Chapter 1: Pilgrimage
Summary:
Axa Mala suffers a rude awakening.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
—
I made a promise.
The little woman sat at the back of the crowded little wagon. Her head lolled on her shoulders and her eyes were closed, but she wasn't asleep– although she was as close to it as her body and mind would allow.
He made a promise. To me.
Still, sleep refused to take her entirely, and so her thoughts drifted through the haze in her mind like dead leaves floating on a pond, tormenting her. Reminding her of everything she was hoping sleep would allow her to forget for a while.
He lied to me.
The wagon jostled her to and fro, her small frame tossed against the other passengers. Her burgundy hair hung in loose curls over her face, her long, tapered ears limp against her cheeks.
He... betrayed me.
The stale air in the covered wagon, the stuffy miasma of the breath and body odor of other kith, combined with the wagon's insistent swaying– it reached her even through her dozing, making her head swim. Soon she began to squirm and groan, started feeling flushed and weak.
He betrayed... us. Both–
... All of us.
Even as another passenger gently gripped her shoulder, asking if she was feeling alright, she found herself unable to fully wake. All of a sudden her whole world was the pounding of her heart, the fever on her brow, the thoughts racing through her foggy, half-sleeping mind, whirling madly, a half-dream almost spoken aloud:
traitor– promise– liar– devotion–
She writhed, trembling, teeth chattering, as a nearby folk man trundled to the front of the wagon, hollering for the caravan master to stop. A dwarf seated by her reached across the gap between them and squeezed her hand gently.
"Hey, there. Come on now, you'll be alright. We'll tell the caravan master to stop for you, and we'll get you taken care of. We little kith have to watch each other's backs, after all." She winked, and the orlan only moaned weakly in response, dazed and frightened.
What do I do now? Without them? ...Him. Am I– I'm–
And finally, she shuddered violently, waking. Her violet eyes snapped open to stare blearily at her shaking hands in her lap.
I... I feel...
...Oh. Gods.
...I never should have done this. Any of this.
...
...Where are we?
The man who'd alerted the driver had returned, looking paler than before. The caravan had stopped, but not because of her.
—
"There." The hired guard gestured toward a large bush bristling with small, pink berries. "Berries Odema told y' 'bout. Let's get y' fixed up, c'mon."
Axa shuffled miserably behind the blond woman, shivering and panting as her cheeks flushed with fever again. It comes and goes, she thought, gritting her pointed teeth, wiping her brow. What in Hel is this malady?
The exertion from fighting off the local fauna wasn't making her condition any easier to bear, and although the caravan master had told her her illness was common and not very severe, it was bad enough to make taking down a single juvenile wolf a struggle. Been in the books too much perhaps, she thought grimly as she caught up to the folk woman. Another favor academia's done me: Now I'm out of shape and out of friends.
As she knelt before the bush, she couldn't help but heave a long, shaky sigh. Well. Maybe I ought to be a bit easier on myself. I've had a... difficult month. And now, this shit on top of it all. Maybe I should find a temple, make a sacrifice to Rymrgand... She tried to laugh, but it came out a weak cough instead.
Calisca side-eyed the little woman as they harvested the berries together, a slight smirk playing on her chapped lips. Maybe it was the orlan's small stature making her resemble a folk child, or maybe it was her stubborn, sulky silence, but she couldn't help but be reminded of her youngest brother. He was a studious, taciturn lad who had yearned to be taken seriously, but always pouted and whined at any little splinter or bruise. Not to say she thought the orlan was faking it, just that she seemed to be acting worse off than she looked. She knew orlans were intense by nature, so maybe she was just being dramatic. After all, she'd flirted with that Aedyre merchant back at camp easily enough.
But when she really thought about it, the fuzzy little redhead had been quiet and withdrawn the whole trip down, ever since they'd rolled out of Ixamitl. None of the other travelers had had much to say about her when asked, other than that she was apparently a former lore college student who seemed content to keep to herself. And Calisca had suffered the Rumbling Rot herself enough times to know that it didn't render a kith this out of sorts. So either she was exaggerating, Odema was talking complete horseshit, or she had something weighing her down besides the fever and chills.
Each answer was as likely as the other, and Calisca's response was the same either way: try and get her talking, lighten her up. Didn't need her bringing the mood down further for the other caravanners, making a bad situation worse. Better to try and make friendly, put her at ease. It'd certainly make this shitshow of a night pass easier.
"People're talkin' about you at camp, like kith will. Word is you're a loremaster from the Plains." Calisca paused her berry picking to glance around, scanning for any movement from the underbrush. "Or somethin' like that anyway. What was it you used to study?"
Axa snorted and winced simultaneously. She could understand and appreciate an attempt at small talk, but the other woman had chosen the worst possible avenue of inquiry. Maybe if she had asked about her love life, that would be worse...
"Loremaster? Hardly. Scholar. ...Of history." The orlan's response was short and clipped, but her voice was deep and rich, clearly accustomed to song and public speaking. Her Ixamitl accent was only partially obfuscated by her easy proficiency in Aedyran. "Well. Linguistics, really. And naturalism. Studying cultures and languages, you know. History is more of a catch-all term..." She gestured vaguely, waving one hand about, dropping half of her harvest in the process. Calisca snorted this time, and she couldn't deny the relief she felt when the little woman laughed along with her instead of getting offended.
"History and language, huh?" The fighter bent down to collect the fallen fruit, a wry grin on her ruddy face. "Come out here to study how we Dyrwoodans been butcherin' Aedyran with our accents and cussin'? ...Truth be told, I might like to read that paper." She rolled her head around on her shoulders, stretching her neck. "Well... maybe have someone read it to me."
"I'm... No, I'm not here on behalf of any college. I'm not here for anyone." She wasn't smiling anymore. Another awkward silence. Calisca was getting ready to just change the topic to something less incendiary when Axa looked away–
Just explain before you have to suffer the humiliation of being asked –
– and sighed. "I was expelled. I... made a poor choice, trusted someone I shouldn't have, and I was forced out of my community." If the fever hadn't reddened her face, this confession certainly had. The berries bled juice from between her fingers, smashed in her shaking fists. "I lost my academic standing, my career, my... everything. So now I'm here. Because it was this or killing myself, and with my luck that would probably just piss off Berath."
There. That's all. You've said the essentials, you've admitted it out loud, it counts as the truth, and you don't need to say it again if you don't want to. Axa looked at the ground, angry at herself, at her shame, at the tears pricking the corners of her eyes. It wasn't that bad, wasn't that bad, wasn't...
If Calisca was at all shocked by the former scholar's outburst, she hid it well. "Damn rough turn, that," she drawled, shaking her head slowly. "...Well, gods know we've all done shit we ain't proud of. Made moves we've regretted. Important thing's to learn from it. And considering you made a living at it once, you're probably pretty good at learnin'. Ain't that right, scholar?" She tried a heartening smile, and found it came more easily than she'd thought it would. "That's what the Dyrwood's all about. Second chances."
Self-pity and gratitude washed over Axa in equal measure. A complete stranger had to be the one to do it– a mercenary at that– but at long last, someone had finally sympathized with her, taken her at her word, and given her a few words of encouragement. How had this taken so long?
"I... yes, I suppose you're right." She wiped her hands on the grass and groped for another berry-laden branch. "I have to admit, it does help to hear someone else actually say it. Academia is infested with egoists who refuse to back down, who never learn from their mistakes. It's refreshing to be reassured by a fellow kith of the universal truth that we are all fuck-ups from time to time." She grinned. "And that the point of life is to learn. A cool hand on a hot brow." Axa looked up at the other woman. "Thank you, Calisca."
And with that, Calisca finally felt herself relax. Despite the blocked road, the sick passenger, the dangerous ruins, the threatening weather– despite it all, she had actually managed to get through to this girl and turn a potential shitshow into a manageable little fiasco. Not bad at all. And Odema thinks he pays me more than my work's worth! She chuckled to herself as she turned back to the task at hand.
"So. Have a destination in mind?" She plucked a few more of the riper-looking berries. Her hands moved at a leisurely pace; they were nearly finished already.
"Gilded Vale. Local lord is practically giving away land." Axa picked slowly, too, still groggy and fatigued from fever and chills.
Calisca nodded. "I heard about that. Got a sister in Gilded Vale myself." The mercenary smiled at the thought of Aufra, but her stomach twisted with anxiety when she remembered that letter. She pushed it out of her mind.
"Any idea what you'll be occupying yourself with? Bein' honest, don't know what kinda life a professional book reader might carve out for herself in a little farming community like the Vale." The blonde woman smiled at her to reassure her that she was joking, but Axa was staring into the middle distance and didn't notice.
The orlan woman sighed, long and slow and heavy. "I have... no idea what I'm going to do next," she murmured.
This was not an exaggeration.
—
"Don't trust them! They mean to kill us all!"
It had all happened in a flash. The Glanfathans had appeared out of nowhere, slaughtered the poor travelers, gutted Odema, and Heodan had thought himself Berath's for certain. But he'd hoped against hope that maybe, maybe someone would discover the grisly scene and come charging in to save the day. ...Preferably before he got his throat slit.
He had nearly cried out with relief when he saw Calisca step into the light before him, sword raised high. Almost hadn't noticed the woman at her side, before recognizing her as the sick passenger he'd sold a dagger to not 40 minutes prior. But when the stinking savage holding him hostage responded to the women's presence by pressing his blade to Heodan's throat, he'd been shocked to see that timid, sullen little orlan suddenly leap to his defense.
She had recognized them as Glanfathans, and she had been clever enough to try to mollify them by explicitly stating that they did not disturb the ruins. But her calls for amnesty had fallen on deaf ears, and Heodan had warned her as a last resort. Now the orlan woman stood stock still, her eyes darting around frantically as she puzzled over how best to proceed.
superstition– passionate– Galawain– belligerent–
Focus, please. She drew a deep, calming breath.
They won't be pacified by words alone, it seems. So... time to push our luck.
For a few terrifying moments, Heodan thought she might actually surrender her weapon trying to appease the madman. But instead she stepped forward, lowering her sabre but not relinquishing it. "Tell me, man of Eir Glanfath. Do you truly think your hunter god smiles upon your deeds?" She stared steadily into his eyes, her face an impassive mask. "Protecting these crumbling stones, long after their builders have been reclaimed by the Wheel... seems to run counter to Galawain's tenet of the young and strong overthrowing and replacing the old. Wouldn't you say?" Axa glanced at Heodan, a clear "I'm trying, please hang in there" in her wide, panicky eyes.
The axe at Heodan's throat shifted slightly, the man holding it leaning forward in his fervor to defend his beliefs. Heodan winced against the assault of the man's hot, stinking breath on his cheek, the roar of his raspy voice.
"You know nothing of our ways, estramor! My people have followed the Lord of Beasts for centuries, known of his sacred decrees for longer than your miserable bloodline has stood! Galawain charged my people with the sacred task of safeguarding–"
Oh, horseshit! Don't let him–
"You call this holy work?" Axa cried, gesturing at the bodies surrounding them. "Brutalizing innocent travelers to 'defend' an empty temple? If you believe that, you'd believe anything– anything so long as it allows you to kill who you please, no matter how helpless." Her eyes bore into the man, disgust and indignance plain on her face. "I see what you really are, coward."
It only lasted a second, but a second was all he needed. The Glanfathan faltered under the woman's verbal assault, and Heodan took full advantage, dropping out of his grip and falling into an evasive roll. He heard the warrior scream with fury, heard Calisca roar a ragged battle cry, heard the orlan woman start chanting...
And after the deed was done, before they could even catch their breath, the bîaŵac was upon them.
—
I know him.
She stood, but only just barely.
How do I know him?
Calisca and Heodan... did not stand. Would not stand again. That man, the masked man–
...He did this.
Oh gods. Oh fuck, I'm in trouble.
She stumbled over the ancient, uneven cobblestones, the fever and chills a distant memory. She could swear she heard voices, and telling them apart from her own jumbled, raving thoughts was becoming more and more difficult.
He did this, he killed them, just like he killed–
...like he
The ghostly image of a woman burning alive on a wooden stake sprung up in front of her, and the little woman fell to her knees, covering her face, screaming–
i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't i can't do this i can't take this please–
–but when she lowered her shaking hands again, she saw only the grass, the stones, the ruins. The pillar and the machine.
Axa made a sound she didn't have a name for, something between a sob and a scream and a bark of crazed laughter. She had honestly believed, when she had woken up this morning, that her life could not possibly get any worse.
...I have to get out of here.
The orlan rose to her feet, slowly, stumbling toward the dirt road leading into the open meadows beyond. The path away from this place.
But she couldn't help looking over her shoulder one last time. At the base of the pillar, where that man
–Are you ready, initiate–
had stood.
What has he done...? Axa clutched at her head, trembling all over. Her thoughts, it seemed, were still not entirely her own.
What has he done this time...?
She mumbled a prayer to Wael, too exhausted to think anymore, as she stumbled away from the ruins.
—
Notes:
I'd like to take this opportunity to thank the Pillars of Eternity Tumblr community. Without all of you out there creating and liking and reblogging each others' creations-- and mine!-- I never would have gotten the wherewithal to try this. I love you all very much <3
I'm interested in receiving feedback, so please feel free to comment/review/etc. Thank you for reading!
In case it's unclear: "Axa Mala" is pronounced roughly as, "AH-shuh MAH-luh."
Chapter 2: A Warm Welcome
Summary:
Axa meets the neighbors.
Chapter Text
—
Axa stood staring at the huge, gnarled tree. The bodies hanging from its deformed branches twisted lazily in the wind.
I'm... cursed.
She stood and stared, and tried to think of how she had gotten here. Surely there was some explanation. Surely it wasn't just because her luck was truly this bad. Unless... Shit, maybe she really did need to make a sacrifice to Rymrgand.
Maybe... maybe the town is cursed?
There had been a few kith in her travels so far who had seemed kind, pleasant, sound of mind. The man by the river outside of town, taking down his tent. He had been nice. Calisca, Heodan, Odema. But as soon as she'd stepped into Gilded Vale– no, as soon as she'd seen what she thought might be corpses hanging from an enormous dead tree as she approached the town's walls, she had felt all her hopes for a little more of that good Dyrwoodan hospitality fly straight off to Hel. The few townspeople she'd spotted on the way in either glared at her like she was a filthy dog that someone had let into their foyer, or didn't acknowledge her at all. And then the local lord's representative had introduced himself...
"By the gods, are you mad?? No wonder this town is in need of new settlers!" Axa spat, flinging her hand in front of her to gesture at the grisly display. "Half of the townsfolk are hanging from this... this monument to brutality, and the other half are slinking around like they're afraid–"
Urgeat cut her off. "Lord Raedric VII has made a sacred vow to his people, to Berath, and to himself: to safeguard his lands and his citizens against Waidwen's Legacy. This–" he gestured to the tree– "is his justice made manifest. If his methods are not to your liking, you are free to seek lodging elsewhere." He smiled a tight, smug smile. Stupid little orlan bitch. She wouldn't last very long here, not with a mouth like that on her.
"Now then, if I may..." He paused, daring her to interject again, but she stayed mercifully silent. "Our esteemed Lord has established some guidelines to prevent certain... undesirable elements from sullying the Vale with their maladies and perversions. So, we must make some inquiries before we can allow you to claim your new homestead." The tall, thin man adjusted his comically small spectacles. "First and foremost– have you ever conceived a Hollowborn child?"
She still barely knew what he'd meant by that. "Hollowborn." It wasn't a term she had heard before coming here, but she was starting to gather that it meant a kith child born without a soul. Axa had heard of soul illnesses, of course, but never anything like this Hollowborn business. She remembered Calisca talking about her pregnant sister, being worried for her, mentioning that people out here had been having trouble giving birth– but Axa hadn't expected to see people being hanged for it, like it was a crime to produce what was essentially a stillborn.
Of course, she hadn't said that to Urgeat. Instead she'd stood there, gaping at the sheer audacity of this rude, smug asshole, until her outrage burst through her verbal filter, shredding all pretense and politesse.
"What the fuck are you talking about?" Axa blurted, exasperated. She had had just about enough on this trip. She'd been banished from her home, crammed into a tiny wagon, beset upon by a bizarre illness, ambushed by murderous indigenes, almost killed by a bîaŵac, forced to watch as her traveling companions had had their souls rent from their flesh, afflicted by yet another bizarre illness, and she had had to hike for hours down dangerous roads full of bandits and hostile wildlife to get here. There was no fucking way she was going to allow some stuffed shirt to humiliate her with overly personal questions just so she could get some godsdamn rest and (hopefully) medical aid. "What business is it of yours if I've– do I look like I'm relocating with a child, you damned fool??"
Urgeat sneered. "Ah. I often forget you outsiders do not suffer this curse." He somehow managed to sound even more condescending as he explained, "A Hollowborn child– an infant born lacking a soul– is generally not brought along when one moves house. ... Unless one should find themselves in dire need of a doorstop, or a paperweight."
He couldn't help but relish the obvious discomfort he'd caused the little woman. Her haunted eyes, her disgusted scowl, her defensive posture– all signs that he was on the right track to getting her properly started here in Gilded Vale. Now, if she could learn to keep her little sewer of a mouth shut, maybe he could make a proper orlan of her. Why, if she were lucky, maybe she could be the new cook at the Hound! If she didn't get too much fur in the soup...
He opened his mouth to continue–
And then the bell had tolled, a harsh, booming tone that shook the earth beneath Axa's feet. She had almost screamed, but had managed to stop herself. Then it had tolled again, and she started hearing the other townspeople gasp and whisper amongst themselves.
Three tolls of the bell apparently indicated a death in the Raedric family, which itself indicated that Axa would not be seeing her new parcel of land tonight. Or anytime soon at all, in fact. Her cheeks flushed with anger as she remembered the smirk the magistrate wore as he told her.
"What... what does that mean? This doesn't change the offer, does it?" Axa's large violet eyes darted around, watching villagers react to the news. Ghostly apparitions still flitted in and out of her peripheral vision, making her stomach churn and twist with anxiety.
Urgeat sighed heavily. He did not have time for this pest and her idiotic questions, not now. "What it means," he hissed, "is that we in Gilded Vale have more important things to worry about than your lodging." The magistrate looked off into the distance, pensive and somber. "...Waidwen's Legacy has struck at the very heart of our community. We must redouble our efforts to appease Berath, lest we invite this curse to blight our Vale forevermore."
Axa stared in silence, reeling from the man's words. She felt her stomach drop, her legs get weak. This wasn't happening. She spoke slowly, deliberately, working as hard as her frazzled mind would allow to understand: "You mean to tell me that I came all this way... suffering misfortunes and malady the entire time... based on your lord's promise of a homestead... and he is now revoking that offer because his wife had a stillborn?"
"The offer has not been revoked as of yet," the magistrate declared, "however circumstances have changed. I will have a more... definitive answer for you once I have conferred with His Lordship. Until then, I suggest you seek shelter for the near future. The inn–" he extended a long, bony finger toward a tall, black-shingled building down the road– "should suffice for now." He turned away from her. "...Or you could sleep in a stable, for all I care."
And with that, the executor of Lord Raedric's benevolent will turned to follow his armed guards up the road toward Raedric's keep. "Wait. Wait!" The little woman clutched at her head, staggered after him. "You can't just... I'm– I ran into a bîaŵac on the way here and I'm ill–" She had been stretched to the very limit of her capacity for misfortune. She was on the verge of dropping to her knees and sobbing aloud, but her defiant need to deny this horrible man the satisfaction just barely kept her in check. Still, she trembled and twitched, her breath coming in shallow gasps. "Can you at least... at least tell me if there's anyone here who can help me?"
The bespectacled man stopped in his tracks, turned to her. A strange, cruel smirk spread across his face as he gestured toward the tree. "A bîaŵac? If what you say is true, then perhaps what you need is an animancer. Unfortunately, the only animancer in town isn't feeling very talkative just now." His gaunt, thin hand indicated an older woman hanging in the tree, a plump little dwarf, grotesquely bloated in death. "That is the fate that awaits those 'soul experts' who lie to our Lord." He paused, lowering his hand to his side, clenching it into a fist. "Who bring such unholy misfortune upon our Vale."
He had kept talking, sneering about adra pebbles and troll piss, vaguely threatening to have her killed, but Axa had been in another world. She'd finally reached the point where she was so angry, so exhausted, so terrified that if she allowed herself to feel it all, she would be annihilated in the maelstrom. So she had stood staring at the dead woman in the tree until the magistrate had had his fill of his own voice and, at long last, slunk away up the road with his toadies, back to his Lord's keep. And she had stood there a bit longer after he was gone, too, concentrating on slowing her breathing and gathering her thoughts.
...The inn. The inn. We can have a meal, and a smoke, and a prolonged, cathartic crying episode, but we have to make it to the inn first. The rest... the rest we'll think about when we've got a full belly and a night of sleep behind us. Come on, girl, let's get a move on.
She closed her eyes and took one last, long, deep breath.
The air stank of death and shit.
She gathered her resolve, forcing the miasma from her nostrils with a sigh, and started down the road toward the Black Hound Inn.
A villager, a well-built meadow folk man, raised his pipe in salute as she passed by, his blond beard framing his wry grin.
"Welcome to our lovely town."
Somehow, she found herself smiling back at him.
—
"Three tolls! Berath's eye, I knew them godsdamned soul butchers wouldn't be able to do shit!"
The burly folk man slammed his open palm against the tavern’s worn and splintered table, and his cohorts roared their agreement. Someone must be held responsible for this tragedy.
"It's all about coin to them! Vailian bastards, they'd sell their mothers for a pand!" His elven comrade slung her skinny arm around his shoulder in solidarity.
Another folk man leaned over the both of them, pointing aggressively. "Fuckin' all foreigners, is the problem. Thinkin' they can come in here and take what's ours, fool us, rob us, kill our kin–" He ranted at length, and before long he had the other two mesmerized, his anger and conviction contagious. They nodded eagerly along as he raved, shouting their approval here and there.
The rest of the patrons ignored them entirely or watched with bemused interest as the drunk trio worked themselves into a xenophobic fury. It was a common enough sight around here, especially as of late. As long as the malevolence stayed at words, it could be tolerated, and they hadn’t gotten violent. Again. Yet. Still, the patrons of the Black Hound watched, ready for anything.
"We oughta run 'em all out, or else put 'em to the sword– like we did the Eothasians! We don't need their meddling or their gods damn coin or their pity! Dyrwood for Dyrwoodans!!" He raised his hands in a show of triumph, his friends clapping and cheering him on.
"Fair 'n' fine figurin' there, if ye've shite fer brains."
All eyes in the tavern sought out the body behind the voice. And they found it pretty much instantly: the slender, quiet elf at the corner table. The foreigner, with the accent.
The evening had only just begun.
—
Chapter 3: At Your Service
Summary:
Axa goes against every instinct she has and makes a friend.
Chapter Text
—
One foot in front of the other, Axa. One step at a time.
The orlan woman walked slowly, deliberately, carefully making her way down the dirt and gravel path to the only inn in Gilded Vale. She kept her head down, eyes fixed on her boots and the road beneath them. If she saw one more person glare at her with open disdain, she feared she'd lose what remained of her tattered resolve and simply crumple to the ground, defeated.
And if you see one more phantasmal torture victim...
Yes. There was that to consider too. Although she hadn't seen any... apparitions manifest directly in front of her since she'd left the ruins, she still heard whispers just beyond the edge of her hearing, still saw flutters and flashes of movement in the corners of her eyes.
All the better to keep your eyes on your feet, then. Not much farther.
The inn was so close she could smell it. This spoke to the quality of the facility, but Axa was in no position to be choosy. She knew that she'd most likely be curling up on a hard wooden floor that night, but even so, the Black Hound Inn was the very, very last sanctuary she had. It was the only place she could turn to to keep from spending her first night in her new homeland sleeping on the street.
So of course there had to be yet another obstacle between her and her goal.
—
She heard them before she saw them: just outside the inn's doors, a group of four kith arguing loudly. She wanted to pretend the raised voices were simply another trick of her soulsick mind, but she knew they were too real, too distinct to be hallucinations. ...And none of the whispers she'd heard so far had called anyone a cocksucker like that.
Just relax. You don't need to get involved.
She reluctantly lifted her head and got visual confirmation: three clearly drunk people, two folk men and an elf woman, posturing and poking their fingers in the chest of one slightly smaller figure that was mostly obscured from Axa's view. She could see the other kith's raised hands and rounded shoulders, though.
Three against one? Mob justice seems to be the norm around here. She furrowed her brow.
...Something's not right.
"I do apologize, sincerely, for the misunderstanding." Axa's ears perked up. The target of the angry drunks was an Aedyran apparently, and a man. As she got closer, she subconsciously slowed her pace, trying to peer around the backs of the belligerent villagers to get a better look at the other foreigner without alerting anyone of her presence.
Yet.
Although his hood partially hid the characteristic long, pointed ears, she could tell well enough that he was an elf, and a somewhat younger one. His body language suggested that he knew he was in significant danger of bodily harm from these people, but his face wore a diplomatic smile. Unfortunately, his genteel mannerisms only seemed to be pissing off his aggressors further rather than placating them, and their flushed faces and clenched fists suggested that their patience for his attempts at a truce had been worn clean through.
He could see it too, but he was clearly out of options. He closed his eyes, pressed his hands together in front of his chest, bowed his head slightly in a show of submission. "W-why don't we... put this unfortunate matter to rest with a drink, yes? Ah... My treat, of course!"
"There he goes again, thinkin' he can buy us off." The elf woman spat at his feet, and her folk companions clapped her on the back, thrusted their chests out at the other man. "There's what we think of your fancy Aedyre coin, copperfucker!" The men with her barked their agreement, and the elven man shrunk back, obviously struggling to keep from panicking.
Axa gritted her teeth. Oh, fuck this. I've seen enough unfair fights to know where this is going, and I've had my fill of seeing dead people today. Besides, they're in my way. I'm getting involved.
"Excuse me."
Suddenly four pairs of eyes were fixed on the little redhead, three of them red and bleary with drink. Axa gazed evenly into each of them in turn, before gesturing to the building behind them. "This is the inn, right? I've only just arrived here–" here she looked pointedly at the Aedyran man for a second "–and I'm in need of shelter for the night."
The hayseed triumvirate took her in, scowling. "Just what we need," one of the men grunted, "another wiseass foreigner coming in here and mocking us to our face. You ought to mind your own business, girl, if you wanna stay in our town."
"If you wanna stay alive, you mean," the other man added, glaring at the hooded elf. "Unlike certain other guests around here who've worn out their welcome." Now all eyes were on the Aedyran again, who appeared to have been blindsided by Axa's interruption and was now staring in mute shock at his would-be assailant. "Go on," the folk man growled, advancing slightly toward the hooded elf. "Say it again. I want you to." The man grinned a predatory grin, feeling the tides of the argument shift in his favor again. By Magran, he'd stick this snobby little bastard for what he'd said.
Oh shit. Shit! Axa felt the shift too, knew she had to move, now, get between the two of them before it got violent–
"I dare you. I'm itching for an excuse–" he snarled, and before Axa could intervene, she saw the elf man... change.
His posture straightened, his lip curled, he angled his face down but his eyes up to glare defiantly at his adversary.
"Fye, yer itchin' fer th' kindlin' touch o' yer sister, ye coxfither!"
It was as though he'd been temporarily possessed, and the spirit was gone as quickly as it had come over him. As soon as the words were out of his mouth, his triumphant smirk melted into a horrified rictus, as though he had suddenly realized exactly what he'd said.
Axa was just as shocked as the three locals, and the four of them stared at him, stupefied into silence.
What the– was that Hylspeak??
It didn't last long. The drunks recovered quickly and screamed, incensed, wordless cries of rage that the Aedyran man could only cower in response to. "You son of a bitch, I'll cut that barrel-licking tongue right out of your cocksucking face–"
Axa had been too slow before, but she couldn't afford to make the same mistake twice. As the elf tried to insist they'd merely misheard him (a ridiculous suggestion– was he trying to bait them...?) she finally found her voice again.
"Stop." She kept her voice even and steady, but put a little extra force behind it as well, just to be certain she was heard. Chanter training coming in handy there, she thought as the drunks turned to her again, compelled just so by her intensity and timbre. Axa took a deep breath.
"Listen. I know you're angry. But anyone talking as big a talk as he is when they're this badly outnumbered is either out of their mind, or they know something you don't." Her gaze flitted between the three puffy red faces, looking for comprehension... and mercifully, finding it. She pressed on, encouraged: "Either way, it's probably wisest to just walk away. Look, he's even carrying a grimoire– he's probably a wizard. Wael knows what he's capable of! Right?"
She directed her gaze at the Aedyre man, now, and found him looking back at her. Their eyes met for only a second– and then he changed again, quickly casting a dangerous, aggressive look at the Dyrwoodans. "We've nye quarrel," he growled, before blinking rapidly and going pale again.
"He's not worth it," Axa added quickly, glaring at him out of the corner of her eye. Wael's bowels, is he trying to fuck this up? He glared back at her in response, as if to challenge her assessment of him.
"Fine," the taller of the two men hissed at last, his cohorts gawking at him in surprise. "But don't think this is over, outsider. You've got a lot to learn about Dyrwoodan hospitality. Watch your back around here."
He meant it to be threatening, and the elven man seemed thoroughly cowed. But now that she really looked at him, Axa couldn't help but see the blustering, drunken buffoon as anything but pitiable.
—
The three of them staggered away at last, and once she was sure they were alone, she turned to the hooded man. The final obstacle between me and that floor I'll be sleeping on tonight, she thought, planting her hands on her hips and hanging her head as he drew near. Hopefully he's easier to get rid of than those drunks were. Gods, that was bad...
"Well. That was not exactly how I'd hoped to meet the neighbors," the elf man sighed, his voice much calmer now that the danger had passed. He fidgeted with his hood, and Axa caught a glimpse of long, dark hair resting against the man's cheek. "I must extend my gratitude to you for your assistance with that... ah... awkward situation." He smiled politely down at her, and Axa shook her head.
"No need for thanks. Couldn't leave another kith outnumbered like that. Wasn't right." She spoke softly, but then shot him a look like a bolt of lightning between his eyes. "Could have done without the extremely blatant goading, though, friend."
The color drained from the man's face and his expression went slack for just a second, but he recovered quickly, laughing a nervous little laugh. "Ah... well, it's... that is, that... wasn't all exactly as it seemed, let me assure you." He paused, seeming to reconsider his words, and then he went ahead and just started over: "P-perhaps introductions are in order?" Here, he stood to his full height, crossed his arm over his chest, and bowed slightly at the waist, extending his other hand to the orlan. "Aloth Corfiser, at your service." His voice was smooth as silk, his movements measured and precise.
Oh gods, she thought, this lad's for real, is he? Axa felt simultaneously charmed and condescended to, a strange, unexpected smile spreading across her warm face. It doesn't help that he's pretty much exactly my type... for all the good "my type" has ever done me. She thrust her fuzzy hand into his, shaking it quickly. "Axa Mala, at yours. Now– care to explain what you think you're doing, going around cursing out drunk locals?"
The hooded man, Aloth, blinked at the little woman as he withdrew his hand, stammered an apology for dragging her into it, but Axa merely crossed her arms in front of her chest, narrowing her eyes. Thought that part of the conversation was over, did you? Sorry, friend. You're not that charming. She waited for his answer.
"As I said before, all that was just an extremely unfortunate misunderstanding. I... probably used a term that means something innocuous back home in the Cythwood– in Aedyr, I mean– but unbeknownst to me means something vulgar here. It's a distressingly common occurrence when one–"
"Are you trying to tell me it's an Aedyre custom to tell people to fuck their sister?" Axa cocked a burgundy eyebrow at him. "Because I'm pretty sure that's what you told that fellow."
The man's expression was neutral, but his face was a twitching, sweaty mess. "I... perhaps... both of you misheard. That must be it. Surely."
"Fye, yer itchin' fer th' kindlin' touch o' yer sister, ye coxfither," Axa stated, clearly and boldly, without emotion. "Isn't that what you said?"
And for a split second, he did it again. He changed. It was over almost before Axa had time to notice, but the elf was definitely having some sort of... emotional turmoil in the privacy of his mind, and his body reflected it. He twitched and spasmed, his shoulders locked. He bit his lip, hard, and the odd, impish grin he was wearing crumpled into a tightly forced smile.
"...I should speak more clearly, next time," he stated placidly, a vein bulging on his temple. "My apologies."
... Is he joking? Or mad? ...Or does he just think I'm remarkably stupid?
"What exactly are you doing in this backwater village anyway, wizard? You don't exactly look like a settler." Axa let her gaze wander over him. His clothes and armor were of fine quality, but just starting to fray from constant use. His face was angular and delicate, his skin smooth and clear, but dark circles were just beginning to form beneath his eyes. Whoever he was, he was clearly from money, maybe even nobility of some sort, but he seemed to be suffering a rough patch as of late.
"Begging your pardon, but neither do you," Aloth shot back, looking her up and down as well. "Nevertheless, I imagine we're both here for that exact reason– lured by cheap land offered by a desperate lord. In my case, my relocation was forced by opportunities for my chosen vocation– I trained as an arcane knight– being quite scarce in my homeland. So, I... sought a new beginning elsewhere." He smiled sympathetically. "A familiar story, I'm certain. You were told of the land offer being conditional on the good Lady Raedric's successful delivery, too, I suspect?"
Axa swallowed, remembering the smug, sneering magistrate. "Yes. Only after arriving, of course. I came here with a caravan that... we ran into some trouble near some ruins north of here, and I had to walk here alone, and he tells me to sleep in a stable..."
"Ruins? Engwithan ruins?" Aloth peered at her with interest, curiosity shining in his eyes. "...I've heard rumors about them, but never been near one, of course. Not when the Dyrwoodans would arrest you for trespassing and the Glanfathans would skip the formalities and execute you on sight."
Axa said nothing. She thought about Odema with his guts around his ankles. Calisca and Heodan limp on the ground.
"Tell me," Aloth murmured, leaning down towards the smaller kith. "What exactly did you find out there?"
For a moment, she wondered if she could just... not tell him. Not talk about it. She certainly had little desire to dwell on the events of the day, and even less desire to discuss them with a stranger. And he seemed to be educated well enough in etiquette and manners to leave the topic alone if she asked him to.
"A bîaŵac." She stared directly into his eyes as she said it, and he reacted as though she'd thrown a cold drink in his face.
Never could resist that urge to be dramatic, could we?
She instantly felt oddly ashamed of herself, and looked away from him, at the door to the inn. Gods she was tired. "Can we... continue this conversation somewhere else?"
He held the door to the tavern open for her. She appreciated that.
—
Chapter 4: Watcher
Summary:
Axa unwinds at the end of a long day and gets to know her new traveling companion. Absolutely nothing bad happens, at all.
Chapter Text
—
Aloth sat alone at a small table in the corner of the tavern, silently counting out rigid increments of time, one after another after another. It had been 26 minutes, 45 seconds since she'd gone upstairs to his room. Their room.
This was a mistake.
"Ye dinnae conne tha' yet, lad."
He scowled into his goblet of wine. "Do not tell me what I do and don't know, rube," he hissed.
He made sure to keep his head down, face lowered behind the pages of his grimoire. Lest this evening's incident repeat itself. Although, he doubted any more trouble now after his and Axa's entrance almost an hour ago.
The foreigner gets frog-marched out of the tavern by three soused churls, only to return scarcely fifteen minutes later with another foreigner, who then proceeds to order two bottles of wine and nothing else...
"I stell whisht ye'd 'ave lemme batter 'em."
Aloth rolled his eyes, lifting his goblet to his mouth. "Your preference has been duly noted," he deadpanned softly as he took a sip.
28 minutes and 50 seconds. They had agreed on 30.
...Maybe. Maybe this was a mistake.
—
She was alone.
She looked around slowly at her new surroundings. Someone else's room at a run-down country inn.
Better than a dirty wooden floor in the common room at a run-down country inn.
Alone. She hadn't really been alone, truly alone alone since–
–the Land, before he–
Axa strolled a bit too quickly across the room, threw herself into a sitting position at the foot of the enormous, lumpy bed. Her hands trembled. She willed them to stop.
Let's think about something else. Right now.
Thirty minutes. She had thirty minutes alone, and then her new traveling companion would rejoin her. They had managed to get a good rapport going once she had been able to sit and relax a bit in the tavern, and they'd shared their histories with one another, although they had kept it cordially laconic. She was a “disgraced scholar looking for a fresh start,” he was a “wizard from a noble family looking for a patron.” Good enough for me.
He surprised her by proposing they travel together, citing that he found traveling with companions tended to be safer by far, especially in the Dyrwood, and she had already proven herself resourceful and courteous. Axa surprised herself by accepting his proposal.
–another lying, flattering elven man? you foolish–
He had graciously suggested they share his rented room upstairs that night ("Meaning nothing untoward, of course," he'd added hastily, ears reddening) and had agreed to give her some time to herself before settling in for the night. The next morning, they would most likely start seriously planning to make for Defiance Bay, to look for lodging, paying work, and some sort of expert on souls. Camping supplies, food, water– all would be necessary for the trip, so doing some odd jobs in the village before setting out might not be a bad idea. Earn some coin, get to know the area, the customs.
Tell Calisca's sister about her death.
Axa paused.
She yanked her boots off of her aching feet and hurled them across the room as hard as she could in a flash of rage. The first tears hadn't fallen yet, but they were on their way.
...Ah. This part. Finally.
She rose to her feet unsteadily, pulling at her clothes. She didn’t have time for this crying shit, she had to get undressed, cleaned up, ready for bed. She was shaking too hard to get her belt undone or her scarf untangled, but she struggled with them until they were at least loose enough to pull her tunic up and off.
No. Go on. Let it happen. You need to feel this. You need to process it.
She clutched at her face, trembling harder, digging her fingernails into her flesh. Now the tears fell, hot and relentless, pouring down her burning cheeks.
Hey. You held on as long as you were able. Maintained yourself, your dignity and your sanity. But this was bound to happen eventually. You can let go.
She collapsed to the floor in her stocking feet and linen shift, curling up on her knees and elbows. Agonized wails tore out of her throat; great, heaving sobs that choked her, left her breathless and red-faced.
No one can hear you down there in the tavern, no one is judging you. Only the gods, and they don't count.
You're all alone, Axa.
She felt it.
—
32 minutes, 45 seconds.
Aloth clutched his empty goblet in his hand, knuckles white with tension. They had agreed on 30 minutes.
Maybe just... make it an even 35. Just in case.
"By th' Wheel, lad, quit yer ninnyin' an' gerrup them stairs. Am shattered."
The elf fidgeted in his seat, lowering his gaze to his lap. "I will, I will. I just... I'm not quite ready yet." He had been stalling, and he knew it.
"An' fer why I should haftae wait fer mah kip? 'Cos yer afeart o' th' wee lass?"
He gritted his teeth, grateful that only his half of the conversation was being spoken aloud this time. "I am not afraid of her," he whispered, slowly turning a page in his grimoire. 33 minutes, 50 seconds. "I just want to make absolutely certain that when I go up there, I'll have given her ample time to finish up any... personal rituals she might have wanted to attend to in solitude. It's common courtesy. Not that you'd know anything about that." He allowed himself a little smile at that, preparing to start to carefully and deliberately ease his grimoire closed. 34 minutes, 5 seconds. He could hold out for 35 even. Easily. He rose smoothly from the table, gliding out of his seat with practiced grace.
A harsh, braying cackle of a laugh. "If'n I conne ye true, lad, yer jes' sayin' yer afeart ye'll burst in oan 'er wi' 'er baps oot if'n ye're up too soon, aye?"
Aloth's fingers spasmed, and his heavy grimoire slipped from his hands, landing on the floor with a resounding thump that echoed in the half-empty tavern.
Every single remaining patron was looking at him.
He'd lost track of the time.
—
Oh shit. Oh fuck. Oh no.
Axa kneeled on the bed, brushing the red hot embers from the thick woolen blankets with her bare hands. She had somehow spilled her pipe while lighting it, and now it seemed she had this situation to deal with.
How had it come to this? She tried to remember. She'd had her cry. She'd laid on the floor for... a bit. She'd gotten up and washed her face and hands. She'd had her drink. Well, her second drink. The first one had been downstairs, with that elf. The weird one. Aloth. That was his name. She liked him.
...No! She'd tied up her hair. Then the second drink, the one she had up here. Then the third, the fifth, the fourth, then probably one or two more. She couldn't really remember. But anyway. Once she'd had her drinks, it was time for her smoke, and–
...Smoke. The pipe? The blanket– SMOKE!!!!
Axa discovered, to her dismay, that brushing the exact same spot on the blankets over and over while reminiscing about the events of the past half hour did not solve her problem in its entirety. The other clumps of smoldering whiteleaf strewn across the bed were quickly leaving hideous scars all over the already badly abused blankets, and she rushed to slap them out, wishing that she had tied back all of her hair and not just half of it for some reason.
Once she was sure she had gotten it all, she packed her pipe again– carefully this time– and stood in the middle of the room, smoking and assessing the damage.
Honestly... he might not even notice.
There was a knock at the door. She pretended not to hear it, smiling blithely at the rug.
"Axa? Forgive my tardiness, the time got away from me and– and I, uh–"
Aloth swung the door open slowly and gently. He was met with a view of the little orlan woman standing in the middle of his room in her chemise, clearly drunk, clutching a lit pipe and regarding the brand new, still-smoking holes in the blanket on his bed.
She looked at the blanket, looked at him, eyes wide and bloodshot– and exhaled a plume of smoke directly into Aloth's face.
He blinked rapidly.
"...Fit like, lass?"
—
He arranged some blankets and cushions for himself on the floor, even though she practically begged him to at least take the bed by way of a proper apology. He insisted, and she acquiesced, although not before expressly forbidding him from using the blanket she'd burned.
He lied when she asked if he minded her smoking, and she could tell he was lying, but she smoked until her pipe was burnt out anyway. It had been a hard night, and something told her sleep would not come easily.
"You always talk shit to people like that?" she asked, peering at his prone figure in the dark room. "In Hylspeak, I mean."
Aloth sighed, fidgeted in his bedding. "It's an old habit. From childhood."
"I see." Axa yawned and stretched, and he could hear her joints popping. "You might try to knock that on the head, friend. Or at least learn to insult these hayseeds in a language they don't sort of understand."
He couldn't help but chuckle at that. "Excellent suggestion. Any recommendations? I hear Rauataian is popular these days."
She grinned to herself in the dark. Still can't get a straight answer out of you about all that, eh? Good thing I'm too addled to care right now. "I could teach you Ixamitl. Little bit of Vailian."
"As long as you're a willing teacher, I'm a willing student."
"As long as we steer clear of Ordhjóma, I'm a willing teacher." Gods, she was drunk, telling him that.
He wanted to ask, but knew better. "Fair enough."
The pair fell silent, and they fell asleep.
—
Axa had expected a difficult night ahead of her. After all, she'd had a difficult day.
Exhaustion, wine, and whiteleaf put her body and waking mind to sleep easily enough, as they tended to do. But her subconscious mind was restless and turbulent, thoughts and memories and half-dreams all swirling together in a maelstrom of emotion, fear foremost among them.
Whispers. Shadows.
It was all... familiar, somehow. The more she looked, the more she saw, and the more she saw, the more she remembered.
The pillars. The machine.
Had she... been here before?
No. That wasn't possible. She'd only ever been to Ixamitl and the Land before this. She had never been to the Dyrwood, never–
–from Creitum, my dear?–
Axa thrashed violently in her bed. Sweat matted her fine, golden-bronze fur and her breath came in shuddering gasps. Her eyes snapped open–
–and she was standing in front of that tree again, the one in the middle of town. The corpse tree.
The corpses were all wrong. She knew for a fact that the blond fellow who'd smiled at her as she'd started off toward the inn earlier that day hadn't been hanging from it last she looked. But he was hanging there now, still smiling his lopsided smile, still clutching his pipe.
"Welcome to our lovely town." He said it, but he didn't. She didn't hear his voice, and his face didn't move. But she heard him, in her mind, somehow.
Is– is this what ciphers– oh, Wael's eyes, am I a cipher now or something?
Axa had no time to dwell on the thought as the monstrous tree slowly began to move, twisting around and down toward her, brilliant violet flames flickering to life all over its gore-caked branches. It loomed above her, below her, all around her, blocking out all light except for the sickly purple glow of the souls hanging from it like overripe fruit.
And front and center, mere feet from Axa's own face, hung the dwarf woman. The animancer that horrible magistrate had so crassly introduced as "an example of what happens to those who lie to our Lord."
Axa could only stare in abject terror as the woman's corpse noticed her.
It lifted its head, wrinkled and deflated like a gourd gone rotten, and stretched out its swollen, distended neck, pushing its maggot-ridden face to within inches of Axa's own. The head tilted to one side and blinked its empty eye sockets, and if she hadn't been on the very bleeding edge of a complete nervous breakdown, Axa might have noticed it smile gently.
The corpse's mouth opened wide before Axa's quivering eyes, blasting her with a wave of rotting stench that threatened to overwhelm the little woman entirely. She didn't know how much more of this she could bear, but at the same time, she couldn't look away. This was, she somehow instinctively knew, far too important a message to look away from.
The dwarf's corpse, like the blond man's, spoke directly to Axa's mind. But it spoke aloud at the same time, evidently to ensure that her message made it through any and all defenses the orlan woman could offer up, whether mental or physical. The corpse's rancid breath, its voice like a dull blade drawn across a gravestone, her essence, all issued forth to assault and cradle and engulf Axa, all focused on the conveyance of one word:
"WATCHER."
—
Her eyes snapped open for real, this time.
A multitude of glowing purple figures stood over her, watching her as she lay defenseless in the dark.
She screamed, a shrill, panicked howl of pure terror. She flailed desperately to escape, and ended up landing painfully on the floor face-first before scrabbling madly for the corner.
Aloth was up in an instant, groping for his grimoire, clambering to his feet in a panic. "What's– Axa?" The elf stumbled toward the cowering woman in the muddled pre-dawn light, reaching toward her with an open hand. "Axa? Are you alright? What's going on, did–"
She shrieked, throwing her arms up in front of her, shielding herself from him, from them, pushing herself against the wall with her trembling legs. "DON'T!! DON'T TOUCH ME!!"
Aloth did not. Instead, he froze– then very slowly drew back, clutching his grimoire in front of his chest with both hands, trying to ignore the little woman as she shook and sobbed, face hidden in her hands.
I... shouldn't be seeing this. This isn’t right. I shouldn't be here. This is something private, and I'm intruding, and... He sighed, lowering his gaze to the floor, his ears drooping.
...This was a mistake. I should... I should tell her I can't–
"I want to go to that tree again."
Aloth snapped his attention back to Axa. She was still in the corner, sitting with her knees drawn to her chest, but her face peered out from beneath her curtain of crimson hair.
The apparitions were gone. "I want to see her. The dwarf in the tree. I have to see her."
Her amethyst eyes fixed themselves on his.
"Will you go with me?" Tears trembled on her eyelashes, but her voice was steady and strong.
"...Certainly," he replied softly.
—
Chapter 5: Home and Hearth
Summary:
Home is where the heart is. But what is "home" when its heart has been torn out?
Chapter Text
—
Edér wondered sometimes just how long it would take his hometown to finally die.
It reminded him of this dog he used to know when he was a kid, a sweet old hound dog called Tibbeth. She was the Rask's dog, but the whole town knew her, cared for her, fed her scraps. Everyone loved that dog. By the time Edér was old enough to make lasting memories, she was reaching the end of her breeding years, and she only mellowed out further with each year that passed. He remembered her fondly from his childhood: Tibby making him late for dawn church service because she sat on his feet and wouldn't stop giving him Sad Eyes till he rubbed her tummy. Tibby wandering between two arguing friends and licking herself so ostentatiously that the argument was completely forgotten, ending in peals of laughter instead of fisticuffs.
But as he grew into an adolescent, Tibby grew elderly and decrepit. Her teeth and fur fell out. She limped. Her scat was watery and thin, and she tended to let it fall wherever she stood. Her belly distended, and she started getting mean and lashing out at those who tried to touch her, tried to help her.
He had known there was something growing inside of her that was hurting her, and what was worse, he had known that there was nothing anyone could do to help her. But to Edér, the worst thought of all was that she was still in there under it all. Under all the pain and fear, sweet old Tibby was still in there wanting nothing but belly rubs and bits of ham from your plate. It was the sickness made her snap at you, made her shit all over herself and struggle and scream while you tried to clean her up. Made her scared.
And it was this sickness that made his hometown like this, now. And just like with Tibby, there was nothing he could do to help. No way to excise the tumor. His gaze wandered to the corpse-strewn monster of a tree nearby. Nothing left to do but end it mercifully.
But he hadn't even had it in him to watch as Tibby was put down all those years ago. She had scratched and bitten the Gyrning's baby girl, and even though she was old and half toothless, she did enough damage to scar the child for life. He had run away back then, hiding the tears he had been getting too old to shed so freely anymore.
He sighed heavily, barely squinting against the feeble morning sunlight as he gazed out over the only home he had ever known.
"We're both gettin' too old for this, ain't we?" Edér murmured.
Gilded Vale did not answer him.
The hairs on the back of his neck suddenly stood on end, and he turned slowly, carefully, to look at the tree again. He wasn't alone.
—
The rest of the morning hadn't gone so badly.
She'd suffered a nightmare, she'd explained, and the strange hallucinations she'd told him about before had decided to manifest at the worst possible time: exactly when she had woken up. Hence the... episode she'd had. Understandable, given the circumstances.
Unfortunately, she did still want to go back to that tree. "For closure," she'd pleaded. "It'll only take a moment, I promise you."
They had dressed and packed their meager belongings in awkward silence, making it all the way downstairs to a table with their bowls of tepid porridge in hand before she had spoken up again.
"I'm sorry," she'd stated, stirring the beige mess in her bowl with all the enthusiasm of a prisoner fastening her own noose. "That was probably a... distinctly unpleasant experience for you. And this little detour probably will be, too. ...Please know that I truly appreciate your agreeing to accompany me nonetheless."
She sounded as though she'd been planning this apology all morning, phrasing and rephrasing it in her head until she could strike a palatable balance between being honest with him and maintaining etiquette. Aloth had accepted without hesitation, of course. He had almost apologized to her himself in return, for perhaps having seen... more than she may have wanted a near-stranger to see, but he had thought better of it and remained silent instead. He hadn't wanted to embarrass her by bringing up her strange behavior again. She seemed to appreciate it.
And now he was standing a few paces behind her in the center of town as she stared at a dead woman in a tree.
They had been standing there for fifteen minutes.
"She's aff 'er heed, lad."
"Nobody asked you," he sighed through gritted teeth.
—
Axa regarded the new, dark world in which she found herself with fear and wonder. She had expected to see the dead woman, feel a little foolish, and then set off on the road. She had not been expecting this at all.
Caldara de Berranzi's soul looked back at her, smiling a gentle, motherly smile.
"What is this?" She said it, but she didn't, just like in her dream. "What's happened to me?"
And the animancer responded in the same fashion. "Poor thing! You must be so confused. The world is a baffling place, and the world beyond the Shroud even more so. But that world is yours now, too, to bear witness to."
"I don't understand," Axa whimpered. She really, really didn't. She didn't even know if this was really happening.
The dwarven woman's soul smiled sadly at the little orlan, tsked in sympathy. "I know you don't, dear. It's a lot to take in. Here, let me put it this way: Whatever happened to you, it freed your soul from your body, but not all the way. You were pulled into this world–" The dwarf gestured at the swirling morass of essence and void around them– "the In-Between of Life and Death. But! You must have only been here for an instant. Any longer, and you'd have ended up staying here, like me." Caldara gestured at herself, a bloated corpse dangling from a tree, with a sweet little chuckle.
"Your soul remembers, though. Remembers even after it returns to your body. Remembers how it sees in this world. Souls, their histories, their memories, their paths through the In-Between. All are yours to observe." The animancer nodded sagely.
"You are a Watcher, now," she chirped, "and a Watcher you will stay."
Axa blinked. Watcher. The word from her dream.
"I... I don't know what that means at all."
Caldara sighed softly. "Oh dear, oh dear. Make yourself comfortable, aimoranet. We have a lot more talking to do."
—
Aloth was starting to feel uneasy.
It had been just over 20 minutes now, and Axa still stood in the same spot, mesmerized by the dead animancer. They were drawing curious stares from townsfolk as they passed by, and he was getting nervous about what might happen– what might come out of his mouth– should one of them try to start something.
He glanced around furtively, his open grimoire like a leaden weight in his hands, searching for anything to focus on besides the fact that he'd apparently elected to travel with this woman. A blond man with a pipe, leaning casually against a collapsed wall some distance away, cocked an eyebrow at him. The message was completely unspoken, but easily understood. "Uh, your friend okay there?"
He shot back a look that he hoped said both "Mind your own business, please" and "I have absolutely no idea why she's doing this," somehow.
The man with the pipe shrugged, glanced up at the dead dwarf, then turned away. Aloth took the opportunity to study him a bit further, recognizing him vaguely from his time in town. He'd seen this man around, although not as much in recent weeks. He was vaguely aware of the Vale's day-to-day goings-on, and he seemed to recall seeing less of this particular face around the same time the local lord strung up his latest hapless victim in this gruesome abomination of a tree. Aloth tried to remember exactly who that victim had been...
...before noticing, with a start, that Axa had moved. She'd snapped out of whatever strange fugue state had taken hold of her and she stood before him now, looking for all the world like a child woken prematurely from a nap: confused, angry, morose.
He proceeded extremely cautiously. "Axa? Are you alright?" He leaned a bit closer for privacy's sake. "You seemed... a bit lost, there." For almost half an hour.
Either she didn't notice his attempt at discretion or she didn't care. "According to that dead woman," she blurted, "I'm a Watcher."
He felt his eyebrows leap up to his hairline. "Oh. Well. That... explains a lot, actually."
—
Edér had watched the elf and the orlan the entire time they stood before the tree.
The elf he'd seen around town here and there recently, but he'd never interacted with the man. Of course, he'd heard others talking about him, saying all kinds of things: a haughty foreigner who thinks he can bring his high-falutin' Aedyran ass here and piss on our hospitality. But given the usual kind of horseshit his fellow townsfolk usually spewed these days, he didn't put much merit in what they had to say. At least he tended to mind his own business.
The orlan had just arrived the previous day, and when he saw Raedric's henchman approach her, he'd actually tensed up, preparing for a fight. With everything he'd heard about orlans, he was half expecting her to pull a knife, or maybe even whisper some sort of cipher magic. But instead she'd just shouted at Urgeat, mad as Hel and rightfully so. Edér had been unable to stop himself smiling at the look on the magistrate's pinched-up little asshole of a face.
Then the bell had tolled, and suddenly everyone in town had bigger issues to deal with. She'd looked positively miserable as she'd trudged past him on the way to the Black Hound Inn.
Look at that, he'd thought, watching her plod slowly forward. Practically one of us already.
She'd met his eye for a moment, and he'd raised his pipe to her in a commiserative gesture. "Welcome to our lovely town," he'd quipped. And she had smiled at him in response, even after all that abuse she'd just had to take from Urgeat.
Maybe that was why he'd decided to say something when she passed him again. She didn't look to be in any higher spirits than she had when he'd said something before, but she had smiled at him back then, so what was the worst that could happen this time?
"Seventeen-and-a-half," he called out to her, and grinned. She's a little kith, maybe she'll like this one.
She and the elf turned to him, both of them wearing facial expressions similar to ones they might have had he catcalled them in an especially vulgar manner.
...Off to a great start, Edér thought. Nothing to do but press on.
"Eighteen dependin' on if you count the dwarf woman as a full person or not. ...I think you oughtta."
She approached him then, slowly, scrutinizing him with her eerie slitted pupils, while the elven man followed behind her. "You're saying there are eighteen people hanging in that tree?"
"Last I counted. You mean to tell me you were standin' there that whole time and you wasn't even counting 'em?"
Her cheeks brightened, and she turned to the elf. "Aloth? How long was I– were we standing there like that?"
The elf, Aloth apparently, winced apologetically at the little woman. "Oh, only about... about twenty minutes. Ish."
The orlan huffed out something between a laugh and a cough. "Only twenty minutes!" She shook her head, grinning, hands on her hips. "Excellent. I was worried I looked like a weird asshole for a minute there."
Edér laughed aloud at last, and held out his hand in greeting. "Edér Teylecg. Although y' may as well just call me Nineteen."
"Axa Mala." He felt soft, fine fur in his hand when she shook it, and with it an extremely confusing mix of emotions. The elf behind her introduced himself as well, as Aloth Corfiser, before she continued. "Nineteen, huh. You mean to say you think you're next?"
Edér smiled sadly, looking up at his friends and neighbors in the tree. "May as well be. Eighteen's my former captain in the war. Was my headman on the farm till Raedric put 'im up there for darin' to stand up for us. For me." He squinted back down at the little woman, clenching his pipe between his teeth. "Bein' honest though, way you were carryin' on with the magistrate the other day, I can't see you makin' it much further than, oh, 22, 23, tops. You seem like the sort of lady likes t' get involved."
She really did, too. For the first time since they'd started talking, her gaze met his, and the intensity of her bright violet eyes almost made him want to look away. Not quite. But almost.
She had a strange, guarded look on her face as she peered up at him. "Do you know what a Watcher is?"
Edér choked on his pipe smoke. This little gal was full of surprises.
—
"Caed Nua, huh? ...Haven't thought about that old place in a long time. Man such as Maerwald, there might be things I wanna ask him. Don't know why I never thought of that."
Obscured One, you have truly outdone yourself this time, Axa mused, a slow smile spreading across her face. This was what she'd been missing after her expulsion: A mission, a purpose, a destination in life.
I was ready to die, and you gave me this gift: an absolutely insane convoluted nightmare scenario, compelling me to try to make sense of it... and in doing so, requiring me to stay alive. I am truly grateful. She closed one eye, sending her prayer to Wael.
It was remarkable how much better she felt just knowing what was wrong with her, having a name for it. Watcher. The knowledge presented new challenges, certainly, but at least now she knew what she was up against. And she even had a tangible, short-term goal in mind:
Get to Caed Nua. Find the Watcher, Maerwald.
The blond folk, Edér, scratched his bristly beard while he thought about her offer. But she could tell he'd already made up his mind. This couldn't go any other way. She'd seen him in her dream, alongside Caldara. A clear sign! This was meant to be!
...Okay, maybe she was taking it a bit too far there.
"I dunno about settin' out with a couple of strangers. Strange strangers at that." He glanced at Aloth and grinned apologetically. "No offense, cousin."
"I'll vouch for him," Axa smiled, stretching, preparing for the work ahead of her. "It's me you have to watch out for."
Aloth shrugged. "Either way, you're probably better off out there with us than here, being sized up for a noose by every other neighbor."
"Can't argue with that. Aw, what the Hel. Sure, I'll do some sightseeing with you folks." Edér grinned at the two of them, his broad, ruddy face brightening considerably. "Where's our first stop on this little roadtrip? We're buyin' supplies, I suppose?"
Axa winced, clutching at her sad, barren little coinpurse. "Uh. Listen... About that–"
—
Chapter 6: Bonding
Summary:
Edér and Aloth talk about Axa behind her back.
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
—
"She's the real thing, isn't she?"
Aloth looked up from his grimoire at the blond man, startled. Until now, Edér had seemed content to ignore him for the most part, more interested in discussing recent Dyrwoodan history and Eothasian theology with their orlan directress. Not that Aloth minded. After all, the less attention drawn to himself, the better. And it was always a boon to be up to date on current events. And to practice his eavesdropping.
But now that Axa had excused herself from their campsite temporarily (sardonically citing "urgent business" to attend to in the bushes), the folk man turned his attention to Aloth. He thrust his bristly, blond chin toward the scrub brush nearby, gesturing into the darkness beyond the campfire, where Axa had walked off a few minutes prior.
"That girl's really a Watcher." He shook his head, his expression filled with wonder. "I was maybe expectin' a cipher with an inflated ego at best. But far as I can tell, she's bonafide."
"It would appear so," Aloth replied after a beat, remaining as carefully neutral as he could. "I must admit, I had my doubts at first. Even suspicions– albeit slight– that she may simply be losing her mind, hallucinating and so forth. But the more we see her use her... unique abilities, the more her assertions are corroborated by the real world, the more undeniable the truth becomes: she is a Watcher."
Edér smiled crookedly at the elf, eyeing him curiously. "...Right. That's, uh, what I meant, more or less."
Ye sound a right fuckin' twat, lad.
Aloth bit the inside of his mouth until he tasted blood.
An awkward silence descended over the two men, Edér propping his chin on his fist and gazing into the fire, lost in thought. Aloth stared into his open grimoire, but found he could not focus to read.
"I knew somethin' was up with Perly and Ingroed. And Nonton," Edér murmured, shaking his head and furrowing his brow. "Just couldn't quite figure out what. But the temple..." He sighed, heavy with melancholy. "Black bones, what a mess. Wish someone like her'd have showed up a few weeks back. ...Few years back."
And although Aloth knew he should at least try to be amicable, he found himself too consumed by his own thoughts to engage the farmer further. Instead, he politely pretended to listen while he ruminated over the day's events.
—
It had started with a few simple tasks. Edér had led the three of them around town, asking if any favors needed doing in exchange for coin and supplies to get to Caed Nua. The villagers seemed surprised and delighted to actually have help with their problems for once, and the three of them had taken to their work with vigor, reuniting a stolen shipment with the town blacksmith and the inn's cook with his stove and cauldron in a single afternoon. They had been on their way back to town yet again, spirits high, when Axa had remembered the hunter she'd met the other day, the bear who'd killed his companion.
"What do you think, lads?" she'd asked, hands on her hips as she stared into the mouth of the cave. "Shall we nip this one in the bud?" She had turned to Edér, her expression cautious and grave. "It killed your neighbor, Edér. How long before it happens again?"
The three kith had come to a consensus quickly, and advanced upon the bear's den, weapons drawn. The beast was slain easily enough, and Edér identified the kith body in the cave as that of his neighbor, Perly. But of course it wasn't as simple as all that.
Aloth had seen her first, had had to elbow Edér in the side to get him to take notice. Just like before, at the tree, Axa had stood above the dead man in the cave, transfixed by something invisible to her two companions. They had traded concerned looks briefly before turning their attention back to her, waiting for the little woman's episode to end.
Thankfully, it didn't last nearly as long as the one before had, but when she snapped back to awareness and turned to face them, Aloth had felt his heart dip into his stomach. She looked like a woman just told about her husband's infidelity. So much for high spirits.
"We're heading back into town, now," she'd said quietly. "Edér. Tell me everything you know about Nonton, Ingroed, and Perly."
He did.
—
And then... she had let them go.
Honestly, that was what had surprised Edér the most: despite her quick temper and no-nonsense attitude, she was remarkably softhearted when the situation allowed. She had showed little hesitation dispatching other kith, as he had observed during their skirmishes with bandits. But when she'd pressed the couple of conspirators, they'd confessed, and when they'd explained, she'd listened.
When they'd asked her to accept their meager savings in exchange for her silence, she'd pushed the coinpurse away. "No. No one should have to live in fear like that," she'd declared, her gaze fixed on the fading bruise on the woman's face. "...And everyone deserves a second chance. You take that coin and start your lives anew."
Edér couldn't remember the last time he'd seen anyone in Gilded Vale shed tears of joy, and the memory of Ingroed wiping her tears away as she followed Nonton brought a slight smile to his lips even now as he stared into the fire.
A memory of Elafa brushed against his thoughts, but only for a second.
"Well... I have always heard that orlans are intense and emotional. And that's exactly how I'd describe her. Just... not in the way I expected, I guess." The folk man could tell Aloth had only been half listening, but he'd pressed on anyway, talking as much to himself as to the elf. "She even stayed her hand against Wirtan, after what he did. Don't know if I could, if it'd just been me there with him alone. She ain't from Gilded Vale, though, of course. So... maybe it's just me."
Now Edér fell suddenly silent, and Aloth glanced up at him. Wirtan. The priests in the cellar. He shuddered, and felt a pang of sympathy for the Eothasian across from him.
And she not only stayed her hand. She let him go, too.
—
"You lied to me, Wirtan."
The gaunt, wiry man had squirmed under Axa's scrutiny, trembled and stammered as he explained himself. She was at least two heads shorter than him, but her fervor, her quiet, indignant fury had had the same effect as though she had towered over him.
But then, the desiccated corpses strapped to her back– that she'd insisted on carrying back herself– lent her a certain authority, too.
Once again, she did not come out swinging, the way your typical Dyrwoodan might. She'd asked him why he did what he had done, and she had listened. And he'd told her everything: how he'd tried to warn them, how he'd tried to help them hide. How he'd abandoned them to their fate, terrified of his Lord's retribution.
"So you killed them," Edér had snarled. "Or you may as well have. You never thought to tell anyone? Try to get some folks together to save 'em?"
"Sure, and get the whole lot of us executed," Wirtan had snapped back, clutching at his bloody wound and glowering at the Eothasian. "I'm sure the Scattered God would love yet another martyr."
"At least then you could have died with some honor left to your name," Edér had retorted hotly, "instead of having to live as the murderin' coward you are–"
"Edér. Please."
She'd turned toward him, her hand raised in a bid for peace, and everyone had looked to her, awaiting her judgment.
"He's right, Wirtan. You are a coward. But... lesser circumstances have made cowards of stronger kith than you. And you cannot undo what you've done, now."
She'd forced the bundled remains of the priests into his arms, looking hard into his eyes.
"The question that remains isn't whether you can make it up to them. You can't. The question that remains is: can you do right by them the best you're able to now? Can you live a better life, be a better man than you've been?"
He could try.
—
Bold, blunt, irascible. Not fond of liars. But... conscionable. Kind at heart, quick to forgive. Aloth was starting to notice a pattern in the little woman's behavior, one that might prove very beneficial to him.
Sure, she were tailor-made fer ye, laddie! Now see if she fits in yer lap nice 'n snug–
He slapped himself in the face, drawing an odd look from Edér.
"Damned horseflies." Aloth smiled blithely back at him, and the farmer cocked an eyebrow, but said nothing, turning his attention back to the campfire.
Yes. After all he'd seen, after his careful deliberations, this arrangement, Aloth had decided, was his best prospect: following a stranger to a castle because she could talk to the dead. It felt like a bad joke, but then, so did most of his life when he really thought about it.
And if she can lead me to some sort of punchline without managing to get me killed, I'll be better off than I was when she found me. He could feel his conviction solidify in his chest, in his stomach. They would reach Caed Nua tomorrow afternoon, and then–
"Think Maerwald'll know what t' do for us?" Aloth jumped a bit at Edér's voice. "I haven't heard any news out of Caed Nua in, oh, years. Don't even really know if he's still there."
The elf gave the folk a polite smile. "I certainly hope so. Otherwise, we might be in for some difficult nights. I've been informed of– and witnessed first-hand– the difficulties Watchers sometimes have sleeping."
He looked at the wizard as if for the first time. "Y' know," Edér murmured, "I never even considered I'd still be followin' her after we met up with Maerwald. But now that I think of it–"
"You'll not be rid of me that easily, I'm afraid." Axa's reappearance was sudden, but not startling. Chanter training, Aloth imagined, easing the surprise with her soft, dulcet tones while still ensuring she was heard. "But I promise to try to keep my nightmares to a minimum."
The farmer grinned broadly at the little woman. "There y'are. Nightmares, huh? I been there."
Goan, lad, ask 'er dae she e'er dream o' bouncin' li'e a coney in a elf lad's arms–
"Shut up," he hissed, turning his quickly reddening face away from the orlan, realizing his error when he saw Edér's dumbstruck expression.
Axa's voice was soft and low and even. "...Sorry, come again?"
—
Notes:
For some fun insight into Iselmyr's last comment, look up the etymology of the word "coney" ♡
Chapter 7: Crumbling Castle
Summary:
A dubious honor, inheriting a fortress both broken and cursed.
Chapter Text
—
Caed Nua stood, a mossy, neglected tombstone hunching above the sprawling, untamed foliage of the Yenwood. Its once mighty towers rose from the center of the ruined castle, climbing only midway to the sky before succumbing to gravity and the ravages of age. The walls surrounding the estate slumped and buckled as well, having sloughed away in places to reveal the overgrown bailey and the collapsed, rotting buildings therein.
Axa let her eyes wander over the derelict keep.
"What a shithole," she muttered.
Her flippant words did little to mask her disappointment, and although Aloth noticed this, he decided to say nothing. Anything he said would probably only make her feel worse, seeing as he was now almost utterly certain that if she was– if they were to find anyone to advise on matters of the soul, it would not be here, in this place seemingly forsaken by kith. But he also knew by now that trying to deter the little woman from her goals was nigh impossible, so he trailed doggedly behind her, scepter and grimoire at the ready. After all, it wasn't as though he had any more promising leads to follow, and what she lacked in subtlety she more than made up for in determination. A disposition which with I am most certainly well acquainted, he thought bitterly, the resulting headache quite worth the barb.
Edér, either out of ignorance of Axa's true emotional state or in a good-natured attempt to lighten the mood, took a different approach and tried to joke with her, remarking aloud on the poor quality of Maerwald's gardeners. But he'd scarcely gotten the words out when the orlan gesticulated fiercely to him for silence, pivoting her long, tapered ears over to her left and listening intently. It wasn't long before her companions heard it too– a low, steady humming coming from just beyond the bridge before them, behind the overgrown hedge, right outside of the walls of Caed Nua.
"Oh, good. We're not alone," Aloth whispered, reaching for his grimoire.
"This trip just keeps gettin' better," Edér sighed, drawing his blade.
Axa squinted in the direction of the humming noise, and a strange grin slowly spread across her flaxen face.
"...Is that Sea of Miracles?"
And she marched off confidently toward the moldy castle walls, her companions scrambling to keep up.
—
"Refrain of the Soul, actually," the gigantic man replied, his pointed teeth bared in a friendly smile. "But you were close! Both ballads were composed by the selfsame skald–"
"Uwēno the Elder!" Axa laughed, clapping her hands together. "Of course! And in the same year, if I remember correctly."
Aloth watched the two bards, utterly bemused. No matter how he tried to prepare himself for what might come, the world always managed to defy his expectations in the most bizarre ways. After they'd heard deep, tremulous murmurs in these abandoned ruins, he'd been sure he'd spend the next half hour hurling arcane flame at hostile spirits or hungry wildlife, or maybe even bandits or cultists. Instead, he had found himself awkwardly fumbling to secure his weapons, trailing after Axa while she strode directly to the source of the noise: an enormous, very amicable aumaua man with whom she was now excitedly chattering about ancient Rauataian songstresses. After the surprise had worn off, he was obliged to wait quietly while they talked, feeling oddly like a petulant child waiting for his mother to finish speaking with another adult.
Glancing over at Edér, who looked as though he hadn't a thought in his head, Aloth felt a mild twinge of envy.
The farmer grinned back at the elf, content to idle for a few pleasant moments while the large shark man and the tiny cat lady laughed together at jokes he couldn't even begin to understand. Honestly, he was just happy to see the poor girl relaxed and in her element, for once. And they hadn't had to fight any screaming monsters! ...Yet.
"Kana Rua," the giant boomed, bending slightly at the waist to extend his hand to Axa, "of the royal city of Tâkowa and her esteemed lore college. Are you, perchance, here to see Maerwald? I assume you haven't come all this way to discuss music history with strangers!" His dark eyes, wide with curiosity, shifted to the other two men. "And with a retinue, no less!"
"Axa Mala," the little woman chuckled, "and my traveling companions, Aloth Corfiser and Edér Teylecg. We are indeed here for Maerwald's counsel. I'm a Watcher, it seems, and I'm hoping he can offer some insight into our shared condition. And yourself?"
Both Kana's eyes and his smile had grown steadily as she spoke. "You're a Watcher? Truly? ...Well, I'm afraid my own reasons for seeking Maerwald aren't nearly so extraordinary. I was hoping he could direct me to a tablet of great historical and cultural import to my people, the Tanvii ora Toha. Only... I've had some difficulties in actually getting near the place."
He winced in the direction of the stone archway leading past the walls of Caed Nua and into its wild, unkempt yard. They couldn't see the dark spirits beyond the castle gate, but they didn't need to. All four kith could feel the dark spirits' presence, falling silent for a moment as the malevolent essence in the air prickled and picked at the edges of their souls.
"To meet the master of the estate, it seems one must first neutralize his spectral visitants, or else find a way around them. I'm... afraid I haven't had much luck at either by myself."
"Ah," Edér groaned, feeling his bowels churn with the sick, primal fear spirits always instilled in him. "There's that fight I knew was gonna happen."
"But this is a magnificently serendipitous encounter!" Kana grinned again, bigger and brighter than the sun, spreading his arms before the group as though to embrace all of them just for being there. "I was planning to finish jotting down these notes, set up camp for the evening, and simply trek to the nearest village tomorrow to hire a helping hand. But since we've the same goal, and you all look quite capable–"
"A collaborative effort?" Axa finished for him, stepping closer to the huge man. "I'm all for it, as long as there are no objections." The orlan glanced back at her companions.
"You'll hear no dissent from me."
"Hey, the more the merrier."
The little woman turned back to the aumaua with a wink. "That settles it, then! Welcome to my retinue, Kana Rua. With you at our shoulders, we ought to make short work of these ghastlies."
His already broad smile broadened ever further. "And we shall hold conference with Maerwald before sundown! I'm certain of it!"
—
Soldier and marauder. Soldier and marauder and Maerwald.
At sundown, they finished burying the keep's former master.
Axa gazed out over the bailey– her bailey, this was her keep now (??!!)– at the freshly filled grave next to the chapel. Her thoughts buzzed frantically like a swarm of panicked hornets behind her eyes, and she couldn't focus on a single thought long enough to make sense of any one of them.
No sleep. No sleep for the Watcher.
"I think... I'm going slightly mad."
Edér frowned sympathetically, placed a heavy, calloused hand on the little woman's shoulder. "Hey, c'mon. It ain't as bad as all that, is it?" He'd done most of the digging, being more acquainted with the work than anyone else, and his hand left a sizable smudge of grave dirt on her tunic.
She didn't look at him. "I'm going to go completely mad. I'm a Watcher, and I'm Awakened, and there's some sort of Woedican cult behind it, and if I can't find them, or if they can't undo this, then I'm going to lose my mind and die. Just like him." To her mild surprise, no tears welled in her eyes or spilled down her cheeks. Although her eyes felt hot and swollen, she supposed she was simply too overwhelmed, too exhausted to cry anymore.
Kana, eye level with the woman as she leaned against the adra pillar under which he was seated, studied her face while he considered his approach. "Well... if it's of any comfort to you, you at least know what to expect in regards to your condition. You know where you're going next, you've an entire keep to set yourself up in while you search." That gregarious smile opened up his face again. "And you've a band of loyal flunkies at your beck and call!"
"And a magic talkin' stone chair lady t' take care of most of the housekeeping for you." Edér grinned down at her, brushing the dirt from her shoulder with a casual familiarity. "All things considered, you got dealt a bad hand, but at least, uh… the deck is lookin' like it's stacked in yer favor?"
Axa pricked up her ears, and turned to regard the blond man with a mix of wonder and disgust. "...I don't know if that's the best or the worst mixed metaphor I've ever heard."
He chuckled as he stuck his pipe between his teeth. "No idea what yer talkin’ about there, lil' darlin'."
She finally laughed, brushing at her dry, sticky eyes with her fists, and Kana laughed too, throwing an arm around her shoulder. "See there! The ship floats yet. Tomorrow the eastern barbican will be restored, and then off to Defiance Bay, where answers abound! ...If Maerwald spoke true, anyway."
Poor woman. They will take you, too–
"Might look for some answers there myself, if you'll go with me." The farmer let loose a plume of smoke as he spoke, failing to finish exhaling before turning to the little Watcher. "Been thinkin' about what I wanted to ask ol' Maerwald before... well, before all that had to go down. About my brother, Woden. Think I might find at least a... hint or somethin' in the big city." He passed his pipe to her, and she did not hesitate to accept it.
"Mysteries upon mysteries!" Kana's booming voice in her ear made her wince. "The Eyeless Seer must have you in their sights, my friend. Pun fully intended!"
"For the love of the gods," she groaned,
For the gods' love! For their love!! the old man sobbed–
a sudden headache gripping her behind the eyes, "is Aloth finished setting up in there or what?"
—
Nae they willnae.
"Oh yes they will. It's inevitable now."
Aloth's grimoire trembled in his hands, sweat dribbling down his temple as he tried to focus. The large, broken brazier he'd dragged into the middle of the great hall wasn't a small target for a spell, but it wasn't exactly a large one either. And it didn't help that Aloth felt as though he was on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
They willnae find oot, laddie.
"They will. All because someone can't keep their thoughts to themselves."
It hadn't been difficult to convince the others to allow him to set up camp for the night by himself. Axa had not seemed very eager to socialize after she'd landed the killing blow on the old man, and Edér and Kana had quickly volunteered to take care of the remains. And after the confrontation with Maerwald, after what the old Watcher had told them, Aloth had been desperate for solitude.
Fye, they wouldnae need t' find oot aught if ye'd tellt 'em sooth from th' start as ye oughttae–
He'd rushed his recitation, and now he flourished too haphazardly, and the arcane fire he called forth flashed and spouted violently into the rusty little brazier. Aloth hissed with pain and surprise as the unruly flames licked at his face, singed his hair.
"Damn you!" he screamed, whirling quickly around, shielding his face with his arms. "You dare to– You always do this, you–" The wizard cut himself off. He squeezed his eyes shut, clenched his fists at his sides. He needed to stop and calm down, right now.
One. He exhaled. He inhaled. He exhaled.
Buck up, Corfiser. Your situation is not that dire.
Two. He shook his hands out of their tight fists, flexed his fingers.
No one has any concrete evidence. Of anything . And no one has said anything. Yet.
Three. His shoulders twitched, tried to lock back up, but finally slumped, laden with nervous exhaustion.
They will find out. About... us. That's an inevitability.
Four. His ears, pressed back flat against his head in irritation, started to slowly droop down and forward.
But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
Five. His hands hung limp at his sides now. His breathing and heart rate slowed.
For one, the same taboos don't apply here like they do back home. Look at how the others responded to Axa, for instance.
Six. He pressed his lips into a thin line, lowering his head until his chin touched his clavicle.
And if Axa can find out more information about her condition, and if she'll have me along, maybe...
Seven. He wrapped his arms around himself, cupping his elbows in his hands.
But... then, if she finds out about... and Kana has made enemies of them, too– oh gods, this isn't–
Eight. He started pacing back and forth. He was shaking all of a sudden, gasping for breath.
This isn't working– Why isn't– I need to–
Nine. He heard the doors to the Great Hall creak slowly open, but he kept his eyes screwed shut. He couldn't open them, couldn't until ten–
Oh gods, if I've been wrong this whole time–
Ten. He opened his eyes.
Axa touched him on the elbow, and he actually yelped in surprise.
"Axa! I'm– You're back! H-how can... I help you?" He winced, looking away from her as he felt his face grow warm. Kana was off to his right, humming merrily away and taking notes about the keep's interior or somesuch; Edér was rummaging through his things, likely looking for more whiteleaf.
Axa herself looked at him with concern– or was that just his imagination?– and cocked her thumb at the now-calm campfire, the meticulously arranged bedrolls. "You've helped more than enough, I'd say. Thank you for doing this."
He prepared to suppress a relieved smile, but she took care of it for him. "Aloth, are you– have you been feeling alright?"
"Wh– well, I mean– yes, yes, of course, just– I've just been a bit... distracted, processing some of the... unusual things we've all seen as of late." He never knew how he managed to fool anybody: here he was, heart pounding in his chest, fidgeting, eyes darting to and fro, insisting he was just fine, thank you.
Nevertheless, the little woman regarded him with sympathy and spoke in a low, soothing tone. "That's understandable. I think we've all had some rather unsettling revelations recently."
"We certainly have, you foremost among us." Aloth had started to recover and he straightened up, tugging at his clothes, dusting himself off, all those little tricks he'd learned to explain away his tics and outbursts. "If what Maerwald said is true, your very life and future are in jeopardy."
She frowned, turning her attention away from him– just as he'd hoped she might– and sighed heavily, staring at her feet. "Yes. Yes, I've got quite a lot to contend with. Whoever or whatever this Leaden Key is, I have to find them. Sooner the better. My sanity, my life could depend on it."
"Indeed." His composure finally restored to a respectable level, Aloth gave the orlan his best diplomatic smile and nod. "Rest assured, I shall accompany you and render what aid I can on our journey to Defiance Bay."
"Why?"
His heart stopped. "...I beg your pardon?"
A look of shock flashed across her face, followed closely by a bashful grimace. "I'm– I'm sorry. Never mind. It's been a long day, I... I should get some rest. You, too. Long day tomorrow as well." These last few lines were delivered half-mumbled over her shoulder as she shuffled over toward her belongings, which he had carefully arranged a safe distance from the fire, close by to his own things. He tried, but found he could not muster a verbal farewell, instead struggling to keep a neutral facade even as she walked away from him.
"...I think she knows."
An impatient, long-suffering sigh.
Nae she disnae.
—
Maerwald sat at his hearth and watched his fire. Watched the wood burn.
Axa sat in the Great Hall of Caed Nua's keep and gazed into the makeshift campfire.
I'm sorry, old man. At least... I was able to release your soul from this place. You can truly rest, now.
Her three comrades slept peacefully in their bedrolls, the ugly, dark things in the keep– her keep– kept at bay by the light and warmth from the fire and from the Steward, both, Axa imagined. Of course, she found herself unable to rest, although she was exhausted. No sleep for the Watcher.
The soul remembers–
A memory. A memory caused this. And that man, the one in the ruins– he called that memory forth.
Who is he? Was he? Is he the same person from... from my past life? How is that possible...?
Axa squinted into the flames, trying to remember him. She pictured his face–
–you, Anthea? My child, what–
– and suddenly powerful waves of emotion hammered the little woman's mind, choking out all other thought. Tears flooded her eyes and poured down her face as just the memory of the man's voice, of his cold, stony stare filled her mind with horror and rage and sorrow for which she had no explanation. If only she could remember more, remember the question she–
–ask him ask him ask him please you have to ask him you have to know you have to have to–
Axa crawled to her bedroll, trembling and sniffling, and collapsed, where she remained for the next eleven hours.
She only slept for four of them.
—
Chapter 8: Cleaning House
Summary:
Her home is not her castle. Her castle is not her home. Axa and crew take care of business at Caed Nua.
Chapter Text
—
"Wael's eyes, man, slow down. It's midmorning yet!"
Axa got up on the tips of her toes and leaned over to pluck the bottle from the old man's surprisingly strong grip, her headache intensifying as she caught a whiff of his rancid breath. She had been mostly joking when she ordered Kana to bring out the wine for their guest, but once she'd seen the delight in the poor old salt's face, the sparkle in his eyes when presented with goblet and bottle– well, how could she refuse?
She glared at the aumaua now, clutching her last bottle of pomegranate wine, barely a quarter full after the old man's assault. Kana winced apologetically at her, but the little woman only smiled wryly and shrugged. It was as much her own fault as it was his, and she knew it.
The old man laughed good-naturedly, revealing a mouth only half full of teeth, and toasted his hostess with his borrowed goblet. "Early it may be, m'lady," he rasped, a strange sailor's brogue coloring his Aedyran, "bu' this elt lad dosnae rest. An' Magran help us, nei'r dae th' thirst." The old man sloshed the wine in his cup as he spoke, slopping it over the lip and onto the dusty stone floor more than once, before smacking his lips and merrily sucking down what remained inside.
As she had predicted, the night had not gone easily for the newly minted Watcher of Caed Nua. What little sleep she'd managed to get had been plagued by nightmares about books and machines, promises and betrayals, adra and copper and blood. And when sleep had failed her, she'd squirmed in her bedroll, tossing and turning and sweating and groaning. And thinking– lots of thinking.
But in spite of it all– perhaps, in fact, because of her sleeplessness– her awareness felt bizarrely heightened. It reminded her of her all-night research sessions in her old college life: standing there practically vibrating from murkbrew and nervous energy, feeling simultaneously like she was strong enough to lift a horse over her head and like she was about to collapse. Scrutinizing the drunken old salt, she squinted resolutely against her headache, determined not to let anything escape her notice.
Axa saw the gnarled fingers, knotted with age, and she watched the unsteady, drunken gesticulations that spilled her favorite wine onto the cobwebs and mouse shit that decorated her Great Hall. But she also saw that the hand itself was steady: not tremulous, but strong and sure. The half-lidded, drink-addled eyes took a while to fully focus, but once he managed to fix his gaze on hers, she could see a remarkably fierce little twinkle in his mischievous eyes.
"Engrim, you said your name is?"
"Pretty much everyone calls him Eld Engrim," Edér drawled, leaning against a stone pillar while fiddling with his pipe. "He's from around here somewhere, but he tends t' spend most of his time on the sea. Or in whichever tavern's nearest. Probably came in from Anslog's Compass lookin' for a little shore leave, ended up owin' someone a favor and havin' to hoof it all the way out here for 'em." Despite the content of his introduction, the farmer spoke with fondness, his eyes crinkling at the corners as he smiled warmly at the old man. "That sound about right, Eld Engrim?"
The old sailor cackled and nodded, clutching his empty goblet in front of himself with both hands like a talisman. "Aye, laddie, ye've got me fairly figured! Masons in yer Vale promised me a fine bottle o' spirits should I answer 'em this missive from oul' Caed Nua, abandoned all these long years. Although, ye did neglect t' address me Mistress, heathen that ye be, She whose spark 'n flame lit me way here!" He winked obnoxiously and wagged a crooked finger at the Eothasian, like a grandfather teasingly scolding his grandson.
Axa had not missed the telltale signs of a Magranite priest. The smell, in particular, of singed hair and arcane flame had tipped her off.
"You didn't think the priesthood of Ondra might suit you better?" Aloth's lip curled with disgust as he regarded the man, glaring at him over the edge of his grimoire. He had been broody all morning, Axa had noticed, and the elf seemed particularly irritated by the old lush.
"Not if he's a cannoneer," Kana suggested. "I can see where you might get Ondra– the sea, drink and forgetfulness, those common themes– but many who work with munitions, and especially ships, keep a Magranite priest on their payroll for their beneficial healing magic as well as for their blessings on and expertise with explosives." He grinned toothily at the elf, beaming with intellectual pride.
Aloth twitched, then spoke in a calm, low voice behind his gritted teeth. "If that's the case, why is he here running errands for stonemasons in Gilded Vale instead of mumbling over a double bronzer or something somewhere out on the sea?"
Axa turned her attention to her guest. "Good question, actually. Maybe you'd care to tell me a bit more about yourself while we make our way back to Gilded Vale, Engrim?"
The old man's eyes bugged out of his head, flicking back and forth between the orlan and his empty goblet. "Och, young miss, ye cannae mean t' be gettin' t' Gilded Vale now! 'Tis a day's sojourn, an' rovin' bands o' bandits roam o'er th' roads, Magran bash 'n burn 'em! An' 'ave only just arrived, me!" He looked around at her companions' faces, groping wildly for support, and found only pity and scorn for this man foolish enough to think to argue with her.
"He... does speak true, my lady." The Steward's voice rang out gently from the halls of the old keep. "No guard patrols have been dispatched along Caed Nua's surrounding roads since old Maerwald's decline into madness, and the paths surrounding the estate have been infested with brigands and monsters alike." As her voice faded, a soft little blanket of sadness settled over the gathered kith like a light dusting of snow.
Axa shuddered. "All the more reason, then, to get going. For better or worse, this keep is mine now, my responsibility." She paused, vaguely unnerved as she perceived the Steward's blush of surprise, followed closely by a soft, tentative gratitude. "The only people I can count on to restore my barbican are not, apparently, ready to take me seriously, so it seems I must issue my orders face to face. And I need this barbican restored. Unless, of course, Aedelwan Bridge is no longer flooded?"
Engrim shrugged, fiddled with the stem of his goblet, shuffled his feet. "Nae, no, 'tis... 'tis nae flooded..."
"It's destroyed," Kana chirped. "Ondra's mighty fist at work! I learned from a traveling hunter just the other day. The Dyrwood can't seem to steer clear of the gods' wrath, can–"
"We're going to Gilded Vale, today. Right now." Axa paused, hand on her hip, and then downed the remainder of her wine, time of day notwithstanding. She almost flung the empty bottle to the floor in a fit of pique, but then remembered the Steward, and quickly tamped down her temper. "...I want this barbican fixed. I want to get to Defiance Bay. By the Wheel, if the only way to get it done is to do it myself, I will."
No one could argue with that.
—
It was a satisfying sound, the scuffle of boots and the shouts of workers. Especially, Axa thought, when you know they're going to work for you. Although she knew the work couldn't begin for another day or two, Axa still felt a distinct sense of accomplishment as she strode out of the Hound, listening to the masons hustling behind her.
"Well, considerin' how drunk they all were, I'm surprised that went as well as it did." Edér clapped the little woman on the shoulder, grinning broadly and chewing gently on the stem of his pipe.
Aloth's voice drifted to her over her opposite shoulder. "Indeed, especially after the third time they addressed their questions to Edér and not to you, despite your repeated and... exponentially sonorous objections."
"Let it be known that the new Lady of Caed Nua does not suffer fools gladly," Kana proclaimed. "Although, speaking of fools... I can't help but notice the sun is setting, Caed Nua is almost a full day's hike away, and we're... leaving the inn?"
Axa smiled. "Remember we met Aufra on our way in? I offered to stay with her tonight, cook her some dinner, keep her company. I trust none of you object?"
No one did. She paused, and when she spoke again, she was much more subdued, almost somber.
"Last time I saw her, I was telling her her potion was horseshit and the fate of her unborn babe's soul was up to the caprices of the gods. Least I can do now is put my money where my mouth is and be the good neighbor that girl needs right now."
They walked in silence for a short stretch.
"If I'm bein' honest– and I actually am, sometimes– I been noticin' a lotta changes around here since we got back. Lot more smilin' people in the streets." Edér strolled up beside Axa, his blond whiskers quirking up with his grin. "Wasn't like that before you showed up. ...'Course, there is still that tree fulla dead bodies in the center of town..."
Kana winced. "Yes, I was wondering about that–"
"It's a long and gruesome tale." The man in the green cloak stepped out into the road, and Axa stopped dead in her tracks, placing herself between the stranger and her companions. "But I'd tell it, if you'd listen. You and the good Lady both."
"Kolsc." Edér whispered, surprised, but not angry. Axa's gaze flicked up to the stranger's face as he limped closer.
—
"...Did I fuck this up?"
Edér looked up from his whittling, focusing his good eye on the little woman. The other eye was still swollen shut, shiny and painful from their fight against his late Lord, but with some rest and the help of Raedric's priests– Kolsc's priests, now– he and the rest of his friends would be good as new for the trek back to Caed Nua tomorrow.
"Ain't too many ways I can think of to fuck up killin' a terrible murderin' bastard like Raedric," he mumbled around his mouthful of smoke, a grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "Unless y' think we didn't kill him enough, or somethin'."
Axa's lips smiled, but the rest of her face did not follow suit. Her party was spending the night in a corner of the Berathian priests' sleeping quarters in Raedric's sanctuary, and she sat on her borrowed bed gently rocking to and fro, her knees drawn up to her chest, her sharp little nails worrying tiny holes in her trousers.
"The Legacy makes men mad. Perhaps it does worse to women. I do not know." Raedric had looked Axa over, then, had glanced toward his bedchamber where his own wife lay dead in their marital bed–
"No, we killed him exactly the right amount, I think." The smile was already gone, soundly quashed by the ugly memory. "I just... feel like I may have acted in haste here. Like there's something I'm missing about all this that's going to bite me in the ass later, when I least expect it." She pressed her chin into her knees, curling up as tightly into herself as she could.
–if i make myself small enough i can just hide away from all this and no one will see me–
Kana chuckled, idly leafing through a massive tome that dwarfed even his sizable lap as he reclined in the worn armchair next to Axa's bed. "Yes, it is a rough sea, the world of the ruling class! So many nerve-wracking social calculations to make, always looking over one's shoulder... The political alliances to take into account, then the family alliances, the religious affiliations... But even the Ranga Nui himself and his own son are at ideological odds! And if you're discovered as a fair-weather friend, paying lip service to either or both–"
"I think," Aloth interrupted, "perhaps, that you've made your point, Kana." The elf was just as irritable now as he had been the morning that old drunk had showed up at Caed Nua, and his half-healed broken rib was not helping to improve his mood.
And now the in-fighting begins in the esteemed Lady of Caed Nua's exclusive inner circle. Axa felt her guts redouble their efforts to destroy themselves, anxiety churning inside her like acid. "Gods, I'm ill-suited for this politicking horseshit. Why did I think I could do this? I'm Ixamitec, we don't... nobody 'owns' land, that's not how–"
"Oh, don't get me wrong!" Kana pressed on, seemingly oblivious to Aloth's peevish attitude. "Just as hard lands forge strong people, rough seas often yield great rewards. For instance, when we return to Caed Nua on the morrow, we can look forward to seeing your Brighthollow manse restored to its former beauty and prestige! Well, in part, anyway. All because of your actions here today and Kolsc's gratitude!"
"And even if you weren't gettin' somethin' out of it," Edér added, "you're the kinda lady can't rest without knowing you did the best thing y' could. Point being, y' had to do something, long-term consequences be damned. And like I said earlier, if y' have to do something, it's hard to go wrong with killing a mass-murdering shitheel like Raedric. No matter how bad Kolsc might turn out to be, better him than what we had goin' on before." He casually brushed the wood shavings from his lap, either ignoring or unaware of the annoyed glares and whispers from the priests in the room.
Axa glanced across the room at Aloth, who simply lay on his back in his bed in the corner, eyes screwed shut, his grimoire too heavy to hold in his lap without irritating his wounds. "Maybe," she sighed, lifting her head from her knees, "I should just hire on an advisor. Someone who actually knows what they're doing, to help me navigate these choppy waters." Her gaze flicked to Kana, a wicked little grin popping up on her face. "You know anyone who needs a job?"
The aumaua laughed, a thunderous noise that filled the small room. "Everyone I know is either in this room or in Rauatai, my friend! But I take your meaning. However, my own experience with the gentry is limited to the court of the Ranga Nui, a profoundly different environment from the one in which you find yourself, so I'm afraid I'd be more of a hindrance than a boon. And–" He glanced over at Edér, his smile half apologetic and half cheeky– "I hope he'll forgive me for saying so, but our Edér doesn't seem like the sort to hobnob with the nobility."
The folk man snorted. "What tipped y' off?"
"That leaves you, Aloth," Kana continued, smiling in the elf's direction. "If I recall, you were raised among the gentry in Aedyr, were you not? That's a bit closer to the political system and aristocratic power structure here; any insight you have into that world would surely be invaluable to our Watcher. You're qualified, intelligent, you're clearly quite learned, you're... capable in battle. Why, you even came to the Dyrwood with the express purpose of finding a patron!" He was getting excited now, leaning forward in his seat, gesticulating passionately. "And here she is! What marvelous serendipity!"
Axa couldn't help but be charmed by Kana's enthusiasm, and she appreciated his effort to lift the wizard's spirits. "That's not a bad idea, actually. What say, Aloth?" She couldn't see his face from where he lay, but she could see his ears were bright red.
Not a fan of being the center of attention, I see. She felt a sudden surge of sympathy and warmth towards the man, and found her own ears reddening soon thereafter.
"I wouldn't take the gig 'f I were you. She can't even pay you, 's what I heard." Edér winked at her, taking his attention away from his whittling for just a second, then hissed with pain and surprise as his knife slipped.
Kana shook his head, his grin as wide as ever as he regarded the farmer with pity. "O, poor man! He who thinks coin is the sole and lone benefit of working for a prestigious, powerful woman like our Watcher! The true rewards of such a vocation are not in material wealth, my friend, but in the challenge! Rebuilding the glorious Caed Nua from the crumbling ruins... The intrigue of the political world of the Dyrwood... the tension, the drama... not to mention the treasure trove of ancient Engwithan secrets just waiting to be discovered in the Endless Paths!" He sighed like a lovestruck maiden telling her friends of her handsome beau. "Ah! I'm so envious. Were I more well-suited to the position, I'd have accepted her first offer in an instant! As it is, it seems I'll have to settle for hired muscle. Either way, I couldn't ask for a finer directress!" Now Axa's entire face was getting warm, and she found herself unable to look at Kana, although she could feel his eyes on her, his smile, warming her like gentle spring sunlight.
"Aye, I wager ye'd leap at a position 'neath 'er, slick-a-britches."
Aloth very quickly clapped a hand over his open mouth– the loud pop! filling the little room– and then came the long, shuddering groan of pain muffled behind his fingers, the sudden movement having yanked at his sore ribs.
Axa immediately flopped over onto her side, laughing like Hel, unable and unwilling to stop herself. Edér's eyebrows leapt up his forehead, surprise and delight clear on his face, chuckling through his nose with his wounded thumb in his mouth.
"...She seems impressed. I think you've got the job, my friend!" Kana quipped, flipping to a new page in his gigantic book. He paused, considering, and then leaned forward in his seat, cocking his head with curiosity. "...Did you say 'slick-a-britches'?"
"No. I didn't. I said nothing." The elf's voice was quiet and short and clipped. "I'm in immense pain and I'm speaking complete and utter idiotic meaningless nonsense. ...Can we please talk about anything else." Axa was still giggling, tip of her tongue sticking out between her front teeth. He squirmed with embarrassment, and it hurt.
"As you say. How about this animancy research?" The scholar lifted the huge tome on his lap, tilting it up to show Edér as he crossed the room to wash and wrap his thumb. "I'm no animancer, to be sure, but from what little I've managed to decipher from Osyra's records, she may have been onto something!"
Aloth bristled, his breath hitching in his chest as he exhaled a bit too sharply. He had said 'anything else,' hadn't he. "All any animancer has accomplished, at the very best, is to swell their own ego and their own coinpurse. In particular, Osrya was a dangerous, insane monster who mutated kith into abominations. I have no interest whatsoever in reading anything that woman may have seen fit to record."
Anyone else would take the man's curt tone and disparaging language as the opposite of an invitation to continue. Kana continued with renewed gusto, "But if what Osrya posits is true– and as far as I can tell, her methods are logically sound, if not morally– why, then this may just provide the solution to the Legacy that the Dyrwood has been searching for these long years!"
Axa had stopped laughing a while back, but only now did she sit back up. She remembered the animancer's words, recited them aloud with an accuracy imparted to her from her chanter training:
"It must be a localized effect. Something which strips the soul from a body, as the bîaŵacs are known to do. I have detected, even so, lingering traces of essence upon the bodies of so-called Hollowborn. This suggests that the soul itself has not been wholly destroyed. It remains, I think, intact somewhere."
Everyone– even Aloth, lifting his head from his pillows– looked at her, dumbstruck. The few priests remaining in the room hurriedly shuffled out, angrily whispering prayers to ward their souls against blasphemy.
"Um." She coughed, suddenly uncomfortably self-conscious. "That was... what she had to say, anyway. Before we had to kill her. ...If I'm remembering correctly."
"That's... what's in here, more or less, yes," Kana blurted, his ever-present grin tinged with nervousness as he shut the enormous book.
"So, what," Edér drawled, squinting at his half-finished carving as he turned it this way and that, "Hollowborn got a soul, but... somethin' or, or someone takes it from 'em soon as they're born?" He furrowed his brow, frowned at a blotch of red on the misshapen wooden thing in his hand. "And... what, hides 'em somewhere? Eats 'em? Why?"
"That would depend, it seems, on who or what is manipulating the souls, I would think." Kana actually frowned, now, staring blankly into the book. "Although I'd be hard-pressed to identify a creature capable of manipulating souls on this grand a scale, for this long, with this much apparent ease and consistency... short of, perhaps, a god." He glanced furtively at Edér, holding up his huge hands in deference. "Not that I'm attempting to implicate any particular deity..."
The farmer shook his head slowly, eyes shut tight with conviction. "Don't worry about me thinkin' that. Like I said before– I can't and won't believe that Eothas was the kinda god would do somethin' like this."
"Do you believe, then, as some in your country do, that the recent prevalence of animancy is to blame?" The scholar was fumbling for a bit of charcoal, now, eager to take notes. "Keep in mind, the Vailian Republics has not suffered a similar Hollowing despite being the leading animancy practitioners on Eora–"
"Whether the recent uptick in animancy has caused the Legacy by inviting the ire of the gods is nigh impossible to know, and thus pointless to discuss," Aloth interjected, "although I certainly wouldn't put it past many of the gods to come up with a bizarre, horrific punishment like the Legacy in retribution for any slight from us kith, real or perceived.” He glanced balefully at the door the Berathians had shut behind them as they’d left. “What can be meritoriously discussed is what to do about the unbridled, barely educated charlatans taking advantage of a terrified and exhausted populace, using the Hollowborn crisis to feed their sick curiosity and their pocketbooks both. That is the everyday reality of animancy that must be dealt with in the Dyrwood, for the good of the citizenry." He winced in pain, his impassioned argument a bit too much for his battered body. "...Ahem. In my opinion."
"I don't think I know enough about any of it to have much of an opinion about it, bein' honest." Edér scratched the back of his neck, squinting in confusion as Kana eagerly copied down the conversation, his attention ping-ponging excitedly between each successive speaker. "I feel like that whole world is way, way beyond my ken. Might have to leave the thinkin’ to you on that, Boss Lady." He smiled over at the orlan, glad to see her relaxing and engaging with other kith instead of clutching her knees and staring into the middle distance. He'd seen enough of that during the Saint's War. "...Although some of 'em are tryin' to do somethin' about the Legacy, at least. I guess. This animancer was a crazy piece of shit, but she's also the only animancer I ever really chatted with, 's far's I know. So I don't really got a lot to go on. Y'know?"
"Caldara was sweet, and extremely helpful." Axa felt an odd little tug of nostalgia at the memory of the dwarf, her warm, motherly smile. "Of course, she was also dead when I met her. So you'll kind of have to take my word for it. That said, ultimately I have to agree with you, Edér: I don't know enough about animancy to pass any sort of judgment on it just yet. It seems potentially useful, perhaps even miraculously so, but also extremely volatile and dangerous." The little woman paused, stretching her sore limbs, and then laid back down on the bed with a long, cathartic sigh. "Perhaps once we reach Defiance Bay, we can get a clearer picture of what the day-to-day animancy trade is really like. Until then, I must, in good conscience, reserve all judgment on the subject."
"A wise and prudent choice, but indecision is a heavy burden. Never let it be said that our Watcher takes the easy way out!" Kana rose from his seat as he spoke, seeing that the orlan was getting ready to settle in for the night, and crossed the room to his loaner bed. "Speaking of hardships, I've heard tell that the poor weather over the last few days may have delayed the work on Caed Nua's eastern barbican. If, once we return, we find that to be the case... and if you're amenable to a bit of dungeon crawling after all this fresh air and sunshine..."
Axa half-groaned and half-laughed, like a good-natured mother finally losing patience with her annoying toddler. "Yes, Kana, I promise we will explore the Endless Paths. I already promised you before, too, remember?"
"Forgive me!" Kana chuckled as he reclined, his feet dangling over the footboard of the too-small bed. "I don't mean to wheedle you, rest assured. But once I get an idea in my head, I tend to focus on it so intently as to neglect politesse!"
"We've noticed," Aloth grumbled.
The massive aumaua turned to Aloth in the bed next to his, smiling still. "That reminds me– I've never heard that one before, 'slick-a-britches'. Did you mean to say I slicken others' breeches– or britches, as you say– or did you mean my own breeches are slick? As in, ah, lubricated for easier removal?” The giant snickered like a schoolboy telling dirty jokes after dark in the dormitory. “Ondra’s jowls, I didn't even know you spoke Hylspeak! You must teach me some!" He wore no malice on his face, only open, honest joy and wonder– and for some reason that bothered Aloth more than if the aumaua had been displaying naked hostility.
Axa cackled maniacally in her bed, thrashing her limbs and rolling about. In lieu of responding, Aloth slowly, deliberately pulled his coverlet up over his chin, then his nose, then his brow. His facial expression did not change.
—
It was a lovely sound, the sound of carpenters and masons plying their trades. Engrim found they sounded even lovelier with a drink in his hand and cool shade under his arse, so that's how he had elected to enjoy the afternoon while he supervised the renovations.
Now that the storm clouds had finally shoved off– and the Little Mistress was back home with her companions, mucking about in that endless dungeon of hers– the crew was hard at work clearing the last of the rubble and overgrown foliage from the eastern barbican's arched gateway and portcullis. By tomorrow evening, at long last, Caed Nua would have a beautifully restored barbican, allowing access to the Woodend Plains and Defiance Bay beyond. And in the meantime, Brighthollow was bustling with carpenters and porters, bringing freshly cut lumber and large, fine beds and bolts of cloth and rugs. Prettying up the Great Hall, restoring the barracks, hiring guards and posting patrols– the fuzzy little thaynu and her stone steward had a plan for this place, and that meant that these laborers could look forward to quite a few more of these jobs and their generous pay.
Engrim smiled his gap-toothed smile, swirling his tankard of cider. It had been a gift for the Little Mistress, sent by a brewery newly under Kolsc's protection, and she had kindly opted to disperse it among the work crews before she and her party had descended into the depths under the castle.
Could get used tae this, me. If Ye'd allow fer a wee bit o' idleness, O Magran. Engrim chuckled to himself. He knew he ought to know better at his age than to press his luck with his goddess, but he just couldn't help himself, sometimes.
It took him a while to realize where the sound was coming from, because he wasn't expecting it to be behind him– after all, he'd specifically chosen to sit in a place where he could keep an eye on all the work that he was supposed to be helping with. But then Engrim heard the scraping and scratching on the eastern side of the ruined chapel, heard the muffled shouts and the banging of fists against solid wood, and he scrambled to his feet, stumbling as quickly as his skinny old legs would carry him. He'd had to help dispatch some of the beasties and spirits that had managed to wander up from the depths of the Endless Paths once or twice already, but they'd always crawled up from the dungeons, inside the keep. That these old bulkhead doors were connected to anywhere, let alone to the Paths, hadn't occurred to anyone.
Until now. Engrim squared his shoulders and planted his feet, readied his staff, whispered a prayer to the Lady of Battle. Waited and watched as the heavy wooden doors shook with the force of a mighty blow from within.
Thump. "Harder, damn it! Or, no, wait– is there a mechanism holding it shut? Give him some light, Aloth!"
The old priest felt his eyes bug out of his head. 'Tis 'erself! The Little Mistress' voice was unmistakable.
"Certainly, just a moment, please..." And the sound of her elf lad kissing her arse all but confirmed it. Engrim rushed forward, dropping to his rickety old knees in front of the doors, his hands scrabbling at the weathered, graying wood.
"Watcher! Mistress!"
Shocked silence hung in the air for a moment, then: "Engrim!? Thank the gods! ...We’ve reached the surface at last!"
"There is a mechanism," her aumaua rumbled, his voice thunderous even behind the thick doors. "A... surprisingly simple one, actually. If I had some light–"
"I said I'm working on it," Aloth snapped, and a moment later the cracks in the doors lit up from within. Engrim squinted against the glare, laid his hands on the twisting, smothering ivy and the dried-up, half-dead rose bushes choking the splintering planks. He furrowed his wrinkled brow, concentrated, began to burn the vegetation away with a care and precision that betrayed his years and level of sobriety.
And before long, the doors were flung wide for the first time in hundreds of years, and the Watcher of Caed Nua and her loyal allies emerged from the Endless Paths.
Axa spoke first. "Engrim, please tend to Edér; he needs healing badly." Kana gently lowered the farmer to the ground, his blond hair streaked brownish-red with blood, head rolling loose on his shoulders, and Engrim rushed to meet him with a powerful restorative blessing on his boozey breath.
"By the ricketin' Wheel, yer lot's flame's lookin' half-snuffed yerselves!" In truth, all four of them were bleeding and bruised, clutching at their various wounds and limping, although Edér was easily the worst off of the lot. "What in Hel did ye find doon in them depths?"
"Ogres. There were crazed, violent ogres," Axa rasped. "And looters who attacked us on sight. And a tribe of xaurips. And their drake." She glared at Kana, anger smoldering. "And you wanted to press on?"
No one present had ever heard Kana speak so softly. "I– I only remarked on the changing architecture, I didn't mean to imply we ought–"
"Spirits, too. Ghosts only I could see, only I could hear." The little woman carried on, her voice rising steadily in pitch and volume. "A pool of blood and viscera. Ancient catacombs full of giant insects and... and animated corpses. And an enormous adra-and-copper statue of a man."
"Or at least th' head," Edér mumbled, now fully conscious again though still bloodied and reeling. "Copper mustache. Heh."
Axa was at his side in an instant, kneeling next to the farmer, taking one calloused hand in between her own. "Don't speak, Edér. Save your strength."
"...'M not that bad, am I?" He managed a weak smile, tried to look at her eyes, but couldn't seem to get his vision to focus. Multiple images of the orlan danced and swam in front of him, and he found that the more he tried to get one of her to stand still, the harder it became to concentrate on staying awake.
Looking at him in full light, Axa felt her stomach drop: his dilated pupils, his unfocused gaze. He's definitely concussed. Gods, we're lucky we found that Master Staircase when we did. "Perhaps," she smiled softly, "I'm being a little hyperbolic. You just look half dead, is all."
The farmer huffed a short, sharp laugh as he let his eyes slide shut. "Work that charm on me, Watcher."
"Kana." Her ire toward the aumaua had receded, but not entirely, and her sharp tone reflected it. "Help Engrim get Edér inside. Stay with him and keep him talking. I'm... I think I have to stay out here for a bit. I kind of need to see the sky right now."
The huge man tried to smile at Axa but found the attempt futile, turning to her only to see her lying on her back in the grass, staring listlessly into the zenith. So he smiled at Edér instead, gently lifting the man by his armpits and guiding him toward Brighthollow, Engrim loping alongside.
He watched them go, and once he was sure they were alone, Aloth slowly, cautiously drew up beside the prone woman. He knelt, rolled his ankle, stumbled, recovered, decided to sit on the ground instead.
"Axa, are you... are you going to be alright?" He winced. What an insightful, intelligent question to ask, Corfiser; my, you're good at this–
"Is that supposed to be a joke?" she croaked, although the sharpness that was in her voice for Kana was replaced with a gentler tone for Aloth. He noticed, and the resulting burst of self-satisfaction tinged with guilt made him think of his school days, his teachers who played favorites, how he feared them and craved their approval both.
She sighed. "I'm sorry. I'm– I'll apologize to Kana later, too, I'm just... tired right now. Scared." She tried to smile, grimaced instead. "Cranky."
"Well–" Aloth twisted his fingers together into tight, trembling knots of knuckles and sweat– "Well. You've been under some... significant stress as of late, it's true, but I can't help but notice you sometimes... struggling. Seeming to have some difficulty coping." He glanced from his hands in his lap to the ground to his hands to the woman on the ground. "I... I just want to make sure that you're alright to... continue this."
Axa sighed as deeply as her little lungs would allow, her half-lidded eyes still fixed on the heavens. "I don't know," she said at last. "I don't even really know what this is, this... new path I'm on. By the Visions, two weeks ago I was living an entirely different life! Now I'm a Watcher, a member of the Dyrwoodan gentry, I'm Awakened..."
"You've a lot on your plate, to be certain," he murmured, hoping he came off as compassionate and not dismissive. He scooted along the ground as delicately as any kith could scoot, until he was sitting alongside the woman. They still had a decent amount of distance between them, but at least now he could see her face. She did not look at him.
"I feel like I don't... know who I am, anymore." Her usually robust, confident voice quavered. "Like this is someone else's life in which I've had to take up residence. None of this feels like it's truly mine, but it definitely feels like it's all my responsibility. None of which I ever, ever asked for."
"Aye, I conne the feelin', lass." Aloth felt the words slip out, and then immediately regretted allowing them to, grimacing and squeezing his eyes shut.
When he opened them again, Axa was sitting up. "You can't help it, can you."
His heart, his stomach, his brain– all felt as though they'd suddenly been submerged in ice water, and as she turned to him with her piercing fuchsia gaze, he half expected her to simply state aloud all of his deceptions and treacheries like some Woedican judge, her Watcher abilities having allowed her to see through all of his pitiful excuses and flimsy lies.
But instead of anger or accusation or judgment, what he saw in her eyes was... relief, almost. Wonder. "The Hylspeak. You can't help it. That's why you keep doing it, even when I've asked you to quit. Or when it's gotten you in trouble. That's why you want to go to Defiance Bay with me. With us. To find someone who can help you stop. Isn't it?"
"I– I don't– I was just trying to–" He sputtered and stammered, subconsciously drawing his limbs in close to his torso in an anxious, defensive hunch. He wasn't quite sure how to respond to this. He was caught, it seemed, but... not? Somehow? He fidgeted and trembled and averted his eyes from hers, unable to bear the little woman's gaze, her sad little smile as she rose to her feet and stood next to him.
And he jumped, much to his chagrin, when he felt her hand on his back. "Aloth. You can trust me. I want you to trust me. And you don't have to explain anything to me. We all have our reasons for... keeping certain things to ourselves." She gave him a knowing smile. "However, it seems that the skeletons in your closet are a bit... louder than most others'?"
He knew, of course, what she was really trying to say. How long did you think you could keep it a secret from me? I'm not stupid, and you're not exactly subtle. "It's... a problem I've had since I was a child." He sighed shakily, sagging with fatigue as he shrugged off this small portion of his heavy burden at last. "And in Aedyr, it's not the kind of thing you take your child to a healer about. Not unless you want him institutionalized... or worse."
Axa gave him a hard look, as though he had set the policy in place himself. "I see. That explains why you came to the Dyrwood for a cure." She perked up abruptly as a thought struck her. "...You know, it's a rather gratifying feeling, figuring all this out about you. It explains so much!" She smiled again, and he found himself feeling charmed and annoyed simultaneously. He'd expected either pity or disgust, and when he got curiosity instead, he felt oddly slighted.
I'm not a puzzle to be solved...!
A lascivious chortle. “She gettin' ye all fired oop, laddie?”
He shut his eyes again, curled himself up tightly. "Axa, while I am grateful for your patience with me, and your understanding regarding my... condition, I would truly appreciate it if we could keep this between the two of us. I'm... it's been a long, long time since I've really talked about this with anybody, and I don't think I'm quite ready for a full roundtable discussion regarding my mental health just yet." He glared in the direction of Brighthollow. "Not with those two, anyway. And not anymore, at all, today. Please."
"I had a feeling you were starting to reach your limit of how much you're willing to talk about it." She relented finally, lifting her little hand from between his shoulders, and he felt the weight of her scrutiny lift off of him as well. "And I'm reaching my limit of how much time I'm willing to waste feeling sorry for myself on the lawn. Come, let's get inside, get our wounds tended, check up on Edér. We'll take a day and a half to rest up and get ready, let them finish working on the barbican. Then we'll set off for the city."
Aloth rose to his feet, brushed dirt and grass from his trousers. "In my official capacity as your advisor, I wholeheartedly approve your plan, my Lady." She scoffed, laughing, and he didn't try to suppress his victorious grin. "And... upon arriving?"
She started off toward her busy little manse, the carpenters and masons gawking at the bloody, dirty little orlan with alarm. "I'll know what to do when I get there, I'm sure," she called out to the elf over her shoulder.
He sighed, picking up the pace in an effort to catch up with her. "I was afraid you'd say that."
—
"I'll know when I get there, he says," the little woman muttered to herself, leaning against the old signpost, thumbing through her bag of bone arrowheads. "Yeah. I'm sure. ...When am I gonna learn, Itumaak?"
The fox yawned in response, licked his snowy chops, and Sagani heaved a weary sigh. Maybe he was right. Maybe it was time to make camp.
The sun was staring to set, and the cooling air brought a refreshing breeze to the little hunter's brow. And in the wind came not only respite from the heat, but information– smells of nature, smells of kith. Sagani could smell new rain clouds already queueing up, eager to take the place of the last ones that had just departed, but hopefully not so eager as to open up on her tonight. She could not smell any other campfires nearby, so she figured she had a halfway decent chance of getting a good night's rest undisturbed by surprise guests. She was about to say something to Itumaak, head off the road in search of a quiet spot to set up, when she looked down at him–
–and found him standing at alert, his head cocked to the side just so, ears pricked. Sagani listened, her breath completely still in her chest.
"A bear? You were whittling a bear? I thought it was a horse!" She'd only ever heard a voice that deep and booming on an aumaua man before, and the Rauataian accent all but confirmed it.
"You ever seen a horse before?" This was a different voice, not as throaty, but still definitely an adult man, a Dyrwoodan. Sagani reached slowly for her pack, not sure yet whether to grab the adra carving or an arrow.
"Whatever it was– is– we'll pick it back up the next time we head down there. With some hirelings, Kana." A woman's voice now, bold and clear. Sagani found the adra carving in her hand when she drew it back to her fore, and she gazed into it.
Cold and dead. Just like always, these past few months.
"Please tell me we're not going back down into that gods-cursed dungeon solely for a half-finished wooden carving of a bear..." Sagani almost didn't hear the Aedyran, she was so disappointed by her poor fortune, but the comically coincidental "carving of a bear" comment made her at least lift her head to regard the group of kith approaching her. Itumaak was bored and anxious, and he fidgeted and whined at Sagani's hip, looking up at her with his big black eyes.
The huntress sighed as she watched the little party notice her. More friendly travellers, I'm certain. Let's just get this little introduction over with.
"Relax, Itumaak. It's not him."
—
Chapter 9: Mother, Daughter, Sister, Queen
Summary:
Defiance Bay is a city that could use a woman's touch.
Chapter Text
—
There was ‘too strange to be true,’ and then there was 'too strange not to be true.’
The former was usually easy enough to determine, at least for a woman of Sagani’s age and experience: she’d be a piss-poor mother, hunter, and leader were she to give credence to every tall tale a guilty child or unscrupulous trader told her. But sometimes a situation was just unusual enough, skirted that line between plausibility and absurdity just so, that Sagani found herself well and truly baffled. Like now, with these kith.
They’d seemed like a regular bunch of adventurers at first glance, although a motley one. They’d been chatting amiably amongst themselves when they’d noticed her, and if she hadn’t heard them talking about a carved bear– and if Itumaak hadn’t nudged her hip and whined, pointed eagerly at the strangers with his whole body– she probably would have ignored them entirely and let them disappear down the road, over the horizon.
Leaving her alone. Again. And still at square one.
So she had cast her line, and had been completely knocked off guard at the response she’d gotten. She had been expecting the folk man– the big blonde with the country drawl– to do what Dyrwoodan men tended to do and bloviate at her until he lost interest and herded his mismatched crew off to their next thrilling adventure. But instead, he had crouched down to regard Itumaak with childlike delight while, to Sagani’s mild surprise, the redheaded orlan had stepped forward and taken the conversational lead.
What with all the bigotry against orlans she’d heard tell of since arriving in the Dyrwood (and the handful of incidents she’d witnessed firsthand), Sagani hadn’t anticipated the leader of this little pack to be one– and a woman at that, although her foreign accent cleared up some of the confusion. Listening to her bold, clear, confident voice, Sagani had been unable to stop herself cocking an eyebrow and cracking a bemused smile at this strange little encounter.
And it had only gotten stranger the more they’d conversed. While answering the orlan’s questions about her hunt for Persoq, Sagani had noticed the giant aumaua behind her scribbling frantically on a sheet of vellum, his excited eyes darting between the orlan and herself. She’d also noticed the folk man ignoring the conversation entirely to focus on trying to get Itumaak’s attention, as well as the elf standing alone in the back who may or may not have been talking to himself behind his grimoire.
And then the orlan claimed to be a Watcher. Sagani’d had to fight to keep from rolling her eyes upon hearing that one again. And here she’d been, expecting more slack-jawed farmhands. Gods, these people were odd.
Yes, Sagani, they’re a bunch of freaks. Not like you, a middle-aged female long game hunter from an isolated village on an island in the arctic who’s searching for a dead man with her snowy white fox.
Maybe that was what had made her put Persoq’s bear in the other woman’s hands, that guilt at thinking her and her companions odd when Sagani had such an unusual story herself. And at least these people were actually friendly, for once. She still hadn’t decided whether they were necessarily trustworthy or not– the orlan was probably about as real a Watcher as that last “Watcher” she’d met– but she could at least fairly confidently tell that they weren’t about to pull some kind of shit. Body language was too relaxed, atmosphere was all wrong for violence or trickery. Hel, this girl wasn’t even asking for coin. So why not let her have a go at it?
And now, watching the little woman sway on her feet and stare like a sleepwalker, Sagani was starting to wonder if she had made the right decision after all. She wasn’t normally an easy woman to rattle, but something about the orlan had changed, something behind her eyes, and it lent her an eerie, uncanny quality that made Sagani’s skin crawl.
“What’s going on?” she blurted, hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. “What’s happening to her?” Itumaak finally snapped at the annoying folk man, curling his lip and snarling, and the big blonde backed off as the fox leaned into Sagani’s side.
“Oh, uh, yeah,” the man stammered, “prolly shoulda warned you about that. She gets like that when she’s doin’ her watchin’, or… whatch’ call it.” He dug his thumb into an itchy spot between his eyebrows, side-eyed Itumaak. “…Your fox bite?”
“Yes,” she muttered, eyes still fixed on the orlan woman, on Persoq’s bear.
“Can I pet him anyway?” The man’s blue-green eyes shone with sincerity.
“Worry not, madam! She’ll come out of it soon enough,” the aumaua interjected, tucking his writing tools away in his satchel before peering intently at the adra carving in the orlan’s hands. “At least, she seemed to come out of it rather quickly when she spoke to the spirits in Caed Nua. This might be an entirely different experience, as far as I’m aware.” He chuckled and gently waved his gigantic hand in the redhead’s face, and she stared through him, completely unresponsive. “Fascinating, isn’t it? I wonder what she sees…”
Sagani glanced up at the huge man, careful to keep the orlan and Persoq’s bear in her peripheral vision. “You’re telling me you all came from Caed Nua? That old keep west of here? I was told that place was nothing but a wraith-infested death trap.” She felt her heart drop, just a little. Yup, that’s what I thought. Too strange to be true.
“Sure’s Hel was,” the folk man grumbled, his tone suggesting he knew from experience. “'Course, that was before we showed up.”
The little huntress narrowed her eyes at him. “Care to explain exactly what you mean by that?”
The shy elf finally spoke up, cringing with embarrassment as he drew closer to the front of the little group. “Er– begging your pardon, madam; what my cohort meant to say is– Well, come to think of it, actually, perhaps introductions are in order–”
“Cliffs,” the orlan gasped, and Sagani’s focus was back on her in an instant, Itumaak yipping softly with surprise. To her credit, everyone else jumped too, startled by the little woman’s sudden return to consciousness. But still, she couldn’t afford surprises like that, especially when it came to Persoq’s bear. Never again. Beast’s Hooves, woman, never take your eye off your quarry…!
The orlan shook her head and blinked, finally seeming to come out of her reverie. “By the sea, I think,” she continued, trembling slightly as she placed the adra carving back into Sagani’s waiting hands. “Pretty high up, but we still got a snootful of that salty ocean spray.”
Sagani’s gaze flicked rapidly between the green-purple lump in her hands and the woman in front of her. “…What? I– what just– what did you do?” That was nothing like the last “Watcher” she’d dealt with, and she knew he was full of shit. But it didn’t necessarily mean this girl was on the level, either.
“…Watched, I suppose. Well, it’s not just watching. It was more like… being inside someone else’s head, feeling what they feel as well as seeing what they see.” The redhead rubbed her eyes, smiled wearily at Sagani. Reminded her of her youngest waking from a nap too early. “In this case, I was inside Persoq’s head, or his reincarnation’s, anyway. Damned disorienting, I have to admit. And it tends to make me look a bit foolish at times.”
“Right. I’ll bet.” Too strange not to be true? …Maybe. Maybe not. The ranger stuffed the carving back into her pack, not quite ready to admit defeat yet. “Y'know, after my story about that charlatan Watcher, I’d have thought a 'real’ Watcher like you would have more to say about the experience than that.”
“A woman after my own heart!” The aumaua butted in again, looming up behind the little orlan like a sunrise. “I’d love to hear more myself. She only ever gives us the barest hints of what she sees, what the spirits tell her! …Although,” he added sheepishly, “I understand sometimes the scenes that play out before her are… not exactly easy to talk about.”
“Yes, Caed Nua and the Endless Paths are not exactly locales with happy pasts, Kana,” the elf chided gently before turning to Sagani. “I know we must seem… an unusual bunch, madam, and you’ve no reason whatsoever to trust us. We were each just as skeptical when we initially met her, and just as shocked as you the first time we saw her peer into the aether. But she has proven multiple times over to each of us that, ultimately, this is no act: she is a Watcher, truly.” He pursed his lips, fidgeted, wrung his hands together– but his face was open and honest.
Gods, they’re persistent! If they’re liars, at least it seems they’ve all got their story straight. “You realize I don’t even have any coin to offer you for… for whatever that was.” She knew how dangerous this could turn out to be, what a stupid mistake it might be to trust these strangers, but she could feel herself wanting to believe them, needing her long, difficult search to finally yield a solid lead…
The little woman shrugged, unconcerned, and turned to the road in front of Sagani, shouldering her pack once more. “Didn’t ask for any coin,” she stated simply. “Knowledge seeks freedom, we say in Ixamitl, and the freer I can make it, the better.” A cheeky grin popped up on her face. “…Although, if you’ve a tent, we’d trade you for it. Someone ruined ours.”
The folk man tore his attention away from Itumaak’s fluffy, rapidly swishing tail to regard the orlan with indignation. “Hey, c'mon, Axa, I said it was an accident–”
And as if on cue, he was silenced by a crack of thunder. All of a sudden, the humidity and the smell of ozone were overpowering, and the gathered kith all turned their faces to the heavens.
The first drop of rain hit Itumaak on the nose, and he sneezed.
“Welp.” The big blonde sighed dejectedly. “Sun was settin’ anyway. Guess I’ll get started on a lean-to for us.” He trudged off into the nearby brush, and as they followed behind him, the aumaua and the elf gave Sagani polite, awkward waves. The orlan woman– Axa, as Sagani knew her now– watched them go and then turned back to the huntress, raised her eyebrows in an unspoken question. The rain was starting to come down in earnest now.
Oh, come on already–
“I… There’s… uh, a little rock outcropping about 15 minutes’ hike southeast. Should fit five and a fire 'neath it. And a fox, of course.” Sagani reached down and scratched Itumaak behind the ears, and he pressed his head into her strong, steady hand. His reassurance comforted her, and she smiled.
Axa smiled back at the dwarf, her cohorts turning back toward the two women. “Well! I never thought I’d say that that sounds more appealing than my current projected sleeping arrangements, but here we are. You’ll lead the way, I trust?”
Just remember, Sagani: if you wake up tomorrow and Persoq’s bear is gone again, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.
The huntress nodded and chuckled. “Sure will. Follow me.”
—
Honestly, it wasn’t as if Axa didn’t know how farfetched her whole story sounded, especially after listening to herself recount it aloud to a stranger. She was also self-aware enough to recognize that she and her companions probably came off as... eccentric, at best. So in the end, she couldn’t really blame the dwarf for being wary of her and her party– anyone would be– even though they had told her nothing but the truth.
It would certainly be a lot easier to convince the huntress of her sincerity, though, if the truth could stop being so gods damned bizarre as of late.
Axa couldn't help but feel like the more of her story she told, the more a liar she made herself look, and the older woman's guarded body language and skeptical expression weren't very encouraging in that regard. She was a mother, she'd told Axa at the camp that evening– five times over, although only three of her children lived yet– and Axa could tell she was a seasoned veteran of the child-rearing arts. She'd borne that accusatory, incredulous glare from her own mother ten thousand times, and it hadn't made any difference to her whether Axa was telling the truth or not either.
–Serpent's Wings, I don't want to hear it anymore! He's not some poor stray tom you rescued from the gutter! He's not even a proper priest, Axa; he's a strange, sick con man who was lucky enough to find a softhearted, foolish girl to–
She winced at the memory. Yes, thanks, Mama. Helpful as always.
Then there were all the things she wasn't telling anyone about yet, let alone this woman she'd just met. She wasn't concealing anything especially damning, just perfectly mundane, boring, everyday intensely painful and private experiences and memories, including some that might explain a few things about her current circumstances. But as usual, every time she was presented with an opportunity to open up about herself, Axa just... clammed up instead. The Ordhjóma thing, for instance, had come up again in an otherwise pleasant dinnertime chat about the southern lights over Nasitaaq when Axa had absent-mindedly mentioned the time she had seen them in the White that Wends, and then she'd had those questions to deflect. She knew there was nothing inherently shady about it, but even so, just the act of politely declining to elaborate on her time in the Land or to speak any Ordhjóma for her curious audience made her feel nervous and guilty, as though she were withholding evidence instead of simply keeping a private matter private. Mercifully, everyone seemed to let it go easily enough, but Axa couldn't shake the feeling that Sagani in particular held it against her.
And if it wasn't what she said or didn't say making her appear suspect, it was the series of ludicrous coincidences that now passed for her everyday life. According to the Lady of Caed Nua's trusted local guide (the smoke-addled fool who'd nearly gotten his fingers bitten off by Sagani's fox), the cliffs from her vision of Persoq just so happened to be a day's march out from Defiance Bay, south, across the water. How convenient, then, that she and her crew were headed that way anyway, and how generous of them to offer Sagani a place in their traveling party. It was all the truth, of course, and intended in the spirit of benevolence– but all the same, it sounded like such an obvious contrivance that Axa had almost not wanted to say anything at all, to save them both the embarrassment.
But when the dwarf had accepted, had shrugged and sighed and told her to "lead the way," Axa had had to actively stop herself from shooting back, "Are you sure?" Even though it was perfectly understandable, Sagani's obvious reticence to trust her (especially while she was actively electing to travel with her anyway) still stung, and it frustrated Axa that she couldn't quite figure out how to not let it make things awkward during their long hike to the city. Each of the menfolk had approached her on his own at one time or another and inquired discreetly after her health and mood, each noting how unusually untalkative she was, and each time she found herself too stubborn to admit why. They were damn near crossing the bridge into the city proper by the time the orlan was finally tired of torturing herself about it, and she impulsively squeezed her left eye shut, hoping for some insight–
–Sometimes, with some kith, there just ain't nothin' for it but to just keep on livin' your truth, Lil' Blossom. Just let 'em be, and you just go on bein' true t' yourself. They'll come 'round, with time... or they don't, 'n you cut 'em loose. Th' true o' heart will follow. Either way you're better off than y'were before, worryin' yourself sick about what some blowhards think–
Wael had answered the spontaneous prayer with a promptness that had startled her almost as much as the answer itself. She hadn't thought about her father in some time, but it seemed the Lord of Mysteries had reached down into her mind and plucked out exactly the right memory for the situation. It was something Papa'd told her back when she was a little girl, tormented by peers far crueler than the kith she was keeping company with now, and she had come to him for advice not on revenge, but on how to get them to like her. At the time, Axa had balked at essentially being told that sometimes there was nothing one could do about another's unfair opinions of them. But in time, she came to see the wisdom in his words, and she found that the less she tried to shape herself to please others and the more she focused on cultivating her own identity and interests, the truer the friends she kept and made.
Not that she'd ever had a very broad circle of friends. She was more like her mother than her father in that way. She lifted her head, cast her gaze over the small group of oddballs and misfits trailing merrily along behind her, and a sudden, fierce sense of camaraderie rushed through the little woman. She felt tears well up in her eyes, and she quickly brushed them away with the back of her furry hand.
Good advice, Papa. Thanks. ...and thank You, Eyeless One.
"Hey. ...You feelin' alright?" This time, it was Sagani herself who drew up next to the orlan, concern plain on her motherly face. Itumaak's nose brushed Axa's fingertips on her other side, the fox giving her a cursory sniff before returning to his mistress. "You've been pretty quiet these last few hours. Nervous, now that we've made it to the big city?" She nodded her head in the direction of the city gates, no more than a stone's throw away now.
Axa wondered, looking at Sagani's kind smile and knitted brow, how she ever could have thought the older woman had borne her any ill will. "Not really, no. I grew up in the second-largest city in the Plains, so tall buildings and busy streets don't faze me much. I've just been... lost in thought, I guess." She smiled back briefly before tilting her head just so, to obscure her face with her burgundy curls. Just in case.
"You're not still hung up on that Magranite priest we met on the road, are you?" Kana closed the distance between himself and the two women in a few broad steps, sensing that the tension in the group was dissipating now, positively famished for a good chat. "In truth, I still am, a bit. I certainly hope we don't meet any more of his sort beyond these gates!"
"Still feel like we kinda overdid it there," Edér piped up, picking at the bandaging on his fox-bitten fingers. "Sure, he was a weird, rude prick, but did we really have to set his beard on fire after kickin' his ass?" Despite his words, the farmer still smiled fondly at the memory as though reminiscing on some old childhood mischief, chuckling as he spoke.
"He called Axa a vicious, unrepeatable slur, Edér," Aloth huffed, clutching his grimoire close to his chest as the group passed over the long bridge into town. "Honestly, he's lucky he got away with his head still on his shoulders, never mind his beard."
Axa's gaze shot to Sagani, eyes wide and innocent even as she fought back a feisty grin. And in response, the huntress laughed, clapping Axa gently on the shoulder. "Now that sounds like a good story. Maybe tell me over a drink once we get settled in at the inn."
'Be true to yourself, and the true of heart will follow you.' Good advice, indeed, Axa thought, smiling back at the dwarf as the party approached the gates of Defiance Bay.
—
As soon as their party had crossed the threshold of the city proper, they'd turned to a local rabblerouser for directions, inquiring about points of interest and general information about the city. He'd filled them in while still trying to hold court with the group of refugees and protesters crowded around him, adding in his own fiery criticisms of animancy and the local constabulary (along with his endorsement of the local vigilante militia), and as soon as the opportunity to escape had presented itself the little band of adventurers had beelined for the nearest tavern, a busy little neighborhood eatery and inn called the Goose and Fox.
Bit strange, that name. Sounds kind of predatory for a house of respite. Sagani glanced down at her own fox, and then chuckled to herself, shaking her head. ...Alright, maybe I'm looking a little too hard into this.
She noticed Axa looking at her quizzically, so she leaned over and murmured: "Here, stop me if you've heard this one: An orlan, a dwarf, a folk, an elf, an aumaua, and an arctic fox walk into a bar..."
"The bartender looks at them and says, 'What is this, some kind of joke?'" Axa quipped back, not missing a beat. It was a punchline from a different bit, catching Sagani off guard, and both women laughed loudly enough to draw attention. In particular, that of a sour-faced elf with a rag draped over his shoulder who frowned and pointed at Itumaak, shaking his finger at the beast as he scurried out from behind the bar.
"Hey, hey, c'mon now, ladies, no loose animals in the dining area– Is that a dog, or...? Either way, tie it up outside, please. This isn't the Salty Mast." He spat the last few words from his mouth like a foul-tasting venom and turned to resume his duties, only to find himself nose-to-chest with Edér.
"He's an arctic fox, actually," the large man drawled softly, his tone hovering between casual and threatening. "And he goes where we go. 'Sides, he's clean, and he don't make no trouble. Not 'nless there's trouble with us. Which there ain't. Right?" He smiled amicably, looming over the sweaty little man as Axa stepped forward to intercede and the rest of her crew discreetly slid into a corner table.
The blonde and the redhead returned shortly, followed by a husky orlan barmaid loaded down with stew and brew for the party of five, plus a little something for Itumaak. They talked while they ate: planning, mostly, about what to do with the rest of the evening and the days to come. The Hall of Revealed Mysteries, temple to Wael and the largest library in the Dyrwood, was a high-priority destination, as was the Ducal Palace in First Fires, for the war records Edér was after. According to the talkative fellow by the gates, First Fires was also where Axa could find the temple of Woedica, and hopefully some clues regarding the enigmatic Leaden Key. And, of course, eventually they'd have to head for the western gates to escort Sagani to the cliffs where she might meet Persoq.
Even though your initial offer wasn't an escort to the cliffs. Only to the city. Sagani smirked as she considered the implications and nursed her tankard. You that eager to prove you're really a Watcher? Or are you just hoping to keep me on a little longer as a hireling you don't have to pay? She watched them eat and talk and drink and laugh, and when the orlan caught her staring, she smiled and offered the huntress a toke from her pipe.
...Frost's sake, Sagani, she thought as she politely waved the proffered whiteleaf away, maybe she's just nice.
Soon enough, she was pleasantly buzzed and half-listening to Aloth and Kana argue about whether to visit the asylum in Brackenbury when she noticed that Axa's attention had drifted as well– to the folk woman at the table nearest the back wall, the one who kept her face out of the lamplight and stared grimly into her ale.
Sagani nudged Axa, indicated the woman with a nod of her head. "You know her?"
"No." The redhead rose from her seat, wiping her mouth and knitting her brow. "But I know that look." She spared a glance at the lads– Edér, his eyes shut, blissfully gnawing on a hunk of beef the size of his hand; Kana and Aloth still wrapped up in the discourse on animancers in the Dyrwood– before striding purposefully towards the solitary woman, Sagani close behind.
It took some coaxing, but they got her talking. She told them her name was Kaenra, and that her fiancé had recently struck up a close friendship with svef, had started bringing strange, unsavory people around to the house to use. That he'd become distant, and then violent, and that now all she wanted from him was for him to take his grandmother's ring back and fuck off out of her life. Sagani watched as Axa listened, watched as she bristled with righteous rage, her eyes lingering on the woman's fresh bruise as she squeezed the ring tightly in her fist.
"I'll make sure he gets it," she vowed.
And so it came to pass that Sagani found herself spending her first evening as a tourist in Defiance Bay firing off arrows in a stranger's kitchen and siccing Itumaak on the drug-addled thugs in the study. Judging from the reactions of the rest of her retinue, apparently this sort of thing wasn't exactly out of the ordinary for Axa: the girl had a thirst for justice, it seemed, and she damn well meant to slake it.
Before long, they were all standing above the cowering, bloodied homeowner, a man called Purnisc who struggled to explain himself to Axa's satisfaction. Turns out he had been dealing svef, too, and when his supplier had found out that he'd been pocketing more than his fair share of the profits–
"–they sent the kneebreakers downstairs," Sagani finished for him, "and the wizard to replace you. Literally." She shook her head in wonder. It really was just like one of her Vailian crime novels.
"Replacement wasn't much of an improvement on the original." The little redhead was steaming mad, and she made no move to hide it as she leaned over the battered man, finger in his face. "You silly bastard, you really thought you could steal from a professional criminal, and lie to your woman about it, and you're just so gods damned clever that no one could ever possibly be the wiser?"
The man's blacked, swollen eyes went as wide as they were able. "You... you've talked to my Kaenra? Is she alright? Sh-she doesn't know I was selling, does she? Oh, gods, please don't tell her. I'm so sorry for putting her through all this. Please don't–"
"Are you fucking kidding me?!" Axa's cry came shrill and piercing, her typical rich, smooth voice consumed in the fire of her outrage. "Kaenra sent us here to return your ring because of your lies, you crooked little shit-for-brains! She loves and respects you! And you'd have us lie to her again?"
The pathetic man had withered under the orlan's verbal assault, and Axa seemed to have made her mind up about him as the group marched solemnly back to the Goose and Fox. But after returning to Kaenra, after telling her what Purnisc had done, the little woman once again defied all reasonable expectations.
"He's just an idiot, not a monster," Axa assured the other woman, "and he still loves you. And although he did a damned foolish thing, he never meant to hurt you. You just need to decide for yourself whether he's worth a second chance." Her violet eyes shone with tears as she spoke, Purnisc's ring on the table next to the women's clasped hands.
When Kaenra smiled and said she’d think about it, that was when Sagani suspected that even if it turned out she wasn’t a Watcher, this girl might really be something special after all.
—
Axa could feel them watching her as they settled into their room at the Goose and Fox that night, could feel them wanting to know. Not only so they could understand why she had done what she had with Purnisc and Kaenra, but also so they could (no doubt) uncover and examine all the painful, humiliating life experiences behind her every decision, all her successes and failures, and then judge her accordingly. Like kith will, she thought, of course. That’s normal and healthy to think.
Genuine concern mingled with morbid curiosity, hung palpably over the group like a scythe posed to reap as everyone sat and waited for Axa to break the oppressive silence. So she drained her goblet, emptied her pipe, got out her whiteleaf, and with a grim sense of determination, she told them about it.
About the career she'd built back in Ixamitl, where she had lucked into a scholarship to a prestigious lore college, bestowed on her by a generous politician acquainted with her father. Because she'd always loved to learn and hear stories about kith from around the world, she had chosen to put her good fortune to good use and study to become a naturalist, concerning herself with the cultures and languages and histories that constituted the kith population of Eora.
While most of her colleagues had decided to specialize in Vailian– a popular choice for the political or business-oriented crowd– Axa fancied herself an intellectual, and so she had challenged herself with mastering Ordhjóma: the exotic, mysterious language of the Glamfellen, separated for 10,000 years from their tropical Sceltrfolc cousins in the far-flung, frozen south, in The White that Wends. She had thrown herself into her studies, blowing through massive tomes and ancient scrolls like a hurricane, outperforming her peers with ease. Within four years, Axa had risen like a Dawnstar to the top of her class.
And then the field work had begun.
"It's one thing to read about a people, learn their language from books and study up on their culture," Axa explained, stuffing her pipe slowly, taking her time. "It's quite another to visit their homeland, speak with them, live among them. I was barely seventeen, I'd never even been out of the city..."
Kana winced, painful recognition in his black eyes. "Culture shock can be particularly difficult for younger scholars. We have certain expectations after all our years of academic study, and to find out that the genuine article doesn't quite match up to the image in one’s head can feel disorienting and disappointing. There's not only the shock, there's anger at the natives, and then the guilt over said anger..."
Axa accepted Aloth's proffered light while Kana trailed off– it always delighted her, using arcane flame for something so trivial as a smoke– and sighed. "That's what was really odd about it. I experienced some culture shock, but ultimately the problem wasn't me. It was them. I know it sounds like I'm just being bitter, but... honestly, for whatever reason, the whole village really was actively freezing me out."
"Nice," Edér chuckled, grinning at the unintentional pun until Aloth's glare chastised him back into solemnity.
"No one wanted to talk to me," Axa continued. "Oh, I tried, incessantly, but they just... kept turning away, or answering with nonsense or... or riddles. My colleagues had little difficulty integrating, but I felt like my presence was just barely tolerated by the villagers. I tried asking the other lore students about it, but they either feigned ignorance really well or they honestly couldn't tell what these Glamfellen had against me."
"Some sort of... racial prejudice, perhaps?" Aloth looked as uncomfortable as he sounded, but at least the topic was broached. Axa shrugged.
"I don't think so, but I honestly have no idea. The other three scholars with me weren't orlans, but they weren't Glamfellen either. And no one ever specifically said anything about my being an orlan."
Sagani nodded. "In my experience, while most Glamfellen tend to be as standoffish as any elf– no offense, Aloth– they don't usually have specific prejudices like that."
"Right? Ordinarily, unity and hospitality are taken very seriously in the frozen south; to support one another is indispensable to survival. Nevertheless, I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong by them, and it was driving me out of my gods damned mind. I was supposed to be studying local accents, dialects, and colloquialisms, but that's somewhat difficult when nobody will actually speak with you. So, I ended up spending a lot of time eavesdropping on people, mostly outside, by myself."
Sagani shook her head, drawing her whetstone across her hunting knife. "Bad idea to go it alone out there in the White. All kinds of dangers hiding in the snow."
The orlan huffed a sharp, sardonic laugh. "You're telling me. That's how I met Vaargys."
As soon as his name was out of her mouth, Axa could feel her entire demeanor transform, and the atmosphere in the room with her. It was the first time she'd said his name since she'd left home, and even though she knew they'd already been listening, her audience really seemed to be listening now. She felt her face get warm and her eyes sting from the impending tears, so she turned to the window, trying hard to focus on the streets outside and not at her own reflection in the glass.
Come on, girl. You’ve run far enough. It's time you faced this.
"I spotted him from afar one day at dusk: a dark, distant, shaggy figure out there among the rocks, shambling around just beyond the village's borders. It took me a few minutes to even realize he was kith. My colleagues noticed me watching him eventually, warned me away from him: the 'wild man' the locals called the 'Cursed Vagabond,' the 'Exiled Priest.' And he was out there all alone, struggling to survive because nobody wanted him around, and no one would say why..."
"You had a lot in common," Aloth murmured gravely. It wasn't difficult to see where this story was going. And he couldn't help but think it sounded similar, thematically, to one he knew quite well.
"Kith will paint a face on a rock with their own blood if it means they can have someone to talk to," Sagani sighed sadly, sympathy heavy in her chest. She could see where this was going too, and she dug her fingers into the thick fur on the back of Itumaak's neck for comfort. He grunted in appreciation.
"I introduced myself, like you do. He was... cautious, but receptive. It helped that I'd brought gifts." Axa smiled with fond recollection, despite herself. "We got to know one another, and over time we became fond of each other. We started sharing meals and stories about ourselves, our lives. He told me he was a priest of Wael, self-taught, and exiled from his clan for venerating the Eyeless Face instead of the Beast of Winter... He let me get close to him, cut his hair, tend to his wounds..." The tears spilled over at last, and she paused for a moment, hid her face.
"And you fell in love," Sagani finished for her. Classic. Tale as old as time.
Axa smiled again even as she brushed her tears away, dragging her little fist across her golden cheeks. "And I fell hard. I was his first real friend, gave him his first kiss. And very soon, I became his first lover." The men blushed and looked at the floor. Axa and Sagani paid them no heed.
"I was fascinated by him, and he adored me. We made our own little world together there in the caves, in the snow. And we lived there, separate from everyone and everything else. Until I had to return to Ixamitl, of course. But I had a plan: Before I could talk myself out of it, I asked him to marry me– the very night before I was to return to the Eastern Reach. ...Gods, I had known him for only five months."
"And... wait, how old were you?" Edér spoke up for the first time since Axa had started her story, confusion clear on his face.
"I– Seventeen, almost eighteen by the time I went back home," she clarified, miffed at the interruption. "I'm twenty-two, now."
The blond man held his hands out in front of him, squinting at his fingers, baffled. "And... and how old were you when you left home? Hey, how old was he?"
Kana sighed and leaned over, patting him on the shoulder with one huge hand and confiscating the man's pipe with the other. "Erh– Never mind that now, my friend. Please, Axa, continue." He smiled that big, toothy smile at the little woman, and she blinked very slowly.
"...I brought him home to meet my family and colleagues, to assist me in my studies since all I'd really brought back from the Land was him, and ultimately, hopefully, to become my husband. In the interest of brevity– albeit somewhat belated– here’s how all that turned out: my family and colleagues hated and distrusted him, and after I had defended him so fiercely I'd alienated myself from my peers, I found out that about three-quarters of everything he'd ever told me about his home and his language was complete horseshit and all of our work together was complete bunkum. So! I burned it all in a big bonfire behind our house before telling him to leave and never come back."
She had ticked her misfortunes off on her fingers as she’d described them, her hands trembling, and then gesticulated fiercely before letting her fists fall to the small tabletop before her. "And then... I left, too. And now, here I am."
...Gods, that was easy. Much easier than I thought it'd be. Why was it so–
She rambled on before she could lose her nerve. "So. That's why I... wanted to do that for Kaenra. My fiancé lied to me and fucked up my life, too, and I can't just ignore that kind of shit when I see it anymore." She sighed, turning to the window again with her pipe still burning away in her hand. "Vaargys is the reason I had to leave my home and everything I've ever known, because his lies ruined my career and my academic standing and my reputation. How could I just stand by and watch it happen to someone else?"
"Yet, you advised Kaenra to forgive Purnisc?" Aloth twisted his fingers together in his lap, staring at them rather than looking at Axa as he spoke. "After... all he'd done?"
Sagani glanced at him, narrowing her eyes as he reached up to smooth his hair– and wipe away a stray bead of sweat in the process. Is it my imagination, or is he...?
Axa kept her gaze fixed on the street below. "Yeah, that sort of surprised me too, to be honest." She spotted a stray soul, its violet wisps of essence drifting slowly amongst the city goers, and she squeezed her eyes shut, felt them burn behind her eyelids. "I suppose... I just got the feeling that it wasn't too late for them, that what they had for each other wasn't so broken it couldn't be repaired. Vaargys and me... not so. There was no coming back from what he'd done, and we both knew it."
"Whatever became of him? Of Vaargys?" Kana leaned forward eagerly, his eyes shining with compassion. For once, he actually wasn't taking notes on the conversation, and Sagani noticed that, too.
Axa opened her eyes, and saw the lost soul on the street no more. She shuddered. "After I confronted him, Vaargys simply... left. Vanished into the horizon, just as abruptly as he'd first appeared to me. And then, I got to clean up after him– after us– all alone. I wasn't up to the task; wasn't really up to the task of anything but hiding in bed and regretting my life decisions up to that point. I could really only scrape together the wherewithal every now and then to go out and sell off or give away all the ridiculous trinkets and baubles we'd accumulated together. A few of the things I tried to get rid of turned out to be stolen, of course– big surprise, Axa, he's a thief and a liar– which did my already brutalized image no favors. Nor my purse, when I was obliged to pay out of my pocket for his chicanery."
"Villain," Kana spat, shaking his head slowly. "Scoundrel! ...Oh, how dastardly, to sow discord between the woman he loves and her neighbors and colleagues, then to abscond, completely free of reproach!" His sorrowful frown was as huge and expressive as his smiles always were, almost theatrically so.
Sagani just barely looked over in time to spot Aloth surreptitiously roll his eyes, and she couldn't suppress her grin. I thought so. Ondra's Lure, they're pretty obvious now that I think of it...
The elf cleared his throat and took the reins. "Shall we assume, then, that your family and friends were unable or unwilling to aid you in your time of need?"
Axa scoffed. "My little brother was sympathetic, but ultimately powerless to help me. He's stuck too far under our mother's thumb. He's a Godlike, and it's made things... difficult, for both of them. He feels obligated to her. As for our mother, she blamed me for my own misfortunes, for 'shacking up' with a man like Vaargys in the first place. So... that sort of says it all about our relationship. My father hasn't been in the picture since I was 13, and any non-academic friends I hadn't already traded for school, I ended up trading for Vaargys. I'd made him my whole world, and he–" She stopped herself, puffed on her pipe. "I don't... really make new friends easily. Never have."
Kana laughed good-naturedly. "With all due respect, present company seems to indicate quite the contrary."
"Ha! Since becoming a Watcher with her own castle who offers to help everyone she meets solve all their problems, I do seem to be quite popular, yes," the orlan agreed with a wry smirk. "...I jest, of course. In any case, the friends I do make, I tend to keep. And cherish." She smiled at Kana earnestly, and now he averted his eyes and went ruddy in the face.
Sagani and Aloth surprised one another, simultaneously faking coughing fits to cover their derisive snorts. Kana went even redder, but still managed a sheepish smile as Axa quickly redirected back to the topic at hand.
"In any case, it was my mother who gave me the idea to relocate to the Dyrwood. She brought back the notice advertising the caravan from the marketplace, threw it at me as I lay in my little nest of quilts and despair, and told me I had better either try and do something to rebuild my life or I may as well just return my soul to the Wheel to start a new one, save it some time and trouble."
"So... in response to your fiancé sabotaging your career and your reputation in your own home community, your own mother told you to... choose between self-exile and suicide?" Aloth spoke very quietly, very carefully. When Axa nodded and shrugged, puffing nonchalantly on her pipe, he couldn't quite come up with anything to say to that.
"As harsh as it sounds," she pressed on as she rose and crossed the room to stand before the hearth, "I agreed with her. I still do. Mama grew up a slave and only finally earned her freedom by running away, so maybe she's biased, but... I was never going to be able to move on like that, lying around like I was dead already, surrounded by bad memories. I had to do something, get up and get out. And she dropped a nice, pre-packaged escape plan in my lap, just like that. Nicest thing she'd done for me in a good long while. ...So. That's what lead me to the Dyrwood."
"And then it lead you to the bîaŵac, the Engwithan ruins, the machine," Kana murmured, rubbing his chin and studying the little woman. "Perchance, did you ever pray to Wael that you might live an interesting life? Because if so, you've had your wish granted many times over!"
"It's funny," Axa sighed as she bent and tapped her pipe against the bricks of the fireplace, "you'd think I'd hold a grudge against Wael, allowing Their priest to make a fool of me like that. But in the end, I had to admit that although he betrayed my trust and wrecked my life, Vaargys hadn't actually ever violated any of Wael's tenets. ...Made me rethink the gods, a bit. Maybe he was a true servant of Wael after all, sent to guide me here for some reason. And I do still pray to Wael for guidance, on occasion."
The aumaua sat up in his chair, beaming. "Ah! Shall we go to the Hall of Revealed Mysteries tomorrow after all, then? We can ask the scriveners' opinion!"
"Gods! I spill my guts to you, and you're still thinking about going to the library?" Axa shook her head and chuckled. "You're a mystery, Kana."
"Wait, so... you were gonna marry the pale elf?" Edér mumbled into his pillow, half asleep and trying to kick his boots off. "But you're an orlan. Would that... how would that work?"
The little woman threw the sheets back on her bed, using a little more force than she'd meant to. "Another mystery, Edér," she snapped, rolling her eyes. "Mysteries abound."
The other two men winced as Sagani laid a gentle, steady hand on the orlan's shoulder. "Hey. ...Hel of a day for all of us. Let's call it a night, yeah?"
"Let's, yes." Axa turned and smiled wearily, placing her little hand over the huntress'. "Thank you. All of you. Truly. Tomorrow... tomorrow should be easier, I think."
—
The next morning, Axa woke facedown on the floor halfway between her bed and the door to the room.
The rest of the day proceeded along the same lines.
They made for First Fires first, to visit the Ducal Palace and discern the fate of Edér's brother from the military records, as well as square away some lingering paperwork dealing with Caed Nua. Naturally, they came away from the Palace with no answers for Edér, more paperwork to do with Caed Nua, and a new, even longer list of tasks and priorities.
"You Watchers do that every time you roll into a new town?" Sagani stretched and yawned and Itumaak did the same, both of them glad to finally be back outside. "Introduce yourself, get involved in local politics, promise the townsfolk you'll visit the caves from their visions for 'em?"
"Sure she does," Edér grinned over the dwarf's shoulder. "How d'y'think we met her?"
Axa sighed, rubbing her bleary eyes. "That seems to be my routine since moving to the Dyrwood, anyway. No better way to earn a bit of coin and endear oneself to the locals than to offer a helping hand. The better to 'establish myself in the city,' too, I suppose– apparently a necessity if one just wants to access one little simple gods damned war record." She looked up at Edér with sympathy.
"Perhaps we might start realizing that goal by familiarizing ourselves with the local constabulary?" Aloth waved a slender finger in the direction of the squat, imposing keep that housed the Crucible Knights. "If what the... representative from the Dozens we met yesterday eve says is true, it sounds like they're well in need of the assistance and more than capable of affording your fee."
"Oh, they're more 'n capable of plenty," Edér grumbled as the party approached the stone arch and started up the stairs to Crucible Keep, "but it don't mean they'll actually do what they say they will. The Dozens, they got the opposite problem: they like t' say they done shit they haven't."
"As long as they pay us and help us get you your war records, they can talk all they like and I'll do the doing." Axa flashed her feisty, confident smile at the first Knight she spotted in the great hall–
–and within twenty minutes, she was storming back down the steep stairs, red-faced and fuming, her companions trailing nervously behind her.
"'Orlans aren't suited for the work,' he says!" she spat, flinging her hands about, teeth bared in anger. "We're 'too hostile,' he says! And then Clyver just... throws some bullshit fetch-it job at me and dismisses me like I'm a child!"
"Now, Axa, please, just– just try and calm down..." As soon as Kana said it, Sagani winced in sympathy for the stupid man. Oof... Wrong approach there, lad.
And she was right. Axa whipped around so fast that the huge man stumbled backward in surprise, nearly tripping over his own feet. She reached up to jab a finger into his solar plexus while her eyes, narrowed into slits like thin violet blades, cut into him. "Never tell me how to feel, Kana, never again. Or by the Beast, I'll show you fucking hostile."
She whirled back to fore, marching away with her fists clenched at her sides, leaving Kana to stare after her and press his palm to the divot she'd poked in his belly. He watched as Sagani and Aloth followed close behind her, before he turned to Edér, eyes wide with bewilderment.
The blond chewed his pipe stem, giving the ochre-hued lad a look of pity. "First time pissin' off a woman? Or... just an orlan woman?"
"Hardly," Kana chuckled, "on either count. Why, it's not even my first time pissing off that particular orlan woman!" He shook his head, slowly ambling after the little woman, taking his time to catch up. "Although that barrel of powder was already well primed to explode, and not without reason. I suppose I just had no idea how serious the anti-orlan sentiment really was around here. Evidently, even the justiciars will make brazen, odious assumptions about a perfectly amicable visitor like Axa based on nothing more than bigoted superstition! And with the four of us standing right there alongside her, no less!"
"Well, I mean, yeah, but... I wasn't gonna say anything." Edér looked away, scratching at the back of his neck, and Kana turned to rebuke the man before realizing, with no small amount of shame, that he hadn't said anything to the justiciar to defend Axa either. He fell uncharacteristically silent pondering this, and Edér thumped him affectionately between the shoulders, passing the other man his pipe in the spirit of brotherhood. For whatever reason, it made Kana feel worse.
It didn't take the two men very long to catch up to the others. They had come to a dead stop not too far away, the three of them standing just beyond the threshold of a nearby building– or, what was once a building. The burnt out, crumbling ruins of Defiant Bay's temple to Woedica appeared to Edér and Kana to be rather unremarkable, considering its purpose and patron. Weeds poked up through the broken stone, insects and small vermin skittered amongst the scattered bricks.
And there Axa stood near the center of the ruin, still as a statue, staring into thin air. The clouds shifted with the wind, and a thin, feeble sunbeam dragged itself slowly across the district, catching her in the light for just a moment, but she made no sign of noticing.
Kana sidled up timidly behind Aloth, peering at the little woman over the elf's head. "Is... is she quite alright? I didn't upset her that badly, did I?" He looked to Sagani, hoping to see an encouraging face, but found the huntress entirely fixated on the orlan woman instead.
"Don't worry, Kana, it's nothing to do with you." Sagani's voice was quiet and clipped, and her face wore concern and shock in equal measure. "She's just... talking to a ghost."
"Oh– why, so she is!" Kana still stood behind Aloth– reminding himself of hiding behind his mother as a child after he'd angered one of his sisters– but he leaned forward all the same to better observe her. Sure enough, the signs were all there: her blank eyes, her unsteady stance, her lack of response to stimuli.
"Told ya, she just does that sometimes," Edér quipped, returning some of the dirty looks they were starting to draw from passersby. "We let her. She seems t’ like it."
Aloth leaned away from the giant chanter looming over his shoulder. "The shock starts to wear off after you've seen her do it a few times," he assured Sagani politely.
And as if on cue, Axa suddenly shuddered and blinked, coming out of her trance dazed and slightly paler than before. Her voice was shaky, but she kept it under control. "...The temple proper is underground. We can reach it through the catacombs, on the south side of Copperlane. That's... where we'll meet her. The Queen that Was." She turned to her comrades and found Sagani in front of her, the older woman's face a shifting landscape of wonder, fear, pity.
"You really are a Watcher, aren't you?" The way she said it, Axa knew Sagani believed it, now.
She smiled weakly. "I am, yes. For better or for worse."
—
Kana Rua breathed deeply of the sea air as the band of adventurers wandered through Ondra's Gift, and a powerful, heart-wrenching homesickness hit him like a punch to the gut. The smell of the ocean was the smell of home to him, and he'd been landlocked so frequently as of late on his journey across the Eastern Reach that he'd started to find it hard to recall the exact details of its tangy, briney aroma. Although the winds from the bay that swept across him now didn't smell quite like the ones he'd enjoyed back home in Tâkowa– rather fishy smelling, this particular shore– they were still a fond reminder of his coastal home, a kindness from Ondra Herself to him, here in Her namesake district in this faraway land.
Chest and mind alike full of the heady fragrance of the waves, he smiled down at Axa, and the little woman smiled back, giving his elbow a gentle squeeze. She had apologized to Kana for her earlier outburst as soon as she'd had time to process her conversation with the ghostly Woedican worshipper, and he had responded with a lengthy apology of his own for his cowardly silence during her earlier confrontation with the bigot at Crucible Keep. Before long, they were laughing and jesting as though nothing had ever happened. Neither of them could stay angry with a friend for very long, it seemed, and both were amenable to a sincere admission of guilt and a genuine attempt to make amends.
And he couldn't deny that the more time he spent in conversation with her, the more he found himself blushing and grinning stupidly, stumbling over his words. Though it felt... coarse to dwell on it, he couldn't help but wonder if there might be something between the two of them. We suffer misunderstandings here and there, but ultimately, she seems rather fond of me. And I have to admit, she's a stunning little beauty... She's strong, principled, fantastically clever... And her charm–
"Smells like a kraken took a shit out here and died," Axa groused, her lip curling back in revulsion as she tried to peer around the other pedestrians crowding the street. "Gods, I detest the sea. ...We must be lost. Isn't there supposed to be an inn around here somewhere?"
Kana cringed as his amorous daydreams quickly deflated. "Ah... there is, yes, the... Salty Mast," he replied reluctantly. "But, erh, you might not wish to give custom to–"
The crash of a heavy wooden door being flung against masonry shattered any sense of tranquility left in the muggy afternoon. Everyone on the street, Axa and crew included, quickly turned to the source of the clamor: a tall, slim woman in silver armor and purple silks, evidently doing her damndest to tear the door to the Vailian Trading Company office off of its hinges on her way out of the building. She appeared to be Ocean Folk at first glance, but when she whipped her head of thick, dark hair around, her feathers–
Her feathers, cerulean and emerald and azure, caught the late afternoon sunlight, fluffed up and fluttered in the breeze. Axa could hear the others around her gasping, whispering, but she–
–a gift, honeycomb, a gift from the Sky-Mother Herself! Oh, Axa, look at him, look at your beautiful little brother and she'd looked and seen feathers, feathers and blood and wet, pink flesh–
–had seen an Avian Godlike before.
"Gods damn that son of a cur!" Her voice was smooth and melodious despite her fury and fervor, and as Axa approached she found herself met by a pair of sharp, golden eyes that rivaled her own in intensity.
The feathered woman sneered, gesturing to the building she'd exited seconds before. "Ado. Looking for work? You could try your hand at running a down-on-its-luck Vailian Trading Company. There'll be a good position opening up soon enough, provided you don't mind mopping up your predecessor's blood before assuming his duties." Her Vailian accent was strong and rich, and she glared at the badly abused door, arms crossed over her chest, careful not to obscure the five suns on her breastplate.
Axa looked at the door herself just in time to see a frantic little fellow inside scramble to shut it as best he could. She turned back to the woman before her, whose scowl cut ever deeper into her striking features. "Uh. W‐well–" It took the little woman longer than usual to find her voice– "Enough coin, and you'd be surprised how well damn near anything'll clean up."
The scowl eased up, for a moment. "True enough. Verzano's just lucky he's not getting his payments in steel these days. Or not yet, anyway." The armored lady cast her piercing gaze at the orlan one last time– pinkish-white membranes sliding up out of the corners of her eyes– before striding purposefully up the road Axa and her companions had just come down.
No one spoke until the brilliant woman had vanished into the crowd, and then it seemed like everyone had something to say all at once. Axa had to lean in close for Sagani to hear her over the din. "I know we made a promise to take you to those cliffs," the redhead told her, "and I do intend to honor that promise. But do you think you'd mind if we made a brief diversion?"
Sagani saw Axa's violet eyes lingering on the ruined front door of the VTC branch office, and the little huntress grinned, Itumaak perking up at her side. "Don't mind a bit, Watcher. Never could resist a good mystery."
—
Chapter 10: Hard Truths
Summary:
A good lie is elegant and tidy, tying up loose ends with a pleasing simplicity. The truth is often more complex. Messy, disappointing. And it only ever reveals more lies.
Chapter Text
—
Kith often thought of Pallegina mes Rèi as a woman with very little patience.
She could see why she was perceived that way– most kith only ever truly heard her, listened to her, long after her patience had run out. Despite all her diplomatic training, all the clout and prestige that came with being a paladin of the Frermàs mes Canc Suolias, Pallegina had found that using anything less than the strongest words delivered in the strongest tones would, more often than not, result in her being dismissed out of hand, without even a second thought. And she knew it was all because of who she was, what she was, for it had been this way all her life.
Of course, Pallegina knew herself well enough to know that she did not lack patience. She only recognized what most did not— that it was a finite resource, a precious one that must be hoarded and carefully meted only out for matters that truly required it. Or to people who truly deserved it.
Verzano did not deserve her patience. He had proven himself a greedy, short-sighted fool time and time again, and even her strongest words and tones could not penetrate his idiotic arrogance. He didn't deserve her sympathy, either, and he certainly did not have it, not even now that Danna Doemenel and her thugs had converged on his position, swords drawn and thirsty for vengeance. And so Pallegina waited outside the Vailian Trading Company office, investing her precious patience in a more lucrative opportunity instead: a chance to talk to the orlan woman Verzano had somehow tricked or cajoled or guilted into working with him.
The little woman had stuck in Pallegina's mind ever since encountering her and her companions outside Verzano's miserable den of failure earlier that afternoon. Something about the orlan had made her memorable– not her face, but the look on it when Pallegina's gaze had met hers. As her initial surprise from Pallegina's outburst had abated, her expression had been replaced not by the typical astonishment or discomfort the paladin often saw on the faces of those who beheld her, but by something closer to attentiveness. Gravitas, even. And after she'd said her piece, the orlan woman had responded with a clever bit of banter, proving that not only had she been listening, she had a decently quick wit as well. She had even almost made the paladin smile.
And if there was a resource Pallegina knew to be truly scarce, it was people like that: people who were open-minded enough to take a stranger's words seriously, people who could listen and lead others and think on their feet. People who could get things done.
She allowed herself a small smile as the badly abused door to the VTC branch office swung open yet again, and the orlan woman stepped out into the street, her mismatched little squadron close behind her. Pallegina didn't even need to step forward to reveal herself– the orlan turned to face her almost as soon as the door had closed behind her, as though she'd known the paladin would be waiting there for her.
"All sorted, then?" Pallegina could just barely hear the disgraced merchant scrabbling around inside the warehouse, preparing to make his escape, and she sighed deeply, shaking her feathered head. "Insufferable, isn't he? Always Verzano plays these ridiculous games, and always he leaves someone else holding the bag."
"Well, if it makes you feel any better, he could still get a knife in the gut on his way to the docks." The little woman tossed an auburn curl over her shoulder. "I may be forgiving, but the Doemenels aren't. He sticks around too much longer, they're gonna 'stick' him."
Pallegina raised an eyebrow. "True enough. But should you not worry more about them 'sticking' you, then, tella, and less about Verzano? You have already been far more considerate of him than he deserves, and his foolishness has earned you a powerful enemy."
"Yeah– bein' honest, she's like that with pretty much everyone." The bearded blonde at the orlan's shoulder grinned down at her, and she shrugged in response, chuckling.
"In any case, you've plucked a sizable thorn from the side of the ducs bels, and done me a personal favor by freeing me to pursue matters more pertinent to the continued prosperity of the Republics than playing nursemaid to a miscreant." Pallegina inclined her head slightly, and her smile broadened just a bit. "On behalf of the Brotherhood of the Five Suns, agracima."
"Only doing what comes naturally," the little woman laughed, offering her hand for a shake. "You're called Pallegina, they tell me. Axa Mala, at your service." She had the smooth, uncalloused hand of a scholar, but her grip was sure and strong, and Pallegina could respect that.
"Bon piaco. I imagine 'they' have told you quite a lot about me," the paladin sighed, but her smile did not waver. "Luckily for us both, though, you do not seem like the type to make snap judgments based on hearsay... or prejudice. If that's so– and if your own priorities here in the city would not be compromised– how would you feel about doing some work for us?" Pallegina glanced over at the warehouse door, still barely on its hinges, her pleasant smile briefly tightening into a smirk. "In an official capacity, I mean. There is work to be done in this city, and I think we could be of considerable aid to one another."
The little woman turned to confer with her party, and the godlike took the opportunity to look Axa's campagnas over, mildly pleased to see assent on every face. Quite a mixed bag, she thought, stepping forward to join them. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. "The embassy is in First Fires, very near the Ducal Palace," Pallegina proclaimed. "We can go and introduce you to the ambassador now, if you wish."
Axa looked surprised. "Now? Well... ordinarily I wouldn't mind going straight away, but I've a prior engagement involving Sagani here." She laid her small hand on the shoulder of the dwarf woman standing alongside her, who in turn gave Pallegina a tired little smile. "It won't take too long, probably, if you can spare the time."
"That shouldn't be a problem as long as I report in eventually. Preferably today, but..." The paladin shrugged her shoulders. "What is this prior engagement, exactly? Perhaps I can be of assistance to you as you have to me."
The dwarf woman, Sagani, gave her that wry smile again. "Oh, we're just heading for the cliffs south of the bay to look for any traces of the reincarnated soul of my long-dead village elder. Like she said, shouldn't take too long."
Pallegina blinked slowly, her nictating membranes sliding out and back across her eyes. "...Eccosi?"
Axa planted her fists on her hips, sighing, her eyes screwed shut. "It's... I'll explain on the way."
—
It was a day's hike to the cliffs, and a day's hike back. Pallegina went anyway, of course.
It was a good opportunity to assess the members of this ragtag band she was joining up with, as combatants and as people. Overall, she was fairly impressed with their martial skills– their tactics and group cohesion were sound, but she was sure to note their evident lack of formal training and quality equipment. She'd found herself pleasantly surprised at their generosity and inclusiveness, sharing food and drink and smoke and stories as freely with their feathered newcomer as they did with one another. No one had even brought up her "divine heritage" until they'd been sitting around the campfire that first night, and the aumaua who'd broached the subject had actually managed to look appropriately bashful as he'd done so. Although in retrospect, an Avian Godlike woman in a brotherhood of paladins probably wasn't too outlandish a concept for these kith, considering that their squad leader was apparently an Awakened Watcher.
Pallegina had been fielding annoying, invasive questions posed by strangers about her body and her soul for her entire life, but Axa was a newly-minted freak, it seemed, and so was not quite sick of talking about it just yet. And her friends weren't either: with minimal prompting, Aloth had recounted her nightmares and her past life memories, Edér had remembered her staring at the tree in Gilded Vale for nearly half an hour, Kana had practically rhapsodized about her conversations with ghosts in caves and temples. And the next morning, as the group stood on the bluff overlooking the sea, Sagani had handed Axa a misshapen little lump of adra, and Pallegina had watched as the orlan peered through it and into the In-Between.
She'd been told the woman was a Watcher, and she'd more or less accepted it as truth, but the paladin hadn't really known what to expect from a demonstration of her abilities. After a few minutes of watching the orlan sway to and fro, apparently mesmerized by the adra carving the dwarf had given her, concern for her wellbeing had compelled Pallegina to approach and take her by the shoulders, attempting to shake her out of it before she wobbled her way over the cliff's edge.
"Everything... all right in there?" she'd muttered, lightly slapping the little woman's cheek.
"Adra arch," Axa had rasped in reply, violet eyes wild and unfixed. Sagani had gently pried the carving from her fuzzy hands then, smiled compassionately at the other two women before asking Edér where in the Dyrwood an adra arch might stand.
That was... very strange. But stranger things have happened, Pallegina had reminded herself. She'd kept reminding herself of that as they'd made their way back to the city, as she listened to the others' stories of reincarnated souls and mysterious cults, dead brothers and ancient tablets and a haunted castle this eccentric little woman called home.
Ambassador Agosti had been less than pleased to receive his agent nearly three days after Verzano had been cut loose, and accompanied by a pack of disheveled strangers no less. But Axa was nothing if not a fierce defender of her troops, it seemed, and although she'd made a valiant effort to keep her comments civil, eventually Agosti had frayed the little woman's last nerve with his dismissive arrogance and insinuated threats, finally finding himself on the receiving end of a tongue-lashing for once. Pallegina had known then that she'd chosen her new companions wisely, biting the inside of her cheek to keep from grinning at Agosti as he stammered and sweated under the orlan's cutting rebuke.
Her amusement at Axa's antics had been soundly quashed, however, by the new assignment laid upon her shoulders, one that she had dreaded might be in the works but had hoped would never actually be implemented– the negotiation of a new trade agreement between the Vailian Republics and Eir Glanfath, one that took blatant, vicious advantage of the Dyrwood's badly weakened state due to the Hollowborn crisis. It made sense in the short term, financially and practically, for the merchants of the Republics to step in and take the reins where the Dyrwoodans could not. But what gave Pallegina pause were the long term political implications of essentially kicking the Dyrwood while it was down, especially now at such a crucial juncture in the deciding of the country's legislation regarding animancy. If the Ducs Bels willfully chose to make an enemy of the Dyrwood now, it could have long-reaching consequences that could do untold damage to the Republics in the years to come, particularly for the animancy community. Animancers were already under attack in this country, superstitious types blaming them for causing this soul plague by somehow invoking the wrath of the gods, as well as for their ill-fated attempts at curing the nation's blighted children. Would the people of the Dyrwood, reactionist and hot-tempered as they were, still tolerate animancy at all should the Republics, animancy's shining champion, stab them in the back while they were at their weakest and least reasonable? What would become of Vailian animancy without competition to keep them sharp, or collaborative efforts to keep them abreast of the latest developments? Even if animancy was permitted to continue in the Dyrwood, practitioners would doubtlessly scoff at sharing their discoveries with their perfidious Vailian counterparts, leading to an inevitable stagnation in the soul sciences– or even worse, the Republics could potentially fall behind the Dyrwood, languishing in the past while the Dyrwood moved ahead, forging the future without them...
No. This was not permissible, not after all the Republics and her animancers had done for her. But still, she had her orders. Now all she had to do was carry them out, one way or another.
"Twin Elms is a good long way from here," Sagani reassured her afterwards at their table at the Charred Barrel, swirling her ale around in her tankard and feeding her fox under her chair. "And Axa'll find more than enough distractions along the way, I'm sure. Plenty of time to come up with some sort of... creative interpretation of your orders."
Pallegina tried to smile, but only produced a weak grimace. "Then I hope our Watcher friend is more 'creative' than I am. I have many strengths, but subterfuge has never been one of them. And one can only openly defy the powers that be so many times before their patience runs out." She stared pensively into her wine as she spoke, couldn't help but think of Verzano's fate, Agosti's warnings.
"I'll drink to that," Edér mumbled around his mouthful of roast pork and potato, raising his cup in a commiserative gesture before knocking it back. "Axa ain't much for bullshittin' folks– not as far as I've seen, anyway– but she's got a knack for solvin' problems, and for pushin' her luck 'n' gettin' away with it. If anyone can finagle some kinda deal that'll keep your ducs happy without totally screwin' over the Dyrwood, I'd wager it'd be her."
"Elegantly stated, Edér," Aloth deadpanned, rolling his eyes and pushing his food around on his plate. "Speaking of Axa, she's been away from the table for quite a while now..." The elf lifted his head, anxiously scanning the throng of diners, drunks, and diplomats. "If I recall, she only said she wanted to catch up with Ingroed and Nonton, but I don't see her at the bar anymore."
"Ingroed and Nonton?" Pallegina glanced around idly and spotted the little woman almost immediately– that bold red hair was unmistakable, even when mostly obscured behind the fat asses and round bellies of the taller kith surrounding her. "More friends, I assume?"
"Couple of folks from my hometown, Gilded Vale. She helped 'em outta a rough spot." The blond man glanced over at the bar, smiling at his former neighbors.
Kana looked up from his dinner, face flushed with drink. "Ah! Are those the ones who set a trap for the dead man in the bear's den?" He beamed at Pallegina, practically glowing with enthusiasm. "You must have her tell you the tale, my lady. A truly inspiring account of our Watcher's unique insight at work. She learned of their betrayal from the spirit of the victim, you see! But there's a tragic twist–"
"Hey, now, don't spoil the ending, you wasn't even there. Let her tell it." Edér had caught sight of Axa too, just as she'd turned away from the fellow she'd been speaking with, and he beckoned the redhead back to their table with a wave of his hand. The stranger watched her go, fussing nervously with the rings on his fingers as she sauntered back to her friends, his eyes widening in alarm as he caught Pallegina staring at him.
"Talking about me behind my back again, were you?" Axa grinned, shaking her head as she clambered back into her seat. "They didn't tell you a bunch of ghost stories, did they?" She winked at Pallegina, and the paladin noticed just how tired the orlan looked.
"Only the true ones!" Kana laughed a bit too loudly– not atypical of him, but the alcohol certainly amplified his natural exuberance. Aloth delicately scooted his chair away from the overly jolly giant, vexation plain on his face.
If Axa noticed, she didn't mention anything, only took a long drag from her pipe. "Found out where your adra arch might be, Sagani. Turns out it's somewhere over by Twin Elms, believe it or not." She glanced up at Pallegina, a cautious little smile on her tawny face. "Unfortunately, I've also heard tell that the road leading there is badly flooded right now due to inclement weather. So it looks like we'll have some time to kill before we can head over that way."
"Belfetto," Pallegina sighed. She appreciated the attempt to reassure her, letting her know she had time to decide how to handle the Ducs' request, but she had a feeling that the longer she dwelled on her predicament, the more it would weigh on her mind.
Aloth leaned close to the little woman. "I take it this means we're to head for the catacombs on the morrow, then?" He looked simultaneously anxious and eager, as though preparing to take on a task he knew to be important but especially daunting. A familiar burden, Pallegina mused.
"Ah... perhaps," Axa replied, looking away quickly. "There are a few other things I'd like to tend to first, though, if you're all amenable. I was just talking to someone over there, the elf in the fancy robes, and he's asked me to do him a favor. See, he has this friend who's a... a courtesan at the, uh, at the Salty Mast..."
She winced as everyone at the table put down their forks and goblets and gave her their undivided attention.
Pallegina downed the rest of her wine.
—
The next day was a frantic whirlwind of words and swords, the six adventurers rising at dawn to race up and down the docks and streets of Ondra's Gift, solving the problems of the district's desperate. Wherever they went in their attempts to fulfill the pleas of those in need, more work seemed to pop up before them: A trip to the local whorehouse to secure a priceless Engwithan relic and thus restore the honor of the Shattering Spear Clan was interrupted midway through by a negotiation with angry townies who had taken to attacking the Salty Mast's wealthier clientele in an attempt to drive down prices. An Ixamitli deckhand, sole survivor of his destroyed vessel, sought to recover a valuable scepter from the wreckage, and the subsequent search turned up the waterlogged remains of a murdered young boy, spurring an investigation. A mission to rid an abandoned lighthouse of its ghostly tenant lead the party to a fidgety sailor boy who pleaded for help recovering his captain's purloined chest.
By the time they'd gotten around to procuring the construct research Commander Clyver had commissioned– rescuing his hired animancer from a squad of Dozens thugs in the process– the sun was already setting again, and the harried little band of do-gooders was ready for a well-deserved rest. Axa, however, couldn't seem to force herself to relax, and so she paced anxiously as the rest of her crew leaned against a dilapidated building on the northwestern end of the Gift and took a badly needed breather.
"Told ya she's just like that," Edér panted, amicably clapping Pallegina on the back. The look she shot him in response could have given a Glamfellen frostbite.
For Sagani, it was easy enough to recognize a procrastination tactic when she saw one– her own older children were experts at attempting to get out of tending to their more difficult or loathsome chores by "accidentally" taking too long with the easier ones, conveniently running out of time and hoping their father might just forget to make them do it tomorrow. Axa's insistence on running herself ragged aiding every troubled soul they met was almost certainly influenced in no small part by her inclination to avoid seeking out the catacombs, entering the temple, confronting the cult. And it didn't take a genius to see why– she was afraid, obviously, of what might be waiting for her down there in the dark. And understandably so.
Of course, the huntress saw no need to point any of this out to her. Axa wasn't one of Sagani's kids, she was a grown woman– a stubborn, strong-willed one with her own ways of handling herself, and reminding her of the daunting task ahead of her would probably only make her want to tackle it even less than she already did. She may be putting it off a bit longer than was advisable, but sooner rather than later she'd swallow her fear and get to it, provided she felt supported by her comrades rather than pressured.
Now, if only she could think of a way to discreetly impart that wisdom to the others...
"By the Visions, Aloth, the catacombs aren't going anywhere," Axa snapped, plugging up her waterskin and wiping her mouth as the elf shrunk away from her. "It may shock you to learn this, but they'll still be there tomorrow, after we've had a chance to rest up and recover from today. What's the big rush, anyway? We're helping people here. Or is that not good enough for you?" She couldn't bring herself to look at him, shame burning her face as she huffed and puffed, crossing her arms over her chest and glaring at the cobblestones beneath her feet. She was wrong, and she was being a bitch, and she knew it.
He tried not to take it personally, frowning down at the anxious and clearly overwhelmed little woman, but it still hurt him to be lashed out at like that, especially by her. "Be that as it may," he hissed, struggling against the urge to spout curses at her in Hylspeak, "might it not be somewhat... unwise to leave it for too long? I'm sure I don't need to remind you that you're not the only one in our group that this 'Leaden Key' has antagonized." He glanced at Kana, who looked just as surprised that Aloth was speaking up for him as Aloth himself was. "And the sooner we can infiltrate their base of operations and find out just what the Hel they think they're doing, the better."
Awrigh' laddie, well said! Mayhap ye've a pair after all–
"Be quiet," he growled into his collar as he turned away, ears and cheeks quickly reddening.
Luckily for him, Axa was too focused on feeling sorry for herself to hear his last comment. "I know," she muttered, trudging away up the wet, dirty street, her companions following dutifully behind her. "I know it's important. And I know I have to find them and... stop them, or question them, or whatever it is I'm meant to do. I just..."
She stopped in her tracks suddenly, sniffed, squinted at the air. "What's that smell?"
Kana stepped closer. "I was wondering that myself just the other day. Rather fishy aroma this side of the sea, wouldn't you say?" He smiled his broad, gleaming smile, jumping at the chance to change the subject and so help to relieve the tension in the group.
"It is not the sea," Pallegina declared grimly, staring ahead at the tightly shut gates to the adjacent district. "What you are smelling is the dead."
As soon as she said it, everyone seemed to recognize the odor all at once. Kana's broad, friendly grin shriveled into a disgusted grimace, Edér's eyes went wide as he rushed to relight his pipe, Aloth and Sagani covered their mouths and noses with their hands. Even Itumaak seemed to react to the paladin's words, his hackles rising.
Pallegina herself sneered distastefully, speaking slowly and with gravitas. "It happened shortly before my arrival in the Dyrwood. Some months ago, some sort of... misfortune struck the district of Heritage Hill. There is not much known about the situation for certain, and those who do know anything about it keep their knowledge behind lips tighter than a miser's purse. All I can say for certain is that no one passes through the gates, neither to enter nor to exit, and the stench of death rises steadily from within."
Axa had heard what she'd said, had listened and processed the words. But her attention was fixed on the stone tower in the distance, the top of which was just barely visible over the walls keeping the rest of the city safe from whatever was in Heritage Hill. On the massive, familiar-looking machine perched atop the tower like a vulture, waiting for the city to die so it could swoop in and take its sustenance from the corpse.
–the machine buzzing to life, spinning madly, churning the essence in the air– her soul bubbling up out of her body like a pot of milk boiling over, being yanked violently away in the unnatural wind– Heodan and Calisca, their mouths opened horrifyingly wide in a silent scream– his voice–
–Are you ready, initiate–
"I'm ready."
She clenched her tiny fists, pointed nails digging into her palms, and spun around to face her compatriots. "I take back what I said earlier. Rest can wait. This cannot, not any longer. Let's go to the catacombs, find the temple of The Queen That Was. Let's go meet the Leaden Key."
Sagani reached out, gave the orlan's shoulder a gentle squeeze. "We're right behind you, Watcher."
—
His voice echoed in her mind still.
The entrance to the catacombs was exactly where the apparition in the burnt temple had said it would be– tucked away in an inconspicuous corner of Copperlane, unguarded and easily accessible to those who knew what they were looking for. But as she stood before the humble stone archway, steeling herself for the ordeal to come, Axa had suddenly found herself swept away from the here and now into a memory from another time, another life–
–It was her turn, at last. He smiled at her approach, warm and fatherly. "You are from Creitum, my dear?"
"I am, Your Eminence." She smiled back, bashful and starstruck. This was an honor, she reminded herself, an immense honor for such worthless caitiff as herself. "I was born and raised in Creitum."
His smile broadened–
Axa had never heard of any city called Creitum, but she had heard the name, had heard him ask her that same question before. In dreams, in memories hidden deep within her soul.
"Axa? Y' okay?" She felt Edér's hands gripping her shoulders as the vision faded away, ready to prop her up should she need him to. She had wavered, but she had not fallen.
Her little hand found his, squeezed it gently as she smiled up into the bearded man's face. "Yes, Edér, I'll be... I'm fine. Thank you. Let's just get this over with–"
–"A fine city, one of the very finest we have encountered outside of our own. Creitum has produced many strong, principled women and men who have heard the call of the gods and answered that call with reverence and devotion, determined to spread the truth of Their word."
He laid a reassuring hand on her shoulder, his smile as warm and nurturing as the sun, and she felt her heart swell with respect and adoration for him, for the gods who had lead her here. "And how did it come to pass that you should hear Their call, my child?"
She had hoped, before, that he might not ask about her previous life, pathetic and meaningless as it had been. But now beneath his benevolent gaze, her answer came easily–
The vision replayed itself over and over in her mind, even as she knelt before the dead man just beyond the bottom of the entrance stairs. The essence still clinging to his rapidly cooling body had revealed to Axa that, for better or for worse, they'd come to the right place to find the Leaden Key.
Axa heard Itumaak growl behind her, heard Edér and Pallegina draw their weapons and Kana start chanting. She whipped around just in time to see the troll lumbering out of the shadows at them, flanked by black oozes that undulated grotesquely in the torchlight. There was no turning back now–
–"I suffered through... troubled times in my youth, Your Eminence. Dark times." She was surprised at how easy it was to admit now, how the shame and sorrow that had seemed heavy enough to crush her before now slipped from her shoulders like an old shawl as she spoke. "I was lost, adrift in a meaningless world without light, without hope. Nothing made sense. But that all changed when your order brought the word of the true gods to us."
He nodded sagely, his grip briefly tightening on her shoulder–
"Gee back, ye clods! These hooded fiends is nae t' be trusted!" Aloth's hand shot out to grab her by the shoulder, but Axa spun on him instead, eyes wide with alarm, surprising him just enough to allow him to regain control.
Strong hands seized him then, shook him roughly as he coughed and stumbled. "Postenago, what are you doing? You will give away our position!" Pallegina's golden eyes narrowed to slits in her anger, baring her teeth as she hissed at the trembling elf.
He opened his mouth to stammer an apology, an excuse, anything to get the Godlike to ease off, but Axa beat him to it. "It's alright, Pallegina, he didn't do it on purpose. He can't–" She glanced at Aloth's face, winced, continued– "he can't help it."
To her surprise, he didn't look betrayed or even angry with her for spilling his secret. He simply lowered his gaze to his feet, apologized again, hugged his cloak tightly around himself as Kana gently ushered him off to the side of the damp, earthy passageway to sit and collect himself.
"Forgive me, I... I don't know what came over me." He smoothed his hair back with shaking hands, his watery eyes rimmed red. "But... perhaps when we're finished here, I–"
"When we're finished here," Sagani snapped, "you're going to have some explaining to do, I wager." The little huntress regarded him with that mix of righteous anger and genuine concern that only a parent could truly master, hands planted squarely on her hips. "Until then: Watcher, you've a job to do. And by the sounds of it, you've not much time to do it in." She thrust her chin at the door at the end of the corridor, voices behind it rising to a crescendo before coming to an abrupt halt.
Axa nodded, pulled on the itchy, stifling hood and mask–
–"I see. Indeed, very little makes sense taken in the context of the falsehoods under which so many innocent lives have labored for so long. Too long." His kind, gentle smile had been warped by pity into a rictus grave and sorrowful, and she feared for a moment that her words might have actually caused him pain, somehow. But the smile slowly returned as he continued speaking, like storm clouds breaking and drifting apart to once again reveal the beauty and power of the sun.
"It is by the mercy of the gods alone– praise be to Them!– that we have been permitted to bear the torch of Their divine truth to these distant shores, to enlighten so many of the lost and heathen in these chaotic times." His hand tightened on her shoulder again, and the tears she had not even known were there spilled over her lashes and down her cheeks. He brushed them away with the back of one finger, showing her such compassion as she had never known in her old life.
"Are you ready, initiate? Are you ready to take the oath, to devote yourself body, mind, and soul to spreading the word of the gods? To bring to the ignorant the light of the truth?"
She found the courage to look into his eyes at last, and in them she saw salvation.
Finally, she was saved. And in turn, she would help the order to save them all.
"I am–"
"State your name and purpose."
Axa was not able to tell if the masked woman was speaking to her with her voice or with her mind alone. But neither had she the luxury of dwelling on such minutiae.
"My name belongs to the gods, and my hand to their service."
She had never been a particularly devout woman, but somehow the words felt familiar as they left her mouth. As though she had not learned them mere moments ago from some fidgeting neophyte, but had always known them, deep in her soul.
"What company do you seek?"
A vision of her friends outside flashed before her mind, the five of them huddled together in the little hallway, nervously awaiting her return. She pushed the thought away as quickly as her wits would allow.
"I seek the company of shadows, that our labors may remain secret."
Secrets and shadows seemed to dominate her life ever since coming to the Dyrwood, that much was certain. Ever since that night, the bîaŵac, the machine–
"Tell me of your labors."
She had yet to fully recover from the day's efforts, her body still aching from physical exertion, nerves raw. All the problems in the city, the poor, downtrodden kith– was it all the work of these people, this cult? How could that be so?
"To see that the craft of kith and wilder does not disturb what bones the gods have buried."
For all that the robed man in her past life had spoken of bringing the "truth of the gods" to the people, this cult seemed awfully keen on obfuscation. Burying secrets, running in the shadows, locking it all away–
"How do we know your purpose?"
And they demanded knowledge while offering none themselves? Threatened with death those who opposed their hidden will? She thought of Kana, pursued across two continents as he quested for the truth of his homeland's history. To what end...?
"You shall know it by the confession of my tongue, the deeds of my hand, and the oath on my soul."
Sins kept secret. Atrocities committed against the innocent. Promises broken and falsehoods unchallenged. Axa's heart pounded in her chest. These people were very dangerous. But a choice between provoking their wrath by opposing their will and allowing them to continue their nefarious operation unabated was no choice at all.
"And how is your oath guarded?"
She looked into the acolyte's masked face, and saw an emotionless, inscrutable void.
"It is sealed by the Leaden Key."
Whoever these people were, whoever guided them from the shadows, she knew she was their enemy. And she would fight them to the bitter end.
She swore it.
—
Heritage Hill. Brackenbury Sanitarium. The village of Dyrford.
She was starting to wonder if she'd bitten off more than she could chew.
Axa had just finished off her third goblet of the Goose and Fox's most modestly priced wine and was considering a fourth, seeing as her hands were still shaking– so badly, in fact, that she'd spilled her pipe on the bar twice while trying to refill it– when she felt a presence at her side take the stool next to hers. She didn't even have to look to know who it was: no one else in her party smelled as nice as Aloth did, moved as carefully and daintily as he.
"Forgive me; I know you're probably loathe to entertain company at the moment, else you'd not have left the table to sit up here by yourself," Aloth murmured, sliding into his seat. "But Berath's mercy, I just couldn't take it anymore." He planted his elbows on the slick, well-polished wood of the bar and buried his face in his hands. "I understand that my... predicament is an unusual one, but why must they pry so?"
"Welcome to my world." Her voice was thick and rough, the wine and smoke having gummed up her throat as well as her mind, and hearing herself speak was enough to help her decide against that fourth drink. So instead she lowered her head to the bar and gently rested it against her outstretched arm, regarding the elf at her side with sympathy and curiosity in equal measure, grateful for the chance to forget her own burdens for a bit by focusing on someone else's.
As it had turned out, he hadn't been entirely dishonest with her before– his uncouth, vulgarity-laden outbursts of Hylspeak actually had been a problem beyond his control ever since his childhood, and one for which no healer in Aedyr would have had a cure. But the cause of his compulsion was not some medical mystery or mental affliction. After the Leaden Key acolyte had unwittingly revealed to Axa the cult's machinations in the city and beyond, after they'd escaped the catacombs and staggered to the nearest tavern to process and recuperate, Aloth had gathered every ounce of courage he could muster and, at long last, he'd told them about his Awakening. About her.
Her name was Iselmyr. The soul that now dwelled within Aloth Corfiser had belonged to her some centuries hence, and if her rustic accent and colorful colloquialisms were anything to go by, her life had been a rough-and-tumble series of drinking binges and late night fistfights in the bucolic paradise of the ass-end-of-nowhere Aedyran countryside. Unlike the fleeting, nebulous recollections from her own past life that Axa's Awakening afforded her, Aloth's past life had manifested in him as an entire separate personality– this bold, coarse woman born again in his body, who forced his own personal will aside at times and supplanted it with her own. Hence the Hylspeak, the surly temper, the rude language that occasionally spouted forth from such a mild-mannered academic as Aloth. She'd been shooting his mouth off at anyone who pissed her off since his adolescence, and he'd been searching for a way to permanently silence her for just as long.
He heaved a heavy sigh, briefly massaging his temples before dropping his hands to the bar. "If I was ever anywhere near as annoyingly intrusive with my inquiries about your Awakening as they've been about mine, I deeply apologize. Sagani and Pallegina are courteous enough to take a hint and mind their own business, but Edér and Kana... Those two boors would have me call her out to play, like she's some damned parlor trick and not the scourge of my existence for the past five decades...!"
Aloth paused suddenly as an argument with his other half erupted inside him, the effort to keep Iselmyr from usurping him again slowly driving color into his cheeks, his eyes twitching and bulging behind his tightly shut eyelids, veins throbbing in his brow. Finally, he choked out a breath, panting and sweating, and raised a trembling hand to summon the bartender.
"Gods, she's persistent tonight!" He ordered a glass of wine for himself, turned to Axa, eyebrows raised in an unspoken offer. She grimaced and shook her head, burgundy curls spilling across the bar, and he shrugged, accepting his drink and sliding the barkeep some coin. "I've gotten stronger over the years, better at maintaining control. But evidently, she's gotten stronger, too."
"What happened to you back then, anyway? When you were young, to Awaken your soul?" Axa lifted her head, planting her chin in the palm of one hand. "I somehow doubt your Awakening was also caused by a strange machine and an eerily familiar black-robed cultist."
The look he gave her in response probably would have made her feel guilty were she not so deep in her cups and pipe, but as it was, she only smiled sheepishly as he glared at her.
"You, uh... you don't have to answer that if you don't want to," she assured him.
Aloth glowered at the orlan a moment longer before relenting with a sigh, the betrayal on his face replaced suddenly with resigned weariness. "No, it's– it's fine. I probably owe you some answers after what I've put you through, anyway." He downed his glass in one smooth motion, watching her out of the corner of his eye as he did. "...And you've tolerated my nosiness more than once yourself. It's only fair you should get a straight answer out of me every now and then."
"'Trust is a double-edged sword, gift and burden both to friends and allies.' My father taught me that one." Axa smiled up at him, hoping she looked more like a supportive listener and less like the sloppy drunken fool she suspected she looked.
Aloth winced as he set his goblet back on the bar, applying a bit more force than was necessary. "He sounds a wise fellow, your father. My own father's lessons were... somewhat harsher."
Axa straightened up in her seat, halfway to sober almost instantly.
The color had all but drained from Aloth's face, leaving the elf pale and gaunt, his voice soft and tremulous. "He was employed as an arcane knight, stewarding an erl in the Cythwood, and as his only son– his only child– it was my duty to follow in his footsteps." He gazed into the empty goblet, picturing it full again, hating himself for wishing it so. "He was quite demanding in his expectations of me, even when I was very young. And when I fell short of those expectations, as children are apt to do, he... was not shy about making his displeasure known. Especially after a drink or six."
"He'd beat you." A cold rage bloomed in Axa's belly and chest, her little hands clenched into fists atop the bar. "He'd get drunk, and he'd beat you."
Aloth struggled to look anywhere else, at anything but the woman next to him. "He... yes. Yes, he would. And although I can't recall the exact details, on one such occasion he was a bit... overzealous about it. So much so that– well, I suppose he must have beaten her out of me. Struck her Awake, so to speak." He toyed nervously with the stem of his goblet, his lips a thin, bloodless line. "To his credit, that was the last time he was physically violent with me. Although it certainly wasn't the last time he put voice to his discontent with my performance as a student of the arcane. Nor was it the last time he drank himself to debasement. As far as I know, it's still his custom to drown himself with liquor as often as his budget allows."
The wine sat heavy in Axa's stomach as she considered his words, eyed his empty cup. "And where was your mother during all this?"
"Away working, usually. She was in a haemneg– a sort of symbolic marriage between folk and elf, more a business partnership than anything– to a landed thayn some five days' ride from home. In truth, that's where the greater part of our family's finances were earned." He gave in at last and signaled to the bartender for a refill, grimacing as he did so. "Although to my father, the fact that his wife supported our family better than he could was just one more reason to get into his bottles." He'd fixed his gaze into the bowl of his goblet, and as the barkeep finished pouring and the wine settled, he saw his father's face sneering back at him in his own reflection.
The two kith sat in silence for a while, Aloth sipping at his drink and twiddling his thumbs, Axa puffing on her pipe and scratching at a rough spot on the bar, both wondering what they should say next while hoping the other would say something first. He wondered if he'd said too much. She wondered if she ever should have said anything at all.
In the end, Axa broke first. "Gods, Aloth, I'm sorry," she blurted, nausea rising in her gut as anger gave way to grief. "No one deserves that sort of shit from their own family, least of all in their vulnerable formative years. I mean, my own family situation wasn't exactly smiles and sunshine all the time in my youth either, but you–"
"It's all in the past now," he interjected, finally turning to look at her. "Water under the bridge. But I do appreciate your sympathy all the same, truly. Thank you for lending an ear... and for not holding my initial reticence against me." He forced a small smile, but when she lifted her gaze to meet his, he found he didn't really need to force it after all.
G'wan, laddie, invite 'er up to yers anon fer a tumble–
Axa chuckled as she slid off of her stool, catching herself on Aloth's elbow and taking a moment to get her feet beneath her while he gritted his teeth against Iselmyr's perverse delusions. "Thank you for sharing yourself with me. Wael knows it's not always easy to talk about past hardships, not even when you trust the one you're telling. But... I'm glad you've judged me worth the risk." Her smile broadened, hand lingering on his forearm, and he felt his face get warm again, not quite knowing what to make of that. "Hopefully we can both find out a little more about our Awakenings at the sanitarium tomorrow– after we've attended to a few other matters first, of course." She patted the satchel at her side, the animancy research for the Knights safely tucked within.
"Of course," he murmured, knuckles white with inner tension as he grasped his cup. "Tomorrow."
She gave his arm a little squeeze– gods, was she blushing too?... no, no, she was just flushed from the wine, surely– before excusing herself and clambering up the stairs to sleep it off in the party's rented room. Her meeting with the Leaden Key had given the Watcher little in the way of answers, but more than enough new leads to chase down, and it seemed she intended to do so with vigor. Aloth only hoped–
–Only hopin' she disnae suss out yer other grand secret, aye? Iselmyr's voice held little of its usual bite, her crude little barbs replaced with what felt like at least partly genuine concern. Nae afore ye can tell 'er yerself, leastways?
He lifted the goblet to his mouth, careful to avoid glimpsing his reflection in it again. "If we should be successful in our endeavors, I hope to never have to tell her at all."
Oh, fine figurin' there, lad, his long-suffering other half sighed. As e'er.
—
Chapter 11: Family History
Summary:
Blood is thicker than water. It clings to you, to your hands, your soul. And try as you might, you can never wash it off.
Notes:
Content warning: Descriptions of child abuse.
Chapter Text
—
The more she saw, the more she remembered. And the more she remembered, the more she dreamed.
Axa was learning– and luckily for her coinpurse, she was learning fast– that while booze and whiteleaf still did the trick when it came to helping her fall asleep, they did nothing to prevent the dreams, vivid and ominous and unrelenting. They tended to start off as vague, foreboding glimpses into a hauntingly familiar world: a lone woman wandering lost through shifting halls, throngs of kith raising their hands in supplication before a flash of light reduced them to crumbling ash, great dragons screaming with rage and struggling against their chains. But before long, the dream would inevitably gather itself and resolve into its recurring main features: the tree, and later, the temple.
It was the tree from her first dream as a Watcher, the tree from Gilded Vale, and yet it wasn't– although she quickly noticed that Edér was dangling from it still, just as she'd seen him do in that first dream, before she'd known him. Instead of smiling at her and puffing on his pipe, this time he seemed to be aware of his predicament, lifting himself with one hand on the branch from which he was hanging in an attempt to relieve the pressure on his neck. In his other hand he gripped a stubby little candle, very much like the ones they'd seen in the ruined Eothasian temple under Gilded Vale, and he trembled with exhaustion as he held the feeble, flickering flame to the rope that bound him.
He'll never burn through it in time, she realized with a jolt, his grip will give out and he'll hang! But as she sprang forward to help him she felt a tug on her ankle, and all of a sudden she lay sprawled in the dirt, the breath driven out of her by her landing. A glance at her feet revealed the culprit: a scroll, of all things, rolling loose and twisted around her boots, little stylized eyes winking out at her from cramped, illegible writing. The parchment trailed into the distance behind her, and when she turned to her fore again she could see its origin: the base of the gnarled, blackened tree, where two figures knelt and bowed their heads together, deep in conversation. And just as Axa thought she might recognize them–
She was hurrying down the temple hall again, no longer herself but a memory of herself, and he stood at the altar, turning sharply to receive her. "Is that you, Anthea? My child, what brings you–"
She opened her mouth to ask him–
–ask him ask him please i have to know we have to know we deserve to know if it was all–
–and woke up on the floor again, blankets tangled around her knees and hips.
A pair of golden eyes, shining like coins, peered back at her from beneath the bed.
"Vaargys–"
But as soon as his name was out of her mouth, reality rushed in to replace the confusion wrought by her dreaming mind, and she whipped her head around to blink stupidly at the blond man crouching at her side, concern plain on his sun-weathered face.
"Uh... name's Edér, actually," he drawled, his brow furrowing as the edge of his lip twitched into a grin. "...Kinda rude that y' forgot."
Axa stared blankly for a moment, then winced as the hangover washed over her. "Oh, shut up and give me a hand," she grunted, yanking at the twisted sheets.
"What are you doing in here, anyway? After all that fussing about 'chivalry' and 'propriety' last night, I'd have thought you gentlemen would consider intruding on our sacred womanly privacy a dishonor worthy of nothing less than death." They'd rented two rooms to accommodate the party of six, and for some reason, Edér and Aloth had insisted– and to Axa's surprise, Pallegina had agreed– on splitting the party between the two rooms on the basis of sex. Axa still couldn't quite wrap her head around Aedyre and Dyrwoodan ideas about segregating women and men in the name of some sort of nebulous "decency," but it was no hill she cared to die on, and if it made her companions happy then she was more than willing to acquiesce.
"Uh." Edér slipped his hands under the orlan's armpits and hoisted her into the air, allowing her to wiggle free of her linen bonds. "Guessin' y' don't remember what happened last night, then." He couldn't seem to bring himself to look at her, and when Axa cast her eyes around the room, she noticed it looked different than she remembered it...
Kana's head and shoulders popped out from behind the hulking wooden wardrobe, his face slathered in soap suds and his smile as broad as ever. "Axa! Our little sleepwalker, awake at last!" Edér gently set her on her feet as Kana rinsed himself off, and Axa felt her face burn as she realized what must have transpired while she was dreaming.
"I'd say y' owe me a beer for makin' me spend the rest of the night on the floor," the farmer sighed, "but somethin' tells me I really oughtta just let this one go."
"Oh gods, please tell me I didn't..." She cradled her throbbing head in her little hands, trying desperately to hide from the implication, but it was no use. "And you didn't even try to wake me?"
"Couldn't. You know what they say about waking a sleepwalker. Plus, you kinda tend t' sleep like shit. Figured y' could use the rest." The folk man yawned. "Even if it was my damn bed."
Axa planted her hands on her hips, regarding Edér with disbelief. "I can't believe it. Of all the people in this inn, I climbed into bed with you?"
Edér huffed out a surprised little chuckle. "Wow. Okay. Who'd you rather've climbed into bed with?"
–oh, gods, if it had been Aloth's bed–
"I– I'd have rather not intruded on any of my traveling companions' personal space while they were trying to sleep, thanks," Axa snapped in reply, quickly turning away to better hide her blushing. It wasn't helping that Kana was in full view now, strutting about with a towel draped over his head, naked from the waist up. "How in Hel did I even get in here, anyway? Didn't you lads lock the door?"
"We were wondering that ourselves last night," Kana chirped merrily, scrubbing behind one ear. "The door was most definitely locked– Aloth was very insistent about that– so we supposed you either tapped into some obscure Watcher ability and phased through the wall somehow, or you picked the lock in your sleep." He laughed softly, taking a seat on his bed and rifling through his pack for a clean shirt. "Perhaps it'd be in our best interests to pay a visit to the Hall of Revealed Mysteries today, ask the Eyeless Face for answers– or mercy, if you'd rather."
"I could certainly do with some mercy. Maybe we should stop by," Axa muttered. "After we've delivered that research to the forgemaster in Crucible Keep, of course." She scowled, crossing her arms and rocking on her heels. "...Not looking forward to going back there, to be perfectly honest. For a few reasons."
Back on his own bed at last, Edér looked up from tucking his trousers into his boots. "Aw, c'mon, Axa, the Knights ain't as bad as all that. Don't get me wrong; they ain't very good, 'specially at actually doin' much for the people. But at least they ain't the Dozens, doin' whatever they please and sayin' it's for the people." He stood, lightly stamping his feet to get his trouser legs to fall evenly, and then got started donning his armor. "In any case, maybe while we're there we can convince 'em to open up Heritage Hill for us. It's not like whatever's been goin' on in there is solvin' itself, and they know it."
"Worth a shot," Axa agreed, massaging her temples. "Speaking of the Dozens, it might be worth it to have a little chat with them, too. As you said, the Knights may be the 'official' peacekeepers here in the city, but it's members of the Dozens who are actually out and about in the streets, winning hearts and minds. It'd probably be a good idea to see exactly what sort of sentiment they’re spreading. And we'll have to make time to visit Brackenbury Sanitarium as well, get Aloth looked at..." The little woman sighed. "Gods, I'm already exhausted. Either that or I'm still exhausted from yesterday. It's getting harder to tell."
She glanced around the room again, briefly allowed her gaze to linger on Kana's bare chest, swept the room again, furrowed her brow. "Where is Aloth, anyway? Don't tell me he sleepwalked into my room last night."
"He left earlier this morning, to dress in the privy or somesuch," Kana grinned, finally finding a suitable undershirt and pulling it on over his head. "He thought it improper to change in front of you. I tried telling him you were sleeping and wouldn't see, but..." The aumaua shrugged, chuckling and shaking his head.
Edér cinched his belt and smiled nervously, looking at the floor. "Uh, speakin' of, Watcher, hadn't you oughtta... y'know. Get ready?" He gestured vaguely at his own torso, and Axa suddenly felt the urge to wrap her furry arms around herself. She hadn't really been thinking about it before, but now she couldn't help but feel uncomfortably exposed, standing there in her ratty old nightshirt that barely fell to mid-thigh, one shoulder poking out from the drooping neckline.
"Uh. Right. Big day ahead of us, after all." She hurried to the door, yanked it open– only to find Pallegina on the other side, midway through reaching for the knob herself, Sagani and Itumaak close behind her.
"Watcher!" The paladin's golden eyes flashed with surprise. "There you are! We woke and you were nowhere to be found. Per complancanet, do not worry us so." She peered into the room, lip curling in mild disgust. "What... what are you doing in–"
Her headache was getting worse. "Long story. Probably. I don't actually know, truth be told. Short version is I somehow managed to get in here last night while sleepwalking."
"I heard you get up and leave the room, but I fell asleep again before long," Sagani admitted, looking the little woman over bemusedly. "Wasn't expecting you to just wander off. Didn't these boys have their door locked?" Itumaak tried to sneak past his mistress and sniff around Edér's pack for more jerky, but she stopped him with a sharp snap of her tongue.
Kana opened his mouth excitedly to explain, but Pallegina cut him off. "No matter. The sun climbs quickly in the sky, and we have idled here long enough. Watcher, you should return to our room and get dressed. There is much work to be done today." The Godlike gave her a sharp nod and turned to march down the hallway toward the stairs, Sagani and Itumaak following a moment later.
Axa laughed despite herself. "Well! You heard the woman. I'll see you downstairs in a bit, gentlemen." She gave the two men one last glance before stepping out into the hall herself–
–and colliding with Aloth, his face buried in his grimoire and strolling full-speed back into his room, clearly not expecting a fuzzy little missile to barrel directly into his midsection. Both kith tumbled backwards, falling flat on their asses, crying out more from surprise than from pain. And when the shock had abated, both groaned in embarrassment.
"You're up, then," he muttered, clambering to his feet. "…However did you get into our room last night?"
"Can I please just go put some gods damned pants on," she wailed in response.
—
She closed her eyes to pray. Opened them. Closed them, tried to pray again. Stopped.
This isn't right, she thought.
It wasn't as though Axa had been expecting exactly the same sort of religious services as she'd grown up with in Ixamitl– especially not from followers of Wael– but sitting in a library and trying to pray felt akin to going to the clothier's to eat dinner, or having a bath in the bakery.
The Waelite priests back home tended to wander from town to town, either alone on foot or in small groups driving ramshackle wagons, setting out their begging bowls and preaching the mysteries of the Eyeless Face by day, taking hazardous amounts of drugs and sleeping in trees or on rooftops by night. Their services were subsequently quite sporadic, their sermons spontaneous and abstruse, sometimes downright nonsensical, sometimes shockingly revelatory. They'd had a knack for showing up when the community was in direst need of their unique guidance– and for absconding quickly and quietly after inevitably pressing their luck too far and pissing off the locals.
"Ah! The exhilarating, carefree life of the vagabond," Vaargys had stated one evening, regarding the other priests with reverence as they'd trundled off in their brightly-painted wagons. "I almost envy them." He'd wrapped his arm around her, then, and she'd leaned into him, smiling. Promising in her heart that he'd never have to live that kind of life again.
She remembered the night she'd kicked him out, the light from her burning books illuminating his back as he'd vanished into the darkness.
"Watcher."
Pallegina's voice startled the orlan out of her reverie, and she looked up to see the paladin standing over her, shifting her weight from foot to foot. She had seemed vaguely uncomfortable ever since they'd stepped foot into the Hall of Revealed Mysteries, although she hadn't said anything, and Axa was secretly relieved that she wasn't the only one feeling out of place.
"Pardon my intrusion, but I think, perhaps, it is time we started our work for the day." The woman's golden eyes darted to and fro, narrowing as they alighted on the huge painted Eye of Wael dominating the far wall. "As much as I appreciate a well-stocked library, I have always felt somewhat ill at ease in temples. And no amount of reading– or praying– will fulfill our tasks for us."
Axa cocked an eyebrow at the other woman, her lips twitching into a grin. "A Godlike who doesn't care much for temples? Sounds familiar."
"Is that so?" Pallegina cast the little woman a piercing glare, feathers ruffling. "In what way, exactly?"
The redhead looked down at her feet, swinging her legs back and forth, still smiling wryly. "My little brother Tico is a Godlike. Touched by Hylea, actually, same as you. He also didn't like temples much. 'Institutions of kith,' he called them, always trying to tell him what he was, who he was, what he was meant to do with his life. And our mother was little better." The smile had slowly tightened as she'd spoken, and now her mouth was a taut, straight line.
Pallegina blinked at her, a bit taken aback. This was not where she had been expecting this conversation to go. "I see," she murmured.
Axa could feel the other woman's discomfort, could feel the mood getting awkward, but she couldn't seem to stop herself from continuing anyway. "Mama always wanted a large family, having never had one of her own at all growing up as a slave in Readceras, but after Tico's birth, the midwife told her she couldn't have any more. She never outwardly blamed him, but it wasn't difficult to tell that she was bitter about it, and she absolutely took it out on him. She used to guilt him into giving her his feathers so she could craft special religious totems, commissions for wealthy clients, to keep the family afloat after Papa disappeared. Tico felt so bad for her, he could never quite muster the strength to refuse. As far as I know, he's still letting her pluck him bald."
The straight line of her lips had morphed into a full-on scowl, now, her little hands balled into fists. "No matter where he went or what he did, he always seemed to be caught between being perceived as either an object of worship or an object of scorn... but always an object. Never a person."
"Ac. It is always that way, for us." Pallegina spoke softly, gravely, a faraway look in her keen eyes. "Being different in the way that we are means always second-guessing every kind gesture or word of praise, always looking over our shoulders and watching our own backs. No matter who we keep company with. Your brother and I have that in common, it seems. He has my sympathies."
Axa sighed, running a shaky hand through her thick hair. "I– Sorry, I– I didn't mean to unload my life story on you. I guess I just had the past on my mind. I was actually thinking of Vaargys just before we started talking..."
The paladin cocked her head inquisitively. "Who?"
Axa remembered, suddenly, that she hadn't yet met Pallegina when she'd told the story of her tumultuous, doomed courtship, and she laughed at her own foolishness. "He's... a long story," she chuckled. "I'll tell you later, if Kana doesn't beat me to it. And after I've had a few drinks first, ideally."
An amused smirk popped up on Pallegina's face. "You may not be Godlike, Watcher, but you are certainly strange in your own way. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, of course."
The orlan glanced at her out of the corner of her eye, fidgeting in her seat. "Speaking of strange things that are hard to talk about– I hope it isn't rude of me to ask, but I couldn't help but notice that you don't exactly... look like him. Like Tico, I mean." She peeked at the paladin's face again, saw more curiosity than hostility, pressed on. "I mean, beyond just the obvious differences. His feathers are a different color, which is to be expected as far as I'm aware, but the amount of feathers on his body, the shape of his nose and brow, even the skin on his hands and feet– he's quite a lot... birdier than you appear to be."
Pallegina scoffed, quickly jerking her head to one side to gaze at the temple's exit. "There is a reason for that," she muttered after a long pause. "And it is none of your business. However, you are not the first to notice the discrepancies between myself and other Avian Godlikes. Suffice it to say I had a certain benefactor in my youth, a practitioner of animancy who assisted me through some of my more difficult formative years." The soldier's face softened, suddenly, just for a moment, and then hardened as she fixed her gaze on Axa again, looking away from the main door as a new visitor gently pushed it open. "That is why I look the way I do. And that is all I will say on the matter."
"An animancer, huh." Axa slid off of her pew, contemplating Pallegina's words as she stretched her back and rolled her shoulders. "...Think the ones at Brackenbury Sanitarium can help Aloth?"
The taller woman snorted derisively. "If he should ever gather the nerve to actually commit to going there and meeting with one, possibly, yes." The man who had just entered the temple seemed to be heading straight for her and the Watcher, so she kept her eye on him, but saw no need to acknowledge him just yet. "And if they should happen to hail from the Republics, all the better."
"He'll come around," Axa sighed. "It's not always so easy to bare your soul to a stranger, literally or figuratively. Although, listening to me you'd think–"
"State your business, quickly." Axa snapped to attention at the sound of Pallegina's sharp, commanding voice, surprised to only now notice the messenger standing before them. Where did he come from?
"Erh– begging your pardon, Lady Knight, but I've a message for your cohort," the man stammered under her cool, confident presence. He regained some of his professional stature as he turned to face the orlan, wax-sealed missive in hand. "You are Axa Mala?"
"I am," she replied. Around the hall, scholars and priests looked up from their books or paused their whispered conversations, hoping to learn what they could of this new development. Aloth and Sagani alerted Edér and Kana, and quickly and quietly the little group gathered around Axa, ready to leave.
"A message for you, madam," the courier stated. "Chancellor Warrin requests your presence at the Ducal Palace this day, to discuss Erl Bademar's ruling on the rightful ownership of Caed Nua."
"I see," the little woman sighed. "I suppose it was about time I got to work today anyway."
—
It was a simple platitude, and one he'd heard quite often growing up: "Be ever honest, forthright, and true, and ne'er shall Woedica frown upon you." The rhyme was reductive and childish, but the sentiment was understandable enough– Honesty is a virtue, and one that should serve any good, upright citizen of Aedyr well.
Of course, Aloth knew better.
He'd known better since he was fifteen years old, clutching his face in his hands and choking on his own tears while his mother tried to soothe him, brushing back his smooth, black hair and holding him close, careful to avoid the bruises, all the while imploring him you must never tell a soul of this, Aloth, never, for even I could not help you then. He'd known better after running to the proctor about the incident with the spellwrights’ gilde and their damned machine, trying to bring it all to light, and instead of finding himself languishing in a dungeon for the atrocity he'd taken part in, he was instructed to continue to meet with them, to keep his mouth shut and his eyes and ears open. No matter the rewards honesty promised, the people in his life always seemed to reinforce the lesson that deception and secrecy were the true keys to success.
Until now. Until her.
Since their very first meeting outside the Black Hound Inn, as far as he could tell– and he considered himself a decent judge of character, most of the time– Axa had not uttered a single lie to anyone she'd spoken with, had not suppressed nor sugarcoated a single truth, no matter how painful. The closest she'd gotten to lying was her reluctance to discuss the chain of events that had lead her to relocate to the Dyrwood, and even that had come out eventually, and entirely of her own volition. In fact, she seemed to not only practice honesty in her words and her deeds, but to relentlessly pursue the truth, to champion it, to draw it out of others like venom from a wound and leave both parties happier for it. Hel, she'd even managed to get him to open up.
How did she make it look so easy?
Practice, I reck'n. Isnae easy fer ye, tellin' sooth, coz yer nae accustomed to it, are ye, lad? Iselmyr's unwanted commentary was almost constant, now, and Aloth could not tell whether it was due to his control over himself deteriorating further, or if she had simply been emboldened by their secret finally being out after all these years. Either way, it was wearing on his nerves, and he worried that it was starting to show. It certainly didn't help that the others were as curious about Iselmyr as he was eager to be rid of her, and only about half of them seemed to possess the decorum to recognize his discomfort and drop it. Even Axa had asked if it were possible for her to speak directly to the horrid little pest, although to her credit she'd only had to be told "no" once, unlike Edér and Kana who seemingly only deigned to speak with him in order to badger him about his "friend," trying to trade jokes with her or learn Hylspeak from her or– Berath take him– flirt with her.
"Jealous," she'd smirked, and Aloth had gone bright red when Edér had laughed in response, only then realizing that she'd made him say it out loud.
Am only out 'n' jawin' wie kith cozza yer wee burd, laddie. If ye've aught t' complain about, tell it t' her. As much as he hated to agree with Iselmyr, he had to admit that she had a point– if he'd been left to his own devices, he might never have told anyone about his Awakening and simply lived his whole life suffering in silence. But since he'd started following Axa, talking with her, fighting alongside her, earning her trust and starting to trust her in return, he'd found that opening up about himself– and Iselmyr– was far easier than he'd ever expected it would be. The clever little woman had had him halfway figured out by the time he finally told her anyway, which had certainly helped speed things along. She had even suggested a method by which he might finally learn more about his condition, although the thought of letting some jackleg animancer strap him to a table and peer into his soul made his skin crawl.
–don't think about the spellwrights the experiment don't think about Targun his eyes empty and lifeless and dull don't think about it don't–
But it didn't seem quite so dismaying when he reminded himself that she'd be there with him.
The events of the day thus far had only served to reinforce this notion. She'd broached the topic over breakfast, suggesting that after they finish their business with the Knights, they make the sanitarium their very next stop of the day– "May as well get it over with, right?"– but, losing his nerve, he had deflected and redirected, stating that he'd hoped to read up on animancy a bit more before making the plunge– "After all, I've waited fifty years, I can wait a few more hours"– while reminding her that she had expressed a desire to parley with the Eyeless Face sometime soon. A little nudge in the right direction was all it had taken for Kana to commandeer the conversation, excitedly gushing about banned books and Waelite secrets, and Aloth had sighed with relief even as he'd winced at the knowing look Sagani had given him. But Axa had not seen fit to press the matter, and so they'd agreed on their plans and headed for Crucible Keep, turning over the research for their new Forge Knights without any issues.
And upon arriving at the Hall of Revealed Mysteries, the distractions had quickly accumulated, as they tended to do. The forgemaster at the Keep had done little to assuage his worries about animancy in general, and every book about animancy he'd half-heartedly attempted to peruse only ended up making him more anxious, so instead he'd spent most of his time leafing through old favorites, comforting himself with the certainties of the classics, repetitively tracing his slender fingers over ancient runes in arcane treatises he'd practically memorized years ago during his training. It was a surefire method of calming himself down, helping him to collect his thoughts– or it would have been if he hadn't been continually interrupted by Iselmyr's whining, Edér's yawning, Kana's incessant attempts to "help" him with his research.
Aloth had just suffered yet another of these intrusions (Kana had jokingly shoved a primer on orlan physiology and anatomy under his nose, opened to a page with some... detailed illustrations) when the messenger from the palace had arrived, summoning Axa to court. He'd have been pleased for such a convenient excuse to continue the deferral of their visit to the sanitarium, but the scene at the Hall of Records had been far from a pleasant one.
"This is she?" Arledr Gathbin had glared down at the little woman, naked contempt on his sneering face. "This little varlet, she's the one who murdered my kin and now clings like a leech to my ancestral land? I'd thought she was just some servant, a wench from the scullery."
"This wench," Axa had snapped back, "claimed that land– a keep abandoned by your noble line for well over a hundred years, I'll remind you– by strength of arms, and with the assistance of the few good men and women standing alongside me." Sagani and Pallegina had blinked in surprise at her words, but raised no objection. "And in any case, I didn't see your name on the door."
Gathbin had reared back as though she'd spat at him. "Never speak to me so brazenly again, cur," he'd hissed, "or you won't have time enough left in your miserable life to regret it."
Chancellor Warrin had been quick to bring the meeting back to order, but the calm had not lasted long. Upon learning that Caed Nua would only be his upon the condition that he pay reparations to Axa for services rendered in recovering it, Gathbin had flown into an even greater rage, going so far as to raise his hand to the Chancellor. And although he had effectively just declared Axa homeless, she had still leapt between the two men to defend the Chancellor, her eyes blazing as she'd roared at Gathbin to stay his hand.
"You dare to issue orders to me, you hairy little wretch!?" He'd whirled on her, his face beet red, and the captain of his personal guard, a sharp-featured elf in gleaming black plate, had grinned eagerly as her hand flew to her pistol. Aloth had been surprised to suddenly feel the spine of his grimoire under his fingertips, his heart racing. And he hadn't been alone: all of Axa's allies had prepared to draw arms as well, Pallegina's blade already halfway out of its scabbard by the time Marshall Forwyn had stepped forward, hand on the hilt of his weapon, calmly but firmly suggesting that Gathbin contain himself.
After Gathbin had stormed off, after the dust had settled and Axa was officially declared thaynu and roadwarden of Caed Nua, she'd still had enough composure to ask the Chancellor to invite his lordship to settle their differences over dinner sometime– in her halls at Caed Nua, of course– before immediately turning to the record keeper who'd seen it all and asking him if she was now "established" enough to access the records from the Saint's War she'd inquired after previously. Edér's eyes had gone wide, his jaw rigid with apprehension as he'd accepted his prize at last, and as he'd flipped anxiously through the casualty listings, Aloth had mused on the little woman's fortitude, her quick wit, the loyalty she inspired in those who followed her.
And that loyalty was not misplaced. Even now as he struggled to gather the resolve to say what he needed to say, he couldn't stop thinking of the lost, haunted expression on Edér's face as he'd found his brother's name, looked up into Axa's eyes, asked her as though she'd known all along: "Why'd he fight for Readceras?" She hadn't hesitated for even a second when he'd beseeched her to go with him to the battlefield where Woden had died, laying her small, fuzzy hand on the blond man's shoulder and assuring him she'd do whatever it took to give him peace of mind.
Be ever honest, forthright and true–
Maybe it was bearing witness to all that– her ironclad resolve in the face of a daunting foe, her powerful devotion to those who placed their trust in her– that made Aloth face Axa now, standing outside the Ducal Palace, and tell her he was ready to head for the sanitarium. "If you're still amenable, of course," he added quickly. If you'll help me stay strong enough to see it through, he thought.
If ye'll held me haund, kiss me wee arse–
She blinked in surprise, recovered, smiled warmly at him. "Of course," she replied. "We can go there now. As long as you're comfortable with the idea."
"Oh," he sighed, smiling pleasantly, "I'm not, no. But to be frank, I'll almost certainly never be more comfortable with the idea than I am right now, so honestly, it's now or never. I'm... simply choosing now."
"I can get behind that," she nodded, turning to the road before them. "Shall we, then?"
She lead, and he followed, desperately hoping he wasn't making a mistake.
—
Axa looked at Aloth sitting on the animancer's couch and wondered if, in bringing him here, she had made a mistake.
He looked utterly miserable: copper bands fastened just a little too tightly around his forehead and his wrists, too wound up with inner tension to even wipe away the bead of sweat slowly crawling down his temple, and Bellasege's cheerful, energetic demeanor as she bustled about setting up her equipment only served to further accentuate his misery. Kana and Pallegina paid more attention to the animancer than to their own traveling companion, inquiring about the procedure and the tools used in performing it regardless of Aloth's obvious discomfort, while Sagani and Edér fumbled awkwardly in their misguided attempts to distract him with jokes and platitudes. Overall, the room had an atmosphere suggestive of the site of a terrible accident in the making that, later, everyone present would claim they could never have seen coming.
Everyone but the victim.
Aloth's gaze met Axa's, silvery-blue eyes pleading silently, and she gave him the warmest, most comforting smile she could muster. "It'll be alright, Aloth," she reassured him gently. "We're all here with you."
Edér puffed on his pipe, bathing the elf in thick, odorous smoke while Sagani dabbed at his clammy brow with a scrap of cloth, her fox sniffing delicately at his boots. Kana ignored him in favor of examining the animancer's complex equipment, while Pallegina stood by the door, coolly observing the scene.
"Marvelous," Aloth muttered.
"Alright, gliente, we are ready now to begin!" The primary instrument Bellasege intended to use rather resembled a telescope, albeit one that bristled with gears and thick bundles of copper wiring, fixed into a tripod and focused on Aloth's midsection. The animancer peered into it eagerly, adjusting knobs and tilting it just so, all eyes in the room nervously darting between her and her subject, waiting for something to happen.
"First," she continued, "we must evoke this other presence in your soul, entice it into showing itself. And to do that, we must agitate your humors– stir up your essence, ac?" She poked her head out from behind the scope, beaming at him. "So! You will answer some personal questions so as to facilitate the emotional response necessary to draw out your inner turmoil."
Everyone's eyes widened as they turned toward Aloth, their eyebrows jumping up their foreheads. "Don't worry, dear," Sagani smiled, wincing as she patted his elbow. "We won't hear any of it, I'm sure." He did not look at her, and Bellasege waved her hand impatiently at the dwarf until she backed away from the couch.
Focusing again on the eyepiece of her scope, Bellasege pressed on. "Please state your full name, your race and stock, sex, age, date and place of birth. For the record."
He sighed. "I'm... I am Aloth Corfiser, Sceltrfolc, male, 62 years of age, born on the 9th of Préauton, 2760 AI, in the Cythwood, in the Aedyr Empire." He started off strong enough, but by the end his voice was wavering, his gaze flitting uncomfortably around the room, not quite able to stay on any one spot for too long.
"And at what time in your life did you first Awaken, Fentre Corfiser?" She somehow managed to take notes with one hand and fiddle with her scope with the other, her script messy and slanting severely to one side due to looking through her lenses instead of at what she was writing. "It is 'Fentre', ac?"
He glanced at Pallegina. "Is it?"
"It is," the paladin asserted. "Unless you are keeping a marriage secret from us, too. In which case, you would be properly addressed as Mestre Corfiser."
"Fentre it is, then," he sighed. "And to answer your question, I... first Awakened when I was still very young, only fifteen or... thereabouts."
"Fractured at... the very cusp... of adolescence..." Bellasege made a quick mark in her notes, frowned, squinted harder into her scope. "...And what were your early years like, Fentre? Were you a healthy infant? A difficult child? Was your family splintered, abusive, impoverished, stricken with madness or malady?"
"I don't– I don't know what you're talking about," he stammered, frustration and humiliation slowly coloring his pale cheeks. "I had a perfectly ordinary childhood. Nondescript, uneventful. What sort of a question is that to ask someone?"
Edér grinned. "The sort one asks a man who talks to a lady in his head, I'd reckon."
Axa glared at the farmer, stepping away from him and closer to the couch. "Not helping, Edér."
Judging from Aloth's reluctance in coming here in the first place, she figured they probably only had one chance at this, and he was never going to get anywhere if he couldn't relax and focus enough to be honest about himself. So she approached him until he was within arm's length of her, lowering her head to look into his face until he returned her gaze. "Here, Aloth: Try telling her about your parents. Your mother, your father. What's the first thing that comes to mind when you remember growing up with them?"
As soon as the words were out of her mouth, Axa became aware of something odd stirring within her. It wasn't physical, it wasn't mental, it wasn't exactly emotional although it was closer to that than to anything else she could ascribe it to. The feeling reminded her of her final moments with Maerwald, how after she'd landed the killing blow and the old man's soul had seeped up and out of his physical body, she had been able to reach out to it somehow, to communicate her will to it and help it pass out of this world, away from Caed Nua and off to the Beyond. Aloth's soul was in no way preparing to do the same, but at the moment it was more... open to her, despite her not consciously using her abilities as a Watcher, and she could perceive it in a way she ordinarily couldn't– and if she tried, she found she could very subtly influence it, too.
His soul was dark and stormy, a thousand thousand writhing violet wires all coiled and snarled around one another, but as Axa spoke her voice resonated within her like the toll of a bell, waves of calm emanating out from her to roll over the turbulent sea inside him, and she observed as the wisps of essence at the edges of his soul smoothed themselves, began to pulse gently in unison. Her eyes were still locked with his, and she dimly perceived his pupils dilating, his eyelids drooping as his soul untangled itself and allowed him to give voice to his thoughts at last.
"My mother," he murmured softly. "My mother is... away. She's usually away, tending to her duties with her thayn. But when we're together, when she's home, she's good to me." The muscles under his eyes and at the corners of his mouth tensed up, and his breath hitched in his throat. "I... I miss her. But that's what brings in most of the money for the household. Her haemneg to her thayn. So she's away, often."
Bellasege gasped. "I'm starting to see something," she whispered.
"My father... hates this. Hates that it's her, her and her other man, who are supporting his family despite his hard work and dedication to his erl. He... drinks to escape that pain. In great quantity, and often. As often as she is away, but sometimes even when she's home." Aloth narrowed his eyes, lip curling into a scowl. "And he takes out on us what pain he cannot escape in drink. He... hurts her when she's home. Hurts me when she's not."
"Keep him talking," Bellasege hissed excitedly, twiddling a knob.
Axa could still feel the calm emanating from her, great waves flowing over to his soul on the tides of her voice, entrancing him. They echoed back to her too, it seemed, snippets of feeling and memory riding back in their wake– a man's voice booming through austere halls, fear and anger that was not hers churning her guts. "He hurt you the day you were Awakened, too, didn't he?"
"She was home," he moaned, squeezing his eyes shut. "I should have been alright. She should have kept me safe. She was home, but he was sodden with it, and I–"
"Slow down," Axa murmured. "What happened exactly?"
"I– I was home, tending to my chores, sweeping the kitchen. Thinking about my training. I tried so hard, I always tried hard, but– but I was so terrified of failure that I couldn't focus, so my missiles weren't manifesting the way they should have. My flame shields were weak, unstable. Like me. And he must have heard about it." Aloth clenched his jaw tightly, his hands balled into fists, and Axa could feel something bubbling up within him, something in his soul raging and frothing up just beneath the surface. "I was sweeping the kitchen floor, and then– then I was sprawled across it, my blood was spattered across it, and I barely had time to think that now I'd have to clean it again before he–"
–can't even do that right, can you–
The disturbance in the depths of his soul spiked suddenly, making the tang of fresh blood and boot polish fill Axa's mouth and sinuses, the memory of his father's voice driving nausea and dread to rise up inside her like a malevolent fog. Aloth started to curl in on himself, drawing his knees up, hunching his shoulders.
–give me the respect I'm due if I have to wring it out of your worthless throat–
Aloth's voice was reduced to an agonized whimper. "And then the beating truly began. I tried to protect myself, but if I shielded my front, he'd go for my kidneys, and if I rolled onto my back, he'd kick my ribs, stomp my belly. It was useless–"
–useless little shit, not even mine, is he, you whore–
"–useless. I was trapped, and he was... I thought he was going to kill me. So I... I did the only thing I could, and I... escaped in my mind. I took myself away from him, left my body on the kitchen floor, and I shrunk back into myself where he couldn't hurt me anymore. Where he could never hurt me again. And I... sh-she..." Aloth went silent, and his eyes bulged beneath his eyelids, his fingers twitching and his jaw clenched so tightly Axa could hear his teeth grinding together. His soul thrashed and seethed, and Axa drew back instinctively, as though turning away from spitting grease.
"Madiccho, I'm losing it!" Bellasege bared her teeth as she furiously twisted her knobs, apparently to no avail. "He's managed to mesmerize himself somehow! His essence is all over the place. Tella, you've got to snap him out of it, quickly, per complanca!"
–stop it please stop he's our son our boy o gods you'll kill him you'll–
"Aloth–" Her heart leapt up into her throat, and before she could stop herself, Axa was reaching out to take his hand, holding it tightly between her own, desperately trying to bring him back to the here and now. "Aloth! Listen to me, you're alright, it's just a bad memory!"
For a second, it seemed to be working– his eyes stayed shut, but his breathing slowed, his shaking subsided, even his soul seemed to cool and congeal a bit, settling back into a more stable state. She squeezed his hand gently, her fingertips pressed to his palm, her thumb drifting over his knuckles. And after a moment, his fingers flexed weakly, tentatively gripping her hand in return. Something in her stomach fluttered, and warmth bloomed across her cheeks. "...It's alright. You're here now, and I'm here with you. You're safe–"
–it's over now, dear heart, you're safe, he's gone–
And with that, Aloth's eyes flew open, and very suddenly his soul violently rejected Axa's presence, severing her influence over it like slamming a door in her face. She jerked back in shock, his hand slipping from her grasp, and he dug his fingers into the meat of his thighs, knuckles white with tension as he glowered at the little woman.
"The lad's nere safe when I hap' upon him." His voice was low and husky and dangerous.
Axa blinked, looking at Aloth's eyes and seeing a stranger. "...Iselmyr?"
"Am damn sure nae yer Aloth, lass. Or could ye nae tell?" He smirked– no, she smirked, using his face, and a second later he winced, gasping and writhing as he struggled for control.
A cry of elation rang out from behind the scope. "Yes! At last! There it is: the anomaly in his soul, clear as crystal!" Bellasege jabbed at her parchment with her quill, consumed with what she saw through the polished adra lenses. "Fascinating! Please, Tella Mala, you must get it– get her– to engage with you further. This data is truly astonishing!" Even Kana looked mildly disturbed by the woman's enthusiasm for knowledge at the expense of Aloth's suffering, and he turned wide-eyed to Axa, grimacing distastefully.
She tried not to think about it. This was more for Aloth than Bellasege– much more– and though it was difficult for him, he'd be better off after all was said and done. "Iselmyr, what exactly brought you out in Aloth? Why did you feel you had to intervene?"
"Fer why'd ye think, ye wee daftie?" Iselmyr curled Aloth's lip into a snarl, glaring at Axa with barely contained rage. "The lad tellt ye whit his da were oop tae. When ye can hear naught but yer bones crackin' 'n' yer blood roarin' in yer heed, when crisis is nigh 'n' it's yer neck oan th' block– d'ye jess lie back 'n' let 'em snuff ye?"
Edér's pipe almost tumbled from his mouth, hanging agape with wonder. "Did anyone understand... uh, most of that?"
"Try to get them to talk to one another," Bellasege suggested, ignoring Edér entirely. "Interacting with outside influences is good, but interacting with each other ought to reveal exactly where one ends and the other begins."
"Can you do that?" Sagani knitted her brow, concern shining in her dark eyes as she studied Aloth. "And even if you can, is it a good idea?"
Axa leaned close again, carefully laying her hand on the elf's shoulder. "Aloth, can you hear me? Can you speak with Iselmyr? Ask her what she's trying to do?"
He groaned in frustration, planted his elbows on his knees and his temples between his fists. "What she's trying to do?" he snapped. "She's trying to ruin my life, that– that damnable, stubborn–" He panted for breath, struggling against her, face red and veins throbbing in his brow. "Sticking weed–" he managed. "Worming parasite–"
And then he threw his head back, cackling, tossing Axa's hand from his shoulder as he did. "Fye, ye'd say th' same to yer wee kindled twig when it faws limp in yer haund!"
"Oof," Edér chuckled, shifting uncomfortably. "Guess that would be a pretty common problem for a fella, knowin' some lady's in his body, judgin' him the whole time he's tryin' to–"
"Not helping, Edér." Sagani echoed Axa's earlier sentiment, taking the man by the elbow and steering him away from the couch, Itumaak nipping helpfully at his heels.
"This presence in him, it... it's as though it pools in the recesses he's made in himself, it ebbs where he flows." Bellasege wobbled the scope to and fro, peering into it all the while. "Whether you meant to or not, Fentre, you've carved out quite the spacious little home for your other half!"
"That's ludicrous," Aloth hissed, outrage and humiliation burning his cheeks. "I give her nothing; she takes without asking, usurps me–"
"I only takes whit I need to keep us ou' th' scupper!" Iselmyr interrupted, baring Aloth's teeth, spittle flying from his lip. "An' I dinnae take wi'out givin', ken?"
Aloth blinked, then scoffed derisively. "What have you ever given me aside from trouble, you wretched bumpkin?" The back-and-forth was dizzying, but Axa was somehow managing to keep up.
"Fye, have lent ye a pair o' baws mair times 'n I can count," Iselmyr snapped. She turned Aloth's gaze on Axa again, his eyes wild and fierce with her behind them. "G'wan, Watcher-lass. Ask 'im whit I dae fer us. How last time that auld bastard da o' his lay his haund on us, I brek it in three feckin' places."
The triumphant grin Iselmyr had forced onto Aloth's face was replaced with an agonized grimace as he wrested control back yet again. "You had no right! That decision wasn't yours to make, nothing in my life was ever supposed to be your decision to make!"
"And Awakenin' in a wee scrawny jessie li' ye were nae my decision neither! But am here fer th' duration, an' am nae jess gonnae lie doon 'n' let ye get us both dragged behin' th' wagon!" This, it seemed, was Iselmyr's final word on the matter, and at last she once again fell dormant, relinquishing the reins of Aloth's body back to him. He sat for a moment, trembling and sweating and catching his breath, his ragged panting the only sound in the tiny, stuffy room.
The drunks outside the Black Hound, the cult in the catacombs, his father's vicious assault– it was all clicking into place. Whenever the meek, mild Aloth was threatened or overwhelmed, the bold, brash Iselmyr sprang forward to take care of it in his stead, although it seemed she also got him into as much trouble as she got him out of. Iselmyr was just as fiery in her defense of herself as Aloth was in his condemnation of her, but the more she thought about it, the more Axa couldn't help but think Iselmyr was trying, in her way, to defend him, too.
"Belfetto," Bellasege chirped, breaking the silence as she bounded out from behind her scope. "Excellent work, gliente! I think I have more than enough to work with here." She whipped her sheaf of notes out theatrically in front of her, her eyes scanning back and forth over them as she spoke, jotting down corrections and addendums here and there. "The second presence in the subject's soul– Iselmyr, as she calls herself– manifested most intensely during the, ah, more heated portions of their discussion. Her essence coalesced in its greatest quantities here–" she thrust her quill at Aloth's chest– "in his left ribcage, near his spleen. Therefore, she is obviously triggered by the production of black bile in the spleen, no doubt due to the profoundly melancholic nature of the subject." Bellasege beamed with pride at her diagnosis. The rest of the room's occupants stared at Bellasege with incredulity, exchanged worried looks with one another.
"Then by your... uh, logic," Kana ventured dubiously, "removing his spleen should... cure him?"
Aloth glared at the woman, eyes wide with disbelief at what he was hearing. "That... is utter horseshit," he spat, and Axa couldn't quite tell which of his body's occupants had used his mouth to say it.
Pallegina snorted. "That's one way to put it."
Bellasege's demeanor flipped in an instant. "Well! I'm certain you know exactly what's going on, then, given my extensive training in the animantic sciences and your having come to me for help. So do tell, Fentre: what is your theory?"
"I– You're seriously telling me to diagnose myself? Why did we even come here if you're only going to spout nonsense?" Aloth sounded more panicked than angry, and he turned to Axa in desperation, silently imploring her.
And she obliged, stepping between the injured animancer and her insulted subject. "If I may? I think, perhaps, you're closer to the truth than my friend is willing to admit, Bellasege." The animancer raised an eyebrow, gesturing for Axa to continue even as Aloth huffed indignantly behind her. "You were onto something when you suggested an emotional trigger for Iselmyr's usurpations, but from my experiences traveling alongside him and his retelling of his personal history– including the very illuminating account we've all just heard– I'd posit that Iselmyr tends to emerge when Aloth is in danger."
She half expected an argument, but both Bellasege and Aloth remained quiet instead, considering her words. "I... suppose that theory could hold some merit," Bellasege murmured after a beat. "You do know him better than I. However, I'll have to cross-reference it with other research, of course."
That seemed to shake Aloth out of his reverie, and he nervously began picking at the copper bands on his wrists. "That's all well and good for you, but I've waited fifty years for some answers. Can't you tell me anything now?"
"Aloth, this isn't the first time you and Iselmyr have spoken like this, is it?" Axa spoke softly, carefully. She had an idea, but she needed to ease him into it or he'd reject it outright.
Difficult, isn't he? Remind you of someone? The thought popped into her head as she remembered his hand, warm and trembling in hers, but she pushed it away.
He gave the little woman a guarded look. "Not exactly," he admitted. "I've been forced to be... discreet about her very existence up until now, so whatever disagreements we've had in the past have tended to be resolved quickly, by necessity. Not that it ever did me any good."
"But she has. You told me yourself your father was never violent with you again after Iselmyr gave him a taste of his own medicine. Maybe her methods aren't exactly what you'd choose for yourself, but you can't say she doesn't get results." Axa shrugged and gave him a hopeful little smile. "It might be worth it to... collaborate with her a little more. Let her in, try things her way."
"Yeah," Edér piped up, grinning, "she's alright. And if she starts somethin' you can't finish, you know we've got your back."
Aloth rose from the couch, rubbing his wrists and scoffing at Axa's words. "You wouldn't say that if you'd had to listen to her deranged ranting day and night for the past five decades." He cast a baleful glare at the discarded copper bands on the couch, but when he turned back to her, his face was thoughtful, sincere. "Regardless, this has been... quite an enlightening experience. In many ways. Thank you, Axa." He smiled at her, and her face went warm again.
"Ac, Tella Mala, agracima!" Not one to be ignored, Bellasege slapped her notes down on her desk and strolled over to her scope, preparing to disassemble it. "I'll be sure to make mention of your assistance in my report, send you a copy once it's published. Although unfortunately I will be unable to credit you as a co-author. You understand, of course."
Aloth's head whipped around to face her. "Report? Published?" He looked as though he'd just been sentenced to hang.
"But of course, Fentre Corfiser! This is science, not fun and games." She smiled at him like a cat with a sparrow caught under her paw. "You'll be the toast of Revua, rest assured!"
He balked, his face pale and drawn until a familiar crooked grin crawled across it. "Lookit ye there, shimmerin' star o' the soul sciences," Iselmyr quipped. "Jest whit ye've always wanted."
—
Stubborn and haughty, it read. Dismissive of the soul sciences, as befitting his Aedyre heritage. Very rude and difficult to work with.
"Unbelievable," Aloth spat.
Upon leaving the sanitarium, the group had jointly decided that perhaps their trip to the expedition den could wait until the following day. However, there were still a few loose ends around town to tie up, and a few more hours of daylight in which to do it. Nevertheless– and despite his objections– Axa insisted that Aloth stay behind and rest at the inn, give his nerves a brief respite after all he'd been through that day while the rest of the party tended to business. And so now he sat in his room at the Charred Barrel, alone with his thoughts.
And with Bellasege's research notes.
How relaxing, he thought, glaring hatefully at the little stack of papers.
Most of the document was utterly unintelligible to Aloth, consisting of either overly technical animancy jargon or Vailian hen scratch, but what little she'd bothered to scribble down in Aedyran only asserted what he already knew– that this woman was a charlatan, a sensationalist hack more interested in reinforcing her own harebrained assumptions than in helping anyone. Least of all him, considering she evidently knew exactly what his fellow Aedyrans thought about animancy and the Awakened and yet she still intended to publish his full name and home province along with her ludicrous excuse of a diagnosis. All she was after, as he suspected most animancers were, was fortune and glory, and his reputation was apparently a sacrifice she was willing to make in the pursuit of that goal.
He had known since the instant the woman had started transcribing his very personal, very private memories that her notes would somehow have to find their way into his hands, so as soon as he'd seen his chance, he'd taken it– and as soon as he'd secured the notes and slipped them into his cloak, he'd seen Axa watching him. Not expecting to be caught in the act, he'd frozen in horror, silently pleading with the little woman to turn a blind eye– and he'd been pleasantly surprised when she'd done exactly that, glancing furtively at Bellasege and then back at him before turning her back on them both and heading for the door, the barest hint of disapproval in her eyes.
Part of him couldn't help but think that that was why she'd left him here by himself– because she was disappointed with him for betraying Bellasege's trust like that, promising her her long-sought prize only to rip it away immediately afterwards, and right under her nose to boot. But he reminded himself that Axa wasn't the kind of woman to practice punitive shunning like that, and if she'd had a problem with what he'd done, she'd have discussed it with him, probably even called him out right there in the animancer's office. After all, she had to know that it had been her who had truly helped him, not Bellasege. So what would she care if that fraud no longer had anything to show for her so-called efforts?
"Be ever honest, forthright, and true"– fye, yer a fine auld piece o' work, laddie.
Iselmyr had been uncharacteristically quiet ever since her outburst in the sanitarium, her appetite for bickering seemingly sated until now, and Aloth jumped at her sudden resurgence in his mind. "Maybe you'd be perfectly fine with word of our condition becoming common knowledge back home," he retorted, recovering quickly, "but I would rather keep our private matters private. Besides, I didn't hear you objecting at the time."
He was expecting more of her usual sharp-tongued impudence, but was surprised when Iselmyr only scoffed softly in his mind instead. Naught t' object tae. Fer once.
Iselmyr not sassing him was one thing, but Iselmyr actually agreeing with him was quite another. Stunned into silence, Aloth could only blink as Axa's words back at the sanitarium popped into his head– "Try it her way, let her in"– when there was a knock at the door, and, grateful for the interruption, he bid his visitor enter.
Axa stepped in slowly, carefully, only cracking the door just enough to allow her inside before shutting it behind her. "Hey," she smiled, rubbing at a fresh bruise on her forearm as she crossed the room. "Just got back. The others are downstairs having a late dinner. How're you holding up?"
"As well as can be expected," he replied breezily, shifting position to face her, frowning as he gestured to her wound. "Looks like you had an eventful evening despite my absence. What happened?"
"Oh, nothing serious," she sighed. "Helped an old man find and free the soul of his long-dead lover from a necromancer... gave an orlan who'd found himself on the wrong side of the law a second chance at life... The usual, you know." She grinned up at him briefly before thrusting her chin at the sheaf of paper in his hands, clearing her throat. "Still figuring out what you're gonna do with those, are you?"
"Oh, I know exactly what I'm going to do with them," he sneered, twisting the notes into a tight little tube in his hands. "I was just looking though them first for any information that might actually be useful to me. I'm sure it won't surprise you to learn I found nothing." He scoffed, rolling his eyes. "She didn't even get the color of my hair correct. You wouldn't happen to need a light for your pipe, would you?"
Axa laughed and declined politely, and so Aloth narrowed his eyes at the animancer's notes, gesturing with his free hand and whispering a few arcane power words, and in a few seconds the papers were ablaze, quickly crumbling into ash on the floor. Another gesticulation, a few more muttered words, and seconds later even the blackened remains were swept away into the aether, leaving nothing behind but a gray smudge on the rug.
"Well, that's that then." Axa sighed, shaking her head as she stared at the smokey spot. "Shame you two couldn't have helped each other more."
He looked away, crossing his arms over his chest. "More? She didn't help me at all. She pointed some contraption at me, humiliated me with prying questions, and when she couldn't even be bothered to put together her own conclusions, she relied on you to fill in the gaps. If anything, my destroying her ridiculous notes is evening the score."
"I know you've not much love for animancers, Aloth, but Bellasege really was trying. Whether it was to help you learn about yourself or to further her own knowledge of the soul sciences, I can't rightly say, but still." The orlan planted her fists on her hips, regarding him cautiously. "Personally, I think she was in over her head a bit. But how can we expect animancers to improve any or to advance the craft as a whole if we don't cooperate with them every now and again?"
"That would be fair enough if their methods were ever anything approaching sound," he retorted. "But you heard her. Black bile? My spleen? Drivel. Quackery. And publishing my identifying information like that is entirely irresponsible. What if someone from home were to see it? I'd be ruined." Color had crept into his face as he'd spoken, and he paused a moment to collect himself, but only succeeded in winding himself up further. "The only reason we figured out anything about my condition from that farce in her office is because you and I have half decent educations and a modicum of common sense between us. Imagine your average kith– Hel, your average Dyrwoodan going to a woman like Bellasege for a consultation. Big words and shiny gadgets are all most people need to believe just about anything a con artist like her can conjure up."
The little woman raised her eyebrow at him. "You do bring up some good points, I'll grant you that. Question is, what's to be done about it? As it is now, the only authority anyone seems to want to exert over the practice is to either let animancers– or anyone who calls themselves animancers– go totally unchecked, or to ban animancy completely. Is there to be no middle ground?"
"It's not our political leaders' jobs to understand animancy's deepest nuances so they can legislate it 'fairly'," he sighed, gently massaging his temple. "They've enough to contend with without having to study an experimental new branch of science, particularly in the Dyrwood."
"Then why not make animancers the ones who decide? Or, at least, give them the chance to advise those who do the deciding." Axa's eyes brightened as she argued, reminding Aloth uncomfortably of Kana. "A council of well-respected animancers, perhaps, selected from among those most trusted and revered in their fields."
Aloth's lip drew back in a grimace. "Let animancers legislate themselves? That's a recipe for disaster if ever I heard one."
She shrugged. "Just tossing out ideas. We'd all probably fare better that way than we do in the chaos we have now."
"I don't see how, but... seeing as it's coming from you, the idea might actually be worth considering." The words were out of his mouth before he really realized what he was saying, and he jolted slightly to hear himself say them.
She laughed. "Don't go around pinning all your trust on any one person or institution completely, Aloth. Not even me. You'll regret it, trust me."
He smiled at his feet, cheeks and ears growing warm. "As you say, Lady Mala. What's on the schedule for tomorrow, then? I'd join you and the others and discuss the matter over dinner, but if I'm being honest, I'm having a rather difficult time working up an appetite for yet more overboiled stew and watered wine."
Her mood changed in an instant, her casual slouch straightening, her face abruptly flipping from relaxed to sober. "Wyla, the justiciar from Crucible Keep that we talked to this morning, caught us on our way back here," she stated gravely. "Heritage Hill will be open to us tomorrow morning."
Aloth froze. "Heritage Hill," he repeated softly. "Did she... have anything to say about the conditions beyond the gates?"
She shook her head again, a haunted look drifting into her eyes. "Apparently, it's bedlam in there," she murmured. "Patrols go in, but they don't come out. The dead walk the streets."
"And the Leaden Key has something to do with it all," he finished for her.
"They do. They must. And we're going to find out what. Together," she answered, determination hardening her voice. She gave him a feisty grin, then, lifted her eyes to meet his, and the intensity of her gaze made him avert his own. "So you'd better get some rest, then, if you're not going to eat."
He chuckled amicably. "As long as we don't get anymore unexpected midnight visitors, I'm sure I'll be well rested come morning."
She scoffed and swatted him lightly on the knee. "Well! I'll just bind my feet together before turning in for the night, shall I?"
They laughed together for a moment, then, and Aloth felt something inside him finally loosening up and spreading throughout him, like an enormous flower made of light and air blooming in his chest. It made him feel warm and giddy and free in a way he never really had before, and the feeling persisted even after Axa had spun on her heel and sauntered across the room, smiling at him one last time before disappearing into the hallway beyond, pulling the door shut behind her. He didn't know exactly what it meant– he'd never felt anything quite like it before, so how could he?– but he had his suspicions, none of which he was really prepared to get into tonight. So instead he got ready for bed, smile still stuck to his warm face as he changed into his nightclothes, washed his face, brushed his hair.
Was ye e'er plannin' on tellin' her it was yerself whit let her intae yer room last night? He could practically hear the cheeky little grin in Iselmyr's voice.
"No," he sighed, "because it was you who did that, not I. And you know it." He was still smiling. He couldn't seem to stop.
Fye, lad, whit diff'rence dae it make?
"All the difference in the world," he answered, and with a flick of his wrist, all the lights in the room simultaneously snuffed out.
—
Chapter 12: Inheritance
Summary:
Where does one draw the line between legacy and legend? Fame and infamy? Gift and burden? For good or for ill, we must carry them all with us.
Chapter Text
—
The Kitten of Caed Nua. That's what people were calling her now.
Or so Axa had gleaned upon walking into Admeth's Den Expedition House and immediately coming face to face with six of the ugliest, rudest, meanest-looking adventurers in the place. They had been on their way out when she and her crew had entered, and the tension hung palpably in the air as the two groups sized each other up.
"Well, well, lookee here. A new litter of pups, come to try their hand at adventurin'." The leader of the merc band grinned, his knife-picked teeth notched and browning.
"Not just any pups, Byne," one of his cohorts sneered. "That's none other 'n the Kitten of Caed Nua and her kits, that new buncha foreigners been makin' a ruckus in our neighborhood." The lone woman in the group lifted her chin to look down her nose at Axa, an open challenge on her rough-hewn face.
Axa had not been expecting to be recognized as the Lady of Caed Nua quite so quickly, and the puerile nickname was a nasty twist to the surprise. She bristled visibly in response, no doubt to the delight of the thugs before her. "Well. My reputation precedes me, it seems. And who exactly are you lot?" She kept her voice as low and as calm as she could.
"I'm Byne," the first man drawled, pride suffusing his raspy voice, "and me and my crew're known around here as the Giantslayers. Best godsdamned adventurers in the city, and don't you forget it."
Axa allowed herself the tiniest smirk. "That so? Never heard of you."
The whole group seemed to deflate all at once, their demeanor immediately souring. "Well you fuckin' have now," Byne spat, stepping forward and leaning in close to hiss at the little woman, barely keeping a lid on his smoldering anger. "You better watch your step, Kitten. Word is you been seen hangin' around Crucible Keep, rubbin' elbows with them little fancy lads. Might be we even heard you been runnin' errands for 'em, helpin' 'em run some sort of sick animancy shit–"
"Byne." A harsh, gravelly voice boomed at them from across the room, and all eyes quickly darted to the source: a well-built folk man who stood with his arms folded loosely over his chest and a no-nonsense glare etched into his features. "I gave you a job to do. You gonna do it? Or you gonna stand around runnin' your fuckin' mouth all day?"
The Giantslayers' leader winced, straightening up and scowling in the man's direction. "Yeah, yeah, keep your shirt on, Wenan. I'm goin'." He cast one last glance at Axa, unconcealed hatred further twisting his features. "You'd do well to stay out of our way. There's only so many bounties to lay claim to in this city, and we get the lion's share. Understand, Kitten? Now then, Giantslayers– let's get this coin." Byne jerked his thumb toward the door, and he and his crew brushed past Axa and hers, glaring all the while.
So, she thought. It's gonna be like that, is it.
"Well, that was thoroughly unpleasant," Aloth grumbled. One of them had very purposefully shoulder checked him on their way out, and he ruefully rubbed at the tender spot.
"Told you this was a bad idea," Edér sighed. "Say, was that big fella wearin' a diaper? Or did his loincloth just really look like one?"
Kana pushed his hat back to scratch at his forehead, grinning bemusedly. "At least they weren't quite as bigoted as the Knights were. Although I don't know whether they invented that 'Kitten' epithet or if they were just repeating it."
"To be fair, I have not heard of them, either," Pallegina added, "and I have been in Defiance Bay for some time now." She smiled wryly down at Axa. "You held your ground well, Watcher."
"Was there a reason we decided to come here?" Sagani glanced around furtively, looking like a deer that was ready to bolt, Itumaak panting nervously beside her. "Other than the delightful company, I mean."
Axa steeled herself, squaring her shoulders and standing tall. She couldn't afford to look weak, not if this was to go the way she wanted it to. "We came here to work, of course," she stated clearly and boldly as she strolled purposefully toward the man Byne had called Wenan. "And to get familiar with the local citizen militia. After all, the Dozens are the ones the people of Defiance Bay actually see out and about solving problems, taking care of business." She stopped at Wenan's feet, flashed that feisty smirk up at him. "Isn't that right?"
"We ain't got any work for the likes of you," Wenan growled, unimpressed. "So you can march your little ass back to your pals at Crucible Keep and tell 'em to step up their spy game."
Quickly, now. Don't let him get on top of you–
"Oh, shut your face!" She puffed out her chest, thrust her chin at him, narrowed her eyes. And drew looks. Lots of looks. Just as she'd hoped she might. "Those stuck-up little lordlings are no friends of mine. The only reason I poked my head into their clubhouse was to see why they were dragging their feet on dealing with the situation in Heritage Hill. And when they couldn't give me a satisfactory answer, I offered to handle it for them. I figured somebody had better."
For a split second, Wenan had let his gruff facade slip and his eyes had bulged in surprise. But he'd quickly returned to his standard squint, his mustache twitching. "That so? Well, what the Hel are you doing here, then, if you're so busy saving the fuckin' city?"
"Just what I said before," Axa snapped back. "Looking for work. You don't think I plan on dying in there, do you? I'll need something to do once I'm finished cleaning up after the Knights, and I'm already fed up playing nursemaid to a bunch of rich brats. Figured you lot might have need of me, seeing as you actually seem to do shit." And here, she let herself soften just a bit, let the act drop just enough for the sincerity in her voice to shine through. "Plus, I meant what I said about wanting to get to know the people of Defiance Bay. The real, honest, hard-working people. You–"
Wenan scoffed and waved a broad, scarred hand at the little woman. "Alright, alright, stow the flattery. Maybe you are on the level. But I meant what I said, too: Unless Byne and his crew fuck theirs up, I ain't got any jobs for you." He scanned the room, glancing behind him at a line of novices awkwardly jabbing their hand-me-down swords at hay-stuffed practice dummies, and he continued at a significantly louder volume than before. "Although you're welcome to hang around, get to talkin' with some of the boys. Maybe you'll find someone with a... personal score they wouldn't mind you settlin' for them."
When he turned back to face her, Axa glanced over his shoulder at the man overseeing the novices, who now had her fixed in his sights. Wenan winked.
Winning hearts and minds, she grinned to herself as she strutted over to the line of dummies.
—
In truth, Axa had gone to the Dozens to try and win them over. Her meeting with Gathbin had left a bad taste in her mouth, along with a gnawing suspicion that she would soon be in dire need of the support of more than just her few followers, and the Knights of the Crucible had not given her much cause to think of them as enthusiastic allies. But if she could earn a little clout with the Dozens, prove herself a champion of the common kith, perhaps she could get them to support her. Maybe they would even start to see things her way, in time.
That was why she'd accepted Osric's request to help him recover his family's heirloom breastplate from one of the Knights– or, it was one reason why she'd chosen to do it, the main reason. Her other reason for accepting the job was to give herself that extra little boost of confidence she needed to believe that she would survive, she would keep moving after she finished her work in Heritage Hill. To remind her that whatever she found beyond those walls, she would not, could not allow it to kill her. Because how could she die when she'd made a promise to someone? A stranger was depending on her to help him with a personal favor out there, so she couldn't die.
She was not going to die in here.
"We're going to die in here," Aloth moaned.
"Please stop saying that!" It took quite a lot to make someone like Sagani raise her voice, a fact that did not go unnoticed by any member of Axa's group that now huddled miserably in the cramped mausoleum. But even the typically calm, relaxed huntress was on her very last nerve, and Itumaak whined and limped as he paced, his ears plastered flat against his head, his bushy tail tucked between his legs. It really was that bad.
Aloth knew it, and he knew he wasn't helping. "Sorry. I'm sorry. I'm just–" He clutched the scepter the Watcher had gifted him close to his chest, dimly wondering if perhaps in having bound Gyrd Háewanes Sténes to his soul, he had somehow injured or depleted or disabled Iselmyr. Usually when he was this worked up, she was bursting out of his seams, so to speak. Where was she?
A loud click echoed through the tiny room, and a sunlance trap shot through the air to sear the stone floor, obliterating a few candles and only narrowly missing the fool who'd set it off. Kana blinked at the sarcophagus he'd just opened, dazed, before turning slowly to his comrades-in-arms, teeth bared in a mortified grimace.
"I'm– I'm okay–"
"D'ye wantae keep yer feckin' haunds t' yerself, ye reprobate??" Iselmyr shrieked, Aloth's face red and shaking with rage. He'd never been so grateful for her in his life.
"All of you, be quiet! Kana, sit on your hands. I need to think." Axa crouched in a corner of the crypt, head between her knees and eyes wide with terror, feeling vaguely like she was suffocating. Kana did as he was told with neither hesitation nor argument.
She had expected the situation in Heritage Hill to be a difficult one, but she hadn't been expecting this. It was beyond anything she'd ever even imagined before, like a horror story told by a madman: The tattered remnants of the residents wandered through the tattered remnants of the district, searching hungrily for the living in a grisly parody of life. She and her crew had killed at least a score of guls and darguls that had charged at them across the once manicured streets, rotting things that had once been wealthy, prosperous citizens of Defiance Bay that they'd had to put down like rabid dogs. They'd entered one of the fine, stately manor houses to find a family, barely recognizable as having once been people at all, trying to coax another member of their clan out from behind a locked door, and had been forced to dispatch them when they'd turned, hissing and drooling, at the sound of her footsteps. And then there was the other mausoleum, the missing Crucible Knight commander turned cean gŵla, the unnatural look in the eyes of her justiciar thralls ...
Come on, girl. Remember why you're here. The vision, the tower. Axa took a few long, deep breaths, and rose shakily to her feet.
"Alright," she rasped, her usually robust voice cracking badly. She cleared her throat, swallowed, tried again. "Alright," she announced clearly, "here's what we're going to do. This place is safer than most in the district–" here she shot a pointed look at Kana– "particularly now that the trap on the sarcophagus has been disabled. So we can rest here a few hours, regain our strength, tend to our wounds–" here she glanced over at Palllegina, who had already started removing one long leather boot to examine the badly twisted, rapidly swelling knee concealed beneath– "and continue exploring once we're ready. The one Aldhelm told us about, Icantha– she has to be somewhere in this district, and I know that if she can tell me how to operate that godsdamned machine up there, we can put an end to all this. All we need to do is– is– Edér, are you okay?" The blond man's attention was clearly fixed elsewhere, on an alcove on the far end of the crypt, and upon noticing this, Axa felt half terror that he'd spotted yet another deadly hazard and half annoyance at being ignored. "Are you even listening?"
"Watcher," he called out, "you prob'ly oughtta get over here. You're... you're gonna wanna see this." Edér turned to look at her, and the desperate look in his eyes alarmed her even more than his cryptic words.
She shuffled to him as fast as the cramped quarters would allow, gritting her teeth all the way. "Gods, Edér, Wael may love a mystery but I don't. Not right now, at least. Just tell me–"
Edér pointed silently into the alcove, his eyes still wide, and Axa looked.
A little girl looked back at them from the shadows. She was filthy and trembling and far, far too thin.
"...Uh," Axa said.
—
"Teir Nowneth. It is called Teir Nowneth."
Icantha had been the woman from her vision, the one the Acolyte had shown her in the catacombs. And she'd been an invaluable source of information– after Axa had managed to extinguish her stubborn pride, get past it and get to the truth of things. And the truth was that the Engwithans had created machines that could tear souls from their bodies, machines that could direct the flow of disembodied souls, or, as in the case of the machine atop the tower, could hold them in stasis. It was because of this that the dead in Heritage Hill had risen, their souls held in place by the machine even after their deaths, latched onto their corpses like parasites.
But why? That, even Icantha couldn't tell her. But she could show her how to read and speak Engwithan, to command the machine, to turn it off. To make it stop.
She could still remember the feeling of the knowledge trickling into her mind from the dead woman's fingertips, the shapes and sounds of the runes drifting up out of the dark sea of her subconscious– and then all of a sudden there were more runes, and punctuation, numerals, grammar and syntax and–
"Here, like this. See?" The older girl's hand guided the stylus in hers, and together they painstakingly formed the shapes of the letters, the swirling loops, the sharp slashes. At length, they were finished, and the older girl smiled, and her smile held in it all the warmth of the sun.
"There! You did it. You wrote your name!" She looked up at the older girl, beaming with pride, and then back down at the parchment to read aloud what they'd written together:
—
ANTHEA
IX
ENSIOS
—
She had come away from the experience with a fuller knowledge of Engwithan than Icantha had ever known– and with tears streaming down her face at the sheer intensity of emotion the memory from her past life had evoked in her. She had heard the name before, heard him say it in her dreams, in her memories of the temple, but she knew for certain now that it had been her name, and somehow it all made her past life feel so much more real than it had before.
But there was no time to dwell on such things. They had a job to do. So they'd hurried back to the tower, to Teir Nowneth, hurried up to Aldhelm and the machine and its control panel, and now Edér stood between the rotting, half-feral animancer and Axa, ready to protect her from him should the hunger overwhelm what little of his good judgment remained while she stood at the controls, working.
"Hold," the control panel read, and, "End." Reading instructions for a machine had never been quite so emotional for Axa. She couldn't help but think of the writing lesson, the older girl. Who was she?
No time to dwell on it, I said! We need to get this over with. She leaned heavily against the control panel, spun the dial violently. "Increase," she commanded, her tongue forming Engwithan phonemes for the first time in millenia and for the first time ever.
The machine spun madly, faster and faster, until its components squealed and smoked and the light that shone from inside flared up, piercing the dull, overcast sky. And then something inside of it finally gave way, and the massive dynamo tore itself apart, slabs of scorched stone and chunks of blackened adra raining down on the roof of Teir Nowneth. The souls inside had been destroyed along with it, but it was a small price to pay to end the madness that had long held the district in its unforgiving grip.
Easy for you to say. None of those souls were yours, were they?
"Still," Aldhelm croaked, "and s... s-sssilent." He closed his yellowing, shriveled eyes, heaved a sigh that more closely resembled a death rattle. "It's over."
"For you, yes," Axa murmured. "For me, it's only just beginning."
—
Debriefing the Crucible Knights went about how Axa had expected it would. She and her companions had staggered out of Heritage Hill only to be immediately escorted back to Crucible Keep along with the little girl they'd rescued from her family crypt, the poor waif falling asleep on Edér's shoulders as they'd made their way through town. Once inside, they'd had their wounds tended to and their bellies filled as they recounted the events of their harrowing mission, repeating themselves over and over to one bewildered Knight after another. By the end of the evening, rumors, misinterpretations, and half-truths about the "end of the Curse of Heritage Hill" were all anybody in Crucible Keep could talk about– unless one preferred to gossip about the mysterious Watcher of Caed Nua instead.
Restful sleep was coming harder and harder to Axa, and the troubling trend had continued as they'd bedded down in the barracks that night. She'd woken the next morning feeling worse than she had when she'd laid down the night before, and her attitude had very much reflected it. She'd particularly let her ire show when her breakfast had been interrupted by a man who'd introduced himself as Penhelm, a name she recognized as the one belonging to the Knight that Osric had sent her after the day before, hoping she could recover his family's breastplate from the snooty little gossip.
"Is it true that you're not actually a Watcher, but merely a Cipher? Like the... others of your kind down at Hadret House?" Arrogance and curiosity mingled in his insufferable smirk as he spoke, not even having had the decency to wait until she'd finished chewing.
"That depends," she'd replied, her mouth still full of bacon. "Is it true you steal people's family heirlooms after talking shit about them and getting them kicked out of the service?"
Needless to say, she had gotten nowhere trying to convince him to do right by Osric. So on her way out, she'd passed through the scriptorium and, with a careful eye and a whispered word to Aloth, she'd left Crucible Keep that morning with Penhelm's soul lineage affidavit tucked away in her satchel.
She had been on her way to Hadret House to have the affidavit examined for authenticity, hoping to gain a bargaining chip that might pry the heirloom armor from the little bastard's hands, when a messenger had appeared at her shoulder, letting her know that her presence had been requested... at Hadret House. She'd almost laughed at the absurd coincidence– until the messenger told her exactly who had summoned her there, his tone low and reverent.
"Who is Lady Webb," she'd asked, "and what exactly does she want with me?"
The messenger had been young, with a casual, almost flippant air about him, but he had still had the good sense to lean close and keep an eye out for eavesdroppers. "You don't know her, milady? She's the directress of Dunryd Row, Defiance Bay's investigative peacekeeping force. No one's actually met her face to face, in... I don't know, a long time. But they say that despite her advanced age, her mind is a steel trap and her will is an iron fist. She and her Cipher operatives keep the city safe from threats that most kith are never even aware exist..."
Axa had listened, at first. She'd tried to listen. But as he'd spoken, as he'd thrust the wax-sealed summons into her hand, she'd found herself distracted by an all-too-familiar feeling. Something was pulling her toward Hadret House, something that had nothing to do with Dunryd Row or Ciphers or Lady Webb, and she'd turned away from the messenger in the middle of his speech to pursue it, helpless to resist.
He was there. Just outside of Hadret House, on the far side of Brackenbury. He was there, and she approached him–
–she approached him, any confidence she'd had before dissolving now in her sick stomach, trickling down her trembling limbs. She couldn't do this.
She had to do this.
He was already watching her, but the impact of his gaze was no less powerful than if he'd turned dramatically to face her. It was as though he knew what she was going to tell him already.
Of course he does, she thought. He knows all. He knows what I've done. What I–
"You look as though you've seen a ghost, dear."
Lady Webb chuckled in her throat, but her face did not laugh with her. "Although, perhaps you have. After all, you are the Watcher who wrested the ruins of Caed Nua away from poor, mad Maerwald, as well as the Watcher who ended the... 'curse' of Heritage Hill, if my reports are correct." The old, frail woman rose from her desk, crossed the room with a deceptive grace. "And they are."
Axa kept her head low, but lifted her eyes to meet Webb's gaze. "Why have you asked me here–"
"–You know why I have asked you here, child." With anyone else, she would have felt that she was being chastised, but with him, she only felt kind, fatherly concern. "Your fellow missionaries have reported a change in your behavior recently. You neglect your duties, you are quiet and distant. What troubles you so to make you act this way?"
Tears stung her eyes. Her whole body quaked. Her breath caught in her throat. The quivering pit in her stomach broadened and her heart fell into it, and for a second she thought she might actually vomit, but instead it was her confession that flew from her mouth:
"Your Eminence, I... forgive me, but I wish... I wish to leave the order."
He folded his hands, frowning–
"You're not a stupid woman, Axa Mala. You should know why I've asked you here. Defiance Bay's concerns are my concerns, you see, and evidently, they are yours as well. But neither of us is overly fond of beating around the bush, so let's cut straight to it, shall we?" Lady Webb stopped at her bookshelf, turned to face Axa again, her keen eyes piercing the other woman's mind, her soul. "Why do you seek the Leaden Key?"
She had known, somehow, that Webb would ask her that, but it still took her by surprise. Nevertheless, Axa didn't waste time asking how she'd known. "I'm looking for someone. A man I saw in the ruins of Cliant Lîs. He... did something to me. And I need him to undo it."
The wizened old Cipher nodded at her, then, let her eyes slip shut, her face twitching–
–"You have been nothing if not an extraordinary asset to us," he said, slowly pacing as he spoke. "Your conviction in our cause has inspired your contemporaries to greatness, and together with them you have brought the light of redemption to thousands, if not more! What could possibly shake your faith in yourself like this? Your faith in us?"
Somehow, without her realizing, he had ended up crossing the room to stand directly before her. He looked into her eyes, worry and sorrow emanating from him. "What's wrong, Anthea? What happened?"
She squeezed her eyes shut but she still saw him in her mind, still saw the compassion in his eyes that a despicable sinner like her could never deserve–
Lady Webb opened her eyes, gasping softly.
"The gods are cruel," she murmured. "The man you seek is none other than the grandmaster of the Leaden Key himself: Thaos ix Arkannon."
The name echoed in Axa's head, the bearded man's masked face floating before her mind's eye. It felt like she'd always known him, or at least known of him, but only now could she put a name to the face.
"Thaos," she whispered–
"I cannot stay, Your Eminence. I'm... I'm tainted, wicked and weak." Anthea lowered her head, letting her tears fall to the floor. "I've done something terrible, something I can never undo, an unforgivable act of blasphemy. I fear– no, I– I know I am beyond redemption."
She curled in on herself, wracked with sobs, unable to continue. Shame and guilt burned her face, but she knew she deserved to burn for real, to burn forever. But even to cleanse her soul with holy flame would be too kind a mercy for a traitor of her magnitude. How could he, how could the gods ever forgive such a miserable wretch like her?
His hand fell onto her shoulder, steady and strong–
"He is a man unlike any other," Webb explained, her voice quiet and serious as she made her way back to her desk, hands folded behind her back. "The Leaden Key is an organization dedicated to obscuring, muddling, and destroying information, including any evidence pertaining to themselves or their activities. There's no way to be sure, but what little we've found suggests that they have supposedly existed for over two thousand years." She looked pointedly at Axa, one eyebrow cocked. "And it was Thaos who founded them."
"But that's impossible," Aloth blurted. "Even the longest-lived elves haven't even come close to..." He trailed off, twisting his fingers together anxiously, dropping his gaze to the floor.
"You'd think so, wouldn't you?" Webb sighed, one drooping corner of her mouth briefly lifting into a smirk. "But when it comes to the Leaden Key, little is as it seems. If what we've managed to learn about him so far is true– and there's no guarantee that it is, but it's the best explanation we've got– he is one of Woedica's Favored, an agent of the Queen Who Was who has been gifted with the blessing of eternal life. In practice, this means that every time he dies, Thaos' soul is guided by Her hand to be reborn in an almost identical vessel, and once he reaches puberty, he Awakens to all of his past lives at once, in order to continue the work of his Mistress on Eora. So strong is his soul, in fact, that he can supposedly even project it out of himself and into others, crushing the will of lesser souls and usurping their bodies for his and his Queen's own ends." She regarded Axa with pity. "He is almost certainly the most dangerous, elusive, powerful man on the face of the planet. And while I can't deny being grateful for the company, you have my deepest sympathies that your path has also crossed with his."
"Why was he in Teir Nowneth the night the machine was activated in Heritage Hill?" Axa demanded, her head spinning. "What was he doing in Cliant Lîs? How did he Awaken me–"
–"So you have sinned," Thaos proclaimed gravely. "You have erred, stumbled on your path, and now you would cast yourself into the Void. Is that it?"
Anthea wanted to cover her face with her hands, wanted to run, to hide, but she could barely even find it in herself to draw the breath to answer him. "What I've done, no god could forgive me. Now or ever."
He brought his other hand around, then, gripped both of her shoulders firmly. "My child, my dear child, if you truly believe that then I have utterly failed you, as a teacher and as a leader. There is no sin so grevious that it cannot be absolved, no path so dark the gods cannot light the way to salvation! As long as you do not turn your back on Them, They will never turn Their backs on you."
She knew it couldn't be true. It was too good to be true, and nothing in her life had ever been half so good. Not since she was a child. But... would he really lie to her like that? He never had before. At least, she didn't think he had. Anthea slowly lifted her head to look at the man who would save her from herself–
Lady Webb sat back down, letting her chin hover just above her steepled fingers. "That's what I'd like to know. There's quite a lot I'd like to know about Thaos ix Arkannon and the Leaden Key, as I rather imagine you would, too. That's why I summoned you here today– to work with you, pool our resources, compare notes. The Key has been... active as of late, and where they go, you seem to follow, righting their wrongs. As you did in Heritage Hill." She smiled, her thin, red mouth like a slit cut into her face. "I'd like you to continue to do so, and to report your successes back to me. In return, Dunryd Row's resources shall be at your disposal should you need them, and with a bit of luck– well, a lot of luck, in truth– perhaps we two can corner him and get our answers at last."
There was something behind Webb's eyes, something mysterious and passionate and unrelenting that Axa couldn't quite place, but she knew instinctively that it wasn't for her. Whatever it was that drove this woman, whether it was a thirst for vengeance or a desire for the truth or a need for justice, the ferocity behind her eyes was only for Thaos.
She could respect that.
"Very well," Axa replied, "I accept–"
–"I... I want to believe that's so, Your Eminence," she stammered, "but even if it were, I don't deserve Their clemency."
"Some among the gods would see you punished, it's true," he murmured. "But the sting of the lash passes in an instant compared to the eternity afterward in which you shall enjoy the boundless mercy, the cleansing forgiveness, the all-consuming love of the gods. That is what makes one deserving– devotion. As long as you devote yourself to Them, They will return the faith you place in Them a thousand fold."
The tears fell afresh from her eyes, this time from sheer relief. Somewhere deep in her heart, she must have known he could make it all right, could show her the path to absolution. He always did. That was the real reason she had come here, wasn't it? What had she been so afraid of?
Thaos smiled warmly at her, his hands still gently clutching her shoulders. "Stay with us, Anthea. We need you. The gods need you. They have entrusted you with the truth of Their Word– will you return that trust?"
"I will," she whispered–
"Now, before you go– what was that bizarre display you put on just outside our door?" Lady Webb was already looking through another stack of documents, but she spared Axa a bemused glance. "It's not a good look, dear, standing around with your eyes glazed over and your mouth agog. You're liable to catch flies."
"I'm an Awakened Watcher," the orlan retorted curtly. "The memories from my past life tend to be a bit more vivid than the ones other Awakened kith might experience. And I don't exactly control what I see or when I see it."
The old Cipher shrugged. "I meant no offense. Only trying to warn you that you may have unwittingly broadcasted your whereabouts to someone who seems to have a bone to pick with you." She gestured vaguely toward the door to her office, and it swung open, an orlan man stepping in as though he'd been expected.
Webb looked at Axa the way a jaded teacher might at an impudent pupil. "Well? Show him the affidavit."
She blinked, and somewhat reluctantly, she reached into her satchel and produced Penhelm's affidavit, the one Aloth had pilfered for her at Crucible Keep. "Uh... Can you tell me if this is genuine?" she muttered.
The older man took it from her, looked it over briefly, and shook his head, wrinkling his nose in disgust as he handed it back. "Not at all," he pronounced. "Being perfectly honest, it's a rather shabby forgery, too."
Webb sighed, shuffling her papers. "Thank you, Kurren; you may go." The orlan gave her a respectful nod and left to return to his work downstairs as the directress of Dunryd Row grinned wryly at Axa. "Now you have your bargaining chip. Penhelm is waiting for you on the street outside. Do exercise caution, dear, and try to keep the blood off of my siding. We've only just had it repainted last month."
"Actually," the little woman smiled slyly, "I think I've got a better idea."
—
"I still kinda can't believe that worked," Sagani chuckled, immeasurably grateful to finally be out of the city again. Itumaak trotted merrily alongside her, clearly echoing the sentiment.
"Which 'that' are we talkin' about?" Edér drawled, chewing on the stem of his unlit pipe as he marched alongside his friends. "The one where she got that Crucible Knight brat to give up his little war trophy without spillin' any blood? Or the one where she convinced the... Diaper Boys or whatever they call themselves to give up that adra disc without havin' to beat it outta them neither?"
"Diplomacy is half the language one uses, and half simply understanding one's opponent," Pallegina proclaimed, turning her head so her campagnas could hear her but keeping her eyes fixed on the path ahead. "The Watcher has a knack for both, it seems."
Axa grunted with effort as the terrain changed and she and her party had to start walking uphill. "Have I? ...Well, I hope I also have a knack for finding anything even remotely useful to use as weapons in an ancient, crumbling, rusted-out ruin." The little woman examined the adra disc, turning it this way and that in her hand as she trudged along. "Hel, I'll settle for just getting the damned door open. Gods, Wenan's an idiot..."
Aloth kept close to her, his hand not quite touching her but hovering just behind her back, ready to catch her should she stumble. "Careful, now," he murmured, peering suspiciously at their surroundings. "You never know who's listening."
"Come now," Kana boomed, clapping Aloth on the back so hard he almost ran into Axa. "Who would come all the way out here just to eavesdrop on some random band of wayfarers? With the Diap– erh, with the Giantslayers having slunk back off to their hideout, the only real threat that could feasibly show up out here would be–"
"A Crucible Knight patrol," Pallegina cried, and as she did, as the party came to a halt behind her, the patrol stepped out from behind the trees, swords at the ready.
He couldn't believe it had taken the ragtag little group until now, when they were within spitting distance, to finally notice the patrol. He had been watching the plate-clad fools trundle gracelessly around Stormwall Gorge all afternoon, careful to keep himself hidden from their sight, although it hadn't exactly been difficult: estramorwn never could seem to see anything that wasn't dangling directly in front of their noses. He'd noticed these new interlopers, too, far sooner than the Knights had, although he'd smelled them before he'd seen them– sweat and smoke, whiteleaf and charred meat, cinnamon and clove and lavender and hot breath laced with murkbrew, a veritable buffet for the olfactories carried on the breeze– and he'd been mildly surprised to actually find himself hoping for a fight. It would give him something to do, anyway, watching these two groups of trespassers duke it out. Although now that he could see that the leader of the adventuring group was another orlan– a young-ish, female orlan, and quite a comely one at that– he felt a little bad about wishing for bloodsport.
...Only a little, though, he reassured himself, lifting his eyepatch to scratch beneath it as he popped a hunk of raw deer flesh into his mouth, settled in, and waited for the show to start.
—
Chapter 13: Hide and Seek
Summary:
More often than not, a secret is like a scab– it conceals something ugly and putrid, but picking at it is nevertheless irresistable.
Notes:
Content warning: This chapter contains suggestive and disturbing language as well as strong implications of sexual abuse. Please use discretion when reading.
Chapter Text
—
Chomp. Slurp. Smack.
He glanced up at the group of foreigners. Nothing.
Slorp. Crunch.
Still nothing.
Hiravias was beginning to wonder if he was wasting his time.
He knelt over the still-warm deer carcass, watching the strange little party as they stood just beyond the treeline, talking and stretching and tending to one another's wounds while he licked the blood from his fingers, pulling each digit from his mouth with a loud sucking, popping noise. Ordinarily he'd never eat so ostentatiously– it was never a good idea to draw attention to oneself while eating in the wild, unless one liked having one's hard-earned kill stolen away by something bigger, stronger, and hungrier than oneself. But they still wouldn't look his way, and by now he was starting to feel full. Wael's bowels, how much more loudly am I gonna have to chew before they hear me and decide it's worth investigating? Maybe I should just throw a handful of offal at them instead.
It was unlike him to be so indirect with his intentions, but one never could tell how some estramorwn would react to a tiny, hairy man openly approaching them with a toothy smile and copious amounts of blood smeared all over his face and hands. So he had decided to play it safe and try to lure them to him, although he had apparently underestimated either the foreigners' capacity for curiosity or the limits of their sensory perception. These foreigners were the strangest he'd seen out here in a long time, and he was dying to talk to them– for instance, there was only one Dyrwoodan among them, if their accents were anything to go by, and he actually seemed to be taking orders from the orlan in the group. That alone was reason enough to try to insinuate himself into their company, just to find out what was going on there.
He had a few other reasons for seeking their attention, of course. And they were curiosity-based, too. Mostly. Hiravias let his gaze drift slowly over the orlan woman as she allowed the feathered Ocean folk to lay her hand on the curve of her furry hip, a soft, golden glow emanating from the Godlike's fingertips. The orlan woman sighed in relief as the bruise marring her tawny skin faded in the golden light, and she smiled up at the other woman with gratitude, her thick, full lips parting just so, her long eyelashes fluttering.
He pulled his thumb from his mouth with a loud, wet pop.
The Ocean folk woman whipped her head around suddenly to face in his direction. "We are being watched," she hissed, her hawk's eyes narrowing as she searched the underbrush.
Finally! He feigned surprise at being "discovered" as best as he cared to, freezing and holding up his gore-streaked hands when the adventurers charged over, cautious but not aggressive. Yet.
"Woah, there! Sorry if I startled you," he grinned, relishing the looks of confusion and disgust he was inspiring on the shiny new faces before him. "I was just enjoying the bounty of nature a little too enthusiastically, I guess. By the way, this isn't your forest, is it? Because if it is, you need a better game warden." He turned his head and spit out a wayward wad of gristle before wiping his mouth on his sleeve, and the wood elf in their party actually gagged and turned away. Hiravias couldn't help but feel an odd sense of satisfaction at that.
The orlan woman, on the other hand, seemed to relax a bit at his words. "I don't think Stormwall Gorge is in my jurisdiction, no. You took this deer down by yourself?"
"A stelgaer killed it, actually," Hiravias replied, smiling pleasantly. Not quite a lie. "A rather large and ornery one. Although the deer had a badly malformed heart and would have been dead within the year, even if the stelgaer had never crossed its path. I'd show you, but, well, it was also a very delicious heart." He gestured to the carcass, spreading his arms wide before him. "Here, be my guest. There's no way I can eat all of this myself!"
The dwarf actually stepped forward, her eyes lighting up like stars in the night sky. "I call the shank," she said, drawing a knife while the fox at her knee slavered, panting eagerly. Everyone else remained where they were, their grimaces slowly intensifying.
"And here I thought Sagani was the only raw-meat-eater I was liable to encounter in the Dyrwood," the orlan woman chuckled, indicating the dwarf woman with a tilt of her chin. "You don't cook either, huh?"
"What, and burn out all the flavor? Wreck that incredible texture?" Hiravias scoffed, shaking his head. "Galawain would strike me down where I stood for disrespecting one of His beasts in such a manner, and for damned good reason, too! I mean, look at this–" He dug into the creature's guts and pulled out a fat, juicy loop of intestines. "How is this not appetizing?"
He held the viscera out to her, trying valiantly to fight the mischievous grin twitching into place on his face, but as usual, he couldn't quite help himself. "Here, go on. It's the best part! You won't regret it!"
She fixed her eyes on his, a smirk of her own slowly crawling across her lips as she crossed her arms beneath her ample bosom. "You first," she murmured, her voice low and smooth and sultry behind her smile.
Well, shit, woman, say it like that and how can I refuse?
Feeling a bit sophomoric, but determined not to give up, Hiravias defiantly returned her stare as he stuffed the pink, glistening tube into his mouth and began chewing– and of course, instantly regretting it. "Mmmmm," he managed, performatively rubbing his belly even as he winced and drooled. "S-so... good..." The taste of shit and lingering digestive acids mingled in his mouth. So much for my full stomach.
The aumaua towering above them all choked out a half-laugh, half-groan. "My friend," he declared, "I somehow seriously doubt that."
"Desgant," the bird woman spat, baring her teeth in a disgusted scowl. She didn't look away, though, so Hiravias counted that as at least a partial victory. The dwarf and her fox watched, too, silently filling up on strips of raw venison with only mild bemusement on their faces. At the very least, he was definitely in there.
Finally he swallowed, although it took him a couple of tries. "Well! Now I know it had elderberries for its last meal. Praise be to Wael for the revelation!" He wiped his mouth again, shuddering, and held out his filthy hand for a shake. "Name's Hiravias, by the way. It's been a good long while since I've shared a meal with such pleasant company, so... thank you for tolerating me." The little woman nodded, smiling, but she kept her hand out of his.
The Dyrwoodan snapped his fingers suddenly, pointing at Hiravias and grinning as though he'd finally solved some great and vexing mystery. "Oh! I got it. You're Glanfathan, ain't ya?"
He barked a short, sharp laugh in response. "This is the brains of the operation, then?"
"What Edér lacks in intellectual prowess, he more than makes up for in other fields, trust me." The orlan woman's smile turned kind as she gently patted the folk man's wrist. "I'm Axa Mala, the... the Watcher of Caed Nua." She almost seemed to have to force the words, as though she wasn't quite used to associating herself with that title just yet. It made him think of the Autumn Stelgaer, a pang of sympathy striking his heart. "What's a nice Waelite like you doing in a place like this, then?"
"Me? Oh, seeing what there is to see, eating what there is to eat, experiencing the wonders of this strange and beautiful and world the gods have blessed us with." He dipped his head low in reverence for a moment before peeking back up at her. "I'm a Druid of the Circle of Hawk and Ivy of the Fisher Crane tribe, you see, and I've been all over Eir Glanfath a few times over now, even pushed into the Dyrwood where I thought I could get away with it without having to face down a bunch of drunken meatheads calling me a hairy little face-painting catfucker. But I have to say, throughout all my travels over the years, I've never had the good fortune to meet a Watcher before."
Her smile broadened even as her eyes narrowed. "And you'd like to see more of this Watcher, is that it?" She may have taken a while to get rolling, but she sure caught up fast. "Well, a Druid's talents could certainly be a boon to us, as well as a native Glanfathan's knowledge of the land and the locations of Engwithan ru– uh." She stopped abruptly, her face blanching as she reflexively readjusted her satchel, pushing it a bit further behind her back. "Not that– we don't– I mean, uh..."
Right. There was that. He'd been so caught up in actually talking to other kith again– another orlan, at that, and not a Dyrwoodan orlan with that depressing, beaten-down, high-strung, constant-victim-of-horrendous-bigotry baggage that tended to weigh them down– that he'd almost forgotten that they were a bunch of grave-robbing sacred site defilers. He'd watched them descend into Lle a Rhemen hours before, and then he'd watched them emerge with their rucksacks bulging, and although his old protective instincts had flared up inside of him, the familiar rage and indignation wrapping around him like a fiery blanket, instead of shifting and pouncing on them or bidding the earth to open up beneath them, he'd just... watched. Waited. Thought. And now, in place of any lingering urge to gut them, he found himself wanting nothing more than to walk with them, talk with them. It had been so long since he'd run with a pack, and even though they were estramorwn with no respect for the land or for the Builders, they were at least kind to him and easy to talk to. And he knew he'd be lying to himself if he said he wasn't itching to find out what secrets lay buried inside the ruins of the Builders, just a little bit...
"You don't what?" Hiravias huffed, hands flexing at his sides, clenching them into fists over and over. "I didn't see you do anything. ...Maybe the gods did, and if so they'll rend your soul asunder when it passes the Veil, as would be your richly deserved fate, but..." He shrugged, forcing a smile. "This eyepatch isn't just for show, y'know; I really am half-blind. So maybe chance had it that my blind side was facing you when you did... whatever it is you did or didn't do."
Axa scratched at the back of her neck, blushing, not quite able to look at the Glanfathan. "Yeah, I, uh... noticed your Eye of Wael, there." The conversation lulled awkwardly for a moment, until suddenly she smiled at him again, her whole face lighting up. "Hey! Wanna help us track down some assholes who stole scripture from a temple of Wael? Maybe it'll redeem me a little in Their eyes, if indeed I've offended Them."
The aumaua brightened up as well. "Ondra's teeth, I'd very nearly forgotten about that! Will we go to Searing Falls as well?" He leaned toward Hiravias, his smile as bright as the sun and twice as big. "We were asked to go there by a priestess of Magran, you see, on a quest to realize a mysterious vision from her fiery Mistress..."
Edér frowned. "Hey, you said you'd take us to that battlefield where my brother died, look for clues there. ...I guess he ain't gettin' any deader, though, so it's no real rush. Just... you know. Be nice to get some answers, if we can."
Axa gave Hiravias a pointed look. "Well, you heard. Scrolls of Waelite wisdom, mysterious visions, and answers from beyond the grave. We'll have you if you'll have us. You in?"
He ran his tongue over his pointed teeth, smile broadening as he shouldered his pack. "With a pitch like that, how could I resist?"
—
Next thing he knew, Hiravias was standing among the Watcher of Caed Nua's retinue in the burned-out fields of Black Meadow, all of them watching as the little woman dug into the soft, wet soil beneath the skull of a drake with her bare hands.
Oh, he thought, I'm loving this trip already.
Their travels hadn't taken them far yet, but he'd already seen and heard more about these people and their lives than he'd ever expected to– and he'd shared plenty about himself as well. The past that had always felt like a humiliating burden in his mind was met not with the suspicion and disgust that he had come to expect, but rather with sympathy and honest, open curiosity from his new acquaintances. His recounting of his forlorn childhood and the misadventure leading to the discovery of his soul's apparent cannibalistic peculiarities had even the uptight elf and the stolid bird woman opening up to him, commiserating about the pains and missteps of growing up knowing oneself to be fundamentally different from everyone else.
Of course, he'd then immediately ruined any goodwill he'd earned by crossing some unspoken boundary somehow, once again taking things just a little too far. All he'd done was try to keep the conversation going– as long as everyone's sharing, may as well ask a few questions of his own, right? How was he supposed to know Aloth would take so much offense to pondering the conundrum of whether allowing his split personality to take control of his body and pleasure the both of them would count as an act of sexual congress or as mere masturbation, or that Pallegina wasn't yet prepared to reveal whether she also grew feathers in any other areas of her body that would typically sport hair? It wasn't his fault some kith were so sensitive. At least he'd been able to make the Dyrwoodan and the Rauataian laugh.
That had been the first night, after they'd fought through swaths of angry wyrms and dodged bursts of scalding steam in the caverns at Searing Falls only to come face to face with a fucking fire drake. They'd fought valiantly– he was impressed with their cohesion, how each member of the party filled in where their compatriots fell short, and when it came down to it, he'd struck the killing blow himself after shifting into his stelgaer form, shielding Axa from the beast's spouting flames before braining it with his claws.
The prize had been yet another mystery: a strange chunk of iron and stone with a twisted, pulsing aura of arcane flame wreathing it. "Maybe it'll mean something to the priestess?" Edér had suggested, mopping sweat and blood both from his brow. "It better, after all this rigmarole."
And now, after the additional rigmarole of hunting down the thieves who had dared to desecrate Wael's temple and recovering the scroll they'd pilfered therefrom, Hiravias stood by with the others and watched as the Watcher buried it.
"You're... sure the voice you heard was actually Wael's?" Aloth ventured nervously, fiddling with a fraying ribbon in his grimoire. "While it's true that you've a tendency to see and hear things from beyond the Veil, receiving an outright command from a god seems just a little far-fetched, even for a Watcher." As soon as he'd said it, his eyes went wide and his face pale. "N-not that I'm accusing you of lying, I– I'm just... suggesting that perhaps you might be mistaken."
Axa didn't look at him, focusing instead on the task at hand. "I've thought about that possibility, too, actually. The whole way here I was wondering if maybe this was some kind of Cipher's trick, or a misplaced memory from my past life." She continued to dig, determined, almost frantic. "But the more I try to think about it, the less clearly I can remember it, and the less any of it makes sense." She stopped for a moment to catch her breath, heaving a shaky sigh as she brushed a wayward lock of hair aside, smearing dirt on her brow. "So I'm trying not to think about it."
"As the Eyeless Face would surely encourage," Kana nodded. He grinned down at Hiravias, winking in tribute to the God of Mysteries. "Really, the fact that you can't seem to focus on it for very long is evidence strongly supportive of Wael's involvement, if you ask me."
"Nobody did, to my recollection," Aloth grumbled under his breath. Hiravias smelled something strange for a second, something musky and sour, but it was gone before he could identify it.
Edér shifted his weight from one foot to the other, scratched the side of his neck with the stem of his pipe. "So... is that what we're gonna tell Grimda?" He winced, considering the repercussions. "Are we gonna tell Grimda? I mean, I trust you, Axa, but this is a pretty damned sticky situation you're putting yourself in 'cause of a voice in your head. Is this really what you–"
The little woman shot up to her full height, whirling on him, but the look in her eyes was more fear than anger. "I don't know! Alright? I–" She squeezed her eyes shut, lowering her chin to her chest and cupping her elbows in her hands, calming herself before continuing. "...It's a feeling. It's a feeling I have, like– like your feeling that we'll find something at Clîaban Rilag, something to do with your brother. No real, tangible logic behind it, nothing to suggest it's feasible or even possible, but– but you feel it, don't you?" Her eyes were wet as she looked up at the folk man again, pleading. "You feel something waiting for you there, in the old battlefield. I feel it, too. And I feel this. Wael... spoke to me. Their voice– voices?– it... rose up in my mind, subsumed all conscious and subconscious thought like a... like a massive stormcloud, choking out the sun. I couldn't see, I couldn't hear, I couldn't think. All I could perceive was Them, and all They wanted was for me to bury this scroll. Here." She nudged the drake's skull with her toe, scowling at it as though it had done her a personal wrong. "Fuck what Grimda might say, what might a god have to say to me if I openly and willfully defied Them?"
"Take it from me," Hiravias warned, lightly drawing his fingers over the strap of his eyepatch, the shredded stump of his ear, "you do not want to get on a god's bad side. Hel, trying to get on their good side is perilous enough."
Axa brushed her face with the back of her hand, but she only succeeded in getting more dirt on her face, the tears still clinging stubbornly to her cheeks. Kana stepped forward and laid a hand on her shoulder, and when she smiled up at the huge man and laid her own little hand atop his, Hiravias smelled it again– that strange, bitter musk, just for a second. He glanced over at Aloth, and saw that the elf was silently fuming.
"We will need to pass through the town of Dyrford to reach Clîaban Rilag." Pallegina spoke up, breaking the awkward silence. "Perhaps stopping to rest there, too, would be a good idea."
"Another small town in the middle of nowhere Dyrwood," Sagani sighed, gently and patiently wiping Axa's wet, dirty face with even strokes of her kerchief. "I'm sure they'll be very welcoming to us."
Edér chuckled. "When it rains, it pours, huh?" He smiled down at Axa, warm and genuine. "Hey. I meant what I said before, about trustin' you. And you've put a lotta trust in me, too, this whole time we been travelin' together. So... I guess if it comes down to it and Grimda's got a problem with you for how you handled all this, then she's got a problem with me, too. Y'hear me?"
Axa nodded, whispered, "Thanks, Edér." She looked up at her allies one after another, smiling at each of them in turn. "All of you."
Edér clapped her on the back, grinning. "Just mind you stay outta my bed at this inn, huh? I do need my beauty sleep, after all." He mimed tossing a head of long, silky locks, and she burst out laughing at the sight.
Hiravias' remaining eye almost popped out of his skull. "Okay, I'm gonna need to hear that story."
—
Axa stood staring down at the two men's corpses, her sabre dangling from her limp, shaking hand. The room was cramped and hot with the breath of kith and the fervor of conflict, stinking of shit and blood and bitter, pungent dyes.
How did this sort of thing keep happening to her?
She'd actually been in decently high spirits upon entering Dyrford, happy enough to see that at least this town didn't have a tree full of dead bodies. But the quaint little village did have its warts, and it had revealed them to her little by little, bit by bit, until by the end of their first evening there she'd wanted nothing more than to be done with the accursed place. Berathian priests brutalized by Leaden Key thugs, bounty hunters tracking down a serial baby killer, a bloodthirsty ogre prowling the periphery, some bigshot noble from the city menacing what villagers hadn't already been driven away by the Hollowborn plague, the remaining villagers themselves surly and suspicious and devoid of hope– this town had more problems than she, and misery permeated the air as surely as the stench from the curriery did.
But Axa never had been one to leave well enough alone. Especially when kith were suffering.
So to start, she'd entered the inn and– with a little help from the orlan fellow she'd helped out of a rough spot down in Defiance Bay's catacombs– located the bounty hunter's target. The other orlan woman was a thief, but no more a committer of infanticide than Axa herself was, so she'd sent the fugitive one way and her pursuers another, figuring there'd be no love lost between herself and House Doemenel anyway– not after the send-off she'd given their Danna back in Ondra's Gift. She'd talked to the town apothecary with her burnt and bandaged arm, as well as the angry farmer whose pigs had fallen victim to the ogre, promising to see what she could do for them. And of course, she'd reassured the nobleman that she'd do what she was able to help track down his missing daughter.
That, really, was where she'd started to feel like something was wrong here. She'd been unable to put her finger on it, but something about her conversation with Lord Harond of Defiance Bay had triggered an unease in her that had wriggled down into her very core, tipping off the survival instincts ingrained in her gut. The way he'd described the missing young woman as though she were not his daughter, but chattel for sale at auction. The way he'd seemed to bluster and make a show of his worrying, as though merely trying on the role of a concerned father. The way he'd nibbled at the thumb of his glove, toyed with and yanked at his graying hair, his eyes never quite meeting her own. The whole encounter reminded her less of a desperate man who wanted to make sure his daughter was safe, and more of a merchant afraid that he'd botched his only chance to make a big sale.
Of course, it had only driven her to want to find the girl that much more.
But first things first. If she was to learn anything from the people of Dyrford, trust was a must. So off she'd gone with her retinue to the wilds a few hours' hike from the village, to try her luck at finding a dragon egg and a rogue ogre. "It almost sounds like the plot of some epic poem from olden times," Kana had laughed.
He hadn't been laughing when they'd come across a band of poachers hunting after the very same dragon egg, baring teeth and blades both at their approach. And he'd found nothing funny about the ogre's den in the spider-infested cave either, the ground littered with bones and stained rust-red with gore– although he had made a sound somewhere between a chuckle and a whimper when Axa had asked if he had any sealing wax for the proof of endorsement she'd written for Korgrak after he'd agreed to serve the Lady of Caed Nua. Watching the giant trundle off into the darkness, Edér had quipped: "Letter or no, Engrim's gonna shit a brick when he sees that fella comin'," and Axa had been surprised to suffer a sudden bout of homesickness for her castle.
And there were more surprises. A wrong turn on their way out of the cave had lead the party to an exit they'd not noticed before, one emptying out onto a ledge that rather resembled a small garden balcony– or would have, if not for the dead man. They figured the poor fool had probably sheltered here while Korgrak was out hunting and gotten quite the nasty shock when the ogre had returned. And Axa had gotten a shock of her own when Sagani'd brought her attention to the tattered, bloody note on his person, the key.
"Now who do you think 'T.' could be?" The dark stripe painted across the huntress' eyes had widened as she'd raised her eyebrow. "Because I've got a few ideas."
"Thaos." Axa had felt her whole body tense up just at the thought of him.
"Actually, I was looking a little closer to home than that," the dwarf had replied, tracing underneath the words with her finger as she read: "'My shop,' it says. 'The tower.'"
"Trygil?" Edér had muttered, scratching his beard. "The leather worker with the hygiene issues? What could he have to do with... whatever this note's about?"
"Perhaps we ought to ask him ourselves." Aloth's eyes had met Axa's, determination hardening his gaze. "After we've asked his neighbors a few questions first."
Everyone else in town had been willing enough to talk after she'd proven her worth to them, but the currier and his assistant had been cagey and curt, and then downright aggressive once she'd started pointing out inconsistencies in their story– in particular, that it seemed rather unlikely that a noble lord's daughter would seek the intimate company of a man who smelled the way he did. "Careful, now," he'd snarled, his hand falling to the axe at his hip. "I never heard an orlan pass judgment on a folk's cleanliness before, and I better never hear it again."
"Trust me, I'll be more than happy to never speak to you again once I get the answers I'm after," she'd retorted, fists clenched. "But you're making it awfully difficult, lying to me like you've been. For instance: the ogre you claim ran off with Aelys never actually saw hide nor hair of her. I know because I spoke with him, and he was a Hel of a lot more forthcoming than you've been so far. Care to explain that discrepancy?"
Trygil had preferred to attack her instead. So now she stood above his corpse and that of his apprentice, watching as Aloth tried the key they'd found with the note in the door at the back of the shop.
"No good," he breathed, turning to her with a slight look of panic on his pale face. "It won't fit the lock."
"Well, we can just break it down, can't we?" Hiravias suggested, rummaging through the assistant's clothing for valuables with one hand and gesturing toward the locked door with the other. "Edér, Kana, you're both huge."
"I don't think we ought to chance attracting any more attention than we may have already," Kana muttered, attempting to peek nervously through a filthy window. "In fact, we might be better served making a speedy retreat. Trygil may not have been the most popular man among his neighbors, but if they find us here with his blood on our hands, there's no telling how they might react."
He looked to Axa, then, grimacing. They all looked to her, waiting for her decision, but she couldn't seem to move, couldn't bring herself to speak. She simply stood, frozen, her blade still hanging loosely from her numb fingers, her mind blank but for one thought:
How did it come to this?
Finally, Pallegina spoke up. "That note seemed to indicate a point of interest on the river in Dyrford Crossing, too. Perhaps this key fits a lock somewhere out there?" She frowned, wiping the last of the blood from her sword. "Don't know why we didn't try that first, before coming here. Regardless, Kana is right. We should get moving before we are discovered. A simple misunderstanding can be the undoing of much good work."
Axa heard and comprehended but said nothing, not even as her companions started readying themselves to abscond. Edér had to take her by the shoulder and drag her toward the door in the end, gently but firmly prying the still bloody sabre from her grip. "Come on, girl, we gotta move now. Don't make me carry you." He smiled reassuringly, but she didn't respond.
And she remained uncharacteristically withdrawn and taciturn as they made their way quickly and quietly along the northeastern bridge, the sense of foreboding that had been gnawing at her gut since she'd stepped foot into the town intensifying with every step she took. Ever since she'd been forced to kill Trygil, she couldn't help but feel that she was now teetering on the precipice of something huge and horrible and invisible, something that could open up beneath her at any moment like a sinkhole and swallow her whole. This, she felt, was the Leaden Key's real power, just as much if not more so than the chaos they'd wrought at Heritage Hill: their grand, clandestine plots, orchestrated over the course of centuries by a deathless man, carried out just beyond the prying eyes of ordinary kith, festering like an abcess just under the surface of society until it inevitably burst, spreading misery and death. And only she knew, only she could see it.
It was enough to drive her mad, although Wael knew she didn't need any assistance in that department. Indeed, even as she fled with her allies, she thought that she could just barely hear the sound of a great many tiny bells and chimes, jingling somewhere along the riverbank, and she couldn't begin to tell if it was real or just in her head.
She heard them for the entire hike back to Dyrford Crossing.
—
Blood. Blood.
It was everywhere. The stench of it filled the stale cavern air around her, it clung thick and sticky to her clothes, her hands, clots hung in her hair, her boots slipped in it. She couldn't even wipe her blade free of it anymore– the cloth she used exclusively for that purpose was totally soaked through with it; she'd had to cast it away some time ago.
Blood. Cursed blood. Beckoning to you, seeping into your soul.
It had talked to her. The blood pool, deeper and richer than even the sacrificial pit in the Endless Paths, suffused with the souls of the wrathful damned, had reached out and attempted to... tempt her, sully her, and though in the end they'd found nothing in her to exploit, she couldn't help but feel that her very soul had been daubed with blood now, too. She saw it when she closed her eyes: all the blood she'd ever spilled, dark and glistening, spreading and congealing, covering her. She couldn't escape, not even in her mind– no matter how she tried to focus on something else, anything else, her thoughts were only of blood.
Something was wrong. Someone was following them. She could feel it.
But at present, she had more pressing matters to attend to.
"Aelys Harond is with child," she snapped at the Skaenite priest. He, too, was spattered and smeared with blood, and he toyed idly with the elven girl's hair as Axa spoke, auburn turning to crimson at his touch.
Blood. Ties of blood, of family. Bloodlines, befouled.
The tall, well-built man smirked behind his mask. "About four months along, yes. But I take it from your tone you're blissfully ignorant of the circumstances behind her... condition." He turned to face her full-on, blood glistening in his teeth. "Shall I enlighten you?"
Secret blood. Sacred, intimate. The holy agony.
She did not know from what dark corner of her mind these cryptic, macabre words sprung. They were entirely unlike her, and they had been intruding on her thoughts and muddling her reasoning ever since she'd descended those stairs beneath the statue in the middle of the river, making it harder and harder to concentrate on the dangers she'd been facing. She'd tried to attribute it to stress, or to the insidious influence of Skaen, but the more horrors she witnessed in the dungeon beneath the river, the more difficult it became to place the blame on anything except what could only be the slow and steady unravelling of her own sanity. Even now, she could barely pay attention to what she was hearing, although it was certainly no help that what she was being told was a truth so horrendous she was loathe to comprehend it at all.
"She is his sister's daughter, not his own. And she is pregnant with his child." The huge man sneered, his fist closing tightly around a lock of the girl's hair. "Harond's wife gave him nothing but Hollowborn, leaving his sizable estate without a proper heir. All he had to look forward to upon his death was this girl, his niece, claiming his fortune for whatever noble family she happened to marry into. So instead of accepting his fate, he chose to propagate his noble line some other way. Whether she liked it or not." At his side, Aelys stared blankly, fresh blood sliding slowly down her cheek like a stream of scarlet tears.
Blood. Blood. Tainted blood, poisoned with hatred and greed. With betrayal.
We can help her. You and I.
Axa froze. These thoughts were not her own, she realized, never had been. It was relieving and concerning in equal measure.
What... who are you?
She heard a hundred tiny bells and chimes ringing out in her mind.
"Nestor Harond's profligacy will not go unpunished, but it is not enough to merely end him. His entire wicked legacy must suffer, never to flourish again." The Skaenite stood above Axa, now, Aelys forgotten as his monologue reached its climax, his black eyes glittering like stones. "We will allow her to return to the house of her uncle, and when the time is ripe, the essence of dozens upon dozens of abused servants and tortured slaves that we have implanted in her soul will rise up within her and guide her hand to the knife. She will end him, end his wife, end his very memory. Harond's name will become a curse, spoken by none save as a cautionary tale, and the nobility of the Dyrwood will have no choice but to remember the power of the Quiet Slave."
Untangle her soul. As you did with your Aloth. Bare her true soul to me, and together we can free her from this trap...!
Shock slapped Axa's mind– my– my Aloth? how– who the fuck–, terror and confusion washing over her in a cold wave, dashing her senses against the rocks. She gazed at the huge Skaenite, his blood-smeared face beneath his skull-like mask, glanced at Aloth next to her, his face a rictus of horror and outrage, looked up at Aelys, dazed and helpless– and, making a split-second decision, she focused her will on the girl with a frantic intensity, reached out through the aether with her Watcher’s perception.
The poor girl's soul was smothered beneath a hideous patchwork of foreign essence, writhing tendrils that had choked off her conscious mind and bored into the core of her being like parasites, wriggling like maggots on a peach, searching for the softest, most yielding spots on her for them to penetrate and infest. The memories that clung to these ragged chunks of soul flashed before Axa's mind's eye, mercifully brief glimpses of fear and rage and suffering beyond words, but she pushed through them and reached out for the original soul, Aelys' soul, the simple, gentle soul of a woman just barely old enough to be called as such, who in her brief life had never known strife or pain– save for the pinch of her uncle's hands pinning her wrists, the icy terror of his knee pressed between hers. Only a dim memory of blood and shame remained near the surface– the rest, her soul had locked away from her waking mind, unable to bear the recollection.
I see her. Thank you, Watcher.
One by one, the wriggling tendrils of invasive essence were suddenly ejected from the girl's soul, whipping violently away as if plucked by some invisible hand, and Axa watched them writhe and wither, cast away into the In-Between. The bells that had been tinkling gently in the back of her head all evening were a crashing cacophony now, getting louder and more shrill with every shred of essence stripped away from the girl, until Axa swore she could hear them with her ears– and to her great shock, she found she could see the shadowy figure from whose wrists the bells hung, struggling and straining with the effort of cleansing Aelys' soul, before she finally collapsed to her knees, exhausted but triumphant, the bells silent at last.
Aelys came to her senses again– and she screamed.
—
And just like that, it was over.
The cultists lay dead at her feet, the girl trembled in the doorway, and Axa and her companions clutched at their wounds and caught their breath.
And the shadow remained, kneeling on the cold stone floor, her bells silent and still.
Axa could still see her, although she knew somehow that she was the only one among them who could. She didn't want to. This whole excursion had been a dark blotch of madness and secrets and blood, and she wanted nothing more than to wash her hands of the entire sordid affair, proceed to Clîaban Rilag, complete her mission there, and try to forget about the village of Dyrford.
"Ba nom e–" Aelys muttered, her fingers twitching. "No, m– my... my name is–"
Watcher. Watcher.
The shadow on the floor, the woman no one else could see– she was the source of the strange, wild thoughts that had been assaulting Axa's mind the entire time they'd been down here, of the incessant jingling in her ear. She had followed them down here, had disguised herself with some sort of obfuscation spell, and had subsequently disguised her esoteric, bizarre musings as Axa's own thoughts, projecting them into her subconscious mind and thus guiding her hand from the shadows. There was a name for kith with abilities like hers.
Cipher, Axa thought.
"Aelys," Aloth stated gently, approaching the girl slowly, cautiously, the way one might approach a wild animal that was ready to bolt. "Your name is Aelys Ha– erh, that is– y-your name is Aelys. ...Do you remember?"
She looked at the other elf, at her own hands, at the gore-streaked stone beneath her feet. "I can scarcely remember anything, in truth," she whispered. Her hands drifted slowly in front of her as though searching for something familiar to hold onto, until they brushed tentatively against her belly, clutched weakly at the swelling beneath her dress.
This town, her people, the Cipher whispered in Axa's head. They have suffered for so long. And not only from the Hollowborn curse. From this malignance beneath their feet, too, festering these long years.
She felt a gentle warmth bloom inside her, the mental equivalent of a smile. No more. Thanks to you.
Aelys' face crumpled, just for an instant, before snapping back to a blank, neutral stare. "I can't go back," she murmured. "Can I? I don't know why, but I know I can't go back to the village."
"It'd be for the better if you didn't, yes." Sagani's voice was soft, but under her gentle, motherly tone ran a current of cold fury for the man who was waiting for this girl back in Dyrford. Itumaak licked his mistress' hand, whining in sympathy.
Edér leaned toward the girl, eyes shining seriously beneath his brow. "Now listen, whatever you're thinkin', don't you go blamin' yourself for any o' this that's happened to you, you hear? None o' this was your fault. None of it." He softened, then, slumping and frowning at his feet. "You just... had some real bad luck in the family department, is all."
And this poor girl, the Cipher continued, victim of stranger and family alike. You pursued her, found her, rescued her. More than that, you peered into her, helped me to find her–
Axa gritted her teeth. You mean you used me to find her. You intruded upon my thoughts without my knowledge or permission, manipulated me, forced me into acting.
A spark of shock tinged with fear and regret shot through her. I... had to, yes. It is the nature of my work. I am sorry if I caused you any great distress–
Any great distress!? I thought I was losing my fucking mind!! The little Watcher glared at the shadow, a vague, shimmering suggestion of a woman's shape that she couldn't quite fully focus on no matter how hard she tried. Hel, I still feel like I'm about to! How can you possibly justify what you've put me through?
The Cipher nudged Axa's attention in the direction of the elven girl.
Not good enough. She regretted it as soon as she thought it, ashamed that it was the first response that had come to mind, but she couldn't help how she felt.
"You... you could come with us," Kana offered, his voice tremulous. "Back to Caed Nua. Our Axa here is Roadwarden and thaynu there, she'd surely shelter you for as long as you may need. And there's plenty of work to be done on the keep, coin to be earned, skills you can learn to help you build a new life." He looked to Axa, his eyes wide and pleading. "We'd be more than happy to lend you aid. Isn't that so, Axa?"
I was only acting in self-preservation, the Cipher whispered, anxiety seeping into her mental voice. Over the course of my travels, I've... had to learn to choose my companions carefully. The hazards on the road are many... but one's journey can prove much more manageable with a trustworthy support network at one's back. A tentative hope crept into Axa's mind, a hand reaching out for hers.
"No," she spat. A door slammed shut in her head, and the surprise that followed was muted, dull, fading rapidly into a murky sorrow, a subtle disappointment.
"What?" Aloth spun to face her, shock coloring his features. "B-but... Axa, she– surely you can–"
She turned away from her companions, from the girl, from the shadow on the floor. "No. No. I'm finished. I'm glad I could help you, Aelys, but I... I've had enough. I can't take any more." She was close, dangerously close to shattering, and she carried herself accordingly, moving precisely and with extreme caution, as though she'd a stack of books atop her head, her voice barely above a whisper. "I want to leave, now. Right now. Please."
Looks were exchanged, and as Sagani and Kana went to Axa's side, Pallegina approached the trembling waif, her piercing golden eyes filled with pity. "You would do well to leave this place, too, and quickly. Leave this village and your past behind you. Go as far away as you are able, perhaps even to the Vailian Republics. There should be many opportunities for a young, well-educated woman such as yourself there. Someday, Caed Nua will have a place for you, if you should still want it. But until that day, please accept this token of good will and be on your way." The soldier took the girl's hand in hers, and with her other hand she pressed a generous amount of coin into Aelys' palm.
Aelys nodded slowly. "I... I won't look back."
"The first and most important step on any journey," Pallegina asserted, squeezing the girl's hand firmly. "Auret augori, Tella Aelys."
"One last word of advice?" Hiravias stepped out from behind the paladin, his lone eye peering up apologetically at the lass. "If I were you, the first thing I'd buy with that coin would be a sachet of bitter squash seeds. Just sayin'." Pallegina glared at him, and for a second he was sure he was about to be punted.
"Y'all? She's leavin', and I don't think she's gonna wait up." Edér and the others rushed to join the Watcher, who was indeed marching stiffly and stubbornly back into the dark, bloodstained halls, leaving the girl– and the Cipher in the shadows– behind her without so much as a parting word.
Farewell, then, Watcher. The bells jingled one last time. Forgive me.
She didn't look back.
And she didn't leave the way she'd come in. The dungeons went on and on, for much longer than Axa had anticipated, but she barely even noticed her surroundings anymore. She was only dimly aware of the shrieks of cultists, the chants tumbling from her own lips, the shock of her sabre connecting with a femur or a skull, and more than once a comrade had to yank her out of the way of danger or shield her from a malicious spell or a deadly projectile. Her only thoughts were of ending this, clearing out this den of monsters as quickly as she possibly could and going home, and she stumbled through the cramped and filthy passageways in an unthinking daze. When she encountered an enemy, she fought. When she came across a ladder, she climbed. When she reached a battered wooden door, she pushed on it. And when it refused to budge, she pulled.
And when it still didn’t budge, she merely stood numbly before it until it was opened for her from the other side, and she was met with an intensely familiar odor– and a band of townspeople, their eyes wide with surprise and their hands stained with dye. "By the Wheel," one of them gasped, "that's that lil' travelin' orlan woman what helped Rumbold 'n Hendyna. What's-Her-Name, Lady o' Caed Nua."
"Axa Mala," she stammered. No. It can't be. This is– here the whole time– they–?
"We was just checkin' on ol' Trygil," the villager before her stated warily, "wonderin' why he's so quiet this past day 'n a half." He thrust his thumb toward a pair of bodies lying in the middle of the room, draped in burlap. "Found out why's that pretty quick."
"Berath's Mercy," Aloth whispered. "Of course. There was an entrance under the curriery. They were part of this..."
The villager scratched at his bald spot. "Sure, there's a catacombs of sorts under this tower. Used to be part of the ol' castle. You lot were muckin' around down there this whole time, with Trygil 'n his boy up here lyin' dead?"
All of the townsfolk crowding together in the tiny shop turned now, a multitude of eyes trained on the little Watcher and her crew. Axa's heartbeat roared in her ears, her extremities went cold and tingly as a man she recognized to be the proprietor of the Dracogen Inn approached her, his body language grave and accusatory and his voice pitched to match. "You mind tellin' us just what in Hel you found down there, little lass?"
"Gladly," Axa replied.
And she fainted.
—
Chapter 14: Brought to Light
Summary:
The problem with light– no matter how bright it is or where you shine it, it always casts a shadow.
Chapter Text
—
She didn't stay down for long. But when she was out, she was out.
Sagani and Kana had seen Axa back to the inn, the limp little woman bundled into the aumaua's arms like a sleeping child being carried home by a doting father, and in her absence Edér had attempted to run damage control as best he could, figuring his fellow Dyrwoodans would react more favorably to hearing the story from him rather than from Pallegina or Hiravias or, gods forbid, Aloth. It had been a simple enough task, explaining the situation with the Skaenite cult beneath the city and the noble lord's missing daughter, and it certainly helped that they had an entire underground dungeon's worth of evidence to back up their claims. Once everything had been cleared up, he'd even gotten a handshake from the mayor, an intense and excitable little fellow who'd gone on to extend an invitation to the Lady of Caed Nua and her retinue to join him at his home sometime for dinner. Edér knew Axa would ultimately decline, but it was a kind offer all the same.
That had stuck with him, that little gesture of neighborly goodwill. It was something he'd been missing for a long, long time. It felt good.
The poor girl had actually managed to sleep through the night for the first time in a week or more, albeit so fitfully that at times she might have been mistaken for the victim of some cruel wizard's hex. She thrashed and moaned, sweated through her clothes, fell out of bed multiple times. Sometime in the wee hours of the morning she'd even attempted to clamber into bed with Pallegina, still completely asleep, and she hadn't woken even as the Godlike had carried her back to her own bed and unceremoniously dumped her into it, blushing and scowling with equal intensity. Edér had very seriously contemplated tossing water on her to wake her– he even told her as much when she finally did wake up– but thankfully it hadn't quite come to that just yet.
"You ever do that to me and you'd better be ready for me to return the favor– with a chamber pot," she'd laughed. But her smile was tired, and it couldn't quite hide the dark circles beneath her eyes.
All the same, she'd insisted that they press on to Clîaban Rilag, and Edér knew by now that trying to dissuade Axa from her goals was like trying to catch sunlight in a bottle to save on candles: a noble goal, but you'd only end up making a fool of yourself. So they'd packed their things, eaten a light breakfast, and after a brief... detour, they'd set off, heading due north.
On their way out, Edér had mentioned to the proprietor that Nestor Harond's room had been awfully quiet all morning. "Might be worth lookin' in on him," he'd murmured, cocking an eyebrow at the other man. "Make sure His Lordship is feelin' alright. Sure would hate to think anything'd happened to 'im last night."
The innkeeper had smirked into his mug of breakfast beer. "Aw, fuck it," he'd grunted. "Let 'im sleep in a few more hours." Then he'd winked.
Edér had smiled back at him. "Now that's hospitality."
He ruminated on that exchange as he sat on the mossy stone just outside the ruins of Clîaban Rilag, comparing and contrasting it with the encounters the party had just had with the two groups of kith they'd met on their way here. They'd thought themselves pretty clever, sneaking around to the back of the ruins to avoid a confrontation with the Glanfathan warriors holding vigil at the front– which had only made it all the more aggravating when they had then almost immediately run into a couple of Dyrwoodan looters that they'd ended up having to fight anyway. They'd done their part in the Purges, the men had sneered, and wouldn't mind starting a new Purge right here, right now, starting with the Eothasian standing before them. And as he'd lifted his blade and adopted a fighting stance, his friends falling in around him, he couldn't help but think that this all felt exhaustingly familiar.
The Readceran standard topper they'd found looked familiar, too– looked almost just like the Eothasian medallion resting against Edér's chest, the one the looters had pointed out before reaching for their weapons. He thought about Woden, remembered the very last time they'd spoken, the argument they'd had just before he'd run off to enlist. Axa had told him that the Ciphers of Dunryd Row might be able to help them find some answers, but the closer he got to the truth, the more nervous it made him to think that he might actually have to face it.
Woden. He turned the standard this way and that, squinting as he watched it glint in the sunlight. Did you really die for this?
"Do you always silently mouth out your inner monologues? Or only when you've been smoking?" Hiravias kept his voice low, hunching over his leatherbound sketchbook and peering up at the blond man. He'd refused to enter the ruins, of course, insisting instead on staying just outside to keep watch for any Three-Tusk Stelgaer who might actually have enough between the ears to suspect that something was up and come snooping after them. He hadn't really been expecting anyone else to want to stay with him– although he'd secretly hoped Pallegina might offer– and had been somewhat unpleasantly surprised when Edér had volunteered. But really, he was in no position to turn down anyone’s company.
The blond head whipped around, eyes wide, mouth agape. "Huh?"
He was just as good a conversationalist as Hiravias had suspected he would be.
Hiravias rolled his eye and sighed. "Nothing. Don't worry about it." He turned back to his sketches, trying to decide whether drawing what he could see of the interior of the ruins would be heretical or not, seeing as he wasn't actually in the ruins. "You really ought to snuff that pipe. The Three-Tusk Stelgaer may not have much in the way of intellect, but that doesn't mean they can't smell." He'd braced himself for an argument, but instead the Dyrwoodan surprised him for the second time that day, tapping the smoldering embers out of his pipe and crushing them under his boot without so much as a word of protest. Edér had been unusually quiet and morose ever since they'd arrived at the ruins. Why, if he hadn't known better, Hiravias might have even mistaken him for being lost in thought.
"Say, Hiravias." Now the blond man broke the silence, murmuring pensively. "You got any kin back home? Any brothers or sisters?"
The orlan cocked his good eyebrow. This thick-necked yokel's just full of surprises today! Wael be praised, I guess. "Sure I do," he replied, grinning viciously. "A whole brood of 'em. Don't you Dyrwoodans have a saying about kith with big families, that they must 'breed like orlans'?"
Edér didn't look at him. He brought his pipe to his lips, remembered he'd snuffed it, lowered it again. "Don't remember ever hearin' that one, actually," he sighed, twisting the standard topper between his thick fingers, twirling it idly. Hiravias felt vaguely disappointed and more than a bit mean, as though he'd kicked a puppy for a joke but no one had laughed.
He pressed on. "Well, it's true. Sort of. Really, we considered all the orlans in my age group back home to be my siblings– whether by ties of blood or of clan." The old, familiar filial pride rose briefly in his little chest before it was soundly crushed again by a flood of bad memories. "Too bad for me they were also a bunch of bullies who routinely mocked and ostracized me while we were growing up."
Edér chuckled, but it sounded uneasy. "Yeah, brothers can... they can be a lot, sometimes."
"I suppose it only follows logic that they all grew up to be backstabbing traitors who threw me out on my ear– pun fully intended– once I shifted into the Autumn Stelgaer," Hiravias continued, entirely oblivious to Edér's discomfort. "I like to tell myself that I know something they don't, I had divine guidance, and someday it'll come to fruition and they'll all regret treating me how they did, but..."
He trailed off as he finally noticed Edér's pale face, his twitching whiskers and hunched shoulders. The standard topper was still now, clenched tightly in the blond man's fist. And Hiravias realized, too late, that this conversation was never really about him and his siblings.
"Uh... shit, look..." He shut his journal on the half-finished sketch, sticking his charcoal stylus behind his good ear as he turned his full attention on the other man. "I don't know what all went down between your brother and you, alright? But... the gods, their ways are not ours to know. Trust me, no one knows that better than me." He chuckled, digging a pinky deep into the waxy canal of his shredded ear. "Maybe your brother really did get a divine calling to join the Readceran forces. Maybe he was mistaken. Maybe you were both mistaken, or maybe neither of you was. But just because you two ended up taking different paths doesn't mean either of you was necessarily wrong. ...Am I making sense?"
For a long, quiet moment, Edér kept his head down and his expression neutral– as neutral as he could manage, anyway. Hiravias could practically see the man's thoughts churning in his brain as he twitched and blinked and chewed his lip, and the orlan winced with sympathy. Such cruelty the gods visit upon kith sometimes, giving an idiot like this such a difficult thing to ponder...
Finally, he turned to Hiravias, smiling a tight, uncertain little smile. "Yeah. Maybe you're right. Maybe I'm looking too hard at this. Wonderin' 'why' when there ain't really a 'why' at all." A shaky sigh tumbled out of him, and he looked back down at the standard topper in his hand. "Still, can't help but wish I could get a straight answer for once. Maybe Axa and the Ciphers down in Dunryd Row really can at least tell me a little somethin' about what Woden was thinkin'. After all, like y' said, Eothas sure as Hel ain't talkin'." With a shrug, he tucked the little steel sun-and-vorlas into a pouch on his belt and leaned back onto the stones behind him, gazing off into the middle distance.
Hiravias regarded the farmer curiously. "You know, Edér, I think maybe you and I have more in common than I initially thought we might. Complicated relationships with our gods, troubles with our kin, cast out by our communities..."
The blonde laughed, a short, sharp snort. "Yeah, us and everybody else in this motley crew of ours. Pretty sure Axa's got some kinda supernatural Watcher knack for findin' folks like us and convincin' us to follow her." He smiled at Hiravias then, warm and genuine, his anxieties actually somewhat assuaged. "Go figure that the first couple of orlans I ever really get to talkin' to are more decent folks than my own damn neighbors ever were. Guess it prob'ly helps you're both Hearth."
The orlan froze. Oh, you’ve got to be fucking kidding me. Only his eye moved, slowly swiveling up to meet Edér's gaze, his eyelid twitching. "...Sorry," he snarled, barely able to contain himself, "care to run that by me again?"
"Well... y'know," Edér mumbled, startled slightly by the sudden mood shift. "Just... it's like y' said earlier, that thing about breedin' like orlans, it reminded me of this saying from back home: 'face of hair, best beware; face of skin–'"
"Stop," Hiravias barked.
"What? I was only–"
"Shh!" He leaned toward the ruins' entrance, his good ear straining against the silence within. "They're back," he hissed. He looked at Edér again, his lime-green eye wide with horror. "They're... they're in trouble, I think. I can just barely hear them, and they don't sound–"
Edér didn't waste a second. Without a word, he practically leapt into the mouth of the ruins, hand on the hilt of his sword, and Hiravias watched helplessly as he vanished into the darkness, his cries of protest echoing off of the ancient masonry within.
He did not follow. Instead he tried, briefly, to call Edér back, and when that inevitably failed he resorted to pacing nervously at the threshold, pausing periodically to fidget with his weapons or to listen intently for his companions. But the wait was longer than he'd anticipated, and the ruins' halls were eerily silent. Had he made a mistake? Had he not actually heard their voices after all, sent that poor dumb racist farmer to his death over a phantom whisper? He wondered what he would do if Edér and the others were to simply... never return from the depths of Clîaban Rilag. How long would he wait here for them, willing but unable– or is it the other way around– to help?
You fool, you're going to just sit by and let the only friends you have die because you're afraid of angering the gods who've already cursed and damned you–
"Alright, fuck this," he growled, squeezing his eye shut and rolling up his tattered sleeves as he plucked up as much courage as he could muster and turned to face the ornately carved doorway. "Gods forgive me, but I'm going in." He took a few deep breaths, his heart pounding in his ear, and he opened his eye–
Pallegina stood before him, streaks of blood smeared across her face and body. In her arms lay Axa, limp and unmoving.
"She is alive," the paladin immediately assured him. She moved very carefully, lowering the little woman to the stones, and Hiravias received her with a spell on his lips, channeling healing energy into her. "In truth, the fighting was not so difficult on her, but the visions she suffered..."
"Visions did this to her?" Hiravias knew she was a Watcher, but in his experience she could be rather reluctant to discuss the things she saw and heard. "Just what the Hel did she see in there? Did she say?"
"The machines–" Aloth's voice was weak as he emerged from the ruins bruised and limping, half-carried by Kana and– yes!– Edér . "The ones at Cliant Lîs and Heritage Hill– there was another just like those, down there. Surrounded by bodies it had reduced to ash." The elf grimaced, swallowed, stared down at the unconscious woman. "She... saw into them, the souls of the dead. And..."
"There are more," Kana proclaimed gravely. "More machines, all over the Dyrwood. Designed to trap souls, or to rip them from their bodies, or to move them between locales..."
"...And Thaos is using them," Axa whispered. Her eyelids fluttered but did not open. "To... steal the souls of... of the recently born. To perpetuate the Legacy."
"But why?" Edér spat.
For a moment, everyone was quiet. They knew who they'd need to ask to answer that question.
"We gotta tell Lady Webb," he entreated breathlessly.
"She needs to rest," Sagani retorted. Itumaak whined behind her, lifting one paw to keep the weight off of it. His fur was streaked with red. "These past couple days, all this– it's been a lot for her, too much. Any more right now and it'll kill her. We need to take her home."
Home. The word struck each of them in the heart, each in a different way, but the effect was largely the same. Tears seeped out from between Axa's eyelids, clung to her eyelashes. Home. Home. I want to go home.
"Right... alright," Edér murmured. "Let's take her home, then." And he gently lifted the little woman into his arms.
—
Caed Nua received her gladly.
As the weary little group of adventurers had made their way back east, Axa's condition had slowly but certainly improved– although she'd been understandably quiet and sullen when they'd stopped to stay the night in Dyrford again ("It's funny– just after y'all left, who'd we find but Lord Harond, dead in his room," the innkeeper had stated, a conspiratorial twinkle in his eye. "Terrible loss. Tragic, really. More ale? On the house.") But by the time they'd set foot on the road leading up to Caed Nua, the little Watcher had been smiling again, cracking jokes with her companions, even singing a bit here and there, and the Steward had been quite happy to welcome her Lady back home in such high spirits.
In Axa's absence, the Steward had continued commissioning work on the keep, bankrolling the construction mostly with favors owed by allies and credit backed by Axa's good reputation– and aided, as ever, by Engrim's audacious, stubborn wheedling. First, in the main keep: a barracks to house guards that could keep the castle safe from invaders (from within as much as from without) and to patrol the surrounding roads, thus preventing the new thaynu from losing all of her subjects' taxes to bandits. And once that steady source of revenue had been secured, the stone matron had turned her attentions toward restoring a few core locations scattered across the premises: the western barbican, the training grounds, the towers, the chapel. And, of course, Brighthollow.
The last time they'd been inside the once stately manor, Axa and her crew had found it so vermin-infested and dilapidated that they'd been forced to set up camp on the floor in the keep's main hall instead. The pool in the courtyard had been a dried-up, crumbling mess of ruined marble and corroded metal; the stench of mold and rot from the kitchen hearth had repelled them so fiercely as to make it nearly impossible to cross the threshold. The upper floor had not even been accessible back then much less livable, the stairs having been splintered to uselessness and the stairwell clogged with debris. But now Brighthollow truly lived up to its name again, a shining beacon of class and comfort nestled in the very heart of Caed Nua: the fountain in the courtyard pool burbled melodiously, arcane torchlight glinting off the polished marble as the aroma of freshly baked bread wafted out from the kitchen and drifted up the pristine stairwell to the comfortable, fully furnished bedchambers above.
Edér had whistled in awe upon first seeing the renovations. "Careful now. You start gettin' too fancy, throwin' dinner parties and whatnot, I don't know if we can be friends anymore," he'd quipped, throwing a wry grin Axa's way.
"My, what a terrible shame that would be," Aloth had retorted, rolling his eyes even as they twinkled with awe at the manor's fresh splendor. "Rest assured, Edér: should Axa's couth rise to unacceptable levels, your esteemed company will be sorely missed."
But Axa hadn't returned to Caed Nua to host any swanky soirées, nor to referee slapfights between her friends over the Steward's choice of decor. She'd come back home to rest, to rejuvenate her badly frayed nerves, to compose her thoughts and gather the courage to do what work still remained ahead of her. And rest she did– as best she could, anyway. For although her masterfully refurbished chambers kept the Dyrwood's weather and wildlife out, they did very little to protect her from herself, and the nightmares were getting worse. She awoke on the floor more often than in her bed, and according to her companions, the moaning and whimpering she'd exhibited before had graduated to screaming as of late. On one occasion, to her great embarrassment, she'd apparently been loud enough to not only wake some of her companions in the middle of the night, but also to compel them to rush to her side.
And as Kana had helped her back into bed that night, his hand warm on her shoulder as Aloth fidgeted in the doorway, that was when she'd announced her decision to return to the Endless Paths. Taking a little time to oneself to rest and recuperate was all well and good, but Axa knew herself to be the type of person who'd be driven to madness by simply sitting around doing nothing, letting her problems fester, her oppressors plotting behind her back. And fulfilling her promise to Kana while also hopefully shedding some light on the strange and dangerous state of affairs in her basement had seemed as good an opportunity to get back into her boots as any.
Kana had been thrilled, of course. Aloth had knitted his brow in concern. "You're... quite certain that's what you want to do? Our last foray into the Paths almost ended very badly, and you're– forgive me for saying so, but you're not exactly at your best right now. Perhaps we could escort Kana down, and you could remain up here, where it's–"
"I don't need to be coddled, Aloth," she'd interrupted. "What I need is to quit moping and get off my ass so I can actually do something that at least makes me feel like I still have a little control over my life." She'd smiled up at Kana, then, had gently laid her hand atop his, still loosely gripping her shoulder. "Besides, Kana's been a great help to me– to all of us. And I gave him my word that I'd help him find what he's looking for. Plus, we're all much more capable now than we were the last time we went down there, and with a better idea of what we'll be up against, too. We can finish the job this time, I'm sure of it."
Kana had enthusiastically agreed, prattling away about camaraderie and determination as his grin grew ever wider. Aloth had said nothing, but he'd gritted his teeth so hard Axa could hear it from across the room.
She thought back on that moment now as she sat beneath the adra pillars encircling Caed Nua's newly restored chapel, staring up into the clear night sky. It was hard to believe that conversation had taken place only just last night– the twenty-some-odd hours following it had seemed to fly by, and so much had happened. The tablet had been there, just as Kana had predicted, but of course it hadn't been as simple a task as just strolling down and claiming it. They'd first had to fight through the hoards of darguls and giant beetles that infested the ancient halls, and then the deadly blights produced by the bizarre machines that dominated the ancient Engwithan laboratory. And after they'd gotten the door to Gabrannos' personal study open, they'd had the author of the tablet himself to deal with, his own arcane depravities having transformed the once revered scholar into a crazed, decrepit skeleton that had attacked Axa and her crew on sight.
And after all that, it turned out that dispatching Gabrannos and his abominations had been the easy part. What came after, discovering the fate of the tablet itself and the aftermath, that had been difficult. Kana had been devastated to find what had become of his long-sought prize, and understandably so. He'd struggled through years of intensive research and months of wearisome travel, pitted his life against beasts and spirits and Leaden Key assassins, only to have it all lead up to this– some useless, scattered chunks of rock, worn smooth by time and smashed to illegibility by the very madman who'd authored them. Axa had tried her best to cheer him, reminding him of the unprecedented anthropological, historical, and archeological discoveries they'd made possible by even progressing this far into the Endless Paths, and his response had made it seem to her that she'd helped ease his disappointment, at least a little bit. She hoped she'd helped. Kana was a good man, intelligent and passionate and loyal, and he deserved some sort of small consolation from all this.
Getting rather fond of him, aren't we?
The thought took her by surprise, and she felt a smirk tug at her quickly warming cheeks even as her brow furrowed. No, no, we're... it's not like that.
Why not? He's fond of you.
The image of the aumaua's smiling face sprung up suddenly in her mind's eye, followed closely by some other, more specific memories: Kana's voice ringing out as he sang a song he knew to be a favorite of hers, Axa passing him her pipe for a toke and getting it back warm and damp from his mouth, the bead of water that had rolled slowly across his collarbone and down his chest as he'd strolled about shirtless in his room at the Goose and Fox. Her smirk broadened into a goofy grin. It all made her feel... not exactly aroused, but something adjacent to it. Giddy, perhaps, or eager.
Well, alright, fine. Maybe it is like that. A bit. And so what if it is?
Aloth's face popped into her mind, his long, slender ears and his high cheekbones. What about him?
She blinked, frowned, her face growing uncomfortably hot. What about him? She thought of him on their first night together in Gilded Vale, just standing there wringing his hands while she wept on the floor, and then last night, clinging to the doorjamb and looking at his feet while Kana sat with her on her bed. He's not interested. Or if he is, he certainly hasn't tried to make it known.
But other memories drifted back to her– Aloth holding the door for her at the Black Hound Inn, his hand gripping hers, warm and trembling, as she guided him through his memories in the animancer's office, that shy little smile he only ever seemed to show to her. She glared at her knees, flustered and conflicted.
Just because I happen to find him attractive– just because I'm helping him through a personal problem, that doesn't mean– and after what Vaargys put me through, don't I–
"So here you are!"
The sudden bellowing of Kana's voice nearly made the little woman jump out of her fur, although she still couldn't help but smile up at him as he approached, even as her heart hammered in her throat. He smiled back. "I thought you'd gone to bed already. I was about to settle down for the night myself, but..."
"Too wound up to sleep?" She scooted to one side, inviting him to sit next to her. "I've been there. Many times."
He chuckled, his dark eyes twinkling in the light of the waxing moon as he lowered himself to the ground. "I'll bet you have," he replied, making himself comfortable as he leaned back and stretched his legs out in front of him. "Even before you became a Watcher, I imagine. Truly, the life of a scholar is one rife with hardship and adversity, much more so than the average layman would ever expect of us soft-fingered page-flippers."
Axa laughed, an uncharacteristically coquettish giggle that actually shocked her a bit to hear coming from herself. "True enough! Although with this adventuring lifestyle I've adopted as of late, I expect my fingers will have calluses to rival Edér's before too long." She brushed an errant lock of hair behind her ear, glanced down at his hand lying flat against the ground between them. "Um. How are you holding up? You seem to be taking all this rather well, I have to say. Not that it's surprising– nothing seems to dampen your spirits for very long."
Kana's smile broadened even as he winced. "Oh, I'm... I'm coming to terms with it, I think. Slowly. Don't get me wrong, your encouragement has helped a great deal, and I certainly have some ideas about what to tell the lore college when I return to Tâkowa, but... to think that the true, original message of the Tanvii ora Toha must forever remain a mystery..." He shook his head slowly, the thick, dark coils of his hair bouncing gently against his jaw.
She looked again at his hand on the ground, a hair's breadth from her hip, and before she could talk herself out of it, she laid her own hand atop it, squeezing gently. "The true message of the Tanvii ora Toha is what the people of Rauatai have made of it, the lessons they've taken from it and applied to their lives and the lives of those around them every day. Whatever that old tablet actually happened to say, it could never change the impact it's already made." Her voice was warm and steady and reassuring, even as her stomach fluttered and flipped inside her. She squeezed his hand again. "You could offer it up to Wael, if you think it'd help. It can be Their mystery now, Their secret to keep."
He laughed, soft and warm and sweet, and Axa's heart skipped a beat as the huge hand turned over in her grip and squeezed back. "Oh, Axa," he murmured, fixing his eyes on the little woman. "You always know just what to say. It helps that you're always right, too, of course."
"Yes, well..." She tried to meet his gaze but found it impossible, so she stared at her knees instead. "It probably also helps that I've a good deal of personal experience with losing years' worth of hard work to what was essentially nothing more than–"
–his hands were much smaller, delicate despite the scars, always cool to the touch–
"–than a bout of extraordinarily bad luck." It left a bad taste in her mouth to reduce her former fiancé to that, even after all the trouble he'd caused her, but she said it all the same.
"Vaargys, you mean?" Kana's ever-present smile drooped, his demeanor turning solemn. "I'm sorry. It must have been so much more difficult for you, losing so much in one fell swoop like that. Your research, your career, your lover... And now, when you should be healing from all that and focusing on your new life here in the Dyrwood, instead you have the Leaden Key and your Awakening to contend with." He turned his whole body toward her, then, his long, dark eyelashes fluttering as his gaze flitted from her hair to her face to her eyes to her lips. "And you've still found the time to lend me your aid, too, just out of the kindness of your heart! If... if there's ever anything I can do to help you..."
"I think–" Her breath quickened suddenly as something wild and reckless rose up inside her, seized her, made her look hard into his eyes, her gaze bold and hungry. "I think there may be something you can do for me, yes. If you're willing."
"I am." He was already leaning toward her, his eyes drifting shut. "You need only ask–"
"Alright then," she purred, reaching up and pulling him closer. "Come here."
Axa had never considered herself to be particularly well versed in the ways of love. She'd learned from a young age to guard her heart closely, and so far only two men had ever managed to earn a place in it– Rhys, a farm boy from Readceras who she'd met near the start of her college career, and of course, later on, Vaargys. The first time Rhys had kissed her, they had just spent the whole afternoon playing hooky by the riverbank on the outskirts of town, talking and laughing and flirting, and as he'd brushed his lips shyly against hers, she'd felt a great surge of pleasure and warmth that had seemed to expand and burst inside of her, scattering throughout her mind and body like the rays of the setting sun on the river's choppy surface. The first time she'd kissed Vaargys, she had just finished bandaging an old scar on his brow that had reopened, and as she'd gently swept a curl of his blue-white hair from his temple, he'd looked up at her with such reverence and adoration and longing that when she'd inevitably pressed her mouth into his, she'd felt almost heroic, as though she were fulfilling some grand and holy destiny.
But when her lips met Kana's, all she felt was a jolt of confusion followed by profound disappointment– as though she'd popped a piece of her favorite honeycake into her mouth only to find that the baker had forgotten to put any honey in it.
What frustrated her most was that she didn't have any particular reason for such a reaction. It had all felt so right at first, she and Kana pairing up like this. It wasn't as though he'd done or said something to repel her, and she certainly didn't dislike him all of a sudden. But all the same, as soon as their lips had touched, any amorous inclinations she'd built up in her mind toward him were dashed asunder in an instant, gone, like a puff of smoke in a gust of wind. And now here she was, still locked into this ridiculous farce of a kiss with him. Only now did she really notice how awkwardly she'd had to position herself in order for her face to reach all the way up to his, and her aching body was starting to protest. The breath from his nose tickled her cheek. His hand was clammy against her jaw. She wondered how long this would have to go on before she could pull away while still sparing his feelings, wondered if sparing his feelings would even still be possible after this. Eventually, mercifully, the moment passed, and the two of them eased back, eyes still half-lidded, cheeks flushed, regarding one another for a very long, very uncomfortable moment.
She spoke first, quietly, carefully. "I... Kana, I'm– that was–"
"Horrible," he blurted.
Axa blinked at him in shock, and then they both burst out laughing.
"Yes!" she cried finally, struggling to catch her breath. "Yes! Oh, thank the gods you thought so too!"
He rubbed at his mouth, still giggling madly. "Ondra's teeth, how could I not? We were– that was–"
"Awful!" Her hands flailed, gesticulating wildly. "There was nothing there, no fire, no spark, just–"
"I know!" he whooped. "Like kissing my pillow! Like kissing one of my sisters!"
She cackled. "Like kissing a good book!"
That did it. The two of them practically collapsed with laughter, doubling over and clutching at their bellies, rolling about on the cool, wet grass. It had been a long time since Axa had laughed like this, and although her midsection quickly grew sore, she was so relieved to be done with the whole mess that she hardly even noticed.
"Oh, Kana, I'm– I'm sorry," she sighed at last, still hitching and snorting here and there, wiping tears from her cheeks. "This can't be how you thought this was going to go."
"Well, no, but–" He sat back up quickly, eyes wide. "No, no! None of that! You've nothing to apologize for! If anything, I ought to be apologizing to you!"
"You didn't do anything I didn't invite you to do," she replied, patting his arm reassuringly. "And honestly, I should have known better than to try something like this here, now. I'm in absolutely no state of mind to be pursuing any kind of romantic relationship at the moment, what with the utter madness my life has become..."
"All the more reason, really, to try and find some small avenue of escape for yourself, some pleasurable distraction. No shame in that. I, on the other hand..." He heaved a heavy sigh, turned to look up at the sky again. "I think, perhaps, I was still hoping for some sort of fantastic storybook ending to the Tale of Kana Rua and his Search for the Lost Tablet." He chuckled ruefully. "If our hero can't get the treasure, he should at least get the girl, right? But..."
"But life doesn't always go the way the old tales would have us believe it should," Axa finished for him. She remembered Rhys, staring at the ground with his fists clenched as he told her he had to drop out and return to Readceras, to assist his ailing uncles on his family's meager farm. She remembered Vaargys, his back slowly retreating from her as her books burned behind her.
She remembered Aloth standing in the doorway, grinding his teeth.
"Exactly. And anyway, I don't think this is my story anymore, if it ever even truly was." Kana smiled down at her thoughtfully, gently placing a hand between her shoulder blades. "I think it's your story. And it's nowhere near finished yet."
She grimaced. "If that's the case, I've a Hel of a bone to pick with the author."
"It's a thorny plot they've saddled you with, you'll get no argument from me there." Sympathy shone in his obsidian eyes even as his smile grew huge again. "But I'm right here alongside you, your loyal supporting character! And I intend on seeing you through to the very last chapter."
Axa chuckled wryly, a much more familiar sound to her ears than the ditzy giggle that had burbled out of her earlier. "I appreciate it, Kana, truly. I can always count on your undying optimism, can't I? Even after relegating you from love interest to deuteragonist."
"Oh, that's not such a bad role to play. Less dangerous than protagonist, at any rate." He peeked at her from the corner of his eye, his grin turning sly. "Besides, Aloth makes a much better love interest than I. Don't you agree?"
"I– wh–" Axa would have been less shocked if he'd kissed her again. "Gods, Kana! What are you– D-did he say...?"
Kana threw his head back and laughed, a hearty, throaty bark of pure delight. "Oh-ho! Oh, Axa, your face! You poor woman!" He chuckled a fair bit longer, even as she squirmed with embarrassment beside him, her face burning. "Forgive me, but– did you really not know? Our little rivalry over you? He's not exactly subtle about it! He thinks he is, mind you, but Hiravias was telling me he can actually smell it when–"
"Kana–" Her voice came out a bit sharper than she'd really intended it to, but he fell silent all the same. "...Please. I meant what I said earlier, about not being in a good place to try and start a romance right now. And frankly, I don't think he is, either. We both have too much work to do on ourselves to be good partners to anyone right now, let alone to one another." She sighed wistfully, surprised at how depressing it felt to actually admit it, before cocking an eyebrow at the other Chanter. "I'm trusting you to keep this to yourself, you understand."
Kana held his huge hands up in front of himself, presenting his palms in a clear show of surrender. "Of course, of course. You have my word." He gave her a cheeky wink before hoisting himself to his feet with a soft grunt. "Well! I'm certainly ready for a good night's sleep now. And maybe a cold bath as well. Shall I help you up? It's a long day ahead of us tomorrow, trekking back to Defiance Bay, and it'd be in your best interest to get in as much sleep as you can."
Axa shook her head, her thick burgundy curls falling in front of her face. "Don't worry about me," she murmured. "I'll be in soon. For now, I think I'd just like a moment to myself."
She drew her knees up to her chest, wrapping her arms around her tightly folded legs, and she waited until Kana's footsteps faded into the distance, until she heard Brighthollow's front door open and close again, waited until she knew she was truly alone. Then, only then, did she let herself have it.
Fool.
You fool. You fool. You stupid, foolish, fucking idiot girl. You knew something like this was going to happen. It happened before, too, when you ran off to the Land. You ran away from your home, from your family, from everything you'd ever known, and what did it get you? Vaargys, that's what. And as soon as that blew up in your face– despite a robust campaign of denial and willful ignorance on your part– you ran away again, here, to the Dyrwood, trying to escape the consequences of your own stupid mistakes. And for what? So you can do it all over again somewhere new? Fall in love with an emotionally unstable liar again, get your heart broken again, fuck up your whole life and then run away from it again? Well, there's nowhere left to run now, girl. If you don't start taking this seriously and stop wasting what precious little time and energy you have left getting yourself tangled up in the lives of others, you'll lose your mind, or you'll fuck up on one of your ridiculous little people-pleasing side jobs, or one of your many new enemies will find you while you're weak and vulnerable, and you'll end up dead.
What's it going to take, Axa? What's it going to take for you to learn your fucking lesson?
And finally, the tears came. And she buried her face in her knees, powerless to stop them.
—
The next morning saw the Lady of Caed Nua just as reluctant to leave her keep as she had been delighted to arrive, and no wonder: although the giant pests and undead monsters that rose steadily from the depths of the Endless Paths terrorized all who dwelled on the grounds, holing up in her relatively comfortable home seemed the vastly preferable option when compared to the trials she had yet to face in the city. Unfortunately, those matters requiring her attention were simply too urgent to comfortably delay any longer, and the messenger who had stood waiting in the main hall that morning had only added to them.
"Let me make sure I understand you correctly," Axa had sighed, massaging her temple. "Chancellor Warrin wishes to meet me... at a tavern?"
"Y-yes, m'lady," the messenger had stammered, wiping a bead of sweat from his stubbled jaw. "At the Charred Barrel in Brackenbury, at your earliest convenience, if you please."
"What," Hiravias had mumbled, "he wants a date?" Sagani elbowed him in the ribs.
"It's to do with Gathbin, no doubt," Aloth had murmured over Axa's shoulder. "What exactly he's planning, though, remains to be seen."
"Whatever it is, he's got the worst possible gods damned timing," she'd sighed. "Can't be helped, I suppose. Good thing we're headed to the city today anyway."
And it was. Wenan was quite eager to finally receive the special Engwithan weapons he'd sent the little woman after nearly a week before, although he ended up rather disappointed with the rusted, crumbling artifacts she'd actually brought back. As it turned out, Axa patiently explained, the reason behind the weapons' incredible properties had less to do with the materials or methods of their construction and more to do with the soul essence the Engwithans had imbued them with.
"You can't be serious," Wenan snarled, disgust plain on his face as he regarded the sword in his hands. "They fused their fuckin' souls to these things? Like they were gods damned animancers or somethin'? Fuckin' Engwithans..." Hiravias twitched, baring his teeth for just a moment, but he quickly tamped down his temper for the sake of his friends.
Axa shrugged. "The more things change, the more they stay the same, I guess. This is why understanding your opponents, what exactly it is you're fighting against and why, is important. All the better to make sure you don’t end up on the wrong side of history." She gave him a pointed look, but he was either purposefully ignoring her or he was too distracted to notice. She pressed on. "Speaking of opposition, I'm afraid I've more bad news for you. My crew and I, we ran into the Giantslayers on our way to the ruins."
That got his attention. The old tough raised an eyebrow at her. "Oh yeah? And how'd that work out for you?"
"They wanted a fight. I didn't." Axa smiled wryly. "Fortunately, I was able to dissuade them from trying anything stupid with me. But when I got to Lle a Rhemen, I found them lying dead near the entrance. With a patrol of Crucible Knights standing over them."
Wenan's lip curled into a scowl. "Bound to happen sooner or later. Byne always had a bad habit of showin' his ass. I'm downright puzzled as t' how he didn't get it kicked proper a long time ago."
"Hel of a way to memorialize your dead buddies," Edér grunted. "Real solidarity, there."
Wenan glowered at him. "Just 'cause they did good work sometimes don't mean they were well-liked. You lot oughtta know all about that." His gaze flicked back to Axa. "Now, about the Knights. You deal with 'em?"
"Not like they gave us much of a choice." The little woman narrowed her eyes at him. "Thinking back now, though, it was a little strange how easily they got the jump on us. Almost like they'd known all along that we were gonna be there."
He turned and faced her full-on now, his intense stare boring into her as if daring her to challenge him. "Maybe they did. Maybe I needed 'em off my ass for a minute, so I sent 'em your way. And maybe I also wanted a little extra reassurance that you weren't two-timin' us, still pallin' around with 'em behind our backs." He glanced at each of Axa's companions in turn, sizing them up, drinking in their stunned silence.
"Ain't that just like the Dozens," Edér snarled, stepping aggressively toward Wenan. "We agree to do you a gods damned favor, and you show your appreciation by tryin' to get us all killed. And you wonder why no one respects you."
Fire flashed in the older man's eyes. "You tryin' to say you think I expected the fuckin' Knights to win? That ain't why I hired the Wildcat of Caed Nua!" He poked his finger in Edér's chest. "Listen, son. Those animancy trials're comin' to a head sooner rather than not, and those little soul-butcherin' lordlings have got the duc's ear. We gotta do what we can to prepare for a worst-case scenario. If I'd known y'all were gonna whine about havin' to off a few fancy lads–"
"That's enough!" Axa stepped between the two men, shoving them apart before whirling on Wenan. "Wenan. I don't know exactly what you think is going to happen in this city once the animancy trials wrap up, but if you're thinking about anything other than the security of the citizens–"
"Of course I'm thinkin' of the citizens!" Wenan's chest swelled with defiant pride. "The Dozens are of the people, for the people! Always have been, always will be."
Axa crossed her arms across her chest. "If that's really so, then you need to start thinking about how to work with the Knights, not against them. They're funded, they're organized, their authority is recognized by the government and the people. Even if the duc rules the way you'd like him to, they're not just going to tuck their tails between their legs and leave." Her angry glare softened with compassion. "And the people here need stability and cooperation between the forces that would protect them, not another small-scale civil war."
"Yeah, yeah. Tell it to them, why don't you," Wenan scoffed, even as his expression shifted into something approaching thoughtfulness. "...But you do have a point. We ain't gonna give up on our city no matter what the duc decides, that's for damn sure, but Magran knows the Knights ain't goin' anywhere neither. So I'll try 'n keep your advice in mind." He smiled down at her, then, seemingly genuinely impressed– and then he lifted his head to glare at Edér again. "Meantime, you might wanna keep your own followers in check yourself."
"And tell 'em to keep a better eye on their things. Anybody other'n me saw you carryin' this around, they'd fuckin' gut you just on general principle." Wenan's foot twitched, and the Readceran standard topper Axa had helped dig out of the mud at Clîaban Rilag skittered across the weathered floorboards toward her, bouncing off of the toe of Edér's boot before coming to a full stop. He stooped to pick it up, eyes still fixed on Wenan, and he didn't let the man out of his sight until they were out the door.
Even after they'd started making their way across the city to their next destination, Edér kept the little metal sunburst clenched firmly in his fist, clinging to it like a nobleman to his coinpurse in a bad part of town. Axa studied her friend's drawn, ashen face with no small amount of concern. He'd been distracted and moody ever since they'd left Dyrford, somehow managing to smoke even more than usual, and their trip back to the city hadn't improved him any. She could kick herself for only really noticing now, wrapped up as she had been in her own foolish problems. Still, at least with him she actually knew something she could do to help.
"Edér." Axa touched him gently on the wrist. "We can just go there now, if you'd like. To Hadret House, get this thing looked at. I know how important this is to you, and you've been–"
He didn't let her finish. "Thanks, but it's fine, really. I'm fine." Edér smiled his crooked little smile at her like he always did, but it didn't quite reach his eyes. "I've waited fifteen years, what's another couple of hours? Like I said before– Woden ain't gettin' any deader."
As accustomed as she was to Edér's dark sense of humor, she still couldn't help but be taken aback a bit. Something about his curt, clipped tone, his obviously forced nonchalance... it didn't sit well with her. Well. No point in trying to force it. Better to let him do this at his pace, on his terms.
"Alright, then," she replied, trying hard to sound casual. "We'll go to the Charred Barrel next, see what Warrin has for me. Probably won't take too long. After that, we can hit the Hall of Revealed Mysteries and the Ducal Palace, finish up our business with those two." She grinned, glancing up at Edér out of the corner of her eye. "I wonder– will it piss off the gods, do you think, ruining two priests' days in a row like that?"
Even Pallegina chuckled at that. Edér didn't react at all.
Desperately, she continued. "And then, finally, Hadret House. We'll check in with Webb, and then we'll go to Kurren and have this standard topper read. He'll know what to do, I'm sure. It’s his job, after all." She turned to Edér, making sure he knew she was addressing him. "Sound good?"
"Yeah, sure. Sounds like a plan." He knew she was talking to him, alright, but that didn't mean he was listening.
Brackenbury wasn't far, but all the same Axa could feel herself rushing, unconsciously speeding up her pace, and not just for the benefit of her sullen companion. She felt oddly exposed out on the streets, as though people were watching her– and to be fair, many were. She'd made quite a name for herself in a very short period of time, and tales of her fantastical exploits made for a decent distraction from the misery and drudgery of everyday life in the thick of the Legacy. Still, all the extra attention was going to take some getting used to. Especially the staring. And the nicknames...
So I'm the Wildcat of Caed Nua now? ...Better than Kitten, I guess.
Warrin was easy enough to spot. Not only was he by far the best dressed kith in the Charred Barrel, but the eatery was also oddly deserted, especially considering the time of day. The midday rush should have been in full swing, but for some reason, only a few scattered patrons lingered at the bar or at the long, low tables that took up most of the dining area. Even the stage stood empty, the conspicuous absence of some two-pand bard cranking away at a hurdy-gurdy only serving to punctuate the unusual stillness.
"Lady Mala! There you are." Chancellor Warrin spotted her just as easily as she had him and beckoned her and her retinue to his seat near the center of the room, carefully setting his tankard down amongst the dearth of scrolls and other paperwork he'd brought with him. "I can't tarry long, unfortunately, so forgive my brusqueness, but I'll have to ask to you to get straight to the matter, if you please." He gestured vaguely at her, smiling distractedly as he did so.
"An' a fine auld day to yerself there, ye gobshite," Iselmyr snarled under Aloth's breath. Hiravias nearly choked on his own saliva.
Axa blinked at him, surprised. "Chancellor, you were the one who summoned me here. I thought maybe something had come up regarding my claim on Caed Nua."
"You could certainly say that."
As her gaze shot to the source of this new voice, only then did Axa realize that the few kith loitering around had all risen to their feet to surround her and her retinue– and they'd drawn arms.
Warrin froze, his serious, businesslike expression shifting abruptly to confusion, and then to realization– and horror. "Oh, dear," he muttered, slowly lowering himself beneath the table to hide. "Oh, no, no, no..."
Captain Emery threw back her hood, her closely cropped hair a black halo that perfectly framed her angular face. "I'm afraid so, Warrin. Don't worry, though. I've no direct orders to kill you." She smirked as she slowly, deliberately drew her pistol, taking aim directly at Axa. "Only her. And any fool who dares stand between us."
Several of Axa's allies– Pallegina, Kana, even Edér, distracted as he was– moved to do exactly that, but Axa stubbornly pushed past them to face her opponent head-on. "He actually did it," she growled, slowly reaching for the blade at her hip. "Gathbin really is that miserly and depraved, that rather than pay me the paltry recompense the Erl decreed was owed in exchange for Caed Nua, he really just went ahead and sent you to murder me for it instead."
Warrin's terrified voice warbled up from under the table. "I-it really was a... a modest fee..."
Emery chuckled dryly, shook her head. "He is a bastard, isn't he? But unfortunately for you, he's a wealthy, noble bastard– and for better or for worse, he's my employer. And I have my orders." A strange look swept over her sharp features. "A shame, really. If even half of the stories I've heard about you are true, you're like some sort of modern-day storybook hero. Rescuing foolhardy merchants from the Doemenels, solving crimes and mysteries all over the city, aiding the downtrodden... To be perfectly honest, the Dyrwood could probably use a few more charitable, upstanding types like yourself." She shrugged, cocking the flintlock mechanism on her gleaming black pistol. "But, as it stands–"
"But nothing," Axa barked. "You know that the stories you've heard about me are all true. And you know that Gathbin is nothing but a miserable little despot. You know he won't win this ridiculous pissing contest he's instigated between us because you know he's in the wrong, and you know that so long as you continue to support him, you are, too." She stepped forward, and Emery did not back down, but neither did she open fire.
"You're afraid of him, aren't you? Of what he'll do to you should you defy him. But it needn't be so." Axa carefully lifted her little hand from the hilt of her sabre, extended it to the bewildered, scowling woman in front of her. "Stop trusting your coinpurse and start trusting your gut, Emery. Join me, at Caed Nua. I'll protect you from Gathbin, and once we've settled things with him, you can start a new life– a better life, doing honest work for an honorable thaynu."
Something between a wry laugh and a startled yelp leapt from the elf's throat, her pistol wavering in her hand just slightly. "Ha! You really expect me to buy that?" She steadied herself, straightening her wrist and narrowing her eyes. "I've been around for a century and then some, pipsqueak, and I'll tell you now: no one's that generous. Not truly. Not even the famed Kitten of Caed Nua."
"It's Wildcat of Caed Nua, now, actually," Edér corrected, baring his teeth as he snarled. "Don't Gathbin keep y'all up to speed on current events?"
"Stay out of this, hayseed," Emery snapped in return, glaring at him briefly before refocusing on her target. But her pistol hand was noticeably shaking now, her breathing quick and shallow, and Gathbin's lesser cronies stationed around the dining room were whispering and exchanging looks with one another, doubt and confusion starting to take hold. And still Axa stood before her offering her hand in goodwill, her devoted comrades at her side, her violet eyes pleading...
Finally, Emery reluctantly let her arm drop to her side, pistol still clutched white knuckle‐tight in her hand, and she regarded Axa with a mix of disgust and grudging respect. "You've some strength in you, Mala, I'll grant you that. But if you think lofty principles and pretty words alone are enough to keep Arledr Gathbin at bay, you've got another thing coming. Ask me how I know." She winced. "Still... maybe I'll just tell His Lordship that you aren't as stupid as you look and you never showed. He'll throw a fit, I'm sure– Wael knows he spent a lot of time and coin concocting this ingenious plan– but he'll get over it. He's got bigger and better plans, after all. As for what exactly those plans entail, well–" Another smirk crept across Emery's pale cheeks, sickeningly smug and icy-sweet– "that's for us to know, and you to find out. I guess we'll see just how strong you really are then, won't we?"
She whipped around abruptly, addressing the thugs surrounding Axa and her companions. "Alright, people! We're withdrawing. Turns out this isn't the orlan we were looking for after all. Easy mistake– they all look alike, anyway." She sneered over her shoulder at Axa one final time before turning to the door, but still Axa could see an odd sincerity shining in her eyes. "See you around, Watcher of Caed Nua. I'd watch your back if I were you."
And with that, Emery and her posse filed quickly and quietly out of the Charred Barrel, leaving Axa and her companions staring after them in stunned silence.
"Quick question: this sorta thing happen to you every time you come to the city?" Hiravias blurted, utterly flummoxed.
"Actually, this is technically only my second time coming here," Axa answered, dazed and trembling as the adrenaline started to wear off. "So I don't really know what to tell you."
"I know exactly what to tell you, Lady Mala." Warrin's sweat-drenched face popped up from under the table, pale and twitching. "She's not joking when she says Gathbin's got plans, for you and Caed Nua both. This was a bold and somewhat unexpected act of aggression in itself, but Erl Bademar has mentioned observing some rather... worrying activity in Gathbin's lands as of late." He fixed Axa with a serious look, his eyes wide with alarm. "If I didn't know better, I'd say it sounds like he might be trying to amass an army."
"Fantastic," Aloth sighed, glancing worriedly at Axa as he reholstered his weapons. "Exactly what we need."
"Indeed." Warrin struggled to his feet, hands shaking as he gathered his paperwork up from the table. "It might be in your best interests to keep a close watch on your staff at Caed Nua– be on the lookout for spies and saboteurs, vet your hirelings carefully. Rest assured, I'll do what I can to discourage any more mischief on Gathbin's part, but you must be very cautious from now on."
"I suppose I must, yes," Axa muttered, wrapping her arms around herself. "In any case, I appreciate the advice, Chancellor. Sorry I almost got you killed."
He shook his head. "No, no– I firmly believe I was in very little danger, if any. Gathbin's no military strategist, but even he would be too wary to order the captain of his personal guard to assassinate a government official in broad daylight. He was definitely only after you and your companions. The reason he summoned me here, I suspect, was because he wanted me to bear witness. To see what happens when the Ducal Palace refuses to bend or break the law to his liking." He picked up his tankard, peered into it, frowned. "Quite frankly, excluding Gathbin himself, I don't believe anyone wants to see that swaggering ignoramus get his way."
"Couldn't have said it better myself," Sagani agreed, clapping Axa on the back. "Tantrum-throwing brats like him deserve no quarter."
"I certainly can't argue with that. But if he's truly plotting something of a larger scale than a barroom shootout, Lady Mala will need a great many more allies than just you loyal few." Warrin gave the dwarf a tired little smile before clearing his throat and addressing Axa again. "Well, I'm afraid I am still rather busy– and because of all this unpleasantness I now have even more work to do– so I must be off. Good day to you, roadwarden. Take care of yourself." The Chancellor nodded curtly at her and rushed to the exit, his papers clutched tightly against his chest.
They all stood for a while in the eerily empty dining hall, Axa gathering herself, fighting to keep her composure while inwardly screaming, and her companions watched her with quiet concern. Eventually, she felt a large, warm hand on her shoulder, and she didn't have to turn and look to know who it belonged to.
"Hey." Edér was as eloquent as ever, but he at least managed to sound a bit more emotive than the last time they'd spoken. "Y'alright?"
"I'm fine," she mumbled. "Everything's fine."
He winced. "Heard that one before. From myself, actually, talkin' t' you a few minutes ago– and I'd wager it's just as much a lie comin' outta your mouth as it was comin' outta mine."
"So now you wanna talk feelings?" She huffed a quick, angry sigh. "...Sorry. It's not your fault, I just– It's not every day my life is threatened like that, you know?"
"Since when?" That got a laugh out of her. Encouraged, Edér continued: "Hey, maybe Lady Webb'll have some ideas for what to do about Gathbin. Spies 'n subterfuge are her specialty, after all. Who knows, maybe she can whip us up some sorta Cipher army, send 'em over to Caed Nua, scare the piss outta Engrim. Again." He grinned, remembering Korgrak.
Axa chuckled. "I doubt it, but... it can't hurt to ask." She peeked up at him, a hopeful little smile brightening her face. "After we get your questions about Woden answered, of course."
He smiled back, his expression as warm as the sun despite the anxiety chewing at his guts. "Of course."
"If you two are quite finished?" Pallegina tilted her chin impatiently at the two of them, standing between the open door and the rest of the group. "We have much yet to do today, Watcher. Hadret House awaits, and the sanitarium as well, if memory serves."
A groan rose from Aloth as the little party stepped outside onto the cobblestones. "Don't remind me."
As they walked, Pallegina watched Axa curiously. "Sparing that fool Verzano despite all the trouble he made for you, attempting to sway your enemy to your side even as she sticks a pistol in your face– your soft heart is either your greatest weakness or your greatest asset. Or perhaps it is both. Time will tell, I suppose." She smirked down at the little woman, amused and exasperated in equal measure. "You might do well to join the Kind Wayfarers someday, Watcher, should you ever seek a higher calling. Or, perhaps, if you wish to be taught how to fight properly."
Axa shot the paladin a sour look. "What's wrong with the way I fight?"
The Godlike made a face as though involuntarily recalling a particularly bad meal. "It... defies description. It is somehow both too sloppy and too rigid. As though you were taught stance by a fencing school dropout and form by a peasant militiaman."
Axa burst out laughing as her erstwhile instructors both leapt to defend themselves– Edér muttering, "Now hold on just a minute–" while Aloth cried, "I beg your pardon–"
"Axa Mala! Stop and face me! You will face retribution for the death of my beloved!"
You've got to be kidding. Axa stopped in her tracks, her allies stopping with her, and she glowered wearily at the man blocking her path. "Do I know you?"
The red-haired, red-faced folk man standing before her seemed almost too consumed with rage to even speak properly, let alone fight, but the hired thugs accompanying him more than made up for it. He stammered and spat, his hand quaking as he pointed accusingly at her. "I am Cendric Duleare. You... you killed my betrothed, my Danna, and for your insolence, you will now pay with your blood!"
Hiravias threw his hands up in frustrated resignation. "Oh for fuck's sake–"
Pallegina rolled her eyes as she reached for the greatsword on her back. "Well, Watcher. I did warn you about making enemies of the Doemenels. Something tells me you will not be able to talk this one down."
Axa drew her sabre with a grim finality. "Good thing I've got a lot of nervous energy to burn off."
—
"Absolutely not."
Axa's face burned with shame as Lady Webb went on to explain why not, even though she absolutely did not have to do that. "We at Dunryd Row are already stretched to our limit here in the city without sending any of our precious few operatives off on a day's ride to the middle of nowhere to play spymaster for the Dyrwood's newest flash-in-the-pan celebrity, no matter how dire her situation may be." She lifted a delicate, pencil-thin eyebrow at the orlan. "No offense, of course. It's just that I've an intelligence agency to run. You understand."
"Of course," Axa hissed. "Please excuse my companion for asking such a foolish question." She glared pointedly at Edér, who meekly shrugged in response– although the look on his face couldn't have been more apologetic if he'd had "I'M SORRY" written on it in bold, black letters.
Webb spared the ragtag little group the slightest sliver of a smile. "You seem to have made some bosom friends amongst the local angry mob enthusiast club. Why not ask them for assistance? I'm sure they'd love to dispense some 'down home justice' to a pompous tyrant like Gathbin and his scurrilous little toadies, should it come to that."
"The Dozens?" Edér groaned, bowing his head to frown at his boots, looking not unlike a child being scolded by a schoolteacher. "But they're–"
"A fine suggestion, my Lady," Aloth interrupted, his whole face straining against a thin-lipped simper as he elbowed Edér aside. "Thank you for your invaluable insight."
The wizened old Cipher sighed. "Don't fawn so, boy; it's not an attractive look." Ignoring Aloth's undignified sputtering, she turned back to Axa. "Now then– you've done good work these past few days, and your reports from Dyrford and Clîaban Rilag have been very enlightening indeed." She paused briefly, a somber scowl tugging at the innumerable fine lines in her face. "I... had hoped that perhaps my fears of the Leaden Key somehow being involved with the Legacy would have turned out to be just that– fears, hasty and baseless. But I suppose I should have known better than to underestimate them. Or to hope for even the barest shred of decency from them, either." She sighed sadly, but quickly straightened up, businesslike again in an instant. "But I digress. You are now headed to the sanitarium to finish up this 'assignment,' for lack of a better word?"
"I am," Axa replied, forcing herself to look Webb straight in the eye. "We are."
Webb returned her stare, thrice as intense with a fraction of the effort. "Why did you not think to pursue that particular lead when you were there last week?"
Axa blinked at her, stunned and very slightly affronted, and Webb chuckled in response, a soft, papery whiff of a laugh. "Oh, don't give me that look. I'm not passing judgment on your methods, dear, I'm only a bit surprised at you is all. You're usually more efficient with your time than that."
"Y-yes, well..." The little woman cleared her throat and looked away. "That visit was of a... personal nature. I was helping a– helping one of my companions." She unconsciously shuffled backwards, recoiling from the spymistress' gaze, Kana gently catching her just before she ran into him. Behind them, Aloth shrunk back, too.
"I'm well aware. Bellasege is quite the character, isn't she?" Webb glanced at the wizard pointedly, a smirk twitching into place for a split second before she returned her attention to Axa. "But that doesn't answer my question. You were already there. Why didn't you investigate? Speak with Ethelmoer, tell him of your suspicions?"
Axa stared at her hands, fidgeting nervously under the old woman's scrutiny. "Well, I– our business with Bellasege left us all a bit drained, and so we... I didn't want to overwhelm my compatriots by taking on too much in one day." And yet I lead them all around the city that evening, a fact you doubtlessly already know... "And besides that, I... well, I was pretty certain that I didn't yet have the necessary clout or... or reputation, perhaps, to convince the director to... to let me... uh..." She stammered, faltered, fell silent, and still the question loomed over her, just as surely as Webb did.
Gods, it's like being back in school!
"And?" Webb huffed. "Out with it already, girl, neither of us has the time nor the patience."
Axa clenched her fists–
–are you ready, initiate–
–and answered. "And– and I may have been a bit... terrified. Of what– or who– I might find there." Her eyes stung with the familiar promise of tears, but she stubbornly blinked the sensation away. "I was so scared, I actually thought that going to Dyrford and Clîaban Rilag first and leaving the sanitarium for last would be the easier option." Sagani gently gripped her elbow, and she flashed the huntress a quick, grateful smile.
"Oh, Axa," Kana blurted, reaching out to pat her shoulder. "You never said anything…"
Webb crossed her spindly arms over her chest. "Sounds like all the more reason to dig in, if you ask me," she sighed. "But it's understandable, I suppose, given who we're up against."
"And in all honesty, that really was only part of why I didn't proceed with my investigation at the time," Axa clarified, emboldened a bit by the truth finally being out. "I was genuinely worried about– about my friend." She could practically feel Aloth overthinking her words behind her, and she couldn't decide if that alarmed her, annoyed her, or endeared him to her further. Kana squeezed her shoulder once more before drawing away.
Webb gave her an uncharacteristically warm smile, tinged with some other emotion Axa couldn't quite put her finger on. "It is important to take care of one's friends, isn't it?" She turned away suddenly to face the enormous desk that dominated the half of the room they were standing in, and she deftly plucked a sheet of parchment from atop one of her many piles. "Speaking of, I'd like you to take this to Kurren when you go to see him today." She handed the paper off not to Axa, but to Edér, who stared at it a bit too long before he finally accepted it, dumbstruck. Webb cocked an eyebrow at him. "It's to do with the missing persons case he'll no doubt immediately press gang you into helping him solve. So I suppose you may as well just read it yourself, too. You can read, yes?"
He scanned it briefly. "Uh... sure. I know some of these words, yeah."
Lady Webb chuckled, dry and raspy, before addressing Axa again. "You take good care of this one, too, Watcher. He definitely needs someone to look after him." She turned back to her desk again, gliding across the floor to her chair, and her voice turned somber and serious. "Thaos, he has no friends, no lovers, no true allies. Only conspirators, scapegoats, thralls... and of course, his Queen. Of all the unique circumstances that could make you a genuine threat to him– your shared past, your Watcher abilities, even Dunryd Row's expert assistance– I believe that the loyalty and passion your friends have for you, and you for them, may be your greatest advantage. Never forget that."
"I haven't," Axa murmured, glancing up at Edér. "I won't."
"Good." She sat down at her desk with practiced ease and rested her head in her hand as she examined another scroll, two fingers lightly massaging her temple. "Go, now. Kurren is a busy man, and you've much to do after you've finished with him."
"Thank you, my Lady." Axa swallowed nervously. "Eydis. You're– I hope to include you among my friends, too, someday. When this is all over."
She glanced up at the orlan woman for a second, an utterly unreadable smile playing on her wrinkled lips. "I eagerly await your next report. Try not to die out there, dear."
—
Axa held out her hand. "Ready?"
"...I guess so?" Edér squirmed and tugged at his collar but made no move to put his hand in hers. "Uh... hey, remind me how this works again?"
Kurren smiled blithely as he twiddled the standard topper to and fro in his furry fingers, his other hand already clasped in Axa's. "Oh, it's fairly simple, really. I will read the essence left behind by the souls who have interacted with this object, you will guide our Watcher friend here by focusing on the unique imprint that the soul you're hoping to track down made upon your soul during its time in the Here– that is, your personal memories associated with the kith in posession of that soul essence– and she will use her Watcher abilities to attempt to trace back the history of that specific soul. Understand?"
Edér stared at Kurren in silence for a second before glancing nervously back at Axa.
"All you have to do is remember him," she assured him, reaching out again for his hand. "Remember Woden– his face, his voice, his mannerisms, the times you spent together, good and bad. Everything about him that made him special to you– made him your brother." She gave him the warmest smile she could muster. "You can do this, Edér."
Edér stared a moment longer before finally heaving a shaky sigh. "Yeah, I– I think I can do that, yeah." He wiped his hand on his trousers, waved it in the air a few times to dry the sweat. "Alright. Alright, I'm– I'm ready. Let's do this." He sat next to Axa, dwarfed her hand with his, and one after another, the three of them shut their eyes and began concentrating.
"A master brishalgwin at work," Hiravias breathed as he watched, fascinated. "Almost seems a waste, considering what Edér's thoughts must be like."
"You don't think he'd mind having a look at my adra carving next, do you?" Sagani murmured, idly scratching Itumaak behind his ears. "Not that Axa's done a bad job of it, just... a second opinion's always nice if you can get one." She shrugged.
"Hush now," Kana whispered, leaning forward eagerly with parchment and stylus at the ready. "They're starting!"
For Kurren, it was a simple enough operation– the seasoned Dunryd Row detective had done this more times than he could count, and the imprint left behind on the little steel sun-and-vorlas was surprisingly strong for its age. For Edér, it was a half harrowing, half heartening sojourn through his childhood memories, and the more he dwelled on his strongest memories of Woden, the more forgotten moments and intimate details cropped up, each one tugging at a disused heartstring.
For Axa, it was a cacophony, at first. The voices of the souls dredged up by Kurren's ministrations melded with Edér's memories of his childhood to create a chaotic clamor of streams of consciousness from a great mishmash of soldiers and peasants, conscripts and farmers, all cheering, pleading, cursing, praying...
–for Him, for Readceras– right over that bridge– Tibby? C'mon girl– with us, we can't lose– Papa I'm sorry– in my damn boots, you– nothin' to go back to– gods, gods, O my God– a candle for– come on you fuckers, one more good push– sun's gone, where's– blisters on my fingers– whitest chickens in the village– O Gaun, Reaper of– far, far away from here–
There! Although she could neither see nor hear the physical source of the thought, Axa didn't need a familiar voice or a head of hay-colored hair to recognize Edér's brother– his soul did it for her. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed back, subconsciously sensing the connection himself.
–hope you're far, far away from here, Edér, and don't you dare follow–
Follow, follow. The thought echoed in her mind, and so follow she did. She latched onto it, onto the remnants of Woden's soul, and traveled with it down a long corridor of sights and sounds and sensations, trailing as far back into his life as she could before the images got too unstable to make sense of anymore. She saw Edér through his brother's eyes, or maybe it was just how Edér thought Woden saw him: sweet and simple, tag-along brat, partner in crime, too good for his own good. Still stubbornly arguing even though he knew it was futile, red-faced and shaking with anger– no, fear masquerading as anger. He was afraid of losing his big brother, afraid of his family and his faith and his country all crumbling away into nothing right before his eyes, afraid of his own powerlessness to stop any of it. Afraid of what he'd have to do should Woden go off to fight, because he'd always followed Woden, and if he couldn't do that this time, what else was he supposed to do? And Woden must have feared the same, because Axa could feel it in the vague, watery memory of his thoughts: What would Edér do without him? And what would he do if Edér ended up following him anyway?
When the call to action had grown too strong for Woden to ignore any longer, the twin currents of duty and fervor had swept him off his feet and carried him away from his brother and his parents and his home, and now Axa went along for the ride, tracing his life's path through his last weeks. The further they got from Edér and Gilded Vale the muddier the picture became, although she still recognized the then-intact Madhmr Bridge leading into Defiance Bay. But no sooner had they breached the city gates than Axa found herself dragged away again, this time heading due north, across meadow and foothill and dry shrub-steppe before finally crossing over into Readceras. Here, the visions grew clearer again as Axa beheld what must have been Readceras' capital city, as Woden's memory drew her up the stairs of what had once been the governor's palace, now draped in purple and gold for their God-King. There was a great, stately hall, a golden throne, a man on the throne–
In an instant, Axa was blinded in her mind's eye by an impossibly bright light, as though a huge mirror had had the light of the sun magnified into it and then reflected it directly into her retinas, into her brain. Looking straight at the man on the throne was as impossible as looking straight into the sun, but all the same she knew who it was, who it had to be. Saint Waidwen, supposed vassal and vessel to the god Eothas, gazed down upon her with all the power and intensity of the sun, and Axa could just barely feel Woden's knees strike the floor as he crumpled under the sensory assault. Even experiencing it by proxy was overwhelming, nauseating, physically painful– she was eerily reminded of her own visit from Wael– but still, she had a reason for going on this metaphysical journey, and she very strongly suspected that this moment was the crux of it all. She had to try–
As though sensing Woden's discomfort– or perhaps, somehow, Axa's– Waidwen rose from his throne and... changed, somehow, dimmed himself, and at last she could see him: a young folk man, tall and lanky in his simple green gambeson, golden-brown hair hanging to his shoulders in curls and crests, shaggy and unkempt– and glowing, still, light pouring from every orifice, beaming up out of his collar, obscuring his face, shining from the ends of his sleeves. He spoke as he approached Woden, but try as she might Axa couldn't hear a word. It was as though the light emanating from the man was somehow humming and buzzing in her ears and it drowned out everything else, making her head throb and swim, and even as he knelt to meet Woden on his level, the best Axa could glean from the shrieking, rumbling din was a mood: calm, gentle, reassuring, with just the slightest tinge of hope– and of sorrow.
Woden rose to his feet and was escorted to a barracks, and as the light and noise faded, the scene changed again and they were on the move, spirited away through field and forest and farmland, south from Readceras back into the Dyrwood, tedious marches and hectic skirmishes all blurring together into one long, amorphous struggle. The sun beamed down harsh and hot on one particular battlefield, and Axa saw the standard topper again– attached to the standard this time, clutched in the hands of a dead soldier. And as she watched, a well-built blond man dashed forward out of the fray and wrenched it from the swollen, blood-smeared hands, made to raise it above his own head, and as he briefly grasped the topper in his fist to pull it out of the dirt–
–die like that so far from home but I'm home but I'm not home, O Mama, Daddy, I hope you'll forgive me but He called and I followed just like how you taught, O I hope I hope I hope you're far, far away from here, Edér, and don't you dare follow me this time–
And then the standard was up in the air and a great hot cry erupted forth from Woden's throat, rallying Waidwen's army once more. The standard was handed off to another man, and then another, and another, on and on down a long line of soldiers spanning space and time, all the way down to the ruins of Clîaban Rilag–
And then abruptly, the trail ended, and Axa could see no further. She was flung back into the here and now, gasping as her eyes flew open, and it took her a moment to fully come back to her senses. Kurren gently pried her fingers from his hand, hissing in pain as he did, but when she looked apologetically at Edér, he didn't let on that she'd been hurting him at all, not even seeming to notice the thin lines of blood her sharp little nails had drawn.
"That all looked pretty intense," he murmured, his blue-green eyes searching her expression. "I guess you musta saw somethin'? Anything about... y'know, about Woden?"
"Yes," she replied softly. "Yes, he... he actually did hold this standard, briefly. I was able to trace him, his path."
"Yeah?" He turned toward her, biting nervously at his chapped lips. "Well, shit, girl, don't make me beg. What'd you see? What happened to him?"
Axa shook her head, still dazed. "He... he argued with you, like you said, and then he left to enlist, but... he only got as far as Defiance Bay." She winced, struggling to put into words what she had seen. "I couldn't tell exactly what made him do it, but he went straight to Readceras after that, and he... they brought him to the capital. He met Waidwen."
Edér's eyes bulged with awe. "Waidwen? No shit?" He contemplated this for a moment, falling silent as he did, but he recovered quickly. "Well, what then? Did they talk? What'd he say?"
"They did talk," she replied, "and Woden joined up, but–"
"What did he say? What did they talk about?"
She frowned down at her hands clasped nervously together in front of her. "I'm– I don't know. I'm sorry, I... I couldn't make out what he was saying. His head was– Waidwen's head was a beam of pure light, and it was so loud–"
Edér blinked incredulously, his eyebrows knitting together in consternation. "What do you mean, loud? How can light be–" He stopped himself, took a deep, calming breath, started again. "Look, c'mon. Everyone knows all about Waidwen and his big lightshow. Doesn't mean he was Eothas. Lot more likely that he was just real good friends with some one trick pony of a wizard. Now, please, you gotta tell me what he told Woden."
"I told you, I couldn't–"
"Aw, bullshit!" He suddenly slammed his palm against the tabletop before him, desperation finally stretching his patience to its breaking point, and the little woman jumped, shocked. "Axa, whatever you're tryin' to pull here, it ain't funny! Now c'mon! What did they talk about? What did he say to convince my brother to fight for him?"
"Edér–" Kana leaned forward to reach for the man's shoulder, his charcoal and parchment forgotten for the moment, but the farmer shook him off before his palm could even make contact.
"Why'd he fight for Readceras?" His voice was strained, thick with emotion. "What did Woden know that I didn't?"
Aloth stepped close to Axa, placing himself almost between her and Edér. "That's enough now–"
"Tell me!"
"Edér–" Aloth hissed, baring his teeth.
"I don't have the answers you want!" Axa cried finally, rising to her feet to close the distance between the two of them. "I wish I did, Edér, honestly I do, but... I've already told you everything I could. I'm sorry, it's... it's over."
It finally seemed to click in his head, then, and Edér completely deflated all at once, sagging under the weight of this new truth he had to live in. Only then did Axa really notice how old he looked, how tired. He lowered his eyes, and she could have sworn she saw tears gathering on his lashes before he ran his hand over his brow, hiding his face from her.
"I guess that's it, then." His voice, usually bold and robust, had dwindled down into a defeated croak.
"I guess so." She wanted to reach out to him, comfort him, but she wasn't sure if it would do any good now. "It was always kind of a long shot, but we had to try, right? If there was more I could do, I would, believe–"
"You did what you could. And it's not like we're gonna find another war relic, is it?" He glared at the standard topper, lying half-forgotten now on the table. "Hel, we were lucky to find this one."
"At least you learned something about him, his final days," Sagani offered, tenderly gripping Edér's wrist. "That should give you some kind of closure, at least."
"You'd think so, yeah." He dangled a hand beneath his chair, and Itumaak licked his fingers, whining with sympathy. At least that made him smile.
"If it's any consolation at all," Kurren murmured carefully, "this was actually one of the better sessions I've conducted regarding this sort of thing, especially from the war. These things rarely go the way my clients hope they will, being perfectly honest. It's... frustrating. Discouraging. I think of resigning over it sometimes, but... well, if I'd given up the first time I'd run into a dead end, I wouldn't have been here to help you now, would I?" The furry little man turned his attention back to Axa, conspicuously clearing his throat. "In any case, I do hope this somewhat... disappointing outcome won't put you off lending your aid to Dunryd Row in the future."
"The missing persons case, right?" Axa gave him one of her winning grins, although it wasn't quite as confident and feisty as it would ordinarily be. "Don't worry about that. With us looking into it, it's as good as solved." She turned to her comrades, hands on her hips, and glanced up at Edér even as she addressed them all. "We're all finished here, yeah?"
"Yeah," he muttered, his face expressionless, eyes dull and dead. "We're finished."
Even so, he lingered at the back of the group, dragging his feet as they all made their way to the door. He turned at the sound of Kurren's voice crying out to him, saw the little fellow waving the little steel sun in his direction. "Erh– pardon, sir, your standard topper–"
"Keep it." Edér turned away, stuck his pipe in his mouth, unlit. "I don't need it anymore."
—
Chapter 15: Trial by Fire
Summary:
Strike while the iron's hot, they say. But sparks will fly, and it only takes one to start an inferno.
Notes:
Content warning: Depictions of severe mistreatment of vulnerable institutionalized people; attempted suicide. Please read at your own discretion.
Chapter Text
—
The first time she'd visited, Axa had been left with the impression that Defiance Bay's sanitarium was a respectable institution: a place of learning, of healing, a magnet that attracted the best and brightest minds of the Dyrwood and beyond. The staff had their shortcomings and blind spots, certainly, but this was science– the realm of intellectual pioneers, ever-evolving, ever-growing. So a few missteps here and there were to be expected.
She'd had no idea.
She should have suspected that something was amiss the instant Caedman Azo's assistant had accidentally let slip that he was running experiments on patients– experiments that, according to head warden Ethelmoer, Azo did not have permission to perform. But she'd told herself that perhaps in order to make truly groundbreaking advances in a field where all but the most daring scholars feared to tread, sometimes one might need to practice a little... self-leniency in regard to certain rules or regulations. After all, no great revelation or lasting change had ever come about from rigid adherence to protocol.
That all changed when she and her party were granted entry to the patient wards down below. Gone were the plush sofas and imported rugs of the lofty-minded animancers who dwelled above in their spacious, comfortable offices. Here, the only furnishings to be found were the austere wooden benches and tables at which the patients sat and miserably slurped their gruel, the only decorations the gouges left by their fingernails or teeth in the splintered, worm-eaten wood. The floors and walls were all the same dingy, dreary grey stone, cracked and pitted from age and abuse, and the heavy wooden doors were fitted with iron reinforcements and, in some cases, tiny barred windows out of which the screams and moans of madmen drifted like the laments of the damned from the Void. And around every corner stood a hulking, brawny flesh construct, their stitched-together musculatures glistening in the torchlight, their veins pulsing with stolen essence, mindlessly awaiting orders.
"I've seen animal pens more hospitable than this pit," Hiravias had hissed, shock and outrage plain on his face. "Is this really how Dyrwoodans treat their soulsick?"
"It's worse in Aedyr," Aloth had muttered gravely, ashen-faced and shuddering with horror.
Every shred of hope or dignity one might bring with them into the wards seemed doomed to evanesce, and at no point was that made more self-evident than when Axa had met and spoken with Caedman Azo. The patient who'd pointed her in his direction had had nothing but praise for him as a kind and gentle healer, a paragon of soul scientists, but a mere few minutes of conversation with him had had Axa asking herself how in Hel he'd managed to fool the poor woman so. He embodied every negative stereotype she'd ever heard about animancers, the way he'd smugly belittled the hard work of common kith and dismissed the ethical concerns regarding his own work while making vague but pointed declarations about the importance of "what must be done," and even Pallegina had balked a bit at the recklessness and ruthlessness of his ambition. By the time she'd coerced him into granting her access to the north ward– the place where the most dangerous and unstable patients were sequestered, where the Leaden Key spy doubtlessly sat waiting– Axa had been ready to slap the sneering, arrogant bastard.
And that was before she found out exactly what his experiments entailed.
His name was Gram. She'd heard the name before from Freyol, the same patient who'd told her where to find Azo. All she'd said about him was that he spoke in a tongue no one understood, that his nightly wailing could wake the dead– and that he was the patient who was brought into the testing laboratories more often than any other. He cowered at Axa's approach, hunched down in a corner of his filthy cell, terror filling his eyes as he shrieked garbled nonsense from his ruined mouth. But after a few calming words that proved she meant him no harm, the poor man calmed significantly, trembling as he tentatively shuffled closer, and he watched her curiously as she focused her Watcher's senses and peered into him. His soul was a mutilated mess, jagged and deformed, but there was enough of him left that Axa could sense a clear core personality in his soul, and with it, mostly coherent memories.
As good a place to start as any, Axa thought, and she gently insinuated herself–
–dark dark always full dark no moon here no stars dark dark no time here eat sleep o when o mama i'm sorry where where ???? o? !!!! o?? turn key? door?? who? ...him. him him rat face him HIM HIM O GODS PLEASE no no no no no no get away say it no get away tongue thick stuck say it won't say it won't no NO NO–
His terror was overwhelming, his thoughts confusing, jumbled fragments, the connection between his body and his mind flimsy and unreliable, but Axa could still recognize Azo's pinched-up, rodent face in Gram's memories, could feel the poor man trying and failing to tell him no. She persisted–
–help help o someone away again stop stop anyone cold cold cold hands cold table straps o can't move can't arm can't leg o help gods away again again again o mama please he does it again to me again please please please NO–
In her mind's eye, in Gram's memories, Azo leaned close and spoke to him in low, calming tones, the way a farmer might to an animal he was about to euthanize. Through the morass of Gram's shattered perception, Axa could only glean every third word or so– "sorry," "need," "supply," "Legacy," "understand," "sacrifice"– and that last word echoed in her head, in his head, as Azo flipped a switch on his great and terrible machine and the pain ripped through him, seared through every vein and artery, as his bowels loosed and the thick stink of shit and ozone scorched his sinuses and he screamed–
–sacrifice– sacrifice– sacrifice–
Axa gritted her teeth and pushed forward past the rest of the bone-chilling memory, her head throbbing with sympathy pains, desperately stumbling into another memory, another night–
–back and forth and back and hungry hungry NO no time here wait wait hungry NO NO o? step? food? no no not food step heavy heavy no not him big big who? who? wh–
Through his eyes, she could see a sinewy, pink flesh construct peering in at Gram through the slot in his door, lidless eyes bloodshot and glistening, but after a moment it turned away quickly to face another cell, the one at the end of the ward. Someone peeked out from the slot in that door too– a pair of sharp, clear eyes that focused intently on the flesh construct, holding the grotesque thing in their gaze before rather abruptly dropping out of view, as though the occupant of the cell had suddenly taken a bad fall. And as soon as she heard the dull thud of the other patient's body hitting the floor, the flesh construct shuddered and jerked, gurgling obscenely, before righting itself with oddly precise, controlled movements. It stood there for a moment as though it was getting its bearings, and then it turned sharply to the ward's only exit and plodded away.
A bizarrely lucid thought drifted into Gram's mind–
–Uscgrim gone walkabout again–
–and Axa finally pulled her consciousness away from his, her thoughts racing. Itumaak nudged his mistress, and Sagani reached out to steady her– they were getting good at detecting when Axa was coming out of one of her trances– just as Gram staggered to the door, practically slamming himself into it, and his knobbly, grimy fingers clutched at the edges of the door slot.
"Yyuuugh–" The poor man struggled valiantly to speak, spittle dribbling down his chin as his face went pink, then red. "Hhhhyuuuuggcch‐h-h-hgggrrruuuuuuhhnn." His eyes, bulging and wet, rolled sickeningly to stare with terror at the door at the end of the ward.
"Uscgrim," Axa murmured. "Yes. It's–"
–"...so strong is his soul, in fact, that he can supposedly even project it out of himself and into others, crushing the will of lesser souls..."–
She felt her blood run cold in her veins. No, it– it can't be. Can it?
"It's him, alright." Despite her growing sense of unease, Axa still tried to smile reassuringly at Gram. "Thank you. You've been very helpful, and very brave. I'll do my best to set things right around here."
Aloth fidgeted with his bracers as Axa turned to face her comrades. "I take it you've learned something useful from the poor fellow, then?"
"I certainly did. Gram here saw the patient behind that far door there doing... something with one of the flesh constructs, something damned suspicious. I'd bet anything that he's our man." The little woman turned on her heel, strode purposefully to the end of the hall, to the cell door she had seen in Gram's memories. The slot in the door had no eyes behind it now, and she had to stand on the ends of her toes to see in, but when her eyes finally readjusted to the darkness inside she was mildly shocked at what– at whom– she saw therein.
A boy just barely past the threshold of puberty stood in the center of the cell, disheveled and slouching and pigeon-toed. He didn't acknowledge her at first, but soon he very slowly lifted his head to meet the little woman's gaze, his own stare glassy and listless. The two of them stood like that for a long, awkward moment, silent and fraught with tension, watching one another.
"Is it him?" Kana's voice was as quiet as she'd ever heard it, a nervous whisper over her shoulder. "Is it the Leaden Key agent?"
"Only one way to find out," she muttered, focusing her metaphysical attentions on the boy, slipping easily past his meager mental defenses and into his–
into–
–!!!!!!!!!–
It was not the boy's soul in there, behind his eyes.
–!!!!!!!!! –THIS IS– !!!!!!!!!–
Not Uscgrim's soul, not at all.
The sensation slapped her in the face like a surge of icy water, feverish chills and hot flashes assaulting her whole body, nausea rising up in the back of her throat and vertigo drowning her mind, her heart pounding, her head spinning–
–just like at the campsite with the caravan Odema springberries rumbling rot the ruins the machine Calisca Heodan–
She felt herself gasp and heave, felt her breath hitch in her chest although her body seemed a million miles away by her ken, and before she could even think to try and resist, she was suddenly dragged into a memory belonging to the soul she'd unwittingly engaged with, the soul not of the boy himself but of the man possessing him, suppressing the boy's true soul like a parasite strangling its host, a soul so ancient and powerful and alien to her that it was difficult to even recognize as kith, and she sees–
–The flesh golem tends to its rounds, as always, and as always, I watch, waiting. When my moment comes, I gather the whole of my strength into my Queen-blessed soul and coil myself up like a spring, and then I shoot forward, propelling myself through the air, through the aether, abandoning the boy-puppet for now to implant myself in the misbegotten abomination, and with minimal effort, I assert my will over it. Once I am comfortably seated in this vessel, my next stop is the pathetic exhibit of failure and ignorance these blasphemous charlatans dare to refer to as a "laboratory," where the machine stands waiting for my ministrations. It has been readjusted during my absence, although not anywhere near to a state of true functionality, and it is my duty and my pleasure both to sabotage it ever more insidiously, to ensure that the farce of animancy may never interfere with the noble ends of my Queen–
"Axa? Axa?" She could hear them but she couldn't, could feel their hands on her shoulders and her wrists and her face but in the moment, the physical world was naught but a shadow play to her, and the real show was behind her eyes, in his head–
–I am behind different eyes now, watching still and silent as the rat-faced hack theatrically throws the switch in front of his crowd of gape-mouthed cretins. The machine hums to life and gets to work, collecting ambient essence from the atmosphere around us, concentrating it into some semblance of a soul, and driving it down into the tiny, frail, soulless body I currently inhabit. That was the contraption's intended function, anyway. Of course, it does not actually do anything; I have made sure of that. But it does put on quite a show, one that these poor fools could never hope to distinguish from the genuine article. After all, that is the very point behind this, all of this: that they never learn the truth.
"Eofie? Can you hear me?" The animancer sticks his sweaty, bulbous face in front of mine, in front of the child's body that I am controlling, his beady eyes desperately searching my expression for any trace of recognition. And slowly, as no Hollowborn has ever done before, I return his gaze. The spectators gasp and cry out in surprised elation, and as he turns to face them, pride and triumph bursting from his every seam, I begin my denouement.
I am screaming, screaming, screaming, thrashing my borrowed limbs wildly, scourging my flesh with my jagged nails. The physical pain is easily mitigated, shoved off into a corner of my consciousness and locked away, so my performance is not hindered by such trivial limitations. He approaches me again, panicky and flailing, and I sprint away from him as fast as this body will allow, streaking across the stage to hurl myself directly into the enormous crystal globe crowning his precious machine. It shatters, lacerating me in a thousand thousand places, blood trickling sticky and hot down every limb, filling my eyes, my mouth. It is only now, now as this body lays dying and the animancer scrambles toward me and the throng shrieks in terror, that I allow myself to smile in my victory.
Another job well done, and all in service to my Queen. As per Her decree, animancy's reputation will never, can never recover from this. After all, for the masses to witness such a brutal display, the horrific death of an innocent child–
–a child– the machine– my child– is that you– Anth–
Finally, he took notice.
Axa was jolted violently back to her senses, the other soul ejecting her suddenly, and she struggled to recover her wits as her companions helped her to her feet. She must have stumbled or drifted away from the door at some point, falling to the ground in the process, and as such, she could no longer see directly into the cell. Only the slot in the door.
And the sharp, clear eyes behind it.
"A Watcher," he murmured, his voice no less intimidating or commanding coming from an adolescent boy than it was from the ageless man Axa knew him to truly be. "How curious."
Axa trembled in every limb, fiercely fighting the urge to scream, to run, somehow managing to find her voice instead. "I... I know you."
"Ah. Do you?" She could see the smug smile in his eyes as they narrowed at her from their perch in the door slot, and she felt his overpowering presence invade her mind, foreign and uninvited, rifling through her thoughts and memories at a speed barely comprehensible to her, like a seasoned scholar flipping rapidly through an impossibly massive tome...
And evidently he found what he was looking for. "No," he hissed, his mind pulling away from hers as his eyes flew open, wide with the shock of recognition. "No. I know you."
"Thaos." She said his name and her companions all turned to stare in shock at the man they now knew to be their enemy, her enemy. "I– please, I just want answers–"
He interrupted her with a sharp scoff. "Of course you do. You're the same as you ever were. The same as everyone else on this sin-cursed rock." He smiled again, then, his voice softening as he continued. "But worry not, my child. I shall put you to rights."
Axa blinked stupidly, her brain a frozen slush in her skull. "You... will you?"
"Oh, yes," he replied, his tone going icy again in an instant. "I shall help you to abandon this pointless endeavor, as you should have done long ago." And the eyes in the slot fell away, vanished as the body of the boy called Uscgrim was abandoned, tumbling to the floor like a rag doll abruptly dropped by a disinterested child.
"Axa?" Aloth hadn't taken his hands from her shoulders the entire time she and Thaos had been speaking, and he still gripped them loosely even as he whipped his head around nervously in the sudden silence. "Axa, what's– was that really–"
He didn't have time to finish his thought, however, as Thaos' powerful soul suddenly ripped through the aether around them, rippling the ambient essence in the air and yanking at the edges of their souls, and it shot out of the north ward like a bolt of lightning to escape to parts unknown.
And all the cell doors around them slammed open, the violent insane stumbling forth to meet them, the flesh constructs in the halls beyond roaring with primal rage.
Aloth felt his heart sink into his stomach. "Oh," he breathed. "Oh, shit."
—
Laddie? Ye lissnin'?
He wasn't listening.
Lad, I conne 'tis braw fer ye, broodin' in yer own heed like, but 'haps ye oughttae take tent o' whatcher aulder's sayin', aye?
Aloth was well aware that he should have been paying attention to what Lady Webb was saying. It was doubtlessly indispensable information regarding the next steps they were to take in their plan to further combat the sinister machinations of the Leaden Key in the Dyrwood now that they'd finished up the last of the field work. But he couldn't listen, could barely even hear her over the maddening din of his own thoughts buzzing like a swarm of hornets behind his eyes, his pulse pounding in his ears, his teeth grinding together, jaw clenched so tightly that he half expected to feel something snap under the strain at any second.
Because it was his fault, everything the Leaden Key had put them all through. And he knew it.
Gods, lad! Nae isnae! Ye cannae g'wan blamin' yersel' fer awt 'n' all!
Of course, he could still hear her, despite the multiple concurrent mental breakdowns he was experiencing at the moment. In fact, Iselmyr had been a surprisingly great help to him back in the sanitarium, taking over the fighting for him when the panic and terror from his untimely revelation had inevitably overridden his good sense and martial training. Unfortunately, despite her undeniable aptitude on the battlefield, Iselmyr's reasoning skills had seemingly not improved at all over the decades, as evidenced now by the idiotic platitudes she insisted on spouting at him. For he absolutely could blame himself for the situation in which he was currently embroiled– and the peril in which he'd placed his only friends by mere association with him, and the lamentable state of the Dyrwood and all their Hollowborn children– and he did, and he would continue to do so until such time as he could come up with some method by which he could repent, if he was even worthy of penance. Because it was all his fault. It was.
Fye, awrigh' then, wisearse, fer what's yer figurin'?
A foolish question. It was his fault, of course, because he had actively chosen to support their enemy. He had willingly been part and parcel to all of Thaos' atrocities since the very instant he had joined the Leaden Key.
As soon as the name Thaos had slipped from Axa's lips down in that horrific dungeon of a patient ward, as soon as Aloth had realized that they were face to face not with an adolescent mental patient but with the inscrutable, implacable leader of the Leaden Key, his entire sordid past had come rushing up out of his subconscious to ravage his waking mind, from his induction into the cult of the Queen That Was up to the very last time he'd spoken with his contact in Gilded Vale. Little had he known that the entire time he'd been spying for them, observing and reporting on the activities of animancers and their patrons, he had actually been assisting them in engineering the Hollowborn Crisis, as Lady Webb now grimly elucidated for them all. He'd had no idea that that was the true work of the Leaden Key, but of course he hadn't– that was how Thaos wanted it to be, how he'd designed the Key to work from its very genesis, and Aloth had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. And as the ancient, deathless soul had brushed against his while fleeing the north ward, Aloth couldn't help but feel that Thaos had recognized him, then, as one of his own. And he was. Rather, he had been. Had been until–
"If I'm going to go through with this for you, then I think I deserve to hear the truth." Axa's bold, clear voice cut through Aloth's mental malaise, and for one horrifying, sickening moment, he thought she was talking to him. But when he looked at her, it was not he who she had fixed in her intense stare, but Lady Webb. "No lies, no omissions. I want the whole story about what went down between you two. You and Thaos."
And as Webb explained her past with the Leaden Key, how she'd fallen in love with its alluring, mysterious leader, had blindly served him in the vain hope that he might someday reciprocate that love, Aloth ruminated over his own history with the organization– the Spellwrights’ Gilde and their illicit experiment, Targun sneering with contempt one moment and screaming in agony the next, his headmaster tucking the key-shaped medallion back beneath his collar, Iselmyr howling in his mind as he knelt and recited the oaths. He'd thought he'd been helping to protect the weak and the ignorant from their own hubristic ambitions and, idealistic fool that he was, he'd never once thought to question them– and it was that, that willful ignorance and blind devotion, that truly made him guilty. It did not escape his notice that he and Thaos both had a history of sabotaging the tools of animancers, although Aloth had not yet even known of the Key when he'd vandalized the spellwrights' illegal device, and Thaos obviously had much more experience and knowledge regarding such matters than himself. Nevertheless, the result was largely the same– his classmate had been rendered an invalid and was cruelly abandoned to his fate, while the Hollowborn crisis continued unabated, dooming a nation and an entire generation of her citizens. How much more misery and death had Thaos caused in the Dyrwood and beyond, using well-intentioned dupes like Aloth to carry out his will for him? And how much more blood had Aloth spilled on his own hands while mindlessly aiding these masked fanatics?
Aye, laddie, ye've made a right shite of it. An' I tellt ye nae t' trust 'em! But... but yer tryin' noo to make it righ'. Tha' oughttae count fer summat, aye?
Aloth dwelled silently on Iselmyr's words as he followed his allies out of Hadret House. As loathe as he was to admit it, she did have a point: given the story Webb had just related to them, he really was no better or worse than she had been in her younger years. Both of them had been intelligent, assiduous young talents, but they'd also both been very lonely and naïve and in desperate need of direction, of someone who could help them escape from the misery of their lives, someone who could offer them something like a home and a family and the opportunity to do more than just fill the dull, oppressive roles they'd been slotted into since birth. And thus had both of them proven easy prey for Thaos, manipulated with his promises of purpose and duty, signing away their lives to lie, spy, and even die for him. For his cause, whatever that may be. The only difference, apparently, was that where Webb had made the difficult decision to tear herself away from her misbegotten path and build a new life in pursuit of truth and justice, Aloth had elected to cling stubbornly to his puppetmasters, so terrified at the notion of going it alone that he'd deliberately ignored his own burgeoning skepticism until eventually, inevitably, he was abandoned. And then he couldn't even pick up the pieces himself afterwards– he'd needed Axa to do it for him.
He watched the little woman trudge determinedly up the road ahead of him, her long, loose curls shining golden-red in the midday sun. He had pledged his life and his soul to the Leaden Key once, in almost complete ignorance of their methods and motives, and they had abused his loyalty, casting him aside when he was no longer useful. But she had offered him her aid and her companionship, had tolerated his troublesome eccentricities and his insufferable evasiveness, had supported him and defended him and never once misled him. He'd joined up with her in the hope that she might lead him back to the Key somehow, and against all odds, she had– but now, after all they'd learned together, he couldn't imagine wanting to go back into their nameless, faceless fold, just as he couldn't imagine what would have become of him had he never met her. It still felt strange to think of her as such, but the fiery little orlan truly was his first real friend, and by far his favorite amongst all the others they'd made in their travels together. He wondered: would he pledge his life to her, now, if she should ask him to?
Yes. The answer came to him almost instantly, leapt forth from within him with such force that his breath caught in his throat and his heart skipped a beat. The unexpected burst of ardor shocked him, made him lower his chin to his chest as he felt a blush crawl over his cheeks, but still he did not let the Watcher fall from his sight. After everything she's done for me? Yes, I would pledge my life to her.
But of course, he knew it wouldn't be as easy as all that. He'd lied to her, had been lying to her for a good long while now, and he knew all too well how she felt about dishonesty, especially considering her history with her former fiancé. Granted, he'd lied about Iselmyr as well, and she'd forgiven him then, but this was something else entirely. Would she– could she forgive him a second time?
There was only one way to find out. So he bided his time, patiently enduring a mercifully short meeting with the Dozens followed closely by an early dinner at the Goose and Fox where he sat pushing his food around on his plate and nervously stealing glances at Axa, waiting for his moment to try and catch her alone. And eventually, the moment came– sometime after her third glass of wine, Kana leaned close and whispered to her as surreptitiously as he was able, an expression of almost comically exaggerated concern on his face, and so she sighed and winced and slid from her seat, slapping a handful of coins down next to her half-finished plate and announcing that she was going to turn in early. Aloth watched her drag herself up the stairs to her room, and as he wiped his mouth with his kerchief and prepared to follow her, he noticed Kana winking at him, grinning ear to ear, making a Rauataian hand gesture that he recognized as one used to indicate good fortune.
Hnh. Queer, tha'. D'ye think he's gee'n up on pullin' th' wee lass?
"Stop... saying things," he muttered into his collar, and he made his excuses to the group and pushed himself away from the table.
Before long, he was standing outside her door, thoughts racing and guts churning, twisting his fingers into knots, desperately trying to work up the nerve to knock as every instinct in his body screamed for him to run away instead. He let out one last shaky breath, raised his trembling fist to the well-worn wood–
"Aloth, I can hear you working yourself into a panic out there. Just come in already; the door's unlocked."
Well. She never was much for formalities, was she?
He clung to the doorjamb like a child to his mother's skirts as the door slowly swung open to reveal Axa lying supine on her bed, her tall leather boots and belt with scabbards still buckled on carelessly tossed onto the floor beneath her. The light fixtures in the room were all still lit, although she'd thrown an arm over her face to cover her eyes with the crook of her elbow, and she made no move to reposition herself even as he entered the room and gently shut the door behind him. Her other hand lay flat against her belly, rising and falling with her steady, even breaths, her mahogany locks cascading dramatically over the edge of her pillow onto the coverlet below.
He tried to avert his gaze as his face grew hot yet again. Why did this suddenly feel like it could be misconstrued as an attempt at some sort of... lascivious encounter? He certainly hadn't intended it to be, but everything about the situation seemed bizarrely suggestive of a tryst ripped straight from a cliché-ridden romance novel– his careful discretion and overt nervousness, her reclining on the bed as she waited for him in her boudoir, the hastily discarded clothing items strewn about on the floor, Kana's ridiculous grinning and winking. It wasn't like that at all, of course, far from it in fact. He didn't even find her– well, alright, he did a bit, but that was only because–
"Was there something you wanted to discuss with me?" Her voice was husky from drink and smoke and her tone curt from exhaustion, and he suddenly felt appallingly puerile and selfish, bothering her with such a serious personal problem at such an inconvenient time. Maybe– maybe he should just–
Fye, nae ye dinnae, ye wee jessie! G'wan there and tell 'er! Else I'll dae it fer ye!
"I–" He lost his nerve for a second, cleared his throat, tried again– "P-pardon my intrusion, but I– ah, I did, yes. Have something to discuss with you. Something... rather serious, I'm afraid." He finally managed to look at her again only to find that she still hadn't moved a muscle, not even bothering to turn and face him, and he decided to put his own troubles aside for a moment. "Erm– Axa, are you–"
"Don't ask me if I'm alright. Please don't. I've been hearing it all evening from practically everyone who's spoken to me, and if I have to hear it from you, too..." She trailed off, sighing deeply, and rolled onto her side, roughly shoving herself up into a sitting position. "In any case, I thought it'd be obvious to anyone with eyes that work that I'm pretty fucking far from 'alright' right now."
He quickly looked down at his feet, clearing his throat. She'd been somewhat sullen and irritable all evening, and understandably so, but it appeared her mood was a fair bit worse than he'd initially thought. Perhaps, if he was very careful and a little lucky, he could soften her up a bit?
Nothing for it but to try. He cleared his throat. "Well... with all due respect, you really can't blame us for being worried about you." She didn't reply, and he glanced back at her, cautious but hopeful. "Do you... would you like to talk about it?"
She scoffed softly, glared at her knees. "What's there to talk about? I met him again. Thaos. And he tried to kill me. Again." Her scowl softened then, the edge dropping out of her voice as she continued: "I didn't even get anything out of it, really. No new information, no new memories from my past life, just... more questions. More fighting. More work to do."
"Yes, it was a rather harrowing ordeal down there in the wards, wasn't it? And now you've the animancy trials to attend tomorrow." He winced sympathetically. "I can see how you might find that... discouraging."
"Don't remind me." Axa drew her feet up onto the edge of the bed, wrapped her arms around her knees. "Gods, I'm not looking forward to that shitshow at all. There's just so much that could go wrong..."
Aloth waved his hand at her in a manner he hoped looked more comforting than dismissive. "The Dozens will behave themselves," he assured her. "They respect the duc too much to act up in any significant manner. And anyway, from what I've seen, you've got those churls wrapped around your little finger." He gave her a sly smile, but she was too preoccupied with her thoughts to notice.
"It's not them I'm worried about," she sighed, shakily running a hand through her thick hair. "What if Duc Wolf-Grin doesn't believe me? What if the Doemenels or the Knights pull some kind of shit? What if Gathbin shows up? Beast's hooves, what if Thaos does?" Her eyes got wider and more fearful with every supposition, and Aloth took a few steps toward her, hands raised in what he hoped was a calming gesture.
"Axa, please... Those are all valid worries, to be certain, but they're also variables that are utterly outside of your control." He tried smiling again, this time in a soothing manner. "You're doing a good, necessary thing here, and I'm– we're all going to be right there alongside you, supporting you." He paused. "Protecting you."
She huffed a pathetic little laugh. "No offense, but even that doesn't do me much good in the long run. Even if we convince the duc of the Leaden Key's plot, what does that mean for me, for my Awakening? What, will he chase down Thaos for me, bring him to my dungeons in Caed Nua for interrogation? The man whose soul can leap between bodies, who's apparently blessed with immortality by Woedica Herself, who's expertly manipulated scores of kith for Wael knows how long? The duc's forces will just subdue him for me, will they?" She was getting louder, shriller, her little body rocking to and fro as emotion started to overwhelm her.
He took another step closer. "Axa–"
"And even if that were possible, what then? Do I just kill him? What if that doesn't work, and I lose the one tie to my past life that could have helped me put it to rest? Or maybe, am I supposed to ask him something? Ask him what? The question my past life wanted to ask him? I can't even remember what the question was!" Tears spilled down her cheeks and she made no move to brush them away, her fingers gripping her knees tightly enough for her nails to pierce her thick trousers.
He thought of their first night together in Gilded Vale, her shrieking and sobbing on the floor as he stood there, helpless. "Axa–"
"Gods, Aloth, I'm lost! I'm scared! I can't do this anymore!" She was full-on panicking now, shaking and gasping for breath as she wept. "I'm losing my fucking mind, and I'm trying so hard, and I just– I don't–"
What're ye dae'n, staundin' abou' wie yer gob agape!? Gae t' 'er, ye dafty!
And so he did go to her. He tried not to think too hard about exactly what it was he was doing, the implications one might assume as he crossed the room in a few quick, broad steps to stand above the little woman, as he bent down and gently but firmly gripped her by her shoulders and held her steady, looking hard into her flushed, tear-streaked face. But when she returned his look, her sharp, violet eyes locking onto his, he found he no longer had to try to keep his mind blank– any kind of coherent thought while staring into those rich, soulful eyes was simply and wholly impossible. Except, of course, for one particularly tenacious, pernicious, terrifying thought that somehow managed to worm its way to the fore:
Why had it been so much easier for him to admit to himself earlier that he'd give his life for her than it had been to admit to himself just now that he thought she was beautiful?
A moment passed between them, long and tense and silent, before finally she tore her gaze from him, laying her hands over one of his– and gently prying it off of her shoulder.
Her voice was a raspy whisper, tremulous and barely audible. "I think you should leave now. I'm sorry, I know you had something you wanted to tell me, but I– I can't. I can't take this. Not now. I just want... I think I need to be alone right now. So, please. Just go."
She turned from him as he backed away, acknowledging none of his weakly stammered apologies, and she collapsed on her side, curling up tightly and facing the wall, quiet sobs wracking her small frame. As he pulled the door shut behind him, Aloth felt as though a dam had just burst somewhere deep inside him, and behind it was a vast, icy void that now rushed forth to fill every corner of his being. He stood in the hallway, fists clenched and mind reeling, for a long, miserable moment.
Finally, she spoke up. Fye, sure 'n that wenttae shite, but... at least ye can put off telling 'er fer a wee bit yet, aye?
"I'm never, ever listening to you again," he hissed, and he stalked off stiffly to his own room.
—
"Rest assured, the duc will hear the truth about animancy."
That was what she had told Wenan the previous evening, clasping his rough, calloused hand in hers as they sealed their alliance. And she'd meant it– she rarely said anything she didn't mean.
Just, she maybe hadn't quite meant it the way Wenan thought she had.
Not that it mattered what he thought. The only important thing to Axa was getting an audience with the duc so that she and her companions could lay bare the Leaden Key's plot, and right now, they were running late. The day's hearings were well underway by the time she and her retinue reached the Ducal Palace, and she'd cursed herself the whole way for having caused such a delay in the first place. Oversleeping was forgivable enough, but to oversleep and then resist every attempt to be woken was nothing short of alarming, and she had to wonder whether all Watchers suffered from such bizarre infirmities or if she was just particularly unlucky, although part of her suspected she already knew the answer to that. Her companions knew too, and had been forgiving for the most part, but she couldn't help but blame herself anyway. Perhaps if she'd tried harder to get to sleep earlier, rather than getting herself all worked up blubbering to Aloth about–
No. No, she wasn't going to think about that. Not right now. There was too much at stake to spend what little time remained to her before the trial dwelling on melodramatic nonsense. It didn't matter, anyway. Really it didn't.
She kept telling herself that.
"Lady Mala?" The page at the front of the great hall blinked with shock at the harried little band. "The trial is–"
"I'm aware, yes," she panted, bowing her head in contrition. "Please forgive my tardiness. Now, where–"
"Up those stairs and to your left, and the guards will admit you to the balcony," the page answered eagerly, her bright eyes flashing. "May Magran favor you, Watcher."
Axa glanced toward the shrine to the goddess of fire, the acolytes therein reverently tending to the chunk of the Godhammer she'd brought to their now-defrocked priestess what felt like half a lifetime ago. "I'd really rather She just cut me a break, but thanks."
"Careful about sassing gods behind Their backs," Hiravias muttered as they rushed up the smooth marble stairs, digging his fingers deep into one armpit. "You might get more than you bargained for."
Pallegina scoffed as she strode confidently alongside Axa to the ornate balcony doors. "As though the gods have not done enough to us already."
Edér gave her a wry grin. "Hey, if there's anything I've learned from the gods, it's that They can always make things worse."
"Well, an Eothasian would know, wouldn't he?" Sagani clapped him on the back, smiling almost apologetically.
Axa felt a small rush of relief as she and her fellow latecomers filed out onto the balcony, glad that they'd managed to only earn a few annoyed glances from amongst the gathered delegates. The final day of the trials had drawn the best and brightest from each faction, it seemed, and the stress of many weeks' worth of heated debate was evident on the faces of everyone present: the impatient scowl of her fellow Dozens representative Eadric Morley, the arrogant smirk of Dyrla Doemenel, the dutiful glare of the Crucible Knights' Taragyth Beordsen, and of course, the drawn and serious face of Duc Aevar Wolf-Grin himself, who slouched in his throne as an animancer rambled on at the podium before him.
"So what you're telling me, Master Barrasc," the duc interrupted, "is that you and your colleagues have made no progress whatsoever in regards to solving the problem of Waidwen's Legacy. Is that correct?" He was quite clearly a man of contrasts, his unkempt hair and wildman's beard clashing almost comically with his posh robes and keen, intelligent eyes. His tone was not dismissive, but neither was it forgiving.
"Your Grace," the animancer replied, exasperation straining his voice, "what I'm telling you is that progress cannot be made unless animancy's potential is realized! And as it is now, we cannot realize our potential if we are forced to keep constant watch over our own shoulders for clubs and daggers when we should be researching, experimenting, discovering!"
Axa squinted curiously at the passionate, scholarly man. "Who is that? Lady Webb briefed me on the other delegates, but..."
"Ramir di Barrasc is a senior animancer at Brackenbury Sanitarium, and one of the finest scientific minds ever produced by the Republics," Pallegina whispered over her shoulder, pride emanating from every syllable. "He is originally from Palminia, but he left for the Dyrwood some years back under the impression that Defiance Bay would soon become the new center of the world for animancy." She leaned back, her brow furrowing in consternation. "And, of course, for the fact that funding tends to flow a bit more freely here than it does back home."
"Of course it does," Aloth muttered. "He's taking advantage of desperate, terrified people who are trying to save their children. With the ludicrous promises animancers are wont to make, it's no wonder they'd–"
"Ssh," Sagani hissed. "We're starting to draw looks."
It was true. Axa could see the Knights' delegate shooting her and her crew a disdainful sneer, while Dyrla Doemenel outright glowered at them with undisguised contempt. She chose to ignore them and focus on the duc, waiting for her opportunity to interject.
Barrasc continued to make his case, hands and spittle both flying wildly about in front of him, until finally Dyrla turned her attentions back to the duc. "We in House Doemenel agree wholeheartedly, Your Grace," she declared, pasting a smug, sycophantic smile on her heavily powdered face. "Animancy does indeed possess unlimited potential, but only if we allow it to–"
"Sure! Unlimited potential to make you and yours unlimited profit, you cold-blooded crook," Eadric boomed, his brawny arms crossed petulantly over his broad chest. Dyrla shot him a withering look, the corner of her mouth curling in disgust, but he gave no indication of backing down.
"But there is no profit where there is no progress," Beordsen interjected, her shining plate armor clanking as she gesticulated, "and what I'm hearing is that there has been very little– if any– progress. Is that right, Master Barrasc?"
The animancer winced, his eyes darting around the room. "Now that's– that's not entirely true. My colleague Caedman Azo has actually made great strides in–"
"Caedman Azo is a gods damned murderer!" Eadric was out of his seat in a flash, slapping his meaty hands hard against the table, face red with rage. "And a child murderer at that! We oughtta hang that son of a bitch for what he done! Send a message to the rest of you!"
Beordsen turned to the duc, gauntlet-clad hands raised in supplication. "Your Grace, please–"
"Return to your seat, Eadric," the duc commanded, annoyed and weary but no less authoritative for it, and Eadric reluctantly obeyed, staring daggers at Barrasc as he did so.
"As I was saying," Barrasc pressed on, only slightly shaken, "Master Azo's work, while sometimes controversial, has provided invaluable insight into the machinations of kith souls, and with that new knowledge, an end to the Hollowborn Crisis must surely be within our grasp." The animancer glared at Eadric, then, dabbing at his temple with a kerchief. "And for what it is worth," he hissed, "you need not prepare your gallows just yet. Master Azo has already passed the Shroud due to an... unfortunate incident at the sanitarium not long ago."
"Unfortunate incident!" Eadric gave a short, sharp bark of a laugh. "All that means is that charlatan tried playin' god a little too hard with those cursed machines of his and ended up doing to himself what he done to that poor girl. Serves him right, I say."
Barrasc squirmed, his face twitching. "No, he– th-the details of his death are proprietary to–"
"I killed Caedman Azo."
In an instant, every eye in the room was on Axa, and she gritted her teeth against the wave of shocked whispers and suspicious murmurs that rushed forth to meet her. She stood as tall as she was able to behind the balcony's banister, comforted slightly by Edér and Kana's reassuring hands on her shoulders. Behind her, Pallegina muttered a curse or three in Vailian while Aloth coughed nervously and Hiravias snickered.
Never could quite shake that flair for the dramatic, could we?
The duc had been the first to look her way, but he was the last to speak up. "Well. I had been told that the Dozens' new delegate would be in attendance today. Interesting choice for a first impression." A grin flashed across his roughhewn face for a second before duty sobered his expression again. "I suppose you're going to tell me you had a good reason for doing what you did?"
"She had better," Beordsen snarled, her hand unconsciously straying near the hilt of her weapon. Eadric fixed an intense stare on the Crucible Knight, his whole body tensed for a fight, while Dyrla's eyes lit up, darting rapidly back and forth between the two of them, eager to see some bloodshed. Barrasc merely stared at his feet, his lips moving silently in what was either a curse or a prayer.
The duc either took no notice or deemed the other delegates unworthy of his concern just yet. He lifted a shaggy eyebrow at Axa. "Well? Care to enlighten us?"
She tried to swallow, but found that her mouth was too dry, so she drew a deep, calming breath instead. "It was a matter of self-defense, Your Grace. I was investigating a case of suspected espionage at the sanitarium and in the process I uncovered some... unsavory details pertaining to Azo's recent activities regarding his patients. When I refused to cover his crimes, he attacked me out of desperation, and I did what I had to do. Ethelmoer can corroborate my story if you wish it. But–"
"You see, Wolf-Grin?" Eadric brayed, cutting Axa off. "These animancers, they play it up like they're some kinda grand saviors of all kithkind, but when it comes right down to it, they ain't nothin' but common criminals."
"And you and your den of graverobbing rabblerousers wouldn't know anything about any kind of criminal activity in the city, I'm sure," Dyrla sneered, taking the opportunity to glare at Axa again.
Eadric balked as he rose from his seat once more. "You're fuckin' tellin' me–"
"Eadric." Duc Aevar silenced the burly man with a sharp look. "I don't believe your delegate was quite finished talking yet." He kept the other man locked in his gaze until he sat back down, and only then did he turn back to Axa. "Lady... Mala, isn't it? Would you care to continue?"
Reminds me of my colleagues' tales of defending their theses, she mused to herself. Shame I didn't make it that far; it'd have made good practice for this. She cleared her throat and continued:
"Thank you, Your Grace. As I was saying, Azo's fate is not so important as his work. Namely, the fact that his machines had been purposefully tampered with, and most likely all of his work has been willfully and systematically sabotaged for years now, obstructing any true progress in the animantic sciences, and thus, any hope of a kith-made remedy to the Hollowborn Crisis. My investigation at the sanitarium confirmed this suspicion when I confronted the saboteur himself, posing as a patient." Astonished murmurs filled the hall again, and the gathered delegates exchanged looks of concern and disbelief.
"What the– what the fuck does any kinda sabotage have to do with Azo and his blasphemous experiments?" Eadric stammered and spat, flinging his hands angrily toward the balcony. "That son of a bitch did nothing but play sick, dangerous games with our children's lives!"
"His ambitions outstripped his sense of ethics, I'll not disagree," Axa conceded. "I certainly wasn't forced to kill him because he was overly eager to take responsibility for his misdeeds. But I doubt he would have fallen to the depths he did if his work hadn't been–"
"Aw, come on, girl! Wake up!" Eadric was up out of his seat yet again, roaring as much at Axa as at the rest of the crowd. "Animancers are all the same, always pullin' this weird, sinister shit! Look at Heritage Hill, what they done there. Wrecked a whole blazin' district, killed good, upstanding citizens. Patriots! And our brave defenders over at Crucible Keep would rather rub elbows with the soul butcherin' bastards, use 'em to make some sort of mechanical abominations to patrol the streets for 'em than properly protect our homes and businesses." He glared at Beordsen then, smirking aggressively as if to challenge her: Didn't think we knew about that, did you?
Beordsen didn't quite rise to the bait, but her reaction was still predictably indignant. "We lost a lot of fine soldiers trying to reclaim Heritage Hill, Morley," she growled, a quiet rage smoldering behind her eyes, "and we'd have succeeded in our duties there if we didn't have to run all over the city and beyond just to keep you and your thugs from the expedition den from inciting both the citizenry and the Glanfathans to riot against us!" At this last bit, Hiravias perked his ear and looked up from his sketchbook. Sagani shook her head at him.
"What happened at Heritage Hill was neither the fault of the Knights nor that of the animancers studying there," Axa interjected. "And I don't seem to recall any volunteers from the Dozens stepping up to offer assistance. Except for me."
Laughter and outrage alike rippled through the crowd, and even the duc had to smile as Morley seethed, face flushed and fists clenched. "She's got you there, Eadric," Wolf-Grin chuckled. "Nevertheless, Lady Mala, that's quite a bold claim you're making. You mean to tell me that you've not only singlehandedly ended the crisis in Heritage Hill, but you also apparently know who's to blame for it?"
"I don't tell lies, Your Grace," she replied. "For good or for ill, my word is my bond. I'm sure Dame Beordsen could secure some testimonials from her fellow Knights if need be."
The duc cocked an eyebrow at the plate-clad woman, and she nodded reluctantly. "She... speaks true, Your Grace. Many would attest to her honesty, Knights and citizens alike. Even when her words are neither helpful nor polite, they are always true." She frowned at the little woman, and Axa defiantly stared her down in response.
Duc Wolf-Grin nodded slowly, studying Axa with a critical eye. "That's what I've heard, too. Good to see my sources are reliable." He leaned forward in his throne, his whole body angled toward Axa. "Well then, with that famous honesty of yours in mind, let me ask you this: if you've determined that animancers didn't cause the tragedy at Heritage Hill, then who or what did?"
Here we go. The difficult bit. "The tower in Heritage Hill, Teir Nowneth," Axa explained, "houses an ancient Engwithan device, a machine that is capable of wresting souls from their mortal bodies and holding them in a sort of stasis. That is what afflicted the denizens of Heritage Hill– not animancy, but Engwithan technology reactivated and running amok."
The duc blinked incredulously. "You expect me to believe that a centuries-old machine at the top of that tower transformed an entire district full of my citizens into shambling monstrosities, and that the animancers who were in that tower and who were most likely tinkering with that machine had nothing to do with it?"
Axa winced, but she knew she couldn't back down. "I understand your misgivings, Your Grace, but correlation is not causation. They were there, yes, but they were also victims of the machine themselves. In fact, they weren't even actually capable of activating–"
"You can't be fuckin' serious!" Eadric cut her off again, his eyes wide and bloodshot beneath his heavy brows. "Wolf-Grin, I swear before Magran, if I'd have known half of what this woman was gonna say here today, I–" His temper seemed to overwhelm him for a moment, and he stopped to squeeze his eyes shut and catch his breath before starting again. "Listen. Everywhere they go, animancers are fuckin' with the natural way of things, spreadin' misery with their horseshit promises, mayhem with their strange contraptions, and death with their unnatural methods. To me, it's plain as an open flame that 'Waidwen's Legacy' ain't about Waidwen– it's about these copperfuckin' eggheads thinkin' they can play around in the gods' domain, and we need to put an end to it now!"
"And yet you offer no proof, no evidence," Dyrla Doemenel sighed angrily, "and you routinely stymie any attempt at a real investigation behind the causes of the Legacy. How convenient for you."
Eadric straightened up, turning slowly to Dyrla, and when he spoke next his voice was a low growl, soft and dangerous. "You want proof? Why'nt you go on and ask my children for it. You can find 'em in my house, buried under my floorboards. Buried there 'cause we ain't got no land to put 'em in, and 'cause your little animancer friends keep the graveyards so full we can't afford no plot for 'em neither. And if we keep on like we been, lettin' these soul-butcherin' freaks spit in the gods' eyes, then someday we'll run outta burial plots altogether, until one day there ain't gonna be nowhere to bury us– and no one left to do the diggin'. How's that for your fuckin' proof?"
Doemenel simply rolled her eyes, gesturing dismissively as she turned to the duc. "You see? Just like that, every time. We keep getting turned away from any kind of empirical, intellectual discussion behind what the causes for the Legacy might be in favor of tangentially related personal anecdotes–"
Eadric trembled with rage. "You call my son and my daughter's deaths a fuckin' anecdote one more time, you miserable–"
"Morley, I have warned you thrice this day," Wolf-Grin barked, nearly rising from his seat. "I'll not warn you again. Now Lady Doemenel has a good point– we all have strong feelings regarding the woes the Legacy has wrought against us, but what we don't have is solid evidence of any kind of cause. I sure as Hel can't say I know for certain exactly what or who is behind the Hollowborn Crisis! Who amongst us can?"
"I can."
Once again every head turned toward Axa, and once again she was awash in a sea of whispers, but this time it wasn't the attention that twisted her stomach and made her heart race– it was the weight of the truth inside of her, the risk she was about to take in revealing it. She took a moment to steel herself, allowing the chatter to die down a bit before continuing.
"Waidwen's Legacy– the Hollowborn Crisis– is the result of a conspiracy orchestrated by a secret society known as the Leaden Key. They have been manipulating the flow of souls throughout the Dyrwood utilizing ancient Engwithan technology to do so, and attempting to pin the blame for their misdeeds on animancers. They are the driving force behind Caedman Azo's fall from grace, just as they are the cause of the tragedy in Heritage Hill, and they are perpetuating these atrocities in order to discredit animancy. And we have all been playing right into their hands."
The skeptical mutterings of the audience suddenly burst into a cacophony, fear and confusion and anger rising in their throats. Taragyth Beordsen scoffed derisively, huffing out a sharp, scornful laugh. "That's the most ludicrous thing I've ever heard! She's mad, Your Grace! Master Barrasc, you did remember to lock your sanitarium doors before coming to the Ducal Palace today, did you not?" Mocking laughter rippled through the crowd, and Axa felt her hackles rise.
A white-hot rage rushed through her, and before she really knew what she was doing she had slammed her fists against the railing and turned her blazing eyes on the Knight, her teeth bared. "You may be content to issue Hollowborn until your shriveled womb drops out of your skirts," she barked, "but I will not permit you to stand between these people and the truth!"
A few scattered gasps and nervous chuckles just barely broke the shocked silence that followed. Beordsen stood utterly stunned for a beat, her mouth hanging open as she tried in vain to form a riposte, before finally gritting her teeth and sitting back down, humiliation and outrage plain on her face. Axa felt a hand squeeze her shoulder lightly– Edér's, probably– and shame washed over her, warming her cheeks. Gods, that was a damned cruel thing to say. Where in Hel did that come from? I suppose the stress really is starting to get to me...
"Lady Mala," the duc intervened, his tone stern but cautious, "I can see that you're very passionate about your convictions, but surely you must know that the Leaden Key is nothing more than a loose congregation of small-time miscreants and children playing at common thuggery. Now I'm not accusing you of trying to mislead the court– not yet– but I'm going to need more than that if you want me to believe you."
Axa looked directly into Wolf-Grin's eyes, laying her hand over her heart. "It's just as I said before, Your Grace: I don't lie. Anyone you question will tell you the same." Except maybe those bounty hunters outside of Dyrford... "And besides, what could I possibly stand to gain by misleading you? I could have simply ignored this whole proceeding, hidden away in my castle, collected taxes from my subjects. But I knew I couldn't, not while the Leaden Key wrought their evil upon the innocent. I know that what I've told you today sounds farfetched at best, but I truly want nothing more than to help the Dyrwood and end this scourge against her people."
The duc considered her words in silence for a moment, and then finally he gestured for her to continue. She took a moment to compose herself, and when she spoke again, her voice was steady and solemn.
"As many in attendance here may already know, I am a Watcher, a condition forced upon me by the winds of a bîaŵac on my very first night in this fair country. My soul was sheared from my flesh, and it is only by the grace of the gods or by some extraordinary good fortune that I survived. But unbeknownst to me at the time– unbeknownst to nearly all kith in the country– the bîaŵac that threatened my life was no natural occurrence, no caprice of the gods. It was the deliberate function of a machine, one built millennia hence in the ancient society of Engwith, designed and created for the express purpose of extracting souls from living bodies. And the machine I encountered in the ruins of Cliant Lîs that fateful night is not the only one. I've traveled all over this land, from Gilded Vale to Caed Nua, from Defiance Bay to Dyrford, and wherever I've looked I've found more, nestled like ticks in the valleys and caverns of the Dyrwoodan countryside and in the ruins of Eir Glanfath, wresting the souls of the recently born from their mortal coils. These machines are the direct cause of Waidwen's Legacy, and I have peered into the souls of those who have sacrificed their lives to ensure that these engines of horror stay up and running. And every time my findings are the same: they are being operated by agents of the Leaden Key."
The murmuring of the crowd seemed almost reverent now, hushed and awestruck, and Duc Wolf-Grin sat calmly absorbing it all, his face half-hidden behind his folded hands, his keen eyes narrowed in contemplation. Finally, he straightened up in his seat, casting a thoughtful look at Axa and her companions. "I have to say, Lady Mala, that of all the arguments I was expecting to hear today, yours was most definitely not amongst them. Nevertheless, you have raised some very compelling points. It seems we have much yet to consider." A wry grin twitched his whiskers. "However: you're still quite young, and a very recent immigrant, and if the ongoing construction at Caed Nua is any indication, your coffers are not exactly overflowing. You couldn't have bankrolled all these expeditions yourself. Would you mind terribly telling the court who has been supporting you through your travels?"
Trying to suss out who's bribing me to say all this, eh? I'm afraid I'll have to surprise you yet again, friend. "I have been blessed with the unwavering support of my traveling companions," she retorted, indicating the kith surrounding her with a wave of her hand, "and I have found the people of the Dyrwood to be most kind and generous, as long as one is willing to offer a helping hand. And of course, the Dozens are the people. My search for the truth would not have been possible without them." She smiled benevolently at Eadric Morley, and he gave her an awkward grimace in return.
The duc's gaze flicked to Eadric for a moment. "Is that so?" he smirked. "Well, I must admit that the Dozens'... somewhat uncharacteristic open-mindedness here today has been a most welcome and refreshing surprise. However, with that in mind, the purpose of these trials is not only to discuss the Legacy– although that is first and foremost amongst our concerns– but also to answer the question of animancy in the Dyrwood. Given your unique insights, Lady Mala, I'm curious– what would your decree be were you seated in my place?"
The room fell silent, and all eyes were once again fixed on the mysterious new delegate, the crowd waiting with bated breath as Axa paused to consider the question. Indeed, what course of action ought she recommend? Despite all she'd seen, she'd had to conclude that animancy truly was just like any other tool– only as dangerous or malicious as the hands that wielded it. It seemed to have the potential to work miracles, if only its practitioners and theorems could get out from under Thaos' thumb. At any rate, it was barely more dangerous than magic. The only difference was that wizards at least had some legal limitations in the form of a governing body, although one might not know it for all the good the Circle of Archmagi had ever done.
Wolf-Grin was correct in thinking that her personal experiences would grant her a unique perspective regarding the soul sciences– but would the common people understand that? Would they accept it? Lofty ideals were all well and good, but even those most knowledgeable about animancy had been victims of aggressive, targeted misinformation for however long the Leaden Key had been conspiring against them. She would have to tread cautiously.
"Before I answer, allow me to make this much clear: I have witnessed firsthand the excesses and follies of certain animancers in this country, and I have seen what horrors they can inflict. However, I also believe it to be very pertinent that practically all animancers in the Dyrwood have been laboring under falsified information for years, if not longer. Therefore, it is my belief that we must permit animancy– true animancy, tainted no longer by the schemes of the Leaden Key– to be studied here in the Dyrwood, for the good of the people. The good of which properly researched and applied animancy is capable cannot be understated or ignored. One need only look to the waning strength of the Aedyr Empire and the rising star of the Vailian Republics to see the dangers of shunning scientific progress and the boons of pursuing it. And with an entire generation lost to the Legacy, the Dyrwood cannot afford to fall behind in any other arena."
"Belfetto," Pallegina whispered beside her. "Well put, aimica." Aloth sighed forcefully, but said nothing.
Is he afraid of me now, I wonder? Axa pushed the thought away, but not quickly enough.
Duc Wolf-Grin leaned forward once more, cocking a bushy eyebrow. "And how, exactly, do you purport to free the animantic sciences from the Key's supposed nefarious influence?"
Axa narrowed her eyes, her little fists clenched at her sides. "Just leave that to me and my contacts in Dunryd Row, Your Grace. Rest assured, they will not escape justice."
The duc closed his eyes and leaned back in his seat again, his expression unreadable, but his body language suggesting great relief. "That's all I needed to hear," he murmured. "Thank you, Lady Mala, for bringing these new concerns to the attention of the court."
He shifted slightly, and suddenly he was no longer addressing only her, but the entire room at once. "And thanks also to all of our fine delegates. The road here has been a long and difficult one, beset on all sides by strife and discord, but I believe we have finally reached the end of it. The time for discussion is over. The time for action has come. I am ready at last to issue my edict. Ramir di Barrasc, please approach."
And as the animancer moved to stand before the duc, Axa felt a familiar chill run up her spine, a familiar heat bloom on her brow. The thick, soft hair on her forearms and on the back of her neck stood on end as the waking world faded into murky shadows around her. The duc continued his speech, Barrasc stood resolute but nervous before him, the gathered delegates and audience listened with rapt attention– and only the little Watcher perceived the change in the room, the disturbance in the aether as a mass of potent essence crossed the hall in one mighty flash and infused itself into Barrasc's body.
Oh no. Oh, gods, no, no, no–
And Barrasc spoke suddenly, interrupting the duc not with his usual cautious and respectful tone, but with the voice of a totally different man, a voice Axa recognized immediately, smooth and cold and deliberate. "I do hope you will forgive me, Your Grace," he sneered, "but we animancers are prepared to suffer no one's judgment save our own."
"Your Grace–" She tried to cry out to him, but could only manage a strangled whisper.
She was too late, again. She was always too late to save them. Any of them.
"Perish," Thaos commanded.
And a great, bright flash of arcane energy shot forth from Barrasc's hands, and before the eyes of all the kith present in the great hall, Duc Aevar Wolf-Grin fell forward off of his throne, dead before he could hit the floor.
Chaos erupted instantly. Screams of terror and roars of rage burst forth from every throat, and those who did not flee for their lives charged forth with their weapons drawn instead, frenzied by grief and clamoring for vengeance. Axa could only watch, frozen in shock, as Barrasc begged for a moment's clemency to explain himself, the foreign essence having abandoned him to face the aggrieved crowd alone, but he was quickly silenced as Eadric Morley leapt across the delegates' table and struck the animancer's head from his shoulders with one powerful swing of his blade. Darla Doemenel, stiletto in one hand and pistol in the other, made for the chamber doors, but was stopped in her tracks by Taragyth Beordsen, shrieking commands at her in some ill-conceived attempt at reestablishing order. When Doemenel responded by leveling her pistol at the Knight, fire flashing in her eyes, Beordsen screamed wordlessly and raised her estoc, running the other woman through without a moment's hesitation. Seeing this, another animancer hurriedly fumbled for her wand, blasting Beordsen between the shoulder blades, and the Knight whirled around just in time to see the animancer tumble backwards in a spray of gore, a handaxe– thrown by Morley, of all people– buried between her eyes.
It all happened in a matter of seconds, and it all kept happening, all around her, another vignette of violence and madness playing out wherever Axa's gaze happened to land. Finally, she felt an urgent tug on her clothing, and she turned to see Edér slash a would-be assailant across the length of his torso while Sagani finished him off with an arrow to the throat.
"Is, uh– is Dyrwoodan politics always like this?" Hiravias muttered, his fist still clutching at Axa's tunic, his lone eye wide with alarm.
"More 'r less," Edér grunted, wiping blood that wasn't his own from his cheek.
"Thaos," Axa croaked. "It wasn't Barrasc, it was him, he–"
"We figured as much," Pallegina interrupted, the ethereal flames of her zeal wreathing her brow. "He cannot have gone far. We must pursue."
"Or at the very least, we have to get out of here," Kana blurted, checking that his arquebus was loaded and primed. "Maybe even out of the city– something tells me this unrest isn't going to stay confined to the Ducal Palace for very long."
Axa glanced back down at the chamber below– the corpses of Barrasc and Wolf-Grin and Doemenel, Morley and Beordsen trading blows, panicked spectators seizing torches from the chamber walls– and then back at her companions– Kana and Aloth looking to her for guidance, Pallegina and Edér guarding the doorway to their balcony against further attacks, Sagani and Hiravias preparing arrows and spells for the struggle sure to be ahead of them, Itumaak panting at his mistress' feet.
–duty– safety– terror– justice–
–Are you ready, initiate—
"Alright." She drew her sabres, bared her teeth. "Alright. Let's go."
The halls were nearly empty, most of the palace guards having rushed in to suppress the havoc in the great hall or chase down rioters on their way out onto the streets, and for a moment Axa was afraid that she was once again too late to intercept Thaos. But as she descended the stairs to the palace doors, her path strewn with the bodies of clerks and clerics, the very man she was looking for rounded the corner only a few paces front of her, stopping and turning to face her and her companions– almost as though he'd been expecting them.
He was exactly the same as all the times she had seen him before, from the first time she'd seen him commanding the machine at Cliant Lîs to the first time her past life had sworn fealty to him in the temple. The severe mask and imposing headdress were absent, but he still bore the long, silver hair, the tidy beard, the piercing eyes, the indecipherable expression. It was him, just as Axa– just as Anthea– remembered.
He stared at her, into her, for a long, tense moment before shaking his head and furrowing his brow, adopting a disappointed, almost fatherly look. "Again with this?" he sighed, sounding not unlike a long-suffering teacher chiding a difficult student. "I have given you every chance to end this meaningless farce. And still, you insist upon it."
Somehow, even through the terror, through the nausea, through the fever and the chills that wracked her body and robbed her of energy, Axa managed to raise her blade.
He cocked an eyebrow, his lips twitching briefly into a smirk. "One more chance, then. Will you accept this final mercy from me, Axa Mala, and end this ridiculous chase?"
She glared defiantly into his eyes, even though it made her head throb and her vision blur. "No. Not until we've settled this."
"I see." Thaos shifted slightly, and his entire demeanor changed, detached bemusement replaced with cold determination in an instant. "Shall I end it for you, then?"
–end it for you?–
Axa felt her breath catch in her throat, felt her knees buckle, heard her sabres clatter on the floor as they fell from her fingers. Those words– his words– had unearthed something inside her, something huge, and the weight of it made her stagger and stumble.
–for you? –end it for you?– end it–
As she struggled to remain on her feet, Thaos stepped confidently toward her, and her companions rushed to surround her, their weapons raised. This was it, the final confrontation, the last battle, the end–
–end it–
Until it wasn't. Thaos raised a hand, arcane energy crackling in his palm– but then he froze, his eyes narrowing, his lip curling, and he turned just in time to aim the blast at an advancing guard instead. The guard flew back down the corridor, sprawling on the polished tile, and Axa finally fell, dropping to the floor as Aloth tried and failed to catch her. Thaos glanced back at the pathetic little party, sneering derisively.
"Or perhaps I shan't. Not yet, anyway. I've more pressing matters to attend to for now."
–Shall I– Shall I end it–
"No–" Axa groaned, the heat in her skull and the chill in her bones forcing her to her hands and knees, dizziness and nausea overwhelming her senses. "Thaos– stop– you—"
–end it for you?–
But he turned away regardless, striding toward the palace doors without another word, and Axa had no choice but to let her eyes roll back into her head, exhausted–
"Shall I end it for you?"
–and when she opened them again, Grand Inquisitor Thaos no longer had his back turned. He was facing the crowd now, facing her, and Anthea shuddered with horror.
How long had this been going on? How long had she been here, watching this? She couldn't remember exactly, couldn't tell, except that it had definitely been for far, far too long.
The Apostate should have been screaming. She should have been dead. She was strapped to the Iron Wheel, that cruel parody of the gods' Sacred Cycle, her bones shattered, her extremities mutilated, most of her long, black hair torn from her raw, bloody scalp, one half of her face disfigured by flame into a seeping, twisted mess of burnt flesh. She had vied for the authority of Woedica, and so had been subjected to a portion of Her burden, had whispered and connived as Skaen might, and so had suffered the punishments due a disobedient slave. Her agony was right and just and complete. And yet still, still she managed to defy the gods, to defy him, and Anthea couldn't help but envy her strength.
If only she could have been half so strong herself.
"End it?" The Apostate choked out her words between ragged gasps, but somehow her voice remained steady and strong. "I am... already far beyond... any of your false mercies... Grand Inquisitor. I... am at peace. Can you... say the same?"
For a moment, just for a mere fraction of a second the Grand Inquisitor's body betrayed him, his shoulders tensing and his mouth contorting in fury– but it passed so quickly that it may as well have not happened at all, and when he spoke again, his voice was as cold and pitiless as the grave.
"Very well, then. You have sealed your fate. Since you are too proud to accept your rightful end, you shall have one nevermore. You are hereby convicted of the crime of heresy. As one who so strives to stand apart from the gods and Their divine order, so shall your soul be confined to the Eternal Prison, never again to sully Berath's Wheel. There you shall stay, alone and undying, until the promised time comes for Rymrgand to claim the final dregs of all creation."
An icy dread washed over Anthea as the implications sunk in. How had it come to this? She'd only ever wanted a world in which all kith could live in peace and harmony under the mercy and guidance of the True Gods, but there was no mercy here, no peace. The Apostate was doomed.
And it was her fault. Because of her, the Apostate– this poor, kind woman now faced a fate far, far worse than mere death. And she was– this woman was–
The Grand Inquisitor stood a while longer on the dais as the Apostate was removed from the Iron Wheel, her broken bones grinding together audibly in the deathly silent court, and he cast his eyes over the assembled Faithful, proud and mighty and terrible. And when his gaze landed on Anthea, he gave her the smallest, most subtle of smiles.
The world went black around her as she fainted–
–and Axa followed her into that darkness, bottomless and unforgiving.
—
When she woke, the city was burning.
What had begun as a frantic free-for-all in the great hall of the Ducal Palace had quickly blown up into a full-fledged riot that now spanned the breadth of Defiance Bay. At first, Axa hadn't been able to tell if the sky had been darkened by smoke or by the passage of time, but when she finally managed to gather herself and make her way outside, she discovered that it was both. Buildings smoldered and filled the air with black, acrid clouds, mingling with the coppery tang of spilled blood and the cries of kith. She couldn't help but think of all the good she'd done in this city, the people she'd helped. Kaenra and Purnisc, Nonton and Ingroed. Niah, Dalton, Nedyn, Osric. Were they all dead now?
Had it all been for nothing?
"Thaos," Axa croaked, smoke stinging her throat. "Where is he?"
"Ran off," Edér spat ruefully. "Said he had 'pressing business' to attend to. Godsdamned coward."
"Hey now, he probably just had the sudden urge to defecate," Hiravias snarked. "You know how elders can be." He grinned nervously at Axa, and as she turned to admonish him, she was stopped short by a sudden realization.
Elders– pressing business–
"Lady Webb," she gasped, and although she was still badly disoriented, she took off running toward Brackenbury.
To get from First Fires to the south end of Brackenbury shouldn't have taken long, but the ongoing mayhem in the city had transformed the path linking the two locales into a sort of gruesome obstacle course. More than once was Axa forced to dodge a flaming chunk of rubble or a terrified refugee, and when she happened across a mob affixing an animancer's severed head to a pike, it took everything she had to suppress her urge to scream her Chanter's lightning at the perpetrators, to draw her blades and dispense justice. She would have been more than justified in doing so, she knew, but the truth was that this riot was no longer a situation that any kith could hope to bring to heel, much less one little orlan and her handful of companions. It was a force of nature now, a wildfire that could only be stopped by allowing it to burn itself out. It would be futile to try to do anything now but to get to Hadret House, to find Lady Webb, and time was of the essence. So she kept running.
The sanitarium was ablaze. She'd figured it would be, but it dismayed her all the same to see it: the smoke pouring from the ruined roof, bodies dangling from the shattered windows, blood and viscera dribbling down the brick facade. She wondered briefly about the fates of the animancers working inside when the angry mob reached them, of Ethelmoer forced to watch helplessly as his life's work was rent asunder and his colleagues were slaughtered in front of him, of the patients locked in the basement and awaiting salvation just like the Eothasian priests back in Gilded Vale– but it was all too much to take, and so she tried not to think about it as she dashed past the grisly sight. They were beyond saving now, unfortunate though it was, and there would be time to mourn later.
Hadret House was relatively unscathed by comparison, although it looked as though a bîaŵac had blown through the interior. Scattered papers blanketed the floors like fresh snowfall, books and scrolls sprawled from overturned tables, shattered ink pots ruining expensive rugs. And not a soul remained inside. Except–
Axa relaxed as best she could, let her Watcher senses drift to the fore, and although she could perceive some vague impressions of essence left behind by the living all over the building, she couldn't make out any intact souls hiding behind any curtains or bookshelves, no one tucked away under a heavy desk or inside a chest. But she could feel an insistent tug coming from above her, a familiar presence pulsing and burning in the In-Between like a lit beacon, and her heart sank as she realized exactly what it was– who it was.
"No one here?" Sagani peered around cautiously, muscles tensed, ready for anything. "Are we too late?"
"No, she's still here," Axa muttered, already staggering toward the stairs. "Up here. But..." She trailed off into silence as she ascended, all her previous urgency gone. There was no need to rush anymore.
After all, Eydis Webb was dead.
It hadn't happened very long ago. Although the blood that had pooled in the cavity of her ribcage was already mostly dry, thick and sticky like the spilled liquor from her shattered glass on the floor beside the bed, Axa could still tell that the woman's death had been relatively recent from the way her soul still clung close to her body, flaring up when the Watcher approached, almost as though the old Cipher had been waiting for her. While her companions looked on, silent with shock and sorrow, Axa closed her eyes, braced herself, reached out–
–It was all quiet now. In here, anyway. Outside, the madness of the riot raged and squalled, but in here, in her home at Hadret House, it was calm and quiet and empty, the perfect mood for enjoying a little well-aged brandy. She hoped Axa would forgive her for starting without her.
She'd sent her people away at the start of it all, to see to the safety of their own homes and families. A few stubborn types had tried to insist on staying, to defend her– as though she needed their assistance– but they were easy enough to "convince" otherwise, and it was child's play for an accomplished Cipher like herself to cast a little glamor over her base of operations, make its presence simply slide off of the simpler minds of those who might wish her harm. She hadn't gotten this far, grown this old, by being some wilting waif who couldn't take care of herself.
Although, she supposed, that hardly mattered now.
She recognized him long before she saw him. Recognized his scent, the cadence of his footsteps, all those familiar pathways he'd worn into her brain lighting up again like a river once more flowing through an ancient valley after a long, long drought. Impossibly, he looked exactly the same as he always had. It was strangely comforting.
"There you are," she murmured. "I was beginning to wonder."
"Forgive me for tarrying so long," he replied gently. He was being sincere, at least insofar as she could tell. Typical.
She sighed and turned toward the window, the warm glow of the fires in the streets below illuminating her wizened face. "I was a fool to think I could rein these people in. To tame them with my ever-so-subtle manipulations. Wasn't I?"
"No need to be so harsh with yourself," he assured her. "Practice is never as easy as theory. And you came closer than most, anyway."
"Hnh. A fine epitaph," she muttered, swirling her brandy in her glass. She took another sip, let it lay bitter on her tongue.
He gave her the very slightest hint of a smile. "No worse than most, my dear."
She closed her eyes, relishing the moment– fine brandy, warm bed, a genuine compliment from the only man she'd ever truly loved. A fine epitaph indeed.
And suddenly, so suddenly she took herself by surprise, she hurled her mind against his, over and over and over, attacking with every last mote of energy in her body. Veins in her temple throbbed, her heart pounded against her frail ribs, and still he resisted effortlessly, just as he always had. Even here, at the end of all things, even after her unnaturally long lifetime spent working and preparing and honing her craft, even now she couldn't–
But she could. And for an instant, she did. One brick from one wall in the vast, impenetrable fortress of his mind had finally wiggled loose, and she desperately grasped at the wisp of thought that escaped.
"Twin Elms," she gasped, dizzy from exertion and the thrill of victory. "...What's in Twin Elms?"
"Pulled that from my mind, did you?" He cocked an eyebrow at her, corner of his mouth twitching. "I have to admit, I'm impressed."
"Well." She settled back against her pillows again, controlling her breathing even as exhaustion caught up with her. "I've had plenty of time to practice."
He crossed the room to her credenza, examining her selection of spirits. "I can tell you have." At last his gaze fell on the brandy, and he smiled almost wistfully as he lifted it to his nose, his free hand reaching for a glass.
She wanted to scowl at his presumptuousness, but found she couldn't quite suppress a bemused grin instead, like one a mother might have for a particularly bold child. "I was saving that for someone, actually."
To his credit, he immediately drew back. "Were you? Pardon me." He reluctantly set the bottle back down, shaking his head. "Pity. It's a fine vintage. I doubt she could truly appreciate it the way we're able to."
"Don't underestimate her." It was not meant as a caution, but as a threat.
"I have no intention of doing so." Her feather mattress sagged beneath his weight as he sat himself down on the edge of her bed, turning slightly to face her. His eyes looked to be full to the brim with sorrow, but she could see beneath the facade, down to the cold, hard truth inside him. "Eydis. You always knew that this is how it was going to be. How it has to be."
The knife was in his hand. It was already smeared with the blood of her countrymen.
"Is that so?" She tilted her head up at him, narrowing her eyes defiantly. "Prove it, then."
She didn't even really feel the knife slip in. It was more of a focused pressure against her midsection, only slightly more insistent than his hand pressing gently against her breastbone, pinning her to the pillows. The sensation brought to her mind the image of an antique paper lantern, old and stiff and delicate, with a paring knife driven between two of its wire ribs.
Taking that analogy to its logical conclusion, she supposed it could only be her light that was leaking out of her now, her warmth. How fitting.
The glass of brandy, still half full, rolled from her insensate fingers, tumbled to the floor below, and she could very dimly hear it shatter as her lifeforce began to ebb. She reached out to him desperately, clasping his knife hand in between her own, and gathering the very last of her quickly fading energy, she dove into his mind one last time. One last question that was too big to be just a question, it was a part of her, a state of being, a fire in which she'd burned for decades, and this would be her very last chance–
And he let her. For once, he left his mind utterly unguarded, and she penetrated his thoughts and memories as easily as his dagger had penetrated her flesh. And there before her, waiting patiently for her to find, was the answer to the only question that had ever truly mattered to her. And it changed everything.
"I knew it," she whispered, and she looked one last time into Thaos ix Arkannon's eyes as death finally claimed her–
Axa snapped back to her senses, her face wet with tears, Thaos' merciless gaze burned into her mind. Webb's soul was gone, spirited away on the winds of the In-Between, and Axa stood before all that now remained of Defiance Bay's most powerful Cipher. She turned to her companions.
"He's gone,” she rasped, drawing the back of her hand across her face. “To Twin Elms."
"The Holy Cradle," Hiravias murmured reverently. "The City of the Builders. Oh, that can't be good."
"Then we follow," Pallegina asserted. "Before we lose him again."
"He'll have a damned hard time gettin' there, I'd wager," Edér muttered. "Wet season's still on. Stormwall Gorge damn near down to Elmshore'll be flooded for another month at least."
Aloth's eyes darted around nervously. "There's no other way into Eir Glanfath? None at all?"
"Not unless we all suddenly and serendipitously sprout wings, no," Hiravias replied. "And before you ask: yes, I can turn into a few different birds, but no, none big enough to carry kith."
"What are we to do, then?" Kana cried. "We can't simply allow him to get away with–"
He was interrupted by a loud crash from downstairs, the tinkling of broken glass followed closely by shouting from the street. It seemed that now that Webb was no longer around to maintain her protective illusion over Hadret House, the rioters and looters had taken notice.
"What we need to do," Sagani barked, "is get the Hel out of this city. I, for one, think it'd be wisest to retreat to Caed Nua for now. We can figure out the rest later. Right, Watcher?" The little huntress laid a comforting hand on the other woman's shoulder, but Axa only turned away, dazed, and trudged slowly away from her friends toward the back of the room.
The bottle of brandy still stood on the credenza.
–"Eydis. You're– I hope to include you among my friends, too, someday. When this is all over."–
In one quick motion, Axa plucked the brandy from the polished wooden counter and tucked it into her satchel. I'll toast to you over his corpse, Eydis. My friend. I swear it. She turned back to her companions, fists trembling at her sides.
"Let's get out of here."
—
"There she is! The Watcher of Caed Nua! It's her!"
The trek back home had been a difficult one, somehow seeming longer and more arduous than it ever had been before, and the struggle was duly reflected in the party's overall mood. Gone were the jokes and songs and lively chatter of journeys past. What little conversation had taken place amongst the travelers during this long walk had consisted mainly of curtly delivered instructions, whispered speculation about the immediate future, or carefully constructed reassurances which were invariably met with stony silence. Morale had never been lower.
And now, upon finally making it to their destination, they were met with what appeared to be an angry mob, replete with the customary torches and pitchforks.
Of course, Axa thought numbly.
"Reminds me of home," Edér quipped, drawing up protectively close behind her.
"Little Mistress! Oh, thank the Flame ye're back!" Eld Engrim hobbled out of the chapel to meet her and her retinue, his speed defying his age and physical condition, and he grasped desperately at her, his knobbly old hands shaking. "These'ns shew up some days back, howlin' fer ye, an' it's been all me 'n yer stone stewardess can dae t' keep 'em from teerin' doon th' place!"
"Fye, am sure ye've been battlin' fer yer life from th' bottom o' yer bottles, ye coxfither," Iselmyr spat, narrowing Aloth's eyes at the drunken old priest.
"And from behind your pulpit as well, I imagine," Pallegina added.
Engrim's bloodshot, rheumy eyes darted nervously between his Lady and her unimpressed companions. "Well what ought I done, Mistress? Call the Holy Flame doon 'pon 'em? They're yer subjects, ye ken!"
"Subjects?" Kana blinked in shock as he turned to regard the group of peasants and farmers and merchants that were now starting to gather up around them. "You mean to say these are all people who live and work in the lands surrounding Caed Nua?"
"Appears so," Sagani answered, casting her keen eyes over the mob while Itumaak growled softly at her hip. "And by the look of them, they're not very happy with us."
"And by the smell of them, they're not only pissed off, they're also piss drunk," Hiravias muttered, sniffing at the air. "Literally, in some cases. Axa, take it from me: being surrounded by inebriated Dyrwoodans is never a good thing. I know you're not exactly feeling up to it, but I think it'd be for the best if we dealt with this swiftly."
Of course. Of course. She stood silently for a moment, gathering what scraps remained of her tattered patience before finally turning to face the crowd. The shouts of the disgruntled commoners quickly dwindled to a soft grumble under her gaze, piercing and unflappable, and when the din of the crowd had grown calm enough, she spoke.
"I am Axa Mala, Watcher and Lady of Caed Nua," she announced, her voice smooth and even despite her frayed nerves, her crippling fatigue, her utter frustration with her lot in life thus far. "I take it you're all here because you have grievances you wish to discuss with me? Well, you have my full and undivided attention."
The mob shifted to and fro, mumbling amongst themselves, until one folk woman, brawny and ruddy-cheeked, stepped forward and thrust a thick, calloused finger at the orlan. "Alright," she snarled. "Alright, fine. Since the rest of y'all's too chickenshit to start, I'll do it. Now you're damn right we got grievances with you, Little Miss Wildcat. 'Cause it's you, you and your ruffians, been terrorizin' all us honest workin' kith this last week and some. And why's we're here is 'cause we ain't havin' it no more."
"My companions and I have been in Defiance Bay and parts beyond these past two weeks," Axa countered gently. "What exactly did these 'ruffians' do or say to you?"
"Somethin' about some horseshit 'crop tax' that I ain't never heard of since ol' Maerwald were around," the farmer retorted, scowling at the memory. "Tried to get money outta me they knew damn well I ain't had, and when I told 'em so, they set my whole field ablaze. And when my boy..." She paused suddenly, her face contorting with rage and sorrow, and when she continued, her voice was thick with unshed tears. "...when he tried standin' up to 'em, they went 'n knocked him in the head but fierce. He can still stand and he can still talk, but he can't think straight no more. Damn sure's he can't work. Now how's me and mine s'posed to run the farm like that? Ain't we pay enough money in taxes for you? Now you gotta make us pay in blood, too?"
Another from the crowd stepped forward, a well-dressed dwarven man. "They came after me for some sort of 'road toll,' they said. I've been traveling these roads for decades and never heard of any toll, but I paid up, just trying to keep the peace and get to my destination on schedule. And as thanks for my cooperation, the bastards executed my guards! Ran them through, right in front of me! Those were good people, men and women with families to support. How am I to compensate their spouses and their children? I can't even continue on my way without proper protection from bandits, and I'm carrying sensitive merchandise here, perishables! How am I to recoup my losses?"
Axa winced. "Not that I'm accusing anyone here of lying– far from it, actually– but what exactly gave you all the idea that these armed thugs were working for me?"
The farmer woman planted her hands on her hips. "Well they said they's workin' for the Lady of Caed Nua. Ain't that you?"
"It is. I am. But I didn't order anything like what you're describing, and I never would. Someone is probably trying to–" As the words left her mouth, the realization struck her like a bolt of lightning between the eyes. Of course. Of course. Of course it'd be him again.
It seemed that Aloth had had the selfsame revelation at exactly the same time, and she heard his leather armor creak behind her as he balled his hands into fists. "Gathbin," he hissed.
Axa was quiet for a moment before she spoke again. "Listen carefully. The people who assaulted you were not sent by me. And as your thaynu, you have my word that this will not happen again. Not to you, and not to your neighbors. I'll see to it." She turned to Engrim. "Increase patrols on thoroughfares and backroads both. And make sure our people are recognizably ours. My orders are to kill anyone who dares impersonate a representative of Caed Nua." The old man nodded nervously, briefly searching his robes for something to copy the orders onto before Kana eagerly thrust parchment and stylus at him.
The crowd murmured amongst themselves at this, torches and farming implements lowered ever-so-slightly. Even the farmer woman sounded more desperate than angry when she next spoke. "That's a start, yeah. But what about what's already done? What about my burnt crops, my boy?"
"And my spoiled wares," the dwarf merchant cried. "And my guards' families!"
"A fair point. It is my duty to protect my subjects. Failing that, the least I can do is compensate you for your losses." Axa turned to Engrim again, untying a pouch the size of an aumaua's fist from her belt. "See to it that this is distributed fairly amongst these people," she instructed, setting the purse atop the parchment still in his hand with a heft that made his eyes bulge.
Edér leaned close, a thin sheen of sweat on his forehead. "Uh... Axa, I know you're one of them generous types and all, but that's– there's gotta be at least a thousand–"
"Yes," she stated calmly. "By my reckoning, it ought to cover any damages done as well as a bit extra for the trouble. Wouldn't you say?"
All pretense of violence dissipated in an instant as the pouch was opened and the glittering coin inside revealed, and Aloth couldn't help but chuckle at the predictability of it all. "Isn't that always the way of things? Words and deeds speak loudly, it seems, but coin speaks ever louder," he murmured, turning to smile at the little Watcher. But she was already gone, trudging wordlessly toward the main doors to her keep, the crowd behind her uttering their thanks as they gathered around Engrim with their hands outstretched.
He clenched his teeth hard, swallowing the lump in his throat, and reluctantly followed her.
By the time he joined everyone else in the great hall, Axa was half collapsed in her throne, the rest of her traveling companions standing between her and a man Aloth recognized as Marshall Forwyn, advisor to Erl Bademar and one of the officials who had been present at the initial hearing regarding Caed Nua's rightful ownership in Defiance Bay. Considering what Gathbin had been up to, both here and in the city just before the riots, Aloth feared that Forwyn's presence was very much not indicative of good news.
And he was right. "I'm afraid what Warrin told you is true, Lady Mala," Forwyn declared soberly. "Lord Gathbin has been taking full advantage of your absence to undermine your reputation with your subjects, and it seems he now feels bold enough to move on Caed Nua herself. He is slowly building an army of mercenaries near your territory at Yenwood Field, and it seems he means to fight you to the bitter end. While Erl Bademar has chosen not to officially ally himself with either side in this conflict, he has seen fit to send me to offer you my military expertise and advice, including but not limited to any assistance you might need forming a fighting force of your own."
"And yet he refuses to just make my claim on Caed Nua official," she retorted hotly. "Why? Because I'm an orlan? An unmarried woman? A foreigner?"
Forwyn frowned. "Despite what Gathbin himself might have you believe, the reasoning behind the Erl's decision is more complicated than mere prejudice. In short, the people of Dyrwood are not ones to bend easily or happily to distant authorities, and this extends to her noble families as well. When lands and titles are stripped from lords or ladies with even the flimsiest claims upon them, it tends to spark outrage and indignance that spreads throughout the whole family, leaking into their subjects and their political allies, encouraging civil unrest. Fiercer battles are fought over milder matters than this. Sometimes even wars. In truth, it would be a simpler matter to kill the man in a private challenge than to risk stirring up the ire of his entire bloodline by disregarding his unfortunately entirely legitimate claim to 'his' ancestral land. At least then the only retribution we'd have to worry about would be from those individuals in the family with a personal fondness for Gathbin– which, according to what we've heard, should prove rather sparse indeed." He allowed himself a tight little smirk.
Axa sighed heavily, slouching down in her seat, and the Steward provided what little comfort she could for her Lady, a metaphysical hand on the woman's shoulder. "Don't suppose I could just stay put behind my castle walls," she muttered. "Let Gathbin and his goons come to me."
"An understandable position to want to take, considering your recent hardships," Forwyn sighed, casting a sympathetic look at the orlan. "But unfortunately, Gathbin's not quite so foolish as to destroy the very keep he wishes to take in his attempt to do away with you. And if you simply hide from him in here, he'll be more than happy to simply carry on tormenting your subjects in your surrounding lands. Refusing to confront him is as good as refusing to perform your duties as Lady of Caed Nua, and the people will take notice and adjust their support for you accordingly." He paused for emphasis. "And that includes Erl Bademar."
She grimaced. "So what you're saying is I have no choice but to fight him."
"You claimed Caed Nua by strength of arms the first time around," Forwyn pointed out matter-of-factly. "If you wish to truly legitimize your claim in the eyes of the rest of the nation, you must prove yourself able and willing to defend her again. That is what it means to be noble in the Dyrwood."
"Might makes right, then," Aloth sneered, disgusted. "How barbaric."
Hiravias shrugged. "Honestly, it's a more meritorious system than I was expecting from a bunch of morally bankrupt slave traders like the Dyrwoodan nobility. I mean, no matter how you slice it, having the strength to fight and the charisma to convince others to help you do it is better proof of right to rule than any multisyllabic, hyphen-laden surname wielded by a pack of inbred blue-bloods could ever hope to be."
"So you're here to be my advisor," Axa grumbled, peering up at Forwyn. "Then advise me. Gathbin has an army. What do I have?"
Forwyn crossed his arms over his chest, sighing deeply. "In truth, not much. You've your hirelings here on the grounds proper, and I've sent out a summons for volunteer soldiers throughout your territory. Now that you've set your subjects straight on who was behind the attacks on their homesteads and mercantile convoys, hopefully they'll decide they'd prefer your rule over Gathbin's. Other than that, you're effectively on your own."
"If the city weren't on fire, I'd suggest roping the Dozens into this," Edér grinned, gesturing with his pipe. "Have 'em make themselves useful for once."
Forwyn cocked an eyebrow. "I'll keep that in mind. Knowing them, they'll still be as ornery as ever once the smoke clears, and more than eager to fight the good fight alongside an ally. Additionally, I am acquainted with a modestly sized group of military veterans who would prove quite useful in training and leading any new troops we can recruit from the countryside. However, it would also be rather pricey to retain their services, I'm afraid– about ten thousand copper or so."
"Ten thousand!?" Axa balked, burying her hands in her hair. "But I don't– gods, I'm still rebuilding the walls, here!"
"Time, also, is on your side, Lady Mala," Forwyn reassured her. "Rumor has it that Gathbin has been suffering some... loyalty issues as of late, and his inner circle is currently undergoing some rather severe restructuring due to that, slowing his progress significantly. Not to mention the fact that his army seems to be beset left, right, and center by misfortune and misunderstandings– lost or discarded paperwork, unexpected tolls, bounties placed on the heads of his most accomplished mercenaries... It's almost as though the powers that be don't wish him to march on Yenwood Field either." He winked at the little woman. "Or, at least, they wish to make it as difficult as possible for him to do so."
"Yes, yes, I take your meaning," she sighed, massaging her temples. "I'll thank the erl once Gathbin is dead. So I have some time at least. But do I have enough time to earn ten thousand copper? Wael help me, I don't even know where to start."
"My Lady, if I may?" The Steward's voice echoed softly but clearly through the hall. "Thanks to your efforts thus far, we've recently been able to restore the Warden's Lodge, and staff it with a seasoned game warden. Although his duties mostly revolve around the wildlife surrounding Caed Nua, he does also keep track of bounties for wanted criminals in the area, and his contacts pay quite handsomely. And..." She hesitated. "And then there's the matter of the missive we've received."
"Missive?" Axa straightened up a bit, curious. "From whom?"
"From one Renengild, the mayor of a small mining town called Stalwart nestled deep in the snowy north of the White March. She has sent a request for your aid, my Lady. It seems she wishes to gain access to... to Durgan's Battery."
"Durgan's–" Kana practically tripped over his own jaw. "The legendary forge that fell to ruin and hasn't heard a single footfall in its halls in nigh on two centuries now? The source of Durgan Steel, the steel for which there is reportedly no peer, neither in this world nor the next? That Durgan's Battery?" His wide-eyed expression of wonder quickly melted into a gigantic smile, and his hands flew to and fro as he gestured enthusiastically. "The lost treasures inside alone must be worth a fortune! Not to mention the forgotten history behind the place, the enigmatic tragedy of her Pargrunen founders and their downfall, the mystique..."
Sagani folded her arms and smirked. "Can't imagine why anybody'd want in there."
"The fruits of such an endeavor could prove very beneficial to both our campaign against Gathbin and our overarching goal of subduing the Leaden Key," Pallegina mused thoughtfully. "And if we were to actually render the forge operational again, a new and quite lucrative trade route could be established between Stalwart and the Republics." Her nictating membranes flicked across her eyes. "...And throughout the Dyrwood as well, of course."
"Speaking of the Leaden Key," the Steward added cautiously, "there's another reason I thought to bring this to your attention, my Lady. Of those who have responded to Renengild's call, a certain sect of masked Woedicans is rumored to have been sighted amongst them. I can't claim to know exactly what they might be seeking in the Battery, but I can't imagine it's anything approaching noble."
Axa felt her heart plunge into her stomach like an icy rock hurled into a sea of acid, and she slumped forward, defeated. Of course. Everywhere I go. Gods, no matter where I look, I'm trapped. Well, I did want to try and break my habit of running away from my problems...
"Not a bad idea," Forwyn agreed. "Someone with your unique abilities and admirable tenacity might actually have a decent chance at breaching the Battery, and the monetary rewards and prestige would be considerable. Although if you should head up that way, I'd recommend giving Crägholdt a wide berth."
"Crägholdt? Archmage Concelhaut's stronghold?" Now it was Aloth's turn to flap his hands about excitedly, awestruck at the mere mention of the man. "Is there– but he's– w-what exactly is going on there that we ought avoid?"
"The situation at Crägholdt is as steeped in secrecy as the Archmage himself, I'm afraid," the Steward replied. "All we know for certain is that the Torn Bannermen, an infamous band of highly renowned and ruthless mercenaries, have been stationed outside of his tower for some time now apparently attempting to gain entrance, but it appears that the two parties are so evenly matched as to result in a stalemate– at least, for the moment."
Aloth chuckled nervously. "That's not entirely surprising, considering how powerful Concelhaut is rumored to be. But still, that one man's efforts could bring the entirety of the notorious Torn Bannermen to a standstill..." He turned to grin ruefully at Axa. "Would that either of them would fight for us instead!"
She didn't respond. She had felt cautiously hopeful for the first time in a long time, thinking about her prospects in the White March– fantasizing that it might be like a little vacation, far away from all this madness– but upon learning of the Leaden Key's presence there, Axa had completely given up on listening anymore and had instead elected to stare blankly at her hands folded in her lap, mired in self-pity and mortal terror, trying hard to think of nothing. It seemed there was still a way for her to run away after all, even if only in her mind. But as she knew all too well, her problems weren't going anywhere. They never really did, even when she thought for sure that she'd finally managed to outsmart them. Everything was just like it was before she'd left Ixamitl, except worse. External, internal, trivial, crucial, personal, systemic: No matter the nature of the conflict, no matter how far or how fast she ran, they'd follow her to the ends of Eora, burning down every sanctuary she tried to hide in, smashing every barrier, mental or physical, until nothing stood between the two of them, between her and her fate, and then she'd have no choice, no choice, no–
"Alright, you." She snapped out of her reverie as Sagani rather abruptly muscled her up and out of her seat. "Up to bed. Right now."
Axa was almost too stunned to react, but she somehow managed anyway. "What– but– hey–"
The huntress shook her head, her thick black braids whipping about her face. "No buts, young lady. Let's go. I'll explain to the others later." Itumaak helpfully nipped at Axa's heels, and the rest of her party simply watched, helpless, as Sagani frog-marched the little Watcher out of the great hall.
"Uh... meeting adjourned, I guess?" she heard Hiravias mumble as the doors swung shut behind them.
Once they were outside, away from the ears and eyes of the others, Sagani leaned close, her voice low and gentle and patient. "Now it isn't usually like me to pull this act on an adult, but you need it. I know that look, Axa. You're overwhelmed, you're terrified, and you're exhausted. You think you're just barely keeping your head above water, but the truth is, you're drowning. You're burnt out, bad, and you're in no condition to be making any big decisions right now. Fatigue kills, and fatigued leaders have a habit of killing their followers along with themselves. And I know you don't want that."
Axa opened her mouth to protest, but no argument sprung forth. Only tears that she quickly blinked away, and a vague sense of guilt– accompanied, oddly, by relief.
Sagani pushed open the door to Brighthollow and lead Axa inside. "Go and take a nice, long, hot bath. Have your staff prepare your favorite meal, a lot of it, and eat. Have a smoke and a drink, put on your comfiest nightclothes, crawl into that big, soft bed of yours, and get some sleep. Caed Nua won't crumble into dust while you're doing what you need to do for yourself, and when you wake up, you'll have a clearer, sharper mind to work with." She only let go of Axa's arm when they stood before the stairs, but she still stood close, never once breaking eye contact. "And we'll all be here when you get back. Got it?"
Axa blinked at the other woman, a maelstrom of emotion churning inside her. "How is it you're a better mother to me than my own mama ever was?" she whispered, her usually bold voice wavering.
"Something to do with perspective, I'm sure," the huntress chuckled, smiling sadly and patting her shoulder. "And anyway, I don't mind getting the chance to flex my mom muscles a little, keep my skills sharp. Kinda lets me pretend I'm home, for a moment. Now– get up there and unwind, damn it."
"Thank you, Sagani," Axa murmured, only barely holding back her tears. "I'll try."
—
And she tried.
She truly, truly did. She bathed, though she was too anxious to luxuriate in the water for any appreciable length of time. She ate, though the food was like sawdust in her mouth no matter how much wine she quaffed. She smoked herself dizzy, though the tears still came, copious and unrelenting.
And she slept. And in that sleep, she dreamt.
Usually, her dreams ended when she approached Thaos in the temple, that single all-important question forming on her lips while remaining maddeningly incognizable in her mind. But this time the dream started with him, his merciless gaze boring into her, horror and despair swirling in her mind, the terrible, unknowable question already asked and answered. She turned to run, to flee from the truth as she always did, but her feet suddenly twisted beneath her and she fell hard on the cold stone floor, only realizing when she checked herself for injuries that she had slipped in blood, and it was not her own.
Somehow she had ended up in the caverns beneath Dyrford again, lying before that horrific pool that brimmed with the blood of innumerable sacrifices. As she watched, horrified, the gruesome soup churned and swelled, and a huge, twisted figure rose up out of the gore, its gnarled limbs jutting out at unnatural angles. It was the tree from Gilded Vale again, bodies still swinging from its branches– or so she thought, until it turned toward her and she saw the glittering black eyes, the roughly shorn scalp, the scarred pits where a nose and ears should have been.
She cowered before Him, certain He would kill her. But instead Skaen merely staggered up out of the pool and shuffled past her, sniveling and sneering as He genuflected before another massive figure that stood shrouded in the shadows beyond Axa's sight. He lifted His bony, trembling hands to the unseen figure, opening His fists to display their contents: in one, He held the corpse of the Cipher Axa had met– and whose company she'd rejected– beneath Dyrford. Oddly, the body was entangled with that of the strange, uncouth Magranite priest she and her companions had had a brief and very unpleasant encounter with at Magran's Fork so long ago, back when they'd just begun their journey in earnest. The two dead folk were charred and smoldering, partially melted together, grotesquely intertwined in death, but somehow she instinctively recognized them, and she shuddered in revulsion at this macabre gift.
In His other hand, He presented the body of Eydis Webb, still engulfed in the flames of the Defiance Bay riots. The shadowy figure gave a barely perceptible nod, seemingly pleased by these offerings, and Axa could just barely make out the glint of metal on the figure's brow, firelight glancing off of the broken spikes of Woedica's ruined crown.
Webb's eyes snapped open suddenly, her gaze instantly finding Axa, and the old woman's voice shot into her mind like a chill wind piercing a warm room.
Don't let him finish it, she urged. Don't let Them win.
A low moan escaped Axa's throat, like a wounded animal's final protest before the hunter's knife found its mark, and she covered her face with her hands, unable to bear any more. And when she lowered them again–
–she saw the silhouette in the doorway, the shadow cast on the floor in the dying light of the setting sun. It was her. Of course it was. Who else would it be?
"Oh, Anthea! I– you've..."
Of course she'd come home right now, right at this particular moment. No matter. None of this mattered.
"Not a word,” she hissed, trying hard not to look at the other woman. "Not another word. I don't want to hear it."
The woman approached, kneeling amongst the long, black tresses that littered the floor around her, and let her fingertips gently dance along the ragged tips of Anthea’s freshly cut hair. It was too short, far too short in the back, and badly lopsided besides. But it was done, and Anthea had done it herself.
Of course she'd made a mess of it.
She knew the other woman was trying to put her at ease, to comfort her, but Anthea could still feel the pity she was trying to hide behind her insipid smile. "It's not so bad. Really it isn't. We... maybe we can fix it a bit. Even it out some, straighten the crooked bits–"
She laughed bitterly, shaking her head that felt so much looser and lighter now that the excess weight of all that hair was gone. The feel of it scared her. Everything scared her. "You really do think this is just about my hair, don't you?" Anger and resentment rose up inside her, and tears sprung to her eyes. Pathetic. "You don't understand at all."
The other woman recoiled slightly, just for a second. "I think I understand better than you give me credit for. You just don't want to hear what I have to say." She was silent for a moment, then, softly: "I wish you'd let me help you."
"And I wish you'd realize that your help isn't what I need!" Anthea shrieked suddenly, her grip tightening on the dagger still in her hand. "It's control!"
"Anthea–"
The tears spilled over, flew from her cheeks as she thrashed and wailed. "Over my body, over my mind, over my soul– I'm tired of being a slave to circumstance, Iovara! I need some kind of control over my own life for once!"
The other woman– Iovara– reached out to her, compassion and sorrow radiating off of her like a flame giving off heat. "You have it already," she murmured. "You just need to accept–"
Anthea slapped her hand away. "No! You can't tell me how to live anymore! No one can! I will be the master of my own fate, one way or another!" She paused to brace herself for what came next, what she had to do. "And if... if no one is willing to cede that power to me... I'll just have to take it myself."
The air around them grew tense with the promise of crisis. "Anthea, please– what are you saying–"
She brought the dagger around quickly to her front, pointed the tip at her own heart. "I'll prove my life is my own–"
"Anthea–!"
Determined to finish what she'd started, she made to thrust the dagger into herself with as much force as she could muster. But in every way that counted, Iovara was stronger than her, faster, smarter, always had been. She seized Anthea's wrists and yanked the dagger away, struggling with her, both women crying out in terror and rage, and when she finally looked at the other woman, glared into her infuriatingly beatific face, she saw the face of the Apostate–
"Axa! By the Wheel, stop!"
Axa woke sitting on the floor of her bedchamber, her vision blurred by tears, her wrists bound in the strong grip of another. She felt something drop from her hand, a tickle on the back of her neck, and when she looked up into the face before her, she nearly screamed in shock to see the Apostate– Iovara– looking back.
No– that's impossible, she's–
She blinked a few times, and her vision cleared. The long, black hair, the grey-blue eyes, the pointed ears– they did not belong to the woman from her past life's memories, but to Aloth. He was crouched in front of her clad in his nightclothes, eyes wide with alarm, his cheeks two dusky pink spots that stood out on his thin, pale face, both hands tightly gripping her wrists.
"Axa– are you–?" As soon as he saw she was back to her senses, he released her, his long, slender fingers twitching as his hands hovered between the two of them. "I– Forgive me for intruding, but I– I couldn't sleep, and I was passing by your door and I heard you in here, crying out, groaning, sobbing, and your cries kept getting louder, more pained, and so I couldn't just– so I had to– to–" He slumped forward at last, exhaling a long, shaky breath, his initial panic finally giving way to exhaustion. "Gods, what happened?"
"A nightmare," she gasped, rubbing at her forearms, her head still swimming. "The worst I've had yet. I... I don't know how I didn't–" She shook her head as she spoke, and she noticed that the motion of it felt... off somehow, unfamiliar, as though her head was suddenly looser on her neck, lighter–
...No. No, I– I didn't actually–?
Wordlessly, she glanced down at the floor to see what had fallen from her grasp upon waking, sickeningly sure that she already knew what it was. And she was right– it was a dagger, gleaming in the moonlight streaming in from the window, lying abandoned in a scattering of long, burgundy curls.
Her hands moved of her own accord. One drifted to the back of her own head, the other toward the discarded hair on the floor, touch confirming exactly what her heart already knew. It was just the same as in her dream, in Anthea's memory: everything behind her ears had been cropped severely short, a haphazard chop job that left her jaw-length forelocks the longest on her head. Her fingers brushed the sharp, prickly edges of what remained of the hair at the nape of her neck, and a shuddering, strangled cry tore up out of her throat.
Oh– I– my hair–
"I'm sorry," Aloth whispered, grimacing with sympathy. "By the time I got the door open, you had already– and then you'd pointed that thing at your chest, as though you were about to–"
"Watcher? Is everything–" Pallegina appeared in the doorway, her brow creased with concern, and her golden eyes widened with shock upon viewing the scene inside. "What... have you done to yourself?"
"I don't know," Axa sobbed, clutching at her head with both hands. Aloth gave the paladin a pleading, desperate look.
And so Pallegina approached and crouched low behind Axa, briskly brushing the loose tresses from the orlan's shoulders and the back of her neck before lifting her up by her armpits into a standing position. "A chair," she barked, "quickly," and Aloth obeyed without hesitation.
It wasn't long before the rest of her party was standing or sitting around her in her bedchamber, offering what comfort they could while she tried valiantly to regain her composure. She appreciated the wine and whiteleaf Kana and Edér had brought her, although for whatever reason, the hot herbal tea that had been pressed into her hands by Hiravias seemed to help calm her the most. It tasted earthy and very subtly minty, and although she had no idea what was in it, she made a conscious decision not to ask.
"Shame Aloth got here first," Edér sighed, grinning worriedly at the little woman. "Perfectly good opportunity for me to finally get that bucket of water on you."
"This is hardly a time for jokes, Edér," Aloth snapped back, wringing his hands and pacing nervously. "If I'd been any later than I was in intervening, she could have injured herself. Or worse."
"In any case, what damage has been done is far from unmanageable," Pallegina asserted, carefully scrutinizing the back of Axa's head. "My compliments, Watcher. As one with extensive experience trimming my own hair, I must say you've done a half decent job for a first attempt, made all the more impressive by having done it in your sleep." She roughly ran her fingers through the fluffy stubble. "It should be a simple matter to even this out. I can assist, if you'd like."
"Maybe I ought to lend a hand, too," Hiravias interjected, stooping to collect the trimmings from the floor. "Believe it or not, I do groom this mane of mine from time to time, and orlan hair can be a little wily if you've never worked with it before."
"I appreciate it," Axa murmured, staring down into her mug of tea. "I appreciate all of you, truly. But even if you could brew me a potion that would grow my hair back overnight, the fact remains that my overall condition is getting worse by the day." She lifted a hand to her brow, squeezed her eyes shut. "My mind is going, and now it seems not even my body is my own. I can't trust my own senses anymore, my own words, my own hands. Gods, who can I trust, who can I rely on if I can't even trust myself?"
"Surely you jest," Kana huffed. "What are we, Axa? Strangers? Hirelings? Hallucinations?" He crouched before her, laying his huge hands on her shoulders and looking hard into her face, his ever-present smile sincere and gentle. "No. We are your friends, and you can trust us. You've given so much of yourself to each of us, and you've never asked anything in return. It's only right that we return your kindness with loyalty."
She scoffed. "Thanks, but I'm no hero of legend, Kana. I'm just an ordinary woman thrust into extraordinary circumstances. I've only done what I have because there was nothing else I could have done–"
Kana gripped her shoulders tighter, fervor overcoming him. "And that is what makes you extraordinary! You see going out of your way to help others and do good deeds as your 'only choice' because to do anything else is so antithetical to your very nature that it would never even occur to you as an option! Surely you must know that most kith do not conduct themselves so?" The giant man rose to his feet again, posing as though he were a lecturer pontificating behind his podium. "For example: you absolutely did have a choice with me. You could have left me to my own devices, scribbling about the brickwork in the courtyard. Many would have! You could have denied me access to the Endless Paths after taking Caed Nua, and you'd have been well within your rights to do so. But you didn't. Instead, you risked life and limb to help me fulfill my goals, and because of that, because of your generosity and understanding, I owe you a debt of gratitude that can scarcely be repaid. Because of what you've done for me, I'll do anything and everything in my power to help you find Thaos and end your suffering. I'll follow you to the ends of Eora if that's what it takes! I swear it!" He beamed, a bright beacon of hope and camaraderie in a dark world.
Before Axa could muster a reply, Edér spoke up. "You helped me with my questions about my brother. Well, you tried, anyway. More 'n almost anyone else's ever done for me." He grinned, chewing on the stem of his pipe. "And you took out that murderin' bastard Raedric. Every soul in Gilded Vale's better off 'cause of you. Especially me. And I was always taught that one good turn deserves another."
Sagani laid a small, steady hand on her shoulder. "You're helping me to find Persoq. And unlike every other 'helpful stranger' I've met in this country, you don't expect anything for your trouble. Not even coin." She gave Axa a wry smile, clapping her on the back. "So just like you're helping me, I intend to help you. We'll track down your quarry together, see this through to the end."
Pallegina stepped forward next, cool and confident. "You relieved me of the burden of babysitting that fool of a merchant, and you have pledged your aid to me in reaching Twin Elms. This alone is worthy of my gratitude. But more than just that– I have seen you fight, seen you struggle and bleed for what you believe in, despite the difficulties you face from without and from within. There are few I have met in this world who have such integrity, such passion for pursuing their truth. I would be remiss to abandon you now, in your time of greatest need. And so, on the honor of the Republics, I shall not."
Hiravias shyly approached her, his eye locked on the floor. "You took a big chance on me. I mean, I can't think of many kith who'd agree to travel with a guy who transforms into a soul-devouring, murderous stelgaer on the regular. But then, you'd know a thing or two about bothersome alter egos, wouldn't you?" He chuckled, finally lifting his gaze to meet hers. "And even though you've more than enough to contend with yourself, you're still trying to help me figure out what my deal is. So it's my duty and my honor both to return that favor. Besides, we orlans gotta stick together, yeah?"
The room fell quiet again, and Axa blinked in surprise at her companions, blushed and fidgeted under this sudden surge of positive attention. She had never been one to make friends easily, blunt and aloof as she was, and although she'd hoped her traveling party might at least fight by her side, she'd never guessed that they'd actually be so fond of her personally. Had they always felt this way? She glanced up at each of them in turn, finding reassuring smiles on every face, and a strange, almost nostalgic feeling washed over her, soothing and cleansing, like a warm rain on a summer's eve.
But... wait, isn't someone–? She looked over at Aloth.
He was deathly pale, a faraway look in his twitching eyes, his fingers knitted together so tightly they'd gone almost completely white. When he finally took notice of the silence having lingered just a bit too long, he suddenly snapped to attention, sweat shining on his brow, and he glanced quickly around at the others before looking to Axa, seeing the question on her face.
His mouth opened, closed, opened again. "Axa, I– you've been–" And then he seemed to break somehow, sagging under the weight of some unseen burden, pressing his trembling hand to his mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I... There's something important I need to tell you. Something I should have told you a long while back. But I was... I couldn't, then. I could never find the right time." He screwed his face up into a miserable grimace. "Nor the courage."
Kana cleared his throat. "Erh– Aloth, not to step on your line, but is this really the time or place for a... a confession of this magnitude?" He gave the elf a pointed look.
Aloth looked as though he wanted to be angry, but could only manage anxious annoyance. "Kana, please; this is serious." He heaved a heavy sigh, tried to look at Axa, settled on staring at the floor in front of her instead. "Just like everyone else here, your companionship has been an extraordinary boon to me. Without you, I likely never would have even made it out of Gilded Vale, let alone all the way out to Defiance Bay. And you were indispensable in helping me to learn more about Iselmyr, of course. But... she's not the only secret I've been keeping from you. And I can't, in good conscience, keep this one from you any longer." He waited for a response from her– an acknowledgement, an objection, a question, anything– and when he heard none, he sighed again, cleared his throat, took a deep breath– and began.
"You know of my school days, my time at Bragganhyl Academy studying the arcane arts. And you know of my upbringing, my father's expectation that upon graduation I would serve under his erl... alongside him. But I haven't yet told you of how I'd planned and plotted to escape that fate, seeking out faraway patrons, desperately grasping at every alternative I could. Which is how I eventually ended up in the Spellwrights' Gilde. And... how I ended up participating in an illegal animancy experiment with them." His face flushed with shame at the recollection of it, and all around the room eyebrows jumped in shock.
This first misdeed admitted, his burden ever-so-slightly lightened, he pressed on. "I'll spare you the details. Suffice it to say, it went poorly. One of my fellow students ended up, while not quite dead, arguably worse off than that. And it was our fault. My fault. And in my guilt, I decided that the only thing to do was to turn them– and myself– in. But when I did, instead of the punishment I deserved, I was offered an opportunity. A chance not only to save myself, but to turn my entire life around." He laughed mirthlessly at this. It all seemed so obvious, in retrospect, almost tailor-made to entice him, to trap him. And it had worked flawlessly.
"My task was simple enough, at first: keep an eye on the gilde. Monitor their activities, suss out the identities of their patrons, and report back to my proctor. And it went well, for a while. I felt important, clever, needed. And then there was another accident, and this time people did die. That iteration of the gilde was disbanded, and I was once again afloat in a sea of uncertainty. But I'd been loyal, dependable, discreet. And there were rewards in store for kith like me. As I'd proven that I could be trusted, my proctor fulfilled his promise to introduce me to a vast network of agents, all fighting heroically against the scourge of animancy– and with a dearth of postings very, very far away from my father and his erl." He swallowed hard, nausea twisting his stomach as he prepared to lay bare the core of his deception. "All I had to do was recite an oath. Wear a mask. Obey without question."
The creeping dread she'd felt accompanying Aloth's every word now encased Axa's heart, freezing her blood, her breath driven from her chest. "You're one of them," she whispered. "A member of the Leaden Key."
He winced, still unable to look at her, at any of them. "I was. For years, I went where they sent me, watched who they told me to, and reported my findings back to them. My last posting was in Gilded Vale, to observe Lord Raedric and his dealings with animancers, but–"
"Then they'd been waiting for me after all," Axa breathed, every nerve in her body raw and screaming. "And you knew. You knew I was coming."
Now he looked at her, his eyes wide with panic, holding his hands out to her. "No! No, no, gods, no, I–" He tried to come closer, but Pallegina stepped between the two of them and held out an arm, glaring hard into his eyes. He shrunk away from her, resumed staring at his feet. "...When we first met, I told you I'd been in the Dyrwood for only a few months. But by then, I'd actually been here for a little less than a year. A superior met with me regularly to receive my reports and issue orders on what to investigate next, who to watch, where to go. She sent me to Gilded Vale maybe four or five months ago, but almost as soon as I arrived, I just... fell out of contact with her somehow." He shook his head. "I don't know if she left the Key, or if she was reassigned, or killed, or sacrificed to one of those horrible machines. All I know is that she told me she would return in two weeks to debrief me as always, and... she never did. I waited, but she never came back."
He spoke very softly now. "By the time I met you, I'd been completely alone for months. Adrift, directionless. I didn't know what I was going to do, where I ought to go. And then you–"
–you were kind to me–
"–you mentioned the bîaŵac, the machine in the ruins, the man in the mask and robes... and I thought, perhaps, that you might lead me back to the Key somehow." He glanced up at her briefly. "And against all odds, you did. But the more we looked into them, the more I started to doubt the Key's methods, their motives. And now..."
"And now what?" Pallegina demanded, her tone more challenging than angry. "Now you expect us all to simply forgive and forget? Based solely on your word?"
"It's not only his words that prove his character, Pallegina," Sagani murmured, folding her arms across her chest. "It's his actions, too. He's fought the Key right alongside us, never acted against any of us–"
"That we know of," the paladin was quick to add.
"–even though he's had multiple opportunities to do so. When we infiltrated their little clubhouse in the catacombs under the city, we were totally surrounded by them. He could have raised the alarm, had us completely at their mercy."
"She's right. He could have handed us right over to them– Axa and I both," Kana interjected. "He'd have been rewarded handsomely, I'm sure, had he done so. But he didn't. And he made that choice himself." The huge man laid a protective hand on Aloth's shoulder, and the elf buckled slightly under the weight of it.
"I still have my misgivings about animancy as a whole," he admitted, "but I'm absolutely certain now that the Leaden Key's way of going about contesting it is deceptive, dangerous, and monstrous. And that my vows of fealty were badly misplaced." He stepped closer again, and this time Pallegina did not stop him. "I thought they had the best interests of all kith at heart, that they would shepherd and protect us. But in truth, they're naught but an iron fist disguised as a helping hand. They've killed and tortured countless innocents in pursuit of their goals, and now even Defiance Bay is burning. They only ever used me to advance their agenda, abandoning me when it suited them without even a second thought."
He gathered his courage and looked at her again, looked into her eyes, his heart pounding wildly. "It was you who supported me. You who guided me, who listened to me, who accepted me for what I am, Iselmyr and all. In all honesty, you're the only person who ever has."
He dropped to one knee before her, kneeling like a penitent sinner. "And it's you who deserves my loyalty– and my service. If you'll have me."
Oh, gods, he thought. Please have me.
She stared back at him, astonished. She wanted to be angry. She wanted to rage at him, to weep, to throw him out and never see him again. She felt like that was, by all rights, what she ought to do.
Liar. Traitor. Sneak. No better than Vaargys, buttering me up and then using me like that–
But–
–his hand, warm and trembling in hers in Bellasege's office–
–but no matter how hard she tried–
–"Gee back, ye clods! These hooded fiends is nae t' be trusted!"–
–no matter how angry and betrayed she knew she should have felt–
–his long, delicate lashes fluttering as she made him blush again, that shy smile he only ever showed to her–
–she just... couldn't.
Fool. You stupid, foolish girl–
"Aw, c'mon, Axa," Edér muttered, glancing nervously between the two of them. "It's Aloth. He's– he's alright. Ain't he?"
You chose me–
She slid carefully out of her seat and stood above him, his head bowed, awaiting her judgment.
And she threw her arms around him.
"Idiot," she sobbed, pulling him closer, crushing him against herself. "You stupid, silly bastard. Of course I'll have you."
Unconsciously, he held his breath, too shocked to dare move a muscle. Her fuzzy jaw was pressed to his cheek, the scent of clove and cinnamon rising up from her body, soft and warm against his own, and that feeling, that exhilarating feeling of something huge and beautiful blooming within him returned for just a moment, filling all the cold, empty spots inside him with light–
She pulled away abruptly, giving him a stern, sober look despite the tears streaking her ruddy cheeks. "But I'll have no more of this sycophantic, loyalty, service horseshit. You're not my vassal. You're my friend. Just like everyone else here. And you'll stand at my side as an equal, not at my heels like some mindless lackey. Understand?"
It took him a moment to find his voice again. "I'm– of course," he murmured, his face hot, his mind reeling. "It would be my honor."
She smiled at him, and his heart melted, weak and dissolving.
Och, laddie, yer in deep...!
"If I recall correctly," Kana quipped, "he is your advisor as well, is he not? Or did he never actually accept the job?"
"Gods, I forgot all about that," Axa sighed, rubbing at her eyes yet again. "I think he did. Well, regardless– why don't you decide what our next move will be, Aloth?"
He blinked, staggered to his feet. "Me? But–"
"Yes, you. I'm in absolutely no state of mind to be making big decisions right now." She shot a knowing glance at Sagani, idly picking at the rough edges of her new haircut. "And every option available to me is equally unappealing anyway. Think of it as a display of my trust– my way of rewarding your honesty."
"'Trust is a double-edged sword, gift and burden to friends and allies both, '" he muttered, grinning wearily at her. "You taught me that one, didn't you?"
"My father's words, yes. You remembered." She smiled back at him, warm and appreciative.
He blushed again and turned away. "Um. Well– if I recall, the way to Twin Elms is impassable at the moment, and will be for a while yet," he said. "But your unique talents are wanted elsewhere. In addition, Gathbin is preparing to launch an assault against Caed Nua at Yenwood Field, and we're badly in need of allies and the coin to train, feed, and arm them." He gave her a cautious, hopeful look. "I hate to ask this, but: what are your feelings on snow?"
She sighed resignedly. "The White March, then. I just had to cut off all my nice warm hair, didn’t I?"
—