32 Autumn 218 - just after the battle with Blackwing
Athelia
The fight still ran through her mind and adrenaline through her body. At her sides her arms hung heavily, but her fingers flexed. She wanted to call the water to her and use it to drown the swans who fled. Those others with their unknown magics that threatened everyone she cared about.
By her feet lay the now human body of the inquisitor. But he’d been a dragon, an impossible creature of sand and power. They’d all watched helplessly, just out of reach, as the angelic girl was turned to dust. Her heart hurt. It could have been any of them, but he chose her. All her friends had fought to find her and rescue her and she mattered to things bigger than Isendel. And in a moment, Danica was gone. That dragon Inquisitor promised to do all that and more to the rest of them. Athelia had no choice. There was no capturing someone like that, he needed to die.
She stood staring at his body, watching silently as the essence of him slipped away. And his sister watched and begged for him to live again. Then even as Danica rose up anew from the water. Athelia’s heart couldn’t stop hurting. Thankful but fearful. Her people, her love didn’t wield great magics and fantastical birthrights. They sailed towards a dragon, and danger and wherever she led them. And more and more it seemed she was leading them to their deaths.
The Tide’sSong arrived just moments to spare, her sails full and crew ready for battle. The water rushed against the sinking boat beneath her feet, rocking the vessel with its wake. She looked up, searching the decks of her ship to where she knew she would find him. And without looking at any others, she ran to him.
Avarian
It was from nothing that became the storm of a foreign sky, the sanguine sand a thing made violent against the bluer and more familiar there above, where roiled the savagery of a lover’s wrath, gargantuan and aching with the scarlet-stained lightning of magic made malevolent by the will of men. It was there beneath she had been sent, and so it was there to-ward the ship had sailed for her.
There was more-a-story there in the faces of those who had survived, and great it was a thing of loss and horror. Where sailors stood on steady legs, as ships swayed in the swell of storm-touched seas, tight breaths and uncertain eyes searched then for what was gone.
There he saw her and to him she flew, and around her folded tight his arms, where fingers pressed into her back and kept her close as a thing so certain and always too so nearly lost to him.
He imagined to find in the others those faces lacking, that one among them would be gone, or broken there as the ship beneath them, but as he searched he saw them each, and so there in the hand at her hair and the cheek against her own there was a question that came instead without words.
Athelia
“It went so wrong,” she whispered. Not wanting to raise her voice to worry her crew, but she clung to Avarian. “The civilian crew, and then those swans with the marks. Everyone wanted to take the inquisitor to capture him. But he became a dragon.”
She pulled back a fraction to find his eyes. “He ate her, crushed her and tossed her in the air and she became nothing. Just dust in his storm. We could all become nothing in just a moment. The Briarbirds, our friends, our crew. If the Baroness has anyone else like him, if she is worse than him…”
Athelia’s face looked haunted, “She was dust, but then something insane happened. Something aasimar or just beyond my understanding made her whole again. From dust. But we aren’t important enough for that. We are just thieves and pirates. No god cares if we fall.”
Avarian
It was there in lavender that was held something so blue as the sea, and around his eyes the muscles drew the slightest hint of what was at first his confusion, and then the slow understanding brought with her words.
Danica had died, and yet she lived.
It had been there in the changing shapes of the storm, even from the deck of the ship on its approach, a dragon, an impossible thing, but it seemed that each step now they took was into something more and more impossible, where crashed the waves and will of gods and people of the sky, and what more the role of sailors better than to drown beneath a sky that belonged to someone else.
There was a half blink of his eyes and the brush of his thumb against her cheek. It was there near the end of her words his lips so simply touched hers, a kiss that was not quite a kiss, but perhaps a prayer for what was already spared, where the bridge of his nose touched her own.
“We need to move our people back onto the ship and what supplies we can take from this other and make haste from this place as quickly as the wind and the water will take us. Everyone and everything for three league bore witness to some part of that. Quickly as we can.”
These were the words he said, but between them was everything more. They were, and they had been for some time, at the very edge, and beneath and behind them all the world was falling into the sea, and so it was with everything they had always hoped to be and to do.
He heard the tales of that which he had not seen himself — that Roux had died and it was Bax Demir who traded his life away that he would live instead, that Talith had been taken by everything that could be pain, and still he stood with them, and now too — impossible — that Danica Thorne had been a thing but ash, and only by a magic they could never know she clung there on that deck to a man who should be dead and another who was likely not even a nobleman.
They were alive so long now by so thin a thread alone as hope. What drunken bard would speak of such a thing — perhaps just one.
He pressed his fingers into her hair and again his cheek against her brow, but to the city turned his eyes, for there beyond the fog and the remnants of this storm-that-was-not-a storm the silhouette of Galoring awaited them, and her many spires were the jagged fangs of so great a beast as they had never known, and it was by some way of the wind or perhaps the water or perhaps something in her voice, he knew.
There within were no more second chances.
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