A fisherman charged.
A sword flashed, and the man split in two halves. It cut the air with a shhhing, moving so fast that no mortal eyes could see it.
Not even the Red Hand’s eyes, despite him wielding it. He flicked the blade out to the side, whisking the blood off it. The two halves of the fisherman’s body fell to either side as the Hand returned his sword to its sheath.
He marched through the valley it created, approaching another trembling, axe-wielding fisherman.
This was a complete waste. These people had provided value to the Dominion.
“I will ask one more time: what did the airship look like?” The Hand kept his fingers above his sword, ready to draw at a moment’s notice.
The fisherman backed up against the small boat’s bow railing. He dropped his axe. A few fishermen screamed behind him. Khara’s boar gored one of them, and she struck another with the back of her arm, where tusks of red Essence manifested. She laughed and shouted, then placed her boot down on a man’s windpipe. He writhed and squirmed, and the Hand thought he saw a smile creep onto her face.
None of the mortal fishermen aboard the boat posed any threat. But they had resisted, even when all the Hand had wanted was information.
Smoke wafted across the deck, and the tattered sails shuddered in the wind. The Red Hand’s only remaining opponent slipped on a puddle of blood, landing hard on his back. He was a man, and he much resembled the Red Hand, only younger—he was a Seissen man, with light ochre skin and long black hair.
“Air—airship!” the man exclaimed.
“Tell me about it, and I will not kill you.” The Hand took another step, keeping pace with the man.
Such a waste. So wasteful.
“It flew over here a week ago, yes?” the Hand demanded. “Small for an airship—about four times the length of this fishing boat, and white?”
“Y—yes!” the man exclaimed. He shouted something in a foreign language—
Foreign? The Red Hand understood. It was the Seissen tongue, and he had grown up speaking it. But it wasn’t Low Speech, the language of the Dominion.
“White envelope, small gondola!” the man had shouted in Seissen.
But a desperate man would say anything to save his life. The Hand had to make sure it was true.
He debated using Seissen to interrogate the man, but decided against it. It wouldn’t sound natural on his lips anymore.
In Low Speech, he asked, “What did the sails look like?”
“Oversized sails!” the man replied in Seissen. “White sails, semi-triangular…”
“Very good,” the Hand said. A fire crackled and popped behind him, getting closer, but he still had time. The airship the fisherman had seen had to be the Featherflight, and that was his only lead. “Where was it going? Did you see?”
“I swear!” the man shouted, again speaking Seissen. “I swear on the Eane, it was sailing due west! It was aiming straight for the coast of Home”—that being Seisse—“two days’ flight or four days by sea. We didn’t follow it, so we can’t say for certain where it made landfall…”
That was all the Hand would get from the man. “Go. Run.” He glanced over his shoulder at Khara, who was still bludgeoning a fisherman with a blunt fortification technique on her arm. “Before she kills you.”
The fisherman scrambled to his feet and leapt over the railing. They had curved northwest again to approach the Seisse peninsula, and the water here was much cooler. The fisherman wouldn’t make it more than a few hours in these waters before he drowned, if he could swim at all, but it was the most mercy the Hand could give.
If the Seissen fishermen had just listened, they would’ve lived. But they hadn’t.
Wasteful.
The Hand slid his blade through the crook of his elbow, cleaning the last dregs of blood off it, then slid it back into its scabbard. “Khara!” he shouted. “Disciple!”
She stood over a fisherman’s body, panting. He was long-dead.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“What’s wrong, Khara?” he demanded. He almost put his hand on her shoulder, but she was soaked in blood. “They are gone, and you won. You’ll just exhaust yourself.” The only thing they could waste now was time.
“They should have known who we were,” she said, deactivating her fortification technique and standing up. She wiped her forehead, clearing the blood from her face. “They should have given us what we wanted.”
“Soon, we will have what we want.”
“What you want,” Khara mumbled.
“Nael died to capture the Heir,” the Hand said. “Do not let his…death be in vain. We serve the Dominion and the Emperor, and he died in service of the Emperor.” The Hand didn’t know whether Nael had died or not, but he was as good as dead with his mind so scrambled.
“Don’t say his name like that.”
The Hand narrowed his eyes. “Don’t talk back to me.”
Khara was silent for a few seconds, then said, “What are we going to do when we succeed? You’ll bring the Heir’s head to the Emperor, and he’ll reinstate your status as his prime enforcer and dirty-work-doer?”
“I will retire,” he said. “I will train a new generation of Red Hands, and then I will disappear, never to be seen again—duty fulfilled, honour regained.”
Khara blinked a few times. A fire crackled behind her, and smoke wafted across the deck, shrouding her face for a few seconds.
“You are the last of my disciples,” the Hand said. “You will be the next Red Hand, and you had better start acting like it, or no one will ever fear you. A screaming girl in a fit of bloodlust intimidates no one.”
Khara shook her hand off, then looked down. “I’m not the last of your disciples. Myraden Leursyn is still out there.”
The Hand spun away at the mention of her name. He took a step onto the gangway between the burning fishing vessel and their own sloop—a small ship barely large enough to weather the waves of the Adryss ocean.
“Come along,” he said. “We have an elf to catch.”
image [https://static.wixstatic.com/media/f3a882_5e221995337243e6a7d4250b55d3aeea~mv2.png/v1/fill/w_280,h_232,al_c,lg_1,q_85,enc_auto/embercore%20sigil.png]
Lady Neria pushed the doors of her tower suite open, then marched into the foyer. The Neria Shipbuilding Guild only had one office in the city of Rasis Nureans-Ost, the Dominion capital, and it was this tower. Her personal suite was at the top.
She lit a candle and held it up, pushing away the nighttime shadows, then stepped into the main chamber of her suite.
It wasn’t the tallest tower in the city, not by a long shot, but it towered a thousand feet above the ground and cut through the wind with its wedge-like profile. Being near the edge of the downtown quarter of the city, her suite had an excellent view of the outer rings. Beyond the thousand-foot tall towers and palaces of the downtown quarter was a wall of smooth gray stone, then concentric rings of buildings and houses and defensive walls all spreading out and away from the city’s core.
She could barely see the edge of the city from here, but Rasis Nureans-Ost sat in the center of a plain, and there wasn’t much to see, except the Stormwall, well beyond the outer bounds of the city.
The Stormwall lingered on the southern horizon, reaching taller than the highest spires of Rasis Nureans-Ost. It was a boiling wall of pure mist and black clouds, and streaks of vibrant lightning constantly flashed through it, searing the clouds with bluish light.
Lady Neria shook her head and stepped into the room. The Dominion claimed that they were the one true guardian of the North, and through the enormous strength of their armies and wizards did they keep the entire northern hemisphere in relative comfort.
But it was the Stormwall that held the darkness at bay.
She walked to the center of her suite. It was a single storey, and the main chamber took up nearly the entire floorspace of this level of the tower. A bank of lattice windows lined one wall, and plain white plaster covered the interior walls. There were no paintings or decorations—only a few model ships on shelves.
Lady Neria marched to the table at the center of the room. A single sheet of parchment rested on it. Two years ago, she had scrawled four words on it. One, Two, Three, and Four.
She picked up her quill and tapped it on the edge of an inkwell, then scratched off the word ‘Three.’
The ‘Three’ in question hovered into the room behind her, floating on empty air. He crossed his arms, ruffling his dark cloak. As usual, he stared at her with glowing green eyes. “I was on your kill-list?”
“I had to take precautions in case you didn’t agree to my terms,” Neria said. “But you did. Now it is time to put all our plans together.”
She circled the name ‘One’, then tapped her quill down so hard the tip bent. “To Plainspar.”
“You would move on Lord One so soon after threatening the Emperor?” Three asked, his voice deep and breathy.
“We will,” Neria said. She placed her quill down in the inkwell and leaned against the table. “One is vulnerable. His watch-lands are vast and rebellious, and he has many mortal political enemies in Plainspar. He has no heirs to replace him when he dies—none close enough to advancing to Wildflame—and his family holdings will crumble.”
Three scoffed. “And you need me to kill him.”
“Who else? You’re saying you’re not strong enough to kill a peer?”
Slamming a hand down on the table, Three stepped forwards, drawing within striking distance of Lady Neria. “I am decades, if not centuries older than One. If I cannot kill him, then I will take my own life for the shame of it.”
“Now that is the answer I expected,” Neria said. Most mortals would have inched away from Three, but she held her ground. “Lord One will be hosting an equinox celebration in two weeks’ time at his Plainspar estate, and we will meet him there. Bring your best void pendants.”
“Why?”
“Lord One’s Plainspar estate holds a great wealth of wild-treasures, and you’ll want to snap them up before the Dominion can.”
Wizards were known for hoarding advancement resources, and the powerful wild-treasures would always end up in the hands of the Unbound Lords before weaker families could use them to advance or craft poisons out of them.
“Do you understand now, Three?” Neria asked. “All is in motion. We will topple the Unbound Lords, then the Emperor himself.”