Monsters & Mist

by Taylor Fenner

  So people thought Andromeda was strange for keeping them at arm’s length. She called it an act of self-preservation. Their words didn’t affect her anymore. They couldn’t. Besides, it is not like there is anyone in her life she wants touching her anyhow. Least of all the two spindly soldiers who hold her arms captive in their grip.

  History of Esternwhorl #2

  The Mistborn

  At first when Faeta felt the land ripped apart around her and saw her temples torn down on the newly divided continents she believed it was all a misunderstanding and that Zarouk would return to her and explain it all away. With time and much convincing from Mellouk, Faeta began to believe Zarouk was the one who betrayed her and confined her spirit and body to the binds of Esternwhorl like a prison.

  She lashed out at the humans who once loved her and now turned their backs on her by throwing great waves over the shorelines and flooding their crops and villages. Mellouk helped by luring fishermen and merchant ships into the mist so Faeta could drown them in her seas. With the help of Faeta’s rage, the human’s hate of the sea grew tenfold.

  Eventually after a dark time of churning seas and choking mist where ships foundered by the hundreds and littered the sea floor like underwater cities, Faeta fell in love with Zarouk’s brother Mellouk and the children born from their new union were called the cursed Mistborn, who looked like humans but could live in the mist or beneath the sea.

  The Mistborn were startlingly beautiful with gray-blue skin and brown or silver hair and gold eyes. Mistborn women loyal to their goddess, Faeta, often spent their afternoons sitting on rocks in the shallows of the sea luring fishermen to their deaths. It’s said that one look at a Mistborn would drive a man so mad with lust that he’d follow her to his watery grave. Mistborn men were rarely seen, but on occasion they snuck ashore and into the beds of Landborn women. The Landborn women they took as lovers would become so addicted to them they would try to join them beneath the sea’s surface, wading deep into the sea as if in a trance. If their fathers or husbands tried to stop them the young women under the lovesick spells of the Mistborn would turn violent and murderous and if they weren’t lost to the sea they were hanged in the village squares.

  Faeta loved these children borne to her and Mellouk even more than the Waterborn children she’d birthed with Zarouk so she built the Mistborn grand coral palaces and glittering cities along the seafloor. There too, like the Landborn on land, one family was placed higher than the others and there a queen rules over the Mistborn and keeps the peace, passing on her title through the females in her family line.

  The Mistborn didn’t need temples to worship their mother goddess as she was in everything they did and the wrecks of ships littering the seafloor were both monuments to honor her power and penance from the Landborn who’d turned their backs on her.

  Though thought of as monstrous creatures, the Mistborn are a peaceful race who excel at the arts and sea life and have a deep appreciation for the world around them. Every living thing is precious to the Mistborn, from the sea plants to the draco mare they keep as pets and use for transportation as the Landborn use horses on land. The Mistborn cannot help that the Landborn are drawn to them, it is just their nature.

  They could have left the Landborn alone and never would have wandered ashore to steal children from their beds had the Landborn not stolen something of theirs to begin with. Therefore the Mistborn will make the Landborn pay until the they return the thing that they have taken from the sea’s embrace.

  Chapter 2

  “Is this really necessary?” Andromeda scoffs as she rolls her bound wrists to get the blood flowing to her fingertips and make the pins and needles feeling go away. It’s a constant form of the pain she felt when the soldiers grabbed her. She thought her wrists would eventually go numb, but the tingling is unending. Andromeda suspects the guard notices her constant shifting and has studiously chosen to ignore it.

  The soldier guarding Andromeda eyes her warily from below before tightening his grip on his horse’s reins. After she was taken into custody and trussed up like a chicken, the general himself hoisted Andromeda onto the back of one of his men’s horses and commanded the soldier to lead the horse on foot. Andromeda swore she saw steam coming out of the young soldier’s ears but he wordlessly followed orders and now clomps behind the rest of his squadron. Though his features are blank and expressionless Andromeda can feel the rage seething under his skin ready to explode at the tiniest provocation.

  She’d pity the soldier if she weren’t equally enraged by the hunters from her village for allowing the general and his troop to whisk her away without protest.

  “You’re accused of treason and theft,” the soldier finally grits out a few words. “This is how prisoners are transported.”

  “It was an honest mistake,” Andromeda protests, “surely you’ve made mistakes in your life.”

  A muscle in the soldier’s jaw ticks and throbs, “And what of the soldier whose weapon you stole? Did you think of him? What if he’d just set it down and you only thought it was abandoned. He’d have needed it more than you if he encountered a Mistborn and if he returned and found it missing you’d be responsible for him losing his life to those filthy sea beasts. Did you ever consider that? Perhaps he would have had a wife or children that depended on him and you robbed them of their breadwinner. But I suppose being a woman, you don’t take those sorts of things into consideration.”

  Andromeda snorts, “I found the aquaswift falling off the back of a merchant cart. Certainly if anyone is to be convicted of theft it should be the merchant whose cart I found it on. And I’m hardly some dull-witted female.”

  The soldier sets his jaw and jerks the lead rope on his animal, urging the horse onward. As the sun rises higher into the sky and the ropes around Andromeda’s wrists refuse to loosen she has no choice but to slump down on her mount and stare at the back of her captor’s heads.

  The squadron trudges on in silence beyond the sounds of their horse’s hooves clomping over the dirt roads and Andromeda’s nose fills with the scent of the animal waste littering the ground. So these are the illustrious Watierai Warriors. Funny, she had pictured them as much more impressive in her mind. To Andromeda’s childhood mind they were fearless warriors, heroes that protected the people of the coastal villages from the Mistborn, not tired soldiers doing grunt work for the King.

  The horse’s powerful body jerks beneath her, sending her flying forward on his back. Andromeda has to grip the horse’s silky mane with her numb fingers just to keep from sliding off and being crushed under the horse’s hooves.

  Nobody asks if she is all right, nor do they offer to help Andromeda right herself so she lays on the animal’s broad back as the sun peaks in the sky then begins its’ sloping descent in the west. The Watierai Guard doesn’t break to make camp until the stars become visible in the dark and even then, Andromeda is just thrown to the ground where her feet are bound with iron shackles and spiked into the hard clay as the soldiers set up camp.

  Once their tents are set up and a fire built, the soldiers break their evening meal without sparing her a second look. If they knew who Andromeda really is they might not be so ignorant of her needs, perhaps they’d toss her a piece of bread or offer her a sip of water and give her a soft pallet to sleep on. Perhaps if they knew who she really was she wouldn’t be their prisoner in the first place. Or perhaps not, as she is nobody of any importance to the one person who may spare her from death. So Andromeda sits silently, alone in the dark as the soldiers drift away from the fire and into their tents for the night.

  The last to leave is the general, the young smart-ass who came up with the brilliant idea to take her into custody in the first place. He stares at Andromeda in the drowning dark, the embers of the fire illuminating his shape but hiding his features and though she can’t see the look on his face it seems as if he’s trying to figure her out.

  ❖

  Thane

  Thane cracks his knuckles and
sits down on the cot in his tent without bothering to remove his smoke soaked uniform. Of all the scents that cling to his body from day to day he supposes a little smoke isn’t so bad. His skin prickles with an unusual awareness and he gets the unpleasant feeling that eyes are watching him even though he’s alone. It’s her, Thane knows it. The odd girl with a soldier’s body, skin the color of a stormy morning, and a woman’s curves, an angel’s face cursed with thin, hollow cheekbones and harsh lips; she’s a walking contradiction as if Zarouk couldn’t make up his mind when he made her and despite her unusual beauty, she’s as cold and rough as the churning seas.

  Thane might be willing to believe her story of finding the aquaswift after it fell off the back of a merchant’s cart, they are sneaky and ruthless enough to steal anything they think they can get a coin or two for, if not for the fact that she was hunting the Mistborn with the useless hunters of her village. The girl came off as cocky the moment Thane laid eyes on her and for a moment it shook his confidence.

  Thane can’t have the squadron thinking he’s going soft. After all, he didn’t fight his way to his title as the youngest Chief General of the Watierai Army in Vacantian history just to be usurped at the first bend in the road, so he had to make an example of the girl. What the king does with her once the Warriors deliver her to the palace is not Thane’s concern. She’s just a silly, foolish girl even if her sister’s child was taken by the Mistborn scum.

  His mind goes back to another night and another child taken from his bassinet in the predawn hours never to be seen again but Thane quickly blots away the thought as he rips the laces out of his boots. I will not think of him, Thane chastises himself as he yanks his tunic over his head and lays down on the scratchy burlap cot.

  The minute he closes his eyes his brother is there looking the same as he did the last time Thane saw him; plump and rosy cheeked wrapped in a woven blanket. He was less than a week old when that monster stole him in the middle of the night and dragged him to the sea. Thane was eight years old when his brother was taken and he’s both feared the sea and sworn to defend Vacantia from the child-stealing vipers that slither ashore kidnapping children.

  Thane forces his thoughts elsewhere, on sparring drills and marching formations, on the hot, greasy chips sold at the taverns in the capital and how after he hands the aspiring girl-soldier thief over to the king he’s going to eat those chips until he gets sick on salt, ale, and willing women. Thane finally falls asleep a short time later with an anticipatory smile on his face.

  A commotion at the center of camp wakes Thane before first light and he is out of bed and jumping into his boots before he is even fully awake. Sheathing his swords at the ready on his side he shoves the tent flap aside and darts outside toward the source of the commotion.

  “What of the alarm?” Thane shouts at the first grunt soldier he lays eyes on.

  “Is’ de girl,” the Warrior’s coastal accent is thick. “She tried to escape.”

  “Curse the seas,” Thane growls as he stalks toward the golden embers of the dying bonfire. Two of Thane’s men drag the girl into view and in the dim glowing light he sees the blood already drying on her face. It’s also apparent by the scratches marring the faces of Thane’s Warriors and the slight limp one has taken on as he drags her toward Thane that she was not recaptured easily. Thane is furious at just how impressed he is by her. To be a member of the Watierai Warrior Guard you have to be at a higher skill set than a common foot soldier, you have to be brave enough, strong enough to face off against a Mistborn and be victorious. And for this little mite of a girl to have nearly bested two of Thane’s men so easily shows him just how dangerous she is.

  “Throw her in the cage,” Thane orders his men, “and make sure her Zarouk-damned bindings are tight this time. I don’t want another incident like this.”

  A few of the other Warriors who had aided in the recapturing of the girl surround them looking exhausted and unkempt. “As for the rest of you,” Thane pauses surveying his squadron shrewdly, “begin breaking down camp. We leave within the hour. I want to reach the capital by midday.”

  “But General, the capital is nearly a day’s walk away,” one of the newer Warriors groans.

  Thane’s frustration with the whole situation bubbles over and he draws his sword, knocking the Warrior sharply on the back of the head with the hilt. He crumples to the ground with a painful moan.

  “Does anyone else have any objections?” Thane’s voice echoes throughout the entire camp. Not a single soul utters a sound nor do they move an inch. “What are you waiting for? Move.”

  As if waking from a trance they snap to attention and begin breaking down tents as Thane stalks back to his own tent to put on the rest of his armor.

  Thane pushes his men and camp is broken down and they’re traveling onward to the capital before the sun has risen. They leave the coast behind and travel through the forest coming out along the Skinwalker Mountain range on the other side. Vacantia has always reminded Thane of a tiered cake, from rough coastline at the base of the island to thick swathes of forest in the midlands that give way to nearly impassable mountains the more higher ground you traversed. The capital city, Vanyia lies north, far from the Losteroan slave camps far to the southwest. Thane should know, his mother was held in that camp when she was first brought over from Lostero when she was fifteen, before Thane’s bastard of a father bought her. Thane had pulled himself up from his mother’s slave origins and the knowledge of his dirty mixed race heritage to command the Watierai Warriors, the most prestigious squadron in the world, and all that comes with it.

  The warm, golden lights of Vanyia creep over the top of the hill the Warriors are cresting as the sun begins to set. Thane’s men are grumpy and dead on their feet but they perk up at the sight of the black wrought iron gates leading into the royal city. They know a hot meal and a willing woman will be waiting for them as soon as they hand over their prisoner.

  Thane shoots a look over his shoulder at the girl sitting in the cage constructed of bars of iron-coated volcanic rock and panels of sea-green ocean glass in the middle of the Warrior caravan expecting her to look terrified or remorseful but she meets Thane’s seeking gaze with a steely, almost smug look on her face. He begins to wonder if she knows something he doesn’t.

  As they pass through the city gates, shouts ring out throughout the city and nobles and slaves alike emerge from their homes to welcome the Warriors home. Small children in dusty tunics and breeches run alongside the caravan pointing to their friends as they press as close as they dare to see the girl in the cage.

  “Do ya think she’s a Mistborn?” One little boy elbows his companion as they press their snotty noses to the glass panels for a closer look before one of Thane’s men shoos him away for fear he’ll get trampled.

  “She doesn’t look like a sea witch,” his companion complains.

  Just then the girl in the cage lurches forward, her curled fingers banging against the sea glass as her face contorts into a snarl. The boys yelp in terror and scramble back to the safety of the crowds observing the Warrior’s parade through town. Thane’s captive howls with laughter at her own trick before reclining inside the cage, her hands tucked beneath her head and one leg propped at the knee.

  Scowling, Thane turns around and leads his men through the palace entrance. Stable hands rush forward to collect their mounts as six palace guards materialize to transport the prisoner to the throne room.

  “What’d this one do?” One guard inquires as he grabs hold of a lead rope to pull the wheeled cage through the palace.

  “She stole Malachi’s weapon off a merchant’s cart.” One of Thane’s men relays shortly as Thane pushes past the guard without acknowledging him.

  The guard gasps as he peers back at the girl. He knows that the sacred swords given to the Watierai Guard are forged using a piece of the wielder’s soul, each piece of craftsmanship created specifically for its’ intended user and no other. If a Watierai Guard dies and returns
to the land of the Gods to be with the mighty Zarouk, so too must his weapon be destroyed lest the wielder never truly be granted peace to move on to the next life.

  King Pavo and Queen Lyra sit atop their thrones at the head of the throne room. Surrounding them are Prince Cygni, Princess Veyla, and the young Prince Corvi, looking out over the courtiers with disinterest. As the doors to the throne room close with a whomp, a snick, and a groan behind the cage all heads snap in the Warrior’s direction, eager to see the new arrival.

  “Your Majesties,” Thane dips low into a grand bow before the royal family.

  “What have we here?” Queen Lyra leans forward with interest.

  “My men have captured a thief in possession of a sacred sword belonging to one of our fallen comrades,” Thane explains as he gestures to the girl in the cage. Startled gasps fill the room but King Pavo merely stares on disinterestedly.

  “Bring the girl forth,” Queen Lyra commands the guards as she rises from her throne. Her silk skirts hiss as she descends the few steps leading to the dais.

  The cage is dragged closer with a mighty groan as the thief is presented for Queen Lyra’s scrutiny.

  Instead of cowering in fear at the feet of her sovereign, the thief tilts her chin up, a smug look on her face, and says, "Hello, Mother.”

  ❖

  Andromeda

  Andromeda watches with smug satisfaction as the color blanches from her captor’s face. The General’s mouth opens and closes like a flopping fish. The men and women of the royal court gasp and begin whispering furiously amongst themselves.