Summer, Norhill 716
Like children, the Totema bickered long into the night. Would Talinda be their instrument of vengeance, wiping out every human in payment for slavery and death, or should they eradicate Man on their own to prove their worthiness? Their telepathic Network sent waves of emotion across the assembled spirits, goading them farther and farther from rationality, and even fair Elusive bit his teeth to avoid dominance displays.
-Every bit as foolish as the other races,- the star thought in dejection.
“Please,” begged a raven Totem, “Blast them apart! Avenge my dead children!”
For the thousandth time, Talinda replied, “I am not your weapon to point where you choose.”
They had time to argue, at least. Last night, as the star hovered over the ministrations of a healer for Glisinda, a spider arrived with a suggestion: a barrier between the armies. Like a fence, it would separate Elsia, Lydia, and the People into three camps. It saddened her to have to force the mortal races to play nice.
Distantly, Wizards poked at her barriers, avidly curious as to the source of such incredible feats.
Only a dozen hours ago, she reunited with Glisinda, and she burned to return to the tent where the Dryad slept. If she was a god, she was negligent – she would rather chat with her friends than solve this god-damn war. What a mess.
“And what will become of this Net?” demanded yet another new spirit. “Will you allow it to sit and devour the souls of our elderly and our warriors?”
“I will remove it,” the star promised in her most patient tone.
“When?”
“Now, if you will shut up!”
A simple matter to extend her influence up to the filaments in the atmosphere. After a moment's concentration on the pulses along its length, she grabbed hold and yanked. The Totema raised ear or head at six distant booms as the Net and its groundings evaporated into so much dust. All with little more than a prick against her thumb. So much for the works of men.
In that flash, a sliver of the star's essence leaped from Net to the same grounding that Glisinda attacked. It dove through the grounding and into the mountain peak, activating the resonance chamber there.
“Happy now?”
Half the assembled People thanked her, and the other half demanded more. She began to see why Athos seemed content to operate under that cloak of silence...
**********
Benjamin long since abandoned the meeting tent where the People and the star argued. He knew the scene well; whether monarch, pope, or star, those with less power clamored for their cause.
“Praise Athos that at least Talinda has a spine to her,” he muttered, passing the Dryad's tent. His dragon scale bauble burned against his neck, the only thing to keep him human...
“Are you lost, sir sylph?”
Raised in court, the monk at least recognized the sudden appearance of this sultry lady as Wizardry. A spy, maybe, or a temptress? He would not discount the Academies finding out about his circumstances.
“Just visiting the top side,” the monk demurred. “Benjamin Fireheart. You, m'lady?”
“Athos, sister of Talinda.”
“A good name.” In no position to certify or deny her relation to divinity, he let it roll.
“A festering thing,” she replied darkly.
“Discarding a few bad apples, I think that name helps more than it hurts,” Benjamin replied.
“Bad apples like war and slavery?”
“If we are perfect, would we have need for gods? Havoc ruled everything in the old days. It wasn't till we bowed to Athos and spurned the Shaitan that the Havoc began to retreat, and we received the gifts of Wizardry.”
“And if Athos, your shining sun god, was a mistake? What if your whole religion was just the run away imagination of an oppressed race, looking for a way out from under the savages? What if Athos wanted to help, but she found the mortal races more interested in tactical advantages than the past?”
The sultry woman's eyes burned, a fire deep and vast, and the dragon scale against his breast quivered. This woman was indeed a star, and her set jaw spoke of long frustration and pain.
“I would say...”
-I believe in God fine. Just not Athos.- The monk suddenly got the joke.
“I would say that sometimes what we think of as mistakes turn out to be the hand of Providence. Angels in the unsuspecting.”
Silence was so very heavy, be one man or star.
Not a cricket nor the river interrupted the two as they found a comfortable rock. The silence dragged on Benjamin, so that instead of sexual thoughts sitting thigh against thigh with a woman, he was just cold.
Even Talinda couldn't hear.
Benjamin let her confess.
Athos shook her head.
The human did not pretend to understand the babble of concepts that followed. Yet he appreciated the sheer scope. All the fields and coasts of his life were invisible to them. To such beings, the world must be a vast dance, and they the musicians. A single royal monk from a backwater country must resemble an insect.
-But I won't let being an ant stop me from helping. Even ants can move something.-
He asked her to begin again. When the jargon thickened, he interrupted. He learned. If Athos was not a god despite her name, then the nameless Almighty in the shadows had sent her.
He knew why the Core wouldn't grant Athos access. Like an imprinted duckling, it would only respond to the being who resembled its mother.
And this world had many parents.
**********
The Totema, rogue Wizards, and Talinda argued for hours in that overstuffed meeting tent, the summer heat slowly cooking them to the smell of sweaty fur and the sound of growls and hisses. What to do with the humans? Which powers to use and which to reserve? Who to punish, save, or negotiate with...
As the star's first exposure to politics, she expected the humans to be less constrained by a bestial nature. No luck there. When she appeared to human generals of Lydia or Elsia, the young woman met furious demands that the barrier around their armies be lifted and that the savages be deposed. Guilds waited with thirsty eyes for the fertile land in the valley, and small fortunes rested on the pillage that a victory would bring.
Meanwhile the Wizards continued to jab and gnaw on her barrier as if it were a narcotic.
After two days of this circus, Talinda settled for the cheapest solution. She carved the armies and the ground beneath them up, carrying them with her magic like two gourds, and sent them flying back home. One to Lydia, one to Elsia, no more to bother her.
Still the star chamber sang out, notes similar enough to the star's own that she assumed they were an echo. The Headmasters, however, took great interest.
**********
“Only I have the power to end this madness. The military respects me, and they do not bow to the decrees of the Queen.”
The Hall of Nobility shuffled, crowded with vassals and servants three times in excess of the seats. Arcs of purple lightning roared outside, a bubble of magic to keep them safe from the mad hordes beyond. Acolytes ringed the outer shadows of the Hall, purportedly maintaining the shield – but they faced inwards like gargoyles.
Beyond the dome, Cove burned. Aurora did not know what cruel god threw the army back across the world to their capital, but all semblance of order dissolved. With the war canceled for all intents and purposes, there would be no spoils for the vassals and their Guild allies. There would be no new land for desperate farmers. No rallying cries of victory to unite the flagging Elsian spirit.
Instead, the soldiers – many suffering sickness from bad water, their pay delayed indefinitely – turned to take their price from the opulent capital. The royal mansions burned; boats in the harbor sagged with refugees attempting to flee (and no doubt pirates gathered like vultures on the sea to take their fill). Even the church was not immune – Athos' great cathedral suffered battered doors and broken windows.
Above, the sky rolled black and furious with the strength of the Havoc roaring through the streets. Each one was a life expended, a bomb of desperation. Sometimes long minutes would pass between the distant rumblings. Other times they would come in steady waves, five or six strong.
Wizard eyes like hawks on Donovan's neck.
Queen Roseblood remained resolute and silent. The monarch believed firmly that a fool required no response. Donovan would count on that – would use it. This would be a repeat of the petition for war.
Aurora swallowed. -Melrissa, my dagger. Evangeline, my link to the People. Jeremiah, the blazing hand...Our allies are strong, though they are unseen. Even Benjamin the traitor...I know that my cousin had good reason for his heresy.-
Though she had promised to become a Queen like no other, she had not expected the moment of need to come so soon.
Flat eyes lusting after her, empty of deeper thought. The same eyes as a beaten beastman...or the hollow smiles of Wizard-cut pleasure slaves.
Acolytes silent and looming, encircling the rulers of Elsia. A single concentrated location, a single strike...
So this was about the Wizards after all.
The princess flicked her left ring finger three times, and Melrissa's crossbow twanged through the Hall. Its bolt crashed into Donovan's breast and splintered, all the effect of a twig against a horse.
Scowls and murmurs from the vassals. Aurora had broken the golden rule – never (openly) harm another noble. Their discontent strengthened Ellswick house and its allies, beginning with smiles of approaching victory.
Queen Roseblood remained silent; she glanced at Aurora's absconded throne, read the title on the young woman's book, and subtly shifted so her flowing sleeve covered it from view.
The princess glanced back at her mother with pleading eyes. -Please forgive me. Later, when we are safe.-
Acolyte lips began to move, rehearsing the death to come. Smoke choked the air beyond the Hall, though inside it smelled of fresh roses.
Aurora smiled.
Melrissa and Evangeline in their appointed places both nodded. The Blade's Guild was ready, and the beastmen would follow her.
Donovan withdrew a sword from the scabbard on his belt, invisible until the moment he grasped it. He approached with it drawn and blood in his eyes – the simplest form of coup at hand.
Queen Roseblood the First shifted in concern, her first emotion of the day, reaching inside her sleeve for the powerful Gems of magic sewn inside...
But Aurora beat her to the punch. The princess dove into herself, through the rush of blood in her veins, and past the heart and diaphragm where the Wizards stored their mana. Past the ache in her thighs – outrunning a mob of angry soldiers away from her mansion in sheer adrenaline – and through the throb of her womanhood, into a dark place and the blood crystal there...
Without a sleeve to cover it, Aurora's book said: -Grandmaster Kenja's Theorems of Articulation on Life and Mana.- It was hand-written by the Grandmaster himself, and the princess had knowingly sent a dozen men to their death to steal it.
-Once upon a time, before the Headmasters and the Academies, mana for was everyone. Human, Dryad, and People. Man and woman...-
Aurora flooded her veins with the mana from her womb. Her blood let up a hundred shades of violet, and she chucked a river of light at Donovan Ellswick. It pounded aside his enchantments, a living fury of fire and thunder, pried open his mouth, and forced itself down his gullet to vaporize his innards, one by one.
The husk of the former Ellswick collapsed to the floor as Acolytes began to chant and vassals screamed.
Queen Roseblood the Second rose on power and light and blew the Hall of Nobility to carefully orchestrated pieces. The boulders smashed as she commanded, crushing Acolytes and vassals. She exulted in the river of power: the mana laughed and danced with her, echoing her moves, sharing itself. Mana was alive, as much a part of her as breath and hair, and it craved the Cycle of life and death.
Willingly, she gave in.
In moments, she floated like an angel amongst the ruins of the old Elsia, little more than a smear of marble and dust. Hunched and terrified vassals – the ones she judged worthy – rose in surprise to be alive between boulders. One, Veres the butcher, she let live so that Evangeline could avenge her family. The lynx girl dragged Veres into the shadows, and he began to scream.
Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.
Part of her quailed before the next few days. To maintain the power she claimed, she would have to swiftly cement a new world. Jeremiah the rogue would head the new Rose Guard, once again putting magic under a proper boot. Evangeline and Benjamin would parlay with the People to the east. Many more allies, large and small, demanded payments and rewards.
For herself, she could never manage it. But there was no other.
She would be a Queen of legend. Not for herself, she insisted, but to fill the vacuum left by the Wizard. Yet the power and the magic felt so very good too...
**********
In Lydia, Blade Guildmistress Lynia sent her men to death and victory. She wished Marcellus was alive to lead the charge, a lover's grief, but she did not hesitate.
In southern Yandra, Jeremiah's rogues called the fire in their veins to blaze among the streets.
Together, the Academies of Norhill crumbled to ruin.
Three Headmasters looked across at themselves in their spartan little tent. A peasant might have called it a portable paradise, but they saw it as hovering an inch above mana-stealing dirt. An inch above powerless death.
They were all one man once, but they could not commune by mind. They had to speak, and every hundred years or so, one would need to die so they all remained the same. As long as they remained indistinguishable, they could share their aether drive like a mother and child, and that meant some dirty work.
None of them dared speak that name. That invisible, elusive bitch who dedicated the centuries to not just their death but their total annihilation. From their perspective, Athos appeared to be a very well-studied witch, no doubt spending all of her hidden time preparing to kill a Headmaster once again. (Thirteen kills, so far.) They would not have reacted well to learning that they were at best a hobby.
They had banned female Wizards, destroyed every evidence that such a thing was even possible, because of that woman.
After several minutes of technical minutae and an argument between Tedras and Lydia's Uriul – essentially arguing with himself – the Headmaster summed up,
Tedras fished a wicked knife from one of the chests. Coiled wire crossed the blade, feeding into a sealed globe of heavy water in the hilt. Perfect for bleeding Acolytes dry, down to the last drop of mana.
If the magic of man could not beat the stars, then they would simply need to evolve up the food chain.
**********
Marcellus was well used to the long periods of inactivity between bouts of violence, and he relaxed into it easy enough. Elusive's valley, on the other hand, geared up for a serious fight and found no where to throw all that rage. The tribes turned on each other, not quite in war, but with duels and honor and that sort of mucking about.
Red and Arctic Howl already made plans to head into the wild lands east, now a much less crowded place. He would follow them, in due time, but for the moment he threw his lot in with the clean up crews. Remnants of the human armies, bits that Talinda's big scoop missed, remained. With Roho's help, Marcellus spent several days drawing aside the Blades and turning them to less suicidal mercenary work. He felt refreshingly naked admitting his identity to these men – most of whom only knew him as the scowling taskmaster in Lydia's training grounds. Despite mixed reactions, he smiled a little more.
Those conversations taught him about Aurora Roseblood's coronation and the fall of the Academies. Elsia consolidated; Lydia bucked with dissent; Athos only knew how Yandra fared. Wizards no longer ruled this world from the shadows, and that made the Headmasters on his doorstep all the more troublesome.
On the sixth day after Talinda's magic, he waited in a nook of the western mountain face, peering down at the suspiciously peaceful tents of the Headmasters with an interesting companions. To his left, there was a shadow, little more than a blur against the rocks – Glisinda, a Dryad warrior and the star's lover.
They long since finished with tactics and pleasantries. Marcellus ran a claw along his forearm fur, dusted brown by the dirt, and closed his eyes to feel every movement of this new body. Strong, like he was built out of boulders; in all honesty, probably more capable than his old body. Athos or Arctic Howl had given him the body of a twenty year old and the mind of a veteran.
Glisinda sighed, a lovestruck doe's huff.
Years of dealing with adolescent Blades in training let Marcellus keep a straight face when a blush appeared across the girl's nearly invisible skin.
Though she skipped some of the more embarrassing parts, Glisinda explained her relationship to Talinda from the very first visit with the Other that she could remember. Her fingers trailed over her horns as she recalled Thanata's gaping wound on the temple steps.
The Dryad frowned, deep in thought.
Glisinda did not respond, but her brow furrowed in thought, so Marcellus let her be.
Several hours passed in tedium. The only break came when one of Elusive's tiger children, Niana, stopped by with their lunch and the news from the camp. Still arguing in the big tents over anything and everything.
-This is taking far too long.- The wolf man cleared his throat and turned to Glisinda.
She looked at him like a lunatic.
With a shockwave and a gout of smoke, the Headmaster's tent erupted into unnatural green flames.
**********
Cursing herself a fool, consumed by rage coating a deep worry, Talinda launched herself over the mountain towards the Headmasters' camp. The bastards! They dug tendrils into her chamber, into her world, arrogantly assuming that she would stand by while they stole the magic of the stars!
She thrice cursed herself for not thinking to check sooner. Even after finally noticing that her star chamber remained active, she let herself stay mired in feral politics. A woman of her power could not afford to let such things slip by!
On the zenith of her jump, breezing through the low mountain clouds, she felt a very quiet shiver down her spine.
The feeling vanished, and she began to descend.
-I won't underestimate you three again,- the star growled to herself. -I'll annihilate you in a single blow before you can harm anyone!-
She emerged from the clouds as a meteorite, careening down on the camp where the Headmasters waited. -That kind of pathetic shield won't stop me!-
Talinda crashed into the nearest Wizard with enough force that the shockwave blew water from the river, and the Headmaster underneath evaporated into a thin paste on the ground. Yet at the same time, his pathetic shield returned the full force of the blow instead of attempting to absorb it. The star's own blow crashed into her like someone dropped the Arc on her.
As the star reeled, Tedras and his clones retaliated. Space bent around the star, and with a confused hiss she found herself thrown into the center of the sun.
Explosions like the pistons of a great machine rocked all around her, the molten center filled with light and heat. It was a strangely nostalgic place, as if she had returned to the womb, and each boom of the star's heart resonated with her own.
For a moment, she drifted in the rhythm. Then she remembered her Glisinda, sitting in broad view of those Headmasters, and the star chamber still active.
Talinda swelled and shed her old body. Her skin grew hard as diamonds and her teeth sharp, her fingers clawed, and her wings broad. With a lash of her great tail, the dragon plowed for the sun's surface and her waiting friends beyond.
Even at her fastest, she would not be in time to stop anything.
**********
The ground shuddered and groaned. To Glisinda, who had held her hand against the side of dying creatures many times, it was a terrible shudder.
Talinda was the world's breath, and she was gone.
As a huntress and Mors, Glisinda froze her heart for later. Talinda her love could survive some remarkable things, while the Dryad needed to deal with the archons of magic and insanity currently blasting their way towards Talinda's chamber in the mountains.
Shifting winds brought the stench of sacrifice to her nose – an odd smell, all the pungency of death with none of the promise for flowers in spring. The Headmasters knew how to drain mana from sacrifices the old fashioned way, by blade and blood.
-Yeah, well, so do I.-
Marcellus and the Dryad huffed up the steep, dirty slope after the Wizards, leaving the camp behind. Up ahead, arcs of violet lightning ripped into the mountain faces and the valley, tearing out house-sized chunks of earth. The Totema and their people fled in surprising order down the eastern pass, leaving the battle field clear for the magicians.
Wizard and rogue met like warring angels. Tedras and Micael met the force of the rogues in turn, exchanging blows through elemental proxy: firebolts, shards of ice the size of horses, lightning and sound. Yet this was not the first rebellion the Headmasters faced down. They manipulated resonance better; they bent the elements closer to hand; they matched Jeremiah and his ilk toe to toe and gained ground.
warned Marcellus.
Two defeated rogues called the Havoc together, their bodies exploding into a cloud of ash that swept into the sky, creating an instant storm. A tornado as thick as three Lydian houses set down in the valley and obliterated the meeting village.
Another shiver passed through the ground and Glisinda. Havoc should not last so long...but who could dictate otherwise when the stars vanished?
The Dryad did not recognize the newest rogue to leap from nowhere, smashing into Micael. Athos opened with a silent ambush and set about blasting Micael as far from his clone as possible. When she could not hammer the Headmaster into the Havoc tornado, she sucked it down to save the valley. She threw up walls to block his path, but the small human could bend space to teleport quickly. Athos could not do the same without leaving gigantic craters, weighed down by her own might.
Things were always so much simpler without mortals involved. What good was celestial power when one good blow would throw up enough dust to choke life from the island?
In the midst of the chaos and the magic, the clouds choking sight and the fire roaring across the river as if it were timber, Headmaster Tedras connected to Talinda's star chamber. The mountain top exploded, violet runes racing free to float in a corona around Tedras.
Marcellus nodded. “Arctic Howl has a way. Not very pretty, though.”
(Meanwhile, Benjamin laboriously climbed up the decimated cliff face towards Tedras, sweating and swearing like a sailor. The dragon scale around his neck throbbed in time with the star chamber.)
Athos finally pounded Micael in the face, taking satisfaction in the crack of bones, and then felt space bending around her...
The star vanished into the sky, lost to the world like Talinda, and the ground began to quake.
Like a punctured lung, thought the Dryad, our world gasps for air.
As the sole Headmaster spent a moment to organize his new, celestial power, Marcellus opened his soul to Arctic Howl, and the Totema seized his body as its own. It poured through the Other into him; he swelled and changed. The humanity seeped away as his fur grew sleek and teeth sharp, and a dire wolf twelve foot tall at the shoulder growled for Glisinda.
I cannot hold this form in the waking world forever, Dryad-child, whispered a voice half Howl and half Marcellus.
She leaped onto his shoulders, and they bounded for the Wizard. The Dryad called on the coldness in her heart and leaned from Marcellus' shoulder, running her hands over the muck. Broken bits of tree and rock sliced at her fingers until she left a trail of blood.
Jeremiah pulled the rogues back, standing by himself in Tedras' sight. The leader of the rogues watched Glisinda and the giant wolf approaching from the east, Benjamin with a glowing bauble sneaking from the south, and he smiled.
Still the ground shook, harder, and a thin band of shifting light wiggled on the horizon. A tsunami of Havoc, approaching to devour all land as the world died.
-We Mors have never used death as power,- thought the Dryad, her skin bleaching and horns aching. -We have always turned it back into itself, to make more life. But...this once, forgive me. I will claim it as my own.-
Her blood a trail across the rubble, Glisinda sucked into herself the death and suffering, the burnt trees and the boiled water, the corpses of good rogues and evil Wizards. Her hands on Marcellus' back grew colder than the Fault, and her breath let out frost.
Tedras crashed down on Jeremiah, all but crushing the rogue in the first hit. The rogue could shift the mana as well as the Headmaster himself, but that meant pretty much dick against a star chamber's fuel. Tedras ripped his right arm off with a boulder, and Jeremiah sealed the wound with a thought and fire. The Headmaster dissolved the ground under his feet to lava, and Jeremiah bound it into burning armor for his vitals. Above all else, Jeremiah kept the Pits-damned bastard on the ground!
Maybe, if he survived the next five seconds, he could get one of those badass new arms like Marcellus sported.
Benjamin ran full tilt for the patch of lava. As he dove for the heat, he fastened his fingers around his dragon scale and yanked it free. The illusion of humanity burned away, and the sylph dove into the fire without a ripple.
Marcellus bound over the remnants of the battlefield with the freezing Dryad on his back, leaving a trail of condensation in their wake.
They converged on Tedras together. Marcellus swerved, leaping into the way of the lightning meant for Jeremiah. It cooked his fur and felt like someone plucked his brain with a rusty fish hook, but he could survive it.
Benjamin erupted from the ground on a current of lava, sweeping into the Headmaster. The corona of star magic might as well have not existed before the sylph, who slid through Tedras' barriers, socked the man in the stomach, and heaved him out of the corona. The celestial runes behind sputtered and began to fade, disconnected from the man.
And then Glisinda, cold-eyed Mors, reached down to grab Tedras by the hair. It began to burn into dust even as she yanked him up. The death in her veins rolled through him as she commanded, turning his ribs and the skin there to dust. She reached inside, squeezed his heart, and smiled.
His aether drive in her palm, fluttering in pain, she thrust the Wizard back into his corona. The runes reactivated, flashing brighter, but the Dryad kept her fingers buried in the Wizard. Power rushed through him, found the shell wanting, and poured into the waiting Dryad.
Like in the resonance chamber at the Academy, Glisinda poured the magic through herself into the land, sending a wave of greenery to restore the valley.
Long seconds later, the corona sputtered out, and she let the Headmaster dissolve into so much ash.
**********
Another Tedras woke, safe in his crypt buried in the mountains of another island. Half way across the world, in a land only the Headmasters even knew existed – much less had people of a similar sort to Lydia – the clones figured this one would be quite safe from temporal enemies. The new man woke with implanted knowledge that he was a failsafe, but he could not understand why his chest hurt so much with every heartbeat.
All said, the gambit would probably have worked out if not for the very, very pissed off dragon with very, very good hearing who returned to the planet.
Talinda landed on his crypt, tore off the mountain cap that hid Tedras, and grew a spike on her tail just so she could shove it through his head.
Sun and moon, she felt powerful! So much of her went into the planet, into the Forest, that when sheer distance broke that link, she felt as though she could rearrange the heavens themselves.
But the price of that came in the Havoc seas that bucked against the islands, swelling by the minute.
-Screwed to the Pits and back,- thought the churlish shadow in Talinda's heart.
She fought down a tantrum and took to the air. The Cradle deserved one last shot to repair the damage, though the star's thoughts dwelled too much on a single Dryad instead of the fate of worlds.
With a lashing tail, she crossed the seas of Havoc in under a minute.
On the western Edge, the Forest cried to her like a lost child, scared in the storm. -Mother! The seas keep rising!-
-Easy, Yanu. I will force them to retreat.- To herself, she admitted, -Or you will die regardless of what I do.-
Then she arrived at the black cloud of Norhill, the ash that tasted of iron and nickel being flung from the depths of the planet. She abandoned her dragon body, letting scale and wing turn to molten pebbles that rained down on the Wastes, and plummeted into Norhill's mouth.
The Cradle's opal surface rippled, distortions across its face that mirrored the Havoc above. She sank in, passing through pins and needles to emerge into the sphere of runes.
She keyed in a dozen runes and held out her wrist. The entire Core shifted, taking on breathable atmosphere and transforming the lines of runes into elaborate ivy. One draped from the ceiling and whipped at her like a scorpion tale, embedding deep in her forearm.
The system opened before her mind, and Sun and Moon was it ever fucked.
Entire sections of the planet dissolved into so much raw energy, the atmosphere there rupturing. Havoc penetrated in all directions, including down; it dug like a mad man for the core of the planet. There the competing forces would suck the core's heat away, destroying any hope of life on this rock.
If she could not get Core access within the hour, then she would need to collect whatever mortals she wanted to save – the Cradle would not hold many – and depart for the Arc, a failed queen to a dead world.
Talinda threw herself against the Core with all her might, and it laughed at her.
For the first time in years, the older star wore no Silence cloak. Her soul rang out, patches of ruby marred by guilt like tar.
Talinda swallowed.
-Couldn't?-
Talinda cleared a section of sphere and blinked. Outside, a bubble of air floated on the magma currents. Inside: Glisinda, a black-furred beastman with white arm, and a young human woman with a crown. Beside it floated that sylph she recognized from Elusive's camp, the one they called Benjamin.
Her first, selfish thought? -At least my Glisinda will survive the destruction.-
As the motley crew piled into the sphere, now getting crowded, Talinda turned to her sister.
“We're going to do this together,” Athos asserted.
Aurora, still rather confused about being kidnapped by demi-gods, stared in fascination at her cousin turned to flaming merman.
Athos glanced at her sister, her expression asking more than permission. It begged forgiveness.
-Why is her soul blackened with such guilt?-
Glisinda slipped close to the young star and whispered for her ears only.
Star and Dryad exchanged a look of shared hearts, and the former nodded.
The races gathered. At Talinda's command, wicked vines descended from the Cradle's roof, each one glinting with long violet needles, and plunged in one sharp jab into each mortal's spine. A second later, thoughts began to race between them; dreams, visions, the pain of watching their world wither.
They saw as a star saw, the crash of Havoc and dance of heavens, while in the background two young girls fought and shrieked over a toy.
Athos could not hide her guilt. She relinquished her mask, letting her sister see the crime that shattered the world. A little sneak peek never meant to hurt anyone...
Talinda recoiled in horror, but Glisinda was there to catch her. To hold her tight while the rage and betrayal passed.
Aurora and Marcellus met like two boulders, emissaries of the refined and wild worlds. They instantly recognized each other as kindred souls, their worlds as identically ruthless.
Glisinda marveled at the strength of the People, and he at her razor balance of life and death.
Benjamin told stories of the earth dragon, the heartbeat in the world, great woven magics that held up the continents, and the awesome dance of sylphs wielding fire and stone like an orchestra.
Marcellus met Athos, and so what? His faith was in God, and if he'd had the name wrong, that was his own fault.
Aurora met Athos, confiding her disenchantment with the church and the religion, no matter how such things helped to stave off Havoc.
I never meant for all that.
The princess knew well how good intentions led to disasters. Apology accepted, God.
Athos laughed.
Two children argued faintly in the distance of the world; hard to tell over what exactly.
The six floated in eternity and shared themselves. Both stars told of cold, grand beauty amongst nebulae; Aurora remembered her father's strong hands; Marcellus knew camaraderie around a fire; Glisinda could name fifteen hundred varieties of flowers and the exact color of each one's bloom.
They joined together in welcome and wove between them a redemption song.
The Cradle heard, recognized, and granted Core access to Athos and Talinda both.
We are ready to rest, replied the three. We will see you again in another era. Be well.
So the three died, at long last handing over care of the world to the next generation, and Athos dispatched sylphs to retrieve their seeds.
There were no greedy, spoiled children in this new redemption song. Just comrades and a vision of a time when Havoc could claim no more lives.
As the next dawn neared, Aurora withdrew. I'm sorry. Elsia is still so fragile. I cannot afford to be gone long. Underneath her thoughts, worries enough for an Arc – a new country to forge.
I will see you there, Athos promised. Maybe my mistakes can guide you to wiser power.
May I come as well? Benjamin asked. It'll be good to see Cove again, even if it is no longer my home.
With a smile, Aurora invited him. The three retreated from the system to confide, and in due time Benjamin would swear allegiance to a new dragon.
Glisinda floated on the runes of the Cradle system, examining the world. Talinda, there are still Havoc seas.
Patience, sweet one. The sylphs will bleed down the seas by degrees, giving the system and the mortal races time to acclimate. It may be a thousand years before all the damage is erased.
“What will happen to the sylphs after that task is done?” asked Marcellus aloud.
They will die.
With a nod, the Blademaster departed. The Blade Guild awaited, and he wasn't going to let Guild Mistress Lynia think him dead any longer. Regardless of what happened there, then he would head east to meet Red and Arctic Howl....to meet his family. If he felt torn between humans and the People, well...he never was one for the easy path.
Talinda and Glisinda rose last, floating up Norhill's labyrinth tubes to the surface. Last night's Great Storm had passed, leaving the summer air cool and moist. Clouds marched in lines across the sky. Where once the Wastes of Norhill blackened the expanses, a sea of prairie grass and flowers danced in the breeze. There were fifteen hundred varieties of flower, and every one bloomed exactly as Glisinda had said.
Glisinda watched the herds in the distance, the birds and rodents.