by Will Wight
Estyr hadn't cared. Instead, she defeated the eight families that showed up for the spring wars.
All at once.
Thus, in one leap, did Estyr Fourteen become Estyr Six. Even when the ambassadors of Kelarac came to her passes and the worms of Kthanikahr passed beneath her feet, she still ignored all news of the war. Her family was warm, and safe, and they had access to more food than she had ever imagined. Better yet, they wrapped her in praise as their protector. Their savior. Their hero.
That autumn, before the heavy snows fell, she traveled to seek out the other families and demonstrate her strength. By the time the next of the springtime wars began, she intended to be Estyr One.
It was Kthanikahr, the Worm Lord, who descended upon the Dylian Mountains. Before she could begin to grasp reality, before she understood her enemy, all her people were dead. And she would be Estyr Six forever.
She had battled the Great Elder himself on the slopes of the mountain where she'd been born. There were no mountains there anymore.
Today, people called it the Dylian Basin.
Until her death, she would protect it as its Regent. This time, no one and nothing would take away the people under her watch. Not a Great Elder itself, and not...whatever this was.
She rubbed the head of grain between her fingers. She was no farmer, but she was fairly sure wheat was supposed to be rich and golden. Not slimy, discolored, and stinking like a thousand burning corpses. She looked up and scanned fields that should have been amber for harvest, but were instead purple and crumbling.
“We thought it might have been Elders, my lady,” the farmer said, resting a pitchfork against his shoulder. The locals had been very concerned about what to call her; apparently “Estyr” wasn't good enough. They had settled on “my lady,” though she couldn't have possibly cared any less.
“Maybe...” she said, still rolling the rotted wheat in between thumb and forefinger. This wouldn't be a standard move for any of the Great Elders, unless Othaghor or Ach'magut had decided to pull some subtle trick that was beyond her. Or if Tharlos had gained a particularly mild sense of humor.
Still, there were a million kinds of Elder out there without enough power to be called Great. Maybe one of them blighted grain.
But she doubted it. “This feels like alchemy, to me. Bring a sample of the soil and a box of the wheat to the nearest Kanatalia chapter house. If they can't find anything, I'll take another look. If it is an Elderspawn at work, it's a weird one.”
He chuckled, but there was little humor in it. “It's weird, all right, but it's also going to keep meals from our tables this winter.”
Two hundred years ago, the last time Estyr woke, she'd been appalled to find everyone stiff and formal. There were intricate manners for glancing across a room, it seemed, and she was worried that the whole Empire would be filled with walking copies of Loreli. The founder of the Luminian Order could get away with being stiff as a spear all the time, but it made everyone else come across like a living statue.
But she loved the current age. All the ordinary people were so earthy and straightforward, down to every word they spoke. It was as though the Emperor had taken steps to ensure that the next time Estyr woke, she would be more at home.
Knowing him, he might have done just that.
The thought sent a pang of sadness and regret flitting through her chest...and it woke the notice of her Vessels.
Around her head, three lizard skulls about the size of an alligator's floated in an eternal orbit. Now they were dried, bleached with time, but once they had each graced the neck of a Cloudseeker Hydra.
“Do not mourn him!” they shouted. “Become him! Rule, as he should have! Rule as only you can rule! You deserve to be Estyr One—Estyr, the One Above All!”
They weren't exactly words, but so specific as to be close enough. They filled her with ambition, with a regal sense of self, with the desire to fly above the world and see it all trampled beneath her. The arrogance of the Cloudseeker Hydras, combined with her own immature Intent as she defeated them and brandished their skulls as trophies.
They were her own pride, writ large. And they were her power.
But they did not own her.
She grinned, focusing on her fondness for the modern people rather than her Vessels' disdain. Estyr clapped the man on the shoulder, a gesture that would have had Loreli protesting its impropriety and Alagaeus furious at the casual contact. “Don’t worry about it, I’ll take care of it. Nobody goes hungry.”
He looked dazed, as though she'd struck him with a club. “But...the blight...”
Estyr motioned, sending a flood of her Intent out and seizing the entire crop in an invisible hand. She scooped up the soil and wheat alike, gouging a crater out of the field. The ball of dirt hovered in the air, big enough to bury a big chunk of the houses behind her, and she piled it to the side. “Now it won't spread. Take a sample to Kanatalia, get it checked out, and I'll re-plant your crop myself. If you lose a single stalk, your family's eating at my table this winter.”
Judging from the flow of his Intent, the man was struggling to decide whether to be horrified at her treatment of his crops, awed at her power, or moved by her generosity. Tears appeared in his eyes, and he started stammering, but she laughed and walked on. She didn't need to hear thanks, or blame, or compliments, or complaints.
She could Read exactly how he felt. More importantly, she knew his family would be fine. That was enough.
Estyr lifted herself into the air, her long black coat flapping behind her, Hydra skulls spinning in a macabre halo over her head. She rarely thought about their power merging with her Intent anymore, she just used them. It took even less thought than using her hands.
Only when they blazed with ambition did she have to put them down. It was a struggle every time, but the habit was most important: when she told them no, she strengthened her barrier against them.
Long ago, there had once been a debate about whether Soulbound really fought against the desires of their Vessels, or if the Vessels merely reflected hidden pieces of the Soulbound's personality. Estyr suspected that, like many debates, the truth remained hidden in the middle. If the power of her Soulbound Vessels came both from her invested Intent and the abilities of the original Kameira, then it made sense to her that the Vessels would take on aspects of both. The Hydras were arrogant, and she had been arrogant to challenge them.
Now, she fought daily to suppress that arrogance, but she didn't resent the fight. If that was the only price of her power, she'd gladly pay it.
So long as it helped her build something that would last.
A column of smoke rose from the north end of the town, rising black against the white of the distant peaks. She flew toward it with a thought, and soon she saw flames beneath her.
The Hydras crowed at the sight, delighting in the destruction. It raised memories of Nakothi's death, and the devastation that had swallowed an entire continent.
Strangely, Estyr felt a bit nostalgic for those times herself. It was rare that she got to lose herself in a contest.
But she commanded her power, her Vessels didn't get a say. And someone down there was in trouble. That took precedence over everything else.
She alighted in the crowd standing around the burning building, skulls spinning around her head. “What's the situation?”
“Everyone's out,” a woman said, shading her eyes to stare into the flames. “That was Yolvic's house, poor man. Can’t do anything about it now. We've got it so it won't spread, and he's on a trip abroad, praise be to the Emperor.”
The Emperor had nothing to do with it, Estyr thought, but another wave of mild grief came with the thought. She'd spent her share of years furious at the Emperor, but she'd still assumed he would last forever. It had never occurred to her that she might wake up one day and he wouldn't be the one pulling her out of the coffin, telling her exactly what had changed and what crisis she needed to solve.
Together, they'd built the world.
Now he was gone, and she didn't know what to do with it.
“I think I can get the fire out a little sooner,” Estyr said, “maybe keep a few of the rooms intact. Might be something in there Yolvic wants to keep. You're sure everyone's out?”
She turned to a commotion in the crowd to her left, alerted more by the flow of Intent than by the sound. A group of men were alarmed, trying to restrain a young man with nothing but pure, focused determination in his soul. He was focused on something to the exclusion of all other thought.
“My baby!” he shouted. “My baby's in there!”
He broke loose, struggling free with brute force, and darted into the building. She thought about snatching him up with her Intent, but hesitated. If his child was really inside, she didn't have any right to stop him.
Alagaeus would have said that her power gave her the right, and her Vessels would agree, which was why she tried to do the opposite. People deserved to make their own choices, even when those choices were idiotic.
Not necessarily suicidal, though. It wasn't as though the entire building was completely ablaze; the fire seemed confined to the second story, licking through a few windows. Unless the man threw himself into the flames, he would be in more danger from the smoke, but she could always pull his unconscious body free. More pressing was this baby. If there was a child in the house, that needed to be her top priority.
She stepped closer, sending her senses into the home.
The chair is crafted with comfort in mind, as a gift to the woman he loves. The crib has been polished to a gleam in expectation of children, then neglected for years in a haze of sadness. The fireplace is made out of red stones, which he fishes up from the river and considers lucky. They will protect his house from disease, from Elders, from vague threats that live firmly in the future. The weathervane is crooked, but it was forged by his father's hand, and it predicts the wind more accurately than anyone else's.
No child.
Infants were too young to have developed proper Intent, so she might have trouble picking up on the presence of a very young child, but nothing else in the house gave her the impression that there had been a baby living there for decades, if ever.
Maybe he's a visitor. Maybe he's a fugitive hiding in the attic, I don't know. There could be a hundred explanations. A strong part of her urged to rush to the man's aid; after all, there was a child in danger.
What had started the fire?
With a bubble of force around her to ward away the smoke, Estyr Six walked inside.
She heard the crack of a gun, and then something impacted her bubble hard enough to send her spinning to one side. Her Intent vanished, forcibly dispersed with a pain like someone had torn her brain in half. She staggered against the wall, bracing herself against a support beam.
It was the man who had screamed in the crowd, standing aside, holding a smoking gun. He tossed it to the side, his Intent still radiating absolute focus.
An invested gun. How did he manage that? Invested bullets were notoriously unreliable, jamming or altering the mechanics of the gun nine times out of ten, and firearms were too complex to be reliably invested, much less Awakened. Any Intent tended to sink into one part or another, and the machine ended up turning against itself.
But he had fired a bullet that had ripped through her Intent. It had to be Awakened, at the very least. Perhaps he was the world's first Soulbound with a pistol as a Vessel, or maybe there was some strange alchemy in the bullets.
Either way, she was so dizzy that she couldn't seem to focus her power.
He raised a second pistol, finger tightening on the trigger.
The skulls roared, and Estyr found herself involuntarily sucked into a Reader's trance. The air is sharper than a knife, the wind cold enough to freeze blood, and everywhere the world is white. She pushes herself through the snow, to a blue-scaled corpse the size of a bear. Its wings flop limply against the packed ice, its eyelids flutter, and around it the snow turns red.
She sees the next part as it actually happened, from both her own perspective and from the Hydra's. Estyr stands over the bleeding Kameira, blond hair blowing in the wind, clutching a jagged stone knife. “Grant me your power,” she whispers, and her Intent flows into the corpse. She cuts, the Hydra's neck flares with a line of pain, and her own pride merges with that of the dying creature.
The ball of lead froze in midair.
The would-be assassin's hand flicked to his belt, where he kept a pair of knives, but she wrapped him in an invisible grip. Around her, the smoke fled.
“You missed your chance,” she whispered, but he heard her. At her words, his Intent sickened with pure fear.
She blasted him out the side wall, along with half the house.
If she hadn't surrounded him with a bubble of force, he would have been reduced to paste. Instead, he tumbled over the ground as she drifted after him. Behind her, the house collapsed and the crowd scattered.
“Are you a Soulbound?” she asked, releasing her grip on him. He vomited on the grass at his feet, staggering in circles, struggling even to find the weapon on his belt. “No, I suppose not. No Soulbound. Maybe a Great Elder in human form? No?”
He flipped a tiny knife at her, which she didn't even bother to deflect. It slapped into her black coat and flopped to the ground. Throwing knives were terrible weapons.
“No. You're not even a Reader, are you? Then what makes you think you had a chance at my life?”
Her Vessels screamed in rage, filling her veins with pure fury, so she kept her voice as calm as she could. She couldn’t give them an inch, or they would consume her.
“You won't...destroy the Empire...” he panted. “We stand...united!”
“Ah. You're one of those Imperialists I've heard so much about.” Half of the Guilds seemed to want her to stand against any possibility of another Emperor, and the other half wanted her to wear the crown herself.
In her mind, it was very simple: the Emperor was dead. There would never be a second one.
It was time for humanity to grow up.
“You and I are about to have a long talk,” she said.
Her Vessels howled agreement, and for once, she didn't silence them.
“I won't betray—” he began, but she'd heard it before. With a flick of her thoughts, she wrung his left leg like a towel. It crunched and snapped, and he howled in pain.
“Okay, it doesn't have to be a long talk. You only have so many limbs.” It would have been just as easy for her to pull his leg out of the socket, but she didn't want him bleeding out.
He clutched his wrist and smiled. “One Regent can't rule the world.”
His Intent went wild, and his body shook. She raised him in the air, splaying his body like a corpse on display in an alchemy workshop.
There, on his left wrist: a needle embedded in the vein. Poison.
“One Regent,” she repeated aloud, considering. Either there would soon be attempts against the lives of the other three, or he wanted her to think there would be. She would need to make sure.
Again, her Vessels howled at her. “Do not tolerate this disrespect! Hunt down those who sent him, his friends, his family. Show them that you alone rule!”
And again, she forced them back. She’d slept for a dozen centuries, but she’d lived almost three. Decades of experience kept her will clad in iron, but she knew she could never slip. It was the knife’s edge on which she balanced her entire life.
As she flew away, she spared one last thought for the man's corpse.
She threw it so far, so fast, that it burned to scraps before it landed.
CHAPTER TWO
Under guard, the prisoners walked to their execution.
Twelve men in the red jumpsuits of an Imperial prison, chained together at the ankle, shuffled side-by-side down the worn forest path. The ground around them rose until they were walking through a narrow stone hallway, open to the sky, trees looming over the ledges far above them.
Some of the men sn
arled, or lunged at each other in displays of intimidation. They jockeyed for position even here, walking to their deaths. Even so, not one of them attacked their captors.
The guards wore black.
There were only four guards for thrice their number of prisoners: two in front, two in back. They wore tight uniforms of pure black, and shrouds of black cloth over the mouth and nose. One pair had no obvious weapons, though they were surely armed. The other two each carried a pair of ancient, bronze-bladed daggers.
Only a precious few in all the Empire would have recognized Gardeners on sight. Nonetheless, the prisoners took care not to offer even the appearance of a threat.
Someone had taught them a lesson.
The thin fissure emerged into a canyon that looked like an overgrown quarry. From above, the area was a depressed rectangle, like one square of a checkerboard that had been pushed down.
The “quarry” was filled with a dense jungle—leafy trees, thick ferns, and twisting vines. The prisoners would not be escaping past the natural stone walls that towered above them, so long as no one had managed to smuggle in a full set of invested climbing equipment. But they didn't have to escape; they could stay lost in the foliage for weeks. One opening loomed behind them—the narrow path through which they'd entered—but none of them would try it. That would only mean a faster execution.
When they reached the edge of the trees, the guards in black halted their prisoners. In short order, the men in red were unchained, rubbing chafed ankles and stretching long-unused muscles.
One of the black-clad men opened up a long, locked chest that sat next to him on the ground. He reached inside, emerging with a long-barreled musket.
Which he promptly loaded and handed to the first prisoner in line.
Shera lowered the spyglass to glare at Kerian. “It looks like they have guns.”
The High Councilor brushed a few of her dangling braids back behind her ear. “Distances can play tricks on your eyes.”
Shera looked through the glass again. “No, I'm quite certain they have guns.”