Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

            “Soon we’ll go to see the stars!”

            The anticipation. The awe. And then the terrible revelation.

            “Dear child, you have no idea how much has been withheld from you.”

            The slow crawl of passing months, nights of crying herself to sleep. There was no place to run underground, no place to hide for long.

            “Oh Primeval Current, source of all knowledge and wonders! Accept this offering, twinned souls born at the mingling of day and night!”

            The long ride up the lift to the surface. Two stone beds. A single scallop-edged knife, carved from pure glintstone, glittering in the twilight.

            “Sister? Where did you go? You promised me, once we were fourteen, we’d go to see the stars.”

            I’m sorry, Aureliette.

            ARISE NOW, YE TARNISHED, YE DEAD WHO YET LIVE. CROSS THE FOG, TO THE LANDS BETWEEN. STAND BEFORE THE ELDEN RING, AND BECOME THE ELDEN LORD.

***

            Aurelia opened her eyes. She was lying on her back, something rough and prickly spread out beneath the heavy material of her robe. Above, an endless expanse of pale blue dominated her vision. As she blinked away the last wisps of gold, she groped for some word to describe that which arced above her.

            The expanse bore no stars, no shining sun or moon, only a few wisps of white and a handful of circling black specks. And yet by its enormity alone, it outshone even the great observatory of Nokstella.

            The sky. Realization came with a detached sort of awe. It must be the sky.

            She had seen it once, she recalled distantly. Her eyes had remained downcast on the journey from the lift to the Stargazers’ Outpost. But when she lay back on the stone slab, she could not help but see it, the red sunset slowly pushing back blue as twilight made way for the stars...

            The stone tables. Master Alcibiades withdrawing the knife from his robes...

            Aurelia shot bolt upright, shaking hands moving to pat down her chest. No trace remained of the sharp, choking pain that had dominated her last moments. Even her robes were whole. Hands trembling so hard she could barely undo the ties, she shifted the garment aside and pressed her palm over her heart.

            The frantic beat slammed against her palm. The skin beneath her hand was smooth and unbroken, not even a scar remaining.

            Aurelia stumbled, her knees turned to water. She caught herself on a lip of carved stone, the weathered surface rough and cool. Head spinning, she sought to take in her unfamiliar surroundings.

            She had caught herself on the edge of a coffin. There were seven others like it, some empty, some with their great stone lids askew. They emerged like worn teeth from the grey-green field that stretched all around.

            Grass. She had seen little tufts of the stuff grown in the curated beds of the botanical gardens. To see such a great carpet of it spread all around was nearly as disorienting as the sky. To see so much empty space at all...

            Aurelia shrank back against the solid wall of the coffin, feeling acutely small and exposed. Surely this was the world of the surface, not some strange afterlife, but how was it that she found herself here, alive and whole?

            She had seen the knife plunge down between her ribs, mere moments after she heard her sister’s screams go silent. My sister. As if in remembrance, cold pierced her heart.

            “Aureliette!” She screamed through her cupped hands, any thought of caution blown away like a screen of cobwebs. “Aureliette!”

            If I am alive, she must be too. Tears blurred her vision. She must be!

            “Aureliette!”

            Something moved amongst the graves, pale and billowing. Aurelia dashed the tears from her eyes. The creature hovered placidly, nearly blending into the pallid sky as it drifted closer. Long tendrils streamed out behind like gauzy banners.

            A jellyfish. They were seen at the borders of Nokstella on occasion, clustering in twos and threes around graves or in the hundreds around the scar of the old gravity well. Her father had called them good omens, the souls of the untroubled dead.

            For a brief moment, she had been one of them. She had looked down upon two small corpses. She had spat poison into her teacher’s eyes, robbing him of the enlightenment he had purchased with two lives.

            Her voice came in a strangled whimper. “Liette?”

            The apparition wavered, a pastel light pulsing within its translucent form. One of the flowing tendrils reached out, curling cool and smooth around her hand. The soft illumination flickered as if in confusion.

            Aurelia crumpled to her knees, desperately clinging to the smooth tendril. Her shoulders quaked, hot tears bubbling up from the ache in her chest. “Liette, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry!”

            More tendrils reached out, draping weightlessly around her neck and shoulders. The spirit pulsed, her soft light now taking on an air of distress. Aurelia drew a shaking hand across her eyes, trying to quell her tears. Aureliette must be just as bewildered as she, just as scared and lost.

            Sobs overcame her, refusing to be mastered. She ought to pull herself together, she ought to comfort her sister and feign assurance that she did not feel. Instead she remained on her knees, weeping as she clung to the ghostly tendril and wished that it were a hand.

***

            It was getting dark. Through the clinging fog of grief, the more concrete pangs of cold and hunger roused Aurelia from her stupor. She reached for the lip of the coffin, rising unsteadily to her feet. Aureliette still hovered at her side, tendrils gently plucking at her sleeves.

            With a shuddering breath, she dried the last of her tears on her sleeve and properly took in her surroundings. The sky bruised a dark blue-grey, blanketed by a thick layer of what she was reasonably certain were clouds. The air smelled wet.

            On the ridge above, she could just barely make out a heap of ruined buildings. To her left the ground dropped away sharply, a muddied slope leading down to a paved road. Even from her high vantage, she could see the piecemeal layout of the paving stones, tall weeds pushing up through the gaps.

            Something lay hidden by the grass at her feet, too long and straight to be an accident of nature. She knelt, laying her hand upon the hardwood grip -- her astrologer’s staff. She lifted the focus in both hands, taking comfort in the weight of it as she gripped it tight against her chest.

            She did not know many spells. Master Alcibiades had directed the bulk of her studies toward the reading of stars. You are a bright girl, Aurelia. You ought to have the privilege of seeing some small glimpse of what your sacrifice will secure. But she knew how to cast a glintstone pebble. Surely that was better than nothing?

            As if to mock that brief illusion of security, a howl echoed out across the hills. Aurelia whirled, seeking the source of the mournful sound. She lit up the focus of her staff, casting blue light into the gathering dusk, and a pair of eyes glittered in return.

            Another howl, long and hungry. Two more sets of eyes reflected from the scattered scrub trees. With swiftness born more from fear than mastery, Aurelia sent a shard of glintstone zipping toward the nearest set of eyes.

            The creature leapt back, now revealed as a shaggy grey beast. It snarled, showing its long muzzle to be lined with fangs.

            Aurelia backed away, glancing quickly to ensure that Aureliette followed. She fired off another shard, a small one to conserve her limited reserves. The beasts paced, crisscrossing her path but not yet closing in.

            The ruins loomed behind her, perhaps a quarter mile away. Long abandoned, surely, but perhaps she could find somewhere to hide.

Chapter Text

            By the time she reached the ruins, the sky had burst open. The downpour fell like a barrage, flattening the long grass and soaking through Aurelia’s thick wool hood in the space of a few minutes.

            The glowing eyes were obscured, though she could not say whether they were driven off or merely hidden.

            A pale glimmer nibbled away at the edge of the darkness, and the downpour lessened in a tiny circle around her. Aurelia looked up -- Liette hovered above her, rain rolling off the smooth dome of her... Head? Upper body?

            Aurelia smiled weakly, reaching up to hold one of the drifting tendrils like a tether. “I suppose we should get out of the open.”

            It still felt terribly disorienting to be so exposed, and being unable to see more than a few paces in any direction somehow made it worse. None of the structures around her had retained a roof, but perhaps a basement or a cellar had survived.

            As she backed deeper into the ruined complex, her foot clanged against something hard. A metal dome shone dully in the half-light. It was big, big enough that she might have fit inside it if she curled up, shaped like a slightly flattened sphere.

            Her curiosity piqued, Aurelia gave it another tentative kick. It did not budge, a hollow tone ringing out at the impact. As Liette drifted closer, her pale light illuminated what lay beyond.

            Bones. A skeleton more than twice as tall as she, half obscured by a decaying cloak. Scavengers had clearly been tearing at it, little remaining beyond the massive yellowing bones and a few scraps of flesh and shrunken hide.

            And beyond that, black hole in the ground with stone stairs offering a crumbling path downward.

            Aurelia backed up against the nearest wall, heart hammering in her throat. What could have killed something so massive?

            “It must be long gone, whatever it was.” Her voice wavered as she attempted to reassure her sister. “The thing’s been eaten down to bones. It... It must have been ages...”

            The hole in the ground yawned like a hungry maw. And yet as sinister as it seemed, she could not shake the instinct that this entire affair would be more manageable if she were safely underground instead of stuck out in the open.

            Motioning for Liette to follow, she picked her way down the stone stairs. The light of her staff was scarcely enough to see her own feet, the faint glow edging the blackness around her with reflective blue. She could still hear the rain above, thumping out its uneven rhythm on the stony ground.

            She caught herself as the stairs ran out, terminating in flat ground. Her free hand outstretched, Aurelia followed the wall until she found a corner. The chamber did not seem terribly large. It was cold, but not dank and foul as she had expected.

            Leaving her sister to hover by the landing, she began a slow circuit of the room, her fingertips trailing along the cool stone wall. Despite initial appearances, this seemed an ideal spot to pass the night--

            In the darkness, her fingertips brushed the cold of a metal panel. Before she could even register the difference the door fell away. Candlelight flickered in her peripheral vision.

            Aurelia whirled toward the light, staff held in front of her like a shield. An ice-blue light and the hum of a charging spell froze her in her tracks.

            A spell-blade the length of her forearm hovered just beneath her chin. Heart hammering within a body that did not dare move, her eyes followed the blade up to the staff from which it sprouted, then to its blue-robed wielder.

            A face of stone glowered down at her, its unmoving features bespeaking cold indifference.

            Aurelia stood transfixed, even her breathing frozen for two heartbeats, then three...

            The blade dissipated. The stone head tilted slightly, and a woman’s voice broke the silence. “Well. You’re no highwayman.”

            She shook her head mutely. Her hands clenched white-knuckled around her staff, shaking too badly to even think of casting. The woman withdrew her own staff, propping it against her shoulder as she folded her arms. For a long moment, the stranger -- by her armament, she must be a sorcerer -- studied her.

            “Lost yourself in the storm, have you?” Her voice softened ever so slightly, neither hostile nor really friendly. “Take the staircase back up. Turn left directly as you emerge. You’ll reach the road shortly. You ought to catch up to your party if you hurry.”

            Aurelia forced herself to speak, the words choking out through the tightness of her throat. “My... My party?”

            “Are you not one of those heading north? You are with a group, surely?”

            She shook her head, tears welling up as adrenaline faded.

            “Hm. That is...” The sorceress trailed off, her stone mask now pointing at something over Aurelia’s shoulder. “Not entirely alone, I see.”

            Staff still clutched to her chest, she sidestepped to place herself between the stranger and Aureliette. The movement was automatic, done before she could even wonder whether a spirit could be meaningfully harmed.

            But of course she knew that one could. A shadow of a memory sprang to the forefront. She had been like Liette, ethereal and nearly at peace. She had blinded Master Alcibiades. His disciples had avenged him in a shower of comets.

            She had died twice.

            The sorceress regarded her silently, a hint of curiosity visible in the cast of her shoulders, in the way she leaned very slightly forward. Aurelia swallowed the lump in her throat. The woman would think her mad if she told the truth.

            Still shaken by the memory, Aurelia scrambled for some coherent explanation. “I woke up out by the graves...”

            “Oh.” The woman’s tone shifted. She raised her staff, and Aurelia nearly bolted for the door before she realized that the stranger merely used it as a light source. “You’re one of those, then? Curious. You don’t have that golden glint in your eye.”

            She had seen wisps of gold when she first awoke, so faint and so short-lived that she had dismissed it as a lingering dream. Aurelia stood at a loss, nauseous with the familiar sense that she was being toyed with by one who knew far more than she.

            The woman’s stone face angled upward, as if her graven eyes might find some secret written on the ceiling. With a slight huff, she lowered the staff to her side.

            “Pass the night here, if you wish. Though I fear I’ve neither food nor bedding to offer.” She turned back toward the door from which she had emerged. Aurelia finally had the presence of mind to notice the clutter of instruments and scrolls stacked within, configured like unruly satellites around a central desk.

            As she retreated behind the desk, the sorceress flicked her wrist toward a stack of small crates in one corner. “If memory serves, I left a warming stone in the second one from the top.”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia awoke in the dark, cold and stiff apart from her cupped hands. The amber stone resting in her palm dulled, its stored energy near exhausted. Carefully setting it aside, she rose from her curled position and attempted to stretch her numbed limbs.

            The pangs of hunger were too great to ignore now. Aurelia retrieved her staff and the outer robe she had spread out on the floor -- at least it was nearly dry now. Food was going to be a problem. She had a cursory knowledge of the subterranean mushrooms and lichens that could be safely eaten, but the flora of the surface world were entirely unknown to her. She had never been intended to see them, after all.

            The sorceress still brooded over her desk as if she had not moved a muscle since the night before. Had she even slept? As Aurelia watched, she laid a hand on her staff. A scroll flew off of one of the haphazard piles and unfurled itself on the table of its own accord.

            The stone face angled slightly upward. “I suppose you’ll be heading north?” She met Aurelia’s look of bewilderment with her usual impassivity. “That is the way most of your kind tend to go.”

            She nodded. Openly displaying her lack of knowledge seemed unwise, but the dull stab repeatedly driving through her belly compelled her to speak. “Are there any settlements nearby?”

            “I believe there’s a Kaiden camp a bit farther down the road, but you are unlikely to find hospitality there.” She rested a hand on her staff once more, and a book flew out of the corner in a cloud of dust to smack solidly into Aurelia’s arms. “Quite frankly, foraging will serve you better than trusting the kindness of strangers.”

            Aurelia crouched down, balancing the heavy tome on her knees. Liette hovered at her shoulder, casting enough light to make out pages and pages of barely legible scrawl that contrasted sharply with the meticulously rendered sketches of wild plants.

            She squinted at the cramped shorthand, skimming what appeared to be the notes of a traveling botanist. “‘Rowa berries... Primarily used by the locals in jams and preserves...’”

            The sorceress paused, a note of mild interest creeping into her voice. “You can read?”

            “Of course I can read.”

            She flinched the moment the words were out of her mouth, half expecting her host to take offense at her tone. The sorceress merely chuckled, amused but not mocking. “It has become a rather uncommon skill of late. And... Refresh my memory, would you? Are those the field notes of Master Dioscorides?”

            Aurelia flipped the tome shut, carefully running her finger along the embossed lines of the title. “Yes?”

            For the first time, the sorceress fully set aside her work. “You can read High Nox.”

            Aurelia nodded tentatively. It was the only script she had ever been taught. She had never thought much of it.

            The sorceress hummed contemplatively, soundlessly drumming her fingertips against her forearm. “I’ve heard rumor of a path to Nokron concealed beneath the Mistwood. Did you perhaps come by that route?”

            “I don’t know,” Aurelia lied. “I never saw the surface.”

            The sorceress stood unmoved, the stone eyes of her mask drilling straight through her visitor. Aurelia suddenly felt very much like a specimen being pinned down for vivisection. She stood abruptly, laid the book at the threshold of her host’s study as if leaving an offering, and retreated as quickly as good manners would permit.

            “Thank you,” she stammered. “I... I’m going to find something to eat now.”

            The sorceress nodded, turning back to her scroll without apparent displeasure. “That entry you were reading, Rowa berries. You won’t starve on those, but they aren’t terribly nutritious for anything without four stomachs.” She called another scroll to her desk, speaking absently as it unfurled itself. “Crabs are easy enough to catch, and you’ll find them practically anywhere there’s water.”

            As Aurelia hurried up the steps, Liette drifting at her heels, the sorceress called out sharply. “And be careful of the big ones. If you see bubbles, you’re too close.”

***

            Aurelia limped back down the stairs, lugging a crab easily the size of her head in both arms. Despite being sore all over and soaked to the skin, the particular satisfaction that came from succeeding at a difficult and messy endeavor kept a grin plastered across her face.

            After a morning of struggling through knee-deep mud, she had finally resorted to sniping her quarry with a glintstone pebble. As she gingerly lowered the cold, heavy thing to the floor, she considered how best to cook it. She was reasonably certain she could light a spark with her staff. Could the crab simply be cooked in its own shell? She didn’t see why not, but--

            The sound of someone clearing her throat broke Aurelia out of her train of thought. The sorceress stood at the door to her study, somehow conveying a sense of mild amusement through her stone visage.

            “What’s this?”

            Aurelia tripped over her words, stumbling to explain what had seemed plainly obvious within the confines of her own mind. “You let me stay the night. And you said you didn’t have any food...”

            “Oh.” For the first time, she seemed to have caught the sorceress flat-footed. “That’s... Rather thoughtful actually. Though I fear I’ve no use for such things.”

            “You don’t eat?” Aurelia stooped, heaving the dead crab back into her arms. She hesitated. “Do you ever leave?”

            “Not in my present state, and not for a very long while.” A hint of amusement colored her cool tone. “Calm yourself, child. I am no phantom. I merely draw my sustenance from another source.” For a moment she paused, seeming to consider. “If you were brought up reading High Nox, you may very well predate the Full Moon Orthodoxy. Are you familiar with the theory of the Primeval Current?”

            Her heart seized, her blood turned to ice. Her wet robes suddenly felt very cold. She clutched the dead crab so tightly that even through her thick robes she could feel the rough points of its shell pressing into her ribs. It occurred to her that she had left her staff propped in a corner at the top of the stairway.

            The sorceress was still speaking, explaining how a scholar of her level -- a scholar of the Primeval Current -- could draw upon the vitality of the stars to sustain herself. But her voice sounded muted and far off. Her own heart beating in her ears was far louder.

            She could hear Master Alcibiades as if he stood before her in the flesh. She could feel the pressure of his hand on her shoulder and see the look of high-handed pity in his silver eyes.

            “We all must serve where we are able, child. The Current will not relinquish its secrets to those unwilling to sacrifice. It is by our resolve that we show ourselves worthy.”

            The sorceress had fallen silent. She took a step towards Aurelia, her stone mask tilted as if in puzzlement. “Is something the matter--”

            “I’m sorry.” She heard the words pass her lips, though she knew not where she found the breath to speak them. “I’m sorry I have to go.”

            Heart still frozen in her throat, she turned and sprinted up the stairs.

Chapter Text

            In the end, she had taken the sorceress’s offhand advice -- north seemed the best way to go. She did not trust her woodcraft enough to stray far from the main road. The way south had been explored out of a contrarian impulse, but that route ended in a fortified bridge manned by archers.

            The way north proved more fruitful. The merchant at the ruined church had gifted her a flint and steel -- not charity, he insisted, an investment -- and showed her how to use it.

            “The important thing is that you survive. Every customer counts, after all.” He chuckled, a sound like the rustling of dry grass. “Gods know it’s rare enough to find one neither mad nor murderous.”

            He had also suggested avoiding the Stormgate. After a look at the garrison outside, Aurelia opted to heed the merchant’s advice. It proved a laborious task, walking the base of the cliff until she found a manageable slope and then scrabbling her way up a slide of gravel and loose shale.

            She wound a circuitous path across the hilltop, keeping a respectful distance from the towering trolls who made their home there. It was near dusk when her slow trek north brought her back within sight of the road.

            It was not only the Stormgate of which the merchant Kalé had warned her. He had spoken also of the Tarnished hunts of Lord Godrick. To her questions of what was a Tarnished and who was Godrick, he had merely waved a hand and retreated deeper under the brim of his hat.

            “Stay off the road,” he muttered. “And stay away from any man wearing red and green.”

            As the stars blinked into view one by one, Aurelia prepared herself for a night alone in the open. A part of her wished that she’d spent the night in the church with Kalé, but that would have cost her more than half the day’s travel. She shook her head, banishing the childish impulse. Now was as good a time as any to get used to making her own way.

            She had wanted so badly to trust the sorceress. But she couldn’t. She wouldn’t. She could not again endure the condescending reassurances of one who, at any moment, might determine her to be of more use dead than alive.

            Aurelia trudged along the edge of the road, resisting the urge to lean on her staff. Even so long and so far away from Master Alcibiades, the lesson that her staff was a casting focus and not a walking stick remained firmly ingrained.

            “It is by our resolve that we show ourselves worthy.”

            She wondered who Sellen had--

            A sharp and metallic scent brought her up short. The stars were out in force now, tiny specks dimmed before the golden tree that dominated the horizon. Their combined light was more than sufficient to see what lay upon the road.

            Aurelia gestured for Liette to stay back. Her throat closed too tightly to permit a spoken warning. She had never seen a battlefield before, yet even she could readily identify the ruin that lay upon the road.

            Great fist-fulls of earth had been torn up, deep gouges in a sort of scuttling pattern not unlike that of a monstrous spider. Haphazard slashes marked the stony ground, the trunk of a lone scrub tree, the embankments to either side. They still glowed a faint gold, an arcane power with which Aurelia was entirely unfamiliar smoldering as it dissipated.

            Blood had been spilled by the bushel, spattered in great arcs and spread out in cooling pools. A half-dozen mules lay dead, five with their throats cut and one ripped to fleshy tatters. Not a single human corpse remained.

            The marks of many booted feet tracked through the blood. They pointed north, interspersed with prints that resembled nothing so much as a tangle of human hands. She could see that they had dragged a great many heavy things with them, most bleeding and all of them struggling. But the blood trail gave out after only a few paces, and there her meager tracking skills failed her.

            Aurelia breathed through her sleeve, squeezing her eyes shut as if that would help the overpowering stench of blood. She broke off from the road, plunging deeper into the tall grass. Liette followed, her light pulsing dim and nearly frantic.

            Somehow the lack of bodies made it worse. Her hands shook as she walked, the faint light of her staff trembling along with her. Something had been dragged away, and by the void, what had made those tracks?

            Aurelia forged onward despite the dark. She would have to stop and make a fire soon or risk attack by one of any number of beasts who hunted by night. But she wanted distance first. At least she wanted to go far enough to escape the slightest whiff of blood.

            A dark shape emerged from the tall grass. The shack had retained a rickety roof and only the barest skeleton of its walls. But it lay at least a stone’s throw from the road, and it provided a symbol of shelter even if in truth it would not keep out a light breeze.

            An animal snort nearly scared her out of her skin. Aurelia leveled her staff at the black shape, only to breathe a sigh of relief when she made out the form of a grazing animal. It was a mule, tearing placidly at the dry grass. This one had been relieved of his tackle, but he was undeniably one of the same sort she had seen dead on the road.

            It comforted her somewhat to see that at least one creature had escaped the slaughter. While Liette drifted over to investigate the beast, Aurelia ducked into the shack.

            The splash of red stood out immediately against the gloom. Aurelia raised her staff and called a light. Wrapped in a hood of brilliant crimson, a figure not much taller than Aurelia herself huddled against the corner of the shack.

Chapter Text

            Short as her travels had been, she had encountered no fewer than six desiccated corpses along the way. Unlike the slaughter upon the road behind her, these had been found alone, tucked into corners or propped against rambling boundary walls. They gave every indication that they had simply sat down and waited to die.

            She had also encountered a great many wanderers, shambling and hollow eyed. Though most dragged themselves down the road or scrabbled amongst the rubble, some had given up on both. These huddled against the ruins, their foreheads pressed to the dirt and their hands upraised as if in prayer. It had occurred to her rather suddenly that one would become the other, that the wanderers would give out, that they would find somewhere to sit in peaceful despair and then simply wait for the final vestiges of life to fade.

            At first Aurelia took the figure in red for one of these. She sat pressed against the corner of the shack, knees drawn tight to her chest, head down. Nothing could be seen of her face, and she made no sound.

            But she lacked the lethargic half-death typical of the wanderers. Her gloved hands held her knees tightly, and she shivered with an intensity that even the cold night could not account for.

            Aurelia wished that she could see her face. From a safe distance, she cleared her throat to announce herself. “Hello?”

            The girl in red made no sign that she’d even heard.

            She knelt down, wary of the huddled figure lashing out in panic just as much as she was wary of a trap. Aurelia tucked her staff under her arm and reached out, resting a hand on the girl’s forearm.

            The stranger jerked as if she’d been bitten, pressing back against the wall although she could retreat no further. Glassy eyes fixed upon Aurelia, set within a face ashen despite the marks of recent tears.

            Aurelia rocked back on her heels. She held up empty hands, words of reassurance lost in her throat. The girl was not one of the husks. She was no more than three or four years older than Aurelia herself, and her eyes held a different sort of emptiness.

            She sat stock still apart from her trembling, as if she were cornered by some terrible beast instead of a skinny apprentice astrologer. Or perhaps her deadened eyes saw something else entirely.

            Aurelia reached out again, gingerly laying a hand on the girl’s shoulder. She seemed to shrink at the contact.

            “Are you hurt?”

            The girl offered a minute shake of her head, hollow eyes dropping to fix upon her knees. Shaking fingers reached up to fidget with the border of her cloak. It was a fine garment, brilliant red and embroidered gold at the edges, strangely ornate to be worn on a journey. Five ragged slashes marred the hem, closely spaced, as if a child’s hand with fingers worn down to bony claws had snatched at her cloak.

            “They... They were taken.” Her voice bore the strain of prolonged weeping. The hoarse whisper blended near seamlessly into the rustling of the night wind. “Taken for the spider, to lose their arms, and their legs, and their heads...”

            Aurelia hovered, torn between the desire to help and the fear that there was nothing to be done. The frantic whisper had been spoken to the empty night, not to her. Even now the girl’s head dropped back to her knees, shoulders drawn up as if she could disappear under her flimsy cloak.

            She thought of the husks, curled up and waiting to die. She backed out of the shack, the night chill reaching her even through her heavy wool robe. Aurelia circled the cabin with automatic steps, keeping Liette’s light in the corner of her eye. There were no more than a few stray twigs littering the ground, but she gathered dry grass and twisted it into bundles as Kalé had shown her. She’d have to make a fire anyway. The shack was a bit closer to the road than she would have liked, but she told herself that what remained of the walls would screen the light of the flames.

            The girl made no sign as Aurelia piled up her kindling and struggled with the flint and steel. After an interminable number of tries and a badly scraped finger, she managed to catch a spark and coax the tiny campfire to life.

            Aurelia circled the flickering ring of light, casting one more wary glance back in the direction of the road. She sat against the wall beside the girl in red, pressing her shoulder to her side in an attempt to share a bit of warmth. She could still feel her shivering.

            As the fire properly took hold, the tense figure pressed to her side uncurled ever so slightly. Though her arms remained tight around her knees, she lifted her face to watch the flames. A fringe of disheveled blonde hair fell beneath the border of her hood, framing her blanched face. Perhaps it was only the new light, but it seemed to Aurelia that her eyes looked less glassy. Now they glistened with tears.

            Master Alcibiades had lectured many times on the discovery of the Primeval Current. Again and again, he had repeated the story of how the first astrologers had looked beyond the stars and been driven mad by what they saw.

            As she watched the flames dance in the girl’s shattered eyes, Aurelia wondered if other sights might cause such madness. Could one see a thing so horrible that it wounded the mind in lieu of the body? She watched the girl’s gloved fingers worry the hem of her cloak, vacantly toying with the five slashes in the material, and she remembered the bloody wreck left upon the road and those prints that had seemed so horribly like human hands.

            “We were bound north.” Aurelia startled, turning to ensure that she had not imagined the murmured words. The girl pressed on, her eyes never leaving the fire. “The others... The ones that could see... They said Grace led north. The one in the white mask said we’d be well so long as we kept to the road.”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia sat in silence, allowing the older girl’s story to emerge in bits and pieces. Her name was Roderika. She and her escort were Tarnished. They had been commanded to follow the guidance of Grace, though she had never seen it. It had the feel of a sort of pilgrimage, the way she spoke of it, though Aurelia knew nothing of rings or thrones. She suspected that Roderika knew just as little -- she spoke as one repeating back what she had been told.

            “We came by way of Saintsbridge,” she murmured. “Then...”

            She trailed off. Aurelia pressed her hand. Then the attack on the road. No need to speak of it.

            “I... I led them to their deaths.” Her voice quavered as if attempting to laugh. “It’s almost comical, isn’t it, that they followed the only one who couldn’t see Grace?”

            She remembered the wisps of gold -- brief, but undeniably there. She had glimpsed her own reflection when she knelt to drink from the shallows of the lake. Her eyes, once pale grey, now bore an undertone of faded gold. Is that what they all meant, when they called her Tarnished? Kalé seemed able to identify her nature with a single glance.

            Roderika’s blue-green eyes held no hint of gold, tarnished or otherwise.

            “How did you know?” Untarnished blue eyes lifted to stare at her in bewilderment. “How did you know you were Tarnished, if you never saw Grace?”

            Roderika wavered, a nervous smile attempting to mask her countenance before it died on her lips. Aurelia saw the look, the look of one who knew she had been lied to but could not yet say it aloud.

            Before either could breach the silence, a pale glow intruded through the ramshackle walls of the shack. Aurelia quickly reached out, laying a hand on her companion’s arm as Liette drifted in through the window.

            “It’s alright. She won’t hurt you.”

            Liette stretched out a curious tendril, carefully bobbing around the fire as she approached. Roderika held out her hand, allowing the spectral limb to drape across her gloved fingers. The pale light shone down on her face, illuminating a look of longing nostalgia.

            “Is she following you?” She gently stroked her thumb across the tendril as if holding a hand. Her voice came in a wistful murmur. “I’ve been able to see spirits since I was a child. Some of them I can nearly hear aloud...”

            Aurelia swallowed, battling with the tightness in her throat. She looked up at the jellyfish, silent without a voice or even a face to make herself understood. “Is... Is she suffering?”

            “No. Most spirits are... Sad, but peaceful, is as well as I can put it. She feels much the same.” Her brow creased. “But she also feels... Hopeful? And...” She turned to face Aurelia, a hint of unsurety hindering her speech. “She doesn’t blame you. I’m sorry, I’m not sure what to make of that, but...”

            Aurelia sat rigid, fists clenched in her lap. Through a blur of tears, she watched a pale tendril drift softly across the back of her hand. She could not speak.

            Roderika gasped sharply. Though Aureliette’s ghostly light continued to shine, Aurelia felt the formless touch upon her hand morph into a palm and five fingers.

            She jerked her head up, the night wind chilling the tears upon her cheeks. Roderika huddled with her back pressed to the wall, eyes wide and one hand frozen outstretched. The spot where the jellyfish had hovered now stood empty.

            A girl sat cross-legged on the floor across from Aurelia. Although she still retained her spectral form, it was impossible not to recognize her -- Aurelia could almost have been looking at a mirror. The phantom girl was a bit taller, her hair a bit longer, messy and tied back, but she could never mistake the face of her twin.

            Liette opened her mouth as if to speak. Her lips moved soundlessly, and her brow scrunched as if in frustration. She shook her head, smiled ruefully, and held Aurelia’s hand. She clutched the ghostly hand tightly, holding it despite the cold and the feeling that she was touching something not truly there.

            Then the hand shifted, molding like water in her grasp. Aurelia looked up to see the jellyfish hovering over her, a tendril once more twined around her wrist like a tether. Roderika let her hand drop with a gasp, sweat beading on her pale face despite the night’s chill.

            Aurelia stumbled up onto her knees, lurching to take hold of Roderika’s shoulders. “Please, bring her back!”

            “I’m sorry!” Roderika shrank back. “I, I don’t know what I did, she just felt like she wanted to say something. I’ve never seen one do... That.”

            Aurelia shuddered, forcing herself to release Roderika’s shoulders. She refused to look up as she felt a soft tendril glide across her hair. Do you not understand? The last thing I ever told my sister was a lie. I let her walk to her death. I could have warned her. I could have attacked Alcibiades and given her a chance to run...

            “Was she your sister?” Roderika’s voice could scarcely be heard, even amongst the near silence of the night. “I’m so sorry. I know it isn’t much, but she’s really not in any pain...”

            Aurelia nodded, choked by her own tears. “T-thank you.” She took a breath and struggled to compose herself. Liette still hovered at her shoulder, casting Roderika in pallid light. “Where will you go? I’m heading north tomorrow, if--”
            “To Stormveil?” That hollow look returned to her eyes. The reality of the situation settled back over them both. Roderika shook her head. “Please, go by another way. You’ve been very kind, I’d hate to think...”

            There was something about the way she said it... A sick feeling twisted in Aurelia’s gut. “That’s where you’re going,” she whispered. “Isn’t it?”

            The other girl managed a smile, small and brittle beneath broken eyes. “It’s the least I can do,” she murmured. “For my men.”

            You won’t spare them by walking to your death. I died beside my sister, and my conscience is no better off for it.

            “You’ll die.”

            She seemed to shrink further, disappearing behind her knees. “I’ll get up the nerve.” Her voice wavered. “Eventually. I’ve never been stout of heart, but I owe them that much.”

***

            Aurelia descended into the basement with her staff clutched tightly in her right hand. Liette remained above, as she’d insisted. She fought the urge to grip the staff with both hands, held in front of her like a protective talisman. She needed to project an air of confidence. She needed to look like anything but a frightened child.

            She braced herself at the door to the sorceress’s study and waited to be noticed. After an interminable silence, the stone crown angled upward.

            “Back already? I felt sure I had scared you off.”

            Aurelia took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. “I need you to teach me combat spells.”

            She could not determine whether the sorceress’s tone was one of interest or amusement. “Oh?”

            She nodded in what she hoped was a decisive manner. “I need to kill someone.”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia circled round the perimeter of the basement, taking brisk and precisely measured steps as she had been instructed. The crystal mass hovered just below the center of the low ceiling. With a flick of her staff, she sent a glintstone pebble zipping toward the target. The crystal lurched leftward at the last second.

            “Don’t hold it like a hammer. Lay your thumb parallel to the staff and keep your wrist loose.”

            Aurelia adjusted her grip. She recalled Sellen’s earlier instruction -- end the movement with the focus pointing at your target -- and flicked her wrist in three swift motions. The first missed, but the next two shots caught the target in a diminutive shower of sparks.

            “Remember, you’re casting, not conjuring. At your level, any thought to the shape of the projectile is wasted mental energy. Simply pluck your shard out of the Current and throw it.”

            So deep was her concentration that she halted her circuit about the basement. The crystal sphere crackled like a live coal and sent a burst of energy to scorch the stones at her feet.

            “Keep moving. You’ll conserve a great deal of energy on shield spells if you learn to simply get out of the way.”

            Aurelia lurched back into motion. Her next shot was well and truly off, but the second struck home.

            Of course she did not know any shield spells. Sellen had insisted on a review of the basics. After viewing a single demonstration of glintstone pebble, she glowered through the stone face of her mask and proceeded to spend the entire day drilling her on stance and footwork. The very first lesson, and she had already quite plainly disappointed her teacher.

            She fired off three more shots, her jaw set in a tight line. All three struck home. She fired again, never halting her precise steps. Two hit, one missed.

            “That will do.”

            Aurelia turned to face Sellen, her eyes widening in protest before she gathered the breath to speak. “Please give me another chance, I swear I can get better--”
            Sellen halted her with an upraised finger. “You’ve done passably well, for your first lesson.” She dismissed the crystal target with a wave of her hand. “I confess, when you told me that you were a year into your apprenticeship, I thought you to be an incurable bluntstone. But it would appear that the fault is not yours. You’re a remarkably quick study.”

            Aurelia leaned against the cool stone of the wall, suddenly cognizant of the perspiration dampening her tunic and trickling down her brow. She had discarded her outer robe at the outset of the lesson, and still she felt as if she had run for miles.

            “Whoever taught you ought to lose his crown.” Her eyes snapped up in alarm. Sellen seemed to pay no mind, chuckling as she shook her stone-shrouded head. “I think I’ve brought you further within the space of an afternoon than he managed in a year. He tossed a few first-year spells your way and didn’t bother to give you the foundation to advance.”

            Sellen lifted her staff, demonstrating the proper grip and spinning the weapon in a tight orbit. “It doesn’t matter so much with glintstone pebble, but flaws in technique, even something as simple as one’s stance, tend to compound the further one advances.”

            Aurelia bit her tongue. Of course Master Alcibiades’ negligence was no mystery to her. A layer of irritation settled over the sea of fear and hatred she felt for the man. If her apprenticeship were merely a farce allowed out of pity for one meant to die young, why not let her ignorance be absolute? Why induct her into the darkest rites of the astrologers and torment her with the knowledge of her fate if he did not even intend to teach her properly?

            “One more thing.”

            Aurelia startled, snapped from her brooding as Sellen approached.

            “I’ll test you once more before we conclude the lesson. Are you familiar with Carian sword sorcery?”

            She shook her head. Even the name of the school was unfamiliar.

            Sellen planted her feet and stretched out her staff in both hands, as if holding a longsword. Aurelia instinctively mimicked the stance.

            “Although the Carian dynasty has since fallen to stagnation, their blade and sword sorceries marked a notable advance in spellcasting, in their day. While the first astrologers plucked raw glintstone from the Current, Carian blade sorcerers drew energy directly from the Current and shaped it to their will. Sword and blade sorceries are rather commonplace now, but they were vital in paving the way for schools such as the Haima Conspectus.”

            A beam of light materialized in the dark, extending outward from the focus of Sellen’s staff. In an instant the light coalesced, hardening into straight-sword the color of ice.

            “Reach out in the same manner you do when you cast a glintstone pebble. But keep the channel open and direct the energy to form the shape you desire.”

            Aurelia braced her feet, eyes focused on the spherical head of her staff. “Does it all really come from the Primeval Current?”

            “Theoretically. Now pay attention.”

            The act of calling up a glintstone pebble had long since been relegated to a sort of mental muscle memory. But she sought to focus on the motion itself, to take what usually passed within the space of a heartbeat and stretch it out. She could feel the energy, slippery and formless though it was. She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined the form of a sword.

            The blue beam lacked the refinement of Sellen’s sword. It flickered in the vague shape of a blade, more a shaft of light then a solid object. Aurelia wavered, unsure of how to...

            “Don’t drop it!” Sellen cut in sharply. “Quickly, hit something with it and see if you’ve managed more than a light show.”

            Aurelia swung the staff and its half-formed blade in an arc. She felt an odd sort of resistance as the beam slashed through the air, not entirely like magnetism. The blade sliced through the wall without effort, leaving a furrow of glowing blue across the stones. Aurelia released the spell with a sudden gasp. She had been holding her breath. She did not realize that she was grinning until her cheeks began to hurt.

            “A bit unrefined, but an impressive first attempt.” Sellen glided closer on oddly silent footsteps. “As you advance, you will learn to tune the spell-blade to pass through armor and cut only living tissue, or vice versa. But that will keep until our next lesson.”

            Aurelia retrieved her outer robe. The feeling of genuine regret as she made for the exit unsettled her. “I... I probably won’t be back either way. Thank you for the lesson.”

            “Ah yes, your duel. I take it the matter is time sensitive?” Aurelia nodded mutely. “Might I inquire who you’ll be facing?”

            “The lord of Stormveil.”

            They both stood in silence for a moment. Sellen cleared her throat. “I wish you’d told me that before I wasted the better part of a day.”

            Aurelia attempted to square her shoulders. “I won’t bother you again.”

            “Oh, by all means.” She glanced over her shoulder to see Sellen back at her desk, once more engrossed in her work. “If you should survive, I would very much like to hear how you managed it.”

            Aurelia marched up the stairs, unsure of whether to feel dismissed or comforted. She supposed that was the closest she was going to get to a “good luck.”

Chapter Text

            The bridge bristled with a forest of steel. Halberds, swords, spear, some driven between the stones and more piled up in heaps. Bones and rusted armor lay jumbled amongst them. Aurelia waited for nightfall to make her way across the bridge, darting from shadow to shadow with her hood pulled up around her ears.

            Moonlight shone down upon the graveyard, turning spears and swords to a thicket of frost-gilded thorns. The silence reigned absolute -- she hardly dared draw breath as she made the trek across the bridge.

            Whatever champion guarded the gate, either she fell beneath his notice or his eye was turned elsewhere. No one appeared to add her bones to the scattered burial ground. Aurelia dove into the shadow of the gate and pressed her back to the crumbling stone, finally permitting herself a moment to breathe properly.

            Pitted by rust though it was, one glance told her that the portcullis would not be moved. Each bar was easily as big around as her arm, the spikes sunk deep in the stone beneath. Not daring to light up her staff, she laid her hands on the rough stone and followed the wall to the left.

            She hoped to find a gatehouse, perhaps one with a more manageable door. Instead she found a gaping hole, yawning black and ringed with crumbling bricks like a mouth full of crooked teeth.

            Aureliette drifted down from amongst the wispy clouds and hovered at her side. Her pale light did not so much as make a dent in the darkness ahead.

            She had to have light. Foolish as it was, she would not go in without light. Aurelia raised her staff and illuminated the cerulean focus.

            “You’d best stay here.” Aurelia looked up at her sister’s ghostly form, outlined in a haze of glintstone blue. “You do rather stand out.”

            Liette floated closer, tentacles tentatively probing the inky blackness. Aurelia attempted to wave her away, but the jellyfish butted up against her chest like an insistent cat.

            “Go wait with Roderika!” Aurelia hissed, attempting a stern tone. “I... I can’t protect you in here.”

            She turned and plunged into the blackness, holding the light of her staff aloft. Stumbling and tripping over strewn rubble, Aurelia made her way through the gatehouse and emerged through a gaping hole in the brickwork on the other side.

            The castle loomed large, its walls flowing straight into the sheer cliff face below. The edifice that from a distance had looked as invulnerable as the mountains themselves now showed its true face in the light of the moon. The walls were punched full of holes, as if a giant overcome by rage had smashed his fist through the stone again and again. Thorn vines as thick as an oak tree wound about the crumbling ruin, dragging it piecemeal into the abyss below.

            A rickety scaffolding picked its way up the side of the wall. It looked as if a light breeze might bring it all down, but regardless, that was her way in.

            A ghost of a shape drifted across the night sky. Aurelia glared -- Liette hovered at a distance, flitting from one cloud-shadow to another.

            “Don’t follow me!”

            She knew that her whispered order did not carry, and she did not dare yell louder. After sending one last cross look up at her sister, Aurelia darted for the base of the scaffolding.

***

            Aurelia flung herself into the narrow gap. Pressed between two walls of stone, she squeezed back as far as she could and brought her arms up to shield her face. The hawk buffeted the entrance to the alleyway, its wingspan too great to permit entry. The blades that had been grafted in place of its mutilated claws swiped within a handsbreadth of her face.

            She flattened herself against the back of the alley. Her heart stuck in her throat as she waited, minutes seeming as hours. Surely the bird would draw attention, surely the commotion would bring an entire company of guards down upon her. But at last the poor beast wheeled away, and the screech of steel and stone gave way to silence.

            The silence held as she remained frozen, waiting with bated breath for disaster to strike. When none was forthcoming, Aurelia crept back out onto the main thoroughfare.

            The castle had not seemed inhabited so much as haunted. Guards still patrolled, few and far between, but the red-hooded figures appeared nearly dead on their feet. They went through the motions of standing guard, of pacing the battlements, of circling the courtyards, but they walked as the living dead. They were singularly uninquisitive, and she had yet to see one deviate from his routine.

            She had suffered a handful of close calls -- the knights in silver were far more lucid than their hooded underlings, and she had been forced to evade one by simply running blindly down the hall until his steel-shod footsteps faded to inaudibility.

            The heart of the castle was very near now. Ahead lay the source of the stench that permeated the fortress, rotting meat undercut by something arcane, something unnatural. Surely this was the lair of Stormveil’s dreadful lord.

            Aurelia clutched her staff in both hands, her heart still turning flips in her chest. She had only made it as far as she had by hiding and skirting around the guards. What would she do when she reached their lord? She would have no choice but to stand and fight then. She racked her brain for some strategy that might give her a fighting chance, but even after Sellen’s lesson--

            Black and white exploded across her vision. She went sprawling across the paving stones, pain throbbing across the side of her head.

            Her staff lay an arm’s length away. She lunged for it, her hand closed around the wooden grip, and then a halberd hooked it away. The staff was torn away so viciously that it nearly took her fingertips with it.

            A steely hand closed around the nape of her neck. The knight yanked her to her feet and slammed her against the stone wall.

            “One from the dungeons?” His voice echoed eerily from within the darkness of his helm. “Trying to make a run for it?”

            The stones grated against her back, her feet dangled above the ground. The knight had a fistful of her hood and her neck with it, holding her up like a runt pup he intended to drown. Blackness poured across her vision like ink, and she fought for air.

            Aurelia clenched her fist and struck him across the visor. Her knuckles burned, but he did not budge. A tiny smear of red marred the face of his helm.

            The knight let out a muffled grunt, one that might been disappointment, or perhaps a short bark of laughter. He dropped her in a tangle at his feet and raised his halberd. “Not even fit to graft.”

            Aurelia clutched at her throat, fighting to draw air into her burning lungs. She had not seen where her staff had fallen. She could not move, she could scarcely breathe.

            Thunder crashed, a sound of steel on steel and blazing gold light tumbling together in the narrow space. Then silence, dead cold and smelling of ozone. Aurelia wiped the blood from her nose and dared to raise her eyes.

            The knight stood stricken, his arm frozen midway through the deathblow. Something sleek and shining protruded from his chest, the thing that had called the lightning. Smoke curled from the man’s armor. He listed sideways, the halberd slipping from stiff fingers as he fell.

            She could see the thing in his chest clearly now -- an axe, its feathered embellishments gleaming in the moonlight.

Chapter Text

            Aurelia curled on her side, gasping for breath. Her staff. Where had she dropped her staff...

            A towering figure took shape as the darkness left her vision. The warrior marched closer, the axe in her hand matching the one embedded in the dead knight’s breast. She stood taller than any Nox monk Aurelia had ever seen.

            With a single twist, the woman freed her axe from the knight’s steel plate. Before Aurelia could take hold of her staff, the newcomer offered a hand.

            “You alright?”

            Aurelia remained as she was, arms wrapped around her ribs. One look at the outstretched hand told her that the woman could have cracked her head like a walnut, but nothing in her manner suggested that she intended to do so.

            Finally Aurelia accepted the warriors hand. She allowed herself to be set on her feet and dusted off. Shaking clear of the last traces if dizziness, she managed to rasp out a “Thank you.”

            The warrior offered a grim smile, giving her one more heavy clap on the shoulder before she let her stand on her own two feet. “You’re one of those brought for grafting?”

            “No.” She finally managed to still the shaking of her hands. “I... I came on my own.”

            “I left the way out clear, so long as you’re careful.” The warrior inclined her head towards the causeway that stretched into the dark behind them both. “There’s nothing further on apart from...”

            “Apart from the spider.” There it was. She retrieved her staff from the battered cobblestones. Turning it over in her hands, she searched the glintstone head for any damage. “I came to face him.”

            At least the warrior did not laugh. Her brow furrowed beneath the shade of her headband. “You came ill prepared.” Her dark eyes lowered, a hint of tarnished gold flickering as she gazed down at the dead knight. “I came at the behest of my father. Who sent you?”

            “No one.” The warrior remained silent, one eyebrow raised. “I met someone. She told me what was happening here.”

            “These lands are rife injustice. I could not even call Stormveil the worst of it.”

            The question beneath the surface came through clearly. What business do you have here? Why is this your battle to fight?

            The answer churned half-formed in her throat. Aurelia squeezed her eyes shut, giving shape to the words that she had not spoken aloud even within the privacy of her own mind. “No one deserves to be sacrificed for another’s gain.”

            The warrior stood silent, arms crossed and eyes downcast. At last she shook her head, letting go of whatever she had tried to puzzle out. “A fine sentiment. But low as he may be, Godrick is of the Golden Lineage. I will not have a child follow me into such a battle.”

            To her eyes, the warrior might as well have been a demigod. Aurelia could scarcely imagine a more fearsome foe. And yet Godrick’s shadow fell long and dark across Limgrave. Whatever horror lay at the heart of this stone spiders’ nest, it was enough to blanket the lands in a miasma of fear.

            Aurelia firmed her chin. “Will you win? Can you be sure that you will kill him?”

            “No warrior can be sure of such a thing.”

            “Then I’m coming with you.” Aurelia hurried on before the warrior could object. “If you die, then I’ll have to fight him alone anyway.”

            For a long moment, the warrior glowered down at her. Then she hooked her axe through her belt and brought a hand up to grip the bridge of her nose. “You aren’t joking, are you?”

***

            Aurelia puffed for breath, taking two steps to Nepheli’s every one. The warrior’s dark eyes remained fixed on the path ahead.

            “You know any battle spells?”

            “A few.” One.

            Nepheli nodded decisively. “I will draw him out. You stay well back and hit him from a distance.”

            Aurelia nodded in return. She had not the breath to answer, and the tightness in her chest was not entirely due to exertion. The walls of the narrow stone tunnel seemed to rush by, the faint light of her staff dancing across the cobbles. Ahead, the red glow of dawn filled the arch.

            She followed Nepheli’s silhouette out into the open air. While the warrior unlimbered her axes, Aurelia ducked her head behind her arm, muffling her breath behind the heavy sleeve of her robe. The courtyard stank of decay.

            Her gaze swept over the rows upon rows of graves, packed together like crooked teeth. A broken corpse loomed above all, a serpentine form impaled upon a great spike. The creature’s long-jawed head hung limp, almost forlorn despite its ravaged flesh.

            A stooped figure knelt before the corpse. A gnarled grey arm stretched out from beneath the shadow of a cloak, a hand of six mismatched fingers trailing along the jaw of the dead beast.

            “Oh, mighty dragon. My kindred. Trueborn heir, most noble of beasts.” The voice rasped like gravel over flesh, the product of a ruined throat. “Lend me your strength. Deliver me unto greater heights.”

            A sharp nudge from the warrior’s elbow shook her from her trance. Aurelia backed towards the shadow of the archway, her staff’s hardwood grip slick against her sweating palms. As Nepheli descended the crooked stairs, the kneeling figure moved.

            He braced his palm against the ground, heaving himself up onto one knee. The black expanse of his cloak rippled. Something -- a great many things -- roiled beneath the surface. “What’s this? Another?”

            Golden eyes set within a pallid face passed over Aurelia as if she were not there, as a lion does not deign to chase a mouse.

            “A lowly Tarnished, playing as a lord.” His gaze fixed upon Nepheli. Golden eyes narrowed sharply, his lip curling in a sneer as he observed the engraved feathers upon her weapons and the steel hawk’s head that formed the poll of each axe. “A lowborn bastard, or a simple thief? No matter. I will suffer no pretenders.”

            Reaching down amongst the stones and the weeds, he drew out an axe of his own. He planted the double head against the paving stones, a spiderweb of cracks unfurling from the point of impact. Taking hold of the shaft, easily the height of three men, he levered his writhing bulk upright.

            “I command thee, kneel.” The cloak slipped away. A forest of arms strained skyward, ashen hands grasping blindly. The giant’s shoulders strained beneath a web of blood and sutures, a patchwork of flesh in a dozen stages of decay all melded as one. Bared teeth split his face in a grin, painted red in the light of dawn. “For I am the lord of all that is golden!”

Chapter Text

            The staff hung leaden in her hand, all thought of training or purpose swept away. The nightmare of tangled limbs lurched closer, his footfalls shaking the ground. With every step he dragged the axe behind him, too large even for his great stature. The blade tore the cobbles as it passed, stone cracking like brittle clay.

            Aurelia stood rigid. Every breath came with the agonizing sluggishness of a nightmare. A tremor took hold around her fluttering heart, capturing her shoulders and running like ice down her arm. The staff quaked in her hand, and she would have dropped it if not for her white-knuckled grip.

            The demigod laid a second hand upon the haft of the axe. As if flicking blood from the blade, he gouged out a chunk of rocky ground and hurled it across the courtyard.

            Nepheli took the attack on a lowered shoulder, stone and hardened earth ringing against the pauldron on her left side. The sound of clashing steel jolted Aurelia from her stupor. The fog of nightmare evaporated, and all at once it was happening swiftly, much too swiftly.

            Godrick surged forward, filling her vision like an oncoming avalanche. Nepheli struck him side-on. A sickening crack, an arm spinning in an arc of blood to land severed on the paving stones. The demigod whirled, a cry of pain and outrage twisting his lips.

            The shard flew from her staff without conscious thought. It struck one of his myriad arms in a shower of blue sparks. If not for his great bulk, she would have missed entirely. With another scream, he hefted the axe in both hands and brought it cleaving down on Nepheli.

            Cobbles shattered, stone dust caked her throat and eyes. The warrior twisted around him. One axe lodged between two plates of armor on a thigh as thick as a man’s waist. The other whirled in Nepheli’s hand, her own storm sparking gold amidst Godrick’s tempest.

            Move!

            Aurelia forced life back into leaden arms, gusts of wind like a solid blow ripping tears from her eyes. For an instant the spider hunched over his axe, putrefying muscles rippling as he tore it free of the stones. Aurelia leveled her staff, remembering at the last moment to adjust her grip, and fired.

            The blue shard struck him squarely on the back of the hand. Muscles spasmed, and his grip faltered. For the first time, the Lord of Stormveil deigned to face her.

            The pale face twisted. The sickening realization that his jaw had been broken and reset, a dozen oversized teeth forced into the new space, settled at the edge of conscious thought. As he turned, Nepheli pounced and scored a shallow cut across the roiling mass of his torso.

            As if a hand had gripped her by the back of her robe and thrown her into motion, Aurelia forced her legs to move. She circled as she and Sellen had practiced. Fire on every third step, the sorceress had said, and Aurelia struggled to find the rhythm, any sense of control, as she sent shard after shard hurtling into the fray.

            One zipped past Nepheli’s ear, and Aurelia wrenched her aim higher. Dashing from headstone to headstone, ducking the gusts of storm and stone he flung out after her, she began to grasp the frenetic tempo of the battle.

            The blood pounding in her ears, the hammer of each haphazard strike against the paving stones, the ringing clash each time Nepheli darted in to land a blow, all of it tumbling together into a sort of music. She added the clash of her glintstones to the orchestra, a sharp interjection into the rumbling of the twin storms.

            Her shots irked him, at least -- his great shoulders rolled, twitching as if beset by stinging flies. In the set of his jaw, in each movement of his hands, she read the urge to turn and wipe her out with a flick of his wrist. But he could not spare even that small effort, not while Nepheli punished every lapse in his defenses.

            Once more the warrior sprang under his guard, landing a blow to an arm of middling size before she leapt clear.

            And then she saw it -- his weight shifting to his front foot, the arc that the axe would follow, the momentum of his great bulk. She beheld her target with the same crystal-clear satisfaction of solving some equation labored over long into the night.

            As Godrick drew the axe back to swing and Nepheli braced to leap clear, Aurelia fired at his feet. Her shard obliterated one greying toe on a foot that held seven.

            He stumbled. Nepheli lunged. As his strike flew astray, she brought her own axe down on the joint of his dominant arm.

            A sickening crunch echoed through the chill morning air, a conclusive finale to the music of battle. The axe the length of three men went spinning through the air, narrowly missing Nepheli as she dove clear.

            The demigod cradled his ruined arm, jaw agape in a ghastly wail. A deep furrow marred his elbow, a wedge of flesh and bone split straight down through the joint.

            Aurelia stumbled to a halt, shoulders heaving as she gasped for air. As adrenaline faded, the exertion hit her first. The nausea came soon after, the thrill of victory overcome by the reality of torn flesh and dangling tendons.

            Nepheli backed away, breathing hard. Her eyes never left the screaming demigod as she waved her companion back. For the first time, Aurelia saw the long slashes across her ribs and the blood trickling down her brow.

            “Give him a moment to bleed,” the warrior rasped. “A man in his death throes can cut you down just as well as--”

            Godrick reeled, slumping against the corpse of the impaled dragon. He grasped his mangled arm, as if he meant to stanch the bleeding.

            Instead he set his teeth and twisted, his own screams joining the sound of ripping flesh and popping cartilage. With a final cry of agony, he tore the limb free and cast it aside. The stump sprayed blood in a crimson torrent.

            The Lord of Stormveil staggered like a drunkard. What little color there was drained from his pallid face. His remaining hand flung outstretched, he caught the neck of the dead beast as he fell.

            Gnarled fingers sank into flesh made soft by decay. With the dregs of godly strength that remained to him, he pulled, pulled until scales parted from each other and muscle stretched to the point of fraying. The weight of the beast’s gargantuan head aided him. With a sickening, wet thud, the severed head and stump of a neck flopped to the stony ground.

            Nepheli cried out, exhaustion fleeing her countenance as she rushed him. Aurelia blinked, struggling to make sense of the horror, to understand the realization that had galvanized her companion.

            Godrick fell heavily to his knees. Nepheli was nearly a spear’s length away when he thrust his bleeding stump into the dead thing’s neck.

            Slack jaws shuddered, then snapped. Muscles long given over to rot spasmed, coiled. Though its eyes glimmered as dull as glass, though skin and tendons tore with every move, the great head rose up, held aloft like a grotesque banner at the end of Godrick’s arm.

            Nepheli snatched a spear from the thicket of discard weapons as she ran. Her arm drew back to throw.

            The beast’s jaws gaped. Amidst the stench of blood and putrefaction, Aurelia’s nose twitched at a familiar scent. Gas. The same kind that seeped from fissures in the caves beyond the borders of Nokstella. The same kind they used in their lanterns.

            A tide of fire burst out from the undead jaws. Nepheli’s spear incinerated in midflight, a heartbeat before the wave of heat and force caught her and flung her back amongst the graves. She struck a headstone as she fell.

            Godrick’s good hand found the haft of his discarded axe. Once more he strained to his feet, his new arm retching red-hot fire into the sky. Bloodied though he was, he found the breath to roar.

            “Forefathers one and all, bear witness!”

Chapter Text

            I don’t want to look.

            That one thought expanded to fill her mind, driving out all else. She did not want to watch that grinning, writhing thing trudging closer. She did not want to watch him bring the axe down on Nepheli’s limp form. She did not want to watch the severed head of some poor dead beast blazing fire across the courtyard, struggling as if perpetually caught in its death throes.

            A knife of blue crystal gleamed against a red sky. Her wrists were held fast, but she could have turned her head. She could have looked away.

            Godrick passed Nepheli’s crumpled form, dragging the axe behind him. More than anything, Aurelia wished that she could close her eyes.

            A gout of crimson struck the Spider across his eyes. He howled in agony, many-fingered hands flying to his face.

            She spat poison into Master Alcibiades eyes, leveraging her new form for a final act of vengeance. The glintstone shards hit her in the next instant, ripping her spectral form to shreds.

            Godrick’s hands fell from his face. Golden eyes now streamed blood and poison, but they had lost none of their hateful clarity. Discarding his axe, he raised the head of the undead beast aloft and took aim at the wispy form above.

            Flames billowed skyward, catching two of Aureliette’s limbs and obliterating them like a blast of wind through candle-smoke. The ghost made no sound, but she shriveled as if in pain.

            Running was not a decision made consciously. Aurelia felt the impact of her feet striking stone, the bite of smoke-ruined air through her lungs, the solid grip of the staff in her hands. Godrick’s bulk seemed to fill the entirety of the world as she pelted toward him.

            He turned, once more raising the axe aloft.

            One chance.

            Running provided no firm footing. Every word from Sellen about stance and aim had fled her mind.

            One chance.

            She swung near blindly, releasing a glintstone shard and praying it would strike his eye. Instead the missile tore his cheek.

            Her heart was a chunk of ice lodged in her throat. Her steps still caried her forward, the staff still sang in her hand. She fired again, twice, three times. He had his hand up now, shielding his eyes. Glintstone dug a sizzling blue trench across his palm.

            The axe fell like a blacksmith’s hammer. Stone split, the ground beneath her feet buckled. The world tumbled, for one terrible instant she was weightless, then she struck the cobbles and rolled, rough stones tearing at her knees and her palms. Her forehead smacked against something hard.

            A grey blur consumed her senses. As she fumbled for her staff, heavy footsteps broke through the ringing in her ears.

            Aurelia whirled, staff aimed high. She fired -- at this distance, she could not miss. He scarcely flinched as he brought the axe down. A terrible rending of flesh, then a scream. The blow went wide. She felt the draft of its passing, the shaking of the ground as it struck a handsbreadth to her left.

            Nepheli’s axe lodged deep in the Spider’s side. Blood streamed from her scalp, painting her face crimson. She clung to the haft of the weapon as if it were the only thing holding her upright, and even still she drove it deeper. Muscle tore, sinew popped. With a howl, Godrick lashed out with a backhand.

            They ripped away from each other, reeling in opposite directions. The axe remained stuck deep within Godrick’s side.

            Aurelia forced her limbs into motion. The demigod planted himself, weight on the back foot. Once more, his baleful gaze fixed solely upon Nepheli.

            “Keep the channel open and direct the energy to form the shape you desire.”

            A glintstone pebble would hinder him no more than a stinging fly. Aurelia reached for that formless void of energy, begging the blade to manifest even as she swung at the back of his knee.

            She felt the pull against her arms, muscles straining as if to overcome magnetic repulsion. The resistance neither intensified nor lessened as her half-formed blade tore a gash the depth of a handspan into Godrick’s hamstring.

            Blood sprayed across her robe as Nepheli took hold of her axe and wrenched it free. As the demigod crumpled, the warrior sprang on him with the ferocity of a wounded animal.

            Aurelia finally closed her eyes, turning away as the blade came down on the crown of his head. She remained thus as the crunch of bone echoed again and again, a dozen times before the blows ceased.

***

            “You’re alright... See, they’re already coming back.”

            Aurelia cradled the stump of Liette’s tendril, the limb pooling like heavy fog in her palms. She told herself that she could see the phantasm becoming more substantial, that the stump grew ever so slightly toward its proper length. Liette drifted closer, bumping almost teasingly against her shoulder. Aurelia fumbled to dry her eyes on her sleeve, leaning against the spirit as much as her half-corporeal form would allow.

            A few paces away, Nepheli trickled the contents of a red flask across her ribs. The ragged cuts ceased to bleed, the edges scarring over even as she watched. The warrior poured the last of the strange liquid into a kerchief and pressed the wad of cloth to her brow.

            Aurelia followed the warrior’s eyes to the ruined form sprawled across paving stones. The tangle of greying flesh lay entwined with the mutilated beast, both edged in the reflected light of gold. A glyph shimmered above the wreckage, three arcs interlocked within a circle the size of a knight’s shield.

            Nepheli limped to stand at her side, gold reflecting in her dark eyes. For a long moment, they contemplated the dead demigod and his rune together.

            The older woman spoke at last. “You kept him off me after I went down. You’ve more than a right to half the spoils.” She let the bloodied kerchief flutter down to the stones. Half-dried blood flaked away from her knitted brow. “But I’ll not set a child on the path to the Elden Throne.”

            Aurelia shook her head numbly, keeping her eyes on the golden sigil and away from the bloody wedges carved into Godrick’s skull. “Take the... the rune. It’s yours.”

            The warrior scoffed. “Graceless I may be, but I’ll not have you leave empty-handed. And I’m not keen to leave you alone on the road either.” She drew a cord from around her neck, a small wooden token dangling from the strip of leather. “This will grant you entry to the Roundtable Hold, with no need of guidance nor maiden. It’s the safest place I know to send you.”

            Aurelia watched the bit of wood twirl lazily from the low point of the cord. A carving of a tree, intricate despite the tiny space, had been burned into the grain. “That’s your way home, isn’t it?”

            Nepheli shrugged. “Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve lost one. My father will grouse about it, but he’ll send another once I’m missed.”

            Aurelia reached out, cupping the token in her palm. Safety, or at least a place to stay. It should have been an appealing prospect.

            “Could I ask a favor of you?”

            Nepheli raised an eyebrow. “I suppose that’s fair.”

            She took a deep breath and pressed the wooden pendant back into Nepheli’s hand. “There’s a girl, in a shack just down the road...”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia had no intention of returning to Sellen. She ventured north of Stormveil with no true destination in mind, but she would not go back to be duped again.

            A pang of loneliness refused to be banished, sticking under her ribs as she followed the dilapidated road down into the wetlands. She cursed herself for a foolish child -- Alcibiades had been her only teacher. The only mentor she had ever known had left her with a knife in her heart, and yet she still wished to learn under another.

            The mage she met in the ruined church was kind enough, but he admitted to being little better than a student himself. The poor man scarcely knew how to light a campfire. Aurelia shared hers for the night, and in the morning she broke off a chunk of Kalé’s flint and traded it for a spell.

            The spell was meant to summon a magic shield. She had to take his word for it -- she had not the heart to tell him that the spell notation upon the scroll was indecipherable to her, so far beyond her time that it might well have been another language.

***

            The knight had nearly scared the life out of her, her heart freezing her chest as the dread figure materialized from the fog. The stranger moved like a phantom, horse and rider seeming as one beneath their matching shrouds. Frost misted upon the blackened mail and plate.

            Without a sound, the knight tethered the horse and sank down to join Aurelia at her fire. For a dozen interminable heartbeats they faced each other across the flickering flames, Aurelia as still as stone and the knight inscrutable behind a black great helm.

            A branch popped, releasing a burst of sparks and collapsing down into the other embers. The horse, a towering shadow swathed in black like its rider, released a puff of breath that failed to fog despite the cold.

            The armored figure shifted, leaning closer to the fire. “Tarnished?”

            Aurelia startled, caught off balance to hear a woman’s voice boom out from beneath the great helm. She managed an abrupt nod.

            The voice grated like steel over a whetstone. “Heading north?”

            “I... I don’t know.” She cleared her throat, attempting to banish the frightened squeak from her tone. “I don’t know this land.”

            The knight nodded, her armored bulk looming closer -- though only, it seemed, to seek the warmth of the fire. “Do not stray beyond the Academy. So long as you do this, you and I have no quarrel.”

            Aurelia remained fixed in place, waiting for some explanation or further threat. Instead the knight simply continued to warm her gloved hands over the fire. The silence rolled on, not true silence but a faint melody of crackling embers, of chirruping frogs, of the faint lapping of the lake against the shore. Bit by bit, the tension leached out of Aurelia’s rigid shoulders.

            The knight had said no more than two dozen words, each one rasped out as if it were a labor unto itself. How long had it been since she had last spoken to a living creature? Perhaps she had approached Aurelia’s fire for the sake of company more than anything else.

            Just as she was considering the possibility of sleep, the knight moved.

            She nearly choked on her own fright a second time as the rider reached for her glaive. Aurelia made as if to spring to her feet, but rather than attack the knight propped the long haft upon her shoulder and rested the blade across her lap. Reaching beneath the shadow of her dark shroud, she produced a whetstone.

            Aurelia’s lungs deigned to draw breath again. Even as she wrapped her outer robe tight around her shoulders and laid down to rest, she kept a watchful eye on the knight.

            Rather than set the whetstone to her blade, the knight laid it beside her knee. Reaching a gloved hand into the embers of the dying fire, she stirred the coals and withdrew fingers dusted in white ash.

            Aurelia watched through nearly closed eyes as the knight sketched a series of runes across her blade, referring back to the whetstone after every few characters. These glyphs were more familiar to her -- not entirely unlike the spell notation she had learned from Alcibiades. She fixed the runes before her mind’s eye, ashen script dancing across the black of her closed lids as she drifted off.

***

            She awoke to a dead fire, only the faintest warmth still clinging to the ashes. The knight and her steed were gone, ghosts if not for the heavy prints left in the turf.

            Aurelia shook away the last vestiges of sleep. Snatching up a broad, flat stone from amidst the wet grass, she dragged her fingers through the ashes and hurriedly scrawled what she could remember of the script across the smooth surface. The memory came easily enough. This was familiar, this was something she knew.

            When she had transcribed the runes to the best of her recollection, she sank down onto her heels, absent-mindedly wiping her ashen fingers on her robe. Once, twice, then a half-dozen times more, she retraced her steps through the script. The “letters” were known to her, but the words they formed were not.

            Somehow this was worse than Thops’ indecipherable scroll. This one was only barely out of reach. If she had just one hint, one key, she knew she could make sense of it.

            A treacherous voice prodded at the back of her mind. I do know someone who could help.

            She tamped it down. Sellen could not be trusted.

            She is a scholar of the Primeval Current, but who’s to say that they are all like Alcibiades?

            Brief as their interactions had been, she had the impression that Sellen had been kinder to her than was her custom. Or perhaps she was merely so starved for novelty that she amused herself by doling out a few rudimentary lessons.

            But did that not perfectly align with Aurelia’s own purposes?

            “We all must serve where we are able, child... It is by our resolve that we show ourselves worthy.”

            “Oh Primeval Current, source of all knowledge and wonders! Accept this offering, twinned souls born at the mingling of day and night!”

            With a gasp she forced her hand down, tearing rigid fingers away from her chest. Seeking to stop their shaking, she clasped her hands around the smooth stone. The glyphs stared up at her, mocking her. One spell painted in ash, just beyond the reach of her meager education. One inscribed on a scroll, utterly beyond her without the aid of a teacher. Both called to her. She needed more than glintstone pebble and an amateurish blade to make her way in these lands.

            Sellen does not know that I am a twin. The treacherous voice crept out of hiding, tugging at her like a persistent child. She does not know that I was born on an auspicious day.

            Who’s to say what she knows? She knows more than me, and she will use that against me.

            She is not Alcibiades. She has no guards, no city at her beck and call. I am not in Nokstella, I can run at any time.

            Even as she wrestled with herself, she stood and brushed herself off. Her feet carried her south, back the way she had come. She turned the stone over and over in her hands as she walked, remembering just in time not to rub the ashen script away.

            She would check Roderika’s shack. Yes, that was it. She need not go further south than that -- she would check and set her mind at ease, make sure that Nepheli had found the girl and taken her somewhere safe. Her decision could be postponed until then.

Chapter Text

            “So, you’ve returned victorious? My hopes for you were not high, but you’ve certainly exceeded them.”

            Aurelia stood rigid at the threshold, the scroll clasped in one hand and the piece of slate in the other. As she grasped for some explanation for her return, Sellen spoke again.

            “Is that a scroll?” Her stone crown nodded to indicate the desk. “Bring it here.”

            Picking her way across the study as if over broken glass, Aurelia placed Thops’ scroll on the desk and spread it out. Sellen leaned forward, studying the writing without touching it. Minute twitches of her stone-shrouded head suggested that she scanned the lines, one by one.

            “We will return to this. But first I would hear the outcome of your duel.”

            A duel. Such a polite term for the carnage that had just transpired. But she had accomplished what she set out to do -- when she passed by the shack upon her return, she found a few stems of wildflowers bound with a scrap from a red velvet cloak, arranged in a manner that suggested reassurance rather than a desperate flight.

            She shrugged, unable to manage more than a hoarse murmur. “I won.”

            Graven eyes fixed upon her own. “I don’t suppose you brought his rune, did you?”

            The hunger in Sellen’s voice could not be mistaken, shining through her air of indifference like the sun through thin curtains. Aurelia shook her head. “I let the warrior who helped me keep it.” Somehow she felt the need to justify accepting aid. “I used the Carian blade.”

            The blurted admission hung awkwardly in the silence of the cramped chamber. Sellen raised her eyes from her work. “Did you really? Did you manage to tune the spell?”

            “I... I don’t know. I hit him behind the knee, he didn’t have armor there.”

            “Good thinking, that.” Sellen stood, waving Aurelia back as the circled around for a closer look at the two spells. “Never add an additional dimension to a spell when a simple shift in tactics will suffice. Now, what about these?”

            Aurelia hovered at a respectful distance, craning her neck to peer down at the desk. “Can you show me how to use them?”

            The sorceress extended a single finger, tracing above the lettering of Thops’ spell. “This is a tad advanced for you, but likely closer to what you’re used to. Give me your best attempt, then we can build upon it.” A long pause, which Aurelia could not determine to be expectant or mocking. Sellen cleared her throat. “You do not read spell notation.”

            “I do,” she protested. “I’ve just never seen it written like that.”

            “Hmmm... You will find paper in the lower left drawer of my desk. Write out glintstone pebble to the best of your ability.”

            Aurelia scrambled to obey. The drawer took such a violent yank to open that for a moment she feared she’d broken it. A cloud of dust exploded into the open, as if the drawer had not been opened in years... In decades. Aurelia coughed through her sleeve as she fished out the paper.

            Spreading it out on the desk, she found the material to be in shockingly good condition. It was a light blue-grey, smooth in texture, with a sort of pale iridescence clinging to the surface.

            Reaching for the quill and inkpot proved fruitless -- the ink had congealed into a mass of bone-dry powder. How does she work like this? Aurelia cast about the table and selected a bit of chalk instead.

            Resisting the impulse to squirm under Sellen’s watchful eye, she marked out the notation for glintstone pebble. Only certain materials would properly hold spell notation, especially in the long term. In her past life, she had most often seen spells marked into thin sheets of lead, by way of an iron stylus. Whatever this paper was made of, she much preferred the new method.

            Aurelia read the spell over twice before she held it out to Sellen. The sorceress inclined her head. “Set it on the table.”

            She leaned over once more, examining the paper without touching it. It was a long moment before she spoke, and by then Aurelia was nearly ready to jump out of her skin.

            “I was ready to count this as another mark against your previous teacher,” Sellen stated. “But you are perfectly literate in spell notation. Regrettably, the script you were trained in is nearly eight hundred years out of date, which is hardly your fault.”

            Aurelia’s jaw worked soundlessly for a moment, breath frozen in her throat. She finally managed a hoarse squeak of a whisper. “Eight hundred?”

            “Your education is actually slightly more current than I had reckoned. I had assumed that you were one of the thousands killed in the fall of the Eternal Cities.” Her stone face tilted, observing Aurelia through graven eyes. “But you lived at least long enough to be tutored in Master Alcibiades’ notation.”

            However hard she may have tried, Aurelia knew that she did not manage to school her expression. Sellen pounced upon the silent admission.

            “On the subject, how did you die? You are rather young, and you do not appear sickly. And the spirit that accompanies you... Is that someone you knew in your past life?”

            Everything in her screamed that it was madness to admit that she was one of a set of twins. Aurelia swallowed, her response small and choked despite her best efforts. “She follows me.”

            It was a response, but it was hardly an answer. But though she surely was not satisfied, Sellen did not press her further. Silent footfalls carried the sorceress back to the desk.

            “Back to the subject of spell notation, then. You’ve brought me two spells, one a mutation of a Carian shielding spell, and the other a kinetic spell.” She waved the younger mage closer, and after a moment’s hesitation Aurelia obeyed. Sellen pointed to the scrap of slate. “Look closely at this one. As I said, it is a kinetic spell, meant to be inscribed or painted on a weapon and wielded by a warrior with some innate arcane ability and little formal training.”

            She gestured for Aurelia to pick up the scrap of shale. “Compare it to the barrier spell. The kinetic runes are larger, less precise, prone to more broad sweeps and flourishes. The spell notation, in contrast, is exceedingly precise.”

            Aurelia held them up together, comparing the two side by side. The longer she stared, the more familiar the ashen runes seemed. “The kinetic runes are older, aren’t they?”

            Sellen’s voice nearly seemed to brighten. “Correct! Kinetic spells are generally uncomplicated, for reasons that should be quite clear. Close combat is highly inconducive to casting lengthy spells. Thus, kinetic spells have remained quite rudimentary throughout the centuries. Spell notation, on the other hand, has adapted to allow for increasingly precise control over increasingly complex spells. Now, take a closer look at that slate. You’ll find something missing.”

            It took her a handful of silent repetitions to catch on. “There aren’t any directional glyphs.”

            “Correct again! If this spell had been applied to a weapon, then angle, momentum, and direction would all be determined by the swing of the warrior’s arm. Now, take a close look at the barrier spell. Look at the third glyph from the left.”

            Aurelia complied, squinting at the unfamiliar symbol.

            “Ignore the extra dots and dashes. Focus instead on the underlying structure of the character.”

            Excitement bloomed within her chest, subdued exhilaration at the chance to finally study something she could get her teeth into. “It’s a directional glyph.” When Sellen failed to interrupt, she forged on. “It... It looks like force projected outward, but it’s so much plainer than the one I learned.”

            “Spell notation had to be simplified before it could be made complex. The base glyph signifies outward force, yes, but those half-dozen dots and dashes I told you to disregard specify the precise angle and velocity of the spell. I’ve a book you shall have to memorize.” What Aurelia assumed to be the tome in question glowed faintly, providing just enough warning for her to catch it as it flew off the shelf. “I dare say it will keep you occupied for some time, but it’s rote memorization, and your working knowledge of proto-notation should aid you significantly.”

Chapter Text

            A shower of white powder exploded in the empty cellar. Little flakes of cold twirled in the air, drifting down as if they weighed less than a scrap of paper. Aurelia lowered her staff and cautiously stretched out her hand. Catching one of the little flakes, she studied it for a fraction of a second before it melted away in her palm.

            “Well done. You’ve translated the spell as it exists perfectly. I will instruct you in reintroducing directional glyphs eventually, but that is far beyond the scope of today’s lesson.”

            Aurelia turned to face her teacher, craning her neck to examine the crystalline flakes clinging to her hood. “What is it?”

            “The kinetic spell is commonly referred to as a Carian ice spear. But translated to cast from a staff and without directional glyphs, I suppose the name would not strictly apply.”

            “No, I mean...” She stretched out the hood of her robe, pointing to the fading specks of white. “What are these?”

            “Oh. That would be snow. Rather enchanting in small amounts, but it becomes bothersome when it piles up.”

            Aurelia was familiar with the concept of precipitation, and between Limgrave and Liurnia rain had long since lost his novelty. But the idea of it falling in a frozen form... With a start she realized that she had seen snow before, piled up in drifts along the walk to the Stargazers’ outpost.

            “The spear should be easy enough for you to commit to memory, once I teach you how to apply the proper modifications.” Aurelia brushed aside a cold shudder, forcing her attention back to the present and to Sellen’s instruction. “As for the other, this is as good a time as any to familiarize yourself with memory stones. Check the chest with the lead corners by the wall.”

            Aurelia hastened to obey. At first she had wondered if the constant orders to fetch and retrieve were meant to familiarize her with Sellen’s organizational system. She had rapidly concluded that if such a system existed, it was comprehensible only to Sellen. Aurelia could hardly imagine how Sellen kept such close track of her many instruments, when the sorceress seemed so averse to unearthing them with her own hands.

            Carefully setting aside bundles of brittle parchment, she found the chest backed against the wall that Sellen had indicated. It opened with surprising ease. Inside, five square-cut stones rested upon a bed of cloth. They were of a lustrous black, shot through with blue veins, fully opaque. She gingerly scooped one into her hand. It fit her palm perfectly, resting there with a satisfying weight.

            “You may take two. Bring them here, and I will demonstrate their use.”

            Aurelia hastened to obey. Retrieving a second stone, she laid them both on the desk before Sellen.

            “These are memory stones. They can be used to store the form of a spell.”

            “Like a spell scroll?”

            “Not quite. Spell scrolls record spell notation, from which a learned practitioner may duplicate the form of the spell. Memory stones hold the form itself. Such forms may be ingrained upon only a select few mediums -- the Black Moon of the Nox, for one, and the human mind for another.”

            Sellen stretched out her hand, open palm hovering over Thops’ scroll. Aurelia watched as the lines of spell notation glowed blue, then lifted off the page and coiled into the memory stone like string being wound into a ball.

            “Why not just memorize the spell?”

            “Because the mind can only bear so much. And a great deal of capacity is reserved for small matters such as language, or the upkeep of bodily systems, or higher reasoning.” The last filament of spell notation vanished, and she gestured for Aurelia to pick up the stone. “And memory stones are indispensable if you intend to travel the Lands gathering spells from dubious sources.”

            Aurelia turned the stone over in her palm, running her thumb across the glossy surface. “Why? What else do they do?”

            “Only what I’ve shown you. But if you encounter a spell that you are unfamiliar with, transfer it to the stone. Do not, under any circumstances, commit an unfamiliar spell to memory until you’ve thoroughly parsed the notation, or brought it to me to do the same.” For a moment Sellen had seemed terribly grim, but now a hint of amusement slipped back into her cool tone. “If you absolutely must investigate dark holes in the ground, it behooves one to use a stick instead a bare hand.”

            She tucked both stones into her robe. A flicker of trepidation would not be banished, despite her efforts to brush it aside. “Is it really that dangerous?”

            “Most assuredly. Spells pluck upon the strings of reality and reshape the world to accommodate their will. They do the same to the human mind. When you commit a spell to memory, you are taking a chisel to stone. You change yourself irrevocably.”

            “Is that why...” For a moment the words stuck in her throat like dry bread. But Sellen was in a forthcoming mood, and knowledge was the power with which Aurelia was most lacking. “Is that why the Primeval Current drives men mad?”

            Sellen did not answer at once. Her hands disappeared back into the sleeves of her robe, and she paced a slow circuit of the study. “Not precisely.” So long had the silence endured that Aurelia visibly startled when it ended. “If the same phenomenon were at play, then the Current could simply be recorded onto a memory stone and then translated into spell notation, in which form it could presumably be safely studied. The Black Moon was the most advanced memory device ever built by hands, and even the Old Nox were incapable of exhuming the secrets of the Current.”

            “Then why...”

            “It is impossible to do more than speculate, when every scholar who has attempted to study the Current has subsequently devolved into raving lunacy.” Sellen shook her head, voice dropping to a soft mutter. “There is not even time for the most basic of questioning. The effect is quite instantaneous.”

            She’s seen it. She’s tried to look, she’s seen others fail... “Who did you sacrifice?”

            The words spilled out unbidden. For a moment she hoped that Sellen had not heard, for she had scarcely managed to put any breath behind them.

            Sellen turned. Despite the cover of her mask, a hint of genuine puzzlement laced her words. “Pardon?”

            “You said that you were a scholar of the Current.” The words clawed her throat even as they tumbled out. She had to know. If she meant to carry this any further, she had to know. “Master... My teacher told me that the Current would only appear to someone willing to sacrifice.”

            “Child, he was speaking figuratively.”

            A phantom pain twisted in her chest, expertly driven between two ribs. Sellen was wrong, but was she lying intentionally? Aurellia could not hope to say.

            “Sacrifice is necessary, of course. Self-preservation, the respect of one’s peers, any certainty of knowing, all of these must be laid upon the altar.” A dark chuckle rumbled beneath her stone mask. “If all that were required were a willingness to kill and betray, I fear that there would be more Primeval scholars running about than stars in the sky.”

            The sorceress turned to face her, and for a moment she seemed to falter. Aurelia wondered if her teacher took note of her bloodless face, of the way her fingers twisted into the sleeves of her robe and squeezed until her knuckles ached.

            “Perhaps an example would serve better than an explanation. I once came within a hairsbreadth of the Current myself.”

            Aurelia waited, listening with rapt attention and a lump sticking in her throat. She had to know. She could not stay with Sellen unless she knew.

            “I collaborated with three others of my class. Drawing upon the work of Master Wilhelm, we hypothesized that the revelation of the Primeval Current might be borne without breaking the mind if it were distributed amongst a group.” Her head tipped back, graven eyes fixed upon the ceiling as if to bore through to the stars beyond. “Perhaps we needed more, or mages of higher caliber. Or perhaps our hypothesis was simply wrong. I felt the first go, a mind snuffed out like a candle, and then the second. I felt the ghost of the edge of the Current, the spray before the wave hits... And I looked away. I broke the spell and let it take the third.”

            Soundless footfalls carried her back across the study, slow and measured as the words that accompanied. “Perhaps if I had pushed onward, if I had looked, then the revelation would have been within my grasp. Or perhaps it would have snapped my mind in two and left me to die in obscurity. In the end I weighed the risk and chose to live to try another day, rather than grasp for glory or utter failure.”

            A chill shuddered down Aurelia’s spine as she passed, blue robes flickering with the pace of her steps.

            “Do you regret it?” she whispered.

            Sellen stopped her pacing, seeming to weigh her words. “I abide by my choice. But it would be untruthful to say that I never wonder what might have been, what I might have discovered had I only risked a little more. We all die someday, child, even those like you and I who linger beyond our natural years. In the end we are outlived only by our work, by that knowledge that we leave for others to build upon. Empires fall, bloodlines die out, monuments crumble. Even gods may be slain. True immortality is reserved only for knowledge.”

            “No, I meant...” Aurelia swallowed, a sudden bitterness coating her tongue. “The three others. The ones who didn’t look away in time.”

            “They were my peers, child.” Something like pity softened her cold voice. “Not my friends.”

            Stop it. Stop asking things you don’t want to hear...

            “Would you look again? If you had the chance?”

            The word seemed almost a hiss in the silence. “Yes... I would pay nearly any price for a chance to look upon the Primeval Current once more.”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia slid down the rocky slope, ploughing twin furrows through the shale beneath her feet. She made an unsteady landing on the path below, shaking gravel from her sleeves as she scrambled for the next switchback. The air around her called to mind an oven, dry and choked with the smell of ashes.

            She had met the girl not far from the Liurnian highway. She was alone, without attendants or even a steed despite her aristocratic garb. Unlike Roderika, she seemed entirely unconcerned with her predicament, aside from a bit of grumbling over the cold.

            Sulfur clawed at her throat with each breath. Aurelia refused to slow. Dropping down from the beaten path, she slithered on her back down the crumbling slope. She found a body lying mangled not far away, blue robes shredded and stained by blood.

            Unlike the dozens of others she had passed, this one was fresh, only just now going cool. With a numbness that she knew would shock her later, Aurelia took the thick cotton wraps from his hands and wound them around her own scraped and bloodied forearms.

            Her name was Rya. She said that she had been accosted and robbed, with no more dismay than one recounting some minor nuisance. But she insisted that she could not leave without recovering the stolen property, and Aurelia could not quite bring herself to abandon the odd young woman to the wilds.

            Aurelia picked her way around two more fresh bodies. Like the last, they wore the same blue robes and stone masks as Sellen. Through a screen of smoke and stone dust, she could make out a collection of rough shelters further down the slope.

            Hunched forms darted amongst the buildings, holding torches to ramshackle timbers. Aurelia set her teeth and dropped down into the ruined town.

            The thief turned out to be a decent sort, although for a moment she had been convinced that he would bash her head in for interrupting his cooking. He claimed not to be particularly attached to the stolen necklace, and when he heard that she had spells but no money he proposed an exchange.

            “Help me drop one of the big ‘uns, and we’re square.”

            Aurelia picked her way over shale and charred timbers, breathing through her sleeve. The faint sound of chattering echoed from across the town, growing ever fainter.

            A “big ‘un,” as it turned out, was a crayfish the size of a dragon. After a sodden and miserable hunt, a lucky shot to the underbelly after dozens more had bounced off the thing’s carapace, and a bowl of steamed crayfish, she had trudged back to the lake shore with the necklace in tow.

            Rya had accepted the trinket without pause, tucking it away and withdrawing a sealed envelope from her robe in the same movement. She had seized Aurelia’s hand mid-farewell, blinked -- blinked vertically -- and snapped the bit of wax from the envelope.

            It was not the bloody tableau around her that had Aurelia’s heart thrumming in her ears. When the girl whisked her away, when the blue-green landscape of Liurnia shattered like a stained-glass window and she found herself amongst flickering red, Aureliette had been left behind.

            Whatever Rya’s strange mother wanted, whatever was happening in that eerily immaculate mansion sitting like a bloodred jewel amidst a blasted hellscape, Aurelia had no idea and no desire to learn. She could only hope that Aureliette would stay put. Then she had at least a prayer of finding her -- if her sister strayed, then there was not a chance of ever...

            A pained groan yanked her back to the present. Aurelia tensed, ready to bolt the moment she laid eyes upon the danger.

            Amidst the boulders scattered beyond the border of the town, a figure slumped like a broken doll. At first she thought that he had been cast down from the cliffs above, for he had been pierced through by crystals so large that he seemed more stone than flesh.

            But the crystals were wholly unlike the surrounding mountains, and they shifted ever so slightly with each of the man’s labored breaths. His head hung slack, not a hint of movement aside from his breathing. Even as she stared, another agonized groan passed his desiccated lips.

            Almost against her will she shuffled closer, one hand half reaching out. She knew at once that it would do no good to remove the crystals. The kindest thing, she realized distantly, would be to end the man’s misery, but she knew she could never manage that.

            “S-sir?”

            She felt like a fool even as the hoarse whisper escaped her lips. The poor man was in no condition to speak, or even to recognize her presence.

            One fleshless hand reached out, bits of crystal edged in dried blood where they wedged between his bones. He moved slowly, painfully, as if he had not straightened that arm in centuries.

            Her heart leapt into her throat, and she swallowed it down. Hand shaking nearly as badly as the wounded man’s own, she hurried to close the distance.

            “No, don’t try to move, I’ll get help...”

            The bony hand shot out and clasped around her wrist. It held with a grasp like stone. She had thought him blind. But as she stared into the bulbous mass of crystal that overtook his head, it suddenly seemed very much like an eye.

            She fumbled her staff, the hardwood slipping from her bandaged fingers as he dragged her forward. Aurelia dug in her heels, clawed at his bony fingers with her free hand. Light flashed, and her head snapped up. Within the blue-green depths of the crystal, a threads of a paler blue coiled into view.

            Aurelia had only a moment to recognize the spell notation, to recognize the way it spooled out as it had when Sellen wrote a spell into a memory stone, to recognize that the spell was flowing out rather than inward.

            The sky opened up before her, countless stars written across the void. Stars birthed and died, blinking out in great blooms of fire. Together they were a river of light, a stream of birth and death illuminating the sky across eons. She followed it back, dragged through time and space to meet the light at its source. The echo of the stars, their blazing image cast across the cosmos to light a distant sky, grew ever brighter as she neared the fountainhead.

            And then, as if while wading she had stepped off of a drop-off into a bottomless chasm, every light snuffed out.

            The inky blackness pressed around her like a thing she could touch. The stars whose light she had followed were gone. Only this pit in the sky remained, perfectly round and darker than the surrounding oblivion, like a new moon, or...

            Around the perfect sphere of void, a blue-black iris contracted and focused.

            Sellen. A needle of awareness pierced through her terror. Sellen lived because she looked away.

            Though the sky still splayed out before her, Aurelia felt sunbaked gravel rough against her brow. Though she could feel her eyelids squeeze shut, still she held the gaze of the void.

            Don’t look, don’t look...

            She felt her throat go raw as if from screaming -- perhaps that was the sound that pulsed in her ears. Even as her mind sank further and further down that dark well, her body buried its face in the dirt and tore at its hair.

            Don’t look...

            Aurelia wrenched her gaze away. The eyes of the void brushed over her a heartbeat later, her bones turned to ice-water by its passing. The stars wheeled overhead once more, heedless of the crumpled form upon the slopes.

Chapter Text

            The stars still wheeled across her vision. They burned far brighter than the grey forms around her, sparks amongst dead ashes. She stumbled onward, blind eyes upturned to the firmament above, watching them flicker in and blink out, watching eons churn over each other in an endless dance.

            Her body seemed a distant thing to her, cold and pain only suggestions of sensation. But she felt tendrils curl gently around her wrists, and when they tugged she followed on halting footsteps. She was blind apart from the revelation written across her eyes, but a soft white glow hovered beneath it all.

            She stumbled onward, slow but unceasing. The world of grey forms cycled -- she did not count how many times -- between light and cold blackness. Sometimes the pale glow around her would flash red, a warning hissing in her ears while the tendrils coiled protectively around her shoulders.

            The passage of time existed only in the pain that cut her feet to ribbons and the cold spike that hollowed out her belly. Even when she pitched onto her face, coarse stems tickling her cheeks and the smell of earth flooding her senses, she saw the stars before her eyes. Tendrils plucked at her sleeves, hissing softly. They prodded and tugged until she relented and let herself be guided along, nearly crawling now. She felt flat stone beneath her palms, cool and damp. Darkness closed in around her.

            Her guide hissed again, the light pulsing brighter.

            A familiar voice pierced the fog. “So you’ve returned. I was beginning to...” Sellen cut off in a sharp intake of breath. “Aurelia?”

            Something crashed to the floor, clattering across the pavers. She heard no footsteps, but Sellen’s voice sounded closer. The words meant nothing, a collection of syllables that may as well have been another language.

            “Let her sit down. Aurelia, can you hear me?”

            The tendrils slackened bit by bit, and Aurelia slipped from their protective hold like a ragdoll. She felt the wall against her back, heard a voice sharp with urgency rattling between her ears.

            “Aurelia, look at me. Let me see your eyes.”

            The response was automatic, responding without thought to the authority in her teacher’s voice. Though she saw only stars dead stars, long dead Aurelia raised her head from her knees and turned in the direction of Sellen’s voice.

            “What in stars’ name have you gotten into?” The faint hum of a spell floated across the room, and something cold and smooth settled into her lap. “Focus. Lay your hands on the memory stone.”

            Aurelia complied, cradling her palms around the orb. It felt heavy in her hands, easily half as large as her head.

            “You’ve seen me do this once. That will have to be lesson enough. Focus the spell within your mind, and then project it out as if you mean to cast it. Let it flow out of you and into the stone.”

            A spell? No, this was revelation. This was the face of god. The thing that had blinded her and yet remained fixed before her eyes could not be a mere spell. And yet she could feel the shape of it, many times more vast than any she had yet attempted, a sprawling manuscript where once she had worked only in solitary letters.

            As if groping in the dark, she felt for the edges of the spell and the eye. She recoiled, stone pressing against her back and scuffling under her bloodied feet. A whimper caught in her throat.

            Don’t look, don’t look. I live only because it did not see me.

            “Do not engage with the spell.” Despite the severity of the command, it came in the gentlest tone she had ever heard from Sellen. “You are not reading the pages. You are simply picking up the book and moving it. You needn’t even look at the cover.”

            Aurelia reached out again, hesitantly as if reaching for a hot coal. Blinding even the eyes of her mind, she felt the form of the spell and sought out the edges. It was too vast for her understanding, taking up too much space, lapping against the walls of her skull until she felt it would burst. Gripping the cold sphere of the memory stone, she willed the spell into its depths.

            The pressure eased. Memory returned, how to see, how to speak. The pain flooded in next. Aurelia bit down on her lips, muffling a cry. She had lost her boots, her feet slashed and bruised near up to her knees. Cold permeated her down to the bone, and hunger sat like a lead weight in her belly.

            Her vision flickered. The stars were gone, the familiar basement study in their place. The figure of Sellen stood at the center of the dark blur, one hand upraised and the memory stone orb levitating above her open palm.

            “I do not believe for a moment that you were fool enough to willingly commit this to memory,” she hissed, and Aurelia cowered at the subdued fury in her voice. “Someone forced this upon you? I have never witnessed a more irresponsible... Bastard of the void, you could very well have forgotten how to breathe!”

            The words washed over her, only half absorbed. Aurelia remained limp on her side, shivers running the length of her frame. Pale light bobbed at the edge of her vision. Liette hovered over her, tendrils gently tugging at her sleeve as if to draw her back to her feet.

            She led me back here. The thought came to her sluggishly. How long had she wandered before her sister found her?

            The hem of a robe swept into view, without the faintest sound of footsteps accompanying. “Can you hear me, child?” When Aurelia could not muster the will to respond, Sellen took on a firmer tone. “You cannot simply lie here. You need food and drink. You must bind your wounds.”

            By great effort, Aurelia raised her cheek from the flagstones and stared up at her uncomprehendingly. The black orb still hovered over Sellen’s upraised palm, pinprick lights dancing deep within.

            “Spirit, help her if you can. You’ve taken care of yourself thus far, Aurelia. You must continue to do so.”

            Limbs trembling like thin paper, Aurelia pushed up onto one knee. Liette’s tendrils curled around her shoulders, their half-corporeal encouragement providing comfort more than any true physical support. Her eyes stung, the empty cold in her belly now churning with bitterness, and she was blind once more. Of course Sellen could not even be bothered to offer her a hand up. She had her spell, her revelation, and now the courier could be dismissed without a care.

***

            Aurelia slumped back against the crumbling stone wall, looking down on the road below. Knees drawn up to her chest, she plucked another rowa berry from the handful at her side and chewed apathetically. It wasn’t terrible, fibrous with a faintly sweet taste like an overripe apple. She forced herself to take another.

            The lake gleamed red on the southern horizon, catching the last rays of the setting sun. She had taken the wraps from her arms and bandaged her feet as best she could, but she knew she would never make it to the shore in her current state. Eat something, then sleep, then perhaps the next morning she could make her way down to properly wash her wounds and catch a more substantial meal.

            A tendril brushed across her cheek. Aurelia reached up and numbly swiped away the tears that had appeared there. She would have given anything to be home with a bowl of hot mushroom soup. The thought shocked her -- not just the memory of home, eight hundred years and two deaths ago, but the pang of loss that followed. For the first time since her revival she allowed herself to think of her parents, kind enough, never cruel, but always distant. She had felt that odd detachment as she grew older, observing how the brief flashes of warmth grew scarce as the years went on, how they were stifled with increasing alacrity. Only at the end had she realized the truth. Her parents were trying not to get attached.

            She set herself to the tedious task of chewing another rowa berry. Couldn’t she at least have let me eat something? Sellen had claimed to have no need of food, so it stood to reason she would keep none on hand. As cold as her teacher’s dismissal had seemed, Aurelia conceded that it would have done her no good to fall asleep freezing and half-starved on the floor of the study. She might never have woken up.

            The bitter pit in her belly and the faint pressure behind her eyes refused to abate. Would one kind word have been too much? She recalled Sellen’s patience in coaxing her through purging the spell and the fury in her voice when she deduced what had been done to her apprentice. Could she not have at least offered me a hand up?

            Aurelia stopped. Could she?

            “Calm yourself, child. I am no phantom.”

            Frantically shuffling through her memories, she searched for any instance of Sellen touching something. She did not eat, she did not sleep, her feet made no sound when she walked. But she handled her spell books... No, she levitated them. She manipulated spell books, scrolls, her staff, memory stones, all objects that would have responded readily to an arcane pull. She fell upon every spell Aurelia brought her like a starving man upon bread, and yet she never left the study to seek out new discoveries on her own. Even while training her in battle spells, Sellen had never touched her even incidentally.

            Aurelia scrambled upright, leaning on her staff to spare her tattered soles. Beyond the pains of cold and hunger, the thrill of a mystery solved thrummed within her. Sellen was a phantom, or a projection, or...

            A thunderous crash shattered the stillness of dusk. A shockwave threw her against the ruined wall, and she clutched the crumbling stones for support.

            The horizon rose up like a pillar, stones the size of cottages hovering weightless in the sky. Flames guttered within the site of impact, a hellish red glow shimmering at the heart of the crater. Aurelia stood transfixed. Even at this distance, the wave of heat baked the tears from her cheeks.

            A star had fallen to earth.

Chapter Text

            Aurelia lurched down the stairs, hobbling on bandaged feet. “Sellen! Did you hear--”

            “The dead heard that, child.”

            The sorceress paced the length of her study, steps brisk, hands clasped behind her back. Aurelia hovered at the door, pulled up short by the sharp edge to her tone. The poised coldness to which she was accustomed now strained, fraying at the edges. She sounded afraid.

            Twice more Sellen paced the confines of the study in silent conference with herself. “I had hoped to avoid involving you in this, but I find myself entirely out of alternative options. I need your help, Aurelia.” Abruptly she halted her pacing, arms outstretched. “The form which you see before you is but a projection. My true--”

            “I know.” Aurelia choked on her words, pinned by Sellen’s glare like an insect in a specimen case. “I... I guessed that you were a construct. You only ever move things with your magic, and...”

            “Aurelia. I will commend you for your powers of observation at a later date, but presently time is of the essence.”

            Aurelia snapped her mouth shut. Sellen continued after a moment’s pause.

            “My physical form is imprisoned in the Witchbane ruins. Follow the road south from here until you reach the pilgrim’s church -- you will find the ruins at the base of the hill. Check my desk and take the map from the top drawer. You will need it at a later--”

            Aurelia took a deep breath and steeled herself. “No.” Sellen snapped around to face her. She hurried on before her nerve could fail her, cursing the trembling of her voice. “I want to know what this is about first. I... I won’t leave this study until I know why.”

            The silence which ensued would have been the envy of any tomb. Sellen remained as still as if she were of graven stone from head to foot rather than merely her mask, hands folded at her waist, head tilted ever so slightly. Aurelia held her breath. It was not the revelation of her teacher’s true nature which had spurred this surge of bravado, for she knew that Sellen could use magic whether corporeal or not.

            “Very well.” Aurelia startled when the silence finally broke. It took a heartbeat or two for the acquiescence in Sellen’s words to sink in. The sorceress met her gaze evenly, facing her with eyes of stone. “My true body is currently rotting in an inquisitor’s cell. He is coming to kill me.”

***

            Aurelia made her way down the slope at a shuffling jog, wincing at the roughness of turf beneath her bandaged feet. She kept one arm tucked securely around the bundle beneath her robe. The map did not show the way to the Witchbane ruins -- Sellen’s instructions would have to suffice for that. Judging by the lake dominating the lower half, the map depicted the north side of Liurnia.

            She carried the trifold of lacquered paper beneath her outer robe, tucked beside the dagger on her belt. The blade was a simple thing, five inches of straight-bladed steel which she had picked up in Stormveil. It was a soldier’s dagger, but Aurelia had only ever used it to cut kindling and pry open crab shells.

            Sellen had insisted that she bring both the map and the blade.

            Even so close to midday, fog hung low and dense. She could make out the ruins ahead, poking through the mist like a scatter of broken and blackened teeth. Not a one of the structures still held up a roof, and few managed more than two walls. Heart thumping out a steady tempo, she kicked through the tall grass, dew soaking her robe up to the knees.

            None of these structures could have concealed a prisoner. She must be looking for a cellar. Aurelia circled the ruins twice, checking every overgrown foundation. The sun rose high, burning off the mist bit by bit. Visibility yielded no progress -- the ruins seemed long abandoned.

            Catching herself with an arm propped against a wall of crumbling stone, she struggled to regain her breath. Between the pain in her lacerated feet and the cold knot of tension in her belly, she found her breaths coming short and fast, too swiftly to do her any good. She grit her teeth and forced herself to exhale, then inhale, slow and steady until the tension eased to something resembling bearable.

            She glanced back over her shoulder. “Have you seen anything?”
            Liette bobbed apologetically, her tendrils swaying in an uncertain manner. Aurelia reached up to pat her “head,” fingers rebounding oddly off of her sister’s half-solid form.

            The thumping of her heart in her ears now lessened somewhat, a new sound took up the rhythm. A steady dripping punctuated the silence, somewhat muffled. Hand trailing along the wall, Aurelia followed.

            Behind the scatter of buildings, the ground dipped sharply. The shallow depression had flooded, but only just. An inch of clear water spread out across the hollow, tufts of soggy grass poking up like small islands. It must have been from a recent rain.

            Aurelia picked her way around the edge, head tilted, half-succeeding in keeping her bandaged feet dry. She could hear the dripping, still muffled but louder now. The water was draining somewhere.

            Liette hovered above the center of the depression, pulsing rapidly from white to red. Aurelia finally gave in and sloshed into the ankle-deep water. Gritting her teeth against the fresh sting, she hobbled over to join her sister. She found the corner of masonry poking up out of the mud, Liette’s animated glow flickering across the wet stone. Sweeping aside the knee-high grass with the butt of her staff, she followed the edge of the structure.

            After a fair amount of hacking with her dagger, she cleared enough of the underbrush to make out the yawning cellar beneath. The stairs plunged straight down into liquid darkness, a trickle of water painting a ribbon of moss down the steps like a miniature waterfall.

            “Wait up here.” Aurelia hesitated, groping for some pretense to keep Liette aboveground. “Keep watch. Make a noise or something if you see someone coming.”

            Allowing herself no time to second-guess, she lit up her staff and plunged down into the abyss. The light seemed paltry, the humidity cloying and the darkness around her almost viscous. Aurelia choked at the smell -- she had expected mold and damp. Instead the passage reeked of burnt flesh.

Chapter Text

            Aurelia had descended the stairs half expecting to find Sellen in her natural state, standing upright, head tilted toward the door as if she had not moved since the last visit. Perhaps now behind a row of bars, or with a chain around one ankle, but still as unperturbed as ever.

            She realized with a rush of nausea how utterly, stupidly naïve that had been. The smell of burnt flesh hung thick and acrid in the enclosed space. Gingerly, trying not to look at the array of iron instruments hanging from the walls or thrust into barrels on either side, Aurelia approached the far wall.

            A figure slumped against the mildewed stone, the familiar blue of her robe nearly lost beneath years of blood and grime. The stone crown seemed absurdly large on such an emaciated frame, hanging limply between bony shoulders. Her arms were held outstretched. Some sort of crystal formation had grown across her wrists like manacles, and...

            Aurelia sucked in a sharp breath, suddenly lightheaded as the blood fled her cheeks. Two iron spikes, each as thick as two fingers, pinned Sellen’s arms to the wall, hammered between the bones of her forearms.

            She flew across the room without conscious thought, stumbling awkwardly on bandaged feet. “Teacher?” Her hands went instinctively to the crown, cold and smooth like marble as she eased it free. Her voice wavered. “Sellen?”

            It would have seemed unnatural to look upon Sellen’s face, even under better circumstances. To Aurelia the stone crown was her face, or might as well be. Had she given the matter any thought, she might have pictured a silver-haired sage, or a queenly face as stern and severe as winter.

            The woman chained to the wall was deathly pale, gaunt, dark hair matted and plastered to her brow. Her eyes flickered open, cloudy blue overcome by a haze of pain and confusion.

            Her countenance steadied somewhat, dull eyes slowly focusing on the face before her. Bloodless lips parted as if to speak. Only a dry croak emerged.

            Blinking to clear the tears from her eyes, Aurelia fumbled for her waterskin and held it to the cracked parchment of Sellen’s lips. She scarcely managed a sip before a coughing fit took her, spraying drops of water across the dusty stones like blood.

            “You made it,” she slurred, head lolling between her shoulders. “Good girl...”

            Aurelia nodded, throat too tight for words. Her hands shook abominably as she reached for the spike through Sellen’s left arm. Distantly she recognized how the wound would bleed when she pulled the spike out, she would need something to stanch the flow...

            “Stop.” For a moment an echo of strength returned to Sellen’s voice. She paid for it with another fit of coughing. “Those shackles were made to hold me. I haven’t the time to guide you through disabling the wards.”

            “But...” The protest sounded pathetically small in the silence. As the reality of the situation hit home, the impossibility of treating such wounds alone in the wild, of carrying a grown woman any distance when she could scarcely walk herself, a terrible suspicion took root. “Didn’t you send me here to save you?”

            “Yes,” Sellen rasped. “But this vessel is far beyond salvage. You brought the map?”

            Fumbling amidst the layers of her robe, Aurelia produced the map. The lacquered surface nearly slipped away from her, so badly did her hands tremble.

            “Good. You see the mark on the upper left corner? One tower out of three?” Aurelia nodded mutely. “If you leave now, you should find that complex abandoned when you arrive. Presuming that my associate held up his end of our arrangement, you will find a new vessel ready and waiting.”

            Aurelia stammered. “A... A vessel? I don’t...”

            “Aurelia.” Sellen’s breaths came faster now, a near imperceptible increase in tempo. As if she feared to run short of time, or to exhaust what little of her strength remained. “Did you bring a blade, as I instructed?”

            Her hand fell instinctively to the dagger. Every thought was a shattered jumble, circling around the growing sense that something terrible was about to happen. Please, please don’t ask me...

            “I do not have a heart, Aurelia. I had it replaced long ago. In its place sits a primal glintstone, the very core of my being. Everything that I am has been coded into that stone. If it were embedded in a new vessel...”

            She lost whatever Sellen said next, the words drowned beneath the rushing of blood in her ears. Cold and lightheaded, she swayed as the edges of her vision darkened. The sound Liette made when the knife struck home. A sharp, wheezing gasp, a final breath forced out all at once. Her own breaths coming shorter, faster, until the glittering blade plunged down and cut them off.

            “Aurelia...”

            She shook her head, forcing the words out through a whimper. “I can’t.”

            “You can.” Sellen drew in a breath, in the manner of one refusing to yield to panic. “This body will die regardless of your actions. You are not my killer.”

            The blade weighed in her hands, cold, clumsy despite the simplicity of its design. Even if she could muster the courage, how would she know what to do? As if Sellen could offer instruction while she was being cut...

            “Aurelia, listen to me.” Her teacher’s voice softened, the steadiness rigidly enforced. “You could not harm a primal glintstone with that steel if you tried. Two of my ribs were removed to make way for the initial operation. The scar is still visible. All you have to do is cut.”

            Is that all?

            Sellen’s shoulders twitched, sinking as far as the shackles would allow. Whatever reserves she had called upon now seemed bled dry, and her eyes took on a dull cast of apathy. “Child, believe me when I say that no blunder on your part could possibly make matters worse. Do as you will. Your aid would be appreciated, but I cannot compel it.”

            She couldn’t. That truth reverberated throughout her skull like a mantra. She couldn’t cut someone open, she couldn’t tear out a heart, she could not be the one holding the blade...

            But a true executioner was on his way. Someone whose hand would not be stayed by a weak stomach.

            In a final plea for reprieve, she looked up at the spikes holding Sellen’s arms outstretched, searching in vain for any way to undo them. They were hammered deep into the masonry, grown over by rust and crystal.

            Quicksilver cords biting into her wrists, stretching out her arms. That catch in her ribs that came with each breath, as if her chest were already being pulled open...

            I can’t.

            I can’t.

            I can’t.

            She could not stand by again, so paralyzed by fear that she could not even attempt to stave off the blade. Numbly, she felt her hands take hold of the dagger.

            Sellen slumped against the shackles, deflated by a sigh of relief. Aurelia reached out. Despite the quaking of her hands, she began to unlace the thick cloth of the sorceress’s outer robe.

            “Child,” she rasped. “My crown.” Aurelia stopped, uncomprehending. Sellen pointed with her chin at the heavy stone mask. “Make it easier on yourself. Give me something to bite, then put my crown back on.”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia doubled over, the sodden grass soaking the knees of her robe. She dug her fingers into the rough turf, bracing herself as she vomited up the meager contents of her stomach. Blood coated her hands, slick and hot, and the heart-sized chunk of glintstone weighed against her chest as if it meant to burn a hole through her robes. Hastily swiping her sleeve across her mouth, she scrubbed her hands in the wet grass.

            Pale light bobbed over her shoulder. Aurelia ignored her sister, brushing aside another wave of nausea as she clumsily scoured her hands. Liette hissed insistently. As Aurelia tried to wave her off, the spirit began to pulse between red and white, a frantic alarm that sent her shadow flickering across the grass like a candleflame.

            Heavy boots trudged down the path behind her, interspersed with the clanking of mail. Aurelia knelt frozen in the wet grass. Her hands were bloodied, as was her tunic. Her outer robe was not. She had set it aside before...

            A gruff cough sounded behind her, no more than ten paces back. Aurelia turned, shifting on her heels. A tremor started with her hands, working up her arms and settling into her core. She grit her teeth and prayed that her outer robe covered the blood.

            The man seemed a giant at first, his stature bolstered by his peaked hood. What she first took for his face was instead a war-mask, a scowling steel visage bearded with grizzled tufts of wolf fur. A longsword hung at his hip, and one gauntleted hand rested upon the hilt.

            For a long while, they faced each other like a pair of statues, the stranger with his feet planted and one hand on his sword, Aurelia with her legs tangled under her and bloody hands concealed beneath her sleeves. Surely he would see. Sellen’s heart felt like a millstone against her ribs. Surely a few layers of cloth would not hide it.

            The man cleared his throat again. She could parse neither cruelty nor kindness from his gruff voice. “The one in the cell,” he nodded toward the cellar stairs, words reverberating oddly behind the steel mask. “Someone you knew?”

            Mutely, she nodded.

            “Your teacher?”

            Aurelia remained as she was, stiff and wide-eyed. She knew that she should not answer, but then she should not have answered the first question either. For a long while more, they both stood as stone.

            The rasp of steel broke the silence. The man shifted his stance, half-drawing the blade at his side. Above the battered leather of the scabbard, a handsbreadth of rippled steel gleamed in the wan light. Aurelia wished that she could see his face.

            Ten heartbeats passed, then ten more. Her staff lay a few paces away in the grass. If she lunged for it, maybe... But no, this man had once bested Sellen.

            The sword returned to its scabbard with a faint click. She jolted at the sudden break in the silence. A huff of air expelled through the steel lips of the mask. “You’re young yet,” he muttered. Turning away, he trudged toward the cellar stairs. His hand remained on the hilt of the sword. “Forget what she taught you, and learn to keep better company.”

            Aurelia did not dare move until the red of his peaked hood disappeared beneath the lip of the stairs. Then she scrambled to her feet, snatched up her staff, and ran.

***

            Aurelia did not stop that night, nor the day after. At first she feared to be pursued by the inquisitor. But after she passed beyond Stormveil, he would have had no means of determining which road she had taken. As she made her meager camp upon a raised stretch of ruins within the swamp, she assured herself that he must have long since lost her trail. She had spent the latter part of the day ploughing through knee-deep water to ensure exactly that.

            No sooner had she spread out her robe and settled in than did the doubts return. Sellen’s heart lay wrapped in her sash an arm’s length away, and even through the layers of cloth she swore that she could see it glowing.

            It was a struggle to think of the heart only as a piece of crystal, a sterile vessel like a memory stone. It was a struggle to sweep aside the thought of how she had acquired it, but she managed. Still she had handled the crystal with a certain amount of reverence -- even in her disembodied state, she doubted that Sellen would appreciate being clutched for comfort like a common warming stone.

            It had been cold when she held it, like ice even beneath the coating of warm blood. Aurelia pushed down a wave of nausea at the memory. The unnatural cold had reassured her, oddly enough. It indicated that the crystal was not merely an inert chunk of stone, and the woman she had taken it from was not merely dead.

            Sellen had described the process as harmless, but it hadn’t felt that way. But maybe it was. Maybe someone like Sellen was so far removed from her humanity that a knife in her chest didn’t matter so much, not the way it would to someone like Aurelia. Perhaps her flesh had not crawled with the urge to recoil as the blade drew near, perhaps fear had not sat cold and heavy in her stomach...

            Maybe it’s like repotting a plant.

            The notion came to her idly, but she shot bolt upright as the implication set in. Aureliette hissed softly in alarm at the sudden movement. Aurelia absently patted the nearest tendril as she fumbled for her sash. Maybe it was like repotting a plant, and you could take out a glintstone heart and move it to a new body without any trouble, but if you left it houseless for too long it would sort of shrivel up and die...

            She breathed a sigh of relief as her hands fell upon the unnatural cold. Whatever arcane presence resided within the heart had not departed.

            Aurelia was tired, bone tired, but she dragged her robe back onto her shoulders and snatched up her satchel. Best to continue on. She didn’t really want to sleep now, in any case. If she did, she would surely dream.

Chapter Text

            A ruined town perched on the ridge ahead, lined in the bloodred glow of the setting sun. After two days of skirting through the shallows, her feet were of lead and her belly an aching void of hunger. It would be alright to leave the water now, Aurelia assured herself. The inquisitor would have to circle around half of the lake before he had even a prayer of picking up her trail.

            She found herself too exhausted to care either way. With her feet numb up to the knee, all she wanted was to get out of the lake. Stumbling up the sandy slope of the beach, Aurelia managed a few paces into the maze of crumbling stone and overgrown hedges. She set her back to the nearest wall and slumped down to the ground.

            By habit, her hand found the sphere of cold, hard ice within her satchel. The chill provided a grain of reassurance, though she knew that her assumption that the unnatural cold proved the presence of Sellen’s spirit was only that -- an assumption.

            Lifting the “heart” from its wrappings, she cradled the heavy weight in her palms. It was a rough sphere, deep blue like the night sky, many-faceted but not cut like a gemstone -- it seemed more natural, like a geode turned inside out.

            She disliked the feeling of holding a life in her hands. Sellen might have assured her that the heart was practically indestructible, but then why had she feared the inquisitor? What if she did something wrong? What if she delayed too long? Why had Sellen placed such faith in her?

            The answer, of course, was desperation. Sellen had no one else to trust.

            The realization stuck like a fishbone in her throat. She hated it, this feeling of being tethered. Cold though it had seemed, she found that she preferred her former position as an oddity that Sellen merely tolerated. She hated the feeling that she could no longer run. Her drive to live up to her teacher’s trust trapped her as surely as the walls of Nokstella once had, as surely as those quicksilver chains on the altar...

            She won’t need me anymore once she’s free.

            Aurelia had become too comfortable with the sorceress, she knew. She had taken Sellen to be apathetic, too absorbed in her work to pay a wayward stray much attention, whether for good or ill. Now she knew Sellen’s inaction to be due to her imprisonment, not by any choice on her part.

            What would the sorceress do when she was free, when she had no more use for a courier or a source of amusement or a friendly voice?

            A shift in position brought a sharp pain to her side. As she leaned against what remained of the wall, her robe clutched tight around her shoulders and her satchel serving as a pillow, something small and hard dug into her ribs. Careful not to drop the glintstone heart, she searched through her things. Her hand closed around a small, smooth stone in the dark, and she drew it out.

            For a long moment she studied the thing in her palm, small and dull beside the glintstone heart -- the warming stone that Sellen had offered her when she sought shelter that first night. Both light and warmth had long since expired. Still, she did not stow it away. When exhaustion finally claimed her, she slept curled around both chunks of icy stone.

***

            Not a soul stirred within the manor, but Aurelia still felt the urge to hold her breath. The silence was that of a crypt, not a safe haven. Shadowy forms skittered across the courtyard around her, concealed by fog. She gave them a wide berth. When she reached the front stoop of the manor house, she encountered no guards. That boon only added to her trepidation.

            Even Stormveil had not been so desolate. Men still lingered there to guard the castle, though their wits had deserted them. Pins and needles crawled along her spine as she crept up a stairway that creaked with each step. Surely this once-grand home would not be without guards...

            Something soft and heavy tripped her up. Aurelia caught hold of the railing, her heart dropping straight down to her toes as the aging wood swayed in her grasp.

            She glanced down and stifled a scream. The corpse she had tripped over lay face down at the top of the stairs, cold and blue. He wore a tabard of azure and crimson over mail. She could see no mark upon him.

            She held her breath as she skirted around him. There were three more like him on the landing, all lying slumped like puppets with cut strings. Aurelia had become accustomed to the smell of death over the course of her travels, and she did not find it here. These men smelt only of a faint whiff of preservative. The scent bit the back of her throat as she picked her way around their tangled limbs.

            An archway carried her back out into the open, shafts of wan daylight filtering down through the mist. It felt clearer up her without the looming shadow of the walls. But anything might be lurking in that fog. The fingers of her left hand plucked feverishly at the strap her satchel -- the open space mixed with her lack of sleep to turn her into a mess of nerves.

            Surely this was the worst of both -- wide open sky from which anything might swoop down on her, and a blanket of fog so thick that she would never see it coming.

            Even as the thought occurred to her, a squat shape loomed through the fog... Only a crumbling stone wall. She steeled herself and made for it. Her map was less than useless, the mist too thick for any landmark to show through. But she had done her best to bear west, keeping the warmth of the unseen morning sun at her back. She would check this structure, and if her search proved fruitless then she would walk until she found another.

            She did not have far to look. Cut into the foundation of a hall long gone, a cellar opened up amidst the stones. Beset by a sense of uneasy familiarity, Aurelia plunged into the depths. This passage reeked of the preservative she had smelled on the guards, not a whiff of mildew or rot despite the dark.

            Ducking under the tree roots that forced their way through the walls, she scrambled out into an open room.

            This time she did scream. She caught herself against the doorway, staff held out in front. A dozen pairs of glassy eyes glared back at her. They sat within unmoving faces, heads lolling slack atop unmoving bodies.

            Not a one stirred, not a single breath nor the blink of an eye. They slumped limply, like dolls, like puppets, like... Like the guards back in the manor house.

            The realization hit her like a thunderbolt. She knew that smell -- silver blood.

            One puppet stared back from the end of the room. While the others lay strewn across the floor, this one propped stiffly on the edge of a cot. Heart hammering like the wings of a trapped bird, eyes darting to keep watch on the other puppets, she made her painstaking way across the room.

            The blue robes were familiar, although she had come to learn that they were worn by all  scholars of Sellen’s order. Both her hair and the hands folded across her lap were a shade lighter than she recalled.

            Ice ran down her spine as she advanced to the point where she had no choice but to turn her back to the other puppets. The one on the bed sat hunched, shoulders slack, head bowed. She could not see the face. Would she even recognize it? Her one glimpse of Sellen’s true countenance had been brief, and her teacher had been so starved and beaten that she surely had not looked like herself.

            The collar of the robe had been left undone, the ties hanging loose. A wound the length of her hand opened just to the left of the sternum. Not an incision, not a wound made to a living body. Instead it had the look of something left unfinished, like a doll that had yet to be stitched up. The flesh within gleamed silver.

            Aurelia stopped at the foot of the cot. Her hands shook so badly that she did not trust herself to take the heart from her satchel. She let her staff clatter to the ground, wincing at the sound of hardwood on stone.

            Last chance.

            Her fingertips found the rough-faceted surface of the stone. Grasping it in both hands, she drew it from her satchel.

            She won’t need me after this.

            Aurelia closed her eyes and slipped the heart into its place. Icy blue crept up the sides of the wound, sealing it slowly but surely. She snatched her fingers back from a bite so cold that it burned.

            The shaking spread up her arms and down the length of her spine, rattling her teeth as she somehow managed to lace up the collar of the robe. As she stepped back, the puppet raised its head.

Chapter Text

            The puppet stood. Straightening with a faint creaking of joints, she rolled her shoulders, cracked her neck, and flexed each hand in turn. One hand rose to her cheek, tracing over the contours of her own face as though it were unfamiliar territory.

            Aurelia stood unmoved, her staff still lying at her feet and trembling fists clenched at her sides. Any words she might have spoken stuck in her throat like a stone.

            “Now that feels better. Thank you, Aurelia.” Sellen’s fingertips lingered on the surface of her new face, a hint of silver underlying her pale skin. “Did you happen to bring my crown? Ah, I suppose it can’t be helped. You did well to bring my heart his far, in any case.”

            She crossed over to the bookshelf on the far wall, paying no mind to the puppets strewn across the floor. Through the thunder pounding in her ears, Aurelia noted somewhat distantly that she could hear Sellen’s footsteps now.

            Her teacher was saying something, but for the life of her she could not take heed of the words. The throbbing behind her eyes would not abate, and her vision blurred...

            She jolted at the touch on her shoulder. Wide eyed, she turned to see Sellen looking down at her with a furrowed brow.

            “Apprentice, how long has it been?”

            Aurelia could not answer. Her tongue suddenly felt very dry.

            “How long,” Sellen pressed, “since we spoke in the inquisitor’s cell?”

            Since they spoke. Since she opened up a breathing chest and coated her arms in blood...

            “A f-few days,” she choked. “S-sorry, I forgot your crown...”

            Something in her chest cracked like a dry branch. With a gasp, Aurelia took two lurching steps forward and collapsed against Sellen. She felt her teacher stiffen as she flung her arms around her waist and buried her face in her robes. Though she expected to be pushed away soon enough, for a moment she clung tightly. A few stubborn tears escaped her tightly shut eyes.

            Her new vessel felt cool to the touch, but it moved and breathed like a living body, not like the cold thing she had left in the inquisitor’s basement. The shakes that she had suppressed since the ruins finally took free reign, chattering her teeth and turning her limbs to water.

            “A few days,” Sellen repeated. “A journey from Witchbane to Kingsrealm should have taken you a week at the very least.”

            No answer could escape the vise-grip that closed around her chest. She felt Sellen sigh, then felt a feather-light touch smoothing down her hair.

            “Foolish child,” the sorceress murmured. “Did you even stop to rest?”

            Finally, she managed to draw in a shuddering breath to respond. Only a hoarse whimper emerged. As she loosened her grip on Sellen’s robes, her knees gave way. The room seemed to dim, and hunger and exhaustion hit her all at once. For the second time in a week Aurelia collapsed upon the floor of Sellen’s lair. This time, she felt arms catch her and lower her down before her senses fled entirely.

***

            Aurelia awoke to familiar sensations -- stiff, cold muscles, her back against stone, brow resting on her knees, her robe drawn up around her shoulders. She might have been waking up at any one of her impromptu campsites scattered across the Lands.

            Instinctively, she stretched out her legs in preparation to stand. Her soles stung at the movement. Aurelia blinked fully awake, roused by the sharp pain. The crude wrappings around her feet had been replaced by fresh bandages, the layers of meticulously bound white cloth smelling faintly of alcohol.

            The wall at her back was rough-hewn and faintly cool, carved directly into the rock. It curved around, encircling a room perhaps fifteen paces square. Her gaze passed over a rack of barrels, four bunks set into the wall, a table and chairs, and an iron-bound door leading presumably to another room. The gravel floor was dry and scuffed by many feet, the wood of the door and furniture untouched by decay. A set of tin plates and mugs set out on the table, and from her position slumped in the corner she could see that at least one held a half-eaten chunk of bread. A lantern flickered in one corner, casting warm light and dancing shadows across the walls.

            Footsteps echoed in the silence. The door swung open with a grate of iron on stone, and Sellen strolled into view. It still felt unnatural to see her crownless, or to hear the faint pad of bare feet on stone as she walked. A rag draped over one arm, spattered red, and she wiped her hands on it and tossed it into the unlit fireplace as she approached.

            The sorceress’s brow furrowed -- stars, it was odd being able to actually read her expressions. Measured strides carried her over to Aurelia’s corner, and she sank to one knee. She flinched as the older woman raised one finger and lit a tiny orb of arcane light at its tip. A light touch to her chin stopped her from recoiling.

            “Look directly at the light,” Sellen murmured, a touch more gently than was her custom. “Good. Now keep your head still.”

            After so many lessons, following Sellen’s instructions had become near automatic. Aurelia sat perfectly still while the sorceress moved her light from side to side, shining it first in one eye, then the other. Apparently satisfied, she dismissed the orb and reached out to take her pulse.

            Though she flinched again at the cold touch on her wrist, Aurelia’s apprehension slowly gave way to confusion. After a moment’s fumbling, she managed a dry whisper. “Was I unconscious?”

            “You have been sleeping for the better part of a day -- an activity which, I suspect, you have not been doing near enough of.”

            Bit by bit, the tension bled out of her rigid shoulders. Nothing terrible had happened. She had collapsed, and now she must have awoken in the home of Sellen’s associate. The maneuver with the light she knew to be medical in nature, though she did not know its purpose. Her father had done something similar once, checking both of Liette’s eyes with a candle after she hit her head trying to scale one of the old ruins.

            Aurelia sat bolt upright, slipping her wrist from Sellen’s grasp. “Aureliette! Did she come with us?”

            Once more, the sorceress’s brow furrowed. “Your spirit? She followed me outside. I expect that she will return shortly.”

            The panic-stricken burst of strength fled as swiftly as it had come. With a shuddering breath, Aurelia curled back in on herself and attempted to disappear beneath her robe. Though the unbearable tension had abated, the shaking persisted, set too deep in her core to be dislodged.

            A light touch settled on her shoulder, pressing down through the heavy layers of cloth. “So far as I can determine,” Sellen murmured, “there is nothing wrong with you that a square meal and a night with a roof over your head won’t set right. Come, let’s find you something to eat.”

Chapter Text

            Aurelia stared out over the shallows of the lake, elbows propped on her knees. Three motionless forms lay half-submerged, their red and blue surcoats rippling in the languid waters. The crabs seemed to be having difficulty with the dead men’s mail. Nevertheless, they kept at their work doggedly, claws nibbling away at exposed hands and faces.

            As promised, she had found Liette just outside the door of the hideaway -- it was a cave, she discovered, cut into the side of a sheer cliff face. Her sister had managed to entice one of the crabs away from the feast, and now she teased it into a one-sided game of tag.

            She envied her sister’s sense of ease. Liette had always been the one to find joy in the moment, Aurelia the one to worry for the future. For the first time in weeks, she had a full belly, dry clothes, and the promise of a fire and a proper bed only a stone’s throw behind her. And here she sat, watching three dead men get picked apart by crabs and contemplating making a run for the opposite shore.

            Sellen was not safe -- the three men who she presumed to be the hideout’s previous inhabitants were a stark reminder of that. She ought to know better than to trust this sudden spate of kindness. She ought to strike out on her own before whatever scraps of pity or obligation Sellen felt toward her ran out.

            At the thought of running back out into the wilds, the ache in her chest deepened. Unconsciously, she reached up to rub her arm.

            She tried to remember the last time her mother had hugged her and found that she could recall no specific instance. It still unsettled her, to look back and truly take in how far her parents had withdrawn. She could not quite hate them for it -- in Nokstella, Master Alcibiades’ word had been law. She and Liette had been doomed by the very stars they were born under. Could she blame her mother and father for trying not to get attached?

            What thoughts had plagued them when they saw their daughters off on that final morning? Perhaps after fourteen years, the comforting lies had become truth to them. Perhaps they had convinced themselves that this was an honor, a noble sacrifice. Their last image would have been of the pair of them walking in the company of the astrologers, Liette bubbling with excitement and Aurelia feigning it to the best of her ability. Perhaps going to see the stars had not seemed so terrible a fate to them.

            Going to see the stars.

            Her grip tightened on the sleeves of her robe. What a pretty thing to call it. As if they were leaving on some grand voyage, or simply floating off into the ether. Her parents could accept the loss with that vague sense of comfort. They’d never had to think about knives or quicksilver cords...

            A few paces back, Sellen cleared her throat. Aurelia jolted. Swiftly mastering herself, she sat unmoved as footsteps padded closer.

            The silence carried on for a few dozen heartbeats. Finally, Sellen cleared her throat a second time. “How old are you, Aurelia?”

            “Thirt... Fourteen.” Fourteen. She had died on the day that she turned fourteen.

            Another pause. “It occurs to me,” Sellen ventured, “that the errand I sent you on might have been upsetting to one of your age and disposition.”

            With her back to Sellen, she surreptitiously dragged her sleeve across her eyes. What could she even say?

            Footsteps padded closer. “Aurelia, you did not hurt me. In fact, I would consider myself to be in your debt.”

            Talk about something else. Anything else. As the hem of Sellen’s robe edged into her field of vision, Aurelia stared out at the three dead men in the shallows. “They used to live here, didn’t they?”

            Another pause. She could almost hear Sellen reshuffling her thoughts. “Yes,” she began, slowly but matter-of-factly. “I will not tell you to cast aside your compassion -- that is, ultimately, a balance that you must negotiate for yourself. But I will advise you to reserve your pity for more deserving individuals. These men would have shown you no such consideration.”

            As she watched, one of the crabs finally managed to tear a hole in the corpse’s silver mail. Aurelia averted her eyes. “And your... Your associate? Did you kill him too?”

            “Oh, Seluvis is dead, but not by my hand. I would not have sent you within a mile of that tower were I not reasonably certain of his demise.” Sellen let out a sharp huff that might have been a laugh. “Given the nature of the scheme he confided to me, I knew that he would not long outlive his usefulness to his mistress. I expect he died before that fallen star had a chance to cool.”

            Turning away from the crabs and their feast, Aurelia pushed up onto her feet. Swaying on deadened legs, she waited a moment for the feel of pins and needles to fade. She only just managed not to jump when Sellen placed a steadying hand on her arm.

            It still seemed so odd, watching Sellen move about freely, pick things up with her own hands, leave footprints in the damp sand of the shore. Even though she had only guessed the true nature of the sorceress’s projection in the eleventh hour, she had still become accustomed to a teacher who was limited, and therefore safe.

            Even now, Sellen’s gaze pierced her like a scalpel. With the air of one observing a failed experiment, the sorceress withdrew her hand.

            “Aurelia, who was your first teacher?”

            She nearly swallowed her tongue. “I... Why? You... You probably wouldn’t know of him.”

            The sorceress’s brow furrowed. Inexplicably, her voice softened. “Because I suspect that his shortcomings extended beyond poor spellcasting technique. Frankly, you keep looking at me as if you think I’m going to strike you.”

            Not for a moment did she think herself capable of selling a lie to Sellen. Instead she grasped for a half-lie. “I’ve heard stories.” She kept her eyes stubbornly downcast, sweating hands clenched tightly around the sleeves of her robe. “About the Primeval sorcerers.”

            “They likely are true.” The lines of her brow smoothed out, a hint of a smile emerging in their stead. “We are a rather ruthless lot, but an apprentice is an entirely different matter than a competitor. You have nothing to fear.”

            She must not have seemed reassured. A hint of worry returned to Sellen’s countenance, and the uncharacteristic earnestness of speech with it. “Oh dear. Is it your nature as a twin that has made you so wary of me?”

            Aurelia’s head snapped up, every muscle going rigid. “How--”

            “Your sister.” Sellen nodded to the spectral form, still bobbing contentedly across the lake. “The spirit is your twin, is she not? Given the naming conventions of the era in which you lived...”

            Idiot! Aurelia bit down on the tip of her tongue, cursing her own negligence. Like a fool, she had used Aureliette’s full name, and now Sellen knew.

            “Really, child, I do consider myself to be a woman of science. I put no stock in superstition.”

            She did not realize that her tears had spilled over until she felt Sellen gingerly dabbing them away with her sleeve. She’s lying. It was not merely superstition. It had worked. Master Alcibiades saw the Current in the moment before Aurelia burned out his eyes.

            Even without all of that, by now she ought to know the feel of a lie meant to comfort.

            “Whatever you’ve heard,” Sellen murmured, “I assure you that I mean you no harm.”

            Aurelia’s fists trembled at her sides. For a moment Sellen gently pressed her shoulders, then she withdrew. She’s lying. Now would be the time to run. Absurdly, her thoughts flew back to the cell in which she had found Sellen’s new vessel, to the feel of a tentative pat on the head, to being caught when exhaustion took her legs out from under her.

            She could not remember the last time her mother had hugged her. The two thoughts twisted together like a knot in her chest. And when Sellen turned back towards the cave, Aurelia followed.