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bones do not speak. Dust does not sing. So I sing to myself instead, in off-key fragments of forgotten lore, craving the warmth of a heartbeat. It began with a whisper and it will end with a scream. What comes between is still to be seen. And so I wait.
“I would understand if you cannot do this. If you can’t be in another war. I would understand.”
So much that I didn’t know.
You are soldiers of Zeryth Aldris,” he said. “Traitor to the rightful king of Ara, Atrick Aviness.
No time to thank her. No time to question. No time to breathe. Any words I could have said disappeared beneath the clash of steel.
I threw myself over him and bared my teeth, my razored incisors sliding from my gums.
Siobhan,
crimson eyes
She wasn’t entirely right, but she was close. Every inch of my forearm was marked, a solid wall of black X’s, scars on top of tattoos. One X for every infraction, for every shame, symbolizing another piece of my skin that could not be occupied by tales of heroics. That was, after all, the greatest punishment among the Sidnee: the erasure of a story, or worse, the potential for one.
But Siobhan? If Siobhan decided that I was worthless, the only possible reason would be that it was simply the truth.
As far as I knew, none of the Houses had had any contact with humans in many hundreds of years. And compared to Fey, humans were so weak. I counted nearly a dozen gutted Fey in those swamps.
“Queen Sesri is dead.”
By Decree of Queen Sesri, first of her name, she of no successor, I hereby declare that in the untimely event of my death… I skimmed through the rest, several paragraphs of winding verbiage. Until I got to the end — the important part: …crown shall pass to the Arch Commandant of the Order of Midnight and the Order of Daybreak, as one who is most committed to Ara and most qualified for the role.
“It’s a spell. It combined my blood, and Tisaanah’s. And it binds her life to mine. If I die, so does she.”
He was just a child.
“What do you want me to say to you?” I shot back. “Do you want me to tell you that I want to walk away from all of this? I do, Max. Of course I do. But there are so many people who cannot walk away.
It is a privilege to do nothing, Max. So many people do not have that gift.”
It felt like falling. One moment, I was clinging to my plans and composure, and the next, I was lost in him. His scent of lilacs and ash surrounded me. I buried my face against his neck, inhaling it. I could feel the slight shudder in his breathing as he struggled to keep from unraveling.
“It sounded like rain,” he murmured, and all at once his fury turned to utter, bleak sadness.
“Something has changed, you know,” she said, quietly. “Far underneath. Deeper than… than all of this. It feels like…” She frowned. “As if something is searching. Reaching. Trying to see me. But I do not think I wish to be seen.”
“You can’t act against him.” “I certainly can’t kill him.”
“Sometimes, you need to act on nothing but gut feeling. And sometimes, no matter what you do, you lose the battle. Healing is more difficult than killing in every way. But that’s how it always is. I’ve walked both roads. Destroying is easy. Creating is hard.”
“But worth it,” he said. “Always worth it.”
{Perhaps once I was something. But I do not remember what. And maybe I have never been anything but the discarded remains of others.}
{I want something that is real. And I want life, or death, but not this nothingness between.}
“Stay,”
“Please.” I hesitated.
Nothing sadder, than to be so alone. I sat down beside the bed. “Fine,” I said.
Weaker.’ That isn’t how nature works. Even the strongest predators have their enemies. And when the numbers are three to one…” “Three to one?” Siobhan gasped. “Is that a surprise? The human lifespan is a fraction of ours, yes, and perhaps their bodies are physically weaker. But while a Fey would be lucky to produce one or perhaps two children over the course of five hundred years, humans reproduce frequently and easily. And they, too, have access to magic once again.”
Most Fey Houses fell into one of two alliances. The Titherie was led by the House of Wayward Winds, while the House of Obsidian headed the banner of the Caidre. The two were… not on good terms.
“Your value and skill as a Wielder has nothing to do with how much time you spend on a battlefield.”
“Sometimes the best possible thing you can be is useless,”
Wtf asshole
Esmaris Mikov did not attack that rival house. He could have destroyed their cities and burned their crops. He did not. Instead he had their children taken, mutilated, sterilized.
Something snapped into place. Something terrible, something I couldn’t control. The world became a smear. Blood was hot on my face. Eslyn and I turned, and Il’Sahaj was raised, and its hilt was so slick my palms slipped.
Esmaris’s voice unfurled in my mind like smoke: Dead men don’t remember your name.
Do you see? I whispered. See the way they look at us? Not like a monster. Like a god.
And they would have seen me — standing there with Il’Sahaj raised and blood-red wings spilling from my back, shielding the city.
And that had left Zeryth, and so he became Arch Commandant. Not because anyone chose him. But because he was the only one left standing. The whole world shifted a little as I realized exactly how perilous Zeryth’s position was.
Suddenly it was Zeryth’s face cradled in my hands, dark veins beneath his eyes. “But they never told us the cost, Tisaanah,” he said. “What does it cost to climb from so low? Are you willing to pay it?”
“The temples were beautiful,”
“But when the humans came, they crumbled just as easily as the brothels. And the scholars and the whores ended up in the same graves.”
“There is no use in dreaming of realities that do not exist,” I said — echoing my father’s words before I even realized it. “Not unless we follow such dreams with action.”
Still, for reasons I couldn’t explain, our nights together became a bright spot at the end of long and exhausting days.
The stillness in Caduan was not calm. It was paralyzing rage.
“The Atrivez butterfly.”
I was exhausted. A headache pounded between my temples, and a deeper ache settled far beneath that. I met Moth’s wide-eyed, horrified stare with my own.
I wished I could say that I remembered the faces of every person whose flesh rotted beneath my magic. But the truth was, they blended together quickly, struck down in panicked moments of barely-tethered control. Sometimes, those deaths were the only thing that kept Reshaye’s hunger at bay. Still, I would dream of decaying faces.
One day, I blinked and realized I had taken over Essanie and Arith’s regular training duties, leading the troops through the drills myself. I now knew many of the soldiers by name, and beyond that, I knew their strengths and weaknesses.
Cursed. Tainted. Life-thief. Could I argue with any of those definitions? That was what I was. A creature that stole magic from others, like a carrion bird. Scriptures told of people like me. Essneras were incarnations of corruption.
“a typical human wouldn’t be able to Wield it. Just as a Valtain can’t Wield Solarie magic, and vice versa.”
