Adrin

The current surged beneath him, carrying Adrin upwards, and then he was in the bright city of the past, standing by the window of a tower that had toppled more than four hundred years ago.

“You have to fight,” an older woman shouted over the wails of the newborn baby that Brizin held tight in her arms. “Give me the child and go join the battle.”

“It’s too late!” Brizin shouted back. “Vas is lost. All that we can do is run, save as many as we can—”

The woman slapped Brizin’s cheek, and the girl drew back.

“How dare you—”

“You always were a coward,” the woman roared. “Always wanted to take the easy way out.”

“You can’t take him from me.” The girl who would become the Ocean glared at the older woman, even as tears welled up in her uncanny red eyes.

“You’re a fool,” the woman replied. “The only way anyone will have a chance to escape is if you buy them time.”

Brizin hesitated. She was so young, younger even than Adrin’s little sister, and whoever this woman was, she had an air of authority. Even the baby ceased crying for a moment, but that only allowed Adrin to hear the chaos outside, howling winds and human screams.

“Take him to the Sanctuary.” Brizin surrendered her child to the stern woman, tears running down her cheeks when she blinked. “Promise me you’ll keep him safe.”

The woman bowed slightly. “I swear it, Lady Rispara.”

“I’ll see you soon,” Brizin whispered to her baby, kissing his cheek. Her son’s eyes were red, just like Brizin’s own. “I love you.”

The woman took the child and ran out the door, and Brizin picked up something from a table and placed it on her head. It was a circlet with a black gemstone that sat in the middle of her forehead. Then she clenched her hand into a fist and punched the glass window. Instead of shattering, it slumped and melted, dripping away like candle wax.

“Follow me,” Brizin said, and it took Adrin a moment to realize that she was speaking to him. She leaped through the empty window, and he followed, despite the height, because he knew this was only a vision and he wouldn’t be harmed.

He plummeted towards the ground, and the terror was very real, but also very brief. A moment later he was sitting up, as if he’d just awoken from a bad dream—only he was sitting on the street in the city of Vas as it had been four centuries ago, in the shadow of something that could only be described as a nightmare.

The construct had the shape of a tornado, funneling upwards to a great height, where it dissipated into the empty sky. Streaks of iridescent color swirled around the black vortex at dizzying speed, both mesmerizing and disorienting Adrin. A tendril branched off the central, swirling mass into the wall of the tower he and Brizin had just leapt from, and the wall began to distort and twist.

Brizin seized the tendril in her bare hand and yanked it out of the wall. Was she flying? No, not exactly. She was running on nothing but air. The tendril in her hand disintegrated, but the whirlwind construct produced several more, sending them creeping like vines in all directions. Adrin had barely regained his footing when the ground buckled beneath his feet, and he dashed away as another tentacle writhed up from the ground. A pillar crashed to the ground behind him, sending him scampering in another direction.

It’s not real, he remembered belatedly. This was a vision of something real, but it had happened centuries ago. Blood rushed in his ears as his heart pounded somewhere far away.

Brizin dashed by him, sword in hand. He didn’t know where she’d picked up the weapon, but she wielded it like she knew what she was doing, slashing through the tentacle that had sprouted beneath Adrin’s feet. It disintegrated into a cloud of black particles, and Brizin was off to the next, severing it with an upward strike as she leapt off the ground.

The dark whirlwind of the construct became a column of sand, blown upwards from a black circle on the ocean floor. When the water cleared, Adrin was floating a few feet above an obsidian seal much like the one he’d played beside when he was a boy in Dhanlir.

Two more columns of sand flowed up and away, revealing two more seals, one to either side of where he stood. Three constructs, lying dormant here, so close to Thaliron?

“I will not let them go,” Brizin said, answering his unspoken anxiety.

“So why did the other constructs break loose?” Adrin demanded. “Did you let them go?”

“No.” The firm, simple answer resonated for a moment before she continued. “There are new patterns in the ambient current. They agitate the constructs, amplify the weaknesses in the sealing channels. I can hold these because I am strongest here. The others are beyond my reach.”

New patterns? Wasn’t the ambient current always changing? It was a nuisance, because it meant you had to reinitialize your appliances every now and then. What was different about the patterns? Why were the seals only breaking now, after they’d held strong for nearly four hundred years?

Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

“There have been deliberate disruptions,” Brizin said. “But I cannot show you more as you are now.”

“As I am now?” Adrin echoed. A current nudged him forward, towards a mountainous reef that he realized was the half-melted form of a gigantic building. As he got closer he saw a white rectangle at the base—a door—and in front of that door stood Brizin.

Every other inch of the building had been claimed by oceanic life, but nothing grew on that rectangle of white stone. Time itself seemed to have left it untouched. The water brought Adrin to a halt before Brizin, but he found himself looking over her shoulder to examine the door.

It was incised with channels, the intricate patterns of lines for shaping vitricity or ambient energy, and he squinted to try to make them out. Here and there were pieces he recognized, some standard patterns, some more esoteric ones he’d seen on the diagrams of construct seals. But this was an ancient artifact, from long before ceram engineering had unlocked the energy of the ambient field, and most of the patterns were so archaic as to be unrecognizable.

Did that channel just move?

Adrin’s breath caught in his throat. As he watched, one of the incised lines wriggled like a snake, breaking its connection from one circuit to weave around and link up with another, locking into a different configuration.

“How?” Adrin whispered. Brizin took his chin in her hand, redirecting his attention from the door to her face. There was something terrifying about her deep red eyes, but also a vast sadness.

“Some knowledge is better forgotten,” she said.

“But—” Adrin’s eyes drifted back to the door, but Brizin redirected him firmly.

“What happened here was terrible. It could have been much, much worse. You must understand, Adrin. You must not repeat our mistakes. That is why I did what I did. Why I became what I am.” She released his chin and squeezed both his hands. The sensation was dull, muted, distant, but real.

Brizin held his gaze. “What I give to my chosen, and what I take, is for the protection of Elorhe. So that the mistakes of the past are never repeated. Do you accept this?”

She was offering him power beyond anything he’d ever imagined. A link to the Ocean meant that he’d be able to seal the constructs when they woke. Adrin hadn’t yet been born when the construct ravaged his hometown, but the scars and the memories resonated through Dhanlir twenty years later. The image of the tornadic construct was one he would never obliterate from his mind. But was he truly the best person to wield that power?

“You are uncorrupted,” Brizin said, still holding his hands, “and you are sufficient. But the burden is heavy, and the cost may be your life. Do you accept this?”

Uncorrupted. Adrin clenched his teeth. The construct wasn’t the only thing that left scars upon his hometown. Avarice and neglect cut deeper into the lakelands than the claws of the black tiger. Becoming the Prince Ethereal meant that he could do something about that, too.

Brizin released his hands, sensing his decision before he spoke it aloud. Adrin’s eyes flicked to the door, but a sudden, sharp pain in his chest drew his attention back to the spirit standing in front of him. She had pulled a tiny strand of light, as delicate as spider silk, from the vicinity of his heart.

After that first shock, there was no more pain, but the thread continued to unwind from his being. Brizin turned her back on him to face the door, and then she vanished. Adrin was alone, the end of his thread drifted in the water ahead of him—

And a cluster of other threads reached out from the door to meet it.

No, Adrin was not alone. First he felt the impressions of people flickering at the edges of his vision, but vanishing when he looked to see. They seemed familiar, friendly. As each thread from the door joined with his, he felt a presence spring fully to life. They were his predecessors, and while he’d learned their names by heart in school they became suddenly real to him, human, as a mere name in a book could never be. All of them were young, full of potential, their threads intertwining with his, their strength supporting him. Gerimon was there, as he had been twenty years ago, his hair pure red; Zafrys, with glittering blue-green eyes, a young woman unbowed by years; all of the Ocean’s chosen, all the way back to Isuld, the first queen of the unified kingdom, staring at him with an intensity that could only be matched by Brizin’s own.

Light flowed upward and out through the channels on the door, pulsing in myriad patterns before converging upon the point where the threads connected. The pulses of light continued through his thread and into his body, flooding him with an incredible sensation of clarity and power. He had been asleep until this moment—all his life, he’d been asleep, and now he was awake.

The power was too much for any one human to bear, but Adrin did not bear it alone. He was bound together with those who had gone before, bolstered by their strength, a new link in a glorious chain. Glimpses of the past washed over him, too quickly to absorb more than impressions from them. Memories from his predecessors—messages from the past. Crises and decisions, mistakes and the lessons learned. He transcended the limits of time, and people who had long been dead lived once more in his mind.

It could not last forever. The closeness, the oneness with his predecessors faded, leaving a void that ached like nothing he had ever known. Time took back what had momentarily been his, the voices of the past echoed across the darkness until they were beyond his ability to hear. In a moment Adrin had lost so many individuals, from all times and places that he’d just seen and known. So many people he had never met, yet he knew them and loved them all the same. He tried to hold onto their memories, but even that slipped away, and their absence tore holes in him.

Something had been torn from him. A piece of himself was gone, something he couldn’t define, leaving only the sense that it was missing and he was incomplete. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw one more shade had joined the others, wearing his face and form.

“We will protect the future and the people you love,” she told him. “Now go back so that all may see that you are my chosen.”

“But I still have questions!” Adrin shouted, even as the current began to carry him away from that strange door. His thread still connected him to it, unwinding from him as he drifted up and back, conveying power to him from the other side—but no answers, nothing that filled the void. “What is that door—that device? What’s beyond it?”

“We will speak again,” Brizin said. “Our time runs short. Very short.”

Once more, she carried him, but there was no comfort in it. Adrin wasn’t a child who could count on a grown-up to take care of him. He had seen things, been given a great and terrible power, yet it was all muddled together in his head. Without clarity, without understanding, he was left with only fear.

“For what it is worth, I am sorry. And the part of you that I took will always remain.”

Part of him remained behind. Another shade to join the rest, forever nineteen, full of youth and potential. Meanwhile the true Adrin—or most of him, anyway—watched a glowing thread trace a path back through dark, murky waters. So thin. So delicate, stretched so tight he feared it might snap.