Spring 55…56…57
Ash fell.
Spring 58
Forty ships departed Ruhum, adorned in tassels of red and gold. They launched to acclaim and speeches, off to reclaim the Isle of Fire from the clutches of southern tyranny, and charged forward with engines churning black waters under the power of their faith.
The Tempest met them at the horizon, standing on the naked air with her arms crossed.
“Cute.”
She landed at the prow of the flagship, nearly tipping it into the sea with the force of her impact, and cut the barrel from its forward cannons as she passed.
“Are you an army of peace?” she asked, kicking the barrel into the sea. “What fish draw such honor?!”
“We hunt monsters!” the forward officer cried.
“There are no monsters here,” she answered.
And there shall be none under my watch
“…save, perhaps, those found in the hearts of men.”
In a series of lightning jumps, the Tempest picked up the vessels and planted them prow-first in the fields. Thirty-nine new trees planted for the new year!
The flagship, though, she carried to Waves and deposited at the mouth of the Dragon.
With a few idle strokes of her Blade, she neutered the ship. Sheathing it, she announced, “My attendants will be with you shortly. My thanks for your contribution to maritime technology.”
Amidst the usual bluster, one young man stared at the Tempest. “Hells…is this all we merit? They’ve had me going sixteen hours a day for this!”
The Tempest glanced at the youth. “Then jump off the side and be free. Ruhum holds no sway here.”
Aghast, the youth shook his head. “We aren’t even a threat, are we?”
She turned, then, and fixed him with an icy smile. “Were you an actual threat, I would not permit you to remain.”
The Tempest leaped to her real Work.
***
Conner Orland stared after the Tempest, rubbing his head. After a moment, though, an officer came to try and rally him into a suicidal redoubt in the belly of the ship.
Fifty men and some pistols against Azure serpents? Yeah, no thanks.
He still didn’t understand how the officers could expect loyalty out of men they’d conscripted for a pittance of copper and a meal – much less those like him serving off a sentence!
Rather than dwell on the past, the young man took a wild leap over the railing and into the Dragon.
Ten seconds later, an Azure attendant fished him out of the muddy water with her serpent, and he braced himself against all the stories of the terrible south…
But she just wrung him, dropped him on the bank beside the other defectors, and turned away.
A moment later, an Azure man with a clipboard asked for his name and whether he wished to return to Ruhum.
The question surprised him.
Just what in the icy hells did that place ever do for me? Plus, how much would they squeeze out of him if he returned a prisoner of war? Probably double my durance and dock my pay!
Somewhere in the last weeks aboard the ship, Conner had reluctantly admitted to himself that he was not – strictly speaking – a particularly good person.
But damn if he was going to submit himself to the ‘justice’ of the righteous back north! They’d wring him for every drop of sentencing…and when all was said and done? He’d be a criminal anyways, as good as branded until his dying day.
Forgiven until they needed to squeeze him one more time.
“Do you guys do baseball down here?”
***
Alisandra burst into the sky above the Cathedral of Fire. Counting minutes in the back of her mind, she landed on the broad Azure steps of this sanctuary in the broken heart of Lumia.
Her heels hit the blue metal and sang out with a soft note.
“Excuse me, Mother,” she murmured. “I look forward to our reunion. Just a few more days.”
Once the Wyrm is shackled, I shall help you with the Work. However much more that requires. Whatever else must be sacrificed. We cannot afford sentimentality any longer.
Inside, the Cathedral reeked with the press of crowds to its gills, the aisles converted into screened living quarters for thousands of refugees now sheltering in every cranny. She could scarcely wind her way to the altar, and she sympathized with those forced to house in the vast catacombs beneath.
This too is only for a little while longer. Endure, my people.
Aaliyah awaited her by the alter.
Alisandra mourned for the quiet entrance, but that was not an Archangel’s lot. Her footfalls fell like thunder now, and all looked to her against the dark.
Excluding fools that would rather spend the national budget on ships that lasted all of fifteen seconds against the Tempest.
Such a waste. Even with a budget three times its initial estimate, that flagship was missing half the promised cannons. How long could they have fed the entire nation for that thing?
“I have but a few moments,” she told her priestess.
“Of course, Holy Tempest. How may we aid you?”
“I would speak to Oliver of the evacuation.”
“He is in the Keeper’s office, Holy Tempest.”
Alisandra mounted the stairs two at a time, dodging people with every step. A line waited from the stairs towards the Keeper’s office, and Oliver’s voice echoed out.
“What about Harrowsgrove?”
Belle answered. “Though Father Lucas has been a great boon, he will not surrender the west while the ashmounts tremble.”
“Are you pulling my leg?! We need him in Mel standing against madness – not shoveling ash!”
Skipping the line, Alisandra shoved into the Keeper’s office.
The fancy furniture was gone, replaced by a makeshift home and office. Oliver rested on a wide cot, hands on his belly, and Belle sat beside him with a stack of papers and her pen. She glanced up at the Archangel’s entrance, gasped, and leaped to her feet for a curtsy, spilling papers everywhere
Oliver craned his neck – close to the only movement he could manage if his bandages were any indication. “What do you need, Ali?”
“What do I need?! Oliver, you are attempting to evacuate every sane man in the country from your cot!”
Tell me what you need, Oliver! I am your Archangel!
The former aldersman shrugged from his bed. “Honestly, we’ve the word out to anyone with ears. The ones that remain feel they cannot come. For health, for money, for fear.”
“Ask them to centralize as best they can. Even wagons will do. I can carry them.”
Oliver pressed his lips in silence.
“My time is precious, yes, but not so precious that I will not spare the hour.”
He glanced away, and an awkward silence settled in.
What is this, Oliver? The destruction of your diner? The troubles in Mel? Your new relationship with Belle? What drives this wedge between us?
Belle squirmed, plucking. “How is Valkyrie?”
“Very well. I have asked her to join my temple, and she has accepted.”
The Wavespeaker gasped. “She has?!”
“Yes. I believe she will be invaluable to our cause.”
Sensing the convenient omission, Nix clicked her peak in annoyance from the empty bookcase.
Oliver said nothing.
Hand on her breast, Belle sighed. “Oh, that is a relief. I feared she hated the temple!”
Alisandra squeezed Belle’s shoulder. “I will take care of her, Belle. Have no fear.” Turning back to Oliver, she cleared her throat. “Now. My time is limited. Oliver, where will you gather them?”
The former aldersman pushed into a sitting position, though he wheezed in pain at the movement. “Ali…no.”
“No?” She arched an eyebrow. “You doubt my ability to carry a wagon?”
“No. This is an evacuation, not a war!”
Stolen content warning: this tale belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences elsewhere.
“Yet my prior engagement was forty warships.”
Oliver flinched.
Forty and not a chance
“I left the ships scattered and defanged.” I should not have to explain this to you, Oliver! “The situation is defused.”
“Defused?! Hells, Ali, this time tomorrow half the country will convince themselves that Waves will invade on the day after!”
“The rags will run what they always run!” she snapped. “Ruhum has no ability to project force beyond its borders now.”
“Which will only redouble their ire for those of us still here!”
“I will not allow it!”
“Dammit, Ali, you’ll just make it worse!” he roared.
The Cathedral shivered.
“Excuse me?” the Tempest asked.
“What the hells is going on with you, Ali? What happened to living as mortals might?!”
“The Wyrm,” she hissed.
“And Angela Cecille?”
“You would defend a woman who kidnapped Valkyrie? The woman that ordered Margaret put a bullet in Belle’s back?! One more evil has been removed from this world.”
“One more evil? Stormmother’s tit, Ali! Have we conquered evil? Has her death brought us peace?”
“It has bought us time. Time enough for the Work!”
As their voices rose, Nix hissed from the shelf. Now she burst across the room, landed on Oliver’s shoulder, and flared her pinions at the angel.
He laid a calming hand on his phoenix. “The Work. The Wyrm. Archangels and Gods. Ali, if that’s where you belong – fine. Just…just go do it. But we can’t follow.”
I can’t keep up anymore
Alisandra scowled, fighting her own temper. “I swore to protect this place, and I will! Yet how am I to protect when you will not call?! The drums of war sound for every monster, but men have waters murky and deep. I need your voices to call!”
I cannot hear you over the agony of a thousand broken worlds if you will not call my name!
“Alisandra, Archangel, or Tempest?” Oliver asked. “Shall we sing for you like Waves?”
Hair lashing, she drew herself up and growled. “You want Waves?! Take it! I would relish the free time!”
“If you hate it so damn much, shrug it off already. You let half the world fawn over your shadow!”
“Men choose to fawn! Hells, Oliver, you of all people should understand my restraint!”
Tiptoeing through a world of glass
The former aldersman winced against a spasm in his back. Silent a long moment, he finally murmured, “Gabriel would not have abided the Tempest.”
The room suddenly became very cold.
“Do not lecture me what my father would have done.”
“Why? Afraid you won’t measure up?”
Alisandra’s pupils shrank to icy pinpoints, her hair froze in place, and the windows to the Cathedral groaned.
“Out of respect for what we have shared,” she stated, “I will forget that.”
She spun on her heel.
“We are done here.”
***
Ali stepped to the ashmounts and dropped to a seat on the precipice over the bubbling caldera.
Her hands shook.
Below, a thin cake of black ash covered the bubbling pit of an exposed lava vein, throbbing like an infected wound.
She set the Hand of God across her lap, letting its pressure weigh against her thighs, and stared into the swirling smoke. Let herself breathe in the fumes, tasting the poisons that would kill a mortal man.
A few gases out of balance; a momentary burst of pressure or heat; even the accumulation of plaque in heart or brain…
How many and marvelous the ways mortals departed.
What a farce.
She now understood why the Wyrm only killed tens of thousands in Lumia despite all his power.
“Why bother? They off themselves perfectly well.”
Those years she spent playing Conclave games – for what? All those hours wasted smiling through her teeth for old Lords as they explained politics she had mastered when she was sixteen! Carefully planting the ideas for them to later relate as their own brilliance!
How had Mirielle managed a century without going mad?
Ah, but she did. She fell to Indulgence.
And Ruhum’s Inventors were now a footnote in a history book. Those few survivors plied their stolen visions in Highbranch, and the Isle of Peace slid straight back into the dark days after the reign of Queen Mishkan.
There is no permanence to be found in the works of men.
Beneath her, the caldera belched. A bubble of magma the size of a house rose, burst, and scattered superheated droplets across the wide slope.
Several splattered on her thighs; tiny motes of heat and fire that sang their dream of Peace and Unity…
She watched them sizzle on her leggings, unable to burn through.
Do you truly understand what you are? What you could become? Have you even noticed that your clothes remain after a dip in lava? Your tailor must be truly astonishing!
The Edenward taught her new ways to see. Her clothing remained because she accepted the garments as a part of herself. Her Light wove through the fabric, granting some tiny sliver of her own power.
The barest fraction of a reflection. Would mortals fawn over this too? Like Donovan fawning over our angelic refuse…
That mage had murdered his way across the civilized world for the discarded baubles of her kind. Did the temple girls in Waves fight over her underwear while she worked? Did they wear her clothes to feel the faintest echo of what she was?
I am weary.
But there was no time to be weary. Eight days until the Wyrm. Eight days to finish the Work. Even this precious time was an angelic lunch break.
Though she dared not resume the Work while her mind reeled with Oliver’s accusations. Instead, she cupped the Hand of God in her hands, running her thumb across the hilt, and asked, “Why must you weigh a mountain? Why such a burden, even for I?”
The eager Blade answered, its echoes readily parting for its master.
Last echo of a Hand that cast the very Gate
Destined and claimed
Regalia!
Her halo of war throbbed.
“The Hand that cast the Gate…”
As we watched a gulf cast between high and low…
Such Light burned the memories into a jumble of impressions. Ah, if only she had been able to focus her gaze beyond that Hand. To see…to see…
Would you sever the dawn and the dusk?
Would you rebel against the Song itself?
Again, the echoes interrupted! “Bitter words from a complacent Chorus!”
Do not worry. I shall tackle your mystery in due time!
Alisandra refocused her attention on the Blade. Forged of the last echo of God across Malkuth, its casing wrung one droplet at a time from the mortal host, its purpose to sunder…
You are Separation, she realized. The high from the low. The subtle from the gross.
The living from the dead.
It throbbed in tune with her, happy to serve wherever she led.
“A Blade. A crown. A throne…”
Claimed with ease in the fullness of her Light.
Her thoughts were so clear amidst the war with the Wyrm. Nothing like this useless tangle of mortal living. If she was to see clearly; if she was to protect this place; if she was to bear the weight of all she claimed…
Should she not set her gaze higher?
The Edenward taught her new ways to see. New ways to extend her reach.
It stretched into the clouds now, tendrils rippling outwards, and carried with it the pulse of her Will.
Once the Wyrm was bound – once Esmie was safe – what would she conquer next? Which mystery was most likely to erupt into another calamity?
Perhaps Elios? Jörmungandr and I hit it rather hard in our last bout…
Or should she turn her attention to mortal wars? Break the powers that even now launched nuclear weapons for inches on a map?
Or should she set her sights on the third of the Mighty – the Tyrant himself…
The drums of war sounded once, interrupting her thoughts.
Ali!
We could use a hand!
Valkyrie, summoning her to the northeast.
Alisandra hopped to her feet. “My Spear at least knows to call!”
***
Lumia had been Ruhum’s beacon of progress. Even as it expanded, Mel had remained a bulwark of the Houses and church. Visitors that progressed from Lumia to Mel often struggled to repress their disdain for the older city’s hidebound ways.
If one traveled to the northern reaches of the country, however, Mel and Lumia were just names in the paper. The places children left to and never returned. Here the only marker of progress was a shared tractor and a handful of electric lights powered by a generator and rationed according to fuel prices.
Of course, that tractor was for pious use; the pick and shovel work fell to the hired hands. Here the House plantations held an icy grip on life. When Winter released its grip, thousands of itinerant workers rented beds in drafty barns and took their pay after the long day in House scrip.
Now, in the wake of the Sevensborough Rebellion, the farm managers decided to withhold the seasonal payout from scrip to silver. After all, why should they pay the Azure filth that corrupted the nation?
That plan would have gone better if one of Aure’s blessed farmhands had not gotten blazing drunk and crowed the entire plot to a room full of those itinerant workers.
Alisandra burst into a grey and listless sky, marred by a dusting of ash, to the scene of a line of angry farmhands, barred at gunpoint from the barn where their belongings waited.
I land. They bluster. I take away their toys. They curse my name. She sighed. Tomorrow, the same.
Why not try another approach?
As she fell, she drew the Hand of God. Closing her eyes, she listened for the hate in the air. That sharp, sweating tension of blood about to be spilled…
Eyes closed, the better to see beyond Malkuth, she cut.
Her Blade caught something sticky like a spider’s web, and a wet snap popped through the sky.
Landing, Alisandra opened her eyes to test her results.
Auren farmers trained their guns on her. Their fingers twitched and shivered. Yet, like dreaming men bid to run, they could not finish the thought.
“Interesting,” she hummed.
If I might cut the violence from a scene, what could I excise from a man’s heart? Could there be a surgery to grant reason to an angry man?
“Holy Tempest!” cried her faithful.
“Did you hear of the evacuation?” she asked.
“W-well, yes,” admitted one man.
“And you tarried for the Spring planting?”
“A-a man must eat, Holy Tempest.”
“I suppose he must, meager though the fare. Valkyrie, my Spear!”
Her call echoed across the farms, and the Azure laborers turned in shock to the girl in their midst.
Her Spear?
Wait, that brat was telling the truth?!
Flashing a smile to hide her relief, Valkyrie waved. “Good timing!”
What are you even doing up here? Alisandra shrugged. “The short version if you please.”
Valkyrie sucked her lip. “Short version? Six gold in back payments, usurious rates in rent, undeserved beatings, and mass detainment when they threatened to leave.”
Ignored, one of the farmers found the strength to pull his finger against the trigger. The metal ground, but the spark refused to light.
Will the guns function once I leave, or have I broken the tool’s ability to function? Does the very concept of violence regenerate? If exposed to blood, would the gun remember? What even of mortal hearts – could that violence too be tamed?
Ah, she had so many questions!
For after the Wyrm’s entombment.
Alisandra waved a hand. “There is work enough in the south for everyone. The temple can fund temporary housing.”
“What? Donkey’s arse it will!” erupted one of the Azure men.
Surprised, Alisandra turned to face a man of twenty or so, his cheek still swollen from a blow. She expected argument from Fire – what foolishness was this from her own?!
“They owe us this! They’ve docked our scrip, docked our blanket ration, spit in our food! They ain’t shown us a sliver of mercy!”
So why should our Tempest show any in return?!
His fellows roared, eager for the Tempest to strut her power.
“Be silent!” she snapped, hoarfrost bursting across the fields. “I choose the manner of my vengeance!”
Its form and its target!
Her ice crackled as it gnawed at Spring plantings fresh in their buds.
Alisandra could have drawn in her icy disdain and saved the fields, but she saw little reason when the farmers still itched for their useless triggers.
“Gather your things. Find a wagon. I shall ferry you south.”
Time ticked onwards; her lunch break neared its end.
The Azure faithful obeyed, sulking. They echoed of sweet vengeance denied even as they gathered their things.
In the meantime, the fuming farm managers hurled insults instead of bullets.
“You are a blight upon this land!”
“Harlot! Heretic!”
“A stain upon our fair soil!”
The Tempest rolled her eyes. “A stain? Ah, if you understood how gently I walk. I carry you, protests and all.”
Do try to be less of a burden, mortal
Alisandra turned to her Spear.
“Valkyrie.”
Shivering against the chill, the girl hopped close. “Y-yes?”
“I am informed that the evacuation is largely complete.”
The girl frowned. “Complete? Everyone from the boroughs, I guess. It gets murkier out here though…”
Valkyrie’s echoes rang with her own burdens.
Trying to find the places the radio won’t reach
The people too afraid to take to the road
To grant every last person a chance
She, at least, attempts to carry her weight.
Alisandra caught the girl by the chin and tilted her head back to look her in the eye.
“You have done well, my Spear,” the angel praised. You fight against the tide, even as our plans are dashed upon the rocks. That is all I ask.
Valkyrie flushed to the roots of her hair. The girl squirmed, licking her parted lips. “I…”
“Lingering remnants offer diminishing returns. Leave the evacuation to Oliver.”
I would not see you lost in this swamp when my eye is turned to the Work. I will not waste such a bright spark as yours.
“You will meet the Erudite sisters next. They have long assisted me in many matters, and perhaps you will find other magics among the Whistlers to compliment that clever fire of your own.”
Alisandra schemed. The outcast scion of Fire would tour the world and learn the magi’s elements. Bonding with multiple elemental beasts was tricky – the witch usually ended up weak in four instead of strong in one – but perhaps this girl could overcome that challenge.
As I seek to unite the Plateau and Jungle, perhaps Valkyrie could unite the gifts of elemental beasts…
“Wait, you want me in Highbranch?!” Valkyrie squeaked. “I’m not done with–”
But she spoke too late.
The Tempest scooped her up and leaped east.