She shook her head. “No, Lojen. My father was your ward. No buts, he was. Not me. I’m done with the Pentax forcing me into something I’m not.” She paused as a pulmo cough wove up her throat. “I… nevermind. Just heed me, Lojen Tevunson, I’ll be fine.”
“That goes against everything a wardkeeper stands for.”
“Listen to the humir, Scurred Hatch,” Ruane said around the tip of her longknife, still digging for whatever was stuck in her craw. “She can handle herself.”
“But the Forgemistress said…” the drakken wardkeeper trailed off as Finnus Dunleith appeared from belowdecks.
The elfir wore Kanjan funerary braids in his silver hair over his pointed ears, kohl circling his yellow-pupiled eyes. Pale face even paler than normal, almost like the very ice of Kanja. His shirt, trousers, and overcoat were black, pressed and immaculate. In mourning he was.
Everyone on Neenah LeFleur’s airship paused what they were doing—even the hobgoblin twins, who were wrestling over the last bone of the evenfall prior’s dinner—and watched as the Kanjan elfir of the Golden Throne walked up to her. His bikromi sister turned her veiled gaze upon him, and if the girl was any good at reading auras, she could tell that the bikrome had seen all this coming and had withheld it from him. Stoic bitch.
Finnus Dunleith drew up before her. With tears streaking the rings of kohl, he reached into his overcoat, and pulled forth a hunk of metal. She realized it was a multi-barreled wheellock pistol. The elfir kissed the grip of the revolver and held it out to her. “He would have wanted you to have this.”
Taking the pistol, she noticed the ‘B’ engraved in the grip. B for Benld. A sob threatened her throat, so she swallowed it back. “Thank you.”
“Wherever you go, Brynn,” he said softly, “know that he goes with you. Just as he does me and my sister-friend up there.” He turned toward Valeria, a sad smile breaking that somber façade of his. “You know, it’s just like Emre Benld to leave us hanging when the going was gettin’ good. There was this time with the mines…”
She turned back toward the desert city of Drenth hidden within the Sea of Mist while the elfir went on. She fingered the engraving upon the pistol’s grip. The Hammer of Mother Marrow was slung at her hip, opposite the Strix. Each pulsed with aether. Life on one side, Death on the other. All bound within her.
One day, perhaps tomorrow, maybe years from now, she’d have to go to the ruins of Eminence. But until that day, the girl with the trueborn name of Brynn Benld would make her own path.
Rebirth
WAILING.
O Nocturne, they heard the wails. It was the sweetest sound. Which meant their wayward soul had a mortal body waiting.
Excruciating.
Demanding.
Irate.
There was pressure upon the veil protecting the Meadows from that of Nocturne’s Pit, a thin, yet strong barrier of elemental material comprising the threads of the entire world. It, the Aether of Life, warded the souls of the damned within the black cauldron of the ethereal void. Their ancient, centuries long lifeforce pressed against the gulf, spanning eternity, yet still nothing at all. Flares burned within them with each second passing.
Time meant nothing in the Meadows, especially to those under the thrall of the Pit. Time was all they had, all they were, all they would ever be until released. Seconds felt like eons, eons passed like seconds.
The veil pulsed, rippling like flowing water. Undulating in waves great and small. Their being, nay their essence, their soul, pressed harder, thrust elemental tendrils at the resistance. It convexed outward toward the Meadows, groaning within the non-walls hemming wandering shades into non-rooms of Death. Snapping and popping along the tethers that bound the essence of their soul to Nocturne’s Pit.
Behind their essence was a crystal of obsidian so large it dwarfed anything else within the Pit. Multi-faceted of crystalline black, the Crystal of Death held a link to their soul. It was the final binding between souls locked in the Pit with those allowed to the Meadows and the peaceful slumber. A prison, a chain keeping a soul bound within the abyss.
Some of the souls were warped, twisted into daemons, others were those of man turned to Nocturne. All were howling in forever torment, all begging for release. But that rarely happened here in the Pit where the heinous reaped their failures in agony.
They felt the god, but it felt wrong, felt incorrect. Nocturne was pure Death, this felt of Life. What did it mean?
And then the heave of the void, felt it within their being. It tensed, the void did. It fought back. The wails of the hateful souls locked in the Pit raged like a volcano ready to burst, spewing forth molten aura. The Crystal of Death pulsed with anger, with hatred, with every negative emotion and desire, and yet, there was that underpinning of Life. Odd. The links between the bound souls faltering under the evil bound within the deathly aether.
But they heard the voice. Soft, delicate, ancient. Muffled sounds, broken words. Their soul latched onto it through the tiniest of cracks within the veil. The wails roared from deep within the Pit. Dank, black, and down near the center of the world. Down near Nocturne Himself, a corrupted prison for their Divine near Noctis. That’s where the source of Life felt the most wrong, yet, there it was.
Fleeting, the sparks of their soul sent shivers throughout the void as memory returned, the dark pushed back at the transparent nothingness as their soul sought purchase within the realm of the slumbering dead. It clawed, their soul did, yearned and stretched from the empty chasm of the Pit, searching for the voice, demanding release.
Like a claw reaching out, they grasped onto the voice. It pulled, yanked them from the depths of their prison. Through the veil, past the withering souls of the dead, upward toward a light-that-wasn’t-a-light. Glorious, it was. Bright and burning with the force of a thousand suns. Fire and glistening dew.
And they knew, finally, they did. Life, succulent and enveloping.
Their eyes opened, bloodred film sluiced down their snouted face as the blooddrake barged into the world of the living like a newborn birthed from a mother’s womb. Crimson cruor poured down the blooddrake’s forelimbs as they sat upright, dribbling down their throat, rivering over their crimson and black exoscales. The blooddrake swallowed the sanguine antidote and felt alive once more.
Vision cleared, red haze giving way to sputtering torches in damp, musty air. Only one clawed hand, the other missing below the elbow on their right, lined with the thick liquid—which the blooddrake now remembered its name: blood—gripped the edge of a hollow tub of stone and mud. Feeling, the sense of touch under hard keratin, sending memories shooting through their snake-like body that floundered in broken remembrance of what it was meant to live.
Restored and rebirthed. Again.
A low, distinct murmur met the blooddrake’s earholes. One voice louder than the others. Chanting, all, the language that of Noctis and Void Form aetheurgy. A voidspeak the living knew naught. A cabal of withered and desiccated, hunched forms locked hands on skeletal forearms, swaying back and forth in the ancient rituals of aether.
Slithering into an S position, the blood coursing down their exoscales as one of the decrepit forms righted itself—herself—as the others continued to chant. The woman was old, older than any living creature not a god. Her skin was emaciated, missing in some places showing the living muscle underneath. Wispy, near nonexistent hair cascaded down the woman’s blindingly pale pate. The creature’s lower lip was missing, and where her eyes should have been were empty holes.
The Matron was the name recalled.
“Solanine.” Raspy, the voice sounded like a dagger on a whetstone. The Matron bowed her head.
Solanine, yes, that was the name the blooddrake was born with. Memories surged into Solanine’s mind. Years, decades, centuries of thoughts, schemes, dreams, and death raced into them. But one regret loomed larger than everything else.
Lu Har and the Godsblood.
“You’ve done well, my faithful servants,” came a melodious voice in the shadows behind the coven of oracles who watched without eyes.
Solanine squinted into the shadows. A man, once handsome, now wilted and scarred, sat with linen stained by blood draped over his shoulder. His body, that which was visible, was burned, as if the acidic blood of a vvyrm had showered him. Yet, his all-onyx eyes bore the hunger of revenge. “Lu Har?”
