by Rachel Dunne
The mage finally worked his fingers in the dancing way that wove a spell, and though Keiro didn’t sense any difference, Terstet nodded to him. Keiro turned back to face the crowd, still waiting so attentively.
“Brothers and sisters,” Keiro began, and he heard how his voice echoed throughout the gathering—not a mighty boom that reached to the far edges, but some trick that spread his voice evenly to any who might hear. “You all know that our time is upon us. The Twins have been freed, and they have risen to walk among us once more. They have pulled Metherra’s sun from the sky, and they have brought the Long Night to the world. All that they vowed, through their long imprisonment, they have done. But they are not alone, for they have all of us.”
The cheer that arose startled him, and it spread like wildfire, until all of the giant ring around the hill was cheering, screaming, hands raised in triumph, and the sound of it all nearly overwhelmed Keiro. He took a stumbling step back, and his hand caught against something warm and solid—Cazi. The mravigi steadied him, Keiro taking strength from his presence, and then Cazi flowed forward from his side. Cazi was young still, and not near to his full size, but the screech when he opened his mouth seemed to shake the ground. It silenced the Fallen more effectively than anything Keiro could have done. In the echoing quiet, the only thing he could hear was Terstet, softly sobbing somewhere behind him.
Keiro took a deep, bracing breath. “Your faith and your eagerness are . . . inspiring. The Twins are honored beyond words to have all of you to serve them. But you must understand: we do serve them, and servitude is not always an easy thing.” Keiro managed not to look at Terstet, to instead face a different section of the Fallen. “The Twins have set us a task—an important undertaking, but not an easy one. It will take all of our faith, and all of our strength.”
Keiro made his voice louder, harsher—not to be heard better, but so that they would hear the words and listen to them. “Hear me, for I am the voice of the Twins. You will leave this place, all of you. Return to Fiatera. You must—” They began to shout then, to complain. Keiro raised his voice further, and with the aid of Terstet’s magic, he shouted over their cries. “You must prepare the world for them. They will march on Fiatera soon enough, and claim the land for their own, but there is much that must be done for them first.
“Go. Return to Fiatera, and spread the word of the Twins. In every city, town, village—any collection of hovels large enough to merit a priest, anywhere that has a merra or parro promising the Parents’ salvation—there should be, too, a preacher, welcoming new followers with open arms into the Long Night. Our brethren should have a chance to prove themselves true before the Twins’ judgment falls.
“For too long, we have had only Raturo to shelter us, only Raturo to call our home. No longer. We must make havens all across the land, strongholds where the Twins’ power is unquestionable and unassailable. We must show that it is not only the Twins who are strong, but that we have grown strong alongside them.
“Go, my brothers and sisters. Return to Fiatera. Only we can serve the Twins’ will in this. Hear me, for I am the voice of the Twins. Go.” Keiro sagged, his hand finding Cazi’s warm, firm shoulder once more. With his other hand he made a motion, hoping Terstet would see it, too tired to speak anymore.
But of course, that was not the end of it.
The Fallen swarmed the hill, those who could not find the inspiration in his words, or those who had not understood that this was not a choice. They scrambled up the sides of the hill, an unstoppable rising tide, and Keiro resigned himself to long hours of repeating the same command, again and again and again . . .
He was saved from that, at least.
Valrik, the ostensible leader of the Fallen, stepped in front of Keiro. He was the first, but others followed, a ring of preachers appearing around the crown of the hill, and they all had two red stars sewn above their hearts. No matter how often Valrik insisted there was no hierarchy among the Fallen, there was no one who questioned that these Eye-marked preachers were leaders. They no longer called themselves the Ventallo, the leading faction of the Fallen, but everyone else did.
The Ventallo alone wouldn’t have stopped the mob, for there were only a dozen of them, but they were not alone. Filling the gaps between the preachers were black-armored mercenaries, and their swords were drawn. They were called blades for the darkness, and they were meant to be the Fallen’s own army. Keiro had only seen them serve as bodyguards to the Ventallo.
He had grown so uncharitable of late.
The naked steel stopped the mad press of bodies, replaced anger with the first inklings of fear. The blades stood completely still, their swords held ready but not attacking. It was a very simple and very effective warning. An equal warning was the mages, still unseen, that had made the sudden appearance of the Ventallo and the blades possible.
“Brothers and sisters!” Valrik’s voice boomed over the Fallen. It was amplified by Terstet as Keiro’s voice had been, but Valrik still shouted. He seemed not to mind hurting all the listening ears, and given how quickly the last traces of anger melted away through the crowd, Keiro wasn’t about to argue the man’s methods. “You know as well as I that Brother Keiro speaks for the Twins. His words are their words—so why do you think to argue with him? He has spoken the will of our gods, and it is not for us to judge the will of the Twins. We—faithful servants that we are—must listen, and obey. Even when we cannot understand their commands, still we must listen. Even if we dislike what we have been ordered to do, we must obey. That is the nature of the Fallen.”
Valrik had a way of putting an edge on both sides of his words—exhorting his people to listen to Keiro while speaking to the doubt in their hearts about the wisdom of the Twins’ orders. In so short a time knowing the man, Keiro had learned already that he needed to be careful in trading words with Valrik.
“Rest,” Valrik went on, his voice less a thunderclap and more the distant rumble of a storm. “You are not expected to leave now. There is much preparation to be done still, and you will have the time for it. Go, and sleep, and listen to your hearts. The Twins have always guided us true, and we must have faith that they will continue to do so.”
The Fallen listened to him better than they had to Keiro, better than they ever would listen to Keiro. There was no help for that. Still, questions rumbled up through the ranks, shouted forward from mouth to mouth until the words found their way to the top of the hill: “Where have the Twins gone?” “When will they go to Fiatera?” “Why did they strike down so many of us?” “Why haven’t they shown themselves?” “We can be useful here!” “Where are the Twins?” “Where are the Twins?” “Where are the Twins?”
They were used to getting answers from Valrik, their leader, and Keiro was sure he would give them something. He didn’t need Keiro hovering at his elbow, ready to catch his words if they faltered or slipped into knowledge they shouldn’t give. Valrik knew better than that.
So Keiro left. There was nothing more for him to do there, nothing for which he was needed among the anger and the hurt and the endless questions. No way through the pressing mob, but there were other paths through the Plains. Keiro walked to the edge of the great crater into the hill, and his feet found the familiar ladder that hung over the edge, and he descended into darkness. He didn’t even have Cazi’s faint glow for light. Mravigi claws were not meant for ladders, and so the Starborn would be taking his own path into the hill, ways that were hidden to all humans, even Keiro.
He was glad for the darkness, when his feet reached the bottom of the great cavern that sat far below the hill’s crest. In the dark, he couldn’t see the bodies that slumped against one wall. Still, the image was burned into him, floating in the empty space behind his missing eye: the old bodies of his gods, their corpses, empty and broken. Thinking of them made his gorge rise, and seeing the bodies was so much worse. He hurried across the cavern, and was not sad to drop to his hands and knees to crawl away through one of the countless tunnel
s that branched from the cavern.
By the time a faint glow caught up to him—Cazi, who could move faster than Keiro and knew more shortcuts—Keiro’s faint nausea had passed, and he’d managed to push the image of the Twins’ bodies from his mind. He didn’t bother greeting the Starborn; one didn’t greet one’s shadow each time it made an appearance, after all.
After a few quiet, crawling spans, Cazi said softly, “You did well.” His voice was slightly shrill, an off-key version of the beautiful music all mravigi spoke. He was growing still, barely an adolescent by their measuring, and Keiro remembered well how his own voice had cracked and warbled at that age. “You spoke strongly.”
“Thank you,” Keiro murmured, grateful for the thought if not the lie itself.
Keiro paused at a branching of the tunnel. The left would take him back up, to a cluster of bushes near the edge of the hills, where the grass turned from chest-high to taller than a man. That way lay the plainswalkers, who had given him home and protection and purpose. He longed to turn left, even though returning to the plainswalkers would only show him how many faces were absent, how many had been buried in their own peaceful graves after the Twins’ rise. The plainswalkers had kept their distance from the Fallen ever since. Keiro truly didn’t know if he would be welcome among the plainswalkers ever again because of his part in the horror of the Twins’ resurrection. Still. He wanted so badly to know, one way or the other—to see them, even if all he saw was fury on their faces.
Cazi nudged his foot. Keiro swallowed his wanting, and took the right branch.
Their path tilted ever downward, each branch leading deeper into the earth. Keiro’s fingers felt heavy and clumsy, the cold ground seeping into him. For a long while, the only sounds were the pad of Keiro’s hands and knees against the tunnel, the snick-snick of Cazi’s sharp claws, the scrape of his tail dragging behind him.
A sound like a rockslide made Keiro flinch, but he did not pause. It was a wonder, how quickly a man could grow accustomed to the impossible. The shouted cursing was faint at first, gradually louder as Keiro continued on. The words set a pressure between Keiro’s eyes—not quite pain, but something very close to it. The rumble sounded again.
“—not working, helesani chornya pero made me useless. Prene te elora, vsint—”
Keiro did pause this time. Very softly, he said to Cazi, “You should wait here.” When he started forward once more, there was no snick-snicking behind him.
Finally the tunnel flattened, and opened into a wide space lit by pale blue light. Keiro kept his eyes fixed to the ground between his numb fingers.
“—even make a simple chentaya.” The words slipped fluidly between ones Keiro understood, and those that made the pressure behind his skull pulse, that made his teeth ache. “Mserin tevarro, tor swear by all the sverein stahn—” Keiro pressed his face against his arm, clenching his eyes and his teeth as the pressure built, built almost beyond bearing. The words took on a new cadence, a chant, each word like a dagger between his eyes, and it was sure to rip his skull open if it went on too much longer. “—elune ment, treteine bero vosha lon, helesani pero—”
“Brother.”
The single sharp word cut through the invective. Silence crashed as sudden as a wave, the horrible pressure fizzling away so quickly Keiro almost sobbed with relief. A different sort of pressure filled the room, but the weight of fury against his skin was much more bearable than when the fury had pulsed within him.
“Control yourself, Brother,” the second voice said. Though she spoke quietly, there was nothing soft in her voice—all sharp edges and clipped words, as though each sound was a heartbeat away from a scream. Keiro knew the flavor of her anger: a slow-building rage that lurked always beneath the surface, but rarely broke free. It wasn’t her anger that palpably shivered the air.
Keiro dared to look up.
Two adolescents stood at the center of an empty, circular chamber. They faced each other, identical glares plastered onto their young faces—their identical young faces, for there could never be any question that they were cut from the same cloth. The girl’s dark hair was longer, her face slightly more angular, and the boy was a good handspan shorter—but for those minor differences, they could have been the same person.
Their eyes were the same, too—ancient eyes, that had seen the birth of the world and seen their own deaths. Incongruous eyes, in such young faces.
As the children continued to stare each other down, the pressure of the anger built. A sheen of frost spiderwebbed out from the boy’s feet. One of his hands was balled into a fist, pounding rhythmically against his thigh, though the hand closest to Keiro hung motionless. The girl stood completely still, not blinking, not even when the frost stretched beneath her feet, spread across the whole floor, rimed the smooth walls of the chamber. The pale blue light, emanating from a single lantern hung above their heads, began to flicker crazily.
Keiro tried to make himself smaller, sitting back on his knees, wrapping his arms around himself, tucking his head. He still shivered violently.
It was not an easy thing, to sit before two bickering gods.
Finally, finally, the girl’s voice broke the silence: “Enough.” Softly spoken, but it held the weight of command. The girl had been named Avorra, but Avorra was gone—replaced, instead, by the goddess Sororra. When she’d wandered the earth long ago, wearing her own body, any who had dared to disobey her had not lived long. The very ground had trembled at her will. “That is enough.”
The flickering light stilled as Keiro lifted his head. The frost receded slowly from the walls. The boy’s clenched fist loosened, and his eyes dropped to the floor. He didn’t utter an apology, but the slumped lines of his shoulders spoke it as well as words.
Sororra stepped forward, the last of the frost crackling gently beneath her feet, and set her hands on her brother’s shoulders. “We will fix this,” she said, and the command had drained from her voice, leaving in its wake a fierceness that burned as bright as the sun had. Her hands slid down his arms to grasp his hands, and his fingers curled around hers—except for the fingers of his left hand, which lay still within her grip. “I promise you, Brother.”
“I know.” His voice was barely a whisper as he pulled his hands gently free. He turned his back to her, shoulders hunched, his good hand tugging at the bad one as though trying to work feeling back into numb fingers. Keiro couldn’t see his face, but he could see Sororra’s, written with a fierce pride and a love that would see the world burn.
She had always protected her brother. Championed him, fought for him, killed for him. All the old stories, the ancient tales that glowed in Keiro’s heart, were full of inconsistencies and the chaos of the time before the Parents had imposed order upon their world . . . but there was a constant, no matter the tale, no matter who told it: in all their interminably long lives, Sororra would do anything for Fratarro.
There was another constant, too, one that burned less bright, that often flowed by unnoticed: Fratarro never truly understood what his sister was capable of.
Fratarro, who wore the body of a boy that had been named Etarro, asked, “Did it go well?”
It took Keiro a long moment to realize this question was directed to him; he hadn’t thought either of the gods had noticed him at all. Before he could answer, though, Sororra said, “It did.” Of course she would know.
Keiro bowed his head. “I sent them away, as you asked.” All the old stories told how much Fratarro had asked from his followers, but he had always asked. He’d never needed to command, not with Sororra at his shoulder, her eyes carrying all the command his words didn’t. “Valrik and the others will see to it that they leave. Two more da . . . moon-passes, and they should all be gone.”
“Good,” Sororra said, her voice lowering, almost a purr. “You’ve done well.”
“Thank you, Keiro,” Fratarro said softly.
Sororra went on, “I know I can trust you to see to things here, and to attend to my brother, whi
le I’m away.”
“Away?” Keiro asked, before he thought to strip doubt from the question. If Sororra heard any, she didn’t show it.
“There’s much to be done, as you said. My brother needs more time to return to himself, but this time is vital—I need to know the tilt of the world; all that has changed, and all that needs to change. It is something I can do, while my brother regains his strength.”
Fratarro still had his back to the room, shoulders tight as he ignored that he was being talked about as though he wasn’t there, but Keiro could see how his thumb pressed into the palm of his motionless hand, pressed hard enough that red, mortal blood began to well around his thumbnail. They can’t see, no one can see.
Keiro looked away, so that he could pretend he hadn’t seen, pretend he didn’t know. “I have always lived to serve the will of the Twins.”
Chapter Four
One of the guiding tenets of Joros’s life was that the application of enough willpower, enough intelligence, enough pressure, would lead to his success. It was a simple arithmetic, and a lesson he’d been able to grasp very early in his life. Though the values of each variable shifted constantly, he need only do more than they required to guarantee the result. With enough hard work, Joros would never fail.
The sun’s vanishing had turned that philosophy to ash.
Trudging through the Plains and the sudden edge of the Forest Voro, away from the blasted hills where everything had ended, Joros had realized that sometimes there simply wasn’t enough effort available to win out. He had given everything he had and everything he was, had tried harder than a drowning man fighting for air—and all for the same result. Eternal darkness. No matter how much he tried, one man couldn’t hope to beat two ancient gods newly freed from their long prison. Joros had tried to keep them from being freed, to stop them before they were a true threat, but he’d lost. He’d played a good game, and now it was over. Everything was done. All of his trying had, in the end, amounted to nothing.
