“Lab,” Draven said reflexively with a put-upon glare. For just a second, Artysaedra could see beneath his tough exterior to the man he was freely inside the castle walls—the man who’d once turned himself into a canary for a few hours on accident, the man who’d gone a week without hands because of a mistake with a moisturizing potion, a week he’d spent riddling his speech with puns—Something’s wrong, Saedra, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. He was amusing to have as a brother at the very least. She definitely enjoyed him more than she did Kinrae, their father’s pretentious little golden boy who could do no wrong.
“So, what news is important enough that you had to come find me?” Artysaedra asked. “Did Mother’s head finally explode? Because if I missed that—”
“Something’s wrong with one of the crystals,” Draven interrupted, “and our parents want us home until it’s dealt with. They’ll want Naliah to look into it, I imagine, if they don’t get word back from the Council soon. Stars if I know why they’d want him, though.” His eyes snapped over to Naliah after he spoke. The two went on sizing one another up, and Naliah grinned like a wolf.
“You know,” Artysaedra said, “I’m sure Lyonard would lend you two his measuring tape if you wanted to whip out your cocks and compare.” At that, both Naliah and her brother looked identically indignant. She rolled her eyes at them. “I’ll meet you at the castle. And play nice when we get there. Pissing off Mother by making a scene is my full-time occupation.”
“I’ll not have you stealing my profession from me,” Draven said. “What do I have to fall back on? Good looks?”
“A wealthy cache of stupidity, more like.”
One-handed, Artysaedra forced Mercy into the ether—the space between the Infinity’s Realms—and let her go. Her scythe vanished. Artysaedra shut her eyes.
She focused on her soul. She could feel the bulk of it churning like smoke inside her, just above her navel. It was easy to let its aura overwhelm her, heavy and vivid and dark. She felt raindrops against windowpanes and handfuls of gravedirt in her palms, the salt of the sea on her lips. She felt everything she was and more—felt the expanse of her essence inward into oblivion and felt the stretch of the multiverse outward into eternity, swallowing every shadow, breathing life into every crevice, blooming worlds from stars. She felt deeper and larger than herself, black and unfolding, and when her aura took up every last inch of her focus, she reached for her inner magic. Dense, it thrummed, and she used it to force her body behind, into the ether.
Unbound, she was soul.
She pictured her destination and speared through the air toward it. Between the breath of one second and the next, she shot over miles of Lutana, up the side of the largest mountain in the Asairabine Range that valleyed the city, until she came upon the grand spires of the castle near its top. Everything blurred together with speed, but even after Artysaedra alighted on the castle’s front steps, hovering there, she could see little. Looking out at the world as a spirit was disorienting—history layered over itself like reels of superimposed film. Right now, she could see the castle, built and unbuilt, the mountain, adult and infantile. She could see a sea, a field, an expansive of clouds ruptured with lightning and swelling with blades of sun—rain and snow and night and day. She saw everything that was and that had been.
She didn’t waste time. She pulled her body out of the ether in a flash. It settled around her. Before she could blink, her brother and Naliah were standing at each of her sides. She grinned at them and shoved her hand into the air. It disappeared as she reached into the ether, grabbing Mercy from where she’d been left behind and pulling her free.
Overhead, the castle loomed. It was a stony grey fortress: regal, untouchable, and cold. Navy and silver banners hung from its walls and flags flew from its squared turrets, each emblazoned with the sigil of a rearing wolf surrounded by flame. Snow fell in a thick sheet from the sky.
As a child, Artysaedra had found her family home a constant adventure, exploring the caves, discovering secret meeting rooms behind bookcases, climbing the library ladders, and dangling over the edge of the raven’s keep. Now, she was loath to return to its oppressive walls. Fixing a glare firmly on her face, she took a deep breath. The mountain’s atmosphere was dense up here, rich with oxygen despite its altitude. Air elementii were employed by the castle to sustain its habitability.
“Let’s go,” she ordered Naliah and her brother, who followed without complaint, but halfway up the snowy front steps of the palace, Artysaedra paused. “Oh, son of a bitch.”
“What?” Naliah asked.
Glaring at the castle’s guarded front gate, Artysaedra patted the front of her belt. It was flat. “That damned sheep stole my flask.”
THESE BONDS, ERODING
_______________________________
Four million new crystals grew this morn. I have chosen one, which has named itself the Realm of Black Waters. Maenasgoroth protects it incessantly. By the morrow, I shall leave to catalogue the new world, though I will have but a few hours to do so. Beings will not have evolved into life this early in the Realm’s infancy. Soon, I fear, too many Realms will grow. We will not be afforded the luxury to visit them. Even now, we struggle. The monarchies of the High and Low Realms are fractured. Wars and bids for power plague us. How long will it be before the Infinity has expanded beyond our grasp? While Raener and my daughter are in talks to succeed our political reign, the proposition to form the Order of the Guardians has only just taken hold within our meetings; my son Dven is an avid proponent, but many of us still oppose relinquishing our powers to regift to inferior beings. After all, we did much to gain them, and those transgressions still haunt my every waking breath.
entry in the personal diary of Vayala Illianthe
THE GRAND REALM OF THE INFINITE
THE NORTH WING, DRAVEN’S CHAMBERS, THE CASTLE OF THE INFINITE ROYAL FAMILY,
MOUNT DRAKIS, LUTANA, CAPITAL CITY-STATE OF THE ONE COUNTRY
“When High Queen Xi’eongsan returns this evening for dinner, you will personally apologize to her for your foulness this morning,” Draven’s mother said tartly. “I will not have insolence in my household, Draven, no more than I will suffer in it a poor excuse for a son.”
The words didn’t bother Draven anymore, not with as many times as he’d had them hurled at him over the years, but they still dug at his waning patience.
His mother was standing in his bedchamber, among brocaded green curtains that were draped throughout the room, among tables that were piled high with dirty tea sets and opened tomes, among banked fireplaces with cauldrons that hung over them, cold and empty. Columns spiked down through the room at even intervals, old recipes plastered to them like wallpaper, curled with age. It was a warm, closed-in space with no more than five feet of open area in any given spot. It was a place his mother never came if she could help it.
She despised his clutter, he knew, because she made a point of telling him so frequently. In fact, the only reason the maids had refused to rearrange Draven’s room on his mother’s orders while he was gone was because he’d lied to them once with a wink that some of his things were coated in poison and these women didn’t want to touch something and die accidentally, now did they? They’d blanched, and he’d gotten his way.
It had served his meddling mother right.
At this very moment, she looked out of place in his created chaos, bound tight in her corset and mustard-plum evening gown, encrusted locket hanging over her dress. Her hair was braided in an intricate pattern against her head and around her horns, a new style cropping up in Lutana, leaking over the Lutana-Hanara border as far as Draven could tell. His mother’s thin lips were painted black like she’d eaten an inkwell, and over her stomach, her arms were clasped together, pointed nails digging into her ruched velvet sleeves. Loose pieces of parchment were caught under the hem of her dress.
How long can I ignore her before she combusts? Draven wondered, fiddling with a silky achanaranga feather and s
mirking. He leaned back against a pillar and watched his mother grow tenser and tenser by the second.
Beaker was wandering around the room, nosing at piles of musty books. When she got close enough to Draven’s mother to sniff at her gown, his mother ground her teeth together so hard that Draven could hear it. Beaker crowded closer, tongue lolling, and nudged into Draven’s mother, hard.
His mother’s face went tight with rage. “Leash your disease-ridden mutt at once.”
“I’ve tried to, Mother, but really, at this point, there’s nothing I can do about it. Kinrae still gets out and wanders the halls.”
His mother’s glare skewered him. “You would speak of your future king so poorly, and when he’s exemplary of the man you fail to become?”
“Is it not better to speak poorly and love wholly than the other way around, Mother? Though you seem to have mastered neither if your open disdain for me is anything to go by.” Draven sat down at one of the tables in his room and crossed his legs, reclining. “Is this the only reason you had the guards strong-arm me up here, Mother? To chastise me like I’m still a boy?”
He’d been on his way to the cavern with Artysaedra and that bastard Staatvelter to show them the crystal, but before he’d even made it to the first staircase, the guards had caught him and ordered him back to his chambers.
“I would not chastise you if you did not act like a child,” his mother said. Beaker still milled about around her, but his mother held her ground against her presence, unwavering. She was standing in a wide shadow, the tall windows in the room cutting sharp paths of light and darkness between the brocaded curtains. Draven turned his attention to the test tubes on the table. They were desperately in need of cleaning, one of them cracked. “Your behaviour is often unbecoming of a prince, Draven,” she said, “but today, you have disgraced our family’s generosity, and I do not take that lightly.”
“I disgraced our family?” Draven asked, looking up, incredulous. He scoffed. “You let that cat-eared bitch malign me! In front of the entire High Court! At least Father had the decency to silence that bastard Loriaris.”
“Watch your tongue,” his mother hissed. “You are a royal, Draven. You take malignance with grace.”
“Oh yes,” he spat, and flicked a test tube, “I do so love to be the quintessential nobility, Mother. Smile to your face now, but in three years’ time, I’ll order my Guard to slaughter your newborns with milk still in their mouths.”
“You would instead have the reputation you do?” she asked, snide. “Do you know the words by which they call you, Draven? Do you know that your name in their mouths carries as much weight as a wageless prostitute’s?”
This again, he seethed.
Always, she thrust this particular sword deep.
For millennia, she’d mocked him—for his indulgence in science and potions, for his neglect of his studies, for his abandonment of social and political events—but always, more than anything else, always for his sexual proclivities. She’d mocked him ever since he’d lain with his first man—a visiting prince with a sweet smile and a sweeter tongue, who’d wooed Draven with compliments and attention he’d never received as the second son—a man who Draven had half-loved during the long weeks they’d spent in each other’s company—a man who, on the last night of his stay, had left Draven’s bed with the sheets still warm to go tell his envoy how easily young Draven had spread his legs for pretty words.
You are an embarrassment to the House of Veiyel, his mother had screamed at him the following evening even as he’d cried in his room. You are a stain upon our name, and you have been given to me by the Infinity as a tribulation I must suffer.
“No house offers their daughters with pride,” his mother said. Shadows curled in the hollows of her face. “Four thousand years now you have ruined yourself. It is no longer a mistake, Draven, when it becomes habit.”
“Good for me,” Draven said, anger growing. “I’d rather have a quick romp with a baron’s son than a pompous little princess who doesn’t know her way around a cock anyhow, Mother.”
“You—” His mother gaped. “You hold—”
“Would you like to know how many of your ambassadors I’ve had in my bed?” Draven asked, standing from his chair. His smile felt wrong on his face, twisted and broken, a weak dam against the anger and hurt brewing inside him. “Some bent for me, Mother, but I most certainly bent for—”
“Draven Meishon Veiyel!” his mother screeched. “Is it your desire to be cast from this family? Because I have been incessantly lenient with you. Always, your father and I have stood by you, but you thwart our every efforts to guide you. You slander and debase yourself, and yet we have loved you despite it—”
“Do not blackmail me with your love!” Draven yelled back at her. He swept a rack of test tubes into the floor, shattering them. “You would not know love if it bit you in the ass, Mother! Enjoying my life does not make me a sinner. Nor does it make me a bad son. If that diminishes my value to you, then perhaps exile is your answer after all.”
His mother’s garnet eyes went cold and her body went still, like a serpent coiled before a strike. In the silence that followed, the room quivered, perched on the edge of some invisible precipice. “You would not survive a fortnight without the privilege to which you are born and blind,” she said, barely above a whisper, as though she could sense the cliff they were balanced on.
“I would rather be abandoned to a life of uncertainty than chained to a life of misery,” Draven returned. “I’m not your puppet, Mother. I am your son.”
“You are a prince,” she contended.
“What, then, does that word mean to you if it somehow contradicts mine? Does my title somehow negate our shared blood? Does it erase your familial duty to me?” He stepped away from the table slowly and forced himself into his mother’s space. She didn’t have to lift her head to meet his eyes dead-on. Neither of them moved an inch. “Will you have me as I am,” Draven asked her, “or am I only your son when I bend for you?”
He could see the cogs turning behind his mother’s shadowed eyes. Her breath was steady against his face. Finally, she told him, “You understand little of this world, my child.”
“No,” Draven argued, “I understand enough. Enough to know that very few people in this world will ever love me for who I am and that I’m damned tired of trying to convince them, least of all my own mother.”
“If you have lost my love, Draven, it is not because I chose to stop giving it.”
“If I have lost your love, Mother, it is not a testament to my failures,” he said, deeply pained. “You gave two of your daughters to the Order without their consent, and your youngest son dreads you. How many of us seek you out, Mother? How many of your children seem to love you? Because we both know that answer.”
He knocked into her shoulder as he passed, heading for the closed door to his chambers. He was going to go find Kinrae, and then the two of them were going to leave. To Hanara, to Sainte Adder, to Ytolla, to Veira-ohn—maybe even to another dimension. He didn’t care. He would beg his brother if he needed to. The two of them could stay gone well into next week if they felt like it, and they could enjoy themselves, just the two of them, escaping the hell that breathed inside these castle walls.
“Tell High Queen Xi’eongsan where she can shove it,” Draven called over his shoulder, pushing open the door.
He didn’t expect his mother to reply to him.
“If you leave this mutt here,” she said, “I will have it cast into the storm. Rest assured.”
Draven halted, the last of his footfalls echoing through the room. Around him, his chambers tilted, sliding deep into that cavernous gulf, down into its black belly of shadows. Draven closed his eyes and shook his head, taking a deep, painful breath. If this was the relationship his mother wanted with him, he was going to give it to her. His words crawled their way from his throat.
“You know,” he said, voice thin but firm, like a prayer, “every single night,
before I go to bed, I make a wish, Mother. One wish. One single wish. A wish that you and Father don’t choke on your morning ham. A wish that you never die.” He opened his eyes to the green marble floor, jaw trembling. “The only reason I make that wish, Mother, is so that Kinrae never has to take the throne and suffer this miserable legacy you’ve shackled him to. It is the only reason, Mother, because if Kinrae weren’t here, you could rot in your grave and I wouldn’t shed a tear for you.”
He spat the words, and summoning Beaker with a shrill whistle, he stormed out of the room, never once looking back.
A LIGHT IN THE DARK
_______________________________
There once was a carp who ate a star. Nobody knows how he jumped that high.
excerpt from an Anderton folktale common in the Guardian Realm of Fogs, translated from Anavene
THE GRAND REALM OF THE INFINITE
MAENASGOROTH’S CRYSTAL BOWER, BENEATH MOUNT DRAKIS,
THE ASAIRABINE MOUNTAIN RANGE, LUTANA
When Naliah lifted his hand from the dying crystal, the visions behind his eyes fell away, but they didn’t leave him. Not really. He could feel them slinking around the periphery of his mind. It made his stomach lurch.
It had been a long time since he’d felt this out of his depth, maybe since he’d walked his first dimension outside of the Realm of Fogs, or when he’d seen his first snow or smelled his first battlefield, when he’d planted his first bomb for the militia or touched a woman of his own volition—or maybe since the very beginning, since his parents’ grim, tear-streaked faces had been ripped from his sight at thirteen years old, when his new master had grabbed him by his collar and dragged him over the dusty threshold of Master Beringer’s manor and out into the bustling street beyond the front gate.
Stuck in his crouch, he looked at the crystal. It was still flickering in and out like a lightbulb, staying grey longer and longer each time it went out. It was hard to believe that inside it was a window to an entire universe. A universe of guts and bones that were swimming in dust and flame. A universe of skeletons. Millions of them.
A Shard of Sea and Bone (Death of the Multiverse Book 1) Page 15