Chapter 14: Darkness

> “Well, far be it for me to tell the dukes and duchesses what they may believe, of course. I’m simply remarking that it seems very strange they all converted to Oneism so quickly. Could it really be so wonderful? It seems unlikely…” —Baron Erard of Avon, overheard at Lady Challeus’ salon shortly before his disappearance.

ON THE WING

Above the lake, Eärrach’s mote 09.06.03.10.03

Rheannach landed lightly on the pebbles and folded her wings in, an exercise which always felt a bit like tucking an extra pair of arms into a tight coat. They were comfortable enough once they were away, but the act of doing so was just slightly uncomfortable, as was the act of extending them.

Eärrach was bathing in the lake. It was ridiculous, really. He didn’t look remotely buoyant, and a man of his legendary thew ought to have found it easier to walk along the bottom than swim. But then again, his precise apparent density was entirely a matter of his will. He could choose how much his presence affected the world, or even how it affected particular individuals, so…if he wanted to swim, then swim he did.

So did Rheannach, for that matter. As he splashed toward her waving, she reached up, unfastened her clothes, and let them drop around her ankles, before wading out to join him. They met, and kissed. He took her in his arms, swirled her around, and from there…

Give and take. She gave herself, he took her*.* Then he gave himself, all of himself just for her, and she took him.

As ever, it was almost too much. He rode the utmost limit of her tolerance perfectly, drove her incoherent almost instantly and held her there for a long, passionate day on the soft grass under the open sky. His reinforcing strength poured into her and the ground beneath them as he pinned her fiercely, smashing her into his body with enough force to crush mountains to powder. The world beneath very literally moved for them, rocking to and fro under the roll of his hips, every thrust forcing out her breath and rearranging her insides around his godly manhood. Her first orgasm had hit almost immediately, and burst every living plant on the mote into premature bloom. Everything after that was a blur, until after a long day of loving her insensate, his own climax eventually hit, setting off an avalanche on the slopes of his private mountain.

And with that, as each pulse drove more and more of his might into her, she no longer had limits. She, alone of all beings in the world, could handle everything he had to offer. It was his particular gift to her, and to himself. Not even the Crowns themselves could experience King Eärrach in his fullness. The world of matter and energy was merely where they started; their melding, as his ongoing orgasm brought them into union infinitely beyond mortal experience, transcended time itself. It lasted seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, and eternities, all at once.

He was as gentle as petals falling on still water, and violent enough even in his smallest, laziest motions to shatter worlds without any effort. Time had little hold on them in this state and they brought each other wordless, nigh-infinite ecstasy, starting in the heat of sweat and muscles and aching pleasure and immeasurable strength, and stretching across realms of reality that could only be felt rather than understood. He rolled his perfect, maximum physique against her, crushing her own effectively indestructible body inside and out with power that was too vast to be understood. He did so with the most trivial of effort and all but destroyed her with every rhythmic, unstoppable thrust, like he was merely molding soft clay. In the very next not-instant she was whole and unbroken, tenderness rolling off him so powerfully that, too, could have erased her, had he not made her strong enough to withstand his most focused, unrestrained attentions.

Then again, and again. He enveloped her very soul into his own, together in a place where people were immaterial and total communion of spirit was as simple as beholding one another. Her, a tiny, bright spark against the raging, impossibly bright near-infinity that was his own inner light. She was so tiny next to the truth of him, she could disappear into his being and it would make no noticeable difference to anyone else.

But he would never let that happen. His was the power to create universes. And to destroy them. And she, simultaneously, was destroyed by him…and ruled him by opening herself to him. For in that power was his love of all that was precious, beautiful, tiny and infinitely worthwhile—all of them. On that day of creation he fell in love with them all, where his virility sired and manifested a million human souls all at once by Queen Talvi, the elves likewise by Lady Haust, along with the countless billions of animals across all of creation, great and small, numerous or rare, in an single act of primal, ritual fertility.

Against such a being, one who wielded such unspeakable power, yet who could not help but love all those around him? She was at once utterly helpless, and completely in control. What he gave her, what she took from him, was exactly what she wanted. And had she bade him stop, it all would have been over, instantly.

The thought never even crossed her mind.

By the time they’d found the end of it, which might have been hours or weeks later, they’d sent psychic waves of lust, love and pleasure across all of creation. There would be many, many children conceived from their influence. She liked that idea. It warmed her almost as much as his furnace-like heat did as she lay on his slab-like chest and traced lazy circles across his skin with her fingertip, back in the world of the comparatively normal, of rules and physics and limitations.

Well…not quite. They lay together awhile in a bubble of altered spacetime, that he might enjoy his physical unrestraint with her without endangering the world. It was here, and only here in moments like this, where should could properly grasp at the reality of what he was. And only here where she could withstand such awareness, awash in his love and protection.

“You are so achingly beautiful,” he rumbled, contentedly. They were still deeply joined, and even still he was pouring his power into her almost as powerfully as at the start. She briefly considered provoking him to round two…

Instead she stretched up, touched her nose to his, breathed slowly, then stretched just an inch further. Their lips lingered.

“Your perfect woman,” she reminded him.

“Mhm…”

“…And you’re my perfect man.”

He said nothing, but his dark eyes glittered as he looked into hers for a moment. He knew it was a complicated reality for her. He did understand.

She sighed, happily. “And I am thankful for it.”

He held her tight, a loving little squeeze from him, but with the strength to crush worlds. “And so am I.”

Their words untied a last, lingering mutual knot of tension that even immortal passion had failed to release, and they finally relaxed truly and completely. The bubble strained against the force of his being, but held, as it always had. For a time that was no time at all and yet pleasantly forever they just…basked. It was exactly what she needed, exactly what she had long wanted.

But of course, the King was insatiable. He stirred within her, driving out her breath with his sheer magnificent size. The King grinned savagely, and being who he was…

Resolutely physical for the next many rounds in his embrace. Long, long almost-time passed as he played her like a fine instrument on the one hand, and the most savage of drums on the other.

But even for them, these beautiful moments had to end. At long last he was satisfied, and they held each other in the embrace that only comes after the deepest passion.

“…How do you do it?” She asked eventually, and ran her fingers through his thick, glossy mane. It was her favorite part of him, really. Every other aspect of him had a terrible, overwhelmingly maximum beauty, from his physique to his personality through to his power and into his very soul, all of which unfolded and amplified within the bubble far, far beyond anything he’d ever revealed elsewhere in the Nested Worlds. But not his hair. It was the one part of him that was both perfectly him and yet still within the realm of human, even never having ever seen a mane on another man quite so…well, luxuriant.

He smiled back at her, nuzzling into her hand as it stroked his locks. “Hmm?”

She hesitated, not wanting to ruin the moment. But, no: she knew better, and simply asked.

“How can you bear such…restraint? I know what you are, Pan. The effort it must take—!”

“Entirely worth it, even if it does feel…” he groped for a word for a moment, then grinned sheepishly. “Uh, itchy. I guess.”

“Itchy.” She poked his nose, playing at being nonplussed. Enjoyed that, for this moment, with the power of countless galaxies flowing through her, she could dent and push at him as if he were a mortal man, wearing mortal flesh.

And not the power of a universe given form.

“Mhm. Itchy. Like a too-tight coat you don’t dare take off. Or a rough sweater against bare skin.”

“Do I at least scratch that itch?”

“You’re the only one who can. Anyone else in this little bubble o’ mine would be destroyed if I let go too much. But not you. With you…I can let go.”

“It feels like being destroyed, almost. And being put back together, over and over. It…hurts. In a good way.”

“…I didn’t know that,” he frowned. “I must see if I can improve on that, somehow.”

“Don’t you dare! I like it”

He shot her a bewildered look, and Rheannach reflected that, for all that he contained, he was very much a male being. There were some things he just wasn’t able to understand. And that thought rather pleased her. Some little fenced-off corner of divine energy was hers to know, while he was forever shut out. Despite his incomprehensible vastness, he was still a finite being. Not all things were his.

“Are you sure? Truth be told, I’d take the excuse to talk to an ancient friend again, anyway…”

“Don’t you dare,” she repeated.

“Yes, ma’am,” he grinned, and for a silly encore flexed his perfect arm, here in the one place he could truly do so without care, with the one person who could behold its awesome power without being destroyed by the show.

She laughed, and they fell fully back into the mortal and finite world again. No longer sharing his power, his body was once again utterly unyielding to her touch; no force no matter how powerful could so much as bend a hair on his arm, nor dimple the skin of his buttock. He was, as always, gentle despite that; they swam a few brisk laps to clean up, and he took her by the hand as they walked around the shore toward the cabin, neither bothering to dress. There was nobody in the worlds whose presence would embarrass them, least of all those few who could actually reach this place. And he was above that, anyway. The earthmote dipped and undulated beneath his feet as he let the tiniest, most insignificant speck of his true being fill his body—which was still such an incomprehensibly vast weight of power, even his little toe was far heavier than the world entire, and the rest of him as if something exceedingly vaster were stepping down onto the earth, instantly fusing it into metal and rock.

The magic of his being was the only thing that could safely contain and control such power.

But there were a few who had some idea of what he was, and loved him in spite of it. Maicoh flicked an ear at them as they entered, opening one blue eye. He was, as ever, stretched out in front of the hearth.

“Loud,” he growled.

“I’ve overheard you and Maingan many a time, pup. You are in no position to complain!” Eärrach chided him fondly, and knelt to squish and massage the great wolf’s ears.

“Where is Maingan, anyway?” Rheannach asked, throwing herself down on the rug to enjoy the fire’s warmth on water-chilled skin. Maicoh flicked his ear again, somehow conveying a shrug without so much as a twitch of his shoulders.

“Hunting.”

“Two words in less than a minute. You’re in unusually loquacious form today!” she teased. To her satisfaction and amusement, Maicoh just growled, tucked his nose under his tail, and pointedly closed his eyes.

King Eärrach sat down cross-legged and unleashed his most devastating weapon: belly rubs.

It worked. Maicoh straightened out, and his tongue lolled happily. Rheannach giggled softly, glad that even they could have the cozy simplicity of sitting by the fire and making a fuss of their dog. She needed it, after the events at Crae Vhannog.

Which was, after all, what she’d come back here to discuss. But she wasn’t going to feel even a little bit ashamed at taking some time for love, first.

“So, Ellaenie has her Word, thanks to you,” she reported once Maicoh had been appropriately pampered. “Did you foresee it?”

“Yes,” Eärrach sighed, stood, and retrieved a blanket from a high shelf to drape it near the fire to warm up. “I might have chosen something different for her myself, but…”

Rheannach chuckled. “Yes, I’ve noticed a pattern like that. Jerl, a man with almost no ambition beyond enjoying the life he already had, came into the power to remake history. Mouse, a man who’d rather go unnoticed, came into the power to dominate wills. Now Ellaenie, a prodigy when it comes to the magic of spirit and people, comes into the power to reshape unthinking matter…”

“He can paint straight with crooked lines,” Eärrach rumbled, suddenly deep in thought.

“…What?”

It took him a moment to respond. “I’m not the greatest power at work here,” he said. “I must pray about this.”

She frowned at him, taken aback by this sudden deep seriousness. “…How is that possible? I know what you are, husband. All that was is within you, down to the smallest bit. You have all the power and knowledge of the World Before!”

“Yes,” he said, levelly. “I do. I am the Universe That Was, every bit of it right down to its dimmest photon. But I am still finite, my love. I am a created being myself. I—the core of me, the bit of me that’s myself, was born a human being, even if not exactly a normal man…” he shrugged. “Still a man. Still finite and definite. I am what I am and doing what I do because…” he paused, thinking, and finally shrugged. “Well, because I am being allowed to be and encouraged to act. That’s the best I can describe it. The best any of us can.”

“Hmm.” She almost chuckled.

He tilted his head at her. “What?”

“I was just thinking, I know what Yngmir would say to that,” Rheannach commented, stroking Maicoh’s neck-fur.

“Heh…yes. Skepticism is Yngmir’s whole being. Haust made him to doubt, and there’s much of her in him. It’s why I love her so much: she’s the one who’s stood up to me most, challenged me most.”

“You put a lot of her into me, too.”

“Less than you’re thinking.”

Rheannach smiled, and sat back. She could feel her hair drying in the fire’s warmth. “I’m not Yngmir. I believe you. Still, it’s a big thing to believe. You’re so present I can’t ignore you.”

“Yes, and I have learned that can be a boon and a disservice to my people.” He gave Maicoh a last pat-pat then leaned over to grab the blanket, drapped its warm weight over his shoulders, then it and himself wrapped himself around her, cross-legged and gently bear-hugging her into himself. Warm, cozy, perfect. They enjoyed each other for a long moment.

Still, he wasn’t quite settled. “The more I understand about Creation, the more it humbles me.”

He was so utterly large she could comfortably lean into his arm even so seated, and so she did, and listened, inviting him to elaborate by looking up silently at his face. His godly, slightly melancholy face.

It always worked. He sighed, adjusted the blanket with a few last twitches, hugged just a tiny bit tighter, and fixed his gaze on something invisible and distant. “We knew much less than we thought we did, and that cost us.”

For a few long seconds, the only sounds in the cabin were the crackle and low rumble of the hearth, their breathing, and the sound of his fingers still gliding through Maicoh’s fur.

”Maybe…there’s some detail about the Second Creation you should know. The story you’ve heard is true, but it isn’t complete. We…miscalculated.”

“…Miscalculated?”

King Eärrach sighed. “Yes. We thought we could combine our powers and act in unison, but that turned out not to be the case. The act of Creation must be singular, and none of us were powerful enough to do it alone. And, so…they all died.”

Maicoh whined quietly, and Eärrach gave him a reassuring scritch.

“By ‘them’ I presume you mean the other Ascended, and not your fellow Crowns?”

“No, them too. They all died in the ensuing struggle, Rheannach. All of them but me. And when they died, their mass-energies became mine. It was only when they had all died and I had all of it, every last scrap of all that had been, that I could speak Being and complete the work.”

“Being?”

“The root word, of which all others are just facets. The first and ultimate.”

“Sounds…hmm. Where’s that one hidden?”

He patted his chest, and she rested her head against it. Here, she could hear his heart thumping away slowly, but with deafening power. One of the many things he protected the world from—even his heartbeat would obliterate the world if his own body didn’t contain the sound.

They rested for a moment, while he gathered his thoughts.

“Within you seems the only safe place for such a Word,” she ventured.

As if he had read her mind—in fact he could read anyone if he wanted, but he strongly respected privacy—he maneuvered her ear right over his heart. It was beyond deafening, so loud her very being quaked with every beat.

“You think so? This, my love, is the essence of Being. Listen to it. It lives within each of us, but in me and only me lies the knowledge and the power to wield it true. It’s for the best: speaking it was almost more than I could do. For anyone else, mortal or Herald or even Crown…non-being. As though they never were in the first place.”

“How many are there?”

“Ah.” He chuckled. “One of the difficult questions.”

“…Really? One? Two? three? A dozen?”

“It…depends. Each Word contains many aspects in turn, and some of them are…well. Take Mind for instance. Civorage took the will to dominate, the power to compel obedience and to see through the eyes of others, yes? Mouse on the other hand took the power to escape notice, to anticipate, and to be liked when he’s remembered. Very different, yet both are Mind.”

“But…?” Rheannach prompted.

He chuckled. “But to make some kind of answer…fifteen. We chose to realize the Words in less, ah, devastating form, so they are now not quite so complete as they would be were I to again wield them entire.”

“And…if you did?”

“Then Being would be the only Word, and that is a discussion none of us are ready for.” He touched his chest again. “Speaking it was a profound and holy moment. I…” Now, his mind’s eye was fixed on something terrifying and wonderful. Tears sprang up in the corners of his eyes. “I was wholly unworthy. Nobody was worthy. Yet Being allowed me to speak.” He fell silent, and she took his hand to squeeze it. Eventually, when the silence had become comfortable again, Eärrach exhaled shakily and wiped his cheeks. “I think that’s all I wish to say on the matter.”

Rheannach nodded, and stepped a small ways back in their conversation. “…So they all died.”

“Yes, they died. But the Crowns…I crowned them in glory in this new Creation, because their spirits stayed with me. And so…I created new forms for them out of the new energies streaming from the Source, and returned to them the memories and information they carried across the threshold…” he shrugged. “But still, they are creatures of this creation, now. I am a creature who contains the whole of the previous. My presence is necessary to anchor the bridge between this ‘verse and the deadverse the Source feeds upon. And, so…Rheannach, I cannot leave, not until this creation again has a universe worth of mass-energy to sustain itself. And I cannot risk myself in any way that might cause such a thing. If I do, this creation will retroactively cease to be.”

“What…could possibly cause such a danger?”

“An act of Creation.” He sighed heavily. “I could, probably, wave a hand and undo all of what’s gone wrong. I could prevent the shades, I could fix the elves before they went wrong…”

“But you can’t foresee what would happen if you did.”

“No. And a thing isn’t necessarily beautiful because it’s perfect. For all that’s gone wrong…this is the world we have. If I tried to polish out all the imperfections, I’d take away all the things that make it real. And there is a very real danger in doing something like that. I can wield the Words precisely because I have suffered greatly and gained wisdom. What would perfect and perfectly naive people do, given the power of a Word? Or to use an ancient story…if you, in a state of absolute innocence and perfection, faced a being who tempted to eat a fruit giving you true knowledge of good and evil…what would that do to you?”

Rheannach blinked. He was in a mood she’d never seen him in, now. And what a bizarre idea! But she took him seriously, and tried to imagine, tried her best to put herself in the position he described.

“I suppose…if I was absolutely innocent and had no idea what good and evil were…I wouldn’t even know what temptation is. I wouldn’t even trust, I’d just…not be able to understand that somebody could be tempting me at all. Whatever they said would seem like the truth to me.”

He gave her a serious look. “Exactly. That is one of many interpretations that arose over the æons, and I think there is much wisdom in it. And that little tale is one of the oldest there is. It was ancient when I was born, and was told when human beings were so unspeakably primitive, we hadn’t yet invented the wheel. Or writing.”

He looked up, through the roof toward the worlds in general. “The people we made here have never experienced life so undeveloped. And that was my great mistake. I wished to spare you some of the torment of growing up. In the end, I was…”

“Impatient,” Maicoh suggested, softly. He’d cracked an eye open and listened closely, Rheannach realized. That ‘sleeping dog’ act never failed to fool her.

King Eärrach, lord of Creation, looked forlornly at his hound, then lay down on the floor and hugged Maicoh to himself. The wolf-herald put up a token bit of grumbling, but also gave his master a reassuring lick. “Yes. Impatient, and lonely. And it may end up costing all of you everything.”

“Or it may not,” Rheannach said, more to be reassuring than because she was really following his thoughts.

“It may not,” he agreed. “As I said, there is a greater power than I at work. I can only pray.”

“And as you said: a thing isn’t beautiful because it’s perfect. Maybe your mistakes are for the good.”

“…I hope so.”

“Painting straight with crooked lines, hm? I think I get it.”

Her husband smiled and rose to fill the kettle and make them some tea. “Ellaenie’s safely back at the Oasis, I take it?”

“Yes. Something about being attacked by a crazed swordsman made her suddenly very keen to get back to little Saoirse.”

“She’s unharmed, though?”

“Completely. Her skin did more damage to the sword.” Rheannach wrapped herself up in the blanket and wiggled happily. She was so warm, now. “The man himself was…peculiar.”

“Peculiar how?”

“He clearly had no idea how to use his blade. In fact, I’d say he’s the worst swordsman I ever crossed blades with. He just…waved it around like a child with a stick. But somehow, it always seemed to be in the right place. He got me good a couple of times, that way. Pure luck, no skill.”

“And he teleported away.”

“That’s right. He called his word Luck.”

“Hah!” Eärrach laughed as the kettle started to seethe on the flames. “Oh, the poor fool! He has no idea what he’s playing with.”

“What is it really?”

“Wavefunction. The fundamental unreality of matter and energy. The way things only exist when they must, and the rest of the time they’re just a set of possible places that thing could be. Probabilities, stochastic processes and quantum mechanics.” He cocked his head thoughtfully, “well, no. That’s almost a lie it’s so imprecise. But it’s maybe a good way to give you a feel for it. Material reality isn’t as solid and abiding as it seems, is the point.”

She stared at him a moment, head cocked on one side. This was now in the orbit of a conversation they’d had many a time over the millennia. “You know, I do still slightly resent that you don’t tell me about all these World Before things, and I have to wait for mortal science to catch up. How far away is that one?”

“Oh, not far at all, now they have electricity. In fact, somebody might already be working on it.”

“Well then it doesn’t matter if you tell me, does it?”

“I just did.”

She groaned and tipped her head back. “Pan...”

“…Sorry.”

“No, no. I trust you. If you say it’s a journey I need to be part of rather than jumping straight to the end, I believe you. Really. But it is so very annoying when you start blathering on about things you understand perfectly and I don’t. It’s a bad habit of yours.”

He nodded. “Well…the short version is as I said. Matter, at its most basic level, isn’t like we experience it in our own scale of reference, waiting patiently in place for something to happen. It’s more like a wave on an endless lake. But it isn't on any one particular place on the wave until it comes into contact with another bit of stuff and the two of them interact. Otherwise, it will remain a wave as much as it possibly can.”

“So things are only real relative to other things. The rest of the time, they’re just…rippling maybes.”

“Yeah!” He had that look in his eye, now: the one that said he was never more in love with her than when she was thinking. “God I love your mind!”

“Hmm. And Wavefunction governs that process? But our new masked friend doesn’t really understand what he’s got. All he knows is that he has control over probabilities. To him, it’s just…just luck. Random events always shake out to his advantage.”

“Exactly.”

“But reality isn’t completely random.”

“No.”

“Luck doesn’t trump intent, effort and skill.”

He nod-nodded happily, then scooped the kettle off the hearth as it began to steam and whistle. “You have it.”

“I rather suspect I don’t,” she replied, archly.

“Heh! Well…true. But this is the first of the truly deep knowledge, love. All those questions you’ve been asking me since the First Day…this is the door to answering them all.” He poured the hot water over the leaves. “See? I keep my promises.”

Rheannach scoffed, and took a deep sniff as the scent of herbal steam drifted over to her. “I never doubted that,” she told him. “But you must admit, twelve thousand years is a long time to be kept waiting.”

He conceded her point with a nod and a shrug, and finished pouring the tea. Whatever his reply might have been, she never got it: they both felt the presence of an old friend at the same time, followed seconds later by the way a fog rolled off the lake and blocked the view out the cabin’s windows. Mist crept in around the edges of the front door, moments before a familiar knock.

“You don’t need to knock, Valkyr, you know that,” Eärach called, setting out a third cup.

The door opened, and Haust slipped through. “I found a lost puppy,” she declared, waving a hand at Maingan who was wagging happily at her heel. Maingan growled playfully at her, and bounded into the room with an enormous goose dangling limply from her mouth.

“Ever the dramatic entrance with you,” Eärrach rumbled in mirth. He scratched Maingan behind the ear and took the goose to hang it up for later plucking.

“Well, it’s only polite to let you know I’m coming. Especially seeing as all of creation knows when you two are making love.” Beneath her cowl, Haust’s lips curled into a slight smile. “Perhaps I clung to the vain hope that my warning would spur you to put on some pants.”

“Me? Pants?! You ask a grave sacrifice!”

“Far too much,” Rheannach agreed comfortably, and sipped her tea.

“Oh, I know.” Haust smiled a little wider, and sat down. “But alas, you’ve had your fun. I have something serious to discuss.”

“I was wondering if today would be the day.”

“The storm’s close, now.”

Eärrach sighed, sadly. “Yes. It is well that you have perceived it now, instead of later. Storms of all kind were always your specialty.”

“Mm. I may conjure up a literal one for the occasion.”

“Be artful with this one,” Eärrach cautioned. “I don’t have much margin of error.”

“When is she anything else?” Rheannach asked. “But what are you two talking about so cryptically?”

“There is a nexus point in Time rapidly approaching. Well, if that’s even the right way to speak of such a thing,” he grumbled to himself. “Young Jerl has a painful lesson ahead of him.”

“And that’s what I wanted to discuss,” Haust agreed. “Just how painful must the lesson be?”

“Yes. Maybe…Rhenn, your insight would be very welcome. May I…?”

He held out his blunt pointing finger. She sighed, and touched her own to his. In a somewhat disorienting flash, she understood perfectly.

“Yurgh.” She pulled a face and sipped her tea again to rebalance herself. “I’ve never enjoyed that.”

“Nor have I. Nor any of us, which is why we’re going to talk about it. But you needed a great deal of context, so…”

Rheannach probed the new knowledge in much the same way a boxer might tongue the back of his teeth to see if any of them were loose after a blow to the jaw. She didn’t like what she found one bit. Haust was right: it was a hard choice ahead of them. One they couldn’t afford to get wrong. Too much compassion might spell disaster.

Then again, so might too little.

With a sigh, she rose, spread her blanket on a chair to sit at the table, and they settled down to a conversation that lasted long through the day and into the night, until eventually they reached a decision, for better or worse.

She just hoped it was the right one.

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> “How many people have the Shades taken? Over the depths of time, it is surely too many to count. How many millions of souls are condemned to eternal suffering? And why? Why would the Crowns make a world where such things exist? Why would they permit them to remain There are only two possible answers: either the Crowns are indifferent, or they are impotent.” —Excerpt from a Oneist tract circulated in Enerlend

ABOVE THE PLAINS OF STÓRSTEINN

Airship Cavalier Queen 09.06.03.10.03

Jerl was looking at a familiar view, with new eyes.

He’d gone to the Queen’s prow once the lookout called. Below and ahead of him he could see the long, wide, shallow valley he’d fled down in the first cycle. At its far end, the Thundering Hall gleamed in bright, clean sunlight that had somehow turned Stórsteinn’s brown plains into a subtle patchwork quilt of yellows, green, purples and silvers, rippled by a grey breeze.

It would have been idyllic, if not for the looming, cloud-clad wall of stone high above in the distance. Yonguitang earthmote, second only to Garanhir in size and slightly larger than Stórsteinn, was riding low in its sphere while Stórsteinn rode high in hers. And the two were moving in more-or-less the same direction, too.

The Thundering Hall was in for a long eclipse.

“It’s a sight to give you chills, nay?”

“Yeah.” Jerl drummed his fingers anxiously on the rail as he considered the oncoming earthmote. He’d rarely looked up at an earthmote from this angle. Something about seeing Yonguitang from below like this was driving home the scale, in a way he rarely appreciated. That was a whole country up there, a whole empire. Looming above them atop those oncoming shrouded cliffs would be river valleys, forests, lakes, farmlands, cities, mountains and meadows, wilderness and groomed bucolic countryside.

But from below…all he could see was the darkness that every sane man feared.

Sin patted his shoulder. She of all people knew best what was going through his head at the sight of it. “We’re okay,” she said, softly. “If we can’t make the Hall in time, we’ll just loiter. We’ve got enough food and fuel in store to last a month.”

“Part of me wants to go all the way back,” Jerl said, softly. “Even though I know what it’ll cost the world if I do…there’s still a part of me that wants to step right back to that day and save him.”

“I know.”

Jerl glanced at her. “…I never…I think I was so wrapped in my own grief, I never actually asked you how you were, afterwards.”

Sin sighed and shook her head. “You don’t need to worry about me, shenkiné.”

“Sin—”

She shrugged. “I’m so much faster than you, and stronger than you when I must be. Part of me still believes I could have saved him. If I could have, and didn’t, that makes me an oathbreaker. But if I had tried and failed…if they caught me before I could use my vamdraech…”

Jerl nodded. “I never blamed you.”

“Not even for a second, at your lowest ebb?”

“That would have been the grief talking. I’ve never blamed you.”

“…Thanks, Jerl.”

It was his turn to give her shoulder a squeeze. She’d sounded like she’d needed to hear that, despite her words.

They both turned at the sound of neat, quick footsteps trotting up the stairs behind them: Amir. He had a navigator’s almanac in one hand, and a notepad in the other.

“I have a verdict,” he announced.

“Good news?”

“We can safely make the Hall and set down with three hours to spare.”

“More than enough time to bring the bag in and batten her down,” Sin said. “And the eclipse itself?”

“Four days, eleven hours, fourteen minutes, give or take ten seconds either way. But I shouldn’t worry about that overmuch. Frankly, I can think of few safer places to weather a long eclipse.”

“Right. You spent your callow youth here,” Jerl recalled.

“Jerl, please. I was never callow.” Amir smiled slightly. “Anyway. Yngmir keeps the place aglow during eclipse. Every surface and object sheds light. It’s quite pretty, actually, though you will want a sleeping mask.”

Jerl nodded, pleased. He’d been impressed by Yngmir last time around, and that impression hadn’t faded even after meeting a few more Heralds. He had a gravitas that Dragon had matched in a different way, Rheannach had downplayed, and the Shisha had actively shunned.

He turned to call back to the wheelhouse. “Gebby! Take us in, nice and quick!”

“Aye aye!”

They shifted their weight as the deck dipped and nosed downward. Gebby wasn’t wasting time on a gentle approach, not with that edge cliff looming. The sooner they were down, stowed and safely indoors, the happier everyone would be.

Jerl leaned over to Amir, lowering his voice. “What’s the latest we could leave and still outrun the eclipse?”

Amir checked his watch and notebook. “Eleventh hour, half past. Why do you ask? Do you have a premonition?”

“No, not yet. I just want to keep my options open.”

“I’d revise that estimate a bit,” Sin cautioned. “There’s a monster storm lurking in that eclipse. They don’t call this place the Thundering Hall for nothing, nay?”

“…Eleventh hour, then,” Amir corrected himself, as a prolonged flicker of lightning deep in the shadows illustrated her point.

Jerl nodded grimly. The tendency of storm winds to draw airships under the earthmotes was a lesson he’d never forget.

The next few minutes were the usual flurry of activity. There was a lot of careful work to do, and Jerl had to weave and slip between the gas canisters as the riggers distributed them across the deck for emptying the bag. It was a procedure that had crowded the deck even before the cannons, and those needed stowing properly for landing too, so now there was hardly room to place a foot, and hardly space to slip between working me.

Somehow, he managed it, and trotted up to the comparatively roomy wheelhouse just as the Hall sent up a flare, acknowledging their approach. Jerl threw out a flare of their own in token of peaceful intent, then stood back to oversee their final approach.

All went smoothly, despite a buffeting, gusty wind that tried to slew the Queen around with vicious timing, but Gebby and Derghan were expert ship-handlers: the engines roard, tilted, corrected the unwanted surge, and they lined up perfectly to drop their ropes to the ground crew.

Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings.

From there, the clanking of windlasses and the chanting of work shanties did the work. The Queen settled in the cradle, the docking bolt slammed across, and the bag came gentle down on the braces, no longer lifting them.

“Absolutely textbook. Well done, lads.”

“Anything to get indoors soon, skipper,” Gebby quipped.

Jerl chuckled and clapped him on the shoulder, gave some last orders to batten the ship down, left the Queen in Sinikka’s hands, and took the ramp over to the cradle’s edge. There was a familiar face waiting for him as he alighted.

“Well met, Heimar’s son.”

Ronar Heimarsson paused in the middle of opening his mouth, and gave Jerl a cautious look. “…Have we met?” he asked.

“Once. Briefly. You won’t remember, I’m sure.”

“You must have a good memory for names, then.”

“Something like that.” Jerl flashed a smiled, and introduced himself properly. “Jerl Holten, of the Cavalier Queen. We’re here to perform research at the Thundering Hall and seek an audience with Yngmir.”

“Mm. The Herald of Lore has been expecting you. You come direct from the Oasis with the blessing of the Crowns, he says.”

“Aye, we do.”

Ronar nodded. “Well then. You’re here at least ‘til the end of eclipse, and our ground crew won’t work through the dark. We’d better get to locking your lady down.”

“Thanks. See the snow elf up there? That’s my quartermaster, Sinikka Nerissith.”

“Understood. Welcome to the Thundering Hall, captain. Do you need an escort up to Yngmir’s seat?”

“No, I know the way. And besides…” Jerl rapped his knuckles affectionately on Amir’s arm. “My navigator here grew up at the Hall.”

“I thought you looked familiar!” Ronar exclaimed, smiling broadly. “I remember a skinny, fussy, dark lad running around a few years back!”

“And I remember a pimply teenager who could barely tolerate a day in his guard armour,” Amir replied, with poise and a small smile. “It’s good to see we’ve both improved from those days, hmm?”

“Heh! Right you are. Welcome back!”

Amir looked up at the Thundering Hall up atop its rock—Yngmir’s Seat—and smiled. “It’s good to be back,” he said.

The stroll through town was much the same as Jerl remembered from last time, though there was an urgency to the bustle this time. Men and boys were shuttling boxes of candles and cartloads of firewood about, and the air was rich with the smell of stewpots as families prepared for a long few days confined to their homes. And Stormclansmen had big families, generally with four or five generations all under the same roof out as far as first and second cousins. Each house was a hall in its own right.

They wouldn’t be bored, at least. Eclipses down here were a time for families to huddle together, sing songs, tell stories, and wait patiently, as Amir explained while they walked. In fact, Jerl got the distinct impression some of the people bustling past them were quite looking forward to a break from work.

He wondered where his crew were going to quarter. No doubt Sin would get it sorted out. He’d be fine, so long as he had Mouse nearby—

He turned, and realized Mouse wasn’t with him. He stopped and frowned, searching the crowd and focusing, trying to see if Mouse had slipped away to look at something briefly or…

“Jerl?”

“Hm?”

“You look like you’ve lost something.”

“Where’s Mouse?”

“…Mouse?” No flicker of recognition or remembrance crossed Amir’s face. Though, that in itself was actually a comfort: it meant Mouse was exerting his power right now and wanted to be forgotten.

Why, though?

“Hmm. Wonder where he’s got to…”

“Jerl, who in Eärrach’s name are you talking about?”

“I’ll explain later. It’s…Wordspeaker stuff.”

Amir blinked at him, then shrugged. “As you wish. This way.”

The ascent to Yngmir’s Seat and the hall was just as Jerl remembered it, right down to the feeling of awe as the scale of the place dawned on him. Somehow, the hall had diminished in his memory, becoming a half-impression of something merely very, very big.

The reality, of course, was that its doorposts were whole redwood trees of staggering height and girth, and the lintel was high and wide enough that the Queen could have fit through the doors. No wonder he’d forgotten: it was too big to hold in the mind, far too big.

He was so lost in gawping up at it that the moment Amir exclaimed happily and jogged forward came as a jolt. Jerl looked down as Amir collided with his old friend and mentor, Sevjin. They hugged each other tight, and it dawned on Jerl that Sevjin must have restrained tremendous pain during the first cycle, on hearing the news of Amir’s death: their embrace was that of a father and son reuniting after too many long years.

He stood aside and let them have their moment together, though it didn’t take long before Amir made introductions.

“Sevjin, this is Jerl Holten, captain of the Cavalier Queen.”

“The Timespeaker himself,” Sevjin bowed slightly. “It’s a pleasure.”

“Thank you. We’ve met before, in a different history,” Jerl revealed. “But this one is a happier meeting.”

Sevjin gave a solemn nod. “Yngmir hinted as much. Come on in. The Herald is preparing for the eclipse and can’t see you just this minute, but we’ll have at least four days to conduct your research when the darkness reaches us. There are quarters prepared for you in the guest wing.”

“Just a small point for the guards,” Jerl told him. “There’s a young man around here somewhere, blond of hair, slim of build. He goes by the name ‘Mouse.’ He’ll probably come asking after me soon. I’d appreciate it if they let him in.”

He saw Amir give him a genuinely bewildered look, but Sevjin, fortunately, didn’t notice. “Of course,” the librarian replied.

“Thank you.”

“This way, then.”

They fell in behind him as he led them through the doors, and Amir leaned in to whisper. “…I know when you’re joking, and this would be a strange time for it even if you seemed like you were. Who—?”

“You don’t remember him because he doesn’t want you to right now. He holds the power of Mind. I’m immune because of Time, but you’ll forget again very shortly.”

“…I…do remember that we did steal the Word, but…rrgh.” Amir shook his head, a motion which turned into a full-body shudder. “That is a most unpleasant sensation. Like unexpectedly finding one of my teeth is missing.”

“I can imagine. He doesn’t usually do this. Something must be awry…”

“No premonitions?”

“Not yet.” Jerl didn’t bother saying that just as Mouse’s powers didn’t seem to work quite right on him, his own powers didn’t seem to work quite right when it came to Mouse. Wordspeakers, it seemed, had a tendency to sort of…slip past each other llike tapioca pearls.

Still, no premonitions was reassuring. He decided to relax and not worry: Mouse could look after himself just fine, and he had the great library of the Thundering Hall to admire.

Last time he’d laid eyes on it, he’d been sleep-deprived, drained from losing Amir and Sinikka, exhausted from several days of running and fighting for his life, and running mostly on fierce determination to get the box to Yngmir and learn what he may. He hadn’t really taken more than a cursory glance at the library on that occasion.

He’d missed out, he realized. It wasn’t that libraries were usually of much interest to him—he reckoned himself an intelligent man but not a scholarly one, and he’d much rather the cozy comfort of an inn’s hearth than a reading room or stacks—but this one was not cozy in any case: it was magnificent. The bookshelves in here were small buildings in their own right, with internal staircases and reading balconies with desks and chairs. The wood and brass alike were polished smooth and gleamed in the light of thousands of magestones.

What Jerl noticed this time, however, was that a great many of the shelves were empty. This was a library built to hold a copy of every book ever written, and Yngmir clearly intended its capacity would last for a good long time. There was room for things that were not books, too: scrolls, clay tablets, chiseled stones, brass plaques, and empty spaces where shelving for new forms of writing as-yet uninvented could be built in the future.

This was a place where people lived, though. And under the hall’s titanic eaves were packed the scribes’ apartments, in suites of rooms around shared hearths. Jerl and Amir were led to one of these, and assured they would get to meet with Yngmir as soon as the eclipse fell and his preparations were complete.

“But in the meantime…what is it you are here to research?” Sevjin asked, once he’d shown them the details of the cunning indoor plumbing, flushing latrines and fire-safe stone hearth.

“The Words of Creation,” said Jerl.

“…You came from the Oasis to study this? The Crowns themselves would be the ultimate authority.”

“There are complications which make them unwilling to touch the subject closely,” Amir explained. “Among other things, they seem to believe that the journey of learning about them ourselves, rather than being taught, is important somehow.”

Sevjin uttered a grunt that might have been the opening beat of a mirthless chuckle. “How suitably inscrutable,” he mused. “Very well. I do not know exactly how much literature we have on that subject, but I know who will. I will ask her to assist you. She will be along in a few minutes, I’m sure. In the meantime…do you object if Amir and I catch up, captain?”

“Not at all. I’ll wait here.”

“Thank you.” And with that, Jerl was left alone. He stretched out on the couch in the suite’s living area, interlaced his fingers behind his head, and settled down to wait. He was good at waiting, that being the life of an airshipman, for the most part. But still, something was still turning over in his mind and bothering him.

…Just where was Mouse?

----------------------------------------

INTERLUDE: CROWNSPOUSE’S APARTMENTS

The Oasis, Alhulw Earthmote 09.06.03.10.03

Her reunion with little Saoirse had, of course, been Ellaenie’s first and most important duty, and she did not neglect it, nor resent it. Still, she was relieved when bedtime was past, the child was in bed, and she got the chance to recount what had happened.

Sayf listened to her account of the Masked Man and his pursuit of Four-Current with a furrowed brow as he sipped smoke through a long-hosed hookah. They were out on the private veranda, for the Crown and his spouses only, where their conversation was concealed from prying ears by the constant white noise of a fountain, and by high walls.

Ellaenie only asked the obvious question once she’d finished recounting the confrontation. “Did you know about this man?”

“No,” he shook his head, and his frown deepened. “And that troubles me.”

“I thought you could be aware of anyone in the world, if you focused on them,” Pal observed. She was smoking too, poured languidly onto a lounge to Ellaenie’s left. It was rare to see her frowning, but on this occasion…

“Usually…” Sayf stroked his beard. “Quantum indeterminacy plays havoc even with my powers, though.”

“In the language us mere mortals speak, please?” Cerida asked, handing him a wine cup.

“Mm….I’m sorry. It’ll have to wait. The important part is, his Word grants him the means to remain hidden even from a Crown’s sight. But I can infer certain things about him. What I have trouble with is the same thing I had trouble with in Civorage’s case.”

“How did he even get his Word in the first place?” Lokar mused.

“Exactly. We hid them quite securely.”

“I thought you said the words want to be found and spoken,” Pal pointed out.

“It doesn’t feel like that,” Ellaenie replied, shaking her head. “It feels more like…more like it would have been quite happy to stay where it was, but it couldn’t any longer. Like its hand was forced.”

“It’s…sapient?” Pal gave Ellaenie’s head an alarmed look, as though somehow expecting to be able to see two minds occupying the same skull. But Sayf was already shaking his head.

“They’ve never behaved as though they are, but they are…responsive,” he said. “You have to remember, the Words are a mystery the Crowns don’t fully understand. Eärrach has his theory for where they came from, Talvi has a different one, Haust has hers…I wonder whether the question may be as meaningless as asking where the center of the surface of a sphere is.”

He sighed, set aside the wine Cerida had given him, and paced around the fountain with his hands behind his back. “I could pass off Civorage discovering mind as chance. Any possible event, no matter how unlikely, becomes inevitable given enough time. But a second Wordspeaker not empowered and entrusted by us? No. The odds of that happening twice in ten thousand years are infinitesimal.”

“Then what?” Galan asked, from his own spot seated on the fountain’s retaining wall.

“Enemy action, of course,” a new voice broke in. The crownspouses turned to look, then rose to their feet out of respect: The Shishah had joined them.

Sayf looked at his Herald, then sighed and nodded. “I fear you’re correct,” he agreed.

“What enemy?” Pal asked. “Who?”

There was a moment of communication between Crown and Herald, the two figures—Sayf tall, burly, round and seemingly soft, the Shishah small, wiry and wizened—held each others’ gaze for a moment. Ellaenie’s sight itched: there was a conversation going on. It lasted only moments, but it seemed to confirm Sayf’s unvoiced fears. He sighed, turned to face the fountain, and stared into its rippling depths. As he did so, he waved a hand at The Shishah.

“You tell them,” he said.

----------------------------------------

> ♪”So airman my love, hold on to me tight, For I’ve never yet mastered the power of flight! If you should let go it’s a long way to fall, So I’d rather not slip from your arms, not at all!”♪ —popular Enerlish song, circa 09.06.03

DOZING ON A COUCH

The Thundering Hall, Stórsteinn 09.06.03.10.03

A knock on the door caused Jerl to realize his peculiar thoughts of wandering lost and looking for something he couldn’t remember were only a dozing dream. The second knock woke him up properly. He sat up straighter, tidied himself up, cleared his throat, and called “Come in!”

He’d been half-expecting Mouse, even though Mouse wouldn’t have bothered to knock. Instead, a young woman poked her head around the door and gave him a wary smile. “Captain Holten?

“You must be the researcher Sevjin mentioned,” Jerl gestured for her to come in fully, and rose to shake her hand. The word ‘cute’ flickered through his mind as an appropriate description: she was soft and short, round in both face and figure, with curly hair she’d clearly never learned how to maintain properly and a nervous expression.

A blush turned her skin pink as she shook his hand. “Uh, yes. That’s me. Captain Holten. I mean Alana. I’m Alana, you’re Captain Holten...” the blush got redder with every word as she trailed off into an embarrassed squeak.

Oh dear. Jerl put on his warmest, least threatening smile and sat down again. “I wasn’t expecting to meet you until after the eclipse came. You must be busy preparing…”

“Oh, I…I already got all my…I already did all that.” She mumbled awkwardly, clutching a book and some notes like they were a comfort. She had a peculiar accent, Jerl thought. Half Storm Clan, half Garanese. But he guessed more of the latter: if she’d been a full Clanswoman, she’d have been tattooed and braided.

Frudlend, he guessed. The vast, flat breadbasket of Garanhir which primarily exported crops, livestock, and bored people who wanted to live somewhere with actual terrain.

“Or…well…” Alana fidgeted a second, then took a suddenly energized step forward. “Master Sevjin said you’re looking to know about the Words. Nobody ever wants to know about the Words! I kind of…I maybe…um…”

“Dumped your chores on somebody else to come help me?” Jerl guessed.

Scarlet now, she nodded wretchedly.

“Well…thank you. Won’t you sit? Show me what you have already?”

She nodded, and sat down with some visible relief. “A-a…a lot of it, it’s old…the, uhm. The Ordfey insisted it was just a human myth.”

“I remember, my quartermaster’s an elf. She still clung to that line until very recently.”

“-R-right. Yes. They, uh, they insisted they were present on the Day of Creation and would remember the Words, but some of the earliest free human cultures claimed they learned about them from one of the Heralds.”

“Which one?”

“I, uh…I-I don’t know.” Alana laid out her papers on the coffee table for him. “most of them w-worshiped Raksuul as the protector goddess who took them out of slavery…”

“It’s not Rheannach, I know that much.”

She gave him a surprised look. “You do?”

“I’ve met Rheannach. If the legend of the Words was her doing, she’d have told me more than she did.”

“Oh! Well. Um—”

“I think we can rule out Yngmir, Dragon and the Shisha too, for the same reasons.”

Alana blinked at him for a second, then put her book aside. “…I’m…I’m sorry, I should have asked. Who are you, exactly? Why are you looking to know more about the Words? And why are you coming to me if you’ve spoken to the Heralds?”

Jerl smiled, and exerted some of his power. She blinked, and in the time it took for her eyelids to start opening again, he’d risen from his chair and moved to behind her.

“This is why,” he said.

She made a strangled noise that was equal parts squeak and shriek, and flinched away from him, and Jerl held his hands up reassuringly.

“Sorry, sorry. I could have been more tactful.”

Alana gaped wildly at him. “What did you—? How—?”

“I’ve spoken one of the Words of Creation.”

Slack uncomprehension. She just stared at him. Jerl smiled, perched on the back of her couch, and waited for her mind to find its feet again. It took a while.

“That’s,” she ventured, then added: “But—”

“Mhm.”

“No, you don’t under— I mean—”

“Oh, I do. Believe me I do.”

“But—” she repeated.

“Time, specifically,” Jerl revealed. “I can move…very, very fast, now. And that’s the least of its effects. I get premonitions of the future, know things I wouldn’t otherwise know, and I even reset time back to a previous moment so I could do things differently.”

“But….no, you can’t—”

Jerl returned to his original seat while she was still in the middle of the word ‘can’t.’ He didn’t say anything, simply allowed the feat to speak for itself.

Alana was silent several seconds longer, then finally pieced herself together. “…Oh my.”

“Mhm.”

“Well, that explains why you want to know more, but…I don’t know how much help I can be, if you have the ear of Heralds…”

“I’m still interested,” Jerl reassured her. “You never know what might be beneath their notice but turns out to be interesting. What have you got for me?”

“Uh, just what the ancient humans recorded of what they knew.” She indicated the books and sheafs she’d laid down, and scooted forward to open and spread them out. “You have to remember, the elves didn’t let humans learn how to read and write, on pain of death. Still, a lot of brave humans did it anyway. But they didn’t dare record very much, because any permanent writing they made would get them executed if it was found. The oldest human writings we have are on standing stones and walls in the grottos, glades and caves where the escaped slaves lived in small hidden communities.”

She laid out a spread of pages. “This is a copy of charcoal rubbings from the caves near Haptar Getesh.”

Jerl frowned at the writing. It looked lke nothing so much as a series of lines with patterns of shorter strokes off it to either side. Each line was a word, maybe?

“The language is late Enslaved Pratherdesh Wightidh, which was common between Ekve’s thirtieth-seventh and fortieth reigns,” Alana told him, gaining considerably in confidence now she was talking about something she’d researched. “Probably it remained unchanged from the earlier Prathardesh wightidh dialects thanks to the humans figuring out how to write but…anyway. What’s interesting about the writings from these caves is they list twelve Heralds.”

She flipped to the next page. “See? Here are Rheannach, Maingan and Maicoh, The Shisha, Faun and Satyr, Yngmir and Dragon….but then here is one more in Haust’s pantheon, and three in Talvi’s.”

“The lost four, yes,” Jerl nodded. “The ones the elves say the Crowns never speak of.”

“Well, the ancient humans of Haptar Getesh had names for them,” Alana said, indicating lines with her finger. “See? Chathamugah, Iaka, Vedaun and Nimico.”

“Hmm.” Jerl mused, scratching his beard.

Alana turned the page. “Anyway, the Words are mentioned on the dexter face of that Stele. Notice something?”

“There’s a hierarchy to them,” Jerl leaned forward, reaching out to trace the lines and shapes of the old charcoal rubbing.

“Yes! Up here we have a root word, a master word of sorts. The Getesh ancients called it ‘Being’ or ’Creation.’ Then below that we have three words—I’ve not been able to translate their names—then a third order below that. That’s where we find Time, over here on the left. And below that, there’s a fourth order.”

“It’s damaged,” Jerl noted. Only one of the fourth-order words was intact: the rest of the rubbing was blank white, with a ragged edge suggesting at some point the stele had been eroded or smashed away in part.

“Yes. Whatever fourth-order words may follow on from Time, that’s lost to us. And what the relationship between orders might be, I can’t say. The ancient laid it out as though the words in a given order were descended from or part of the higher-order word, but then you have these other words up here, and maybe some more down here in the damaged section, that aren’t part of the structure at all. I call them the ‘transcendent’ words. This is Magic, here’s Mind…this one here, some people translate its name as ‘thought’ but I prefer Logic. And this over here is either Soul or Spirit. And there might be others. Didn’t the Heralds tell you any of this?”

“Not a word. Nor did Prince Sayf.”

“Well…they have their reasons, I’m sure.”

“Mhm.” Jerl nodded, thinking about the missing Heralds whom these people had apparently known, got information from, and named ‘rebel.’ The Crowns were careful with information about the Words. For one of their Heralds to reveal too much…

He was still trying to figure out the shape of that thought and turn it around to fit into his growing picture of the world when a bell rang loudly, somewhere up above them among the Thundering Hall’s gables. It was answered by other, more distant bells down in town. Eclipse was upon them.

“I’d better find my crew, they should be up here by—” he began, only for a familiar heavy-handed knock on the door to immediately presage Derghan’s arrival, with Sin, Mouse, Marren, and Padraig in tow. Padraig in particular looked around and whistled appreciatively as they filed in.

“Promotion comes with nicer digs, I see.”

“Better get used to it,” Jerl flashed him a grin, then waved a hand at Alana, beckoning her to relax. She’d surged to her feet and started gathering her papers and things. She turned pink, put them down again. “Everyone, this is Alana, she’s the clerk assigned to help us find what we’re after.”

Alana wilted under the barrage of friendly hellos, and mumbled something indistinctly polite. Poor girl. Jerl decided to take pity on her. “You know what, there’ll be plenty of time for research later, if you’d rather—“

She bobbed gratefull and practically fled. Marren scratched his head as the door closed behind her.

“What’s with her?”

“Hates being seen,” Mouse said, curling up on the couch next to Jerl. He didn’t elaborate further and instead scowled around the room. “Here, is this really lit well enough?”

“It’s fine,” Derghan assured him as he flopped down on the couch opposite. “What, you’re nervous?”

“He’s lived on Alakbir since he was young,” Jerl pointed out. “What is this, your first eclipse since you were a lad?”

Mouse fidgeted a bit, but nodded.

“We’ll be fine.” Sin poured herself in against Derghan and tucked her feet up under herself. She was definitely more physically intimate with Derghan nowadays, Jerl noticed. Perhaps they two of them had received some advice of their own at the Oasis…he hoped so. “You’d have to back into a corner to make a shadow dark enough for a Shade in here, and then it wouldn’t be large enough. Besides…”

She trailed off and grinned as, with immaculate timing, there was a swell of magical power like the distant sound of a choir taking up in song a few rooms away. A thrum passed through the floor and walls, and, gently, with a soft golden light, every inanimate object in the room started to glow. The couch, the tables, the hearth and wall hangings, the window frame and door, all were swiftly outlined in warm radiance.

“We’re under a Herald’s wings here,” Marren commented appreciatively. “Bloody nice!”

Outside, the bells rang again. One minute to go. There were a few shouts, a few distant bangings of closing doors…then a stillness. A familiar tension during which all the humans in the room plucked a stone from their pockets, and Sin shifted her hand up to the grip of her vamdraech. The minute passed in silence, punctuated only by the crackle of the fireplace.

Then there was a feeling of weight. The window darkened, and the whole world became heavier somehow, as with some sense or another they became aware of an unguessable mass of rock far above. The Thundering Hall issued a prolonged creak as the light from the sun went away and the temperature plummeted. It sounded like the huge building was grumbling with displeasure.

A first flake of snow fell past the window, followed by another, then a handful, then a bucketful, a flurry. The eclipse storm was a blizzard, it seemed.

Jerl gave Mouse’s white-knuckled hand a squeeze. “See? Safe.”

Mouse let out the breath he’d been holding, cleared his throat, and nodded. Nobody made fun of him: if there was one fear in all the worlds that everyone shared, it was eclipse.

Inside, though, their suite remained cozy and well lit. After a second, Padraig moved to the window and drew the curtains shut. The temptation was always there to look out and watch those twisted, wretched shapes lurching through the darkness, but it wasn’t healthy.

“…Where does a fella get a drink in this place?” he asked.

It lightened the mood. There were chuckles, Sin let go of her suicide knife, the magestones were returned to their pockets, and within minutes they were simply relaxing on nice couches in a cozy warm room again. Jerl showed them the documents Alana had brought him, and they conversed over what it might all mean, and what they should discuss with Yngmir when the time came.

Jerl took Mouse aside. “Where’d you get to?” he asked.

Mouse frowned at him. “Can’t you feel it?”

“Feel what?”

“I feel a…weight. Like there’s a powerful attention turned our way. I was trying to find it, but…” Mouse sighed, and shook his head. “I don’t know. You don’t have a premonition, do you?”

“No,” Jerl assured, confidently.

Mouse sighed in relief. “Good. I guess I’m just freaked out by the eclipse.”

“I wouldn’t discount your power so lightly,” Jerl suggested. “If you’ve got a feeling, I’d listen to it. What did it feel like?”

“Like…being watched.”

“By Civorage?”

“No…no. I’d know his mind and power anywhere. This didn’t feel like being watched by a person at all. It was just…whispers. Thousands of them, mindless whispers on the edge of consciousness.” Mouse fretted.

“Could be the Shades,” Jerl suggested.

Mouse looked like he was listening for a moment, then shivered. “…Maybe,” he agreed. “I don’t want to listen to them any more. Distract me?”

Jerl chuckled, and took his hand and led him back to the couches.

“Gladly,” he said.

----------------------------------------

If there was one sound that always lulled Jerl into a deep and perfect sleep, it was rain. His small room above the kitches back at the Rosehip Inn had faced toward Garanhir’s leading edge, into the prevailing wind, and so every shower, squall, rainy day and storm had drummed on it. The sound of rain on glass was the sound of a cozy night’s sleep to him, and that had only become stronger during his career on the Queen so that even the occasional flash and boom in the sky and the rattle and groan of the wind was soothing.

He slept deeply, despite the unfamiliarity of the bedroom and the glow of magestones and Yngmir’s power, until some point deep in the night when Mouse abruptly sat up, elbowing him sharply in the ribs as he did.

“Do you feel that?”

Jerl shifted, groaned and rolled his shoulder to dispel some lingering numbness from his arm. Sleeping cuddled up was nice, but…

The question’s urgency finally sunk in. He sat up too and pulled the sleeping mask off his face to squint against the warm glow suffusing their room. “Whuh…? Feel what?”

“…Malice.” Mouse sprang from bed and started dressing in a hurry.

That was enough for Jerl. He swung his feet out of bed and groped around for his boots. “Wake the others.”

Mouse closed his eyes a second, then nodded and continued to shrug his clothes on. “Done.”

Jerl nodded. Through the wall he could hear the heavy sounds of Derghan rolling out of bed and cursing…oh! and the sound of Sin’s voice, too? Interesting! But not relevant right now.

Focus, Jerl.

In moments he had his shirt and britches on, his gun belt buckled about his hips and he was in the middle of buckling up his coat when, with a smash, the window broke in and something small, round, dark and hard punched through it to land fizzing in the middle of the floor, the glowing end of its fuse just about to vanish into its iron casing…

Time leapt at his command: he grabbed Mouse and was out of the room only just fast enough, wood splinters and shards of cast iron hurtled past, glinting evilly, and one crescent piece of grenade casing flayed Jerl’s sleeve as he twisted himself to avoid it.

He rolled, came up on his feet, and drew his saber. With a grunt of effort, he cast the only magic he knew: a light spell. The sword wouldn’t glow for long, being such a refined piece of work, but he could make it shine brightly so long as he held it, and he had no intention of being Taken tonight.

But what came through the smashed window was no Shade.

It was an elf, naked, skinny and androgynous. Their hair was shaved except for a long crest, and their upper face, scalp, forearms, hands, feet and lower legs were stained black with an ink or dye that traced crawling, vine-like patterns across its torso. The pointy ears were pierced many times with bones and black stones, as were the lower lip, nose and brow.

Nornfey. Hag elves.

Featureless dark eyes glinted in the light from Jerl’s sword as it raised a wicked long knife in a salute or challenge that Jerl didn’t return: he threw himself into the attack with a pair of sabre strokes that first relieved the invader of their arm, then opened their throat to the spine. The elf collapsed, its expression chillingly unchanged and calm. There were two more with it, and Jerl cut them down with an ease that astonished even himself. The last time he’d fought nornfey, they’d been terribly dangerous foes, as fast and lethal as any elf could be.

He only noticed that time was still running slow when he glanced at the hearth and saw a tongue of flame unravel with all the languid grace of ink in water.

He let go. Mouse gasped, there was a twin yelp of alarm from the adjacent room, and moments later Derghan and Sin burst out the door with their weapons in hand.

“The fuck?!” Derghan demanded.

Jerl didn’t bother explaining. He could hear bells ringing across town again now. Not the one-two-three rhythm of an eclipse warning, but the desperate wild clamor of a call to arms. Out there among the lambent glow of Yngmir’s protection, he saw flashes, sudden bursts of darkness, and dark shapes flitting between the pools of light.

“…Shit.” Sin cursed. “What do we do?”

Jerl flicked some unnervingly dark blood off his sabre’s blade. “We defend the hall. Come on!”

Other blasts and shrieking elsewhere in the building. Somewhere outside, one of the clamoring bells fell silent.

Oh, fuck, the Queen! If they got aboard and lit the powder store…

She was too far away. And what were they going to do, sprint all the way down there in the middle of eclipse, storm and battle? Suicide. Especially when—

A man in an archivist’s robes crashed out through a side door, coughing blood and trailing entrails from a hideous disembowelling wound. A hag elf surged out after him, the victim’s blood standing out startling and vibrant on their unnaturally pale flesh: Derghan blew the marauder back through the door with a shot to the heart.

It was just a drop in an ocean of suffering and madness. The air was thick with the scent of blood, and every few seconds another grenade exploded somewhere in the scribes’ quarters. Each door they opened showed them a charnel scene of murdered innocents, or revealed another hag.

They fled into the Thundering Hall’s central vaulted chamber, where the first flicker of hope made itself known. Jerl had assumed the Thundering Hall’s guards were there as a matter of course, mostly just there to handle the drudgework of keeping the place secure and maintaining the peace. He should have known that a Herald wouldn’t permit themselves to be protected by the unskilled. As the fleeing archivists retreated into the inner hall, the guards brought up the rear in disciplined groups of three, fighting with shield and axe in the fore with a rifle behind.

But retreating into the hall granted the hag elves more room to move. There were dozens of them emerging from side passages and out of the building’s residential wings, and now that they weren’t fighting in tight corridors, they could move like elves.

They flitted noiselessly and without regard for the human limitations of speed and surface, like shadows cast on the wall by a flickering torch. They leapt like fleas, swarmed up the walls like geckos, sprang lightly among the balconies and rafters. Arrows lanced down at random, aimed cruelly at the noncombatants rather than anyone actually armed and resisting.

The message was clear: you can’t protect them.

They seemed to be right, too. It didn’t matter that Derghan’s rifle spoke as often as he could work the lever, and that each shot sniped a pale figure from the rafters to come tumbling down in a spray of black. Each one that fell was replaced by two.

“How fuckin’ many of these bastards are there?” Marren roared, as he thumbed another strip of rounds into his own rifle’s magazine.

“All of them!” Sin replied. She whirled, and snatched an arrow out of the air that would have skewered a hapless librarian otherwise. “All the Cronewood must be empty!”

“How?!” Padraig took careful aim and fired—Jerl didn’t see what he was shooting at. “And where’s the Herald?!”

“Fuck that, where’s Amir and the crew?” Derghan asked. “Where’s—?”

There was a furious howl from one side that made Jerl’s heart leap even higher than it already was before he recognized it: wychwethel. Dozens of them. With a combined war-whoop, the Rüwyrdan Set exploded into the hall through the main doors, and pursued the Nornfey into the rooftops. The rain of arrows fell off sharply as the hag elves tried to form up and face them, but the Rüwyrdan gave them a hard chase. Jerl watched Harad in particular leap from beam to wall to beam again, his unusually heavy blade making a deep throbbing sound as it separated one of the twisted elves from their leg.

Jerl jumped into the gap the milling, disjointed humans needed. “Every man with a rifle, to the Herald’s door!” he roared.

The voice of leadership worked. The huddling, cowering groups of humans saw their chance to regroup. In seconds, a battle line had formed at Yngmir’s huge study door, and it was here that they found a familiar figure tending the wounded.

“Amir! Winter’s Tits it’s good to see you, mate. Where’s the Herald?”

Amir gestured with his head toward the study. “Meditating. This glow of his demands constant focus.”

“…Meaning if they get in and distract him—”

“We will all be taken.” Amir nodded grimly. “Do not let that happen, yes?”

“Roger!”

The next several minutes smeared out into an age. Wherever Jerl went, Time turned the tide as he dove into a knot of Nornfey and took them apart with speed they couldn’t match. But he couldn’t be everywhere at once, and no matter what he did his intuitions and premonitions didn’t so much as flicker. He had no inklings of where he should be or what he should do, beyond what his own skill and sense told him.

It was as though it didn’t matter, somehow. As if his presence couldn’t possibly change the outcome of this night no matter what he did. As if—

There was a rippling boom from somewhere distant. A familiar one, followed by an incoming, mounting rushing—

“DOWN!”

He hit the deck and covered his head, not a second too soon. A series of explosions tore the end of the Hall open, blasting apart the huge front doors in a blizzard of splinters. Yngmir’s light flickered and dimmed and Jerl grit his teeth as he forced light magic into all his clothes. He was an unpracticed, amateur mage at best, and the effort of it made his whole body sting, but it was sufficient: his shirt and breeches shone brilliantly for just long enough, and then the Herald’s focus was restored and the Hall shone again.

He clambered to his feet and took in the scene. Fortunately, the length of the hall had spared the defenders the worst of that barrage, so even though the long floor was littered with wicked wooden shards and the occasional twisted nail, nobody seemed to have been harmed by the salvo. But now, an army could march in…and indeed, it did. Nude pale forms poured in by the dozen.

But Jerl’s attention was on the clothed figure behind them.

Nils Civorage was dressed in blue and cream, edged in gold. He hadn’t bothered to draw his basket-hilted rapier, nor the ornate dueling pistol on the opposite hip. Instead, he strolled into the hall amidst his hag elf bodyguard and looked around with an air of vague disapproval.

At Jerl’s side, Derghan snarled and raised his rifle to shoot the bastard dead…but couldn’t. No sooner did he have Civorage in the crosshairs than all will and motivation seemed to lose him. He blinked, then slumped in sudden listless defeat.

The same was happening all around. The Rüwyrdans were slowing, lowering their weapons. The human guards became numb. Shields, axes and rifles dropped from fingers that suddenly lacked the will to hold them. Jerl could feel the silky insistence of Civorage’s power blowing past him, like a rainstorm from inside a greenhouse. Only he and Mouse remained unaffected, while all around them, everyone else sank to their knees and stared slack-jawed.

Well, no matter. He stood up and faced his enemy.

Civorage smiled at him, and beckoned. “Parlay, captain?” he asked. His voice was soft, gentle, even mellow. he didn’t raise it, but still Jerl heard him perfectly well despite the hammering rain on the roof and the rumble of thunder and the distant sounds of battle.

“Fuck you,” Jerl replied, calmly.

“Oh, we may as well talk, mightn’t we? After all, you can’t kill me and I can’t kill you…”

Jerl grunted, glanced at Mouse, and together they descended the steps. “I can damn well kill you,” he pointed out.

“You’ll disembody me briefly, certainly. But this old thing? I’ve had it quite long enough, I think. The right wrist pains me and tingles sometimes, my hips ache, my back is stiff, and reading is becoming quite difficult. You’d be doing me a service, if you forced me to move on to something younger. I’ve been training up a few promising young Circle youths for exactly that purpose, in fact…”

Mouse shivered in revulsion.

“…But then what? You’ll just step backwards in time, I suppose.”

“I suppose I will.” Jerl stopped ten feet away. The hag elves spread out, their impassive faces watching for the first flicker of movement. “Why are you here, Civorage?”

“I’m here for the same thing you are: knowledge of the Words.”

“You won’t get it.”

“Indeed. We have a sorry impasse, don’t we? I can’t beat you, because if I do, you’ll simply undo my victory and try something different until you pull out an impossible win…or at least, sour my victory enough to seem worth it. Or you’ll somehow know exactly what you need. Like my safe combination. I still find myself wondering how you did that. Did you turn back the clock thousands of times?” Civorage shook his head. His smile was almost affable as he turned his cool, blue eyes on Mouse. “On which note…you, the usurper and thief, went and threw it away. Out of…what? Principle? Fear that I’d get it back? Spite? I hope it was spite. Because in that regard, at least, you succeeded. It did sting, quite a bit.”

“Good,” Mouse replied.

“Hah! Spite after all, then…” Civorage looked around. “So. What shall it be? Shall we snipe at each other and then engage in a brief and futile duel? Or shall we actually converse for once?”

Careful. The word arrived in Jerl’s mind from multiple sources at once, not least of which was his own sense of caution. Mouse’s voice was in there too…and a third one. A powerful one.

“I fail to see how that might be productive for anyone but you,” he said aloud, putting a hand to his pistol.

Civorage chuckled. “Don’t you have questions?” he asked. “Burning questions about…oh. Why am I doing this? What makes me think I have the right?”

“I doubt you thought about it too hard,” Jerl replied, still gripping his pistol. “You could, so you did. Might makes right.”

“Amazing how you manage to speak two such true and virtuous statements with such contempt.” Civorage replied. He started moving slowly around to Jerl’s left, keeping his distance and his thumbs tucked unconcernedly into his coat pockets. “I could, so I did. But captain, how many people go through life who can but don’t?”

“Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should,” Jerl pointed out.

“And just because you think I shouldn’t doesn’t mean I shouldn’t,” Civorage shot back. “You’re a passive man, captain. Your father was much more impressive in that regard—dissatisfied with the life of a second son, he chose to step out from under his older brother’s shadow and make something for himself and his heir. You have your airship because your father summoned up the strength and drive to make something happen. You, though…you just drift on the wind.”

“You don’t know shit about my father,” Jerl growled.

Civorage simply shrugged. “I know a lot more about many more things than you guess, dear Timespeaker. Mind is a far more powerful tool than little miss ‘leave me alone’ here understands.”

He smiled at Mouse, who scowled at him. “You’re a cute couple, really. Both of you pretending to be what you aren’t. Jerl Holten pretending at being a man of ambition and will, and Kara Glazier pretending at being a man full stop.”

Mouse stiffened. “That name is dead to me,” he snarled.

“But not to your dear daddy. You know he wishes you’d go back? Wishes you’d stop pretending and he could have a daughter again? He wants to see what you’d look like in your mother’s clothes, and with long hair.”

“I’ve spoken Mind too, Civorage,” Mouse retorted. “I know my dad’s thoughts.”

“Do you? Coward that you are, I doubt you’ve looked deep enough. You’re too afraid to look and see what he really feels.”

“I’ve looked deep enough to know that people don’t think just one thing,” Mouse spat back. “Nobody does. Even if he does have those thoughts, they don’t matter. He has other thoughts too.”

Civorage smiled and looked up at the huddle of people standing transfixed by his will up by the Herald’s doors. “True. Most people are torn like that,” he agreed. “Take that fat one on the left, there. Alana. There’s hardly a person there at all, you know. Just a nebulous cloud of appetites and fears.”

He skewered Jerl with a look. “Why should I give a shit about the freedom and rights of someone so pathetic? She’s nothing, Jerl. If you could see her from my perspective, you’d understand. She’s a soft creature, without the will to exercise or eat in moderation, without the courage to make the friends she so desperately wants, without the intellect to really understand all the books she’s read. There’s a lick of wit there, an admittedly impressive memory…but not a person. Not really a person.”

“Bullshit,” Jerl grunted.

“Heh! Oh, I can feel the outrage in your mind. You want to stick up for her, this girl you barely met. But Jerl…she’s not happy.” He looked up at Alana and smiled sadly. “She’s stressed, and afraid, and lonely, and wishes she was prettier and more interesting. If I took her away to the circle, all those problems would be gone. The stress? gone. Somebody else’s problem. The fear? She’d have nothing to be afraid of. There’s no such thing as loneliness in the Circle, and her looks would improve dramatically with the proper diet and exercise she’d receive, and her ability to be interesting…irrelevant. I could solve all her problems like that.” He snapped his fingers. “One small twitch of my power, and she’d live out the rest of her days in productive, constructive, useful bliss. And the only price to pay would be the self-same free will that causes all her problems in the first place.”

“Sounds like a nightmare to me,” Jerl replied.

“Of course it does. You aren’t like her, captain. You’re cut from a completely different cloth. A worthier one. Bringing you into the Circle would be a waste.”

“A happy slave is still a slave. And yours don’t even have the freedom to know they’re enslaved.”

“Does it matter?” Civorage wiped a gloved finger along a bookshelf, inspected it, then pulled a face of mock approval. “You’re an absolutist thinker, captain. To you there is right and wrong, and nothing else. Slavery is always wrong, freedom is always right. It’s dismayingly un-nuanced. Isn’t the real test of morality in the results and consequences? And let us look about us to see how that is going, hmm?”

He gestured to the door. “Out there…the consequences of freedom. The Crowns live by their absolute vision of right and wrong, and so nightmares stalk the land, twisting everyone they touch into more of themselves. Out there on your ship is Ekve, and over there by Yngmir’s door sits Bekhil, two of the worst and bloodiest murderers in history, whose tally of misery infinitely exceeds my own. And yet, the Crowns let their bloody regime run its course. In the name of freedom, they permitted slavery to endure! Hah!”

He turned, and gestured to the hag elves. “And here…proof positive that the Crowns’ love is not unconditional. Do you know their history?”

Jerl glanced at Mouse, who frowned back at him. This was a dangerous game they were playing, letting him speak. But…the more they learned of him and his thoughts, the more they let him carry on, the more he might slip up and say something they could turn against him.

Jerl hadn’t yet heard anything persuasive. In fact, he wasn’t even sure he’d heard anything heartfelt. Civorage was so…closed. It was difficult to imagine him having any real convictions.

“Only what Sin told me. That one day the elves all over the world felt a terrible anger, after which the Nornfey became their own distinct group, never reincarnating into other Set.”

“Oh yes. The anger of jilted gods,” Civorage chuckled again. “Though, Bekhil’s information is a little amiss. The Crowns’ anger wasn’t directed at these elves, no…if anything, I daresay you would call them victims.”

Jerl and Mouse glanced at each other again. “I’ll bite…” Mouse ventured. “Why would we call them that?”

“Because this wasn’t their choice.” Civorage paused by one of the elves, whose dark eyes turned to look at him with an expression Jerl couldn’t quite read, but which he felt via Mouse.

Like the thoughtless adoration of a dog.

“This was…done to them?” Mouse asked.

“Oh yes. Just the same as I give the gift of the Circle to useless creatures like your librarian girl up there, these useless creatures—supremacists whose only dream was a return to the slaughter and debauchery of the Ordfey—were given a similar gift. Not by me of course, their change was imposed on them long before I was born.”

“Then by who?” Jerl asked.

“My dear captain, surely you’re smart enough to have put the pieces together by now?” Civorage stroked the elf’s translucent chin affectionately, exactly like a man giving a collie a scratch behind the ears, then turned to quirk an eyebrow at him. “Or are you really arrogant enough to assume you’re the only one with Heralds on your side?”

As the long silence that followed went on, his smile got slowly wider.

“You were, weren’t you?”

“I didn’t even know about the forgotten four until today,” Jerl admitted.

“The forsaken four,” Civorage corrected him. “The rebel four, cast out by their own creators for daring to disagree with the Crowns’ great plan. My partners.”

“Your masters,” Jerl shot back.

“Heh! No. So wrong, it’s not even insulting.” Civorage shook his head. “They’re like me, they understand that most people are born to serve, and some few are born to guide them. And just like the Crowns chose you for your Word and set it in your path, the Forsaken chose me for mine and pointed me toward it. Though, of course, I only learned of this after I had already passed their test.”

“That’s what you tell yourself?”

Civorage laughed, and shook his head again. “Jerl…you really disappoint me. Here I thought a man who’d had his perspective expanded by a Word wouldn’t be so closed.”

“And you’re open? No. No, you’re just the man who’s desperate to be the good guy and is willing to lie to himself to manage it,” Mouse replied. “You haven’t mastered Mind, Nils. If you think Alana’s weak for her appetites, then what does that make you? You saw a chance to become the richest being in existence, and you pounced on it.”

“And who are you?” Civorage’s disapproval made the walls shake. “A weak little girl pretending at being a boy, and a sneak thief. Your greatest desire is to go unnoticed. Mine is reshape an unjust reality! Can’t you see what I’m thinking? No more suffering, no more slavery, no more abusive or neglectful parents, no more wars, no more tyrants—”

“—No more desire, no more ambition, no more peace, no more art, no more freedom—” Jerl countered, interrupting him.

“No more SHADES!” Civorage snapped. “The Crowns could have got rid of them any time they wanted! They could have fixed what they broke! Instead we have to cower all the dark night from the monsters they created and they allow to exist! And why? Because it might tip one of them past the point of no return? Because Eärrach can’t bear the thought of losing one of his harem?”

He scoffed and shook his head. “How many people are doomed to that?” He waved a hand back out through the dark, smashed doors “Millions? Billions? They could all be saved, but they won’t be. The Crowns aren’t willing to make that sacrifice for us.”

“Or maybe they know something you don’t,” Jerl retorted. “But we’ve talked long enough, Civorage. Is this conversation all you came here for?”

“Oh, no. I came here to conquer and seize. I wasn’t expecting to find you here. You’ve surprised me, and thwarted me. No matter what I do at this point…oh, I could instruct everyone here to drop dead on the spot of a heart attack, or fall into a sleep from which they’ll never wake, but so what if I do? You’ll just un-do it. No, the bitch-thaighn’s curse strikes again, it seems…no matter. You can’t be everywhere at once.”

He turned and strode away toward the door. In his wake, the hag elves dropped from the rafters and followed.

“So long, Jerl. So long Kara. Until one or the other of us has the power to finally win this thing,” he called over his shoulder, and strode out into the dark to vanish from sight.

The silky pressure of his power slipped away with him, like he’d been casting a long shadow that withdrew as he stepped out of the light. People stirred, blinked, rose to their feet, picked up their dropped weapons. The entire hall seemed to exhale.

Back up by the study doors, Derghan flopped over on his back, groaning and holding his head. “Fuck. Me.”

“Is everyone okay?” Jerl trotted back up the stairs to check on him.

Derghan massaged his temples. “Ugh…bastard knows how to torment a man, sure enough. Motherfucker.”

Jerl looked around. Dammit. He’d been right, the conversation had served Civorage well. He could see it in all their faces, the abused, violated expressions. Sin was staring off into infinite distance with tears threatening to break through her control. Amir’s eyes were closed and he was taking deep, steadying breaths through his nose, meditating himself to calm. Harad’s knuckles were pale and his eyes wide with blistering fury. Alana, nearby, was weeping in a ball, scratching at herself as though all her skin itched. Marren flexed his hands like he wanted nothing more than to break something.

He would have wrested quite a lot from their minds, Jerl realized. And could have planted anything. Could have turned any of them.

Dammit.

Mouse squeezed his arm. “Don’t let him make you paranoid,” he said. “That’s his strongest weapon.”

“He’s going to destroy the Queen…” Derghan groaned, pushing himself upright, but Jerl shook his head.

“No. He knows I’d draw back time if he did that.”

“But—”

Jerl put a hand on his shoulder reassuringly. “It’s okay, Derg. She’ll be okay.”

The small postern door in Yngmir’s huge study doors swung open, and a nervous face peeked out: Sevjin. He looked around the hall, at the damage, the dead and the wounded, and then at Jerl.

“Captain Holten? You’re wanted in the Herald’s study.”

“...I bet he fuckin’ does want to talk, at last,” Derghan grunted.

Jerl clapped his shoulder again, traded ‘I’m okay’ nods with Sin, patted Amir’s back, traded up-nods with Marren and Padraig, and followed the senior scribe through the door.

Yngmir was much as he remembered: huge as an airship in his own right, finely dressed, his beard and hair as well-groomed as his clothing, seated upon a sculpted oak tree for an office chair. The ledger on his desk must have been the death of herds of cattle just to bind it, never mind the parchment, nor the ocean of ink written upon it with a pen the size of a great spear.

For the moment, however, his eyes were closed and his hands rested lightly on the arms of his chair. Light seemed to flow from his fingertips, along the branches and down the trunk, down into the roots from whence it spread out in rippling waves to suffuse the Thundering Hall and its township. He did not acknowledge Jerl’s arrival in any way

“Lord Herald…?” Jerl ventured.

There was a soft whispering noise, like a train of silk cloth being drawn over a polished wood floor, and a figure in white robes emerged from behind Yngmir’s chair. Her cowl was drawn low over her face, so that all that could be seen was a pair of thin, pale lips. She smiled at him, took a step to her right to pass back behind the tree, but did not emerge from the other side. When placed a hand on Jerl’s shoulder from behind as though she’d always been standing beside him, he somehow didn’t flinch.

“He’s too busy,” she said, and gave her giant herald a fond smile. “He insists on doing this himself.”

Jerl turned to face her. “…Lady Haust,” he greeted her, stiffly.

Her lips moved sideways in a rueful, almost apologetic little smile. “You feel aggrieved.”

“How am I supposed to be entrusted with this if you all won’t tell me everything?”

“How are we supposed to tell you what we don’t know for certain ourselves?” she replied. With a gesture, she summoned two chairs from across the study and sat in one, inviting him to sit opposite her.

Jerl frowned at her a moment, then accepted the invitation. Truthfully, he was glad to be off his feet: the adrenaline of the brief fight and the tension of the conversation with their enemy were fading now, and he hadn’t had enough sleep: tiredeness was settling on his bones like a flock of birds coming in to roost. “Well, you know now.”

“Yes. Civorage was kind enough to confirm it.”

“But you suspected. You could have told me you suspected.”

“Maybe we should have. Though, there is rather a lot we suspected that turned out to be wrong…”

To his astonishment, she reached up and flipped her cowl back. All of her cultivated mystique and shadow went with it as Jerl found himself looking upon a quite normal face. Narrow, but not gaunt, with no more than a hint of cheekbones. Pretty, in a bland and forgettable way, framed by an unfashionable and unsculpted short frizz of dull hair that couldn’t quite decide if it was blonde, or brown, and compromized on a lustreless ginger. He’d expected a youthful, fresh complexion but actually she wore enough lines and wrinkles to suggest the threshold of middle age. It was the sort of face he might spot ten times just walking around any major city, scrubbing clothes or collecting the groceries.

But she was a Crown. Her face could be whatever she wanted. This one could be the mask she calculated was most appropriate to his mood in that moment.

“Don’t say it. You’re not only human,” Jerl told her.

“We are in the ways that really count, deep down.” She glanced toward the door, then up at Yngmir. “…The biggest one being, we fuck up.”

Jerl watched her for a moment. Part of him wanted to…what? To suddenly mistrust her? To treat every word and deed as just another facet of an elaborate lie?

Was that his voice urging him, or Civorage’s?

Dammit. He should never have let the bastard say his piece. But he had. And the only fair thing he could do now was to let Haust say hers.

He sighed, and sat back.

“…What happened?” he asked.

----------------------------------------