by Tammy Salyer
The maturity of her words struck Ulfric with more force than her vulnerability did. As she’d grown up, the time they’d spent together was a ceaseless litany of him telling her to pay attention, to quit daydreaming, to focus, Isemay, for the love of the Verities! His Crumb had finally, through the travails that he’d hoped would never mark her time, become an adult.
“Come then,” Symvalline said, and the three of them trekked upward to meet the bruhawks.
Now looking through Urgo’s eyes, which saw so much more than a person could, he watched Deespora’s gaze follow them. Because of her warning, Ulfric already knew they would not find what he sought. He would leave Arc Rheunos just as empty-handed as he’d entered it. Still, there would be other rites and lore within the celestial artifact. Something in it could be useful against Balavad.
After reaching the hawks, they paced outside to the far end of the open balcony that overlooked the northern mountains rising behind the fortress. The overlook was secluded, with few sounds of the valley’s revelry coming to them.
“This will do,” Sym said and ran a finger along the edge of the memory keeper. “How will this work, Ulfric? You have so many ways now of seeing.”
He thought about it a moment, then said through their link so both Sym and Urgo would hear him. Urgo, up for it?
The hawk consented, though he didn’t speak in any human tongue, and Symvalline sat cross-legged before the birds, who lowered to their chests and settled. Isemay copied her, and Sym placed the Scrylle’s flared base on the ground.
“Isemay, if you concentrate on seeing through the Fenestros the same way you concentrate when recalling memories through your pendant, you’ll be able to look inside the Scrylle as well,” she told their daughter.
“What’s it like?”
“Like a flood, like your mind is at the mercy of a hurricane,” Ulfric told her. “It takes training and practice to be able to focus and hold back the outpouring.”
“And most suffer from a headache their first few times,” Sym added.
Looking pensive, Isemay said, “I’ll just watch you this time.”
Sym gave her a reassuring smile, then sent to Ulfric and Urgo, Ready?
The woman and the hawk leaned toward the Scrylle and Fenestros. A moment later, thousands of years of Arc Rheunos’s history and lore began to pummel Ulfric’s mind. With long practice, he held back the tumult and started his search for any clue regarding the act of caging, and more importantly uncaging, a Verity.
There was a difference to his search this time, which he became aware of gradually. Despite Ulfric’s own nearly two thousand turns of experience, his focus came more smoothly than he was used to. Every bit of knowledge came to him sharply, smoothly, clicking into place in his mind as if he’d always known the things he was only just learning. He barely had to concentrate before he could parse whatever his mind latched on to. Was it due to Urgo’s assistance? Was this what it was like to have a predator’s mind, and the singular focus of a bruhawk? Whatever it was, he reveled in it, though it wasn’t long before this was subsumed by the truth he already knew—the Scrylle said nothing about his predicament. The way to unmake the cage wasn’t here.
But many other things were. One in particular drew his mental gaze, the thing Vaka Aster and Balavad had discussed so heatedly just before battling in his warship: the Syzyckí Elementum. Its lore blossomed within the Scrylle, and he heard Symvalline ask, What does this mean? at the same time he perceived a reference, like a prophecy, that read, The final age of the Great Cosmos will turn on the Union of the Five, the Syzyckí Elementum. It will bring the destruction of destruction and the remaking of the unmaking.
Before Ulfric could try to answer Sym’s question, though he had no idea what it meant either, his inner sight was filled with the sky at night. Like the sky over Vinnr, it was full of stars, near and far. Vinnr’s was a sky he’d looked at for so long that it felt like an old friend, or a home he could sit in and comfortably relax, knowing its walls were sturdy and would keep him safe—until Balavad had arrived, that was. But the sky filling his inner eye now was more immense, more boundless than Vinnr’s, which he’d never thought of as anything but infinite before. It was not a comfortable and familiar sky. It stretched into an infinitude that his and Urgo’s minds combined were nowhere near able to apprehend. Just seeing it made him feel as if his mind was being forced to stretch. Its endless edges pulled at him perilously.
Blink, Urgo. Or look away. I can’t… can’t take it.
Everything went dark briefly, and when Urgo opened his eyes, the enormous and limitless skyscape had passed.
Symvalline? he asked.
She didn’t answer right away. Just before he had Urgo look away from the Scrylle to check on her, she said, I felt like I was lost in there for a moment. But I’m all right now. If that is the Great Cosmos, Ulfric, our home is less than a sparkle within it. We are infinitesimal, like smaller motes on dust, and I never realized it.
I don’t think it was the Great Cosmos that now exists, but the one that might be if the Syzyckí Elementum happens.
The “destruction of destruction”? That doesn’t sound promising, and that sky—it was so cold.
He agreed and knew he didn’t need to say it. Keep searching. We may yet find something useful.
An unknown time later, filled with wonder but without any new tools for achieving their immediate goals, Ulfric finally had to relent. The buffeting by the Scrylle lore was exhausting. He told Symvalline he was going to return to awareness but wanted one last glimpse of that endless sky. He found it, gazed into it, hoping for some clue that could save Vaka Aster from their nemesis. As the cold void sucked at him, other words he’d read in the Scrylle slid through his head: Where the Five Flames have burned, Fimm’s final vessel will sing the Syzyckí Elementum.
Urgo gave a low catlike hiss and shook himself, and Ulfric was out of the Scrylle and back on the balcony of Everlight Hall.
Midevening had settled on the realm, and the mountains lay in total darkness. That final bit of lore washed through his thoughts again, giving him an internal shiver. Its meaning was lost to him, but he put considerations of it aside when he noticed Isemay standing at the banister with her back to him and Symvalline. At some point, she’d been joined by Salukis, and she and the Zhallah youth were speaking quietly, their faces close together in a show of intimacy.
Observing the wings growing from Salukis’s back, Ulfric’s thoughts wandered to the brief time he’d been sharing the young man’s body and knew for himself what it was to fly under his own power—a yearning for adventure he shared with his daughter. And the tinkerer and inventor in him suddenly understood something that had long eluded him. I’ve got it! I know how to make my wingsets work! Now all I have to do is live long enough, and get mine and Vaka Aster’s freedom back, to try it! He had a momentary pang of nostalgia for the simpler days of Knighthood before Balavad’s coming, a feeling like a cold draft against his heart, but it quickly passed. He told himself they would defeat Balavad, and he’d get his chance to create wings for both himself and Isemay to fly like Salukis. He just had to keep his focus for this final challenge.
Isemay and Salukis hadn’t noticed Ulfric’s and Urgo’s return to awareness, and he listened to them for a moment.
“If they ask you to go home with them, will you?” Salukis asked her.
Isemay’s hand rose to the back of her neck as if to scratch an itch. Ulfric noticed for the first time that she had a mark there, something he’d never seen before. Despite the dim light, Urgo’s eyes had no trouble making out the design. It was a pattern, about the size of a fist or a Fenestros. Several interlinked lines twining around each other. They looked like a simple labyrinth.
Urgo’s eyes flicked toward Salukis and found the same mark. It was their Verity mark, given to them when they’d sworn their oaths to the Everlight, like the nine-pointed stars that marked the chin of each Knight Corporealis.
Isemay answered him, “I’
ll do whatever the Everlight orders. Maybe she would want me—maybe even want us—to aid my parents and the Vigil Star. If Balavad continues to attempt to control the realms, maybe that’s what all the other Verities will want, too.”
She said this as if hopeful she might be called into such service, and Ulfric had to fight the reflex to immediately disabuse her of the idea. After the battle against Tuzhazu, when Isemay had told him and Symvalline that she’d chosen to be ordained as an Archon of Mithlí, neither he nor Symvalline had taken it calmly, at first. They’d realized, though, at the same time, that it might be the best way, maybe the only way, to keep Isemay safe. She’d stay here, while they went back to Vinnr, and she’d be endowed with the resilience the Verities gave their sworn protectors. He and Sym would go back to Vinnr and resume their duty to Vaka Aster without the unbearable worry for their child’s safety that had been consuming them both till now.
Thus, they had agreed to encourage Isemay, and he couldn’t ignore the swelling of pride he had for her regardless of his own regrets about Knighthood. In the end, it wasn’t as if she’d have changed her mind if they hadn’t given their blessing. Or maybe she would have, he reminded himself. She’s grown up so much in the last few weeks.
Beside Urgo, Sym took a deep breath, the sound drawing Isemay and Salukis to turn toward her. His heartmatch blinked a couple of times, then looked to Urgo, and her next words brought Ulfric out of his ruminations.
“Unless your luck was better than mine, Ulfric love, we have difficult plans to make. Vinnr cannot wait for us to unshackle Vaka Aster. The future of our realm now hinges on stopping Balavad on our own.”
Chapter Two
Aboard the warship Primator, a world-killer belonging to Balavad and filled with his army of Raveners of the Tooth, there had been pain, agony really, more than Mylla had ever known a person could experience and their heart continue to beat.
And then hers had stopped—hadn’t it?
She didn’t know for sure. She knew only that the pain was cut off abruptly, and then she was immersed in cold black stillness. Death, she assumed.
That was when the dreams began. Faces of people like her, their screams, fire in the night, terror…
It wasn’t long before she realized they weren’t dreams. These images had the crystal clearness of memories. The sights, the smells, the sensation of wind and heat on her skin—all things she knew she’d experienced, all now emerging from somewhere deep in her mind, memories of a past long buried that hadn’t been probed since she’d been a child. An orphan taken in by the Prelates at the Resplendolent Conservatum, she’d given up trying to remember who she was soon after they found her. It was too painful to know her history, she’d learned, and much easier to form herself anew, like a sapling that pokes its first twigs from the scorched earth after a forest fire.
As her childhood came back to her in that cold darkness, she realized that if she was remembering things, then she couldn’t be dead.
The first memory had slammed into her mind like a comet, sharp and painful as molten stone. In it, she was kneeling on a floor and watching a fireball blaze across the sky above her. She had been inside a round building with walls that seemed to be wood, but not cut wood. Trees grew from the packed earthen floor in tight bunches and entwined around and among each other more intricately than most tapestry weavers in Vinnr could match.
The walls rose overhead, but there was no roof. She could see there had been one, but it was obliterated. Pieces of it, wood and leaves, littered the floor around her. After the fireball was lost over the horizon, all that was left was a sky, black with both smoke and night. The dancing shadows of fires outside the building jumped and quivered against the roiling smoke, twisted dragørlike monstrosities that had made her small body shudder in fright.
A hand gripped her shoulder. “Come, Mylla, get up! We can’t stay in here. They’re destroying the city!”
It was a man’s voice, one that strummed a familiar chord deep in her mind that should have brought her comfort. But instead, the urgency and despair in it only increased the terror the sight of the fireball burning across the ragged, smoke-blotted sky had ignited in her.
Outside, cries of fear and battle filled the night. She didn’t move from her spot, too afraid of what would happen, too afraid of not knowing where the man, her father, wanted to take her. Then his face was before hers, his smooth full mouth tight with worry, his deep nearly black eyes, ordinarily so gentle but now slit with anxiety, staring into hers. The hand gripping her shoulder joined his other hand beneath her armpits, and he pulled her up and into his chest, holding her like an infant, though she must have been seven or eight turns. She immediately pressed her face into his neck, hiding in the heavy weight of his beard.
“Ayanna,” he said, “forget going for the caravan. Leave everything but your weapons. It’s too late to flee the city. I have… the Scrylle.”
“The Scrylle?” a woman’s voice, her mother’s, said. “You can’t stop the Ravener army with—”
“I know. I’m not going to stop them. There are too many. Come on.”
Her father led them through the wooden house’s doorway into the chaos of the city outside. Flames and people roared, fire and fighters and destruction sweeping toward them from the edges of the city. Mylla only opened her eyes for a split second, saw death everywhere, then returned to the safe darkness of her father’s neck.
They ran. Ayanna, her mother, whispered between pants behind them, “Greven, if you don’t go back to the fort, Fimm will punish you for abandoning the vessel, and for taking the Scrylle.”
“No. No! I can’t be blamed for trying to get you and Mylla away from Kaldrwoot.” He stumbled, grasped Mylla tighter. “Besides, Fimm hasn’t moved, hasn’t done anything to stop the invaders. Damn our creator.”
Mylla’s young ears were shocked to hear her father curse the Verity—he’d made her chew soap for saying much less—but she kept her eyes shut, her throat tight against the cries that wanted to escape her.
Greven went on. “Let the rest of Wardens stand beside Fimm while the Verity just sits there, watching us get slaughtered. I have you and our daughter to keep safe. When you are, I’ll come back.”
The memory had trailed away there, but another soon replaced it.
A strange room of white stone. She was lying down, still a child. Was it days later? Weeks? She didn’t think much time had passed, and then she saw her father’s and mother’s frightened faces peering down at her. Her father looked exactly as he had in the first memory, down to wearing the same clothes, his face unchanged by time—but then, he wouldn’t age. He was a Warden Temporalis, timeless.
Another woman was in the room, and her appearance more than the strange furniture and unfamiliar stone walls jolted Mylla. The woman had no hair. Not just on her head, but even her eyebrows and lashes were missing. She was murmuring something as she handed a bowl barely larger than a cup to Mylla’s mother. In the First Tongue, the woman told Ayanna to have Mylla drink it, adding, “We don’t have a cure. Few live through the first week. But this will give her some relief.”
And that’s when Mylla realized the younger her was sick, very sick. A freezing sickness that made her stomach feel like ice, while her skin burned. Her mother put the cup to her lips and whispered, “This will help, my little one. Drink it all.”
She tried, but the medicine was so strong and sweet that she gagged. The gag turned into a cough, and her lungs ached as she pulled herself into a ball, trying to stop their spasming.
“We call it the Great Waste. We’ve lost many already,” the woman who’d given her the medicine said. “We don’t know where it came from, and it’s spreading so fast…”
The worst of the coughing stopped, and Mylla looked up to her parents again. Greven reached down and brushed her sweat-matted hair from her forehead, saying to Ayanna, “Vinnr. We’ll take her there. She can recover there.”
Ayanna said nothing, and Mylla’s childhood self had stared
at her, seeking the hope and the assurance in her mother’s dark eyes that her illness would pass. She’d had brown-umber skin like Mylla, but instead of Mylla’s raven-black hair, hers fell in loose braided ropes down her back just past her waist, red as dying embers, red as blood.
Her mother finally responded to Greven. “And what will we find in that realm? Not this plague, but maybe another? Maybe the forces of Battgjald? We ran from Ærd to save her, but this… this may be how we lose her.”
From that memory and her mother’s fearsick words, Mylla’s adult mind finally understood—she finally knew where she came from and who her people were.
She was Ærden, a creation of Fimm the fifth Verity, not the child of Dyrrak exiles, as everyone had believed because of her umber skin and black hair. Not even from Vinnr at all. Now that she remembered her parents, she could see their resemblance to the southern people of Dyrrakium. But if her parents had brought her from Ærd to Vinnr, what had become of them? Why had they left her alone?
And with that moment of understanding, she was swept into her last new memory, the last trauma she’d experienced before being found as a child on the Great Province Byway in Vinnr by travelers on their way to Asteryss City. Why were all her memories of such devastating moments? Had she never experienced happiness before becoming an orphan, or had the terrible things she’d been through simply taken over and burned away the good memories?
In the final memory, she was well again. In fact, she felt more lively than ever in her young life of seven turns. Hand in hand with Ayanna and Greven, they walked a wide, well-maintained flagstone road. The Great Province Byway, though she didn’t know it then. In the distance on the north side of the road and ahead of them, soaring snow-covered mountaintops tickled the sky. A warm sun beamed overhead, a mild yellow cloak of early summer. The kind of day she would spend outside at home in Ærd until twilight, playing with friends, exploring outside the walls of her home of Kaldrwoot’s arboreal fortress while her parents followed their vocations, her mother a craftswoman, her father a servant of Fimm. The clothing the three wore was the same that they’d left Ærd in, but at least the smell of smoke had been washed from it sometime recently. How long had she been sick? It didn’t matter, because she was well now.
