On the road between Rinsfeld and Last Harbor
Summer 213
There is a dying in the autumn that needs not the fire nor the turning of a leaf, but only the changing of the wind that is the whisper of the coming end and a moment so still in which we learn to say goodbye.
It was a flame, however, that cast its copper glow against the faces that gathered in its warmth—where frost found the breath before their lips.
The City of Rinsfeld was behind them now by a week and a day, and it had only been by the bending of the mountains cut by the blade of a river that they made their camp.
There was the scent of stew made from leek, potato, and a bit of lamb—where the bass of S’olenroux’s humming was twined in the rhythm of a whetstone on Rowen Baleburn’s stolen sword, its sparks akin to fireflies rare on a winter night.
The sisters Sor’rel and Lae’sireli sat close and curled into one another—and apart from the others—at the edge of the fire’s light and just beyond the reach of its welcome, the curls of elvish words coming gentle from their lips—stray pieces plucked like blossoms at the edge of Emma Spinsugar’s careful listening, where her quill scratched at sheepskin.
The end of a thin stick had pulled crude drawings in the dirt, where gathered around it Danica Thorne, Ethan Fairchild, and Talith Elinasti, debating ideas of swordplay and strategy.
Their hushed murmuring tangling with the more excited voices of Garbon Tutonson, Caspis Ward, and Lumotu Musket, who marveled in laughter over an octopus puppet built from scraps of iron and wire, which seemed to dance between them beneath its own locomotion and a funny hat made from folded leaves—and it was not far at the edges of the near trees that Cashew and Twig chased one another among the branches and the snow.
It was Bax Demir, son of Abram, who stood most apart from the others, where the fire’s warmth was another place and it was the stars and the Octurne that painted him in a paler light.
The forest and the road had become a friend to him now—so broad and bending, the tannery which had for so long been home seemed now so small and far a thing—he had taken from it all the things that mattered and searched still for those yet to be found. The thick animal furs won by the hard hunt wrapped him and kept the cold away, his father’s hunting spear rested in one hand with its haft against the ground—but where his right eye was bound by cloth, the other stared beyond the bronze of the gentle blaze and across the pale night—for on the distant and jagged line cut by the cliff-edge meeting the gleaming stars that formed a dim horizon—was there something wrong with the world.
“Hey, Guys. Guys. Guys! Uh—I think I saw someone. I think there’s someone following us,” he called out half-behind his shoulder, but hesitant to take his eye from the cliff’s edge.
The pleasant murmuring of an evening well spent was extinguished, and soon only the crackle of campfire’s slow flame and the night-song of insects remained—before that aching quiet was broken by the sound of Rowen’s boots crunching the snow, as he rose and moved to the edge of the camp and closer to Bax—squinting against the newer dark. “What did you see?”
The hunter pointed a gloved finger toward the stone ridge beyond the nearest line of trees to guide the other boy’s view. “He was there. Right there. I just saw him for a second. I think—I think he was wearing one of those masks.”
The last of those words was given space in the air for a moment, before it was cut away by steel singing free from sheaths—there came the strummed chords of Roux’s crossbow being slung around from his back, while Talith drew forth the tarnished silver of his longsword, Vivian, from the leather fixed to his belt.
Emma perked from her work on her pages, “Oh my! Is there going to be a skirmish?”
The ebon blade of a thin dagger with a handle made of bone fell from Ethan’s sleeve and into his hand, as Danica pushed up to her feet and pulled Kelwin’s longsword from the oiled leather of its sheath, her voice quick and decisive, calm despite its urgency. “Okay. Okay. Talith, Bax, Rowen with me—set up a perimeter.”
“Torches from the fire around the camp and put the rest out. Stay close—I reckon they’re here for the twins.” Roux’s voice picked up where hers left off.
It was Sor’rel’s voice that followed as the teal-stained and horned elf got to her feet, the tail behind her swaying anxiously, each word an urgent punctuation. “No. Bad. Wolves. Cannot win. Have to go.”
Rowen either didn’t hear or didn’t listen. He had already his sword in hand, but where the tip of its blade had rested into the snow, he swung the weapon upward and at the ready, as he took a single step forward toward the edge of the waiting night. “No, we’re putting an end to this.”
It was Ethan’s eyes green as sea-glass that searched farther into the star-touched dark beyond the edges of the torches little Caspis and Lumotu had scattered around them, his voice edged with urgency. “So, just to make sure I understand—we’re about to pick a fight with a group of highly trained elven warriors who have been successfully killing people for hundreds or maybe thousands of years? We think this is a good idea?”
“I’m ready,” Talith said, flourishing his sword.
Bax’s spear had been turned toward the night, his stance set wide in anxious preparation for what was to come, but here was a flick of his eye toward Rowen and then toward Sor’rel and the others. “Uh! Guys?! What are we doing?”
There came the softer complaint of snow beneath smaller feet than his and with it a hand that reached—but did not touch—and a voice so gentle and certain in its fear—Sireli’s words so thin a knife to cut the space between them. “Rowen. Father is coming. Please. Run.”
There lingered a moment whispered in its waiting—a choice unseen from which one cannot return—a choice from which only two roads reach as serpents shared and searching.
Rowen felt the weight of the sword in his grasp—it was so much lighter than it felt a year ago. He had taken it from the hands of another now dead. The bear-shaped scar at the corner of his chest ached numbly in the cold.
How many times should he have already died?
The tip of his sword-blade fell to rest into the snow and the now muscled curves of his shoulders slumped forward. “Fine. Let’s get out of here.”
---
Soon it was the night and the stars and the pale shine of winter white set against tops of spearing pines that smeared into the sound of shouting voices and snow crunching beneath the boots of the fleeing.
It was when the sound of heels in the snow became the clattering of solid soles on a long and broad bridge of wood and iron chain that Danica’s sprinting steps slowed and frost stained gasps of curling fog filled the lapse in hurried boots.
Summer eyes as honey flecked with gold, luminous beneath the Octurne, searched frantically and drank in the fleeing of her friends—and the wolves, the elven warriors, the Ru-ara’thuiel, that hunted them. The words barely found a sound beyond her gasping breaths, urgent, desperate. “It’s here. It has to be here.”
Ethan’s heels scattered the snow as he stopped and reached out, grasping Danica’s arm, and began to pull her—his own breathing urgent and gasping in search of air, his words chopped short by his own panting. “Can’t stop! Let’s go!”
Danica’s wrist stuck Ethan’s own to knock it away from her arm and she shook her head urgently and called out in the space between her breaths. “No! Here! Fight! The bridge. Cut the chains!”
Ethan’s eyes were wide and his brow furrowed in exasperation, one hand gesturing wildly toward the bridge. “We don’t have time! It will take an hour to cut through that! We won’t hold that bridge for more than a few minutes! We can’t stop! Let’s go!”
It was the sound of Bax’s steps that joined them, his eye searching the ridge line behind them frantically, his animal skins and furs whipping in the howling mountain wind. “Why are we stopping?! They’re going to catch up!”
The twins were swift despite the snow, but slowed and stopped to see the others lingering behind. Sor’rel’s terse words were made harsher still by the shortness of her breathing. “No stop! Must go! Wolves fast!”
Danica straightened her posture from where she had bent with her hands on her knees, and nodded her head several times, while choking down a cough. “Yes. They are going to catch us. They are moving faster and we’re getting slower. The next town is hours away. It’s here, Ethan. This is our only chance to survive this,” she said as she wrapped her fingers around the hilt of her sword and pulled it free from the sheath.
There was a moment cut by the frigid wind where bewildered eyes stared at the girl aglow who took the first lone steps onto the narrow bridge alone. “It’s here. We have everything we need.”
It was Garbon’s boots that first joined Danica’s on the wooden slats, opening the wire of his spectacles and pushing them onto the thin slope of his nose, his breathing heavy to match. He ran his hand along the iron chain, the woven links as thick as a man’s arm. He nodded his head slowly. “She’s right.”
There was a long sigh that rolled into a groan and made its way out of Bax’s throat, as he spun the spear in his hands a few times, and stepped out onto the bridge. “I don’t like this idea at all.”
Talith ran his fingers through his hair and pushed an amount of it back from his face, while he cut Vivian back and forth through the air with a few practice swings as he stepped out onto the bridge. “Trust me, guys. We totally have this.”
Rowen nodded thrice and pulled the longsword from his back as he stepped out onto the bridge beside Danica, Talith and Bax. “In a forge a furnace is used to heat the iron so that it can be worked with a hammer. Korene taught me that.”
Ethan glanced back and forth between each of them, an argument coming to perch on his open lips, but instead he threw his hands up and began to pull the wooden shortbow from his back and fished an arrow from its quiver. “Alright. Emma, are you absolutely sure you can do this?”
Emma folded her arms with one elbow resting in the palm of the other while a finger tapped thoughtfully at her lower lip. “Well, as it were I have been formulating an experiment that would combine the constellations of the Beacon and what I have come to call the Urn into an entire new arrangement, that should theoretically—”
There was the whistle of a hawk feathered arrow that cut into the end of the wizard’s words and thrummed against the heavy wooden boards that ran the width of the bridge.
Emma!
Emma!
Emma!
Emma!
“Oh! Right,” she said, before the girl began to trace her fingers through the air where trailed after them gleaming lines of pale that bridged the points of what could be nothing other than a constellation of stars, and before her the iron of the chain began to glow like an iron rod left long in the flames. “I’ll need a few moments!”
It was upon the crest of the nearest rise that sloped down toward the thick iron and hard winter wood of the bridge that appeared in dotting that near horizon the figures of that which they had come to dread—the Ru-ara’thuiel.
It was two figures that so quiet in their distance began to descend the slope first at the pace of a walk—each were masked in wood painted and decorated in the approximation of wolves, armored only lightly in ribbed, earth-toned leather—one carried a long and curved sword and the other two shorter swords the length of the forearm—and soon the two began into a jogging stride, and then soon into a sprint run of long and nimble bounds across the snow and then onto the bridge.
A turn of her head set Sor’rel’s urgent stare into Sireli’s own, fear and panic knitting her eyebrows. “We have to help them. We have to help Bax. We have to help Danica.”
Danica lowered her chin and raised her sword in both hands above her head as she spread her feet into a wider stance, where eyes that still clung to the last hint of forgotten sunset stared hard, her hair pink beneath the Octurne and thrown by the chilling winds. “Here we go.”
It was on the hill behind and above which overlooked the bridge that Sireli’s fingers curled into the linen and leather of Sor’rel’s clothing, barely breathing, while eyes as a clear summer sky stared at the ridge in waiting of the one figure she knew would be there—the elvish words curled past her lips, almost inaudible. “This is my fault.”
…and there on a swaying bridge above a ravine that was a maw with teeth that were stones was sparked the singing steel when crossed at last the paths of those whose fate could not bear the being of the other - where the plucking chords of lute-bow set the rhythm to the clashing of Isendelian steel against curved blades of the Syn’celnarin—where poured forth the magic and the mechanisms of those chosen by the stars—and so soared and slithered snow and shadow of sisters seeming twice.
---
Roux’ back was pressed against the thick stone pillar that held the bridge, where he loaded another bolt into the slot atop his lute-bow, before drawing a breath and raising it near his shoulder and swinging out around the pillar enough to aim down the length of the bolt. He immediately caught a glimpse of one of the Ru-ara’thiuel as the elf flashed in and out of his view behind Rowen.
There were a few sparks of steel and then a splattering of red blood against the wood where Rowen stumbled. Roux fixed his aim onto the blue painted wolf and began to squeeze the lever on his crossbow, but a quick sword-swipe of the red painted wolf forced Danica to step into the line between Roux and the one he meant to fire at. The half-elf shifted his aim to the other, but by the time he had lined up the bolt the red painted wolf had spun and ducked to avoid a swipe of Bax’s spear, concealing himself behind Talith.
Behind the other pillar, Ethan was pressed with an arrow nocked in his bow, where he drew three quick breaths before drawing the string and swinging out in search of a chance to fire. The black haired boy glimpsed a flicker of movement just behind Bax and aimed his arrow in that direction, but just as he began to squint in waiting for a chance to fire, the whistle of another arrow brought a stinging bite of searing pain, where a wooden shaft with hawk feathers protruded now from the front of Ethan’s shoulder.
His own bow string thrummed as his arrow flicked off of the bridge’s chain without finding either of the wolves, as he cried out through gritted teeth and spun back around behind the stone pillar, before he began to laugh aloud in a voice threaded with pain. “Oh yeah. That hurts. That’s not a good feeling. Emma, can you make this go faster?! This is not going well!”
There before Emma the intricate mandala of gleaming starlight lines and flaring points were collapsing and flickering, while her nimble fingers worked swiftly to rebuild and rearrange them. “I’ll have you know that this is actually incredibly difficult - and fascinating! The constitution of the iron alone can—”
“We’re almost ready!” Garbon interjected, where he squeezed the swollen bladder on a contraption he held in each of his hands, a stream of acid pouring out onto the now orange glowing metal, fumes and smoke pouring off of it.
There was another arrow that whistled through the air and thrummed into little Caspis’ wooden shield, behind which the gnome was nearly entirely concealed, with young Lumotu just behind her. “I know you can do it!” the halfling called out from around the shield.
---
Danica could no longer hear the sound of swords clashing, but only the pounding of her own heart and the panting of her own breathing in her ears.
The strikes of the Ru-ara’thuiel were swift and strong, and each slash, thrust, parry and riposte lead so seamlessly into another that the girl was pressed to the limits of her abilities just in order to stay alive, searching desperately for an opening to attack.
Bax thrust forward with his spear, but a swift upward parry of the red painted wolf’s sword sent the hunter’s spear sailing up and above his shoulder, where Rowen’s sword collided with the metal haft, the elf using Bax’s own spear to block the strike.
It was there Danica saw and opening and thrust forward with a strike of her longsword toward the red painted wolf’s exposed abdomen, but a swift kick of the blue painted wolf’s foot into the flat of her blade sent the thrust astray and right into Bax’s side, who cried out in pain and collapsed backward, stumbling behind the line they held on the bridge. “Get back! Get him back behind us!” she cried out in frustration and panic.
Rowen stepped closer to try to keep the bridge, but their line had fallen from four to three. Talith held Vivian with both hands, swinging the tarnished silver blade in crescent strokes toward the red painted wolf, before a swift counter-blow carved a line across his breastplate and sent the boy stumbling backward a step.
Infuriated, Talith lifted his palm where a smoking mix of black and silver began to coalesce in front of his hand. “Let’s see how you like—”
The blue painted wolf had thrust his long and curved sword toward Rowen, but when the boy turned an upward parry to deflect the blade, the elf pressed his sword deeper past him and used the strength of Rowen’s own parry to slash the elvish blade into Talith’s forearm—sending a searing blast of eldritch energy up harmlessly into the sky.
Talith stumbled backward, thick blood pouring from the laceration that carved the inside of his wrist and around the fingers that instinctively gripped the wound.
The red painted wolf used the opening to lunge forward just past Talith and drive one of his swords into Rowen’s side, while the other deflected a swipe of Danica’s longsword.
The red haired boy grit his teeth against the pain, and shoved the red painted wolf back, which tore the blade out from his side. He stumbled backward a few steps, and tried to step forward again, but collapsed down to one knee as blood began to make its way past his teeth and down his chin as his eyes drifted upward, caught by a bit of movement.
It was there at the top of the rise on the far side of the bridge that more figures had appeared, and among them a tall and lean figure whose ornamentation surpassed the others—a longbow of pale wood on his back—his mask tall and vicious and where it had once been broken had been remade with veins of gold. He gestured and two more of the Ru-ara’thuiel began in a sprint toward the bridge.
“Father,” fluttered an elvish word. There was a half-blink of Sireli’s pale eyes and she took a half-step closer, as though such a thing would help her see him more clearly—he had come so far to this place to hunt them. She was sick with fear, and still the child in her dared still to hope that now—that somehow even now…
It was Sor’rel’s hand on her arm squeezing that made the girl blink and take a small step back into her sister.
Roux grabbed Rowen by the strap of his sword sheath and Talith by the edge of his breastplate and began to haul them backward toward their side of the cliff, leaving Danica alone with the two wolves. “Danica! Get back! Now!”
---
She could feel the breaths burning in her lungs, Kelwin’s longsword held in each of her hands. She took a step back and shifted the angle of her sword, and the wolves adjusted with her. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the two of them, and as one stepped to better position and she stepped to adjust, the two wolves passed each other, switching places—pale eyes staring at her from behind the holes in their masks, faces painted was wolves—emotionless and hunting—each of her steps was countered, each an opportunity for the two Ru-ara’thuiel to gain a better position—and if she turned and fled she would be dead before she took a step.
The cold mountain wind blew across the surface of the bridge. The girl drew a slow breath into her lungs and for just a moment she felt the summer wheat against her calves and the stick in her hand—she could see S’olenroux Faux standing in front of her, while the other children of Aelorean’s Crossing watched on.
Roux hauled Rowen and Talith to the relative safety of the near side of the bridge, and as soon as they were on the ground the oldest of the boys spun around and pulled his lute-bow off the ground and aimed down the bolt. His aim drifted between the two wolves—while the two others sprinted toward the bridge behind them all—and Danica always seemed to be between him and firing a shot. “Come on…”
The step and counter-step lasted almost a full three seconds, before it was broken by the pulse of starlight and Emma and Garbon shouted in unison, “Now!”
The red painted wolf stepped and swung with a far outside strike on Danica’s left side and she moved and angled to parry it. The thrust from his other sword was already approaching on her right, and out of the corner of her eye she could see the blue painted wolf with his long sword raising for an overhand strike that would cut from her outside right.
The only way to avoid both would be a hanging parry with a shifting step to her left, which would trade her place with the wolves and place her back to the two new approaching Ru-ara’thuiel—and that would be the end.
So she didn’t.
The thrusting blade of the red painted wolf sparked as it pierced her armor and drove deep into her abdomen, while she completely ignored the strike and brought her own sword in a tighter and quicker swing into the shoulder of the blue painted wolf. There was a splatter of blood against the wooden slats as the Ru-ara’thuiel was driven backward with a stumble—his heavy sword now slower in one hand.
Danica lifted her knee and planted her boot in the hip of the red painted wolf, shoved him backward, throwing herself away from him at the same time, tumbling backward and into a dead sprint toward the near-side of the bridge.
The blood that splattered out from the gap in her armor was thick and torrential, running in hot current down her leg. The red painted wolf stumbled from the kick, but planted his heels and took off after her in a head-long race back toward the near side of the bridge. The blue painted wolf was right behind them by a few paces.
The iron of the bridge chain groaned and one of the links gave way, which sent tight iron snapping and whipping out across the ravine, while the bridge lurched and swayed—which sent Danica stumbling and scrambling to keep her feet while she ran.
Bax’s breathing was quick and heavy, he stepped forward a step, his hand holding the wound on his own side. “It’s too far.”
Ethan was still gripping the arrow in his shoulder, he pushed up to his feet, sliding his shoulder against the pillar. “Roux, she’s not going to make it!”
It was little Lumotu who stepped forward, his eyes staring at the girl who sprinted toward their end of the bridge. “She is going to make it. I believe in us. Believe in us.”
Ethan seethed pain through his teeth, glancing back and forth from Danica to the edge and to the others. “No… she won’t.” He snapped the arrow in his shoulder and began to scramble forward, stumbling and sprinting toward her.
S’olenroux Faux drew a slow breath and pressed the stock of his lute-bow more closely into his shoulder. He closed his eyes and the front of the bow drifted upward.
Danica sprinted and no matter how quickly she breathed her lungs couldn’t take the air that she needed. There was a hot trail of her blood painted on the wooden slats and the edges of her vision were beginning to gray. She ran with every ounce of strength she still bore, but the wolves who chased her were faster.
It was the red painted wolf who reached her first, his curved swords turned down in each of his hands and with a great leap the Ru-ara’thuiel soared up into the air behind and above Danica…
Roux squeezed the lever on his lute-bow and the string thrummed and his bolt sailed just above Danica’s head and into the shoulder of the red painted wolf, who fell short and tumbled across the bridge with one of his swords clattering off the edge.
Roux quickly began to load another bolt into the lute-bow, while Bax hoisted his spear and began to limp closer toward the edge, as the red painted wolf rolled across his shoulder to his feet and sprinted after now two paces behind. Danica stumbled forward with her arm outstretched.
The hot iron of the chain stretched out like taffy, the surrounding chains snapping as the bridge let go. They saw Danica’s eyes go wide as the bridge beneath her feet vanished and she fell.
“No!” Ethan dove forward with his good arm stretched out and his hand found her forearm where hers found his—grasping onto one another.
The weight of her fall jerked him forward and he began to slide toward the edge, but it was Bax that grabbed hold of Ethan just as he was about to go off of the edge. “Rowen!”
The most stout of the boys clasped Bax’s hand, “Hang on!” and with a strained groan pulled the lot of them back from the edge, Danica’s boots finding purchase as she climbed with the pull up onto the cliff’s edge.
The children stumbled back from the edge together with panting breaths, the snow stained with blood, and the sounds of the bridge crashing into the rocks beneath echoing from the ravine.
Bax stumbled through the snow and tossed his spear down before he collapsed, panting, while Rowen hauled the heavy weight of his sword to the sheath on his back and moved to sit on an outcropping of rock.
Ethan and Danica sank to kneel in the snow, where thick red dripped into the white between them. His gloved hand gripped onto her shoulder and squeezed there, where the heel of her closed fist struck gently at the center of his chest.
“Well, that was a terrible plan,” the black-haired boy said.
There was a pause before the two began to laugh for just a moment, something loose and tumbling from lungs too tired for such a thing, before the girl began to slump and her head lulled as blood spread through the snow around her knees.
Ethan caught her by the shoulders before she fell into the snow, “Woah there, Hero. Okay. Bax, help me get…”
It was at that moment the curved blade of an elven sword dug into the snow and the stone at the edge of the cliff and was joined by another set of hands nearby. The red and blue painted wolves began to hoist themselves up from the edge.
The laughter and the smile drained from Ethan as he stared at the climbing wolves and he began to shake Danica by her shoulders. “Danica. You need to wake up. You need to wake up right now.”
The Ru-ara’thuiel got their feet beneath them and leaned in a sprint toward the children—their painted masks unwavering, free of fatigue, free of fear, and without remorse.
Rowen, Bax, and Talith began to scramble to their feet, grabbing their weapons up from the snow, but they were much too far away to get there in time.
The distance between the wolves, Ethan, and Danica was already gone. The red painted wolf crouched low and lunged forward, while the blue painted wolf leaped upward with his long curved sword.
Roux’s eyes were still closed when he pulled the lever on his lute-bow, the bolt slicing through the air and into the throat of the blue-painted wolf and sent him sliding still into the snow.
There was no time.
Ethan jerked Danica around behind him and spun around to put himself between her and the red wolf, while at the same time a flick of his wrist dropped the black-glass dagger from its place under his sleeve and into his palm.
He lunged forward to meet the Ru-ara’thuiel.
The long months of his training in the Fading Wood with Rye and the Red Bandanas, the long hours in Rinsfeld he had spent learning to be quick and to be quiet—in learning that a blade need only be swift instead of strong—it all had led to this moment.
Ethan was no match.
The thudding of wrists in a brief exchange three-strikes-long could have been called commendable by those who understood the sign of true talent, but in a quarter of a second the blade in Ethan’s hand was pried away from the thumb and came free of his grip, flipping through the air, before being caught by the red-painted wolf, who drove it swiftly beneath Ethan’s arm and toward his heart.
The boy knew he had lost before the blade was even sent, but in the breath that was sucked in across his teeth and tongue did not come the sinking of a blade—but serpents twined shadow stained in sanguine and in amethyst that struck the Ru-ara’thuiel and sent him stumbling backward where frost beyond the reach of winter crawled across his skin—then there came another and another—until he had staggered so far his heels had come to the cliff-edge—until the painted mask on his face had been cracked and fell away, Ethan’s dagger dropped at his feet.
The man’s eyes were the color of the moss that grew on the river-stones in the summer months when the days grew most warm, before the turning of the autumn when Sor’rel and Sireli most liked to play in the water as children.
His name was En’dahliar and he had served their family for more than five hundred years. It was he who had taught Al’rowan the bow and the spear when he had been their age.
He met the stare of those sisters with ragged breaths and blood that ran down from the edge of his lips, one of his arms gripping the shoulder of the other where the skin had turned black from the bite of frost and shadow that slicked still from their palms.
He was brave and he was loyal and he would never stop hunting them.
There was a quiet pleading in Sireli’s eyes in the moment that hung between them, but En’dahliar grimaced and took a step forward—and the two sisters each closed fists wreathed in writhing shadow.
Sireli turned her eyes away so that she would not see what happened next—Sor’rel did not.
There was screaming for a moment and then there was no more—and soon something twisted and broken tumbled down the cliff-side and beyond the fog beneath.
There was a moment more that hung silent aside from the howling of the winter wind, before Ethan stumbled back a single step and sat down into the snow with one hand over the place on his chest meant for a blade but a moment ago. There was silence, but then there came a brief and gentle chuckle, before then it came again and began to fill the belly.
There were disbelieving eyes that moved to Ethan, where he lay laughing, before he moved to hand to cover his mouth—the laughing became a brief and soft sobbing, before smearing into a softer and sighing laugh and then becoming quiet. “We’re alive,” he chuckled again.
Sireli’s voice moved across the snow, her eyes and those twinned by her sister staring across the ravine at the figures who still stood on the far side and fixed upon he who stood most central.
“He is Se’aldar. He is father.”
The eyes of the others moved then across the ravine to the far side, now separated and impassible, but it was Bax that plucked his spear up off of the ground with a limp and after a moment of hanging silence shouted across the ravine. “Not so tough now are you?! We got you! We won! Go home! You suck!”
Rowen lifted his sword up off of the ground and sheathed it across his back, stepping closer to the edge and staring too across the ravine. “You’re no father. We don’t care what you want with them. These are our friends and you can’t have them. Don’t come looking again.”
It was Roux that turned first and slung his lute-bow across his shoulder and began toward the fading road that led away from the bridge. “We’ll have to carry Danica. Let’s get out of here.”
---
There had been a time when they were still small—too small to understand what it meant that they were—the burden of their being.
It had for him been but a moment in all the great forest of moments that had grown and fallen and would too again—but it was so precious and small a thing—that moment of simple wonder in that they were his.
There had been an instant when they lay in the crooks of the arms of his Amaran’thel and they were not monsters—they were only children—they were only his.
Se’aldar watched from behind his mask the children across the ravine as they began to gather themselves from the snow and make their way from its edge and toward the thin path that lead deeper into the mountain, and beside him stood an elf masked as he—and his hands he held a roll of white doe hide.
Se’aldar moved from his shoulder a bow of pale wood from a tree which had no name and ornamented with the feathers of birds which the world had now forgotten.
The elf beside him opened the doe skin and resting within were the arrows that she had made—the Fangs of Se’aldar.
They were simple and fletched with the leopard feathers of a mourning hawk, iridescent beneath the Octurne—the arrows’ heads a crystal as blue as eyes he loved, as blue as eyes he dare not see—and they served a single purpose.
Se’aldar took the arrows from the skin and knocked them into the bow and in the distance was smeared so gently something teal and something lavender. He drew the bow and leaned the arc into the wind for it would carry now his burden.
There was a moment that waited there between his breaths, behind his mask—but such moments are not meant to last.
---
The snow was crunching again beneath their feet and now smeared stains of blood gave telling of their passing. It was Bax’s voice that accompanied the sound of gasping breaths as they began to crest the top of the climbing hill.
“If I had to guess—it will take them at least two or three days to find a pass beyond the ravine. According to the merchant on the road, we should have hit the next town by the…” There had been other words from Bax’s lips, but the sound had become something distant for Sireli.
It might had been the curve of the path ahead, or perhaps the rising rocks and the way they leaned, or perhaps it was the blood smeared in the snow which should have instead been autumn leaves.
This was the place she had seen him die in another time that hadn’t been, and she thought for just a moment there on the horizon the sky was stained with amethyst in the hinting of the coming dawn.
There was a thin dread, vague and misshapen, which had formed in the place just beneath her heart, constricting into a quickening panic.
“Al’ethan,” she had barely said when she heard the gentle whistle of an arrow on the air and spun so quickly with eyes wide and breath caught in her throat in search of him, but her eyes found eyes so familiar they might have been her own.
It was a thing too quick and quiet to be real—the way Sor’rel gasped and stumbled in her steps, while a tuft of fur was thrown into the air as the second arrow meant for Sireli struck a squirrel so soft and small—Twig barely made a sound when he was knocked from the air and tumbled against the snow, twitching and smeared in red. Sor’rel took a few small steps, her lashes fluttering in want of blinking.
Quick and shallow breaths lead her eyes and her steps in searching for something she didn’t know—before she faltered and slid down to sit in the fresh white winter that fell beneath the stars.
The blood that began to spread into the thirsting snow around Sor’rel mirrored the cracked-glass patterns that began to spread through the skin around the arrow embedded in her back - glowing so gently as the dying embers of the campfire they had left behind. A delicate hand reached out for another so much like her own, confused eyes seeking other eyes that had always been hers. “Sireli?”
- Kelly / Sireli Begins Writing Here -
It was silent and it was sudden, and the panic that rose in her was ancient, and it was familiar, and it was cold, cold, cold.
Her sister fell soundless to the snow, and Sireli didn’t remember following her, only knew that she did; that this moment reverberated against another, a mirror, a twin—the feeling of an arrow through a different body, a shadowed body, a body that never should have been; the crunch of snow beneath boots and then only air, before the shattering of ice and the darkness that came with being pulled beneath the current of a river.
It was a moment years ago, before she knew Common and before she had murdered and before she knew anything of amethyst or magic or caverns found a hundred thousand leagues beneath the ice.
She thought for a moment she might yet blink and wake there, her sister in her arms as she had been then. But when she looked up, lips shaking beneath the weight of a promise she never wanted to give but a price she had to pay, it was the faces of her friends that looked back at her, their eyes a rainbow absent of violet, and when she looked down again her sister was there, quiet and stilling and pulled haphazardly into trembling arms.
Winter air blew sharp and cool against the tears staining Sireli’s cheeks, and the hollow horror that filled her knew only one dull truth: that this moment was not that moment, and the blood that stained her hands as they scrambled over her sister was forever, so much thinner and redder and slicker than it had ever been in dreams.
“No,” she said thickly, as much an order as it could be. Her fingers dropped from Sor’rel’s face to the feathers that protruded from her, feathers she had been waiting for since the moment she’d seen him on the hill; feathers she’d seen already, in a lifetime apart from now, quivering from the wound of a boy she thought she could save.
Had she? Was this her fault? One life for another—Sor’rel for Ethan? One soul, one shot, one price?
“No. Sor’rel. No, don’t, please. You can’t leave me. Please.”
The arrow that cleaved her time as a twin and her time as something else in two was thin; thin as silk and thin as waking and thin as ice. She wanted to pull it from the wound as her sister had a lifetime ago in the square of Aelorean’s Crossing, but she knew this fletching, and she knew this magic, and she knew this pain.
“I need you. Al’rowan needs you. Twig and Bax and Danica—you can’t—I can’t—Sor’rel, Sor’rel please, I—“ She would have lived a lifetime in that moment, a lifetime frozen in that pain, if it meant holding on to the only thing that mattered. If it meant remaining a whole, even as her other half threatened to slip away.
“Sor’rel please.” Tears fell from desperate eyes to her sister’s collarbone, slick and horrified and panicked, and she prayed in that moment with snow still falling and their friends still watching that an arrow would find her too. “Don’t go. Please don’t go. Please.”
- Chris resumes writing here on behalf of Katie / Sor’rel -
Sor’rel had seen this face—for always had it been her own.
There had been another time and another girl and another arrow—and there in a place they had fallen so deep through water and through night, until there was but sanguine stained ice and the kind of cold for which a word had not been made—and she too had pleaded and had begged and she had bargained to have her back.
There had been tears then in a time when her tears could still be warm—and now there were as well. She could taste them cold and salty as the unbound sea where they spilled down her cheeks to her lips and clung to her chin and dripped into the blood and into the snow.
There were fingers touched in teal that moved and brushed so gently to the lean lines of a lavender face, while her brows knit under the weight of an apology that could never be given beneath the shadow of what was coming next.
It began as quietly as the first and last of the turning leaves taken by the wind—the way her skin and the fabric of her clothing began to flake away from her body as glowing pieces of ember-ash carried across the mountainside.
There were meant to be words and there were meant to be answers and a peace so gently woven that it could somehow stand before the roiling vastness of an unending sea stained in blood—but there was only the press so soft of her cheek to her sister’s own and the words that found themselves in the mourning music of the elvish tongue, desperate and true, “I would do it again. A thousand times and a thousand more would I bargain all the world to have you back for even one moment—my sister, my Sireli.”
There had been another girl and another arrow on another shore and just at the edges of her hearing, as her fingers clung so close to Sireli, she could almost hear those voices still.
“Name. Ethan… Fairchild? Al-Ethan? Danica. Danica Thorne. Sor’rel. Sireli. I’M BAX! BAX DEMIR! Bax… Bath? Bath. Bath! Bath Demir!”
And Sor’rel was gone.
- Kelly / Sireli resumes writing here -
No.
The word fought for purchase in her lungs, the last use of air left in them; yet it was empty and it was futile and it was heavy, and when her lips formed the syllable it was stillborn, strangled by the umbilical cord of an unspeakable dread.
No.
It wasn’t enough. The word wasn’t enough and the sentiment wasn’t enough and the horrible, growing vastness inside her wasn’t enough as her desperate fingers scrambled for purchase, as if she didn’t already know the terrible truth of what the Fangs of Se’aldar did, or that there was no magic in all the worlds that would let her put the pieces of her sister back together again, even if she hunted the rest of her years for every shred, for every moment. (and they had had so very few moments, in the end)
No.
Pale blue dust lifted to the air, spinning with snow in the starlight, and if she thought to speak now it was impossible, for there was another noise escaping her; something inelegant and something inhuman, the awful cry of an animal in pain. Even with her eyes closed and face buried in her sister’s heart there was no stifling it, only the violent shaking of shoulders and quiet sound of choked gasps that became louder and louder as her mirror’s form, first so solid, crumbled to whispers beneath her and faded to ash.
The laugh that started to escape her was high and horrible, an uncontainable pitch that split the night and descended into something ugly, something choking, when she looked back down and saw not the snow beneath her crumbling palms but hands of a different sort; a paler sort—the sort she had always dreamt of being born with, white and elven and ordinary.
There, kneeling in the snow, what remained of her sister stolen by the elements, the wind chipped away at her—slower and more deliberately than it had her twin. As she stared in horror, the veneer she had hated so much sloughed off first into the snow and then into the air, piece by lilac piece, until horns had crumbled away from her forehead and it had spiderwebbed and shattered the unbroken ice of her eyes, leaving pupils and haunted irises the color of her sister in their place.
Teal and lavender twisted for the last time in the air above her and she knelt, trembling and bloody and unmistakably elven, beneath the dim glow of starlight silent and stifling with its apathy. Slowly, quietly, the wind took what remained of Sor’rel.
The best of Sireli went with her.
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