Auroras rift, p.16
Aurora's Rift, page 16
part #1 of Celestial Arcanists Series
“So why did you kill the Speaker?” she demands as if this is some sort of gotcha moment.
“She didn’t,” Sasun says. “I did. Because he quite literally stabbed me in the back.”
“Any deaths last night occurred after our lives were threatened,” Beith says, speaking for the first time in several minutes. “How many of your Disciples can truthfully say the same?”
The human woman sputters for a moment in response, then grabs the still mottled-pink man by the upper arm and turns to leave.
“If you intend to stay in Viathan,” I call after them. “You should know that I will not tolerate anyone from any of Sirethan’s religions and faiths killing innocents simply because a voice only they can hear told them to.”
The woman looks back over her shoulder once with pure hatred in her eyes.
“It is beyond me that such a thing even needs to be said.” My final words hang in the air even after the humans vanish out the door and into the city.
Aigen’s face is unreadable when I glance up at her, but her eyes are hard and unblinking. “They will not listen.”
“Perhaps some of them will,” Beith says encouragingly.
“It matters not if some listen when the rest hold the power,” Aigen says flatly. She then turns to me, and it’s as if she has thrown back the curtains on a beautiful sunny day, so quick is the smile that leaps to her lips. “You, on the other hand, have the appearance of integrity about you. We ought to make sure what you wear into that world out there reflects that to those who need it written into your clothes to see it. Come.”
New Quest: Looking the Part. Follow Aigen. You could do worse than being outfitted by a master smith.
The golden scroll in my head doesn’t need to tell me twice.
The thought makes my sudden excitement at new gear falter a bit. Am I truly as bad as the human interrogators and purifiers? I listen to what the quests tell me to do. Is that any different?
But then I think back on it—I don’t think the quests have ever outright told me to kill someone, and they certainly haven’t told me to kill any innocents. To the contrary, they’ve rewarded me for preventing bloodshed.
My step quickens after Aigen, and I wave briefly to Beith and the others who are now speaking quietly in the foyer, hurrying after the folk woman’s retreating back.
It strikes me as I sit in the armory waiting for Aigen to return from the smithy that I haven’t really gotten much gear from this game at all. I’m used to loot dropping abundantly in games—to a lot of people, that’s what they live for.
I pull Apathan’s staff from my back and hold it in my hands. Quality, though. Quality over quantity. I can’t remember the last time an item I practically started the game with worked its way into my heart.
Aigen returns, carrying a stack of clothing and armor. She sets it carefully on a wide work table. “I’ll have to do a fitting first. I only guessed at your measurements. Beith wanted to measure you in your sleep, but I said that was too creepy, and so did Ferelthin.”
Ferelthin, eh?
“Okay,” I tell her. “Suit me up.”
“You’re going to have to strip first.”
Right.
There’s no one else down here right now; a few things have ground to a standstill around the palace while we work out new staff and new needs and make sure the day-to-day city bureaucracy functions the way it should, which very well may not be the way it has been functioning.
All while trying to prepare for a probable invasion. Swell.
I pull off my gear, down to my small clothes.
Aigen squints at me.
“Is there a problem?” I’m not a particularly self-conscious person, but Aigen is the type of person who makes her own size and strength the standard you compare yourself to.
“Nothing you can fix,” she says primly.
That makes me feel better.
She hands me a soft set of leggings that at first look like pure leather, but when I take them, they’re leather sewn over soft cotton lining in perfectly interlocking strips, reinforced at every seam. Wearing just leather is a nightmare of breathability. (Don’t ask how I know that.) But these look comfortable, flexible, and sturdy without trapping a swamp in my ass.
When I get them on, the size is actually perfect. So perfect I blurt out, “You guessed my measurements?”
Aigen raises an eyebrow at me. “This is my job.”
Oh. Right.
The tunic is light and breathable too, but something clinks when she moves the remaining items on the bench, so I assume it won’t only be this. Sure enough, she hands me a delicate chainmail tunic. No way she made this so quickly.
At my look, she makes an ahem sound. “Armorer. I modified some things I already had in inventory.”
Of course. My face grows warm.
The chainmail is lightweight, though, lighter than it feels like it should be, and it doesn’t clink that much when I move.
“Put your arms up,” Aigen says, and I obey. “All the way.”
I stretch.
“Twist.”
For the next five minutes, I follow her instructions while she observes my range of motion. When she’s satisfied I’m not going to get chainmail pinched into my armpit if I turn too quickly, she nods.
“Do you want boots?”
“Do I want…boots?”
“Elf. Scrawny. Likes to be barefoot. How are your feet without boots?” Now she just sounds like she’s talking to a toddler.
“I do like being barefoot, but—” I stop. “I’ve always just been in the city. I never really gave it much thought.”
Aigen reaches for something on the table, and when I see what it is, I have to blink back tears unexpectedly.
Foot wraps, like Apathan always wears. I never really paid attention to his feet, but I do remember before his knee got bad when he’d sit crosslegged in front of the fire and stretch in the mornings before carefully wrapping his feet in leather. He always left his toes free. “So I can feel things I’m meant to, as’lin,” he told me.
“Those are perfect,” I say before Aigen can hand them to me. “Thank you.”
The tall woman blinks at me, her eyes softening. “There’s bracers here, which are adjustable, so the fit shouldn’t be a problem. Last thing.”
She holds up a breastplate, watching me carefully as she turns it so I can see the front of it.
She’s emblazoned it with a stylized rift that cuts vertically through the very center, and in the middle of that is a symbol I don’t recognize. It looks like a star, if I had to guess. The way stars look when you squint at them and the light bends to make a burst. It’s fuller in the middle, just above the centerline of the breastplate, and it trails downward to a burst of smaller sparks, all molded into the silvery-white metal like a comet’s tail.
“While it’s not as immediately practical, it is important that you feel kinship to the emblem of your movement.” Aigen holds it out to me, and I take it. “If we are to call you Aurora’s Chosen, the celestine, you need to feel like we are yours. Like the banner we raise in your name is truly yours. It needs to be yours.”
“Yes,” I say softly. “You got it exactly right.”
Aigen takes it back from me to help me into it, fitting it over the mail with its leather buckles and over my back. It’s the first time I’ve worn proper armor, and it feels—if not normal—right.
“Good,” she says. “That’s not half bad.”
“Are you kidding? It’s marvelous.”
“You do your job, celestine, and leave the smithing to me. Perhaps someday I’ll get the chance to show you marvelous.” Aigen’s cheeks show the slightest twitch of a dimple that says she’s hiding a smile.
“Speaking of smithing, we might need your help fortifying the city. Those tunnels—”
“Already working on it. Which is to say we’re working on fixing the outer walls first, because if they get to those tunnels at all, we’ve got far bigger problems.” Aigen helps me on with my bracers finally. “You should have a helmet or a cowl or something, but if you can bear the risk of it, I’d say hold off.”
“Hold off?” I ask warily.
“Right now they need to learn your face. It’s a pretty one, but that’s not the point. The point is hope, and with that thing in the sky, everyone in Sirethan needs hope more than anything else.”
With that, Aigen shoos me out of the armory with my new gear, telling me to find a tailor about casual wear.
I get a ping for having finished Aigen’s quest on my way upstairs, which seems to have just been to talk to her, really. I truly like her the more I interact with her. She seems deliberate, thoughtful. But when she moves, she moves. I appreciate that about her.
A sharp whistle gets my attention as I’m climbing the stairs back toward the companion quarters. When I look over, Ink’s perched straddling the enormous marble balustrade, their back up against a pillar with a piece of grass dangling from their lips like a caricature of a farmer. Or maybe they just remind me of Peter Pan. I’m not entirely sure.
“Something amok?” I ask.
“Might be. Fancy a field trip?” Ink nods at me—or on second thought, at my new outfit. “Break in the new stuff maybe?”
“What’d you have in mind?”
Ink grins, lips tightening around the grass stem. “I found a cave full of spiders.”
Nineteen
Cave full of spiders is not exactly the descriptor I want to hear, well. Let’s face it. Ever.
Something of my distaste must show on my face, because Ink bursts out laughing.
“You should see your face.” They giggle. “If I could make my face do that—oh, never mind. It’s not actually full of spiders. There might be some spiders. It’s probably more likely that we’ll run into a goruk and some of its minions, though, and I think you’ll want to take care of them.”
“I’m listening.” The sentence comes out with a slight upward intonation at the end that makes it sound more like a question, probably because I’m still stuck on cave full of spiders, and I don’t even know for sure what a goruk is.
Ink swings their leg to the inside ledge of the balustrade and hops down.
“I was talking to a few of the servants who stuck around, and they said that Speaker Stabbyknives liked to hide stuff down there when he didn’t want his best pals to find out. Which means—”
“Which means it could be useful. Right. That sounds like a good plan to check out.” It does, really, and I’m getting a bit antsy in the palace.
“You need to blow off some steam, celestine,” Ink proclaims. “Who else do you want to join us?”
“I think Aigen’s busy, but we probably would be smart to bring along Sasun, too. And Teinath? If there’s spiders, he could help me roast them.” Now I’m just embarrassing myself. I sound pathetic.
I just really hate spiders. It’s not the most original fear, but one of the myriad reasons my parents are terrible is that they used to show me horror movies when I was a kid to see how scared I’d get, and one of them featured lots and lots of spiders. Impressionable age. I’ve gotten to the point where I can see an arachnid without going catatonic, but those are also usually Earth arachnids, which, unless you’re in Australia, do not tend to be the size of pit bulls.
But Ink’s shaking her head. “Teinath’s busy learning to run the city today. Get Ferelthin.”
Why does that make me feel nervous?
“Okay,” I say after a beat. “You get Sasun, I’ll go find him.”
The walk up to the companion quarters has me worried I won’t actually find him after all he said about maybe not being around, but when I arrive upstairs and knock on the door to his room, he’s there, in a new outfit himself.
For a too-long moment, we both just look at each other. Aigen—because it has to be her work—has him in what looks like counterpoint to what I’m wearing. His colors are almost lilac-grey and charcoal in contrast to mine, making the deep purple tattoos on the sides of his head stand out even more.
“Hi,” I say, dropping my gaze to the floor almost sheepishly.
Get it together.
“I see Aigen found you too,” he says. “It suits you. A mage who is a graceful fighter is rare enough; she should have the equipment needed to do what she must without fear of a stray stroke causing preventable damage.”
He raises a hand lightly to my shoulder, healed now, but drops it again after the slightest brush of his knuckles against the chainmail.
It feels like he’s sent a lightning bolt through me.
“Thank you,” I manage to say. Barely. Did he say I was a graceful fighter? He did. “I’m glad to see she made certain of the same for you.”
Help.
To my utter disbelief, Ferelthin blushes, glancing down at his feet before meeting my eyes again. “With a little luck, none of us will embarrass the cause on the field.”
“Speaking of fields,” I say, then wince. “Or rather, speaking of caves.”
“We’re speaking of caves?”
“We’re about to be.” Smooth, Lithrial. Well done. “Ink found a cave, and she wants us to explore it with her.”
Ferelthin doesn’t blink for a moment, then he twitches. “Wait. You’re serious.”
“Oh. Yes?” There’s a moment of awkward silence. “It’s probably not actually full of spiders, right?”
The other elf’s laugh is almost enough to make me ready to take on a whole palace full of spiders.
Almost.
Ink is the only one who seems excited about this cave, flitting ahead of us and then back the whole way out of the city. It’s not far from the palace at all, through the southeastern-most gate and a bare mile toward the mountains themselves. Both Ferelthin and I walk with our staves in hand. Sasun makes a disgusted noise any time a bird sings, which strikes me as strange, but the serpentus is not someone I know well enough to pester about it yet.
Plus, I think she could flatten me.
“We’re almost there!” Ink sing-songs the words, stopping halfway up a grassy hillock with both hands on their hips.
The posture is so Peter Pan-like, I half-expect Ink to burst into a rendition of I Won’t Grow Up.
“What is it with changelings and caves?” Ferelthin asks under his breath.
Sasun makes another noise that could be a laugh this time.
Doggedly, I follow Ink up the hillock.
The slope evens out against the wall of a ravine. There’s a creek bed at the bottom of it, dry for the season, though in the distance somewhere I do hear a trickle of water.
And sure enough, tucked back behind a large bramble is a hole.
New Quest: Go Tell It In the Mountain. Ink has discovered a cave near the city where it’s said Speaker Feld kept things he didn’t want the Disciples of the One God to find. Explore the cave and find out if your changeling friend is right. Beware of the locals.
Great.
“I’ll go first,” Sasun says, and without waiting for anyone to object, she slips around Ferelthin and Ink and heads right in.
Darkness immediately envelops us.
“I don’t suppose anyone thought to bring a torch?” Ferelthin asks with deceptive mildness.
“Torch?” Ink asks as if he’s suggested bringing Speaker Feld’s gold plated tea set we found in one of the parlors.
“Oh, for Viath’s sake,” I mutter. At least this gives me a chance to try out my celestial night-light. I coax a trickle of mana into me, melding it with the hum of the rift, and a ball of silver light forms in my palm. “Better, Ferelthin?”
He looks at the light, then at me. “Yes.”
Sasun gives me a nod of approval and moves deeper into the cave. The first few minutes of walking are unremarkable, but after we’ve gone probably a quarter of a mile down the gentle slope, Sasun motions to the walls, where ahead a black shape stands out against the grey stone, lines too angular and sharp to be a natural formation.
“Not sure if it’s Feld that put those here, but someone definitely got use out of this cave and didn’t want the light from those torches to be seen from the entrance,” she says. “Lithrial or Ferelthin, one of you could probably light it.”
Maintaining my little ball of light doesn’t take too much mana, but I’m not sure how well I’ll be able to juggle it if we need to fight.
It doesn’t take much to draw on Tein’s portion of my magic, the fire god, the one Teinath is named for. The torch against the wall of the cave ignites with a muted whoomph, and I let the star-light go out.
My eyes need a moment to adjust to the change in light, but there are other torches at intervals along the walls. I light a couple more while the others keep watch. The cave is still little more than a tunnel, but the slope’s grade increases noticeably after the third torch.
Sasun takes point again. I try to listen past the sound of our footsteps for anything indicating whether we’re alone or not. The sound quality is muted. Quiet. There’s a soft rush of air and the scuff of our feet. I’m starting to understand what Apathan meant about his foot wraps allowing him to feel what he’s meant to. The floor is…cool without being cold. There are irregularities in the stone, but nothing sharp.
There. A sound. I wait to see if it comes again, slowing my breathing and my pace.
Almost a high-pitched creak or a squeak, but definitely made by something alive.
“Be ready,” I say softly.
Sasun’s head swivels to look at me, but she nods and stops walking.
The tunnel is opening up around us a bit. We’re almost outside the light of the last torch. No one moves while I walk to the next one.
As I light it, the stone beneath my feet vibrates almost imperceptibly with the force of a series of small impacts.
“Look out!” I yell, jumping back from the fire.
Not a moment too soon.
Crawling along the base of the tunnel wall right where it meets the floor is a spider the size of a wild boar.
Ink crows and looses an arrow at it just as Ferelthin hits it with lightning. The spider brushes off the electricity like it’s a mild annoyance, and I cast Starfire at it, dancing back out of its range. The blast of my spell catches it in its enormous torso, throwing it off balance, but the damn thing has eight legs and knows how to use them to catch itself against the tunnel wall behind the torch and stabilize.
