The body’s aura was a dark honey shade in her aetheric vision. A jaundiced yellow signifying the fear that was the servant’s last emotion. Fear of her knife, fear of his death. That yellowed hue bled into his actual blood, spilling from him as the last of his life ebbed.
She shook her head, trying to forget his face, to forget his eyes when he’d found her there. The growing surprise as her blade bit into his neck.
“Snow Eyes, what’ve you done?”
Evander barged into the study, finding her standing over the dead servant. The soft peals of orchestral strings met her ears before he clumsily shoved the door closed.
Ashe pulled a small flask from the sheath strapped to her thigh under her newly bloodstained stola. Golden and emblazoned with filigree, she took a full draw, the harsh liquor calming her frayed nerves. “Zenith’s cock, Evander, nobody was supposed to be here. I had no choice. And stop calling me that, you know I hate that name.”
“By Nocturne, Snow… er… Ashe.” Evander squatted by the dead body, rifling through the man’s pockets. “You shouldn’t have done…” The young man went silent as his eyes unfocused, glazed even, as if he went somewhere else entirely. He did that from time to time, unnerving it was. “…that,” he finished.
The mist rushed up her legs, pawing like a dog returning with a hunted fowl waiting for a scratch and declaration of a job well done. It aimed to soothe her, the mist did, as the yellowed aura of the wan and pallid corpse faded.
It had to be done, she told herself. But to Evander, she said nothing.
“Elian’s not going to like this.” Evander’s aura blazed shaded crimson with anger and warning. “You weren’t supposed to kill anyone.”
“I don’t give a dawdle of Mother Marrow’s tits what your brother wants. Would you rather I tickled his seedpods to make him forget about sounding the alarm?”
Evander pursed his lips. His face was all planes and angles, not to mention ugly to boot. He had short brown hair in tight curls. Tall and lanky. “That’s not how this crew works.”
“Seedpod juggling it should’ve been,” she muttered into the lip of her flask, a tress of raven falling across her face.
A deep-rooted cough welled from within her breast. She covered her mouth as her entire body convulsed, the mist darkening around her slippers, feeling the pain with her. Entwined, they were, she and the mist. Though the thievery job brought them to the top floor of a five-story villa within Drenth’s Silk Circle sector, the grey aetheric haze clung to her. And it was the poison within the mist that was destroying her from the inside out. A consumption. The nigrum pulmonem as it was called, a wasting disease borne of The Pentax Themselves. Borne from the tomb of Eminence.
The paradox of her connection to the magical aether within the grey.
“Pulmo’s getting worse,” Evander sighed.
Another cough, less painful. “I’m fine.” She washed the coppery tang coating her lips with another shot of spirits. “Let’s find that stupid safe.”
“Ashe, the pulmo takes everyone eventually.”
She looked over; Evander’s aura shifted from angry crimson to darkened peridot fear. Fear for her. Gods, why did he care for her so? He was nothing but a partner to ride beside toward her true purpose.
Nearly a year in Drenth and she was no closer to uncovering her past. She was but a lost cause without a trueborn name, without a history. Elian’s crew out of the second sector, Slag’s End, remained her only meal ticket until she could find her truth.
To discover who she was. Who she’d been.
Evander, a few years her senior, had taken an instant liking to her, giving her that pet name of ‘Snow Eyes’ on account of her white irises and because she’d come from up north from Kalderim in Kanja, where most of the land lay covered in snow. She’d not requited his affections, didn’t want to. Didn’t desire to. He never touched her, though, and for that she was grateful, as she knew most others wouldn’t dream of holding back.
“Enough of the heartwarming butter talk, we need to get out of here so I can have a proper drink.”
Evander side-eyed her in that creepy uncle sort of manner but then relented to begin an extensive search for the hidden trigger that had eluded her before the servant had made an untimely appearance.
The soft hum of aethecite bled through the walls, pulsing like a heartbeat, sending the valuable fuel borne of Eminence’s aether throughout the majestic Silk Circle villa. The desktop lamp gleamed brightly as the warmth from the aethecite engines outside the villa spewed radiant energy within, a reminder of the essence of which the ore was derived—the Great Crystal of Life.
Ashe coughed and took another drink before pocketing the flask. The mist quivered beside the dead servant, sluicing over the corpse with a probing tendril.
“Here we go,” Evander said as part of the wall opposite Ashe slid open, revealing a darkened portal leading downward into the belly of the villa. He gave her a lavish grin, while his aura churned a dark forest green with greed melding with a darkened red of lust. “See?”
She shrugged.
Evander lifted an old-tech lantern from a peg just inside the hidden door, coaxing the wick to life with his firestarter. Unlike the rest of the villa, it appeared this tunnel wasn’t powered by aethecite. The smell of centuries-old musk wafted up as they hurried down the winding stairway, the soft blossom of the lantern lighting the hoary passage. Ashe ran a finger across the aged stone, dust thicker than her fingernail. At the bottom, the walls were lined with catacombs. Faded sculptures lay undisturbed, covered in thick, opaque cobwebs. Doorways, arched and crumbling, led to other chambers.
She shivered as she examined a statue of some long dead bastard, as it wasn’t lost on her that in the dark, dank catacombs, she was clothed in a thin-sleeved, pleated stola with slippers. Her hands roamed up and down her arms trying to coax some warmth back into her flesh. She could’ve burned her aether, but she decided to save her energy for what was to come.
Evander disappeared, the luminosity of the lantern fading. Ashe followed, the mist around her feet rippling. Ever present, her constant reminder that time was not on her side.
Trotting to catch up, Ashe began to brood, as she was wont to do when she was about to use her aetheurgy.
Her thoughts strayed to the dead man in the study above. How long until the Pentax judged him worthy of the Meadows in the afterlife? Or would he be sent to Nocturne’s Pit with the rest of the broken and battered? Would she be deemed worthy of the Pentax when the pulmo finally ended her?
An answer she sought constantly but never learned.
None of the augurs of the Scattered Shards could answer her questions whenever she’d coyly asked the clergymen about the mist and why it was killing her even though she rarely stepped foot outside the mega-cities of the Mistlands. Priests to the Pentax the augurs may be, but as scholars, they went lacking.
“Must be ‘round here somewhere.” Ashe found Evander pushing stones about with the tip of his boot. “Here we go. Right where Elian said it’d be.” Under the pile of stones was a circular ring, rusted with age. He handed her the lantern and pulled it with a grunt. The stone slab gave way to a cloud of dust. “Call me a firedrake’s tit,” he cursed, waving the earthy powder away.
“Firedrake tit.”
“That’s not what I meant.” Evander cleared his throat annoyingly as he took the lantern and shined it upon a now-revealed safe. “You ready for this, Snow Eyes?”
As always, Ashe kept her true thoughts to herself—at least until she had a few drinks. “Stop calling me that.”
Staring at the lock, Ashe painted it across the canvas of her mind, memorizing each little intricacy, any irregularity. Everything seemed to stop; all there was, shoved to the back of her consciousness. There was only her and the lock.
When the mist curling around her feet oscillated, she was ready, the memory ingrained.