It is a mystery to me, to have found a hidden room in the deepest cellars, sealed with the emperor’s own mark. An emperor of many generations gone, no less, when our legions first came to this wild place. I would never have found it at all, if not for having to send workers below to repair the water damage.

* The Journal of Decimus Avitus

☀

13th Day of High Summer’s Moon, AC 297

Trist woke to beams of light falling through the rustling leaves above, and beyond that, the strange sky of Auberon’s realm under the hill. He felt weightless, and the sensation was doubly jarring because, since suffering his wound, he passed directly from unconsciousness to awareness and vision, all at once, without the intermediate step of opening his eyes.

He was floating in the Fountain of Niviène, surrounded by the faerie queen herself, her daughter Osma, and even Acrasia. Three pairs of hands, delicate and cool, moved over his limbs and his torso. “Be still,” Niviène said. “You have exhausted your very core. You know that I did warn you about this, Trist.”

“You pushed too hard against Forneus,” Acrasia chastised him bitterly. “Your oaths to us are not yet kept.”

“It was quite romantic to watch, however,” Princess Osma said, with a sly grin pointed in Acrasia’s direction. “Charging in to save your wife like that. Most men would have run away, I think.”

Trist sighed. “She is safe, then? I could not find her at the end.”

“She is,” Niviène said. “And I tell you that so you will not reach out and try to find her. Let your Clarisant tend to her own affairs for a while - she has one of my husband’s wives to help her, already. You must recover.”

“How do I do that?” Trist asked.

“This pool is a good beginning,” Osma explained. “You know the healing properties it holds from when you first arrived with your companions, I believe. But the next step, you can only do with Acrasia.”

“You are holding a great many Tithes,” Acrasia said. “You should spend them, Trist. It will strengthen your core, rather than work it harder, straining to hold them. Think of it like the difference between holding a mug of ale aloft for an hour, in your hand, rather than drinking it down. One will eventually tire the muscles in your arm. The other won’t.”

“Ten, you said,” Trist recalled. It was pleasant to float, and to be tended to. More pleasant than the idea of rising from the pool, and going to a ruined city where he would need to fight more daemons, alone. He forced himself to consider his options, and what he might need in Vellatesia, without any support to be had.

It was tempting to strengthen his Graal Knight Boon from a red strand, to an orange. He would need to be able to tend to his own wounds, and the power of the Graal had saved not only himself, but his friends and companions many times over. Then too, he wondered whether he might not be able to regain his own sight, the eyes he had been born with, if that strand was more potent. Or had he missed his chance forever, trying to heal himself without enough power? Instead of bleeding, leaking eye sockets, he now had scars, as if the wounds were from months or years in the past.

The Hunter’s Boon, which he had of Cern, would help him run or ride to Vellatesia with great speed, and without tiring, but he had a better way to travel, now. Why cross the intervening space of the forest at all, when he could use the Gates that he had stolen from the daemon Bathin?

“Two Tithes to the Gate Boon,” Trist said, after a moment of long consideration. Acrasia reached out her right hand, splayed her fingers, and set her palm over his heart. The part of her that had no physical form reached down into his core, weaving two threads of the power he had gained from slaying the leviathan, and injecting them into a single red strand. Power thrummed through him, and the shade of the burning whirl she manipulated lightened, from a deep red to a blazing orange. That left eight Tithes to use.

It also left Trist with not a single red boon. His core was now a knot, or perhaps more like a ball of yarn, entirely in orange and yellow fire. Would it be better to shore up some of the Boons he had neglected, of late? Only Fae Touched and Daemon Bane were yellow, because he had felt constantly on the edge of losing not only himself, but those he cared about, when forced to fight battle after battle against daemons.

On the other hand, did he really expect Avitus and his minions to allow the Gate of Horn to be destroyed, without trying to stop him? If the Suneater descended on the ruins of Vellatesia, would Trist rather have shored up his ability to track his quarry through the forest, or have enhanced his physical strength and speed even further?

The idea of fighting Sammāʾēl was what decided him, in the end. That confrontation was going to have to happen eventually, if this endless night was ever going to be lifted. Trist knew that Ismet would be willing to fight the thing, and he had no doubt that Bors would give it his best, as well, but he wasn’t willing to count on one of the other Exarchs dealing with the problem.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

“Fae Touched,” Trist said aloud, and Niviène sighed.

“Are you certain?” the faerie queen asked him. “It is not uncommon for Exarchs to reach shades of yellow during the course of their lives and their battles. A Boon strengthened to burn white, however - that is the border of the capabilities of beings like Auberon himself. Mortals of your world were not truly meant for such power. You are unlike other Exarchs, in the circumstances of your birth, but I feel I must give you a warning even so.”

“The Sun Eater must be stopped,” Trist said. “Do it, Acrasia.”

The last time she had bound so many Tithes into Trist’s core at once, when he’d just defeated Zepar the Scarlet before the west gate of Rocher de la Garde, he’d lost consciousness entirely. He braced for the feeling of his body seizing up once again, entirely out of his control, and was thankful that at least now he was floating in the water, surrounded by those who would care for him. There was no fear of falling over.

Acrasia thrust both her hands into his chest. Her fingers passed through his muscle and wrapped around his heart, his core, and Trist’s limbs shot out, fully extended. His back arched, and he strained so hard his muscles ached. He could not breathe, he could not think, and once again he experienced the peculiar sensation of floating above his body, detached from the physical.

All around, in the darkness, he could see twinkling lights, dozens of them. He recognized one as Acrasia, grown fat and bright on the Tithes he’d fed her over the past moons, and nearby the other two must be Queen Niviène and her daughter. Osma burned nearly entirely yellow, with only the barest flicker of orange left, but the faerie queen’s blinding shades of white and blue matched those of Auberon, in the distance. There was Cern as well, and more faeries within this realm than Trist could count, each one its own star in the vast darkness.

Only Acrasia’s core, however, circled his. Or, more precisely, they circled each other, in an endless dance, with cords of fire stretched out between the two, twining and binding them to each other in revolution after revolution.

“This is you,” Trist said, without a voice, in a place where form was meaningless. “Is it not?”

“This is me,” Acrasia pulsed, and a corona of burning yellow fire licked off her. “Now wake up, Trist.”

He sucked in a breath, and all the tension left his body. If it hadn’t been for the three faerie women holding onto him, he would have fallen below the surface of the pool, then, in a panic, and Trist wasn’t certain his exhausted arms and legs would have had the strength to keep him from drowning.

“This is the greatest change to your body you’ve ever experienced,” Niviène murmured in his ear. “You need rest. Let us care for you, Trist. Relax. Empty your mind, and sleep.”

Her words were soothing, her voice a soothing lullaby, and Trist let himself drift away again.

☀

When he woke, lying on a carpet of plush moss, beneath the arching boles of a great oak, Auberon was waiting. Trist had not spoken to the faerie king in weeks, since he and the other Exarchs had first arrived at the heart of the Ardenwood.

“Now,” Auberon said, “You are ready.”

“I was not before?” Trist asked. “To go to Vellatesia?”

“To get there, yes,” Auberon explained. “You could have done that. Your father and mother did so, with me to guide them. You might even have been able to destroy the gate,” the King of Shadows mused. “If no one stopped you. But while Avitus never expected your mother to turn against him, he is well aware of your existence, Trist. How could he not be? At every turn, at his every advantage, you have somehow appeared to ruin his stratagems. Plans he has laid over the course of decades, you have set to naught. He never accounted for you, though perhaps he should have.”

Trist frowned. “But he is working with Agrat. Valeria is her Exarch. They sent a plague to kill my mother. They must have known that I exist.”

“A human child,” Auberon mused. “With no power. What threat could you possibly be? They knew, you see, that no Angelus would ever take you as an Exarch, Trist. Whatever potential you inherited from Agrat, from that second mother’s womb, would never flower, because it would never be given an opportunity. Which is why I sent Acrasia to you.”

“You made me,” Trist said. “Because you needed someone capable of doing what you want. I am a sword to you. A weapon in your hand.”

“Your mother and father made you,” Auberon said, with a grin. “If they planted a seed, I simply watered the garden. Or, if you would prefer, they forged you, while I quenched you in oil, wrapped your hilt in leather, and ground an edge onto your blade. And what a weapon you are now. You will serve me in a way that Maddoc never could.”

“And when it is done,” Trist said. “If I survive it all. I free Acrasia, and I am free of you?”

“Is that truly what you want?” Auberon asked. “To return to obscurity? You are a hero to your people, Trist, a champion of your kingdom. Will you find it so easy to hang up your sword on the wall and go back to your village? To raise a pack of brats, and grow old and fat and die?”

With a groan, Trist rolled over and got onto his hands and knees. He hurt everywhere, but he managed to get to his feet. “I will go,” he said. “And I will keep my oaths. And then we are done.”

“You will not leave quite yet, boy,” Auberon said. “There is one more thing you need to do, first. Take up your sword.”

“What?” Trist’s mind was fuzzy, still fogged with sleep.

“Take up your sword,” Auberon repeated. “And defend yourself. Let us see precisely what quality of weapon the past two decades of work have forged for me.”

The King of Shadows reached into his own, and drew forth a blade of utter and absolute darkness, that seemed to consume light itself. It was long and thin, a blade meant to rely on speed and grace, and yet Trist sensed from it such a threat as he had never faced before.

On the moss at his feet, Trist saw that his longsword had been placed beside him. Never taking his eyes from the faerie king, Trist crouched, grasped the hilt in his right hand, and held the sheath in his left. The sword sang against leather when he drew it forth, and then stood up again.

Blade in hand, beneath the oak leaves, Trist faced the faerie king.