Aurora's Rift, page 12
part #1 of Celestial Arcanists Series
Ink snorts from across the room, muttering something about the rigidity of humans.
“What sort of factions?” I ask.
“As with any human city, there are the extremely…faithful,” says Sasun with something halfway between a grimace and a smirk. She bares her teeth a moment later. “The ones who believe that the ruler here is not doing enough to curb the unruly masses. There are also some more moderate humans who call themselves the Counterweight, a loosely organized group that mostly likes to tell their more extreme counterparts that they’re wrong, but they have the occasional good idea.”
“Even a blindfolded mouse sometimes finds cheese,” Ink agrees.
Sasun cracks a smile at that.
“What about the non-humans?” Teinath asks.
“I was getting to that.” Sasun takes a deep breath. “There has been rumbling for some time of an actual revolution, but it wasn’t until the past couple weeks—since the rift appeared—that it seems like people are getting organized. That would be a good thing, potentially, but really, mostly their goal is anything but this rather than an alternative, and they need an alternative. Quickly. That’s where you come in.”
I have to hold onto every bit of composure I have not to swallow.
“You’re an elf,” Sasun says. “Both of you. And Ink’s a changeling. Stories spread fast, celestine.”
It’s the first time she’s used my title, and to my extreme surprise, she sounds sincere.
Sasun is going on. “People know that a company of humans essentially went apostate at the very sight of you, Lithrial. That alone is going to mean two things. Well. It’ll mean a lot of things to a lot of different people, but two things from the jump. First, it means you can rally the non-humans of Viathan to your cause and to your banner by pure virtue of being one of them. Secondly, it means Mithrathan will retaliate.”
“Whatever we do needs to be decisive and unambiguous,” Ink says, turning to us suddenly. “If we can’t pull that off, Mithrathan will crush us even if we nominally have control of the city.”
I do not like the sound of that.
Thirteen
The people from our encampment are scattered throughout the city, but I am fortunate not to be very recognizable yet, so the next day after a remarkably good night of sleep in the biggest bed I’ve had in any world, I set off alone into Viathan.
Sasun has given me a map of the city, including which places to avoid. Right now I’m headed to the merchant halls to meet up with a pair of folk artisans Sasun said would be a good first stop. They were with us when the rift opened, but the few days I was in the encampment were such a whirlwind, I didn’t have a chance to meet them.
The merchant halls are in the center of Viathan and encircled by an even larger market that spills out through the streets like spokes on a giant wheel. To the south, the mountains rise above the city skyline, dominating the view in spite of the splendor of the city itself.
At the very center of the merchant halls is a grand fountain—another remnant of elven architecture that apparently caused the invading humans no little amount of consternation. It depicts Ela standing with hands outstretched, either in supplication or offering, and water loops and soars from spouts that encircle the god, dancing in streams and droplets that sparkle in the sunlight like diamonds.
The merchant halls are actual halls, but they are roofed in glass that seems worked into the stone itself. Standing at the fountain, it looks like the entirety of the marketplace is open to the sky.
I follow Sasun’s directions to the southwest corner, where there is a gathering of the folk.
In so many other games, the stone and metalworkers are dwarves. The folk almost look like—I don’t know. Vikings mated with Greek gods. They are all different skin colors and hair colors and styles, but they are all enormously tall. The shortest of them are as big as Ragan.
They are somewhat quiet, though, rather than boisterous. Apathan said that the folk save their merriment for their halls, but it’s hard to imagine this stoic bunch getting rowdy at all.
They don’t visibly acknowledge me when I move into their midst, but something tells me every single one of them knows who I am. A pair of them move aside when I come close, a willowy, pale redhead with piercing blue eyes and a huge man with dark brown skin and his hair in locs to his waist and held back by a leather thong.
“I’m looking for—”
“You’re looking for the anvil,” the man says with a nod. He raises his arm and gestures, but doesn’t point. “That way.”
I step under the glass roof of their section of hall. The scent of metal and fire and stone surrounds me immediately, and the temperature goes up several degrees.
What he said didn’t particularly make sense, but he seemed so certain.
I’m not entirely sure who to look out for here. One of the smiths in a thick leather apron wipes sweat from his brow and calls out.
“Aigen! She’s here!”
Every eye in the hall turns to me, and I suddenly feel very small.
Well. Compared to all of them, I’m a Labrador in a roomful of Bernese mountain dogs.
The folk woman who comes up from the back of the chamber, removing both of her heavy gloves, is not what I expect. She is about average height for her people, which is to say she’s got a foot on me. Her skin is deep, deep brown, and her hair falls in gentle black curls to her shoulders, held back from her face with a brightly-colored band of fabric.
“Ah. Yes,” she says. A smile lights her face.
Aigen is lovely. There is something magnetic about her, and something soft despite the obvious hard labor of her work as a smith.
“I was hoping to have the chance to meet you sooner,” Aigen says to me, extending a callused hand. “I am told that you will be in the city for a time now, yes?”
“That’s the plan so far,” I tell her, clasping her hand in mine.
“Good.” She seems to hesitate for a moment, glancing at the man who called out to her to tell her I was here. “I wonder if perhaps when you move on, if you would be willing to take me with you.”
“You want to join us?” First Sasun, now Aigen.
“Yes. I am a master smith and—” There is a noise from the man, but Aigen gives him an annoyed look and goes on. “And I am a stonesmith. The first in a very long time. I would like to lend my art to your cause.”
“Aigen,” says the man, “telling her that’s all well and good, but you sell yourself short by omitting the other important part of what you do.”
I give Aigen a questioning look.
She sighs. “I am also a fighter. I learned to smith to make my own weapons, and it became my preferred occupation, but you will find no one more skilled with a labrys than I.”
A labrys. It takes me a minute to remember that a labrys is an enormous double bitted axe.
On Earth, it’s a weapon of gods.
“Yes, by all means,” I say quickly. “Please join us.”
Companion Recruited: The Anvil.
The Anvil—I remember what the man said when I first entered. Not just an anvil. The Anvil.
That puts this woman in a whole other perspective.
Aigen grins.
I spend the rest of the day walking through the city until my legs burn with the exertion of going up and down hills and I half consider casting Ela’s Touch on myself just to take the edge off.
I speak with elves, serpentus, changelings, folk, and the occasional human from the company that defected. They are all eager to see me, some of them furtively greeting me with “Celestine” and others calling me Lithrial as if they’re getting away with something. Though I do notice that not a single one of the humans will address me by my name, which is something I might have to keep an eye on. I don’t want them to transfer one fanatical urge to follow into another.
As I speak to them, I learn their stories. I hear about growing up all over Sirethan and the days they picked up and followed after Teinath’s tales, whether they heard it from Teinath himself or from someone else, like whispers spreading wildfire through the continent. These few were the breath drawn to shout, the tide pulling back before the wave.
It grounds me even more in this world.
Walking back to Sasun’s home in the falling dark, a notification pings.
Quest Complete: Get Your Bearings. You have traveled to a new city and spent the day learning from it and the people who followed you here. While you still have much to learn, you are starting to understand what you must be. The question remains: who are you? +250 Experience.
Dusk has fallen by the time I reach the eastern side of the city, and a shape materializes out of the darkness as I turn the corner.
“You’ve been busy,” comes the voice of Ferelthin.
“Are you being creepy again?” I ask, teasing in spite of my exhaustion.
He grimaces, stepping out of the shadows. He’s dressed more normally now, though his tattoos and hairstyle are still striking. He’s wearing a dark grey-blue hooded tunic and carrying a staff across his back.
“Not exactly,” he says. “I’ve been trying to catch up to you, not trail along behind you. Every time I got somewhere, you’d just moved on.”
“Oh. Sorry.”
“Don’t be. You’ve really affected them.” He’s doing that thing again where he looks at me sideways.
“Well, that’s the job, I guess.” I sound more flippant than I feel. Really, though, I’m a bit drained. “What did you want to talk to me about?”
Ferelthin takes his staff from his back and sets it root down on the pavement, leaning against it to stretch his back. “I thought I would ask if you would perhaps be open to another mage joining you. I may not be around all the time, but for the occasional endeavor, perhaps?”
“Why wouldn’t you be around all the time?” I ask. It’s the obvious question.
“Aigen won’t always be with you. Nor will Teinath or Ink or any of the others you’ve gathered,” he says. “I simply meant that I will sometimes have other business to attend to.”
“I think that’s allowed,” I say. For some reason, the thought of Ferelthin being around even a little bit is an enticing one.
Naturally, Lithrial. Go for the weirdo who turns up in your tent.
I ignore the voice. Is that really that much weirder than just happening to stumble into Teinath? Ink following us across the plains? Not particularly.
“Is that a yes?” Ferelthin asks, face impassive.
“Yes,” I say.
Companion Recruited.
The omission of anything after those two words sends a bit of a chill through me, but when I look up half-expecting Ferelthin to have vanished, he’s still there, looking pleased.
“Thank you,” he says.
“For what?”
“Letting me stick around.” He motions with his chin, and we start walking toward Sasun’s house again. “It’s been a long while since someone came along who made me look at this place differently, like things could actually change.”
“Me?” Oof. That’s the type of flattery that’s terrifying.
“Well, Ink, really. You know I think I saw them climbing the palace earlier? Are changelings part spiders?”
I’m not expecting it, and I giggle despite myself.
Ferelthin grins at me sideways. “But seriously. Yes, you. Like I said, a celestial arcanist is a truly rare phenomenon.”
That puts a damper on the flattery. “Ah.”
I’m quiet for a moment, trying to put my finger on what’s bothering me. When I was with Greg, I always felt like he had constructed this…image of me. Not a truthful one, just a picture of what he expected I was. He treated me like the sun shone out of my ass for the first couple years of our relationship, had me so high up on a pedestal. At the time, I thought that was just love.
Turned out, people resent when you’re not the picture-perfect idol they’ve constructed of you.
I don’t want to be that to anyone ever again.
“I’m just a person,” I say quietly. “Whatever they’re calling me, whatever magic is within me, I’m still just a person. I’m going to fuck up. Probably going to get people killed, people who don’t deserve it. Hopefully some who deserve it too, but—yeah. I’m just a person, Ferelthin. Don’t put me on a pedestal.”
He looks at me as if he’s reassessing me all over again. He nods slowly. “Of course. You’re absolutely right. I apologize.”
It’s that more than anything that surprises me. I can’t remember the last time I heard someone say, Yes, you’re right, I’m wrong, and I’m sorry. It shouldn’t be such a terribly difficult thing to say. So many people just jump in with You just don’t understand or I wasn’t or the evergreen I’m sorry you feel that way.
Some of the sudden tightness eases off my lungs.
We talk about other things for the rest of the walk, and when we reach Sasun’s, he has me laughing hard enough my eyes are watering, and the serpentus just shakes her head when she lets us in, pointing resolutely to the dining room.
Fourteen
It is Ink, naturally, who comes up with the plan.
It turns out that Ferelthin really did see the changeling scampering up the side of the palace walls, and Ink turns up the next morning after missing dinner the night before with a detailed sketch of the castle itself, a list of possible allies in the Speaker’s household, and a hefty collection of contingency plans that could help us distract the more radical corners of the city while we stage a coup.
I’m not the biggest fan of overthrowing a city, especially in the context of the rift and what they’re calling me and my followers—in the past two days, the word riftsworn has started to filter through the city—but if Beith is right, and I think she is, it is our only hope of withstanding the inevitable retaliation from Mithrathan.
Retaliation that could be coming any day. The longer we wait, the more time there is for news to reach the city and for them to send out an army in true force.
“One thing the stupid humans did,” Ink says, “works to our advantage.”
Ferelthin is perched on the arm of a sofa in the sitting room, with Sasun and Teinath sitting on the actual sofa, Aigen sitting daintily in an chair she makes look like a throne, and myself leaning against the wall.
“What’d the stupid humans do?” Teinath asks with an indulgent smile.
“In their efforts to wipe out pesky elven magic, they destroyed a lot of the natural defenses of their own city.” Ink looks so affronted, I think they might actually be angry. It fades a moment later. “Their shortsighted loss is our inevitable gain! There’s a series of tunnels that used to be used to transport goods in and out of the palace. Vroom.”
“Vroom?” I say.
“You know,” the changeling says, exasperated. “Magic. Put it in a cart and let it zoom down a tube. I don’t know. I wasn’t there at the time. Point is, the humans who moved in hated the magic in spite of how practical it was, so naturally they tried to block off the tunnels.”
“Ah,” says Ferelthin. He nods. “The structure wouldn’t like that.”
“The structure—” Sasun begins. Then she shakes her head. “Never mind.”
“It’s not as strange as it sounds,” Aigen says. “And this part is not elven magic, changeling. It’s folk magic. Stonesmithing.”
“Like what you do,” Ink says without missing a beat.
“Like what I do.”
Ferelthin inclines his head to the folk woman, who returns the gesture.
“So you’re saying what—the tunnels are open?” I ask.
“I’m saying that in trying to push away the elven magic, they didn’t realize the tunnels were folk magic.” Ink’s face is lit up like the sky at midsummer. “And we have a stonesmith.”
Quest Updated: Ma Grath, Ma Viathan. You have made it to Viathan and discovered that the city is in a place of uneasy peace, with a mostly-secular human ruler caught between religious purists on one side and a discontented populace on the other. With retaliation from Mithrathan nearly certain, you must secure Viathan if your movement and your journey is to continue, let alone survive.
Survive.
Well, that’s cheery.
Exactly the sort of message I like to see when I’m entering a dark tunnel under a palace that is literally built into a mountain.
We’ve split into two groups for this, with Aigen, Ferelthin, and Ink with me and Teinath and Sasun preparing groups of the more organized citizens to be ready to arrest the leaders of the radicals, who Sasun says have been mobilizing in the past few days.
It’s no wonder Viathan felt like a pot about to bubble over when we arrived.
Aigen almost has to stoop to stand up in the tunnel, but not quite. When I say so, she grins, her teeth flashing white in the darkness.
“Like I said. Folk magic. We weren’t going to enchant a tunnel we couldn’t stand up in.”
Ferelthin chuckles at that.
The darker it gets, the more I expect to have trouble seeing, but I’m able to see everything around me, from the perfectly honed shape of the stone to the long, strange track that runs down the center of the tunnel.
It takes me a bit to remember that it’s part of my new passive skill, Aurora’s Beacon. Ink doesn’t seem to be having any trouble, nor does Aigen. But Ferelthin mutters every time his elbow knocks into the wall, which is kind of adorable.
When I chuckle after the fourth time he does it, his head swivels toward me. “Something funny?”
“Having trouble seeing?” I ask him innocently.
“You’re not?” He sounds outright irritated.
“Nope. Why don’t you just touch the wall so you know where it is instead of giving it a chance to run into you?”
Aigen laughs. Her laugh is as clear as her hammer striking the anvil.
“Oi. Quiet.” Ink stops in the middle of the tunnel. “We can measure everyone’s eyesight after we take over the city.”
We don’t make it much farther before the tunnel dead-ends.
