We flitted through the ruins for almost an hour. It was now getting close to midnight, but there was nothing untoward about being here in the darkness anymore. If anything it felt, well, magical – an empty city, snow billowing… A magister-band stationed at the remains of the Green Tower was renewing our protective spells and flight every fifteen minutes – even if they were inferior, the spells of mere mages would still do at a pinch – and Timesnatcher was stretching each interval out for us, allowing us more time to comb through the shattered laboratories and libraries before Zakimel’s lot got their hands on them. I’d long-since let Gilaela go back to Etherium to save myself the inevitable jokes, but even without the glittery radiance I got by okay – I needed little light to see by, and as far as I could tell the arch-diviner would’ve been just as happy with his eyes closed. As such I didn’t bother with any illusions or other light-sources I could’ve produced.
We stood, the two of us, in the dusty darkness of a tower-room, alone but for the artefacts of a bygone era.
“Do you actually know what you’re looking for?” I called to him across the stacks of books, time-worn volumes of dubious value. He’d been ‘feeling’ increasingly strange to my power, but I couldn’t quite discern what was going on.
“It’s lain dormant, buried under the vampire’s potencies for a long time,” he said. “The traces are almost cold. It might be that it won’t speak to me, but I would be most surprised if it were hidden entirely from my sight. There should be more traces to be found… Should we continue?”
He was putting the weight of the decision on me?
We’d explored what we could of the Green Tower’s basement, and I’d stayed behind him while he went from place to place, from one horrid, bloody room to the next – after the first twenty minutes we’d started investigating the other towers, and now here we were, no closer to answers than we had been right at the start. A number of objects had called out to my senses, and in the undead archmages’ chambers there’d been opulent (if ancient) furnishings accompanying spell-worked swords, a number of wizardry-imbued pieces of armour… but for the last thirty minutes everything I’d perceived had been an ensorcelled item of inauspicious nature. The only interesting ones were a pair of mouldy boots granting the wearer a light tread, if I was reading the runes right, and a bracelet designed to imbue the wearer with a strong grip (probably made for an old person). There’d been one book, but it was just a mass of pulp, sitting as it did unprotected beneath a bare, rotten windowsill; the covers were proofed against burning, and, to add insult to injury, it was a text of divination.
I’d expected more, frankly. Had the place been so-thoroughly picked-over already by the previous treasure-hunters?
I somehow doubted it. We’d been taken to the more-boring areas, that was all.
“Is there some reason you want me to be the one to decide?” I asked. “You’re supposed to be the arch-diviner.”
“I don’t think we’re going to get any further tonight,” he said at last, carefully placing a thin volume back where he found it. “I… There’s something – something ahead of us. I can’t see what’s coming – for us.”
I stared at him.
“Oh, damn it, fine,” he said in a resentful tone, and slammed his hand down on the shelf a second time –
A new book was there, bound in pale human leather, stamped with a single Vaahn-rune on its cover. Along the spine was a series of glyphs I couldn’t read at this distance.
No wonder he’d been triggering my sorcerous senses lately.
“I didn’t want to tell you.”
I kept my voice level: “When did you find it, Timesnatcher?” I was more curious than angry.
“Fifteen minutes ago. I’ve been trying to find a route to avoid it, because I don’t think it’s safe to read – but every path I travel ends in trouble between you and I. That I wish to avoid at all costs. Everything about those futures screams I’m doing something wrong.” He smiled, tired-looking, and seemed to wait pensively for a moment before saying, “How do you intend to respond?”
“Well at last, I found you!” a voice cried out above us, cutting us off.
For a split second I didn’t recognise her without the obvious Onsolorian accent, but before I looked up to see Em floating above us I twigged it was her and moved higher to meet her, darting between the sections of broken roofing.
She was in her Stormsword apparel, the rising-phoenix mask and teal-coloured hood, and when I ascended into the snow storm and kissed her it just brought back memories of last night… her flesh, so much of her skin in contact with my own… I almost shuddered, and felt the same quiver of pleasure pulse through her body as I held her.
“Ah – I believe you had something to report?” Timesnatcher interrupted after giving us a second or thirty. “Stormsword?”
I noted the strain in his voice.
Can’t he tell what she’s going to say?
I expected an update on Shadowcloud’s condition, something similarly ominous.
“Oh, ze – I mean, the, guard…” Em took a moment to catch her breath, “the guards are saying that Rosedawn’s… her body – it has gone missing. The courier, found alive three miles from where he was last seen – from where he last saw himself, he says, once they found him and untied him. They…”
Em faltered. We watched, looking down from fifteen feet as Timesnatcher blurred.
The kind of incessant motion into which he’d entered was uncanny. It was as though he’d been painted-on to reality then smeared across its surface – I drifted closer to him, back through the roof, as if to reassure myself he still possessed depth, solidity…
Unauthorized use: this story is on Amazon without permission from the author. Report any sightings.
Suddenly I was almost on the ground, and he was standing before me – his fingers around my wrist were painful despite the satyr-flesh I was partaking in.
I didn’t have shields up, and his violence startled me. He held my right hand palm up, and his eyes behind the mask were closed.
“Savarre… oh, oh… this hand – did you have a dagger, Feychilde?”
Did I have a…
“A dagger?” I swallowed. “Duskdown took the only dag-”
I lost all breath, all consciousness, for a single instant. As though the world stopped and restarted.
“-ger…” I finished the word explosively, looking around in amazement.
Snowflakes, frozen on the air.
Em, unmoving above me, not a hair stirring in the breeze.
No – for there was no breeze.
“I’ve taken you as deep as you can go,” Timesnatcher said, loosening his grip on my wrist only slightly. “What – what is Duskdown to you?”
“I honestly don’t know how to answer that. He seems to have a plan for me, and he’s warned me off trying to take him down…”
“Can I ask – for a favour?” He suddenly sounded scared. “Will you shield me, Feychilde? A-against any ill-will?” He licked his lips.
“What is it, Timesnatcher?”
There was an awful hollowness to my voice, a borrowed terror that came in recognition of the emotion that gripped him. He hadn’t been afraid like this even once throughout the whole day, not when facing thousands of enemies, not when facing a deity.
“It’s him. Duskdown.”
“If I put a shield on you,” I said slowly, mind struggling to keep up, “it can’t go too far from me or it’ll weaken, dissipate, according to the books. I’m working on getting a better range, but if you’re going back I’d –“
Time span again, everything desynchronised.
There was a fluidity, a motion, like being pulled deep under the water in a terrible current that goes only downwards, ever downwards, into the heart of the world where Wyrda ruled the dark under-oceans, miles from the light.
“– have to –”
A single normal moment, a moment of blue fire, and I knew I was crossing the Winter Door – then the dark depths washed over me a final time before it was over.
“– come with you… Where are we?”
The gardens were small for a building of this size. There was a neat rectangular wall eight feet high enclosing the estate; trees loomed beyond the wall whichever way I looked, even through the silvery gate, clearly overgrowing the pathway that was the only way in and out. The ivy covering the building’s peach-painted exterior had been recently trimmed, and the rose-bushes were expertly maintained. I looked up at the big mansion, its three storeys pale against the night sky.
No lights were lit within. The stillness of this slowed-time spell he’d put me under was creepy, sending shivers up my arms.
“My home. We need help.” He went up the steps and opened the door, pulling me along with him. “Come – she’s locked the window and I can’t keep you like this forever, not without paying the price. I need my full faculties. There’ll be hell to pay if I just smash my way in…”
“Where – where’s Em?”
“I did not bring her.”
“… Why?”
“I neither need nor trust her. She is Henthae’s. Zakimel’s.”
It chilled me to hear him speak of her in such a manner, but I could hardly argue – not with him – not when his very words set my own doubts aflame.
As we entered the hall and flew together up to the shadowed balconies looking down upon the entryway, I settled shields about him, shields separate from the ones I put around both of us. Even if Duskdown didn’t intend me ill-will, he still shouldn’t have been able to get through the barriers so long as he intended Timesnatcher ill-will – but this wasn’t the time to test it. An independent defence made the most sense in this situation.
At first I thought the shapes’ rotations were slowed like everything else here, but I blinked and saw with satisfaction that it’d just been a relic of my fearful imagination – they would still operate under the effects of the diviner’s magic.
It was only as we reached the upper floors that I realised what I was sensing.
“Timesnatcher…”
“Just here – in here –“
Doors, narrow passages – a bedchamber.
I could tell immediately that something was wrong, even before I saw Lightblind’s corpse. A debris of fine objects littered the room; one of the bed’s four posts had been buckled, caved in. The smells of death were heavy on the air, but there was blood in only one place: ‘DUSKDOWN’, the characters drawn by his finger, the red word written on the mirror.
Timesnatcher released me, and before I even realised that his fierce grip on my wrist was suddenly alleviated, gone, he had already cleaned everything up – the mirror was clear once more, the buckled post of the bed righted and the debris swept aside; the masked corpse in its gleaming white robe was across his lap as he sat on the edge of the bed, his head bowed and his shoulders shaking.
“Perri! Perri, no, Perri…”
Quite how long he’d been sitting there like that, I didn’t know. But no amount of clearing up would eradicate the image from my mind.
The blood on the mirror, long dried, each letter having run, dripping at the bottom edges so that they were twice the length they ought to be. Giant, gaunt letters.
The little items on the ground: the platinum figurine of a house-cat, looking pleased with itself; a tiny ring inset with three diamonds; a small, cracked pocket-watch.
The champion’s body, hanging beside the bed. The Bagger Boy’s dagger, punched through her mask at a crack in its brow, stamping Lightblind’s head to the wall.
“T-Timesnatcher,” I said, voice breaking –
He whipped his head around as if to glare at me. “You – your dagger – how? What is this, Feychilde?”
“I suppose,” I said thickly, raising my wet eyes to the ceiling so I didn’t have to see such a glorious champion flopping around lifelessly across his knees, “he’s… erm… Oh drop it all.”
He already knew what I looked like. I removed my mask, pawed at my eyes while I thought out loud.
“He’s trying to drive a wedge between us. A dagger. Whatever he wants from me, it involves us being at odds with each other. He –“ I drew a quivering breath, forced myself to look back down, meet the arch-diviner’s eyes. “He knows you can’t fight him. He knows you’ll have to blame me instead.”
Timesnatcher was shaking his head softly but I continued:
“He kn-knows you know you c-can’t blame me but you have to.” Revulsion, a sickness comprised of anger and sorrow, rose up through my vacant innards – I wanted to throw up, I wanted to put my fist through the wall, I wanted to fall to my knees – the opposed urges kept me trapped, pinned in the moment, disgust rolling up and down my taut skin in waves. “Why? Why, Duskdown? Why did you have to do this?”
One urge finally won out – kneeling.
I fell forwards, then sat back on my feet, setting my mask down next to me.
I looked down at the metallic half-face, designed to complement a grinning visage.
I am not Feychilde, I thought with a shudder.
Whatever answer I’d expected the universe to provide to my rhetorical question, the growled words of the arch-diviner were not it – words so deep and strangled I could barely discern them:
“I k-killed his w-wife today.”
Then, at last, he broke, bursting into dry sobs.
I wanted to return to Em, to my brother and sister. See them all, explain everything. Maybe even pick up an incredibly-dangerous text that’d been haphazardly placed on a pile of books in a random tower.
But first I knelt on the floor of Timesnatcher’s bed-chamber while he cradled his dead lover, knelt there and listened to the wept words of a crushed hero.
I might not have been Feychilde, not right now, but I was still a champion, damn it. I was there for those who needed me most.
Lightblind, Leafcloak, Rosedawn were gone. The others could wait.
In this moment, the one who needed me most was Timesnatcher.