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Arthur Leywin

After I doused the flames still burning, I had to do several things before I could afford to track the source of this beast horde. I wrote a detailed communication scroll to the Council, informing them of what I’d discovered and what steps I’d be taking next.

Sylvie and I stayed for a short time as we helped the town pull itself into a modicum of order. She hauled bodies from the rubble and healed who she could, while I conjured walls around the town in case more beasts came.

But there was an urgency in my steps and my mind that finally pulled me away. I couldn’t wait for reinforcements from the Council to finally reach my location and reinforce these people. I hated to leave them alone, but some gut instinct–some fear I couldn’t place–told me I couldn’t stay here.

Those mana beasts–corrupted, and even an S-class–had arrived at this town in a concentrated group before tearing it apart. And if there was anything I knew about Agrona from my talk with the horrid psychopath was that he did nothing in half-measures. There was more to this, and I feared to understand what it was.

Sylvie blurred through the air as we followed the lingering distortions in the mana south. They formed an eerily straight line from an indeterminate source far beyond, and traces of the mana beasts’ passing were easy to spot if one knew how to look.

They carved a path straight to that town, I thought, wondering why. They didn’t stop for water, didn’t take any detours that would make it easier. Like drones seeking a target.

Sylvie was uneasy beneath me as she beat her massive wings. We didn’t talk of the strange ability of Dawn’s Ballad that I’d just discovered, where I gained the ability to influence aether somehow by touching on our bond. I could tell questions about it lurked in the subconscious of her mind, but she was focused on trailing that path our enemies had taken.

I will have to talk to Elder Rinia about it when we get back to the castle, I thought with gritted teeth. The aether-influencing elven seer was infuriatingly vague and shifty about both her abilities and what she saw with her visions, but she was my only real avenue to learn more about the intricacies of my manifested weapon.

After all, the asura had abandoned us. No dragon besides my faithful bond would stand by Dicathen, all because of their failed assault on Alacrya.

I ground my teeth as I focused forward, thoughts of war and whatever Agrona could be planning bouncing around in my skull like an infuriating itch. Eventually, however, my mind drifted toward Spellsong.

The phoenix-blooded mage was the focus of many of my endless questions, especially as my dreams—nightmares—of my past life as Grey continued to return like painful wounds.

I wondered who he was often, even though I knew I wouldn’t arrive at the answer I needed. He clearly knew who I was in my previous life, but I couldn’t fathom him. Was he a councilmember I’d once known?

Or, I thought with dark humor, was he some unfortunate Trayden soldier I killed? That might make sense, considering he knew so much about Cecilia. About the Legacy.

But that also didn’t fully make sense, either. And even if I somehow figured out how he knew so much of my past life, that didn’t change that he seemed to know far, far too much about my new one, too.

I remembered a faint voice that seemed to touch my soul. To reverberate with the greatest pull I had ever felt.

“Because your anchors are here, Arthur.”

Sylvie and Tess.

My heart clenched painfully as I closed my eyes, letting out a breath as I pressed my forehead into Sylvie’s scales, seeking their centering warmth as I worked through my emotions. Tess knew my secret now. She knew it. Knew why I’d rejected her advances for so, so long.

When I next saw her, I’d need to–

Sylvie lurched in the air, a spike of horror tainting my uncertain thoughts a crimson red. I struggled for a moment to stay perched at the base of her neck as I was nearly thrown off, adrenaline coursing through my body as I prepared to fight. Sylvie crooned in a mix of disbelief and despair as she physically recoiled from something.

“By my ancestors,” she cursed into the wind, her shock like a bolt of cleansing fire across my system. “How… How could…”

I immediately reoriented, ready for combat as Dawn’s Ballad fuzzed into existence by my palm. “Sylv, what is it? What do you–”

I looked past my bond’s neck as she flapped her wings, hovering in place in the sky.

And my jaw went slack, a matching horror rising from the depths of my stomach. I stared for a long, long moment at our destination–because I knew this was where we needed to go. I knew, in some deep part of my soul, that this was what I’d been fearing.

My eyes drank in the sight, my nose twitching from the metallic scent. Finally, I took a deep breath, inhaling the scent of smoke and burnt flesh. The familiar scent, but not from this life.

Grey suffused my emotions as I prepared myself for what needed to be done. All my questions of Spellsong. All my anxiety regarding Tess and what our relationship would be after this. All my fears for this life and my last one.

I smothered them all as I adopted the mantle that had protected me for so long. And for once, Sylvie did not protest.

“Set us down, Sylv,” I said, my voice like iron.

My bond complied without a word, circling down before she finally set her massive bulk into the dirt. The ground rumbled for a moment before I finally swung off the neck of my draconic companion.

My shoes squelched in crimson mud. A familiar sensation, one I’d experienced many times in countless battlefields. When enough blood was spilled by bullet and blade, the very earth itself would drink the scarlet flow. And as soldiers marched onward to add their own life’s blood to the tide, the earth would claw at the feet of her children, trying to hold them back from further slaughter. To prevent them from marching to their dooms.

But the red mud did not bind my feet as I marched forward solemnly. This child had long been rejected by the stones below, and no longer did Earth wish to hold me back.

This had once been a city. Not a large one, far from it. Probably only several thousand people at most. With its well-planned roads and sturdy architecture, I knew this nameless city had once been a thriving place. Distantly, some part of me that was still Arthur could imagine children playing in the square. Could imagine merchants hawking their wares and mothers carrying their babes through the streets. As I swept my empty gaze across the shattered walls, I could almost imagine guards playing dice by the gates.

“You do not have to look,” I said, aware that Sylvie’s trembling human form stood behind me, her feet sinking into the bloody soil.

“I need to,” Sylvie said, her voice firm. “I need to see this.”

I exhaled, my eyes forward. “Okay, Sylv.”

I continued my death march forward, tasting the wrongness of the ambient mana. The world itself seemed to be stained red, each particle of ambient mana weeping tears of scarlet blood. Even the aether felt unnaturally still as I waded toward the carnage.

Lady Myre had told me that the aether had its own sort of Will. A sentience or drive that the dragons could not fully comprehend. That was why the formless energy that crafted the bowl we lived in could not be directly manipulated like mana. Because, just like one could not directly control another person, you couldn’t grasp aether with your intent.

If aether has sentience, a mind behind its unfathomable workings, I wondered, staring upward at the horrible symbol, a rotting totem to Agrona’s malice, can it feel grief, too? Can it sense the tragedy?

I thought it could. I could almost hear the world weeping.

At the very heart of this city, a tower of corpses blocked out the sun above, stretching fifty feet into the sky. Blood streamed from broken bodies in waves, like the stories of ritualistic sacrifice from my old world. Empty eyes watched as torn entrails and broken dreams cascaded down a monument of meaningless death.

Sylvie fell to her knees behind me, vomiting into the red-stained road. The bile leaving her throat was subsumed by the river of blood that soaked the streets.

There were so, so many. Hundreds of bodies, maybe thousands, created a dread statement from the lord of Alacrya. Because I understood what he meant, now. Agrona had told me not long ago, hadn’t he? And I didn’t know then. Not really.

“I’m sure you’ve seen a great deal of bloodshed, King Grey. More than most lessers. Maybe even more than most asura. So I want you to understand what I mean when I say that the blood shall flow soon…” Agrona’s phantom smile burned itself across my mind as my bond wept tears of horror and sorrow into the bloody earth. “It’s going to be the bloodiest war in history’s tapestry. Numbers cannot fathom the casualties that your continent will face.”

In my mind’s eye, I remembered how Agrona’s scarlet eyes had sparkled with amusement as he puppeteered Sylvie. As he commanded her body to preach a horrid truth she would never subscribe to.

“There will be no surrender. No sparing of prisoners. No recourse for civilians. Men, women, children… The serpent will have its fill of the crimson tide.”

As I stared up at the pile of nameless bodies–many in chunks and simply torn apart–I found myself strangely fascinated. What sort of madness possessed the Sovereign of Alacrya? What sort of twisted psyche gripped his mind, to push for such a massacre?

Because that’s what this had been. My gaze focused on the head of a young girl–there was only a head to stare at–and I wondered what she felt when she died.

But I knew. She died terrified.

I knelt, massaging Sylvie’s back as she sobbed with sympathetic grief. I wanted to comfort her over our bond, but I could not. Right now, I was Grey. Feeling anything… Feeling anything was difficult. So all I could do was be by her side.

“So many people,” my draconic bond said, her choppy wheat-blonde hair stark against the endless red. “Why?! Why did it happen? Why did he do it?” she demanded, her aura warping the air, a roar pulling itself from her throat.

I knew why this burned her so deeply. Agrona had delivered the very promise of this bloodshed through her mouth. Her lips had uttered the words; her tongue had formed the syllables. It was not her mind that had delivered the ultimatum, but my bond still felt disgusted. She felt as if this was her fault.

I laid a hand on my bond’s back as she vented her emotions, staring with dead eyes into the mound. And internally, I reasserted my vow. I would not allow Agrona to enact his plans.

—

Less than an hour later, Sylvie rested outside the walls. She was not physically tired, but she was emotionally wrung out by her entire endeavor. Her massive chest rose and fell in fitful shudders, and I could feel the uneasy nature of her dreams.

Since I had first found the mound of death, I had not allowed myself to slow down. Even as Sylvie slept, I scoured the ravaged city, searching for signs of whence the horde had come.

Because while the corpses had been deliberately piled together–almost mockingly–the actual slaughter had been done by mana beasts. People had been torn apart by tooth and claw, and the lingering mana told me of the bestial nature of the attack.

But where had the beasts come from? Where did the wave appear?

The best I could tell, the mana beasts had appeared from the inside of the city. As if from thin air, an entire horde has suddenly spawned in the streets. But this city had no teleportation gate, and the only points of damage beyond the wall were clearly where mana beasts had exited.

Some sort of portal technology, I cataloged with an analytical mind as I inspected a stone building that appeared to have been trampled by something massive. The Alacryans are able to call these beasts around wherever they please somehow, but there must be limits.

This and more I noted with cold logic as I made my rounds through the city, making sure there were no mana beasts left.

I needn’t have worried. I was the only living thing within the stained red walls. I knew from experience that flies and crows were quick to feast on the flesh of the dead, but none dared to touch the testament to the basilisk’s cruelty. The wind was still as I marched toward a break in the stone walls.

I stared out at one breach in the city walls, indicating another offshoot of the horde that had torn this place apart. The town I’d saved had been only one of many–and now there were mana beasts surging toward the surrounding villages on a tide of death and decay.

I exhaled slowly through my nose, calculating in my head how long ago this massacre had happened. Not even a couple hours ago, if my estimates were correct from the warmth of the blood around me.

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I marched out of the breach in the wall, tracing the path of mana beast hooves, claws, and feet as they churned the earth, trailing blood behind them. More towns were in danger, and it was my duty as Lance to put the threat down.

Sylvie, I thought with iron, the touch of my mind jolting my bond from her short rest, we need to move. There are places that need our help right now.

My bond shifted as she awoke from her restless nightmare, her large, topaz eyes staring at me silently.

She didn’t speak as she lowered her serpentine head to the ground for me. I said nothing more as I vaulted onto the base of her neck, my hands tightly grasping one of her spines.

We had monsters to slay.

—

The stars were bright in the night sky as I rested my back against the corpse of my foe. I observed them from below with an impassive gaze, tracing the outlines of the constellations. My arms–made entirely of aether-tinged earth mana–slowly phased back to a fully-flesh form, the mana I’d been imbuing into and through the acclorite in my blood sifting back to my core.

That was something new I’d discovered as I’d tested myself against scores of mana beasts for hours upon hours on end. Something unique to my new body and the acclorite that suffused my very cells.

If I wished it, I could embody the elements themselves. Fire, water, wind, earth… I was the elements, and the elements were me. But as my flesh became solid once more–stiff from being the earth itself–I wondered what other powers this strange new physique would afford me.

Beside me, Sylvie sat in her human form. Both of us were deeply exhausted from the day, and not just physically. My dragon laid the back of her head against the defeated iron hyrax behind us.

We’d managed to reach two of the offshoot hordes before they reached populated towns. Those didn’t have S-class mana beasts in them, and my bond and I rained death and destruction on the corrupted beasts with the pent-up fury of asura. They broke like matchsticks before our might, a hundred beasts easily becoming less than chattel.

Every time we slew an offshoot horde, Sylvie and I returned to the decimated city–that place of horrible massacre, where the very mana and aether itself seemed to tremble with sorrow–and then we followed another trail left by rampaging monsters.

We’d been too slow to stop what had occurred at the end of the last trail. A small farming village had been utterly decimated by the stampede of an iron hyrax, leaving mashed bodies and broken houses.

I knew I couldn’t bring back the dead, but I could avenge them.

I stared up impassively as I sensed a mana signature approaching in the skies. My eyes narrowed as a nimbus of gold, electric mana swirled around a nondescript figure as they honed in on our location.

Lance Bairon Wykes slammed into the earth like a thunderbolt, dirt spraying around him as his eyes focused on me. His teeth were visibly clenched as lightning crackled across his arms. The scent of ozone fizzed in the atmosphere.

“Lance Arthur Leywin,” he hissed, marching forward. “What do you think you have been doing, darting around Sapin without authorization?” he snapped, clearly agitated. “The Council ordered your return hours ago, but you have ignored direct orders. Is this insubordination–”

“You are late,” my ice-cold voice scythed across Bairon’s tirade like a chill wind.

Bairon actually blinked in surprise, his scowl deepening as he stared down at me. I waited for the arrogant Lance to open his mouth to reply, before intentionally cutting him off.

“Did you read my report?” I pressed, tilting my head and allowing my blood-stained auburn hair to brush against my shoulders. “Did you see the massacre?”

Bairon’s mouth closed, opened, then closed again before he scoffed, turning around. I almost thought he might be ashamed.

I slowly pulled myself to my feet, feeling as my body twitched slightly from how much I’d used it today. I took my bond’s hand, pulling her to her feet in a helpful maneuver as I stared back at the corrupted iron hyrax behind me. “I have spent the last six hours killing as many mana beasts as I could, ensuring the citizens of Dicathen weren’t torn to shreds. Because it is my duty as Lance.”

I tilted my head, my eyes sharpening. “Tell me, Bairon,” I said, my voice cool as a spring lake, “why I should have forfeited my duty to answer the Council’s calls.”

Bairon finally turned, staring at me contemptuously as he clenched his fists. “Because this isn’t the only place that has been under attack by beasts,” he bit out. “At several points across Sapin, reports have come in of beast hordes that seek the blood of our people.”

I closed my eyes, taking a deep breath in, before letting it out in a slow exhale.

It made sense. Why would this be the only place? Why would Agrona take half-measures?

Agrona wanted to cause rivers of blood to flow. And as my gut churned, I wondered what effect one Lance–even as powerful as I was–could have on the outcome of this war. When the goalposts shifted so drastically, what place was there for conventional warfare?

—

The Council meeting was a painful, unbearable slog. My patience was thin as Grey revolved around the edges of my perception, and though Sylvie hung close to me in a measure of comfort, she couldn’t block out Blaine’s angry, pained yells.

I’d given a succinct report of how I’d discovered the massacres and what I’d done to stop them; of all I’d witnessed and fought across the past day. And as the questions from all built, I felt my tension rise once again.

What was the point of it all? To instill fear? To damage supply lines? To break morale? Agrona’s slaughter of civilians, from the point of view of the councilmembers, made no sense. He could have loosed those beasts on any other place. Supply lines, military outposts or simple homes of high ranking officers. Even if these were terror attacks, they weren’t efficient. Just empty slaughter.

Perhaps that was what had pushed the former monarch of Sapin into such a rage.

“So can none of you can say anything?!” the maroon-haired former king snarled, slamming a fist into the table. It cratered from an application of mana, fires sparking around him as his broad shoulders heaved. “All you can tell me is that my people are being slaughtered? That my citizens are being torn apart in the thousands, and you have no clue why or how?”

His eyes smoldered with fury as he demanded answers from us all.

I was the only Lance present. Bairon, Varay, and Mica had been sent out to scout the entirety of Sapin, each working feverishly to try and quell the rising of beasts to stop the incoming tide–but that set me alone across from the raging councilman. Alduin and Merial both clenched their jaws in sympathy, and Priscilla hesitated to approach her husband’s wrathful form. Elder Buhnd had a distant cast to his face that told me he was reliving old memories.

“You are not alone in your anger, Councilman Blaine,” Virion said wearily, the lines on his face seeming deeper than ever. “We all lament the loss of life. And our Lances are trying everything they can to figure out how this happened.”

Virion, unfortunately, provided himself as the perfect target for Blaine’s outburst. “It shouldn’t have happened in the first place,” he snapped, pointing a finger at the old Commander. “Ever since the asura left us, it’s all been downhill and downhill! You can’t even protect our people, Eralith!”

Alduin, predictably, rose to try and counter Blaine. “Calm yourself, Councilman Glayder,” he said sharply. “We all lament these actions, but yelling and pointing fingers will get us nowhere. Present yourself as a representative of Dicathen, not as a raging brute.”

My eyes sharpened imperceptibly as I sensed Alduin’s mistake. Blaine’s trembling shoulders stilled as he slowly turned to face Alduin. “Would you be so quick to say this, King Eralith,” he hissed, flames sputtering around his hands, “if it were your people being slaughtered? If you saw all the ends of those you fought a lifetime to protect? Even now, your elven Lance shelters your daughter instead of tending to the people massacred by our enemies.”

Blaine struck a nerve. I watched with resignation as Alduin puffed himself up, ready to retort with something just as caustic. Virion, too, prepared himself to try and regain control of the deteriorating Council.

In the depths of my mind, I saw a grim mirror of the Etharian Council. Of how each and every one of the greatest people of the land threw themselves at each other like hyenas after the death of Holden Drutha.

All it takes is a little wind to knock down the tallest of towers, I thought darkly, embracing Grey a bit further. At my side, Sylvie tensed, her amber eyes flicking to me with worry as she sensed what I prepared to do.

“Blaine Glayder,” my even voice echoed through the Council chamber, cutting through the rising tension, “look at me.”

Blaine seemed to belatedly realize I’d called him, his anger dipping sideways as he turned to me. I saw his smoldering contempt beneath the surface–and no little shame, I thought. “And so the Lance finally speaks,” he said, his voice sounding more weary. “Come on, boy. What do you have to say that will make this meeting worse? You have a talent for delivering bad news.”

I let Blaine’s scalding words wash over me, even as Sylvie’s eyes narrowed in annoyance on my behalf.

“He doesn’t know his place,” Sylvie thought to me. “He goads you so openly. Goads the chosen of my grandfather.”

He is a man who has seen his people slaughtered and butchered mindlessly, I thought back calmly. Petty, yes. But human.

Virion looked at me oddly as I tilted my head, engaging in a quiet staredown with the former human king. The other councilmembers misted away into the background as I inspected Blaine with the critical eyes of Grey.

“What makes a King, Blaine Glayder?” I finally asked. “What makes you a King?”

Blaine’s eyes narrowed, and I could almost taste his growing uncertainty from the dullness of my tone. “What makes you fit to question royalty, Lance?” he countered swiftly. “You are no councilmember.”

“That is the wrong answer,” I said simply, unfazed by his words. “A King is made by his people, Blaine Glayder. A true King puts them before himself. But it is also a King’s duty to be calm and collected when nobody else can.”

It was an ironic thing that Blaine Glayder was a greater king than Grey ever had been. Because unlike my previous life, Blaine cared for his people. He loved the people of Sapin. That was why he grew so angry and tempestuous at their slaughter, why all reason fled him and he grieved for their deaths.

Blaine scoffed, but it wasn’t as heated. “And I suppose you know what it is like being a King, boy? You, who grew in the countryside and gallivanted along the Beast Glades in your youth? You surely know the burdens on the shoulders of each councilmember.”

The other councilmembers watched the exchange with muted solemnity, each of them–if not aloud–then internally agreeing with the human monarch. These precious few men, elves, and singular dwarf carried the weight of their continent’s future on their hands. And though I offered my input, helping where I could, Blaine had a point, didn’t he? What would Arthur Leywin, peasant boy and adventurer extraordinaire, have to know about kingship? The closest they knew, I’d spent my childhood in Elenoir amidst the Royal Family–but that was no royal education.

Virion looked ready to intervene, a dark scowl making the wrinkles on his face seem like deep ocean trenches. But I couldn’t help it. I burst out with a hearty, mirthful laugh at Blaine’s words. Ironically, it served to loosen the tension I’d carried ever since witnessing the mountains of dead corpses.

Because Blaine was right–at least partially. Despite my previous life, I’d never cared for the people that fell under my boot. I’d become monarch to further my selfish goals, not to protect the men, women, and children I ruled over. And they suffered for it. Only as I witnessed the tired eyes and stress-grayed hair of the monarch in front of me did I begin to understand this.

Maybe I didn’t know what Blaine needed to be now. But I knew the alternative.

“I surely don’t know what it means to be King,” I said after a minute, a solemn smile on my face as I stared at the former monarch of Sapin. “It seems you’ve gathered yourself, and that my input is no longer needed in this meeting.”

I pushed away from the table, a strange silence following in my wake as I strode from the council room. I felt the eyes of each of the councilors on my back as Sylvie trailed behind me, her emotions uncertain.

I let myself walk through the castle, my thoughts carrying my steps. Part of me was tempted to see if I could find Kathyln, Elder Hester, and Elder Camus. I had new abilities to train–namely, the strange aetheric abilities I’d found myself capable of during the attacks, and the ability for me to meld my body with the elements.

I need to hone myself further, I thought dourly, only partially aware of my surroundings. The manifestation of Dawn’s Ballad and all the imprints of mana within had led to these abilities, and I needed to find a way to maximize them. This was my path to being able to fight a Scythe. To being able to finally protect my family and home. I just needed to be stronger.

“You need to be careful, Arthur,” Sylvie said from behind me, her emotions shadowed over our link. She was still recovering from the bloodshed she’d witnessed. Processing the brutality. “Please. Don’t fall back into that darkness. I know it’s easier. But you can’t. Not with everything you have to protect.”

I didn’t turn around. “You can still feel the pain in your chest,” I said after a moment, my voice dull. “I can sense it over our bond, Sylv. And it hurts so, so much. But I can’t afford to let myself feel hurt. To let myself hesitate in my steps. While maybe the councilmembers carry the weight of the continent on their shoulders, I…”

I trailed off. I carry the weight of my loved ones’ lives on mine, I thought, but did not say. And those precious few felt so much heavier than the millions across Sapin, Darv, and Elenoir combined.

“I told you once not to fall back into that pit,” a raspy, decrepit voice said from a nearby hall. “But I can see it in your eyes, boy. That pit has already claimed you. It has sunk its claws deep into your chest and heaved you down.”

Sylvie reacted fast, moving to put herself between me and the flashing eyes of Rinia Darcassan. Her choppy, wheat-blonde hair covered one of her draconic eyes as she glared at the elven seer. I could feel her mana–dark and tinged with soulfire–churning beneath the thin veneer of a teenage girl.

“Rinia Darcassan,” Sylvie snapped, her hair practically bristling as she put herself protectively between me and the scarecrow of an elf, “you must explain yourself. You had to know this would happen. Had to know what would become of… of all those people!”

Rinia simply gave my trembling bond a sad, mournful look. On her shoulders, Avier crooned weakly. ”There are things I can see, Lady Indrath, and things I cannot. I am not all-knowing and all-powerful, child. Yet it is dangerous to influence the future in any way. To risk changing the outcome at all.”

Sylv looked ready to lash out again, tears building at the corners of her eyes. Tears of regret and pain. Tears of sympathy. Tears that I couldn’t shed–not right now.

Instead, I cut her off, placing a simple hand on her shoulders. She turned back, looking up at me with gemstones of glimmering topaz.

I kept my focus on the seer.

“Every time you’ve approached me,” I said, “it’s always been with some motive. First, it was pushing me toward Spellsong, so we would fight even when we didn’t need to.”

In the aftermath of my duel with the Asclepius-blooded Retainer, I’d learned from Tess that she had never been in true danger at all. Toren Daen had been healing her, removing the taint of Agrona from her core and taking away an advantage.

Which meant that Rinia wanted us to fight.

“You appeared in the aftermath of my confrontation with Agrona Vritra, then used an artifact to break the spell he’d placed on Sylvie’s mind,” I listed second, “and you told me only now we had a chance of winning this war.”

I leisurely shoved my hands in my pockets, tilting my head as I observed the elven aether mage. If I really, really, really focused, I thought I could see the dying fires of her lifeforce amidst the four colors of the elements. The embers of lingering aetheric motes that denoted what remained of her lifespan pulsed lowly from her heart.

They were pitifully small.

“Every time you’ve approached me, Rinia,” I said simply, “you’ve approached me with an alternative motive. You’re trying to push this world along a certain path–that much I can see. You claim you can’t tell me what that path is, for fear it might diverge.” I rolled my shoulders, feeling how loose they were. Loose, like Kordri had taught me to be. Strong, like forged steel. “Say your piece, seer.”

Rinia stared at me, her multicolored eyes bearing a profound weariness–one I knew from long ago. And even deeper, I saw the resignation in them, too. “The pit has claimed you again, Arthur Leywin,” she said quietly. “You might feel like you can never crawl out. Once, I told you that you couldn’t let yourself fall into it for that very reason.”

The old elf hunched deeper as she took a moment to catch her breath. Her limbs were thin as matchsticks, her face sunken like melted candle wax. And every word seemed to take a bit more of her withering lifespan.

I waited for her to regain her strength.

She took a deep, rattling inhale as she forced herself to straighten like a bent tree forcing itself against gravity to stand tall once more. “But sometimes, Arthur, the only way out is through.”