The Brass Tower

JIRA ne'JIRAL

They had come upon the Heartforge five weeks later.

Five weeks of walking, resting, and arguing. Five long, arduous weeks filled with nothing but each other's presence. The Bear Maiden was still missing at the end of it, and the general feeling that passed between them all was that the woman was dead or lost or worse. And during those musings of dread and despair and growing tiredness and impatience, no beasts invaded the sanctity of the group. No monsters, no abominations, no horrors. They only had each other and the winding, lonely hallways of the Tower. It was all an ascent of ladders, stairs, shifting rooms of slabs that carved pathways and interconnected for brief moments, and many more chambers filled with items of unknown origin and make.

Within one, Alden sheathed his sword and shouldered his shield to pick up a recurve bow in an abandoned blacksmithing chamber. Its size was perfectly suited for him, as was its overall design, having been efficiently crafted out of strong blue wood with a string of excellent hide. The curved limbs were decorated generously with sigils and words, clearly belonging to noble houses that no longer existed, with the ends topped by reptilian claws.

"Never took you for a bowman," Jira remarked.

"Haven't taken myself for one either," Alden concurred, pulling on the string and finding it easy to pull despite the weight of the bow. He picked up the quiver, itself made from the same hide as the string, though more robustly reinforced for travel and carrying the arrows. These weapons themselves were made of a hardy silver that felt cold to the touch. With a nod to himself, Alden shouldered the bow and strapped the quiver to his hip.

They walked on, moving endlessly until the heat of an ever-burning furnace blasted their flesh. They all fell to their knees with hacking wheezes. Before them loomed a grand archway lit fire-red. It had appeared without warning, much like the storm and lightning and savagery of the battles past. Alden patted at the ground to pick up the few arrows that had slipped out of the quiver.

"What is this?" Jira blurted out in an almost disembodied voice.

"This is the Heartforge," Silof exclaimed as he emerged from a fold in her vision. "I guess we found it."

Svend and Alden were first to their feet, albeit strained and bleeding from their eyes. Goscelin was next and was the first to step forward. Jira was last, taking a much farther step toward the arch.

"Inside, we'll have the chance to change everything," Silof announced. He had his hands on his hips and a tremendous toothy grin. When Svend and Alden fell to their knees again, and Jira and Goscelin could barely crawl, Silof suddenly made a noise of surprise and waved his hands. The fires of the Heartforge died down enough to allow the four warriors to stand up.

"Sorry, I was lost in the moment," he barely lamented.

"I would ask how you can do that, but I really don't think I want to know the answer right now," Jira grimaced.

The four traveled inside, heaving with every breath. They beheld two sights, one magnificent and one that made Silof freeze stiff. "Well, that's unexpected."

Gíla glanced at the group, hammer in hand, as she struck the construct on the anvil before the Forge, whose flames had died down just a touch from Silof's hand. Jira saw immediately that she was older, even for a Nujant Chhank. White fur spread in patches across her body, and her eyes appeared heavy. "Oh. Hello."

"Gíla?" Alden squawked, wiping a drip of blood from the corner of his mouth. "How-"

"It's not her," Silof grunted, stepping in front of the young man with a sudden darkness to his gaze. "I knew the woman barely, but that is not her. Not the one you parted with."

"I am, actually," she grinned, and Jira saw that her teeth were maroon. She set the hammer down and picked up the construct in her bare hands, the white-hot metal smoking with her flesh before she tossed it without care to Silof.

The thing posing as a man grabbed it, equally unaffected by the burning heat, and examined it. "How did you make this?" he asked, incredulous and lost.

"You asked me to," Gíla answered, moving away from the Forge and wiping her hands before removing the leather apron of a blacksmith. She was dressed in casual clothing, the clothing of a peasant within Nujant Chhank society. She sat down on the stone lip of the Forge with an exhausted heave. "Not now, of course, but later."

Goscelin threw up his hands and nearly stumbled in his frustration. Alden caught him. "I'm getting tired of this 'time' malarky."

"I am, too," Svend grunted, stepping beside Silof, who was still examining the construct. "Be plain, Gíla. What happened to you?"

"I wandered. For a very long time. After I separated from you all, I don't know for how long. But I learned things. A lot of things. More than most of my kind. Then Silof here came to me and imparted the knowledge I needed to construct that. In a blink, I was in the Forge here. The Heartforge. Roared it to life and began crafting. It took me a very long time. Centuries."

Silof finally cooled the construct, and Jira saw it. It was a slab of some kind with a belt hook on the back. On its surface, runes and glyphs glowed with purpose. Whatever it was, it would allow Silof to enter the material world. "Did I say why I couldn't?" he asked the Bear Maiden.

"It was hard for you to explain things without a face. I knew it was you by everything else, but you had no face. And then you died."

Silof scoffed and blinked. "Died? I don't die. Not unless...not unless we failed."

Gíla shrugged, and Jira saw that she was beginning to lean to her right. "Maybe that's what happened. I don't know. But what I do know is that you have the relic now. And you can enter the Material World when the time is right to use the sphere and snap the key."

Jira and Alden and Goscelin all stepped forward to speak, but Svend crossed in front of Silof to stop them. "Don't," he whispered. "This is not a Gíla you need to converse with. We need to find ours. If what she says is true, then something changed, and we have an actual chance now. We need to find ours."

Jira looked to the Bear Maiden with sadness growing in her eyes before she acquiesced to Svend and stepped back. Silof cleared his throat. "Well, I suppose that helps a lot with the time issue. Now it's just a matter of getting you all back to traipse down to Tahrir."

"The relic will help you with that," Gíla said, and Jira saw that she was almost entirely flat on the lip of the Forge, lying on her side. "I inscribed a passage from the texts of Acominatus. It is enough."

The Bear Maiden passed without further word, and the Heartforge went cold once again. Silof turned to the group, and there was regret on his face, nearly masked by the confusion. There were things they all wanted to say, question, conjecture, but time was limited. Time, seemingly, didn't exist here. And they were tired. And so, Silof wished them luck, promised to watch their progress and wait for the perfect time to appear. And then he read. And the world was filled with a screaming blindness.

And they were gone.

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Mist - Rynishan

H'SAIAH OBARATI

H'saiah had just returned home to Mist when he was informed that his father had been killed.

By the time he arrived at the cemetery where he had been put to rest, the tears had dried. By the time he reached the sarcophagus in the mausoleum where his body was interred, he felt nothing but rage. And by the time he set himself in front of that facsimile that had been carved into the stone lid of that coffin, all words that he had been considering and muttering fell silent like the Gods.

Beside him stood his friend of twenty years and his rival of ten, T'alak Udirati. Similar in build, complexion, and overall style. Honey-scaled, with quill-like hair that ran to the middle of their back from the crown of their scalp—half of it painfully plucked from the sides of their head to make room for grafted silver plates etched with the glyphs of their arcana. Robust and well-fed, yet bearing all the traits of a neurotic student of magic and scholar of the blade. Brute strength blended seamlessly with grace. Armored robes, the color of the black night sky, covered these physiques, with the base of the fabric gleaming like the sunrise.

So much honor and tradition in a place of rotting corpses.

"He was a strong man," T'alak muttered as H'saiah stared at the facsimile of his father's face. "I saw the...the-whe-where it happened. There was a fight. He fought."

"And lost," H'saiah scoffed, finally speaking again after minutes of painful silence and water dripping through the ceiling. He brushed his hand over the stone face that forever stared at the cold dark of the prison. "It doesn't even look like him."

"They did the best they could with what they had, H'saiah."

"Did they not have a face to replicate? Were there no pictures of him? No drawings? No previous sculptures?"

"They...I should leave that to the investigators."

H'saiah turned to his friend and clasped a massive hand on his shoulder. "Tell me, T'alak. Why does it not look like him when every other one here is a perfect match to records."

T'alak shivered in the cold and closed his eyes, taking a sharp breath. "I will leave it to the investigator to tell you, my friend. It is not my place to give details like that. I shouldn't have even said what I did earlier."

"You were trying to comfort a grieving man. I understand." H'saiah casts a final glance to his father's eternal prison and sighed. "Where can I find the investigator?"

"Ilands Nexus. Best of the best. No gutter-rat assigned to this one. Your father deserved that much."

"Surprised they cared after the Landur incident. But that is beside the point. I shall go there at once."

As H'saiah turned to leave, T'alak followed him, stammering. "Would-would it not be prudent to return to your father's estate and settle the matter of inheritance first?"

H'saiah scoffed as they both ascended the mausoleum stairs. "My father had twenty children. I am of the middle brood. What inheritance I gain will pale in comparison to what B'olon and E'ori will earn. Besides, my father was a man of considerable assets; the matter won't be settled anytime soon."

The night air of the city of Mist bustled against them as they emerged from the ground. Around them, wandering glow-spheres hummed and buzzed to light the way of travelers, mourners, and investigators. Ahead of them was the southern fence, and beyond that, the River Mala, and beyond that, the rising arca-spires of Mist, the center of it all being the magnificent brass tower that rose beyond perception. Perhaps even into the realm between the stars. The domicile of those who claimed to still commune with silent gods, granted patronage and position above all others in the country. Advances in technology and the last gift of the goddess K'saka before her silence fell over the world. Lights streamed through the levels, each spire rising beyond the clouds, the peaks of their society hidden from the lowly cur below. Through each one, necro-wyverns flew carrying carriages and cargo, transporting people and wealth. Both sometimes. Most of the time. Patrols of the policing body of the d'rnax whispered from sight and beyond it, hundreds of them bolstered by the new ranks of F'ael Draka, creatures similar to the standard denizen of Mist but far taller and bulkier.

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"It has been a while since you've explored Mist, my friend," T'alak said. "Why not take the night to reimmerse yourself into its luster and then seek out the investigator tomorrow? Return home and see your family."

H'saiah considered it for a long while, the air chilling his scales and his snout, before taking a resigned breath and nodding. "Very well. What shall you do?"

"I have studies I must complete before the night ends. My master's having me take an exam tomorrow on necro-wyvern physiology and its uses in alchemy."

"Understood. Take care then, T'alak. And may your night and day go better than mine has."

For several hours, H'saiah traversed the city streets and great causeways of Mist, silent and musing. He purchased a hot drink and a roll of meat and pastry. He sat above the streets, dangling his legs over the ledge of an unused wyvern-port.

And he thought.

He had been gone for several years, parted with his family on amicable terms, but was glad to be away from them. Fighting in the war with the Cius of the South. It had been a welcome change to monotony and allowed him to dive deeper into the arts of the arcana. Mystar cal Taecus. He had learned the proper ways of casting, of drawing from the ambient vitality of the world to fill his body with its energies to be molded into new powers. He had learned how to differentiate the energies to support specific branches. He had learned how to get them to tell their stories. The rage from the sun to empower fire. The chill tears of the air to empower wind and even water and ice. The stubborn resolve of the earth. He learned the balance. Take too much, and the ambient life would decay and become unusable. In the words of Mist's bards, its story would end. Take too little, and it would feel offended and refuse to help. Balance. He had learned artifice to create phylacteries to practice Soulweaving or Lorthathus.

It had all gone so well.

And then he returned home.

H'saiah wiped a single tear of liquid crystal from his eye and worked through the crowds of night shoppers and the deluge of poor and ambitious. He stopped in an underpass on the small coast of a branch from the river, where wingless drakes overhead tromped with their riders atop their backs. Half-sentient kin turned into steeds. He slumped against the curved stone foundation of the bridge, hands tucked into his pockets, quills set flat against his scalp and back. "What am I to do, father?" he asked himself. The world. The spirits.

There was a crackle nearby in answer.

Near the water, where the ripples of night-dim river lapped at rocks and trash.

His body froze when he saw the source of the crackle. It reflected in his eyes.

It was like an orb of lightning that shattered across a mirror, entirely under the overpass. Hidden from all eyes but himself. Then it broke apart, and amidst the hustle and bustle of the city of Mist, four screams bellowed out in shock as four people fell into the water and on the rocks.

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Mist - Rynishan

SVEND IA

As far as he could tell, he was the only one not knocked unconscious from the landing. As far as he could tell, he was the only one not in the immediate danger of dying. As far as he could tell, he was staring into the surprised face of a tall, broad, golden-eyed draconic thing that stood only a few feet away. As far as he could tell, that terrified him, and every instinct he had and all sense of assuredness and self-confidence that he had in the Tower vanished in the face of defending himself without wasting a breath.

Before the thing could move, he moved, charging the thing with sword drawn and swinging for its head in dazzling display of strength that screeched through the air. It moved quicker than he would have thought it could, slinking away from the arc of metal that carved instead into the stone foundation of the bridge over him. He began to turn to face it, only to feel a sharp, stinging pain in his ribs. The base of his vision was filled with the color of twilight. And then he was blown back into the foundation as though he had been thrown into it by a giant.

And Svend saw nothing else for the remainder of the night.

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Mist - Rynishan

H'SAIAH OBARATI

"Father is dead. Murdered. You are absent for years, fighting in the south, and now on the night you return, you bring these...monsters into our fucking home, H'saiah?" his eldest brother, B'olon, raged as H'saiah cautiously dropped the pale creature onto the last available couch in their foyer. All of them he had rescued from the underpass, each muttering and mumbling, and were, decidedly, disgusting. Grime, blood, and other repulsive material covered their armor and what flesh was visible.

"I thought it prudent to at least get them away before the d'rnax found them and kept us from ever figuring out who they are," H'saiah tried to explain, his voice unsure and his eyes darting from thing to thing.

"Who they are?" B'olon, black scales flaring with red beneath them, stepped up to the youngest of the creatures, the one notably leonine in build and face. "Look at them! They are the same breed of abominations we cast out epochs ago." His voice was like firewood on the last bits of ember.

The second eldest brother, M'alagon, stepped in with a snorting laugh. His white-black scales were polished and gleaming in the reflected light of candles and torches. He was a walking beacon of the family's virtues. "Tales and fantasies from childhood, brother! Not reality." His voice was thunder itself.

"Do you have a better explanation, M'alagon?"

"There is no explanation to be had yet, not until they awaken. We have no idea what they are, who they are."

"All the more reason to have left them or killed them where they lay."

"No. That is the fool's route. The coward's route. Once again, H'saiah took the correct path. Our city is not entirely forgiving to outsiders, let alone those absent even a tinge of dragonblood. Father always preached knowledge first. Learning first."

B'olon began to pace as the rest of the family slowly swarmed into the foyer. Mother, one of the last, quickly set the guards to stand in double shifts outside the house, ensuring their silence with a flicker from her palm and a hazing mist from her mouth. "Look at them!" B'olon screeched, motioning to the black-haired one that had attacked H'saiah. A wisp of flame surrounded him as the heat in the air began to scream and demand bloodshed. "Scaleless monsters. Aberrations. Mutations! These are the same horrors, no doubt, that Baku C'rius spoke of, and H'saiah rescued them!"

"And where has Baku C'rius been, B'olon, to support these accusations of being?" M'alagon asked, the chilling ice of his demeanor freezing even the wrathful heat. "The man wrote a single text hundreds of millennia ago, and you still quote it as fact! You stand as eldest of this family yet act as its youngest. E'helgon has more reason than you."

B'olon stepped up to M'alagon, standing only half a head shorter yet boasting a broader physique. "I am eldest and inheritor. When the estate is formally passed to me, we shall see if you still wish to make such remarks."

"Inheritance does not remove weakness of self, B'olon."

"Enough!" Mother roared, and all in the foyer was silent. Lightning spearing through thunder and ember. "Are you all so childish you forget our family's highest command? I will not have my children squabble like rodents in my home. M'alagon, since you are so keen on defending your brother, you will join him in carrying these...things to the cells while I consider a course of action. Go!"

When Mother spoke, it was never suggestion. Be it during the time Father was alive and the time after his death. She spoke, and the world knelt to its demands. And though his time away had indeed distilled some of those effects that would get him to fall in line, H'saiah understood that now was not the time for independence. Not completely. So, with M'alagon at his side, he carried the four strangers to the cells beneath the manor—the Uomra Casp. It was a half-mile structure beneath the structure, containing three levels of holding cells, laboratories and armories, and executioner chambers. Such was the allowance of imprisonment his family bore in Mist that nearly all the holding cells were inhabited. Cius, Kuill, Xires, Anzy, and Pyra. A variety of war-captured. Invaders. Enemies. Rivals. All of them deemed worthy enough only to be held in chains and killed for sport and entertainment. Part of H'saiah felt repulsed by this. Part of him was indifferent. Part of him enjoyed it.

What would become of the four he has saved?

Such answers would only come in the next day, and with that in mind, three levels down, H'saiah and M'alagon dropped the strangers into the only cell available. Cramped by most standards but wide enough to hold them. And as they began to stir away, M'alagon slid the door shut and faced his brother. "You brought them here, and I defended you. But you watch over them until Mother decides what to do," he said, low and almost hissing.

"Understood," H'saiah bowed his head and kept it so until M'alagon had left.

That is when the creature with leonine features began to shout and scream and charged its body into the thick bars of the cell door. It babbled and wailed in a tongue H'saiah did not understand. It roared, seethed, spat, and fumed in ways H'saiah had never seen outside the battlefield.

And then he gazed at the pale creature, who was decidedly less pale and more like himself. He cocked his head to the side as it stood up, its body that once bore flesh like marble now decidedly scaled like himself, though certainly more serpent-like than one of dragonblood. The leonine thing noticed this and set its back to the cell door, screaming more and screaming louder. The dark-haired figure that had attacked him seemed chagrined and pinched its nose. Only then did H'saiah notice that the fourth one on the ground still was blind and confused.

The dark-haired one grabbed the leonine creature and pulled it away from the cell doors, allowing the serpent to step up. It spoke in the same tongue as the leonine and then tried another, and another, and five more before it closed its eyes and gave up. H'saiah watched them bicker, yell, and scream. At one point, the leonine creature struck the serpent hard and knocked it nearly off its feet. Part of him was repulsed. Part of him was indifferent. Part of him enjoyed it.

The night passed without much incident beyond this, and he was eventually joined in the creeping hours of dawn by his fourth sister. S'ylna. "You really set the bar for idiotic decisions, H'sai," she laughed as she sat next to him on the ground.

He huddled his knees close to his chest, hugging them as he stared at the four in the cell. Two of them had fallen asleep. The serpent and the dark-haired one remained awake, staring. Glaring. Hating. "Figured it was better than leaving them to possibly avoid the d'rnax and run amuck," he explained. "And M'alagon was right. Better to know these things first before another family does. Who knows what they could offer us."

S'ylna hummed. "Hopefully, your ambitions provide success in greater measure than consequence."

"Hopefully. Rather impactful, my first day back."

"Not even a full day. A night and a dawn."

"Not even a full day. What's the status with Mother?"

"She is convening with the Yax. Seeing what wise advice they give her on this...very unadvisable situation."

"Old fucks who're closer to being a necro-wyvern than they are us."

"Does not discount their wisdom."

"Perhaps not. But how long must we endure their advice before we realize they're two years from death with no inheritors of their position set? Worst case scenario, we deal with neophytes who understand our family policies like the Cius understand peace."

"And we will deal with that if that comes to pass."

"After suffering their indignities?"

"We've suffered worse. Remember the Landur incident?"

"Yes."

The serpent began to bang its fists against the prison bars, startling the siblings out of their conversation. H'saiah was the first to stand and approach, nearly face-to-face with the creature. It spoke, and he understood none of it, and he told it as much.

"What language do they speak?" S'ylna asked, standing beside him.

"I don't know. Do you have any spells that could translate them?"

"None. I focus on solar. Not-"

"-not linguistics. I get it. Must be someone in the family who can."

"Will these things live long enough for us to use it?"

"I hope so."

The serpent bashed its palms against the cell and huffed away. And at that, M'alagon returned and said: "Mother wants to see you, H'sai."