by Alex Raizman
Even to her ears, Eupheme’s voice came back small and distant. “Finally! Next time you throw yourself in a hole, you really should have a plan to get back out of it.”
Tythel chuckled and shook her head. After they’d both slept, Eupheme and Tellias had insisted on letting her rest. She’d tried to protest, but her own exhaustion had teamed up with the two of them and forced her to sleep for a bit. While she’d slept, Eupheme had stepped through the abundant shadows to find some rope.
Tythel had been glad for the shadow when Tellias had told here that’s what Eupheme was doing. It had hidden her deep flush. She hadn’t even tried to consider a way out of this pit when she’d jumped down it, and had only realized there had been no clear escape route when Tellias had said that Eupheme was going to the surface.
Just now, Tellias was giving her a concerned look. “You…did have a plan for us to get out, right? Because I remember you telling Eupheme to go to the rendezvous, not come and recover us.”
“Of course I had a plan,” Tythel objected, feeling that flush forming again. If Eupheme hadn’t come back, the only option left to her would have been to dig to the surface from down here. It would have taken days. She wasn’t certain how deep they were buried, but given that Eupheme had needed three attempts to find a rope that was long enough to reach the bottom of this pit, it couldn’t be shallow. If they’d found water, it was possible she would have made it back to the sunlight before she’d collapsed from starvation. Possible.
All of a sudden, Tythel felt a desperate need to get out of this flathing hole.
Tellias looked like he was going to ask what that plan might have been but wisely decided to keep the inquiry to himself. Tythel didn’t know if that was to avoid angering her or if it was to keep himself insulated from the realization that Tythel had thrown him in a pit with no idea of how to get out. Instead, he secured the bundle to the bottom of the rope.
His armor was too heavy. It would risk breaking the rope if he tried climbing up with it. So the armor was being hauled up after Tythel climbed up with Tellias on her back. It was a gamble – if the rope broke, it would be difficult to recover the armor. However, the alternative – the rope snapping and killing Tellias in the fall – was worse.
Tythel’s pack was on Tellias’ back. She’d claimed she wanted to keep as much extra weight off the arcplate as possible, and Tellias had pretended to believe that excuse. The extra weight was minimal, there was no need to worry about the rope snapping. Certainly not enough to make her even considering risking her pack alongside the armor.
It’s good to know your priorities are in order, Tythel thought to herself, blinking away the thought and bending down to let Tellias onto her back. His arms wrapped around her neck. “Am I choking you?” he asked.
Tythel shook her head. “Just keep them where they are. If you tighten up, you’ll be tugging on my chin, which I’m pretty sure I don’t need to breathe.”
“You sure about that? I’m no expert in half-dragon breathing, so I can’t be certain you don’t need to breathe through your chin.”
“I’m almost positive,” Tythel said with a wry grin, standing up. Tellias’ weight was barely enough to register as a presence. She tugged the rope one last time, making sure it was secure. “We’re coming up!” she shouted to Eupheme.
A faint shadow appeared at the lip of the spot of light above and made a wide-armed gesture beckoning them up. Confident that Eupheme had properly secured them, Tythel began to climb.
The added weight of the arcplate at the bottom prevented the rope from swinging wildly as she made her way up.
The last time she’d tried to climb a rope this long had been a couple years ago. Karjon had several golden statues depicting the Eight Holy Oaths of the Carnadi Islands. The people of that island had believed that, so long as the Eight Holy Oaths were maintained, the Lumwells would never grow dark – but if they were broken, they would be snuffed out forever.
The statues were all that remained of the oaths, each of them built in the likeness of a man or woman with the head of an eagle and the arms of a jaguar. No one knew what the Eight Holy Oaths were, which Tythel had reasoned meant that they had probably been broken by now, and the lumwells hadn’t gone out.
She’d wanted a closer look at them, but Karjon had them displayed high on a ledge. Instead of waiting for him to return from hunting, she’d fashioned a lasso out of silk and thrown it until it had caught itself around one of the statues. They were pure gold, the weight was more than enough to support her.
The climb was twenty feet. A tiny fraction of the distance she had to go now. But back then, she hadn’t had been reborn in heartflame. She was strong – years of helping clean piles of gold in place of normal chores did not make for weakness – but there were things Karjon hadn’t taught her. Things he couldn’t have taught her, because he didn’t know.
So she’d been completely unaware of how sharp a thin length of silk could be.
Even now, the memory made her hands ache. It had sliced two deep furrows into her hands that had cut her almost to the bone as she slid down the silk, still reflexively clinging to it as tightly as she could manage in the vague hope it would stop her fall.
The smart thing to do would have been to let go, let gravity do its work. She’d barely been halfway up the rope, it was unlikely she would have even sprained her ankle. By grabbing on, she’d only made the injuries worse.
Karjon had been back in mere minutes, having heard her cries. As soon as he’d seen the blood, he’d taken a deep breath.
It was funny. Even then, in the worst pain of her life – at least, until she’d found herself in battles and discovered whole new levels of pain – she’d never doubted for an instant what Karjon was doing.
That was the first time she’d seen him unleash heartflame. The golden fire had washed over her in waves, and her entire body had been warm – except for the palms of her hands, which had felt like she’d dunked them in ice water.
Afterwards, he’d lectured her for a good half hour on how dangerous that had been. Then he’d plucked her up by the back of her shirt in his jaws, like a mother cat carrying a mischievous kitten, and plopped her on top of the ledge.
The memory made her smile. Now she was the one carrying someone to a height they couldn’t reach, although she couldn’t carry them in her mouth. The idea of carrying Tellias in her mouth made her nictitating membranes flicker in amusement.
Then she was hauling them both up and over the edge to collapse to the earth.
Puffs of ash flew up from where she had landed, a billowing cloud that formed around her and Tellias. They both started coughing, and Eupheme stepped smartly away from the ash as it filled the air around them.
Tythel’s nictitating membranes flicked shut, protecting her eyes from being filled with ash – the reason dragons had the protective covering. She could still see through them, although they rendered the world cloudy like smoked glass.
It was enough. The forest they had been in only yesterday was now a charred wasteland that stretched for miles.
A wasteland of her creation.
“Tythel?” Eupheme said, reaching down to gently touch her on her back. Tellias was getting his coughing under control and trying to take deep, rasping breaths to clear his lungs.
Tythel didn’t answer Eupheme, not right away. She could only stare ahead. Directly in front of her was what she vaguely remembered as being a tree yesterday, an immense oak. It had likely stood there longer than Karjon had been alive, and absent Tythel, it would have survived far longer than she would have walked Aelith.
But it had been in a world with Tythel. She’d burned it. She’d burned everything.
“We have to get moving,” she said, her voice hoarse. “We have to…we’re exposed here. We need-”
“There’s no one around,” Eupheme said. Her voice was gentle and soothing, and Tythel could see the worry in her eyes. “I wouldn’t have stood out in the open if there was.”
Tythel’s nictitating membranes flitted open to begin blinking away the tears that were forming. It wasn’t her membranes or the tears that had made the air cloudy. The smoke still hung low in the air, giving the whole scene a haze. To her left was a tree that still stood, although its branches and leaves had been charred away to leave a broken pillar that jutted up to the sky. Between cracks in the bark, she could see deep reds and oranges that showed the flame still raged within the tree’s trunk.
Tythel took a step forward. Eupheme said something, but it was drowned out by the pounding of Tythel’s heart, beating a deep rhythm within her own ears. In front of her a particularly dense cluster of branches still burned under the ash, small tendrils of flame peeking up here and there as smoke still rose from it. Spots like that were everywhere, dotting the landscape like haphazard campfires.
The sun hung in the sky ahead. The dense smoke stripped away much of its glare, and Tythel found she could look directly into it without hurting her eyes. It was the blood-red color that was normally only adopted as the sun sunk below the horizon. Seeing it floating in the air above her made the landscape look weirdly alien. Unnatural.
The ash still swirled around her, disturbed by the slightest breeze into great plumes. She had to breathe carefully. She was dependent on her scales to protect her against flame and ash on her skin. Dragon’s throats were heavily protected against the same, but it was done with a layer of mucus that could easily be dried out with this much ash in the air, same as how pushing through too much flame would evaporate it and burn her throat raw.
Part of Tythel’s mind, clinging to scholarly dispassion, brought up the old Cardomethi view of the afterlife. They didn’t believe all people found their reward or punishment in the Shadow after death. That was true of most people, but pathbreakers, blasphemers, traitors, murderers, and disrespectful children were lumped with enemies of the Empire and sent to a realm that sat between Light and Shadow, a blasted landscape they called Inturfani, which translated to ‘the Char.’ Here, they believed all were shunned by Light and Shadow alike and chewed by beasts for all eternity.
The Cardomethi had believed that dragons were creatures that had managed to escape the Char, monsters from another world that spread the death and torment of that realm. As a child, that had been enough for Tythel to dismiss the idea of the Char out of hand.
Now that Tythel stood here, weeping in an almost perfect recreation of that realm of eternal suffering, she understood how the Cardomethi had come to believe that. If nothing else, dragons could create their own vision of that punishment at a moment’s notice.
“Tythel,” Eupheme said, putting a hand on her shoulder. “We would be dead if you hadn’t done this. I mean that. We were in over our heads. We were barely fighting for our lives. I couldn’t stand against that Lumcaster. Leora would have found a break in your defenses. Tellias was no match for that flying monstrosity. You saved our lives.”
Tythel blinked back the tears. She forced herself to imagine instead the forest, lush and green and whole, but with Eupheme and Tellias’ corpses laying broken in the underbrush.
“Never again,” Tythel whispered hoarsely. “Never again, Eupheme. I can’t…I can’t keep doing this. I have to – I have to find a better way.”
Eupheme shook her head. “No,” she breathed. “Don’t do that, Tythel. Don’t tell that lie to yourself. Because when it happens again – when the only option to save the people you care about left is to burn the world and salvage what you can from the ashes – you will do it, and you’ll remember that promise. You’ll hate yourself for that promise being broken.”
The tears were flowing faster than her membranes could clear them. “Then what?” she asked, her voice hoarse. “I’ll just keep doing this, over and over and over? Burn the whole world so long as it means the Alohym can’t have it either?”
“No,” Eupheme said. She stepped forward and wrapped her arms around Tythel in a fierce hug. “No, you won’t. You never, ever need to worry about turning into that. Not so long as you still weep to see it. That’s the promise you should make. That you will never do it capriciously, and that you will always morn the need.”
Tythel took a deep, ragged breath and, in spite of the pain, found herself nodding. “You’re right,” she said.
“Of course I am,” Eupheme said, breaking the embrace. “I’m very, very smart. Now. Let’s get moving. The Alohym will eventually think to check back in here, and I’d rather not be exposed when they arrive.”
Tythel blinked and looked back to Tellias. He wasn’t coughing anymore and gave her a nod of agreement.
She bent down to begin hauling up his armor, careful to avoid letting the rope scrape against the side where it might fray. This, unlike Tellias, was heavy enough where she noticed the effort. After a few seconds, she could feel her heart begin to pound in her chest. Moments after that, a few more hauls in, and her breathing started to come out harsh and ragged.
Never capriciously, and always mourn the need, Tythel repeated to herself.
Tythel’s arms started to burn with the effort. There was a comfort in the repetitive motion, a rhythm and ritual to it, and she started to punctuate every tug with the mantra.
Never capriciously, and always mourn the need. Hand over hand, almost one-hundred stone weight dangling into the pit below her. It was a tool they desperately needed to fight and survive. A weapon that, if it was lost, would increase the chance that Tythel would have to burn the landscape again.
She began to pull faster. Never capriciously, and always mourn the need. Her lungs were burning, not from the ash, but from the deep breaths she needed to keep herself pulling. She could feel her knees begin to tremble from the effort and dug her talons into the ground beneath her for better purchase.
Never ca- The edge of the armor crested the hole in that final tug. Tythel wasn’t expecting it, and found herself tumbling backwards, falling into the ash.
Or she would have, but Tellias and Eupheme were right behind her. Together they caught her before she could fall and helped her stand again.
“Alright,” Tythel said, taking one last look around the land she had destroyed. Never capriciously, and always mourn the need. “Let’s go.”
Neither of her companions objected.
Chapter 35
“Poz?” Nicandros said, looking up at the window with wide eyes. “What…what are you doing at my flathing window?”
“I need your help,” Poz said. It had been years since he’d last seen Nicandros, but they had fought together. He wasn’t sure what kind of reception he should have expected, but it wasn’t this. Nicandros looked wild, unkempt, and like he’d spent the last few days either drunk or hungover.
Nicandros cursed and stood up, striding over to the window and throwing it open with a violent gesture. “Get in here,” he growled, “before someone sees you.”
Poz’s nose twitched as he slid through the window. The room smelled of ale and wine and sweat. It smelled like the common room of an inn whose keeper spent no time making sure it was well kept, and whose patrons were the kind of surly that didn’t much care either. “You seem to be having a rough time,” Poz said carefully.
Nicandros ran his hand through his hair. It was long and grayer than Poz remembered. Human hair did that, a slow transformation as it lost color with age, but Poz hadn’t expected it to have changed quite this much. He also hadn’t expected Nicandros to allow his beard to grow out so much. “Well, it’s good to know you’re still observant.” Nicandros shook his head and walked back to the table. “What did you want?”
Poz pressed his lips into a thin line of annoyance. “You are less than pleased to see me,” he said, as opposed to directly answering Nicandros’ inquiry.
Nicandros chuckled. It wasn’t a pleasant or friendly sound. The laugh was dark and hoarse. “How hard did you look to find me?” he asked. He motioned for Poz to take a seat on the bed, the first sign of hospitality Poz had noticed.
“I’ve been
looking for weeks,” Poz admitted. He took the proffered seat. After all this time searching, he’d been hoping for a warm reception. Or at least one that wasn’t ice cold. “I’ve gone halfway across the kingdom and back. Everywhere I knew you favored. I broke my exile terms and ate Crowflesh, among others.”
