Fast atop the Rooftop
She awoke with a gasp, a swimmer breaking the surface. The ceiling was grey. The room was quiet. Somewhere in the distance, servants chattered and then were still again.
A dream. It had all been a dream. The broken pattern, the figure on the mountainside. Her father had hit her, had scratched at her arms and kicked her and there had been blood, but he had not. She had dreamed it all.
Her face felt strange. One eye was not working properly. The skin on the eyelid pressed back on itself and would not open all the way.
She lay still and let her gaze travel around the room. It was not her own bed chamber. One of the servants, perhaps. The mattress was of straw. The blankets were loose woven sackcloth.
She tried to sit up. Pain flared along her side, a bright, hot needle drawn through the ribs, and she could not move. The bedclothes pressed her back down, drowning her. She thrashed against them like a horse in a marsh, then lay still.
She lifted her head, grimacing at the pain and looked down along the length of her body. There were ropes. Someone had tied her to the bed while she slept. She closed her eyes, trying to regain the sense of the dream. It could not be true. Someone had tied her to the bed, and what else had they touched while she slept when they had carried her and bound her with rough hands.
Her mind rebelled against the thought. She strained against the bonds and the bedclothes, arcing her back until the pain forced her back down again.
Be calm you fool, she told herself. Think and work it out.
The ropes were heavy, blackened with tar, the knots large and clumsy, but ropes were no challenge to her.
The servants did not know about the band at her wrist. She still had her connection. The flame leapt within her chest, eager to obey. She forced herself to concentrate. Starting a fire in the bedclothes would be a sad way to die. The flame fluttered in her, poorly shaped, sickly. She commanded it, feeling the heat of it kindle and grow. She pushed on it, shaped it, sent it into one of the places where the rope wrapped around the bed frame. The room filled with the stench of burning pitch, then the rope suddenly became slack. She struggled and kicked, worming her way to the top of the bed, out of the cocoon of blankets and bonds that held her, fighting the urge to cry at the bursts of pain that stabbed at her chest like knives.
And then she heard them calling.
Her sisters. She felt them, calling to her. There are bonds deeper than the flame, and she felt them now, the brightness of them, Lenadriel, Fentallion, even Meriviel though she was yet far off.
“Come stand with us.”
“I am coming,” she whispered. “Wait for me, I come.”
“Stand with us and defeat the shadow.”
They could do it. Three Sintarael, bright and terrible. And she would stand with them and cast fire over their enemies and burn them. Burn their bones while they walked.
“I am coming, she whispered once more, shrugging off the bedclothes and climbing free.
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Atop the western tower, Lenadriel and Fentallion kept watch over the plain. Far away, beyond the river, a rider galloped. Flame red hair streaming out behind her, tunic green as the grass that churned beneath her horses hooves.
Lenadriel leaned over the rail. “She is coming see? She comes to our call. Oh, how she rides!”
Fentallion said nothing, but watched, through narrow eyes that glittered.
Lenadriel clutched at her arm. “We will stand together against the Darkling and all the powers! The king will be himself again! Meriviel will make it so! Oh sister, we will triumph against this evil that has come on us, how could we not? We are strong, and our armour is bright!”
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Llaneth sat on the side of the bed, breathing hard. Her sisters, were calling. The broken pattern had a new beating heart, a kaleidoscopic hub of a brand new wheel that spun about the flame and the unbeating hearts of her family.
There was a dresser in the room and as she stood she caught sight of her reflection in the polished metal disk. One half of her face was fat and swollen. The eye was squeezed halfway shut, the eyelids purple and squashed together.
She gave a small cry and lifted her hand to her face, feeling the lumpy shape of it. It did not feel like her own face. She was someone else, someone ugly.
Her forearms were a mass of scabs, hard and weeping from the cracks. Beneath the chain on her wrist was a deep burn that seeped fluid.
But the pain was nothing. The pattern was all. She would join her sisters, they would march on her father and force him to his knees.
Then there came a new noise, soft at first, a rumble that shook the curtains and rolled up through the soles of her feet. A distant crash of masonry. A flight of birds, scattered. The tower trembled.
She could see a high bridge through her window, A slender white span connecting two towers. It shimmered in a vibration that shook the air, folded, fell. The crash echoed up to her window, and then the screams.
This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The call of her sisters faltered, and then grew stronger. “Come! Stand with us!”
The screams from the street below grew louder. A crashing of glass.
Then at the door there came a knock knock knocking, gentle as a friend.
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The Western Tower trembled like a struck dog.
Leandriel clutched at Fentallion's arm. Across the city, towers cracked and tumbled. A shock wave passed over the roof and the wooden deck hummed like a bowstring.
A cloud of smoke rolled into the sky and the world was darkened beneath it, the sun red and small in the haze.
The flame guttered and heaved, drunken, dizzy. The pattern caught and broke open like a machine, chewing its own gears.
And behind the sisters, slow and stately, dragons rose silently from the broken heart of the city up into the still evening air.
They were black, and they curled like rags tossed by a gale, weaving and flickering. Their bodies were half formed, rags and tassels, shadows and smoke. Their heads were featureless ripples of soot around a snarling maw. They circled the city, three of them, calling to one another in tongues long forgotten.
The sisters stood ready, but the wyms were not meant for them. They swooped low over the tower, then up, over the walls, westwards, towards the place where Meriviel rode. The sisters clung together as the tower shook, and the smoke engulfed them.
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The green plain of Erin stretched wide, like a bowl, rising at the edges into mountains. In the middle distance, the towers of the White City were dwarfed against the slate grey cliffs of the Natalnoura.
Hoofbeats drummed across the plain, a lone rider on a grey stallion. Meriviell, full galloping across the green field. Her red-gold hair billowed out behind her, and she was fair, not because of her face and form, but because of the joy she took in riding, and the love she had for her horse.
There was light and joy in her eyes, but fear lived there too. She felt the call of her sisters. She felt the dance of the flame and the shape of the pattern, and she saw the smoke begin to rise.
Far above her, beneath the clouds, three creatures turned in the crisp blue air. They were black and ragged, and they coiled like rags around a fist. The cries they made were the cries of lost children, the weeping of women. The wail of the damned.
One of the rag creatures coiled down and passed close over her horse. She leaned into the animal's neck, and it swept over her, calling her by name. Its voice was the sound of a mother mourning for her baby.
With a small cry Meriviel stood in the saddle, and leaped from the horse’s back. As she fell she spoke of the flame and the pattern, and she shifted, or rather the whole world shifted around her, and the shape of the world was rewritten to take her new form.
She landed hard, carving long grooves in the earth with hands and feet that were now clad in iron, and when she stood she was not Merriviel anymore, but an elegant creature of green folding, tall and slender as the towers of Erin, with red gold hair flowing out behind it.
Some way down the road, one of the creatures stooped upon the galloping stallion and lifted it high over the plain with hooked talons, longer than swords. The horse cried for its mistress as it was carried up and up. A fount of red marked the blue sky, and the horse fell, broken in two pieces, hooves tangling in the air. The two other wyrms snatched up the pieces as they fell and shredded them into hailstorm of tumbling meat and bone that thudded into the ground across the field.
Merriviel did not move as the flesh of her companion horse rained from the sky around her, but though her face was hidden, a single tear escaped her visor and splashed into the grass.
Instead, she spoke a second word, and where once she had been empty-handed, now she held a green blade, thrice as long as a man is tall, etched with the pattern, that hummed as she swung it.
The three dragons came together in the sky, tangling in a cloud of rags and darkness, then fell apart, diving on the princess, screaming her name in tongues long forgotten. Merriviel raised her sword as one of the creatures flashed overhead. The blade passed along the full length of the beast, and it came apart, falling in two pieces, strips of black and ribbon that writhed on the green field, carving up the soil. Then it lay still, and the wind began to take it, but something still moved within the wreckage, something with a human form, that climbed free of the ruin, and advanced on Merriviel.
It was a boy, dressed in black rags, so that he had appeared to be part of his mount. His eyes were sunken in his skull, shrivelled up like raisins. The armoured princess towered over him, tall and bright as a tree in high summer. Nevertheless, she fell back before him, warding him with her sword.
She drew breath beneath her visor, and it seemed she would speak, but before she could make a sound, a pulse of darkness emanated from the boy’s chest. It ate into the ground, and the green grass, and the blue sky, till all around was grey and silent.
Meriviel’s sword cracked, then shivered into dust in her hands. Her armour crumbled, great hunks of green fell from it, tumbling down her body, crumbling into powder, until the princess knelt, torn and bloody, in the long grass. Merriviel, Queen of the stilled, kneeling before a ragged child with shrunken eyes of coal.
The two remaining dragons landed either side of the boy, snapping at her but coming no closer. She looked up, into the face of the boy, into the grey drear of the boy’s binding, and she whispered eight words.
“I’m sorry, for what we did to you.”
Again it seemed she would speak, but before she could take breath, a bright blade flashed in the boy’s hand, and she fell, bright Meriviel, red hair tangled in the new spring grass.
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Fast upon the ramparts tall,
Of Aladice of Fae and Fain,
Lenadriel, Fentallion watched,
their sister toil upon the plain,
Atop the gilded castle bright,
As even lengthened into night,
They watched her leap, they watched her fight,
They watched her face the blackened bane,
They watched their sister fall.
And then they knew beyond all doubt, Their father’s heart was poisoned ‘gainst, His daughters.
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Lenadriel the fair, golden in the afternoon sun, mouth open in horror, clutched at her sister’s arm, and watched Merriviel die.
Fentallion, unmoving, whispered a vow under her breath. A curse of retribution, terrible and unending. A pattern against her enemies, their families, their children. A bane against the worlds, and a promise, dark and cold and sure as the current of the sea, to walk until her vengeance was enacted.
Behind them, unseen at first, a door opened, and men began to file onto the rooftop. White cloaked men in black leather armour, each with a crossbow, some grim-faced, some fearful, some openly weeping. A hundred men, and a hundred more, spread out in a circle around the two young women.
The flame fractured and splintered into a thousand fragments. The pit was open. The pattern hung in ruins.
Fentallion drew the pieces into her, coaxing the embers in her heart. Smoke from the city still swirled across the rooftop in thin tendrils, as though the chasm itself were trying to draw her home.
She pulled at the power, drew it into herself, shaped it, but there was not enough, not enough.
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Atop the rooftop, eventide,
Lenadriel, Fentallion stood,
Against their myriad foe.
They drew the flame and spoke a word,
A spell to keep themselves from harm,
A spell of flight and shield and might,
A spell of armour, desperate,
But ere the pattern was complete,
An hundred arrows flew.