The Patron of Feathers trembled as she tried to organize her thoughts. She had come here because she had nowhere else to turn, yet she still felt like a failure.

Everything had developed too quickly, the situation had spun so far out of control so rapidly that she had been left with little choice but to latch onto her father and his legacy, but she was a piggy bank and her thoughts and worries were the coins in the hand of a curious youth, jangling and clanging and bouncing off her interior as circumstances shook her about.

She squeezed her hands together and forced a small smile. For a moment, she had forgotten she wasn’t alone. Her thoughts had been hoodwinking her like that quite often these last few days. “I’m sorry. This shouldn’t- I shouldn’t come here to talk about my woes. Just- with the Nexus going as it is-”

“You were right to come here,” The other woman sighed. Between them sat an ornate gameboard with hand-carved horn pieces. Due to the Patron of Feathers' long trains of thought, the game had stalled out. The woman reached out and toyed with the crowned figure at the center of the rest. Her smile was brittle. “Despite our differences, the Nexus remains… everything to me. A constant reminder of my failures. We just… disagreed on how to proceed. It’s easier if I simply remain here and let him choose what happens now.”

The Patron of Feathers nodded. “I understand. I just wanted to ask you for some help. My father… well, I’m happy we have reached an equilibrium. But now, he wants me… he has discovered a way to create a weapon of time. However, to form it, two individuals are needed, experiencing time at different speeds, maintaining a tenuous connection. Because of our harmonious blood, no one is better suited. But I… the costs are high.”

The woman’s smile twisted upward. “And no one has more experience with complex familial relationships than me, right?”

The Patron of Feathers flushed. “I didn’t mean-”

She blinked and looked around. She suddenly stood alone on a dried creekbed, before a heap of stone. Several withered roots peaked out through the dark crevices. Her feathers tingled. She pivoted on her heel, her mind still reeling from the abrupt sense of deprivation. Hadn’t she just been talking? And now, why-

The Patron of Feathers paused. But who had she been talking with?

Her pupils dilated as she reached several times and found nothing. All those horrid, whispered fears and repressed tensions from her childhood surged back to the fore, crawling up her ankles and her lower back with sharp fingers. She squeezed her eyes closed and clenched her fist; she looked down in surprise to find an object in her left hand.

She held a small coin, glittering even in the shadows of the creekbed. A sharp pain cracked across her brow, sudden and unexpected, but in the next moment the discomfort had vanished. She felt light-headed. Her hand squeezed the coin, feeling the pulse of a strange Engraving on its surface. She could almost hear a voice whispering to her, telling her that so long as she had the coin with her, the price she would need to pay in the Dungeon would be blunted. Yet she felt bewildered by where that knowledge had come from.

And again, who had she just been talking to?

The Patron of Feathers stood in that creekbed for another fifteen minutes, alternating periods of frantic thoughts with bouts of shaking. She wondered whether, like many of the chosen experimenters for her father's trials, the altered experience of time had left her with certain mental… hiccups that had begun to manifest. Yet the coin remained in her hand. Whatever had or hadn’t happened had resulted in the coin.

So didn’t that prove whatever she couldn’t recall had happened?

Eventually she moved, worried her anxieties and uncertainties had become a swamp in that creek bed and the longer she remained, the deeper she sunk into their cloying rot. When she arrived at the Westrisser compound, her father waited for her with his hands folded in front of him and his wings folded behind.

They met in the basement that had been converted into the Dungeon crossroads, with three Dungeons with various amounts of time dilation arrayed behind him. The wide portals flickered and stretched, two of them occupied, the third waiting for her, propped unnaturally wide open like the mouth of an opportunistic predator.

“Have you thought about my proposal?” He spoke in a mild voice, even as he requested his daughter to venture off into the unknown. Based on every bit of data the two of them had gathered, it was certain she would suffer some sort of mental defect over the course of the weapon’s creation.

The war between Aether and Nether loomed heavily over the two of them. Both understood what could happen if the fragile equilibrium was broken, the Aetherlands steadily converted and infected by Nether.

It would be the beginning of the end for all Aether beings.

“I understand the consequences,” The Patron of Feathers whispered. She bit her lip, teetering on the edge. “I just…”

Her father looked at her with his pale eyes, letting her articulate her thoughts. She cleared her throat. “I just wish… it didn’t need to be me.”

This story has been stolen from Royal Road. If you read it on Amazon, please report it

To her surprise, Faelmac Westrisser blinked. “Well, it didn’t need to be you. The compatibility helps, but that wasn’t my main motivation. Simply… I couldn’t risk choosing anyone else. There is no one I trust as much as you, despite our differences. Your talents are simply superb, Frigite. You will not fail.”

The Patron of Feathers choked back a sob. At that moment, she couldn’t tell whether the flush of heat through her cheeks was love or hate for him. She couldn’t understand the sticky intricacies between them, flesh and blood and time and memory binding them uncomfortably close. The itching bond between parent in child that rankled but that also she couldn’t imagine living without.

She listened quietly as he went over the process of folding time, both of them coiling it like mechanical energy being forced into a spring, the pinned in place by the structure of the Dungeon so both could do their respective work. The details of how the difference in time anchored the force. About how the weapon would inevitably be reversed when it had finished, pointed so the in-Dungeon winding faced their foe.

Her father looked her in the eye. “You will not need to wield the weapon, but you should be aware of its costs. The more vicious temporal strike will be aimed outward, but the user will still be stricken with its activation.”

Frigite, who much preferred that she remained the Patron of Feathers, felt a sinking in the pit of her stomach. The coin she didn’t remember receiving but knew she needed burned in her pocket. For whatever reason, when her father told her she would not need to use the weapon, she felt certain that, in fact, she would someday unleash it. The certainty settled around her neck, a heavy, invisible iron collar.

Her father bid her goodbye with an impatient wave, already turning to his own calculations. With the tools and the prepared food, she nodded to him and entered the Dungeon. The Patron of Feathers looked around quietly, taking in her circumstances. Unlike the other spaces, her father didn’t bother with creating a large interior area in which she needed to train. Nor had much energy or time been invested in decor. The Dungeon’s interior resembled a jail cell, a blank grey space with slightly darker grey walls. The only real ornamentation was a large steel table against the far wall, on which the Patron of Feathers was to lay out her calculations for the weapon creation.

With heavy steps, she walked over to the table. But halfway there, her nose twitched. She swayed, unable to understand the warm scent of sugar and cinnamon she detected. With staggering steps, she went the rest of the way toward the table.

Sitting there, still steaming slightly, laid her favorite marshmallow pie. Her mind skittered over it, trying to understand how it could be there. Obviously, her father must have brought it into the Dungeon and placed it; he must have delivered the treat and put the Dungeon in stasis as he left so it would still be fresh when she came.

She tried to picture the same man who had dismissed her with a wave thinking to provide this dessert, but couldn’t.

How long ago had he baked the pie? Did he order a servant to do it?

Quickly, a chilling realization tightened around her heart. He had always known she would acquiesce to his request.

Again, her heart pulsed with a heat she didn’t study closely enough to understand. So many thoughts were tangled together she couldn’t be bothered to cut them apart. But before she sat down and began to create the Engraving necessary for her father’s great experiment, she did quietly eat the pie.

With her hands, digging her fingers into the sweet goop and shoveling it into her mouth. When she finished, she looked at all the diagrams her father had given her.

The theory might be complex, with the Dungeon requiring special anchoring and an elaborate energy-shutting mechanism to avoid the spatial bridge between the two time-bubbles from collapsing, but the work the Patron of Feathers would be doing was extremely simple.

It required her to exercise her image, but it was just as mundane as hand winding a crank. Which she would be required to do for…

An indeterminate amount of time she would need to judge by examining the stored power. Her father had provided written descriptions of temporal anomalies he suspected would begin to appear once she had reached certain requisite tiers of time compression, but those were just hypotheses. The real experimentation would have to be done by feel.

She was the only one he trusted to do this.

Choking back a sob, the Patron of Feathers wiped the remnant pie from her mouth and cleared off the table. She took out the diagrams given to her by her fathers and painstakingly drew out the Engravings. Whorls and traced gears to grip time and force it into the shape that Faelmac Westrisser had so long dreamed.

The Patron of Feathers had worked up a light sweat by the time she finished her preparations but otherwise felt fine. She looked around at the grey walls, inspecting her current situation one more time. She had missed no details on her first examination. The area was grim and tightly shuttered against all distractions.

She looked down at the messy remnants of the pie in the pan. She scowled and stored it away, pulling out a jug of water and taking a sip. Then, after she produced a comfortable chair from the same interspatial bracelet, she began to wind.

It took about an hour of winding for the coin to begin to twinkle and warm. The Patron of Feathers paused in her labor and pulled out the coin. Suddenly, she heard a half-remembered voice in her ear. You are right to be afraid; your enemy in such circumstances is loneliness and an idle mind. I cannot help with either directly, but you can trick yourself with this coin, to help pass the time.

As the coin activated, the Patron of Feathers could feel her image continue its toil with the weapon, but her mind began to drift. She skated through fluffy pink clouds of warm emotion and arrived at a familiar scene. She was young, slender and bright, carrying a heavy darkness from the constant scolding of her father. She could not act, could not alter the course, but she could watch her own life flow past her, from beginning to end.

Her childhood passed relatively quickly, considering how tortured it was. How stifled Frigite had felt by her father and by the absence left by her deceased mother.

But one day, while heading to the market to fetch a certain herb he wished, she saw two young adults, bold and confident, arguing over how they were going to break into the Westrisser compound. She had frozen and stared at them until they had noticed her.

They were Elhume and Yystrix, the two individuals who altered the course of her destiny.

After meeting them on that day, Frigite Westrisser would someday become the first of the Patrons, the Patron of Feathers.