A couple dignitaries at the table stifled their laughter, but Draven ignored them, choosing instead to glare at High King al-Loriaris head-on.
What have you contributed to society other than a proclivity for impregnating children? he wanted to spit at the man.
“My son is not the subject of this meeting, Nelo,” Draven’s father interjected flatly, and all laughter immediately cut itself off. Several dignitaries looked guilty. “You’ll do well to remember that. As will you, Nianna’so.”
“You have my sincerest apologies, Saeinfinae,” High King al-Loriaris said slyly. “I meant no disrespect to you.” He bowed his head, but the cat-eared queen several seats down gave an exaggerated shrug, grinning widely enough that her fangs were visible.
“Why you speak for him, Saeinfinae? You no speak for self, niki doqeenen?” she asked Draven, and the meeting grew silent. Immediately, Draven realized everyone at the table was now staring at him. Fifty pairs of eyes. He could feel his mother’s gaze on his face the most, heavy just like the snowflakes on his cheeks, and knew he was getting ready to embarrass her.
“Well, you speak plenty enough for the both of us,” Draven told the queen flippantly, and on cue, he could hear his mother grind her teeth.
“Lok hwen yu ga, niki doqeenen,” the cat-eared queen said with a dark sneer, and leaned back in her stone chair. She traced a sharpened nail over a tiger that was burned into her leather vambrace. “Lok mi fwexei yu bo, yuhji gan qne koipe shezgat—”
“Do not threaten the boy, Xi’eongsan,” snapped a king down the table. He wore a crown that looked like icicles, loops of beads hanging down from it over the curtain of his fair hair. At his throat was an arrowhead fastened to a silver chain. “The Saeinfinae ordered your silence. Unless, of course, you’re attempting to inform him you’re uninterested in attending Kjall’a this year.”
High Queen Xi’eongsan glowered, but after a beat of hesitation, she acquiesced with another shrug, arms crossed over her leather breastplate, thin lips pursed.
The conversation about Kjall’a resumed.
Draven took a deep breath of the cold air through his nose just to feel the sting. He hated politics. He hoped he was never married off and given an estate to take care of. All he wanted to do was roam the Infinity freely, and the rest could rot. The thought of Kinrae staying behind to take their father’s place made him sick.
Backstabbing, social-climbing bastards. You’ll abuse every ounce of trust Kinrae extends you. You don’t deserve him.
Beaker nudged at Draven’s numbed fingers with her rough nose and then turned her head up toward a castle turret looming over the balcony, most of it visible through the willow branches. There, in one of the mullioned windows of the raven’s keep at the turret’s top, was a redheaded boy waving his arms back and forth with vigor. Draven furrowed his brow, letting his sight bridge the distance until he had a better view. The kid was Kinrae’s pageboy, Henry. What did he want?
Immediately, the boy ceased his frantic motions.
Draven eased himself away from the wall he was leaning on and cast a questing glance at his father. His father gave a nod, and Draven excused himself as soundlessly as possible. He would deal with this, whatever it was.
Slipping into the connected sitting room was like stepping into a wall of heat. It made his skin stiff, but it brought the feeling back into it quickly. He rubbed his hands together and took several steps into the room, only to halt: in a high-backed chair in front of the fireplace, Kinrae was cradling a sleeping Athirae, still wearing his wool coat, his violin and bow discarded on the mantle. He looked up when Draven entered the gilded room, silver eyes only darting away to follow Beaker, who trotted over to the fireplace and collapsed in a pathetic heap on the rug. She stared at the empty corridor just beyond the doorway on the far side of the room, ears perked in alert.
Draven fought a shiver as the fine coat of snow gathered in his hair and on his shirt began to melt. He crossed to the fireplace for its warmth and, needing something to do with his hands, plucked up the violin bow sitting on the mantle. The horsehair was coated with fine white rosin, and in the shaft, there were hairline cracks from where Kinrae had gripped too tightly with his demonic strength. They made Draven smile.
“You’re supposed to be gone, as I recall,” Draven said. “Unless that conversation we had earlier was just a fume-induced hallucination of mine.”
“Certainly fume-induced hallucinations aren’t that common an occurrence for you, Brother,” Kinrae parried easily, holding Draven’s eyes.
Draven’s smile grew. “Oh, I think you’d be surprised. Last week, I had an entire debate with Mother about cured ham until I realized I was arguing with a mop.”
“I am most assuredly not a mop.” Kinrae’s hand smoothed down their little sister’s hair, and one of Athirae’s ears twitched. “If you want the truth, though, I returned early from my lesson to relieve you at the meeting. Guilt weighed on me.”
Draven narrowed his eyes and scrutinized his brother down to the pointed tips of his leather shoes. Then he brandished the violin bow like a rapier. The end was only inches from his brother’s nose. “You just want out of our deal, you liar.”
Kinrae’s lips quirked up at the edges, smile nearly hidden against Athirae’s scalp. “Why ever would I want that?”
“Renege and I will fill your bed with tadpoles, Brother. Hundreds of them. The maids will question your proclivities, and you’ll never get the rotten smell out of your sheets.”
Deep, musical laughter spilled from his brother’s mouth, lighting up his silver eyes. His smile was wide enough that his fangs peeked out from between his lips. He stood from his high-backed chair, Athirae snuggled against the gentle curve of his neck, practically hidden in the white curtain of his hair. “Pray tell where you’ll find that many tadpoles in the winter, Brother.”
“I have my connections,” Draven said, and sniffed. “Ser Allister deals in oddities.”
“Ser Allister is a tadpole smuggler now? I was certain he was an herbalist.”
“I’m sure if I gave him enough coin he’d be a tadpole smuggler for me. Coin makes anyone anything. Basic transmutation.”
“People do not abide by the laws of alchemy, Brother.”
“You should know better than anyone else that people are just as malleable as the base elements. It’s all science in the end.”
“Gaða gilda, ve nul cæl da gilda comen,” Kinrae quoted, eyes soft. “Given gold, we become as soft as gold. Yes, I read those works by Kjetterman you lent me.” He reached out and stole the violin bow from Draven’s hands with a reproachful tut, but before Draven could snatch it back, everything exploded.
One second, Draven was on his feet, and the next, his chin was slamming off the floor hard enough that red flashed behind his eyes. His ears rang, high and loud. Around him, the castle moaned. It took time to blink the spots in his vision away, for his hearing to come back. The castle settled as he came to.
Grunting, he forced himself up to his elbows. Blood coated the backs of his teeth. He looked out at the room. Dust from the stone of the castle clouded the space. Burning logs were scattered across the floor and the rug. He jumped when he saw the cuff of his trousers was ringed with flame. He beat the fire out with his bare hands. A few feet away, Kinrae was lying on his back next to the overturned armchair, Athirae clutched to his chest. Draven could smell smoke and blood—his own and Kinrae’s—but his attention was arrested by Kinrae, who was staring upward, gaping.
Draven looked up just in time to see the large gilded mirror over the fireplace break away from the wall with a snap.
Panicked, Draven scrambled across the distance between them on hands and knees and curled himself over the top of his siblings. The mirror hit his back with a blow that knocked the air out of him, and it shattered with a pop, raining shards of glass down around them.
“Fuck,” Draven wheezed. He could hear the dignitaries on the balcony moving around, their voices raised in chao
tic concern. Even deep down into the lower levels of the castle, Draven could hear panicked footsteps scurrying. At the door, Beaker barked madly. Draven looked down at Kinrae underneath him. There were a few slivers of glass in his brother’s hair, but otherwise, he looked unharmed.
“Are you all right?” he asked, and Kinrae gave a weak nod, wincing with the motion. He reached behind his head, and his fingers came back wet with blood. Draven lifted up to get a better look at his sister. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or exasperated that Athirae was still sound asleep.
Kinrae’s pageboy from the keep skidded into the open doorway and hunched over with his hands on his knees. “I was trying to warn you,” he said, out of breath. “Warn you before—”
“Warn me about what?” Draven snapped.
“It’s Maenasgoroth, Your Royal Highness,” the boy said. “She’s, ah. She’s crying.”
Flocked by a swarm of guards, Draven and Kinrae journeyed deep into the bowels of the castle. Warmth faded quickly, and the pressure in the air increased.
They ran down dozens of torch-lit staircases, beyond lavish sitting rooms and great ballrooms with polished white marble floors, beyond kitchens overflowing with bustling workers whose movements wafted around the scent of spices and fried potatoes, beyond servants’ quarters that were deserted due to the midday hour. After a while, there was nothing else to run by. They were so far away from life that even Draven’s demonic hearing could barely pick up on the shuffle of feet or the murmur of voices above. What he could hear instead were the unearthly screeches echoing up from the depths of the mountain.
They were below even the unused dungeons now. The walls had turned from interlocked stones to the lopsided, lumpy walls of a cave. The vaulted halls of the castle, so wide and tall that they could have been the gilded throats of dragons, were now nothing more than pitch-black cracks and crevices that Draven had to squeeze through.
Eventually, he came out into a cavern. It was one he’d been introduced to as a child, one he only visited now on rare occasions. Nothing about the place had changed in four thousand years. A stone bridge that was five shoulder-widths wide stretched through a void of darkness. Torchlight flickered from the tops of pillars that lined the bridge and created a tunnel of light. Everything beyond it was dark and, even for a demon, completely silent.
“Don’t step off the bridge, M’ide’dzekinrae,” his father said, clutching Draven’s small hand in his callused fingers. “We never could figure out how far the drop is.”
Draven navigated the bridge beside his brother with the castle guards at their heels. Ahead was a massive set of doors, arced by torches that illuminated the doors’ sleek white stone and the eleven faces of the Council that had been carved into it. Their smooth eyes were open. Always watching.
When Draven got to the doors, he bit down into the meat of his hand with his fangs and winced. The watery copper of his blood bloomed across his tongue before his skin began to knit back together. He smeared his hand onto the surface of the doors, marring the white with a red gash. After a long second passed, the doors groaned and cracked with a thunderous boom. Then, slowly, they swung inward.
The second they did, the shrieks from inside began anew, amplified tenfold. Draven threw his hands over his ears, tears springing to his eyes. The sound hurt. It sounded like a mix of shattering glass and the whistle of a teakettle that was determined to drill through his ears and stab through his brain. Overwhelmed, he fumbled to adjust his senses. He forced himself to focus on his ears like he’d been taught to as a young child, until he could feel where the feather-soft touch of his soul stretched upward to fill the insides of his skin, where its light was hooked into his cells, and then he pulled the light back from his ears. His hearing deadened.
Ahead, the room beyond the doors was the same as always, though fuller than the last time he’d seen it. The room was a series of interconnected colossal caverns, stretching up and out as far as Draven could see. Every inch of them was covered in quartz. The largest crystal points were in the central cavern, Draven knew, each the size of a fully-grown dragon, the crystals representative of the High Realms. Then there were crystals so small they could have fit on the tip of Draven’s fingernail, millions of them scattered near Draven’s feet; these crystals were linked to Realms perhaps only hours old. All of them glowed an ethereal white. He stepped around them, following a vague path through the entry cavern into the one just beyond it. He paused when he got there.
In the midst of the chamber, Maenasgoroth was weeping. Her long serpentine body filled the room, curled around a bed of quartz points. It disappeared in places where her crystalline scales blended in perfectly. “E dliek!” she was crying with a voice like fissuring rock. It shook the room. Crystals vibrated and sang. “M’kep dliek!”
Draven approached her carefully, watching his feet to make sure he didn’t crush a crystal. He could feel Kinrae hovering at his side, silent. “Who’s dead?” he asked. “Maenasgoroth, what’s wrong? Gfen a?”
She lifted her enormous snake-like head, but it drooped. Crystals spiked out from her jaw in jagged points. When her piercing blue eyes met Draven’s, they went dim. “M’kep dliek, ide dzekinrae,” she said, lips moving around a mouthful of pointed teeth.
“What child?” Draven asked her. “Gfen kep?”
Maenasgoroth dipped her head lower and jutted it out to point downward, and for the first time, Draven noticed a small crystal springing up from an empty patch of the cave floor beneath her. The crystal was about knee-high, and it was flickering from a blinding white to a dull grey.
Flickering?
“What the hell?” Draven gaped at it and stepped forward, but Kinrae grabbed his wrist, pulling him back. His brother’s hold was too tight, Draven’s bones grinding.
Draven had never seen a crystal do anything other than glow. Jerking from Kinrae’s hold, he rushed over to it and went down to his knees. With a quick glance up at Maenasgoroth to make sure it was all right, Draven cupped the crystal around its smooth sides and—
Icy seas crashing up against the steep, mossy feet of fjords—a moonlit bay of ink-black water full of moored ships—muddy rivers stretching through miles and miles of green moorlands peppered with purple bell heather—sloping green mountains swarmed by forests full of swaying oak and linden trees—fish with glassy eyes floating in lakes—cliffs splitting and crumbling away—towns ablaze—so much fire—fire and ash and bone and blood—a clanging bell bouncing around his skull—screaming, screaming, so much screaming—
Draven pulled back from the crystal with a gasp, but the images didn’t leave his mind. He could see the Realm as clearly as he could see his own quivering hands. The images hovered like sunlight suspended on motes of dust, and with them, a name surfaced. It hung behind Draven’s eyes without any letters, without any sound, but somehow, he could still see it, could still hear it. He felt it down to the marrow of his cold bones.
When Kinrae cupped Draven’s jaw with both of his warm hands, already knelt down in front of him, Draven jolted. He hadn’t registered his brother’s presence at all, but now his senses were overtaken by him. He saw nothing else but the concerned set of his brother’s eyes and mouth, felt nothing but his steady hands, smelled nothing but lightning. His words came unbidden.
“The Realm of Black Waters. I think they’re all dead.”
WALKING THE RUINS
_______________________________
I told her I loved her, three days after she died.
scrawled under a fire escape in the Realm of Seven Lands
THE MULTITUDINOUS REALM OF BLACK WATERS
THE SLUMS, NORTHEASTERN LINDENNACHT,
COUNTY KAVETT, NORTHERN OSNASTEDT, FJORDE
When Oliver opened his eyes, everything was white.
It took several moments for him to realize he was awake. His whole head was metallic, a dream hanging just behind his eyes. His wrist throbbed a steady pain down into his fingertips, and something dug into the back of h
is left calf. Hot and wet, his breath steamed up the inside of his mask. When he reached out into the blinding white void above him and twisted his dirty fingers in the light, he realized he was staring at the overcast sky. The ground beneath him was sharp and damp. He drew another thin breath of dusty air, coughing. It rattled through his lungs and aching ribs.
He remembered the attack on Lindennacht slowly—the blast of his sister’s gun punctuating the silence—the wolf slamming down its paw. At the memories, his heart jolted in his chest, hard, and he closed his eyes.
It was all real.
When he stood, his legs wobbled, both from weakness and from the unsteady rubble underfoot. His pepperbox was still holstered at his waist. His force-issued pants were torn at the knees. Looking around, he realized he was standing in a giant crater. Buildings were pummelled, slabs of rock sticking up around him like thousands of tombstones. In places, deep black earth peered through the debris. By his estimation, it was more than a mile climb to the crest of the crater. He didn’t bothering trying. Instead, he sat on the remains of a roof, the cold of the loose rock shingles seeping through the seat of his coat and pants.
Lana.
He stared at the ruins of Lindennacht, then down at his hands. They were smeared with dirt and blood, one of his fingernails ripped off, a laceration in his right palm. They were cold, too, almost numb—and they were shaking. He clenched them into fists, just to feel his broken wrist twinge, and dropped his head forward between his shoulders.
He couldn’t hear anything—not shifting rubble, not gunshots or voices, not the Watchtower’s distress sirens or evacuation bell, not seagulls or stray mutts or even the Saints Chapels’ wailing songs that echoed through Lindennacht every morning and evening like clockwork. All he heard was the whisper of the bay. The whistle of winter air through debris.
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