Midnight's Blossom

by Corinn Heathers

  “Miss Alcyone,” he greeted me in warm tones.

  I slid into the seat, tucking the skirt beneath me as I did so, and buckled the safety strap. Devon expertly manipulated the vehicle's steering column as he accelerated back into traffic. At this hour, the number of cars on the highways were somewhat lessened, as the Fiallan workday typically started early.

  “Thank you for the ride,” I told him.

  Devon chuckled. “It's my pleasure, Miss.”

  “You've known Cassius for a long time, haven't you?”

  “Yes. We fought together in the same unit, during the Forge War.” A faraway look entered his eyes, and I could tell that he did not relish the thought of traversing memory's paths. I chose to swiftly proceed with my intended question.

  “So you know him very well, then.” I gazed out the windshield of the car as we drove down an elevated highway structure that cut through the heart of the city. “What do you think he thinks of me?”

  Devon didn't seem to be surprised by the question. “Rose loves you dearly, and that counts for much in his estimation. Her mother passed away some time ago. With Lailah's soul departed into the void, Rose is the person that matters to him most.”

  “I suspected as much.”

  “Why do you ask?” Devon inquired.

  “Rose wants me to… to defect.” The word sounded strange when I said it out loud. “Because she's afraid I'll be in danger if I stay in the Empire.”

  The weathered old man's face twisted into a grimace. “I begin to see your dilemma. Rose is willful and headstrong and blunt and… well, you know all of this already. She needs to act, to do something to protect you. This is the clearest solution she can think of.”

  “But why?”

  Devon's expression was grim. “With the potential for conflict brewing ever stronger, Cassius will pull her out of the Academy and recall her to Fialla. He was never very enthusiastic about her idea to study abroad in the Empire, even as she argued passionately for the chance to show the Solarians that Fialla is not their enemy. Unless something significant changes, and soon, tensions between our nations will continue to rise. Already there are many Fiallans who are angry at how the Governing Council and Ministry of State continue to bend to the Empire's whims.”

  My heart seemed to vanish from my chest. There it was, the reason for Rose's strident and continual insistence. I knew it had to have been something like this, but I found myself refusing to accept it until someone else spoke the words plainly.

  “Nobody in Fialla wants war, but there are many of my people who refuse to tolerate the Empire's aggressive foreign policy. People are upset, and rightly so, that the people they chose to represent them at the Council table appear unwilling to fight to protect the people.” Devon sighed as he cut the wheel sharply to the left to avoid a slow-moving freight vehicle. Almost casually, he sent the car weaving through the slowing traffic around the exit to the downtown surface streets.

  “It's inevitable, then,” I murmured, and shivered.

  “Barring some great catastrophe within Solaria itself, I cannot see another future. We've all heard the reports of the rebel faction within the Empire, but information is scarce. Our military commanders do not believe the Solarian rebels have enough strength to act. The current theory is that the rebels will lie in wait while the war rages on; they will allow the Empire to expend their forces upon conquering us, then strike at the heart of the Empire after it has committed forces to occupying Fialla.”

  As much as I didn't want to ascribe such cold pragmatism to someone like Willow Corvus, I saw the strategic value in the decision to wait. It was at that moment that I understood the conditions that would cause Rose to return to Fialla forever. It didn't matter what happened. If the Antilight struck before the Celestial Prophecy could convince the Empire to go to war, Cassius would recall his daughter. If the rebels chose not to strike and war between Fialla and Solaria became a certainty, he would likewise recall her.

  I fought away the stinging in my eyes, not wanting to start crying yet again. This was supposed to be our vacation, a break from our studies at the Academy. For most ordinary students from ordinary families, it would have been nothing more than that.

  But it was not to be; neither Rose nor I were ordinary children of ordinary families. Both Alcyone and Merope were deeply entrenched in the politics of our respective nations. This inevitably introduced complications.

  A handkerchief appeared in my lap.

  “T-thanks,” I murmured to Devon, wiping my damp eyes. “I'm sorry.”

  “No need to apologize, my lady. You've been through a lot of changes as of late. I imagine it's been a bit overwhelming.”

  “Rose has, too.” I sighed and gazed out the window at the blur of buildings and other vehicles passing by as the car sped down the highway.

  “Miss Rose has her father to confide in,” Devon pointed out. “Fialla is also her home. I may not understand your situation entirely, but I do know what it feels like to be an outsider.” He paused for a moment, as if he were trying to carefully choose his words. “Rose wants her home to become your home, as well.”

  I ground my teeth in frustration. “I know, it's just—” I broke off and shrugged. “I don't know. I don't know what to do.”

  “Consider it from her perspective. For months, Rose was forced to watch while your people treated you as if you were less than a person—and she was unable to do anything to stop it from happening. She wasn't prepared for that, and she doesn't understand why you would go back.”

  “I told her why,” I murmured. “I can't—I can't just abandon Mother. Rose lost her mother. How could she not understand how scared I am?”

  Devon's features were dragged down into a frown. “Rose was very young when Lailah died. She has few memories of her mother, and I'm sure you understand how she views Cassius.”

  I sighed and leaned my forehead against the window. He was right. Rose had met my mother, saw the strong and confident Juno Alcyone, one of the most powerful mages in a nation filled with powerful mages. Mother insisted that she could take care of herself… and Rose accepted that. Rose trusted in my mother and her abilities.

  By the Seven Holy Stars, if Rose could trust Juno Alcyone at her word… why couldn't I?

  Chapter 20

  Learning the Lies

  Over the next few days, I pushed my fears aside and focused on the magic. Trying to reconcile with the prospect of returning to Solaria without her—or forsaking the Empire entirely—filled me with far too many conflicted emotions to process. Instead, I did everything I could to avoid the thoughts entirely, falling back upon the concentration and breathing exercises that Mother had taught me when I was just a child.

  Magic was wild and unpredictable by nature, loathe to follow the order imposed upon it by people who wished to make use of it. Without calm, careful contemplation, it could easily rage out of control. Some Aspects were more prone to this than others.

  Light was pure and strong, and it crystallized into a natural structure that made those with the rarest Aspect incredibly powerful. Affinity for light mana sought out souls that innately rejected chaos and unpredictability. Water moved rapidly, but was endlessly mutable, changing its shape to fit the path it was directed through. Earth was ponderous, slow and cautious; hard and unyielding, but could be wielded by those souls blessed with patient deliberation.

  Fire and wind were forces that defied order by their nature, but they could be tamed by mages with aggressive and forceful natures. From the Academy masters I'd learned that mastering one's fire Aspect was much like saddle-breaking a wild horse. Wind was harder to hold onto, but less likely to fight back. It sought to escape, to flee, to reject confinement and required a stern, authoritative disposition to master.

  I'd learned all of this at the Academy, and from Mother before that, and the House Alcyone tutors who helped word-wean the young prospective mages of the family. The Five Aspects was a book every Solarian child was made to read, and I cou
ld almost recite passages from memory.

  Nobody ever taught me anything about the sixth Aspect. Even asking questions would have cast suspicion. Yukari's surprise at my continued survival was understandable; it was only through Mother's machinations that I'd been able to enroll into the Academy at all. She sent me to the Academy to learn as much as I could, to strengthen my tenuous link to my mother's magic, and to make friends and allies outside of House Alcyone. That method would have held, I'm sure, had I not stumbled upon the relic.

  Mother was trying to protect me, but she couldn't have possibly predicted that I would find my fey parent's spirit blade. Eiri's legacy had touched my soul from beyond the void through the magic she'd left behind, and… unknowingly put me in great danger. Now I had little choice but to learn how to master it, if I wanted to survive.

  Shion placed another series of targets before me. I knew what I had to do to complete the exercise; Yukari's seeking spells had discerned the nature of my magic. The power of a necromancer was rooted in three areas—control, deception and corruption. These exercises would determine the length and breadth of my magic and give me a starting point upon which to build a foundation of knowledge.

  “Go again,” Shion ordered.

  I nodded and focused on the first target Shion had put down. It was a brand-new sword blade, cold and hard and very sharp. The steel was in flawless condition, the flat of the blade polished to a mirror-bright finish. It was my task to destroy it with my magic, to corrupt the purity of the work and cause it to fall into ruin.

  Mana surged from within my body and welled up in the palm of my right hand. The crackling violet-black prominence was a deadly contradiction; a chaotic, entropic energy that brought eternal equilibrium. With a thought, I sent the clot of darkness deep into the sword blade.

  For a brief moment, the steel glowed purple as it was suffused with crawling arcs of violet-black lightning—

  Then abruptly dissolved into useless black dust, as if centuries of decay had been imparted in a single, terrible instant.

  Shion nodded approvingly. “Good. Move on to the next target.”

  The second item Shion placed on the training room floor was a piece of green wood, freshly cut from a young and strong tree. Necromantic enervation of nonliving materials was easier than corrupting something that still held the whisper of life's energies. The piece of wood was cut from a living tree, and it was physically dead, but the echo of aether still clung to it.

  As before, I conjured an orb of dark magic. The shape in which the spell was woven needed to be adjusted for the difference in material. Wood was structurally weaker than a forged blade, of course, and a physical blow could have splintered it easily. My task was more difficult; I was not to strike it with force, but with death.

  The bolt of darkness struck the split log and, once again, the object was enshrouded in negative brilliance. A moment passed, less than a second, before the fragment of wood began to dissolve into that same fine, uniformly black ash.

  “I'm impressed,” Shion muttered. “It took a moment longer than the steel, but you still managed it handily. Good work, Lily.”

  I wiped sweat from my brow and nodded. It was hard on the body and the mind to focus the magic, even though my fey-touched soul granted me a measure of innate efficiency when it came to converting raw aether into dark mana.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “A little weak, but still good to go,” I replied.

  “Let me know if you start feeling faint. Your Aspect is powerful and your body lacks capacity, which is not an ideal combination. Necromancy is inextricably tied to the concept of death. If you overextend yourself, the magic will take the fuel it needs from your life essence.”

  That was a sobering thought, and one that had been well-drilled into me by Shion. Yukari warned me, as well, that the unconventional way in which my Aspect rapidly evolved meant that my body's ability to contain aether hadn't kept pace. Had I been permitted to grow my nascent affinity into an Aspect the usual way, that capacity would have grown along with it.

  “I wish there was an easier way to do this,” I grumbled. “If only I could use the spirit blade properly…” I threw up my hands and made a disgusted sound. “Sorry.”

  Shion clucked their tongue in disapproval. “I know you're impatient, and I know we have little time, but that would be exceptionally dangerous. Rose already told me how it affected you the last time you tried to use it. The relic drained you so badly you were unconscious for two days. Until you've mastered the basics of necromancy, you shouldn't try to wield the spirit blade.”

  “That's why I said 'properly,'” I snapped, feeling a little defensive and more than a little annoyed at Rose for revealing that incident. “If I knew how to—”

  “It's not just a matter of knowing. You need to be strong enough to wield the relic.” Shion's arms crossed in front of their slim torso, the adept's face adopting a stern expression. “This is why we train, little by little, so you can control your Aspect and harden your body against aether. Once you can do that, then you can focus on training to use the relic without placing yourself at risk.”

  I ground my teeth in frustration, but said nothing. Shion was right, of course, and I knew what I had to do. I had to keep using my magic, little by little, gradually working through these small spells until I could cast them without feeling any physical strain. I would only be in Fialla for a few weeks before the new term at the Academy began again. This was the only chance I'd be able to practice my necromancy safely, well out of reach of the Church and its inquisitors in IPSB.

  Letting my thoughts still and my mind become calm, I focused my attention on the third and last target of the exercise. I'd been given metal and wood, neither of which were particularly easy to deal with, but the final task was worse still.

  Resting quiescent upon the floor of the training hall was a small silver pendant in the shape of a four-pointed star, a symbol that was as familiar to me as my own family name. It was the holy symbol of the Celestial One and the insignia of the Church of the Celestial Prophecy. Far from being an ordinary piece of religious jewelry, it was an amulet of protection, specifically warded against necromancy.

  I wasn't even going to ask where Shion had procured the amulet. I'd never seen one before that wasn't hanging around the neck of a Celestial Acolyte or IPSB officer. They weren't rare, of course, but their distribution was heavily restricted in Solaria. The fact that one was here in Fialla, in the possession of a secret guild of necromancers, suggested that its original owner was no longer among the living.

  “It belonged to a spy,” Shion said, apparently picking up on my surprise. “We caught him sniffing around one of our other operations. I don't know the particulars, but office gossip suggests Master Shimizu left a bit of a mess for the disposal team to deal with.”

  My eyes widened slightly at the mention of Yukari. So she had killed the spy and recovered his amulet. I imagined the Cabal would have tasked her with studying the device to determine how its protections could be circumvented.

  Unfortunately, I didn't have the fruits of that research, and I had no idea how to get around the amulet's wards. I closed my eyes and thought back to the barrier exercise at the Academy, the one that had ended with Rose inadvertently sending me to the infirmary. As with that assignment, I couldn't go around; I had to go through.

  “Give it a try,” Shion instructed.

  I took a deep breath. “Okay.”

  My spirit reached intangible hands into the aether of the land, drawing power from the ley lines into my body. I felt the odd tingle/warmth of unformed arcane energies soak into my being, and then the sudden, abrupt coldness as the shapeless ore was refined.

  Once again, the sphere of violet-black materialized in my hand. This time, to overcome a much tougher obstacle, I'd poured considerably more power into the spell. My mind's eye beheld my spirit weaving the umbral threads of death, building up the magic over and over again until it reached a critical mass. It
was a painstaking process that dilated my perception of time; though less than a few seconds had passed, it felt like an endless eternity.

  I locked my gaze on the warding amulet and, with a simple act of will, released a long line of entropic destruction that struck the amulet directly. The perfect, crystalline order of the Light was painstakingly woven to resist the Dark. But it wasn't designed to handle this much pressure, this directed on such a tiny spot.

  Rather than shattering the barrier with brute force, I chose to pierce it. The slender arrow of shadow met with a counter-force designed specifically to resist it—

  And exploded.

  I shielded my eyes from the weird, reality-distorting detonation. The air around the amulet rippled and twisted for a brief moment before snapping back into place. Both arcane forces, warring for supremacy, sent sympathetic shockwaves cascading through the material world.

  When the dust cloud settled, I felt my heart sink.

  The amulet was undamaged—but the training room floor around it wasn't.

  My attempt to pierce the ward failed, the amulet's magic proving stronger. With nowhere else to go, the energies contained within the broken spell lost their cohesion and erupted into a chaotic blast. I strained my arcane sight, trying to see if my attempt had done any damage at all to the amulet, but I couldn't see any change in the pendant's enchantment.

  “Are you hurt?”

  I turned to Shion and grimaced. “Only my pride. And… the floor.” I avoided their eyes self-consciously and felt my cheeks start to warm. “I'm sorry about that.”

  My teacher laughed.

  “What's so funny?”

  “You have nothing to apologize for,” Shion informed me. “You performed exactly as expected, and better than I hoped.”

  Irritation and embarrassment washed through me. “I was set up to fail?”

  “None of the masters of the Cabal, not Master Shimizu or anyone else, were able to forcefully shatter the warding on that amulet. You had no reasonable chance of destroying it.” Shion stifled further laughter and fixed me with an approving gaze. “This exercise was meant to test your ability to contain the backlash of a broken spell.”