on the cusp of death, the erbok was majestic. Snow was a scrambled, gore-daubed ruin around its legs and head, stirred up by the creature’s death throes. Now its body was serene, frozen ribbons of flesh and a mess of tangled guts spilt onto the rock from its burst belly. It reminded Khyrr of a Demacian stag, although much taller and more muscular, its oily cream fur ample protection against the vicious cold. Its bone-plated skull continued into a thick, straight trunk of horn over its head, which bore numerous scores and cracks, hallmarks of a beast of ancient age. A hunting bolor might have attacked it—Khyrr considered—and left, spooked by their approach.

Khyrr and his tutor made the discovery on a massive rock ledge that protruded from a giant, oddly shaped crag in the mountain range, its stone rendered into crooked form by the gods in the likeness of a scythe blade. It seemed as if the place floated over an endless ocean of grey mist, just above the cloud cover, yet nowhere near the heaven-piercing peak of Targon. A vast tide of clouds broke on the mass of the sickle crag and tumbled over the ridges on both sides of the ledge like waterfalls of a ghost river.

Khyrr had had no trouble mastering the crude ways of the blade and the subtle arts of night and ice, but while his fellow novitiates also gained impeccable command over the intricacies of the arcane, he fell by the wayside in that regard. He needed to find a way to surmount his powers, without allowing them to surmount him. His tutor maintained that no mundane training would resolve his problem, for absolution lay within him—and so they came to the sickle crag. This was a place where they sought to be closer to the peak, for it could provide more subtle depths of meditation. And it apparently already had. The substance of it eluded Khyrr, but not his tutor, who smiled contentedly at the unfolding scene.

“Ah. A mighty creature.” The ottrani’s hooves made soft clicks on the stone as she approached it, rubbing the cold out of her hands.

Khyrr passed by her, a swipe of cloak as he scampered to the erbok and hunkered down at its head. Frozen saliva caked the corner of the beast’s mouth; its hot purple tongue tumbled out to the side, but there was yet a sporadic work of vapours at its wide nostrils. Weakly snatched breaths quaked its skewered chest. Warily, Khyrr reached out to touch its impressive horn. The rugged, keratinous bone felt warm under his skin.

“It yet lives.”

“Not for long,” his teacher remarked, a morose smile lacing her words.

A keening wet groan cut the air, and Khyrr sprang to his feet as his hands went to the scabbards of his sabres. Something stirred behind the enormous bulk of the erbok. Three small fawns furrowed into the thick woolly hair of the creature’s back. One staggered a step in Khyrr’s direction and repeated its gurgling cry, a call of challenge for anyone who would approach their mother with ill intent.

“It has fawns. They are too young. They will die in this cold alone.”

The ottrani crossed her hands behind her back. “The mountain takes its toll.” Khyrr looked up over his shoulder at her. Her features were obscured by the glare and the backlight of the setting sun. He squinted, but all he could see was a dark outline; beyond her, clouds like a sea of blood stretched to the horizon where the red iris of day plunged down. It took serious effort for Khyrr to compose himself and deliver his urgent plea in a way that would be palatable to his tutor.

“You could heal it.”

“As could you,” she retorted, nonchalantly.

Dejected by her answer, Khyrr dwelled for a moment, but the sorry state of the creature stopped him from hesitating. He swallowed and set his hands on the bone-plated skull of the beast. He knew the mental incantations and subliminal projections necessary to conjure and channel the benevolent light spanning the cosmos. It came naturally to him, yet it was to no avail. As soon as the healing warmth began to surge through his body, trickling from his fingertips as motes of bluish-white light, the fits overcame him.

Acute pain sliced into his flesh as though his nerves transmogrified into thorny vines and embarked on a sluggish crawl through his arms. Veins bulged on his skin in vile colours; blemishes with the shade of rotten plums grew and died on his fingers. Khyrr stopped with a choked groan and examined his hands. They were often bruised when he first began his training with his chosen weapons, the sabres, but never as bad as now, wracked by his own magic.

“I can’t. You know I can’t. My magic ... it is broken.”

“It is just fine.” His tutor turned away and set out towards the stone steps from where they had accessed the treacherous height. “Magic is not something that can be soiled or broken.”

“Then why is it so hard for me to wield it?”

The ottrani’s words were hard to hear, as the wind picked up. “Have you ever seen the champion bid the mountain that it might bow its head for him to mount it? Or the sailor to plead that the sea drain, that it might offer a dry path?”

“That doesn’t make sense. I’m doing all I can!” retorted Khyrr, irritated by the riddle.

“Is that so? Then perhaps ask that little pugnacious fawn. She fares better than you, even in her predicament. You have something to learn from her.”

Khyrr stared down at the tottering spawns in utter confusion. Still, the infant creature taunted him, her siblings joining in the squawking and screeching as they guarded their mother despite their bleak chance of survival dissipating with every breath of warmth they relinquished. Finally, the large beast joined them too, emitting a faint growl, hardly more than a sigh.

Khyrr never forgot those large, glassy eyes as the ebbing light they held implored him for aid he could not grant.

Five

Tymotheus’s cognition lagged one step behind, struggling to cope with what Demetria’s accusations and his own cloudy memories implied while her statement hammered down on him.

“She is dead, Tymotheus.” Demetria’s voice was tremulous and low, barely audible over the monotone growl of the distant fires. “Your wife … my sister is dead!” Demetria corrected herself, articulating the latter formulation with distinctly more weight.

Her gaze was denied to Tymotheus; head bowed and turned aside, she disguised her expression in slivers of hard shadow that fell where the moonlight could not. He only saw a faint tremor of muscles across her chin.

“No. It doesn’t make any sense.” In Tymotheus’s heart, gut-wrenching sorrow met a solid wall of denial. He stiffened with it, round-eyed and thunderstruck like an astrologer watching the stars vanish from the canvas of the night.

It indeed didn’t make sense. Who would benefit from hurting her, or any of them for that matter? They were inconsequential, with no substantial wealth to warrant the attention of any highwayman worth their salt. They were poor in all but name, riches squandered in trumped-up legal disputes, land and money embezzled by cunning solicitors. Their political aspirants had seen to that in the past decade. They had no enemies, or at least none who saw them as a threat, not anymore.

At first, impoverishment had seen them relinquish only luxuries and the various superfluous amenities that came with lordship, but it’d gotten ever more severe. With time, it became their singular challenge to keep the family above water. Lately, they—and Tymotheus especially—had gone to exceptional lengths to that end. When every precious ornament and every piece of silver cutlery was exchanged for coin, Tymotheus resorted to selling tapestries and furniture to put food on the table, left with only kind words and hollow promises to pay his remaining servants with. But it mattered not. He would have scraped the gold from the murals and the gilded bannisters if it would have granted his children a day’s more full belly. Lilyenne agreed with the sentiment, but she wasn’t possessed of the persevering, nigh foolhardy hope that kept Tymotheus ever defiant. Of the two of them, her tolerance of their dire predicament had run short first. Despair slowly eroded her, forcing her hand to consider options hitherto deemed unacceptable.

She had travelled to the city that very morning, exactly because she knew Demetria would be there, so she could solicit a small amount of funds. Tymotheus had hated the idea but was made to concur grudgingly, with all other alternatives having been ruled out. He expected her to return the next day, but the next day was yet on the other side of midnight, which hadn’t even beckoned before Demetria unleashed her wrath upon their home. And Lilyenne? Where did that leave her?

“You lie! It cannot be true.” Yet, his words came out with the edge of a question.

“It is true,” Demetria said and lifted her face to reveal a callous grimace; however, the sadness suggested by her glistening eyes and working jaw was hard to miss. “My sister, along with so many others, can be added to the tally of the gangrels and freaks you call your children.”

She spat the words, caustic with disgust so intense and loathsome Tymotheus could hardly bear it. Her palpable hatred was the fire that boiled his suppressed misery into a choleric red fury. He made no pretence to withhold it.

“Do you even hear yourself? What feverous madness ails you, woman? How can you even imagine … Is there nothing in your heart except lunatic zeal?” he cried as he leaned towards her as if he could impale her with a keen look.

With his passions let slip, the last slivers of his demure, lordly disposition were stripped away, allowing something animalistic to come to the fore; the naked hate-fuelled despair of a parent driven into a corner. Only his tied hands kept him at bay; he tore at his fetters like a guard dog on a leash who could only bark in vain while the fox snuck in and culled his charges.

Demetria showed no sign of qualm, unaffected by his explosion.

“You come here with these accusations, with these lies; you put my hometo the torch …”

“I didn’t light the flames,” she protested, but Tymotheus cut her dead, heedless.

“What mad delusion could possibly drive you to hunt your own family? You accuse me and my children, after we’ve lived in fear of your fanaticism for years. Look at us! What harm could the godforsaken dwellers of this old ruin possibly do? We are ...” His voice cracked.

“You are blind Tymotheus.” Demetria snickered. “If you hadn’t been, you would have started the questioning long ago. Between these walls, of all places.”

“What?” Tymotheus recoiled, momentarily lost for words. “Demetria, there’s nothing in this house! All that’s left is dust, and memories of past grandeur.”

Yet despite his protests, Tymotheus had doubts he couldn't deny. Was what she insinuated possible—agents of malice dwelling under his roof? Down beneath the seething indignation, he still hadn’t come to terms with the unexplained attack he’d suffered, from no other than his own servants. The wound at his left temple still pulsed hot, churning out phantom flashes of thought, making him see disturbing things. Could Lilyenne be no more? Would the lost souls he'd provided with refuge and sustenance endeavour to harm him? And his children – did they all reach the hideout, and if yes, how long until the fires reached it too? The waves closed in around Tymotheus, panic tight in his throat, but he had to persevere. He couldn't lose himself to fear. His loved ones needed him. Hope remained his only anchor and he held onto it tight.

“I … frankly I cannot fathom how things could have transpired this way. I don’t know why I was attacked, or what you think you’ve found here. But one thing I know, it’s that my children have nothing to do with it. They are innocent. And so are the refugees that your masters’ tyranny drove here.”

“Innocence means nothing,” Demetria snapped. A shadow of a thought passed over her unflinching gaze. “Khyrr was innocent too. Look where he is now. Gone with a Crown of Stone. Dead, in all likelihood, buried under ice and snow on the mountain of penance, your handiwork just the same.”

Tymotheus’s angry grimace was tempered by a sudden bewilderment. You don’t know that, he meant to say with a scowl but Demetria didn’t let him speak.

“He, too, could have been saved, the tragedy avoided, if not for your foolishness.”

Tymotheus sagged, shaking his head. Thinking about his lost brother brought a jolt of bitter pain, adding a new flavour to his already ample miseries.

“No,” he sighed. “The Mageseekers’ elixir almost killed him, Ria. He had suffered that poison for ten years! Ten! It turned his magic against him, devouring him from the inside out. He couldn’t walk—gods!—he could scarcely see in the end. You’d been there, seen it with your own eyes!” Tymotheus felt his gorge rise again but he rid himself of some of his tempers with a snort and said in a small voice, “All I wanted was to give him a chance so he could be the maker of his own destiny. I ask no more for my children.”

Demetria put her hands on her hip, showing not a hint of reconciliation or agreement. “Present yourself the saviour for all you like. But your constant stream of misfortunes are clear proof of your pernicious tendencies. You made us all share this curse of ill-fate of yours.”

Tymotheus considered that, as the disquieting thought had occurred to him, too, in the preceding months. Unlike his lost brother, Tymotheus did candidly believe the curse was real, but he shared his late father’s sentiment that it was also a blessing. The hardship it entailed bestowed strength upon those who overcame it, and compelled one to one’s betterment. It was the anvil upon which the Volosh were forged.

Tymotheus wet his lips and looked deep into his sister-in-law’s eyes.

“Listen, Demetria. You may not harbour any love for us in your heart, that I understand. But you cannot wish to condemn these children to the same fate as my brother.” He took a deep breath, fighting to keep his voice steady. “Please. You can still walk away. Let us go. We could leave Demacia. You’d never hear from us again. We can forget this. Forget it all.”

Demetria paused, grinding her teeth as she took a good measure of him. For a moment, Tymotheus believed he saw hesitation on her face. In the end, she said, “It's too late for that.”

In the heat of the debate, Tymotheus missed the sound of steps and only noticed the arriving newcomers when the double door flung open. Two figures entered the bleak winter garden. One of them—a dark-skinned, bald woman of particularly short stature—was a Mageseeker, clad in the compulsory blue-silver attire and half-mask. The Mageseeker carried herself in a distinctly pompous manner that belied her meagre height. She held a candelabra; its flickering candlelight hardened the rim of shadows around the sombre foliage of potted plants and bestowed an erratic animation upon the darkness.

The other figure was an armoured knight, an aged veteran by his hunched poise and brusque disposition, craggy-faced under the shadow of his helmet, with a stubble-peppered chin and a persistent frown in the corner of his mouth. He carried a crossbow ready in one hand. In the other, he held a chain. On the end of the chain, a fettered little creature was dragged along.

It was a girl, not older than sixteen, mouth gagged with a rag tied at the back of the neck. Her tangled black hair was soiled just like the linen tunic she wore. Her neck, wrists and ankles were shackled, hooked up with heavy chains that rattled with her every move. The bonds linking her ankles were barely a foot long, condemning her to scurry with short steps, struggling to keep up with her captors. She was stumbling desperately, and as the knight nudged her forward, she fell. The knot of her muzzle must have slackened, because she managed to wriggle her mouth free.

“Papa!”

“Danica!” Tymotheus gasped in terror.

The girl eagerly crawled towards him until a hard yank on the chain by the knight stopped her an arm’s length from Tymotheus.

“That’s far enough!” the knight grunted.

The girl was pulled backward and fell hard on the tiles, legs and arms flailing. The abrupt tug on the chains pressed the fetters around her neck at her throat and made her retch painfully then gasped for breath as she doubled up on the cold floor. Red marks blemished her skin where the irons clasped her, bloody dirt caked her livid feet and nails.

“What are you doing? Are you insane?” Tears streamed down Tymotheus’s face. His whole body shaking, Tymotheus felt as if his heart was being ripped out. His outrage earned little more than sullen looks from his beholders.

“Yesterday, on the way to the Keephart estate, my sister’s convoy was ambushed by cultists of the so-called Harvest.” Demetria spoke distantly, almost formally. “They mutilated and massacred her and all her entourage. When the city guard arrived, the monsters were already fleeing. The girl tried to flee with them.” She gestured towards Danica. “How do you think I felt when I learned she was yours?”

Weeping, Danica knelt up, sitting between her heels. Her face was daubed in tears and dirt. For a moment she just stared at Tymotheus, eyes filled with a trembling blankness, radiating dread. To Tymotheus she appeared on the brink of speech, struggling to word the horrors that beset her mind.

“I saw it all, Papa,” she stammered eventually.

“No talking!” With a scornful grimace, the knight pulled the chains taut.

Danica gnashed her teeth as her spine arched back wildly, but she fought to stay upright, teetering on her backside, nails clawing the edge of the tiles at her knees.

Dismay driving out exhaustion, Tymotheus bellowed, “Is this some kind of sick joke to you? She is not dangerous! She’s just a shocked girl, how can you not see that?”

No answer came. Tymotheus’ mind raced furiously. He wanted to rage, to scream obscenities at Demetria, but she had hardened into an inert statue devoid of emotions. He knew there was a human in there—a feeling, loving sister, a proud, gracious soul—buried in the deepest reaches of her dark heart, beset by walls of spite. They were family, how could she have done this? Her inhumane apathy baffled Tymotheus. While he fumed, Danica wept quietly, trembling on the cold floor, too frightened to even look up.

Despite the mixture of ire and cold fear coursing through him, Tymotheus felt a strange peace settle in his soul. For a long time, he had refused to acknowledge a dire premonition that had been nagging him for years, preparing him for this very moment. Now the moment was nigh, and he was woefully unprepared. He wanted to stand his ground, fight for his family and come out of this crisis on his own terms, but he couldn’t afford to delude himself with such prospects. Subjected to his captor’s insistent silence, and the sight of his foster daughter’s tortured form, Tymotheus slowly came to terms with the futility of his struggle. His anger began to dissipate and give way to despair. Tymotheus closed his eyes, deflated, his face slack with fatigue.

“What do you want, Demetria?”

“You tell me where your urchins are hiding. We’ll sort out and take themages. Together with you.” She inclined her head towards him sternly. “You renounce your titles and come with me to the capital to stand trial.”

“What?” Tymotheus rasped, swallowing to gain back control over his cracking voice. “You want to take everything? Their life? My life? Everything? How do you expect me to ...”

“Or I’ll make sure your kids will burn with you!” she interrupted, raising her voice, then hurried to the old knight, wrested the crossbow from his hands and pointed it at Danica. “And I’ll kill the girl.”

“No!”

Danica whipped around on the floor and screamed as she noticed the weapon pointed at her. She writhed backwards as far as her chains allowed.

“Now.” Demetria raised the crossbow, placed her index finger on the trigger, and aimed. “Time’s up, Tymotheus.” She made a step towards Danica. Even her servants stared at her, taken by surprise.

The teenager curled up into a ball and squeezed her eyes shut. “Papa.”

That little whimper broke him. “Kitchen!” he shouted, trembling, awash with anger and terror at his wit’s end. “There’s a hidden chamber. Behind the old tapestry, next to the pantry door.”

“You’re lying? I wouldn’t lie if I were you.”

“I swear!”

Demetria let out a cautious sneer and lowered the crossbow. She glanced over her shoulder at the knight. He regarded her with a nod, dropped the chains and hurried away through the door into the house.

Her chain leash released, Danica crawled to her stepfather and pushed her face against his lap, hugging him so hard his legs felt numb. With the little degree of movement allowed to him by his bonds, Tymotheus bent and placed his forehead on her temple. As they exchanged tears huddled together in the cold, dark clouds rolled up against the moon to extinguish the silver light that lit the room. Fires raging throughout the house reflected back from the snow outside, dressing the winter garden in an eerie dim redness.

The Mageseeker who stood next to the door finally stepped up next to Demetria. The candelabra in her hand was now the most powerful source of brightness, casting twisted shadows on their faces. They returned each other’s look, pride swelling. At their feet unremarked, Tymotheus felt Danica twitch in his embrace.

“Finally.” She muttered.

“What?” Tymotheus cocked his head, straining to make out her sob-choked, feeble squeak.

A breath flavoured with a smile exited Danica's body. “Mother sends her regards.”

Six

The ghastly features of the Volosh house raced away on the edge of his vision as Khyrr ran. It was as though he was plunging ever deeper into a bizarre nightmare. His old home was a contorted version of itself, oddly at variance with the warm images he nursed in his recollection. Doors were left ajar, furniture turned over, curtains torn, and utensils and shattered ornaments littered the floorboards. A reek of panic permeated the corridors, a spectral aftertaste of the fleeing staff, picked up by his preternatural senses. Heavy grey smoke billowed through the halls and lambent orange light spilt from under several doors as the flames claimed more and more of the old mansion.

Though he agonised at leaving his brother temporarily to his fate, Khyrr resolved to try to find the children first. Still, an ominous sense of curiosity urged him to uncover more about what designs lay beneath this work of destruction, and for this reason, he decided to take a short detour towards the central courtyard of the mansion—what they called the atrium. Setting that as his goal was more than a decision. He felt as if something was drawing him there, and that gave him one more reason to be worried. Luckily, despite his five year absence, Khyrr didn’t have to slow to find his way around, he knew every nook and cranny of the place by heart. With the rampant furore of a hunted beast, he ran.

In one room, scattered tellstones crunched underfoot where they had been deposited from a capsized table, the remains of a hastily abandoned game. In another, tea-sodden carpet squelched with his steps next to a table that bore chaos-ridden compositions of a forgotten tea party. An obstacle course of curled-up rugs and toppled chairs told of a great commotion, every room a degree more ravaged than the one before. Bodies, too, resolved in the firelight-stained gloom. Sickly warped forms, sagging lifeless atop overturned furniture in contorted poses, or perched in corners with trails of blood smeared behind them on the wall. Khyrr did not slow down for those either, rather, he increased his speed. However, when he reached the tall, mirror-inlaid doors of the atrium and saw a flicker of movement in the reflective surface, he skidded to a halt.

Tarnish caked the edges of the silvery plates, their crack-webbed faces throwing Khyrr’s dishevelled, panting form and resolute steel-grey gaze back at him. Behind him, the image of the hallway fell apart along the cracks. In the incoherent scene, he glimpsed two figures as they slipped from their hiding place—an antechamber adjacent to the main hallway—then stopped in their tracks.

Aware of their discovery, they froze perfectly still mid-step. One of them was a little blond-haired boy, barefoot in his nightgown, the frightened glint of his eyes discernible even through the tarnished mirror. The other seemed to be a maid. Her smart garb was blood-soiled, her skirt soot-trimmed, sleeves rolled up messily. The mirror’s cracks collected to a point just where her face should have been. Khyrr wheeled to look at them directly. The maid returned his gaze with palpable dread, eyes misted over in shock, head sunk between raised shoulders. With one hand, she clawed her own torn mane of curls; with the other, she held onto the boy’s hand. Khyrr shook himself in realisation.

“Go! Run back this way through the western wing, the path is clear of guards!” he rasped in a subdued voice, pondered for a second, and added, “There’s one more in the old shed. You can hide there, it’s safe!”

A tiny quirk of a smile—of gratitude, most probably—appeared in the corner of the maid’s mouth, and she ushered the boy down the corridor until the darkness swallowed them.

Khyrr looked back at the door to continue his stride, but could not move. His stomach rose as an awful premonition took hold of him, like the whole world was about to crumble and the skyfall down on him. All of a sudden, he felt light-headed and short of breath, and reached  to support himself against the door.

While he lingered at the threshold, a blanket of clouds drew up on the sky, blotting out the moon. His mirror image, which began where his palms touched the silvery surface, melted into a muddled haze in the absence of light.

With a shiver that ran through his spine, Khyrr became aware of a subliminal sensation complemented by a sugary scent he could not place; foetid yet somehow enticing in equal measure. Whatever gave it off was powerful, yet distant. Hiding. Lurking. Its presence licked at his othersense, itching him where he could not scratch. He tasted malice in it.

There was a wrongness about this place. The foundlings. Khyrr mouthed Minerva’s words in silent rumination. Would his brother really jeopardise his family’s safety by sheltering mages? Of course, he would, Khyrr admitted bitterly. The presence of Mageseekers was proof of that. In that case, perhaps the unfettered, raw magic of mage-born children had caused a discrepancy in the aether. Or did perhaps some cruel mystical device employed by the Mageseekers rile the arcane? He dismissed both possibilities in short order, but then all that remained was uncertainty.

“What is going on here?” Khyrr whispered to himself, screwing his eyes shut in an attempt to banish a headache stabbing at his temples. He had to curb his growing worry, lest he too be consumed by panic. Shakily, he took a deep breath and turned his attention inward.

There was more to this mayhem than the Mageseekers’ mere performance of disciplinary action. He did make out the edge of their keen, sombre zeal lacing the astral folds of the spirit realm around him, but there was something else; the presence he caught scent of a moment ago. It was raw, chaotic, and vast; more, it was unfathomable. He tried to pry into it, but all he could discern was an indistinct encroaching mass of supernal might, pregnant with an insatiable hunger. He found no end or beginning to it, and that frightened him.

Khyrr growled as the memories of his vision stirred up unbidden from his subconscious. The laughing flames. The death of Lilyenne. The girl. With his training abandoned halfway back at Targon, still wrecked by a sickness of self-devouring magic, would he be able to avert the doom he so vividly foresaw?

From the other side of the door, shouting stirred him. A surge of trepidation cleansed his swimming head. Well-honed hunting instincts took over and compelled him to move. He slowly tipped the door open and snuck into the atrium. It was a majestic place. A patio in the middle lay open, exposed to the chilly night sky, framed by limestone colonnades on all sides. Sporadic snow drifts and a thin layer of frost accreted on the protruding features of ancient statues. Their presence was unnerving, their inert expressions concealed in white. Khyrr skirted one of the columns to have a better look at the source of the shouting.

Half a dozen armsmen came running in from all directions, only to halt in the middle of the patio, armour rattling. They were similarly garbed as the knights accompanying Master Caeto, with thick coats above battleplate complemented by teal-coloured tabards. It was of a style which Khyrr did not associate with any of the Demacian battlegroups or vanguards he knew.

“Volosh spilt it!” one of the men yelled as he jogged over to his mates. “They’re in the kitchen. Secret door. I can show you.”

Khyrr flinched. They had his brother. They must be interrogating him; otherwise, he’d never have given up the hideout. Judging from where this guard came, he must have been in the winter garden. Khyrr felt ill at ease. Maybe he could rescue Tymotheus first, before taking care of the guards and getting the kids to safety. Except … Khyrr’s heart sank as one of the knights confirmed his fears.

“The kitchen? That’s in the eastern wing, you fool, that’s almost all in flames.”

“Then we must be fast!” rasped the oldest of them, an officer most probably.

“The corridors are full of smoke!”

“Then you’ll go around through the garden. Hurry! We don’t want to serve grilled mages to the Sword Captain, do we?”

As they hurried away, Khyrr’s mind raced. The path to the winter garden was open. He could go for it. But then he’d leave the kids to their fate in the fire, and they’d either end up dead, or worse: in the hands of the Mageseekers. And if he allowed that to happen, would he have the mettle to get them out of the enemy’s clutches? Perhaps, but it was too much of a risk. He had to help the children, and now.

He cut and ran back into the house, faster than ever before. A hidden service stairway brought him up to the servants’ quarters. There, he knew of a door leading to a passageway commonly used by the house staff, providing the fastest route to the rear annexe. On top of the stairs, he found the door, but as he opened it, heat and pain made him recoil.

He flinched with a grimace, shaking his hand that the hot handle had singed. Pungent bitter smoke and a rush of warm air washed over him, filling his eyes with tears. The shortcut he wanted to take was at the edge of the inferno. Smouldering debris lay strewn all over the narrow service corridor, and flames licked at the path before him. A red-hot glow laced the planks of the ceiling, which buckled under the weight of burning rubble piled above it. With loud cracks, wood, metal, and mortar all succumbed to the heat. The end of the path was lost to sight behind a billowing curtain of pitch black smoke.

Khyrr gritted his teeth and hesitated, measuring the passage, tallying both what his impeded eyesight provided, and what memory served him with. It was a long run, but it looked ... doable. Khyrr took a deep breath, grabbed the snow-drenched end of his cloak and folded it over his face.

“Silver Sister!”

Braving the perilous tumult of flames, he darted forward, squinting against the heat. The wet fabric he used as a makeshift mask was a poor excuse for protection, and the caustic gases had already begun to claw at his lungs the moment he burst in. Seconds stretched out painfully as he ran, every muscle in his body exerted to its limit. Fright robbed him of his concerns, granting him a strange, pleasing sense of clarity that only lasted for a few seconds. Soon, the heavy torrent of heat overwhelmed all his senses, squashing him as if the scorching air itself was possessed of a tremendous weight. He felt nothing but pinpricks of hot pain, nor did he see anything but a red hellscape composed of fire and darkness.

As he began to choke, the realisation dawned on Khyrr that he might have underestimated the perils of this route. Together with doubt, fear of failure emerged from his innermost thoughts, like an old friend. It lurked in his soul at all times, his recurrent companion, dismaying him with the promise of sadness and shame. Strangely, the idea of letting down those he loved caused a great deal more dread to Khyrr than the closeness of death. He had heard many tales about the twin avatars of death as a child; there was the Lamb whose arrow offered a quick end for those who accepted it, and the Wolf who chased those who attempted to defy it. Khyrr had yet to make an acquaintance with the former, but the latter he had felt lurking on his trail many a time when he mounted the snow clad ridges of Targon, wrecked by thirst and hunger, freezing and alone. Now it was there with him again, snatching at him, its maw fashioned from smoke and fire. He stumbled and swallowed a gulp of scorching smoke, unable to hold his breath anymore. The corridor in front of him seemed to come to an end, and a door emerged. Khyrr reached for the door handle—a triple image rendered in seething red—and swooned. To his merit, he swooned towards the right side of the threshold.

Through a doorway that belched soot and acrid fumes, he burst free, trundling into an unlit space and falling down hard on the rugged flagstones, limbs flailing. Sharp pain in his bruised shoulder and hip welcomed him as his sentience plunged back from nigh-oblivion to the corporeal. His lungs and eyes burned. Whistling gasps accompanied every quickly snatched breath he took, intermittently cut off by spasmic coughs, as he struggled to crawl clear of the corridor that still vomited heat. Once the pain abated a little and he regained some of his strength, Khyrr managed to rise on his hands and knees and squinted with watery eyes into the hazy darkness around him.

Silhouettes of robust wooden tables, time-worn musty crates and barrels, and a towering stone oven were the first shapes he could make out in the smoky gloom. Wrought-iron chandeliers hung from the arched ceiling, their candle trays occupied by burned-out stumps, a decade’s worth of wax oozing from them in stalactites.

Taking the arduous path had yielded some reward. Reeling to his feet, Khyrr recognised the worktables of the main kitchen veiled in thin smoke, messy and derelict—just like everything else now that calamity had befallen his childhood home. Supporting his weight on the tables, he staggered towards where he remembered the pantry to be, kicking and crunching on detritus. Disturbed by his clumsy movements, a brass ewer tumbled and fell to the floor with a loud clang, spilling wine.

Khyrr reached out to touch a piece of thick fabric hanging from the wall next to the pantry door. The old, smoke-stained tapestry was dangling half-torn, held in place by a couple of crooked nails on one side. The secret door of the hideout was exposed, and to Khyrr’s surprise, ajar. His stomach lurched. With a pounding heart, he tipped the door fully open.

It took a couple moments for his eyes to grow accustomed to the thick darkness within, and for that time, behind every colourful pop and flash that played upon the muddled canvas of his vision, Khyrr fancied there was movement; the form of a child emerging as the shadows parted. But the windowless room was empty.

“No. No!” Between involuntary mumbles, he desperately scoured every dark corner of the hideout, reluctant to accept what his eyes presented to him.

Footsteps pounded through an adjacent corridor. The armsmen were closing in, yet their haste, just as his, was all for nought. The children were gone. In their wake, only a faint afterscent of youthful angst remained, a scent not of the tangible world but one Khyrr’s extraordinary senses could not fail to pick up, proving they had been there not long ago. Why would they leave the safety of this place? Why?

It didn’t take long for Khyrr to make the intuitive leap to answer that question. They were either dragged out with force or lured out by someone they trusted. Strangely, he found the second version more unsettling than the first.

Born of despair and anxiety, a crawling sensation came alive under Khyrr’s skin. He trembled. He could not shake a feeling that somehow he had been played. His mind was clouded, but it wasn’t simply the effects of the smoke he had inhaled. Something was deliberately orchestrating this chaos, blunting the perceptions of those who dwelled here, to its benefit; it might have been doing so for a time, pursuing a dark agenda that Khyrr could not yet fathom, but he was sure that instruments and schemes beyond that of the mundane had been set in motion to its ends. His enemy was not merely physical, and Khyrr cursed himself for not seeing it outright.

There was something else. Unbidden, a frigid, incorporeal gust rushed through him. It came with the same malicious reek as before, yet much more powerful this time. The all-permeating sentience made its move, and in a startling realisation, Khyrr became aware of what that move might have been.

“Tymotheus.”

He caught himself at the last moment. When the Demacian knights rushed into the kitchen, he was already one with the shadows, and as the panting warriors began to search the smoke-choked place, he snuck out the same way they’d come. As soon as he was far enough for his steps to be undetected, Khyrr broke into a run once more.

Seven

9 Years Ago

Demacia, Idryja City

At the climax of the crowd’s anticipation, the two mounted knights passed one another. One of the hollowed lances found its mark and burst in a shower of splinters, the crack of exploding timber barely audible over the clamour. Spectators rose, clapping, cheering, pumping their fists in the air. The kid next to him was the loudest of them, and Khyrr winced at his boyish, high-pitched squeals.

Khyrr couldn’t stop chewing on his nails as he watched the knight, in what for him was the right side of the arena, stop and swirl around on horseback, looking unscathed. Only then did he remind himself to breathe. He cut his eyes towards the combatant on the opposite side. This one looked considerably worse. His cream-white mantle and the ornate blue caparison of his horse were barbed with chips of wood, and as he swivelled, a fist-sized indentation became visible on his otherwise unblemished chest plate. The impact would have been dangerously close to cracking a rib had the brightsteel buckled just a hair deeper.

The knight tossed his undamaged lance to the ground, where it landed soundlessly on the hay spread over the sand. Then he tore off his helm and tossed that too, heedless whether the lush red feathers that jutted from its top might break. He felt at his ruined armour, assessing the damage and looking severely displeased that his ornate wargear was set to bear the inglorious account of his participation in the jousting. Perspiration clung to the old knight’s thick, hoary moustache and brows, and deep crevices lined his forehead. His lot of squires flocked to him, but he snarled at them and trotted away.

“Ser Alec must be really mad to lose to a southerner,” chuckled the boy next to Khyrr.

Khyrr did not know the knight and he had had too much going on in his head when the man’s names, deeds, and lineage had been shouted before the joust, but judging by the heraldry embroidered into his horse’s caparison, he was likely from High Silvermere. Also, the kid knew him, and the boy ought to know his neighbours after all.

Khyrr returned his attention to the winning combatant. Squires bustled around that one, too, taking the shattered lance and handing him a battered waterskin in its stead. The knight took it and raised the visor of the helm before taking a swig, revealing the face of Demetria, blushed and gleaming with sweat. Some stray walnut tresses had worked loose under her helm, and she blew upward to remove them from her eyes. She handed the chalice back to her servant, but something went awry with that move, and she bared her teeth and scrunched up her nose with evident pain—involuntarily, the mirror image of the same grimace pulled at Khyrr’s mouth. His heart drummed a roll of strong beats, making his throat throb and his breathing pick up. The highlander knight was not the first opponent Demetria had bested, but Khyrr had serious concerns about whether she had enough stamina to keep her hitherto impeccable track record unblemished, all the while avoiding getting seriously hurt. Khyrr was afraid she hadn't. Not with that injury.

***

That morning, hundreds had risen from sleep throughout the vast encampment that skirted the port city of Idryja in the shape of a crescent moon. At first light, scores of tents had begun to stir with motion, door flaps flying out and spewing their drowsy dwellers to the open. They shuffled in their mud-caked boots, relieving themselves, seeking water and food, their numbers bolstered by the dozen with every passing minute. In an hour, the whole area had come to tumultuous life. Ashen ruins of campfires were lit anew to warm spiced wine and cook buttered corn, glazed pears, and salted meat. The morning air was robbed of its crisp flavour, overpowered by bittersweet smoke and the sour tang of horse dung and spilt ale. Stalls and rickety shops sprouted along the makeshift streets that crossed the camps, the overlapping bellows of merchants booming as they competed for prevalence.

Once the morning was well underway, trumpets roared to announce that the fights would soon be commencing, and the great gates of the arena yawned open. Hundreds answered the call to join the many lumbering queues picking their way towards the arena. The edifice towered over them, but regardless of its size, its pews could only seat so many. Countless others simply gathered around its massive log walls, having to content themselves with catching the occasional sound of rattling armour and cracking spears, and feeling the mad earth-shaking roar of the crowd in their stomachs, while the scenes of mêlée played out in their imaginations as they watched children spar with wooden swords instead. Later, their friends would tell them exaggerated stories to fill the gaps in their fantasies.

Singular spectacle and gut-churning thrill awaited those who had the luck or the privilege to watch the grand tourney from the pews. The seating areas of the common folk were stuffed full of peasants, townsfolk, and foreign visitors, jostling shoulder to shoulder for a better spot. Comfort came second to the chance to attend.

Khyrr looked through them each. The elderly wore faces of sulky indolence, the young of sincere excitement. The veteran spectators showed only unforbearing bloodthirst.

For whatever it was worth, tourneys were declared safe. And they mostly were safe, but not entirely. Everyone who wasn’t naive or deluded knew that the occasional accidents still took place, and many sought the show only to witness them.

Looking up from his low seating, Khyrr took in the eager, boorish crowd, and it made him uneasy.

Upon arrival, Khyrr was rolled up an improvised ramp and berthed at the lowest tier of the raised seating areas right before a parapet girding the oval arena. This was the only place his scrawny manservant, Hagen, was able to haul him up in his wheel-fitted chair. Joining his kin was a prospect he discarded outright.

Tymotheus and Lilyenne were to sit in the upper tiers, but for him to take his assigned seat up there, Hagen would have had to carry him all the way, cradled in his arms like a child. His meagre form, constricted to a wheeled chair, had already solicited many dubious looks and had proved several rumours; he was not about to humour the curiosities of half the Demacian nobility with a display of shameful infirmity. So he remained below, next to the northern boy, where his chair fit.

The arena was a tall wooden edifice in the shape of an elongated torus, and though it was hastily built, it was as imposing on the inside as on the outside, if not more. Elevated tiers of stands served as seating areas, rising up in concentric circles, the highest competing for the sky with the city walls proper. The seating zones were split along the arena’s long, major axis; one side modest, its tiers lined with simple benches, open to anyone regardless of descent or rank, while the opposing side was reserved for Demacia’s elite, boasting lush tapestries, sparsely placed ornate armchairs, a profuse service of nuts, wine, and honeyed fruits, and an army of eager servants. A length of grey oilcloth was stretched in the shape of a ring high above the seating spaces all around to protect the spectators from the elements, especially from the rays of the late spring sun, which grew in strength every day as summer beckoned. From this oilcloth canopy, countless flagsticks protruded towards the zenith of the arena, banners of every shape, colour, and size hanging limp in the windless warmth, promulgating the noble families in attendance.

The jousting was ordained to take place on the first day. Down on the sand and hay, alternating pairs of mounted knights clashed, each round offering a chance for two combatants to put their honour on the line and measure their martial skills against one another.

“She’s good! Really good! Who did you say she was?”

“She’s Demetria of House ...” Khyrr’s absentminded drawl trailed off as the boy interrupted him.

“No, no I know that! They announce the names and titles before every round. I meant, who is she to you? You said she’s family or something.”

Khyrr let out a strangled sigh. His conversation with the boy reminded him of the ordeal of aristocratic dinner parties, where, despite his objections, he was made to sit and socialise with juvenile members of another family, the age gap between teen and child allowing for only shallow exchanges of banalities and trifling, tiresome giggles.

“She’s the sister of my brother’s wife.” The boy took some time to digest that, mouthing wordlessly, even taking stock of his fingers as if that helped him somehow.

The high sun suggested midday, well an hour—perhaps two—into the tourney, and with the crowd getting drunk on thrills and ale in equal measure, both islands of onlookers became rowdier and more loose-tongued. People threw kisses and whistled after Demetria, while others threw garlands and flower heads as she trotted away.

Demetria had had five challengers so far, four of which she’d defeated, the knight from High Silvermere being her latest tally, whom she beat three points against none. Her previous challenger, a Rijenlandean brute of a man—whose name also left Khyrr’s recollection as soon as it was shouted by the tourney marshal—was the one who had broken her streak. He had thrust Demetria from the saddle with a mighty strike, and as she fell, an ugly shard of wood from the shattering hollow mace had wedged itself in a crevice between her armour plates at the armpit. Stewards helped her up and ushered her from the grounds, but two rounds later she returned on horseback with a cocky smile plastered on her face that convinced everyone except Khyrr.

He willed her to look at him, and when she swept her gaze through the crowd and met his eyes, the usual wordless quarrel played out between them. Khyrr gave a condemning shake of a head, and Demetria shot him a wide-eyed, pointed look, gesturing with her head like a mother reproaching her child with a keen look when words were not possible. An expression that said: Stop it! Then she beat the northerner with ease, a success that involved a bit of luck, and a great deal of pain, Khyrr suspected.

“You must be proud to have her in your family, then. A brave warrior. She reminds me of my aunt Tianna.”

As Khyrr paid little mind to the boy, it took some time for the words to penetrate the disquiet in his thoughts. When they did, he started. “Tianna Crownguard?”

“Uh-huh.”

“You’re Crownguard.” It was a statement, though laden with bewilderment.

The boy nodded, nonchalant. “Uh-huh.”

“Huh.” Khyrr reclined in his chair. “Huh,” he repeated, contemplating this new discovery. For the first time, he turned his head to get a measure of the boy. He might have been younger than ten, but his height and bulk suggested more, which spoke of his penchant for favouring adventures over books. His hair was dark brown, and simply cut as if it were trimmed around a bucket placed over his head.

Feeling Khyrr’s gaze, he turned, aiming his sky blue eyes at him, then said, “Soon I’ll be just like her.”

Khyrr raised his eyebrows, unsure if the boy meant Demetria or his aunt.

“I’ll join the military,” he continued. “I’m almost of age.”

Khyrr scoffed. “Are you? Don’t be in such a hurry to put your skin in harm’s way.”

The boy paused, as if the sentiment didn’t make sense to him. Khyrr turned back to the arena, but he caught the boy scrutinising his chair with a quizzical look.

“Do you say that because you got injured in combat? Your legs ...”

Khyrr flinched at the unseemliness of the question. He shrugged, trying to think of a short answer that would put an end to the probing. He went with a half-truth. “I was born this way.”

The boy lowered his head gravely. A remorseful silence ensued, and when Khyrr was certain he wouldn’t be engaging him with further queries, he returned to his own counsel. He was already tracing back his own thoughts when the boy regarded him again.

“But would you want to be a soldier? If you could be? Like your friend?”

Anger was Khyrr’s first response, but as the question sank in, his anger drained, leaving only a sombre void behind. Repressed sadness swelled in his chest, and he buried his head in his hands to massage his temples. “Leave me alone, kid.”

“And now!” The marshal’s sudden bellow drowned out the constant ambient clamour of the crowd.

Khyrr jumped. All eyes in the arena fell on the troubadour presenter, dashing with the grace of a dancer towards the centre of the sand-covered combat stage. “My great lords and ladies, diligent labourers, plebs, sailors, and distant visitors! It’s my utmost pleasure to present to you our next challenger, a true hero of our glorious realm! Praise the day, for you are blessed to be allowed to bathe in the radiance of his magnificence! Raise your voices and greet the paragon of Demacia, the glorious Lord Claude Omignon Laurent!”

From inside the stall spaces below the stands came a white steed; riding it was a man of exceptional beauty. His long face and sharp features made him almost avian, marked with high cheekbones, thin lips, and a forehead not yet creased by age. He wore his long hair in a tight ponytail, which was almost milk-blond, as was the flawlessly trimmed beard that framed his chin. Armour of pristine silver encased his form, trimmed with gold and embellished with rare stones and intricate embossing, a plume of black hair protruding from the slim helm tucked under his arm. The ebony caparison in which his horse was draped—in harsh contrast with all his fair colours—bore the Laurent crest, an ornate rose embroidered with golden threads. The perfect parade march gait of his stallion came to a halt at one end of the jousting runway. Sounds of applause and exhilaration erupted, but they died as soon as the knight lifted his right hand.

Resplendent in his armour, he threw a brief look at the marshal with hooded eyes. “I challenge Demetria Keephart to the joust!” He didn’t need to raise his speaking voice; its rich, deep timbre carried to the far ends of the grounds with ease.

“Not again,” Khyrr whispered to himself then bit his lips, while the crowd broke into wild cheers.

“My lady!” Claude Laurent raised his voice this time, eliciting a new wave of silence intersected by gasps and surprised murmurs. Satisfied to affirm that he remained the target of everyone’s attention, he raised his gaze towards the highest stalls, directing his proclamation to the highest seat, to the host and patron of the event. “I offer this victory to you!”

Khyrr shuddered with disgust, taken aback at the blunt brashness of the premature offer. Many exchanged dubious expressions and hushed comments. It even left the Crownguard boy gawping wordless. The mass of commoners, however, came to new, depraved life. It was as if the Laurent knight’s gall had corrupted them. Across the sea of faces, twisted sneers began to proliferate, spreading like sickness, jeering cackles and whooping calls cutting through the rumble.

When Khyrr looked up to inspect Lucinda Armstrong where she was berthed on the highest seat, she was a blurred, colourless shape backlit by the glow of the sun. She rose and gave a curtsy.

A tourney on the solstice wasn’t usual. Its true reason was an open secret. It was a wedding present for her, arranged by the Laurents, when after some lengthy negotiations she finally accepted to be wed by one of their distant jerkwater cousins—another name Khyrr did not care to know—thus committing great amounts of wealth and power to Laurent hands.

Cheerful bellows greeted Demetria as she trotted out of the stables mounted and ready in acceptance of the challenge. She was unadorned, wearing the standard plate of her battalion, the only signifier of her lineage being a simple, painted shield fixed over her shoulder and depicting the guarded bastion symbol of the Keepharts. She came already wearing a helm, expressions tucked away in brightsteel. It might have fooled the crowd, but Khyrr saw through it readily. Her bearing gave her away; cold, unforgiving disdain was apparent in her every move, saturating the air surrounding her.

Khyrr fidgeted in his chair as doubts flooded him. This boded ill. Her injury had not remained unnoticed. She had been selected as an easy target. A blood sacrifice on Laurent’s altar.

The two warriors took their places on either end of the arena. Khyrr felt as if time increased its pace twofold, along with his heartbeats. He tried to hold onto the moment—where possible futures could have diverged, where there was a world in which he’d shout at Demetria to stop, to step down, and she would, and no harm would have been done—even when the marshal brandished his white flag, and the horses broke into a gallop.

Out of the blue, the warm air that had hung stale and inert over the city since daybreak now lurched into tempestuous motion. The gale stirred up sand from the battlefield and swept the ringside thick with grit, rasping against skin and sizzling through wooden surfaces. High above, the oilcloth canvas pounded like a drum as nature lashed at it.

Khyrr strained his eyes, squinting into the sand-filled gust, dead-set to see the two knights clash. It all happened too fast for him to pick out everything. Demetria’s lance seemed to be on mark, yet her strike went wide as her enemy’s lance cracked under the brutal thrust against her shoulder guard, right above her injury. The marshal raised his flag sideways towards Claude Laurent, marking one point for the shoulder hit.

Khyrr could only manage unintelligible mutters of disbelief. Claude Laurent was handed a second lance at the end of the runway. His horse let out a high-pitched neigh as it whirled and reared up in a theatrical fashion, Claude Laurent venturing as far as to knock back his visor and flash a cocky grin for the spectators. The crowd, now that their hunger for violence and scandal had been whetted, grew utterly feral. Taunts and scornful giggles followed Demetria as she took her position across the field, sagging slightly in the saddle. A spoiled cabbage hit the ground next to her. It rolled away, trailing loose, ragged leaves.

The city guards who, regrettably, had been given the privilege of post at the event, were now turning their heads at the frenzied masses, intent to coerce them back to order, having little to no success. One of them sought to intimidate a bunch of rowdy minotaur sailors with the tip of his halberd, but only laughter answered him, and he pulled back his weapon with a rotten apple having been fixed on its tip.

The newfound vigour of the elements chased gaunt clouds, drawing a blanket of grey over the skies. With the golden radiance banished, the arena gave up a measure of its wealth of colours.

Already the knights were charging again, and Khyrr was staggered to witness the mirror image of the previous round take place, as if time looped back on itself. Demetria was hit on the arm again, with her lance going haywire a second time.

“Come on!” Claude Laurent cast his broken lance aside and gestured towards his servants with furious impatience, his lot scrambling madly to get the third lance for him, spooked by their lord’s bloodlust.

In the centre of the grounds, the marshal had barely been able to shamble through the  sand and swing around his flag when the two knights launched for the third time. Mad exultation reigned. Khyrr’s mind could barely cope with the overwhelming roar of the crowd. The thundering clamour made his skull ache and his chest throb.

Then the jousting was over faster than he could make sense of it all. Upon the third and final clash, something went wrong. He heard the hard clack of wood striking wood, and saw Claude Laurent jump in the saddle, jerking his shoulder back like he was trying to pull his lance away, but his armoured bulk made it impossible for Khyrr to see what transpired. A horse squealed and roared, and he saw Demetria break sideways from the runway, her brown mare throwing a fit, jumping and thrashing, shaking her head, her mane flying, quilted with splinters. Only with great struggle did  Demetria remain saddled and restrain the runaway animal, displaying well-honed horsemanship in the process.

The poor mare still trotted anxiously when the marshal jumped, composing his thunderstruck countenance. “A horse had been struck! The rules are clear, Ser Laurent is eliminated from the race!”

The proclamation made the audience stand up as one man. Irascible cries mingled with applause and cheers of righteous vindication.

Claude Laurent tore off his helm, revealing a grimace of rage unbecoming of his patrician features. “This is absurd! She cheated! She drove my lance down into her horse’s face!” Heat rose in his cheeks, and the marshal shrank away from him, trying to sell his qualms as justified exasperation.

“I … I can only repeat myself, ser. The rules are clear!”

Claude Laurent left the stuttering functionary with a growl and goaded his horse towards the stable doors below the arena stands, where Demetria was leading her injured mare indoors, her limp now clearly indicative of her injuries.

“Hagen, wheel me down.” Khyrr was pushing the rim of his right chairwheel to turn around, coming face to face with his servant.

Hagen’s young, freckled face was still frozen into an expression of bafflement, and he seemed petrified by the joust. “Say it again, my lord?”

“Wheel me down! Now!” Khyrr shouted.

Hagen returned to reality with a wince. Khyrr turned his back on the grounds, to which now acrobats, dancers and minstrels flooded in a desperate attempt to quell the rage of the crowd. His scrawny servant fell behind him to help push his chair.

“Are you leaving? There’s still the mêlée,” the Crownguard boy prompted, the excitement of the past minutes fresh in his eyes.

Khyrr grunted. “That’s exactly what I’m afraid of.”

They descended the ramp still in place for him in a hurry. Hagen had to commit all his weight to slow them lest they tumble down, even with Khyrr helping him steady the iron-banded wheels, resulting in burnt streaks on the skin of his palms.

“That way.” Khyrr poked to the left towards a path running between the wooden guts of the building, crisscrossed with girders and pillars.

Hagen struggled to manoeuvre him through the small space, stopping frequently to dislodge the wheels from holes in the bumpy hard hardpan soil. Fine particles sifted down from the rumbling stalls, and Khyrr’s mouth and nostrils grew parched from the sand and freshly cut timber dust. The path led into a long stable that served to accommodate the needs of the knights in preparation, along with their horses and servants. Sounds of commotion already cut through the muffled rumbling of the throng overhead.

“I will not stand by idly and watch this wench blemish our name!” Claude Laurent strode indomitable at the forefront of his plethora of squires and footmen, with the servants of the tourney marshal mingled into their midst, all of them skulking in his wake, voicing their protests and remonstrances, cutting each other off, but united by the intent to halt the heated aristocrat.

In the center of the stables, Demetria was being stripped of her armour, as her helm, shoulder guard, and gauntlets had already been taken off. With the armour removed, a wet, dark red patch revealed itself, staining the gambeson under her right arm. Her squires gazed openmouthed both at the injury and the approaching, enraged noble.

“Double-time boy. In we go,” Khyrr goaded his servant. He heard Hagen swallow hard as he picked up his pace and pushed him onward, closer to the scene.

“Brother, behave yourself!” A well-dressed, blond boy, younger but similar in features to Claude Laurent, shouldered through the crowd and grabbed Claude’s shoulder, but the man pulled away aggressively, sparing only a grunt for his supposed brother. When he caught up to Demetria, she turned her back on him with arms stretched out, having been stripped of the breastplate too.

“Do you hear me?” Claude Laurent roared. “Look at me when I’m talking to you!” He grasped Demetria’s breastplate at the armhole and wrenched her around.

With the momentum of the twist, Demetria threw a punch. All voices trailed off; even the incessant rumbling of the arena felt like silence for a moment. Demetria’s eyes grew, as she found her fist seized in the hard, gauntleted hands of Claude Laurent.

The man bared his teeth in a wide, insidious grin, dropping the charade of the peevish noble, well-prepared for her to rise to his bait. He twisted her hand, making her wrist bend unnaturally and emit a sickening pop. She had barely released a throaty groan, her face contorted in pain, when the man headbutted her; then her nose cracked, too.

Men flooded the space between the two of them, prizing them apart to hold the combatants down. The hefty Laurent quickly elbowed himself free of them, reproaching his attendants or merely shoving them aside. Demetria made no attempt to escape. She let her squires lock arms with her in misplaced fear of an outburst that never came, doing nothing except nursing her sore wrist against the bosom of her breastplate still yet to be removed. She stared pointedly at her attacker without a word, a rich stream of blood trickling from her crooked nose to stain her lips and teeth and formed droplets on her chin.

“You dare cheat, and now you try to lay hands on me, woman?” Claude Laurent spat to the ground. “Who do you think you are? A leftover spawn of a worthless family, still boasting about some scrabbled mentions of its name in mould-eaten tomes, but in truth you have nothing to show for it, except finally going extinct! Did you really think we’d overlook this roguery in our tournament, from you of all people?”

“All that happened was that you messed up that riposte, Laurent. I won in a fair fight.” Demetria let out a trembling sigh. “But you have my sympathies.”

Before Claude Laurent could launch his next punch, Khyrr bawled at him from the sideline. “Stop!”

The circle of onlookers widened to admit the new arrival, regarding the disabled noble and his chair with looks of apparent misgivings.

Claude Laurent cocked an eyebrow and clicked with his tongue. “Oh look at that! Seems your pet has taken upon himself to protect you, Keephart,” he said with a sneer. “Looks like he barks too.”

As soon as she noticed him, Demetria’s mask of dauntlessness cracked, revealing cold dismay. To everyone’s surprise Khyrr began to push himself upright. His arms trembled with effort as he invested all the strength he could muster, but he eventually stood.

“You will be held to account for this, Laurent!” Khyrr managed.

“Oh really?” Claude Laurent responded in a raised tone like he was addressing a child, his clenched jaw, and wide, seething eyes clearly indicative of his revulsion.

Demetria suddenly seemed ill at ease. She tried to lunge forward but was held back by the hands of her squires and maids, to protect their mistress from further escalating the fiasco.

“Khyrr, stay out of this! Leave!” she cried, right as Claude Laurent halted over Khyrr.

“Looks like you’re fine! You don’t even need this crude contraption!” he jeered, spreading his arms in false conviviality, then with a powerful kick at the armrest sent the wheeled chair tumbling. It rolled away a few paces before turning over, almost hitting Hagen as it went. The terrified footman jumped out of the way and retreated with quiet, delicate care, as if seeking to become invisible in stillness.

Khyrr was about to collapse when the man seized his throat. Cold fingers encased in metal pressed against his skin and lifted his meagre form with enough force to make him fumble for the ground on tiptoes. He gagged, choked both by hands and a sour reek of sweat. Khyrr clawed at the armoured hands with instinctive, desperate futility, his eyes bulging as the courage that had filled him in his momentary lapse of judgement was supplanted by hot panic.

Heads turned around in the crowd, as in the distance, attracted by the sounds of bickering, the guards of the tourney finally began pouring in through the stable gates, but Claude Laurent paid no heed. Khyrr felt a jolt of grit steal over him and found his hoarse voice. “There will be repercussions for this!”

Claude Laurent barked out something between a grunt and a laughter. “Oh, like you wouldn’t believe!”

He let go, and Khyrr slumped to the horse-dung-soiled hardpan, his weak knees folding without resistance. Gulping air with sharp, shaking gasps, he struggled up on his elbows, dirt and hay sticking to his clothes and hair, all the while Claude Laurent’s libelous accusations hadn’t ceased raining on him.

“Do not think I don’t know what you are, Volosh! They might be able to keep you behind curtains for most of the time, but rumours cannot be locked away. Your and your family’s …” he licked his teeth, contemplating the right word, “... exotic shortcomings are widely known. I will make certain that everybody in court sees how grave a mistake it has been to allow such a family of aberrant interlopers in our midst.

“And you ...” He rounded on Demetria, forcing each word out through gritted teeth. “I will answer your roguery in kind. We have more influence in the Great City than your pathetic family ever had in its heyday, and I shall not think twice about wielding it to your detriment. You can forget ever rising to the ranks of the Dauntless Vanguard. I’ll do everything in my power to make sure you rot in a nameless battalion until you finally die in the mud of an insignificant battlefield like the expendable armsman you are, with your name lost to oblivion.”

Demetria fell to her knees. On her cheeks, tears drew clean trails on the dust- and blood-caked surface of her skin, and her servants seemed to hold her now only to keep her from collapsing rather than to keep her from lethal action. She loosed a feral, unbridled scream of utter frustration and defeat, then her head sagged. A maid in her retinue burst into tears while others stood silent, stilled by shock.

Claude Laurent was unfazed, a brightsteel-clad display of bleak pride. “Such travesty. One family of freaks and one forsaken. Your siblings suit each other just fine.”

“What transpires here?” a guard interrupted, surveying the scene perplexed as he came upon them.

Claude Laurent merely scoffed without so much as a glance spared to any of them, and walked away, his coterie of sycophants tailing him.

Regret was a lump of barbed ice in Khyrr’s chest. His family had always walked a thin line, and despite Tymotheus’s attempts to shift the blame to the whims of the court, or a curse of ill-fate or other nonsense, Khyrr knew he would soon come to terms with the fact that their undoing had always been his misbegotten weirdness. He would soon have to accept that he himself was the taint. But not that day. That day he deluded himself with his brother’s sweet lies and tales, denying the encroaching omens of the reckoning at hand. Still, from beneath all that denial, a repressed, but ever-present self-loathing came to the fore, as scenes of bravery played out in his mind’s eye; courses of action now irrevocably lost to time he would have—should have—acted upon, had he possessed the strength to do so.

Barely cognizant of his own weeping, he watched as Demetria’s tears fell to the dirt. Conflicted and hurt, he tried to get closer to her, but in the throes of the conflict he was robbed of what little stamina remained to him, unable even to crawl.

“I told you to leave,” she breathed and raised her eyes, offering him an expression of complete acquiescence and sorrow, her lack of resolve so distinct, it grieved him.

“I … I.” Of a hundred words and excuses, he managed none.

Demetria sighed, and turned her face away.

Eight

The cosmos reeled. Sounds of distant tumult beyond the winter garden began to ebb, and in ways alien to the elemental conduct of nature, all motion was suddenly brought to a halt. Despite his limbs benumbed with cold, Tymotheus’s brows tingled as if droplets of sweat were about to form on them, having been delivered from searing cold to stifling, foetid warmth. It enveloped him—not just the hot air but something else—an impalpable, nebulous quality that impregnated the space. It grasped him like it was alive, its miasma rushing down his throat to well heavy and uninhibited in his lungs.

This subversion of reality also induced a strange quiet that only slurred, faint sounds could penetrate, all unintelligible and nothing like the sounds of the calamity and fire that filled the winter garden a moment ago. Tymotheus was not uninitiated when it came to the ways of the arcane, but even he found unexplainable such powerful an influence.

Abnormal as it might have been, Demetria and her Mageseeker companion stood unstirred by the sudden disturbance. Tymotheus looked up at them to find their images blurred, reluctant to be animated despite the behest of time to which he remained subjected. As he watched, stupefied, a sensation of sudden cold rose him, radiating from Danica’s body as her weight pushed heavier against his skin. She still knelt at his feet motionless, arms locked in a loose embrace around his knees, her head buried in the bloodstained fabric of his trousers.

She stopped sobbing. Instinctively Tymotheus tried to reach out for her, straining his bruised wrists against the ropes that held him, resulting but only in a soft creak of the armrest.

“Danica? My girl?” He could manage a whisper, nothing more, his tempers subdued under the weight of the unnatural atmosphere. His eyes fixed on her meagre, tortured frame, and the paler the girl’s colour became, the more anxiety churned his stomach.

Finally, the girl stirred. “Papa?” Her words rang tremulously in a high-pitched tone that seemed odd and uncanny in her mouth.

Tymotheus hesitated.

“Papa?” She moaned, lacking the demure modesty of the girl who had been dragged into the room some minutes ago. If anything, it was playfully exaggerated, almost jeering. Accompanying it came a rasping chortle that wasn’t of a young girl.

She rose awkwardly, shuddering like she was opposing the motion that her body was being subjected to. When their eyes finally met, Tymotheus shrunk away. From within his little girl’s irises, an erratic gaze lambent with a rakish purple flame returned his look, veiled by her rumpled strands and curls of black.

“What now? Are you not happy to finally see us? Be with us?” she lisped, thrusting her lower lip forward in a pout. There was a raspiness to her jingling voice, as though she were choking on a mouthful of slime.

Her arms opened in a wondering expression. The shackles on her extended wrists—as well as on her ankles and neck—went maroon bright for a moment, then blackened and melted off like they’d been turned to mud. Bereft of their anchorage, her chains collapsed to the floor, jangling and all but useless. Unctuously she purred on.

“Because you see, all this time we dreamed about being with you. Close to you.”

“Wait,” Tymotheus protested.

Danica perched on his lap in defiance, wrapping her sluggish arms around his neck. Up close her features were abominable, a mask worn by someone whom its size did not fit. The left half of her face sagged inertly and drool trailed across her chin, while the right was alive with twitching and a carnal grimace, her blood-rimmed eyes alight in purple.

Under her weight, Tymotheus shifted in the chair, disturbed. His stomach turned, revolted by what had been suggested by the demeanor of whatever was left of Danica. Albeit he finally realised: the creature that was writhing over him could not have been his foster child.

“Where is she? Danica? What have you done to her?”

“Oh.” She snickered and licked the side of her lip. Her tongue began to turn a sickly lilac. “She’s here even now. Melded into our choir, a mere whimper stifled in the deluge of our voices. And she will not be the last one.” She pressed her forehead against his.

For a moment, the maelstrom of her seething glare became Tymotheus’s world. With each uttered syllable, splutter rained on his cheeks, carried by puffs so close he felt their warmth over his lips.

“We have come for the last harvest. You and your progeny’s death cries provide the final song in our discord of apotheosis.”

Tymotheus’s eyes brimmed with tears.

“Don’t worry.” She caressed him with a spasmodic and frigid hand, brushing up his cold, sweat-drenched hair. “You will join her. You will join all of them. In the chant of ...”

The girl trailed off, interrupted by a dank, fleshy thump. She peered down, amused to find the metallic tip of a bolt protruding from her chest between the ribs.

Tymotheus filched at the warm spray of crimson that struck his face. Taken aback by the flood of metallic taste on his palate, he hiccuped an involuntary, tremulous sob.

By then, whatever enchantment had had Demetria entangled in timelessness finally began to wane. First she’d reached for her aching temple, rising to the surface on the currents of pain, then with a confused blink and a shake of head she’d rid herself of the bewitchment, only to find the foul scene unfolding before her eyes. For a split second both she and the Mageseeker just stood there perplexed. Then finally Demetria came to her senses, raised the crossbow and shot.

Of all the horrors that single night had in store, this was the cruelest for Tymotheus. Whatever was the truth of the girl-fashioned apparition, he could not help but start in anguish at the sight of his little Danica—or at least the likeness of her body—having been pierced mortally. A parental fear, innate and deep seated, overcame him. Choking with tears he struggled to invoke the girl’s name, but all he managed was gasps of panic.

As for not-Danica, she spun towards her attackers, twisting unnaturally, her spine cracking and popping, oblivious to the bolt through her torso. The face she wore held nothing but sick obsession.

“By the Winged Protector.” The Mageseeker withdrew, her shaking hands already fumbling for her greymark. Seeing that the shot had had little effect, Demetria reached for the hilt of her sword. She had already dwelled too long.

“Whore!” the creature shrieked, and with it, the tapestry of creation itself concussed around them. The core of her dark soul burst in an incandescent pink tide of baleful energy.

It washed over the two of them with a gust that blew out the light on the Mageseeker’s candelabra, then in its wake came a shockwave. It was not targeted at Tymotheus, yet even to him it was earsplitting, reducing his hearing into a stabbing shrill while his diaphragm shook with its violent, low rumble.

The two women were thrown aback, flying like puppets. Every single window shattered. The release of arcane might flung the Mageseeker against the doors with such a force that both wings ripped off their hinges. They shattered in a shower of gore and wood chippings, her misshapen body disappearing along the sconce-lit corridor beyond the threshold. Demetria’s armour-clad frame hit the walls with a metallic clatter, her eyes bulging as the wind seemed to be knocked from her lungs. Then, as the hellish force ebbed, she crashed down and lolled limp on the floor. In the rain of jangling shards of glass, the creature turned her attention towards her prey again.

Tymotheus’s mind roiled under the effect of the magical aftershock, his thoughts coalescing into an incomprehensible whir, barely conscious of the girl seizing his sagging head in both hands.

“And now.” Consumed by ravenous madness she was almost growling, her jaw tense with a monstrous snarl. Spittle bubbled between her teeth as she stabbed her fingernails into his temples.

Not that Tymotheus felt much of it, he was a human wreck by now. Cold and thirst had drained him, and all his wounds throbbed in numbing unison. Though his eyelids felt heavy, he fought off the rigid haze that was descending over his mind and peered at the twisted face above him. He wanted to search for a last morsel of vigour in his soul to fight, to find a way out, yet when he looked into the face of his girl—however perverted it was—his heart sank and even that last morsel of resolve dissolved into nothing.

Strangely, at that moment Tymotheus found clarity, one that he had been looking for in all his life. He knew what choices he had failed to make correctly that had led to this moment.

The creature seemed to relish his surrender. A terrible lavender fire erupted from under her palms. It crept over Tymotheus as though alive, engulfing his whole body; a fire not made of heat but of torment.

Tymotheus stiffened. His spine stretched as every nerve in his body lit up, and the haze that enveloped his thoughts was blown away by a torrent of blazing pain. He screamed, helpless against the power that violated him. In his mind’s eye, worms made of ember crawled into his veins, lacerating him from the inside, filling his mouth, creeping down  his throat despite him retching up blood against them. His skin peeled back on itself, and in its place black tendrils coiled forth from his flesh, raking it with thorns made of shadow. The suffering intruded his mind as well, without resistance. Images of destruction and oblivion flooded his thoughts, and all his pleasant memories were torn from his grasp.

In the lack of hope of faith to cling onto, his mind succumbed to the unfathomable despair that had lurked about his mind all along. The girl-thing's voice was a faint whisper against the screaming deluge of pain.

“We will savour every last drop of suffering we can wring from your miserable little soul, and all your children will share your curse of ill ...”

Steps crunched on the debris somewhere close by, and not-Danica fell silent, eyes wide in surprise. The cold swish of moonsilver was only a glinting blur, too fast for her to make sense of. She drew a sharp breath, voice rising for a final shriek, but before she could release it, her head separated from her neck and spun away with the momentum of the strike. The body followed shortly; it collapsed to the side still twitching.

Taking its place, Khyrr stepped over his brother’s tortured form.

Nine

Only a few minutes had passed since Minerva parted from her uncle back at the winter laurel thicket, but in the cold, time flowed considerably slower for her. The conflagration that engulfed her home was distant now, and so was its warmth—which she nearly began to miss when she finally saw the ancient shed concealed deep within the neglected, forgotten depths of the courtyard’s outlying edge. The homestead reached far, and after a point it became hard to distinguish where the Volosh lands ended and the surrounding woods began.

Minerva’s teeth chattered furiously in the cold breeze as she waded barefoot through the ankle-deep snow towards the derelict wooden shack, stumbling on the occasional roots jutting from the unkempt path. In the lack of a gardener’s diligence, nature had begun to re-enact its reign in and around the ramshackle building, its rotten, beetle-chewed timber frame hardly offering any resistance. Mould-ridden tiles covered the roof that caved in under the weight of time, now further strained by a load of snow. Rafters stooped obediently and emitted an occasional groan.

Surrounded by intruding limbs of the nocturnal woods, the shed was anything but inviting; still, Minerva couldn’t wait to finally get inside. The path she had taken had been rendered torturous by the elements. She walked on stubs of red numbness. Her sweat-wet hair and clothes, though offering cool relief in the mad heat of the house, were now a blanket of caustic frost sticking to her skin.

She wrestled the door open. A tarnished brass handle was reluctant to turn, so Minerva gave the door an impatient shove and the rust-eaten latch clawed itself free from the wooden mortise with a soft crack. The inside held gloom and chaos. At first sight, an indiscernible, grotesque mess of darkness seemed to fill the space; then, as Minerva’s eyes adjusted, the phantoms of tangled shapes revealed themselves as piles of busted gadgets—broken cartwheels, abandoned gardening equipment, rotting furniture—and further inextricable things withheld by the shadows. It was an awful place, yet its horror eluded Minerva’s heart, as for her it was everything but unknown. She welcomed the musty stink of decaying wood and stale water, the same sensations which had greeted her when last she clambered in here through the windows, her siblings at her heels. Back then, the door could still repel their attempts at burglary.

The shed used to be many things to them: den, fortress, dungeon—whatever they imagined it to be—but on every occasion, Minerva had been the one holding sway over it, regardless of what role that occupation required—usually a princess or a dragon. The status quo was set when she had become the first to dare entry into the rickety shed, while all the other kids had cowered behind nearby trees, afraid of ghosts, ghouls, and other monsters spun up by their fantasy. The aura of the forsaken place scared them, but not Minerva. She had always been the first to take up a challenge, the first to climb the highest trees and descend into the darkest cellars.

Memories of careless exploration rekindled her strength; the stiffness she had been carrying finally left her shoulders, even the edge of the cold mellowed when she closed the door behind her, although in truth, the ruinous walls provided little shelter against the elements. There was, however, a legless, neglected cot—and a jumble of sackcloth atop it—that she sighted at the back of the hut. A promise of warmth, free for the taking. Only a barricade of scattered junk denied a clear path to it.

After a moment’s thought, Minerva skittered ahead, jumping from toehold to toehold, keenly aware of the protruding barbs and shafts of scraps in the dense mess. Finally, she flopped down on the cot, sinking into the dank wheat straw it was filled with, and pulled up the bristly blanket onto her back. Then she waited for a time unaccounted in the chilly blackness.

Knees huddled against her chest, kneading her cold-reddened feet, she stared at the door, waiting for it to creak open with Khyrr and her siblings or even her father on its doorstep, but the door, as all her surroundings, remained immobile.

All around her, the woods throbbed softly with the distant rumbling of the fire, its lights playing hateful pink on the fresh snow. Every so often, she grew alert when a piercing shriek or a plaintive groan echoed through the wilds, deciding hesitantly that it must have been but the house itself in its final death throes: a wall collapsing, or a beam cracking, nothing more. Soon, she became numb to the dull noises of faraway ruination. The slumbering trees cared not for it either; their wintertime skeletons radiated a strange motionless tranquillity. Quiet, saturated with a grim anticipation, enveloped the woods. It was palpable and so dense that she could nearly bite into it.

Minerva’s heart became a little lighter as she steadily accepted the fact that no imminent danger threatened her. For the first time in a while, her turbulent mind could wind down. As her anxiety waned, fatigue heavy as lead settled on her, fogging her thoughts like a cup of warm fruit punch. Exhaustion allowed memories to bubble up unbidden. She adjusted her weight on the hard bedding, eager to ease the soreness in her bottom, and the old beechwood complained with a groan. The sound cut the silence of the forest like an arrow.

The night before, nightmares had denied Minerva the comfort of sleep—all incoherent scenes of running, screaming, and getting lost, to which an amalgamation of places from her real life served as a theatre. There hadn’t been any tangible details that she could salvage after waking. Now, looking back, she thought of the bad dreams as harbingers of the horrors that had befallen her. Still, she wasn’t one to be brought down so easily by such paltry spooks of the mind. Weary but undaunted, she had been up early, prepared to flout the rules she was supposed to abide by, as always.

Together with Kleon, she had crept up to Danica’s unoccupied room—their foster sister having left early for a trip with their mother. Kleon bragged the whole of last night about how he could make a ripe fruit sprout on the cherry tree that reached up with its branches all the way to Danica’s window. Ignatz vouched for him, jabbering fervently about how delicious and red—and most importantly, real—the cherry had been. However, when, after several minutes of struggle, all Kleon could conjure was a tiny pink bloom on the frost-coated branch, they grew bored, and hunger drew them to the breakfast table. Their father came, too, but he did not eat at all. Just fidgeted. Kept straightening the cutlery in front of him absently, kneading his hands.

What fare came to the dining table became poorer with every passing year. This time, all they had was some watery gruel, cheese, and bread. Most of the staff Minerva grew up with were gone, exchanged for even more mouths to feed; exiles taken in by their father, and the foster kids. Initially, Minerva found it hard to share her home and the attention of her parents with the newcomers, but they won her over with their infantile curiosity, sincere naivety, and most importantly, their rapt fascination with her. All of them had humble origins, and unlike the various offspring of highborns with whom Minerva had the misfortune to make acquaintances in the past, none could boast wealth or brandish titles and names. They were all children of peasants and commoners, and so naturally they idolised her; the educated, well-dressed, and—by at least name—noble girl. Unreachable, a world apart. Someone who, under normal circumstances, would not grant them the privilege of her presence. Whose majesty was to be appreciated only at a distance, or admired in an even more indirect fashion, through old portraits.

This engendered a certain sense of responsibility and protectiveness in Minerva. She took it upon herself to temper Monah’s tantrums and wipe away Ignatz’s tears on occasions when childish banter became particularly cruel, and it was she who mollified Kleon before his reckless penchant got the better of him. They looked to her for advice as much as for protection and validation. Despite her initial standing, now Minerva wouldn’t exchange them, not for an army of maids and footmen.

Though they could have used the help. The house was a mess. Loyal servants who had chosen to serve for as little as room and board were few. Verica was one, the young head-maid of Minerva’s original cadre of three personal handmaidens. Only she remained with her. Minerva counted herself lucky for having Verica. Especially after she learned about the poor circumstances her new brothers and sisters had to endure. She never knew hunger, cold, or exhaustion. Not as they had. Experience of true poverty, even in this second-hand manner through her foster siblings’ accounts, made her see even her diminished circumstances as privilege. She didn’t have an army of servants, but still had someone to care for her. She could no longer take delight in sumptuous feasts, but she never left the dining room hungry. The question was, what more would she be required to resign?

Minerva’s mother spun tales about how unkind summers had wrung their lands of fertility, and bared their woods to the single tree, but Minerva knew the truth. Everything was sold or taken from them. Even now, their mother took to the road to solicit funds from her family in Idryja city. Their father often said that the gods intended some years of hardship for them so they could grow strong, but his doubts showed. His weakly concealed sadness permeated the children—it stirred up bitterness in their stomach every time they observed his morose countenance—and that morning this had been especially so. It was a cloudy, unhappy day for all of them, bereft of thoughtless games and music. Then came the night, and with it, the raid.

What woke Minerva was a clammy hand against her mouth. It was Verica’s. Her curly hair was dishevelled, and her paleness apparent even through her ebony skin. Wavering lights streamed in through the half-closed shutters and cast her in dim yellow stripes that animated across her body as countless torches bobbed around out in the courtyard. There was clamour in the air; men were shouting, dogs barking, horses whinnying, and steps crunching on the pebbles outside. Someone yelped something that sounded like an order for soldiers. When Minerva sat up, Verica removed her blanket and grabbed her wrists, fixing her with eyes wide in fear.

“My lady, we must hurry! The Mageseekers came, you must leave!”

She could barely shake her drowsiness, let alone collect her wits about her—yet found herself being dragged down the corridors barefoot in her night suit, scampering up and down the stairs, running from the echoes of pounding steps and bellowing voices. The intruders had yet to show themselves; still Verica chose to take her in circuitous ways, stopping at corners to look around, choosing stealth over haste.

Minerva could not make sense of it at first, until she realised her maid was trying to avoid the inhabitants of the house as much as the intruders. To her query why they were not heading to the hideout in the kitchen, but to the exit via the winter garden in the northern wing, she didn’t deign to answer, but when Minerva asked whether the enemy was already inside, she said, “They’ve always been inside.”

 Minerva was baffled by the cryptic answer, but panic kept her from any debate. However cautious they had been, it was almost inevitable for them to eventually cross paths with someone in the commotion. They were in the library, mounting a length of winding staircase to avoid a busy main aisleway via a service corridor upstairs, when someone called out to them from the two-winged doorway of the library’s main entrance.

“What are you doing, Verica?”

Verica didn’t look back; she increased her speed, tightening her hold over Minerva’s hand. Looking down, Minerva recognised Bellard, her father’s old head of staff.

“You cannot turn your back on us anymore!” the man screamed with an unbound wrath that Minerva had never in her life heard him profess, so uncharacteristic as though a wraith had taken possession of him. It made Minerva’s skin crawl.

Verica paid no heed, and so they ran, leaving the mad servant behind. That’s when they’d met the girl.

In the shed, Minerva tightened the blanket around her, but her shivering did not cease; it wasn’t cold-induced. A tingling sensation swelled in her chest and made her breathing heavy. The vision had stayed with her. It marked her like a wound, like claw marks in her skull. It was indelible, and so profoundly unsettling that her head swam as it replayed before her mind’s eye.

Chased from all directions, they were put to a standstill at the doorstep of her father’s study. How that came to be was unclear, as the place was off the path they were supposed to take. Did the intruders drive them there? Or were they called there perhaps?

Waiting for them in the candlelit room was a stranger, standing against the windows behind her father’s busy desk and peering down at the commotion in the courtyard.

However hard Minerva strained her mind, there had not been a single sharp form, nor a distinct feature she could recall about her. Only vague sensations, a sort of scent—of spilt wax and a sour hint of lignin, the aura of the book-filled study itself—and something else. A curious odour, sweet and thick and warm like honey, pungent with spices. Like something brought back from an ancient, primal world—something forgotten and forbidden.

But the girl? Memory could not retain her entirely; she was inimical to human conception. All that was left to Minerva were impressions. A short black dress—of silk? Hair, a cascade of ashen white. Skin of milk and a wee playful smile.

She had a hand up, her long fingers toiling with her lips as she curiously studied the scene unfolding beyond the window glass. As they entered, however, she turned for them.

“Who ...” was all Verica could cry out.

The girl made her trail off with nothing but a keen look, then she caught Minerva’s eyes. Those golden irises were a trap. She was unable to divorce her eyes from them and just stood there, petrified by the gaze. Although this was not the entire truth—that, Minerva refused to even formulate in her mind. Neither her body was paralysed, nor her thoughts taken over by any force; but the sheer will of her heart was twisted, turned inside-out, and moulded in a way so that she did notwant to move. The choice was made hers. It infected her like a parasite, a choice of surrender, alien in her brain yet still her own, born in discordant unison with a visceral fear.

Without breaking her gaze, the girl stepped away from the windows. In her right hand, held only by a curved index finger around the handle, an ornate candleholder bore a single candle alight. Minerva watched, arrested as she slid to the desk, gracefully extending her arm over it, and simply relaxed her hand with mischievous neglect, letting the candle holder dislodge from her grip. As it hit the desk, fire spread across the sheaves of notes, crumpled envelopes, and various utensils—racing unnaturally in all directions like the flames were alive with insects of molten silver.

All the while the creature cocked her head, studying the two figures on the doorstep, her own shape undulating behind the surging heat of the fire. Orange luminosity filled the room, but it revealed nothing of her.

Thinking back, Minerva considered that it might not have been a person at all, but something else entirely. A concept, perhaps. A vile essence. An ingredient of creation endowed with malicious sentience older than time, dressed in a costume of human flesh that was foreign to the consciousness which inhabited it. She—it—was too symmetrical and clean, wearing features nondescript and unfathomable. Yet she was beautiful. An image torn from the dreamscape of an abandoned lover, or a mourning father’s loss made manifest. Her gestures felt wrong, however, as though wrought from echoes of humanness without end or beginning, replayed abruptly on the canvas of her body and face, all just an act. Except for one true emotion. Insatiable hunger.

Minerva’s heart drummed as she watched the creature lift a hand and, with a coaxing motion sent a kiss towards her. Then vanished. A blink of an eye, and she was just not there anymore.

As if a fist unclenched around them, Minerva and Verica stumbled, gasping, only to wheel around and see a pair of armoured knights striding towards them, with two Mageseekers right at their heels. Verica shrieked as she was seized by the two men, but the Minerva slipped from their grasp and ran. Her recollection was hazy after that; just a jumble of panic and madness, and a chase through smoke and heat.

Alerted by a high-pitched hoot, she roused and raked the shadows of the shed for lurking dangers. Nothing stirred, only an owl repeated its cry outside. She must have dozed off a bit. As consciousness possessed her again, the first thing she became aware of was the cold, especially on her cheeks, nose, and limbs. Only later did she discern the sound of steps—snow crunching ever closer to her hideout. Finally. It must have been Khyrr.

Ill at ease, Minerva hopped to the edge of the cot and leapt to her feet, ready to leave darkness and solitude behind, but immediately her heart sank, because when the door creaked open, an unknown figure appeared on the threshold. She froze instinctively like a forest creature when spotted, hoping darkness would veil her presence in perfect stillness, but the newcomer’s eyes fell on her right away.

It was a man, about her father’s age, dressed in a commoner’s raiment—simple but smart breeches and a loose shirt of black or perhaps dark lilac—made apparent by the unbuttoned, black, fur-trimmed leather coat he wore against the cold. It was so long, its hem had gotten drenched brushing against the ankle-high snow outside. He was well-groomed, his square chin clean-shaven, and possessed of a wolfishly handsome aspect due to the sharp cut of his nose and the slanted, keen line of his thin brows. Pale, bare skin showed on the right side of his skull and temple, as if his raven-black hair refused to grow there. The rest of it was all combed to the left side of his face, revealing a large, messy scar on his right cheek as though on prideful display, running all the way up his temple and down his neck. From a distance, it seemed a poorly healed severe burn.

The man’s sharp features stiffened, brows raised in recognition. “Here you are!”

His deep, smoky whisper made Minerva baulk.

“Oh no! No, do not fret, child! I’m a friend!” With an imploring look, he made a step towards her, but the clutter of junk that filled the place thwarted him.

Minerva felt the urge to withdraw, but there was nowhere to back away to. Warily, she glanced at the window on her left; the man keenly followed her eyes.

“If you fear that I’m acquainted with the scoundrels who brought this bedlam to your kin, I can assure you, I’m not.” Then suddenly, as if on a whim, he hastened to say, “Look now! I’m in fact just like you!”

He crouched to be level with her and extended a hand, palm up. Currents of intangible excitation began to surge in the air, making little hairs raise on Minerva’s neck, and a pearl of ethereal blue light crackled into being just an inch above the man’s long fingers. The icy illumination deepened the shadows on his face and revealed more of his hideous scarring.

“You see? I came to save you.”

Minerva stared at the brilliance, uncertain about her next move. The man was evidently a mage, and did not look like a Mageseeker. If he’d been one of them, he wouldn’t have bothered with the kind words, Minerva was sure. Was he perhaps a recently admitted refugee in their house, so new that she had not yet had the chance to be acquainted with him? Minerva thought back to the chase in their home, how Verica was keen on avoiding the staff, and a jolt of unease bit into her. Dark reaches of her imagination began to churn, forming half-resolved suspicions and theories, all disconcerting.

Were all the horrors of the night—the razing of their home, the butchery and chaos—just collateral damage in the intersection of more clandestine agencies than she initially believed? If yes, then along what scheme had those agencies moved, and more importantly, to which did the scar-faced man belong? Minerva was not one easily fooled by some arcane trickery. There was an ominous air about the man, but she was unsure if she could pull off an escape, especially if the man had considerable arcane capacities at his disposal.

Still, she had to do something. She could perhaps stall for time. Khyrr had to be on his way. Minerva dismissed her concerns and steeled her heart.

“Whoever you might be, that is of no concern ...” Her voice caught. Silence and thirst made her hoarse. She cleared her throat. “... no concern to me. I’m waiting for my uncle. And my father,” she put in primly. “It appears to me that you are neither, nor do I know you. So. Begone,” she stuttered finally.

The man closed his hand, stifling the little light. As it died, the shadows seemed to return even starker than before. He licked his upper teeth with a resentful grimace and cast his eyes down, pondering. Having been freed of the man’s inquiring gaze, Minerva dared a step and craned her neck, examining him crouching there like a reprimanded child. She startled when he took a deep breath and rose, straightening his back.

“As you wish.” He lumbered back to the door, but instead of exiting, just simply pushed it open further, beckoning someone from the outside. “But first. I thought you might want to say goodbye to someone.” He bit his lips with a smile, as next to him, wrapped in a thick wool blanket, Kleon shambled in.

“Sister.” His expression was wan and his eyes dull, but he smiled amiably and extended his arms toward Minerva.

That was all it took. Shouting her brother’s name, she galloped through the chaos, letting her cloak of sackcloth fall into the mess behind her. She was already sobbing when Kleon took her in an embrace.

“I thought you were gone. Gone in the fire.” Swallowing her tears, she peered down at him. Looking back at her was only hollow indifference garnished with a faint smile; her young brother’s face was impassive.

“Is something wrong?”

“Hmm,” was all Kleon regarded her with, then he turned his head towards the man expectantly.

Minerva noticed it, and—like she only now became aware of him being within arm’s reach—pulled closer to her brother and clasped his arm with both hands.

Kleon didn’t bother responding, just watched her and the scar-faced man undisturbed.

Content with the progress, the man approached and stooped for her gaze. “Come now.” He paused. “I have your other siblings too.”

Minerva raised her head. “You do?”

“I do. Shall we go to them?”

He proffered a hand towards her. Minerva hesitated but took it.

Ten

Doubts stayed Khyrr's hand, but when the creature became aware of him and began to turn, he snapped to and resolved upon delivering the deathblow. It had not been the first of lives he’d taken—the Mountain presented those in the form of beasts and ghoulish darklings—yet as soon as his curved sabres struck flesh, he felt the weight of the dark deed pull down on his soul. His remorse proved to be misplaced, as the girl-thing was not human, not anymore, just as he’d suspected. As it died, he felt an immaterial flood of foetid energies erupt and break against his soul, like tidal waves against a cliff of stone. Skeins of nefarious spells unknotted in the arcane mesh of the aether, and the magic that puppeteered the creature was no more.

The headless body blackened as it hit the floor, crumbling into a pile of gritty charcoal dust—a homunculus, a fetch, all she was. The real girl was dead. Khyrr knew not her name; that she must have been one of Tymotheus’s foundlings, that much he deduced, but courtesy of the vision the Silver Sister had granted him, he had seen her limp and dead in Lilyenne’s arms. But then, who was its puppeteer?

The question was torn from his thoughts when his brother’s wretched frame became fully visible, and Khyrr realised he was late.

Tymotheus looked barely alive, wrapped in lazily dissipating phosphorus smoke that remained in the wake of the virulent fire which had bathed him. His skin wasn’t burnt, rather putrefied by the flames; it festered with blisters and ulcers; bulging veins like roots crept up his neck and cheeks in sickly black and inky blue. His hair was gone too, reduced to scattered patches of grey on his mottled scalp, his skull accented hard against paper-thin skin. Even his garb was blemished, his white shirt and leather breeches discoloured and mouldering. The ropes that once restrained him to the chair were crumbled as if millennia had passed over them.

Khyrr let his sabre fall from his grasp and clatter to the tiles. Gripped by horror, he knelt and cupped his brother’s face in two hands, skin slippery under his fingertips with warm crimson leaking from Tymotheus’s ears and nostrils.

At the touch, Tymotheus stirred with a weak gasp. He sought to clear his vision with quick blinks as he came round, though to no avail. His eyes were clouded with cataracts, irises lost beyond a milky haze.

“Tymotheus.” Khyrr could barely push a word through the mounting worry that swelled in his throat.

Tymotheus raised a trembling hand, uninhibited by the withered shreds that remained of his bonds. The ropes gave with ease like rotted, mould-eaten rags. Fingers thin and parched like twigs smeared gore on Khyrr’s face, as his brother groped at his features. When he made sense of them, he seemed to inflate with excitement, his mouth fell open, showing teeth daubed in blood. His voice came hoarse and faint.

“Brother. I … I …” He furrowed his brows, concerned, fumbling for words. “I have to take you back to the infirmary. Father will be upset.”

“No.” Khyrr swallowed as a sudden choking sensation almost robbed him of the capacity to speak. “I’m here. Really here. Now.” He paused. “You were attacked.”

With a frown of confusion, Tymotheus gawped at him, helpless to make sense of the world. His hollow gaze ran circles in a futile attempt to find purchase.

“Yes,” he rasped with recognition. A shadow passed over his aspect when he finally anchored himself in the now. Feeling his way around the hands that held his face, Tymotheus’s fingers sought to grasp. Khyrr answered the gesture with a double-handed grip around his brother’s bony hand. “You have returned?” The corner of Tymotheus’s mouth tremulously quirked up. “You’re well.”

“I am well, brother.” Khyrr couldn’t prevent a smile and a small chuckle from breaking through his silent sobs. It took all the mental fortitude he had to retain some of his composure and assess the damage wrought upon his brother’s body. Many of the blisters borne of the necromantic fire had begun to burst, oozing blood, and the more colour that drained from Tymotheus’s body, the more the hopes Khyrr harboured for his survival dwindled.

Tymotheus cocked his head in a moony fashion. “I have always dreamed of the celestial lights painting the heavens over Targon. Tell me, are they as beautiful as in father’s tales?”

“I’ll do better. I’ll show you. I’ll take you there.”

“Yes.” Tymotheus’s expression darkened. “You must go back. We never should have come here. We sold our faith for false peace at our peril. We abandoned our creed and consigned ourselves to oppression, for the lack of courage to fight. We brought an ember from Targon, and now it’s going out. We’re not cursed, we only lost our way. I see that now.”

His mumbling was lost on Khyrr. Every time he touched Tymotheus, his hands came away red, and as his desperation grew, so did his resolve. He placed his hands against Tymotheus’s chest and steeled his heart, coaxing the benevolent song of the cosmos to find its way through him. Humming light lit up his palms in a fluorescent azure; the release of power expelled winter’s harsh edge around them for a moment.

Khyrr winced, watched as his veins warped and darkened, and a familiar inner fire filled his lungs. Magic—as always—flowed through him like barbed silver, drawing blood and inflicting torment. Grinding his teeth, he fought the pain that spread unchecked through his flesh, but not even a single wound was closed by his frail magic before his brother clasped his wrists and pushed him away. The sudden gesture gave Khyrr pause and broke his concentration. Reality sighed as the disjointed fabric of the weak spell unravelled and its energies settled.

“I must heal you, brother,” Khyrr insisted. “There is no other way, you’re dying.”

“Listen to me.” The hold on his wrist tightened.

When Khyrr peered up, Tymotheus’s countenance was changed. His gaunt visage was rendered hard-edged, his blank sight glinting with stern light; he wore the face of the strict older brother now, though tremors wrecked him—clearly, the dregs of his strength were spent to poise himself. Cold stole into Khyrr’s gut as he recognised his father’s erudite manners, his sharp wit, glimmering in his brother’s eyes.

“You need your strength. I need it,” Tymotheus whispered through laboured breaths. “Lilyenne is ... gone. I’ll follow her soon. You must find the children. Take them back with you.”

Exhausted in the effort, Tymotheus’s head sagged. Khyrr grabbed him by the shoulders and pushed him against the chairback to keep him from swooning. His skin radiated cold under his grasp.

“I won’t leave you. I’m staying here, do you understand?” In an effort to sound confident and strong, Khyrr endeavoured to slow down the flood of words pouring out of him. It was all useless. His poor attempt to compose himself only made him sound shaken. His every utterance was tremulous, his mind drowning in the fog of panic.

Tymotheus could only mumble. “You and me, we don’t matter. Only they matter. They are the last ember of our legacy. The last spark that remains of the light our father’s fathers brought here from beyond the sea. They must be returned to the old home, or everything our ancestors have fought for will be for nought, and the light will go out. Our blood will be lost. You must promise. Promise me, you’ll find them. Take them home. Whatever the price.”

Khyrr kept his silence for a moment, then said, “I don’t know if I can do it, brother.”

A groan startled him, uttered by Tymotheus. It was almost a mirthful snort. “Remember what father used to say?”

“What?”

No answer came.

“What did he … Tymotheus?”

Tymotheus’s head lolled back, and he died.

Khyrr had no time to come to terms with his grief. Sounds of metal scraping on stone and the crackle of rubble scattering roused him. A knight’s armour-clad form behind him at the wall—one that he regarded as dead when he entered—now stirred. The figure groaned on the brink of waking, her face half lost in a mess of tangled strands broken loose from her braids.

The moment of recognition robbed Khyrr of his senses of the waking world. He hadn’t yet ceased to shed tears for one tragedy, when he found himself at the cusp of another. A world of fire and ice collided in his chest, the crippling loss of his brother now squashed by a sense of heinous betrayal as he watched Demetria slowly come to. Right at the scene of the crime. Her involvement was painfully evident, but the means and intentions behind that involvement eluded Khyrr.

He stood dumbstruck between his brother’s cold body and his childhood paramour and protector; he shuffled to and fro, stupefied and utterly incapable of deciding what action to take. Should he help her? Was she on his side? She served the cursed Mageseekers, that much was clear, but what did she have to do with the dark powers that infested this place? Because dark powers were widespread indeed, he had felt it in his vision, had felt it outright when he set foot on this land. The malevolent creature that he’d beheaded, the one who took his brother’s life, was proof of that.

Somebody had taken the other children, too, and it wasn’t the Mageseekers or their henchmen. Perhaps—Khyrr decided—whatever sinister agent worked its malice here, had caught Demetria and her men off guard, too. Khyrr made a step towards her but hesitated. Running steps and bellows echoed from down the corridor; now the time to dispense with his doubts was nigh. He could not go to her. Not now. He would jeopardise the safety of Minerva and all the children.

In that moment, he contemplated whether his father’s curse of ill-fate was indeed real, and vowed that if it was, he would end it that night. With a heavy heart, Khyrr retrieved his dropped sabre and ran for the patio door. Just like when he’d left his deceased father’s room all those years ago, he could not force himself to look a final time at his brother’s lifeless body.

***

If it had not been for her armour of petricite-infused steel that absorbed the arcane wrath of her quarry, Demetria would have undoubtedly shared the fate of her Mageseeker companion, Tarra—lain dead and misshapen on the tiled floor in a pool of her own blood. Instead, she was relatively uninjured; however, having been hurled at the wall with the strength of a charging stallion did hurt. It hurt immensely. Her vision was a throbbing blackness, and the breathlessness combined with the excruciating pain granted her some alleviating oblivion. One moment she was snatching at her weapon, the next she found herself face down in a mess of earthy debris. Shattered remains of pottery clattered aside, clumps of soil shifted and crumbled as she made a clumsy attempt to clamber upright.

Looking up, she tried to get her bearings. Her vision split into a smudgy canvas of blacks, blues, and reds, with one dark shape flickering in the middle. Squinting, she fought the fogginess in her head until it finally dissipated and the image before her cleared; when it did, the moving dark shape was already gone. It disappeared in a thin shaft of light, probably through the portico’s doorway in the back. It must have been the creature escaping after her deeds were done.

Demetria pushed herself to one knee, beheld the headless, withered form on the ground just beyond the shaft of moonlight that once more lit up the centre of the winter garden, and reconsidered her conclusion with some unease. Then, her unease built into dismay as she made out Tymotheus’s tortured, ashen body, still seated in the chair.

His spine and sagging head seemed awry at an awkward angle. He was limp like a puppet too loose to be properly seated, stilled just on the brink of tumbling down from the armchair. With a curse on her lips, Demetria lugged herself up and stumbled forward a step, but a sudden wave of lightheadedness drove her back to one knee. She barely registered her knights flooding the winter garden, calling her name, helping her upright. From under the physical pain and nausea that the dark magic had induced in her, a deep-seated sense of failure and loss crept forth and settled as a hot weight in her stomach. She could not part her gaze from Tymotheus’s form.

She resented him, maybe even detested him, but she did not want him dead, especially not as a result of her own failure to contain the situation. Whatever malice had hid inside the girl’s body, it had made a fool out of them; it made them play ferryman for it, to get to here. Demetria swallowed a bitter taste. She squinted again to banish the pinpricks she felt in her tear ducts, the effort concealed from her man with a sullen grimace.

“I am fine.”

With that, her man’s several queries after her well-being were shaken off, discipline restored with a sharp look. Four of her knights stood at her side and several more came running towards them down the hallway.

“Report,” Demetria demanded.

“The children are gone, Sword Captain. The cultists must have gotten ahead of us.”

The owner of the voice was the guard who had held Danica’s chains before he was sent away. The man, still panting, slid his gaze around, aghast at the chaos in the winter garden. The still burning fires lit up the snow-covered landscape outside in crimson, which made scattered, broken pieces of glass on the floor glint in wrathful colours. “Master Caeto was killed.” Another knight picked up the thread of the unfinished report. “Some mage surprised me and Rhanos. He took the trueborn girl.”

With a limp Demetria made for the patio exit, resting her left hand on the knob at the hilt of her sword for support. Defeat only hardened her resolve. “We were played,” she grumbled, half to herself.

“Sword Captain!” bellowed one of the newly arrived armsmen. “We cannot find the guards by the main gate, but tracks suggest a large group left there towards the southwest road.”

“Then what are we waiting for?” She raised her voice. “Rhanos, Tewir, search the rest of the estate, find our last men, or whatever is left of them, and take the wounded to Idryja City. Everyone else, with me.”

There was only one place they could have gone—though Demetria kept her conclusion to herself—the place where her past had died in flames and her present had been born from its ashes.

“We ride for Hobhearth!”

Eleven

6 Years Ago

Demacia, Idryja County

The village was in flames. Not the houses, rather the hearts of the people, as it was the first night of the Greathorn Rut in Hobhearth. Every spring, when the winds turned benign and the woods embracing the cosy cluster of huts turned lush, the wilderness grew loud with the rut and clatter of the great stags as they clamped and clasped antlers in competition. It was during the Rut when the freshly planted wheat, rye, and barley tended to poke their first greens out of the ground, the cold of the night relented, and the people of Hobhearth gathered on the streets to banish winter for good with music, laughter, and carousing.

“Watch your step, good sir!” jangled a voice.

Khyrr recoiled as a large tray laden with mugs of mead swished past a hand’s breadth from his face. The barmaid who carried it even cared to regard him with a quick smile and wink, undeterred by the weight of the tray or the loitering crowd. She danced away, the sky-blue of her skirt sweeping the cobblestones.

Hobhearth was seething with people, the throng far too large to be composed of only locals. All along the cobblestone main road, which crawled through the village touching every porch like an obedient snake, merchant stalls and makeshift drink terraces sprouted in chaotic fashion. Every stall was choked with people despite the late hour. Colourful flag streamers connected the eaves of houses like a cobweb overhead, and gaudily dressed hay effigies raised their hands in the air on every corner; ugly depictions of winter made to frighten away the spirits when they eventually went up in flames. Old traditions still lived here, but they were not always this open to the public.

Debauchery on the first night of the Rut was an ancient custom of the local wardens, but despite their closely knit, reclusive nature, a few hundred years had been enough for folk in the area to learn that it was worth sharing a table with the mighty wardens in their festivities. The surrounding towns emptied out and people—poor and rich alike—poured in and filled the spaces under the thatched roofs of the hunters, sharing ale and game. The Rut also served as a great equaliser, at least for a single night. Lords clinked their glasses with bakers and blacksmiths, stewards and bailiffs danced amongst peasant girls and grifters. The scent of charred pork and honey wine wafted through the streets, its smoky air resonating with rhymes of zither and pipe music, singing and laughter.

Now, with a measure of his strength returned, Khyrr relished being amongst people, walking on his two feet again. As he pushed against the flow of bodies, voices of scorn and outrage made him turn. He saw the crowd spilling aside around a game of tellstones as two contestants cast curses at one another. One of them kicked up the table in his tantrum, sending mugs and many coins—along with said tellstones—skittering and tinkling away. Khyrr turned his head away. A bit of an affray was not uncommon, and who was he to judge centuries-old customs?

He was just about to continue his stride when a tug on his sleeve halted him. Peering down he saw a pair of innocent blue eyes looking up at him in scrutiny, owned by a little boy. A mane akin to a jumbled haystack crowned him, features lost in tangled blond curls.

“You’re not very dandy.”

The notion made him blink in surprise, but his tension ebbed as his heart warmed. It was Thubb. The kid was their head chef’s, Madame Thadwell’s, secondborn from the manor; he had known him since he was a helpless little cub. His father was the blacksmith of the village. Now the boy was at the age when he could have started helping his mother peel potatoes and carrots, little but not so little anymore, and as such, some boyish brashness was a given; albeit he was not wrong. Dressed in his tidy shirt and red jerkin, he was much better dressed for the festival than Khyrr, who slid through the crowd in a shabby grey travel cloak, hood up. The little one’s sober eyes recognised him regardless of his clandestine conduct—hopefully, he was the only one so far.

“Aren’t you afraid of being caught?” the boy asked in his thin voice, as if aware of Khyrr’s thoughts.

Thubb was in the small covert cadre of servants who not only knew where Khyrr was hidden from the Mageseekers, but actively took part in keeping him that way. Khyrr held up his index finger against his lips, shushing with a wink and crouched down to him, so his whispering would be heard.

 “No. Unless you keep drawing attention to us!” he murmured with a playful tint in his voice.

“Yes, lord. No lord.” He cast his eyes down, unsure if he was reprimanded or played a joke on. “I lost me ma,” he complained.

“Oh.” Khyrr raised his eyebrows. “Let me see.” He put his hands under the kid’s armpit and hoisted him up in the air like a babe. “Do you see them now?”

As if used to being picked up and thrown around, the boy did not fret; he got a hold of Khyrr’s shoulders, legs dangling free, and strained his eyes, pouting. He carried his gaze through the crowd from his elevated position intently for a few seconds before his face lit up in recognition.

“There they are! At the stables!”

“There you go! Good lad.” Right as Khyrr put him down, the boy scurried away, passing under the elbows and raised glasses, swallowed by the mass of bodies. Khyrr looked after him for a moment before making his way to the tavern.

During the nights of the Rut, the Inn of Hobhearth was the place to provide bedding for nobles and rich merchants. Well, in truth, it provided bedding for anyone who had the coin to pay for it, but considering their hefty prices during the festival, common folk could ill afford to rest under its roof.

This was where he was supposed to meet her—away from the watchful eyes of the court—provided the letters he had sent in secret had indeed been delivered.

Khyrr came to the raving village possessed of a strange sense of serenity and absolution, but as he approached the stone walls of the neat two-story building, his calm ebbed. Upon reaching the gates, he felt jittery, his heart drubbing in his throat. By instinct, his hands went for the little amulet hung around his neck; his fingers played with the Veiled Lady’s figure, reassuringly familiar under his touch. He knew this was not going to be easy. It was going to be much worse than saying goodbye to his brother, and that had already been hard enough.

***

“You ride for the Idryja docks. No detours.” Tymotheus had dictated the instructions for the umpteenth time that day while handing him the reins of Waltz, their fastest stallion. Tymotheus’s waistcoat was unbuttoned just as his shirt at the neck, and he rolled up his sleeves to help get the horse ready. “You go straight to the ship. They’ll be waiting for you. It’s called ...”

“The Dryhaven,” Khyrr finished for him. “Yes, I know.”

Tymotheus nodded and checked the saddlery, tightening the straps on Waltz. No footmen had been there to assist them, not even the reliable ones; all arrangements had been made in secret.

Good for Tymotheus, Khyrr thought. At least he had something to occupy his mind. Perhaps the fact that he helped in the preparations made him believe that he had at least a modicum of agency in keeping his younger brother safe.

Inclined to do something useful himself, Khyrr knelt down and went through his backpack of supplies one more time.

A cry cut the air. “Uncle!”

They all jumped, fearing that someone unwanted had snuck up on them. The precursor of sunset, a benign stream of brass light that penetrated the stables through the two-winged gate, darkened as the newly arrived blotted it out. Drifting motes of dust in the air flickered. A little girl leapt inside, trailing feet-long tangled tresses of chestnut brown. She skittered through the dusty, hay-strewn hardpan, face down to hide her tears. The little girl slammed into him and  locked her arms around him so suddenly that air was knocked from Khyrr’s chest with a groan and he almost lost his balance and toppled over where he knelt.

“You cannot leave without me!” she squealed. “You promised you’d take me. You promised you’d show me the stellacorns!”

“Minerva, what are you doing here? Go back to your room and be quiet!” Tymotheus growled at his daughter in a subdued voice, with more choler in the rebuke than he normally exercised against her, the tension of the undesired parting putting him on a short fuse.

Khyrr peeled the little arms away so he could look into Minerva’s eyes. It still struck him as strange seeing such sharp intelligence in those green irises. To him, it felt like yesterday when his niece was just a gawping babe. Minerva smudged the tears on her face with puffy child fingers, smearing spots of dirt on her cheek, remnants of a day spent playing outdoors. The little girl’s dismay soured Khyrr’s heart. He could have said a lot of things that made sense: You are too young. The road is too treacherous. There might be nothing but death and ice waiting there. But none of those words would temper her sadness. Or his, for that matter.

Khyrr had stopped taking his petricite potions three months ago. Not because he gave up on the good habit, but because he was officially missing—and thanks to the combined effort of friends and family, he had managed to stay missing. This was by no means a permanent arrangement; his discovery was only a matter of time. With other options ruled out, all that officially remained for Khyrr was a slow death or eternal banishment. Except he knew another way.

The Crown of Stone was an ancient Demacian rite, a path of atonement for any Demacian whose failure or flaw was beyond redemption. One would cross the great sea to the south and brave the heights of the roof of the world—the majestic Mount Targon. Any culprit who survived would gain absolution. Alas, the Mountain in most cases meant certain death, and consequently, those punished by the Crown of Stone most of the time merely ran away abroad, rather than actually go and test their mettle against the sky-scraping cliffs. Khyrr, however, did not plan to simply climb the Mountain.

The idea came to him on a chilly dawn as he studied the battered murals in his father’s old bedroom. If the tales of their forebears were true, their ancestors still lived in the dark recesses of Targon. If someone knew a way to heal him, to help him find his way in this world, it was them. He had to find them. He had to find the Lunari.

***

Khyrr jumped. Before he could go for the tavern door handle, the hinges squeaked and the door flung open. From inside came a deluge of bad air carrying milky pipe smoke and a warm, hoppy bitterness. An old man dressed in fine white robes halted on the threshold. The Dawnspeaker of the village, he realised. Khyrr tightened his cloak; the man had known him since childhood. Luckily for him, the old chap was a tad bit too drunk to recognise his features under the gloom of his cowl—or to even care to find out who he was, for that matter. Not when he struggled even to keep the ground from twirling away from under his feet. The groggy functionary regarded him with a grunt and shambled past.

The prospect of being recognised and questioned was a constant risk, but having just evaded it by a hair’s breadth unsettled Khyrr further. He had to deal with this last thing fast. Walking in, he didn’t even spare a glimpse for the barkeeper, or the merry crowd around the tap, but threaded towards the stairs, weaving through the throng. A carpet-covered, creaky oak staircase took him to a sconce-lit aisleway on the third floor, doors lining it on both sides. He strode past all of them and took the one at the very end—ornate, its doorknob made of blackened silver. He did not knock, just entered and pulled the door shut behind his back. As the latch clicked closed, frustration exited him with a huff. He’d finally made it.

Within the room, what greeted him was a testimony to a life of long-despised excess. Compared to the modest peasant houses of the tiny village, the interior was nothing shy of ostentatious. Along the walls, gilded mirrors repeated the opulence of ebony furniture, dark leather sofas, and tables brimming with dried fruits and confectionery. A ghost of past revelries, the sweet scent of expensive cigars hung in the air that, throughout the many years, had seen the ceiling take up a yellowish hue. Overhead, candles in a brass chandelier cast everything in soft, warm light, while underfoot, thick ruby fabric of Shuriman carpets swallowed his steps.

Khyrr’s gaze was instantly drawn onto a great ornament, hung on the wall above the mighty, brick-framed fireplace. It was the gaudy crest of the Keephart family rendered on a shield—a crenellated battlement, with a rank of armour-clad knights behind the parapets—the crest further emphasised by a pair of crossed halberds behind it. This place was the Keephart’s local residence, and the lofty drawing room and conjoining bedrooms served as their base when they decided to spend some time away from the city. Looking at it all, Khyrr felt nostalgic; this was a world he had finally renounced, and it was high time he cut the last golden thread that bound his heart to it. His determination was strong. Stronger than ever, yet when Demetria silently walked out of a bedroom on his right, he felt it waver.

She had the stature of a knight, regardless of her garb being only a pair of leather breeches and a high-collared white shirt rich with embroidery. Beyond the dourness of a soldier and the eminence characteristic of a stateswoman, however, there was a hint of nervousness about her—angst fluttered in her eyes as if she were preoccupied. Or even afraid, Khyrr thought, but that seemed like a bit of a stretch to him, knowing who she was. Who she really was—that was the main reason why he feared this meeting. Conflicting emotions churned in his mind; he had to urge himself not to falter. They both deserved closure.

“You walk?” Her surprised, amiable tone gave him pause, somehow, having prepared for reproof and scorn. The fact that she was here meant that his messages had reached her. And that, by extension, meant that she was aware of what he was planning. He was very clear when he’d put his intention on paper.

“Walk?” Khyrr spread his arms as if presenting himself, unable to suppress a little grin. “More, I run!”

At that, some of the blithe light that permeated Demetria’s visage began to seep away.

“I see.” Demetria skirted an armchair that separated the space between them and put her hand on the backrest. Whatever qualms her gaze held when he first sighted her, she repressed them because now she seemed utterly composed. Her hair was untied, its loose honey-brown stream rolling over her shoulders in unruly curls, possessed of a soft gold sheen in the candlelight.

Khyrr knew exactly how those curls felt against his fingers. He cast his eyes down. Warmth rose in his cheeks, conscious that his discomfort was apparent. He cut to the chase, steeling his heart. “I’m ready to go. I’ve got Waltz. And two weeks of supplies.”

“Good. Good.” Demetria repeated, then paused and cleared her throat. “I have talked to the Buvelles. I’ve arranged sanctuary.”

Her words, though perhaps intended as a proposal, came out like an order, lofty and bleak.

Khyrr felt his stomach clench. “Ria ...” He exhaled and lowered his gaze dolefully.

“They have land in the east. If you’re there, no one can say you’re a liability to the family. They would decrease your doses too.” She made a step towards him, her eyes gleaming expectantly. “It could be a new beginning. Just as you wanted,” she added with a half smile.

Her insistence confirmed his fear, one he had carried up until this moment, now feeling as though it weighed down upon him like his shoulders were made of lead. Khyrr was suddenly weary, but managed a short-lived, forgiving smile. Then crossed over and clasped her hands with both of his.

“It’s not just about the potions. Or the family.”

Demetria blinked back at him, confused, surveying his face as though desperately trying and failing to understand him. This close, her aura washed over Khyrr, a tide of bittersweet lavender that eclipsed the faint smoky odours of the room.

“Then what is it?” she asked with a subdued voice.

Khyrr tightened his grip on her hands, groping for words. There was so much to say, in so little time. “You’ve said it yourself. Here, I have always been just a liability. An object of shame. A cripple, a freak. It won’t change if you tuck me away somewhere. I’ll still be an oddity to be kept a secret.”

Demetria shook her head fiercely, brows furrowed in disapproval.

“No, it’s not like that, you misunderstand. It’s for your safety. For everyone’s safety. It’s …” he paused, fumbling for words.  “You cannot help it, the laws ...”

Khyrr flinched at the half-fumbled notion. All the tenderness that his heart held was stifled under a wash of resentment. “Exactly,” he interrupted. “Demetria. Why would I choose to stay in a country where I’m considered an abomination?”

“You’re treated here!”

“Treated.” He bit back the rest of his reply with a scoff, chewing on his lower lips with poorly contained frustration. Demetria’s hands fell from his loosened grip. He closed his eyes for a moment to compose himself.

“You’ve watched me choke on their poison since we were children. You have seen me wither. And their shady experiments with my magic? Is that what you call treatment?”

“Do you think it was easy for me? How many times must we argue about this?” she snapped. “It was necessary! Unshackled magic is a pernicious risk. What will it take for you to finally understand?”

With that, her mask of composure shattered, giving way to a surge of passion that made her voice tremble and her eyes well with tears. Seeing her rise like the tide, Khyrr shuddered. She was a force of nature, and even now she provoked a sense of resurgent longing in his heart. But he buried it and cut his eyes. There was something else. A hot stinging began at the back of his skull that made his head pulse with pain. He tried to wrestle it, shaking his head a little.

“Do not play deaf!” Demetria continued, pointing at him. She started pacing, gesturing vehemently. “It is because of the treatments that you never posed any danger to yourself or others, but do not think that the potential is not within you! You haven’t seen what magic is truly capable of when it’s allowed to fester! How it can pervert the soul. All we wanted—” she dared a step towards him, swallowing a measure of her anger,. “—all I wanted was to protect you from it!”

“Yes,” Khyrr said in a dismal voice. “And so, I spent my life in a box. I resented myself for it. For being nothing but a caged animal.”

“You should have been proud!” she exclaimed. “A man of your station ... you’ve made an example with your condition, showing how to keep it in check with rigorous care!” Studying his face intently, she edged closer, trying to ascertain if her approach would be welcomed.

“It’s always about reputation for you, isn’t it?” Khyrr snapped his gaze to her.

“What? What? No I … I ...” Demetria stammered, her eyes wide in both bafflement and embarrassment.

“I was dying, Ria.”

They both fell silent. The air between them became laden with sorrow, so profound it stifled the cheerful sounds of celebration beyond the windows.

Demetria finally shook herself, stepped closer to Khyrr and placed a hand over his chest.

“I wouldn’t let you die.” She sounded as though she pressed the words through a knot swelling in her throat.

“Then let me go.” Khyrr felt Demetria stiffen, but continued. “The Mountain. It’s calling to me. That’s where my path leads, to the home of my ancestors. There my redemption awaits. And my healing,” he added, almost pleading. It was all conjecture, Khyrr knew it, but there wasn’t an iota of uncertainty in his voice. He placed his hand over Demetria’s. It was cold and clammy under his palm. “I’ve never been so sure about anything in my life.”

This time, it was she who pulled away. “You must be out of your mind if you believe that the witches and sorcerers of the south and their ilk would take better care of you. They’ll only taint you with their madness!”

“It is my choice to make.”

By then, both of their eyes were brimming with tears of misery and suppressed anger. The throbbing ache in Khyrr’s head increased to a hot numbness that threatened to engulf his thoughts.

“Don’t you see?” Demetria cried. “All I want is for us to stay together!”

“That is not enough!” Khyrr yelled back, his exasperation finally breaking through the floodgates. Demetria winced. The explosion of his temper surprised even Khyrr. He buried his face in his hands, regretting the outburst right as he let it go. They both stood there, fixed in place wordlessly for a moment.

“I can’t … this isn’t just about us. You cannot solve this. Not any more,” Khyrr murmured, defeated, his words devolving into whimpers.

Demetria swallowed her tears, her trembling jaws clenched. Gradually, the grimness of the battle-hardened combatant reemerged in her, eclipsing the pain, so that only the wetness of her eyes remained.

“I was hoping it would not come to this.” Her words rang hollow.

She beckoned towards the dark bedroom from which she had come when Khyrr arrived. Something stirred there amongst the shadows. Three figures walked out through the doorway.

Khyrr withdrew, dread flooding his body, blood retreating from his limbs. At that moment, like an insidious joke, the crowd outside rose in an earth-shaking ovation, throwing hats in the sky. “Forgive our eavesdropping, my lord. I hate to disrupt the ... ahm ... intimacy,” said in an obnoxiously coaxing voice, the one who came at the front. He was an aged, short man. His bald head had a sheen of perspiration and a greyish goatee adorned his puffy face; his wolfish eyes bore an ominous glint. He wore the blue-silver regalia of the Mageseekers, and Khyrr was suddenly all too aware of what had caused the strange headache he had been feeling since he arrived.

Looming behind the Mageseeker came his associates—a burly fellow who looked more like alleyway muscle than a Seeker’s bodyguard, and a gaunt young man with long, raven-black hair and an insidious air. They were disguised. Both wore travel cloaks and grimaces of utter contempt.

“You can be of witness, High-Provost Dylan, as I testified ...” Demetria sputtered. “... the … the rashness of the boy, it’s why I personally solicited ...”

“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” Dylan cut her short impatiently. “I do see now, your account of this ordeal had been substantial.”

“And so ...”

“And indeed,” the man interrupted again, putting his hand up. “The last few minutes provided ample evidence for us to be able to draw a conclusion. No doubt, Lord Volosh must certainly admit himself to our custody!”

He bulged his tightly packed round belly out like a peacock, accentuating the greymark hanging around his neck, and examined Khyrr with a triumphant grin. His cursed medallion was the source of the strange, visceral headache that clawed at Khyrr’s mind. He could have recognised the sensation sooner, but his thoughts had been too occupied to manage telling apart the symptoms of his elevated feelings from the prompts of his prescience. Khyrr tore his gaze away from the source of his fear and looked over at Demetria.

“This was the plan all along, selling me out?” he snarled, nostrils flaring, chewing on so much anger it made his voice tremble. “You have nothing in your heart but zeal! I’ve had enough of you! You and your people.”

At that, Demetria straightened bolt upright, dumbfounded, as if hit by lightning.

“My people?” She forced a giggle oozing with suppressed fury, and made a step towards him. “My people?” she repeated, her temper growing twofold.

Dylan and his ensemble advanced and invaded the space between the two of them in an attempt to stifle Demetria’s outburst, setting themselves as a wall in front of her. Khyrr scrunched up his nose as the whiff of movement brought the Mageseeker’s perfume-spiced reek of garlic perspiration under his nose. Dylan came to a halt in the middle of the room, his body poised sideways so he could look at either Khyrr or Demetria with a twist of the neck.

“No need to make it worse than it is! If the boy proves to be docile, the Compound may—in exchange—prove to be lenient in this matter.” The provost might have addressed Demetria, but his ravenous eyes had not left Khyrr.

Khyrr stood his ground, mustering all the courage and defiance his nascent anger granted him. “This doesn’t make any sense! What would you possibly hope to gain by keeping me here? I have the right to choose the Crown of Stone!” he proclaimed. Dylan pushed his bottom lip forward, considering that for a second.

“Your rights can be disputed. No right supersedes our duty to serve Demacia,” he asserted, his tone laced with condescension.

“You cannot do this.” Khyrr began to inch backwards, but he quickly ran out of space. His rear side bumped into the hard oak surface of the door. His hand behind his back grasped, hungry for the cold, metallic touch of the doorknob.

Dylan keenly watched his every move. The Mageseeker wet his meaty lips, a smirk developing on his face—unmistakable proof of his delight as he savoured the fear he induced.

“I can promise, no harm will come to you, my lord. But alas, if you’re disinclined to follow us willingly, or worse, you encumber our lawful conduct, we cannot but infer further infractions were undisclosed here. Further secrets to be prised from your mind, perhaps?” he probed.

“With all due respect, provost.” Demetria tried to push through them. “All we need to do is keep him here, our families can deal with this issue.”

“Enough, woman!” the Mageseeker rasped out, glowering at her over his shoulder. It seemed the time for “my lord’s” and “my lady’s” was over. “You’ve already proven your incompetence at handling this predicament! We have come as you wanted, now do not interfere with our conduct, unless you want to incriminate yourself even more! I already connived at your heretical relationship with the boy!”

Khyrr froze as the doorknob finally filled his grip. His sudden stiffness was an obvious tell, one he considered too late to mask. Dylan missed it, distracted by his argument, but not his sidekicks. The bulky man just stood unfazed, leering at him menacingly; the slender one shifted, a nervous scowl on his face, eager to make a move. It took not a single heartbeat, as the three of them—Khyrr and the two goons—exchanged quick glances in what seemed to be a tranquil moment of common understanding, and then they spurred to action all at once.

Twelve

6 Years Ago

Demacia, Idryja County

Khyrr flung the door wide open and darted out. In concert, his pursuers jumped after him, hitting only the vigorously swinging door in his wake, no more than a split second too late to have him tackled. Heedless in their frenzy, the two men fell over each other as they squeezed themselves out through the doorframe simultaneously, the big guy pushing wind from his skinny partner. Khyrr had little time to look back and relish his pursuers’ comical eagerness, but the pounding steps making the floor shake and flames flicker in the wall-mounted sconces told him that the muscular guy came after him first.

To get from the room to the staircase took Khyrr a sprint shorter than three heartbeats, yet he experienced it as a maddeningly long, desperate struggle against stretching space. Instincts not so different from those of a hunted animal fell upon him like red smoke, drowning out all measure of reason. His nerves were ablaze, a buzzing tension encompassed his whole body. Cold sweat began to form and purl down his back as he pushed his muscles to their limits.

“After him!” Dylan’s furious bellow echoed through the walls, distant and long overdue with the chase already being afoot, but Khyrr barely made sense of it. The delirium of fear robbed him of clarity. Every successive drumbeat of a step behind him felt as though it came from twice as close as the one preceding it, his attackers closing in with what seemed like inhuman speed.

He felt a ghost of warmth caress the skin over his shoulder; whether it was heat from a closing grasp just inches away or an imagined sensation, it mattered not, for it drove him all the same.

He knew without a doubt that slowing down to take the steps would see him caught. When he finally came up to the staircase, his mind was already set on the jump. Khyrr leapt, the incapacitated state of free-fall taking his breath away while the ground rushed up to him. He stomped down on the landing between the two floors, a surge of glee washing over him, having succeeded the jump without breaking an ankle. Only his extended hands stopped him from slamming into a wall of hard planks. With the momentum of the leap, he shot himself off the wall, spinning aside barely in time to avoid the arriving danger.

His muscular, thug-looking pursuer proved he was not just strong but foolhardy. Just as Khyrr, the man did not even slow down to ponder the jump; he simply made it, but—unlike Khyrr, who was possessed of a slender form—his bulk and weight were considerable. And so was his inertia.

He landed awkwardly, stumbled, and slammed into the wall at the end of the staircase landing. A loud thump of cracking wood or bone—or perhaps both—announced his arrival, sending a flurry of dust into the air from under the rattling woodwork.

That must have hurt badly. It must have slowed the man down, Khyrr reasoned to himself. He glanced over his shoulder to ascertain his advantage. In cold shock, he realised there was none. The cloaked thug was yet hard on his heels, his neck thick with bulging veins and sinewy muscles, nose swelling at a severely disfigured angle, a stream of blood trickling down from one brow. He propelled himself down after Khyrr, ludicrously undeterred.

Khyrr took every third step, scurrying down as fast as he could, pivoting wildly around the newel post, but again, he wasn’t fast enough. With every second, the bulky figure grew larger and larger in the periphery of his vision. A throaty growl of rage rang too close in his ear. The rest of the group was also after him, made apparent by the sound of indistinct bickering from both Dylan and Demetria, and the clomp of hurried steps from above, but it was of lesser concern to him with the bullish man breathing down the nape of his neck.

He would end up in their clutches, if not in moments, then down in the crowd of the tavern’s salon, where he’d be hindered by the mass of bodies. He needed to devise an advantage.

On a whim, when he got to the first floor, instead of descending further on the stairway, he plunged forward down the corridor, heading for a door left ajar at the far end. It didn’t appear that he would reach it, but to his luck, an alternative presented itself. Miraculously, just a few jumps ahead, a door opened up, and a man stepped out, a woman tailing him close behind.

The guy seemed to be noble born, well-dressed but dishevelled. With a drunken, mellow face pouting under his enormous handlebar moustache, he was  concentrating acutely on the task of fastening his belt, which was concealed behind his considerable belly. His room’s keychain in one hand and a pouch—of gold presumably—in the other further encumbered the manoeuvre. Next to him, the girl—a redhead, similarly tousled in a cut-up skirt and a dark bodice rich with lace frills and ribbons—regarded him with an impatient glower; one brow shooting up, she held her hand out, palm upward, towards her temporary chaperone.

The scene was unmistakable, but for Khyrr this was not a time to be judgmental. And an open door came in handy. The two figures looked up at the commotion; their eyes grew wide as they sighted the onslaught barreling down the aisleway in their direction. When Khyrr lurched to a halt next to them, they both retreated, bodies squished up against opposite sides of the corridor. The woman let out a little screech.

“Beg your pardon!” whinged the man with utter indignation.

Khyrr didn’t even break his sprint, let alone regard them. The panic and the furious run had already left his untrained body depleted. His quickly wheezing breaths could not feed his lungs fast enough, keeping him on the edge of asphyxia, while sweat stung his eyes and impeded his vision. He hurled himself into the room. The door stopped abruptly as if turned into stone before he could pull it shut behind him.

From the other side, a heavyset hand  wrenched it open just enough so the large toe of a hardened leather boot could insert itself in the gap over the threshold. Khyrr heaved, committing all his heft, face scrunched up in a grimace of utter exertion, realising far too late that the door was blocked.

When he did realise it with a moan, a throaty snigger answered him from the other side. Then the door was torn open with immense force, almost unimpeded by his effort to close it.

Khyrr felt the world race away. Still connected to the door handle with a desperate clench, he was flung back out to the corridor like a puppet, his right shoulder almost dislocated by the vigorous yank. Staggering, he only caught fleeting glimpses of his surroundings —the noble and his girl scampering towards the stairs, the slender, cloaked guy, Dylan’s other henchman, shoving them out of his way with a cold resolute look, striding on—before the big man grabbed Khyrr by the throat, so hard and fast it was almost a punch.

Khyrr let out a gurgling, choking gasp. A small painting—a pipe-smoke darkened fruit-piece—wobbled and fell when his body hit the wall next to it. His fingers clawed at the man’s thick forearm pitifully as he was lifted in the air, his back rubbing hard against the wall.

“Easy, easy,” the man growled, joyous fury and patronising gloat writ plain on his ruined face. Blood dribbled from his nose, mixing with beads of sweat that sat over his dry, cracked lips. He licked it off with a grin. “Looks like you need some of your medicine, calm your nerves.” He raised his chin, gesturing towards his mate, but his eyes remained fixed on Khyrr, a cruel, unsettling light growing in them. “Weird! Fetch a potion!”

Dread. His stomach shrank and turned sour. In his mind’s eye, countless hands held him down and he lay shuddering, overpowered, the foggy liquid rolling down his throat, engulfing him, its power intruding his veins and nerves, warmth leaking through his ears and nose, his eyes bulging as if they were about to pop like squeezed grapes. No. Never again.

In the arguably simpler times of his early childhood, still under the boon of blissful ignorance, Khyrr often experimented with his magic, provided nobody was watching. At first, his mind struggled to sculpt it, get hold of it, his power just gushing out or trickling away from him, either breaking things or evaporating without any lasting effect. Later, he learned that with focus, and by exerting a sort of mental impetus, he could weave it into commands: making water boil or freeze, willing items to lift and bend, candles to light or go out. He could also just gather it like a deep breath and release it raw, as an arcane tantrum of sorts. That was something that caused a lot of accidents and turmoil when he was small, and consequently, he was never allowed to do it. He’d heeded that rule throughout his life. Until now.

It was like hitting a high note in a melody he hadn’t ventured to sing for a long, long time, the exploration of long forgotten sensations unwieldy to his mind and body—but after he jerked those energies into motion, everything fell into place. All the panic and anguish nursed in his heart coalesced into a wellspring of arcane might, and he drank deep from it, then released it all towards the man who held him.

It was a violent feeling, almost like vomiting, a formless hot miasma belching out of his spirit, wild and unfettered. His skin turned lambent with ice-blue light; it reflected sharply in the muscular man’s eyes—eyes which filled with terror of a realisation that came too late—and a formless cerulean fire erupted from Khyrr with a deafening otherworldly roar.

It swept through space inconceivably fast, a rippling tide of radiant blue expanding in every direction, bringing ruin to everything it reached. The walls shook. Paintings tore from their pegs and flew away. Carpets peeled up from the floor, just to fall back down a few feet away, all jumbled up. Fires in all the sconces went out, darkness enveloping the place. The arcane blast laid waste to the entirety of the aisleway and disappeared as quickly as it was belched into life, debris and shattered fixtures littering the ground in its wake. The muscular man had the premier place to taste the might of the barrage. It hit him with the force of a charging bull. His body slammed into the wall with a loud thump and he fell down on his face and stopped moving.

To Khyrr, the world became a hazy, twirling soup of shapes, full of popping colours. He felt ill and depleted, the magic—like always—wore on him, but this time it was worse. It was worse than the most torturous hangover he’d ever had. He tripped and fell to the floor, no longer held upright by the throat. As if on a carousel, the image of his surroundings spun away from him. For a moment, he thought he might throw up, but his sudden sickness relented just enough for him to tell up from down. Somewhere close, voices rose in consternation. Still, he was not safe. He scrambled to his feet and into the abandoned tavern room and finally shut the door behind him.

The place was dark and sparsely furnished, the bedding tangled up, the window open to the celebration below. The night vista looked as though a boiling, bubbling potion was being brewed under the horizon—surging lights played, and multicoloured ribbons of smoke twirled up over the rooftops. Everyone was loud and busy, blissfully unaware of the commotion in the tavern.

“I know where you are!”

The high-pitched, singsong voice made Khyrr shiver. It came from the corridor outside, along with the sound of approaching steps. It must have been the man the big guy called Weird. He was exactly that, weird and unnerving, and Khyrr did not desire to be face to face with him. Demeteria and Dylan must have been close, and who knew how long the muscular fellow would stay flat? Khyrr spun about, quickly assessing his situation.

There was no key to lock the room; it had gotten lost in the chaos. He ran to the window and leaned out his upper body, holding himself at the window frame. The cool night breeze on his face alleviated his nausea. Below him stretched a dark alleyway, straddled by the walls of the tavern and a cluster of stone-wrought dwellings. The cobblestones of the alleyway gleamed wetly at an unsafe distance down. Beyond the dwellings, a tumult of vibrant lights emanated from the crawling fair.

Khyrr murmured a curse and wiped sweat from his brow with the back of his hand. In frantic futility, he began to tear at the bedsheets with the intent to tie them to the window handle,so fabricating some sort of rope, but his time ran out. The door creaked open behind him. His throat closed with the onset of fear, but he did not allow it to take hold. He was not getting caught, not tonight.

Willing himself to move, he stepped onto the low window frame and threw himself out to the cold, not even bothering to check who came after him. For the second time tonight, he succumbed to the helplessness of the fall, all renounced but his hope in a good landing. Luck eluded him this time.

Hurtling down, he saw rats in a final flash as they scurried across the muddy puddles of the alleyway—spooked by his clumsy entrance. His first foot came down awry as it slipped and buckled at an awkward angle on the wet stone, pain bolting up one ankle as he tumbled sideways and hit the ground, ribs and shoulder first. There was a blunt strike at his temple. The image of the alley was supplanted by blackness flashing with sporadic patches of greens and yellows. Gritty stone raked the skin on the right side of his face.

Khyrr let out a groan. Tinnitus robbed him of a measure of his hearing. Pain was suddenly a solid thing in his body, heavy and rigid in his flesh. Aching heat rose where the ground had pummeled him. He spat out a mouthful of bloody saliva, unsure whether a tooth was in it. As soon as the sharp pain in his muscles eased into a hot buzz, he crawled up to all fours. Two times he tried to stand, two times he fell back to one knee, fully succeeding on the third try while he steadied himself, clinging onto a tin water-shoot.

“He’s down!” The singsong voice rang echoless in the room above, still playful but with a disappointed, slightly frustrated tint this time.

“I’m going around!” resounded Demetria’s distant voice, accompanied by Dylan’s grumbling and cursing.

Lucky for Khyrr, none of them risked the jump. He shambled down the alleyway, trying to break into a run but held back by a terrible limp. His composure was severely frayed by injuries, both mental and physical. Involuntary whimpers issued from his throat with every breath. An alert tension born of shock and dread denied him the relief of crying. He felt sobs rise and get stuck halfway down his gullet.

Demetria’s betrayal made him feel as if every ache in his body was caused directly by her hand. Tymotheus had warned him about her proclivities to ignore reason in the face of infractions against her precious Demacian ethos, but Khyrr had disregarded these warnings. He had fiercely believed that their feelings for each other would surpass her dogmatism.

How naive he was. Trusting her was about to be his undoing, and the realization of that truth, of his own foolishness, instilled in him a crippling self-hatred that drove him to even greater degrees of despair. As he shambled farther down the alleyway, he felt the eyes of the gaunt man—the so-called Weird—on his back.

“You’re not getting away.”

Khyrr jumped. Bright lights flared overhead, and a multitude of sharp pops exploded in his ear. He looked up just in time to witness a cascade of brilliant reds and yellows hung up on the canvas of the night sky, expanding with lazy motion. More seething colours followed in their wake, lighting up the heavens in quick succession, blue and purple this time: fireworks. The explosions were ear-aching, but they were not the reason for Khyrr’s surprise.

That was the voice ringing inside his head. The voice of the Weird.

“You’re not. Getting. Away.” It came again, purring, putting weight on every hushed syllable.

There was no point of origin to the speech, no real sound whatsoever, yet Khyrr heard it. He was made to hear it, made to be aware of its meaning as if his own imagination was compelled to form concepts and endow them with a ghost sensation of sound. The Weird was in him. He felt him inside, flaying away at his brain.

Khyrr stumbled, but did not slow, not even for this outlandish impediment. Like someone trying to get water out of one ear, he made a spasmodic shake of head, but there was no relief. The alien presence was all over him, spreading through his consciousness like fungus, intruding uninhibited on his thoughts. He scratched himself, but the irritation did not relent. It was his aura that itched from the inside. If Khyrr had had any doubts why the Weird was called as such, they were gone now.

Though the Mageseeker’s order had many clandestine practices, the fact that they did not eschew employing magic for their own benefit was an open secret. In that, Khyrr had first-hand experience. It was not the first time he’d had a telepath rifling through his thoughts, but it had never been this obscenely violent.

A group of kids coiled away from his shaking, limping form as they ran for a better spot to see the show, but he barely noticed them. Through his panic, he rummaged his mind for a solution. Could he disappear in the wilderness if he reached the forest, or would the Wardens of Hobhearth find him before he’d get away? Was there a place in the village where he could hide until things calmed down?

So much he had jeopardised by this folly, by taking Demetria’s loyalty for granted. Months of preparation, countless sacrifices, days of tiresome scrutiny endured by his friends, just to allow him this journey. It would be all for nought because of his misplaced trust. It wasn’t right. They should have heeded his will to take the Crown of Stone. There were laws. He shouldn’t have suffered this injustice, and the fact that he had disturbed him.

The interloper in his brain followed his train of thought. “You and I were born pariahs, tainted with magic. Laws do not apply to us like they do to them. Though you’re right. You ‘could’—” his ghost voice went high-pitched on that word“—You could have chosen exile. But it’s not that simple. You don’t understand the full picture, do you?”

The alleyway led Khyrr into a wide crossing that weltered with dancers and red-faced drunkards. A bonfire of wood and hemp fashioned in the shape of a jumping Greathorn flared in the middle. It exuded heat like the summer midday sun. The sound of pipes and drums was a vague hint in the exhilarated pandemonium. People milled around with drinks in hand, slipping on the treacherous earth that was waterlogged due to a  stale deposit of rainwater, and becoming muddier with every spilt ale.

Khyrr pulled his cowl and started inward, the crowd thickening around him. It was like wading through a morass of flesh, the mob thwarting him every step of the way, dancers jostling him about. The air was redolent with briny sweat and the syrupy scent of spirits, and the thick smoke of the bonfire suffocated him. Faces regarded his dishevelled visage with drunken grunts and revolted gasps. He was not looking good. He felt blood dripping from his chin.

His mind roiled, the uninvited guest slithering within. “Get out ...” was all he could mumble.

He felt as the Weird’s sentience snickered in the back of his mind.“Don’t worry about me. Worry about them.”

As if on cue, there was a shout, half drowned out by the still roaring fireworks. People stirred around Khyrr—first just a few, then more—and gawked at something in the distance behind him.

“There he is! After him!” Dylan’s outraged cry was distinct this time.

Khyrr’s heart skipped a beat. Peering over his shoulder, he made out the Mageseeker’s round-bellied stature on the far end of the crossing, pointing a fat finger right at him. Demetria and a local guardsman at her side were already wading through the crowd in his direction. Khyrr picked up his pace, his limping gait making him painfully apparent in the throng. A sharp ache in his ankle was the price for each hurried step he made, and he feared his capacity to withstand this pain was at its end.

A sudden change rippled through the streaming tide of bodies. Some folk kept dancing and carousing, heedless and blithe just as before, but others scurried backwards or froze in recognition of the Mageseekers’ involvement. Fear began to spread through them.

Khyrr ducked and crept onward, using the commotion to his advantage, and for a moment his pursuers seemed to have lost him in the swirling carnival. Searching for a hiding place, he came across the gate of the blacksmith’s shop, forgotten ajar, cold darkness within. The little Thubb’s father’s place; Khyrr knew it well. He’d been there countless times, helping his father and later his brother to arrange the re-shoeing of horses or other ironwork. He lunged for the welcoming darkness, the door swinging behind him. It took a few seconds for his eyes to grow accustomed to the half-light. Little by little, indistinct shapes resolved around him—messy worktables, tools dangling along the walls, the towering bulk of the forges—shadow-marred details supplemented by his memories and imagination alike.

“I heard fascinating rumours about you.” The voice returned; in truth, it hadn’t been gone, its presence had merely been muffled under a veil of angst that lifted from Khyrr’s mind once he was out of imminent danger. “Your powers are feeding on your own life energy. They broke you in a marvelously fascinating way, didn’t they?”

Khyrr cut him dead. He floundered his way around in the dark, running his hands along the workshop tables, making tools and gadgets clink and clatter. He came to a halt as a great bulk of tepid, rough metal filled his vision. It was a coal storage; he recognised it. If memory served right, there had to be a backdoor somewhere close by. Khyrr skirted the storage cylinder and tentatively stepped forward, arms stretched out.

“You still don’t get why they want you so badly? Why they won’t let you go? Isn’t it obvious?” The voice reduced to keen whispers in his head. Listening to itbrought an irritating sensation, like hot silk caressing the inside of his brain, brushing lightly against the back of his eyes. “Imagine what they could do if they understood your strange condition. Perhaps even harness it! Induce it in others, so to speak. A weapon tailored only against other mages. A manufactured disease. A curse of arcane self-flagellation!”

“Enough!” Khyrr snapped but trailed off halfway through the word; the volume of his own voice scared him.

In this state, tortured by grief and aches, consigned to his imagination and memories in the absence of light, the words of the Weird were even more profound. They brought memories to the surface that hung superimposed on his gloom-eclipsed presence. Foul conjectures took root in his mind, drawing an image more ominous than anything that had ever occurred to him. Ideas he hitherto failed even to consider now felt plausible. Could this have been true? Had he made sacrifices throughout his life for this vile purpose? Was his scrupulous treatment not for his health and his family’s safety? Was all just a ...

“A horrible experiment,” the eerie presence remarked, completing his chain of thought with pretend grief, its wraith-voice drenched in jest. But there was more. This time, the disembodied whispers carried something else.

“It shouldn’t have been allowed. If they’d succeeded …” There was a weight to the psychic speech, not in the shape of cadence and tone, but rather in the form of subliminal scents and dark suggestions that leaked from the sorcerer’s mind and seeped through his telepathic touch, conveying his true emotions.

They sent a jolt down Khyrr’s spine. The owner of the voice did not like his master’s plans either. Khyrr felt the heat of the Weird's soul boil with frustration and determination, heedless of danger or consequence.

A rough, hardwood surface sprawled under Khyrr’s palms. He ran his splayed fingers across it, first hesitantly probing, then as he grew certain, madly fumbling. It was the backdoor he was looking for. His questing fingers stumbled upon the bolts just where he suspected them to be. The hard, cast-iron contraptions did not resist his attempt to undo them, but the door stuck. Khyrr gave it a shove, ready to dart out.

A torrent of sound and light overwhelmed his senses for an instant, but as the door flew open, there lay his path to freedom, through the main thoroughfare of the village. A surging throng filled it; its tides breaking against ramshackle stalls and pub terraces, the currents of bodies guided by the scent of booze and the sound of music. Here, he could get lost in the stream and then disappear through the woods.

Khyrr baulked. Between him and his escape path stood the form of the Weird, framed by the roaring fires and blatant debauchery of the streets. His cadaverous mien seemed to bleed an incorporeal cold that made skin crawl and teeth chatter. There was a memory of lost grace—perhaps even beauty—irretrievably effaced by his now gaunt, anaemic features, but that only made him the more uncanny. His purple mouth curved into a measured, almost gentle smile.

He played sheep with his gestures, but his eyes betrayed the wolf in him. His gaze fixed Khyrr with such a rapacious intensity that it was hard to hold. When Khyrr nevertheless ventured to do so, he found he could no longer separate his eyes from those midnight blue irises. His attempt to escape was destined to fail from the outset. Every thought, every step he made was prised from his mind nigh as he conceived them.

Khyrr scampered backwards frantically, elbowing a bouquet of hanging thongs and utensils, hips bumping against worktables and producing metallic clanking as he went, eyes glued to the man on the threshold. He’d only managed a few steps when the main door burst open behind him, his other three pursuers pouring in. Dylan was the first, but Demetria shoved him aside and jumped at Khyrr, grabbing his wrist from behind.

She called his name, but it did not matter. Khyrr was on edge, frightened and aggrieved. His pain and exhaustion pushed him to the cusp of insanity. At the sudden touch, he wheeled, freeing himself, and pushed his attacker with all his strength.

“Get away!” His full-throated scream burst with such visceral ferocity that it made his assailants shrink from him.

Demetria was not ready for her friend’s unmitigated violence. She stumbled and dropped on her backside, hitting her shoulder blades hard against a large metal armoire. Half-made, hiltless, and ill-repaired swords fell to the ground next to her. Something sharp in the jumble of falling metals carved an inch-long score over her left ear, drawing blood.

All throughout the chase, Demetria had worn a brittle mask of dutiful detachment, poor concealment of her evident qualms and unguarded remorse. No sooner had she lost her footing in the face of Khyrr’s aggression than that mask fell away. She looked up from behind a veil of tousled strands. Her mouth fell open, eyes welled in fright-induced tears, sheer bewilderment all over her face. A drop of blood traced a route in red from her temple to her chin.

It took a moment for Khyrr’s hasty, primal rage to drain away, a sense of abject shame growing in its stead as he was arrested by what he barely recognised as his own doing. Abhorred by his own pitiful loss of composure, he looked away, only weak groans issuing from his throat as he fumbled for words. When he finally found them, time had run out and his apologies died in his throat.

Across the workshop, a crackling sound sprang up; along came a release of a sickly violet glow that drew a sparkling sheen on everyone’s eyes who faced Khyrr. Khyrr gasped as hisothersense suddenly kicked into overdrive. All the hairs on his arms stood on end as he slowly swivelled towards the source of the anomaly.

It was the Weird, his left fist wreathed in arcane light as if a handful of tempest had been contained by his grasp, sizzling and popping in its rampage, eager to be set free. Jagged, erratic arcs sizzled away from his hold to whip at particles in the air haphazardly. He drew closer and stood next to the large coal storage Khyrr had bumped into in the darkness. The air grew foul as he approached, and Khyrr bristled as he felt the manifold of reality lurch to a whirl, goaded by the sorcerer’s mighty presence.

By the merit of his talent to sense magic, Khyrr perceived the imprints of the arcane as scents and tastes, and he had sampled many flavours of it throughout his life. Never had he tasted a power so profound.

He slowly raised his hands in an instinctive gesture of surrender. The Weird saw it and, with a stubborn shake of head, appeared to dismiss it.

Demetria picked up a crooked, rust-gnawed longsword from the ground and sprang onto her feet. The guard next to Dylan just stood dumbstruck, his eyes darting to and fro between the Weird and Khyrr, unsure who his enemy was. Dylan himself stepped forward.

“It appears to me that we’ve got a stalemate!” He coughed, slightly short of breath, wiping his sweaty forehead with a laced handkerchief.

“Sacrilege!” Demetria blurted out the only word that came to her. With her sword held up, she made a threatening step towards the Weird, only throwing a brief, indicting look at Dylan.

The Mageseaker cocked an eyebrow and grunted. “Save your indignation, Lady Keephart! My good novice Ser Haelbach is a sanctioned practitioner of the Compound. He will assist us in ourdeed. Isn’t that right, Ulrich?” Dylan’s gabbling, though it was meant to reinforce confidence, betrayed his qualms and, as such, achieved the opposite.

The Weird—Haelbach—raised his chin, nostrils flaring, and flashed a flinch of scorn, his eyes glued to Khyrr. “Exactly,” Haelbach growled. “Our deed.”

Thirteen

6 Years Ago

Demacia, Idryja County

Haelbach bared his teeth as his eyes rolled up in their sockets, presenting but a gaze of empty yellowish white, and threw out his left hand in front of him.

Khyrr felt the length of his guts quiver at the terrible explosion of sound. It was as if a thunderstorm let its crackling roar loose indoors, right next to his ears. Blazing, capricious razor veins of lilac-tinted light crept high over Khyrr—an unnatural lightning bolt of sorts—connecting the fist of the sorcerer with the rafters of the smithy’s roof. Khyrr looked up unbidden, the sickly light hurting his eyes and leaving the inverse image of the lightning bolt’s fickle form burned onto his retinas as it chewed through the joists and beams, spitting embers and chips of wood.

The destructive power of the spell was immense; the handiwork of mortal masonry and carpentry stood little chance against it. Immediately, a great portion of the roof came down in a cascade of cinders and shards of desecrated woodwork.

In the panic of the moment, Khyr’s gaze flicked over to Demetria, and he saw her both appalled and mesmerised by the horror of arcane havoc, her eyes ablaze with the light of the dazzling phenomenon. Then she suddenly came to with a wince and gave him a hurried, tear-misted glance before her form was obscured in a deluge of smoldering rubble.

There was a loud cracking sound over Khyrr, and his head snapped up to stare into a downpour of wrecked roofing—a disconnected rafter plummeting towards him accompanied by a shower of broken roof tiles—but before the rubble could bury him alive, his legs disappeared from under as he was seized at the collar of his cloak and dragged to the ground and out of the way.

 Demetria invoked his name, Dylan screamed in anger, but all was distant and indiscernible. The blast left a whistling in his ears that numbed the cacophony to mere hints of sounds. Khyrr searched his surroundings in the suffocating wash of heat. Demetria and Dylan were lost to sight, either beyond or inside the swelling inferno that engulfed more and more of the collapsed building. Its well-furnished workshop was decimated into jumbled swathes of singed wood and stone, fogged by banks of rising smoke and a rain of dust, ash, and shards of detritus.

Ulrich Haelbach stood above Khyrr, backlit by the fiery mayhem he’d unleashed. In his right hand, he produced a long, thin-bladed dagger. There was a hint of pity in his resolute stare as he raised the weapon to strike. Khyrr heard little of the man’s whisperings; rather, he read it from his lips.

“Forgive me, brother.”

There was a long crackling rattle, and a hatch on the side of the coal storage slid open. Haelbach had not the time to even gain cognisance of what was about to befall him, let alone bring himself to motion. His astonished expression was met by an avalanche of black pellets bursting out of the tall storage cylinder. Haelbach lost his footing and disappeared in the steadily growing coal heap.

Khyrr pulled his legs up and away from the dark tide as he writhed and clawed backwards on the floor, eager to avoid his assailant’s fate.

There was movement out of the corner of Khyrr’s eye. He stiffened and turned to the left. To his surprise, he found the little boy, Thubb, behind the bulk of the coal store cylinder. He hung there timidly a couple feet above the ground, hands stretched out above him as he held onto a lever for which he had evidently had to make a jump. The lever was connected to an old pulley system that could set counterweights in motion, raising the heavy hatch doors of the store cylinders.

Khyrr sighed with relief. “Clever boy.”

The kid let go of the lever, dropped on his feet, and waddled to him. “I’m sorry, lord,” he stuttered timidly, unsure if his reckless act was welcome.

They both started when the pile of black coal suddenly shifted and sent smoking, craggy balls rolling down along its sides as the pellets caught fire in the swelling heat. Khyrr risked another glance towards the far side of the ruined building. All was lost in the undulating heat and impervious downpour of ash.

Only for the briefest fraction of a moment, Khyrr felt conflicted and doubtful, as his heart fell at the thought of Demetria being injured or lost under the ruins. Only for a heartbeat, it occurred to him to find her. But there would be no further lapses in his resolve. He would not allow it. His capacity to be compassionate had utterly eroded; the savagery of the relentless chase, and the Weird’s vulgar muddling of his mind had seen to that.

“Lord?” prompted the boy.

“It’s all right,” Khyrr wheezed, his mouth and throat dry. “Let’s get moving.” Pain racked every inch of his body, but he staggered to his feet—the boy tugging on his clothes with all his childlike vigour to help him—then they exited the burning workshop and broke into a run. A pitiful run full of stumbling and desperate groaning.

Khyrr’s twisted ankle became a swollen lump of numbness that sent a surge of sizzling heat through his nerves every time he put his weight on it. Around him, the raving festival was just a washed-out turbulence of coloured shapes and indistinct bellows.

A bitter grief took hold of Khyrr. This time, he’d gone too far. People had gotten hurt. Terrible, irrevocable acts had taken place. There was no turning back now. Not that he wanted to, but still, the realisation clenched cold in his gut. He grieved over his past life, his lost love, and somewhere deep, he hated himself for forsaking it all.

 A new addition to the canorous bluster of the crowd, the rapid, deep clang of fire bells rang loud, instantly out of place. It devolved the fair’s merry sounds into a worried discord, punctuated by agitated shouting. The revelry began to fray at the seams as the realisation of the growing danger spread; people stopped in their tracks, turning towards the collapsed, smoke-choked smithy. As they did, Khyrr became aware of a pathway opening up in the brief motionlessness through the mass of bodies like a whirlpool through stirred paint; a path leading away from the houses and into the woods. A way out. His resolve rekindled, Khyrr picked up his pace.

In an abrupt flash, his surroundings lit up. For a moment, all was rendered as black outlines by the blinding luminosity. The source of the light exploded somewhere close but out of sight with an earth-shaking thunder. A strident scream came from behind him. Khyrr whirled just in time to watch the little boy, Thubb, fall to the wheel-rutted, hay-littered ground face first. A singed black mark blemished the middle of the little man’s back, giving off a thin stream of smoke. The scent of burnt linen and cooked flesh sullied the air.

Khyrr made to cry the boy’s name, but a voice in his head interrupted him before he could draw a breath.

“I won’t miss again!”

Before Khyrr, the colourful crowd split up in a line like a canvas torn in half, and at the other end, not an arrowshot away, there was the Weird—Haelbach—marching in his direction. He was dragging a leg, staggering, wildly seizing the arms and shoulders of onlookers to support his weight or shove them out of his way. With his garment tattered and filthy, cheeks bruised green and purple, one eye black, one red with a burst vein, blood seeping from his hairline, he came—a grimace of seething hatred on his face.

A collective gasp broke out of the widening ranks of beholders, terrified wails and aghast murmurs lacing the sudden silence that encroached the village. As if in response, a faint whimper escaped Thubb’s throat as he shifted on the blackened ground. Khyrr swallowed hard, staring at the shrivelled little body, frozen in indecision. A measure of compassion resurfaced from his dread-subdued mind, and his heart fell with it.

Haelbach caught the scent of his worry; he switched his gaze from him to the boy and then back at him again.

Khyrr saw it and his blood ran cold. Haelbach raised both his hands, fingers curved into tight, convulsing hooks, and released another discharge of arcane spite. He aimed at Thubb, deliberately this time, and he did not miss. The boy raised his trembling head and faced the surging tide of energies that crackled through the air, its questing veins of hot light racing towards him inexorably like a fissure tearing up the tapestry of creation itself. Then Khyrr stepped in front of him and received the magical discharge with both hands held out.

At that moment and on the edge of his nerves, his pent-up anticipation and last-ditch focus miraculously granted him a moment beyond time. He sensed the ripples of the perturbed aether reach him before the lightning washed over him like livid steam, pungent and heavy. He savoured it and instinctively knew that what was coming would annihilate him lest he found the strength to resist it.

And resist it he would. He gathered all the will that remained to him, and with it, he imagined himself a shield—more, a sheer manifestation of denial itself—and braced.

Khyrr felt every morsel of his flesh clench. A crackling sound exploded in his ear, and he felt a shove, like from a gale. There was heat, insane heat, and a sensation of convulsive torment in his muscles, but he was alive. He opened his eyes. Tides of pernicious magic rolled over him in waves of pain, but the lightning never reached him. It sundered and dispersed on the immaterial wall of his ethereal vigour right at his outstretched fingertips, breaking into small, white-hot splinters of raw magic that spilt in all directions.

It was as though another burst of fireworks had been let loose on the bare street. Showers of boiling light rained on thatched roofs and ramshackle stalls, drowning the dumbstruck throng in asingeing hail. Hay, linen, and hair burst into flames, and with that, true pandemonium erupted on the streets of Hobhearth.

People fled in panic, trampling each other to death, skittering from the sizzling arcs of lightning that spontaneously broke away from the main bolt of Haelbach’s sustained cast and raked the square. Tendrils of supernal fire flailed out at random to everything that didn’t manage to get far enough; striking people, buildings, animals without selection, flames spreading like plague. A man—probably Thubb’s father—used Khyrr’s arcane umbrella to his advantage; he ran behind, threw the boy’s body on his shoulder and ran away. Not that it was any relief for Khyrr.

The unbridled torrent of arcane power running through his soul robbed him of nearly all perception. He was aware of only two things. One was the torment of magic—so all-encompassing, so numbing, that he grew drunk on it and despite himself, the sensation made him chuckle. The other was Haelbach’s form on the other side of the spiteful current linking the two of them.

Time stretched out, and Khyrr felt as though this state of narcotic torment would never end; this would be his world from now, his personal hell. Then, as abruptly as it was summoned, the baleful light went out. Cold darkness engulfed him, but was only a moment’s respite before the heat of the fires brushed against his skin, smoke and ash permeating the air along with the scent of cooked blood and the plaintive screams of the ill-fated.

Bile rose in his gullet and trickled out from the corner of his mouth, down his chin. He didn’t have the strength to hold it down. He fought the sinking sensation of a swoon as he righted himself and took hold of his trembling knees. Looking down, he saw the shape of a convoluted spiderweb drawn by vitrified sand under his feet. Around them, charred bodies lay strewn where they emitted lazy streams of smoke. Toppled benches and trampled stalls, broken clay mugs, and other items of forlorn celebration littered the ground. Fires crept up the buildings, bleeding heat and fostering a thick mist of ash.

Ahead, still firm in the same position, Haelbach stared at him openly dumbstruck, probably by his suddenly revealed capacity to protect himself with magical means. Then the sorcerer went into a fit of rage. This time he did not hold back, and Khyrr was almost too late to raise his psychic defences.

The ground shook under the shockwave that the spell’s thunderous birth cry released, and a convulsing stream of hateful incandescence connected Khyrr once more to the Weird. This one did not make him chuckle. It made his skin crawl and his limbs shiver as if he were trapped under an enormous weight ready to crush him as soon as his strength gave out. Blackening veins bulged at his wrists, running up his arms as if hot lead flowed through them.

His hands began to radiate an unnatural inner light and exude white steam; Khyrr watched his fingertips begin to fry. On the other side of the sustained bolt, Haelbach allowed full rein to his anger, surrendering himself to an almost feral insanity. He growled and hissed, drivelled between his teeth, snarled like a rabid wolf. Here and there, he let out a mad gurgling chortle, as if a remark on the surprising persistence of his enemy. Still, slowly, but steadily, he was gaining the upper hand.

“Aren’t you a tenacious little brat?” He began to inch forward, while Khyrr fell to his knees.

His head dropped between his shoulders and all he could do was keep his quivering hands up, barely holding back the barrage. By then, he was wailing like his limbs were being sawn off. Haelbach took a deep breath and, with a crazed shriek, squeezed out a final exertion of power, swelling the lightning so large and unbearably bright that it momentarily engulfed Khyrr’s figure.

Pain was all. Blood gushed from his orifices as he gurgled hoarse cries, sparks snapping between his teeth, his mind-shield crumbling against the relentless onslaught of magic about to break through fully and burn him to cinders. Haelbach laughed with sadistic abandon. He didn’t stop laughing when Demetria’s longsword ran clean through his belly from behind.

Then he howled and lost control of the eldritch powers he had so far managed to keep at bay. The arcane blast that followed threw Demetria back through the streets like a rag doll, and in its wake, a hail of magical fire lit up the streets of Hobhearth once more. Haelbach’s unchained magic ran rampant as his own lightning crawled up his body and marred his face like a rabid beast.

Plagued by horror, his sanity hanging on a thread, Khyrr clawed and crawled away from the raging phenomenon, fumbling on cobblestones slick with blood, his body sustained by only a primal desire to survive. Through the emptied streets, he shambled and stumbled amongst blackened corpses, not looking down. He didn’t even notice as the string of his old, precious amulet frayed, and the effigy of the Veiled Lady fell from his neck and disappeared in the ruinous dark, forever lost. He only slackened his pace when the shadows of the forest swallowed him. Far behind, faint amongst the roar of the fires and the shrill of screams, he could still hear Demetria howling. Wailing. Calling his name.

Fourteen

The wind picked up to play a hectic game of release and relent with the woods as it pummelled the bare crowns of the trees with a barrage, just to subside for a little before it lost its temper again. The night would have been the sole domain of impenetrable darkness and frost, if not for the glare of the heavens that flickered in a thin stretch of sky spanning just above the horizon and below the sprawling storm clouds. The moon hung, too, as time and time again it resurged from the racing clouds and revealed a snowfall-speckled dead forest, devoid of colours.

Khyrr wrestled his mounting panic when he found the old cabin at the edge of the garden empty. First, he tried to bargain with reality—she’s just hiding here below, there behind—calling her name, turning up tables and dragging covers off of little-girl-looking piles of bric-a-brac. Then he began to beseech fate, ready to settle for an empty shed rather than one with her lifeless body tucked into the rubbish somewhere. The trails that were scantily wrapped by the snowfall sent his imagination into overdrive when unexpectedly he made them out; small recesses, just a shade darker than the rest of the endless white. As luck would have it, reading snow was something he was good at; a necessary skill on the ridges of Targon, where discerning the tracks of creatures or the promise of snow slides and icefalls were matters of life and death. Holding his breath, he distinguished the wake of three humans, two of whom were children, one of them barefoot. Minerva. But who were the others?

Khyrr was puzzled. Did one of the house’s footmen, along with one of her siblings, find her and take her to safety? But where? The area had been crawling with Mageseekers and their lackeys. And, agents of a yet unknown evil lurked in the shadows of this land. Khyrr discerned their tenebrous presence in the ripples of the spirit realm. The creature that had killed his brother while wearing the flesh of a human girl was further proof. What instilled dread in Khyrr, though, was not the mere presence of this nebulous evil, but his nagging suspicion telling him that it had always been here, lying dormant in the shadows for uncounted ages. He had felt it as a child every single day, becoming so accustomed to it that it never struck him as extraneous. Had the awakening of this dark presence drawn the Mageseekers and Demetria here?

Demetria. Her association with the Mageseekers sat ill with Khyrr, tearing up old wounds and bringing forth emotions he had long sequestered in a forgotten corner of his heart, but he could not afford to be swayed by them.

He sped through the woods, all senses keen, clinging onto the scent like a wolf on the hunt, the promise of redemption keeping his blood warm. Devastated by his failure to save his brother, Khyrr could not allow the children to suffer the same fate, or worse. That, at least, he owed to Tymotheus. His brother’s last wish would be granted, whatever the cost.

The trails led him to the main road, where they became garbled amongst the overlapping prints of men and horses, all marching along to the south. He knew where that road led, and at the realisation, a caustic sadness settled deep in his heart. He promised himself never to return to that place, yet he broke into a sprint without hesitation. How presumptuous a promise it was.

Midnight had long passed when the faint, withering glints on the horizon announced Hobhearth. Khyrr left the road and approached the village from the hills to avoid meeting Demetria. Surely she would recognise what had happened and follow the trail herself.

The hillside provided a vantage point for him to survey the area. It was a sad, wretched thing to behold. The place was a collection of wreckage floating half-submerged atop a sea of snow, dwellings huddled together tight against the cold. It was a carcass of what it had been when he’d last seen it, now shrunk and forlorn. At the back of Khyrr's mind, a thought emerged to plague him. Could it have been that it was he to whom this decay and ruin could be credited? It wasn’t hard to make the intuitive leap, after all the destruction his naivety and foolishness had resulted in all those years ago. Memories of fire and carnage roiled in a recess of his mind he, for so many years, had refused to call upon.

Khyrr pushed his worries from his thoughts and turned his attention back to the centre of the village. Only some two dozen buildings circling the large main square emitted light, their chimneys puffing sparse ribbons of smoke. The rest were dark and inanimate, occupied only by the cold, conceded to ruin. There was movement in the distant central square. Glowing, flickering dots—torches, Khyrr realised—milled about in a commotion of people. The wind brought vague shreds of their muffled bellows.

As he watched, a shriek cut through the gloomy blizzard; a woman’s, or a girl’s. A stab of worry urged Khyrr to move. He waded through the knee-deep snow that blanketed the hillside, making every step with a lunge to gain speed. He had his hood up and wore a face-scarf against the breeze, but the scarf had already hardened as the vapour that sifted through it froze. The unprotected parts of his cheeks were numb, such were his toes and hands; frost coated his eyelashes, but it did not matter. None of the torments winter threw at him could slow him down.

Even though he told himself there had been no way to keep his brother alive, he couldn’t deny that he could have come to his aid sooner. He allowed himself to be taken for a fool, looking for the children in vain. In a flash, Khyrr remembered the maid he let go with a boy in the mansion’s ruined corridor. She, too, could have been an agent of their destruction in disguise, Khyrr reflected with an annoyed flinch as he bit his lips. And even though he had been late, he couldn’t dismiss the fact that it had been his ineptitude in the ways of magic that resulted in his brother’s chance of rejuvenation having been denied. Khyrr desired atonement like a gulp of air after being held underwater. Whatever malign will endeavoured to bring his family down, he would find it and call it to account, Khyrr decided as he pushed his body further, quickly snatched breaths feeding his stringy muscles to an all-out sprint.

When he reached the border of the village, the sounds of the commotion changed, becoming more agitated; he could discern impatient tussling, cries urging haste. Could they have noticed him? Soft tremors travelled up his legs from the ground, intensifying quickly. Then came the whinnying of horses and the sound of commanding shouts. Demetria and her men had arrived.

Khyrr’s mind raced as he sped through the outer streets of Hobhearth; once brimming with life, now derelict, doors and shutters twitching and knocking in the draft, abandoned wrecks and junk littering the pavement, indiscernible white shapes under a blanket of frost. He had more questions than he could keep count of. What had Tymotheus done that had earned him such a grim fate? What was the nature of the supernatural enemy that sought their ruination? And Demetria, had she come here for Tymotheus and his magic-tainted orphans, or to combat the pernicious malice that had befallen his brother? Moreover, what did the children have to do with any of this, and why had they been taken?

“In the name of Demacia ...” Demetria’s announcement was mangled by a burst of wind. She must have already been in the centre of the village, facing an enemy whose identity Khyrr so far failed to divine. She might have been in more danger than she recognised. Khyrr was surprised at the sudden pang of worry he felt for her, but was quick to tighten the reins over his emotions. Keeping composure was paramount now. Whatever was going on, it might just benefit him if the two parties kept each other busy while he freed the children. Provided he found them in time.

An echo of a shout broke through the howling of the tempest, and though the winds robbed it of meaning, Khyrr recognised Demetria’s voice and hastened his sprint. He was too far. Maybe he was already too late and too ...

A dark obstacle was suddenly in front of him, inescapable. It hit him simply by being there, firm against his momentum, a gut-wrenching punch to his stomach. He fell over it, his momentum sending him into a forward somersault, and dropped onto his back in the snow. Only in mid-air did his mind belatedly register a call delivered with a jingling voice that said, “Not so fast.” It was an exhale warm about his ears, a ruby glare on the periphery of his sight.

Khyrr let out a strained, soggy cough and swallowed back a bitter nip of puke, grasping his abdomen tight with pain. Nauseated by the shock of the fall, he looked up, groaning. Images of lookalike dwellings seemed to whirl around him in a blur.

Reverberations from a quarrel hung in the air, distant and faint, every utterance more belligerent than the last. In his mind’s eye, he saw Demetria and his nieces and nephews calling out in distress, in need of his aid. With his qualms resurged, Khyrr came round, blinking hard to rid himself of a sickening double vision. He struggled upright, almost stumbling on the scree that crunched and slid under his knees and feet below the snow cover. In the effort, his scarf slid off his face, so each of his laboured breaths came with a plume of vapour. The obstacle that made him fall—whatever it had been was nowhere to be found. Head swimming, Khyrr tried to find his bearings, suddenly feeling lost, his foggy eyesight further hindered by the heavy snowfall in the thick of night.

He was made to stop at a crossroads bordered with abandoned, crumbling houses that slumped morosely under the weight of the snow. His gaze was drawn to a forbidding pitch-black form standing out on the grey canvas of its surroundings. Squinting as his sight cleared, he made out the dark figure.

It was a woman, standing in the middle of the empty street like she’d always been there, no trails around her in the blanket of white. She wore a thin black dress that began with a close-fitting collar right under her chin and ended in a skirt covering her feet, the uniform darkness of her slender form only broken by a stream of silver buttons running all the way down her gown. She poked one shoulder up, her pointy porcelain chin raised to match it. Leering at him wordlessly, she let out only an inquiring “Hmm?” as if requesting an opinion.

Khyrr was stunned by the ludicrous absurdity of the image. The young woman was like a depiction removed from a royal portrait and mistakenly painted atop this scenery of rural still-life, entirely unfitting. She tasted fake, a simulacrum in contrast to the surrounding reality, but to Khyrr, she also tasted somehow familiar.

A distant, thin scream roused him. Discord was growing somewhere beyond the houses, and Minerva was trapped in the middle of it, no doubt. There was no time to waste, and he couldn’t care less for the strange woman, nor could he ponder how she’d ended up in the ruined village. Khyrr cast a glance towards the commotion.

The woman followed his eyes, furrowing her brows in a wince of pique. “Wait. Don’t leave me,” she mumbled. Was she in danger? Not by the looks of it. He didn't have time for this.

"I'll come back for you!" Khyrr swivelled and darted towards a narrow alleyway.

“Don’t leave me!” Her shriek exploded through the empty streets, a thousand voices as one, sending a shockwave that made the surrounding snow cover jump. Khyrr felt his ribcage quiver, his eardrums benumbed and buzzing. He quickly realised what the dark obstacle had been, that which had faltered him a moment ago.

All around, the shadows inside the ruinous buildings came alive. Their black miasma expanded and gushed out through doors and windows, materialising into abyssal tendrils oozing and tangible, like they were made of hot tar. Khyrr couldn’t escape them; his mind still grappled with the surreality of the spectacle when they lashed out at him from every direction, coiling around his legs, waist, and chest, pressing his hands to his torso. One slimy shadow arm snaked around his neck, lifting his chin. They felt wet against his skin and writhed tightly all over in all the wrong places.

He tried to squirm himself free, but the tentacles only strengthened their grip with every moment he spent wrestling against them. Slowly, he was lifted in the air and spun around. The woman was there, closer now, goading the physical darkness into motion, her index finger drawing lazy circles in the air.

As if she were knitting it onto the texture of reality with her fingers, the slimy blackness grew with the rhythm of her gestures.

Khyrr could only squeeze a whisper out. “Who..?”

The tense wrinkles of her irritation were promptly disguised with an overdone smile. “Name’s Vivica.”

“Let me go.” He couldn’t continue, the tendril around his neck spiralled up and muzzled him.

Vivica beckoned in an enticing gesture, fingers slowly curving and stretching, curving and stretching, and the arms obediently hovered Khyrr closer to her.

“You know it’s odd, we haven’t met before, but I feel as if I knowall about you, Khyrr.” She stretched the word ‘all’ like a note held out in a song, rolling her head. “Your brother’s head was full of you when I tasted him.” She bit the side of her lower lip, looking upward in reverie with a lascivious moan.

Khyrr could make no answer other than a muffled grunt.

“You’re like hot spice. The souls of your family are all seasoned with your essence,” she continued. “And though they served as a lavish feast, while I was devouring them, all I could think about was tasting you.”

They came face to face, staring each other down from up close. Khyrr struggled to keep eye contact, intoxicated by the mere proximity of the strange woman. She was a creature of black, white, and red, and possessed of a feline beauty so striking it was almost uncanny. Flanked by the lush ebony streams of her hair, her fair features were sharp as a knife; the keen line of her brows arched down to the gently upward pinched cut of her nose, framed by slender cheeks that ended in a pointy chin. Eyes immense, with a pair of irises so violently red, it tantalised Khyrr.

Releasing his gaze, Vivica peered down at his mouth, now revealed by the receding tentacles. Her crimson lips parted, and—unbelievably, at Khyrr’s surprise—she went for a kiss. Just before her lips brushed his, Khyrr earned a whiff of her flavour and his mouth watered. She tasted like dark berries and damnation. His body shuddered, and he felt a nerve running from the nape of his neck to his stomach go sour. In the mingling aromas—some of which were physical, and some were picked up by his subliminal senses—he recognised a tinge on his palate, one that he’d felt when he beheaded the creature that wore the girl; the creature that took his brother’s life.

In a moment of sudden clarity, Khyrr knew who he was up against. Anger flushed over him, and he unleashed it towards his captor without hesitation: a burst of raw magic fed by grief and rage of a brother lost, a family ripped apart. The abrupt spell caught Vivica by surprise; the gust of arcane force was like a mace to the head and shoved her back. The strike would have sent a grown man slack, yet she remained seemingly unharmed; a sulky grimace was all it provoked out of her.

“Bitch.” Frowning, Khyrr spat blood, his nerves on fire at the careless exercise of wild magic.

Vivica let out a peevish chortle, wiped a non-existent tear in the corner of her eye with a pinky, all the while working her jaw. “Men. They’re all like pork. Before cooking, they always have to be tenderised.”

The tentacles drew back and threw Khyrr across the street like an unwanted toy. He screamed, eyes wide, and his stomach lurched tight like it was being tugged from his belly by the momentum. His limbs uselessly wrestled the weightlessness before he slammed into a pile of mouldering rubbish, a stack of old barrels and crates, too fast to be able to brace against the impact. The world tumbled and wood cracked under his weight, but no pain reached him; all was subdued by the sudden rush of fright. It felt as if even his bloodstream clenched. Khyrr found himself lying on a pile of soft dampness. As he felt around, swathes of straw crumbled between his fingers, mouldy and wet; it covered him all over in clumps, mixed with pieces of ruined wood. Running a trembling hand through his torso, wiping away the debris, he found himself miraculously unscathed.

Celestials be blessed, luck was on his side this once. He turned his attention back to his surroundings and was faced with a black tentacle swooping from above, about to smash him. Not a second too soon, he rolled over, feeling the ground rumble under the mighty blow an arm’s length away. A shower of drenched straw, icy mud, and flecks of broken wood splashed into his face. Crawling backwards, he wiped splotches of mud from his brows and eyes and raked the streets, frenetic, for his attacker.

And there she was, next to a ruined log cabin where she laughed, aggressive and girlish. Writhing arms enveloped her form, giving the strange impression as if an octopus made of ink had been crammed into the surrounding ruins and struggled to break out, too big for the buildings’ fracturing orifices.

Khyrr sprang up, and drew his curved sabres, moonsilver greeting Vivica with an opalescent sheen.

The disturbing jeers of the woman had slowly begun to solidify into bitter truths in Khyrr’s mind, and the familiarity of her aura was a mystery no more. With a steadily mounting rancour, he began to distinguish around him the tenebrous essence that had lingered over the mansion too. Before, in the proximity of his homeland, he had sensed the malice only as an evanescent whiff on the winds. Now it was a constant, pungent reek, yet it was unclear if the woman was the main source. One thing, however, Khyrr knew for certain through gauging the bizarre mien of the creature with his othersense. She was no woman. No mere mortal mage, for that matter. She was something else entirely.

A tentacle shifted and darted out from the mass of writhing darkness, a spear eager to pierce his lungs. Khyrr broke to his left, spine stretched back away from the strike, and swung up both moonsilver blades simultaneously to effortlessly slice through the shadowy limb. The end of the arm detached and melted into sickly twirling gases, then vanished before it could hit the ground. Vivica let out an ugly choking scream—a sound made with breath drawn rather than released—that mellowed to a lustful groan.

As a response, Khyrr threw one of his sabres at her, no preamble. The masterfully crafted weapon flashed through the air like a dart, turning end over end, and lodged into the log wall of the cabin right next to Vivica’s face, missing its mark by a hand’s breadth.

She eyed her mirror image in the quivering, polished surface of the blade, mouth gaping, and raised one brow. Curled a sneer, too. “Mother has always been keen on you,” she purred. “Now I know why. Your persistence. It’s delicious.”

“You.” Khyrr pointed at her with his remaining sabre. “Are you the architect of this calamity?”

A dissenting sigh came as a response. The raving dance of the arms swelled like a black tide, and Vivica’s form became lost amongst them. Her excited leer was the last to disappear. “For the blood spilt tonight, all credit is due to the hateful woman, I’m afraid,” she chirped, her voice riding the slopes of a nursery rhyme. “The one you carry in your heart so diligently, despite the many wounds she meted out on it.”

“Liar! Why did you attack our home?” Khyrr spun around, muscles tense with explosive strength to make a dodging leap or swift parry. All around him, the tendrils churned, streaming from windows, doorways, spilling from cracks in the walls, slowly encircling him.

“Your home?” Her tone climbed with mimicked pique. “No, no, you are mistaken, my dear boy! In fact, it was more my home than yours.”

Four arms shot in his direction at once, lashing and jabbing from all angles. Khyrr was ready for them. He sidestepped one that lunged at him from above and veered away from another, spinning around the stretched limb to shear it off with a quick blow. A deft jump saved him from the third tentacle that swept the ground under his feet. But the fourth came from behind, and that one connected, took him by the throat.

He exhaled a strangled groan, surprised for a moment before he wheeled and scythed it off, the stump bleeding inky smoke as the severed part around his neck disintegrated.

Vivica only laughed. Her words came from all over now, as though emanating from her countless black appendages, with the barest of variance between each utterance, sensual murmurs mingling with their own mock reverberations. “The mages and their cohorts your brother sheltered were like carrion flies—they carried us, their hearts doused in our pestilence. Hatred. Fear. Sorrow. Jealousy. We spread on the wings of hushed desires and shared tears. We grew cocooned in corners beyond light, hiding inside mirror images, fed by the womb of grudges nursed too long. Animosity harboured beyond reconciliation, grief retained till it festered. Then Mother came. She gave us purpose. But in reality, it was he who provided nourishment all along. Tymotheus.” She paused, her pitch sweet with a smile. “Papa.” In her disgusting amiability, Khyrr recognised the girl's voice just as it had been when she devoured his brother’s essence.

“Killer!” He wheeled round and round, fuming, desperate to find the she-monster in the squirming, writhing mass to whom his anger could be directed. Vivica was getting under his skin, so much so that Khyrr resigned his attempts to subdue his tempers any further, and doing so, abandoned the teachings of his Targonian masters: never to let his emotions dominate. With all such restraints dispensed with, his heart seethed, justified indignation filling him. “Do not dare to utter my brother’s name, monster!”

Khyrr fell silent. Even through the red mist of anger, the assault of familiar sensations and unveiled defilements stirred dark knowledge in him. He had tasted the stain of a similar evil in the shadowy recesses of Targon, one that haunted the challengers of the peak with the promise of inevitable defeat. Vivica was made of the same foul substance; the similarity had been staring him in the face the whole time. All he had to do was verbalise it, and with an accusatory cry, he did.

“I know what you are, demon!”

“That word,” she rang wearily, her mischievousness suffocating under boredom. “You love your words, don’t you? Stick a word to it, as if it would make it any more tangible to your feeble mind, that’s what you do. Like you could even begin to comprehend what we truly are.”

A thrill of alarm ran the length of Khyrr’s spine when Demetria’s bellow cut the air again, its meaning drowned out by the tempest. The sound of her distant voice hadn’t even fully dissolved in the gale when tiny tremors began to travel up from the ground into Khyrr’s feet, stronger with every moment. An ensemble of battle cries boomed like thunder. Things were escalating on the main square. He was running out of time.

“Stop playing with me, fiend! Face me or let me go!”

Vivica did not deign to answer him.

In an explosion of sound, the charging horses’ steady, rolling din was supplanted by a rush of torturous screams. Khyrr felt an aftershock of magic wash over him, suggesting an enormous magnitude of arcane power had been let loose somewhere nearby. It boded ill. Something terrible was taking place.

The panic of inability crept into Khyrr’s voice, kindling his anger further. “Why are you doing this? To what end did you take the children?”

“Don’t you see?” she said at length, her words syrupy with false remorse. “We only took them to protect them from the mage hunters, so our harvest could be complete.”

There was hesitation in the air, an exhalation before the release of an arrow. Khyrr shuddered, a chill surging through his nerves.

“But it won’t be complete without you.”

The swirling black tide suddenly rammed at him, a thousand arms in furious entanglement jostling one another with a rapacious hunger for his flesh. He sliced at them to no avail; they overwhelmed him with their sheer mass and number, coiling all over his body, coalescing into a writhing bath of tar. It swallowed him neck deep, and the more he fought, the deeper he sank, as though trapped in shifting sands of obsidian. The forest of tentacles softly unravelled in front of him, and Vivica’s form rose from its depths. She wore a mask of imploring, her mouth pouted, brows raised.

Behind her in the distance, Khyrr spotted his sabre’s left twin still jutting out of the log wall. He furled his mind around the hilt and pulled, but the blade had impaled deep; it wouldn’t even budge. The other weapon was still in his grip, all but useless inside the black mortar that held his flesh fast.

“Danica, Tymotheus, they’re all here.” She placed a hand on her chest where a heart would be. “Their essence hums in the eternal chorus within me. You can join them. Be together. You have no reason to fight it,” she pleaded. “Absolution lies before you.”

Grinding his teeth, eyes squeezed shut, Khyrr gathered all the arcane vigour that was left within him. Beads of sweat grew on his forehead, but the demon would not allow him to defy her any further. As Vivica crept closer, the burning-sweet scent of her proximity slowly began to smother Khyrr’s willpower. He felt light-headed and his resolve ebbed under the suffocating weight of her narcotic influence. Her presence fogged his mind. Why was he here again?

A baleful red light bloomed across the houses, the heat of the explosion washing over them with an ear-throbbing boom. Roused from the intoxicating delusion, Khyrr turned towards the sound as a flurry of memories rushed back to him. Demetria and Minerva were still in grave danger. He had to fight. He had to get to them. Vivica pinched his chin and yanked his head back to face her, but Khyrr side-eyed the smoking wake of the blast, clinging to it, to the alarm he felt, to his threadbare umbilical cord to his conscious will. He gained a mere moment of lucidity before gloom descended over his mind again; Vivica’s coercion was too strong.

“You still think about her?” Vivica spat. “About them? You fool, they don’t want you! They loathe. They abhor. They have nothing but condemnation and prejudice for you!” She held his face in the palm of her hands, the sizzling red of her eyes so terribly bright it erased everything around it. There was only it and darkness. A gruesome lavender fire began seeping from her hand towards his cheeks like venom; it percolated his flesh, a spasm setting in his muscles.

“You could leave it all behind, Khyrr! Relinquish your guilt, your sorrow! We can be together till the end of time. You can escape this torment with me. With them.”

His eyes rolled back in their sockets, and for a moment, he saw it. Tymotheus. Lilyenne. His father, Oltharion. Bathed in dazzling gold light, they awaited.

He wished to be with them. With his brother. To Khyrr, Tymotheus was special. He was possessed of no upstart pride, nor false modesty, as were so many others who were firstborns of a noble house. Nothing had hampered him from little acts of insolence if that could grant a moment of easy mirth for his ailment-ridden brother. Even when everyone shunned Khyrr, Tymotheus never turned his back.

The golden light grew in intensity. Tymotheus smiled and proffered a hand towards him. Khyrr reached out for it, but before their hands could connect, the sudden rush of a memorystayed him.

His brother sat next to him. They were supposed to behave at the dinner table, especially when guests were at the house, and especially him. The freak. The secret. “We must put up a good front for the magistrate,” his father said in an echo of the usual sentiment. But Tymotheus, always defiant, set a trap. It happened when Khyrr almost succumbed to sleep at the table, weakened and sick from his racking treatment by the Mageseekers, lulled by the drone of boring conversations and clanking silverware. A jab between his ribs roused him, made him look over at his brother’s plate, where the comically smudged image of their guest lay, rendered in haphazardly strewn peas and creamy mash, a tiny carrot serving as its nose. As Khyrr took a swig of his drink, Tymotheus moved the food-puppet’s asparagus mouth with a fork and whispered in a pretend, deep voice, “We can ill afford to be involved in such a scandalous affair.”

That made him laugh so hard, his watered wine sprouted from his nose. As irritated grumbling broke around the dining table, the crowd frowning at them with plain disgust, Tymotheus couldn’t help but giggle as well, a grin of honest joy on his face. They laughed together, despite the repercussions that would follow. It was good fun. For a moment there, Khyrr didn’t feel pain.

Khyrr opened his eyes. A sobering rush of cold wrath ran through his nerves, and he looked Vivica in the eye. “There’s no escape for me.”

The blade that was stuck into the log cabin’s wall finally submitted to his will and dislodged, whistled through the air like an arrow, and went cleanly through Vivica’s throat. Bubbling purple ichor sputtered and gushed out of the wound, out of her mouth, as she choked and gurgled up filth, both her hands grasping the blade that protruded from her neck. The ocean of tentacles immediately boiled into a rancid mist and hissed their scream of death.

Khyrr fell to his feet and leapt behind the demon, the black smoke swirling with his motion. He retrieved his blade, wrenching it out of the wound, then wheeled and severed her head. The tapestry of the spirit realm shook with her cry as she was banished beyond. Her mortal shell was already crumbling, bones cracking and mouldering until nothing but a smoking pile of scorched meat remained where she stood. Khyrr shook himself, and ran.

Fifteen

“Don’t!” Kleon clutched Minerva’s wrist with both hands before she could widen the gap in the soggy, putrid-smelling waxed cloth that veiled their pen from the outside. The grip transferred her brother’s cold-induced tremor into her, all the way to her marrow. “You’ll get caught!” Kleon whined. “They’ll hit us again!”

Minerva’s instinctive response of pique died in her throat at her foster brother’s countenance. He struck the same tone she herself used to upbraid her siblings with. It startled her. The prospect of a whip lashing at them again for prying dismayed her less than this particular voice, unwieldy in the mouth of her taciturn little brother, completely at odds with his docile spirit. It meant desperation, further accentuated by a stare which Minerva wouldn’t have seen in the darkness if not for the shimmer of angry tears it held. Minerva yanked her hand from Kleon’s grasp, wordless. Her witty, patronising retort fell away.

She surveyed her siblings and felt her apprehension building. They were mere silhouettes in shades of grey, timid and feeble forms cowering at the back of the cart-mounted cage where they were held captive. A single linen blanket, soiled and ragged as their nightgowns, was their only refuge against the winter’s edge and was spread out between them sparsely, tugged ever left and right between the four of them. Their little shivering faces were all tethered to her by a gaze each, a similar wet glimmer in their eyes as in Kleon’s, nursing their meager hope. Hope they borrowed from her, even when hers waned.

“Why did they lock us in here? Is Papa coming for us?” someone whimpered—Ignatz, she recognised, despite being unable to find which shape belonged to him in the gloom.

“I’m so cold! Don’t push me away!” Elanii beseeched as she tried to snuggle up to her siblings for warmth.

The little Monah squeaked next with a husky voice, teeth chattering. She sounded strained, and Minerva imagined her struggling with her bigger siblings for a couple more inches of blanket. “Where is Uncle already? You said he’s coming for us!”

Minerva hastened to hush them, again, unsure in the half-light as to where the gesture should be directed. The little ones hadn’t yet been part of the family when Khyrr had left them, but all the more their faith was rooted in him, and by proxy, in her. They had it simpler than Minerva. It was easier to believe in the magical uncle they’d only heard coloured stories about, than remember the real one: broken and riddled with ailment.

“That’s what I’m trying to find out!” she said. Ignoring Kleon’s grumbling, she stepped to the rails and opened a slit in the canvas. Cold crept in with a swirling hint of snow. A slice of light drew a line across the wooden boards below them. Kleon pulled his leg out of the way as though the light would burn him. All the others craned their necks, lured by what sparse brightness seeped from the outside.

Minerva saw very little, only a suggestion of a cobblestone-paved square girded with distant buildings. Out there, scores of torch-bearing individuals swarmed about, their fires smothered into tiny glimmering motes behind the gossamer of heavy snowfall. Faint cries and mutterings filtered through the storm, and sometimes a neat array of figures became encompassed in the elusive auras of chasing lights, looking like a lumbering queue of prisoners. It was impossible to say with certainty what labours their captors were engaged in.

There was a brisk clicking of hooves nearby, and a figure on horseback swept across their slim window, bearing a torch that cast them in a sudden hectic orange. Minerva crouched, her heart jumping to her throat. She felt as her siblings all sank frightened behind her, emitting muted, plaintive gasps. The figure did not seem to notice them, only halted his horse and held his torch up high, its flame guttering in the blizzard—a dancing yellow twirl in one moment, a rustling blue wisp in the next as the gale picked up.

“We’re out of time. Rally the men,” the figure ordered with calm rigour, his air of authority not the slightest diminished by his reserved disposition, instead all the more assertive.

Minerva recognised the voice of the scar-faced man, the one who’d lured her from the shed in the woods. The man jutted his head forward, urging his cohorts, and the surrounding commotion grew twofold.

“You heard the master! Gather her the flock, double time!” somebody bellowed in a gruff voice. “Round them up! Quickly!”

Close by, figures darted left and right, torches in hand, but still the tempestuous night hung much too thick for Minerva to ascertain what the bustling was about. Instead, she studied the cloaked figure. The man had deceived her, Kleon, and everyone else.

They had followed him to the main road outside the estate, where a gathering of soot-covered, wretched servants and cloaked footmen had awaited them, ready to set out. They bore wooden spears, pitchforks, and whatever improvised weapons they could find, carrying their scant bags of quickly snatched up belongings in hand or on rein-led horses. At first sight, Minerva believed them to be refugees from the attack, but she couldn’t shake the thought that something was terribly wrong. When they walked closer in the scar-faced man’s wake, her suspicions were proven right as she swept her gaze over the assembled, and instead of disheartened and wary faces, she saw eyes of pure disdain and lascivious rancour looking back at her. Minerva’s steps had faltered as a horrible foreboding came over her. When the muffled, plaintive sobs and cries of her siblings reached her, it was already too late to run. The strange, unnatural calm that—until that moment—had possessed Kleon suddenly evaporated, and he started to weep.

“He was in my head. In my head,” he sobbed.

Minerva and Kleon were dragged into the malevolently snickering throng where a cart awaited them, a rust-crusted cage atop it covered with a large mud-grey canvas. They were goaded inside like livestock, made to crawl in through a hatchway too narrow for even them, small folk. A chain was spun around the rails, its padlock latched in between chain links to complete the seal, their freedom forfeit. Then they rattled ahead, despair slowly setting in them along with the chill that cut to their bones, the cold burning their bare feet, turning their nails and lips purple.

Despite their captivity, Minerva took relief in having all her siblings back in one piece, embracing each of them, subjecting every little face to scrutiny to make sure they had each come through unharmed. If they had any physical injuries, they were superficial, not like the wounds they had taken to the heart. The horror of the night shook all of them to the core, abject dread and the experience of terrible loss stunning some of them into mute melancholy, while driving others to tantrums. Seeing them like this brought Minerva to the verge of tears, but she would not cry, and so her quelled sorrow welled up and resurged as caustic anger. It strengthened her resolve, urging her to find a way out of this horror.

First, she had to figure out what was going on. Regrettably, all she had to work with were her siblings’ hastily recounted memories of chaos, butchery, and fire. Some of them had managed to run to the hideout in the kitchen, knowing that was where they were supposed to go on the occasion of a Mageseeker inspection, but malicious staff lured them out with the promise of better hiding places. In the end, they all ended up tucked away in the cart-mounted cage, one which normally served as a pen for chickens bought at the market. It was a nasty, rust-chewed old thing. Ghost scents of acrid excrement still hung in the air, but the cold locked most of the stink away in frost, rendering the white marks of dung rigid under the hay-littered floorboards.

She didn’t know what madness drove the servants and refugees of their home to smuggle the children away amid the Mageseekers’ raid. Similarly, the fate of their father was a mystery, as were the intentions of the scar-faced man, who seemingly led the vile congregation. Minerva kept her own counsel for a while, reluctant to disclose her reunion with Khyrr in fear of breeding false hopes in her siblings, but their dejected expressions and constant prying convinced her otherwise.

The promise of their uncle’s return lifted their spirits a little, but Minerva could not share their enthusiasm, the hollowness of the second-hand promise weighing down on her, yet another responsibility she held no sway over. About her encounter with the strange girl-thing that set their home on fire, she said nothing.

Their procession came to Hobhearth; Minerva knew this despite their pen having been shrouded. The derelict village was adjacent to their homestead, the first stop on the old road. She’d come here often when younger, but had only the blithely vague, desultory recollections of a small child to show for it, devoid of clear details. Later on, after the fire, she’d merely passed through the village. Always in a carriage, always with closed curtains, never stopping. Hobhearth was said to have been a hospitable place, a place of celebration and rural tranquillity hidden in a pocket of untouched woods, but according to her father’s succinctly shared accounts, most of it was lost in a terrible fire some years ago. There were other nebulous rumours as to what otherworldly doom had befallen the once pleasant village, but for the plain facts, what remained of it these days was little more than a desolate valley littered with crumbling ruins and old huts in a state of disrepair, housing none but homeless wretches, and hiding outlaws.

On the way, Minerva tried to sneak a peek through the canvas several times to figure out where they were, but each endeavour resulted in them being hit and lashed at with sticks and whips. This time, however, the cart was forgotten, their captors busy with their unknown toils.

Kleon tugged on the hem of her nightgown, though she was unclear if he meant to dissuade her or urge her to narrate what she saw. She waved him off dismissively, but her motion slackened and stopped as an ominous premonition fell upon her. Something was wrong. Minerva felt her heart increase its pace, and she expanded her othersense to figure out what caused the curious ethereal shift. She discerned a sensation in the air, almost like a scent, a tangible taste of something that she interpreted as anxiety. It emanated from the cloaked figure, the scar-faced man, and was carried to her by the breeze. He was nervous.

The realisation rekindled Minerva’s hope; more, it invigorated her, and she allowed herself a flicker of a smile. What could trouble the man, if not the fact that help was already on its way?

Out of nothing, the scar-faced man gave an amused huff. “You think you’ve figured me out, don’t you?”

He was unperturbed, his shape motionless under the hooded fur cloak; he could have been addressing his men but his subdued tone suggested otherwise.

Calming herself, Minerva considered that he might have just been engaged in some half-vocalised soliloquy, but the scar-faced man cocked his head and directed a look straight at her. No eyes, only a cloud of black under his cowl.

His words were a gentle breeze near-dispelled by the wind that tousled his garment, and snatched at the fire of his torch held overhead. “You’re a feeler. A smeller. Just like your uncle. But I …”

He spoke gently, almost hesitantly, yet Minerva’s blood ran cold, the chilly questing of the unseen gaze like tongues of ice licking at her soul. She resisted the urge to swallow a knot in the back of her tongue. The figure moved neither, animated only by the whims of the snowstorm.

From the darkness beyond, harrowing wails and urgent begging washed into the winds, laced with the sharp snap of a whiplash. Minerva was distracted by the sounds for only a heartbeat. When she directed her attention back to her thoughts about the man, he was already in there, looking back at her from between her own thoughts like a crazed duplicate self, a facsimile sentience crammed inside her head.

“I’m a listener!” He was a sheaf of thrashing vines worming themselves into the folds of her brain, tightening as they went. A drawling rasping whisper, he gurgled in her head, her flesh pulsing with every syllable. “I’m. A. Talker.” 

A grater made of ruthless thoughts inseparable from her own, filing away at her mind. His abominable presence saturated her, a scorching spasm running through her nerves. Whimpering, she fell onto her knees and blinked away flashes of red and white, a feverish inner heat surging from her lungs as she trembled. A vein popped in her nose, and warmth trickled down her lips.

Only then did he release her, the ebbing of torment granted like a gulp of air after holding one’s breath for too long. Her siblings— similarly touched with the arcane—picked up on the warping of reality and whimpered. Kleon, being the closest to her, must have tasted a ghost sensation of her pain and in response curled up into a ball, convulsing with sobs. Minerva squinted up and flared her teeth in stubborn defiance, her left hand tightening on the icy rail of their cage, her right still holding the curtain open.

The man sniggered. “You have the guts, all right.”

The heavens shifted. A transient wound ripped open in the clouds, and in the briefly swelling moonlight, figures became visible on the square—men, children and women too—boarding carts and wagons, some of them dragged in chains. Minerva paid no mind, keen to deny any respite for the scar-faced man from her permeating gaze, as if her insistence could hurt him. She was mustering her grit to cast some improvised insults at him, but wavered at the risk that his psychic touch might return to torture her.

In the wordless face-off, Minerva had her attention drawn to tiny specks of sounds. First, the tin eyelets of the pen curtain began to clink, quiet like the chirp of a fledgling bird, then louder; the chains and various fittings of the cart steadily joined the chorus. The ground rumbled beneath, and the urgent cussing outside gave way to confused mumbling, then to disturbed clamour. The scar-faced man was the first to cut his eyes, veering away with his horse. Minerva’s shoulders slumped as tension eased in her chest.

“Riders!” Kleon, his qualms resigned, jumped to his feet and peeked out next to Minerva, just in time to see what had brought about the upheaval.

In all their brighsteel-clad grandeur, a great Demacian cavalry rode into the square, their rolling gallop dwarfing the storm’s howl. They emerged from the dark of the forest, a torrent of flame and iron. A squadron of warriors armoured from neck to toe, twenty shields braced, twenty swords at the ready, twenty steadfast wills focused. The ground convulsed under their weight and the crumbling walls of the village shook helplessly, coughing dust and debris.

The lead—a hay-brown mighty mare—skidded up hard at its rider’s yank on the reins. A clenched fist was thrown in the air in the way of a command; to that, all others followed suit. They came to a full stop on the far end of the square, a grey wall of muscle, their horses nickering, snorting, pawing the cobblestone under the dirty snow. Their poised commander surveyed the stage before her curtly with a bellicose air. She carried herself as if already on the verge of combat, fettered aggression unmistakable in her tight posture. Her proud timbre drowned out the winds.

“In the name of Demacia, cease your labours and stand to attention!”

Through blasting wind and snow-hazed gloom, Minerva made out her aunt Demetria as the head of the force: her knightly demeanour and demanding voice—though somewhat laboured for being short of breath—was unmistakable. She felt Kleon stiffen next to her, their surge of excitement abating instantly.

This was not the relief force they’d expected. Their aunt had always been a distant figure, almost like a glorious family ornament, never to be touched—or approached, for that matter. An alabaster form clad in steel and gold, seen only on official events and celebrations, always from afar. This was—as Minerva knew well—for a good reason; Demetria’s association with the Mageseekers’ Order meant peril was always at their doorstep. “Where she walks, only destruction follows,” her mother explained on one occasion. “I cannot walk down that path with her. Not for your sake. For your brothers and sisters’ sakes. You must keep your distance at all times.” But there was more to it than her aunt and mother not seeing eye to eye. Demetria had played a part in their uncle’s unfortunate banishment, though the exact nature of that remained a well-kept secret, something her father often lamented with silent tears but never indulged in sharing the weight of with her.

With everyone’s attention directed at the unfolding conflict, Minerva risked a bigger opening in the cage curtain, and the rest of their busy caravan came into view. A wealth of yet unseen details became revealed in the intermittent starlight as the clouds slowly wore thin. Around their cart flocked a disorderly caravan of old wagons. A crust of snow decorated the portions that faced windward, slanted buildups of ice hinting at the direction of the icy gale which had crafted it. A clandestine hooded mob gathered next to the wagons, most of them bandit-looking folk, beggars and outlaws, dressed in tattered, rancid furs. They all stood rigidly amidst their tasks unfinished—cargo halfway hauled, horses ill-prepared, a herd of wretched, bonded prisoners trembling in a line as their procession stopped. All stared open-mouthed at their newfound pursuers in befuddlement. Minerva recognised the faces of her family’s late servants and refugees mixed amongst captives and captors, but their original party coming here from the estate had definitely swelled with the lowly dwellers of Hobhearth. The throng numbered several dozen now.

“Identify yourselves!” Demetria barked without grace or ceremony. She tightened the reins, her horse ill at ease.

Before her, the village seemed to be frozen in time, as for a moment nobody made a move. Even the tempers of the storm abated somewhat, as if the world held its breath. The scar-faced man had yet to break his reticence, merely standing his ground with a menacing serenity. Minerva caught sight of him as he inclined his head by a hair. Simultaneously, the stink of oozing magic prickled her nose. The man was reaching out with his mind, of that she was sure.

Minerva couldn’t know what schemes played out between him and his henchman with that disembodied voice of his, but it made the dark congregation jerk back into motion. Slowly, they all resumed their toils, packing and goading their prisoners onto the wagons.

One prisoner, a young man, his bonded hands laced together at the waist, stood rooted to the ground as he looked back at the ranks of knights, the light of hope dwindling in his eyes, but a kick in his rear urged him to turn away and shamble on.

“What is going on? Why aren’t they doing something?” Kleon whispered at Minerva’s back, keeping hold of her shoulders as if to shield himself from what was about to transpire.

Minerva bit her lips, tense with anticipation. She had a bad feeling. The shadow of a looming disaster crept over her.

“Have you heard what I said, or should I repeat myself, citizen?” Demetria shook a loose strand of hair out of her face like a furious steed.

The scar-faced man took his time. Right before Demetria’s patience seemed to run out again, he tutted and pushed his hips forward; on cue, his horse lumbered ahead lazily, rolling its head in reluctance.

“I heard you loud and clear, Demetria Keephart.” The man halted his horse after a few steps, raising his voice so the knights could hear him still a good fifty paces away. His half-hearted response was infuriatingly indolent, but it was enough to forestall another indignant outburst from Demetria.

Demetria stiffened, like a predator catching sight of its prey. Her eyes flicked to the mysterious rider and followed his every move with mad intensity. Rapt with cold-blooded alertness, she feigned a smirk and with the smallest degree of false levity, said, “You appear to know who I am.”

“Of course I do.” The scar-faced man giggled. “Dark paragon of Demacia. Ruthless hand of the Mageseekers. We’re actually old acquaintances, you and I. More, kindred souls.” He offered a little bow of his head with a courtly flourish by his right hand. His face remained cowled. The cajoling cadence of his voice was so disturbing, it made Minerva’s skin crawl.

Demetria let out a grunt that sounded like ridiculing laughter. “What do you take me for, stranger? I don’t make acquaintances with criminals and warlocks.”

“I assure you, I’m nothing of the sort. But I’m afraid we won’t be able to play catch-up just yet.”

As the scar-faced man spoke, the rank of horsemen came loose behind Demetria, shuffling left and right, to let through a rider from the rear.

Despite the wealth of ornaments on display amongst the brightsteel-clad knights with their polished crests, heraldry-inlaid plates, and horsehair-plumed helmets, the arriving figure eclipsed them all in his sheer extravagance. Without having been swathed in a mass of thick blue and white robes against the cold, his delicate frame would surely have been dwarfed by the surrounding armoured figures, but as he was, the mass of brocaded trims and silver-embroidered fabrics of his garment, together with the copious amount of jewellery that adorned him, he very well might have weighed more than any knight present. Resplendent atop his chest, a deliberate display of utmost authority, his silver-trimmed greymark made introductions redundant.

Minerva felt a chill run the length of her spine upon laying eyes on it.

The Mageseeker craned his thin neck as if to seem taller, revealing his features under a fur-trimmed hood. A silver half-mask covered the right side of his face. His only visible hairless brow arched and his nostrils flared with disgust, accentuating further his sharp, vulturine features.

“Answer the sword-captain! Who are you?” The thin timbre of his demand, sour with condescension, belied his dignified stature. Iridescent pearls hanging from his many earrings clacked against one another in the wind. Entirely hairless, his tattooed scalp glistened under his hood like the skin of a snake. Watching him filled Minerva with unease, even though the Mageseeker seemed nowhere as dangerous as the veterans at his back. He had a vicious light to his leer, testimony of a voracious cunning his allies utterly lacked.

The scar-faced man appeared to ignore the newcomer, addressing his words only to Demetria with an almost light-hearted nonchalance. “I doubt we need an introduction, I’m sure you’ve identified us already. Have you not, sword-captain?”

No sooner had he let his thought take voice than Minerva tasted a whiff of that same thought, leaking into the aether from the man’s mind in his carefree humours, and so his intentions became clear to her with a sudden snapping clarity. The scar-faced man was simply stalling for time, so his accomplices could get ready to leave. She had to thwart his plans. Without a second thought, Minerva took a deep breath and cried out. “Aunt Demetria! Help us! We’re here!”

Every single gaze turned towards the waxed-cloth-covered pen. As soon as their initial shock abated, all the other kids joined the chorus, their little screams piercing the murmur of the blizzard, sending overlapping echoes through the forlorn village. An angry kick from one of the bandits rocked the cart, stunning the children to silence, but the deed was already done.

“It is them!” exclaimed the gaudily dressed Mageseeker.

Demetria leaned forward, pulled her claymore from the saddle scabbard, and lifted it in the air, looking back over her shoulder. “Ready!”

At the commanding shout, her men gripped swords and spears, horses fidgeting under them at the familiar sound of metal screeching. The scrappy caravan of the scar-faced man suddenly bustled with action, too; pikes, pitchforks, and knives burgeoned like thorns in a rosebush. Minerva felt the cart wobble as her siblings ventured closer to flock about with their whispered inquiries, clinging to the rails next to her, but she hardly registered them. The prospect of a terrible massacre became more inevitable with every second, and both strangely and suddenly, she felt content to be in a cage.

The Mageseeker raised his brittle voice, poking out an accusatory gloved index finger from his velvet sleeve. “By royal decree, I hereby proclaim your congregation illicit, furthermore a sacrilege against the creed of our king and realm!”

The scar-faced man finally cocked his head in his direction, suggesting generous curiosity, but was in every other sense unmoving. He merely appeared to be watching, but it seemed to unnerve the Mageseeker.

“Cease your blasphemous business at once and submit ...” The Mageseeker choked hoarsely on his sermons, swallowing as his eyes welled.

“Is something the matter?” the scar-faced man asked with demure charm. “Don’t mind me saying,” he said, before the crack-voiced dignitary could continue. “But your words carry little weight, magistrate. We are all faithful here.” He held his arms out wide to encompass his wicked parish. “We heed only the Mother of the Harvest. Your edicts do not concern us, and as such, I cannot help but debate your authority.”

People in the crowd snickered and exchanged smug looks.

“Dishonourable bastard!” Demetria snapped, seething hatred and caustic grief contorting her visage. Angry tears gave a wet glimmer to her eyes and a trembling quality to her voice. “I will make you pay for what you’ve done!”

“You will do no such thing just yet!” the Mageseeker commanded with haste, darting his eyes from Demetria to the cowled man and back, clearly distraught at the sudden escalation. His protest only served to curtail Demetria’s already short rein over her temper.

“I understand what you must do,” answered the scar-faced man, ignoring the Mageseeker’s interruption. “You and I are not like those bureaucrats in the Silver City. We’re out here, wading in mud and gore, following our own creed, chased by our own desire to repent.”

“We are nothing alike!” Demetria cried in reply.

The Mageseeker trotted ahead and halted his horse right between the two of them, making it impossible for the scar-faced man to disregard him.

“Enough! We do not have to shed blood unnecessarily! We can help each other! Lay down your weapons and submit to the law!”

The scar-faced man snorted. “If I do, should I expect my crimes to be excused?”

“Nothing”—Demetria pressed the word out through her teeth, moving out from the Mageseeker’s shadow—“will ever condone your crimes, fiend! You’re a murderer and a witch! You will rot in a cell forever, or die at my feet tonight!” She dug her spurs into the flanks of her horse and broke into a gallop.

A quickly yelled command yanked the battle-line to advance behind her, the relentless thrum of their tread gradually overwhelming the wind’s howl. They took over the dumbfounded Mageseeker who disappeared in the tide of brightsteel-clad ranks.

In wordless apprehension, Minerva watched the charging horsemen closing in, raking up speed in an unstoppable flood of muscle and iron. Her vision tapered. Warmth retreated from her limbs. She became short of breath, had to take a large gulp of air until her lungs stretched to full capacity, and even that felt insufficient. In the midst of all this, the storm rescinded its temporary favour of light, shrouding the stars once more. Darkness descended on the village and swallowed the caravan and the charging knights, consigning all to the mercy of ripping torchlights.

“And will spilling my blood condone your crimes?” The scar-faced man’s voice hovered deep, soft and heavy like lush red wine.

It was difficult to say if Demetria understood any of it through the rumble of hooves with hot rage simmering in her mind.

The attackers crossed their half of the square in the space of a few heartbeats, and Minerva could already envisage the terrible clash of colliding bodies, driven by her premonitions to believe that this would be the awful culmination she so feared coming. Her fears were misplaced, as such a clash did not come to pass, and as the realisation of that dawned on her, the mounting dread she felt up till now evaporated with a stunning finality, as if it had run out like sand through an hourglass.

“I will cut your tongue out!” Demetria boomed on the top of her lungs.

The scar-faced man did not utter a word, nor did he open his mouth, yet he did make a reply. Everybody heard him this time. “That will not stop me speak!”

His serrated growl seemed to permeate every single mind on the main square. Minerva gnashed her teeth in panic, feeling as if a thorny branch had been stabbed into one ear and pulled out through the other, even though only an echo of the spell must have reached her and her siblings at the back.

It was the Demacian knights who took the brunt of the mental onslaught. Their minds exploded with it. Harrowing screams and drivelling groans filled the air, and the charge deformed into a frenzied stampede. Knights tore at their helmets in madness, foaming at the mouth, their limbs contorting with seizures while their horses went berserk under them, jumping and kicking with abandon, relieving themselves of their riders, dead or alive. In their chaotic gallop, the massive bulks of combat-trained steeds jumbled up and collided with terrible forces, the majestic animals tumbling on one another, throwing armoured forms in the air or crushing them under their massive weight against the cobblestones, effortlessly rending flesh and rupturing bone.

Minerva watched as Demetria’s mare reared up and threw her off into the meat grinder of bodies. One by one, torches fell, were extinguished in the bloodstained snow, and steadily the night consumed all detail, leaving only the tools of hearing and imagination for Minerva to deduce what further horrors were taking place. A whirling gush of snow burst from the skies and flooded the square.

The children were screaming. Minerva felt a tug on her sleeve as one of them tore at her dirty nightgown, but she remained glued to the theatre of destruction. She chewed her lips and squinted out into the snowfall-scribbled dark. There wasn’t much to see. Time and time again a feeble light would glint inside the commotion, rising to the surface from a whirlpool of shadows and ice, before dying out again. The wind-scrambled groans and cries echoed so distantly, it occurred to Minerva that the devastation with all its participants might have fallen away into some fathomless well.

The surrounding caravan fell silent too. She could sense the string of their anticipation stretch taut. She heard their laboured breaths, felt their grips tighten on weapons. Everyone was waiting to see what was left of the ill-fated riders.

The scar-faced man stirred first, snapping his head to the left. Minerva followed his line of sight and noticed a strange red light flicker deep in the blizzard. A shimmering mote first, then bigger. In a second, it went from the size of a firefly to as big as a campfire, and it launched itself towards the caravan. The flaming projectile went wide, missing the scar-faced man by an arm’s length, and sped away, ebbing in the skies and trailing angry white smoke.

The scar-faced man cursed, watching the scrawny Mageseeker step out of the blizzard, his gaudy cloaks hanging in tatters. His brilliant earrings were missing on one side, blood dripping from one earlobe. Bruises covered his previously immaculate skin. Soon after him came the knights, too, just a dozen who remained, their horses gone, many of them bruised and shambling but standing regardless, determined, swords and shields in hand.

The Mageseeker was kneading fire. Minerva watched, arrested as it twisted and turned and steadily grew under his fingers. He caressed the flames, running his hands over the twirling energies as though tending something alive, before launching another fireball towards them. This one found its mark, hitting one of the scar-faced man’s marauders square in the chest. His death was terrifyingly swift. The poor fellow could only utter a gurgling whine as his face melted. His garb combusted instantly and crumbled away. He made a step back, clawing his sizzling skin as the white of his ribs poked out from under the liquefied flesh that peeled away from his bones, and fell supine.

Some baulked from the wash of choking heat around the unfortunate, but most of the crowd remained calm. The Mageseeker shot back his fur-trimmed cowl in an act of defiance, revealing the intricate swirling motives of fiery wyrms tattooed on his scalp and the blue-green bruises he’d suffered in the chaos. From a wound on his head blood trickled and ran down the side of his silver half-mask. He flared his teeth, and at his behest, coruscating matter came into being under his fingers once more. Kneading the fire anew, his gaze bore into the leader of the enemy. Tottering knights gathered behind the Mageseeker in a half circle.

The scar-faced watched it all in silence, but before the Mageseeker could throw his projectile again, he scoffed and with an almost bored drawl, said, “So you do fire? Huh. Let me borrow that.” He held out a gnarled hand, and slowly began to close his fist with trembling effort as if something corporeal was in his grip fighting his squeeze.

A purple incandescence engulfed the Mageseeker’s eyes. His gaze flared with dread—the final thought that seemed his own—before his identity flickered out, irises disappearing in an opalescent haze. He stopped working the flame and instead extended both his hands and beheld the arcane fire in his palms with an expression of vacant admiration.

“Fascinating,” said the scar-faced man. Said the Mageseeker at the same time, a little smile tugging at his thin lips.

“No! Run! Get away!” Bursting out from the darkness at last, Demetria’s bellow was far too late.

The gathering knights recoiled as the fire rushed up the Mageseeker’s hands, entwining him until it fully immersed his form—and then he exploded. All his arcane vigour expelled in an involuntary snap, let rip by the foreign will.

Minerva was unable to turn away. The sheer horror of it held her rapt. Folds gathered on her forehead as she opened her eyes as wide as she could, staring into the blossoming inferno that grew and devoured everything in its path. In a blink of an eye, the night dressed in red, and she watched the ruined village bathe in a baleful mock-sunrise, before the warm gust of air from the explosion rammed into her.

The cart rocked hard with the force of the blast, and Minerva lost her footing. Torn from her grasp, the wax-cloth curtain closed up again, banishing all light. Blinking blindly, Minerva felt the bunched-up mass of her whimpering siblings soften her fall. Coughing and groaning bodies writhed under her, trying to crawl or wriggle free. The hot metallic fumes of magic were pungent in their noses, the resulting heat as choking as it was temporary, already dispersing into the cold of night.

“I want to go home!” Ignatz cried somewhere below her.

Minerva struggled to clamber to her feet. The arcane aftershock had unleashed a deluge of raw magic that was almost intoxicating. Her limbs felt numb, just as her mind, as though she was waking from a long slumber. Dull, pulsing pain filled her ears. With both hands, she took hold of fistfuls of her grimy hair and relished the aching sensation of strands pulling at her scalp.

All hope was lost. Right when the dregs of their endurance threatened to run short, a chance to escape their predicament had presented itself, only to be annihilated in the most gruesome of ways. Without experience or means to process the horrors she was made to witness, Minerva felt the lunacy of it all overwhelm her. She blamed the celestials, blamed the curse of ill-fate, which her father so often credited mishaps and unlucky coincidences to; yet oddly, she was still holding onto a precious morsel of hope, like one grasps onto an aspect of a dream after awakening, aware of its falsehood but clinging to it nonetheless.

“Here!” Kleon grabbed her arms and helped her up. They listened.

“We have no more time to waste!” The scar-faced man’s bellow rang outside. “Go. Now! We must not delay the ritual further!”

They all jumped when the cart jolted under their feet and began a lazy juddering onward. Minerva scurried back to the end of the cage and poked a hand out to reach the hem of the canvas, pulling the slit open once more. She unveiled a world of utter destruction that receded as their cart picked up speed.

In the afterglow of dying fires, scorched bodies lay strewn across the filthy slush, some of them still shuddering as their life drained away, bodies crusted a foul white as a shower of ash-stained snow fell. Rank smoke wafted in the air, seasoned with the bittersweet tinge of burnt flesh. Somewhere, a felled horse lifted its neck, whined and kicked out miserably, unable to stand.

There were some survivors. A handful of knights shambled amongst the remains of the catastrophe, confused, struggling to stay upright. Minerva heard a sword clatter to the cobblestones. No screams resounded, only pitiful groans and the crackle of languid fires in the wind.

As more and more distance was appended between their cart and the death-mottled central square of Hobhearth, Minerva became aware of tears streaming from her eyes. They purled forth uncontrollably, as sorrow finally overflowed in her heart where all the madness she witnessed had been bundled up so she could stay resolute. She couldn’t hold it in anymore. Her mind fumbled to keep an ember of hope from smothering. The scar-faced man—still back where he stood—gestured for some of his lackeys who stayed behind with him, and they approached the reeling Demacian soldiers with their makeshift weapons in hand. One aimed a crossbow and let loose a bolt; the pang of the shot was seamlessly followed by a soggy scream; a kneeling soldier falling onto his face.

Minerva wanted to scream, too, but all she managed was a scraggy sob. The little ones watched not the events beyond the rails, but her; she who was the oldest amongst them, their looking glass into the insanity of all the havoc that their little minds could not yet comprehend. Her wailing broke them one by one, their damp, little space filling with cries.

“What are we going to do?” Almost inarticulate, Ignatz’ query was drenched in sobs, his little face scrunched up.

Many plaintive questions followed. Their dread swamped Minerva, and bereft of any means to console them, she sank down between them.

“Minerva!” Kleon, who took over holding the canvas of the pen open, reached down and grabbed her arm. “Look!”

She did. Through the blur of her tears, in the progressively smaller ruined square, she caught glimpse of a tall figure looming in the billowing smoke and sifting ash. Garment soot-blackened, the remains of her sea-green cloak flapping in tatters, their aunt emerged, taking her place at the head of her battered knights’ ranks. Demetria raised her claymore and began forward.

“Unbelievable!” the scar-faced man snapped. His exasperation was audible, so much at odds with his, so far, collected demeanour. Without further preamble, he threw out his left hand and a blinding projectile ejected from his open palm.

A flash of all-encompassing white took Minerva’s sight. She was still blinking away a milky haze when the crackling rumble of the arcane strike hit her. It was a whack of a sound. They all winced and jumped, as even the bolts and fittings of their cage rattled at the force of the blast.

The magical lightning bolt had hit Demetria in the chest. She emitted a shrill, reeled, and fell to half-knee. Grey steam rose from her brightsteel-clad form and sparks jumped between her teeth as she growled, but her grimace was more of rage than pain. Coruscating lights played on the petricite steel of her armour; the rare alloy it incorporated had been pushed well beyond the limit of its magic-absorbing capabilities. Demetria wrestled herself upright once more and shambled on, slowly ramping up speed.

Minerva shook her head. She uttered a soundless “No,” as if that would stop her aunt from running into her own demise. She would not survive another bolt.

The scar-faced man erupted in hysterical laughter. “Why? Why can’t you finally die!”

The second lightning burst into life, but before it hit, Minerva saw something—a figure—as it darted out to the square from between the houses, and jumped in the way of the arcane strike before it could hit Demetria. The figure caught the bolt like a lightning rod.

Minerva’s eyes widened with recognition. She took a sharp breath and started to scream.

Sixteen

The path stretched out under Khyrr as though space debated his intention to clear the alleyway. Beyond it, Demetria’s trembling form was painfully distant. Her petricite-infused armour sweated exhaust plumes of grey steam, as the extraordinary metal rid itself of the excess magic. She wobbled on one knee halfway upright. Khyrr could bring nothing into focus but her; his panic stripped away every other detail—the dying soldiers, the backwash of carnage—and all muddled to incoherence, save one more thing.

Imprinting the spirit realm with its fire, there was a distinct presence of magic-imbued contempt; it hovered somewhere on the edge of the scene, about to lash out again. Khyrr had not the time to get a good measure of the attacker, but he heard its laughing cry born of delirious rage.

“Why can’t you finally die?”

Slush splattered under Khyrr’s feet as he ground to a halt, both hands thrown out before him to receive the second discharge, palms towards his foe, like someone about to curb a runaway carriage bare-handed.

He caught it. Muscles in his neck and shoulders tensed up as the lightning came over him and twined around his flesh. He gnashed his teeth, deafened by the crackling thunder, vision burned out by the searing radiance. It was as if a current of corporeal madness doused his flesh, gnawing away at his nerves. This time, unlike all those years ago, he did not resist it. No wall was brought up by his mind, for he had been taught better how to confront such powers. He allowed the volatile energies to seep into him and the convulsing surge of magic to stretch his veins as it filled them.

The arcane force was an alien fabric in the tapestry of his being, cutting through him like yarn drawn across silk, trailing the eye of a needle.

But it was Khyrr who drove the needle this time, and though it was a feat that took immense pain and focus, he guided the energies all the way to the core of his being. There he unravelled the spell: he breathed in, and as space in his lungs expanded so did between the yarns, out of which the magic had been woven. From there, it took a tug of his mind to unpick its threads; he stripped of form that which the other sorcerer bestowed upon the spell and emanated all the shapeless, pure cosmic energies back to nature via a prismatic corona of light. Lost in concentration, Khyrr did not fail to hear Demetria whisper his name in aghast realisation.

Caster of the calamitous powers and its bold recipient were connected by the sustained lightning. Thrashing spasmodically, the bolt sprouted short-lived branches and questing tendrils that lashed out for everything they reached, grazing charred marks on the cobblestones, whipping at particles in the air; snow and ash vaporised at its touch. The village basked in the black and white of its hypnotic strobing, rendered colourless, light and dark so sharply in contrast as if the shadows were tangible.

Despite the enormous toll, Khyrr endured, holding firm against the relentless deluge. The more the destructive powers flowed into him, the more he emanated as harmless light. His enemy, however, grew impatient and exhausted. Khyrr tasted his frustration through the vibrations of the arcane filament tethering their souls. The mage’s frantic exertion infused the lightning with a tint of angry lilac as its destructive power amplified. It destabilised too, twitching wildly like a ravenous snake grabbed at the tail, sputtering violent sparks.

Khyrr staggered back. Every gulp of magic he ingested eroded his body more and more, and he had already pushed himself so far during the night. Vertigo had him, and he tasted blood in his mouth. Barely above the monotone rumble and the popping burst of sparks, he heard his name drifting in the storm. Eyes squeezed shut, he twisted his head; with only a speck of attention to spare, he listened, and there it was again, even louder, a tone rusty with a sob, shouting his name. Minerva.

“Promise me, you’ll find them.” The memory of his brother’s voice bubbled up from his subconscious. “Take them home.”

The rush of relief spilt warmth in Khyrr’s chest, kindling his strength. There was still time. The children were still alive, though, alas, in the clutches of his enemies. They still served a purpose; otherwise, they’d already be dead. In the back of his mind, where Khyrr had hardly any capacity to dwell in the midst of arcane wrestling, another thought intruded, one issued by a jingling voice. “We only took them to protect them from the hateful woman, so our harvest could be complete.”

He could not afford this test of endurance to drag on; it had already depleted him severely. The cowled mage was weakening as well, but Khyrr had no intention to see who could hold out longer. Bracing and bringing his well-honed powers under sharp focus, he envisaged a single acute conception—an arcane jab of sorts, no more—and sent it through the cord of magic that ran between them, quick like a stab. It rushed through the lightning in green and exploded at the hands of the caster in a cascade of emerald sparks.

With that, the spell was severed. The mage screamed and jerked his hand away, shaking it wildly. The force of the strike shot back his cowl, his face revealed.

Oddly, his horse had little to no reaction, oblivious to the insidious powers let loose in his vicinity despite its eyes glowing with a strange purple light.

Darkness rushed back to replace the lightning’s brilliance, but before it could engulf all, the ruthless black face of the temperamental clouds shredded open once more, bleeding patches of starlight.

“It cannot be," Demetria mouthed, voice muffled by disbelief.

Khyrr regarded the man with no consternation, only a scoff. He tried to deny it, disregard it, but in truth, he had recognised him instantly upon tasting his magic. The unforgettable flavour—which, for all he tried, he couldn’t erase from memory—of the Weird. Khyrr’s lungs filled with the tainted essence of him.

The man—Haelbach—flashed wrath before he recovered his morose countenance. His downward look of poised condescension perfectly matched what had been conveyed by his cowled and faceless demeanour up till now. The right side of his face bore deep scarring, but the shifting anaemic light made it unclear whether it was badly burned, if it festered with ulcers, or both.

“Look at us.” Haelbach peered beyond them, a hint of a smile hanging across his expression, as though he were lost halfway in reverie. “Fates forfeit. Fettered in our self-inflicted condemnation. Deliverance out of reach.”

“I killed you!” Demetria raised her claymore in her right hand to point at him, but she swayed, the blade drooped, and the hilt almost dislodged from her trembling grasp. She had to quickly bring in her left hand amidst the accusatory gesture, lacking the strength to complete it one-handed.

Haelbach sneered. “You merely excised a tumour of false piety.” He rolled his shoulders to open his cloak, grabbed the wide, loosely buttoned collar of his shirt, and tugged it down. A horrid pulsing scar presented itself on his chest just where Demetria’s blade had exited it many years ago. Unbelievably, the scar still oozed thick black blood. Glistening purple veins bulged and spread from it like the questing roots of some hideous plant. Echoes of a distant cry drew Khyrr’s attention.

He looked beyond Haelbach and caught a glimpse of a cart on the main thoroughfare as it rattled over a hill beyond the ruined dwellings, escorted by cloaked figures, their procession slowly receding beyond the horizon. The cart carried a small pen, and from under a canvas sprouted little hands reaching out towards him to no avail. Too much like the little hands hammering on the windows of the burning mansion in his vision.

Khyrr felt his muscles bunch, urging him to run; he almost did, but by then Haelbach’s brutes had already closed their circle around them.

They skulked under hoods, clutching every kind of botched tool that could cut and stab. Some of them were filthy crooks, but some were sleek, well-fed, haughty figures. Khyrr recognised footmen, maids, stewards, and guards under their hoods—traitors of his house, of his family. The demonic woman was right. This dark influence ran deeper than he dared to believe. Khyrr unsheathed his twin blades of moonsilver.

“I didn’t want this. Having to take your lives. After all you’ve given. It angers me,” Haelbach offered, a sullen drawl pressed through grinding teeth. “I wish you wouldn’t seek to thwart me. I wish I knew a way to dissuade you both, so you could live to see our metamorphosis.”

The cultists drew closer; two, maybe three dozen of them. They were not at full strength—many of them having been left together with the imprisoned children to pursue whatever vile machinations they had in the making—but even so, the numbers they came with were daunting. Khyrr looked round to catch a glimpse of each of them, allowing not the slightest movement in the enemy ranks to escape his scrutiny.

As the storm relented again and the winds died, an ominous stillness encroached the village, pierced by suffocating moans and the intermittent whines of dying horses. Shafts of moonlight sifted through the frayed clouds, tracing the remnants of havoc. Scorched and disfigured corpses lay under the fresh accretion of soiled snow, some writhing spasmodically, some struggling to stand, some motionless. Snakes of smoke seeped from the scattered debris, some of which was still lambent.

Demetria’s men—the few who could stand—gathered around. A tall one coughed in a dented helm that had caved in and stuck onto his head; the man squeezed one eye shut against a stream of blood trickling down his face. Next to him, a hefty older fellow fidgeted with a sword unwieldy in his left hand, snarling away the pain as his right arm dangled inert with an unnatural twist in his forearm. Another, a blond boy with a smashed nose, trembled behind them. He seemed far too young, not yet grown into his armour. More rose to make a final stand, though each in worse condition than the last, about a dozen injured knights altogether. They squelched anxiously in the gore-ridden slush, already forming a defensive circle around their officer.

Khyrr received nothing but diffident, nervous glances from them; they seemed unsure what to make of the stranger. Their expressions prompted Demetria for acknowledgement or an order, but her attention was locked on her opponent.

“Though in fact,” Ulrich Haelbach continued, “I think I always knew that I would have to spend your absolution to purchase mine. Shame,” he jeered on a high note.

Khyrr shook his head. Resentment felt like a distending mass of heat in his brain, pressing against his sanity. Haelbach’s amiable tone was a mockery in the face of what he’d wrought that night.

“You will pay for this with your life, Ulrich!” Demetria growled.

“I wish I could. But that, I’ve already spent.” He poked towards them with his head as an order to his men, turned around his horse, and rode away. He hadn’t even begun to gain on his leaving caravan when the cultists lunged at Khyrr and the remaining Demacian knights. A single pitiful crossbow shot by one of Haelbach’s henchmen heralded the onset of the bloodbath. The bolt hit the blond-haired knight’s chestplate at an awkward angle, and it ruptured, sending out a cascade of splinters. The young swordsman emitted a boyish squeak, to which a cacophony of snide laughter responded. Then came a deluge of flesh, iron, and rage.

Khyrr suddenly found himself in a whirlwind of blades. A suffocating reek of murderous intent rushed over him through the spirit realm, just as the heat of bodies did in the corporeal one. He diverted a pitchfork hurled at his chest—the spittle from a furious war cry yet finding its mark on his cheek—just in time to raise his blade again for a parry against several consecutive spear thrusts. Aptitude with the sword mattered little, their enemies charged with mad abandon, overwhelming them with their sheer numbers. They launched wild, haphazard attacks with no regard to finesse but were driven by a mad bloodlust sated only temporarily when their makeshift weapons drew blood, just to be riled up again a moment after.

Despite his impeccable bladework, the tall knight in the crooked helm could only parry so many jabs before he was impaled by no fewer than five pikes from all directions. The broken-handed muscular one fared only slightly better. He dodged a pike lunging at his heart. He then survived a second one that slid off his armour as he swerved. But it nicked a deep, slanted groove in his chestplate, the edge of his gorget saving him by driving the metal tip away from his face. The third pike—a toothless, garlic-smelling drifter at its end—got him. His enemy dug the sharpened, crooked tip of the weapon into the gap between the armour plates at his armpit under his injured, useless hand. The knight instinctively dropped his sword and grabbed the wooden handle of the pike instead, endeavouring to pull it out where it burrowed into his flesh. Simultaneously, he kicked out at his attacker, but he hadn’t the necessary reach or strength, his muscles too overwhelmed with pain, and he was kept at bay by the length of the pike that jerked deeper the more he fought it.

Khyrr scurried to help him when a wet crack exploded next to him, and a spray of red took his sight. He felt soft speckles of gore rain down his body and heard a wet, burbling cry. The stench of bone marrow saturated the air. Khyrr groaned, shook his head, blinking to clear his vision, but saw only a hazy jumble of bodies buckling over one another.

The dagger came from behind, stabbing between the ribs but not quite strong enough to sink deep. Khyrr cried out in pain and surprise. He spun and lashed with both blades in mindless panic, pure instinct without the grace of swordsmanship. His enemy—a young girl—sidestepped the clumsy strike. She grinned at him, and for a moment through the veil of blood, Khyrr thought it was Minerva; her true self flayed away, ready to give him the fate his brother had received.

It was only a maid, but she was fast and used his confusion against him, so went straight for his heart while he struggled to bring back his blades for a parry. Demetria’s claymore hit her from behind in a mighty horizontal strike and wedged itself halfway into her spine at the waist. The girl jolted, her face turned pallid, and her legs buckled. The claymore dislodged from her back with a bony, moist pop and came down again, driven with the precision of an executioner.

Khyrr met Demetria’s eyes. After what, five years? Though to Khyrr, the reunion was not such a surprise, with their encounter in the winter garden less than an hour ago—a truth which his sense of time disproved.

Demetria was heaving. Specks of gore stuck her snarled tresses to her sooty face and the wreck of her delicate braids clinked with silver embellishments. In the effort to yank her blade free, she flashed her twin rows of pearly teeth, begrimed with blood, in a snarl, her belligerent expression relaxing for a moment. In the window of her sunken, green eyes, Khyrr glimpsed myriad thoughts competing, all unreachable in the heat of the moment. Her ash-crusted lashes fluttered, and the corners of her mouth curved downward. She released a laboured, trembling breath.

“I feared ...” Her expression was invasive, keen to disclose yet unable to enunciate … what?

It eluded him. Was it guilt? Relief? Did she fear he would fall just as far and deep as the cultists she was slaying? Khyrr’s heart turned sour with a flicker of indignation, but there was no time to contemplate, no respite. The wave of attackers came anew to wash them away.

A cloaked steward with a curvy moustache sliced at Khyrr with a hatchet, but the man almost slipped amid the clumsy attack. His footwork was nonexistent, the arc of his strike so predictable, so amateurish, he was merely hacking. The realisation roused Khyrr to the fact that, unlike his assailants, he could actually spar. He was in fact twice the swordsman than any of them—at an advantage even as he was now, fatigued, and losing blood. His injury mattered little. Already, he was barely cognizant of the wound in his back, the hot throbbing in his muscles feeling distant, overpowered by the anxious thrill of close-quarters combat.

Khyrr whipped and blocked the attack along with another one—the jab of a straightened scythe he sensed coming from behind—then veered out and with a flurry of bladeworkensnarled the weapons of his attackers. Before they could recover their stances, he danced and struck. One of them fell to his knees, disembowelled, entrails spilling through his grasp, the other one screamed, staring down at a pair of bleeding stumps where his hands used to be. Demetria threw herself into the fray too: she waded across the crowd indomitable, in defiance of her wounds and bruises. Still, every cultist she cut down, two replaced.

Despite the brutality of the battle, watching her familiar moves sparked apassel of memories in Khyrr. They intruded upon him, painfully irreconcilable with the colours and scents of the now; flashes of the past played out in the space of half a heartbeat. A carousel of images from childhood: of a tourney, one of many. Demetria dishevelled and unladylike, her honey strands tousled by a spring zephyr, the cleft of her wooden sword finding its way through the meagre defence of her sparring partner; older and bigger, yet his bravado crumbling in the face of defeat. The thrilled buzz of the spectators and the anxious fidgeting of the judges. Her unnerving determination, her almost unhinged desire to win apparent in her posture even from the highest seats of the arena. The Demetria he knew gone, totally submerged in what he plainly called her ‘combat delirium’. Finally, the finishing blow, its strength poorly measured as ever, branding her opponent with yet another purple bruise. Every time she’d prevailed, she’d scrutinised the crowd to find him, exchanging looks of pride and concern when their gazes met, even though little risk had been involved in the mock fights of the tourneys. Images, distant like a dream.

A gurgling figure staggered away from him, clutching his bleeding neck. A squirt of red missed Khyrr by a hand’s breadth. He choked on putrid, metallic-tasting air, letting it out with a cough. His attacker’s body hadn’t even touched the ground before the surging crowd overtook it, swallowing it up and presenting a line of new attackers to jump to their deaths.

Nearby, Demetria faced the same fate. She let out an anguished moan, holding out the sound until it became a scream, and committed her full weight in a push as she finally transfixed a grey-haired toothless rogue, her claymore ramming through chainmail, hardened leather, and ribs all the same. The man skewered on the blade simply cackled in her face, vomiting blood as he died.

Khyrr was puzzled by their rabidity. They were akin to ravenous vermin, always biting forward, oblivious to their lives and with a delirious fervour to kill. For a moment, he submitted to the urge to peer at their visage across the spirit realm. The horror of it made him shiver.

Beyond the veil, he found himself beset by a forest of lavender rushlights. In every single one hung enclosed a heart: one for each of their foes. They had all been made thralls of this demonic fire, languishing in its beautiful torment. The spectral screams and moans of their souls threw the spirit realm into discord. He also distinguished that this magic was not Vivica’s. It was something much more potent. Something primordial. Something fathomless.

Mother has always been keen on you.

Was this the fate that awaited his nieces and nephews? Oblivion in madness? That, he could not allow.

But how could he match the might of this enemy alone? Even if he survived the fight, could he take on Haelbach and his remaining cultists by himself? It seemed impossible.

His hopelessness built into fear, his fear built into anger; one more chest impaled, one more lavender light blew out. Ire gave him impetus to double his efforts despite his fatigue. It also eroded his focus and allowed him to be caught off guard.

He kicked a body off his blades when an enormous hammer grimed with bits of grey matter rose overhead behind him. Khyrr registered the incoming strike too late, and only by sudden flickers in the intensity of the moonlight. Glancing behind his shoulder, he saw a piggish man looming over, sweat rolling down his grey stubble, bulging eyes avid in bloodlust. Khyrr was taken aback. There was no time or space to dodge, nor could he impede such a mighty strike with his thin sabres and stringy muscles. His powerlessness left him only with one option.

Despite his depleted state, he plunged furiously deep in his psyche and from the kernel of his being conjured a spectacular tsunami of destruction, accompanied by a howl of pain and anger. Unleashed was a prismatic wave of teal celestial fire that rolled across the battlefield, opening a path of devastation through the throng, catapulting bodies into the air.

The Demacian knights were spared only by sheer luck of not happening to be in the way. Khyrr’s hefty attacker flew back. Every single bone in his body shattered, and he sprawled on the cobblestone. The effort almost made Khyrr swoon, the energies of the spell having been siphoned straight from his body as much as from his arcane power well. His vision displayed a triple image of the scenery in front of him, which, to his surprise, seemed less gruelling than before.

Though it took a great toll, the show of supernatural power induced a sort of pause. Suddenly, Khyrr and the knights were not losing ground. Like a wolf pack happening upon a campfire, their attackers baulked, but their stupor would not last long. As his vision cleared, Khyrr found that only two of Demetria’s knights still stood their ground: a woman and a man, both panting, shield and sword ready, awash with gore. They showed confusion, switching their nervous gaze between him and the cultists, as if debating who their enemy was.

Even now. Even after they’d spilt blood in alliance. The memory of Vivica’s words swirled like hot acid in his mind. They loathe. They abhor.

Withdrawing a couple of steps from both ally and enemy, Khyrr found himself at the far end of the square. In the turbulent brawl, their assailants had driven them all the way back. A street opened up behind Khyrr, luring with the false promise of escape. Not like the injured, tired and heavily armoured knights could outrun this foe. Ahead, more than a dozen pairs of hungry eyes shimmered still, devoid of mercy, milky white with the reflection of a grim moon newly unveiled upon the sky. They would overwhelm them soon.

“We die here,” said one of the knights, the woman, between pants and matter-of-factly.

“No,” Demetria replied. “You run! I can hold them long enough. Leave this to me!” She inclined her head towards Khyrr, sideways, without looking at him. “Save your children!” There was some reluctance in her gesture, and together with how she turned her face away, it conveyed regret and perhaps shame. Then the moment was gone, and she charged the forbidding line of protruding blades and spears, claymore raised.

Her soldiers looked at each other and followed regardless.

Khyrr was taken aback. Demetria’s words sank deep, growing to a cold ache in his lungs. The unwavering action of her knights made it feel as if only he were addressed by the order. He felt undressed, all his boyish coyness suddenly rushing back into him, his disposition from ten years ago pervading his present.

He had always been the one left by the wayside, being nothing but a deadweight when it came down to a fight, coerced to obey his friend’s dismissal due to a lack of strength to share in the punches or bear the hardship of perilous childhood adventures together. And, as if to further his ignominy, Demetria was always there for him when it mattered, but never allowed it to be the other way around. Not like Khyrr could have made it otherwise. Little Khyrr, trapped on the paths that only his wheeled chair could tread. This time, it was supposed to be different. All this macabre dance they shared should have amounted to something—a solidarity in combat, an acknowledgement of his newfound talents, at the least—but not even that would be granted for Khyrr. Only banishment.

A tremble set in Khyrr’s jaw. Did he squander his chance to finally achieve vindication before those who mattered most? What else—what more flaunts with sword and magic—was he to do that would warrant her trust?

With a wide swing, Demetria swept a path free of jutting speartips and scythes, vaulting into the ranks of her baffled quarry. She paid no heed to the weapons questing on her armour, scraping and nicking the brightsteel in search of flesh—and occasionally finding it. The wide arc of her initial strike brought her claymore up sidelong, selling that she was unable to bring it back for another strike in time. The first benighted cultist who ate the feint and jumped her paid with his life. His neck went a peculiar shape as Demetria’s armoured elbow sank into his throat. Not even halfway through the hit, she was made to twist her face, roused by sparks that a knife scratched into life as it ran up her gorget, and carved her a crescent moon wound from her chin to her ear. The stab was aimed at her eye, but the tussling of the crowd had skewed her attacker’s aim.

Demetria hammered her foot down on his knee, bending it unnaturally with a devastating snap, and then brought her claymore down to cleave the man’s head open at the cheekbones before he could even fall screaming. The vicious kill had an intimidating effect; it opened up space around her, a boon especially when wielding a two-handed weapon, but she had little time to relish it.

A foreboding, born of expert combat-awareness, urged her to look up. An aperture opened in front of her amongst the surging bodies. A crossbow-wielding wretch stood at the end of it; the very same who commenced the bloodbath. He was here to finish it too. Demetria noticed him too late, realising with mounting dread that the arrowhead was already trained on her torso. The shot was perfectly aligned, but the man never had the chance to let loose. Barely did his finger graze the trigger when one of Khyrr’s blades whirled through the air, turning end over end and impaling him square through the chest.

Khyrr darted into the fight, lunging to retrieve the blade, but was made to shuffle back, a spear having been thrust just through the space he occupied a beat earlier. He seized its haft with his empty right and stabbed with his left, then tugged hard on the spear to help sink his blade into his attacker: a girl. She gawked into his face. Khyrr did not grant her his gaze. Nor did he care for Demetria’s reaction to having been saved.

Little stopped him from raising his blades against the knights fighting beside him. His foes, his allies, everyone seemed to wear masks from his past. Familiar faces goaded him in the dark. The fear of the arcane, neatly contained in expressions of scorn and distaste. Disgust packaged neatly as pity. Patronising scorn dressed as counsel. They all shunned him, except for his family, and even they did nothing but keep him fettered to a hollow fate.

“Run!” A crack in Demetria’s cry revealed despair; even her dourness seemed to relent.

Her pleading was lost on Khyrr.

A sword-wielding cultist met her blade with his in an awkward parry. The man recoiled from the concussive force of her strike, leaving her momentarily without an attacker. She used the heartbeat of respite to face Khyrr. “I said run!”

“There’s nowhere to run!” Khyrr exploded in a scream, giving her a taste of the anger that riled him. “They’re everywhere!” He was intoxicated by the overwhelming scent of death, mesmerised by bloodstained silhouettes glistening in the moonlight. All he wanted was to quench his self-hatred and fear of defeat in blood, but this only exasperated him further.

Maybe he would die here, indeed. Yes, maybe that was what he wanted. He’d rather die than bear the shame of walking away one more time—but even that thought exacerbated his pain, a part of him knowing that such an end would have him forsake the promise he’d made. A promise he had not the strength to fulfil.

A man, a hoary, bearded menial in swathes of muddy furs, lunged at him with a dagger but stumbled on the blood-soiled slush. Khyrr came down upon him without a second thought. The strike was thoughtless, feral, and skewed. His only remaining blade wedged tight into the man’s flesh at the collarbones. The old betrayer flashed yellow teeth in a snarl, eyes wide in panic. He clutched at the blade jutting out of him, uncaring of the edge cutting up his palms, as his open neck wound gushed and spurted blood. He struggled only for a second, then blanched and fell to his knees unconscious, dragging the moonsilver sabre down with him. Khyrr wrenched hard, but the blade would not come loose. There was screaming. Somebody called his name beyond the red mist that darkened his mind. He pulled again, again for nought.

A blurred ribbon of steel flickered across his sight as Demetria disarmed him, the hilt of his weapon struck from his grasp. Immediately, she had him by the collar of his leather armour and shoved him aside with such vehemence he almost lost his footing. Khyrr’s indignation culminated in empty bafflement. The lengths she would go to dishonour him.

They locked eyes, but to his surprise, Khyrr saw no defiance there, only a wince, and a great strain. There was a tightness in her grimace that now gradually dissolved away, weak, faltering apprehension taking its place. Khyrr’s blood ran cold.

In the welter still roiling behind Demetria, Khyrr caught sight of the crossbowman he’d thrown his blade at what seemed like an eternity ago—a bleeding wound across his chest, the crossbow in his hand held upright—before he lolled back with a faint grin fixed on his death-rigid face. The weapon in his falling hands was not cocked anymore: no bolt lay loaded in the bold groove.

Demetria’s eyes welled, colour drained from her skin. She stood at the same spot where Khyrr had been when he’d struggled to free his blade. Khyrr caught the glint of a bolt’s ruffled black feathers protruding sideways from under her right armpit, right where the chestplate gave way to the shoulderguard. A bolt, intended for him.

Demetria swallowed, stumbled forward, dropped her sword, and fell.

“Sword-captain!” one of the last two soldiers snapped, but they couldn’t offer more than a concerned glance for their commander. They formed a protective perimeter around her, keeping the foe at bay with intimidating swings. But their mastery of war only delayed the inevitable demise that they would soon share.

Bizarrely, some of the cultists stopped closing on them and merely cackled, savouring that they’d managed to fell their cardinal adversary, licking their teeth in triumph.

Khyrr floundered to his knees next to Demetria. Her chest rose and fell in quick succession with each shallow, ragged breath. Her eyes trembled as if she chased something bouncing between the stars in the darkness above.

“Khyrr.” Her gauntlet was at her neckguard, fumbling with something beneath her gambeson.

“Do not move!” Khyrr looked at the wound under her arm, madly rummaging for options or remedies, switching his gaze between her and the tottering enemies that closed their ranks around them, gloating over them, laughing, spitting inarticulate curses. Khyrr felt all the anger and shame drain out of him, leaving his bones hollow and cold, a hot lump gathering in his throat. Down, below Demetria’s body, he saw the mirror image of the stars distend in a black puddle of gore growing across the cobblestones.

“Hold still. I think I can ...” He grabbed the short bolt, crumpling the dishevelled raven feathers at its end, but without even tugging on it, he felt that it had settled deep and fast. Dropping his blade, he ventured to staunch the bleeding, trying to fit his hand under her chestplate. But the wound reached deep, piercing her lungs, maybe even the veins feeding her heart, and it bled internally. That much was clear from the angle of the shot, though that fact, Khyrr refused to acknowledge.

At his indistinct mumbling, Demetria produced a short-lived, trembling smile. She began to shiver. Her hands seized Khyrr’s, and she pressed something into his grasp.

“All that hatred ... I couldn’t ...” Her voice was a weak murmur, her face a blueish silver like the night’s snow.

A seal loosened in Khyrr; a vestige of something now rekindled beyond it. His fingers smeared blood on the polished chestplate across his own warped reflection.

“No, no,” Khyrr drivelled, choked by sobbing. “I cannot save them, Ria. I cannot save them alone.”

Demetria winced and a weak, wet cough drenched her lower lips with blood. Her breath came in whistling, thick heaves. “Khyrr. I cannot see you.” Her eyes widened with horror as they flicked up and down, unable to find anchorage.

“I’m here. I’m right here.”

“Khyrr?”

“I’m here!” he shouted, clutching her gauntleted hand so hard his fingers turned white. Demetria’s terrified gaze froze and emptied out. A tear hung lodged in the corner of her eyes, half released. The weight of her arms pulled down on Khyrr’s as her fingers unfurled, leaving a small object in his hand. Khyrr peered down to find the Silver Sister’s botched effigy lying in his palms; its shapes well-thumbed and rounded, crevices tarnished black and stained with blood. It was yet attached to Demetria’s motionless body via the filigree links of a silver chain.

Fate had finally caught up to him, and the cacophonous melody of his soul that had troubled his mind throughout his life finally fell to a heavy silence—and in that silence, he realised the promise of escape still lured him. No, not lured. Mocked. Beyond the encroaching tide of killers, there was the possibility of escape. He could make a final push; he could dart through the tapestry of the physical world and gain distance, as he had in the mansion. It would hurt immensely, but it was possible.

Then, he could outrun the foe. He could even try to be true to the promise he made to Tymotheus; or merely disappear in the woods just like all those years ago. All he had to do was turn away. All he had to do was watch as one more life gave out in his grasp.

“Have you ever seen the champion bid the mountain that it might bow its head for him to mount it?”

One of the knights emitted a cry, even as the charge of the three attackers took him off his legs at the end of their spears. His fellow cried his name, cried for the celestials, as she was pulled down by a vortex of daggers. As the torrent of rage was about to reach Khyrr, he stood, squeezed his eyes shut, turned his palms towards Demetria’s cooling body and reached out for his birthright, letting the celestial forces of creation pour through him.

An onset of pain rushed forth to meet him, riding the surge of magic in his veins. He welcomed it. A threshold in his body was breached, and from the zenith of his consciousness emerged an unyielding deluge of spiritual might, materialising and sweeping through the war-torn square as a dazzling flood of light. All the cultists fell paralysed by it.

Khyrr cried tears of blood. His skin turned a parched black. His hair withered and fell. As he immolated himself away, slowly but finally, Demetria’s wounds began to close.

At the verge of life and death, as every beat of his heart was exchanged for one in Demetria’s chest, Khyrr smiled, because he finally remembered what his father used to say.

Unmarked

Plunge up! Behold in a fathomless deep,

Where constellations poised in time embraced,

The Silver Sister’s bright form; thereon seeped

Her pale glow through night skies, blessed where she gazed.

Galaxies stirred stars, their sparkling incense

Smoke thread space, spellbound worlds juxtaposed—

A Rite of Creation, a ceaseless pace.

Therein she dreamt. Worlds in her effulgence

Turned their face nightward—where it once been clothed

In her sisters' drape—now lulled in white lace.

A spark of faith bloomed—My Heart!—she bristled

Condiments of stars caked on her cloak flaked

Accretions—of cosmic winds roused, whistled

Her Warrior doomed, body and soul staked!

She knew this one—the Repentant—the beat

Of his heart spent. Lifted, in her mind’s eye

The threads of his fate unspooled endlessly,

Moments in a heap, regrets on repeat.

She ruminated all it’s how’s and why’s,

Weighing him on the scales of destiny.

So long—he invoked on her sentience—

I lamented the afflictions that which

Mortal life entailed. Blighted inheritance!

Things it denied me to smell, taste, touch.

She came—does the Wolf envy the Owl’s wings,

When both roam the night wild and free, or

Would the Peak trade for mist over the Pond

Her majestic zephyr? Your frail shell wrings

Of torture self-imposed, made to ignore—

for the lack of a tree—all the Woods beyond.

My path I would have traced,  he besought, though

For the haunt of death, ever I thread awry.

If the Shooting Star—She beamed—feared to throw

Her form awaste, how’d the light trail the sky?

The Warrior swooned—I crumble under

The weight! This grim design, all harsh! Mere toil!

My child, only—she held his face—dust

And stone settle and still. But earth can sunder,

The skies thunder, waters, winds, and flames roil,

Mountains stab heavens, saplings crack the crust!

Blessed you are with hills to scale, to combat rust,

With foes to strife, for that is Life!

Bathed in Her silver glow he soared wordless,

Convoluted thoughts beheld in the mimed

Mirror of webbed stars—no maze, but compass!—

Skeins shifted into seams. Gods, he was blind!

Yarns of his subliminal unknotted

And like in veins, ran through a cosmic light

Colours blossomed across trillion stars

Void with flourishes of music flooded

Nebulas burst a breeze of dazzling sprite

Creation took breath, sands ran bereft hours.

Now I see! he cried,

This Destiny I accept it as mine.

Good. A smile. Now plunge down!

To dirt, cold, and blood. One final last time.

Seventeen

Demetria opened her eyes. All her wounds were mere memories marked by a faint caress of phantom pain. The bolt that pierced her lungs and tore into her heart was now lying in a pool of blood next to her, cooling, thin wisps of heat issuing from it. Her last two soldiers, seemingly just as unharmed as her, regained their feet, turning their heads in awe at the sight of their enemies who now all writhed on the ground, seized by vicious convulsions, clawing at their temples as if the inside of their skulls were aflame. Demetria raised her gaze as her attention was drawn to a radiant apparition, so bright she could not behold it without her lashes fluttering. Khyrr stood above her in a dazzling aura of silver light, proffering his right hand for her. After so many years she looked at him and she saw a mage, but for the first time in her life she did not perceive that quality as a weapon. She saw a herald of rejuvenation and light.

Demetria did not hesitate to take his hand.

Eighteen

At the beginning, the mournful chorus was barely a hum; its dying echoes drained away in the rock around Minerva through its countless tunnels and crevices. Then, it began to grow. There was a wrongness about it, like an elegy that throbbed from underwater, or like words sung backwards with their notes skewed by hoarse throats. Its thrumming made the stale darkness of the caverns feel close and warm and alive. Shadows threatened to thicken into lurking presences about murky alcoves that sight, scent, and touch were unable to populate—mere figments of her imagination, yet Minerva felt eyes searching the corner where she cowered. She became conscious of every little noise she made: the scree crackling under her heels as she shifted, her shaking breath, the warm drubbing in her ears. She was afraid to swallow, as if the spittle rolling down her throat would stir this rigid dark.

As the distant grim choir intensified, distinct voices cut through the milling echoes and unintelligible susurrus, and Minerva’s eyes went wide and blank as she shifted all her focus to her hearing—dissecting the noise for any resemblance to her siblings’ voices, and simultaneously bracing for them to be screams and wails. If any of the sounds belonged to the children, they were too distorted to tell. Hairs prickled on her arms, still, as amongst the incoherent cries and petulant goading shouts, she made out other things—muffled begging, hoarse retching, tortured mumbling. She couldn’t keep her mind from weaving images for every one of them, each insinuating a possible horrid turn of fate for her. She shook her head as if the noises and the corresponding renditions of her fantasy were droplets of oil she could dislodge from her ears, but they only seeped deeper. Solitude was slowly digesting her.

Ignatz had been the last one they took before she was left alone in the cave cell, for which they exchanged the one on the cart. Her foster brother had had to be scooped out of her trembling, screaming embrace, and when she wouldn’t let go, she was softened with a smack on the cheek. The callous, heavy palm of a man left a hot prickling under her eye and around her nose; she kept licking blood off of her upper lip. It was hard to say how long she spent alone; there was no way to find a grasp on time in the dark.

Again and again, Minerva retraced her steps, trying to find a mistake she might have made, an opportunity she might have missed, as if to pick a loose thread on the seam of events where the chance of escape might have been left unnoticed. Surely, she could have done something. Surely it was she who had failed them.

Khyrr’s dazzling form as he wrestled the arcane might of the scar-faced man had been the last thing Minerva saw before the cart had rounded a corner and the view had been taken over by the dead streets of Hobhearth. Then even the village withdrew, shrinking into a collection of snow-crusted toy huts hugged by the woods in the belly of the vale. The hellscape of its main square, all the blood and death, tucked away inside. The whirling shimmer of sparse moonlight on faint puffs of billowing smoke was the only tell. It was a dubious testimony of the destruction, for one could think it but the mark of some well-stocked fireplaces keeping vigil against the keen edge of winter. Minerva had lifted her gaze higher, and in the distance she almost fancied to distinguish another animated stream of grey that seemed out of place among the dispersing mass of clouds, venturing to contribute it to fire that, she suspected, still gnawed at the walls of her home. Almost at once, the mirage disappeared in the shifting of the heavens, and a soft tremble took hold of Minerva’s chest. Then the cart rattled onto bumpy forest roads, and one of the cultists hissed at her, whip in hand, so she let go of the canvas and collapsed back into the dark.

There they huddled together—knots of whimpering, shivering sibling flesh—collecting the little warmth their bodies held to keep each other from freezing. Under them, the road grew rougher and the cold mistier the more they sank into the depths of the woods. Minerva was on the verge of losing consciousness, her reality coalescing with the phantasms of frostbite-induced dreams, when the cart lurched to a halt and hands dragged the canvas from their cage. By the blinding glow of torches, they were goaded out to the open at spearpoint. A surging throng swallowed them right as they emerged, nudging them forward with curses and blades. The fear of getting lost was suddenly overwhelming, and Minerva wished she had more hands. Desperate, she grabbed two of her siblings, and they relayed her grasp; that was how they had held onto each other, in a chain linked by clammy hands slipping in each other’s grip, the jostling testing their strength. There was no respite, no time to get her bearings. Her recollection of the next events consisted of a series of mere flashes.

The snow-dusted litter of dead foliage crunching under her numb feet. The purple light of a star-speckled sky above her head, stretching beyond skeletal winter canopies. The whimper of an old man, another captive, same as her, falling to his knees. A tear tracing the crevices of his wizened face. His eyes bulging as the strangle-knot around his neck stretched taut, forcing him back on his feet. A distending shadow outlined by silvery white from the moon, growing, gradually overtaking the sky; a giant crag, she realised, its tapering peak bulging from the depths of the forest like the spear tip of a buried titan. A great interminable dark blot ahead of them, blacker than anything she’d ever seen, devouring their procession, revealed by torchlight to be the mouth of a cave. The sudden rush of too-close echoes, a fit of fear roused by tight spaces, her breath quickening. Moaning and begging, and growled retorts. A long walk. Bustling through the damp corridors, stumbling fatigued on jutting rocks, kicked and shoved all the way, and finally ending up in a cell—its space feeling generously measured now that she remained its only occupant, but back then way too narrow for all of her kin—about two steps wide, a terminating tunnel on one side, a set of bars on the other. The bolts of the cell door driving home, the torchlight slowly moving away. Darkness.

The rapid, helpless alternation of events stopped there, and the finality of imprisonment set in. From that point on, her memories were no more frayed; on the contrary, they were viciously undiminished in all their horror, every detail sharp, playing out in her head again and again at a glacial pace.

They were left in the dark, alone with the reverberations of their querulous wails and whimpers to kindle their unease, crunched together tight between the slimy faces of the rock wall.

“What is going to happen to us?”

“Is Pa coming for us? Is Uncle Khyrr coming for us?”

“He isn’t coming, is he?”

“I’m thirsty!”

“Are they going to hurt us?”

They clung to Minerva as to a rope before a leap of faith, clutching her wrists, clawing at the torn frills of her dirty nightgown. She became breathless, daunted by their begging, their mumbled dire suppositions, utterly at a loss for how to console them. She should have taken pleasure in the fact that up till that point, at least they had each other, because even that sparse boon was to be taken away.

Soon, a cultist returned, pruning her siblings away one by one. Minerva didn’t let them go without a fight, but eventually they were all peeled off of her, one by one like slices of skin from an apple, and only she was left, the bare flesh.

She could have fought harder for them. Maybe if she had been stronger, like her aunt, or perhaps more clever like her father, she could’ve conceived of a daring escape, a devious ploy, like the ones utilised by the Piltoven inventors, Shuriman rogues, and other cunning heroes of her father’s bedtime tales. She could have picked the lock of the cage on the road, or summoned a magical doorway to lead them to freedom, had she been possessed of the means to do those things. She could have done more. She could have been more.

From the passageway that led to her cell, faint whispers and shambling steps roused Minerva, and she put the self-deprecating thoughts from her mind. The blunt fear that relentlessly choked her suddenly swelled to a sharp fright, cold in her veins. She curved up into a ball, driven by instinct to shrink out of vision, yet she couldn’t help herself from attempting to gauge a shift in the uniform blackness. Along the adjoining tunnel, the rock walls began to reveal their rugged, glistening faces in blue, as if an underwater radiance had been creeping closer beyond the bend, its expanding brilliance flooding the tight space, exchanging fantasy for bland details. The approaching party’s whispered conversation similarly increased in its intensity, and Minerva started to make out the substance of that too.

“And master ...” rasped a voice after a pause, its owner’s hesitance clear despite the dark. “The others. They’re yet to return from the village. Could it be that ...”

The cold luminosity stopped its advance as the bearer of its source halted beyond sight. The procession lapsed into silence, lingering for a moment before they set out again.

A deep voice answered, keen with authority. “It matters not. We have what we need.”

As the light rounded the corner and became directly visible, Minerva had to squint and raise a hand to shield her eyes. There must have been at least three people, she presumed by the sound of their steps. The bearer of the light reached her cell door and stopped, and so did their acquaintances. There was a rasping sound, the dry scrunch of rust under skin, as the figure clasped a bar of her cell. There was a sigh, bearing the familiar timbre of a man. For a painfully long moment, they only watched her. She felt their gaze; her skin crawled under their scrutiny.

As her eyes adjusted, she made out a cloaked form, one she had seen before, and a face illuminated by a handful of blue flame, which was just as familiar.

“Look at you,” said the scar-faced man. “Such a strong little flower. Yet even the most stubborn weeds wilt and sag with no light, no earth to find purchase.”

Minerva shot up and withdrew, pressing her back against the stone wall at the end of the cell.

“Where are they?” Her voice caught, dry and hoarse. She had to swallow to regain it. “Where are my siblings?”

The man snapped his fingers, and his two companions opened the cage and entered,grabbed Minerva above the elbow. She writhed and struggled, but she was weak, exhausted by thirst and cold, no match for the two men.

“What do you want from me?”

The scar faced man cocked an eyebrow, and a flicker of a smile quirked in the corner of his mouth.

“Only to blossom in red.”

He spun and started back down the tunnel. Minerva was made to follow, dragged out of the cell and along the trail of the scar-faced man who threaded left and right along the bends of the corridor with the surety of someone at home. Minerva was too busy struggling against the inevitable, feet buckling, arms and legs flailing, to greatly heed the widening path, the growing ominous noises, the swelling crimson illumination surpassing the cold blue of the man’s guiding light. Eventually, it became useless to keep the spell alive, and he allowed it to flicker out.

A strident scream somewhere far too close made Minerva quail and look up. The unhinged voices, which she’d only caught faint hints of back in the cell, were suddenly all around her, rendered unending by their own coalescing echoes. A jittering orange glow caught on the oozing rock face. The wet air of the cave grew leaden and warm with the cloying scent of sweetened smoke, thickening until it combined into a grey mist, its spices harsh in her eyes and acrid in her throat. Ahead, the narrow tunnel ended, running into an enormous hallway, one that she couldn’t appreciate the first time she was dragged through it with her siblings, for the lack of firelight.

Minerva let out a shuddering sigh as she carried her gaze around, tracing the rugged facade of the towering stone walls rising up and disappearing in the darkness at heights which no light could penetrate. Over millennia, dripstone had moulded the cave walls into almost organic shapes, and she felt as though she’d ventured into the hollowed out belly of a buried, dead giant, its petrified ribs and misshapen, melting organs jutting from glistening stone surfaces. The vast tunnel stretched out ahead of her, seemingly endless at first in the thick smoke.

Minerva’s eyes followed the path down through the hallway, and she found that it terminated at an even greater chamber, which, by the look of it, was so large that one could fit the whole Volosh mansion inside it. Upon exiting the tunnel, she quickly learned where the warm firelight was coming from. Countless candle circles beset their path through the hallway, haphazardly arranged along the cavern floor. Each circle was inhabited by one or more figures, their forms wreathed in censer smoke, their work indiscernible beyond the all-permeating haze. Simply looking at them was madness, yet Minerva could not help but look, and she found that most were cultists, busy with delirious rites. Most, but not all. Some of them were prisoners. They wept on their knees, or cowered on the ground with fettered limbs, begging for their life.

Inside one particular candle circle, a cloaked figure fastening the bonds of a man sitting in front of her looked up as she passed by, and Minerva thought she might have been one of her mother’s maids. She didn’t manage a good look, for her captors jerked her forward. Leaving the mad creatures and their ritualistic preparations behind, she was dragged through a narrow stone bridge at the end of the hallway. A chill ran the length of her spine when she looked down over the edge, presented with yawning blackness.

On the other side lay the vast vaulted chamber she had sighted before. It was like the mouth of a giant beast: stalactites pierced the darkness of its ceiling, reaching for their reflections on the carpet-thin pond that covered the entire room like a mirror. Minerva felt as if they were walking on water, half afraid she might submerge when she stepped on it first, unable to gauge its depth under the mirror sheen. It wasn’t easy to manoeuvre across it; her bare feet kept slipping on the wet limestone. All around, by the walls of the great chamber, oil fires burned in cauldron-sized black iron braziers. Beside each, cloaked cultists writhed around the flames.

They were mutilating themselves. Minerva felt cold creep into her marrow. She glimpsed men mumble hysterical prayers while their palms cooked, pressed against scalding iron. A woman drew runes into her flesh with her sharpened nails, singing eldritch hymns. Some of them merely lay trembling in the shallow water, screaming, moaning, retching blood; their minds addled, their bodies blighted by poisonous concoctions.

Finally, her eyes found her siblings, too. At the back of the enormous room, they were all chained to the plinth of a ruined statue, all of them fettered at the neck, their faces and bodies daubed with crude macabre symbols in blood. The statue was ancient. Drippings made it melt into its surroundings, features crusted in limestone. Minerva could make out that it once depicted a woman. Great wings sprouted from her back, but they had been cut or bound; it was hard to make out. A fallen celestial, perhaps.

Kleon was the first to notice her as she was brought closer. Meekly, her siblings began inching towards her, all wide-eyed like lost foals glimpsing their dam across the field. Ignatz, unable to contain his excitement, lunged for her, but the length of his chain quickly ran out, and he was yanked to a sudden halt at the neck like a dog on a leash. He choked on the shackle slamming into his throat, then toppled back, knees folding. By then, Minerva was no longer being dragged, but held back from running to them. With splashing steps, the cultists led her to the plinth of the statue. A chain collar locked tight around her neck, too, and she was quickly added to the fettered fold.

The cultists moved away, but the scar-faced man stepped closer, stopping just beyond the reach of their chain tethers. One of his servants walked up to him, dragging a final, longer length of chain, and handed it over to him. It, just like all their bonds, ran into a large, steel ring that had been bolted to the base of the statue. The scar-faced man considered the chain in his left hand, kneading away at its links, deep in thought. He looked up and surveyed them, too, studying each of his captives with the care of a shepherd, a stern, scornful delight plain on his visage. Minerva leered at him. Her siblings folded over her in a shivering embrace, scared to even look up, save Kleon, who dared a glimpse or two.

Minerva mustered her bravery and called out.

“My father. My uncle. They will not let this go unpunished!”

The man scoffed, humourless. “My child. All the family you have left is at your arm’s length. And now we will test if you can pay the price to keep it.”

He unsheathed a large, ornate dagger from under his cloak and threw it into the water at their feet.

Nineteen

Again and again, Demetria looked up to sneak a glimpse of Khyrr as they rode side by side. The moon and the frayed winter canopies played rushing strips of light on his stark features as their group galloped through the southern woods. Precursors of dawn, dull greys and blues spilt at the bottom of the eastern sky, but the sun still lay deep under the horizon, far too weak to lift the gloom just yet. From the ocean came mild winds that swooped down the valley and fostered a steadily growing mist. Fog billowed out from under the earth and perspired from the trunks of trees like an exhalation of the very forest itself.

In a sidelong glance, Khyrr caught her probing eyes, his silver irises a flash amongst the flickering shadows. She immediately cut her gaze away towards the path. As her discomfort passed, she dared a coy peek once more. Khyrr returned it again. She couldn’t look away the second time they locked eyes.

After all those years spent apart, her childhood friend utterly puzzled her. On the one hand, his proximity induced in her a familiar, intimate warmth. It was a pleasing sensation, similar to the odour of the parental home after an involuntary, protracted absence, where the resonance between people allowed for the passing of half-thoughts via mere slanted looks and exaggerated sighs. A sensation of family. On the other hand, there was something inaccessible, something sublime about him. An ineffable quality that suggested tremendous wisdom and bridled power, and Demetria couldn’t help but feel awed by it. His solemn features, the sharp line of his nose and brows, the slightly downward curve at the corners of his mouth, which gave him a perpetually crestfallen countenance, were all so familiar, but beneath them now lay a foundation of tranquillity and adamant resolve. She remembered him being always unsure, out of balance, and afraid. Now he was not. Could he have been the same person?

Khyrr wasn’t the only reason for her unease. Demetria struggled to come to terms with everything, with all the madness that had transpired, all in a single night. Her last hour was almost indiscernible from a dream, where everything she had was taken away only to be given back to her all at once.

When she’d come back to life on the streets of Hobhearth, the cold of the blood-soiled slush that drenched the back of her gambeson had reached her sooner than the memories of the pandemonium. Taking Khyrr’s hand to stand up, she had searched her addled mind, trying to piece together what had happened, and the first thing that came back to her was the moment of her imminent death. An echo of terror and despair swelled in her chest. Instantly, she had snatched for her baldric, but it was hollow; her claymore lay beside her, half-submerged in the sludge. She thought to retrieve it, but there were no enemies to fight.

All her deranged foes now lay on the ground, shuddering with cold, hugging their own knees or torsos, muttering unintelligibly, their milky eyes chasing phantom images that only they seemed to glimpse. What powers Khyrr employed to achieve this, Demetria could not fathom, but it had banished the malignant sickness from the cultists’ minds, leaving nothing but whatever little was left of their shattered humanity, and thus, reducing them to gibbering husks. The magic had saved from death the last two of her knights, Keera and Davion. They both dragged themselves upright, looking no less confused than she was. The rest of the force she had marshalled, men and women of the Witchbane Vanguard’s seventh shield, were frozen, lifeless lumps on the ground under a thin layer of ashy snow.

With tears streaming down her face, her breath shaking, Demetria beheld the scene, unable to blanket her dismay. She looked upon a world soiled with chaos and death; a world, she realised, she’d said her goodbyes to. A world she’d departed from. And yet there she stood again, alive, faced by the repercussions of her failure. Demetria considered that perhaps dying would have been more merciful. Shame racked her, and she found she could no longer quash the feeling under ire and bloodlust, seeing finally how that attitude had brought her to this end. Hatred had been her refuge. A white hot delirium that washed away the pain, but now she couldn’t allow herself to be given over to it. Not that she didn’t crave the release of unfettered rage, she did, but now being so aware of her own deranged passions, she caught herself the moment she began to succumb to their warm embrace.

All her life, Demetria had fed her conscience with the lie that her fathomless hatred was the seed of her conviction, keeping her doubts at bay even though they gnawed at her from the inside. What she’d brought herself to believe to be her strength was now utterly, painfully unveiled. It was a blindfold.

And where did that leave Khyrr? In the past she had thought him no different than the sorcerous Mageseekers; they were afflicted, yes, but kept true by the honour and discipline their rigorous training instilled in them. Everything changed when all those years ago Khyrr and she had parted ways on the burning streets of Hobhearth. Demetria had hated the Mageseekers, she'd hated the Weird, she'd hated fate itself, but in truth she couldn't ever find in her heart to hate Khyrr. She had thought she'd hated him for his choice to abandon the Demacian ethos for the wisdom of foreign witches, but even that was a lie. Another blindfold made of contempt that she invented to smother her conscience. Now, in the clarity granted to her by the red curtain of bloodlust having been lifted, Demetria saw that deep down she'd always blamed herself for being unable to keep Khyrr on the true path. Yet this sudden clarity mattered little, for now she began to question even that so-called true path. The foundations of her soul were cracking, and Demetria found herself slipping down the fissures.

“We have the trail.” Khyrr’s voice finally shook her from her thoughts.

An evil still had to be purged, a cult to be eradicated. Friends to be avenged. It was a reality that she did not accept without difficulty, but Demetria knew she could not undo the ultimate sacrifice her brave brothers and sisters in arms had been forced to make. What she could do was to make it count. She had been given another chance to finish the job. She was Demetria Keephart, and no Keephart left a scale unbalanced. It was as if a beacon of magnificent purpose had been lit on the horizon of her mind; the significance of her pursuit had filled her again with determination.

“This is Khyrr Volosh.” That was all she had said to Keera and Davion. That was all she had to say; the circumstances granted them a common understanding. They were now all bound in duty. Their prejudice towards the mage had been left behind on the streets of Hobhearth. They quickly searched the place, gathered the loose horses that would still run, and left in a hard gallop.

Now they rode through the forest, she and Khyrr at the front, her remaining sword brethren at the back, the thick of the wilds slowing them down the deeper they went. Cold air cut Demetria’s cheeks, burned her throat, and the stench of blood still lingered about her. The after-scents of murder galled her, yet it served as an ample reminder to keep her tempers warm and her spirit resolute. She thought of the names of her soldiers, the little banters they’d had, shared moments of both bereavement and conviviality.

Khyrr spoke. Demetria’s eyes picked up the movement of his mouth, but his voice barely registered; the words did not find purchase in her churning mind and passed straight through.

“What?” she mouthed, inaudible.

Khyrr tugged on the reins—so they all did—and the gallop of their horses eased to a trot until they fully stopped. Khyrr held up a hand, preoccupied, and turned his attention to the diverting path in front of them. His lips parted as if he was about to speak, but seemed to decide to take his own counsel. He scrutinised the forking forest path for trails of the cart they were following, and after a moment’s thought, urged his ride towards the right.

“The Volosh motto,” Khyrr called above his shoulder, repeating the question when they were once again on the move. “Do you remember it?”

It was so out of place a question, it left Demetria gawping. “Your family motto?”

“Yes.”

Demetria crinkled her forehead, searched her thoughts for a few beats, and indeed there it was, tucked away in a bouquet of happy memories. It was a peculiar thing to remember, foreign yet all so familiar. She couldn’t resist a little lopsided smile.

“How was it? ‘In calamity, act as if there’s no help coming?’”

Khyrr humphed affirmatively in front of her.

Demetria urged her mare to fall into line with Khyrr as the path widened again. She caught the hint of a rueful smile on his face, quickly dispelled by his morose bearing.

“I can’t say if I ever understood it. Such a grim saying for your children to inherit,” she added.

Khyrr’s countenance seemed to darken. “Tymotheus tried to remind me of it.”

At the mention of the name, Demetria started, the cold rush of remorse flooding her nerves, and with it came the last images of him, or at least what remained of his mortal shell. A limp, dessicated revenant, still seated in the chair where she had had him bound. The image had become forever engraved in her memory. Utterly engrossed in the hunt, she had not thought to move the dead body when they’d left the Volosh mansion. The fires must have reached him soon after, making him one with the land his ancestors had nurtured for centuries.

This newfound feeling of regret surprised even Demetria. Did she really believe, somewhere deep in her heart, that she was complicit in Tymotheus’s death? As she rifled through her recollection of the events, the experience of that debate in the winter garden possessed her again.

No. She was not guilty. She was right. Her investigation yielded substantial evidence that the Volosh house was indeed the nest where the brood of the cult dwelt, and her suspicions were confirmed; her sanctions warranted.

While she had been firm in her duties, she had always wielded a leniency regarding her family. In the years Demetria had spent hunting the Cult of the Harvest, numerous places in the southern country fell under her scrutiny where the clandestine activities of the cult came to light, bustling towns and backwater villages alike, each case attesting to her suspicion that the fiends used mage children in their pursuits; or more, the anger and fear of those who would have done anything to keep their abnormal children from the Mageseekers.

The pattern was unmistakable, yet Demetria was disinclined to even consider the involvement of her family despite all the clues that told her they were also fostering mage refugees. She turned a blind eye, out of being partial to her sister, who blamed herself for not being able to bear more children after her first. For Lilyenne, this was a way to have the big family she always wanted, and for Tymotheus, Demetria fancied, perhaps a sort of atonement for his lost brother. Reticence was a dangerous gambit on her part that could have jeopardised her military career, but she would not have denied Tymotheus and Lilyenne the benefit of the doubt, and so she built a wall between them and herself out of necessity, for the safety of everyone. They never knew of this, of course, thinking of her as the spiteful aunt who renounced her own kin. This deterioration of their relationship sat poorly with Demetria, but she made her peace with it. Then, in a single day, it all took a turn for the worse.

News of the crime had found Demetria in Idryja, in the scanty halls of the old Keephart residence, where she’d roomed only temporarily, both to cater to the wishes of her visiting sister, who desired to meet, and due to having been tangled up in bureaucratic matters of her house, the accumulation of which was the result of her long absences and her older sister’s neglect in equal measure. When word reached her about a murder case near the city walls that bore the hallmarks of dark magic, she immediately rode out, unprepared for the horrors that awaited her there. Later, in possession of all the evidence—out of which her sister’s sorcerous maid and the girl’s association with the cult were the most disturbing—and as she stood over the mutilated cadaver of Lilyenne, the lies that she’d deluded herself with finally ran out. Then, and only then, did she revoke her reluctantly granted trust and go after Tymotheus.

Yet now, Demetria realised, therein lay the source of her guilt too. Her discretion and precarious manoeuvres notwithstanding, she had inadvertently become complicit in the tragedy. In the end, it was exactly her leniency that allowed events to escalate to the murder of Lilyenne, as much as it was the fallout of her sister and brother-in-law’s foolishness. And what was worse, she concluded that the cult wouldn’t have killed the mother bird of its own nest unless they wanted to draw attention to themselves. It was all by their design. She let the enemy roam free by allowing them a blind spot, while they kept her busy on false trails; then, as the trap was set, they lured her into it, making sure she was wrong-footed, with every condition set in their favour.

Demetria furrowed her brows, wrestling angry tears that stung her eyes. “Listen to me. This ordeal ... the extent of atrocities ... day and night, I could keep laying out the harrowing details of what occurred, and I wouldn’t do it justice. You have no idea what risk this evil poses, how deep the roots of its malignancy reach. They have an endless capacity for cruelty. When dealing withso vile and insidious a foe, one cannot give quarter. There’s no time for second-guessing yourself. And Tymotheus ... on his own, he might have been innocent, yes, but it was his credulity, his folly that allowed this predicament to unfold.”

Demetria blushed at how awkwardly wistful and strained the words came out, her embarrassment only fanning the flames of her ill humours. She had a heartfelt desire to account for the night’s tragedies, to attest to the necessity of her severe conduct, but even to her, the string of words leaving her mouth conspicuously sounded like an apology and a recitation of excuses, and she hated that.

Ill at ease at Khyrr’s silence, she floundered on. “But I had not the slightest intention to ..”

“I understand how you might see it that way,” Khyrr cut in, denying her eye contact, surveying only the path ahead. His voice was hollow, plainly disclosing with a bland tranquillity. “He was pure. Always pure. His proclivity to help others in need, despite the risks involved, his most precious quality, was subverted into fostering this blight that beset my family. There is a lesson to learn here for all of us, but it must come from wisdom, not hatred. We cannot turn our backs on charity and kindness altogether, only because it once failed us. Otherwise, we will become what we fight against.”

“If ... when I find the kids,” he corrected himself, “I want them to understand this. And to understand our ways. Our fathers’ ways. I want to take them away from here.”

Demetria stiffened.

“There’s a ship in the city harbour, the Dryhaven,” Khyrr continued. “I have friends there who can help us get back home. In Demacia, they’d always be outcasts. Untouchables. Amongst the Lunari, they can become who they were born to be.”

Demetria found her voice at last. It was that of a stateswoman, the knight, unassailable beyond doubt. In her anger, she even disregarded the implications of Khyrr’s words, revealing that he might indeed have found his ancestors on the mountain. “The children are goingto the Silver City.  There’s no telling what evil still lurks amidst them, what corruption they might still bear!” The words poured out of her now. “For all we know, they could be no more than thralls of the cult. The mongrels lived under the same roof with them for what might have been years, free to prey on them when and how they pleased. Too long had they been subject to this malevolent taint.”

And whose fault was that? cut back her guilt-wracked conscience instantly, her shame not the least alleviated by Khyrr’s nonchalant demeanour.

Khyrr kept his silence, only his preoccupied gaze hinting at his ruminations.

“I can keep them safe!” Demetria blurted out after a little hesitation, probing at what might have been Khyrr’s concern that set him against her will.

“I know you would,” Khyrr responded in a soft, kind voice as if accepting an apology. “You’d hold them as poison coursed through their veins, just as you held me. But I cannot resign them to that fate.”

Demetria felt her stomach clench as old wounds tore open. Doubts surfaced in her thoughts. In the past she had always been able to quell them, for they were engulfed by the smoke of her beacon of burning hate, but now she began to doubt whether that beacon shone true. It irked her to consider turning her back on her obligations, but deep down she knew Khyrr was right. Even if the children carried a measure of taint, exile to Targon was a much more merciful sentence than what the Mageseekers offered—incarceration, and torture. Khyrr’s next words, however, brought her back to her senses with a pang of indignation.

“I owe this to Tymotheus. To my family.”

“You mean, the family you left behind?” Demetria felt the air grow rigid between them. In the uncomfortable pause, she became aware that the rapping, squelching steps of her knights’ horses sounded from further away, as her soldiers fell back, surmising the delicacy of their conversation required a degree of privacy. It was a considerate gesture, but it irritated her. She was a warrior, not some peevish lady needing space during a sulk.

Khyrr seemed unfazed by her insult, self-possessed, focused on the task at hand, which made her all the angrier.

“Why did you come back?” she asked him point-blank.

Khyrr gave her an odd sideways glance that lacked the surety that was writ across his visage up till now. “Because of all this. All that has happened.”

The notion left Demetria dumbfounded. “You’re not making any sense.”

“There’s a wealth of arcane knowledge I became privy to, by the grace of the Lunari,” Khyrr went on reluctantly. “Amongst those, the gift of foresight.”

Demetria couldn’t keep a mirthless bitter laugh from bursting out. “You returned on a soothsayer’s whim? Is that it?”

“Why, had I been wrong?”

Demetria said nothing at that.

“Regarding the children, your concerns are misplaced,” Khyrr offered in a serious tone. “They are pure. They were kept pure deliberately.”

His words only served to further Demetria’s puzzlement. “And what makes you believe that?”

Khyrr didn’t answer right away. “You have to trust me.”

“Trust you?” Demetria huffed, irritated, trying and failing to curb her heated emotions. “I have to trust you? Khyrr. You cannot just return after five years and expect me to renounce my duty and charge for mere divinations! I didn’t want this. Tymotheus. The mansion. None of it. But I am a soldier. I have obligations. Orders. This is who I am. I have to do what I must. I cannot be someone else!”

Khyrr leaned back hard and pulled his horse to a swift stop, the stallion whining in reluctance. He swivelled in the saddle and grasped Demetria’s reins to stop her horse as well. Demetria recoiled, but her consternation evaporated as soon as Khyrr looked into her eyes, offering a warm, forgiving smile.

In that moment, as she held that soul-permeating gaze, Demetria felt something rigid and cold give way in her heart, and understood that it was not only Tymotheus she had failed. The boy who left her care was utterly broken, a shell of a man clinging to life by a thread, yet he stood before her now, mind and flesh steadfast. In her absence, Khyrr had grown into a warrior who rivalled her in strength just as in conviction. Demetria’s shoulders sagged at the onset of sorrow weighing down her heart. In a wretched epiphany, it had been laid bare before her that not only had her hatred proved to be a curse, but her love too.

“You kept the effigy.” Khyrr peered down at the ancient amulet that now hung exposed over her chest plate, the one she had carried since childhood. As though it were an unclothed body part, Demetria was suddenly all too aware of it being nakedly visible, and felt the urge to reach up and hide the little trinket in her grasp.

“I lost mine in the woods, running. I lost many things running.” A shadow of remorse flickered through Khyrr’s countenance. “You were always so much wiser. Yourheart stronger. So much stronger. I know you will do the right thing when the time comes. I trust you—I should always have trusted you. Always.”

No, Demetria thought. I should have trusted you. Bereft of the courage to speak her mind, however, instead she said, “Then, follow my lead.”

Twenty

Khyrr pulled the cart’s canvas open and inserted his torch into the cage. The fire revealed only an empty cell. All the vehicles of the makeshift caravan stood abandoned, strewn along the forest path like hollow insect shells. Moonlight reflected from the frost-coated bulks of carts and wagons, picking out their edges in silver amongst the dark. The cultists’ horses were gone too; they must have been let go for some reason, as if none of them planned to leave this place.

“I know who Haelbach is.” Demetria approached Khyrr as he scrutinised the marks in the mud around the wagon he was investigating. Their horses foraged lazily in the snow for stray tussocks, further back along the path in a snow covered clearing. Keera and Davion were ahead, trying to find out where the enemy had gone. Circumstance allowed her a moment alone with Khyrr.

He seemed distrait, and so her prompt did not reach him at once, but when it did, he stilled and drew back. His eyes narrowed. “You did remember his name. From back in the village.”

Demetria delved deep for a memory, and when she reached it, she had to hide her shudder with a shrug. “Do you remember the story of the magic-tainted noble boy? I think you shared it when we were small. Or maybe I did.”

“The boy who killed his mother and sister?” Khyrr ventured, unsure.

Demetria nodded, biting her lips, making no attempt to disguise her discomfort at reminiscing about the outcomes of her investigation.

She still remembered reading the reports, whose author did not fret over scrupulously describing the numerous charred human remains that littered the ruined seaside manor, built to the southeast of the city of Idryja. Demetria was no stranger to the horrors of war, and while she had come to terms with the fact that the blood of duty-bound opponents might turn a battlefield into an abattoir, the same happening to innocent civilians in a family home was a very different thing altogether. After all that had occurred that night at her behest, there was certainly some irony to that sentiment, and perhaps that was what truly unsettled her. The imagined scenes of the Haelbach case she’d long committed to her memory upon reading its dreadful accounts now seemed to painfully overlap with the pictures of her handiwork at the Volosh home.

Demetria cast her eyes down, her mouth sighing open; then, she made a little shake of head, composing herself. “After Hobhearth all those years ago ... I knew the name was familiar, so I looked into it. That’s when I learned that it was him.”

The surrounding forest was quiet and windless now, muted under the weight of the thin fog that enveloped it like a mortuary shroud, rich with the bitter tang of frost-delayed decomposition. There was a quality of unnatural motionlessness to the woods as if it’d been haunted by an invisible, all-encompassing force countering every effect that dared to disturb it. Even the milky puffs of vapour Demetria exhaled seemed reluctant to dissipate.

They followed the tracks off the main path. Demetria folded her arms over her chest plate, as if that could warm her up under the brightsteel. After the fight, the sweat that’d drenched her gambeson below her plate and chain mail had cooled, the wet touch of it chilling her skin.

“The case itself was well documented, but that didn’t tell us much about the Haelbachs. They were reclusive. All the written records about them, at least the ones I managed to dig up, were particularly vague. Accounts of the house servants told about a family quarrel preceding the accident. After so many years, there was no telling what truly happened, but it ended with Ulrich’s powers laying waste to half of their estate, taking his mother and his sister with it. I think his sister’s name was Marianne? Marie?”

“Celestials.” Khyrr sighed. The blues of the night and the reds of torchlight fought for dominance on his sharp features as he lowered his torch. He offered a daunted look, shaking his head. “What of the rest of the family?”

“They are no more. His father died shortly after. Manuscripts that the bailiff at the time left behind were ambiguous, but I figured he could not rule out the death having been self-inflicted.”

Khyrr considered her words with a rueful nod.

“Tragic, but it does little to explain all the atrocities he committed, if you ask me,” Demetria added.

“Yes,” Khyrr said and turned his eyes back to the forest floor to hunt for tracks. “But I can hardly imagine a worse cauldron of doom that could brew up a vile monster such as him.”

“That makes the two of us.”

“The Mageseekers only prolonged his suffering by using him as a weapon. Why? Why take the risk at all?”

Because he was too valuable not to use. Demetria knew the answer, but she couldn’t admit it to Khyrr, so she kept her silence instead, facing the ground.

Khyrr crouched to have a closer look at something on the ground. Shifting his posture made dishevelled tresses of his white hair drape over his profile. Something in his disposition changed, easing the solemn air around him to something more gentle. His voice came deep and warm, laced with a weak smile.

“Apparently, it is not only our family that’s been racked with tragedies.” He stood and looked at her.

Despite herself, Demetria gave a sad, resigned smile. It didn’t last long, but she enjoyed the respite granted by this moment of bitter levity. When the moment passed, they were still searching each other’s gaze. Time slowed down. Then, it lost its meaning as though it solidified into that endless instant.

The weight of undisclosed sentiment—confessions, apologies, and so much that had remained unsaid—hung in the air between them. Demetria felt a warm jolt in her chest, raising the temperature of her blood, making her short of breath. A curious weakness stole over her, but she didn’t fight it, allowed it to sink all the way to her bones. Khyrr’s hands reached out for her.

Demetria snapped to the voice of Keera, who appeared from the shadows of the forest behind her, bellowing, and the intimacy they shared came to an abrupt end.

“We found where they went, sword-captain!”

Demetria shrugged off her reverie and, together with Khyrr, hurried after Keera into the treeline. After a short hike through the untamed wilds, with the forest floor getting steeper the further they went, they caught sight of Davion too, in a flickering circle of his torch’s light. He stood guard under an enormous shadow, ten times as large as he, reaching well above the crown of the trees. It seemed as though a triangular shape was cut out from the backdrop of star-speckled sky and filled in with a fathomless black.

As they approached, the blackness began to grow a ragged stony skin, revealing itself as the face of an ancient crag. A cave entrance, tapered and skewed like a sword-cut wound, presented itself in the middle of the crag: the gaping throat of the hills led downwards into an even thicker darkness. Their group hesitated for a moment before Demetria gave the word, and the four of them descended on the steep gravel path.

The air grew damper and more rigid the deeper they ventured, turning into a syrupy miasma that felt wet and warm on their skin and fusty in their nose. The tunnel shrank with every step, and after a few minutes they resorted to progress in single file. Demetria was first in line. She unsheathed her blade, but the small space made her uneasy; she could hardly wield the bulky weapon here.

Soon, stalactites started to protrude from the ceiling of the tunnel, oozing slimy water droplets that made their torches sizzle. Their stride slowed to an unsure waddle on the slippery stone floor. Many smaller pathways forked off from the main tunnel, but they didn’t seem viable to navigate, and so Demetria chose to take the most prominent path on every turn.

“Maybe we missed a turn?” At the rear, Davion kept looking behind his back, unnerved.

Khyrr grunted with disapproval. “No. They’re this way.”

As if to prove him right, a faint echo rose from the shadowy depths of the cave. It was a wraith of a sound, lost in the incessant dripping, so quiet that none of them seemed to notice it, except for Demetria. She halted, all her nerves stretched taut, keenly fixed on the distant noise. It sounded like wet scratching, blending with what she judged to be a woman’s querulous mumbles. Demetria stiffened, trying to discern any meaning in it before the little sound was completely quenched under the booming voice of Davion.

“Sword-Captain. Forgive me, but this could easily be a trap. We’re at a dire disadvantage if we’re to fend for ourselves here ...”

Demetria paid no heed. She heard the sound again. Davion’s words melted away to a meaningless baritone murmur in her ears; she comprehended none of it, all her senses arrested by the agitating, ghastly scratching. Was it louder now? She felt it against her eardrums, yet it was still so quiet, nearly indistinguishable from the plip-plop mutterings of the dripstones.

Demetria almost made out a whispered word when Keera joined the discourse, too. “I smell something rancid. Something ...”

Demetria’s temper rose, but before she could quieten them all, they fell silent, stunned by a tremulous wail. It swept through the tunnel, this time loud enough for all of them to hear. It didn’t stop, it kept going, an unintelligible chant of sorts, querulous and distraught. Demetria’s blood froze. She wrenched around to look at her companions.

By then, Khyrr was already moving. He slipped past her when she swivelled backwards and her sideways position allowed a bigger gap forward. He was running, torch in hand, trailing a receding aura of scintillating light on the wet walls of the cave. He was fast too, not hindered by the weight of plate mail or bulky weapons, and before they blinked twice, he was gone, the darkness closing in behind him.

Demetria scurried after him and cried his name, immediately stifling herself mid-word, startled by the loudness of her own voice’s close reverberations. The worry that she might alert their quarry to their approach mixed with her fear for Khyrr, growing into a knot in her throat. Darkness closed in around her as she left the safe reach of Davion’s torchlight, running heedlessly to catch up with Khyrr. After a certain point, her eyes saw nothing but faint wet glistening on a uniform background of grey.

Still, she didn’t slow down. Her free hand rummaged the darkness, feeling out the curves and bends of the slimy walls to keep on the main path. Something changed. She bumped into a warm gust of air, her nostrils filled with the scent of sweet smoke. The faraway cries were still there, ceaseless now, joined by new tones and growing into a discordant choir. Demetria bristled and slowed her stride. An alien quality began to percolate the space that surrounded her, but her eyes proved little help in ascertaining what made her feel that way. Was someone here with her in the dark?

“Khyrr?” Demetria whispered timidly, tightening her hold around the hilt of her sword while her other hand instinctively balled into a fist. She tried to shake her anxious thoughts, but the sensation did not relent. There was a presence. She could not see it, but she felt it in the crawling under her skin and in the itching at the back of her skull. A beholder in the shadows.

Demetria was wheezing, and the echoes made her sharp breath sound out of synch, as though some of those sounds did not belong to her. Her mind was playing tricks on her, Demetria decided, inching forward, but she did not let her alertness slacken. She sensed the corridor curve left and downward ahead of her, and the more she expected it to finally straighten out, the more it bent inwards. It defied logic. It was not even a path beneath the hills anymore, but the innards of a snake coiling around and around, finally biting its own tail.

The tunnel narrowed. Soon she had to stoop and turn sideways to be able to press through the slimy crevices between the teeth of limestone deposits, slowly biting down on the path. The wails grew unbearably loud. Demetria finally could make sense of them, yet now she wished she couldn’t.

“Take it. Take it! It’s yours! Take it!” someone rasped. “I can give you more! More! More!”

Finally, she forced herself out into the light. The shadows dissolved, and the tunnel stopped its endless curve to widen into a corridor as tall as a castle’s antechamber. Countless other paths diverged from the cavernous space, worming their way deeper into the earth. The hall basked in the light of a thousand lit candles set up haphazardly adjacent to the walls, their dancing flames making the wet limestone surfaces pulse with a foul pinkish sheen.

Along the corridor, bodies littered the ground, each in a patchy ring of near-melted candles. Air in the vast tunnel undulated over the countless small firelights, made hazy with perfumed smoke and the savoury tang of perspiration. Demetria’s eyes watered. She made a few steps, coughing, trying to gauge where the large main passage led. Far down, a thin stone bridge arched over a wide fissure and disappeared into grey fog, its other end obscured by what seemed like smoke from burning oil. She could make out no clear details beyond the bridge; all that penetrated the haze were shimmering orange lights made intermittent by disfigured and elongated shadows, as figures whisked through the backlight beyond. Only the rumble of a deep, delirious choir cut through the shroud of smoke with such might that it set the stone floor trembling under Demetria’s feet.

The source of the wails and cries she’d heard earlier, however, she did see well enough. They were figures that knelt next to, or inside, the candle circles in the great hall. All were dressed in robes, and all were drunk with madness. On Demetria’s right, an old man was teetering on his knees, ripping at his own patchy hair while he whistled a lullaby. At the man’s feet enclosed in the ring of candles, a young boy lay sprawled, ice blue eyes casting a vacant gaze at the ceiling, his throat cut from ear to ear. The flickering flames that beset him were a double image, reflected in the puddle of black gore wherein he lay. Right beside, Demetria saw a girl sitting on her heels in front of another candlelit cadaver. She held up a hand mirror, as though admiring herself in it, but her reflection revealed a face with eyes gouged out; and there were more, all hurting themselves in hideous ways, all in reverie, oblivious to the outside world.

Demetria had experienced in abundance the many flavours of carnage and destruction that war and its savageries could bring about; she could recall the vile rank of the charred and the eviscerated, and all the sights and reeks that remained in the wake of a battle. She was insusceptible to the devastating fallout of armed conflict, but not to this. This was savagery on a whole different level. It did not stem from patriotism, greed, or even rage; those she at least understood. The source of this bloodlust was madness, and madness defied logic. It was inexplicable, profound, and contagious. It threatened to drag down into its seething depths whoever dared to dwell in it, intent on divining its meaning. There was a palpable aspect to it. It seeped from the cultists, saturating the air with its seduction. Demetria reeled just thinking about it. She raised her claymore, but none of the cultists seemed hostile. They were barely cognisant of the world around them.

She recognised Khyrr, standing in the middle of the limestone hall with his back to her, silhouetted by the light of a hundred candles. His torch lay dead in a deposit of bloodstained water next to him. As Demetria closed in on him—together with Keera and Davion, who also caught up on the rear—a sobbing little creature became revealed, kneeling at Khyrr’s feet.

A woman; she was shaking with tears, and shaking with effort as she strained her muscles, grasping something on the floor. It was the neck of a man. She was choking him, but his face was cold and grey, its owner long gone from this world. Still, the woman would not let go.

“I offer it to you,” she pressed through her teeth, tears and drool dripping from her chin, her face contorted into a hideous expression of rapt pleasure, perverted grief, and manic rage. It was a face which Demetria knew.

“Illka?” she probed timidly.

To her surprise, the girl looked up amiably, all the unhinged insanity in hermien suddenly absent. “What?” she chirped.

Illka was her sister’s maid. Demetria didn’t know much about her, but she believed the girl was a mother and a wife, as she remembered having seen her with a grown belly. Demetria never saw the man herself, but the conjecture that it could be the one lying dead on the ground made her shudder. She stepped up to Khyrr and seized the woman’s wrist, dragging it upward and straightening her from her hunched position. When Illka let go of the corpse’s neck, swollen purple marks were revealed on the parched skin.

“What is this lunacy, woman? What have you done? You defiled your love!”

“You know nothing of our love!” she snapped indignantly, glowering back with a baleful shine in her gaze. She wrenched her scrawny wrist to and fro, to no avail against Demetria’s iron hold. “Our love is eternal!”

“Yet you threw it away in blood sacrifice?”

Illka sat down on her heels, still hanging by the wrist. All her muscles slackened, even her head slouched back. Her eyes filled with tears. She struggled no more, just allowed Demetria to hold her up like a puppet.

“My sacrifice was not blood,” she said tremulously.

Demetria let go, allowing the woman to collapse onto her husband’s corpse.

“Then ...” She swallowed, utterly confounded.

Khyrr placed his hand on her shoulder plates and pressed down lightly to attract her attention. His stare was cold with understanding.

“Agony,” he said. “It’s their own agony. That’s their sacrifice.”

Illka let out a snide chortle. “She is very close now,” she moaned at length. “Ve-e-ry close.”

They all looked up as the air convulsed with thunderous echoes. The crackling and popping boom of unleashed magic shook the cave. It came from the far end of the vast corridor, from the smoke-choked chamber beyond the stone bridge. A strobing white luminosity lit up the curtain of smoke from beyond.

“Come on!” Khyrr spurred to action. “We haven’t got much time!”

Demetria steeled her heart, made a stiff nod, and ran.

Twenty One

Minerva pushed herself up from the water-drenched cavern floor. The dregs of her strength barely brought her up on all fours. The stone under the cool sheet of water was slick and icy smooth at the touch, and it fought her all the way, her limbs slipping as she struggled to support herself. A hot ache set her muscles in a tremble. When she tried to regain her feet, they gave way, and she fell back into the water, bruising her shoulder and hip.

“All I require is one life.” The scar-faced man came again, barely audible over the white noise of pain. Minerva felt her skull throbbing as if something was expanding against it from the inside. “Forfeit it, and you may live.”

Time passed, unaccountable in the space between slipping in and out of consciousness. Bodily sensations were flickering things, abandoning Minerva on a whim, but the keen buzz of pain remained a constant, following her even to unconsciousness, churning up her incoherent dreams with hot colours and furious lights. The border between nightmare and reality faded, and the two became indistinguishable. The touch of cold water on her face was always the first sensation to intrude upon her mind as oblivion eventually lifted, but she began to doubt whether that experience stemmed from the waking world.

A clamour rose, reaching the borders of her perception beyond the delirium. The screams and devotional mumbling of the cultists began to change. Discordant voices ebbed, and slowly the song of the dark choir coalesced into a collective rhythmic chant resembling a guttural “o” sound. It was hypnotic as it was subversive; Minerva’s eardrums were benumbed by it. It felt sickening, but even more, it felt incredibly real. Yes—she accepted, heart-wrenching despair gnawing her at the reluctant admission—this was not some nightmare. She was still in the cave, consigned to the will of her captors that sought … what? Her destruction? Her suffering? What did they want?

Minerva pulled herself onto her knees, grovelling like a worm, and finally came up on all fours again, forearms shaking. Vertigo tugged at her sense of up and down, and she had to keep looking at the ground in fear of the earth being wrenched out from under her lest she lose sight of it, madly blinking against the whirling sensation threatening to snatch her away. Painted in the warm colours of the surrounding ring of brazier fire, a mock mirror image looked back at her from the muddled face of the water, features garbled and indiscernible, except for the blueish glint of her tremulous gaze. Dripping water and drenched strands of her hair stirred the image further; then she saw a dark droplet fall.

When it broke the surface, haphazardly questing tendrils of red spread underwater as it submerged and mixed. Another drip followed before it could fully dissolve, then the next. Plink, plink, plink. Warmth caressed her upper lip, tingling the soft skin as blood trickled from her gums. Her breaths came in ragged heaves, each sip of air an effort against the rising sensation in her gullet. What more did her body want to disgorge? Not a drop of bile remained in her to expel, yet her stomach churned and clenched, and she occasionally retched dryly, the exertion further robbing her of vigour.

On her hands and knees with her head dangling limp, Minerva looked back through the space between her arms and torso. Presented to her was an upside-down image of madness and despair. A fit of hysteria had Monah in its clutches. Her cheeks and temples ran with purplish red, and she was out of breath. Unremitting wails seized her, fear and anger bursting forth raw, emotions so severe a little girl such as her—just barely more than a toddler—had hardly the faculties to control.

While she erupted, the others collapsed inwardly. Ignatz was rocking on his haunches. Eleanii clung to him like a babe, her little hands clutching tatters of his dirty tunic, head tucked into her brother’s shoulder. Kleon was the only one who dared to fight his doom, yet to no avail. He pressed his feet against the plinth of the statue while he clasped his chains and pulled on them, endeavoring to free himself. Despite his struggles, both iron and stone held fast.

Minerva placed her right foot on the ground. Her strength was returning. Slowly, stopping every time she felt herself wobble, she clambered to one knee and looked up at the man in front of her, teeth clenched with effort. The scar-faced man returned her gaze, cocking an eyebrow that showed the slightest pique of interest. She beseeched him with her expression, but it was just a front. The flame in her chest still flickered with defiance.

The scar-faced man did not miss it. He licked his teeth and tutted. “Oh? Maybe you need a little more convincing.”

In response, the children’s voices rose—pleading protests and “no’s” and panicking—but the man paid no mind. Minerva bared her teeth and braced. Now she knew why the man was holding a length of chain, connecting him to his prisoner’s fetters. It was the link between his terrible powers and their flesh. The metal in his hands took on an ice blue glow. From his grasp, liquid magic ran down the length of the iron, lighting up the chain link by link in quick succession, all the way to the bolted ring at the feet of the statue. From there, it spread, climbing up each of the children’s individual chain leashes, bathing them in cold witch light, their neck shackles warming with its brilliance.

A muscle twitched on the man’s face and his nostrils flared as he committed a jolt of his powers, sending a quick burst of magic that flashed through the link, sizzling water away as it went, and burst in caustic, forking sparks at their necks. It was just a quick shock now, but it hurt all the same. Every muscle in Minerva’s body convulsed for an endless second. Her spine violently arched back, and her chest stretched out as if her rib cage was about to reverse its curve and burst from under her skin. Her fingers, even her toes, gnarled up spasmodically.

Then the torment came to an end, and in its absence, the body she regained her senses over was utterly hollowed out, as if all her vigour had been boiled away. Her eyes rolled back and the world fell away, but before she could fully succumb to exhaustion, the splashing ice-cold waters in her face made her snap to, and the cycle started anew. How many such torturous shocks they had been made to endure, Minerva had lost count long ago.

The cries of her siblings abated, whittled down to painful moans and muted squeals, but the hellish choir droned on, every bit as intense as before. Minerva groaned, just to hear something else for a moment besides their infernal song. An unsettling thought occurred to her that perhaps the cultist’s ritual had eroded her body and mind just as much as the arcane torture, if not more. The dark rite had many subversive components. There was the choir. Hypnotic, it intruded on the mind and robbed it of clarity. Then, there was the reek. Time and time again, it was temporarily masked by the otherworldly metallic steam manifesting in the wake of the scar-faced man’s lightning, but it resurged quickly in a roar of scents. It had in it the spiced redolence of the braziers, the saline sweat of the cultists, the chalky taste of the cavern walls, cooked blood and charred flesh and more, with a perfumed sweet tint percolating it all that had no discernible source whatsoever, but it was there, tickling Minerva’s brain. She took in a lungful of this air and honeyed smoke, and it had weight in her windpipes and lungs, so thick was the taste of it.

Sluggishly, Minerva floundered to her knees again. The water seeped into her mouth, too, but she hadn’t the strength to spit it out; she just allowed it to drool down her chin, mixed with pink saliva. In the red and black blur of her vision, forms took painfully long to come into focus. She wanted to direct an imploring look to the scar-faced man, but, unable to discern him, she just cut her trembling gaze left and right, raking the darkness for a recipient. She began to formulate a plea—a strangled sound even escaped her throat, just a mewl of vowels about to be words—when her eyes caught a faint glint right before her under the water.

Minerva hesitated. First, she couldn’t make sense of the shiny object under the rippling surface. She merely watched it, mesmerised as its forms evened out while the waters calmed.

It was the ornate dagger. Why was it there again? It was something important, that much she knew, and she scrambled through her addled thoughts in order to make sense of the series of events that’d led to the weapon ending up there. She was too slow.

Kleon appeared in the periphery of her vision, and he reached for it. That finally made her remember. It was the tool provided by the scar-faced man with which they were expected to draw blood. Each other’s blood. Minerva couldn’t allow that to happen. She snatched for the dagger, unsure for a moment whether she or Kleon would be the one to reach it first under the furiously splashing water. The sudden burst of strength that possessed her at the moment surprised even her.

Minerva stood, wobbling. When she looked up at her siblings, they all withdrew a step. All their eyes were fixed on the edge of the blade she held at her waist. Those looks bore presumptions that made her sick, and appalled with herself. They were all breaking under the arcane might of the scar-faced man, but the prospect of easing the pain for the price of hurting each other was too horrible to be given consideration. At least up till now.

Minerva shot a nervous look towards Kleon, then she held up the dagger in front of her, blade and hilt cushioned in her open palms like it was not even a weapon but some forbidden book. It was a beautiful thing, a testimony to a smith’s mastery. Scores of intricate vines rich with blossoms crept up its hilt rendered in gold, splitting up at the end to form an S-shaped crossguard. Age saw the keen lines of its fuller tarnished, but the double edge was treacherously sharp down the whole length, almost as long as Minerva’s forearm.

“I didn’t want to. I didn’t. I just …” Kleon shook his head compulsively, his red eyes brimming with tears.

Minerva saw her very own feelings expressed across her brother’s face, and understood what underlined his gabbling disposition. He wouldn’t want to do anything with the weapon, same as her. He just went for it in sheer desperation, to do something, anything, that could delay further torture. But what he’d have done from there, he knew not. Being the slower one, he didn’t have to worry about that anymore; it was now Minerva’s burden. She looked down at the blade, and the crushing weight of responsibility took her breath away. What now? Indecision and shock pinned Minerva in place, and she already feared another burst of anger might erupt from the scar-faced man. She flinched when he started to speak, even though he did so calmly.

“Your every instinct protests against the act. That is the point. Through this burden, I offer transformation, power, and life! This is no punishment but a rite of passage. A crucible! You may not see it yet, but you will. As soon as you accept the inevitability of it and give in to the primal urges that burn deep in your heart.” His voice was barely a notch above the chanting; still, his mellow tone cut through it. Maybe his voice rang in her head just as much as in her ears. Minerva couldn’t tell.

The man leaned forward so his eyes were level with Minerva’s. He took drawn-out, raspy breaths. Stray black strands of hair stuck to his forehead and temples, and perspiration grew into tiny beads above his top lip and along his scrawny neck. His black shirt also darkened with sweat under the heavy fur coat. He seemed to be more exhausted than what the humidity of the cave could have explained. The tremendous amount of magic he had unleashed throughout the night must have been taxing, and the penalties of it bore down on his body and soul alike. His bloodshot eyes, however, were alight with vigour.

“Or”—he shrugged—“I’ll singe you all till you cook.”

All the children visibly shuddered and withdrew, except for Minerva. The scar-faced man’s gaze gnawed at her resolve. She had no more capacity to feel fear, no more strength to fight for alternatives. There were none. Only the ones the scar-faced man offered remained. She grabbed the hilt of the dagger with both hands and held it up in front of her. A dark thought possessed her as she stared at the thin slit of her reflection across the polished steel. She was petrified, arrested by the insanity of her own idea. Reluctantly, however, with every other option being even more incomprehensible, she conjured the strength necessary, reversed her grip on the hilt, and turned the point of the blade to her own heart.

Simultaneously, as if to convey the trepidation of everyone present, the pitch of the unholy chorus rose in awe. Minerva peered down at the cold, hard metal softly pricking at her skin through the thin fabric of her soiled nightgown. On the cusp of something terrible, prompted by that ominous prickling sensation, swathes of memories poured forth before her mind’s eye in a moment that seemed to encompass minutes. Amongst them, Minerva saw her mother’s and father’s faces, and her heart fell.

The muscles in her arms locked fast; she couldn’t move. Realisation dawned, and she immediately felt stupid and ashamed. She was utterly incapable of doing such an act of self-harm. Not only did she lack the courage, but deep down somewhere she was still clinging to hope, and however hard she willed herself, she could not relinquish it. From behind a welter of tears, Minerva looked to Kleon. Please brother. There’s no other way, she would have said, beseeching him to do the inevitable, to be the executioner she couldn’t be, if she had managed the words, but a guttural sob was all she could utter, face scrunched up in grief. Her whole body shivered, her knees trembling, and almost folded.

Kleon turned white and faltered, but his attention was quickly drawn to the scar-faced man. His unsettled expression made Minerva look too. The obsessed dedication and cruel indifference of the cult leader were wholly gone, dismay and bewilderment taking their place.

“What?” he blurted out.

They all jumped when he suddenly stood bolt upright. Minerva’s tears ran dry in surprise. The scar-faced man let the chain slip from his hand and fall rattling to the floor. He began pacing away from them.

“No. No!” he mumbled, suddenly coming to a halt. His right foot anxiously tapped on the floor. He raised both his hands to his scalp and locked his grasp around fistfuls of dishevelled hair. His voice trembled, as though on the brink of tears. “No, no, no!” He veered back to face them, and screamed through gritted teeth, spraying flecks of spittle.

Minerva flinched and recoiled, the dagger falling from her hands and submerging in the shallow waters once more. Veins bulged on the scar-faced man’s neck as his skin took on a wrathful red hue. In dark-rimmed sockets, eyes of a rabid madman regarded Minerva, lambent with hot rage.

“How dare you even suggest rejecting this gift! Besmirching her blessing with self-sacrifice? You ... you cannot just take your own life!” he stuttered. “Don’t you see what I offer? The power? The inevitability of it? Don’t you see, there’s no other way!”

Minerva scurried away, but the man lunged for her and caught her neck in a choke hold.

“You little filth!” He squeezed hard.

Minerva couldn’t help but claw at the fingers around her throat. She felt foolish for dropping the dagger. Her eyes grew in fright, and she tried to scream, but only managed a gagging moan. Her siblings screamed in her stead. The man’s sour breath was warm against her cheeks, his bawling deafening from up close.

“No matter. I’ll make you understand, just as I was made to understand.” The scar-faced man licked his teeth and his eyes flared, suddenly wide open and glowing blue.

Crackling energies manifested around the cult leader’s hands, and as the tempestuous power began to seep into Minerva’s flesh once more, with her throat crushed and her lungs burning with breathlessness, her defiance finally broke through the thick walls of pain and heavy languor. She would tolerate this torment no more.

Minerva screamed without words, she screamed with her very soul, and instead of the liquid power suffusing her muscles, she saw a bright flash. For a heartbeat, it reflected in the scar-faced man’s eyes, his contorted features lit from below—carnal delight squashed by the abrupt onset of dismay—then the light devoured everything and the world fell away from Minerva.

***

Darkness ensued. For a time, Minerva thought everything had ended. It wasn’t like fainting, nor was it like sleeping. Strangely, she remained conscious, awake; she felt the low simmer of her awareness, yet none of her senses reported anything, and she merely lingered in the soundless, lightless, spaceless abyss. The first sensation was a taste in her mouth. It was the taste of putrid water, sludgy and old, flavoured with the bitter tang of slimy kelp and rotting duckweeds. A grey sky encompassed by lush crowns of trees loomed above her, though it was beyond a wildly undulating, bubbling miasma of dirty green, as if she were underwater.

Cold prickled her skin and burned her eyes, making her realise with a start that indeed that was the case. She was underwater. Panic threatened to consume her; she felt it rising like heat surging from the core of her stomach, but it never broke the boundaries of her sentience. It took a moment for her to realise that nothing she experienced originated in her, but in somebody else. The panic was not her panic, nor was she underwater, yet she saw and felt it all. Ghost sensations broke over her, and as they did, she tasted the flavour of them in her heart. They were faint like a distant scent on the wind, but each clearly distinguishable: shame, love, fear. These were somebody else’s feelings. Somebody else’s memories.

A dark figure hovered above her, silhouetted by the weak sunlight streaming through the gloomy clouds. Minerva felt the figure’s furnace-hot hatred radiating. She—it was a she, Minerva knew it in her heart—clawed her skeletally thin fingers into the velvet jerkin of Minerva’s assumed self, pushing the body under the water’s surface. Minerva—or perhaps more aptly, the soul whose recollections she was privy to—was being drowned. He. He was being drowned.

A muffled scream escaped Minerva’s ghost double’s throat, rendered to incoherent gurgling and a torrent of bubbles, despair mounting as air was replaced by  water in his airways. Then the pushing force at his chest reversed its direction and dragged him out of the water. Minerva moved with the host of the experience, inseparable.

 They emerged from the troubled, dirty water of a garden pond, mottled with duckweeds thrown about on the rippling surface. Bleached outlines of a lavish garden spread out in the periphery of Minerva’s shared vision, rich with carefully manicured bushes, trees heavy with ripening fruit. Immaculate statues boasted further proof of wealth, each rendered in graceful poise. No more subdued by the sloshing water, some of the yet indiscernible sounds finally resolved with keen clarity. The thin, fitful scream of a child pierced Minerva’s ears, so full of terror and so hoarse with hysteria that it set her teeth on edge.

Another trembling voice laden with seething ire came from close, so very close, that each word struck Minerva’s borrowed face with warmth and spittle. “You unworthy little bastard!”

Minerva’s twin sentience looked into the face of their attacker. The graceful mien of a noble woman became revealed through the water-clouded, burning vision of the observer. An amethyst purple dress of pure silk flowed down her body, sharply accentuating her gaunt figure, the jutting shapes of her pelvis and bony knees keenly apparent. The troubles of her past had evidently eroded the aspect of this person; still, she would have been beautiful if not for the delirious hatred that wracked her countenance. Her outburst saw the left shoulder strap of her dress roll halfway down her upper arm, and loops of brown hair streamed free from the unravelling mass of her gaudy, ribbon-bow garnished topknot. Furrows gathered around her eyes, tight with rage. She bared and ground pearl-white teeth. From the darkness of her scowl, her irises glistened with tears borne of unfettered lunacy.

“You think you’re better than us? Better than her? You filthy monster! Abomination! If it weren’t for your father, you’d rot in the Mageseekers’ dungeons for all eternity!”

“Mother! Please leave him alone! Don’t hurt him, please!”

Minerva became aware of another one present, the owner of the fitful scream that first greeted her. It was a little girl, barely older than Monah, clutching the woman’s purple dress in desperation. Hay-brown tresses stuck to her ruddy face, which was wet with tears. Mucus mingled with a thin stream of blood and came in rivulets from her nose, popping in small bubbles occasionally as she blubbered. She had a red bruise on her right cheek that seemed fresh to Minerva, webbed with red, hair-thin veins.

“It was an accident, he didn’t mean it!”

The mad woman did not look at the girl, heedless of the little creature tearing at the expensive fabrics of her attire. “Oh, I think not! I think it was an attempt to get rid of the true heir. So he could take everything!”

For the first time, the boy who shared his perception with Minerva opened his mouth to speak. “No! Mother, I ...” he protested in a thin voice. He was a weak little creature, not much younger than Minerva herself, his tone betraying a great deal of sorrow and fear, making it evident that he had little in the way of strength to defy his elder, even in the face of death.

“I am not your mother, bastard!” Minerva couldn’t help but flinch and shrink from the woman’s shrill voice. “I will not let your sickness run rampant amongst us. I will not allow you to hurt us. You’ll get nothing! Unworthy. Unworthy!” With that, the woman pushed him down. Feet thrashing, arms flailing, back he went, the water of the pond closing around him once more.

Only a couple of heartbeats had to pass for Minerva to realise, in concert with the boy himself, that the wrathful woman would not let him come to the surface again. Despair robbed him of composure, and he screamed, writhed, pulled at the hands that held him down, mouthfuls of foul water rolling down his throat, washing into his windpipe and lungs. He gagged and coughed, infuriated by his inability to save himself. The madness of raw fear tore something up in the boy’s soul, and from the disembodied wound, formless, boundless magic poured forth.

Minerva felt a build-up of arcane energies climbing to monstrous heights. It was only held back by a remnant of self-restraint that frayed further as the boy succumbed to unconsciousness. In the end, desperation overcame resolve, and he unleashed it all willingly before he could pass out.

The ensuing cataclysm reduced the garden and everyone in it to ash. Water in the pond fizzled away like a raindrop on a white-hot ingot. Foliage disintegrated. Ethereal flames flayed trees of their bark down to scorched black ruins; their boughs became crooked arms of glowing cinder. Graceful features melted off the faces of statues.

The last vision her conjoined senses with the boy granted to Minerva was the little girl’s tear-smudged face, rueful, yet edged with puzzlement at the sudden flash of light, her pupils shrinking to pinholes as the blinding whiteness washed over her. In the next moment, she was gone.

Minerva felt a lurch, and the mirage world composed of unfamiliar memories dissolved and fell away as if she were a fish plucked from a bowl.

Reality reasserted itself abruptly, painfully, and Minerva was back in the cave as if not a moment had passed, the horrors of her true flesh forcing their way back to her awareness. The scar-faced man released her neck with a forceful shove. Minerva stumbled, her tired legs going out from under her, and she toppled backwards to land on her rear painfully in the cold water. No thought was given to the bruises; all that mattered was that she could finally breathe again. She greedily swallowed whole lungfuls of air with each quickly snatched heave, and instinctively hunched up her shoulders to protect her frail neck, all the while crawling backwards on the ground. There was nothing to run to; no one came after her.

The scar-faced man beheld Minerva with a haunted look, his pupils flickering with unease borne of exposed shame and unearthed grief. Then he looked away and seemed to fall into reticence, shoulder slumping, head slouching. Turning his palms up, he gazed at his hands as the foul chorus droned on around him.

“Perhaps I was wrong.” His vehemence was whittled away to nothing, every word spoken with effort and saturated with a rueful, almost amiable serenity. There was something menacing in his new, strange conduct that sent a chill down Minerva’s spine. “You lack the strength. Yes. You won’t be able to do what is necessary. I see it now.” Drunkenly, he made a step towards them, his expression unreadable. “It is fine. I’ll do it for you. You’ll watch as I reap the harvest.”

With an impassive, defeated gaze, he raised his left hand, pondered for a second while he selected his mark, and shot lightning straight at Kleon. The raw release of power was blinding, its thunderous scream deafening and further boosted by the reverberations of the vaulted chamber. The strike was not mitigated by the chain this time—which meted out a portion of the power to each of them—nor did the mage hold back. The entirety of his force struck Kleon raw in the flesh, and the boy fell to the ground wailing, his skin giving off a hot white steam.

The children threw themselves to the ground. Minerva cried her brother’s name and scurried on all fours towards his body, the water splashing violently around her. She sat and lifted Kleon’s shoulders to pull his head onto her lap. Kleon’s head lolled to the side, limp, his eyelashes fluttering half open. He was not dead, not yet; he took slow, shallow breaths.

“Who’s next?” called the scar-faced man with a weak, impotent anger in his tremulous voice. The confidence he’d carried himself with was gone, jaded enervation taking its place. “Hm? Come now? Who’s so fucking brave?”

The children were all curled up into little balls, hiding their heads between their knees and sobbing quietly. On Minerva’s lap, Kleon groaned. He was gazing with glassy eyes far into the depths of the cavernous hall.

“I see her,” he rasped out, then coughed, and stiffened with pain, baring his teeth. “I see her.”

“Kleon?” Minerva swallowed her tears, trying to make sense of her brother’s weak croaking.

“The Winged Protector,” Kleon whispered. “She’s come to save us!”

The scar-faced man trailed off and peered over his shoulder. As he did, they all looked up in unison, just in time to see Demetria Keephart’s brightsteel-clad bulk, the gilded embellishments on her blood-soaked, ornate armour dazzling with golden light, her claymore poised to strike, as she charged head-on for the cult leader.

“It cannot be! How many times must I kill you, woman?” The sudden onset of rage, though diluted with desperation, roused the scar-faced man from his lamentations. He lashed out at Demetria with a crackling surge of arcane power.

Astoundingly, Demetria did not slow down. She raced on in spite of the searing tongues of light battering at her cuirass with a tremendous boom. Sparks flickered between her teeth, indigo filaments interlaced the flying strands of her loose hair, but all of it she withstood. Excited by the immense deluge of destructive energies, her petricite-infused armour took up a shimmering turquoise glow, pushed to the limit of its absorbing capabilities.

She was closing the gap, her charge unwavering, like she was the angel of judgment herself. In the last moment of her stride, she emitted a furious battlecry, testimony of the wrath that fuelled her through the excruciating pain, and her blow came down, severing the scar-faced man’s hand at the wrist.

The crackling energies faded to nothing, the booming of the thunder replaced by the scar-faced man’s cry of frantic pain. Demetria kicked him in the stomach, then the sole of her armoured greave sank deep into his belly. He was thrust back, without footing, and collapsed retching, a jet of red squirting from the bare stump of his arm.

Time picked up its pace. Suddenly, Khyrr was there too, sinking to half-knee right next to Minerva.

“Will you let me?” he probed, reaching out towards Kleon’s weak frame still nestled on her lap.

When she conceded with a nod, Khyrr placed his hands upon Kleon’s slowly rising and falling chest, palms down, hands drawn together like someone warming over a campfire. Minerva felt her skin tingle as the aether lurched around her, and a blueish white light came to be under Khyrr’s palms, seeping from between his fingers like heavy, luminous steam. It rolled down to permeate Kleon’s skin.

A moment later, the boy gasped and opened his eyes, energetic like someone waking from a nightmare.

“Kleon!” she cried, her heart drumming with relief.

“They’re chained to the stone.” The voice came from a white-haired man whom Minerva didn’t know, but his livery of a Demacian knight she instantly recognised.

Another woman in the same armour raised her shield and fastened her grip on her sword, turning her head in alarm. That’s when the realisation dawned on Minerva. The incessant chanting of the choir, all-permeating, head-numbing, now petered out and stopped. Only the whooshing and hissing of the brazier fires and the chirp of the dripping water cut through the ominous, silent buzz of the cave. All around, bleeding and contorted cultists were waking sluggishly from their sick reverie.

Khyrr leapt to his feet. He hesitated for a moment, looking up at the ancient profaned statue, then ran to the root of the chains that still held the children in place. He pulled it, grunting with effort. “It’s bolted deep into the stone.”

“Step aside!” Demetria demanded. As soon as Khyrr backed away, she lifted her claymore and struck down, breaking the metal ring with ease. The children all clambered upright and waddled over to Minerva, rattling lengths of chains trailing them, still connected to the fetters around their necks.

“We’re all as good as dead if we’re not leaving right now!” cried the unknown woman, looking round warily.

“You’re dead either way.” The exhausted remark came from their rear. Minerva realised, though she’d lost track of him in the exuberant moment of their deliverance, that the scar-faced man was still there, discarded on the cavern floor. He half sat up, clutching the stump of his left hand, and looked them up and down, then spat into the thin water. Dishevelled black strands of hair framed his slouched, skeleton-pale face. He crunched up his mouth, making an attempt to show disdain and anger, and disguise what he truly felt.

Minerva saw right through him. Despite his seemingly weak state, power still lurked in his veins. He had ample enough arcane fuel to give them a hard time, but the spark to light that fuel had gone out. He could still have fought; it wasn’t over, yet he seemed utterly defeated. Something told Minerva it wasn’t the loss of a hand that had finished him. Did their involuntary communion evoke long-denied self-reflection that ultimately brought him to his knees? Perhaps. Perhaps the weight of atrocities enacted and choices born of choler and crippling malcontent had crushed down on him. He looked as though he hated everyone and himself in equal measure. Even after all that transpired, Minerva pitied him.

“Enough of your games, Haelbach! Order your mongrels to stand down!” Demetria jabbed at his chest with her sword.

Haelbach considered the weapon with an indifferent sneer. His voice was hoarse and weak. “No order can hold back the fury of the forsaken and the outcast. You might have had the upper hand today, but savour this victory, for the time will come when the ones you banished in the name of order and justice will rise again.”

Demetria pulled away her blade with a resigned grunt, realising the futility of her threat.

“Sword-captain!” bellowed the old knight.

One of the cultists was suddenly upon them, charging with a feral growl. Minerva caught sight of him, or it, and the horror of recognition seized her in place. It was the thug who had threatened them with his whip, back when they were travelling in the cage. And yet it wasn’t him anymore. Hideous lacerations marred his face, and lavender fire bubbled and leaked from his eyes and other orifices like burning tar. The same sick flames pooled around his hands, and at the end of his fingers, sharp black claws sprouted as his malformed bones ripped through his fingertips. Somebody shrieked. The knight vaulted forward and made a long, wide sweep with his sword. Ludicrously, the enraged man made no effort to avoid the strike. Minerva squeezed her eyes shut as pinpricks of warmth struck her face.

“Everybody run! To the bridge!” Khyrr shouted, grabbing Kleon and Ignatz by the shoulder.

They all broke into a mad sprint, children shepherded by the adults. Minerva kept stumbling; she couldn’t watch her steps, her gaze instead pinned to their first attacker as his body slumped. A deep gorge ran through his torso from groin to chin, bisecting his jaw. Gore, viscera, and broken teeth gushed forth, soiling the clear cavern waters.

A hand hooked under her right elbow, kept Minerva from falling, and dragged her forward with urgency. It was Kleon; he ran beside her, clinging to her arm, giving her a look that bordered on panic. Animalistic screeches rose all around them, overlapping with the frantic careening echoes of countless feet splashing across the shallow ponds of the cave.

A black shape rushed at them from the front. Khyrr spun and matched the attacker with a double-bladed cleave. A woman’s head rolled away next to Minerva’s legs, her mouth still grinning with filed teeth, ribbons of red lacquering the stone in its wake. Minerva barely registered another two shadows gaining on them from the back when the old knight adjacent to her cried out and wheeled around to stop their pursuers.

“Davion!” Demetria cried.

Minerva saw the old soldier fending off three cultists, keeping them at sword length, pummelling one with his shield as it made a feral lunge to maul his face.

Minerva had little time to muse on the knight’s bravado. Kleon’s grip on her arm tightened, and her brother let out a hysterical cry. Her breath caught in her throat when she turned forward right into the deliriously cackling and burned face of a witch, slashing at her and Kleon, its hands a hail of sharp claws. Minerva noticed the attacker too late. It was so close, she could smell its skin; her nostrils flared under the stench of burnt flesh and sweet ritual ointments.

A bulk of steel rammed into the laughing monstrosity with an enormous wallop of crashing bone and racketing of metals that threw the flailing creature off its feet, out of Minerva’s path. It was the other knight; the woman righted herself and was about to bound forward to keep up with their group, but a score of cultists lunged at her as soon as she became separated, and she disappeared out of sight.

After that, Minerva looked nowhere but forward. She tried to focus on her aunt’s soaring sea-green cape, as its torn fabric made ripples in the air as they ran. Her heart beat at triple its normal pace. Rushing angry colours emerged and grew on the edge of her vision, which narrowed and narrowed until she felt she was observing the world through a pinhole.

The crescendo of bloodlust and violence was unbearable. Bile rose in her stomach, and she teetered on the brink of fainting. Suddenly, a deep blackness flanked her on both sides, and she swayed, almost falling into it. A great force gathered in the air, and all the hairs at the back of her neck stood on end. Minerva’s knees crumpled, but someone pulled her forward, and instead of plunging into the endless depths, she met hard stone with a painful bludgeoning thud.

Above her, something bright hit the cavern roof with a strident shrill that made her ears ring. Hands were clutching her arms and clothes, dragging her across the ground, away from the catastrophe. Somewhere close, Demetria screamed Khyrr’s name, then the stalactite fell, followed by a roaring boom of rock smashing rock with relentless force. A shower of sharp stone chippings pricked Minerva’s skin. An explosion of choking, dry stone dust pummelled her next, and left her gullet and mouth parched. Coughing convulsively, she sat up, snatching at her burning eyes to rub out the chalk-fine dust, so she could lay eyes upon the impending peril that was surely to see her crushed or mauled to pieces.

As the thick cloud of dust dispersed around her, Minerva found one of her bare feet dangling above a fathomless black abyss. She writhed backwards in terror, trying to make sense of her surroundings through tear-fogged eyes. The sight presented to her took her breath away. They had miraculously crossed the bridge that connected the main chamber to the rest of the cave, but now in its place was an uncrossable chasm, locking all their enemies on the other side.

Minerva could only see silhouettes of them beyond the veil of dust and smoke. They appeared to have stopped moving. Save the rustle and rap of raining scree and dust, it was quiet; she could hear the cultists’ feral screams no more, but their absence brought no solace. Minerva felt a sinking dread as her preternatural senses discerned a subliminal scent that felt oddly familiar.

Just as she caught the whiff of it, otherworldly might washed over her spirit in a tidal wave, drenching her soul in its foul perfume. Simultaneously she became aware of a dominating presence lighting up the spirit realm. The unlight it gave off pressed against her brain, filling the surrounding air with psychic mirages and wisps of opiate scents, conjuring phantom caresses on her skin.

With her heart still beating in her throat, her eyes raked the other side for the source of the strange phenomenon. Beyond the rift, the two knights still stood, though both were bloodied and heaving. Minerva made out the woman first; her shoulders were slumped as she stared at the baffling, inconceivable scenery that’d unfolded around her.

In the great chamber, every single cultist had prostrated themself on the cavern floor and trembled in zealous awe. Among them was Haelbach, too, just where they’d left him. He was kneeling openmouthed, looking up in delirious wonder at a newcomer. A girl stood in the centre of the great chamber. From where she appeared or how was a mystery, but Minerva recognised her. She was the same girl who had lit her father’s desk on fire. She was the epicentre of the numbing power.

Around Minerva, all her siblings were safe, Demetria on her side, but as she pushed herself upright and the dust fully ebbed, her heart fell.

Her Uncle Khyrr was on the other side of the chasm.

Twenty Two

Demetria cried his name. With a pang of sorrow, Khyrr looked round at her and the children. They were beyond reach across the rift that Haelbach’s last lightning strike had wrought between them. Whether this was the sorcerer’s intended result or whether he merely floundered his attempt to fell the whole group under the crashing stalactite mattered little. A malice, magnitudes greater than Haelbach’s, inhabited the cave. Khyrr felt it lurking in the shadows, everywhere and nowhere at once, long before it revealed itself.

“Uncle Khyrr!”

Small, tear-reddened eyes stared back at him from the far side of the yawning depths. Even without the bridge, Khyrr could have crossed the chasm. It was an impossible jump, but he could have woven through the aether and come out the other side, just like when he closed the gap between him and Master Caeto in the Volosh mansion. The distance made it a challenge, but it was possible. He could have joined his family, but had he done so, would have brought peril with him—for this unfettered evil that poisoned reality would have surely followed. Its thirst for Volosh blood was immeasurable. It would not stop until everyone Khyrr loved was dead; he knew it in his bones. It had to be dispatched, and permanently.

Khyrr did not hide his compunction, but under that, he remained resolute despite Demetria’s cries of rage and despair. He had to weather the shame of denying Demetria a part in this fight, rejecting her just as she had rejected him so many times in the past. She saw through him. Threats and imploring began to spill from her lips.

Khyrr did not heed it; he allowed nothing to pierce his focus. He could not. The agency of celestial might saw to grant him this fight, bestowing upon him a second life to prove himself, and he would not squander it. He felt those heavenly eyes on him even now, as much as he heard the prowling of the Wolf and the bowstring of the Lamb stretching taut—the aspects of death lured by the spectacle of his reckoning.

Reluctantly, he turned his back on Demetria to behold the true enemy. The cultists were all moaning now, whispering tremulous and unintelligible prayers with their faces pressed against the cavern floor. The object of their worship was a girl who seemed to have appeared out of thin air, offering them but an impish smile, carrying her gaze round with hooded eyes. Her ashen white hair, so neat as if just combed at the dressing table after a warm bath, shone in the stifled light of the braziers. She wore a simple dress, impossibly pristine in the musty cave and black like it was sawn from the abyssal strands of night itself. Her form bore the ever-shifting quality of a dreamscape apparition, yet it forced its unreality upon the realm of the mundane with the vehemence of a brand. Every gaze laid upon her removed a detail and added a new one.

Khyrr was wise enough to see the falsehood of this flesh costume, but dared not peer through it lest his mind descend into madness by the inconceivable, unfathomable nature of it. She oozed such raw, primordial power that it subverted reality itself. Ephemeral sensations and coaxing scents were conjured out of nothing. It was as if potent memories had been spilt on the canvas of the present, experiences of the most exquisite, and the most crippling, painted in illusory flashes, their colours borrowed from the leaking souls of delirious cultists. Giggles and whispered enunciations of forgotten lovers seeped from beyond the veil, and rays of long-set suns and moons filtered through the shadows, perfumed with the zest of lavish feasts and bustling fairs. It was overwhelming.

The weight of this presence made Khyrr’s limbs feel leaden and his head throb, yet that wasn’t what disturbed him the most. Through the assault of sensations, he was shaken to discern a sick attraction. In all her horrible, outlandish majesty, the girl-thing was frighteningly beautiful. Regal like a statue, the beholder might have perceived her to be almost motionless, but upon a second look, one could espy a slow shifting about her: the undulating motion of her delicate bare shoulders, the predatory grace of her head tilting, her chin rising and falling. She seemed to work her fingers in a fluent motion, one chasing another as if playing chords on a harp. It was an almost imperceptible yet hypnotic dance, and Khyrr was unable to separate his eyes from it. A carnal yearning took residence in him, accompanied by an agonising thirst that he might die of if not for a single glance spared to him by the magnificent creature. The strange urge almost surmounted him.

When he came to with an effort, he found himself teetering between steps somewhat closer to the girl than he remembered. He recoiled. Around him, the cowled sycophants did not resist her goading. Khyrr watched sickened as they writhed towards her like worms, moaning and cooing. Still holding the stump that had once ended in a hand, Haelbach crunched on his knees to the feet of the outlandish girl.

His reverently whispered words were dry and hollow like charcoal on rock. “Mother! You ... you have come at last!” Ulrich Haelbach swallowed hard, the weight of his failure apparent in his coy grimace. He darted his eyes towards Khyrr and the children afar, just a fleeting glance, barely a flinch, but Khyrr caught it. “I’ve done all you asked. I’ve shepherded the flock. I’ve shown repentance for you. We all did!”

Whimpering sounds of assent rose from around the chamber in unison.

Haelbach wetted his lips and said, “Mother! We are ready to ascend! Will you deliver us?”

For a moment, nothing happened. Khyrr felt that even Demetria and the children were rendered silent and immobile. Then the girl moved; she turned her attention towards Haelbach. He shuddered from head to toe and almost swooned when those yellow irises regarded him directly. Khyrr stared in rapt fascination as the girl offered a hand towards Ulrich, her expression every bit as mischievous and delighted as before.

Overflowing with joy, Haelbach giggled and shuffled closer. He reached with his intact hand towards the girl’s, shivering with ecstasy. The aether quivered, suddenly awash with foul energies. Khyrr winced as a thin pool of inky smoke came to be right under Haelbach’s form. It coiled and convulsed as it spread around the man’s knees, an ugly purple light burning inside it, but Haelbach paid no heed. The girl’s mouth opened and the shadow of something passed over her face, a flicker of voracious elation, Khyrr realised, as she savoured Haelbach’s glee.

At the cusp of their fingers touching, the girl closed her hand into a tight fist. Horrible thorns, as big as broadswords, speared up from the black smoke at the creature’s behest with furious speed, their tapered forms blazing in a cruel fuchsia fire, and impaled the cult leader. The sound of ruptured flesh and breaking bones made Khyrr's skin crawl. A wetly clicking stifled groan issued from Ulrich Haelbach’s mouth, the faint hint of his past delirium together with an acute fear frozen as one expression on his face, while the shallow water below him turned brackish and deep red with arterial blood.

The girl, who was not a girl anymore, took Haelbach’s spasming face into her purple hands. Claws like blades of pinkish ice left long parallel bruises on his cheeks. Her words were luscious cream incense smoke against the cult leader’s ears. “Unworthy. Die.”

And Ulrich Haelbach did just that. As soon as his eyes hollowed, the spears of hellish magic pulled back into the ground, and his body slumped like a hunk of dank meat. With fresh blood spilt, the insanity of the congregation climbed to new heights, and discordant shrieks burst from the cultists’ throats. Each of them unleashed their own flavour of senselessness. A woman wailed in grief as she tore at her clothes, while a man adjacent to her was taken by uncontrolled laughter. Others leapt to their feet and began waddling manically, arms outstretched towards the object of their adoration, the girl-thing.

“Enough! You’ve taken breaths for too long, fiend!”

To Khyrr’s right, the knight Davion ramped up to a full-on charge, his weapon raised. Keera, across the chamber, regarded the act warily for a second, but her comrade’s display of valour tempered her doubts, instigating the warrior in her, and she began to advance swiftly as well.

“Davion, hold!” Khyrr cried, but words would not stop the assault of the old soldier, with his foe within reach and his mind set to prosecute it at last.

The girl-thing’s mouth stretched into a long, wicked smile. She threw her arms out to either side, palms towards the ceiling as though offering an embrace, her mesmerising true mien blooming free, while she lifted off the ground.

With her false human vesture cast aside, the horror of her true form became revealed. She was almost naked, her pewter grey flesh bared save a few judicious applications of liquid shadow. Churning tattered darkness streamed off of her to lick with a ghost heat. Every single part of her bore instruments of torment and murder. The last of her digits were elongated, tapering into dagger-like claws, and—like the fingers from which they sprouted—shimmered with a sinister pink inner light, as though her hand were made out of hot glass.

Her lustrous white hair parted to allow a pair of horns to sprout from the top of her brows. Playful violet flames danced over her head like a crown of baleful fire. At her back, originating from her spine on either side, crept out two appendages made of the same oozing blackness that dressed her. Protruding out several arms’ length, each unnatural lasher ended in an enormous razor-sharp glaive.

Khyrr’s stomach shrank with profound foreboding as the surging throng closed in on the soaring creature, the knights jostling into the heedless, enthralled crowd. Before either of them could reach her, the girl-thing—for the first time since she showed herself—cast a glance at Khyrr and closed her eyes.

Her rear appendages drew back and lashed out crosswise, one sliding over the other, describing a wide, horizontal arc in the air. The attack was a flash, so swift, Khyrr would have missed it if he had blinked. Inside the half-circle of her reach, every living thing was scythed asunder. The momentum of the strike sent out a shrieking gust full of gore and screams with the force of a punch.

Khyrr hastened to brace against the blow, widening his stance, but the cultists had not the clarity to save themselves. Born aloft, they were tossed back like rag dolls. The fires of the braziers guttered and died. As darkness fell, Khyrr’s failing vision granted a last phantom image, a colourless glimpse. What he saw shook him to his core. Davion, as his torso toppled from his hip, sword and shield still at the ready, while the marching gait of his buckling legs awkwardly continued for a pace. In the very last flicker of dying light, a faint suggestion of collapsing, bisected bodies became revealed in shades of grey, then the impenetrable blackness swallowed all. The wet thud of numerous moist weights sloshed into the shallow pools on the floor.

A heavy silence ensued. Khyrr’s stomach clenched. Bile rose in his throat, but he forced it down. Keeping his emotions at bay, he reached deep into the reserves of his power—no more encumbered by the self-chastising backlashes of his magic—and at his behest, shimmering silver light blossomed along his curved blades. The darkness lifted in a tight circle around him.

Thoughts racing, Khyrr raked his surroundings for movement. He didn’t have to search for long. A cloaked figure lunged into his aura of light. With his nerves on edge and his blood still up, he didn’t hesitate. He whirled aside and delivered the deathblow, a single sweep of moonsilver at the throat. His mind caught up too late to register the running man’s mad fear and pleading gaze, mistaking it for hostility. Even in the face of the atrocities the cultists had wrought, regret wrenched at his heart watching the fleeing man fall dead, but Khyrr didn’t allow his emotions to surface.

“My lord!”

Khyrr spun at the sound. Keera shambled into the light on his rear. The knight was pale as fresh snow, her shield and sword nowhere to be seen. With wildly trembling hands, she was clutching her abdomen where a wide horizontal cut wracked her battle plate. The rift was deep and impossibly clean across the steel surface, like the slash of a razor through parchment. A patch of gore spread down the length of her breeches, soiled pieces of chainmail trilling down as she drew closer.

Khyrr gasped, rummaging his mind for words of alarm, when a swift shadow darted across his vision, and he felt the whiff of something dashing past. Keera stopped and wobbled. Her eyes chilled, and her chin protruded, as if sickened. A thick red line was suddenly drawn across her throat. The wound opened, and from it, blood gushed forth mercilessly along the line of her thick-set neck. Keera collapsed in a clatter of armour plates. The chamber rang with a gleeful cackle that sent a chill down Khyrr’s spine.

“Come into the light and face me, demon!” he cried.

“You ache to lay eyes on me again, don’t you now?” The question came as a sensual groan through gritted teeth, the voice resonating with a multitude of strange harmonies.

Khyrr set out towards where he assumed it came from, testing every step as if he threaded through shifting sands, letting his guard falter not for a beat. The pools of the cave threw mingled reflections of his ghost lights back at him. His magic could not penetrate the darkness more than a few arm's lengths. The gloom was not only physical; he felt invisible powers reaching out from it, caressing him, skimming the surface of his thoughts and fiddling with his senses. Soon, ghastly outlines of mangled cadavers resolved around him from the unlight, heaps of mutilated flesh he dared not focus on. A circular form that Khyrr disregarded at first shifted among them. A second look revealed it to be a cowering, blood-soiled woman.

Khyrr swivelled around, feeling a presence behind him, only to be presented with the bland, rigid dark.

“Do you fear I’ll make short work of you, too?” Khyrr growled.

He picked out a muffled scream. Suspecting that it came from the cowering woman he had neglected, Khyrr rounded, only to catch the last glimpse of her sprawled form being snatched away. Her fingers clawed the ground in desperation as the wall of black swallowed her.

“Don’t worry,” the girl-thing purred. “Ours will not be such an abrupt affair as it was for you and Vivica. I’ll make sure of it.”

“You will share the fate of your brood anyhow!” Khyrr barked back. His heart drubbed in his throat, and despite himself, his carefully maintained concentration was fraying. The creature played a game of minds, employing the shadows, the eerie sounds of the cave and even his own nagging thoughts to rile him. It got the better of Khyrr. He kept wheeling around, and with every completed turn, his trepidation grew twofold.

“You speak of fate, but you are blind to its currents.” Her voice jingled from all over, as if every few words originated from different directions and distances. Still, the falseness of her exaggerated pity was unmistakable. “With all the wisdom granted by your ousted kin, the truth eludes you even still. Your destiny is bound to me!”

“You speak lies!” Khyrr spat. Then he saw her. Just a suggestion of a shifting outline, almost indistinguishable from the bleak shapes that his imagination kept drawing on the surrounding canvas of black; a pair of amber eyes looming in the middle of it. It was akin to the reflective gaze of the predator happened upon in the depths of the slumbering woods.

“All had been by my design. From the moment your misbegotten ancestors set foot on this land, I was there. Always. Their injured souls were unresistable. The aching memory of their banishment, their proclivity to self-flagellate, and their obsession to do penance in the face of their failures had beckoned to me. Death, sickness, betrayal. I gave them all my flavours of agony, and they developed a fondness for it. They relished it, worshiped it. Worshiped me.”

“No! We never paid devotion to agony itself. The woes of our past served not as a temple, but as a crucible of perseverance and tenacity,” Khyrr said, eliciting another laugh from the demon.

“Even now, you invoke the wisdom of your fathers and their fathers and their fathers. Don’t you see? I put these words in their mouth.” The demon giggled, her gently uttered words lined with vitriol. “They’re as good as a prayer on my altar. Look into my eyes, Khyrr. Face it! I am your curse of ill-fate made flesh!”

For a moment, Khyrr couldn’t help but consider it. Was she truly the author of their suffering? Had his family’s creed been a lie all this time—just like the Mageseeker’s so-called medicine he’d been made to drink?

The demon could taste his soul. His growing doubt elicited a snide grin on her alabaster face, as she was clearly pleased with the product of her machinations. She was toying with him, and her gloating only further kindled Khyrr’s anger.

“Monster! I will have none of your lies!”

The creature licked her teeth, and threw a taunting look towards the entrance of the chamber, where Minerva and Demetria were still calling out for Khyrr. “My carefully cultivated fruits of agony,” she groaned. “You are ripe, and the time of harvest is nigh!”

“No!” Khyrr lunged forward, weapons raised. His precious composure shattered, and the overwhelming torrent of emotions consumed him.

To his surprise, the creature did not retreat into the shadows this time. She matched his charge with a wicked grin, as if she were waiting for the moment when he let his self-control slip. Khyrr no more possessed the prudence to suspect a trap behind this dubious provocation. Fuelled by rage, his combat instincts took over. He saw her veering left and made two hacking blows towards where he anticipated to meet her with the blade, not realising the manoeuvre was a feint.

She spun out of the way and mauled his side. Khyrr flinched at the plaintive ripping sound as four gouges opened on the hard, moulded leather under his right arm, the upward swipe cutting through flesh and grazing his ribs. Grinding his teeth, he whirled to retort, but the demon was smoke; she darted out of reach, wheeled and propelled herself into a second attack.

The hurtling blade of her lasher missed Khyrr’s head by a hand’s breadth. She moved with horrifying speed and accuracy, allowing Khyrr barely enough time to recover his guard after each strike, risking certain death were he to dare launch an attack instead of solely focusing on defence. Her volley of strikes did not relent; she jabbed at him with her lashers and swung with her claws in quick succession, making Khyrr feel as though he fought four enemies rather than one.

He narrowly sidestepped a spearlike thrust, wobbling for half a second as in the hideous mess of fallen bodies, he landed on a false footing. Taking advantage of his blunder, she closed in on him, her dagger claws aimed at an opening over his waist. Khyrr swept her barbed fingers away with a quick sideways swing, generously providing a gap in his defence for her second lasher that hurtled for his heart.

Desperate and reeling, he struggled to bring his free sabre up to divert upward the thrust of the demonic glaive. It took great strength, but he drove the attack away from his heart, and it instead sliced a groove in his shoulder, running through his leathers without resistance and scoring his clavicle. He felt the bone crack under the force and retreated with a mad shout, but the demon moved with him, giggles spilling from her mouth.

“Beg me to stop!” she snickered, not even breaking a sweat or losing momentum, while she drew Khyrr to the verge of his endurance.

He didn’t know how much longer he could repel the demon’s onslaught, but his seconds were certainly numbered. Every dodged strike gave way to one that hit its mark and drew blood. Scores of bruises and cuts blemished his flesh, and a scorching ache filled his heaving lungs. His grasp around the hilt of his sabres became numb, so fierce was the recoil every time he thwarted the demon’s mighty strike, each closer to ending him than the last. If he wanted to live, he had to act, and fast.

As if the creature had sensed his thoughts, she changed tactics. She bounced back, and with one hand reached out for him. Khyrr knew instantly that she did so not to seize him, but to knead her terrible powers into shape. Beads of sweat turned cold on the back of his neck, and he felt the cosmos around him pull taut. Living shadows bubbled up from nothing underfoot. She was about to end him, the same way she ended Haelbach.

Khyrr answered magic with magic. With the dregs of his strength, he emptied his mind and willed the fabric of his mundane form to fray into countless threads of supernal light, and then reform again. The demon made a hand of hooked fingers, and pulled her arms short as if shearing at something invisible in the air. At her command, the horrible thorns shot up from the ground, stabbing only empty air. Khyrr blinked into existence with a hissing pop, materialising from a flash of iridescent light right behind the demon girl.

“Silver Sister!” He let go a cry of prayer, hacking crosswise with both blades to behead the foul creature while the surprise of his arcane jump had her dazed.

But there was no surprise. Even as he darted through the aether, she already spun, ready to face him, and Khyrr found himself locking eyes with her. Clarity came to him with a sudden jolt of dread. He’d acted exactly as the demon wanted him to. There was a flash of movement, and with a hard, crystalline clink, Khyrr found the blades of his weapons clutched by her razor grasps. As warmth withdrew from his limbs, the demon’s pupils widened in plain, vicious delight.

“I will teach your gods to scream!” she howled at the peak of her delirium. Then she clenched her fists, and the blades shattered. A rain of moonsilver fell. Shards still shimmering with waning magic plunged into the bloodied pools.

Khyrr still clutched the useless sabre hilts, lost for words, when the twolashers impaled him in the stomach. He gasped, petrified by the intense pain, and gasped again when the lashers ripped free. Blood gouted and struck the demon’s face, drawing a horizontal line from cheek to cheek through the gentle curve of her nose. A hot copper stench rose. He felt wet warmth running swiftly down his legs. His knees shook, then buckled, and he crumbled to the floor.

Cold stole into him, though his skin still gleamed with sweat and his muscles were still stiff from exertion. What suffering his body had to bear, though enormous, was dwarfed by the sorrow weighing down upon him. His heart fell. On the fulcrum of his family’s destiny, his borrowed life was spent in vain. What was he thinking? He could never have won this fight. The powers and responsibilities bequeathed to him were all for nothing; in the end, his complacency and blind hope were his downfall.

A distant flicker cut through the pitch dark, and the form of far-away figures resolved in the silver halo of a hesitant light. Demetria, her armour reflecting the rays of ethereal light, legs straddled in a battle stance, her arms at the ready, prepared to launch herself into the fight. Minerva stood next to her. She held a ball of wraith light in her palms, squinting with effort to keep the frail conjuration alive. They were still waiting for him over the rift.

As he lay on cold, wet stone, his body heat ebbing, Khyrr felt his thoughts begin to melt away in the deluge of agony. All he could focus on was that tiny light. It was his last anchor to his purpose. He reached out for it. The last ember of their legacy. The last spark.

“Tell you what. There’s still a drop or two to squeeze from your soul.” The demon turned her attention to the children, regarding Khyrr only from the corner of her eye. “You will live a bit. You’ll watch me finish the little one. You will see the last of your blood perish in screams.”

She leapt headlong, arms with hooked claws stretched out beside her, covering several steps in a single heartbeat.

You must promise. Promise me, you’ll find them. Khyrr heard Tymotheus’s voice as if he stood next to him.

He saw Demetria lift her claymore as Minerva's feeble light picked out the demon's nimble form, racing towards her from the depths of the chamber with immense speed.

Take them home.

He saw as courage fled her eyes when the horrid apparition resolved from the shadows, ready to cross the chasm as though borne aloft on wings of darkness.

Whatever the price.

Before the demon could close on them, or even reach the edge, blinding silvery rays bloomed to life in the air around her, and all of a sudden she was fixed in place.

Dazzling celestial light erupted from under the creature’s feet, locking her in what looked like an arcane cage of radiance. It banished the darkness and lit up the cavern chamber. The air became awash with whirling motes flickering in and out of existence, like precipitation in an arcane storm, brought forth by the torrential release of magic.

“I’m still here, demon!” said Khyrr in a hoarse voice, struggling upright amid the butchered cadavers. His right hand was levelled at the demon, a steady stream of white light pouring from it. His eyes burned with the prismatic light of a raging star.

“Your deceit and lies are ash and smoke. You masquerade as the maker of our fate, yet you fail to understand us. You promise agony to weaken me, but it only fuels my strength. It has always been thus. Our arduous past is the anvil upon which the strength of our heart is wrought!”

“You made me stop!” she jingled, amused with genuine surprise. “Fascinating. But futile.”

With effort, the demon twisted her upper body towards him like a snake, the magical bonds opposing her every move. Her form shook and swelled as she tested her chains. She was making progress, and Khyrr strained to keep her at bay.

“There’s no use denying this destiny. You cannot unmake it.”

Truth was in her singsong tone, Khyrr felt it in his guts. On the precipice of his demise, the realm of death filtered into his reality. In a sombre premonition, the essence of all his ancestors seemed to commune with him, sharing their rueful concord, their souls bitter with long forgotten woes. They yearned to be delivered from a curse for which he was bereft any means to remit. But perhaps he had not been the one to lift their curse. Perhaps nobody was. Their fight was never about winning, or avoiding misfortune altogether, but about simply fighting on. Learning on, and passing down the legacy of lessons earned by weathering each calamity. Khyrr began to understand.

All the while his grip was slipping, and the demon managed to make a slow, strangled step towards him. Beyond the chasm, Minerva watched, still holding onto her tiny light, a spark compared to the tower of radiance encasing their enemy. Khyrr stole a glance at that little spark, and the realization almost made him laugh out in joy. Peering into that feeble glamour of hers, his soul became lighter; a weight had been lifted from it, giving way to a final revelation. The destiny he was to forge had been staring him in the face the whole time.

He met Minerva’s gaze and poured all his resolve and faith into that keen look. Dejection and unease emanated from the little girl, but slowly it was surpassed by a sense of solemn acceptance. Minerva straightened her back, her jaw tensed, and tears began to well up in her eyes, but she stood resolute. An unspoken accord had been struck between them, sealed by her final nod. Their exchange took mere seconds, yet to Khyrr it spoke volumes of the potential she held within her. She was not ready. Not yet. But she would be.

Khyrr then lifted his gaze to look Demetria in the eye. She trembled with the anguish of inability, but her rage was quelled once she sensed what Khyrr was about to do. She shook her head, expressions of disapproval developing into reproof, then supplication, all in a span of a second. Khyrr shared her tears. He had been standing on her side of the chasm his whole life. She had fought all the battles that were meant for him. It was high time to return the favour. With newfound dedication he cracked a hesitant smile at the demon.

“You will have me, creature. But not them. I will make this place into your tomb.”

The walls of the cave began to shake, as wild magic ran rampant within. Blood started to trickle from Khyrr’s ears and nostrils, and a familiar sick blackness ran in his bulging veins—but it was no more the tally his ailing soul used to require of him. It was deliberate this time. He was willingly expending the currency of flesh and blood—his own life energies—to seal the deal. The demon’s eyes widened in unbridled rage.

“You fool!” she shrieked, clawed hands braced against the wall of celestial light, as she lumbered steadily towards Khyrr. Black fire burst across her form and a horned face made of undulating flames with a purple tear for a mouth opened wailing where her pristine mien had been. “I am undying! You may ravage my cloth of flesh now, but I will remanifest! Your fate is sealed, there is no escape! All you can win is a little time.”

“You know,” Khyrr snorted. “A little time just might be enough.”

Then he shot his hands skyward. His mind fastened its grip on the enormous earthen hills above him and he pulled, and the colossal might of the moon itself—the might which dragged the very tides of the seas— joined in to pull with him. The demon finally broke her bonds and darted to stop him, even as the roof of the chamber buckled with a monstrous crack, and a rock as big as a bastion took her under. A deluge of stone with the weight of a mountain descended to meet Khyrr. In the complete dark he saw the Lamb knocking an arrow on the string of her bow. He smiled, and opened his heart to receive it.

***

Her hair, clothes, and skin crusted in fine stone powder, joints aching with pain, and her mind addled due to lack of sleep, Minerva crested the slope at the lip of the cave, her siblings close in her trail. She looked through a flurry of blinks to the east. Daybreak spilled cream blue on the canvas of the sky, and she willed herself to peer into the first golden rays blooming on the horizon. Instinctively she reached to her left and found that Demetria did the same towards her. Their hands laced together, feeble pink fingers mingling with hefty, brightsteel gauntleted ones. Demetria raised her head towards the sky and Minerva followed suit. Right above them, an enormous silver moon ruled still, defying the conquest of the dawn.

Epilogue

“Hurry! We’re almost out of time!” Kleon beckoned from across the enclave.

Minerva bellowed back to plead for her brother’s patience. She hung the silver necklace on a sharp rock that jutted from the ancient altar. Every inch of the surrounding shrine was overflowing, buried under the tangled mess of offerings. Shining trinkets and hand-carved effigies of devotion glinted in a flickering sea of candles. She held the moon-shaped amulet once more in her fingers, reliving the moment when it was her only token of faith, during the sea voyage to Targon.

Standing at the stern of the Dryhaven she had squinted against the spray of brine cast from the waves to see Demetria’s form recede on the distant harbor.

“Your uncle wanted me to tell you something,” Demetria had said when she hung the effigy about her neck. “A story about your family’s old motto.”

Minerva nodded and allowed her to blunder through the tale she evidently had a rudimentary understanding of, just to spend another minute with her. In truth, there was no need; her father had told her it many times before.

The first time she still remembered. Her favorite toy, the old wooden crossbow, had fallen apart again between two shots. Kleon got bored trying to fix it and left her to her struggles. Her father found her slouching and whimpering in her room.

“He said he won’t fix it,” she chirped, dejected.

“Well, you see.” Her father crouched beside her. “In calamity, act as if there’s no help coming. This is what my father taught to me. And what his father taught him.”

“So, will you not stay to help me?”

“Oh little star, I’m always going to be here to help you.” He offered a tender smile and sat beside her. “It is not about rejecting help. It’s about embracing responsibility. In moments of hardship, to accept one’s solitary burden of destiny is to recognise one’s inherent power to shape that destiny. Every woe that betides your life provides an opportunity to rise above it. You will never be stronger, faster, more cunning, than on the verge between defeat and victory. And while some might blame their failures on the gods, on luck, or on another—or should I say, their siblings,”—he ruffled her hair—“a Volosh always knows that these are all just petty circumstances. Mere flickers of fate. Resenting them is futile, and in the moment of now, where the future is wrought, all that matters is how we take action to shape that future. That is why in calamity, we face the odds as if there’s no help coming. Together.”

Minerva let the amulet swing down and disappear in the jumble of trinkets. She pulled her garb of furs tight, and hurried after Kleon. As she left the enclave running, the top of the world revealed itself above her; a colossal mountain, its tapering peaks stabbing at the heavens, dressed in a dazzling aurora of prismatic lights as it cut the breathtaking vista in half. Falling stars began to streak the night sky and as she watched, bemused, little shapes resolved in the plunging streams of light, resembling tiny ponies made of scintillating brilliance. Minerva traced their path as they soared through the skies above her. Warmth swelled in her chest and cajoled a smile on her face.

“You were right, uncle,” she whispered. “We came to see the stellacorns after all.”

Afterword

When I started writing this book three years ago, League of Legends had a bit of a lore drought. It’s easy to argue with this because that was when the first season of Arcane came out, which definitely gave a boost to the game’s following. Nevertheless, around that time, the continuous stream of short stories petered out, and the focus had palpably been moved away from expanding the lore — a trend that fortunately has turned since then. Despite this temporary lore drought, however, Arcane had shown that the world of Runeterra reached a maturity where it can support individual stories, a conclusion that eventually drove me to write something for Runeterra. This world is awesome, and I hope more and more people will put pen to paper, so we can make this universe grow even further.

This book has been the work of three years, and I wouldn’t be here writing this afterword without everyone who supported me. First and foremost, I thank my wife Nikolett for her everlasting patience and care. I spent many nights inside my office working on tangled paragraphs, and I would never have reached the end of it without her support and understanding.

I’d also like to offer thanks to a friend who now remains unnamed. We started dabbling in writing together, but circumstances led us to walk separate paths. Still, we learned a lot about writing and the literary market, and this book would not be the same without our time spent together.

Another crucial, though involuntary, benefactor was Necrit from YouTube. It is he to whom my interest in League lore can be credited, and I would surely have lost my way in the complexities of it if he hadn’t lit my path via his amazing work.

I’d also like to thank my amazing beta readers, Mathilde, Leo, Gabrielle, Lilla, and Seth. Their advice was crucial in fine-tuning the final edit.

Greatest of all among the people I worked with was my editor, Kelsey. She’s a true gem, and the heavens must have aligned that I found her. She handled the manuscript with a truly professional care, making sure that all my scramblings make sense and my message comes through.

I also thank the artists @chrisfrootart and @Phalanxus who made the book pop. You guys are true rockstars!

Finally, I’d like to offer my gratitude to my English teacher, Andras Ruff. Without his rigorous lessons, strict conduct, and singular professionalism, I would not be the person I am today, as English was the key to all the gates in my life. May he rest in peace. Köszönöm András bácsi.