Norhill 716, late spring and summer
Talinda at last surveyed the world she had wrought. Her heart clamored to escape, run back to the Forest darkness of ignorance.
She forced herself to Listen, tears swimming in her eyes.
Slowly, stories emerged from the static. The mountains and the seas clamored for her like fighting children, each eager to emerge dominant across the Havoc-swept surface. Other directives fought to inject life, air, or fire in the appropriate ratios, and the total sum dissolved into a whirlpool of chaos.
Not a problem.
Maybe Andreas in his death throes imparted her with his own technical knowledge, or perhaps she had finally grown courageous enough to look into her own memories, but Talinda held the answer.
Physically, she stood on the trembling lip of Norhill, staring into the furious magma far below. Making sure that Andreas' star stone remained securely in place on its new necklace between her breasts, she hopped over the edge and into the fire. Her body shifted with liquid ease, skin beginning to glow and legs fusing into a tail, as she adopted the sylph body so useful for swimming in the thick stuff.
“Come to visit, little star?” teased the dragon, its voice rolling through the bubbles of minerals like a wave.
A moment's thought; Talinda found its outer name. “Hello, Earth. I've come to try and make things better, so please hold on a bit longer.”
“I do my best,” it vowed.
Its notes strained for a moment, the echo of grinding wear.
Talinda scowled to herself and kicked harder, soon reaching the entrance to the Cradle itself.
Once, the Cradle lay on the surface, but time and Havoc sank it lower until it submerged into the side of Norhill's inner chamber, clinging like a parasite. An opal sphere to all appearances, it rippled at her touch. She sank into it with ease, leaving the orange glow of magma behind.
Inside, dark. Mana-charge fluid filled the round chamber, closer to a womb than a pond. Talinda floated towards the center, mumbling the word to activate the light rune. At her call, the entire spherical interior erupted into a whirl of purple veins; they pulsed in long streams, darkened and brightened in a dance of information. Closer inspection would reveal near-microscopic runes embedded into the flows, a work of supreme technology.
The first stars had no such technology. They created the first new worlds though brute toil using hundreds of stars in teams to marshal the power unleashed by the three dragons of each planet. For a moment, Talinda marveled that they managed to do anything with such primitive tools.
Primitive stars, armed with nothing but will and their aether drives to shepherd the mana, seemed no more real to the young star than the bowels of the Arc with their wonders. Even after dying and returning, she could barely believe that once her soul was such a person.
Her fingers drifted to Andreas' seed.
“What will you be when you wake up again, brother?”
She felt no ill will to him. Both wanted to survive...only one succeeded. When she healed her planet, next she would make sure he rejoined the Arc – which she could contact from this very room.
For a moment her fingers hovered over the runes, thinking of Dela Vertita Machien. Floating, somewhere, in the vast reaches, full of the star children waiting their turn to claim stars or planets as their own.
-Later. Once I've fixed my mess, I can return to that place and reacquaint my past.-
Floating to another cluster of runes, she let the faintest trickle of her burning heart through her fingertips. The runes projected themselves into the center of the bubble, and she began to read them.
Much like a ship's log, these manifests recorded every event of any worth since the Arc landed. They were cruel in their honesty, detailing the off-hand mistakes she made for those thousands of years in the Forest. More importantly, though, they offered a concise set of information for her to weigh the best way to cure the world.
Havoc was much less prevalent in the year Norhill 716 than when she went to sleep, yes...because the world ran on finite energy. The motor of creation was wearing down. Given perhaps ten thousand more years, the Havoc would stop entirely. Mana flow over the Havoc seas would stop, and the world would collapse into a lifeless rock.
-Well. No pressure, Talinda.-
Her pulse increased to a pitter-patter as she pulled two lists side by side. One, a birth record. Second, a death record. Both registered by release of mana tainted by individual aether drives back into the system....
On the first list, she found Glisinda: Norhill 696.
-Please, God, whoever you be or wherever, don't let her be dead. Let at least one of the people who I wronged remain, that I can make up my sins.- Quieter, in that part of herself that preferred to stay unacknowledged: -If anyone has to live, its my Glee.-
On the second list...nothing.
Glisinda lived.
Talinda exhaled loudly, sagging backwards for a long moment.
Then she kicked herself and moved to the reason she came.
-Core access please.-
Her veins buzzed with the flow of power, and the runes began to twist into new configurations that would grant her access to the very air the world breathed...
The runes lurched and jerked back to their original positions.
“What in the Pits?” she swore aloud to the sphere.
Again, the runes refused to grant her Core access.
She began to worry. -How in the world can it lock me out?! I claimed this world!-
Unless...
-Unless someone else claimed the world when I abdicated my position.-
**********
Though a star knew no need for food, air, or sleep, fatigue weighed heavily on Talinda. She lost count of the number of days that slid by as she fought with the runes, enough that the seasons began to turn above. No luck, no access. She could not pierce Core access nor even identify whoever claimed that right.
-Goddammit, I'm not a Rune-weaver! I couldn't build this system sober and isolated, much less while Havoc plays with the diagnostics and the runes are active!-
In despair, she finally floated from the Cradle, once again taking on a sylph's form.
“What is this?”
Earth took a long time to reply.
She nodded and thanked the dragon, stealing a moment to watch its colossal work in action. The buzzing activity of sylphs, the churn of lava, the will of a star who fought death to hold up the world...
Atlas by another name, her three dragons.
To the surface, then.
**********
Talinda plopped on a volcanic boulder and Listened to her world for a while. -Athos, sister Athos, where are you?- Almost instantly she began to pick up hymns of worship and petitions of faithful humans. Frowning, she brushed them off. The Athos carried in those words was a sun god, a bright patrician, and little resembled the star that she knew on the Arc.
The star slipped into deeper meditation, glossing over individual voices to hear the beat of the waves. A tiny fragment of her stayed alert for another tune, one made by a slender Border Guard...but most waited on Athos.
A few more days slid past. The distant spec of dirt farmers wormed across the horizon, scooping up the fertile ash to sell in Lydia. At long last, a true note sang through the air, and Talinda slipped across the barrier between world with a thought. It felt much like wiggling through a tight doorway.
Other-sky rolled above her, caught in perpetual storm. Memories of Norhill clung to the astral ruins, the glimpse of grand column and long-dead slave, but Talinda ignored them. In the Other, she need obey no laws of gravity. She hugged herself and felt the bones of her shoulders rearrange. Muscle built, bone extended, and wings burst from her back to sweep the air.
-Ah...- Mana and excitement pulsed through her blood as she twisted to stroke the layers of new feathers. -Yanu will never command me again. A thought, a dream, and I can become any form I wish, even a dragon among the skies.-
Yet the Maiden maintained her plain form, little more than human, for the sake of Glisinda.
With a stretch and a sigh, she leaped into the air and soared north at ear-shattering speed. Herds of nightmare beasts shrank away from the blur that streaked above, and the occasional lost dreamer stared after her in befuddlement. To such dreamers, Talinda was a winged comet, roaring across their minds. The winds sang to her, anxious to unveil all the histories they witnessed.
Oh, Talinda felt at home amongst nightmares and dreamscapes. To dip her fingertips in the lakes of the collective unconscious as she floated overhead, leaving her face in a thousand minds as they woke. To echo the howls of the nightmares on their rampages and laugh when the creatures looked shocked at her reply.
For a few minutes, she forgot all about the world and lived happy.
Soon enough, she landed. As the young woman wiggled through the barrier to the physical world, her wings dissolved into so much dream dust. Plain once more, she emerged onto the remnants of Havoc and little more.
Disappointment coated her tongue as she surveyed the crater, a blackened pothole in the endless grasses. An abandoned home smoked a few hundred feet away – the result of fire, not Havoc. The air's mana still hummed with the story, ripe for her keen ears.
At issue was heresy – how to portray in art and song Athos, Lord of the Sun. The family who lived on this land was wealthy by Elsian standards – enough to feed themselves and have a son to spare. That son turned his art to the holy, and began to sculpt. Soon enough, though, he deviated...
Talinda followed the threads into the burned out home. Only a stump remained of the statue, though its echo stood firm in the Other. She knew that bosom figure, clad in robes of stars. Athos, her sister. Why in the world were mortals worshiping her sister?
He claimed that the Goddess herself came to him in the night to impart wisdom. To decry the religion in her name. All good in his own house, but the priesthood came to visit...
The star shook her head, unwilling to Listen to the foolish arguments that followed. -What craziness is this? Religions founded on stars? Sister, I oughta smack you.-
Threading back to the crater, she watched the echoes replay the man's final moments. No, that wasn't true. At the last, angry moments, watching the man quickly approach the Forbidden Word as he argued with three priests who fulled intended to lynch him, she squeezed her eyes shut.
The Word came, rushing into her like a flood with the taste of three deaths – but not four.
Hmm? Talinda forced herself to watch.
A fireball erupted from several feet up in the air, roasting the priests....but a protective bubble shimmered around the artist boy.
The star raised her hand to touch the echo, and it felt like stardust over her fingertips.
-Athos.-
Could her sister be so strong – so Silent – that Talinda's keen ears could not detect her at point blank? The Maiden Listened with all her might, tasting the rank rush of death and the jangle of the artist boy's puzzlement...but no hint of Athos herself.
-How in the world will I ever find you, sister, if I can stare at your echo nigh a day old and sense nothing?-
“Sister Athos,” she sang, backing the words with mana. “I want to see you. What in the Sun and Moon is going on? Who stole my planet?”
A roar echoed through the Other, followed by a dozen more. The nightmares had arrived to feed on the echoes. Like astral maids, they devoured the left over images – good and bad, fresh and ancient – to sustain themselves. Eventually only the inedible bits were left, a patchwork of history.
Talinda cloaked herself so they would not spook and run, waiting for her summons to float to Athos on the wind.
Several hours passed that way, the day passing into night, while she watched the dark creatures feed. The longer she sat on the grass, motionless, with the patience of her kind – a solar patience – the less mortal she felt. Talia the dreamer, yes, she was a strange girl, easily accessible by the Dryad children...but Talinda the Star?
Would Glisinda and the Dryad children still want to play with her like this?
She had thought growing up would banish these fears, but it seemed to mean accepting them as burdens and continuing regardless.
-For a moment there, I lost myself.- A cry in the dark, a whisper all but dead.
The star shot upright, casting about. Her cloak fell, and the nightmare creatures freaked, boltingfrom the being of light and power.
-The cold and the dark...why can't I die?-
“Marcellus Howl...” She crossed into the Other, her wings blooming again. “Hold on!”
**********
The shadow beast she found, king of its own brutish pack, little resembled the voice from afar. A hulking, ugly thing, it browbeat its mates across the plains, hardly stopping to eat. Talinda circled far above, convinced she heard wrong. An echo of the long dead.
Yet she Listened once more anyways and caught the faint buzz of a soul almost extinguished, orbiting the beast.
-Lost myself...for a moment there, I lost myself...-
His beast had devoured most of the soul's echoes, but with effort she could discern the beat of a snakeman shaman's drum, bridging worlds and summoning the spirits...
Like herself, this man lost his trial, crumbling along a fault. Like her, he refused to die when proper. If he ever wanted to escape his ghost orbit, he needed to face the demon who wore his skin.
She wove a lattice between her fingers of starlight and air. With it outstretched, the star struck the floating soul and carried it with her into the Beast.
Both vanished under its skin without a ripple.
Rage, war, and death. Shackled by the iron will of a warrior, so callused a heart that it could only march onwards in bloodshed. So many faces floating in his past, lost to blade, poison, or dumb bad luck. He carried their deaths for them, bent low with the effort.
-I can't release your burden,- Talinda admitted. -Only give you one final chance.- As she gave Glisinda and Thanata.
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Marcellus' soul grunted permission. She scooped him in her lattice and plunged it into the sea of nightmares, applying heat like a weld until body and soul met once again.
Then the Beast leaped through the link, out of the sea, into her. Shrieking, howling, ready to devour...
Andreas' soul seed flared to life. Maybe it recognized its kin, one Devourer to another, or maybe her fallen brother's seed desired in some recess to protect her. It yanked the nightmare away, down, and swallowed it whole.
The body and mind of Marcellus sagged to the grasses, heart wind-swept as the tundra. Wind-a-whistled behind his eyes. No more anger or hate or guilt...not much of anything, really.
**********
A long, pleading howl from a star's slender throat echoed across the plains of Elsia.
Red Howl, Alpha of Arctic Howl and rust-furred terror of the Elsian slavers, heard. With the army off to the east, preparing war against Elusive's mountain valley, she and her ilk danced across the countryside with impunity, freeing their brethren and wrecking the homesteads of the slavers.
Blood, victory and Havoc. Good days to be alive.
Red set most her sisters to escort the freed slaves to the so-called wild lands east of the mountains. Every species and level of bestiality, beastman slaves needed education like children – to meet Totema, feel the stirrings of Wild in their hearts, and become People. With a half dozen of her strongest warrior-wolves in tow, she headed for Talinda's cry.
On the way, they encountered a band of human rebels or pirates. Hard to tell the difference. As they shared a water hole, the groups chatted and traded across clearly marked camp boundaries with the curious civility of a wild truce. Good predators knew better than to take every fight, especially when there was enough violence and plunder in Elsia for all. Besides, slaves and serfs shared quite a bit in common; the gentry would be horrified to learn just how many desperate farm boys lay with a comely wolf-girl.
Red's muzzle ill-suited smiles, but she grinned inside on the next dawn as the serfs set out on their mission of plunder or revenge or whatever. The anarchy of it all, Elsia unprotected and the Havoc boiling just below the polite strictures of Athos, appealed to her. The man she had been eons ago would have been abhorred, but Ellswick killed that man. She loved the call of Wild.
A day and night later, she and her band arrived at Talinda's little camp to a sight she would not have wished on Ellswick himself.
Empty as a gourd, Marcellus slumped against a boulder that the star crafted like a chair, one foot in the water hole she opened to sustain him.
The ex-Blademaster glanced at her breasts in mild interest.
Talinda said, stoic except for her quivering lower lip.
“Long gone. I found Marcellus shattered, prowling the Other with the nightmares...”
-Then the initiation did fail,- Arctic Howl explained. She was long used to his sudden appearances, the living, white tattoo blooming on her breast. -Marcellus proved weaker than his rage.-
“Even as the weeks passed, I hoped he would return with that cocky grin,” admitted Red.
As Talinda watched, she turned his head side to side. Her fingers ran through his chest fur, feeling the muscle underneath, and he began to shift in arousal.
“His soul still exists. Its just been...cracked...” murmured the star.
The Howl tribe surrounded Marcellus.
Talinda turned her head, blushing, from the intimacies that followed. Close flesh, tender touches, shallow breaths. Thoughts and whispers, private things, carried to her keen ears.
Come back to us.
We know that void.
No one else could ever..
Only I survive. Why?
The dead don't need your guilt.
Only thing I'm any good for is war.
Then we'll show you new things.
The ring of a blossoming soul like a chime. Softer, life meeting life in Red's belly. There would be children.
Marcellus declared, once again alive. No, more than alive. He spent too many years as a Blademaster just living, trapped in guilt and war. He was enraptured, virile and free. His pack would share the burden of the dead, a weight best carried by tradition and companionship.
His body was a little taller, rippled with the fur as dark as his skin. The human Marcellus would be nothing but a memory, lost beneath his sharper teeth and wolf-sharp nose. But this....this was not the hell he had thought it would be.
Red backhanded him and laughed.
Old Marcellus would have fought for dominance. This new man accepted the truth – he had pretty much fucked up being Alpha – and smiled that wide-muzzle grin.
The tribe descended into an orgy of fun, while Arctic Howl padded across the Other grass to sprawl beside Talinda.
(Athos, unseen, unknown to her sister, breathed a sigh of great relief.
Howl nipped at an itch on his flank.
Shclosed her eyes and sighed.
As Talinda began her tale, starting with the Arc, she swore for a split second that she heard the song of Athos in the air above. When she looked, there was nothing there.
**********
Summer, Norhill 716
Elsia and Lydia camped their armies at the northern and southern edge of Elusive's pass, separated by clear-cut land and the frigid river. The plains nation fielded large numbers of peasant chaff supported by calavry, while Lydia relied on smaller squads with technological superiority and Acolyte back up. Both stared in confusion at fortifications along the pass slope too complex for the savages they meant to squash.
To ransack the beastman valley beyond the pass, they would need to trample through a series of stepped bottlenecks, pressed between the swift river and angry, entrenched savages.
This did not match military intelligence at all. Admittedly, when it came time to pay the Wizards for their divinations, no one stepped forward...but surely the beasts could not have learned modern warfare in a few months? Now the armies paid, and the Wizards answered.
Overnight, the name of Benjamin Athosson became poison. Excommunicated, royal no more, cursed aloud.
When the scouts failed to find another route short of trekking down through Lydia and up again in the wild lands, the generals begged the Wizards again. One act of magic to save thousands of lives.
The Academies agreed that the cause and price sufficed. A handful, perhaps two dozen total, of Wizards knew of the Net's true purpose, that men must die – as many as possible. (They already poisoned the rations and soured the wells, dysentery flaring up almost instantly.)
In other words, the Wizard who stepped forward was clueless and expendable. In a show of fire and lightning worth of the Academies, he threw the elements against the savage fortfications. The People fought back, their seers hefting high Artifacts with runes glowing. Magic met magic, flashing like the sun. When the fury passed, the fortifications remained, and the Wizard did not.
Just as well for the Headmasters. Saved them the effort of sabotage. They still needed time to attune and ground the Net.
Fate provided Benjamin again. For the People he had come to know, he wheedled on Elsian honor and Lydian technicalities. He brought up legalties, pay rates, and rules of chivalry through long letters to each army. To generals and Blades, utter bullshit...but they answered to nobles, knights, and investors very concerned with protecting their own tails from questions of decorum and law. Ben also brought up the truth about stars, dragons, and the People to the exact wrong audience, which did not help his reputation.
All in all, very little got done that week.
Finally, as the human armies began to shift and rumble, dysentery and tempers running wild, began final grounding procedures for the Net.
Killing could begin.
*********
Glisinda froze. A feather-light kiss rolled down her spine, just the faintest hint of perfume over the yammering of summer's bloom.
“Talia?”
Roho glanced back. They rested on their bellies on a boulder, crawling behind the Acolytes who worked to finish grounding the Net. Above the tree line in cool, thin air, they fought for meager cover, progress as slow as ants. Not far down the slope, Acolytes and bought Blades disposed of beastman corpses with disregard.
It had been a short battle, ended by the power of the Crimson. Roho restrained himself, watching with a tight expression. Glisinda's face felt cold, overtaken by Thanata's harshness. Better to see death in its frankness than to show surprise when it caught up.
“What did you say?” Roho whispered. He wore carefully dirtied furs to match the half-melted snow and exposed rock. She was the colors, a ripple.
“Think these will work?” the carpenter hefted the three heavy water lodestones. They more resembled blue rocks than proper foci, but Jeremiah assured that they were the cuttest edge of rogue Wizardry.
“No clue, but its a damn sight better than trying to sneak a rogue up here.” She smiled grimly. Far below, the beastman valley teemed with activity, well aware that their last assault failed. The threat of another battle pushed the Acolytes to weave faster...the kind of weakness Glisinda liked.
Roho chuckled.
“What?”
“Nothing. You just remind me of a guy I used to know. Real front line kind of Blade, he gave that same smile when things went his way.”
“Oh, yeah. What happened to him?”
“Dead, I think.”
“Mm.”
The Net itself resembled ropes of silk, translucent in the sun reflected off the slush, bound between three pillars of iron. Knotted at their apex, it floated into the sky to meet its brethren from other pylons, a spider web dome over the entire region. More than enough men to trounce the Dryad and Roho waited at their posts, watching every angle while their fellows down below threw the bodies down the slope.
“Hand me the heavy water stones. There's a hole in the patrol – I can set them. You cover my butt, toss some of those things if I need a distraction.
“Let me do it!” he objected protectively, fingering the grenades at his belt. An ugly weapon, all flying metal and burning smoke. It offended her sensibilities, but it worked.
“Which one of us has the camouflage skin again?” Glisinda chided, taking a single grenade for herself as well. With no vegetation to call on for hundreds of yards, she burned fat to generate the mana needed to cloak her bundle of items as well. Even for a Dryad, she was rail thin, her ribs showing through. Too much drain on her own body with no Forest to rely on.
Roho didn't like her plan.
-Tough.-
She took her time, inching close to each pylon as the guards shifted, scratched, and exchanged positions. These were disciplined men, alert for change and trick, and she merged herself to the snow and rock, breath in little puffs and movements crawling with the pylon's shadows as the sun turned. Wary men stepped in the space between her outstretched arms and never knew she was there.
Everything seemed to smell of Talia, even the dirt and slush she buried each heavy water lodestone in against the pylon's grounding.
Roho moved as well during the hour she took. He remained hidden, quiet enough to do Marcellus proud, though he covered less ground than her. Both were on the steeper rim, facing inwards over the valley, when the beastmen returned to wreck everything to the Pits.
Neither witnessed much of the fight. Two great eagles with intelligent eyes flung salvos of lightning, calculated strikes that rattled the muck underfoot and left deep craters. Roho and Glisinda found their holds dissolving, and they tumbled down the mountain atop a mudslide. It hit the treeline and erupted into a storm of attacking, shattered branches and lurking rocks. When the world slid to a stop, Roho cradled an arm broken by a glancing rock and Glee's leg welled blood from a deep gouge.
One of the enemy Blades spotted them too.
“Sun and...fucking moon,” swore Glisinda, thigh on fire. Mud and grime deep in the wound.
As soon as the bastards upstairs finished with the beastmen (and they were winning, the Acolyte brimming with fire), the duo would be next on the list.
-Screw that!- Roho would not let Glisinda die like that! He found the strength to move his good arm, heave Glisinda (bleeding all over him, the camouflage on her leg flickering) over a shoulder, and run-slide-scramble further into the dense trees.
Headed straight for the savage armies.
Alone, no way a human – injured or no – would walk into the new lands. Yet the beastmen warriors did not recognize a Dryad, and their blanket hatred for humans wavered in the confusion. They resolved to detain both, bound and watched, until a seer and healer arrived. Roho bit his tongue when they yanked his broken arm behind his back.
As the delicate parlay between Roho and the warriors dragged on, the Net grounded. Gossamer threads snapped into their proper places, drinking the very mana from the air. To Glisinda, hissing with every heart beat pumping pain and too much blood from her thigh, it resembled a giant spider spreading its shadow across the sky, killing everything it touched.
**********
With Arctic Howl and Talinda the star at their fore, the Howl tribe showed no fear of the Other lands. Nightmare beasts and stranger things infested the reflection of the human's camp, feeding on the dreaming soldiers, but parted like the sea before the pack. How easily the group passed through the enemy's defenses, invisible.
As per the star's orders, a shaman waited on the other end, holding together a bridge between worlds with his Artifact staff. The pack crossed into the waking world, emerging into the center of the People's growing city. Children fishing, smoke puffing towards the peaks from lunch fires, the roar and cry of territory squabbles over tents. Hundreds of warriors tarried, what weapons they mastered in hand, around the camp circles. They waited for the call to war and the righteous extermination of the humans.
Talinda stepped through the bridge last, sealing the Artifact with two fingers to its runes. Elusive and his seer Marjoly waited for her. Hundreds of Totema chattered and yowled in the background, as crowded as the Network.
“I'm sorry for causing you worry,” she apologized. “You were right. I went, and I died for my foolishness.”
“You're here now,” Elusive replied. “That is good enough, Muno Regina.”
“Ah?” She blushed a bit. Muno Regina – Queen of the World. “I don't deserve that title.”
He tried to kneel and she swatted him up before anyone else started bowing and worshiping her like some statue. “Who told you such a thing?”
The question answered itself as a sylph came into view. A dragon scale around his neck kept his blazing self in check, a gift from the earth. Was this an envoy of the dragons, or a run away who talked too much?
“I'd like you to meet Benjamin, my dear,” growled Elusive. “He has brought us forgotten knowledge and a great deal of help in this war.”
“Thank you, Benjamin, for helping Elusive.” She tipped her head, trying to smother the annoyance. -Somehow, when someone else tells my story...it feels like a betrayal.-
“Its a great pleasure to meet you,” he replied, manners courtly smooth. “I have done my best to stall the inevitable, but I confess to looking forward to the help of larger beings than I.”
The star did not immediately respond, head cocked to one side. The Wizards appeared to have set up a poor osmotic Net over the valley, anchored across several points. One, two, three, four, Glisinda, five; the sixth rested squarely on the resonance chamber where Talinda-as-Talia fought the hag for her flute.
During her concentration, other Totema shoved Benjamin away to growl at her. A hare's seer pawed at her arm like a nagging child. “Muno Regina, please! Wipe the humans from the face of the world! They are a blight, a mistake! Why else, when a human and the People join, is the child always one of us? We are superior!” His hatred burned bright under the veil of reasoned words.
“No,” she brushed him off.
“They enslave and kill us! At the least, eradicate their foolish army!”
“Be quiet!” she admonished. Her Listening echoed through the battle front, analyzing, but something about the anchors kept tugging her back.
Three, four, Glee...
Talinda bowled through the crowd of People, slipping on the stones of a shallow ford and clawing up the hill.
“That is your vaunted queen?” hissed the hare to the crowd. “She ignores justice!”
“Because your genocide is justice,” scoffed Benjamin. “Be thankful she bothered to come at all. She and her siblings have far larger things to worry about than you.”
Talinda did not care about the politics below. Panting, she cursed the frail form she wore for its slowness, but there was no time to craft another. Glee was bleeding!
Long minutes of harsh breath and cramped thighs later (Marcellus charging behind, refusing to leave a girl alone in battle even if she was a star), the girl burst into the clearing where Glee lay. Rudimentary stitches laced the gap in her thigh, but infection already lingered in the muscles with its hungry noise.
“Talia?” The feverish Dryad shook her head in disbelief.
Her guards, seeing an apparent human charging at them, moved to tackle and subdue her. The star cut them off with walls of mana, sealing the Dryad, Roho, and her into a private box.
“What are you doing here?” Glee asked in a daze. “Shouldn't you be in bed?”
“Shh...this will hurt.”
Even as she cursed herself for sleeping through her education on the Arc, Talinda stuffed the broad side of her palm between Glisinda's teeth, and for good reason. A second later she tapped the slightest hint of her molten heart, and her bones glowed like the sun. The grass (and several inches of soil) under her knees ashed, and oh so delicately she turned that inferno to Glee's leg. Every second keenly aware that the slightest hiccup would incinerate the one person she could not bear to die.
She had none of the delicate control of power that the elders on the Arc commanded when they created a new species. She could not regrow the tissue, only carve away a path for healing. As she worked, weilding fire like a scalpel, a thought struck that almost killed everyone with its absurdity.
-I might as well be a mors. Kill what's holding you back to make room for more.-
Burnt flesh stank in the air, and the Dryad's leg looked terrible, charred and smoldering...Talinda could do no more with fire.
Talinda withdrew, shaking from the effort. Her fingertips cooled so slowly, a breathless eternity before she could brush away the ash and char to see living flesh beneath.
Glee had gouged a perfect mold of her teeth into Talinda's left hand in the pain, deep enough to scar.
“Looks like neither of us got out untouched,” Talinda whispered, supporting the Dryad.
“Mm,” Glisinda hummed, and she pushed herself up on an elbow to kiss Talinda.
Their lips met, sharing each other's surprised breath, and bodies touched. Sweaty, charred and stained, exhausted and elated, they kissed in a bed of ash as if it were roses.
Glee smelled of loam and violets.
-The Forest wanted a Chosen One, my Guide,- the star admitted. -I only ever wanted you.-
“Water, food, medicine,” the star ordered aloud. “For our guests.”
“And send a messenger to the rogues,” Glisinda added. “Jeremiah and his force will join us here.”
With a glare from the star, the People shrugged. One unbound Roho's hands, giving one final twist for his broken arm, and the group parted. The Blade-turned-carpenter watched Glee with mourning in his eyes, but he let the two hobble together under a pine from the summer sun and share their journeys.
**********
Marcellus showed up fashionably late, chest bellowing, and skidded to a stop. -Good Athos above, that girl can move! Not all of us can sprint a mile a minute uphill, you know!-
Then he saw her and a Dryad leaning together in the shade and softened. A younger man might think the Dryad leaned on Talinda for friendly support, but he knew love when he saw it. He was a tad jealous.
“Please tell me you're a healer,” said a familiar voice, though gritty with pain.
Sure enough, Roho slouched in his own patch of shade, no worse for wear than most Blades after a few years of separation.
“Athos' balls, you survived the run!” Marcellus scooped the young man into a bear hug, careful of the arm.
“The run from what?” asked Roho of this black-and-white wolf-man.
Marcellus paused. “The Empty Armies. You all ran. I figured the lot of you dead within an hour, and I damn near shared your fate.”
Wait...the Lydian carpenter recognized that voice. “Sir...is that you?”
“Marcellus Howl. Ain't a Blademaster, so don't call me sir.”
“Fuck that, sir. It was never your title I respected.”
“You don't care that I turned into a savage?”
“Sir, I wouldn't care if you turned into a tree stump. You're still the Guild's father.”
-Father?- Was that how his men saw him? Gruff, skilled, curt? A father?
The wolfman clasped Roho's hand, and no more needed to be said. “Come. Someone in that damn valley's gotta have enough mana to fix that arm.”
“Yes, sir.”
**********
Talinda wanted the moment to last forever, sharing a trunk with her Guide in the afternoon laziness. Yet bad news remained to be given.
“Glee...when I woke up...” Better for her to keep the secret; let Glee learn later. But she could not bear to live with such cruelty. “Andreas killed me, Glee...and your brother sacrificed himself to bring me back.”
How the Dryad stiffened.
“Serge is dead, Glee.”
That strong will, that impudence that could spit in a Wizard's eye crumbled. She sagged and let out a childish wail. Her big brother, her one true believer no matter what...gone. In her late night fantasies in Roho's attic, it was never her parents who redeemed her; they had a community, a home they owed allegiance to, and both were young enough to bear more children to replace her. It was always Serge, her heroic big brother, her invincible big brother, who came striding in like a triumphant warrior.
He would never brush the hair from her brow again.
Glisinda cried and cried while Talinda held her.