Airlean Tales S2E31: Venarei Morben (4)

Charlene Penrose, heiress to the Penrose Winery, lover of animals both great and small (but mostly small), was quite fed up with all the secrets bandied to and fro like a game of battledore and shuttlecock, and she would like a straight answer for once, thank you very much.

She prowled through the winding halls of the Golden Apple compound in search of prey. She must have made quite the sight—long fluffy nightgown bouncing at her ankles like sheep’s wool, pastel nightcap pulled over her golden curls. But no matter. Sometimes urgency called for immediate action, and that left no time to don a chemise and drawers and corset and hoopskirt and petticoats and skirt and chatelaine.

Charlene bustled into the center of the compound and faced its namesake: a flourishing apple tree that spread heavy boughs over encircling buildings tiered like stones on orderly steps. Compared to previous nights, there were hardly any guards stationed—just two at each of the small gates, and a single one patrolling within the premises. Just down the road, the bouncing globe of a torch marked the arrival of another guard. His appearance was much younger than the others. Soft-faced, light armor, a middling stature made shorter by the way his shoulders hunched in exhaustion and defeat.

Excellent! Small, meek, vulnerable. The perfect sort of prey.

Charlene waited until the new guard had shuffled through the gate, murmuring a soft greeting in Atlantean to the ones on duty. She waited until he had rounded the corner, entering the patch of shadow that cloaked her.

Then she struck!

Fast as a hare, nimble as a squirrel, decisive as a terrier, Charlene—

—stepped onto the road in front of him and cleared her throat.

“Ahem! Pardon me, good knight.”

The guard froze. Quickly, his posture snapped to attention. “Y-yes. Are you lost? In need of directions?”

“I have a question about the strange happenings tonight.”

For a split second, the young guard’s face melted into a panicked look of utter dread, and it seemed like he might burst into tears on the spot. Then she blinked, and it was gone. The guard stiffly nodded at her.

“Yes, madam?” he said hesitantly. “What is bothering you?”

“Madam!” Either he thought her bearing was mature, or that she looked very old. Charlene chose to believe the former. “You may call me Charlene. What is your name?”

“Uh—Colin. Warrior Colin.”

“Yes, very good. Sir Colin, this is my question: are you hiding a terrible monster in the bowels of the earth, and it is about to break out of its confines and wreak untold devastation, and that is why your senator had the Airlean delegation relocated to the opposite side of the dominion?”

Colin stared at her, mouth opening and closing like a fish.

Finally, he said: “What would give you such an imaginative idea, haha?”

“Well, it’s been a lovely festival and all, but I couldn’t help but notice that a number of things have been very strange.” Charlene began to tick her fingers. “Firstly, everyone is being shuffled about late at night so abruptly! It’s quite cumbersome to move ten cases of belongings without advance notice, you know. Secondly, we have been moved to the opposite side of the dominion. Finally, the night watch is about a quarter of the personnel as it has been previously. Then some dire matter has most of your military mustering wherever we initially were, no?”

When the guard said nothing, she shrugged and continued.

“It could be a fire, a plague, perhaps some unusual fallout from the mistlore. But I just tried to think of the most dramatic explanation possible, because if there is one thing I’ve noticed ever since that duel to the death, it’s that the Atlanteans do seem to love their dramatics! So, Sir Colin? Unless you would like me to spin more wild fantasies, why don’t you tell me the truth?”

Colin looked up at the sky in a helpless way, like he was hoping lightning would come down and smite him in that very moment.

“Well,” he mumbled slowly, “you’re—not wrong about everything. I mean, yes, there’s something happening at the Amphitheater that might be a small risk. But you’ll all be very safe! Senator Xiph only moved you to be absolutely certain.”

So! Once again, her superior instincts had prevailed! Yet it was too early to proclaim victory. Instead, Charlene set her hands on her hips and tried to fix Colin with her most intimidating glare.

“Sir Colin.”

“Yes, Miss Charlene.”

“We are Airleans.” She tilted her chin proudly. “You may call us soft and foolish and think that because we are landwalkers, we know nothing. But we daily face annihilation from the Storm! We drive back darkness from our borders like the sun beating back the night! My brother, a talented soldier in his own right, went off to fight corrupted heralds at the Battle of Two Blights. And I”—she tried to recall what she had been doing that night—“am—am very dexterous at embroidering cushions!”

“Miss Charlene,” Colin said miserably, “be that as it may, and I’m certainly not questioning your dexterity at the needle—”

“Excuse me, good warrior!”

The new voice had both Charlene and Colin turning violently, like deer caught in the light. Strolling down the road, lantern in hand, was a young man that Charlene immediately recognized as one of Wessie’s…friends? Retainers? Soldiers? Greg Dismal. No, Grey Dismas. Unlike Charlene, he had found the time to throw on a presentable tunic and trousers and boots.

“Yes!” Colin blurted. Relief washed over his face at his newfound savior. “Yes, sir, how can I help you? What do you require?”

“I have a question about the strange happenings tonight.”

Colin hung his head and made a strangled noise.

“You see,” Grey continued in a calm, even cadence, “my liege has yet to return to his chambers for the evening. In fact, I haven’t seen him since Florenhost opened. Not that it’s unusual for him to skip off to stars-know-where...damned boy and his debilitating infatuations.”

Charlene barely held back a squeak of delight. But debilitating infatuations were adorable, and by far her favorite part of Heartsign’s novels! Wessie must have found True Love with his lady hunter. Good. They’d looked so very sweet together.

“However, with the sudden relocation in our accommodations,” Grey said, “I’m now concerned that he is none the wiser at our change in venue. Might I return to the embassy to fetch him?”

“No!” Colin immediately blurted. “I, I mean, currently, the area surrounding the Amphitheater is—”

“—in grave danger,” Charlene said in a conspiratorial whisper. “Some urgent matter is demanding the muster of the entire Warmonger’s army.”

Colin threw up his hands. “Lady Charlene, kindly return to bed before you incite panic in the entire compound.”

“A fabulous idea, sir,” Grey said. He extended an arm towards Charlene. “Lady Penrose, if the circumstances truly are so dire, we ought to keep to our accommodations that the warriors may be unimpeded in their good work.”

“What?!” Go home and turtle like a coward?! Had the man no sense of honor? Or at least the tiniest sliver of curiosity? “Absolutely not!”

“Yes, please, if you would,” Colin said, looking very relieved. “It is our solemn vow to keep you safe. Remain in the compound, and you will have nothing to fear.”

Charlene glowered openly at Grey. “You may turn tail and run, good sir, butI—”

Grey forcefully looped his arm through hers. Ugh, and here she had thought she’d escaped the watchful purview of her personal guards! As it turned out, even Wessie’s retainer was nothing more than another warden of this posh prison. And here she thought he would make for an ally.

Charlene did not whine or wail as Grey escorted her back to her chambers with all the indignity of a mother cat hauling a kitten by the scruff of the neck. She wanted to, of course, but it was tedious and boorish for a lady to make a ruckus during sleeping hours. Instead, she devoutly prayed that hole might open up in the earth and swallow Grey. And safely deposit him in his personal chambers. It wouldn’t do for anyone to get hurt, after all.

Grey drew to a halt at the ornately decorated door to her suite. Mindful of his watchful eye on her, Charlene sullenly unlatched the entrance with her key. But when she stepped inside the dark room, Grey followed her, illuminated by nothing but moonlight.

“Excuse me!” Charlene pronounced, hands on hips. “Thwarting my sacred mission is one thing, but now you are entering unchaperoned into the room of an unmarried lady! Have you no decorum?”

Grey peered down the hall, then looked over his shoulder, then quickly closed the door. Before Charlene could protest his impropriety again, he rushed out a whisper.

“Don’t be mistaken, my lady. Should you wish to sneak out of the compound, we must confer privately. We were going nowhere with that warrior.”

Oh. Oh, so he was an ally! All of Charlene’s fantasies of spontaneous chasms consuming him disappeared in an instant, and she beamed openly. “But of course! Cunning of you indeed, Grey Dismas.”

He paused. “You…remember me?”

“Of course I do!”

Everybody always thought her mind was so empty. It was, of course, at least when it came to unpleasant things like grudges and schemes and political machinations. But Charlene loved to remember things about people. Her head groundskeeper’s favorite snack (chocolate-dipped madeleines), the grandson of her pianoforte tutor (James, he’d just started learning his scales), and the birthday of her uncle’s nephew’s cousin’s aunt (the seventeenth day of the first Zephyric month). Every factoid of every companion was a pearl to be treasured, a seed to be nurtured, a book to be protected.

“Are you a noble, or a soldier?” Charlene asked.

Grey straightened a little. “I am—well, I am of House Dismas. Vassal house to House Geppett, Eminent House of the Heavensward Tree.”

Charlene looked crestfallen. “A noble? Oh, bother. ’Twould be far more useful if you were a soldier.”

“Well I—I mean, I can be a soldier. I am a soldier, I mean. I have…soldiered before.”

She brightened and beamed at him. “Most excellent! Then you shall come with me. You have windsoles, yes? Let us jump out the window—the guards shall never expect it!”

Grey gaped. “My lady, you are of a noble house! You can’t be seen leaving in such a state!”

“Then I guess no one shall see us at all, no?” She placed a finger to her lips, eyes dancing. “Come now, Sir Dismas. Surely you would like to find Wessie, and I, my answers. If we are to both search in earnest, why should we not do so together?”

Grey Dismas emitted another noise of protest, but Charlene’s mind had been made up. She seized his arm and hauled him to the open window, where the tasseled curtain fluttered like a friendly wave.

Truth, adventure, and most importantly, Romance awaited.

Nest was an apt term for the teeming, thorn-encrusted mess that made up one of Rathos’s centers of power.

From a safe, distant perch atop the flat roof of an abandoned house, Wesley Geppett surveyed the area, a bronze collapsible scope held up to one eye to magnify his view. A maze of brambles and thorns swarmed the ground, and at the nest’s center rose a gnarled tree that reached dark, twisted arms over rows of shattered Warmonger buildings. Bioluminescent veins danced up its ebony trunk in ghostly threads, and silvery cocoons dangled from its branches like half-formed fruit.

Other than looking utterly nightmarish, the nest was oddly quiet. Wes saw no telling shapes of prowling corruptions or abyssal appendages. Still, he had seen enough leylines to know the peace wouldn’t last.

Time to get to work.

Azalea was springstepping to her limits to reach the Scarecrows. He, too, had to do his part.

With decisive motions, Wes collapsed his scope and unfurled a roll-up leather pouch hooked on his belt. Within the plentiful sewn pockets lay a vast catalogue of colorful artifacts—ampoules with chromatic liquid, testing tablets of various metals, sterile cotton squares and wraps, and more. He turned his attention to a row of double-walled vials, each filled with glittering dust of a different color. These were his elemental testers: powders manufactured to replicate the same properties as elemental mana.

Wes shucked his trusty leather gloves in favor of a clean cloth pair. Then he unclipped another pouch from his belt, removed a folded sheet of cotton, and gingerly unwrapped it. Inside laid the stringy clipping of an abyssal frond that he’d managed to snag at the sandpits. It wafted innocently in the musty breeze, almost tricking him into believing it was harmless.

He laid the clipping carefully on the ground, still separated from the ground by the sheet of cotton. Then the goggles came over his eyes. Then, with a careful pinch of silver tweezers, he extracted a few grains from the vial containing rust red dust and dropped them over the base of the clipping.

Immediately, sparks flickered over where the dust met the frond. The base of the stem promptly wilted, blackened and charred.

Good news, as Wes had hypothesized. The plant was, unsurprisingly, weak to fire mana. Mana corruption tended not to alter an organism’s entire biological makeup; if anything, it only magnified it, or turned it berserk.

Wes waited a few protracted seconds to make sure no anomalies surfaced. Then he proceeded to a vial with verdant green dust: plant mana. This time, when the dust met the frond on a fresh leaf, it was absorbed—almost consumed, sinking into the surface until the leaf perked up, nourished.

Not so good news. It was not just resistant to plant mana, but was mended by it. Wes himself would serve little use in the battle ahead.

The minutes stretched on as he painstakingly proceeded through the rest of his kit. The potency of water mana was slightly dulled; lightning and ice mana, slightly effective; wind mana, neutral. With each new dust came a new page of notes in Wes’s field journal—and with each page, he struggled to bury the growing sense of foreboding as there was still no sign of Azalea on the horizon.

For what could be taking her so long but that something had gone terribly wrong?

Sethis swerved on his windsoles, sliding just under the belly of a leaping abyssal toad. His sword carved upward, splitting its abdomen open in a shower of black gore. The liquid stank strongly—not of iron, but of brine, a salty and nauseating tang that turned his stomach.

He grimaced as he pulled to his feet, flicking the dark blood off his blade and surveying his surroundings.

This nest was the closest to the Amphitheater, and it showed. Plant blights and abyssal mimics were already teeming like a hive of insects. Coils of gnarled roots surged out from the twisted luminous tree at the center, each budding with a hundred poisonous bulbs.

The only saving grace was that the chaos saturation of the surroundings was not as intense as leylines; manacraft was largely unimpeded. Sethis and Lilian, therefore, had decided to immediately engage rather than wait for signals from the other nests. It risked detection, but they had little chance of destroying the tree with so many heralds about.

“Lilian!” he called. “What have you found?”

A burst of blue flame answered him from the treetops, pinwheeling out of the boughs like a blooming flower. Ash fluttered to the ground like black snow, and a charred branch clattered at his feet. Lilian landed just behind him, blade raised to guard his back.

“Well, like most trees, it’s not all that fond of fire,” she said. She grimaced. “Unlike most trees, it’s popping out heralds faster than we can fell them. We’d best pray the signal arrives soon.”

Odd. Noticing a catch in her voice, Sethis turned to examine his cousin. Her face was strangely pale, and a minute tremble kept the point of her sword uneven.

Fear? From Lilian?

Well, it was natural to be afraid in the face of such corruption—but Sethis knew that Lilian was not natural. He had personally witnessed her cut down assassins and traitors, dress the most vicious wounds in post-Storm triage, even volunteer to be bitten by poisonous spiders for Observatorium research, all without batting an eye. Fighting in an environment like a leyline wouldn’t ordinarily cow her. If anything, she’d been hankering for a good fight for years now.

Something was amiss.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing.”

He squinted. “You answered too quickly.”

“Asters, Seth, is this really the time?” Lilian’s sword flashed as she carved down an abyssal wasp the size of a horse. Its veiny wings twitched as it hit the ground with an uncomfortably solid sound. “Look around. It’s easier to ask what isn’t wrong.”

“Shall we trade positions for a moment? I can take the treetops.”

“No,” Lilian immediately said. “Fire mana is more effective. I fare better than you.”

So the issue lies in the treetops.

Without any further deliberation, Sethis fired his windsoles, soaring up to the highest bough.

“Wait! Seth!” Lilian screeched from below. “Stars damn it—”

Sethis arced into the tree’s canopy, and nearly caught a faceful of spider silk for his trouble; black webbing spun in intricate knots between the branches, backlit by the cerulean fluorescence of filaments running through the bark. Signs of Lilian’s efforts littered the ground—mutilated corpses of serpents, crumpled spiders, charred toads.

Sethis steeled himself and proceeded up the twisted path of ebony wood, sword-point raised.

No creatures came running to greet him. The glowing foliage wafted in a musky breeze; eyes peered at him from the darkness before slithering away; abovehead, the silver cocoons glittered in pinpricks like a starfield. Those cocoons were growing denser, Sethis realized vaguely—a forest of silk and slumber. In fact, they seemed to be…pulsing. Like heartbeats.

Dread fell over Sethis like a shadow, and he squinted, eying the cocoons.

“Seth!” Lilian pushed into the canopy from behind him and hacked through a lattice of webbing, which frayed into dark pieces at her feet. “I know that listening isn’t your strong suit, but Asters forfend, would you kindly not make it your final one?”

“Lilian.”

The evenness in his tone halted Lilian in her tracks. Her sword lowered until it dangled uselessly by her hip.

“What are you hiding from me?” Sethis said.

Lilian’s mouth immediately opened—and just as quickly, closed. Her hesitation was answer enough.

Sethis’s eyes turned back to the cocoons as he braced his stance, preparing to fire his windsoles. A heavy hand came down on his shoulder and squeezed it tightly—not a demand, but a plea.

“Don’t,” Lilian murmured.

He released a soft, humorless laugh. “I regret to always neglect your advice, cousin. I regret more that my disobedience must continue.”

This time, when he flew up to the cocoons, she didn’t stop him.

A quick blaze of Sethis’s sword sliced a shallow cut lengthwise through the closest cocoon. Like a husk, the outer layer peeled away, fluttering gently as it fell out of the canopy.

The stench of rot hit Sethis’s nostrils first. Then the sight of a chalky, grey-skinned pupa, half-formed mouth open in a dazed moan. Then the disquieting thought that the pupa was oddly humanoid in shape and size. And then, only then did he realize—

Bile filed his mouth. He turned, retching.

“I didn’t wish for you to see this.” Lilian was perched carefully on a branch behind him, fingers white around the handle of her longsword. “Hopefully they’ve gone too mad to feel what is being done to them.”

It explained too much. Rathos’s power was accelerating at a rate beyond even the greatest corruptions, because he was siphoning from the most abundant source of mana possible: humans. Atlantean warriors were not swarming the battlefield in throngs, because a typical soldier would only be captured and further feed the senator. These must just be a few of such unlucky victims—civilians and warriors caught during evacuation, kept maddened and half-conscious to feed his voracious manawell.

Sethis felt his hands shaking. He tightened his grip on his sword, willing it to cease. He attempted to work out words past a mouth dry enough to hurt.

“Can…Is there any chance…”

Lilian’s eyes softened. “You want to save them even now?”

“If it is possible.”

“I don’t think there’s a way to recover from this.”

Sethis didn’t, either. He clenched his jaw. Mana flowed like honey into his sword, an answer to his silent plea. A golden aura embraced the blade, flares skittering off the edge to dance around the silken cocoons.

Then let me see them to a gentle slumber.

The mana gathered, mournful, beautiful. But his attention flagged when Lilian touched his shoulder.

“Seth.” Her voice was hesitant. “If we strike them all down now, the senator will immediately feel the loss of power. Our scheme will be undone.”

“Then what? Let this continue?”

“This is why I didn’t want you to know.” A hint of steel entered her tone. “If you free them now, it could thwart our only chance at bringing Rathos down.”

Everything in him was screaming to end this, to put this misery to rest, to destroy this evil that never should have been. Sethis’s mana flickered, his decisiveness torn.

“Why?” he choked. “Why must the scales always be balanced between victory and untold suffering?”

“I…I don’t know.”

Lilian fell quiet, her gaze fixated on the cocoon’s half-digested victim. Sethis knew she was remembering other moments—nights where she’d stood at the stained glass windows of the palace, her eyes fixed on the fire-striken, molting horizon, where hundreds died in ashen fields to protect her country while her blade was bound to a cowering king. She shook herself from her trance.

“Return to the ground, my prince,” she said gently. “Let me take this vigil.”

“I cannot blind myself to their torment.”

“Then watch the skies.” A smile lifted her lips. Lake-green eyes, so much like his mother’s, illuminated with fiery resolve. “Watch for the signal. Watch for the moment where we can lay these to rest and seize victory. A king’s eyes must always be fixed above, so that he may tell the people when the sun will rise.”

Sethis’s golden flame sputtered out. Sparks shed from his blade, flitting like fireflies against the silken cocoons, before they extinguished completely. He exhaled heavily, feeling every miserable, painful beat of his heart.

“I leave this place to your care,” he said, every word a stone in his mouth. “Look after them well, Lilian.”

Fist to her chest, she bowed shortly. “I’ll not disappoint you, my liege.”

Sethis turned, his sword heavy in his hand as he heard a ravenous chorus of beasts building in the canopy above—hissing, spitting, screeching insects and amphibians and blights. A sea of shadows lunged for Lilian, who raised her sword with a flourish, blue flame raging like a torch.

He let their shapes engulf her as he dropped from the tree, plunging with vengeance to the swarming corruptions below.

The ground was a blur under Azalea’s feet, the wind a strident scream in her ears as she zipped through the air to the Harvester’s Dominion. The mana quartzes on her windsoles were burning into her ankles, overtaxed from the demands of rapid springstepping.

She found herself praying they wouldn’t shatter and only pushed herself even faster.

It didn’t take long to find someone. Figures were stationed on the dominion’s outer walls, perching on the edges of the parapet like carrion birds, faces fixed towards the ivy dome crawling over the Amphitheater. Without a doubt, they were the Harvester’s Scarecrows.

They lifted butterfly knives and hand crossbows as Azalea landed just outside the dominion wall. A countless sea of them were perched on every elevation—in the embrasures, on the branches of the looming hoplon trees, on the ground before the gatehouse. They peered warily at her, heads cocked and weapons primed. Still, they did not fire.

“W-warriors!” Azalea’s voice squeaked; she took a moment to steady her breathing before she continued. “Warriors of the Harvester! I come in the name of—of the Crown Prince of Airlea, who has lent his sword to the cause of Senator Vascea of the Warmongers! He asks—calls upon you to answer in the face of a peril that threatens to destroy the peace of your nation!”

Oh, this was not good. She was fast, but she was no wordsmith. She felt her tongue stumbling. Her breath was too fast from sprinting, and her figure was small and uncertain in the shadow of the Harvester’s magnificent hanging gardens.

The Scarecrows glanced at each other. Then their uncanny bejeweled masks returned to her.

Azalea waited, but only silence greeted her.

“So…um…” She tried to inject more force into her tone. “What is your answer? Surely you see the catastrophe brewing on the horizon.”

There was a distant rustle in the hoplon trees. In uncanny discipline, the warriors turned aside and stepped back, parting the way for another Scarecrow, who glided light-footed down the bough of the tree. A handful of colored feathers sprouting from the plumage of his mask set him apart. This had to be Griffin Macar, the head Scarecrow that Halcyon had mentioned.

He wasn’t as imposing as Azalea had expected. His height was average, his build the same bony lankiness shared by the other Scarecrows. Still, he walked with a confident, prowling grace that spoke of men stronger and greater that had fallen under his blade. Azalea tried not to shrink back as he stood at the crown of the gatehouse and looked down on her, inscrutable behind his beaked mask.

“You’re a long way from home, Airlean child,” he called to her. “Were you the only one they could spare?”

Azalea squinted at him. That was clearly an insult, but she didn’t have the leverage—or time—to start a fight over it.

“That reveals how dire the situation is, no?” she said after a pause.

“The Warmonger, in dire straits.” Griffin chuckled bitterly. “Perhaps it is only karma. The black lots her ancestors have passed down to her.”

Azalea’s exhaustion gave way to a blaze of fury. “You speak too lightly of the potential annihilation of an entire people, Sir Macar!” she said sharply. “So what, you’d leave thousands to die so you can relish one person’s suffering?”

“Do not speak to me of suffering!” he snapped. “How am I to know what atrocities and unthinkable torment the Warmonger has enacted upon my lord, that he should have corrupted to this extent? This may only be the result of the Warmonger’s cruelty! I am not a naive fool like you, girl!”

Azalea opened her mouth to shoot back a retort, but doubt crawled where there should have been righteous anger. What if he was right? She didn’t even know why Rathos was on Warmonger territory in the first place, much less the circumstances that had him detained there. What if Xiph had been mistreating him, or neglecting him of proper care, or driving him mad? She wanted to think it impossible, that people wouldn’t do such things to each other. But she knew better than that.

Her mouth trembled as she worked for an answer, but found none.

Griffin seemed to soften at her hesitation. “Leave, child,” he said quietly. “Gather your countrymen. Even the Warmonger devil has enough honor to see that you are returned safely to Airlea. Depart and do not return.”

“I can’t.”

“You can and you must, if you wish to live.”

Azalea gripped the edges of her cloak. “Then I won’t. Not when so many innocent people will suffer. That senator is a high-ranking corruption, Sir Macar. He won’t stop at the dominion walls. He’ll come for Polis, for the other senators, for you. His rampage can’t go unimpeded.”

“Ah.”

Griffin chuckled softly. The sound was hollow. He looked around at the other Scarecrows perched along the trees, their heads cocked, listening intently.

“Clever of them,” Griffin said after a moment, “sending one like you.” His mask glinted as it turned back to her. “You almost lured me into a daydream, young one. A daydream where blind heroics win out in the end.”

“It’s not a dream,” Azalea said desperately. “Why would you think it is?”

“Don’t be a fool!” His voice thundered across the gate, swaying the hoplon trees. “When the Warmonger strikes down the Harvester, do you know our lot as a lordless dominion? We are to be crushed! Consumed by the other senators champing at the bit to expand their influence, just as all the other dominions were consumed!”

He threw a hand behind him, towards the towering mosaic gates, towards the waterfalls that poured from levitating terraces in beautiful crystal lines, towards the flowering greenery that crowned everything that made the Hanging Gardens.

“And all of this,” he said, his voice cracking with grief, “will come to nothing. All our heritage, our history, everything we swore to protect…it will be seized from us. Rewritten. Made a shell of what it initially was. And the Warmonger”—he scowled at the ashen horizon, hatred burning in his half-veiled gaze—“she’ll be the one to take it from us. As every Warmonger before her has.”

Azalea’s bottom lip trembled. Oh, how wrong it all sounded. No one deserved to lose their home, their history, everything that gave their people pride—and wild-tempered as Xiph was, she seemed to care deeply for the whole country. But what right did Azalea have to speak for the senator? It had to be true to some extent—she hadn’t heard a peep about the previous senators’ dominions. Had they truly been absorbed, or destroyed, or otherwise written out of history? No one deserved such a fate.

But Halcyon had charged her to bring reinforcements. Azalea had to bring reinforcements, or they would never bring down the senator. Everyone would perish.

“A-and if Senator Vathalos razes the Warmonger’s Dominion to the ground, he’ll come to you next,” she said, grasping for words. “The Hanging Gardens will be destroyed either way. Take your chances with the living, who can still see reason. With the Warmonger senator—no, with me! I’ll petition her. I’ll convince her to let you keep your land.”

“Then you’re even more a fool than I already knew.” Griffin shook his head and turned. “Goodbye, landwalker. Time will teach you that you are much more impotent than you would like to be.”

He’s leaving.

Panic rose until Azalea’s thoughts were a jumbled flurry in her head. She stumbled forward, her tongue feeling as heavy as iron. “No—you can’t—you have to—the nests, we need someone at all of them, or they’ll just regen, he’ll be invincible, Atlantis will—”

Her words faltered as Griffin disappeared behind the foliage, his shadow melting back into the hoplon trees. Wordlessly, the other Scarecrows slipped after him, their figures eclipsed until nothing remained.

I’ve failed.

Azalea stumbled forward, struggling for breath past a throat burning with tears. “How could you?!” she screamed. “Your country needs you! They’ll die without you, and you’re content to just stand back and watch?!”

A somber voice carried to her from the rustling trees. “It is for my country that I do this. But you have never seen the Warmonger unleashed. You would not understand.”

“And what will you do once the corrupted senator’s engulfed every other dominion, once he comes knocking at your gates and you have no answer for him but death?”

“Then we would have paid for our sins.”

Somewhere in the compound, latches dropped like heavy drums. The final seal on a cruel fate.

Azalea’s legs finally lost strength; she sank to her knees, her whole body shaking with exertion. “Do it for your wives!” she cried. “Your children! All the beautiful things you still hold dear, all the things worth protecting—don’t you dare resign yourselves to despair!”

The gates did not answer.

She was no diplomat. No silver-tongued envoy. And Nicolina had thought she could be trained as the next guildmaster. She couldn’t have been more wrong.

Azalea had failed—and with it, an unfathomable number of innocents would perish.

She wanted to crumple under the weight, to sink to her knees and cry right there in front of the wall. No reinforcements would come. No dawn would pierce the night. Someone else should have come—someone smarter and more charming, who could muster any heart to battle.

But that person wasn’t here. Only her.

Azalea set her jaw. She braced her hands on the ground and pushed herself to her feet. Her fingers dug into the stone path until they bled.

No wallowing. She had to go back. She had to convey the news to Wes.

Maybe together…they could find a path through the impossible.

Halcyon tasted blood as a root clipped his shoulder, sending him spiraling into a mass of limestone wall. He threw up a shield of water to cushion the impact—if it could be called cushioning at all. The wave dashed upon the rocks and he still crashed hard, the limestone fracturing into large chunks of rubble, vision jittering as his skull rang with a vengeance. Stone fragments slashed up his arms, drawing stinging blood.

Shit. He predicted my movement.

That was bad news. Very bad. Halcyon did not work his windsoles the way others did—powerful bursts, straight lines, easy to predict. Instead, he wove it through the water he Formed. It kept his movements smooth, maneuverable, always turning and cresting in ways that were difficult to track.

Still, Rathos had landed a blow. Against all odds.

He’s learning.

That alone was not impossible to manage. Matches in the kennels were similar. Ring fighters were always watching, learning, mixing up their attacks and attempting to out-maneuver their opponents. That was the unique strategic thrill that Halcyon couldn’t get from fighting monsters: an ever-changing battlefield, where the demands surged to and fro, in and out, turbulent as the tides.

But fighting an intelligent, adaptable human in an environment where manacraft was banned was one thing.

Fighting an intelligent, adaptable monster with the manawell of a god…was definitely another.

Class Fives are absurd enough. And now we’ve got a Class Five who can think and strategize for itself?

Giant vines flayed down on Halcyon’s position. He fired his windsoles and darted under the cover of one of the floating islands. Chunks of earth and a swirl of razor-sharp leaves descended on him; the earth rippled under his feet, sending him off-balance; thorns erupted at his back, nearly stabbing him through the neck.

In the onslaught of attacks, there was no time to think. Water and waves crashed at Halcyon’s first instinct. Crescent shields to ward himself. Pinpoint streams to shoot down projectiles. He pivoted, swept, dashed, pushing himself faster, stronger, more.

Still, still, his efforts weren’t enough. He could feel Rathos’s interest waning in him, beginning to wander across the dominion.

I can’t let him catch on.

If Rathos reinforced the nests, he’d be unstoppable. Yet Halcyon could feel his manawell draining at an alarming rate. If the current pace continued, he’d barely have anything left when the nests were dismantled—and that was when he’d need enough to strike a devastating final blow.

How can I divert the senator’s attention without expending all of my mana?

The answer came as quickly as he thought of the question. From the moment he’d stepped into Atlantis, he’d awakened to an ever-present, low burn in his chest, like a serpent slumbering on the bedrock of the ocean floor.

The power of the Ancients, passed down from his forefathers.

Halcyon could feel traces of it from the Kardeia in the distance, as if it was singing directly to his bloodstream, goading him to war. Call upon me, Leventis heir. You were bred for the Hunt.

He didn’t know what exactly reaching for such power entailed. But he had an inkling. He saw the way Old Magick ravaged the senators’ bodies as they called upon it. He was fighting one such example right now. It opened a door to abyssal corruption—one that could never be closed. It had been Rathos’s lot. One day, it would be Xiph’s.

And if Halcyon called upon the Hunt, it would one day be his, too.

He laughed drily, looking up to where the mutilated carapace of a senator hovered in the sky, untouchable.

“As if I ever had a choice,” he muttered.

He braced his feet into the broken soil and planted his glaive firmly. He opened his senses, calling traces of that unknown, ravenous power from the Kardeia. The sensation of it felt slimy on his skin, resistant. He knew that if he introduced it to his manawell, it would corrupt it forever.

And yet…

There was beauty in it, too. Like lines of silver in the dark. A feeling of history, legacy. As if the determination of the first Atlantean senators were reaching out to him from the other side of Time. We shall save our country, no matter the cost. For all who will come after us, we pay this price.

Halcyon hissed as the strange energy built to a frenzy in his grasp. This was not the orderly threads of elemental mana, found everywhere in the world, the stable building blocks for modern manacraft. This was primal, voracious, abyssal. Old Magick to its darkest roots.

And yet, right as his manawell was about to attune to the new power, absorb it as its own…

…Karis’s face flashed in his mind.

He saw it, clear as a portrait. Rain-slashed, drawn and pale beneath a black parasol. Her eyes, hollowed, as she watched the last embers of a pyre swallowed by night. A pyre for him.

His death would break her, and leave no fragments behind.

Halcyon hissed through his teeth, teetering on the edge of success.

Why? Why?

Why would it hold him back? Hadn’t she already made her choice? And would it change anything about the fact that Halcyon needed a solution, now? If he didn’t rise to the occasion, if he didn’t eliminate the senator, they would all be dead. Not just him. Azalea, Sethis, Karis herself—all of them would fall.

His hands shook as his manawell boiled in his blood, both reaching for and shying away from the power of the Ancients.

I can’t do it.

The realization stunned him.

I can’t do it. I…want to live.

What a simple, cruel, impossible wish.

He wanted to wake up to the sight of Karis’s eyes. He wanted to feel the dawn breeze of Mythaven’s coastline and hear the bustle of trade, drinking, games. He wanted to see Sethis crowned over a restored Airlea, Azalea happy and confident both in and out of the guild, Xiph triumphant over the curse set on her birth. Maybe, just maybe, he could perch a child on his knee, a child who looked a little like him and acted a little like Karis.

The Halcyon of Havenport wouldn’t have thought twice before sacrificing himself for honor, glory, heroism. Today’s Halcyon, who should have matured and developed…somehow could not.

Have I grown more selfish? More short-sighted?

Rathos’s shadow hovered above him, just out of reach.

Or…did I finally find something worth living for?

Halcyon let the last spark of his ancestral power wink out. His hands dropped to his sides, swaying harmlessly. No Hunt, no power of the Ancients. Just his regular manawell, his glaive, and an impossible mission.

But he’d scarcely taken a moment to breathe when the Amphitheater exploded with activity.

A piercing light flared from the ruins of a far tower, followed by a wave of force that swept forth, bowing the trees and swaying the floating islands. Halcyon braced himself, but it was gentle when it hit him—a passing breeze, more than anything else. A cerulean glow, soft as moonlight, bathed over the Amphitheater.

No, not a glow. There was no light mana being Formed; instead, Halcyon placed it as a mixture of wind and water mana, creating a fine mist that coated the ground. The elemental blend was…odd, yet confident. It lacked the substance of an experienced manacrafter, at least for combat use—the amateur brazenness of someone devoted to self-study.

A shadow flitted from the illuminated tower and dove towards the battlefield.

Halcyon tensed as the figure of a young Atlantean warrior landed right before Rathos. Warmonger red billowed from one shoulder in a thin, lopsided cloak. Gleaming armor, too pristine to have been through any real trial, shimmered like gemstones under the moonlight.

Rathos’s attention swiveled immediately to the newcomer. Yet he didn’t move to attack; his head tilted curiously, bemused.

The warrior drew himself upright, and Halcyon nearly dropped his glaive.

Red eyes blazed from beneath a shock of dark hair. Bony shoulders, just starting to harden with muscle, barely filled the half-plate guarding a lithe torso. Bronze skin, sharp jaw, a mouth pressed tight with the vexation of a youth that wanted to be taken seriously—Halcyon knew it all too well.

“Vathalos!” The boy’s voice, young and clear as a bell, resounded with impressive confidence for his age. “You trespass your authority upon soil where it has no place. As Champion Initiate of the Warmongers, I raise my weapon for the people of this land! We shall beat you back into the abyss where you belong, you wretched abomination!”

The boy thrust his opalite halberd into the air. Water mana crackled in starry rays around the moon-shaped axhead—a simple manacraft, yet utterly defiant.

“Rizas mali!” he cried. “I, Actaeon Leventis, the last scion and heir of the Leventis Arbiters, will see you to the depths of Hades!”

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