Ternion

[Flames of Hyperion]

Kayu.

He clung to the earth like a babe to its mother’s breast. But his fingers found little purchase, tearing through the warped loam like cleavers through flesh. Distant thunder muttered upon his eardrums as it rolled through the overcast sky. Droplets of fine rain sifted down in filmy curtains, trailing fingers of slick grease on his skin. Burning wood reeked and crackled, spewing soot and smoke into the low-hanging night.

He cowered amidst the debris as a second thunderbolt descended from the heavens, vengeant wrath of the Thaynes manifest. Astride a froth of brilliant plasma, far outpacing the sonic shockwave of its own passage, tracing an idle white line from atmosphere’s edge to ground, it struck upon the fabric of war-torn Raiaera and ripped the renewed silence asunder.

Blindingly concussive overpressure rolled out from its flaring core. What remained of the magnificent redwoods at the heart of the Lindequalme bowed and shattered, explosive fury painting the clouds in vivid scarlet. Raindrops froze mid-air, glittering in shining diamond and ruby before disappearing in puffs of steaming vapour. Flaming wreckage, born from the abyss of the Necromancer’s lair, arced skyward like meteors yearning to return to the heavens.

Kayu.

The entrance to Xem’zund’s personal hell beckoned behind and below him, at the far end of the broken trail he had spent hours carving through the quagmire. Pools of liquid crimson trickled in his wake like bloody tears, pus oozing from wounds inflicted by the Harbinger’s long occupation of the elven heartland. The corrupt corrosive stench alone might have laid him low, had he been bound by such mortal laws.

But he wasn’t, and not merely because warped reality saw him crawling through treacly mana puddles that could dissolve unprotected flesh in a blink. Not merely because he and six other courageous, honourable souls had just fought the battle of a thousand lifetimes against the Dread Liege; not merely because they had only emerged victorious at the cost of their lives and the breaking of their company. Not merely because, unbeknownst to him, the plane of his existence had just survived a Certus that had doomed a thousand others.

He wasn’t bound by the laws of mortality, because he lay alone in the voracious shadow. Because broken beyond belief he stifled the grief and the sorrow until it consumed him whole. Because both in nightmare and in reality he drowned in guilt and regret and shame, and no longer could he even distinguish between lucidity and hallucination. Because he had paid in the blood of the future for his survival of today, and the pacts of the Thaynes were nothing if not capricious.

Kayu.

His wet cheeks had long frozen icy solid. The pallor upon his skin had long passed deathly. The last vestiges of life had long left the haunted depths of his eyes. The grip of death clenched tight upon every muscle, every synapse, every fibre of his being.

How many precious moments did he have, before what was left of his physical shell failed him entirely?

But until it did he had to try.

Kayu…

[Flames of Hyperion]

Broken, his body passed from one moment of consciousness to the next. Dragged by trembling limbs through desolate forest it wavered on the edge of existence. No other living soul ventured here for fear of the dead. So he sated his hunger on blades of faded grass, though his jaws could barely masticate the tough herbage. He quenched his thirst in the greasy rain, paying little attention to the burning film it left in his throat. He took shelter beneath the drooping boughs of millennia-old bloodwoods, shivering in nights not yet free of winter’s chill grasp.

Time slipped past like breath on a mirror, ephemeral as ripples on a pond.

Over hours his fevers dimmed, until the desperate struggle to live doused the fires consuming his thoughts. But no dose of harsh reality could wholly extinguish the frightful madness he had endured in the Dread Necromancer’s lair.

Over days his wounds closed, until he no longer had to sear infection from exposed muscle. But the gaping scar on his chest festered in burning agony, incessantly branding torment into his vulnerable mind.

Over weeks his bones knit, until he could stand again on his own two legs. But neither left knee nor right wrist properly set. Every limping step buckled in the treacherous mulch, each attempt to brace his passage sending fierce lightning racing up his arm.

Over time the muddy trail of blood-stained torture faded to the grim but determined totter of a soldier with nought left to lose. The cacophonous thunder of the warp-storm gave way to the abandoned silence of war-weary countryside. But rot and death settled like motes of tar in the depths of his lungs, sickly sweet and cloying. And the west wind howled with dire tidings of betrayal and kinslaying.

It took him two months to crawl through the remains of the elven realm. When at last the Castle in the Clouds hung in the skies overhead, the wretched ruin of spring had passed him by, leaving constant warm rains to herald summer’s ascendancy.

The bloody glory of the setting sun silhouetted Winyaurient’s elegant spires and buttressed walls. What remained of Old Raiaera lay beneath it, as if awaiting execution by the ceremonial dagger held high. To the west, smouldering in glowing flame beneath the horizon, the ruins of the old capital Eluriand shuddered beneath renewed fighting. Opposite, blanketed beneath the encroaching night, the scourged libraries of Anebrilith gathered dust next to the unplumbed watery depths of the Chasm. Frigid chill reached down past the flattened forest of Timbrethinil, tendrils of hatred from the mountains of Salvar and beyond. The poisonous pall mingled virulently with the bitter corruption that had marred his path from the Lindequalme. Not a single seed had taken root that season in the once-fertile soils.

Those armies that had not regrouped to the last virgin woods in the northwest of the country now gathered beneath the safety of the floating fortress. Beacons dotted the sprawling armed encampment like fireflies on a still autumn night. Haphazard layers of manned stockades attested to their growing numbers as stragglers continued to trickle in. Some were mercenary warbands who had survived the vicious skirmishing around Eluriand, or volunteer legions who had fought their way up from landfall upon the coast. Others, the militia of those coastal city-states who refused to follow the Bladesinger-General’s orders to abandon their domains and flee to the forests. The muted murmur of their conversation rolled up the barren slopes, harsh and painful upon ears that had not listened to civilised words for months.

Shadows flashed overhead as a wing of skyknights swept the vicinity. But the riders did not notice him curled in the lee of a shattered tower, one motionless broken body amongst many.

Only now did he pause to ask.

Why?

Dimly he focused on a memory, of reviewing casualty estimates with the Princes of Tor Elythis, the Lords of Gunnbad, and the Chieftain of Keldagrim. At best guess, they estimated that nearly three quarters of the White Elves of Raiaera had perished during Xem’zund’s incursion, or would lose their lives in the chaos and famine to follow. At worst, they projected that barely a tenth of the pre-war population would survive. And the figures made for even worse reading for their human allies, and for the scattered dwarf throngs with nowhere left to fall back to.

So many had lost their lives. So many had fallen fighting and fleeing from the Necromancer’s reach, and so many more had been struck down by hunger and plague in the process. Save for the lucky few whose comrades had sanctified their cadavers before death took hold, they had all turned into the very undead monstrosities they’d fought and fled from. To kill some more, to continue the cycle, until the world burned or the will of the final Dread Lord failed.

Thankfully the White Elves and their allies had ensured the latter would come first. But at what cost? What price in blood?

He counted a hundred, perhaps two hundred fires in the welling shadows. How many soldiers per fire… five? Ten? Two thousand survivors huddling against the dark, thankful for their lives, and perhaps another thousand in Winyaurient overhead…

How many had they lost? Friends and family, comrades and companions? Loved ones, mothers and fathers, daughters and sons?

How many had they been forced to kill themselves?

He had fought alongside five hundred men, dwarves, and elves in the Siege of Anebrilith and the push through the Emyn Naug. How many of them had survived the Corpse War?

He had led two thousand brave souls into battle at Nenaebreth, against the Dread Lord Maeril Thyrrian. How many of them would ever see their homes again?

He had joined six heroes in the raid on Xem’zund’s underground stronghold. Would any of them live to witness any semblance of peace?

And amidst all the death and destruction... Why am I still alive?

Instinctively his thoughts turned to the name that had kept him alive over the past two months. The name that had guided him across the continents to the war-wracked Occident. The name that had lit his path of wandering for well over fifteen cycles now.

“Kayu…”

Conjuring a bone-hilted blade from thin air, suddenly Xem’zund loomed above her still-sleeping form. With deadly intent only exacerbated by the hollow void where his face might once have been, the Necromancer prolonged for an eternity the terrible instant as the sword pierced her flesh. Tortured and bound behind the bars of his paralytic prison, unable even to close his eyes, the young man could but watch as the ghastly scenes branded his mind.

Her agonised scream of helpless terror and pain.

Her silken flesh dissolving beneath ravenous necrotic plague.

Her lilac scent devoured by brimstone and burning blood.

Her hopeless pleading eyes as bright crimson gushed upon pure white sheets.

The eternity passed. The sword left flesh and once again rose high above its victim.

The Harbinger’s million voices gloated. The young man screamed in desperation. But her excruciating agony overrode them both, shattering entire skeins of reality in her forlorn search for relief.

Over the course of another eternity, Xem’zund repeated the process.

And again.

And again.

Once again he saw her as she lay still. Lingering agony forever marred the beauty of her face, her sleeping body torn open and devoured like a sacrifice upon an altar.

I’m sorry.

Once again he broke down. Hot tears flooded in unfettered freedom, bawling free the pain as would a swaddling babe.

I’m sorry.

He woke, cold uncaring wind fanning the fresh streaks on his face. And he burst into renewed torrents of tears, choking soundlessly on his own voice beneath the clouds scuttling past so far overhead. Curled up as tight as he could possibly manage, he tried to hide from the world and the pain and the hurt.

I’m sorry.

For years a black hole had eaten away at the centre of his heart, an aching agonising void swallowing all emotion whole. He’d spent so many years trying to patch it over that sometimes he could forget just how black it could be. But at other times, at times like these, he could be grateful for its presence.

I’m sorry.

He lay motionless except for the spasms wreaking havoc within his chest. Every spilt tear flushed away the worst of the hurt for another day, until illumination touched upon the eastern horizon and he could at least think clearly through the exhausted throb of his mind. The more he thought, the more he remembered.

I’m sorry.

The glares of horror and disgust, piercing his body like red-hot lances. On the streets of Naniwa or in the harbours of Choson, whilst walking the corridors of Ueda Castle or trudging the corrupted farmlands of Raiaera. All of them contemptuous, as if they stared upon excrement encrusted on a chamber pot.

I’m sorry.

The raised voices warning him off, telling him to ‘get lost because there’s no food here, no water, no shelter for anyone but me and mine’. He’d heard that before too, in Nippon and in Choson. It took a very special soul to look beyond one’s own in times of need, somebody like…

I’m sorry.

The hammering of tiny fists upon his broken shoulder, the shrill screams demanding to know how he had emerged from the darkness where her papa had died. Why wouldn’t he ever come back? Why?

I’m sorry.

Basking in the first light of a belated dawn, even his rambling thoughts finally gave up the ghost. But in the deepest, darkest pits of despair he stumbled upon a single golden nugget of truth.

I have to believe that she’s okay.

To believe otherwise would succumb to the very darkness that Xem’zund had planted within him. Ever since he’d faced down Natosatael on the Night of Nefarious Flame, he’d dedicated his life to protecting her from the shadows. Nippon, Choson, Nippon again, now Raiaera.

But I dare not go to her.

He deserved not to of grace her presence. The corruption now coursing through his veins only exacerbated his lack of worth. And it seemed now that not even by living in shadow could he protect her from himself, no matter how noble his intentions. Never again could he ever endanger her on his behalf, no matter how unintentionally. Once was more than enough.

Once is one time too many.

So he had to pull the oldest trick in his book. He had to pass away, here and now, never to return. In both light and shadow he had failed to protect her. Only the void beckoned.

Whether or not he could ever be reborn again, with the strength to combat and triumph against monstrosities such as Xem’zund…

Whether or not he could ever walk in light once more, fighting to save all that he could against the tides of darkness heralded by the Harbinger…

Whether or not he could ever allow himself to see her again…

The libraries of Anebrilith lie in ash and in flame.

So he had to reach back further in the oceans of time. He had to dig deeper through the histories of Althanas.

Rising from the piled cadavers, phoenix from the ashes, finally he made up his mind.

He had to head to the ancient elf capital of Ael-en-Gilith.

Now known as Blightwater.

[Flames of Hyperion]

Northwards. Ever northwards.

Through the Remembered Sin, the black sands of Eru Morn, where rain fell but never landed.

Through the dead lands, the star-speckled craters of Timbrethinil, littered with mummified corpses of Dread Lord and Wanderer alike.

Through the impassable, the towering heights of the Dagger Peaks, over rivulets of melting snow and escarpments of jagged rock.

Northwards. Ever northwards.

The golden grasslands and rolling hills of southern Salvar, scarred and scorched by years of strife and neglect, slipped unnoticed beneath his tired tread.

Pristine snowdrifts hampered his progress beneath ancient pines and over rugged steppes, as cold and as empty as sundered oblivion.

The frozen tundra and towering highlands of Kalev, broken peaks that had once separated civilisation from legend, greeted him with blizzards as fierce as any beast, with darkness as cold and clear as ice.

Northwards. Ever northwards.

Endless bootprints trailed behind him. In places they staggered, in places they tottered, stretching unbroken to the far horizon. Those with the patience and willpower to follow them to their origin might eventually find themselves beneath the crimson boughs of the Lament for the Fallen. There, in the ashen ruins of the Dread Necromancer’s final rest, they would scream soundlessly amidst burnt flesh and shattered bone.

The broken peak of Mount Modhgar rose about him. Torn in twain by extraordinary force some nine centuries previous, its crown of molten obsidian broke the snow in a ragged circle a good twenty leagues in diameter. Years of accumulated precipitation tugged insistently at his feet. A moment’s lapse and it would drag him down into its unplumbed depths, there to join the frozen bones of the long forgotten dead.

The husk of an abandoned Andvall village nestled before him. Longhouses of mud and thatch huddled together for protection against wind and snow, exposure and cold. Shattered planks from doors and windows, charred ruins of fire-gutted dwellings, and tell-tale splashes of rusty brown spoke of the violent sacking of the settlement not so long ago.

Northwards. Ever northwards.

The Emperor’s Sigil, the Seven Stars of the Northern Sword, beckoned.


***

Glittering snowflakes nipped and whirled, motes of diamond dust dancing beneath the luminescent gaze of the overhead moon. They bit like frigid midges where they landed on exposed skin, swiftly dissolving into streaking tears that ran unchecked down raw red cheeks. Those that did not meet such a fate joined their brethren on the ground below, gradually piling up a fleeting blanket of purity over accumulated years of dirt and grime.

Wrapped in the most threadbare of cloaks the wanderer huddled against the cold, shivering by the roadside in the lee of a boarded entry. Breath escaped his body to the muted rise and fall of his chest, frosty vapour soaring to freedom beneath the stars. Time and again it obscured his vision, fogging the battered spectacles he wore across exhausted features, the frame of which had frozen against his worry-lined temple. Not that there was much to see, for not a shadow stirred on the streets two hours before dawn. Not a rodent scampered, not a pigeon fluttered, not a single sound echoed as the embracing heavens slowly buried him alive.

So peaceful.

So peaceful that he could feel the essence of his soul drifting into oblivion. A wisp on the wind. A candle-flame flickering at the end of its wick.

So peaceful…

He woke with a foot in his ribs and bile rising in his throat. Inevitably the vomit spluttered across the folds of his cloak, disgustingly putrid in the depths of his nose. Scathing laughter raked across his contorted back. The steel-capped boot struck again, and again.

“Lookit,” a coarse slur accosted from on high, its Istralothian accent heavy and tarnished like rusty bronze. “It’s alive!”

“Barely.” The second voice snorted in equally disdainful Common, framed by a rustic Salvic lilt. Between hapless convulsions, the wanderer sneaked a sloe-eyed, sleep-addled glance at the looming shapeless hulks. Orc? Armoured human? “Not worth the grain to keep it. Somebody else’s already been here. Picked it cleaner than scavengers picking meat from a bone. This runt must have been away, come home afterwards. Found his village abandoned and lost hope.”

“Might be some’un willing to pay some’in for him?” Again the steel-shod prodding in his stomach, followed by the more insistent butt of a polearm. “Lookit, it’s wearing spectacles. Must be some’un learned or some’in.”

“Oh?” Repugnant breath blew into his face, stinking of rotten fish and sulphurous eggs. “Might as well drag it along then. Throw it in with the rest. If it dies, it dies. If it lives, and there’s nobody willing to pay extra, maybe it’ll last a month in the mines. No need to increase the ration.”

“Oy, boss.”

Meaty hands grabbed hold of the cloak at his neck, stern grips calloused and scarred after years of living by the club and the flail. Cold snow and hard rock bruised the back of his head, paying scant regard to the chokehold upon his airway. He fought for focus and consciousness, little more than a helpless bundle of rags caught up amidst the rough handling. But the overcast grey laughed at his efforts through a half-eyed blur.

“Hurry it up. Getting the feeling we don’t want to be here much longer.”

“De Scarlet Shadow? You don think it’s…”

He felt the shiver in the chill, timed perfectly with a nervous equine whinny.

“Don’t know. All I know is that the sighting reports have been headed north this season. Don’t want to be here when it arrives.”

“… dey say it eats weapons like twigs. Burns through leather like a knife through butter. Leaves nobody alive…”

“Then where do you think the tales come from? Fool. It don’t kill nobody, it leaves them all alive. Naked in the snow, stripped of all their goods, surrounded by smouldering debris. But never dead. Always alive and shamed. Until the brass hear of it. Then dead anyways, dead dead dead.”

The flesh-merchant spat deftly to windward, uncaring that the phlegm-tainted spittle tarnished his newest acquisition. The stench of a hundred naked bodies, packed far too tight for comfort, reached his nostrils: excrement and death, mixed with misery and fear.

“The Company’s already lost a third of its trade this year to that thing. Not to mention it burnt every last one of our Archen operations to cinders last month. We’re not going to fall to it as well.”

“I hope not, boss.” The Istralothian hawked to clear his throat. “There’s a doxy in Archen, been waiting three months to spread her legs for me. Not worth dying until…”

Shadowy wind rushed over his face, fanning it with chill and char. The flame hit without any further warning.

Snowdrifts blew apart in tall plumes of obfuscating steam. Screams of agony, of men boiling alive in their armour, echoed through the blinding white. Horses reared at the stink of blasted flesh, then bolted in panic as they caught the scent of something infinitely more dangerous. Only by lying prone did the wanderer survive the clouds of roiling death, as the world about him dissolved into utter panic.

Cool air touched his face for the briefest of breaths. Immediately he threw off his mantle of lethargy, ignoring the protestations of exhausted muscle and rolling to his feet. A second blast of dark flame speared down from above, but this time he managed to desperately fling his will in its direction and deflect it away from the slavers and their merchandise.

Scattered fires had taken hold amidst the ruined village and the stockpiled supplies. By their flickering light the wanderer somehow navigated to the flesh wagons.

The impact of the first explosion had torn the wooden frames to shreds. Corpses littered the vicinity: those who had taken the brunt of the flying debris and those who had been already dead. A lone slaver cowered in the lee of the flame, the right side of his face blistered and raw.

“The Scarlet Shadow…” he whimpered as soon as he spied the figure stumbling forth through the welling blaze. “You… you…”

Why won’t he come back? Why?

The wanderer froze, horrified. Desolation swept like paralytic poison through his veins.

The dragon landed.

The very land quaked in fear, shedding snow as a waking she-bear shed blankets of fur. Fire-weakened foundations shattered like brittle crystal, and in the distance an entire mountainside collapsed in thunderous ruin. Roiling waves of foggy whiteout dissipated away from the epicentre of the impact, revealing the remains of the slaver caravan to the midday cloud. Fleeting shadows scurried away from exposure, making the obvious decision that discretion was the better part of valour. Those wounded who remained lay as still as the dead, crippled by terror.

He recognised it as an Oriental dragon, lacking the dread bestiality and the sulphurous stink of its Occidental counterparts, but a fearsome and violent monstrosity nonetheless. Its scales flashed crimson, deadlier than the hungry flames framing its passage as it wound like a sinuous river through the devastated wagons. The hoarded heat in the beast’s belly roasted rock and snow alike, fresh vapour spurting skywards like geysers. Its blunted nose and shrewd brown eyes loomed closely over the lone wanderer, lashing tongue barely visible as it sized up the potential of its meal.

His life flashed before him, reflected in the silky pools peering so effortlessly into his soul.

Then slowly, imperceptibly, he relaxed.

Sudden violent gusts tore at his exposed ears. Powerful strokes of leathery wings stirred up the snow once more as the dragon retreated to the skies. This time, however, it did not journey far. The scarlet serpent settled almost instantly on a knobbly hillock in the centre of the village, dominating the decimated settlement with its majestic bulk. Coarse, hardy grasses scratched at its scythe-taloned claws.

A heartbeat later, it disappeared.

In the space it had vacated now stood a naked man, short and stocky and dark of hair, his presence every bit as dominating as the dragon he had just replaced. Smouldering coal-like eyes stared at the wanderer for a moment longer, clearly commanding him to follow. Then he disappeared behind the hill.

The silence settled anew in the wake of his passing. But the serenity of earlier had died a brutal death, never again to return. Blood and snow steamed in sibilant hisses as they soared into the angry clouds, gluttonous dragonflame crackling voraciously as it gorged on wood and flesh. The stench of seared meat lay heavy upon the valley, all-pervasive and sickening.

The wounded began to moan once more, venting their pain and their relief to the uncaring cold. The dead lay by the dozen in their motionless heaps, unable to do even that.

The wanderer forgot it all as he obeyed the other man’s wordless decree, far too tired to argue. Heavy footsteps carved a fresh trail into the churned mud, one anonymous print at a time. Those unlucky few in his path and still alive shrank from him in equal parts fear and loathing, desperate to avoid associating themselves with the one who’d brought such ruin upon them. As a consequence, it didn’t take him long to arrive at the heavy oaken door, set into the hard-packed earth beneath the hilltop.

A sign creaked in lonely vigil above the entrance, flame-scarred and decrepit. Faded, barely legible letters read simply, ‘The Choleric Den’.

[Flames of Hyperion]

Dirt steps led downwards into a haunted underground chamber, splattered with dried blood left behind by a desperate last stand. The ceiling pressed upon him, stiflingly low. His eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom, unlit but for a single candle at the far end of the room. Only with great effort could he pick out deserted tables and overturned chairs, hidden in pockets of impenetrable darkness. Alcohol and vomit clung to the chill like flavours in a cask of aged ale; above them all hung the pungent aroma of death. Still, at least somebody had taken the trouble to clear the room of corpses.

The stocky man awaited him at the far end of the chamber, leaning with casual indifference upon the veneered counter-top. He had somehow acquired and donned a simple cotton robe, its deep indigo hue nearly indistinguishable from the shadows in the flickering half-light. Motes of dust danced in his grimly focused eyes, though the relative cleanliness of the bar proper attested to just how recently the settlement had been sacked.

The two men exchanged glances. A nation’s wealth of information passed between them in that split second: their relative physical well-being, the state of their minds, their respective motives. Like a pair of open books they read each other, shrewd and perceptive as only ancient acquaintances could be. They held each others’ gaze for what seemed an eternity, until Akiyoshi Sanada, Lord of Ueda, beckoned with an imperiously waved hand.

Sasurai-no-Ijin Nanashi, known in Raiaera as the Dawnbringer Ingwe Helyanwe, sighed and embarked upon the long walk down the abandoned tavern aisle. As he did so, two shadows stepped out from behind him.

Startled by their sudden presence, he whirled instinctively to his defence. But they simply nodded solemnly to Akiyoshi, faces and forms shrouded in heavy cloaks of forest green, before leaving the same way the wanderer had entered. Puzzled, the wanderer stared for a moment longer at the empty space into which they had materialised. Then, deciding he could not spare the effort to unravel the mystery of their appearance, he resumed his slow progress towards his destination.

Akiyoshi chuckled mirthlessly when Nanashi emerged at last into the light. Reaching over the counter, he poured himself a drink from a bottle of crystal-clear liquid, sloshing it lightly in the hand-sized tumbler before downing it in a single draught.

“Half dead from exposure. As usual.” His curiously accented, somewhat quaint Common rolled delightfully through the echoing chambers, resounding nostalgically in Nanashi’s tired mind. A massive, bear-like paw of a hand reached into the folds of his robes, retrieving and tossing a tightly wrapped parcel in his old friend’s direction. “Bet you have not eaten recently either. Twenty gold honours on it.”

Silence settled again as the wanderer tore hungrily at corded string and thick bamboo leaves to get at the dried meat inside. His first intuition was to feed his familiar, the gyrfalcon Hayate, only to remember for the umpteenth time that in preparation for infiltrating the Dread Necromancer’s lair he had left the snowy-white bird of prey behind with his erstwhile comrades in the Legion of Light. Breath caught in his throat, familiar pangs of regret stabbing at his heart like a poisoned blade. Then his rumbling stomach got the better of him, and he tore into the food with ravenous abandon.

“Thank you,” he whispered around a mouthful of half-chewed meat, as soon as he dared tear his attention away from the sustenance. Anxiously he cast a bespectacled gaze at the tavern door in the distant shadows, and at the world of death and devastation that lay outside. Akiyoshi read his worries as clearly as if he had voiced them aloud.

“Do not worry about out there. The twins will tidy up for you.”

Nanashi frowned, brow furrowing in wavy folds. “For you, you mean. Surely.”

Akiyoshi bit back the instinctive retort: that the identity of the Scarlet Shadow was in fact Nanashi, that for months the cataleptic young man had terrorised those flesh merchants of Vorgruk-Stokes unlucky enough to stumble across his path, that for a single glorious night he had scourged the slaver presence from Archen in cleansing flame, lighting beacons of hope in the hearts of all the oppressed of Salvar. If he remembered it at all. On the evidence of today, the wanderer had done so on instinctive and subconscious willpower alone.

Critically the lordling from Ueda eyed his friend, not failing to miss the hunched set of the shoulders or the occasional spasm racing through the chest. He poured himself another measure of coarse Salvic voda, measuring the clarity of the fermented grain spirit as it reflected the single flame, savouring the burning warmth as it carved a path down his throat.

A bout of choking coughs brought him back to the present. He stopped himself from offering his own drink just in time. Although Nanashi had surprisingly high tolerance to alcohol in spite of how little he actually drank, the voda would simply make him sick. Instead Akiyoshi busied himself in pouring and passing over a glass of stale brackish water. The wanderer accepted it as ambrosia from the gardens of heaven, clearing his airways in long thirsty gulps.

Having learnt his lesson, Nanashi returned to his meal at a more assured pace. Akiyoshi poured himself a third drink to stoke the fire in his belly, the voda tinkling gently as it flowed into Akiyoshi’s tumbler and back out again. The heartbeat of the candle flame picked out in intricate detail the ancient beams supporting the earthen roof over their heads, alcoves of deep shadow wavering in and out of existence beneath its gaze. In muted silence two figures sat at the counter, squalid specks of humanity in a vast expanse of dark void.

Only when Nanashi had finally sated himself did Akiyoshi speak again.

“How long has it been? Since you left Nippon? Two years?”

“Nineteen months,” the younger man corrected with only the barest of hesitation, tentatively playing with the remainder of the meat. Though the food had settled his stomach and his composure, still he conserved his voice against the darkness.

“Should I say that you are looking good? That you have improved much since I saw you last?”

Nanashi grimaced wryly, a faint shadow of the ronin who had served Akiyoshi for a year in the Nipponese province of Ueda.

“Spare me the false platitudes, you know how they make me queasy.” His eyes flickered belatedly to the freshly healed wounds on Akiyoshi’s bare limbs. “What happened?”

Akiyoshi’s eyes darkened. “You do not want to know.”

“A Dread Lord? I didn’t realise that any powerful enough had survived…”

“Worse. Let us leave it at that. I would rather not speak of it here.”

Nanashi paused, then nodded slowly. Lost in confusion he took another bite of his meal, chewing deliberately through possible explanations for Akiyoshi’s recalcitrance. The foul stench of the tallow candle, so much coarser and oilier than the beeswax candles favoured by the elves, hampered clear thought.

Recognising with a start Akiyoshi’s voice in his ears, he returned to the present. “Pardon?”

The samurai grinned. “Do you remember when you sat still and worked your spells for two days just to make it rain? So you could peacefully resolve the long-standing feud between the villages of Shigeno and Komoro? You told nobody. But I wondered why everything had calmed down so quickly. And only then did the daughter of the inn-keeper let it slip.”

“I’m not sure I understand what you want to say, Aki.”

Akiyoshi smiled at the use of his old nickname. How long had it been since somebody had called him that? “What do you go by nowadays? Still nameless? Or what was it that the elves used to call you? In… Inge? Inde?”

The shadows closed in upon Nanashi’s pinched features.

“Ingwe Helyanwe is dead. Gone. Buried.”

“Heard what happened down south,” Akiyoshi told him sympathetically. “Last Crusader, Dawnbringer. They hail you as a hero now.”

The younger man’s expression grew even more darkly haunted, a fleeting ghost caught by the merest whim of the candlelight. The same flicker revealed cold-wrinkled fingers, nails bitten to the quick, digging painfully into the wood of the countertop.

“Please,” he whispered in anguished grief. “I’m no hero.”

The candle whispered and died. In its wake it left only the faintest strands of daylight, reaching down through ventilation slits in the earthen roof. The edge of one such wispy thread caught the two men in quiet conference, etching starkly upon their features Akiyoshi’s concern and Nanashi’s agony.

“No. You have never basked in glory. Never sat on your laurels. Never been satisfied with what you achieve. Let me guess. You defeated the greatest threat to the civilised world in nearly a thousand years. But all you can think about is those who suffered along the way. How you could possibly have prevented it.”

The further silence, and the wanderer’s distant eyes, indicated just how close to the truth Akiyoshi’s words struck.

“You are afraid of letting go. You would fight to the death to protect someone you barely know. But you can never make the decision to leave him by the wayside. That makes you a good man. But not a hero.” The lordling paused once again to let his words sink in. “A coward. Not a hero.”

Somewhat to his surprise, Nanashi merely emitted a toneless, mirthless laugh.

“Did you think I would disagree?”

Cocking his head, Akiyoshi considered the question. The answer he arrived at in the end astonished even himself.

“No. But then I suppose I have known you for long enough. For long before you were my Vermillion Falcon. For long before the disaster in Choson. Even before the Night of Nefarious Flame. You have always hated losing. You have always wandered alone. Perhaps you have always run the harder for it. But never have you cared about the most important of matters. The path you have walked is littered with pieces of yourself you have sacrificed along the way...”

Nanashi’s voice cut across the monologue, uncharacteristically angry and harsh. “I don’t matter.”

“You…”

“I. Don’t. Matter.” The words bore no malice, no spite, but equally brooked no room for argument. Their finality cut across the frigid chill, echoing through the dim chamber, chasing away the stench of dried blood and smouldering fat.

In a small voice, Akiyoshi replied, “And that is why you will never be a hero.”

He knew that he could say nothing more to convince his old friend otherwise. Even during the year in Ueda that Nanashi had spent in his service, Akiyoshi’s best efforts had never once changed his ways. The younger man spent his entire life in pursuit of something that he could never quite reach, desperate to catch up at any cost. Akiyoshi had a good idea of what that something – or someone – was, and his brow creased grimly.

“You will never be a hero,” he continued out loud, “until you are able to ask others to shoulder some of your burden. Everybody is happy to allow one man to sacrifice himself for the good of the others. To brand them a hero in the process. But that is not heroism. That is nothing more than a martyr.”

“I’m hardly concerned, Akiyoshi.” Nanashi’s eyes dimmed again in apology, but neither would he give ground. “I would ask that you don’t allow it to bother you, either.”

“As long as you bear in mind that I need you alive. You are my Vermillion Falcon. Do not dare forget that.”

“This is my choice. But thank you for the thought. I’m not that desperate, Aki.”

Akiyoshi scoffed. “How would you know?”

Nanashi smiled in appreciation of the skilful riposte, allowing more of his cracked gratitude to show. But the sorrow never left the depths of his eyes. And in that moment Akiyoshi knew for certain that nothing he could do would work to the wanderer’s salvation.

Still. It was karma for Nanashi’s friends to die. Karma for Nanashi himself to live. But above all, the samurai lordling needed him to stay alive. And he would stoop as low as necessary to achieve it.

“One more thing. If in your quest for absolution you should fail in your duty to her…”

Akiyoshi’s eyes gleamed dangerously, eclipsed by the threat of hungry dragonflame.

[Flames of Hyperion]

Hackles rose on the nape of Nanashi’s neck. Not at Akiyoshi’s threat, but at an explosion of arcane energy intruding upon their conversation. At once he swung to the attack, Akiyoshi but a step behind him.

Just as abruptly, they halted in their tracks. Akiyoshi clapped fingers to Nanashi’s shoulder, stepping protectively in front of the younger man. His other hand instinctively went to the short killing sword at his waist.

A middle-aged woman stepped from the pooled darkness at the far end of the counter, her eyes milky opals blankly devoid of emotion. She wore little more than a layer of tattered, grimy linen rags that barely covered emaciated ribs and sagging breasts. Skeletal limbs, exposed to the icy cold, glowed an unhealthily pale grey in the half-light. She stank of filth and her own excrement.

A voice emanated from her general direction: arrogant, confident, and strong. Very obviously, it did not belong to her. The two men tensed as one.

“Akiyoshi! Still as blunt as ever, I see. You’ll never get through to him like that. Intruding far too brazenly into personal boundaries.” They could almost taste the cocky smile behind the scathing words, the jutting set of the jaw and the haughty cross of the arms. The woman even managed to perfectly capture the correct mixture of contempt and pity when she finally glanced in Nanashi’s direction. “And you… you haven’t changed at all.”

Slowly she shuffled in their direction, her frostbitten gait pained and broken. Now that they knew where to look, they could see the cellar door behind her, coated with a rippling glistening sheen. But neither of them spoke as of yet, Akiyoshi’s hand still resting on the hilt of his sword, Nanashi fiddling with his spectacles. Only when the woman had arrived at the counter, well within Akiyoshi’s killing circle, did the lordling finally break the silence.

“Touma.” He spat the name like an obscenity. “Neither have you. Who invited you here?”

The woman dismissed his bridling antipathy with a wave of her stick-thin wrist, nose wrinkling in perfect pantomime mockery. Her gestures conflicted jarringly with the emptiness of her expression.

“Truly? I honour you with my presence in this… dingy little backwater, and that’s all you can think to ask me?”

This close, both men could see just how badly life had abused the unfortunate woman. Hunger hollowed dark pits from the contours of her bony cheeks. Hair fell from her scalp like dry brittle straw. Only the faintest hint of colour in her forehead distinguished her from a walking cadaver. Standing shoulder to shoulder with the wanderer, she wouldn’t have looked out of place seeking refuge from war-torn Raiaera.

“Who is she, Touma?” Nanashi’s whisper echoed cold and hard through the shadows. “What have you…?”

Akiyoshi interrupted the rest of his sentence, if anything even more venomously. “Give me one reason why I should not just run you through. Here and now.”

Paying no attention to her peril, the woman shook her head sadly and continued speaking in that incongruously deep and derisive voice.

“And you wonder why I have to appear before you like this, Aki.” Grim humour touched her gaunt face at the angry twitch in Akiyoshi’s features, the samurai not reacting well to Touma’s use of his nickname. “Should I assume that your virgin encounter with a Disciple didn’t favour you?”

The air turned vicious, poised on the edge of a blade.

“One more word, Touma. Just one more word…”

Three hundred highly-trained, battle-hardened elves, obliterated in a matter of minutes. Akiyoshi and his shieldmaidens had barely escaped with their lives. By now the eldritch abomination threw itself against the invading armies of Alerar, decimating White and Grey Elf alike. And Touma must have known, throughout all his canny machinations, exactly where he’d been sending his erstwhile friend…

The husk of a woman spared Akiyoshi one more pitying glance. Then she turned her withering attention to the other man in the tavern.

“And you…” A second sad shake of her head sent translucent hairs cascading towards the rushes on the floor. “Don’t you have anything better to do than waste your time with petty slavers? The Scarlet Shadow?”

A hint of surprise flickered through the wanderer’s strained features. Unable to provide a glib reply he settled into a silent glower, allowing the skeletal woman to blithely press the attack.

“Nanashi… you don’t mind if I call you that, do you? Nameless? You seem to pick up pseudonyms like a proper man might pick up women, I really don’t know what to call you anymore.” She tossed her head gaily. “Nanashi, do you really think you’re saving the world, one emancipated slave at a time? Or did you not realise that slave labour supports the entire economies of Garamantes, Cathay, and Atalantae? That without Istraloth’s slave legions, they would have long ago been overrun by orcs from the far north? The world needs these nations strong. Just ask Akiyoshi, if he hasn’t already…”

Without warning, Akiyoshi lunged. Powerful hands, calloused from decades of sword-fighting, grasped the woman by the neck and lifted her into the trickle of light. The sudden movement spilt an object from the folds of her hempen shirt. It clattered to the rushes that covered the earthen floor, glinting in scornful disdain at the show of violence: an expensively crafted Raiaeran hand-mirror, silvered glass in cured elm frame, gilded in intricate golden leaves.

Ignoring it, Akiyoshi bared his teeth at his prize, angry pupils penetrating her veiled façade.

“Snake. Stop hissing. Give me an excuse to rip out that forked tongue of yours. I dare you.”

“Aki.”

Only the urgency of Nanashi’s restraining hand on his upper arm restored Akiyoshi’s self-control. Reluctantly, he relaxed his grip, letting her slump spinelessly to the ground. She lay there in unresponsive catatonia, eyes rolled back into her head and tongue lolling helplessly. Nanashi checked to make sure she was not permanently harmed before turning his attention to the mirror, to the handsome serpentine face just about visible there.

“I can just about understand Aki somehow finding me, out here in the middle of nowhere. Though I’m yet to understand exactly why.” He reached down to cover her with his own tattered travelling cloak. She barely reacted, staring blankly into the earth wall beyond him. “You, however… if you’re here, Touma, then there’s a definite reason. And I think it’d be better for you if you make it clear. Quickly.”

Akiyoshi snarled again at the mirror to reinforce Nanashi’s words. Touma’s shade simply rolled his eyes in disgust.

“Haven’t you learnt anything in the past seven years? Why in my right mind would I ever reveal that?” His hawkish nose twisted in a mildly condescending sneer. “Shadows within shadows. A master of spectrussa, of monarchs or shoban, surveying the board. A puppet-master in a hall of mirrors. I’d given you credit for knowing my methods. Don’t give me the pleasure of withdrawing it.”

“Then I won’t.” Nanashi pulled himself upright, ignoring tired protestations from overworked muscles. Absently he tossed the bamboo wrapper of his meal at an overflowing, stinking waste receptacle. He missed. “So this is me forcing your hand. I have places to go, knowledge to seek. If you’re not here for anything more than pleasantries, then I’ll take my leave.”

He started over to retrieve his mess. An angry hand reached out to grab him by the shoulder.

“Now hold on a…” Chomping down on his words, Akiyoshi started again. “You are in no condition…”

Surprisingly stubborn despite the samurai’s firm grip, Nanashi slipped free.

“I’m afraid I can’t stop now, Aki.” The set of his jaw softened, though his determination didn’t waver. “Thank you. For everything. One day… one day I might be able to…”

He stopped, unsure of how to continue. Then he shook his head, reached down, and this time successfully added the remains of his meal to the bin. The stinking pile of waste mesmerised him for what seemed like an eternity, a fecund reminder of the lives that had flourished even in the depths of these tundral wastelands until fate chose to abruptly snuff them out. Only at length did he resume his journey towards the tavern entrance, his pace slow but firm.

Two steps from freedom, a loud sigh echoed from the mirror.

“It’s about her.”

Fists clenched, Nanashi stuttered to a halt. “Of course it is,” he managed through grit teeth. “Is there any other reason for all three of us to be present in one location?”

“You deduced that much, and you thought you would be able to just walk away?” The irony in Touma’s voice could have withered the Red Forest. “Did that petty war in the elf homeland really rob you of what little backbone I gave you credit for? Or are you really so desperate as to resort to such an easily called bluff? Truly, I really didn’t think that you would have fallen that far, Y…”

The mirror shattered and scrunched as Akiyoshi ground it into dust with the heel of his boot. Without taking his eyes from the shards of fine glass, he pointed a ramrod-straight arm at Nanashi.

“I am not done with you yet. We will have words later on this matter.” Then his voice deepened into a bestial growl. “But you. Touma. You go too far.”

The Serpent Tamer’s face reappeared in the shimmering film of the portal cast upon the cellar door.

“Aki, Aki, Aki. Temper.” He shook his head forlornly, clearly used to such misunderstanding and malignment. “Now where were we? Ahh, yes. About her.”

A pointed glance at Nanashi. “Or rather, your obsession with her.”

The wanderer flinched, as if struck. Flatly he replied, “The point, Touma.”

“Wouldn’t you like to know?”

Smiling, the Serpent Tamer's features disappeared from the shimmering surface. But the portal itself remained.

“He is inviting us through?” Akiyoshi could not quite conceal his incredulity.

“Apparently so.”

The wanderer’s fists unclenched, deliberately and purposefully, one trembling finger at a time. Exhaling firmly, he steeled himself.

“Wait. You can not be thinking to follow him.”

“Unfortunately, I don’t think I have anything to lose by doing so.”

Emotions rippled through the air between them: disgust, concern, acceptance. Akiyoshi could only eye Nanashi for a moment longer before giving in.

“Very well. I will accompany you. Just one thing before we go.” He remembered the disastrous events that had brought him to find the wanderer in the first place, and shuddered deep inside. Only a flicker of his fear reached his features, but even that was enough to frighten Nanashi as well. “Do. Not. Trust. Him.”

The wanderer hesitated. Then he nodded, wiping his face clean. Short tottering strides took him to the tightly closed cellar door. Without further ado he plunged into what should have been sturdy wood. But the film of arcane energy woven into the archway gave way before him like rippling water.

Cold void. Oblivion. The hollow sensation of falling.

Falling.

Falling.

[Flames of Hyperion]

He emerged into brightening dawn, the highest of Mount Modhgar’s broken ring of peaks sprawled out beneath him. Light traced the eastern horizon, illuminating thinly stretched cloud that in turn chased away the night. A chill gust grabbed hold before he could fully find his legs, dumping him on his backside in an ungainly heap upon the jagged rocks. The broken fragments of his self-esteem took another battering when Akiyoshi landed cleanly on both feet alongside him.

“Where are we?” the older man coughed, caught out by the sudden change in altitude. The nameless wanderer felt a bit better for it. Then the hacking spasm in his own lungs worked its way up his throat, and he doubled over in agony of his own.

When finally he found the strength to stand again, tears streamed unstopped down his cheeks. Not all resulted from the pain in his chest, though. For some reason the vista touched the very depths of his soul, like so few things had ever done before and so few things would ever do again. The empty lands, so devoid of life, positively glowed in anticipation as the darkness fled from the day: swathes of pristine snow glittering beneath the sunrise, far outshining the scattered jewels in the purpling velvet above. The beauty in the desolation, the hope in the void. The slow but inexorable revolution of the world, the eternal pursuit of moon by sun, symbolising his own journey through life.

“Once the very top of Mount Modhgar,” Nanashi replied, barely squeezing the words through his throat. Prickles ran up and down his shivering arms, in emotion rather than chill. In fact, aside from the initial gust, he found the climate on the peak almost unnaturally comfortable. “Now just another forgotten zenith.”

Akiyoshi frowned as his friend self-consciously wiped his face clean, not understanding the younger man’s sentimentality. Tiring of the view, he took a closer look at his surroundings… and his jaw dropped in slack surprise.

Behind him sat Touma, in person this time. Legs folded informally and back slouched, casually he observed the two arrivals. He wore nothing other than an expensive cotton robe of raincloud grey and a smug grin on his face. A black feather danced jauntily in the wind behind his ear, and he chewed lightly on the copper nib of a slender pipe-like kiseru. Akiyoshi felt Nanashi’s twinge of envy as he too spied Touma’s presence. Only then did the lordling recognise just how poorly the wanderer’s tattered tunic matched up in comparison to both his and Touma’s clean kimonos.

Somebody had gone to great lengths to set the scene. Touma took his seat upon a mat of dried rice straw, its pleasant pungency reminding all three men of far-away home. Decorative paper screens, inlaid with gold and ivory, surrounded them in shimmering translucence. The dirt between mat and screens had been carefully swept and tamed, creating an illusory island of culture amidst the harsh tundra wilderness.

“Cha?” Touma called nonchalantly, refined timbre breaking the stunned silence. With a particular glance at the wanderer to reference their common bastardry, he added, “Or perhaps you, like me, occasionally prefer tea in the Occidental manner?”

Both Akiyoshi and Nanashi struggled for the right words. The samurai found his tongue first.

“Damn you, Touma. Damn you to the bottom-most rung of hell. Preferably with only voracious flesh-eating wasps and your own putrid words for company.”

He switched to flowing Nipponese as he swore long and loud, his voice explosive across the echoing valleys. Then he added a few choice obscenities in Choson and gutter Cathay, purely for Touma’s benefit. Neither of the other two men spoke, giving Akiyoshi the face he would otherwise have lost. Finally exhausting the stream of invective and choosing instead to express his displeasure by stomping rudely through the carefully combed dirt, he at last favoured Touma with a coherent reply.

“Cha.”

“The same, please.” Though Nanashi phrased his request politely enough, the undercurrent of tension remained. He hadn’t spoken Nipponese for far longer than Akiyoshi or Touma, and his words came out more halting and stilted than he’d hoped. The wanderer cringed inwardly, hating himself once more for his lack of a fluent tongue.

He too stepped towards the dais, less conspicuously than the samurai but still leaving indelible footprints in the dirt. Choosing to sit in reserved formality at the very edge of the mat, he favoured Touma with a neutral glance over the rims of his glasses. Akiyoshi, on the other hand, did not bother to disguise his animosity in the set of his shoulders or the fire in his eyes. Both waited patiently for Touma to make the first move, his prerogative as their host.

To their surprise, he waited as the slave woman emerged from the portal shimmering to their left, landing gracefully and soundlessly in the muddy snowdrifts with Nanashi's travel-worn cloak still wrapped about her shoulders. He waited as, enveloped in stale silence and the blooming half-light, she bowed correctly to the three men. He waited as, at a wave of his hand, she served them from the teapot at his feet, her eyes hollow and unsettling. But her movements bore the understated elegance of a master of the ceremony. Obviously Touma had trained her well.

Akiyoshi accepted his cha with a perfunctory nod. Nanashi bowed as an equal, pausing only to send a turbulent glance at Touma, just enough to deliberately disturb the harmony. The cha, however, was good: grassy and bitter, scorching his tongue, unravelling the knot in the pit of his stomach. A soft sigh escaped his lips.

Then, and only then, did Touma indicate the scenery with a sweep of his robed arm.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?”

“To enjoy the view?” Akiyoshi raised an eyebrow, his voice dry enough to parch the Black Desert. “All the way here?”

Touma allowed his gaze to roam over his guests, delighting in the contrast between them all. He sat languidly, cocky and confident, his air like the coils of a snake as it dominated his half of the tatami mat. Akiyoshi sat opposite him as aggressive as he dared, hands set on outspread knees, body held forwards and poised to strike. Nanashi made himself as small and as insignificant as possible behind Akiyoshi: shuddering as he rubbed his shoulders with as much vigour as he could summon, fevered bespectacled gaze looking about him curiously.

“The world is full of places such as these. The menhirs of Berevar on the winter solstice. The great ziggurats of Sindh passing through the eye of a hurricane. The floating mountains of Corone, where you can stand on a precipice and overlook rivers of cloud flowing so far beneath your feet. Even the cherry blossoms of Nippon, swaying in the spring wind.”

He chuckled at the blank looks on their faces.

“While you’ve been busy making friends, Aki, and our mutual acquaintance here has spent his life buried in books, I’ve wandered the world and back, visiting places like this and listening to the tales they have to tell.”

Akiyoshi scratched his chin impatiently. “I assume you wish to tell us the tale of this place.”

“I’m surprised you don’t know it already.” Touma raised an eyebrow. “It’s one I thought you might have heard before.”

Grimly aware that he had neither Nanashi’s scholarly intellect nor Touma’s intelligent cunning, Akiyoshi’s expression darkened further. “Get to the point.”

“You have no appreciation for theatre, do you? One day, perhaps, you’ll look back on the lengths I’ve gone to set this up, and realise just how deliberately boorish you’re being. Oh, very well.” Touma sighed melodramatically. Absently he tapped the bowl of his kiseru on the edge of the teapot though, unlit and unused, no ash poured forth.

“In eons past, when Althanas was born, so was the Eternal Font. Born to magic and of magic, its essence pooled over ages of stagnancy until at long last it crafted the miracle known as life. The dar’el, beloved of the Elder Thaynes, were the first to walk the world. Over time they were joined by others, and conflict sprung up between them and tore them all asunder. But the Font remained ever constant and ever flowing, a beacon of bright hope no matter how dark the times. To touch one part of the Font was to touch all others, and many sought to make use of its great power, delving deeper and deeper into its mysteries. Only a few, fearing the great unknown, created alternate means to combat it.

“Millennia flew by, further cycles of peace and conflict, prosperity and calamity. And then, almost overnight, the world changed.

“Magicians arose who had learned to plumb to the absolute farthest extents of the Tap. To use vast amounts of it was easy, even for the uninitiated, but only they could actually harness and understand it. They are best known today as the Forgotten Ones, but to you and I they are better known as the Harbingers.”

“Aesphestos, Denebriel, Pode, Xem’zund, and Nyvengaal,” Nanashi whispered.

“… are the five names that survive from antiquity,” Touma agreed amiably. He delighted in the momentary interest flickering across the wanderer’s face.

“… meaning that there were more…?”

Touma simply smiled, an enigmatic and sorrowful half-smile. He squinted into the first true rays of dawn peeking over the horizon, surprisingly kind and caressing. Akiyoshi smouldered beneath their attention. Nanashi might simply have faded away.

“Their motivations are not wholly known to us. But they sought power and dominion in all of its myriad guises, and for centuries they terrorised the Free Peoples of Althanas. When not in open war they engaged in intrigue and infiltration, sabotage and subterfuge, seeking the upper hand through any means thinkable. The dar’el, or the mya as they were called at the time, emerged from isolation to rally in opposition. But their numbers had dwindled and few of the divided races would heed their call. In desperation, the last of their descendants banded together for one last battle.”

“The Leaguer of Caradin.”

Akiyoshi frowned again, speaking slowly. “Even I have heard that name.”

Touma laughed as his other eyebrow rose. “Really?”

“Once or twice,” the samurai grimaced, hand gripping his knee tightly. “Go on.”

“I have little left to say. If you want to know about the battle, ask him.”

Akiyoshi turned to Nanashi, still shivering uneasily, then shrugged. The angry fire in the samurai lordling’s eyes, however, smouldered unabated.

“Later. Perhaps. Should I assume that…”

“The fortress of Caradin is gone. Erased from this world forever, and the Eternal Font sundered along with it. This is where it once stood. But though the Font has gone its flow remains. Frays in the weave of the universe, corollary to the deflagration that ended the War. The biggest of them is here.” Touma shrugged, indicating the wanderer. “That’s what he’s currently sensing, why he’s currently so uncomfortable. Or part of the reason, at least.”

Looking back to Akiyoshi, absently he ran his fingers through the black pinion feather perched behind his ear.

“And though the War is over, its repercussions still affect the world today. The elves suffered not only from the division between White and Grey, Raiaera and Alerar. Next time you get a chance to talk to that Ranger Lord Arminas, ask him of his Onyx kin. Watch how he reacts.

“Not to mention that the kind of magic used to battle the Forgotten Ones to a standstill during the Leaguer simply does not exist anymore in the world today. The White Elves cannot wield the magic they once used to. Ecthelion is one of only two or three who still have control over the old ways. And much of what knowledge did remain was lost during the Corpse War. Xem’zund’s successful razing of Anebrilith accounted for most of it.”

“But we saved some,” Akiyoshi countered, shocked. “Tor Elythis…”

“Not all. It’s the little tomes that matter most, the ones hidden in the back of the shelves gathering must, that nobody’s read in years. Everybody reads Sonshi’s Book of War, but nobody the Fifteen Tenets of Oroi. And yet, it was Oroi’s tenets that decided the great Battle of Kawashima fifty years ago.” Drawing deeply on the non-smoking kiseru, Touma's eyes lost themselves on the distant horizon. “That’s how knowledge works, Aki. It’s never what you know that matters. It’s what you don’t know, and especially what you don’t know you don’t know. Ten… twenty… a hundred years from now, that’s what could have saved us.”

Silence descended upon them as they digested the words, the sun finally rising over the horizon in all its blossoming glory. In the hazy air of an early winter morn it hung like a crown jewel above the broken mountains, a gentle orb of light promising a hint of warmth at last to the bleak wildlands.

[Flames of Hyperion]

Blue sky inched between sun and jagged skyline. The pall of quiet that had descended upon them had brought with it fitful flurries of wind and sleet. But the air still clung to their skin with unnatural warmth, tinted with the faintest suggestion of brimstone and the memory of battles fought in ages long past.

In the darkness into which Akiyoshi and Nanashi had emerged, the night had pooled in misty mystical swirls far below. The rising morning light served to reveal only barren expanses of snow-strewn rock there. Nothing lived from horizon to horizon, not a single patch of green or moving shadow.

Silence.

Stillness.

Serenity.

Until Akiyoshi finally snapped.

“You did not go to all this trouble for the sake of a lesson from the past.”

“Past?” Touma failed to prevent the surge of anger from briefly creasing his features, before quashing it beneath iron-fisted control. “Even the half-wit over there knows better than to dismiss legends and history as past, Sanada Ueda-no-kami Akiyoshi. Or are you really so dense as to believe that what happened once will not happen again?”

But he did not miss the perceptive flicker passing through Akiyoshi’s smouldering coal-like eyes. It was a ploy Touma had oft used himself, deliberately pretending obtuseness to draw out further nuggets of information. He reminded himself never to underestimate the samurai lordling… but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t have fun at Aki’s expense.

“Why, what do you want to know?” he asked, working to keep his voice light.

“Why do you and he know them as the Harbingers?”

Not smart, perhaps, but most certainly shrewd. Akiyoshi’s dark glare suddenly clamped down on its fury, leaving it boring guilelessly into Touma’s.

“Wrong question, Aki.” The Serpent Tamer bared teeth and the tip of his tongue in a simmering smile. “The real question is, why does the world know them as the Forgotten Ones?

Nanashi answered quietly for both of them.

“Because someone… or something… is actively erasing them from the history of the world.”

Touma inclined his head in agreement.

Forgotten One? Harbinger?

Pawn. Underling. Toy. Set upon the world for merriment and for fun, to be discarded at will and resurrected at leisure.

“That What We Face plays not by our rules.”

Palpable foreboding, heavy and uncomfortable, choked their airways. Nanashi shivered again, relaxing his formal posture to cradle his knees against his chest. Neither Touma nor Akiyoshi batted an eyelid.

At length, Akiyoshi’s scepticism got the better of him. “That what we face?”

“That What We Face. The True Enemy. You’ve already encountered one of her minions.” Touma’s words evoked darkness in the depths of the Lindequalme, the horror that had lain so close to Xem’zund’s lair. The titanic battle had engulfed the bleeding trees, leaving multitudes of dead elves in the berserker’s wake. “And if you would like a third opinion, there’s one other you can ask.”

Nanashi sighed as another piece of the puzzle fell into place. A calm, soothing balm washed through body and mind alike. The throbbing pain in his chest eased. The heated chill running through his veins abated. The choking pressure in his throat lessened.

“Kayu.”

Her face rose to the surface of his mind, and to the thoughts of both other men as well. They remembered her, each in their own way, and they remembered the promise they had made to themselves and to each other. The Oath that Nanashi had avowed to himself fighting the flesh-devouring daemons on the Night of Nefarious Flame. The Oath that the three of them had sworn together beneath the fleeing braziers in Choson. The Oath that Touma Kamikaji had made to her after her graduation from the Academy. The Oath that Ingwe Helyanwe had affirmed again in wartorn Raiaera, amidst fresh corpses and rotting cadavers alike on the battlefield of Nenaebreth.

Akiyoshi frowned, the puzzlement genuine this time. “How does she fit into all this?”

The wanderer opened his mouth to answer, but thought better of it before any sound escaped. Stifling his answer by pushing his glasses back up his nose, he looked expectantly to Touma. The manipulative puppet-master, though, simply met his eyes, giving nothing away except feverish fanaticism. After a moment or two the younger man averted his gaze, unable to match the intensity there. Touma tapped his kiseru against the mat in victory; Akiyoshi slapped his knees in consternation.

“Damn you again. Why go to this trouble if you will not tell us anything?”

Nanashi’s eyes strayed to the snowscape, to the bowl of devastation and desolation surrounding the peak upon which they now sat. Not so long ago its beauty had enraptured him. Now, beneath the rising sun, it rankled in his belly like a lump of frozen rock.

Cradling his aching wrist against his throbbing chest, he breathed deeply of the chill. The mighty exhalation of vapour that followed clouded his spectacles and sought refuge in the heavens above. Like a dam breached by the rocks of their companionship, like a glacier thawed by the presence of another being, his voice barely a murmur in the overwhelming immensity of his environs, he at last began to give voice to his thoughts.

“He’s already said, Akiyoshi. Knowledge. Patterns in history, tales told by rock and sediment, recorded in written word and spoken tradition. We know not yet the entirety of what they hold, only that they exist.

“Maybe you’re right that we’ve lost much, Touma. But if our ancestors were successful in driving off the True Enemy, then such a way surely exists. If we know that for sure, then even if we’ve lost it, we can find it again. That’s a much easier task than looking for something that we don’t even know exists or not.

“Personally, I’m more concerned about the fate of the dar’el… the mya as they were known. They were never a numerous race, and the sundering of the Font… the unbridled power unleashed wiped many of them from the Firmament. Everything I’ve read over the last five years points to them as the progenitors of this world, ancient ancestors of the elves, older than dragons and daemons and titans. What happens to Althanas if they truly died out?”

He broke his monotone reflections to shudder in premonition.

“What comes in their place?”

Again, Touma’s eyes gave nothing away. Inwards, however, he reeled as if struck. Did the nameless wanderer know how much he’d sacrificed to reach that conclusion, to gain that knowledge? He’d sold his soul to a daemon, and Nanashi had simply…

Almost imperceptibly he shook his head to clear his mind. The Ninth Doom was nearly upon them, and they had little opportunity to prepare. He would make do with what he had.

Stalling for time, he brought the unlit kiseru to his lips once more, savouring the metallic tang of the copper mouthpiece. His gaze flicked from one man to the other, gauging them, reading them like open books. In a completely different tone of voice, he spoke again.

“Kayu. What does she mean to you?”

The words almost instantaneously wrought change over all three men.

White like I’ll never be.

Innocent like I’ll never be.

Beautiful like I’ll never be.

Touma remembered the first time he’d laid eyes on her, the day she’d entered the Academy. Languorously basking beneath the falling cherry blossoms, her skin lucent like molten porcelain, she laughed brightly with her newfound friends. Later, when Natosatael had whispered to him the truth about the Cataclysm, he’d seen in her the hope he needed to defeat it. He’d been blinded by her brilliance, and from that day on he’d sworn to never let that smile know pain.

Symbol of purity, of devotion to duty.

Of holding true to one’s tenets no matter what the world thought of her.

The epitome of elegance and of courage.

The true dianthus flower.

Akiyoshi’s thoughts turned to the night in Choson that he’d lost Satori to the masked daemon. He’d left the army barracks to cry his grief away, not allowing it to leak until certain he was alone, until at last he’d spilt enough tears to last a thousand lifetimes. The beast within him had grasped hold of his soul, tightening its fleshy weakness between adamantine talons. But when he’d woken up she’d been there with him, and from that day on he’d sworn to never let her kindness go unrewarded.

The white hind galloping ahead.

The blossom high on the barren cliff.

How he had to strive for just the faintest glimpse.

How he had to strain just to reach out to her.

A long time ago, she’d given the nameless foreigner a name. In a land of suspicion and distrust, she’d smiled at him and treated him with kindness. Thanks to her, he’d never been truly alone, even through long years of solitary wandering. So much of her was distant memory, and yet… and yet… and yet he cared for her still. He’d known what she meant to him for years now, and from that day on he’d sworn to never lose her from his heart.

The silence settled one last time. Touma breathed deeply of its stillness, pleased that he’d diverted the conversation as neatly as the wind whistling past his wards. Doubtless the nameless wanderer clung to memories of the past. Akiyoshi, ever practical, would strive to make the most of the now. Thus it was up to him, the Serpent Tamer, the Silver Tongue, to plan and scheme for the future.

The one thing he did share with them, the one and perhaps only thing he could count upon, was their shared determination to protect Kayu. She was no prize to be coveted, no broodmare to be cosseted, no porcelain doll to be displayed behind lock and bar. All three men admired her as much for the strength of her character as for her kindness and her radiance. But as long as any of them still drew breath, she would never stand alone.

In the end, Nanashi spoke for all of them.

“… everything.”

[Flames of Hyperion]

Cocooned by the windless tranquillity of the snow-dusted peak, each man wandered in the sanctity of his thoughts. The ragged slave-woman sat quietly behind Touma, arms folded in her lap and pale gaze downcast, careful not to disturb their collective reverie. When the morning sun shone directly upon them from an acute angle in the southern skies, at last the puppet-master tapped his kiseru on the straw mat to shatter the calm. Unapologetically, he then reached over his shoulder to scratch his back with its copper bowl.

“Both of you had best listen carefully then to what I’m about to say.”

Akiyoshi gave Touma a long, incredulous stare. Very deliberately, he proceeded to reach into his robes to scratch an imaginary itch in his loins. Nanashi flushed and averted his eyes hastily. The gaunt woman, still wrapped in the wanderer’s worn cloak, stared blankly into the distance; her hollow cheeks failed to colour even at a gesture so overtly rude. Touma himself only just stifled an involuntary burst of laughter.

“Do we have choice in the matter?” the samurai lordling asked. “We have come this far. You might as well speak your piece.”

Touma allowed a hint of a smile to touch his features.

“Why don’t you begin by telling him what’s happening in Nippon at the moment, Aki? Doubtless it’s been a while since he’s heard from home.”

If he caught the troubled flicker across Nanashi’s features, it was only because he looked for it there. Neither did he miss Akiyoshi’s mien darkening once more.

“Bad. Trouble everywhere. The southern lords rebel against the central bakufu. They pillage Cathayan coasts and raid her trade. Then they arm themselves with the gold thus plundered. The reclusive northerners expand beyond the straits and exploit the resources there. And everybody else fights amongst themselves. They bicker like small children over the Emperor’s favour and the Shogun’s pleasure.”

Nanashi frowned. “But hasn’t it always been that way, to some extent or another? The current Shogun is young and his council divided, but hasn’t he always been promised for greatness? Once he grows of age…”

“Perhaps,” the samurai lordling responded, the shadows etched upon his face refusing to recede. “But the news from Cathay is even worse. Something consumed the entire Matarkha Sultanate in one night of savage butchery. Now the same foe besets the Jade Emperor from the south. I myself did not believe such tales until an elf by the name of Laerdon convinced me of them. His description of the struggle was… ghastly. And one-sided. Cathay is on the brink of collapse.”

The wanderer’s mouth gaped, struggling to close as he digested the news. Cathay was the bulwark of the Orient, bigger and more populous than Salvar and Corone combined, the single most powerful human realm in the known world. If it were truly in danger, or heavens forbid if it were to fall, the ramifications upon civilised peace would be disastrous.

“Of course that’s not all.” Chewing once more upon the nib of his kiseru, Touma took up the tale. “I don’t have to tell you about the civil wars in Corone and Salvar, or the invasions of Raiaera. The upheaval in Scara Brae, the unrest and uprisings in north Istraloth and throughout the Free Cities, the darkness threatening the Five Dukedoms. On top of all that, word from the Garamantes has been scarce, and that from Sindh even further south practically non-existent.”

“… Telchar said something similar the last time I saw him, just before…” Nanashi murmured slowly, shaking free the cobwebs as he dug for memories buried beneath months of apathy. “He worried for the safety of his kin of Austral Dheathain…”

Robes rustled as Touma stood, replacing the kiseru into the pocket at his chest and fingering the black feather tucked behind his ear. Shielding his eyes against the glare of sun on snow, he peered south towards the closest civilisation. Akiyoshi and Nanashi automatically followed his gaze, wondering what he saw beyond the undulating waves of exposed granite and the oceanic expanses of white.

“The world is beset by a thousand catastrophes. A hundred apocalypses.”

Lightning flickered through the puppet-master’s eyes.

“But only one Cataclysm.”

The word echoed from the peak, rolling through the snow-dampened valleys like thunder from the heavens. Skies darkened with abnormal speed, filtering all warmth and light from the heavens as something ominous and malicious turned its attention to them. For a fleeting instant the forbidding chill froze their lungs and paralysed their minds.

Then the instant passed, and they could breathe again. The sun shone upon their pitifully small, lonely forms once more, wan and repentant. Nanashi curled his knees to his chest, clutching his elbows with trembling fingers, shuddering in remembered pain. Akiyoshi wore a mask of sheer anger as he pounded his knee repeatedly, forcefully trying to thaw frozen nerve endings. Touma inhaled deeply, as if forced into making up his mind.

“I came here to tell you three things,” he said suddenly. “The first and foremost is… don’t lose sight of the bigger picture.”

“Perhaps that is your job,” Akiyoshi retorted instantly, still rattled by the mental incursion and not a little cross. “I am not able to simply ignore somebody in need. Neither is Nanashi.”

“Perhaps,” Touma agreed. And perhaps that is the true reason why I am here. To stop you from getting distracted by every last damsel in distress, to point you in the directions that I need you the most. “But, for example, if we lose Istraloth or Cathay to anarchy because you shut down so many slaver operations…”

“I will not accept a victory built on such sacrifice.”

“Then you condemn us to defeat. As a leader of men, I would have supposed you immune to such decisions by now. What was it you said of our mutual friend here? 'A coward. Not a hero.'”

Sparks flew once more between the two men, their indefatigable wills locked in sudden combat. Tension swelled like a cresting wave, thick and palpable. Deep-seated resentment and distrust dug yawning chasms across the tatami mats between them. But Touma’s impassive confidence gradually sapped Akiyoshi’s righteous anger, until eventually the latter was forced to relent. He turned away in disgust, clicking his tongue loudly.

“Do you think me weak, flawed?” Touma’s harsh, victorious whisper cut through the thin air. “Do you hate me for gladly ignoring the one life in agony if I could save a hundred, a thousand? I would commend you, Akiyoshi Sanada, but then I would have to discard you, for you would lack the moral strength to see your duty through.”

“That is arrogance…”

“And thus in my case arrogance is a virtue. We must suffer if we wish to survive. It is that simple. Ask him. He knows.”

Akiyoshi glanced uncomfortably at Nanashi, who had remained determinedly silent throughout the exchange. The wanderer’s downcast gaze and clouded brow mirrored the samurai’s own discomposure. Touma allowed them to wallow in their upset, savouring the moment like sugar on the tip of his tongue. He sipped triumphantly of his tea, long since gone cold and stale, to disguise his sudden good humour.

“Second,” he began again when he judged the time correct, “Kayu is currently in Salvar, south of Archen. She’s…”

“That’s slaver territory,” Nanashi interrupted in concern.

“Indeed. She travels with escort, but you of course see why she’ll soon need more than that, you who have done such a good job of stirring the hornet’s nest.” Sarcastically he glanced sideways at Nanashi, who again looked decidedly awkward and downbeat. “But the roots of the problem lie much deeper than anything you can solve on your own, and are much more difficult to deal with. At this rate…”

Akiyoshi shook himself, like a hound picking himself up from a telling off.

“Then she will be my responsibility. The very fact that you are telling us this means you want me to go to her. And that you are obviously unable to go yourself. Perhaps she finally saw through that forked tongue of yours?” Touma’s mocking gesture of submission, not entirely feigned, restored some of Akiyoshi’s face. “Nanashi is eminently unsuited to the job. Hence it is mine to claim.”

The wanderer hesitated only briefly before nodding his resigned acceptance, conscious of Akiyoshi’s renewed and fierce scrutiny. Neither of them noticed Touma’s continued satisfaction.

“Thirdly and finally, we require more knowledge. The dar’el, the Harbingers, the True Enemy, the Cataclysm. We know little of the threat beyond that it undeniably exists, and even less of how to combat it. But as you said…” – a waggle of his finger indicated the bedraggled wanderer – “… it’s been fought before, and though the knowledge is currently lost, it can’t have been completely destroyed. It just... can't have.”

“We only have to find it?” Akiyoshi had trouble disguising his scepticism. Even he had some inkling of how difficult that might be.

Struggling to put aside for a moment the pain and the exhaustion, the wanderer stared curiously at Touma. Not well versed in the ways of men, his probing did little to reveal just how much the handsome hawkish features hid behind their confident smile. How much did Touma know without telling them? How much dared he trust of what Touma said?

Not that it mattered, in the end. He needed to study for himself the troubles of which Touma spoke.

From the corner of narrowed pupils, Touma noted the scrutiny and hid yet another satisfied smile. He counted his blessings: that he knew just how to cajole and convince his old acquaintances, who like well-placed rats happened to be so important in determining the fate of the world; that he could fake humility and irritation and helplessness as well as any noh actor, scheming and manipulating all the while.

“Of course, it won’t be easy,” he told them with barely a flicker of emotion, consciously mimicking Akiyoshi’s deadpan snark. “I promise you there’s nothing in the Vaults of Scrolls in Ettermire, or the Dark Scholarium of Deep Haidia. Anebrilith is lost to us, and if your friend the runelord didn’t tell you anything…”

“Ael-en-Gilith.”

One last time, Touma inwardly smiled a triumphant smile. To his companions, however, he allowed just a hint of uncertainty to show.

“Pardon?”

“Ael-en-Gilith, city of the heavens,” Nanashi repeated blithely. His voice monotone, his eyes hard, he dug fingers into the flesh of his upper leg as he fought waves of fatigued agony storming through body and mind. “The city founded by the first of the dar’el to lose their wings, after the Great War of the Ancients, long before even the War of the Font. I… I read it somewhere in Eluriand. What we’re looking for is so far rooted in history and legend that the civilisations of today… even Raiaera and Alerar… they won’t have what we seek. Or it’s been destroyed, deliberately or by the ravages of time.”

“So?” Akiyoshi asked, brow set in confusion, not following the line of argument. Touma sighed on Nanashi’s behalf.

“So you go further back still.”

Nanashi nodded.

“As far back as I know how to go. To Ael-en-Gilith.”

He paused, then clarified,

“To Blightwater.”

[Flames of Hyperion]

Akiyoshi held up his hand to stem the conversation, his frown indicating that he still needed to digest the information. Touma did his best to display the appropriate appreciation for Nanashi’s deductions and determination, all the while strangling an irresponsible desire to chortle out loud. The wanderer could do little more than to take their reactions at face value.

All of a sudden his shoulders slumped, arms dragged downwards as if laden by invisible weights. The crushing pressure upon his chest swelled unbearably, flinging bolts of piercing agony through random muscles. His mind bore the worst of the onslaught, thoughts collapsing into bottomless pits of abject despair. Exhausted by the continued interaction with Akiyoshi and Touma, he wanted nothing more now than to disappear, than to get away from the exposed mountain peak and never return.

“In which case, gentlemen.” With excruciating care for the last shreds of his mangled dignity, Nanashi rose to his feet and bowed. “I shall take my leave.”

“Hold it right there.” Akiyoshi’s growl stopped him in his tracks. The samurai’s beefy paw reached out to once more clasp the wanderer’s shoulder in an iron vice. Nanashi froze, a rabbit caught in the dragon’s claws. “We still need to talk.”

One of Touma's patrician eyebrows rose in amusement. The puppet-master settled back on his haunches, not having expected this final sideshow but fully prepared to enjoy it.

Nanashi made a pitiful attempt to choose his words carefully. “I’m not sure there’s anything left to say.”

“Nothing?” Voice smouldering like molten rock, Akiyoshi’s grip tightened upon the grimy cloth of the wanderer’s tunic. Nanashi of old would never have allowed himself to dress in dirt. Drab, perhaps, but never dirt. Breathing deeply, the samurai paused as a sudden thought struck. “You could come with me. You and I. And Kayu. We can do this…”

Emotions flashed through Nanashi’s unguarded face. The remainder of Akiyoshi’s words went unheard. Hope, despair, anguish, acceptance, all passed by in the space of a fleeting heartbeat. But in their wake, they left nothing but a sad half-smile.

“No,” he whispered softly. “Thank you, but no. I can’t… not again. No more.”

“No more…?” Confusion and anger warred openly upon Akiyoshi’s broad features.

“I trust you to keep her safe. Like you did in Choson.” Nanashi’s eyes lost focus, tongue slipping on simple syllables. With effort he reeled himself in. “I don’t trust myself, especially not after… not after Raiaera. That’s the end of it.”

“I hope you do not truly believe that you are the only reason why she faces danger. You think far too much of yourself if so.”

Nanashi tried to shake his head, and failed. He succeeded at last on the third attempt. “No. But if I’m with her, danger increases. Undeniable. Logic. For us both to accomplish what’s necessary, we need to…”

“For what Touma wants us to do! Do you really want to blindly follow his orders?”

By now, Touma wore his smile openly and smugly. “No, please, do continue. I’m quite enjoying this.”

Both men ignored the interruption.

“Have you any idea who he really is? What he really…”

Nanashi interrupted the tirade in a barely audible mutter. “I know.”

“He deals with the devil. He…”

“I know, Aki.” Beads of cold worry traced wet streaks across skin as pallid as ash. “Remember I was there. The night it all began.”

The Night of Nefarious Flame.

Chills ran down their spines despite the heat of their argument. Sweat dripped in dull thuds to the tatami mat, the wet splotches of their impact soon drunk dryby the thirsty straw. Wind stirred the carefully brushed and equally carefully marred dust, carrying upon it the stench of brimstone and sulphur, of flowing blood and futile death. As one they quailed before memories of daemonic battlelust, of the screams of the dying and the damned, seared upon their minds like brands upon slaves. Their collective fear stained the pristine snow of their surroundings.

“… you knew even then?” Akiyoshi could disguise neither shock nor instinctive disgust. “Why? Why did you not…”

“I didn’t,” Nanashi corrected. “It was years before I suspected, and years still before I had evidence.”

“And now?”

“And now… now that I know…” The wanderer took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself. With effort almost monumental, he then looked the puppet-master in the eyes. “I cannot forgive him. But I cannot blame him either.”

Touma burst into derisive laughter. Though neither of the other men paid him any attention, his amusement echoed loud and clear from the mountaintop, resounding in the wind that streamed rivulets of cloud through the steep valleys. Why did he have to be absolved of all the death and suffering he’d caused, by Nanashi of all people? The sheer ridiculousness of the situation broke down all barriers of detachment in a singly massive outpouring of mirth.

But the wanderer held Akiyoshi’s gaze, despite the darkness encroaching upon his psyche, despite the bile rising in his throat. Part of him wanted nothing more than to turn and flee from the contact. Almost equally desperately he had to get his point across.

“’Mankind must suffer to survive.’ Perhaps what Touma says is true. But nobody said that everybody has to suffer. And if by my actions I can lessen the suffering of the rest of the world by even the smallest amount…”

He shrugged, a sad and lonely gesture as he stood silhouetted against the southern sun. His determination, however, didn’t waver.

“No hero. A martyr.” Disappointment dimmed Akiyoshi’s swarthy forehead. He himself had struggled to accept that Touma had been working behind their backs for so long. Nanashi’s ready recognition of that fact was somehow even more difficult to understand. “You are either a lot stupider or a lot stronger than I am. Still I think you should come with us.”

Continually struggling to contain his laughter, Touma raised a hand.

“No. No, he shouldn’t.” Forestalling Akiyoshi’s biting retort with a wave of his dapper wrist, he explained, “There may come a day when we can trust him enough to work with. I hope that the day comes sooner rather than later.”

The words tasted bitter as they left his lips, but he’d long grown accustomed to the taste of insincerity upon his tongue.

“But until that day, it’s best that he works separately from the rest of us. Safer. Less trouble. Greater chance of success.”

Nanashi smiled curiously, eyes disappearing into dark hollow pits.

“No need to beat around the bush, Touma. Alone I fade into the background, ignored by the crowd. Nobody will look for me, nobody will see me. I stand the best chance of finding answers without causing panic or alerting the enemy.”

Gently shaking free of Akiyoshi’s hand one last time, he walked wearily to the edge of the ceremonial pavilion that Touma had set up. Once again his footsteps marred the delicate dirt, even more unsteadily than before. Distant eyes caressed the horizons, lingering on the faint promise of warmth upon the south before turning reluctantly to the cold and unforgiving north.

“Who knows what’s buried beneath all this snow? Long-lost dwellings of the titans, maybe even a dragon or two? Not even That What We Face… and while that still holds true, we may yet stand a chance.”

He turned to face them, still wearing that curiously sheepish half-smile as he peered owlishly over the edge of his spectacles.

“A slender chance, perhaps. But a chance.”

Akiyoshi’s calloused hand remained outstretched, as if it hadn’t yet realised that the wanderer had slipped from his grasp. A slight tremble ran through it, coarse hairs standing helplessly on end. At last, however, it lowered to his side.

Nanashi’s eyes tracked its fall, half in relief, half in sorrow.

“Aki, could I leave the slavers in your hands?” The whisper came out hoarsely, his vocal cords quite obviously on their last legs. “I… I won’t be in the area any longer and…well… it’s what she would do.”

Touma sighed in disgust. Nanashi turned watering eyes to him, staggering as his left leg gave way briefly beneath his weight.

“Let her go, Touma. Nobody deserves to be subject to that much hopelessness writ upon their face. For all your shades of grey, you’re better than that.”

The slave-woman in question, Nanashi’s cloak still draped protectively over her shoulders, displayed no sign of acknowledgement. Neither hopeful flash of joy nor angry resentment creased the emotionless emptiness of her face. Tongue firmly in cheek, Touma told the man, “I’ll think about it.”

“The Scarlet Shadow? Might be able to take up that mantle.” Resigned now that he could not yet change the wanderer’s fate, Akiyoshi allowed a ghost of sincerity to touch his face.”In the meantime, I order you to take care of yourself.”

“But in the long run, what does my one life matter?”

Nanashi’s words trailed into oblivion as finally his throat gave way. Had he any reserves left, he might have tried to communicate once more. But the effort was beyond him, simply too great.

Nothing, he thought to himself as he turned away, shivering one last time against the cold and the thick pools of mana accumulated upon the hallowed peak. In his fifteen years of roaming, he’d always dedicated himself to one cause or another. Only twice before had he found himself in the position to help her directly. No matter how he might beg in the deepest of his hearts, this time would not be the third. And yet, if he succeeded, he might give her a fighting chance against the oblivion that threatened their world.

That knowledge alone kept his tread steady upon the path that lay ahead.

Everything, Akiyoshi bellowed wordlessly at his friend’s retreating back. This was a man who had stood against flame and shadow to protect those who had barely deserved to be called his friends. Who had stayed behind on viciously vengeful foreign soil to cover the retreat of hundreds who would not even acknowledge his name. Who had crawled through the bloody mud and broken remains of a war not his own. He would never have dared treat another’s life with such callous disdain.

So why couldn’t he grant himself the same luxury?

Watching both of their unspoken screams, Touma simply smirked, that enigmatic charismatic smirk.

Cresting the rise, the nameless wandering foreigner embarked upon the long descent down Mount Modhgar. With every inexorable step forward, he disappeared further from sight.

[Whispers of Abyssion]

They watched until he shrank into insignificance, a mere speck buried amidst the deep drifts of snow in the valleys so far below. Their severe gazes cut through the swirling wind and cloud, stilettos through the wafer-thin chill. Puffs of breath left their mouths to the muted rise and fall of their chests. The slave-woman’s hollow gaze watched unnoticed over the two left behind.

At last, with Nanashi gone and conversation sure to flow more freely, Akiyoshi felt comfortable enough to give voice to what he had previously been unwilling to ask.

“Touma. What are you planning?”

Not a flicker of emotion crossed the puppet-master’s serpentine brow.

“He is dangerously close to the brink. Do you not need him alive?”

Neither batting an eyelid nor relinquishing attention from the retreating wanderer, Touma replied in an analytical monotone that seemed to seep from the corner of his mouth.

“That ridiculous sufferer complex of his isn’t something you or I can solve, Aki. He feeds on his regret like a carrion scavenger. He beautifies the past and bullies his present self for being unable to meet his own expectations. And because of that he has no friends. Consciously or not, he considers others simply tools to be used and discarded.”

Akiyoshi’s eyes narrowed as he shook his mane of coarse black hair, half sad and half angry.

“I disagree. He is simply too scared to trust. He has been living on his own for far too long. So long that even the thought of human interaction is enough to cause him to withdraw into his shell. Notice that he never considered just asking any of the elves who survived Anebrilith for the information he needs.”

“Not that any of them know. Or that they would tell him if they did.”

Engrossed in his diatribe, Akiyoshi did not heed Touma muttering beneath his breath.

“Thus he feels that he has to do everything himself. That he cannot allow any other to shoulder his burden. That he cannot rely on somebody else to accomplish what he thinks needs to be done. Even us. Even despite our oaths.”

Touma scoffed. “He wants her to notice him. That’s all.”

“Perhaps. But judge him not by your standards, Touma. There is considerable difference between you and he.”

“The most glaring being that I’m not walking off alone into the depths of Berevar, wallowing in self-pity like a sow in mud. It didn’t take me total war and genocide in Raiaera to glimpse That What We Face, and I can see beyond my own desire for her. He’s a weak link, Aki, and I need him strong more than I need him alive.”

“Again. I disagree. Unlike me he was not born to greatness. Unlike you he did not cheat his way up the ladder. Out of all of us he struggles the most to realise who he is and what he can do. Not only for her. Not only for Althanas. But also for himself.”

He paused for breath, dark pupils tracking Nanashi’s distant progress.

“Can he be saved?”

“Is that what you came here to do, Aki? To save him?” As guileless and inscrutable as ever, Touma’s left eyebrow rose in derisive question. Retrieving the night-black feather perched behind his ears, he brandished it like a quill in his compatriot’s direction. “From me? From himself? From the darkness you faced, deep in the Lindequalme?”

With a flourish he bowed, leaving the feather to tremble in the scarcest breath of wind. Akiyoshi failed to read further into the Serpent Tamer’s intentions, though he tried with as dirty a glare as he could muster. His disgust, both at Touma’s deceitfulness and his own inability to deal with it, rose to his features in shades of florid red as he muttered,

“Damn you. Truly a puppet master in a hall of mirrors.”

Mid-morn sunlight caught the samurai lordling flush in the face as he turned to depart, etching deep lines of worry and fatigue into his battle-worn features. Banks of cloudy fog, rolling in like tidal waves across the valleys below, finally obscured the wanderer from sight. Touma sighed as if released from a spell.

“Why?”

Akiyoshi halted with a frown, startled by the unexpected question. “Why what?”

Rolling his eyes and sighing at the samurai’s obtuseness, the puppet-master elaborated.

“Why go out of your way to defend him? Why go out of your way to offer a helping hand? Why step between me and him, when it must suit you more to abandon him and focus on what can be done to battle That What We Face? You, of all people, should know what is at stake here.”

Smouldering embers rekindled in the depths of Akiyoshi’s soul.

“Because we are responsible for what happened to him. For why he is like that.” Pale yellow teeth bared in a fanged grimace. “You most of all.”

“Ridiculous,” Touma retorted, eyes glimmering feverishly. “It’s his choice. I can think of a million better things for you to be doing than trying to reach out to one who doesn’t want to be touched. I can think of a million things I’d rather you be doing.”

“Then I ask you in turn. What was that for?” With one burly arm the samurai indicated the remains of their conference, the gold and ivory partitions shivering in the breeze and the empty porcelain cups of cha upon the grass-green tatami.

Touma simply smiled his enigmatic half-smile.

“Because if he does survive, it’s important that he sees me as his nemesis, his villain, the shadow scheming against him. Otherwise he may lose his motivation. His motivation to protect her against me, as well as against the True Enemy.”

“Are you her enemy then?” Akiyoshi’s hands strayed dangerously close to the killing sword at his waist. Though he would never allow himself to draw upon Touma at a place of the latter’s choosing, the temptation to end the charade in a fountain of spurting blood still threatened to overpower him. Even Touma, himself a master of the sheathed blade, shivered in the knowledge that he was well and truly dead if the samurai really wanted to kill him. Outwardly, though, only a cross flicker marred the Serpent Tamer’s exquisite composure.

“Of course not.” Ever the accomplished actor, he wove the mildest of exaggerations into the most convincing of truths. “I am her greatest ally, greater I assure you even than yourself, far greater than he. But for now it suits me for her not to know.”

“Urgh.” Akiyoshi’s left hand clasped his temple, ruffling his hair angrily, as Touma’s words fostered a stabbing burning headache. “Then what are you to me?”

How he now hated that arrogant smirk. How he now wanted nothing more than to wipe it away with a hammered fist. How his blood now boiled when he remembered how Touma had tricked him into battle against an eldritch monstrosity from the age of legends, and left him for dead on a battlefield strewn with the corpses of three hundred elven elite.

Glaring into those fathomless mirrors of inky brown, he felt his entire soul being dragged from his physical shell. With momentous effort he wrenched his mind from Touma’s grasp, visibly concentrating on the silky smooth voice as it infiltrated his ears.

“The puppet-master with his hands upon the strings, the one who can save the girl who saved you.”

Involuntarily Akiyoshi blanched, remembering how she’d rescued him from himself that night. If she hadn’t been there, and the dark side of his curse had taken hold, who knew where he would be right now. But because she’d saved him then, because she’d salvaged his humanity with that smile of hers so long ago, he’d found the strength to gather men to his side and prepare for the inevitable conflict.

“The one you can’t quite understand, who you think is doing the right thing but can never quite be sure. And thus you’ll always convince yourself to leave me be, just a moment longer, just a moment longer.”

Was it truth that lingered there in the depths of Touma’s eyes? Or was it simply further duplicity, another masque showing him simply what he wanted to see? Mirrors in mirrors, strings upon strings, the world turning its cogs and wheels upon the Serpent Tamer’s command.

“… in which case. What am I to you?”

Touma smiled.

“A piece on the spectrussa board, Aki. A warrior. A dragon. Possibly even a hero. But just a piece.” He paused a moment, then added, “As is he.”

And at the centre of us all, Kayu, key to the Cataclysm.

For long, eternal moments neither man moved. Their eyes fixed in combat, sizing up their opponent like heraldic beasts in the arena. The serpent, sinuous and cunning, against the dragon, honourable and volatile.

As monsters of myth they knew that confrontation between them was inevitable, that eventually they would have to settle their differences in blood.

But as men, they decided together.

Not today.

“I do not like you,” Akiyoshi growled calmly, unconsciously echoing his own words from a month previous. His brow glittered in the flurrying chill. “And I certainly do not trust you.”

“Of course you don’t,” Touma replied, still wearing that enigmatic half-smile. “But for now, you’ll do as I suggest. After all, in the end, what do we have but each other?”

The martyr. The hero. The puppet-master.

The ternion.


***

Akiyoshi left soon afterwards, back through the portal to the Andvall village from whence he had come. Solemnly Touma pinched the mirror-like sheen shut. Only then did he allow his own exhaustion to show, exhaling long and deep into the frosty air. Thinking so much of Kayu had tired him, as had dealing with the two Chosen, and uncharacteristically he had divulged much. Perhaps too much. But in the end, he told himself, it was all part of the plan.

“What did you think?”

The hollow-eyed woman rose slowly to her feet from the tatami mats, shedding the veil of mediocrity she had been hiding beneath. Hair like molten silver flowed in lustrous regality to the small of her back, her skin blemishless alabaster and her eyes gleaming white. Feathered wings spilled from slender shoulders with the darkness of sculpted night. Nanashi would have recognised her at once as a dar’el, a mya, one of the few survivors of the War of the Tap.

The wanderer’s tattered travelling cloak spilled to the floor as she stood. She stared at it without emotion for a moment, then kicked it aside with a delicate touch of her bare feet. Her lusciously rich voice caressed her pinion feather that Touma now held between fore and index finger, as she uttered but one delicious syllable.

“Pawns.”

Touma shrugged lightly, almost benignly, as he beckoned for her to accompany him. He too replied with a single word.

“Karma.”

They would become pieces of note, and they would succeed. Or they would not, and they would fail. Either way, he had problems of his own to attend to.

Last of the ternion he turned his back on the desolate mountaintop. He offered one perfectly poised arm to Silmeria, who accepted it with a dainty touch. Then a snap of his fingers, and he disappeared into the void.

The next battlefield awaited.

[Flames of Hyperion]

Northwards. Ever northwards.

The Emperor’s Sigil, the Seven Stars of the Northern Sword, beckoned.

The broken peaks of Mount Modhgar lay silhouetted against the gloaming skyline, somewhere behind him and to his left. His every bootstep echoed like an avalanche in the deep drifts of snow, taking him further and further away from its sanctuary. The fading warmth in his belly served as a distant reminder of the companions that he had left behind.

That he had abandoned.

I’m sorry.

Northwards. Ever northwards.

Weary legs carried him over the Gorum Mountains and into the wilds of Berevar. Greys and blues of rocky outcroppings, windworn and forlorn, pierced the pristine white blanket at his feet like teeth upon snowy gums. The piercing cries of hunting drakes overhead occasionally punctuated the motionless silence. But for most of the time the muffling hush filled his ears like cotton wool soaked in ice.

Ancient watercourses carved steep gorges in the thick glaciers, trails laid by nature herself as protection for her children against the merciless wind and cold. The frost beneath his feet smothered the heart of a living beating river, audible in the dead of night as the faintest of tinkling in the back of his ears. Blinded by blizzards that often lasted for days upon end, he followed its frenzied meandering with little idea of where it truly led. He sighted ruined stonework in the furthest depths of the glacial embrace, and crossed icy bridges over abyssal gorges, and passed beneath arches of ice bent like the knees of frozen titans. Who knew how long they had withstood the ravages of time, their creators long lost, their purpose long forgotten?

Northwards. Ever northwards.

The sun shone low in the southern sky, casting spectacular hues of cerise, amber, and gold upon the swift-moving cloud. Beneath its pallid gaze he trudged ancient game-trails, warded by guardian totems weary with age. Some spread roc-feather wings wide on the hilltops to catch the wind; others stood sentinel over the road proper, tattered ropes of braided mammoth hairs strung across splayed poles the size of oakwood trunks. Still others bracketed the frostways in soaring arches of tusk and jawbone, ever so briefly obscuring him from the scrutiny of the gods above.

At night, stars littered the skies like jewels on black velvet. Dark mountains loomed ominously upon the horizon, giant beasts of burden inching across the boundless snowscape. Some smouldered with inner flame like the tines of a molten crown, dousing the entire skyline in burning garnet. Occasionally he caught the stench of brimstone in the rimewind, pungent enough to pierce his frost-encrusted nostrils, reminding him of the volcano he had once witnessed erupting in the far southern isles of Nippon.

Northwards. Ever northwards.

Some days he walked by the sea, frozen earth biting with wickedly serrated teeth into the icy water. Fog rolled past in solid blankets, so thick that he could barely see the glasses upon his nose. Inhaling of frigid salt he crossed treacherous floes upon a winding path reaching out to nowhere, closing his ears to the raucous crowing of sea vultures stalking his footsteps in the expectation that he would keel over at any moment.

On others he trudged upon mountains so high he could reach up to touch the heavens. Drifting curtains of bright blue and deep purple washed in prickly horror over his skin, drifting serenely through the night sky. The aurorae formed the perfect backdrop for the bright red moon, hanging low and large behind him. Upon the darting breeze he listened to the mournfully distant howls of tundra wolves on the hunt.

Northwards. Ever northwards.

The wound across his chest festered angrily, the flesh around it curling with black rot and weeping malodorous pus. The trail of footsteps behind him staggered unevenly where his wrenched left knee caused him to limp, and he cradled his useless right wrist against his chest in the feeble hope that the scant warmth there would do the deep-set ache some good. Every night he collapsed at the end of his tether, sinking into dreamless unconsciousness where he fell. Every morning he woke to the insistent cries of carrion birds investigating his prone form, wrenching fingers and rending exposed skin with powerful razor-sharp beaks. Eventually he would succeed in shaking the cobwebs from his mind and the lethargy from his limbs, picking himself up for the next day of travel.

He learnt how to ward away the worst of the chill with a thin layer of heat over his skin. He learnt how to protect against the wind with an aegis of compressed air. He learnt how to endure the freezing rain, such that it washed away the mud and grime caked upon his skin. He learnt how to scavenge barely-edible stalks from beneath the desolate snowscape, and how to scrounge enough clean snow to quench his feverish thirst.

Had he failed any of his lessons, he would have disappeared without trace, buried beneath the merciless white.

But he didn’t care.

For he was ijin, foreigner, and nanashi, nameless. And he was also sasurai, wanderer, without anything his heart could call home.

But he was not without purpose, nor without determination to fulfil that purpose.

Kayu.

To Blightwater.

[Tobias Stalt]

Alright, to business.

Story: 7. While lengthy and slow in some places, the story was imaginative and immersed the reader in a dialogue heavy setting. There is tension and suspense, but it's sporadic. The reader was able to glean that the relationships between Aki and the others are not exactly pleasant, but may be left wondering why.

Setting: 9. The writer draws the audience into the setting and calls them back to details. From the strange circumstances surrounding his awakening, to his journey north and the chill that awaited, and even into the darkness of a blooded underground.

Pacing: 6. The pace moved with some disruptions that were mostly mechanical. The first post was choppy, but recovered quickly in the writing that followed. Notably, near the beginning and the end, the thread had an upbeat tempo that kept it moving forward. Each post progressed the plot, but they moved slowly in the process.

Communication: 10. Possibly the strongest point in this thread, the communication was employed to tell the story. Whether questions on the part of Aki or answers from Touma, everything seemed to come together to weave part of the tale.

Action: 7. Where it was used, the action was strong. Movement between dimensions twisted the thread, as well as his trek northward. The short lived battle sequences and attacks were vivid, but ended quickly and left the reader wondering why they weren't expounded on. There could have been stronger action to supplement a phenomenal dialogue.

Persona: 9. The characters were thought out well and displayed emotional and intellectual individuality. The personalities were developed and exemplified through writing.

Mechanics: 6. The writer suffered at several points here. At the very beginning, the second sentence beginning with "But his fingers..." Due to the way it was written, it was cut off from the first sentence, and it became a dependent clause. This means that the entire second sentence is improperly written, because it consists of two dependent clauses. There are a few places where the writer makes this mistake (Though it is an easy mistake to make), wherein he writes fragments or unfinished sentences. Other than that, the thread is excellent and free of spelling errors or grammatical issues.

Clarity: 7. There were points where the reader could easily get lost due to a presumption of previous knowledge. With context clues, it was easy to realize there was bad blood between Touma and Aki, but provocation alone did not seem like enough to rile the man. Gaps in continuity, however small, can detract from the clarity of the writing. Also, be wary of mechanical issues and overuse of literary techniques.

Technique 8. The use of strong description and language empowered the thread, and remained consistent throughout. Scenes were depicted vividly, and so had a more lasting impact on the reader. This allowed for a powerful use of setting and allowed us to see through the character's eyes. Worth mentioning would be the overuse of repetition, which began to get stale.

Wildcard: 4. Some of the repetitive themes were overused. While they don't disrupt the Pacing per se, or really detract from the read overall, I found them to be more distracting and almost filler content. I've had a fellow I wrote with at one point say to me three words that helped me cultivate a writing style I don't mind going back over to read. Those words were this, "less is more." You don't need to go back and dredge up the same idea and keep it fresh in the reader's mind if you did just enough to grab their attention the first time. While reading some books, I can go over one part and take note of it, and when it comes up again I always fiendishly circle back to the first mention of it and triumphantly proclaim, "this and this! These are connected! Woah! This is good writing!" Bear that in mind. You don't need to give everything to the audience. Just enough that they can draw the connections and fill in the gaps themselves. It's more fulfilling to read that way. Which isn't to say the writing is bad (it isn't.) I just feel like you want to tell me everything, but you're not really showing me. Lead me to the water, but let me drink on my own. If that makes sense. I hope it does.

Final Score: 73/100

Flames of Hyperion gains
1,900 EXP and
370 GP

Whispers of Abyssion gains
250 EXP and
50 GP

Congratulations!

[Lye]

EXP & GP Added!

Flames jumps to Level 10!