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On the night Erin would meet his sister, he was sitting in his room, reading by candlelight. This was his regular routine.
Candles were, of course, wildly inferior to lacrima light. The room required dozens of candles to be illuminated properly, and the light flickered and warped in a manner that made it extremely inconvenient for reading. Unfortunately, any trace of elemental energy aggravated Erin’s condition, and he would prefer not to contaminate the soulcrystal cleanroom that served as his bedchamber. So candles it was. He was used to it by now.
Erin would read anything, but he liked fantasy novels in particular, where he could escape to other worlds full of clever heroes and epic adventures. The idea of going so far and exploring so much left him breathless with wonder and jealousy. When the migraines kept him bedridden for hours, he would wait out the pain with elaborately choreographed stories of globetrotting adventure, filling out the world map in his head with puzzles just waiting for someone like him to come and solve them. He imagined deciphering the long-lost secrets of Ancient ruins, mapping the perilous labyrinth of the Singing Caves, and watching the shore sink behind the curve of the world, until the horizon was blue-on-blue against the endless open sea.
Then he would crash back to reality, and he would curse his worthless, deformed soul. He was a prisoner of his own biology.
The clip-clip of horse’s hooves on stone drifted into his room from behind his long velvet curtains. Father had returned early. He had been away on emissary business for nearly a whole sindahlan, all the way in Skeiron, but since he wasn’t supposed to arrive until morning, Mother wasn’t here to welcome him home. Sighing, Erin put away his book and got up to go and greet him.
As he stepped past the boundary of his room, his head swam like he’d stood up too fast after sitting too long, and he had to lean heavily against the doorframe as he waited for the lightheadedness to fade and the spots to clear from his vision. The energy in the air bore down on him like a strong grip squeezing his forearms. Still, it was nothing too painful tonight.
Father was already in the foyer when he made it downstairs, directing servants struggling valiantly to cart his luggage into the house. Erin greeted him with a respectful bow. Father nodded dismissively in acknowledgement. Father didn’t like Erin much, and for good reason - having a magically-intolerant invalid as a son does not reflect well on one’s social standing in Asera, the city of mages.
Father moved to wave Erin off, but then he paused, tilting his head and gesturing for Erin to wait. Erin, who was already contemplating which book he wanted to reread after he finished the one left on his bed, was rather annoyed and slightly curious by this change of routine, especially when Father said he had a gift for him.
A gift! Father never brought him gifts, unless Erin counted the clothes he bought him to wear for upcoming parties. This was highly unusual.
His interest piqued, Erin watched with a mixture of caution and curiosity as his father turned and called a name into the night: Tess.
Instantly, a servant appeared from around the back of the carriage. In their arms was a suitcase that looked far too large for someone of their size, but they carried it with relative ease.
“Yes, sir, Emissary Ruunaser?” they said. Erin’s brow furrowed; they sounded quite young. Their voice echoed strangely in the open street.
As they walked towards the doorway, Erin’s jaw dropped. His first thought was that they were wearing some kind of golden armor, but no - that was their skin. Their whole body softly glinted in the streetlamps like a dusty mirror, the amber light warping and dancing hypnotically as they moved. A metal-caste. Erin had never seen a metal-caste in person before. He’d read what he could about them, of course, but information was frustratingly sparse. And here was a living, breathing metal-caste right in front of him!
Father snapped at him to fix his posture. Erin robotically obeyed, barely listening.
The girl, Tess, moved to stand at his father’s heels. Her eyes were blank silver spheres, so the chandelier’s reflection made it seem as though her gaze was fixed on the ceiling as she gaped at the luxurious decor. Erin wasn’t exactly sure how metal-caste aged, but she seemed barely older than him, which was certainly out of the ordinary - Father generally didn’t like children as a rule. Of further concern was that she wasn’t wearing their servants’ uniform or the robes of a guest; instead, she was dressed in sackcloth rags and no shoes at all. Clamped around her neck was a thick collar of solid iron.
A sliver of dread began to grow in his mind.
Father calmly began to explain how he’d purchased Tess in Skeiron - purchased, like the slave markets in the Crystal Empires he had read about - and how he was really committing an act of charity because if Erin had only seen the conditions she was being kept in, he would have wanted to save her from that horrible fate too, wouldn’t he? But Father and Mother were too busy now to deal with Erin's condition, so Tess would be his personal playmate and servant, and maybe do a couple chores around the house in her spare time. It was all framed so reasonably.
But, of course, Erin was long practiced in deciphering his father’s predatory logic, and there was a politician’s ooze in his words that made him worry.
He looked up and caught Tess staring back. He didn’t quite know how he could tell - the shine in her eyes still worked the illusion that she was looking upwards - but he found himself quite sure her gaze was trained on him. She looked... concerned, almost.
Father droned on about how Tess would help him with all those daily tasks he struggled with. He called her people weak of mind, which made Erin bristle indignantly. Tess struck him as quite perceptive, if she could catch a flash of emotion in the stranger in front of her that his own father missed. The strength of the mind wasn’t dictated by biology or genetics.
He swallowed his argument and let Father go. It wasn’t worth starting a debate right now.
Father mentioned something about sending Tess to the servants’ quarters as he disappeared up the ornate staircase, but Erin was barely paying attention. All his focus was on the girl in front of him.
Up close, it was easy to see how her metal skin clung to the bone underneath, to the point where Erin suspected he would be able to count her ribs from several feet away. Her wiry silver hair had been allowed to tangle into a matted, dirty mess. She smelled unwashed, and beneath the layer of grime were rough, rashlike patches of ugly green-brown tarnish that broke the smooth reflections of the lacrimae that lit the room. Father hadn’t lied; this girl had been appallingly mistreated.
He struggled to put an emotion to the look in her eye. She watched him the way an old, caged circus tiger watches its ringmaster: wary, resigned, awaiting the inevitable crack of the whip against its fur.
Erin was still reeling from this whole encounter, but he found himself powerfully sure he did not want to be the person she was looking at.
“Hello, Tess,” he said, as nonthreateningly as possible. Her expression flickered curiously. “I’m Erin. It’s nice to meet you.”
“Hi, Erin.” Her voice had a distinctive echoing quality, like she was speaking to him through a shallow pipe. “It’s nice to meet you too.”
Despite the moral ambiguity of her - acquisition? adoption? - arrival, Erin couldn’t help his excitement, and his nervousness. He so rarely got to interact with children his own age.
Quickly, he ran through his options and selected the safest. “Would you like to come to my room and play dolls?” he suggested. “I have quite a lot of them.” Mother bought them for him, but he rarely touched them - dolls were boring without friends.
Tess perked up. “That sounds fun!” She hesitated. “But I can’t.”
Erin’s heart sank, but before he could change tactics, she kept talking. “Maybe we can do it later, though? It sounds like Emissary Ruunaser wants me to go to the servants’ quarters right now, but I’ve never played dolls before. Howd’s it work?”
They chatted all the way down the hallway, and when Erin had to leave her at the servants’ quarters, he wondered about her all night.
He and Tess quickly became inseparable.
Erin hadn’t quite realized how lonely he had been until he wasn’t anymore. He and Tess spent hours together each day, sending Erin’s previously-untouched dolls on grand imaginary adventures and playing cards until their fingers hurt. When Father made Tess fetch a package from all the way across the city, Erin brought out his big annotated map of Asera and found the best route for her to take. When Erin fell over from the element winds after staying in the garden too long, Tess helped him stagger to his room and stayed there by his bedside as he shivered in pain, doodling pictures to pass the time which Erin hung proudly on his walls.
It took only a few days for Tess’s face to light up whenever she saw him, and only a few weeks for the pair to wordlessly reach the mutual agreement that they would spend as much time as possible in the presence of the other. It filled a yawning need neither of them had been able to touch before.
When she wasn’t with him, though, Tess was put to work. His father could justify it with whatever demagoguery he liked, but the slimy truth of the matter was that he used Tess alternatingly as a pack horse, an errand girl, and a drudge. She would often enter his room and collapse breathlessly against the door, utterly exhausted from running halfway across the city or carrying hundreds of pounds’ worth of food to the kitchens.
She always said she was fine when he asked, that it had just been a hard day. Then she’d struggle to her feet and set about lighting all his candles, one by one by one by one. Her mirror skin reflected the unstable, flickering flames, as though she were made of red fire.
He imagined a ball and chain around her ankle as she limped to his bedside.
Tess began to feature consistently in his daydreams. She held off the wyverns as he rifled through their nest for a local emissary’s pilfered sigil; she kept a lookout and asked fascinating questions as he dissected an Ancient automaton; she backed him up as he cunningly negotiated their release with the bandit queen. They journeyed thousands of miles in his head, from coast to coast and across the seas, talking and discovering and playing and solving mysteries. The brilliant explorer and his sharp-as-a-tack best friend.
And that was another thing - “weak of mind” couldn’t have been a more inapplicable descriptor. Tess was observant, witty, and remarkably quick, with an uncanny ability to see through smoke and mirrors and cut to the truth of things. He would think she wasn’t paying attention, and then she would casually comment something that hadn’t even occurred to Erin, like:
“Emissary Ruunaser’s probably throwing this gala tonight ‘cause the assembly didn’t go well.” Or,
“Nah, she’s not tired, she’s sad. Someone should give her a hug.” Or,
“Erin, if you go to that dinner, you’re gonna be miserable for days.” (He was, in fact, subsequently bedridden with a migraine for thirty-six hours.)
And yet, despite her social acumen, Tess was in some ways obtusely naive to a degree Erin found bizarre. At one point he had needed to sit her down and explain that no matter how physically strong, it was not reasonable or acceptable to expect one malnourished child to do the work of five grown men without a single error. She seemed to understand, and then the next day he found her toiling over the spit in the kitchens because the lacrima was broken, and he nearly lost his mind when she relayed that Father had told her to stand there and roast the pig “until it was done” - a task of no less than four hours. At that point he’d actually marched up to Father’s office and made up some lie about his condition acting up to get her released.
Unfortunately, in the interim, she had burned a section of the rump. Father disciplined her by refusing her dinner. He’d said it was an “appropriate punishment”.
Before he’d even realized it, Erin had already whirled around and blurted “TYRANNY!” in his father’s face.
For his punishment, he wasn’t allowed to talk to Tess for a week. When she entered his room to light his candles one by one by one, she looked on the verge of tears, but despite begging, bribery, yelling, guilt-tripping, and eminently reasonable logical argument, she refused to even make eye contact with him. He was left to stew in the betrayal and the maddening guilt as to how he’d wronged her.
But at some point, he had stopped brooding, and started thinking. It was, after all, the only thing he could do.
There was a solution to every problem, an answer to every riddle. Perhaps, he reasoned, her unwavering loyalty was some kind of odd metal-caste cultural norm? She hadn’t mentioned it when he’d interviewed her about her people, but she had an irritating habit of forgetting what she had or hadn’t already told him.
He swiped some money, snuck out of the house, bought a book, and spent the next four days with his eyes glued to paper.
When the week was over and she’d burst through his door with a stream of apologies, he’d responded by opening his notebook to a new page and asking her, very carefully, to explain the concept of a “Spark.”
They talked for hours: about Sparks, about slavers, about Ironhill, about family. Erin didn’t realize the time until Tess was haloed in soft, silver shieldlight.
That was the day Erin discovered that his best friend was a prisoner of her own biology.
In the pitch black of his room, sleep a long-lost memory, he found himself truly, passionately hating his father for the first time. That night, he made a promise to himself: that even if he could never escape his cage, he would do everything in his power to let Tess escape hers.
Three mornings after that, after having successfully wielded a combination of impeccable reasoning, strategic exaggeration of his symptoms, and very good timing, Erin’s father allowed Tess to move into Erin’s room with him.
It wasn’t much. But it was a start.
“DON’T YOU REALIZE WHAT YOU’VE DONE?”
The doctors had known for a while that his condition was worsening, but it hadn’t even crossed Erin’s mind as he begged Father to let him go with him to the annual Mage Academy dinner. There were so many people he wanted to meet, so many things he wanted to see. He had been ecstatic when Father reluctantly agreed. Even Father’s long list of ridiculous stipulations couldn’t quell Erin’s mood, and he’d spent the rest of the week agonizing over wardrobe choices for himself and Tess and rambling excitedly about all the celebrities who would be in attendance. Tess had been worried, but he’d brushed her off.
“YOU HAVE SINGLE-HANDEDLY UNMADE MY REPUTATION! MY STANDING!”
He had been in awe of the Academy. The main ballroom was a mesmerizing feat of engineering, the ceiling a collage of several different stones and metals all swirled together like marbled cake. As per Father’s demands, Erin had played the perfect son, mingling with chief magi and high-ranking professors with the ease of any aristocrat, and for a few hours it was utter bliss: learning, impressing, networking. He only betrayed his excitement with a few acceptable slips, and he only betrayed the pain of being around so many mages when Tess shot a glance his way.
In hindsight, it had perhaps been a rash decision to attend. But not even Erin could have predicted Asera themself would decide to incarnate.
“You. Girl.”
Erin was, quite possibly, the most sensitive mage to ever live. He felt Asera’s eye turn to the ballroom, felt the walls and the floor and the air all abruptly come alive with a soul and a mind of their own. It was like someone had dropped the sky on his shoulders.
There was a millisecond’s clash of wills - a single instant where Erin delusionally believed he could pretend nothing was wrong and continue his conversation with the Vashan dignitary - but he was, ultimately, a little boy pushing against the force of a god.
He snapped like a twig.
“…yes, Emissary Ruunaser?”
It had pressed in on him from all sides, crushing through skin and muscle and cranial tissue like a butcher with a meat tenderizer. Gravity had gone sideways and his lungs had gone numb. Tess’s frantic face and the cacophony of shouts and the swirling ballroom ceiling had all melted together in a tangle above his head; in the background, he had vaguely registered Father’s voice, high and frantic as he babbled to a very confused Asera. Against Tess’s feeble protests, half a dozen Life mages attempted to help, all of whom were utterly baffled when their magic only made the pain worse. The echoes of his own screams reverberated through the beautiful ballroom.
“My son cannot be trusted outside of this room.”
At some point, a merciful someone poured a purple syrup down his throat. The last thing he remembered was the sensation of the floor dropping away, his body floating in the grip of two strong hands.
“Do not let him leave it ever again.”
He spent the next week unable to get out of bed. His head hurt too much to even escape to his daydreams.
Even though he was shielded from the element winds in his soulcrystal bedroom, the damage from whatever had happened at the dinner had taken its toll. The slightest movement of his arms alighted every nerve with pain, and the migraine was a constant pounding from inside his skull that showed no sign of weakening. Daylight was unbearably painful, so the curtains were drawn and his room kept pitch-black, lit only by bare candlelight.
Tess spent her days toiling over him as though he were a dying grandfather. She brought him his meals from the kitchen and sometimes had to spoon-feed him because his fingers could not wrap around the silverware. She changed all his dressings four times a day, tediously unwrapping and rewrapping the soaked bandages. She ran his bath each night and placed him gently in the hot water, and helped him bathe when the agony overrode his stubbornness.
Erin wailed like a toddler the whole time. He kicked and fought and screamed in her face with as much ferocity as his weak, sickly frame could muster, to the point that he even once tried to bite her while she was carrying him across the room, which had done nothing but make his teeth hurt miserably. None of his protests brought any catharsis, which just made him want to scream more.
She never screamed back. She would sit back in his armchair, arms crossed, and let him howl until his voice was hoarse, and every once in a while she would ask, “Are you done?”
He would always give up eventually. What else could he do? The walls of his room were as much his sanctuary as his prison. It wasn’t as if he could fight his own body. He was just delaying the inevitable for the sake of his own ego, and making Tess’s life worse in the interim. He hated himself for it.
She’d sigh, deeply, heavily, and for a moment she would lift herself out of the chair as though she really were weighed down by the metal of her skin.
“I’m sorry,” she would say, and her eyes would gleam with something that looked like pity, but he would be too tired to protest.
And when he wasn’t throwing a tantrum, he was weeping - weeping from the pain, or weeping because the horror of being trapped had finally set in, and the idea that he might stare at the same thrice-cursed walls until he died was a kind of torture he hadn’t known was possible. And, of course, it was his own fault that had led to this fate, which made it all the worse.
When that happened, Tess would sit comfortingly by his bedside, and she’d find a way to say something poignant and sensitive that made him feel better. Then that would make him feel even worse than before, because he was being horrible to her, and he didn’t deserve her sympathy.
She once screamed at him that she was his jailor, and that he should hate her.
But he never blamed her, not once. They were, of course, both prisoners of their own biology, not of the walls they were stuck in. The only one to blame was himself, for being her ball and chain.
There was a solution to every problem, an answer to every riddle. Confined to his room as he was, it took Erin nearly four years of research on metal-caste to stumble across a solution to this particular problem, plus another year to gather the necessary resources, but he refused to give up. It was difficult, obviously - all the lacrimas and practice inscriptions had to be carefully hidden from Tess and all the other servants, or else they’d report it to Father - but he had a plan, and for his own sake and the sake of his sister, nothing was going to stop him.
His daydreams changed. He now dreamed of Tess and him journeying the world, hopping from city to city and coastline to coastline, seeing every sight there was to see. Tess made friends with a ship captain in a single day, and managed to secure them both passage to the Crystal Empires. When a crooked mage tried to rob them on the road to Glassloop, Erin stalled as Tess snuck up and dropped him with a well-placed hit to the head. Eventually, they made it all the way across the globe to Ironhill, where Erin got to watch Tess’s tearful reunion with her long-lost parents.
The storm that took place on the night of Lyssandra’s Turn that year was one of the worst ever recorded. Houses were tipped straight off their foundations and into the flooded streets like fallen cups, and lightning boomed so brightly as to match the noonday sky. Some people even swore they saw flashes forking upwards from the ground, as though the clouds and the earth were at war.
She found him on the roof, just like he’d planned. He was soaked to the bone and half-suffocating with pain, staying conscious only through pure force of will - he had spent far too long building up to this moment to miss its apogee.
Tess shouted his name. The sheets of rain clinked like falling needles against her bronze skin. Every crack made her flash unbearably bright for just an instant.
He smiled proudly.
Then he was light as air, nothing but a conduit for the jagged sword of golden light that arced down from the endless open sky.
He was trembling.
No, that wasn’t him trembling, was it? The whole mattress was vibrating, shuddering like a lacrima filled too far.
Golden streaks flickered in front of his eyelids. It was nothing like candlelight.
“Erin,” she said. The echo of her voice had changed.
He pulled his eyes open.
Tess was incandescent. Lightning dazzled across her body in pops and forks and bridges, her mirror skin radiating her own light so brightly it was like staring at a piece of the sun. She bathed his bedroom in golden glory, shaking with the power, her light casting shadows up the walls that flickered and crackled in time with every breath.
“Erin,” she laughed. Tears traced down her face. “I- I can’t believe you. You could have died.”
Her clothes were soaked with rain and burned half to tatters. There was a new, horrible scar labyrinthed down her shoulder, still steaming and red-hot like a forged sword quenched. It must have been agonizing, but she moved as though she could barely feel it, her eyes aglitter with whirling possibility.
Finally, she had sloughed off her imago and shattered her cocoon, and she had emerged as something new. The first dawn of an era.
This was the way it was supposed to be.
“It would have been worth it,” he promised.
She dove forward and engulfed him in a hug, crying freely, and he couldn’t tell if they were good tears or not, but there was a smile in her sobs that she couldn’t seem to wipe away. She smelled like ozone and smoke and petrichor and rain. Laughter bubbled up in his own throat, because she had hugged him, and that was undeniable proof - proof she was complete, proof he had finally done something right. He had kept that promise to himself after all.
Her chest spasmed against him as she wept silently into his hair. She squeezed him so tight it almost hurt, and suddenly the hug was a goodbye, a last farewell.
“Erin,” she said, voice cracking. “I have to go.”
“Good,” he whispered, and it was true, though the jealousy still burned. At least one of them could escape their prison.
They packed her bags by the light of her skin. Under Erin’s bed was a full traveler’s kit he’d scraped together over months, with everything she might need wherever her road took her, because he’d done his research, and he’d known this was coming - he’d wanted it. She deserved to be as far from him as possible.
She put on the new clothes he’d gotten her - just her size, of course - and Erin wrapped his favorite purple cloak around her shoulders, and tucked his precious world map into her satchel. Though it had been only a few minutes, she kept glancing longingly at the curtains, to the window behind them and the open air behind that.
When she flung them open, the night was dark and vast and moonless, but she sucked in an awed breath like she was seeing the sky for the first time. Perhaps she was. He wondered what it felt like.
Erin had dreamed about this moment, the day of her apotheosis. He had dreamed about what she would become. In his mind, she was a traveling saleswoman, wandering the earth in search of rare treasures and trinkets; she was a bodyguard, defending scientific expeditions and poor merchant parties in exchange for nothing but the pleasure of company and the stories of their lives; she was a bard, bashing out a tune on a hand drum as she sang through the square of a town on the other side of the world.
He tried not to feel his heart break. Tess could be so many things without him, and he had seen them all. This was what was better for her.
“Come with me.”
He froze.
“We don’t have to stay here anymore!” She leaned out the open window, the breeze shaking her hair, looking for all the world like she was going home. “I get it now. I do, I really do. The world is so big, and this place is so empty, and we can just- leave! We can do that!”
“Tess,” he said. He chuckled brokenly, not quite knowing why. “Look at me.”
She crossed her arms. “I am looking at you, and I want you to come with me.”
Frustration pounded in his head. “Tess, think about it for two seconds! If I came with you, I’d only drag you down like I already do. But you’re free now!” He gestured wildly at the window, as if she didn’t understand. “You don’t have to take care of me anymore! Just go!”
Her expressions were so much bigger now, so easy to read: surprise, indignation, yearning, before finally sagging in resignation.
“You want this as much as I do,” she said sadly.
“Yes,” he murmured. He could imagine the crunch of gravel against his feet, the whip of the wind in his cloak, the sound of the trees shaking in the sunlight above his head.
All dead dreams, now. He had new ones.
She hugged him again, because she knew nothing she said could ever change his mind.
“You were never a burden,” she said firmly. “Never.”
“Even now, you still think that?”
“Especially now, Erin.”
She climbed onto the windowsill, blazing like a sun and shaking with potential energy, tilting her head as if to a song only she could hear. With great effort, she ripped her gaze away from the horizon one last time to stare at his face, committing the image to memory.
“I’ll find you again someday, little brother. I promise.”
Erin smiled, and it tasted bittersweet. He didn’t think he’d ever see her again - but who knows how long it could take to keep a promise?
“Goodbye, Tess,” he said.
“Bye, Erin.”
She jumped off the ledge, and the room plunged into darkness once more.