Of the five patterns, three of them share the same eight opening moves, while the other two diverge after four. Nearly every game ends in one of the three open-core patterns. Only the very easiest and very hardest of routes can be played once the center is full, so it is a strategy reserved for the most daring and most foolish of players.
-A Verdis Player's Handbook
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Desten Varon 2 (though only I appended numbers to their names) lived far across the city well away from my home base with Desten 1. I underestimated the time it would take to get there, forgetting that this far from the downcity there were no horses, no carriages. Everyone flew. If they wanted to go further, they flew faster and higher, and if there were a system for being flown by someone else I didn’t know how to access it.
So I walked. It took hours.
Compared to the downcity, the Varon capital wasn’t particularly large, but you could still fit Woodedge inside it eight times over and still have room left.
Desten 2 was a verdis player, and thus spent hours every day either working out or training with his team.
I’d never heard of verdis in the downcity, but it was one of many power-enabled sports that the upcity folk put great stock in. It consisted of three teams who acted in rotation, one on offense, one on defense, and one on interference. There were very complicated rules, but it boiled down to trying to construct a particular pattern in the scoring area with thrown power, which was incredibly easy to disrupt as long as someone could get between you and your target. So there was a lot of running, flying, fighting, and other excitement. Very popular. Not my thing.
I found Desten 2 at his family’s private verdis training arena in the northern quarter of the city. He was flying between glowing obstacles in the air painted of solid light, all in red, yellow, or blue. His own power was so tightly controlled, I couldn’t even see it as he ran through the air, sliding beneath, flipping over, and twisting around the ever-shifting field of obstacles.
An impressive level of ability, and one that made me less inclined to suspect him. Killer Desten used his power very flashily. Desten 2 gave off a vibe of such incredible control, I had a hard time imagining him hacking wildly at a body instead of simply slicing it apart cleanly without a sign.
Ugh. Horrible mental image. My stomach squirmed, but I focused on the arena.
“Hey, what are you doing here?” demanded one of the other onlookers, glaring as he noticed me walk in.
Several of the blue obstacles flickered, shifting position, and Desten hit one before he could swerve.
“Kavist!” Desten growled, and the man hastily refocused on the training arena. The rogue obstacles solidified and resumed their normal movements.
“Who is that?” a woman asked. She was lying reclined in the center of the arena, floating on a cyan disc with a bubble of the same colour around her, but after the brief commotion she drifted down through the maze of obstacles and landed in front of me. “Who are you?” she demanded.
“Astesh Varon. I need to talk to Eirn Desten.”
She snorted, eying me unhappily. “Lots of people want to talk to Desten. I don’t see any reason you should be special. Who let you in?”
“Uh, no one? I just walked in.”
She snorted. “Walked? Hah.” She floated nearer, flipped onto her stomach, and poked me in the chest.
“Hey!”
“Yeah, you’re well below the household danger threshold, that’s why. But at least you’re politer than most obsessed fans. So I’ll tell you nicely to go away.”
“I am not a fan. I’ve never even seen a verdis game. I just need to talk to Eirn Desten about something unrelated.”
“No, you don’t. As far as I’m concerned, there is no unrelated. If you’re not here about verdis, you’re not welcome. Shoo.”
I was beginning to really dislike her condescending attitude. “I need to talk to him.”
“About what?”
“Eh.” I couldn’t very well say ‘his whereabouts on the night of snowfall 18th,’ without it becoming immediately obvious what I was doing. Honestly, I didn’t have a very good plan. Just, feel him out, try to see if I could find any way to narrow down the suspects.
I was close to ruling him out by sheer power control alone. But if I could at least see him up close, hear his voice, see what colour his power actually was.
“Eishen? What’s the matter?” Desten shouted, and the woman turned, blushing. The blue obstacles which matched her own power in shade had started to drift. “Why is everyone so distracted today?”
He flew towards us, but I already knew he wasn’t the one I was after. His voice was very deep, rough and accented in a way the killer’s had not been. His short hair only added certainty to my initial impressions.
“I’m Astesh Varon, sorry to bother you. I’m trying to find a particular Desten, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t you. My apologies, eirn, I should not have intruded. But, if I might ask, what colour is your magic?”
Desten 2 huffed. “Didn’t the name give it away?”
I shook my head, puzzled.
“Reirn Desten. Look him up. Kids these days.” Then Desten 2 flared his power in a quick flash that covered his entire body like a skin-tight outfit. Yellow, matching the majority of the obstacles that hadn’t drifted while we conversed. It vanished just as quickly as he turned to the woman in her cyan bubble. “Eishen, be helpful if you can. Kavist, stop fooling around.” And with that, he turned and jumped back into the obstacle course.
Eishen scowled at me. “So, you need a list of all the Desten Varons in the area, huh?”
“That would be incredibly helpful, thank you.”
She scoffed. “I don’t have such a list, moron. Why would anyone need a list like that?”
Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
I shrugged.
“Where are you from, anyway? I don’t recognize your name.”
“Ah, well, I’m from a remote branch that mostly went into hiding several generations ago. It’s a long complicated story, and not really relevant to my purpose here. I need to find Eirn Desten. But, not this one. Obviously.”
“Eishen, I know you can do better,” Desten shouted.
Eishen turned back toward the arena, waving a hand dismissively. Her cyan obstacles began acting more aggressively, and Desten nodded once before continuing to weave his way between them. She spoke without turning away from the arena. “So, a bit of context would really help. Obviously, you didn’t see Desten in a verdis match. I’ve heard of a few other Destens around, but no one’s really been in the verdis scene lately. There was one visiting a year or two back, but he’s from Bluemont. In this city?” She shrugged. “Can’t help.”
I couldn’t offer any context clues, since I didn’t know what Desten did apart from murder fellow nobility in the middle of the night far from any cities. But at least I could rule out Desten 2. That made me feel better about my chances.
I took my leave and started for home, thinking as I walked.
The upcoming touring could either be a good thing or a problem, but it was still a time limit pressing down on me. I wanted to get any local Destens out of the way before it began, in case they decided to travel for the season.
I began to worry I'd already waited too long.
I still didn’t know any solid potential motives for killing the Sarosa heir, especially for a Varon. They were close allies. Maybe I’d be better served investigating the Utrenad or Oros Destens. Or even Desten Metako. He was Fylen’s wife’s brother, which I really shouldn’t assume meant he would be innocent. Families could be contentious. Families in high power? That had to only make things more complicated.
The local political situation was actually very stable. While houses in general did a lot of backstabbing and shifting alliances, Sarosa and Varon stayed at the top because of their stable alliance. Which made them a lot more of a target to outsiders than from within.
Fylen’s death really served no political purpose, unless one had a grudge against the Sarosa reirn and reirna in particular. As Fylen had been their only child, and they were considered far too old to have a replacement heir, this was an attack on their legacy more than anything. But his wife and soon-to-be-born child survived, and there had been no whisper of an attack upon them. So his legacy was intact, even if there would be a period of internal chaos if the reirn and reirna died before their grandchild could come of age, it would be largely an inconsequential blip in history.
‘Die well; you never lived well.’ That retort from Fylen was my biggest potential clue. They knew each other. It had sounded personal. Which made more sense than anything else.
But I had no way to get close to the Sarosa. Trying to infiltrate them while they already searched for their heir’s murderer would be beyond idiotic. My half-finished backstory wouldn’t hold up to a serious investigation. If I started making major splashes, someone would look into it and I’d lose any protection from Reirn Ushan.
I should have just abandoned civilization entirely and become a glowing hermit. No one hunts down glowing hermits. Sure, it would be a pointless waste of my life, but this whole venture was beginning to seem equally pointless. I was too inconsequential to really learn anything of import. I couldn’t just approach Fylen’s widow and start interrogating her about his friends and enemies. Besides, any normal connections would already be under inquiry by the Sarosa guard and their own internal investigators.
I had the advantage of personally witnessing the fight. And that was it. Every other advantage lay with them.
I half hoped they could solve it themselves, but the fact that months had passed with no whisper of news gave me no confidence in their progress. I tried to imagine what they could possibly learn from the scene. And, honestly, the most likely outcome of a proper investigation would lead them to me. When people could fly and disappear, something like a cart track in the soft earth would be far easier to find.
I shuddered and abandoned that line of thought.
I really should have brought a book or something with me. This walk was interminable.
Darkness had fallen by the time I arrived back to Desten 1’s house, which really did feel like home to me now. I’d missed both lunch and dinner, but was familiar enough with the staff by now that the cook had set aside some for me. Desten himself was out, as he was about half the nights, presumably with his lady friend.
“I don’t suppose you know how I could find the other Destens in the city?” I asked the kitchen assistant, who was busy scrubbing dishes.
“There were a couple of them on the circuit last year,” she said, sounding positively gleeful. “I remember, because their seating was mixed up, and one ended up next to the other’s mother. It was a whole disaster. The planner was in disgrace for months.”
“Do you know where I can find them?”
She shook her head. “I have no idea. They might be from anywhere.”
“Any chance you could track them down for me? It’s important.”
She turned to me, eagerness glinting in her eyes. “Oh? Important? How so?”
Nooo, no. Maybe setting the town gossip on the job would be the wrong move. “You know, nevermind. I just remembered, it should be easy to find the Desten I’m looking for, since he’s a versan player.”
“Verdis, you mean?”
“Yeah. That.”
She turned back to her work, clearly disappointed. “Let me know if you need my help. I know plenty of people, I’m sure I can find out what you need to know.”
“I’ll keep that in mind. Thanks. But I’ve got lots of reading to do, I’ll just leave you to it.”
I collected my remaining food and evacuated as quickly as was polite. Perhaps a tad bit quicker.
I had to think this over. If I was going to bring anyone else into this, I had to do it with care. Not as a whim. The moment I started asking real questions, other people could also ask questions about me. And unfortunately it would be a lot easier to track down one Astesh Varon hiding out with the Reirn’s nephew than to find every Desten in the world.
I pushed aside the dread that hovered over me, the certainty of eventual doom if I didn’t move both quickly and very carefully, and refocused my efforts on what I could do right here and now.
First, I set aside my other reading long enough to look up Reirn Desten Varon, who had lived perhaps four hundred years ago. At the time, their house colours had been red, green, and orange. But Desten was born with a rare mutation, at the time, which warped his orange stone into yellow. And which manifested as fairly dominant. Every generation of the head branch for the next century had at least half their children’s power come out yellow instead of orange. The house colours would eventually be changed as a result, the orange traded to Novarot.
But that was only the start of it. Reirn Desten Varon the 2nd, his great grandson, made an even larger splash. Varon hadn’t been that powerful, and this was long before their alliance with Sarosa, until Reirn Desten single-handedly annihilated a flashstone that nearly impacted a Raysh city. After negotiating extreme concessions from Raysh in return.
The mutation for yellow power gradually became less common, and the rarer it became the more of a status symbol it became. And since two famous reirns, both named Desten, had been famous for that specific colour? If a child’s stone manifested early signs of mutating to yellow, he was practically guaranteed to be named Desten as a result.
Which explained a lot, but also made my search that much harder. Thanks so much, history. But at least I could worry a little less about my host. If 100% of Destens had yellow power, that did give me one fewer way to narrow them down, but it also lessened the probability that I was living in the house of a killer.
I continued reading until Desten returned from his evening out, then we spent an hour trying to pull my power to the surface before bedtime.
Days continued to pass, and I continued to succeed at increasing my knowledge and fail at manifesting my stolen power.
I’d all but forgotten the brief interaction downstairs, when one morning a piece of paper appeared on my floor as though slipped beneath the door while I slept.
A list of every Desten Varon in the territory, city of occupancy, workplace, and home address. Desten 2 had a star next to his name, while the others were included ‘just in case’.
It wasn’t signed, but the cheap paper and blocky handwriting narrowed it down to non-nobility, and the rest was fairly easy to guess.
I wasn’t sure if I should be grateful or worried. But I had the information I needed. Three more Destens lived locally, and I had the addresses of two others in nearby cities.
I just had to trust the inquiries had been made discretely.
Time to meet some more neighbors.
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