Tonight, though, tonight would be different. Happiness saturated my spirits, chasing away even the most malevolent of my thoughts. I was beyond relieved to know that Rune hadn't been forcibly made a Commander. That was good on its own. But seeing the look on his face when I told him he was okay... well. That was another memory I would never forget. A good one, for a change. I wanted to hold on to it as long as I could.
The constant white noise of the surf below the keep was a lullaby that would have had the power to coax me into a fitful slumber if I hadn't been so thirsty.
Stretching, I stepped into the relative darkness of the guest wing hall and spotted the long refreshment bench beneath a gold-framed painting. There were cups, a pitcher and a bowl of apples.
Ignoring the tightness in my healing calf, I made for the bench. As I poured myself a cup of water, I looked up at the painting. It was a lovely work of oil: flaxen fields, spiky palms and gently rolling hills beneath a stormy sky. Afternoon light brightened the grass, laying contrast to the darkness on the horizon with incredible precision. It was clearly a depiction of the lands surrounding Breakwater. I searched for Rune's initials, but found an unfamiliar pair instead.
After experiencing the divine sensation of drinking water and quenching my significant thirst, I noticed someone at the other end of the hall.
As rational as a person can be, it's difficult to not be afraid when someone startles you in a dark, sleeping building. Now I, on the other hand, had always been equipped with a very irrational imagination. It didn't take much to scare the pants off me, as long as a few key elements were present. Dark, check. Empty, check. Hallway, check.
Random stranger, check.
There I go again. Welcome back to being five, Kat.
I put the cup down nervously, ready to dismiss my fear and hurry shamelessly back to the girls’ guest quarters.
A chill turned my spine to ice.
The figure moving up the hall was mimicking my every move.
“Thank you for being creepy,” I told the person. “You've terrified me, congratulations.”
Every single nuance of movement, from my hands to the tilt of my head and the rigidness growing in my posture, was mirrored with flawless precision.
I froze the way a child would, frustrated by a sibling copying them, and equally like an animal startled out of good sense by imminent danger.
The figure drew closer, and I could see shadows peeling free of it like sticky tar. A pair of white eyes.
No!
It was too late. I looked into them and couldn't turn away. I skittered backward, too slow. The shadow ripped free of its bindings, sprinting for me, unraveling the closer it came, expanding, smoking and burning with black gauze.
The figure lost its human shape entirely, tumbling and twisting all around, closing me off from escape. A scream was stolen from my lungs before it could touch the air. Tripping on my own feet, I fell backwards.
I hit the shadows in the floor like a pool, and sank to the bottom of darkness.
Chapter 3: Silhouettes
I expected it to be like it had been before. Staring into those perfectly round, white eyes should have been a direct link to Prince Raserion. He used shadowy humanoid figures to see, speak, and Command his subjects from afar. Linking eyes with a “Voice of the Prince,” as they were called, would force a person into an unwilling audience with the Prince himself. When I spoke with him, I'd seen his silhouette through a wind torn vortex of black, blue and gray smoke.
This was different.
The wind ripped at me, screaming into my ears. I felt pressure all around me, like I was being smothered. I gritted my teeth, steeling myself against the suffocating embrace. Determined not to be caught, I sent out a violent pulse of electricity.
My back hit the ground, punching the air from my lungs. I curled up reflexively, cradled my head, and groaned. How far had I fallen?
When I breathed, the air was close, like I'd stepped into a closet that had been closed for fifty years. It was stagnant, but clean. Scrambling to stand, I exploded with another burst of electricity, freeing it from every inch of my skin. The white flash blinded me and illuminated nothing of my surroundings... at first.
It was after the bolts died away that I saw the shadow chasers. They were all around my feet, swarming to me. A thousand pairs of tiny white eyes blinked up at me. Their salamander-like bodies were flickered with wings and horns and spines of electricity. After hoarding my power for themselves, they burst into flight, soaring away in all directions.
I shielded my face and shuffled back a few steps. Two zipped past my ear, and I could feel the static pouring off of them. I marveled at them and then lost my breath entirely.
Eyes finally adjusting to the darkness, I found myself submerged in another world. The sky was all wrong. It was slashed and moving, like layers of sheer fabric floating in a slow current. The horizon blushed with soft cyan light, and blended with midnight azure. Only the crown of the sky was true black.
The shadow chasers grew distant overhead, darting and twinkling like swimming stars.
I was in a glen of shadowy tall grass. Black outlines of great leafy trees undulated in a nonexistent breeze. Stoic silhouettes of boulders, ridges and mountaintops thrust up from behind the woods. Fog curled through the place in varying shades of gray, lending depth to the pitch-dark world. The shape of a mighty palace stood proud in the distance, the focal point of the entire scene. It must have been enormous, because though it seemed quite far off, its many spires still managed to brush the upper quarter of the sky.
Everything was blue and black, white and gray, almost like Breakwater had been that night. But this place couldn't be real. It was beautiful and heavy and twisted. It was like the stage of a play with a thousand shifting parts had tumbled into the real world, as if it was cut from the cloth of dreams… or nightmares.
A silky white stream flowed beside me. I leaned down to touch the strange water, and my hand drifted right through it, disrupting the flow pattern like I'd brushed a ghost.
I pulled my hand back at once, afraid of what it might do to me.
Wind began to whistle again. There was a tearing sound, and four horses leapt into existence before me. Sixteen hooves clattered on the stones of the ghost stream as they landed, diaphanous water splashing up around their ankles. The way a cat's eyes will shine in the dark at night, the way an opal will seem to be a certain color and then another, these horses appeared solid and then semi-transparent. As their positions shifted, their muscular black masses would gray out like they were made of smoky quartz crystal, showing me glimpses of their ivory skeletons within.
Four sets of white eyes found me. Ears flicking flat, heads pulling back, they spooked as though they didn't expect to see me there. Neighing, the group bolted off down the meadow, only looking back at me when they were a safe distance away.
Like they were the only ones who'd been startled. I found my hand clamped down like a claw over my heart. I was still gasping for the thick, still air, when I saw the three-headed warhorse, picking its way through the field toward me.
“Oh no,” I said, backing up. “No. No. No!” My last word came as a shout. I screwed up my face, squeezing my eyes shut, and emitted a third blast of electric energy. When I opened my eyes again, I could still feel the sharp buzzing of the Spark just beneath my skin. I was certain I'd used my Ability, but nothing had changed. In Cape Hill, when I'd been locked into the gaze of the Voice of the Prince, using the Spark had freed me from his grasp. Why wouldn't it work now? Maybe I really was dreaming.
The ground at my feet was glowing. Shadow chasers surrounded me again. Just like before, they beamed with my light and soared away on electric wings.
The three-headed warhorse stopped to stare at me from across the stream. Everything about the creature was slightly too long, from leg, to neck, to snout. A rider sat astride his back.
“They won't let you leave.”
That voice.
I'd
heard it before.
It belonged to Prince Raserion.
Chapter 4: The Prince and Me
“You'll not depart this place until I allow it,” said Raserion, the Prince of Shadows, leader of the Western armies. “My shadow chasers are seeing to that. I wish to speak with you, Lodestone.”
The Prince swung down from his seat astride the three-headed warhorse, and walked to the water’s edge. His molten silver eyes lacked pupils, and were the only clear feature on his face. There were insinuations of a nose, a mouth, but no matter how hard I looked at him, I couldn't see any of it clearly.
He wasn't a real person. He was a shadow, like everything else in this three-dimensional diorama. He was nothing more than the shape of a man; a silhouette among silhouettes. There were no points of a crown atop his head, no insinuations of fantastical armor. He wasn't even overly tall or burly. He was plain in every respect, but for that voice. His rich baritone had all the depth of individuality that his body lacked. He spoke with elegance, but without weakness. Though he sounded neither young nor old, a resounding maturity flavored his every word. When he stopped speaking, the world, whether real or imagined, was a little emptier for the absence of that audible perfection.
I wanted to tell him that we had nothing to talk about, but when I opened my mouth, the wrong words flowed out from me. “You killed Sterling!”
And Lina Thayer, and her parents, and my countrymen.
He cocked his head ever so slightly to the side. “I know no one by that name.”
Rage boiled up in me at the slight. My arms burned with lightning and I threw a bolt at him before I could stop myself. I gasped, blinking. The electricity never had the chance to leave the palm of my hand. It was being siphoned away by the shadow chasers teeming at my ankles. I looked at my palm as the last tendrils of energy slipped down my arm, over my waist, my legs and down to the shadow chasers. Dozens of them took flight, lighting up the sky.
“There are billions of them you know. I had no idea how easily they could reproduce when I created them, but I was just a boy.” The Prince stood for a moment, watching them soar. “This friend of yours, Sterling. Shall I presume he was the Lodestone that caused my Margrave Hest's death?”
He dismissed my attack like I hadn't done anything at all. I may not have been able to strike him, but my anger remained strong. “She murdered him, and you probably ordered her to do it!”
“I did no such thing,” he said, subtly chastising me. “It was a bold attempt but a foolish one on her part. Their deaths were regrettable.”
“Let me guess, you're sad to see a waste of resources,” I spat. My whole body was rigid with tension, every muscle tight and ready for action. I wasn't anything close to a trained physical fighter, but I'd bite and claw if I had to. I would never surrender.
I expected him to do something, to come at me, or attack. He made no violent move, but that didn't set me at ease. I trusted him even less.
“If I am to blame, then so is time,” he said, pacing the stream. “In the face of time, belief is both fickle and fleeting. Imagine that a people know a blue horse. They have seen it, it exists, and it is real as the sun. The blue horse disappears, but people remember it for exactly three generations. A hundred years pass. People are educated that the blue horse once existed. Another hundred years pass, and history begins to blend with fiction. People believe wrong things about the blue horse. Again, I educate them. Again, they forget. Five hundred years pass with this dance. I teach them, they forget. I teach them, they forget. Tales grow taller, fact all but disintegrates, and people begin to disbelieve in their own historical documentation of the blue horse.
“You see, every civilization of every age in time thinks itself to be brighter, smarter, better than the last. They are not. Humanity has always been the same. The facts about Lodestones went out of fashion long ago, and I will not spend eternity wrestling truth into a people who do not care to have it. One man alone cannot defend against a plague of ignorance that can only be treated and never cured. I have learned this.
“In part, I am guilty for your friend Sterling's death. I was unprepared to find Lodestones here, now, after so many hundreds of years. My people were uneducated. Until some few months ago, all but the most studious Historians believed Lodestones to be little more than minerals, mined from some foreign mountain. Lauren Hest should have known that draining a Lodestone was far beyond her capacity. Only one living being is strong enough to consume a Lodestone.”
“The Monarch,” I said for him, openly glaring at his shadowy figure. For all I knew, the war machine was as alive as the mecha-organic Lurchers that lived in the hills surrounding the Haven Mountains.
“Living being,” he corrected me like I was utterly stupid. What other living being could drain a Lodestone?
I blanched. “You?” I'd figured draining one of us and surviving was impossible. I was wrong. So far, during our strange discourse, I'd been seething; letting everything he said drift through one ear and out the other. All I wanted was to be free of this place. Or to make him pay for what he'd done. My skin prickled at being so close to one of the two most dangerous men in the world. But when it dawned on me that he, the Prince of Shadows, could drain Lodestones and survive, everything he was saying became very real. Every detail was important. I scrambled inwardly, trying to recall every word he'd spoken and adhere it to my memory.
This being, this Prince, could destroy me and live long enough to celebrate it. I should have been afraid, but I was just too angry. “You really are immortal,” I thought aloud.
I could see his teeth flash as he smiled. “It has never been proven otherwise.”
“Let me go.”
“No.”
“Are you going to kill me?” I asked him. Was I strong enough to fight? Not with these shadow chasers leeching off my every strike.
Raserion's tone changed. “No.” He said it as though I'd asked him if he wanted to share a biscotti.
“What do you want from me?”
“Yes,” he said like he was greatly pleased. “Yes. Everyone wants something. It is the sole source for all interaction. I do want something from you, and you want something from me.”
“No I don't,” I snapped. If only there was another way I could escape. I attempted to use the Pull, my Ability to find whatever I sought. I focused on finding the hall of Breakwater keep where I'd fallen. The result was chaotic, and painful. If the Pull were a compass, the needle would have been spinning out of control. I felt the need to walk in every direction. I couldn’t understand it.
“On the contrary, you want many things from me, Lodestone.” He waved a hand and a shape began to grow and twist from the ground at his feet. It stretched and contorted, reaching over the stream until it planted down beside me to form a narrow bridge. Mist swirled around it, hissing like water hitting a fire.
Raserion stepped up onto the bridge and began to cross, moving toward me.
“Don't come any closer!” I warned him. If only I weren't helpless. I cast about, searching for a weapon or a way to defend myself, but I found nothing but shadows. This was his place. What chance could I possibly have?
He ignored me, resting his palms on the railing of the new bridge. Tendrils of white steam licked up from the rail, between his fingers. “You want to leave this place, the Shadows within Shadows, and you want me not to invade your home and kill your people. Am I mistaken?”
I ground my teeth together and admitted the truth. “No.”
“Ah! Good,” he said leaving the railing to disembark from the bridge. His boots, or whatever he wore on his feet, crunched into the gravel on the bank. “There's nothing I love more than honesty.”
I tried to back away from him, and nearly tripped over the shadow chasers at my feet. “What do you want?” I asked again.
He tipped his head, looking down at me. There were no whites to those eyes, no pupils, just an impossibly pure surface of silver. “I want you to help me find and kill my brother.”
>
Chapter 5: An Impossible Position
“You want me to what? You're asking me to kill your brother? The other prince?”
Why don't you ask me to sprout tentacles and ride a flying elephant while you're at it?
“Well, I'd prefer to do the killing, if it's all the same to you.”
“Why me?” My life depended on keeping my face perfectly still. If he didn't know I had the Pull, I could not implicate myself. A long time ago, when I was a prisoner in Breakwater, I was told that Raserion loved using people who were gifted with it. I was also told that the last person with my unique Ability had killed himself while in the prince's employ.
The tearing sound returned, and a herd of thirty warhorses charged down into the grass on the far side of the stream. Prince Raserion didn't so much as turn to look at them. He paced beside me and I spun to follow his movement. I didn't trust having him at my back.
“You are Katelyn Kestrel, the Lodestone who posed as a Historian in the capital city of the Reedy Coast. It's a pity we hadn't met in Cape Hill. I've been told I departed upon your arrival. Shame. Shadows within Shadows is a fine place for a discussion, but it's no place for action. I would have insisted that you show me your other Abilities.”
Something told me that “insisting” was a kind word for what he'd do. He'd probably Command me to use my Abilities the way Stakes had at Breakwater's Installment.
The dark prince rounded on me. “If you could fool my own Margrave then you already possess the appropriate skills to walk among my brother's men in the North.”
“That was different,” I stammered. So far as I knew, Raserion was death incarnate. Why would I ever dream of helping him? “You're a monster. If you think I'd help you, you're out of your mind.”
No filter. Just say whatever you're thinking. Good job, self.
His voice was so soothing, so diplomatic. “We already share a potentially symbiotic relationship. I can offer you much, and more. You know of my Monarch weapon, but are you aware that I've built one in every major Installment across the West? I have.”
War of the Princes 03: Monarch Page 2