Jast
Jast’s feet had carried him to the ghost of his childhood home, the Clan Lunurian compound of Midtown, now a hollowed out wreck of dilapidation. Its iron gates lay battered and rusted, trampled into the soil, the primary structure sagging and languishing in disrepair. Crude tents occupy the lawn, which Jast knows are the makeshift shelters of the city’s homeless. None approach him, he still wears the stolen Garrison officer uniform, and none question as his numb feet lead him across the threshold into the wallowing interior.
It smells of mold and ruin. Each heavy footstep shifts uneven weight across the floundering support beams, a vacant creaking and groaning echoing through the empty halls, much like the death rattle of a man stabbed in the back. Jast hates the familiarity he has with such noises. Not a soul stirs in the abandoned halls and rooms, not a single spider nest in their webs, empty and forgotten.
Jast exits into an open air atrium. Sunlight filters through the square opening overhead, unbothered and unfettered by Nuaranth’s towering skyline, illuminating the dust and debris in its white caress. The sun is pleasant and warm against the Shadowarch’s face and he closes his eyes, soaking in the soothing heat.
Unprompted memories, shattered and torn, flood Jast’s mind and sight behind his eyes. His joints lock in place as they flit in and out of view, teeth grinding as he is helpless to resist unwanted remembrances. Jast’s father naming the songbirds that come to roost in the eaves; his sister chasing him around, whipping at his ankles with tangible shadows as they play; his mother doing her daily exercises, slowing moving from one form to another as she glides across the ground. He remembers all of them and yet each glimmer of his past life passes through his mind. It’s all sand in a sieve, leaving only coarse grains for him to cling to. Hot tears fall from unclenched eyes, lips trembling open and teeth bared, fists clenched against the ground as his breathing comes in ragged gasps.
Hatred.
Jast allows himself to wallow, but knows that lingering will lead to despair. He picks himself up, and he walks. He can’t bear to stay here any longer. The vagabonds that made camp on his lawn watch him as he leaves, whispering among themselves.
“It is nearly time now,” they think aloud, collectively. “It is nearly time.”
Jast exits Midtown, but not before casting off his stolen jacket in favor of something less conspicuous. He found it hanging from a clothesline strung across two tenements, a canvas long coat, drab green and well loved. He tries it on first, seeing if the sleeves can conceal his arm bracers, and commits to the theft upon finding that it does. The tails flare out, still stiff from the cleaning process, and the back of the collar likes to stand high while the outer edges fold towards his shoulders. It’ll keep Jast warm during the frigid temperature drops and block the sun’s harshest rays. Jast makes for the Lower City, hands tucked in his jacket pockets.
Jast finds two coin purses upon Rifling through the pockets of his ill-gotten attire. They belong to Holver, the Bright Caster he murdered during his flight from the Garrison, the pouch made from supple black leather and stuffed with silver coins and small, rough-cut amethysts. The second came from the coat, a threadbare clutch with squeaky hasps, containing a paltry offering of five silver marks and a spare button. Jast splits Holver’s cash between the two and keeps them in separate pockets. It makes sense to keep one’s money spread among their personage. He recalls his mother hiding a silver mark under her tongue.
The Lower City stands against Jast’s better judgement, buildings like bad teeth supporting one another and the makeshift shanties that sprout between them. He knows it could be worse, memories of his time as a Praetor bringing him to the ghetto where officers treat the residents like target practice. Bile rises in his throat as he suppresses the Dog Incident. It comes to his mind unbidden regardless, for memories you want to forget are most thoroughly etched in your brain. Jast takes a seat on the ground, dizzy with nausea.
As he recovers, he watches a Shadowarch washing the windows of a tenement building, a loose armband hanging off her upper arm. She’s skinny and sallow, cheeks sunken in and eyelids heavy from working dawn until dusk for days on end. She lugs a wash bucket larger than her head up and down the street, dunking stained rags in the water and wiping the gunk from the dirty glass. The property’s owner pays the Garrison to have her work onsite. Jast knows she jumped at the opportunity to leave the ghetto. As bad as the job is, it at least gets her out of that oppressive, city-sized prison.
A trio of Garrison officers approach the window washer from down the street, fresh blood judging by their lack of Praetor detail, young men who think themselves grown into adulthood. Although, Jast can’t judge considering his own development. The leader of the group, eyes bright with Inner Light, hooks his foot around the girl and trips her. She tries, oh does she try, to stop the bucket from spilling, but her efforts only cause the cloudy contents to empty all over his boots. His compatriots laugh at the misfortune, but he snarls.
“Filthy little shadowmonger!” He kicks her while she’s down. “How dare you?” Hardlight sprouts from his palm and he holds the crystal like a baton, striking the Shadowarch as she curls into a defensive ball. She uncurls herself once he finally relents, met with his dirty boot in her face. “If you know what’s best, lick them clean”.
This will not stand.
The window washer hesitates and the Garrison officer raises his baton once more. It doesn’t connect, Jast holding his wrist back with a firm grip. The officer’s head glares at him, but the breadth and height of the man surprises him. He tries to rip his wrist free, but Jast holds fast.
“You have five seconds to unhand me.” He tries to sound threatening, but the uncertainty in his voice betrays his inexperience. He looks to the other two Garrison officers and they step forward, light crystal batons at the ready, but they lack the backbone required to seem threatening. Jast tightens his grip.
“Are you going to strike that poor girl?” the Shadowarch asks. “She’s had enough, I think.”
“I’ll be the one to decide if she’s had enough, citizen.” The officer says that last word, “citizen,” like a slur. Jast finds his response to be the wrong answer. He tightens his grip even further and the young man—the boy—cries in agony, dropping his baton. It shatters against the pavement, twinkling shards skittering this way and that. It’s only once he drops to his knees in pain that Jast releases him. The other two stare him down as he shoves past them.
“That was a mistake,” Jast thinks. He’s cognizant of the three Bright Casters following him, but at least they’re leaving the window washer alone. They keep a healthy distance between each other, but it’s clear to anyone who’s looking that Jast is being followed.
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
He can turn down a back alley if he wants to, knowing full well that they’ll come to blows once he stops walking. But Jast doesn’t want to fight. He continues wandering through the Lower City before deciding on a proper destination, some place with a crowd of people, witnesses that would make it difficult to justify beating him. He spies a bunkhouse out the corner of his eye, a squat wood building with two and a half stories stacked on top of the ground level. A bustling place, filled with workers seeking to reduce their commute time between shifts, offering them hearty meals and potent beverages. He veers his course and walks inside, his stalkers not far behind.
Many men, likely fishers based on the smell, sit at tables and the bar. Salt and sun weathers their faces, some having a glimmer of Inner Light in their eyes while others wear armbands of varying colors and designs. The conversation is thick, joyous in some places, pale beer flowing like soda water from the Water Downs and leaving a sticky residue on the floor. Jast enters unnoticed, but silence engulfs the place when the Garrison officers arrive. Outsiders attract attention, but all eyes turn to Jast at the bar. The people part as the patrol leader sits next to him, the other two standing behind them with arms folded behind their back. Jast puts a few coins down on the bar and its nervous tender sets down to wooden mugs of pale beer before taking the coins and scurrying away. Jast remembers officers forcing Praetors to drink, competing to see who would pass out first. Still, he takes a long drink of the stuff and smacks his lips. Piss water.
“You know what is about to happen, don’t you?” the leader says, leaning toward the Shadowarch. He’s trying, oh how he tries, to be intimidating, to no avail. “My friends here are going to take you out back, beat you to within an inch of your life, and throw your bleeding hide into the ghetto.”
“No,” Jast says, voice soft. “I’m going to break your arm, one of their legs, and all three of your jaws.” He takes another drink of his beer as the officers laugh, genuinely laugh at his hubris. They stop, expressions falling, and a pregnant pause falls across the bunkhouse.
Jast can feel his implanted Demesne, Unlabored Flawlessness, activate and he leans back as the Garrison officer throws a right hook at him. Jast grabs his arm, twists it so that the elbow faces upward, and hammers his beer mug into the joint. It bends in a sickening direction and the officer’s shrill screaming cut off as Jast follows through with a punch to the jaw. His head spins around and there’s an audible pop before he collapses on the floor. Jast uses Unlabored Flawlessness to its fullest extent, dodging the counter attacks from behind. Jast weaves through them and stomps on their shadows, causing them both to freeze as Jast’s Shadowarchy arrests their muscles. He can feel the darkness roiling at his touch and he makes a swooping gesture with his fingers, one of the officer’s legs following suit as it twists at an angle. He cries out, unable to move or even fall, as he witnesses his leg being mutilated before his very eyes. Jast takes both his fists and knocks them together, the two bodies following suit. They collide chin to chin and Jast squeezes his fists, crushing their jaws into dust. He releases his fists and they drop to the ground.
“Shadowarch,” is the whisper on the wind, those who remained in the bunkhouse staring wide-eyed at the display of raw power. “Shadowarch. Shadowarch.” A man exits the kitchen and gestures for Jast to come closer. He has auburn facial hair, cut into a neat beard and short mustache, his eyes hard and unyielding above sharp cheekbones.
“Follow me, stranger,” he says, accent thick and unnameable. The Shadowarch follows and arrives at the kitchen’s back door. “Exit through here. It won’t take long before someone squeals and the whole precinct floods the place.”
“Why are you helping me?” Jast asks. “I can offer you nothing while the Garrison—”
“The Garrison makes few friends,” the man interrupts. “They’ll hold complicit whoever they choose.” He runs a hand through his auburn hair. “I consider myself a friend to your people. Call me Zacaer.” Jast nods, but doesn’t quite understand Zacaer. Still, he’s ushered out the back and onto the street.
“We have little time,” Zacaer says, “and we’ll better lose them if we split up. Trust that I’ll find you again, friend.”
“My name is Jast.”
Zacaer smiles, clapping Jast on the shoulder and giving him a reassuring shake. “Trust that we’ll meet again, Jast. There’s more happening than you realize, but it’s not the right time. I’ll head north. You should try to lose them by the docks.”
Jast nods at the instructions and takes off for the docks. He’s careful to avoid the incoming Garrison patrols, dipping into whatever scrap of shade and darkness he can find when he feels their collective boot tremors through the pavement. A veritable army of Praetors follows in their wake, pushing through pedestrians and knocking over food stands. They’re liable to search the surrounding city blocks after upending the bunkhouse, so Jast continues toward the Lower City docks. The Garrison beat him to the punch, competent Garrison lieutenants reasoning that if they don’t find him at the bunkhouse, they’ll be better off scouring every avenue of escape.
Jast curses to himself, slipping inside an awning shade. He sees no escape. Panic welling up inside him. But then he feels a distant calmness, a shadowarchological connection forming between his location and the fluttering shadow of a rooftop banner. He focuses on the connection, tracing in from the awning shadow and through the trembling threads of clotheslines overhead, up the shaded crevices between mortared bricks, and the spindly spire casts a shadow that runs over the edge. It’s all one enormous shadow, stretched thin by the time of day, a webbing of clothesline linking every building together. Jast clothes his eyes and imagines himself on that roof. When he opens them, he’s in the fluttering banner shadow.
Exiting, he peers over the edge. The Garrison clogs the winding, narrow streets, and their Praetors only getting in the way as they search every nook and cranny they can reach from the ground. Though he can see the calm, dark sea from where he stands, Jast knows he won’t be able to get to the docks. He’s forced to go west, traversing the flat and domed roofs of Lower Nuaranth.
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Zacaer had slipped into the sewer the moment he was able. Being proficient in stone Elemnistry, it’s a simple matter of tunnelling through the ground and sealing the entrance hole without leaving a trace. From there, he can return to his hideout, his sanctuary away from his sanctuary of origin. A subtle glyph denotes the entrance hidden in the stonework. Those unaware may see the glyph as a collection of random dots. But those dots resemble stars forming the Crow Constellation, a mark of secrecy in the Ordo Elemnata, associated with the Ordo Corvinet. Fitting, given his circumstances.
The Elemnist throws open his secret door, slamming it closed behind him. The hideout is an Elemnatically shaped box in the stone, dozens of small air vents boring through the walls and ceiling. In the corner, a hammock holds an Espreth, swaying with the rhythmic water drips from air-vents. But Zacaer knows that isn’t true. The Garrison ransacking the Ordo Labrythyne sanctuary left Sorel cracked but alive. The healing will be slow and Zacaer curses himself every morning for his inability to shape Elemnatic glass.
The Elemnist raises a stone seat out of the floor and sits across from Sorel’s hammock, hunching over and bouncing his knee in thought.
“Kuna still doesn’t trust me,” he says. Even though he knows he won’t get an answer, Zacaer waits for Sorel’s response. “But that’s alright. I found the Under City without her. There’s an entrance in the Lower City, in the catacombs near the Wallside neighborhood. Finding it requires prior knowledge. Or Elemnistry to feel it out.” Zacaer looks up and smiles. Sorel remains still. He sits back and exhales, patting his knees with his palms.
“I met an interesting fellow earlier today. A Shadowarch calling himself Jast. I’m not sure if that’s his real name, given the circumstances.” He trembles, racking his brain for some forgotten detail. “I’m sure I’ve heard or seen that name before. But where? Could he be the other…”
Zacaer stands up and paces the short length of the cramped room. He’s been on his own and without support for ten years, and now it seems as all the required pieces are converging on Nuaranth. He sits back down, pressing his palms together between his knees.
“I’m sure the Ordo Elemnata has sent someone to investigate Nuaranth by now. Soon, they’ll discover their truth, and the entire Ordo Melikinara will converge on Nuaranth. I need to gather them.”
Zacaer stands up and climbs into the hammock. He holds Sorel’s cracked glass body close to his chest and rocks from side to side. His eyes are wide open, staring off into the middle distance.