Emre staggered like he took a cruel jab to the throat. She’d caught him off-guard. In a way, that made him seem more real, more humir. Less the Gutter King, more a simple man. “How do you know that?”
“I saw a bikrome with a baby. Daemons followed her. Among other things…” His aura began to steady itself, no longer waffling under his emotions. This was his true self, she realized. Hardened and stalwart. He was steel through and through. How could someone become so hard? “I saw a vision of you. And a woman in black dying while an owl pecked at her.” She lifted the bangle. “Through this, I think.”
“I should’ve known the visions would come to you sooner rather than later. I can see it now, Brynn, the aetheurgy in you has begun to change. Your pupils, they are turning white.” White? How? Emre sighed, “Forgive me, Cad.” To her, “Brynn… your mother, the Fallen took her.” His aetheric aura pulsed a dangerous crimson. “She was lost…”
Although the man’s face bespoke of truths, Ashe discerned there was more he wasn’t saying. The Gutter King was holding something back, not her father. Something he wasn’t yet prepared to speak aloud. She should press, she knew, but didn’t. He was here now for a reason, why wait all these years? From all rumor and talk, the Gutter King was nothing if not tactful.
Had she not the encounters with Solanine, the drakken, the vicars, nor Elian’s subtle threats all in the last two days, she probably would’ve been more surprised. But these were not coincidences.
“Why are you here? And why are my pupils turning white? That cannot be normal,” she said through a grin, trying to make light of this quaint meeting.
“A part of me wishes I didn’t have to.” His hands scratched at his forearms as if trying to calm an itch, instead digging deeper as if he wanted to be free of his skin. If not for the coat he wore, she might figure he would draw blood. He almost seemed grateful for her switched topics. Almost. “It would be better had you never known me. Make no mistake, Brynn, I loved your mother. Love her to this day. She was a part of me that I could never be.” Guilt threatened tears at the corners of his eyelids. “And I love you more than my own life. More than my own soul. I may be damned, but it is not a wish I have for you.”
“You say that now? Like you know me? Or what I’ve endured without you to guide me. Father you may be, but you’ve not exactly crowned yourself sire of the year because of what happened to Drenth.” There it was, that anger again spinning out of control. “I’m not a fucking child anymore! You saw to that when your bikrome left me with the Scattered Shards.”
He took her attack with grace, which, truth told, made her more irritated. She wanted a rise out of him, to be able to hate him. It would make this easier.
“I know, and for that, I’m eternally sorry. No parent should ever want that life forced upon their child.” His compassionate gaze turned hard. A look Ashe knew all too well. The look of a fighter. One who needed to use all at their disposal. Even family. The harsh reality of life in the Mistlands. “You ask why now? Because I need you, Brynn. More important,” his gaze lowered toward her runic tattoos, “I need your aetheurgy. Without it, we cannot beat the Fallen.”
“Some father you are, begging for help from a child left on her own. Think I’ll just forget seventeen years without parents and come toddling about because you beckon?”
Her face must have revealed the betrayal she felt inside because he turned away from her in shame. No, in hurt his aura told. “I… The higher a person rises, the less the rest of the world sees. So, it becomes when we fall. It dogs us until the end. Plagues us.” He turned back toward her. “My father used to tell me that when I was but a child. It wasn’t until the Fallen took everything from me did I truly understand. I cannot erase what I’ve done. Had Bliss given me another choice, I would have chosen different. For you, more than anything.”
“Forget it.” Her tone was more acidic than she’d intended. How could it not? For years she’d imagined what she would say to her parents if ever the chance presented itself, but this was not how she’d envisioned it going. “Forget it,” she repeated, more even keeled this time, “it’s in the past. I’m over it.”
“You shouldn’t lie, Brynn. It’s unbecoming.”
“I am what you made me, Father.”
“Fair.” He knelt beside her anew and pointed at her bangle instead of reaching for it. She realized she was grateful because she didn’t know if she could maintain her veneer had he touched her again. She would crack otherwise; her walls would come crumbling down. It would take time for him to earn her trust and he seemed like he knew it. “Do you know what that is?”
“This?” She turned the golden ring on her forefinger, the rune of Ignis etched upon the thin, auric band. “Void no. I didn’t steal it, if that’s what you’re implying. It… this is going to sound stupid, but I was… well, okay, yes, I was going to steal something. But not this. I didn’t even know it was there. All I felt was a pull. It was aether, obviously. But one second, I felt this pull, then the next, this was attached to my wrist. I tried to take it off, but it won’t budge.”
“You couldn’t remove it shy of removing your hand from your arm. It has chosen you as its master.” A pause stretched. “It’s called the Eye of the Soul. A talisman of Eminence.”
Eye of the Soul? “That sounds… ominous. For me, eh?” The diamond gleamed in the soft aethecite lamp that bathed the prison cell. “Do you know what a Godsblood is?”
“You’ve heard this before?” She nodded. “A Godsblood is one borne of the line of the chosen. Unbroken from the First Godsking down to the Last. Blessed by the Pentax.”
“Cursed more like.”
“As Cad once said,” he lamented. “She used to say, ‘Never trust the Pentax.’ I now know what she meant. As you will one day. Your mother has the Blood of the Gods in her veins. The Nightingales hail directly back to Eminence. That is why the Fallen took her instead of killing her along with the rest of our family. And that blood flows through you. That is why Val stole you away. Val,” to her inquisitive frown, “is the bikrome you saw in your visions. She was the one to hand you to the Shards. Directly to one named Cyan, as commanded by Bliss. It was the Ideal Daughter who chose to revive me. To bring me back.”
Cyan… betrayer. Liar. How could you have kept this from me all this time? “Then I have Her to thank for this misery?”
“Misery you may think it, my daughter, but I see it as a blessing. Without Bliss’ intervention, the Fallen would have had a Godsblood and the Eye. With both, he’d have a clear route into Eminence. To finish what he started five hundred years ago. On Bliss’ command, Val is the one who placed the Eye in that safe. O yes, Val knew you’d one day come to Drenth. She is a bikrome, after all.” The steel came back to his face, hinting at some torment underneath in need of covering. A secret hidden, perhaps? “All we needed to know is where and when you’d be.”
“Lucky me.” She tried to read the secret in his aura, but somehow, he was able to keep it from her. Zenith’s cock, he was a hard man to read. No wonder the Fallen hasn’t been able to capture him after all these years. “So, what’s this thingamajig do?”
“Several things. Your aetheurgy is unlike any Form you might’ve learned by your tutelage of the Shards. But the most pressing use is the Eye is the means to break the Seals of Eminence. This might be difficult to learn.”
“Godsdamn,” Ashe said after her father explained about the Seals. About the final act of the Last Godsking during his war with the Fallen.
She realized now how much history the world had buried in the tomb of Eminence. Even the teaching of the Scattered Shards held nothing of this information. She was but a paint droplet in the mural of the world.
“Which is why it cannot fall into the Fallen’s hands.”
“Why do I sense a ‘but’ coming?”
Emre regarded her with raised cheeks. “You sound just like Cad when she was but your age. Your mother was one mercurial woman.”
“Thanks?” Ashe then began to hack, her lungs on fire as the pulmo tore through. A glob of tar rose, and she spat it onto the prison’s stone floor. “What about this? Pretty sure the pulmo’ll kill me sooner rather than later.”
“That is the corruption of Canlon Carr’s final sacrifice. The pulmo is dangerous to all, but more so to a Godsblood, for your aetheurgy is also corrupted. Your Soul Form is tainted, and yes, it will kill you if you do not learn to control it. The mist is your tool, your weapon, your existence. Harness it, be it, and it will serve you.”
“Wonderful.”
He stood, maybe a head and a half taller than she. Yet there was a presence about the man. His aura blazed. She didn’t know what that meant, for it had never been that strong before.
“For one who calls himself ‘king’ of this city, I expected you to be taller.” She couldn’t stop herself.
“Not the first time I’ve heard that.” He retrieved the lantern. “Tevun once told me that height mattered not when a drowning man had the determination to reach for the surface.” Another sad smile. “Tevun always had such odd parables and that one always stood out to me as one of the weirdest.” A shake of his head, but it had a sort of fondness in it.
“Who’s Tevun?”
“He was my wardkeeper.”
