The Daughters of Devils
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Into her dreams, seditious and wild came Reva Featherblood. Night after night, in high summer or winter’s chill, Mordelain Saythrou relived the harpy queen’s descent from her tower. She felt, in those silent, paralysing fears the wind as it whipped past her enemy. Her stomach churned in the final moment when skull and pinion ploughed into the desert. It haunted her for three years.
“You can’t be serious?”
She raised an eyebrow, calculating the messenger’s honesty and intent. Her eyes, sunken and dry, told the boy the professor had been at her desk since the end of classes the day before. The room was musky, old books and stale bread clung to their nostrils.
“I am sorry, Professor Saythrou. I only give message.”
She waved him away, and re-read the note scribbled in red ink onto ageing parchment. Although done in a hurry, written on traces of an old map, it was unmistakably Coradan’s hand.
“I saw her corpse…”
What Mordelain had seen was undeniably a dead harpy. The skull caved in on the flagstones surrounding Reva’s tower. She had carted the body back to Irrakam herself, and seen to its burning by Jya’s priestesses. A final, undeniably absolution for the il’Jhain terrorised for so long by the Cult of Mishra’s leader.
“I am sorry to contact you in such undesirable circumstances,” she read. Her mouth was dry, and only now did she realise how hungry and pained she was. “But, rumours have turned to reality. The Cult of Mishra resurfaces in a moment of weakness for Irrakam. They see Jya’s abdication and the rise of a Senate as a chance to see through their plans from long ago.”
Mordelain took a deep breath. She exhaled through her nostrils, and wrinkled her nose. A cautionary glance around her study confirmed suspicions that she immersed herself in her study of demonology for a great deal longer than anticipated.
“Reva or a harpy claiming to be her takes flight from Tor Anstey, an old Tama ruin at the foot of the Zaileya northern reaches. Other, darker things flock to her. Meet me in the Crucible. We have work to do.”
Putting the note down for a moment, the professor pressed her fingers together and closed her eyes. Her senses finally dragged away from the weighty tome set out before her, hunger, tiredness, dissonance set in. After a few, silent moments, save for the distant sound of students walking to and from lecture halls beyond the dusty, sandalwood door, she stood.
Tendrils of power lashed out from her mind, catching hooks suspended all around her, and dragging her from Althanas proper into the cavernous nothingness of the Void. From hunger, to elation, and then with a crash to the hanging libraries of Petra. Mordelain took a deep breath of the icy, minty scented air and stared out at the azure skies that surrounded the corpse of ancient flying whales.
“Will Fallien ever be at peace?” she asked no one in particular.
Most unlikely.