As Kaeto watched the rite of synastry unfold, Sora’s screams sent a line of unease crawling up the prince’s shoulders. Even the Jah Annan beside him seemed unnerved as Keros began drawing in mitokar, ripping it from the air itself and forcing the starlight into Sora’s body. However, the strangest thing about the whole sight for him was the northerner’s children.
The children knelt down on the far side of the circle, pressing their hands to the chalk and chanting under their breath. The only sign they were saying anything was the rapid moving of their lips. Their faces were both expressionless, eyes inhumanly still as the words left them.
The black chalk around their hands turned white as hot ash as the two chanted, but Kaeto's confusion neither was wearing silverglass nor were they visible pulling on any starlight. Whatever they were doing started spreading, changing the black chalk white, gradually filling the room with a sickly pale glow.
Somebody grabbed his arm, and Kaeto jumped. Turning his head, he found Adarelle looking at him, her face tight with fear. “What?” he asked her quietly.
“Those two. I’m… I don’t think they’re human,” she said, pointing towards Keros’ children. The prince focused on the boy and girl, the growing glow making it hard to see. As he stared, the kids’ skin began to ripple. At first, he thought it was just a distortion of the light, but then it happened again, and the children were no longer entirely human.
Each had a pair of insectile antennae above black fuzz, their eyes half compounded like a bug's. The transformation was halfway between their human shapes and the caterpillar-like forms of the changelings.
Without thinking, Kaeto moved towards the two, not children. To his surprise, both Jah Annan, Leahan and Botaran, followed after him, each focusing on where Jotaranell and Keros held Sora.
A loud boom resounded from the citadel below. Fear spiked through Kaeto, but he continued on, stepping over the fine and intricate lines of glowing chalk. If he hadn’t been actively starting to panic, he might have stopped to appreciate the fine artistic detail in the ritual circle, but Kaeto was panicking, so he didn’t stop.
The prince grabbed the knife at his belt with his off-hand, readying the sharp iron nails fused to the fingertips of his main hand. He reached the first changeling, the boy he thought, though it was difficult to tell now, and the morantai beast’s head snapped up. The not boy raised one hand, and a blast of sickly white light sent the prince tumbling away towards the center of the circle.
He nearly crashed into Botaran’s legs as he rolled, but the Jah Annan crouched and caught the prince before he could. Botaran helped Kaeto to his feet, checking to ensure he was okay. A few meters away, Sora lay curled up on her side, Jotaranell standing above her with the long dagger pointed down towards her ribs, and the prince watched in amazement as Leahan sprinted forward to tackle the stargazer.
The Jah Annan was too slow. The new shield let out a guttural scream as Jotaranell plunged his blade into Sora’s chest, a strange white fluid gushing onto the floor from the wound. Kaeto was staggered less by the stargazer's actions than by the jah annan’s shouting. He’d never even known any of the warriors could feel something so profound as the emotion ripping itself from Leahan’s throat.
Leahan barreled into Jotaranell and wrapped his arms around the stargazer, bringing him to the floor with a heavy thud, white light silhouetting their struggling shapes. Apparently, whatever the changelings were doing to the chalk kept it in place somehow. Kaeto moved to Sora’s side, falling to his knees beside the Jah Annan girl.
Was he too late? Had the changelings done something terrible? If they had, could he even do anything? Heart racing, mind spinning, Kaeto looked into the girl's blank wide-eyed expression and reached his hands towards her face, not entirely aware of what he was doing.
“No! Stop, you fool!” Jotaranell yelled from where he lay pinned beneath Leahan. The shield had a look of such rage that Kaeto could hardly comprehend the scene before him. It was all so surreal, almost like a dream.
He held Sora’s head in his hands, returning his gaze to her face. The black lines beneath her skin seemed to be burning, and he could feel the temperature rising under his hands. The heat became too much, and he tried to pull his hands away, but his arms wouldn’t move. He jerked his arms back with all his strength, but his hands remained stuck to face as if fused in place.
Heart racing, now on the verge of a heart attack he suspected, Kaeto watched as the black lines spread over his hands and into his arms. Before reaching halfway to his elbow, they stopped. The skin where the line ended swelled like a tanner’s needle pressing against leather.
Mitokar burst from his arm in a fine spray of blood, and Kaeto watched, body quivering, as they twisted through the air, then plunged into the center of the circle. As the last of the black chalk turned white, the room exploded with light.
At the same time, a dark circle appeared in the air above the white lines, and Jotaranell screamed, “No! You stupid boy! You’ve ruined everything!”
The guttural sound barely reached Kaeto’s ears as he watched the black spot hanging in the air. It looked almost like a rotating sphere, spinning and expanding, growing larger with every apparent rotation. He blinked, shielding his eyes from the overwhelming light beneath him, and the dot became a hole the width of the circle.
The bright white light thinned as if it were being consumed by the black pit now hanging above the circle, and Kaeto noted that Leahan had dragged away the screaming stargazer. Beside the shield, Botaran held a drained-looking Keros at the edge of the glowing ring. Beneath the prince, the delicate lines of white melted, spreading across the floor, became a bright noxious white circle that perfectly mirrored the black void above his head.
They were nothing more than passing thoughts on the surface of his mind as he stared on in shock and terror, the burning pain in his hands the only thing grounding him in time.
It seemed like an eternity passed at that moment, and then the illusion was shattered as something stretched out of the dark above, something else appearing from the light below. A white chain falling from the black circle, a black chain rising from the white.
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Kaeto reached out to touch one of the two chains. He wasn’t sure which, just moved his hand towards them. It felt right for some reason as if he’d already decided on an action he didn’t understand. A sudden tremor shook the chains, and they began to move, weaving through the air like dancing cobras.
A scream sounded from outside the circle, and the prince was vaguely aware as one of the changelings collapsed just beyond the ring, but it wasn’t important, not anymore. The chains wrapped around both Kaeto and Sora, the burning pain intensifying.
Something coalesced at the end of each chain, beads of black and white light. The beads became threads, humming in the air with what sounded like a man screaming in pain, and the light stabbed into both his and Sora’s chests. Kaeto screamed, feeling like one of those research balloons filling up with hot air, the pressure building beneath his skin. The light around the edges of the circle began to dim, and then the black and white circles started to collapse in on themselves, audibly snapping and cracking.
As the light dissipated, Kaeto felt a presence in his mind, like a distant line of thought, but not his own. The circles snapped, the sound like a thunderclap in the small study, then shattered, and Kaeto fell onto his back, hitting the hardwood floor with a solid thunk.
He closed his eyes and groaned, overwhelmed by the sudden awareness of the pain in his hands, the aching in his whole body, forcing his muscles to tense up. His head was screaming in pain. No, wait. That wasn’t quite right, he realized. He did have a headache, but the screaming was coming from somewhere inside his mind.
Kaeto pushed whatever it was aside, trying to box it up in his head and ignore it. Alongside the voice, the prince almost felt like there was a line of string or rope wrapped around his senses, leading him towards…
The prince’s eyes snapped open, and he sat up, gasping as he pressed his hands to the floor. Or at least as he tried to. Something wasn’t right there, but it didn’t matter, not yet. He stared at Sora, the jah annan girl lying still on the floor amongst a small pile of ash. She looked dead, but through that thread in his head, he could feel her somehow.
He wasn’t sure how he knew, he just did. It was a simple fact in his mind. The sun sank before night, the sea crashed against the shore, and the thread in his head led to Sora’s still living mind.
“My lord?” Somebody asked in a quiet voice from behind the prince. He turned, and his eyes met Adarelle’s dark brown irises. They seemed full of worry as she stared at him.
“Yes?” he said, not sure what else to say.
“Your hands,” she said, and he furrowed his brow in confusion. His hands? What about his hands?
Looking down, he understood. His hands were gone, only smoldering stubs of bone and flesh where his wrists should have been. Kaeto looked back up to her, a weak smile on his face, and said in as casual a tone as he could manage, “At least I still have my right hand.”
At that moment, he was too tired to think about what he was saying, he was too tired to care. He shouldn’t have spoken to her like that, but Adarelle looked so… He blinked in surprise. She was... laughing, and it was beautiful.
“What did you do?!” Jotaranell shouted from where he stood, Leahan pinning the astrologians arm behind his back. The shield had managed to regain his composure, it seemed, his face returned to that indomitable jah annan calm.
“What did I do?” Kaeto asked, looking from the stargazer to the katori. Keros was slumped up against the wall, paler than usual, dark blood starting to dry on either side of his head, the foul liquid staining the front of his robes.
“You took him from me, boy!” Jotaranell screamed. “You took him from me, from the great one!” The man began to cackle. “I hope Lytash drives you, mad man! I hope his mad ramblings in your head keep you from ever sleeping again! When Mora’s vishran find you, princeling, you will beg for their mercy to be rid of the star-breaker, and they will give you none!”
The astrologian fell into more mad cackling, and Leahan punched the man in the solar plexus, squeezing the air from his lungs, sending the astrologian into a coughing fit. Behind the Jah Annan, King Galdrin and Speaker Jahn stood frozen in evident terror.
An explosion sounded from below, and the prince groaned as another wave of pain rolled through his head. He gestured to Adarelle, and the steward helped him rise to his feet, putting one of his arms around her shoulder.
“Father, you and Master Jahn must go. We need to know what's happening down there,” Kaeto said, his voice rough as raw granite.
The king raised a shaking hand towards the far side of the room. “What of those things?” He said, voice quivering as much as his oversized body. Kaeto looked and saw the changelings on the far side of the room. One lay still on the ground, but the other raised their spindly insect hands, white light shining from the appendages.
“Go!” Kaeto yelled, not looking to see if his father or the speaker obeyed. “Shield,” he began, but Leahan was already moving towards the monsters, saber drawn. Jotaranell laid sprawled face down on the floor in a crumpled heap, a bruise forming at the base of his neck.
The other Jah Annan, Botaran, moved to Sora’s side.
“Join your shield, Jah Annan,” Kaeto said, and Botaran stiffened visibly. Even after Leahan’s outburst, it seemed unnatural to see a jah annan react so visibly. Botaran unsheathed his saber, drawing out his maul as he prowled towards the changeling.
“We should leave, my prince,” Adarelle urged, but Kaeto waved her off.
“We need to get her out of here. We will need her power,” he said. Adarelle seemed uncertain but did as the prince ordered.
They moved to Sora’s side as the two Jah Annan engaged the changeling, steel ringing against carapace in the small study. Adarelle checked the girl's pulse, and her eyes opened wide. “She’s alive,” she said.
“Of course she’s alive,” Kaeto said since it was all so obvious to him now. He was fully aware of the girl, of her boy, her mind. It was… unnerving, to say the least. “She died, but the starlight brought her back, repairing the damage with mitokar and morakar. Hurry, Adarelle. There isn’t time to talk.”
The steward nodded, and Kaeto pushed away from her, managing to stand on his own, if only barely. Adarelle knelt beside the taller woman and wrapped Sora’s arms around her neck. She rose and began dragging the girl towards the thick study door.
“Let me help,” Kaeto said, reaching down to help his steward. The motion made him momentarily dizzy, and he stumbled before regaining his balance again. “Nevermind,” he muttered, cursing his weak legs.
“I’m alright, my lord. She’s not as heavy as she looks,” Adarelle said, doing her best to hide the exertion in her voice. Never before had he truly admired his steward, Kaeto realized. He thought he had, but there in that moment, he truly did admire her.
A whistling shriek split the air followed by a burst of white light between them, and the prince found himself flung to the far side of the room. He landed hard on his side, something in his chest snapping wetly. He wheezed, trying to push himself up off the floor, but a lance of pain through his chest stole the fading strength from his arms, and he fell back to the wood planks.
Slowly, Kaeto turned his head, trying to angle himself to find Adarelle. She could help him. She always could. When his eyes found her, another lance of pain stole through him, and he gasped.
Adarelle laid slumped against the wall opposite him, Sora’s limp form lying at the steward's feet. Kaeto tried to call out, to yell at them, but he only managed a weak exhalation of air. He tried again, throat tightening, to no result save for more pain in his chest.
Eyes watering, the prince stared on at the two, at his steward, feeling an unfamiliar sensation seeping into his mind. Dread.