Flame's Shadow

by Anna Eluvae

  Wenaru took to his studies more than the other children. He was intelligent, and in this new environment he had a chance to show it. As the years passed, other students left, sometimes taken away in the middle of the night. Wenaru was one among many with the domain of flesh, but in the end, the Iron King would only need one. Wenaru knew what his role was to be before he was told, and took to studying his domain, not only what was written in the library's books, but his own body as well. He went from lean to powerful, growing slowly so as not to make mistakes, honing his craft in front of a full-length mirror. He was short, but he made his shoulders broad and his muscles thick.

  One day Wenaru became the last remaining illustrati of flesh at the school, and the next day he was standing before the Iron King.

  The Iron King stood eight and a half feet tall. He was a mountain of a man, an impossible giant, and when he saw the perfection of the king's form, Wenaru wondered what he could possibly be needed for. Yet on first touch, it became apparent. The king had not started out so enormous; he had been made that way. He was a sculpture of flesh and bone, changed and warped into his state of seeming perfection. Yet there were flaws; he had little feeling in his legs and feet, and disorders of the body. His joints were weakened, and though he was extremely powerful, above and beyond what was granted by his fame, he moved sluggishly. Wenaru was able to solve some of these problems, with time, and give instruction to alleviate some of the others, but eight feet was taller than a man should be, especially one that demanded such an excess of muscle. The Iron King weighed eight hundred pounds. He ate two dozen eggs for breakfast, and a whole chicken for lunch. By most accounts he was a titan, yet he was king all the same.

  Wenaru wasn't allowed to work on the king at first. He was given prisoners to practice on, and instruction in making them as powerful as he possibly could in conjunction with one of the Bone Warden's acolytes. He refined his techniques and his artistic talent. It was easy enough to swell the muscles, but there was a difficulty in making sure that the men were still aesthetically pleasing afterward, and unintended consequences that could result from putting emphasis in the wrong place. Domain intuition wasn't enough, it took study of human physiology and a keen eye for the arts, both of which Wenaru was made to learn. He made mistakes, in those early years, but there was always a fresh body to practice on. He made a half-hearted effort to fix his errors, but one of the king's advisors had stopped in to say that his job wasn't to fix things - it was to never make a mistake in the first place.

  Officially, Wenaru was the court physician. The Iron King didn't publicly admit to using the bodily domains to his advantage, in part because he had made the practice illegal, and in part because it might have hurt his reputation. The stories circulating about the Iron King claimed that he was born enormous, that his mother died in childbirth because of his size, that he could lift a wagon with one hand at the age of ten, on and on. His father had prepared him well for the role of king, with a mythology that he easily slipped into. Wenaru never shared the king's company in public, only in small, secret rooms, when repairs and modifications needed to be done to the king's flesh. It continued that way for a time, until a fateful day when the king asked a question.

  "Where does blood come from?"

  Wenaru recited the theories. The older theory was one of latent domains. Domain genesis was often considered one of the core abilities, and few domains lacked it; the Iron King could produce more iron simply by touching an existing stock of it, and with concentration and an exercise of will, produce it from thin air. The theory of latent domains postulated that every person contained within themselves all the bodily domains, and had a mild, entirely subconscious access to them. Bones knit by themselves, given time. Flesh would mend, if slowly. Hair grew, skin stretched, all - so the theory went - because people had an unspecialized and basal access to those domains. The answer to where blood came from was then the same as the answer to where any substance produced by the illustrati came from, which was a great and unsolved question of a different magnitude.

  The second theory was that blood was produced by some organ of the body, in the same way that salivary glands - isolated only five years prior - produced saliva. Which organ was an open question; many thought it was the heart itself, in the course of its constant beating, while others said it was a secondary (or even primary) effect of the lungs or liver.

  "Find out for sure," commanded the Iron King.

  Wenaru didn't start by taking people apart. He started with rats, with hounds, with other animals whose biology was close enough to human. He wrapped himself in the problem, partially because there was nothing better to consume his time, and partially because he found it faintly absurd that no one knew the answer. Blood was so basic to life, so elemental to human physiology, but they had no idea where it came from. Wenaru ran his experiments, often several in parallel. He would remove a single organ from a rat, then drain a quantity of its blood, and compare these different rats to each other after several days. The heart was a tricky one, but the solution had been simple - remove the heart, then stitch together veins and arteries from a second living creature, so that both shared blood. It took many iterations to get right, with mysterious deaths that couldn't be accounted for by the trauma of the surgery. He made investigations, and found that this was a problem long-known by the illustrati of blood, an incompatibility that they couldn't explain.

  He published a brief titled "The Classifications of Blood" which documented his methods and his findings. It was the first of its kind, an attempt to bring the revolutions in study to the human body. The second volume he produced gave detail to the process by which blood was created in the marrow of the bones, something he'd discovered when he'd begun removing bones from his rats. Before, Wenaru had been elevated through the Iron King's sheer might and bardic organization. Afterward, it was through a measure of his own success.

  Wenaru pushed himself, and the Iron King smiled on these efforts. There were new things to learn, questions that the Iron King found value in having answered. How long could a man survive cold? How long could he survive heat? There was no domain to govern the majority of the organs with a man, but could it be made safe to replace a sick organ with a healthy one? How were teeth made? Why did people have two sets of them? What governed the natural repair of bones, if the theory of latent domains was incorrect? What caused people to be misshapen, or to have disorders of the mind? Wenaru wanted to know the answers to these questions, even more than his king did. Curiosity was part of it, and he wouldn't deny that fame was too, but mostly it was that sense of progress that came when the air smelled metallic and his fingers were slippery with blood.

  Many of his subjects were prisoners, but not all. He was given a building to conduct his studies in, and it housed a number of his subjects, many of them oddities brought in from around the Iron Kingdom. Wenaru never killed anyone, at least never by intent. With his power he could split the skin and tug at the muscles to look at the inner workings of a person, to inject drugs directly into their vital organs or make observations of the body under distress. He was kind to his patients, and understanding. They were provided for. They were comfortable.

  The Peddler's War brought changes. The Iron Kingdom was attacked, and when it fought back, more viciously than anyone realized it could, prisoners of war were given over to Wenaru. Wenaru published many volumes on the findings that resulted, and the state of the art was advanced immeasurably. He surrounded himself with assistants and like-minded colleagues, and rarely ventured from his hospital save to attend to the king's body and keep it in its optimal shape. The hospital was Wenaru's castle, and he thought of himself as a king in his own right, a ruler over human biology, an explorer forging straight ahead.

  When the Peddler's War ended, Wenaru was nearly executed. The Iron King had won the counter-war, claiming land in the process, but Wenaru had become too well known, and too much of a political liability in a time of peace. He hadn't known before how much of a mons
ter the world saw him as, nor had he heard the stories that were told about him. His mail had been censored. The domain of flesh was looked down on or outright hated, and the stories of mangled men and piled up corpses had only added to that. The Iron King settled on exile instead of execution, and Wenaru was thrust out into a world that hated and feared him. The bubble he'd been living in was popped, and he was left to face cold reality.

  * * *

  "I drifted," said Wenaru. "For three years. I heard the songs that they sung about me, watched on occasion as they burned my books. I kept myself shrouded. I was hunted from time to time, but I fought back. I was strong, monstrously strong, a tight ball of muscle and pain. I lashed out. I grew despondent. I tried to hide, and failed. And in the end, it was Lexari who brought be back from the brink."

  "You saved his life," said Dravus. He had heard that story before. As the it went, Lexari had been badly injured in a fight and nearly dead. He propped himself up against a lonely orange tree, waiting for the end. His heart had stopped when Wenaru found him, but for Wenaru, a stopped heart was an easy problem to fix. Ever after, Lexari had traveled with Wenaru, and acted in his defense.

  "I saved his life," nodded Wenaru. "And he, in turn, saved mine."

  Dravus wondered whether it was true. It was impossible to say just from watching Wenaru's expression, but Dravus suspected that it wasn't. There were many reasons to keep Wenaru Mottram close to you, not least of which was the fact that he was a powerful illustrati and - even assuming some exaggeration - one of the foremost healers in the world.

  "I worry I'm a stain on his goodness," said Wenaru. "I worry about the answers that he has to make for me. The duels he's been forced to fight because I've vowed to take no further lives. Lexari wouldn't throw me away like the Iron King did, wouldn't ever turn his back on me, but I worry about what I cost him. It's been nine years since the Peddler's War, and still people talk. Sometimes I think that I'm the only thing that they remember from that time, nevermind that the death toll between all sides was four hundred thousand men. I was a symbol. I still am."

  "I'll take whatever enhancements you can give me," said Dravus.

  Wenaru's eyes lit up. "You will?"

  "I trust you," said Dravus. "Whatever is in the past is in the past."

  He said it with his most ready smile, but the truth was that he knew he was going to take the offered advantage at some point in the future, so it was better to simply take it now, when he could gain the most benefit from it and solidify a bond between them. For all Wenaru had said in his story, there were few enough specifics. Don't admit to anything specific, show contrition, promise reform, talk about your crimes like they're all in the past. It was close enough to that script that Dravus had used, if he was being cynical. And Wenaru had never explained the headless child, or the crate full of teeth. In a world full of stories, perhaps it was simply easier to say that all the bad ones directed your way were inventions of the frightened and ignorant.

  Wenaru touched him lightly on the arm, and the change began. Dravus's muscles twitched slightly, moving of their own accord. He sagged slightly, leaning against the wall. Parts of him were shrinking, or vanishing entirely. He felt like there were tides of flesh moving within him. And then, just as quickly as it had begun, it was over. It hadn't been unpleasant, exactly. Dravus flexed with newfound strength, a physical might that seemed to nearly match that granted by his fame. He felt the need to go running, to stretch his legs out and punch at the air.

  "That's the beginning," said Wenaru with a small, cautious grin. "We'll let your body adjust over the next few days. I'll watch this one; go do some stretching out, feel how things are working, and report back to me at once if you feel something wrong in one of the joints. And save some energy for later in the day. I know that Nemm wanted to put you through your paces."

  "I will," said Dravus. "And thank you."

  * * *

  Wenaru rested his hand on Wealdwood's chest.

  Would the world be a better place if Wealdwood never woke up?

  Chapter 5

  Dravus felt like he had been sick his entire life, and had only now gotten better. Partly this was a result of the magic Wenaru had done, and partly it was Dravus's continued increase in standing, but the combined effect was that Dravus was brimming over with energy and power. He wanted to run, but the ship couldn't have been much more than sixty feet from bow to keel, and even if it hadn't been teeming with sailors, there wasn't enough of a straightaway to put on a good amount of speed. There were another eight and a half days until the ship arrived at Torland, and Dravus was already aching for the chance to sprint at full speed. He'd been able to do that at the outskirts of Genthric, where the roads were straight and mostly empty; he could run until his lungs ached and he was drenched in sweat.

  Dravus needed someone to show off for, or at least someone that could share in his excitement. He held out his hand in front of him, and with just a slight act of will, conjured the same dagger as he had last night. The closer he looked at it, the more it looked like one he'd seen in a display case in Genthric. A smile split his face, and he couldn't have hid it if he wanted to. So long as his fame lasted, he would never be truly disarmed. More than that, it was a blade that wouldn't weigh him down. He would be able to run through the city streets and then reach out to grab his dagger from nothing. The intimidation aspect alone would make him the envy of all his friends, even if the blade itself had been completely non-functional. Dravus's smile faltered when he remembered stabbing Cerulean Bane in the side, and then fell completely when he remembered spearing Zerstor through the heart.

  Dravus shook away those thoughts, and looked at the shadows. He could make the shadows larger or smaller, shrinking them away entirely until he was left with no shadow at all. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the sensation of movement, and was mildly surprised to find that he could still sense the shadows, at least those along the deck of the ship. He continued for some time, testing his limits, from the range of his powers to the strength and speed of them. When Nemm found him, he was trying to alter the form of his dagger.

  "You started training without me," she said with a yawn and a cat-like stretch. She had abandoned her armor entirely, though her daggers still hung from her belt. She was barefoot and wore a blue dress. Dravus realized it was the first time that he'd never before seen her without pants. She seemed almost absurdly feminine in comparison to the night before, if Dravus ignored the daggers. He could see the graceful curve of her collarbone and the flare of her hips.

  "You can't have a dagger," said Nemm. She was watching him with a raised eyebrow. "Thematically, I mean. I use daggers, Lexari uses a spear, you need to pick something else."

  "I like daggers," said Dravus. He thrust forward with the shadow dagger, stabbing at the air. The balance of it seemed perfect, even though the dagger itself was weightless. It was an odd sensation. "And besides, can't I just pick whatever best suits the moment? Surely you'd use a sword if the situation called for it."

  "Absolutely," said Nemm. "But as I said before, being an illustrati isn't all about fighting. It's not even mostly about fighting. If you want to be an icon, you have to craft an image for yourself, something that people will remember you by. You need a persona that causes an instant association. There are people who have no idea who I am, but they've heard the name 'Queen of Glass' before, and maybe some stories about my daggers, so when they see me in the flesh they make the connection. What you don't want is people arguing about what should be a matter of fact. I've gone incognito more than a few times, and listened to stories get brought to a grinding halt because two people wanted to argue about whether some illustrato wore a cape or not."

  "Well, maybe he didn't wear a cape all the time," said Dravus.

  "That's exactly the problem," said Nemm. "Variations in personal appearance make it harder for you to stick in someone's mind. If you see a person once, and they're wearing a cape, that's how you think of them until the next time tha
t mental image is challenged."

  "I've seen you in four different outfits over the course of two days," said Dravus.

  Nemm looked down at her dress. "This one doesn't count. No one is around to see it. And as for the others, those were for different occasions. I have one outfit I wear for day-to-day, I have a formal suit of armor, and I have a full combat outfit. That's the whole of it though. All of them are distinct from each other. If I do switch over to something that's not one of those three, it's generally a large departure - an outfit where the whole point is to draw attention to how unusual it is." She looked back down at her dress. "And of course, when I have some privacy, I can wear whatever I damned well please."

  Dravus looked down to his dagger and let go of it. It faded away in an instant. "So I'll need to pick out something iconic for myself," he said slowly.

  "I'll need to pick out something iconic for you," said Nemm. "You can have some input, but I have years of experience seeing what works and what doesn't, and I know who has claim to various looks. There's a fortunate dearth of shadow in this part of the world." She tapped her lip and looked him up and down. "We're almost certainly putting you in a dark purple and gold, which won't step on any toes. It's no use having people mistaking you for someone else."