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Cerrit flies.
He does not land, does not stop, does not rest beyond brief snatches of sleep caught on warm thermals and steady currents. Locked wings allow a light doze once he rises to a decent altitude. Rations packed into his belt out of habit are made to see him through a twenty-four-hour emergency shift, but necessity stretches them until he is nearly knocked out of the air by exhaustion on the sixth day. Ten hours of sleep too restless to count as a long rest is broken by the distant rumble of earth breaking apart. Gods are at war. He gets up. Scrapes together the resolve his kids deserve, and forces tired wings back into the sky.
He cannot stop.
The Calamity races on.
Maya holds a golden sphere in cold hands. Indents, carefully crafted, line ridges. It hums. The adults Mom works with say it’s an Arcanum or something, a powerful artifact that contains more knowledge than she could ever use.
They’re very snooty about it.
She thinks, privately, that she doesn’t like the wizards very much.
Maya is the only one it responded to, the only one it seeks out when the wizards try to take it. They have bigger things to worry about. She sees the dark shadows under their eyes lengthen. Talk of defenses and contingencies takes over Mom's time with panic settled in shifting wings and cobbled-together civilian weapons across Gwessar. There is no time for history when the future is at risk.
So, it is hers.
Mom goes away for hours every day, bow over her shoulder and careful armor strapped on. Arrows rattle in their quiver. She laces blades into her boots and maps out escape routes when she thinks Maya and Kir aren’t looking. Nobody knows the woods like Mom.
The skies are red every day, now.
They say it’s nothing, it’s just a challenge to tough out, so don’t worry, okay? Everything is fine. Don’t worry. You’re safe, you’re here, it will be okay because I will make it be okay.
Make what okay?
Kir has their father’s courage and loves- no. Loved their dad. Loved him so much it turned into unshakable trust. He flies up to the tallest trees and sits there, watching the skies in hope that Dad will come find them like he promised. He has Mom’s stubbornness and Dad’s dedication.
But Maya watches like her father. She has his eyes, his ears, his intellect. Analysis is easy. It’s not so difficult to piece together that the world is tearing itself to pieces from overheard conversations and subtly exchanged glances between adults. Whatever happened at home kickstarted the end of everything. Nobody survived the city’s crash.
Nobody.
And Dad has always loved his work because he loves their home.
Maya doesn’t have a future anymore. It was ripped from her hands before she knew what was happening, and all the adults are starting to give up on fixing it. They’re leaving it to her generation. She knows this because everyone talks about running like it will happen. They talk about fixing like it might happen. The difference burns in her chest and settles, panicking, in the back of her throat. She is thirteen years old and has discovered the future of ashes isn’t going to be fixed. It is hers. Hers to drown in, hers to be buried in, and hers to inherit if she survives long enough. Every adult in their camp has nearly given up.
It’s hard to be angry at them. It’s hard not to be angry.
Maya knows, somehow, that Mom is hurting.
Not from an injury.
Mom stood outside long after the sending stone failed. Her head was tipped back, eyes closed and face tilted to the sky as light sparked across the horizon like a strike of lightning continents away. Ash began to fall like snow for the first time. It’s hard to tell with these things - Maya is all of thirteen years old and inexperienced for all that she’s studious - but sending stones don’t just break.
Dad isn’t okay.
Dad isn’t alive.
(Dad is a liar.)
But he promised.
Cerrit squints past ocean spray. The distant line could be land, could be a trick of the light, but his eyes are sharper than most. Through the ash and smoke of a burning world, he makes out a dark splotch thicker than the rest. Red and grey cloak even the waves below.
That’s an island.
Salt-crusted wings ache in relief. Cerrit is used to being overworked through investigations. Wizards overreaching their limits kept him up for far too long, away from home or locked in his office. Endurance flying is hardly different. Sleep can be caught in snatches. Rations are restocked though the foraging skills Wrayne showed him back when they went on dates in the forests below Avalir. Even now, she saves him through her love.
But everyone has limits.
If he had not found a place to stop, Cerrit would have drowned or starved at sea. Nydas will say something about the irony of that-
Nydas is dead.
He flies on.
Days pass.
Maya figures out how to manipulate the sphere. Memories and oceans of information rest inside. She spends three straight evenings immersed in the history of Avalir before that method of running from reality crumbles around her. She can’t hide from the loss of a dad forever. Not when his face flashes across the screen.
Dad is young in the illusionary scene. Relaxed. He leans heavily on Evandrin the First Knight, gesturing at Loquatius Seelie from the Herald. The background is hazy, but Maya has clever eyes.
That’s the Architect Arcane sitting next to Mr. Seelie. She finds more memories - little things, tucked away like an afterthought. Parties and laughter. Victories. Defeats. Sleepless nights and reckless days.
Dad stands in the back of a gilded room and dryly tells Patia Por’co that Zerxus the First Knight may believe in redemption but that there’s no coming back from some things. Miss Por’co watches Mr. Seelie slide up with mischief in his eyes and stores away the memory of a successful prank in her libraries for prosperity’s sake.
Maya remembers her dad coming home one day with gold paint splattered across his wings. He loved his friends, even if it was in a long-suffering way sometimes. In each memory Patia Por’co slipped away, the Brass Ring was a family.
They look happy.
Dad looks happy.
He looks less happy in the next one.
There was a tree with masks and names and faces. Maya watches her dad leave and knows where he goes when he says, “there have been some incredibly selfish actions amongst this group. I don’t know if we’ll survive the night, but I’m going to go take care of mine now.”
She watches a greedy hand sink into the bark and answers flow out through time like taffy. Time breaks. A man made of red-burning malice and rage steps into the world, horns curled up from his head and distain in the palm of his hand.
She changes the search, typing in C-E-R-R-I-T-space-A-R-G-U-
Before her last name is finished, Maya finds her parent's wedding.
Mom finds her crying that evening. They sit together, and Maya listens to stories until she falls asleep. Exhausted with running watches and organizing evacuations, Mom follows not long after.
Maya wakes up in the middle of the night, curled into her mother’s side as the skies are clouded over with the choaking grief of broken heavens. Kir is on mom’s other side, barely fitting on the small roll-out mattress that Maya doodled over in those first evenings of denial.
That denial ended with the overhead conversation between Mom and the old man who was her boss before everything ended.
“We are fish climbing a mountain,” he had said. “It’s better to give up now than tear our scales on the rocks.”
“Then I shall flop one inch higher,” Mom had said.
Maya wonders, in the night, what she did wrong.
Why does everything hurt?
Cerrit tracks his way across the continent.
He is so tired.
They're moving camp, traveling often to avoid combat. Wrayne is fast, faster than him and clever enough to match any wizard. She knows the woods better than anyone. His family is safe.
He finds a little carved message in the floorboards.
Wingspan-
Come home. Over and out.
-Talon.
Kir.
He needs to find them.
Cerrit has always been a perceptive bastard. He goes through smoldering wreckage, tracks the frustration of fiends who lost their prey, and delicately unfolds the ashes of a map tossed into raging fires. Smoke roils in the distance. He keeps an eye on it while picking out the slightly tinted patches of ash that would be indistinguishable to anyone with lesser vision. Wrayne favors expensive ink that can handle rough elements. It’s useful to her. Most importantly, it burns differently.
Wrayne knows this. She used to burn little codes in their fireplace, love letters for him to pick out that said little things like grocery lists and appreciation for the seedlings he’d brought home after a long shift away. She knows, from fond memories, how long it will take for the elements to claim this soot.
They went north.
He rakes a hand through the ashes, destroying the precious clues for whoever finds this place next.
Maya spends every spare second diving through the arcane knowledge of the sphere. She learns the last librarian or whatever was her dad’s family as well as a friend. Mom's crusty old boss says Patia Por'co wasn’t technically just a librarian, so Maya keeps calling her that to annoy the old man. She likes Patia, she thinks. Nobody could boss her around, and she was also kind of a badass.
Plus, Dad considered her a sister. Probably. He is- was- one of the Librarian's only six real friends. She watches the Ring of Brass joke and laugh and scheme. Backroom deals and lists upon lists of erased memories filter across polished gold. They were arrogant. Proud. She sees the last Librarian's notes and calculations and knows, instinctively, what some people could do to the world for knowledge or power. Dad had opinions about that.
Kir wants to know what Dad did at work. What bad guys he caught and what mysteries he solved. He wants adventure.
Maya watches illusions of the bloody scenes her dad waded through with hubris splashed red across failed rituals and knows she can’t tell him.
But this is her dad.
This is all she has left of him.
"Are you alright?" Kir asks her when he finds her curled up on her bed. Earlier today, they could see celestials fighting on the other side of a mountain range. They trampled the earth, impossibly tall, and reworked the landscape like it was discardable trash. Maya sat beside Kir on the porch to watch.
The gods are dying.
The gods are dead.
The gods are here.
"I’m fine," she says, and does not think about how ten scant minutes took her from her first kiss on the cheek from Lylian to losing her friends, her school, her house and room and books. She lost her dad, and he promised to find them while his ring light the fear in his eyes.
She has her father’s eyes.
That ring lit up when she said she wasn't going to the Academy party. It lit up when she said it was Kir who doodled on the underside of the table or that she doesn’t like being carried because she’s too old for babying. It lit up when Dad said everything would be okay. That he would find them.
Kir shuffles a bit. "I want to go home."
Yeah.
"Me too."
Cerrit sits under a tarp, wings shaking with exhaustion as rain turns ash to a clay-like mud and music drifts from some kind of stringed instrument. Grey sticky sludge chokes the ground and vegetation alike. Rivers have become wrathful forces, slow moving by all appearances but twice the death trap as flash floods combine with volcanic debris. It sticks to clothing and weighs down his feathers until flight would pose more danger than progress. He’s grounded until he can find water clear enough to wash in.
A passing band of refugees found him attempting to claw his way out of a mudslide. Rain and mud had plastered his feathers flat. Muck had gripped at his arms when he’d attempted to shove it away, and Cerrit had fallen under the weight of overreached limits. Cold seeped bone-deep. He had been half dead when they’d found him.
Their druid scolded him when he woke up.
Rightfully.
He keeps watch even as fabric rustles next to him.
“You are not a god,” a soft voice says, and Cerrit tears his attention away from the shifting grey landscape. A cleric meets his eyes evenly, patience held in the jut of her chin and slope of her shoulders. Tattoos crawl up her cheekbones in geometric lines. Back and silver paint twilight across her skin. He thinks back to the scorn Avalir’s elite fostered towards the magic borrowed from gods, and wonders if the precedent of distain will change.
They have certainly been humbled.
“I’m well aware,” he says.
He does not think of lost friends, of arrogance, or the endurance of a family that is one survivor of six. Rooms stained bloody with failed rituals of ascension, chasing the coattails of a woman made death incarnate. Mortality is natural. Correct. It is Wrayne pulling an arrow out of the deer whose life will feed their family, age gone grey and content, and even those cut too short too soon. It is what he witnessed every single day at work.
They are not gods.
They never were, never would be, and to think otherwise was exasperating at best.
He has always known this better than any other.
“Then why do you act like one?”
Cerrit falters.
“You cannot survive on nothing,” the cleric tells him. She reaches out, an offer, and sets a green-glowing hand against his wing when he nods. Feathers straighten and aching joints ease. “We fight for the next generation, yes. But we should live for them, too.”
“I owe them this,” Cerrit agrees. It’s a phrase he’s clung to desperately.
A benediction.
“Ah, what do I know,” the cleric says, personality flipping on a copper. She leans back dismissively. “I’m just a quaint little god-follower.”
“They did you a disservice,” Cerrit says, quietly. He thinks of the Raven Queen’s champion. “We all did.”
And now we pay for it, he does not say.
The cleric pauses, then laughs. It’s a viciously bright sound. Too bright for the grey.
Hope made lethal.
Angry.
Perhaps that is what a god saw in her.
“Scoot closer,” she says. “Let me see what I can do about those wings of yours.”
It takes an hour of healing for his aches to ease, and even then the cleric isn’t able to scratch his bone deep exhaustion. Scrapes heal over. Another hour of hard work eases clay from his clothes and burns out the infection that was taking root in his injuries. Cerrit hasn’t taken a long rest since he left. Part of him is afraid if he does, he’ll be out for days.
This is still the longest break he’s taken since the city fell.
It’s probably saved his life.
But now that he’s well enough to fly, he cannot do anything else.
“You’re a bit of a fool,” the cleric says as she hands him precious rations. The druid behind her looks on, disapproving. “But I can’t say you’re a coward. Moonweaver guide you.”
“And you,” Cerrit says.
The blessing of a goddess sticks in his throat.
The mountains are on fire.
Maya squints at it as her feathered ruff rises in a patchy crown. Her stupid molt itches.
"Mom?" she calls, only to stop when she notices Mom passed out, papers and defense plans scattered across the desk. It reminds her of the map she’d found in one of their other camps, a sheaf of paper next to it with calculations spanning out how long, exactly, it would take wings with her father’s endurance and mother’s skills to cross an ocean. There were several routes plotted out, straight lines across oceans that twisted like juggernauts across islands.
She wonders if that map is here, or left behind when they moved camp.
Kir didn’t keep watch for Dad yesterday. He started to listen to Mom’s worried requests he stay in sight of the camp at all times when their outer patrol was attacked. Maya isn’t proud of it, but she threw a fit when she found out. It felt like giving up. Even if she already knows better.
Kir is stupid.
He isn’t allowed to give up.
Whatever.
The fires can wait until they're closer.
Maya rests her arms on the windowsill and watches orange-red glitter in the night like embers. Thick, choking smoke smothers the sky, but it’s hardly noticeable when the whole world smells of ash and decay. She'll raise an alarm if it gets closer.
One hour later, she does. It takes another for tents to be broken down, teleportation circles activated, and they transfer to the next base.
She misses her dad.
Cerrit is so tired.
His wings are nearly locked in place. Every time he flaps them to rise is like a hammer driving into the joints.
Endurance is agony. Exertion batters against hollow bones. He struggles to buy precious seconds still airborne even as exhaustion pulls him down. He can barely see. Barely fly.
Hills pass, similar to inked maps left in fires, and Cerrit relies on instinct to cover ground. Eventually he will crash to earth and drag himself to a makeshift shelter. Sleep will claim him, fear will wake him with the long-trained alarm of a Sightwarden, and he will gather food as best he can before taking off again. It’s a vicious cycle. Non-sustainable, and Wrayne would tear him to pieces for pushing himself too far in an emergency like this. Rangers tend to be clever about their limits, and the work they do scouting out rare spell components will always be invaluable to places like Avalir. They also pull longer shifts than Mage-Hunters.
In a career made of knowing that so much is impossible, that mortal limits exist for a reason, Cerrit is perfectly aware of what he is attempting.
He should stop.
Rest.
Heal.
But his kids deserve his best.
Maya finds the last moments before the Library or whatever was sent to her.
Its... bad.
Very bad.
There is no reason for her dad to lie to his closest friends, no glowing rings or promises to survive in this memory. Maya watched battered heroes resign themselves to death. Her dad stands among them. Blood is crusted over his chest, armor torn, and shadows wrapped around him like a second cloak.
He is not smiling.
It occurs to her, briefly, that he wouldn’t want her to see this.
That Kir would rat her snooping out to Dad in a second given half a chance. He might tell Mom.
The record ends before her dad falls.
She’s grateful, and angry, and confused about all the emotions that burn their way through her heart. It settles beside the ache that hasn’t faded yet from that first night. It probably never really will. She wants her dad.
Perhaps it’s selfish, but the truth of what she saw stays secret and quiet, precious moments in time locked away. Patia Por’co did this all the time. She hid the truth all the time, so Maya allows herself this because she’s the older sister and Kir is nosey for all that he’s a nerd. He’d ask to see. That’s not an answer she wants to give.
Maya already had nightmares, but they get worse after that.
Cerrit has always believed that integrity is a mightier force than power. That the quiet dedication to a promise, no matter how impossible, is what makes a person before their abilities hit the limits all living beings must respect.
Starting the Calamity has said an awful lot about his friends' character, just as working to minimize the fallout did. His friends were complicated people. They died trying to be better. But breaking this promise says an awful lot about Cerrit.
Darkness dances at the edges of his vision.
Cerrit knows he is nearing the end of his endurance as he searches above the forest Wrayne left clues to. He knows there is a good chance he will not make it back. Making peace with inevitability happened when he first walked along the path Laerryn mapped out between minds, Loquatius’s talisman clutched in one hand.
His task has never been to succeed.
It’s been to try.
So he will keep trying, until the gods drop him from the sky themselves or his wings give out.
Whichever comes last.
Maya has her father’s eyes, so she notices the dot in the sky first.
It circles, high overhead, and she squints at it before making out the blurry shape that can only be-
Can only be-
Wings.
Wood splinters under talons as she scrambles out the window, sending Kir tumbling dangerously close to the fire, but she can’t care, can’t pause, because that’s- that’s the first bit of hope she’s felt in a long time. So she’s going to leave camp. Maya is thirteen years old and insufferable about it according to her brother. She’s not following the rules as much as he thinks.
Kir yelps, collecting his little wooden hatchets. By the time he turns around, Maya is out the window.
Wings spread, smaller than her dad’s but no less clever.
He told her so.
They have illusions put up over the camp. Mom says Dad can find those. Even invisibility is detectable with the right training, and the Sightwardens of Avalir are under her dad’s command. That means he’s the best of them. There’s logic in the tracks of the wizards who put up this spell knowing her father would see past it.
But Maya has spent these weeks learning that adults lie all the time.
She takes off, beating air into submission to rise as high as she can, as fast as she can. It’s no graceful thing, but Kir can barely judge, and Mom is out scouting the next escape routes. Twenty meters, thirty, and reality ripples around her as Maya breaks through the illusionary dome shielding their camp.
Her wings hurt.
She could not care less.
The person in the sky is still circling, and Maya has no breath to spare as she climbs. This high, she can make out a familiar silhouette. As she struggles upwards, they turn and begin a hunter’s dive – one of the dangerous maneuvers she’s not allowed to try yet. Not until Dad is sure she can slow down fast enough.
It’s him.
It has to be-
“Dad,” Maya calls, only for the word to get caught as she struggles to rise faster. “-Dad!”
Dad rockets toward her, wings spreading at the last possible moment. Light filters oddly through torn feathers and rough armor, but Maya launches herself the last few feet forward. She barrels into his arms like she’s all of five years old again and just like he did back then, Dad holds her close as he begins the glide downwards.
“You came home,” Maya says through the wet on her cheeks and choking feeling in her throat.
“Of course I did,” Dad says as he holds her tight, like it would take the stars themselves to make him leave his family now. It feels like safety. He’s weirdly thin, dirt and what Maya now recognizes as dried blood coating his armor. She knows now, through Patia Por’co’s eyes, that he’s not invincible. Dad is trembling, feathers broken and in disarray, a shadow of an undefeatable legend, but she has never felt safer. He’s here.
And she wouldn’t change it for the world.
“And I swear,“ Dad says as his voice wavers. “I swear I’ll here for you. No more missed days. No more.”
“You have to promise it,” Maya tells him as she grips bloody armor close. “You- you have to promise.”
“I promise,” says the only adult Maya trusts not to lie to her. Not things like it’ll be fine and you don’t have to worry. Not stupid things everyone lies about. Dad doesn’t lie about not-stupid things. She knows that now.
They drop a couple feet too fast, and Dad exhales harshly as he course-corrects. Wings beat, slightly off-balance. Maya has her father’s eyes. For better or for worse, she knows what violence looks like and what her dad faced to make the earth burn a little less.
He’s hurt.
Maya leans back like she didn’t notice him falter.
“Why don’t you go down first?” Dad says easily. “They probably put up wards, so I’ll find my way in after you.”
“Okay,” Maya says. She shoves the heel of her palm across her eyes and poofs her feathers up in determination. If Dad needs her help to get into camp, she can do that. “You’ll follow?’
“I will,” he says, and it sounds like another promise.
She spreads her wings, and he lets her go.
Maya feels the air ripple as she drops through the barrier. A few people have ducked out of their tents. Kir is far below, struggling to get proper liftoff with little air currents to help – he’s not very good at direct takeoffs yet. She has barely a moment to reach him before trees burst apart and Mom skids into camp. She starts for the healer’s tent, stumbles to a stop, and bends over like she has a really bad stomachache. Her hands clasp in prayer and rest against her forehead.
Someone must have Sent or Messaged.
“Mom,” Kir starts, and Mom’s attention snaps to them. Wind buffets Maya as Mom crosses the clearing in three short seconds.
“Kids,” she says, gathering them in her arms. “I need you to be strong, okay?”
She doesn’t know they know.
Maya points up, for once not worried about liking like a tattletale. Mom looks up and freezes in shock as Maya rattles off, “Mom, Dad is- he’s here. He found us-”
A blur strikes the ground. Maya shrieks, instinctively latching onto Kir as a vaguely brown shape crashes into Mom.
"...Darling?" Mom says it like all the wonder and fear in the world has been compressed into a word. Arms wrap around Dad, first hesitantly and then all at once. Maya feels as though the air has been punched out of her lungs as Dad stumbles.
Kir makes a break for them and Maya lets him go.
Mom is already there to steady him.
“Darling,” she says again, seconds before Kir slams into them both with the impact of a very small battering ram. Mom holds steady, but Dad nearly falls again. He probably would have if Mom hadn’t wrapped him up in a hug.
Mom’s hugs are the best.
“Dad,” Maya says. Her voice echoes that evening – Dad, why is your ring glowing? -and she swallows. “Are you hurt?”
Mom hugs him tighter for a split second before shifting so Dad can lean on her. “Your Dad just traveled a very long distance very fast,” she starts. “He’ll need to rest a little while.”
“I just need a nap,” Dad tells them.
Mom makes a face and reaches over to gently adjust some of the feathers on his wing. “A long one, darling.”
Dad keeps his promise.
When he fights to make the world a slightly better place, he does so from her side. She and Kir are his priority. They always were.
Mom says that their generation lied so much because they felt helpless. They wanted to keep Maya and Kir safe. Generations of comfort and confidence bred hubris and short-sighted arrogance. She also said that it was no reason to stop fighting. Dad and Mom are similar like that.
Maya figures it out as she reaches her mid-teens.
The world is ash and fire, made seething wreckage in the face of deities battling across its surface. Some things don’t change: Maya has no future besides what she crafts for herself. She has no home in Avalir, no pretty triton girl to kiss her on the cheek or parties to sneak out to.
What she does have, is a globe of gold with knowledge pressed inside by the woman Maya now thinks of as her aunt.
She makes one kickass librarian.
Over time, her father's lessons on fighting without any use of magic are passed down, along with her own research habits. The deep trauma of corruption will become a warning also passed on, that power corrupts. When she tells her students to hide the Archives of Patia Por'co when this world of war ever finds peace from divine corruption, she does so because mistakes cannot be repeated. Arrogance is a drug. Thirst for power brought down her home, and she will not become the kind of person her father once hunted meticulously. She will not contribute to deadly hubris.
Hope is a discipline, happiness is a choice, and arrogance is destruction that starts at the source.
So, she passes down a system of checks and balances. She makes it big – international – because if one city can fall to greed, then surely more eyes would ensure safety. Her Dad was the Senior Sightwarden, and Maya has his eyes.
A caution against corruption.
Her library, one day, will be known as the Cobalt Soul.