by Rosie Scott
For the first time, Cerin looked over, surprised. “Knowing them would doom you to my fate,” he protested.
“Being here with you dooms me regardless,” I replied. “I might as well be equipped with as much knowledge as I can get.”
The necromancer blinked a few times, as if deep in thought. Then, he looked back toward the skies. “I may teach you when the time is right.” I supposed it was just another way for him to tell me he didn't trust me. As if to further prove it was about trust, he asked me, “Is your Alderi friend an assassin?”
“Ex-assassin, yes,” I admitted. “How did you know?”
“I have killed many like her,” he replied, bluntly.
I thought for a moment about his past, according to what I was told back in Thornwell. “The Icilic have worked with the Alderi to try to kill you?”
There was a short silence. “How much did you learn of me in Thornwell?”
“Everything they knew,” I replied, to be open with him.
Cerin stiffened beside me. “Then I suppose I have nothing to add.”
“You can add to it whenever you'd like.” When he did not reply, I said, “I am so sorry for what has happened to you.”
He said nothing for a long while, so neither did I. I had nearly given up on the idea of continuing conversation with him when he spoke again. “How did the Alderi escape the underground?”
It reminded me that Cerin had yet to really learn about his new companions, so I decided now was as good of a time as any. “She was tasked to assassinate me, within the year that you left Sera. She decided not to do it, we got to talking, and I saved her life from my father's wrath.” I hesitated. “Her name is Nyx, by the way. And she is my best friend.”
“You must have a habit of befriending outcasts,” he mused.
“I don't try to on purpose. They just seem to be the most interesting people.” I paused for a moment. “Silas is the Celdic elf. My father arranged for him to be a bodyguard for me after the attempted assassination. He is an heir to the Galan family of Celendar.”
“And you two are together,” he added, as if I'd forgotten it.
“No,” I replied, surprised at his statement.
“Oh—forgive me. Perhaps I sensed something that was not there.” It was the first time in years that I'd seen Cerin embarrassed.
“We tried our hand at it for a time,” I admitted. “He couldn't get past the difference in our lifespans. I don't expect I'll live very long.” I laughed softly and awkwardly. “He will.” Cerin said nothing, so I continued, “And Theron is the human. He is a mercenary we hired back in Sera to take us to Whispermere, since the rest of us don't know the way outside of looking at a map. He's been immensely useful thus far, and I'm hoping he will stay with us past our destination.”
Cerin seemed to be thinking over this new information. At last, he said, “I will teach you the spells I know.”
“Is the time already right?” I asked, with a small laugh. His proclamation to teach me so quickly after not seeming to want to came as a surprise. I wondered what had caused the change.
“Necromancy is the only magic that expands your lifespan,” he argued. “The sooner you learn, the better.”
His reasoning made sense, of course. His offer was selfless, considering that he had no reason to trust me not to use the spells against him. There was only one thing that gave me pause.
“I will need to come to terms with stealing the life force of others first,” I murmured.
“I am surprised you asked me to join you if you are against that.”
“I don't know if I'm against it or not. It just seems...cannibalistic.”
“There is no moral difference between killing a man with a sword or killing a man with magic, even if it is death magic that is feeding you. As long as you are not leeching off of innocents you wouldn't otherwise be fighting, I do not see the problem.”
As usual, he made sense. He'd clearly thought this through many times. Perhaps there was still humility within that hard shell of his.
“Let me earn your trust, Cerin. Then teach me the spells.”
He exhaled slowly beside me. “You place a lot of value in trust.”
“Yes, and especially with you. You have little reason to trust anyone.” My words were met with silence. I decided to risk a question. “What happened at Sera?”
It took him so long to answer me that I started thinking he was ignoring the question. “I was a shy kid with no friends and many enemies, so I spent most of my time in the library. I ran across an old text that had been donated to the university, but not yet processed. The first and last one hundred pages were filled with generic nonsense. The middle section was a study of necromancy, and held a great many spells.”
“Clever way to hide it,” I mused.
“Clever enough to where I found it before the library could catch it,” he agreed. “I taught myself as many of the spells as I could before I had to leave that night, because I wasn't certain I'd ever see the book again. And I didn't, on subsequent visits. At one point, there was a rat that had died in my closet. So for the first time, I tried a spell on its corpse, and it worked. I was ecstatic, because I'd taught myself a spell and used it correctly before we'd even learned our elements at school.”
“You learned death magic before life?” I asked, surprised.
“Yes...which is why I was so, so relieved when I learned life as well.” Cerin hesitated. “As embarrassing as it is to admit, I was a lonely enough child that I kept that rat's corpse in my dorm to revive repeatedly. It was almost like having a pet. After learning life magic, I practiced shielding him, among other things. Before long, it had decomposed into a skeleton. Little did I know that two other kids were spying on me from through the keyhole. They went and fetched an adult, who burst my door in and caught me sitting there with an undead rat. I knew I might as well have signed my own death sentence, so I fled. Left most of my things and just fled. I didn't know how my parents would react, but Thornwell was the only place I could think of to go. I was a kid—kids always turn to their parents when they need help.”
He fell silent. I didn't speak for fear of interrupting his words or thoughts. I knew that considering where this story ended up, it would be hard for him to tell me. I felt grateful he was trusting me with this information as it was.
“Your father sent his men after me,” Cerin finally admitted. “A dozen or so mages, and three of the Twelve, later on.” An exhale blew through his lips. “I killed them all.”
A sharp, painful ripple waved through my body at that, and a dull ache throbbed at my temples. I remembered when my father had been distressed over their losses, particularly of the three Twelve veterans. I had attended their ceremonies, as royalty of Sera were expected to do. I had seen Bjorn in tears over losing men he'd once trained. Men that the necromancer sitting beside me had killed.
I think Cerin was waiting for me to say something, anything. He had to have known that I knew the severity of his crimes, that I'd known the men he had killed. But I couldn't say anything at all, for the moment.
“I pleaded with them not to attack me and to let me be, as I did with you,” he finally said, his voice having lost its energy. “I told them I wished to use necromancy for good, not for ill. They barely let me speak before they attacked.”
“It was self defense,” I said, weakly. I did fully believe that. In my opinion, neither side had been completely wrong, but one did attack before the other. I believed him when he said this, for it is what he had done with me. Still, it was of little wonder that my father and the rest of Sera had gone to such great lengths to find and kill him. Now that he was here with me, any would-be assassins would be coming after the rest of us, as well.
“It was. But I am glad to hear you say it.” After a lengthy exhale, Cerin continued, “Anyway, I did make it to Thornwell, feeling like a disappointment, a failure, and a murderer all in one. I found nothing but a gravestone and a village that wanted nothing to do with
me.” He stood, and continued in an awkward ramble, “Forgive me if I don't wish to relive it at the moment.” He looked off toward the tent we'd prepared for him. “Perhaps I am tired, after all.”
“Oh...” His sudden departure caught me off guard, and my eyes followed his retreating form. It upset me that he was leaving. I felt we were slowly finding common ground as he opened up to me, but perhaps he'd just needed to get it off his chest. “Good night.”
Cerin glanced back toward me at the face of his tent, looking regretful. “Good night, Kai. Thank you for your company.”
Just like that, he was away from sight and in his tent, leaving me alone with just the night sky and plenty of time to question our conversation and its repercussions.
Twelve
The Cel Mountains were so grand in scope that they put the Seran Peaks to shame. The weather had become cooler the closer to the path that we got; now that the sign for Cel Pass sat before us, it was like the seasons had changed to Red Moon overnight.
Nyx finally felt comfortable enough to keep her hood down, and had stopped wearing long sleeve shirts beneath her armor, since she no longer needed to cover her skin. Both her and Cerin were more comfortable in the cooler weather given their blood.
The pathway before us was a simple one made of dirt that rose up along the side of the mountain beside us. It looked as if whoever had built it had had quite the time, for up ahead, large rocks were cut through to make room for the path. Far above me, where the air was thick and foggy with snowfall, I could see just the hint of shaky wooden and rope bridges crossing over the gaps between peaks. The journey from here on out would be more perilous.
“Was this path made for just Whispermere?” I asked, my question mostly directed to Theron and Cerin.
“It's possible it was created for that, but it leads to many places,” Theron replied, looking above us at the cold gray rock of the nearby mountains. “Cel Pass is the only way to get from western Chairel to eastern Chairel if you don't want to go far to the north or south. It splits in multiple places along the way. The dwarven city of Brognel lies to the northern end of the mountains. It is a beautiful city; half above ground in the peaks, half below. The Mirren River leads directly from the coast of the Servis to the north to underground, where the lower half of the city was built around it. It is entirely self-sustaining and sends out trade carts to Comercio only sparingly.”
“You have been there,” I commented, listening to the detail in his description.
“Yes. It is the reason I was out here at all. They sent requests out to all of Chairel about a decade ago, offering crazy sums of gold for defensive jobs. Dwarves pay extraordinarily well, given they are the ones who mine the gold.”
“My father always complained about dwarves for just that reason,” I said, watching the snowfall so far above. It was amazing that I could see it snowing, but the view was from so far below that the snow didn't reach it here. I had always found snow to be beautiful. I was sure traveling in it would begin to change that perspective. “He said their constant influx of gold depleted its value and constantly put Sera's economy at risk.”
“I am sure that is true,” Theron acknowledged. “But when you need skilled mercenaries, and your city is so isolated, you need to offer them enough gold to make the trip and the job worth it, and so they did.”
“What sort of trouble did they come across that required such a request?” Nyx asked, curiously.
Theron watched her carefully as he replied, “Their miners broke through to the tunnels of the Alderi.”
“As I thought,” Nyx commented.
“The two don't like each other, I gather?” I asked, noting Nyx had expected such a clash.
“They abhor one another,” Nyx replied. “The Alderi believe the underground belongs to them, and that dwarves are infringing on their territory. We are built for the underground, while the dwarves are an above ground race, so we are taught it is our right and our natural habitat, while they are the aggressors.”
“But you don't believe that,” I commented. I knew Nyx had nothing but love for the dwarves. They tended to be such partiers that I was sure she had both befriended and bedded quite a few of them while they were tourists in Sera.
“The underground is gigantic, and the only parts the dwarves are interested in are the areas ripe with gemstone. The Alderi can go suck on dwarven cock.”
Her statement had humored and shocked the lot of us. It was the first time her despisal of her own race had shone through to Theron or Cerin, so the two were caught off guard.
“I have a feeling you know a little bit about what that is like,” I teased her.
She grinned. “The dwarves are as hungry for sex as the Alderi, friend. If they didn't despise each other, we would be overrun with a new race of half-breeds. If I were able to bare children, the majority of the illegitimate bastards would have dwarven blood.”
That Nyx was rendered barren was both a blessing and a curse. On one hand, that option had been forever taken from her as a child. Most Alderi children were sterilized forcefully; only the Queen and a select few of her most prized heirs were allowed to breed with the males. Male breeders were selected for both their looks and their strength; all others were deemed unworthy. It was a wonder that the Alderi were able to continue to exist under such a culture of incest. Nonetheless, as an heir to the Queen but far from the first in line, Nyx had been sterilized as a young teen. However, she had never once lamented this fact. She valued her freedom and her wild ways, and I doubted she would ever lose sleep over the absence of children in her life.
“Are there any places in the mountains we can stay to be safe out of the weather?” Silas asked, bringing our attention back to the journey ahead.
“Caves and the like,” Theron replied. “Brognel and any mountain settlements I know of are too far off the path.”
“Perhaps we should begin our trek, then,” Silas said, impatient with the talk at the bottom of the mountain. “The sooner we're off, the sooner we can look for shelter.”
Theron raised his eyebrows at me. Maybe he was as surprised as I was at the elf's impatience. “Shall we?”
We began our trek up the path, leaving the Seran forest behind us. The change of scenery would be nice; we had traveled through grasslands and forests for nearly half a year, though that proved to be much easier than the uphill climb now. The path was also over hard ground and rock, causing back aches much sooner than walking over softer ground.
Over the next few days, the path became steeper and colder, and looking toward the ground at the bottom of the mountain range only served to instill fear in my gut. The Seran forest looked laughably small from here, the trees that had once towered above our heads now appearing as dots along the landscape. All it would take was one tumble, and one of us could be dead. I found it hard to believe that I had blood relation this far up in the mountains. The weather was bitter and uncomfortable for me here, and now that we had stayed in the mountains for many days and nights, there was a chill persistent in my bones that no amount of campfires could cure. Surely, if it was this hard for me to journey through it, it would be even harder for those related to me to live.
We finally reached the highest path of the first mountain, where the snow was thickest and heaviest. The day had been long, and we were all fatigued. Just off the path was the blackness of a hole that had been cut into the rock of the mountainside, the rubble still sitting on the ground beside it, though covered in snow.
“That was not here the last time I came through,” Theron commented, his voice raised so he could be heard over the biting winds. He motioned toward the cave.
“Let's check it out,” I suggested. “We could have our shelter for the night.”
The others quickly agreed. The night before, we'd had no shelter save for our tents that we'd had to resort to setting up on the side of the path. My body felt stiff with how cold I was and had been for days. At this point, even Nyx and Cerin were desperate for warmth.
Theron led us into the cave. As soon as the shadow of the rock walls fell over me, it felt almost warm. It wasn't, of course, but the lack of wind and snow in here was deceiving our bodies into thinking it was. The entrance to the cave was long, winding, and dark; whoever had built this hadn't meant to create a cave as a shelter, but a path to a destination.
From within the stone walls, the wind outside sounded like nothing more than a low whistle. The farther we got, the lower it became. At a certain point, Theron turned, asking us if we wanted to stop and turn around. We decided to keep going.
Finally, after feeling as if we'd been walking for the better part of an hour, we saw natural light ahead of us from through the rock. I wondered if we had entered the cave on one side of the mountain just to walk through to the other. It was clear once we got close enough to the light, however, that that wasn't the case.
Theron was the first to escape the rock tunnel into a large, open cavern. There was a few inches of snow on the center of the floor ahead, just below where the mountain broke open to the sky above. The cavern had to have been thousands of feet across, and the ceilings were at least one hundred to two hundred feet high. Because it was so open and had direct access to the outside, it was much cooler here than it had been through the tunnels.
“Well, we came all this way to rest, just to find it's still cold,” Theron said, sounding apologetic.
“It's better than the outside, at any rate,” Nyx replied. “It actually feels pretty good in here. To me, anyway.”
“There is more to this place,” I said, pointing to the other side of the cavern, where it appeared black. From this distance, I couldn't see the contents of the room the opening led to. Given that all other sides of the cavern shone with the natural light bouncing off of cold or moist rock, I knew the darkness meant the absence of a wall.
“Let's go over there, then,” Nyx suggested, starting to walk across the cavern. “We don't want the humans to freeze to death.”
Simply trekking across the cavern took a couple of minutes. This place was huge, and one would have had no idea it existed if not for the tunnel entrance. It was a curiosity how someone knew it was here to where they would have built the tunnel to get here. I pondered over whether we would come across someone here. Maybe some people had made a home in these caverns, safe from the biting chill of the outdoors. Maybe this was just a quick detour someone had made through the mountain, and the cavern had just been here to find.