by Elise Kova
With a grand stroke of luck, a pheasant made its way along the bank with an enticing little coo. Florence dropped to her knees, gun at the ready. The noise of her footfalls was covered by the sound of a nearby waterfall, seemingly the font of the river.
It rushed down around craggy rocks, determined to smooth over the rough hillside in long white strands that seemed to glow in the pale twilight. Florence brought the gun to her shoulder, adjusting her crouch so that one knee was up and the other was planted firmly in the river rock. She lined up the notches down the barrel of the gun, tracking it over the bird.
Florence took a deep breath and fought the urge to close one eye. With the bird securely in her sights, she brought her finger to the trigger and held her breath.
The creature raised its head suddenly, turning in surprise. Florence hadn’t heard what spooked the animal, but she didn’t hesitate; she took her shot.
With a crack, the bird was dead.
Satisfied, Florence stood, slinging the rifle over her shoulder. It wasn’t as much as she’d bagged previously but it would be enough for a night, even split five ways. So relived was she that Florence never bothered to heed to what had nearly scared the bird away from its watering hole.
She didn’t realize she wasn’t alone until she had the pheasant’s clawed feet in her grasp.
The sound of the water rushing over the rocks began to fade. Her head filled with a numbing white noise that set her inner ear to spinning. Florence blinked, turning, looking between the darkness of the trees. She grabbed for her revolver, waiting with heart-pounding dread for something to emerge.
Movement caught the corner of her eye and Florence looked up to the top of the waterfall. Long, clawed, horribly joined and gnarled fingers curled over the edge of the rock. Cresting the edge was a set of horns woven like frozen flame. They were attached to a skeletal face, skinless and pointed in a sharp-toothed snarl.
Eyes like those of a Dragon glowed in spite of the darkness. White on a field of obsidian sockets sunk far into the depths of the creature’s head. It was all arms and legs and sinew, a monster that looked as though it had woken from a thousand-year slumber and now sought its first meal.
Its low breathing dulled her senses. There was a wicked sort of magic at play here. Not like the Dragons, not like Chimera. This was a creature born of malice and murder...
And it was not alone.
One by one, horned monsters crested the rocky bluff. Each sang their sense-dulling requiem. Their eyes turned to her with instinctual purpose.
Florence’s sweating palm slipped off the handle of her revolver. Her legs had been disconnected from her body. Her hands didn’t move as commanded. She could hear nothing other than the mind-numbing, low breaths of the monsters. She could see nothing other than their glowing eyes.
In the fading twilight, she stared at a nightmare made flesh.
13. Arianna
The sun and moon were not even close to the same thing. While they both gave off light for nearly equal portions of the day, one was bright and painful to stare at, while the other was muted and ghostly. Arianna had known this before arriving on Nova, but even after nearly two months of her useless tenure in the Xin manor, she remained fascinated by the moon’s shifting phases.
The sun was constant. Every day it shone in its perpetual orb-like manner. Bright, blinding, and filtering down through the clouds onto Loom below. But the moon shifted. It went through its phases with no regard for any who might be depending on its light for guidance through the dark night. And once every month, it winked out of existence entirely, as if to remind the world below that they were lucky to have it at all.
Arianna had been forced to be like the sun on Nova: constant, present, dependable. On Loom, her true nature was that of the moon. She could be an evolving creature, growing with every turn of the calendar.
The stagnancy she found herself in was nearly coming to an end.
She’d moved the small table over to the western facing window so she could watch the moon trail through the sky. Arianna enjoyed its ghostly play on her papers, the way it set her firm black lines of ink against the white. She kept diligent records of everywhere Cain showed her, adjusting her map regularly.
There was something in the rock of Nova, Arianna had decided, that made it defy gravity. The islands floated, that much couldn’t be argued. Why they were floating she had yet to fathom, and likely never would. Magic was as good an explanation as any. But even magic had rules it must follow, and if some of the rock could float, then why couldn’t all rock float?
Arianna continued to push the question aside, focusing on what was of most direct importance to her.
The second she’d wrapped her mind around accepting that rock could float, she threw out the parameters she’d been relying on for her mental reconstruction of the manor. If there was no need of support beams, load bearing walls, or secure foundation, the structure could indeed evolve in whatever way the Dragons saw fit. That led her to her next string of logic: What way did they see fit?
Cain had been hard to unravel, but unravel he had. Day by day, Arianna had prodded and worked her way under his thick skull to try to understand what was important to him and the other inhabitants of this world. It was surprisingly simple from there.
Gods. Hierarchy. Beauty before reason.
It was a language Arianna didn’t speak, but she was learning. And, in the process, she’d nearly zeroed in on where she suspected the glider was being kept. Her pen paused mid-stroke, the detailed blueprint forgotten.
Her nostrils flared, her mind trying to process the thick scent assaulting her nose. She knew it from all similar aromas like a lock-box that could be fashioned by a thousand Rivets but bore a single maker’s mark. It was familiar in the worst of ways. One whiff and a hundred memories assaulted her with vicious purpose.
Arianna stood slowly, reaching for her daggers, sliding them out from under her pillows. She gripped them tightly, her eyes focused on the door as she rounded the bed. The scent grew.
It couldn’t be this easy. Her lips curled back, baring her teeth in a ferocious snarl. Bloodlust churned through her veins with every mechanical beat of her heart. Her mind screamed for death—for vengeance.
The door lock disengaged and the handle turned. Arianna flipped her dagger into an ice pick grip and reared back. The door opened and the scent clouded every sense. She lunged forward and… stopped short.
Cvareh stared back at her, wide-eyed and caught completely off guard. The edge of her dagger rested between his eyes. Blood beaded around its tip, cutting the smell of cedar with potent woodsmoke. In his hands he cradled a box, one whose contents were so important that he clearly did not risk dropping it even for the sake of defending himself.
Arianna panted, her mind clearing slowly. She blinked and her eyes darted with every close of her eyelids, trying to find the source of the offending scent. They landed on the box.
“What do you have?” she hissed.
“Only what you asked for.” Blood ran down his nose in a thin golden line. He had yet to step away from or move aside her dagger. The Dragon placed a foolish amount of trust in her to assume she wouldn’t plunge the blade straight into his brain.
“What I asked for?” She was slow on the uptake, slower than she’d ever been previously. But her mind put together the pieces with ritualistic precision in spite of her vertigo. “The hands?”
“Yes.” Cvareh rubbed the bead of blood on his forehead the second she pulled away the blade. “Is that how you greet Cain?”
“Only if he’s earned my ire.” Her jest fell flat. Arianna’s mind was entirely on the hands. “I smelled the blood, thought that maybe there was some kind of combatant…”
Her words trailed off as she continued to focus on what he was bringing her. For now, she bit her tongue and kept herself from asking him where he’d acquired them. S
he would guard that particular question until she was ready to act on its truth. Until the time of her vengeance was right.
Arianna set her daggers down on the table and motioned for Cvareh to place the box before her. As soon as he did, the Dragon took a full two steps away from the vessel in question. The whole idea of what was about to transpire clearly set him on edge. It was enough proof of the box’s contents that Arianna didn’t feel the need to verify it with her own eyes just yet.
“I trust you know what to do with them?”
“I do. I will need three stand mirrors, thread, needle, and bandages.”
Cvareh looked to the door frame and Arianna followed his gaze. She shouldn’t have been surprised to see Cain there. She shouldn’t have been surprised to see every Dragon in the Xin manor standing there to investigate the potent stink that was now wafting from her room.
The sea-foam blue Dragon looked on in disgust. “You can’t possibly—”
“Fetch them for her,” Cvareh ordered. There was no space for questioning between the sharp clip of his words.
Cain’s nostrils tensed, arching upward in disgust and anger, but he left as commanded. Arianna got a wicked sense of pleasure from his discomfort. The night was shaping up in unpredictable ways. Her plans were changing before her eyes, a new set unfurling like a scroll of truth that had been kept from her until just that moment. Patience was paying off.
“What can I do to help?” Cvareh asked.
“Nothing.”
“But—”
“I said nothing.” She glared at him, wondering what about a singular word could possibly be confusing.
The Dragon blinked back at her. He didn’t understand. He wouldn’t understand the source of the rekindled flame of her rage. If anything, his confusion assured her enough to keep him alive, to prevent her slamming him against the nearest wall and skinning him over and over and over until he told her what she wanted to know.
“I know what you are about to do, and you cannot possibly intend to do it alone.”
“I do intend, and I will.” Arianna was spared further exhausting affirmation by Cain’s return. At least someone among them was competent enough to do as she asked and then leave her be. The other Dragon departed with a pointed glare, the supplies deposited haphazardly on the opposite edge of the bed as though he could not be coaxed into entering her room more than necessary under the present circumstances.
Arianna began setting up the supplies on the table. Her hands moved with the certainty of practice. She had done this before with Eva. She had done worse before. It was not a delight, but it was not something that was cause for fear. It was science, as Eva would say. And science existed beyond right, wrong, and fear.
“Let me help.”
“Do you really want to be involved with this?” Her violet eyes met his gold ones as Arianna attempted to burrow under his resolve. It was a plant with shallow roots, easily felled when the earth around it was overturned. She could feel his magic waver before his stare did. “I didn’t think so.”
Cvareh opened his mouth to speak, but Arianna wouldn’t let him.
“I commanded you to harvest one of your own. I am going to cut off my hands, and stitch these on, and use them forevermore as though I was born with them.” Arianna tilted her head to the side. “The blood of your kin is already on your palms. Do you want to take that further?”
He was completely disarmed, and that told her everything. Arianna didn’t know the depth of the truth yet, but she would find out in time. She would find who the original owner of the hands had been; she’d just confirmed the man she had known simply as “Rafansi” during the last rebellion was someone of House Xin.
“I have been here for weeks, and you could not be bothered with me,” she reminded him. The pain was real and bright and angry like a fresh wound. It hurt more than she thought it would, and that only flared her temper further.
“I have acted in no way that was not on your behalf, or in your best interest,” he insisted. “But I have had other things to attend to. I couldn’t let myself be distracted, and when I am near you… There were matters of my House.”
“I understand,” she said quietly, letting the clasps of the box falling open ring louder than any single word. “Because you are Cvareh Xin’Ryu Soh, peeled from the blue of the sky itself. I am Arianna the Rivet, steam given the shape of a woman. And our priorities only overlap as much as it behooves your sister to seek my help.”
He had the sense not to try to object. Though his face was tormented by enough conflict to make her very briefly question what, exactly, was going through his head.
Arianna put the hesitation aside with a smile, an expression somewhere between an exhausted triumph and a bitter sneer. “So, pretend this is nothing more than what it is: you earning my trust. And get out.”
His claws shot from his fingers and an equal measure of hurt and anger was fresh on his magic. It dotted his pores like a midday sweat. She wanted him to fight, she realized. Arianna wanted him to tell her she was wrong and insist that there was some purity beyond simply overlapping desires that strung them together.
Instead Cvareh retreated. He left with wide, hasty steps.
She paid him no further mind. The truth of her words had made them pointed, not the bitterness that had been building in her chest at the weeks of being saddled with Cain. She was here for a purpose, a shifting, changing, elusive purpose, but a purpose all the same.
Arianna walked over to the door, dragging the spare chair behind her. She sat heavily in it, placing some of her makeshift tools in her lap. Running her fingers over the lock like a lover, she made quick work of the panel. She was Arianna, and she would be kept nowhere she didn’t wish to be. She’d do nothing she didn’t wish to do. She’d let the Dragons think otherwise for weeks, but now it was time to remind them that she was a force of her own.
Within a few minutes, and a few precise movements, she’d dismantled the lock into the engaged position. Arianna stood and swung the chair around, wedging it under the door handle for good measure. She didn’t think anyone would have even the slightest bit of interest in coming to her side, especially not after she warned off the one Dragon who could—for some inexplicable reason—have half a mind to do so.
But she could take no chances.
She was about to be in the most vulnerable state imaginable. She was about to spill her secrets upon the table with every drop of blood. And she would risk no witnesses.
Like a ritual, Arianna drew the curtains over the windows, candlelight the room’s only glow. It was more than enough light for her Dragon eyes to see with precision. She sat heavily at the table, her reflection a flickering visage in the polished mirrors. Purple eyes stared back at her from every angle.
Arianna remembered when her eyes had been black. She remembered when they had been violently gouged out. She remembered losing all sight, and the moment of stomach-churning terror when she thought she might never see again. She remembered coming to peace with the notion that the face of the woman she loved could well be the last thing she ever saw.
Her eyes had opened again. Sharper, clearer, more precise than she could’ve ever imagined. Now Arianna inspected her hands. They were the hands that Master Oliver had trained, hands that could dismantle a Rivet lock like it was nothing more than a simple bank vault.
Arianna rested her palm on the table and reached for her sharpest dagger. Her chest tightened. Nature fought against what she was about to do. Her mind flooded with endorphins as it fought against itself. Instinct commanded she jump from the table and drop the knife. It struggled with her hand, trying to force it to shake, wanting her movements to suffer so much that she gave up on them entirely.
But Arianna was stable. She kept her churning stomach quelled. She kept her breathing even.
The knife pierced her ashen flesh. It gouged sharp and true, bit to bone
. Arianna bared her teeth, gritting them so hard they ached straight through her jaw and into her neck. Golden blood pooled across the table, mixing with marrow as bone splintered.
Two hands waited for her, the same color as her ears. They held the same scent as the man who had given her organs in a gesture of trust, only to turn and betray all that she loved. Arianna’s lips curled back. Her body shook. But she remained focused. She would take his magic once more. She would use it to find him.
She would kill him in blood more frigid than snow.
Arianna repeated it over and over in her head, uttered it like a violent prayer of the darkest variety. She did it again and again to keep the agony at bay as her magic fought to heal her body, to keep her mind right in the wake of shock.
She was Arianna the Rivet. She was the White Wraith. And she would not scream.
14. Cvareh
He could hear her.
He could hear every labored breath. He could hear every drop of blood splattering the floor. He could hear each dull thud of flesh that served as a chilling auditory reminder of what was happening behind the door he faced.
Cvareh hadn’t moved since being cast out. He had made no motion when he heard her quiet tinkering with the lock. He did not attempt to force entry by breaking the door frame and smashing the chair she’d propped against the latch.
She had not wanted him there. She had chosen to endure the self-surgery on her own. It was as foolish as it was brave. It clouded his emotions with both admiration for her ferocity and aggravation at her persistence that every burden be shouldered alone.
But that was Arianna. That was the torrent that pulled him under every time his eyes rested on her. And it was no wonder why he had purposefully avoided seeing her. Every complex emotion combined with the draw of the boon was too much for him. For weeks he’d wanted to run from it, and now that he was faced with her once more, literally carrying a reason to loathe her, he wanted nothing more than to be by her side. He wanted to tell her that she didn’t have to be alone.
