Chapter 149 – Burn |
Saphienne questioned; she agonised; she weighed and reweighed. She scrutinised the indeterminable division between self and other, only to reach a conclusion that had been obvious to her all along. Whether or not she could choose, it was better to act under the presumption that she possessed free will than risk throwing away her right to decide.
Yet as you and I come to the crescendo of this story, I would have you know:
She had a choice. To be an elf, or to be a dragon. To show mercy, or to condemn. To be joyful in the woodlands, or to be discontented as herself.
Saphienne had a choice.
So did we all.
* * *
Sleep was peaceful but brief.
Saphienne rose early and glided through to her mother’s room. She paused on the threshold to smile wryly at the two figures entangled in the sheets, neither of whom were Lynnariel, both of whom were dreaming deeply.
Creeping to the chest at the foot of the bed, she withdrew ‘The Girl and the Gulls’ and impassively skimmed what was written inside; the poem she’d penned slid soundlessly between the pages, concealed from watchful spirits with the same sleight of hand as had hidden its composition beneath more banal writing.
Downstairs, the warden Elowyn nodded grumpily to Saphienne, paying no particular attention to her passing. Lynnariel was sipping tea in the kitchen while gazing into the rear garden, serene against the riotous blossoms that devoted spirits had grown.
“I see you slept with him after all. How drunk were you?”
Her mother blushed. “Sober! So was he. Phelorna drank more than enough for the three of us.”
“Elowyn isn’t pleased.” Saphienne tipped down the sink’s enchanted pitcher. “I suppose she’ll be watching me at night, now that he can’t be impartial.”
“She’s annoyed because Myrinel resigned from the wardens yesterday.”
That made her grin. “Shocking. You and Phelorna lured him astray.”
“He doesn’t know what he wants to do.” Lynnariel faced her daughter. “He just knows that he doesn’t belong with them. They tried to talk him into staying, but his mind was made up…”
Careful not to betray the subtext, Saphienne shrugged lightly. “I’m sure he’ll find something to do with himself. I’ll miss him being here at night.”
“So will I.” Her mother swallowed the tea as though it were acrid. “But he’s changed a lot since he first came to stay with us; so have I. Whatever the future holds, so long as he finds something that makes him happy, I’ll be glad for him.”
The flippancy in her tone was incongruous with her sorrowful heart. “Will you be pining for him?”
Lynnariel forced a laugh. “I’m sure we’ll see each other.”
How she wished that could be true. Saphienne splashed her face with water to conceal her emotions, then inhaled a cleansing breath. “Just don’t give me a brother or sister right away. Wait a while.”
Another, more genuine laugh broke from her mother, who crossed to hug Saphienne with tender affection. “One daughter is plenty! He’s just a friend. Phelorna is taken with him, but she won’t be hurrying to have a family.”
They shared what they each sensed was a final embrace.
Lynnariel held her hands as they parted. “You’re busy today, aren’t you?”
“Extremely.” She squeezed her fingers. “I’m helping Nelathiel entertain the children, and I’ll be rehearsing my story before then. May I make a request?” She fixed her mother with an insistent stare. “I know Phelorna goes to the Shrine of Our Lord of the Tranquil Garden around this time every year. Could you both meet me there? Just before noon? I’d like to pray with you.”
“I’ll persuade her.” Lynnariel trusted Saphienne.
“I might be late — you know how children can be.” The dragon’s hold was steel. “Promise you’ll both wait there for me? No matter the festival’s distractions?”
Her mother mirrored her grip. “We won’t wander off. I’ll make sure.”
Their hands ached as she pulled away.
* * *
Dressed for the day before anyone else in her household, Saphienne waited on the couch for Sundamar. She’d warned him the prior evening that she’d left her story in the studio, claiming that she wanted to do her exercises and practice her performance before the morning festivities began.
He collected her at the agreed hour — though they were waylaid by Myrinel’s emergence on the landing, provoking a friendly yet fierce heckling from his former comrades.
“No offence intended to your lovely mother,” Sundamar muttered as they went out into the grove, “but she isn’t going to hold onto Myrinel. I give them a month or two before he regains his senses and takes up his bow again.”
Saphienne feigned that she was contemplating his assessment as she surveyed her family home for the last time. No, not her family home: the tree atop the grove had always been her home, for all that she hadn’t wanted to admit it.
“You might not be wrong about them,” she replied, turning from her past, “but I don’t think you’re right about Myrinel. He wasn’t at peace.”
The warden grunted. “Maybe. Too much reading on his own. He was fine before he got lost in his own head.”
“I’ll pray for him.”
Bizarrely? She didn’t feel like she was lying.
* * *
Shortly after crossing the ward ringing the tent pavilion, Saphienne heard windchimes tinkling, Holly assuming her invisible guard duty. This reassured Saphienne that her gambit had been correctly conceived, only one spirit present to be dealt with… alongside the warden who bathed in the morning sunlight just outside the entrance.
An almost-finished wooden sculpture sat ready. Saphienne left it where it was as she positioned herself within the small forest of carved elves and spirits that crowded her work area, concerning herself with the nearest statues, checking they were properly placed. Her gaze lingered on a leafless, seemingly abandoned tree half-concealed behind her plinth.
Satisfied, having rehearsed in her head what was to follow a hundred times, she took her fascinator from her satchel and seated herself in the clearing, flipping the jewel to illuminate the nine carvings that were arranged against the wall.
Flickering colours sprang up in the stones, sigils revealed by the fascinating radiance filling the tent.
A third of the nine were for Sundamar and Holly. These she memorised first, willing the serpentine symbols to slither into her mind, where they coiled in anticipation, intense violet beside two distinct hues of violet-yellow-orange. She didn’t have to command their submission, for she was their maker, and like drakes, they lived to serve a dragon.
The remainder were far more complicated. One was vested yet hollow, hungry for the mark that would soon fill its void. All seared into her eyes — smouldered on her kindling.
Magician and dragon, artist and tyrant, Saphienne gathered herself together.
Her call was concerned. “Sundamar?”
He peered through the opening. “You need me?”
“Something is wrong with my fascinator.” She stood and pointed to the gem. “There’s a crack… I think…”
Cautious, though more toward the enchantment than Saphienne, the warden entered and strode to her side with his hand near his belt. “If it’s broken then there’s nothing I can do about it.”
“I’m not sure whether it is… do you see what I see?”
He didn’t bend, kept Saphienne in front of himself as he crouched to examine–
She was faster than his knife.
* * *
Fascination, apprentice, is not about dominance. A master of our discipline does not need to force their will onto others: our spells are most potent when they are in alignment with the subject and their everyday disposition. The better you know a mind, the easier you will find convincing them to think and feel as you desire, for their desires and habits are chains to bind them to your rule.
You cannot make someone go against who they are, but you shouldn’t ever need to.
* * *
The steel blade hovered against her throat.
“Please sheath your knife and shut your eyes,” Saphienne instructed.
Sundamar obediently lowered the knife as his eyelids fluttered closed. He was good at following orders.
She didn’t pause to be sure he would obey — snatching up the enchanted chisel and lunging for his head.
Holly took the bait.
* * *
A dizzying collage of books and plinths and flowers and willow leaves surrounded the bloomkith as she plummeted into an unexpected chasm, her self-conception resembling a thinner and more graceful Nelathiel as she flailed and shrieked in bewildered fright.
Saphienne was waiting when she washed up on the beach, animating the sprouting grass to tie her to the ground. “If it makes you feel better, possessing Sundamar wouldn’t have worked either.”
Tawny eyes wide, Holly gaped at the scaled woman who held her captive. “Saphienne…? How have you–”
“Hyacinth once warned me that you would join any hunt called against me,” the dragon mused, tilting her head as her tail wove back and forth. “Unlike you, my horns aren’t merely an affectation. I require no chase to catch you.”
Terror withered the bloomkith. “…I am to be devoured…”
“I don’t need to eat you.” Saphienne paced around her captive, her physical form tipping over the nearest of the wooden sculptures, elves and spirits toppling in succession, forming a circle. “And I don’t want to. Everything you were taught about dragons is a partial truth; I am not – nor was I ever – a behemoth with rapacious appetites. All I tried to do was leave the woodlands to be among my own kind.”
“What– what will you do to me?”
“Be not afraid: I’ve no interest in digging for your secret name.” Within the studio, she set the tree in the middle of the miniature glade. “Gaeleath isn’t coming today, and Sundamar is mine. No one will notice you’re missing until I’m done…”
Realisation made Holly struggle, her kicking futile.
“…While you wait, think long and hard about your sisters like Tyrnansunna. However unpleasant your imprisonment, at least I’ve promised it will end.”
* * *
Binding secured, Saphienne had Sundamar hand her the arrows from his quiver, then take up place just inside the door, watching to ensure no one would disturb her during her delicate spellcraft.
She didn’t anticipate anyone. Keeping him busy kept him docile.
Vestaele’s enchantment throbbed with hostility, but the draconic magic she wielded had little in common with the resonance that it had been fashioned to counter. Transmuting the pattern with exacting precision was demanding, so much so that her first attempt failed, leaving the arrow mundane. Saphienne corrected her error; her subsequent effort proved flawless, and she held the altered arrow underarm as she reached for her woodworking tools, moving to the plinth.
When the transfer was complete, she turned her hand to louder work.
* * *
Magician and warden left the tent after half an hour.
Behind them lay a bound spirit, a heap of formerly enchanted arrows, and eight piles of broken stone.
The ninth engraving was not left unmarred. Her chisel had split apart the dragon that once reared behind the pious girl, destroying it along with the sigil hidden in its breath, leaving only its lashing tail and curling teeth, the latter repurposed as horns, both belonging to the new, truer likeness hewn from durable green.
* * *
Sundamar liked being her lookout. He was good at looking on as others did things that made him feel bad.
Saphienne left him in the grove while she went around her old house and through the once more untended garden. The hillock hadn’t changed on the outside, though when she pushed through the door and saw the forge she chuckled to herself. Her sandalled feet carried her over the clay floor to set her satchel on the bench, and then her fingertips trailed across a row of shining, mythril implements that now hung on the wall.
She passed them over. Her grasp instead lifted the heavy hammer formerly wielded by Taerelle.
“The promise of winter’s end.” She wound around the ritual space. “The promise of winter’s end. The promise–”
Hyacinth gusted in from the garden to burrow beneath her skin.
* * *
They kissed. Thrill and fear were palpable in their intermingling.
“I am yours,” swore the cradled bloomkith. “Your will be done.”
Saphienne bared her sharp teeth. “Lend strength to my arm.”
* * *
Beat by beat, hardened clay shattered.
She didn’t gasp or sweat, but nor was she composed, her hair wild and her heart singing as she sundered the floor from edge to centre, freeing what had lain undisturbed and yet undiminished since her detainment. Step by step in a narrowing gyre, she separated the ruddy covering from sand and scoured stone.
A meow halted her swing.
Yet Inky was not alone in the entranceway. The cat sprawled across shoulders clad in robes that matched his black fur, comfortably draped behind the neck of his keeper in what was evidently his customary place. “…Saphienne?”
She smirked, waving with the hammer. “Celaena. Weren’t you busy this morning?”
“I lied…” The apprentice wizard spoke distantly. “I didn’t go to a revel last night, either… I just came home and had wine, in the bath…”
“An excellent use of the evening.” Two more strikes finished preparing the ground. “Did you have chocolate as well? I’ve missed wine and chocolate…”
Nervous, but summoning her courage, Celaena crossed the threshold. “What are you doing? You sound like you’re–”
“How I was before Tolduin ruined my mind.” Saphienne unceremoniously tossed the hammer to clatter by the forge, then retrieved her satchel. “Correctly observed, apprentice — albeit belatedly.”
Celaena was stunned. “…You’re really you…”
“In the flesh.” She sauntered to the midpoint of the floor. “Though not for long.”
Since her lonely childhood, the daughter of a wizard had been accustomed to restraining her feelings and focusing on fact. “You were waiting for the festival,” Celaena understood, recovering her poise. “You intend to leave.”
“I don’t belong in the woodlands.” Saphienne placed a hand on her hip, Hyacinth fading from her eyes to waft protectively around her. “I’m sorry you had to hear it from Almon, but I never was a bird. You were right about my wings and talons, though.”
“You don’t believe you’re an elf.” Celaena’s sadness was tinged with pity. “Oh, Saphienne…”
A feral grin lit her face. “Would you have reacted this way before? I felt like you would have… but then, what you whispered to me after Iolas left made me wonder…”
“Saphienne, please, listen.” The apprentice wizard raised her hands in supplication. “I don’t know what Hyacinth has been saying to you–”
“She said hello, by the way.”
“–But you’re not well.” Her blue-grey gaze pleaded. “I’m glad what was done to you wasn’t lasting, but you need help. We can go to Master Almon: he’ll know how to handle this wisely.”
Saphienne sighed. “I’ll be visiting him next… I just needed to collect what I’d left here. Hyacinth, if you would please clear the floor?”
Whirling, the spirit startled Celaena and Inky as she swept the ground, pushing shards of clay and grains of sand to the room’s edge, thereby exposing the vitrified spiral that had lain obscured since the previous summer festival.
“…What in the world…”
Saphienne aligned herself with its turning. “…I am what I make of it…”
“A sigil?” Celaena had clasped her hands before her chest, and she lowered them to cast the Second Sense, divination briefly whitening her pupils. “But unlike any I’ve seen… this isn’t elven…”
“Of course not.” Saphienne shivered as Hyacinth resumed possession. “I made it — and I am not an elf.”
Shaken from her contemplation by those words, Celaena squeezed her fingers behind her back as she addressed her friend. “Saphienne, I know that belonging is difficult… and you’ve endured so much pain… far more than anyone should… but running from what you are isn’t the answer. You’re not a–”
“Aren’t I?”
A roar evoked the veridian fire that whistled from the dragon’s spreading hands, flame bathing the spiral she twirled to obliterate, directed with confidence and skill that had deepened in the reflection compelled by her detention. And yet, though the fearsome display made Celaena cower and Inky flee, her lips were not contorted in anger, but bent in an exultant grin.
Cooling bands of glass hissed in the aftermath.
“They would kill me for this.” Saphienne steepled her fingers. “I was inconvenient, and that was enough for them to have Tolduin shred my mind. If they’d witnessed what you’ve now seen? I would have been put to death.”
Celaena was dazed.
“I wasn’t a monster.” She delicately stepped over the melted bands. “I had no desire to hurt anyone. I was going to leave and make a home for unwanted elven children, like Kylantha. All I wanted was freedom.” She stopped before the woman in black. “If I had asked you, instead of Faylar… would you have come with me?” She leaned close, whispering in her trembling ear. “Would you yet join me, if I asked now?”
Celaena shut her eyes. She managed to shake her head.
“I thought not.” Saphienne swayed around her. “I don’t blame you for being who you are. Take Inky to a shrine or sacred glade, and throughout what unfolds, trust that I’m making the least worst choice.”
“…What are you going to do?”
In the doorway, Saphienne didn’t look back. “Something great and terrible. If you ever respected my judgement – if you have ever loved me as much as I love you – then don’t try to stand in my way. Goodbye, Celaena.”
* * *
Hyacinth went on ahead; Saphienne meditated as she walked north and westward. Her fire branded the waiting sigil, settling into place around the exclusions she’d carefully formulated.
Her sole limitation would be her own sense of the sacred and the profane.
* * *
She closed the door to the parlour behind her.
Reminiscence was a dangerous indulgence, but Saphienne allowed herself to take in the classroom where she had been taught the Great Art. There lay the throne that had loomed over her studies; there below the window were the writing boards that had been her battlefield; there was the fireplace that had crackled in winter, and on its mantlepiece a toad she had – much later – carved in the same season; there upon the shelves the books from which she’d stolen her fledgling, weak flame.
And there, holding his lapels atop the curving staircase, was her teacher.
“I knew this reckoning would come to pass. Upon learning the auguries for the festival were confused and conflicted, I suspected you would pay me a visit.” The portly wizard bowed. “My welcome to you, Master Saphienne.”
She returned his courtesy. “Thank you, Master Almon.”
“Not that you would have reason to believe me,” he admitted, “but I told no one. Your recovery is to known only to myself.”
Saphienne smiled as she strolled to his chair. “Shall I joke that you can’t know anything — or that you’re existentially incapable of telling anyone else?”
His lips curled. “Very good.” All humour vanished as he descended a few steps. “I cannot blame you for seeking revenge; what was done to you was an obscenity. Although I will defend my life, I will not defend my conduct.”
“Hearing that is affirming,” she replied as she reached into her satchel, “but I haven’t come to punish you.”
His eyebrows rose. “No?”
“I’ve forgiven you.” She presented the gift she’d made. “I bring this.”
His blue gaze fell on the wooden flower that recollected the hallucinated lavender with rounded leaves once disbelieved on a snowy night. For an instant his eyes glimmered…
Then he cast the Second Sense.
“Not that you would have reason to trust me,” Saphienne mocked him, “but the only spell or enchantment you’ll see is the fascinator I’m carrying.”
“So it would appear.” Almon leant on the banister for support. “But your attainment exceeds mine. This could well be a trick.”
She didn’t refute him. “I made and memorised new spells. Sundamar is fascinated — I left him outside.”
The wizard drummed his fingers. “What a change from the girl you were! I recall you being quite upset with yourself for compelling Iolas.”
“I have no intentions of harming him.” Her stare was defiant yet cool. “You know what I am. You know that I don’t belong in these woods. You know that my kind are not all the behemoths described in the stories.”
“…I contemplated your recovery.” Almon inclined his head. “You always did refuse to be anything other than what you chose for yourself…”
“Unwelcome fascinations and transmutations that surpass my resistances will either be overcome–”
“–Or result in your death.” He’d read the same treatise.
She set the offering down on his chair. “I daren’t linger. Farewell, old friend.”
He called for her to wait when she reached the door. Saphienne approached as Almon came down to lift the flower.
“…Exquisite.” He turned the warm, unvarnished petals toward the light. “Clearer than I remember. To think that my demonstration left such a lasting impression…”
“Indelible.”
Almon lowered the true likeness of the false bloom. His hand trembled; his voice was fainter than breath. “I’m sorry, Saphienne.”
She, too, softened. “I know.”
That moment between them lives eternally.
“Let me show you something,” Saphienne reluctantly said, producing the fascinator. “You will appreciate the artistry — you may well be the only other magician in the woodlands who holds the beauty of the Great Art in higher regard than its power.”
The wizard wavered. “Have you tampered with the fascinator?”
“No. This is like any other.” She held out her empty, left hand for the gift. “Let me have that for a moment — I’ll return it presently.”
No child can resist the allure of their own curiosity; and we are all children in the presence of that which we love. Almon passed the blossom back to his former student by its pointed stem.
“Thank you,” she smiled.
Saphienne flipped over the beguiling gemstone–
And drove the sharp stake into Almon’s shoulder.
* * *
A scream brought Sundamar into the classroom.
Saphienne was unyielding where she held the wizard pinned against his shelves, twisting the wood to painfully subdue him as the pink star in her right hand shone sweetly across the parlour. “Shut the door, and then restrain him.”
Almon writhed, pale with shock. His ward had been pierced by the magic abruptly imbued into the weapon, collapsing entirely when the enchantment had tasted his blood — as had the hallucination he wore. Exposed, he was much thinner in build than he contrived to appear, less substantial, gaunt in his face, his grey eyes sunken in their sockets.
“What–” He winced as she pressed harder, red seeping into his blue silks. “How?”
The warden seized Almon efficiently, wrenching both arms behind his back and pulling them upward. “Come quietly.”
Saphienne gestured to the stairs. “Take him to the uppermost floor. Don’t let the restraint be removed, keep his head down, and keep him away from the windows.”
“How did you do this?”
“Ignore whatever he says.” Saphienne was concentrating as she trailed them, utterly immersed in the reality of the bars she asserted upon every entry and exit. “Peacock! If you attempt to leave our presence, I’ll kill him.”
Almon countermanded her as he was dragged up. “Don’t listen! Go for–”
His straining against Sundamar told her where the figment lurked, and she rounded on the imaginary bird she willed herself to perceive. “I won’t warn you again: stay, or he dies.”
Shedding feathers where he beat his wings to hover improbably beside the steps, the panicked familiar was shrieking. “You’ll kill him anyway!”
“His death is unnecessary. I’ll only kill him to prevent you from raising the alarm.”
“You aim for the vault? Fool! If you’d asked him–”
“What I want isn’t in the vault.” She caught up with the warden, following Sundamar beyond the sitting room. “Nor would he ever surrender it.”
* * *
Outside the wizard’s bedroom, Saphienne faced the wall between the windows and cast a spell to project his hallucinatory seal upon it, effortlessly mimicking his resonance — having been thoroughly acquainted with his spellcraft by her apprenticeship. The passage to the vault coalesced from a blue haze.
“He holds a key: find it.”
But Almon laughed as the warden emptied his pockets. “I don’t have it.”
“I won’t be deceived.”
“I’m not deceiving you!” He grimaced as Sundamar patted down his arms. “Vestaele insisted I pass the key to Tolduin; she foresaw you might try this…”
She stared him down while the warden completed his search. Saphienne didn’t need to wait for Sundamar to shake his head to know that the wizard spoke truthfully.
Peacock settled on the vault’s steps, forgoing his typical sarcasm in anxiety. “He would’ve told you if you’d asked! Vestaele didn’t trust him not to–”
“Quieten yourself.” Saphienne went around the bird, climbing until the adamantine hatch blocked her progress.
Sundamar trod through the figment as he pulled Almon after them.
Was this to be her defeat? All her careful planning – every hour of toil – undone by a simple door? Hatch, lock, hinges, and setting: in the fascinator’s glow, all were made from the same dull grey adamantine that not even a dragon’s fire could melt.
“It pains me to tell you this,” Almon dryly remarked, “but you’ll have to go without your spellbook.”
A great weight settled upon her. “…I don’t have time to take the spare key from Vestaele…”
“Whatever you sought is beyond your reach.”
Heavy and heavy, she hung her head.
The magician let her eyelids fall–
And her cheek stung.
Saphienne’s gaze hardened against the magical metal. “…There must be a way.”
“Adamantine is impervious to all magic. The lock cannot be picked — and the whole vault is similarly reinforced.”
Yet she paid no heed to the impossibilities clarified by the wizard, her brain ablaze with insight fanned from the cinders of her past. What right did she have to despair? Her wyrd had carried her to this point; and all her life, her wyrd had driven her to breach barriers contrived to thwart her. Why should now be any different?
Her lips moved silently. “Take me one step further; I’ll walk the rest myself. Show me what I must see.”
Impassive before her plea, the hatch was unyielding, unbreakable, neither warm nor cool to the touch, sheer and perfect–
Saphienne blinked.
Goosebumps rose across her skin as she stepped back.
In his dread, Almon misread her posture. “I won’t call for help if–”
“How we see things…” Saphienne laughed to herself. “…That’s how my wyrd plays out in the world. Wyrd is but another word for story; our stories shape how we perceive what surrounds us; we act in accordance with what we can conceive through them.”
Peacock squawked. “I see a locked hatch. What do you think you see?”
Her speech grew dreamlike. “I made my coin into adamantine… later on, I studied the magical metals. I wanted to understand how a substance other than iron or steel could be made indestructible through magic.” Her hand stretched outward. “But it wasn’t the copper that I transmuted; nor is it the gold or the silver that become orichalcum and mythril.”
Saphienne traced the surface with her fingertips. “Mythril cannot hold magic, and orichalcum retains it forever. Silver and gold are both bright in the daylight, but one inevitably darkens.” Her palm settled in place as her magic flowed throughout her being. “Orichalcum is forged from the imperishable lustre of gold… mythril is wrought from the tarnishing of silver… and adamantine is formed from the sole unvanquishable trait…”
She pressed as delicately as she breathed; bolts around the hatch gave a sharp squeal as they each sheared in two.
“…Imperfection.”
The crude iron pivoted on its hinge to shatter on the floor.
Below her, both the learn’d wizard and his talkative familiar were speechless.
* * *
Almon had left the chair in front of the circle inscribed on the floor. She smiled at that as she scanned the shelves, finding her belongings near where she’d last seen them.
“Take them,” Almon grunted. “Take them and go.”
Her glare was withering. “Really? After everything I’ve achieved, do you think I’m that stupid?”
Between his thin cheeks his own smile was sickly. “…You’re far from the impatient apprentice you once were.”
Her authority – upheld by Sundamar – made the wizard gingerly lift her spellbook before he was forcefully seated on the floor within the ring. Meanwhile, Saphienne placed the active fascinator on the chair and then wandered past the sheathed sword and rods of repulsion, scanning for the implement most crucial to her design.
Hyacinth interrupted, tiredly summiting the stairs in a shambling floral shell. “All is as you wish; the flowerbeds now grow across the gravel, and their spying blossoms lie dead above and below.”
Peacock chirped in dismay. “Not his garden! Shame on you! Couldn’t you at least have left him that?”
Saphienne ignored her guilt. “Take over from Sundamar. Don’t possess–”
“I recall,” replied the bloomkith, lumbering to Almon to bind him with her briars.
At last the magician found the green and white gemstone in a silvery ring, trepidation bidding her hesitate before she collected the enchantment.
Ensnared in twining greenery with purple petals, Almon moaned as he beheld what she intended. “…Poetic justice…”
“This isn’t revenge.”
“So you have claimed, Saphienne.”
She dismissed Sundamar with an instruction to prevent anyone entering the parlour, settling cross-legged before the wizard, the jewel on her lap. “Please don’t try to fight me, Almon. Any injuries that result will be healed by Hyacinth; your refusal to comply will only prolong this unpleasantness.”
He laughed grimly. “After everything you’ve seen of me, do you think I’ll listen?”
Her rueful smile was affectionate. “Not until it’s too late.”
The other gemstone’s sunset was joined by a sinister, emerald dawn.
* * *
There wasn’t any need to narrate his history. Saphienne didn’t creep into Almon’s mind like a friendly fiend, but impacted the earth before his towering home in scaled majesty.
The wizard awaited her on his doorstep. “So this is how you know yourself? An elf becoming a dragon?”
She didn’t respond, acquainting herself with the unusual perspective as she tilted her horns and inspected her beautiful robes. The sensation of using the sculptor was akin to ruling over her inner landscape, yet her perspective was limited to her imagined senses.
“Not wholly a dragon…” He rose nimbly despite his returned bulk. “…But dragon enough to slay.”
Lightning flashed from the clear sky, and Almon caught the bolt, holding it to crackle and spark within his hands.
“The way is barred to you!” he thundered his warning. “Beware, wyrm: you trespass into the mind of a master of Hallucination! I have dreamed the fantastical longer than you have drawn breath. Retreat now, or make ready for a battle where your flame will not avail you!”
She shrugged as she sauntered forward. Whatever the differences to being on the receiving end, she could discern them as she worked.
“I say again: you shall not–”
Saphienne disbelieved the phantom as she walked through him, entering the classroom in search of her quarry.
Taerelle and Rydel were hard at work examining maps, and they looked up in surprise before scrambling to their feet. Nevertheless, she persisted to the stairs, wise to the attempted manipulation.
“This isn’t going to work on me,” she called out as she reached the sitting room. “I know you too well. You can bluster and bullshit, but you can’t hide.”
Running feet thumped overhead–
And Saphienne sighed, going down into the kitchen and through the still-swinging door that led into a maze cultivated from flowerbeds. She did him the courtesy of playing hunter, stalking the fleeing wizard rather than tearing through the blooms to catch him.
“You can’t escape me, either.” She caught glimpses of him – a child no more than twelve years old – as he vanished around each corner. “There’s no pretending with me. I know who you really are. Iradyn told us that you’d changed your name; I guessed why even before I learned about your book; and my conjecture was confirmed when your brother told me what happened to your fath–”
She rounded the final bend to arrive before Jorildyn’s studio, the door slamming shut and bolting as the boy took shelter within.
“…If you insist.” The dragon advanced without relent, claws smashing through the door to unlock and push it open.
Within the airy room–
Explosions deafened her.
Pummelled to the floor, Saphienne was buried under celestial detritus, luminous fragments raining down in the aftermath of a barrage of fallen stars.
“He was right about you, Saphienne: you do like to hear yourself talk.”
Straining against the glittering weight piled upon her, she managed to grin at an athletic, elegantly dressed wizard in yellows and greens who leant at ease near the window, meeting his sky-blue gaze with cheer. “Hello, Aldyn. You’re the part of him responsible for Peacock, aren’t you?”
“Of course you know me!” Delighted, he preened. “How wonderful! I always liked you better than the others; Taerelle and Rydel challenged him as a teacher, but they seldom had the courage to challenge him as a person — and they never took an interest in my bird.”
“Peacock might have been a lie, but the best lies are based on truth.”
The other half of Almon laughed fondly. “Indeed! Much of myself shows through that figment… which is to say, it shows much of his heart.”
With great difficulty, Saphienne managed to sit up. “All that he represses; all that the great and mighty wizard dare not be.”
“And so I’m greater than he who taught you.” Aldyn’s arms folded. “You cannot defeat me, Saphienne. You can kill me, but you will never best me. The dreaming mind is replete with terrifying potential: I’m more powerful than he whom I protect.”
“You’re right about all of that.” Her cheer diminished. “Destroying you will destroy him… there won’t be an Almon left behind.”
The guardian bowed. “You aren’t given to violence by nature. Withdraw, before you hurt him in a way that can’t be mended.”
“May I pose a thought to you?”
His eyebrows rose. Silhouetted against the glass, Aldyn perched on the edge of the sill. “Feel free! You’re the only visitor I’ve ever had.”
“He represses himself, which empowers you.” Saphienne smiled as she caught sight of her reflection in the window. “Can you imagine how much more powerful you’d be if he didn’t?”
Aldyn furrowed his brow. “That makes no–”
Kylantha cried out with glee as she crashed through the glass.
* * *
In the vault, the hallucination of a bird unwove into shapeless luminance.
* * *
“Get off me!”
“No,” Kylantha giggled, sitting on his back, her colossal weight pinning the larger yet lesser Aldyn beneath her. “Not until you apologise for what you said about Saphienne.”
He sagged in his subjugation. “Fine! I’m sorry: she’s appropriately enamoured with her own loquaciousness. Now release me!”
“I will — when she asks me to.”
Saphienne brushed brittle, sparkling remnants from her hair and shoulders as she went further into the studio, realising that the interior didn’t belong to Jorildyn. The mannequins were different, the construction older, and the drafting table was piled with swatches of bold fabrics that the tailor didn’t favour.
Not only fabrics: sigils scintillated above the surface, fraying at their pained edges, one more prominent than its peers.
Aldyn grew agitated. “Leave those alone!”
She squinted to identify them. “…I only need one of these…”
“Don’t you dare–”
Saphienne conjured her fire, consuming all symbols but that corresponding to Peacock, unmaking them while preserving their possibility.
Aldyn had ceased to struggle. “…Your magic isn’t elven…”
She shook her head. “I’ve surpassed the spellcraft of elves. If I merely dismissed these, he wouldn’t be able to prepare spells today.”
Comprehension caused Almon’s unconscious self to exhale with relief. “That’s what you’re doing this for? All of this, just to get around the traps laid on your spellbook? You’re a capable magician: why didn’t you craft a spell to counter them?”
“I needed to devote my time to other works.” She let the last sigil be, sweeping her gaze over the studio to find the door from which Aldyn had emerged as defender. “And I was going to have to use the sculptor anyway… which reminds me…”
* * *
Saphienne convulsed where she held the enchantment.
* * *
“…Better.” She inhaled as though fully filling her lungs for the first time, feeling the amazed happiness of the stunted self she’d reabsorbed. “I’d forgotten what it feels like to have my whole brain to myself.”
“Astounding…” Aldyn was awed. “Is that how you did it? You bent the transmutation to your will, and made a false self to be sculpted?”
She shot him a pitying glance. “He wishes that was the case, doesn’t he? No, Aldyn: I was almost erased. All I could do was plant a seed to regrow. I mastered the rest across the intervening years.” Saphienne drifted from the drafting table toward where a bolt of cloth hung to hide a doorway.
“He meant his apology!”
Kylantha flicked his ear. “And she meant her forgiveness! Saphienne didn’t lie.”
The magician pulled aside the veil…
* * *
…And Saphienne was suddenly in an entirely different time and place.
Rain fell beyond the dark window of the small study, drumming soothingly in complement to the candlelight. An ornate desk was before the glass, bookcases crowding the walls to either side, their shelves covered in titles both mystical and mundane.
She skimmed with interest. “…Some of these are restricted. ‘Descent and Madness’ isn’t available without special request; and access to the ‘The Bequeathment of Blooms’ isn’t allowed for anyone who lacks faculty with the Great Art.”
Several dozen volumes were untitled — a gap in their row.
“I understand you perfectly now.” She lowered her attention from the shelves, crouching down so that she was shaded from the flickering illumination by the edge of the desk she looked under. “Your father was a sorcerer, wasn’t he?”
Knees folded up to his chest, the child who would rename himself Almon kept reading as he answered. “He only wanted to be a tailor.”
“But that isn’t quite right, is it?” Saphienne knelt. “He was an artist, like you.”
“I’m nothing like him.” The boy turned to a new page. “My father didn’t want me to pursue wizardry. He intended to make me in his likeness.”
“That’s ironic….” She canted her head. “Jorildyn said your father didn’t want you to be like him… but your brother was referring to his illness, I suppose.”
“Our mother left because of it.”
“Your father gave up the study of magic?”
Finally, the child met her stare. “He renounced all his arts. He was convinced that his creative work worsened his condition… even poetry.”
She knew then whose composition Almon had presented on the night she’d met Iolas.
“My father was paranoid. He refused any help.”
“And help couldn’t be forced on him while he wasn’t a danger to others, or…” She let the rest go unsaid. “That’s why you and Iradyn remain friends, isn’t it? You were loyal to him throughout because you’d seen the same before.”
“Everyone abandoned my father.” His anger was hot. “Even me.”
Saphienne took the book of handwritten poems from his unresisting grasp, seeing there the verse about stars that had profoundly moved them both. “You weren’t the same as them. You wanted to be what he couldn’t; you left because he wouldn’t let you.”
“He was inspired.” Wetness spilled onto the boy’s cheeks. “His poetry, his passions… they were immense. If he could only trust, he would have been…”
She bowed her head. “Did he die while you were away?”
“When I returned.” Misery poured from his recounting. “I’d donned the blue, and was home before I was to go to the Luminary Vale. He’d never been admitted; they judged him too unstable.”
“You wanted him to be proud of you.”
“I wanted him to see he was wrong. The fact that I was accepted proved he was wrong about me… and thus he could be mistaken about his art.”
Yet the realisation had driven the unwell man to suicide.
“You know the rest. What did you think of my writing?”
Shame made her blush. “I didn’t actually have opportunity to read it; Myrinel was greatly affected. I recognised your portrait of Iradyn from what I heard, and might have believed it was his prose had the ending not betrayed you.” Saphienne wiped her face. “Your magical praxis broke when your father died, didn’t it?”
“My old world ended.”
“That’s why you recommended writing a story. You’d written one to sift through yourself — searching for a new praxis.”
“‘Not less,’” quoted the wizard in full, “‘because in sapphire I descended the western day through what you called the loneliest air, not less was I myself.
“‘What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard? What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears? What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?
“‘Out of my mind the golden ointment rained, and my ears made the blowing hymns they heard. I was myself the compass of that sea: I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw or heard or felt came not but from myself…’”
She recited his ending. “‘…And there I found myself more truly and more strange.’”
In the lull, they let the rain speak for them.
“…You reinvented yourself as someone worth respecting, taking a suffix from an older generation for your new name.” Her mirth was gentle. “Given your poem, did your first attempt at Almon have facial hair?”
Disarmed, he chuckled. “I went too far. The point was to be memorable, not gawked at as an oddity.”
“What a mess you are.” She was grinning. “One sympathises.”
“…This really isn’t for vengeance, is it, Saphienne?”
“No. I couldn’t conceive of any approach that didn’t go straight through you.”
He found amusement in that sentiment. “But of course! I am the world in which I walk; you are what the world makes of you…”
Replete with vast and resolute dispassion, she pressed the poems into his hand and grasped his wrist. “…And I am what I make of the world.”
* * *
Restrained by Hyacinth, the wizard opened the spellbook, unharmed by the defences that would have disabled Saphienne as he studied the sigils the magician selected.
She called a halt after memorising the first through him, casting an Abjuration spell before they resumed.
* * *
“That will suffice.” She pulled the boy away from the drafting table, withdrawing him now that her mind was aglow with constellations of elven script. “I hope you found the experience enlightening.”
“…Somewhat.” He was humbled by her swiftness. “The Third Degree remains a mystery to me…”
“Would you be proud to know that I’ve mastered the next?”
Aldyn snorted, Kylantha giggling as she held him down.
Childlike in wonder as well as appearance, the wizard peered up at the dragon. “Entirely on your own? Without sigils to study? Then – even discounting your alacrity – you are among the greatest magicians the woodlands has ever produced.”
“Not among them…”
Rising in the vault, Saphienne kept the sculptor angled to Almon as she cast a Fascination spell, denying him the use of his limbs before she dimmed the fascinator and pulled the no longer enchanted wood from his shoulder, levitating her spellbook back to the shelves.
“…I am the greatest…”
Blossoms momentarily sprouted all throughout the son of a tailor’s studio, Hyacinth briefly possessing Almon to seal his wound.
“…And my mastery shall be proven by the solstice’s end.”
The bloomkith ceased her possession, then also released her physical hold, her verdure collapsing as she rippled through the air to unite with her master. Her presence remained distant from the scene imposed by the sculptor; Saphienne felt Hyacinth’s horror at what was due.
The dragon steepled her claws. “But you, my old friend, will be the first elf to recognise my accomplishment.”
Terrified by what the change in her mood portended, Almon backed away. “What are you going to do to me?”
“To you?” Saphienne flicked her tail. “I won’t be resculpting you…”
With a hiss that told well her draconic appetites, Kylantha seized Aldyn, pulling him against her immense and unyielding flesh.
* * *
As the wizard screamed, part of him detachedly observed that the emerald agony suffusing him was not unlike dragonflare.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
* * *
They were locked together. No matter how Almon contorted, he could never have escaped Saphienne as she did what came naturally to her kind. Everything else but dragon and elf ceased to exist for them, even Hyacinth vanishing as the bloomkith bore witness to a catastrophe being birthed.
Had the cat not yowled, there would’ve been no warning.
Saphienne spun–
But her contingent spell was quicker, meeting the blow with a solid wall of force.
A resounding bang filled the chamber, followed by the crash of far shelves collapsing.
She blinked. Then, her ears drooped.
Saphienne laid the sculptor on the floor in front of her catatonic victim, nevertheless maintaining her fascination over him as she strode to the steps. What she surveyed from that vantage froze her in unfathomable grief, and when she thawed she picked her way listlessly through the debris – past the raised hackles of the cat – to collect a cracked length of iron from the foot of the far wall.
She laughed hollowly as she inspected the symbols above its grip.
Descending the steps, Saphienne held the Rod of Repulsion aloft, her yellowed eyes impassive where they lanced her attacker. “You used the highest intensity.” She tossed the weapon aside. “I ought to be complimented… no half measures.”
Blood pooled beneath Celaena. Her shoulder was mangled where the metal had passed through; were it not for Saphienne turning, the rebounding force would have shot the rod through her chest. Having been thrown across the vault and sent tumbling through the hatch, her arms were twisted and her legs were broken, her bones jutting out from her shin and thigh where she lay ruined.
She was lucky her neck hadn’t snapped. Celaena wheezed as she breathed, throat filling from haemorrhage. “…I couldn’t let you hurt him…”
“Of course not.” The magician’s voice cracked. “No one treats a wizard like that.”
The elf passed out from blood loss.
* * *
“Heal her.”
“She tried to kill you!”
“Tried and failed. Heal her, Hyacinth.”
“I will not restore her to the bloom of health — I refuse.”
“Then do enough to prevent her demise. Do it for who she was to us; do it for me.”
* * *
Superficially, Celaena’s sinew and skin knitted back together, bones pulled into alignment with sickening crunches that would have tortured her had she been awake. She was still insensate when Hyacinth finished, and her mouth spoke with a drowsy voice that wasn’t her own. “What now? Will you spare a spell to finish my work?”
“I need to reserve my magic.” Saphienne backed toward the vault. “Watch her. When I’m done, I’ll have Sundamar carry her upstairs, and I’ll instruct him to fetch Gaelyn and Spire just before noon.”
Conflicted fury carried from the spirit. “…To delay risks leaving her with wounds that can never fully heal…”
The dragon’s ascent was bleakly bitter. “Then we’ll remain birds of a feather.”
* * *
Midway through the sculpting of her masterpiece, Saphienne set the gemstone aside and turned her attention from mind to body. She couldn’t let sleep disrupt what she ordained, nor permit hunger abate what she set into motion. The spell she cast blurred Transmutation with Conjuration, informed by her studies into the physiology of drakes, and the cycles of slumber and unrelenting action they inherited.
Restless though he would be, his dreams would abide.
* * *
Kylantha concluded her impartation.
Where the boy had rocked in her shadow, now sat the defeated man, bereft of his sustaining fictions. “…Is it over?”
The figure embraced by the mortal elf – who was neither mortal nor elven – rose upon her newly taloned feet, scales visible upon her soft skin before she clothed herself in heavenly cerulean. Above her golden brow her horns caught and cast down the sun upon the man, her veridian gaze pitiless and playful as she uncoiled in his innermost depths. “We’ve only just started, you and I.”
Saphienne regarded her other self, given permanence and independence as half of what had been Almon. “Be kind to him. Don’t force him to be you.”
“He shall be what he yearned to be.” Her imprint bent to hug Kylantha farewell. “I am tyrant to the wizard — but I am no behemoth.”
Kylantha beamed across a silken shoulder. “She’ll do what’s right: after all, she’s made in your image.”
The wizard shuddered, covering his face. “Why do this? Why kill Almon?”
Beckoning him, Saphienne approached the sole sigil on the drafting table, simultaneously attending to the formless spell that floated in the vault. “I’ll show you. I haven’t just replaced your unconscious mind: I’ve bestowed on you what Almon could never comprehend. Come and see.”
Apprehensive, allured, he crawled to her feet, staring up into spellcraft that augmented the figment that was vessel for his familiar, beholding then more than chaos in the fire she wielded like hammer and chisel, spying behind the lashing tongues his own self in his perpetual becoming.
Overcome by that harrowing freedom, he wept.
* * *
As entertaining as your analysis of her treatise was, Saphienne, now that the fun has passed I would be remiss not to correct you. ‘Of Delusion’ is but a proposed explanation for what countless wizards and sorcerers have observed: a fascination cannot compel a magician to cast spells against his will. Whether or not Vestaele has formulated a hypothesis that you find convincing, you cannot dispute the underlying phenomena it addresses.
Ah, but I forget — you must dispute everything, child. Very well. I look forward you demonstrating that all your predecessors were in error. May we both live so very long…
* * *
No longer blue and violet interwoven, what had been a simple figment shimmered with sun yellow, spilling red, and sprouting green that were all equivalent to the original hues with which they were fused. The wizard was enthralled, and he couldn’t deny Saphienne when she suggested he should will the manifestation out from his tower and into the garden, where sunlight would reveal what she had authored.
That she’d incorporated his spellcraft from the wand he’d given her was the highest praise he could imagine; he was unaware that the fascination immobilising him had rendered him suggestible.
* * *
Sundamar did as demanded, pilfering pillows and blankets from the spare rooms for the vault. He was lifting Celaena when Saphienne went with Hyacinth down into the kitchen, there to seat herself in the open doorway and feed the bloomkith with a heightened casting of Lesser Gift of Sunlight.
By the time Hyacinth had fetched down her shell to compost, Saphienne was concentrating on a large bowl taken from a cupboard, engaged in overdue divinations.
Hyacinth sat on the kitchen steps. “Can you see them?”
“…Peluda is asleep in Filaurel’s house… locked inside…”
“And Minina?”
Saphienne was distracted, concentrating, deftly dividing her attention across her active spells. “…I’m scrying for her now…”
Meaning emerged from the geometry flickering in the bowl. The magician smiled with relief, then grinned widely when she understood the significance of what the vision showed. She allowed the spell to lapse as she stood and moved to the sink. “We were both wrong: she’s not still hiding behind Rydel’s colonies, and my guess that she’d found somewhere shielded against Divination was wildly off.”
Hyacinth creaked as she leant forward. “Where must I go after I return?”
“Only to Peluda.” Cool water from the pitcher filled the bowl. “Minina will be in no danger; she made her way out of the woodlands — and beyond the protectorates.”
Rattling with laughter, Hyacinth sprang up in dance. “Clever girl! Sweetest of spiders! Does she thrive?”
“She was tending to her plants.” Saphienne splashed herself, cooling off in the rising summer heat. “I’m not jesting: she must have hauled seedlings the entire way. The journey will have taken her months. I haven’t any idea how she evaded detection.”
Blossoms hugged her from behind. “Perhaps she was aided? Did someone carry Minina out?”
She plucked a cutting and pulled away; permitting herself comfort risked undermining her resolve. “There’s only one person with the requisite talent that I can picture assisting, and she can’t travel to and from the Luminary Vale on her own. No, it’s more likely that – if she did help – Taerelle impeded the divinations.”
“Would she risk her position?”
“She did when she scried me… she’s more sentimental than she pretends.” Saphienne started upward. “Go outside. I’ll meet you shortly.”
* * *
Celaena reclined on a makeshift bed, Sundamar hovering nearby with an hourglass that counted the time until he was to seek the local healer. Almon – what remained of him – was where Saphienne had left him, sitting in the chair she had moved to the middle of the circle. The fascinator and the sculptor were also untouched, pieces of both strewn around the room after she’d blasted them apart with a Rod of Repulsion.
She kicked chunks of the gemstones aside, striding to position the water near the shelf that Inky was hiding under.
He hissed. Saphienne couldn’t blame him.
A complex spell soon stripped the traps from her spellbook and other belongings, her increased faculty since attaining the Fourth Degree exceeding Vestaele’s ingenuity. She placed her spellbook and copy of ‘The Girl and the Gulls’ into her satchel, leaving her auxiliary tome to be puzzled over in her absence; the bark-scaled pouch made by Kylantha accompanied them, but she clutched the coin to her chest, relishing that small victory before she slid the disc into her pocket.
There was no more reason to delay. Saphienne projected her seal on the ring that encircled the wizard, sealing him inside as the bindings came to life. No ordinary magician could imitate the peculiar, draconic resonance she instilled into the mark, ensuing that he would only be released by a High Master.
“I tried to think of something to say in advance,” she said to him. “I couldn’t.”
Tranquilised, he listened passively.
“You aren’t the same man who educated me. What I’ve done to you is evil, and no appeals to necessity can absolve me. My only hope…” She swallowed. “My only hope is that the part of you which lives in me has been conveyed along with everything else; and that who you become shall exhibit several, rare traits of character held by only the finest wizards.”
A sharp breath wracked her. “I lied before… I mean this now…”
Saphienne bowed low.
“…Farewell, my old friend.”
* * *
Greenery discarded upon the brown flowerbeds, Hyacinth communed with Saphienne, receiving a draconic sigil that blazed in gold and jade. She struggled to contain its contours, but her master’s encouragement overcame her self-doubt.
“I love you.” Saphienne kissed the spirit’s brow, clasping her upon the shore beside a subterranean, churning sea. “You know what you’ve to do?”
“To the clearing, unleashing what I hold; then to its origin, guiding.”
A spring breeze caressed Saphienne as they separated.
Abandoning her vacillation, the magician peered up at another, looming presence in the dead garden. “And you? Are you ready to play your part?”
Brought alive by the captive wizard, dreamed by the Saphienne who had glutted herself on his heart, the figment that was no bird took flight.
* * *
Did she have to destroy Almon? Was there no other way?
Endowing a familiar with oneself takes time, time that she didn’t have.
There was another constraint, however.
Someone had to sustain the spell; Saphienne needed her work to outlive her.
* * *
Whatever you shall make of her, we proceed now with two, parallel perspectives, for Saphienne was in both of them.
* * *
She had time to kill, and not only time.
Saphienne roamed through the village and into the festival grounds with a predatory grace that her countenance disguised. To onlookers she was but a carefree celebrant who returned their greetings, preoccupied with her errands as she hurried on. That a dragon walked in their midst was inconceivable, and that she was impelled by murderous desire would have been absurd, incongruous with the joyful occasion.
“Is that Saphienne?”
A familiar refrain, but more so than the rest. Saphienne slowed…
Laewyn was elated to see her friend, gasping aloud, her excitement and disbelief erupting in a shout as she tugged on the hand she held and called to her companions. “Gods! I don’t believe this — it really is you! Everyone, it’s Saphienne!”
And the hand that Laewyn pulled after her?
In spite of his summery complexion and long, blonde hair, Faylar was pallid, struck mute, as though visited by a ghost on a moonless night. Attired in the conventional white that elves favoured for the solstice, he gawked, stupefied, perhaps submerged by recollections that arose to drown him.
Saphienne wasn’t supposed to recognise them. She blinked honestly, then responded with contrived uncertainty. “Hello… do I know you?”
Her words roused Faylar. “You don’t remember us?”
“I–”
“She’s Saphienne?” One among their group was incredulous, a young boy of the age Faylar had been on the night she’d met him. “She doesn’t look like much.”
Laewyn scowled and swatted at the speaker. “Shut up! She’s been unwell–”
“I’m better now,” Saphienne interjected, closing the distance. “I’m sorry, I can’t say that I know you. Were we good friends?”
Uncomfortable, Faylar cleared his throat. “We spent time together. My girlfriend and I used to live in the Eastern Vale.”
His reply caused Laewyn’s exuberance to fade.
“This is Laewyn; I’m Faylar. How are you?”
So they’d rewritten his past, too. “I’m well. This is the first day I’m without a chaperone. I’m on my way to read to the children…”
A gangly girl yawned. “Boring! We’re looking for our master. She said she’d have something important for us to do.”
Faylar took that opportunity to lead Laewyn and the youths away. “We won’t keep you. Good to see you again: I hope you have a lovely day.”
Had Saphienne stumbled on them a day prior, she would have ran after them, insisted on repairing their relationship.
Yet the hour was nigh. “You too; stay safe.”
She exchanged a forlorn wave with Laewyn, and then the pair were lost in the crowd.
* * *
Howling over the dislodged windchimes that had been left to decay atop the hill, Hyacinth billowed into the hidden clearing.
The figment landed beside her, casting an aloof but calculating eye over the wreckage of the imprisoning tree that the bloomkith hovered above. The spirit was visible to the living spell, scrutinised with anticipation.
“If prayer was in my roots,” Hyacinth shared in susurrus, “I would now pray.”
Moving widdershins, she stirred the dust, singing syllables from a tongue that even Mother Marigold would have fled from. Beneath that arid ground, the ley line responded to her presence, and then to the golden-green flame manifested through the will that her master had imparted, current abating as the corrupting fire sank and spread.
This pleased her watcher. “Attunement; I feel it.”
Hyacinth didn’t delight in her success. “Tread with me. A great distance we must go, by paths seldom trod by my sisters.”
The bloomkith vanished beyond the world of form.
A moment later, the figment dissolved into the ley line, flowing in her wake.
* * *
Malice.
There was no word more apt for what Saphienne felt as she stood in the shade and watched Filaurel, the librarian laughing as she addressed a small gathering of elves who were likely her fellow censors. They were chatting on the steps that had once given form to Saphienne’s mind, and the morning light made them splendorous in their solstice garb, a scene that would surely have instilled reverence in Felipe and Cosme.
But the dragon was not in awe of elves.
Her smile was well-rehearsed as she stood herself before the steps, her intonation melodious and friendly. “Filaurel?”
The secretary to the local consensus brightened, as pleased as she had been when she’d seen the magician arrested. “Saphienne!” Her feet skipped down to meet her professed loved one. “You look– that dress befits you.”
Contriving to giggle, Saphienne twirled. “Celaena gave it to me!”
“That was good of her.” The librarian faintly frowned, glancing over the people streaming by. “Where’s Sundamar? Wearing his Ring of Misperception?”
That was a useful explanation. “I think so… he told me I could go on ahead. I’m not being chaperoned this morning.”
“They trust you to behave yourself?”
“I know the gods are watching.” Saphienne held out her hand. “Walk with me? Somewhere private? I’d like to talk about what you said before.”
Filaurel called to her acquaintances – promising she wouldn’t be gone for long – then eagerly accepted.
“You have excellent timing,” she said, linking fingers with the dragon as she was drawn away from safety. “I was busy all day yesterday, and this is the only time I…”
Her pace faltered, and the librarian stopped.
Comporting herself frivolously, Saphienne raised a quizzical brow. “The only time you have free? If you’ve just remembered something urgent, I promise I won’t delay–”
“You…” Filaurel was hushed. “…It’s you.”
Saphienne redoubled her ruse, tightening her hold. “Why, who else would it be?”
Yet as she kept her gaze trained on her prey, Saphienne saw Filaurel behold the cold and hateful ocean of rage that had accrued behind the dam of her eyes, invisible to every sense but that which was most intimate, and most fundamental to their history.
The elf wilted.
The dragon tugged on her lifeless arm. “Come.” Her mask hardened. “Do not make me involve bystanders.”
Yet the gods were not her only audience.
“Saphienne!” Laelansa darted from the crowd to throw her arms about her beloved. “I’ve been looking for you all morning — I should have known you’d be here! Hello, Filaurel. Do you mind if I borrow her?”
Saphienne remained rigid as she felt the loving warmth enveloping her.
Absurd… her life was absurd.
Reluctantly, she relinquished the woman she wanted dead.
Her parting message to Filaurel was delivered in a low and even cadence only the librarian found chilling. “We will meet again.”
Devastated, Filaurel stayed impassive while Saphienne went cheerfully into the summertime with Laelansa.
* * *
More than windchimes barred the way to Hyacinth’s destination, and thus she transited back into the material world with half a mile remaining, traversing as a furtive, anxious breeze.
That which she guided wrenched free from the ley line and soared up on wings that cast vast shadows over the thinning forest below.
They took care when crossing the gross perceptual veil, slowing to pass through together; yet their pause as they descended upon the lip of the occulted valley wasn’t prompted by caution, rather the desolate vista reaching to the horizon.
“I cannot go further.” Hyacinth felt leaden, as motionless as the monumental gap in the clouds through which a harsh sun shone to desiccate the vale. “The path within for one like I depends upon clever growth, growth I have neither time to tend nor chance to risk.”
Her companion hissed. “Sweet deceiver! Although you tell no lie, your quailing is what roots you to this edge. You fear this place.”
“Do you not?”
A pause was warranted. “…No. It is not in my nature to feel fear.”
“Then…” She dragged her perception from the petrified columns that lay ahead. “…What does this shameful, sinful prison inspire in you?”
Growling, rumbling like far thunder or the shuddering bowels of the earth, the figment leapt and soared down to the wards that guarded against spirit, elf, and all who might obey them, gliding ghostly and swift. Whereas the bloomkith had once expended great effort to pass and return undetected, none of the matriarchs or High Masters who had contributed to the prison had anticipated the need to exclude a mere hallucination, nor had they been willing to die to abjure against all magic.
A titanic breath filled the figment’s chest, and then the answer to her question was exhaled – ephemeral and unreal, yet unmistakably wrathful – across the First Vale.
* * *
Laelansa walked Saphienne to where the children were being entertained on the outskirts of the festival grounds, their arms linked, her opposite hand holding the end of her overlong braid–
A hand that commanded Saphienne’s intense interest. “That jewellery you’re wearing… is it ceremonial? Related to your noviciate?”
The novice priest was studiously mild as she displayed the golden, floral web that stretched across her left hand. “You’ve seen this worn by Tolduin? He gave me it to give to you; he wanted me to be the one to explain what it meant.”
Laelansa had no clue that she wore a disguised draconic sigil, oblivious to the fire that seethed in the metal forged by Saphienne. “A gift? For me?”
“That can wait.” She scanned the thinning crowds. “I don’t see Sundamar anywhere…”
“He’s probably listening in.” Saphienne was distracted, calculating how best to reclaim the ornate finger rings while keeping to her schedule. “All the wardens have bands that hide them from people at a distance. They watch over us like the gods: everywhere, yet unseen.”
Her deceit had the opposite effect than intended, Laelansa increasing her pace, agitated as she leaned closer. “Saphienne, do you trust me?”
…How could she ever sift through the feelings that arose in response?
Laelansa squeezed her arm. “I love you more than anyone. You don’t know everything that’s happened — what was done to you. If you feel the love we shared together… please, trust me now.”
Blinking, Saphienne noticed that the end of the braid held by Laelansa was rigid, and that her relaxed posture was belied by the alertness in her roving, grey-green gaze. “…Of course…”
“Then do what I say.”
Teetering on the brink of a chasm that had cracked open in her chest, Saphienne went meekly with Laelansa to where she had already planned to go — behind the tent that hosted the children’s revel and between the empty crates that had been neatly stacked there. She watched as Laelansa let go of her arm and flattened against the nearest tall corner, hidden from the pursuers that the novice expected would follow.
As Saphienne floundered, Laelansa unknitted her hair, readying a short, vicious, needle-like blade.
“…Laelansa…”
“Hush!”
Were they safer, Saphienne would have thrown herself upon Laelansa in wild abandon, smothering her with the loving lust that constant devotion had brought back from the grave.
“Laelansa, we’re not being followed by wardens.” She took a steadying breath, then closed to whisper more quietly. “Sundamar isn’t coming.”
“Saphienne, I need you to be silent and–”
“He’s fascinated.”
There was no reaction; Laelansa stayed ready to pounce.
When her head turned, her pupils reflected Saphienne in their spreading dark. “…What?”
“He’s fascinated. Holly is bound.”
Her partner stared.
Then Laelansa was a flurry of movement, palming the knife and grabbing Saphienne. “We need to go — there won’t be a better chance.”
Saphienne floated where she was standing. “Go where?”
“I have friends.” The novice’s jaw set in a grim line. “Rophana introduced me to them — we knew her before Tolduin took you.”
“I remember–”
“Or we thought we knew her.” Alive with fear and fight, not yet grasping the full import of what Saphienne said, Laelansa babbled, having reverted to her comfortable – and comforting – habit of oversharing. “She’s much older than she pretends; Rophana isn’t even her true name; she was assigned to observe the Eastern Vale; if not for all the attention on you, she would have tried recruiting us; my friends are waiting now; we can trust them, they saved our drake from–”
Saphienne yanked her hand away. “Laelansa, who the fuck are you talking about?”
The woman in rebellion at the woodlands flinched, calming.
“…Witches.”
Never had the dragon blinked harder.
“My friends are witches; I joined them for you. I know you don’t remember what that word means, but we don’t have time–”
“My disappearance wouldn’t go unnoticed. The Luminary Vale would scry for me, and they wouldn’t ever stop searching.”
“They’ll think we’re dead.” Laelansa was slowly frowning as the impossible sank into her spinning mind. “There’s a ritual for changing identity… switching names… and my friends are disrupting divinations of us for the moment…” Her lips parted. “…How do you know that the Luminary Vale wouldn’t let you go? How do you even know what the–”
Yet Saphienne was laughing, first low and muffled, then louder, higher, her composure cracking as she doubled over in hysterical, pained guffaws, tears overflowing as she choked and gasped and stumbled to lean on a tree trunk.
Laelansa shook. “…Saphienne…”
“Tragically–” She gulped, coughing as she swallowed her grief. “Tragically, Laelansa, no matter what I try to do, I never can stop being myself. Wherever I shall go, there ever I shall be.”
The knife fell to the ground. “…You’re…”
“Still a distrustful fool.” She clenched her fists as she straightened. “Still unable to believe I’m truly loved by anyone but myself and my reflection. She’ll be back soon — but don’t risk saying her name, not unless you’re confident in your friends’ countermeasures.”
Laelansa hugged herself, no longer a confident adult, once more the awkward child who had held a dying girl with a caved-in skull. “…Hyacinth?”
“I invoked her.” Saphienne’s smile admonished only herself. “I refused to be the good girl that Tolduin wanted; I am my mother’s daughter, and the tree bequeaths its roots to its saplings.”
“I– I was waiting for–”
“The summer solstice festival!” Saphienne lilted the words. “But of course: there wouldn’t be a better opportunity. Great minds think alike… and fools seldom differ.”
Laelansa lost the power of speech; she rocked where she was standing, fragile…
Until Saphienne bent to collect the knife. “Be careful — the tip is poisoned.”
“You’ve changed,” Saphienne dryly approved, flicking the edge through the air.
“I had to.”
“For me.” She met her gaze. “You’re prepared to be a murderer, for me.”
That communion restored the novice witch. She lowered her arms, drew back her shoulders, grounding herself in the nourishing green that she adored. “I am. I vowed to the gods that I’d slay whoever stood between us.”
“Fuck your gods.” Saphienne bared her teeth. “You’re an idiot. Everything that’s been done to me wasn’t divine will — people made me who I’ve become. There are no gods, Laelansa. They’re just songs and dances to carry us between cradle and grave. All the woodlands are a cult, all its icons are empty, and all your so-called gods were what stood between us in the end.”
What did the hurting magician expect?
Not how Laelansa responded. Humbled, she remained steadfast. “I know; whoever or whatever makes the world unfold, the elves of the woodlands worship false gods. I didn’t vow to them. I swore before whatever would witness me.”
How perfect; how perfectly awful.
The dragon furled her wings with a resigned sigh. “I love you, Laelansa. I’m glad you weren’t caught with me. I wish you’d tried yesterday; you would have saved me from myself.”
Laelansa offered her hands. “Whatever you’ve done doesn’t matter, we can go–”
“It’s too late.” Saphienne peered up at the clouds that would be ashen come the evening. “I’ve set things in motion… things I must see through.”
“We can just leave–”
“No.” Her choice was absolute, her mien severe. “I’m not joining your witches. How long have they skulked in the shadows? Six thousand years? And what have they done in that time? You say they saved Audacity — but did they save Kylantha? You say they’ll save me now — but why should I believe in them, when they never saved the child I was?”
Laelansa dropped her hands. “…Then forget them. Whatever you’re doing, wherever you’re going, I’ll come with you.”
The blade swayed like a tail as Saphienne stalked closer. “Even if I leave the woodlands?”
Her beloved whispered, “Yes.”
The dragon gripped Laelansa’s throat, pulling her near. “Even if I burn them down?”
“Yes.”
The knife loomed, mirrored clearly. “…Even if we go to our deaths?”
“Even then. I love you.”
A single cut sufficed.
* * *
A dream of pale green flames dressed the stony trees in crackling foliage, colour returned to the First Vale. To uninitiated observers, nothing was different, and even to the hallucinating bloomkith the fire did not consume, but rather shimmered atop candle-like trunks.
Circling overhead, the figment hissed at Hyacinth’s unguarded emotions — amazement, uncertainty, and fear, all warring together. “Soon; my tyranny expands apace.”
“…We have an hour.” The spirit gusted to the briars that secluded the valley. “By now my sisters will have noticed something is amiss. Swift, we must tread.”
Indeed, the dance of the spirits to feed the sacred glades had been disrupted, disquiet beginning in the eastern woodlands and rippling westward. The servants of Saphienne took advantage of the disharmony to proceed directly, Hyacinth unnoticed behind the bickering as she stole from vale to vale. She visited the corporeal forests within each, waiting while the familiar surfaced from the ley line to spiral outward.
They arrived back where their journey had begun as the sun climbed toward noon.
“I go for Peluda,” said the bloomkith… yet she hesitated. “Unless you need me still?”
“I am sustained here.” A fond tail whipped up the spring wind. “You did well; you believe in the invisible more readily than creatures of flesh and blood.”
“I believe in Saphienne,” Hyacinth swore, intertwined with what moved her, “and thus I believe in what makes beat her heart.”
“…Maple-blooded, and fairest of flowers…” The familiar tasted the fragrant air with her forked tongue. “I will grow your namesake when you are gone.”
Jubilant in her unfettered liberty, she who had been Peacock bounded from the bloomkith and beat her wings, arising with a farewell cry to circle once, then dive for the village.
* * *
No one who saw Saphienne emerge serene and alone from behind the pavilion thought anything amiss, and the children were crafting paper flowers when she halted beside the entrance to appraise their efforts.
There were no daffodils; there ought to have been daffodils.
“You’re cutting it fine,” Nelathiel grinned, comparatively informal in her loose leggings and with face unpainted. “I was worried you’d lost your nerve.”
“They’re only little…” Saphienne wasn’t addressing the priest.
“Don’t be overconfident: they can be the harshest critics.” Nelathiel ushered her over to the screen, behind which the puppets were readied, the lantern lit but covered. “Any last minute revisions?”
Saphienne shook her head. “Nothing significant. Even if it’s bad, I’m committed.”
“That’s the spirit!” The toymaker hefted a doll of distinctive semblance, her curling hair stiffened to better cast its shadow. “You’re to be seated in front of the stage. Are you sure you don’t want music? Our harpist can play quietly.”
“I want their full attention on us.”
“As you like.” Nelathiel assumed her position next to the lamp. “Don’t look so apprehensive! I was only jesting. They’re an easy audience; just be enthusiastic with them.”
Embodying her advice, a caretaker was energetically corralling the children, complimenting their sticky artworks as another helper placed a stool before them.
“That’s our cue. Have fun, Saphienne.”
Spreading her locks to hang across her shoulders, Saphienne fixed a smile in place and went out to meet her audience with a flourishing wave, distantly wondering whether her transformation resembled how Eletha had seemed when the jeweller had come alive in her defence.
She pushed those thoughts aside as she eased onto her perch, and leant forward, her tone low but replete with anticipation. “Who wants to hear a special story?”
Several hands shot up among the two dozen or so children.
Saphienne frowned theatrically. “I don’t think I heard you!”
A chorus greeted her, and the children laughed.
Yet a boy seated at the front didn’t join in, his hand still raised. “What makes the story special?”
“Well!” Saphienne clapped, uncharacteristic levity suffusing her words. “The story I’ll tell today is special for many reasons. It’s a story about a child not much older than all of you, and it’s a true story…” She craned forward conspiratorially. “…But do you want to know the reason I think it’s special?”
Won over despite his misgivings, the child nodded.
“It’s not just an everyday story…”
Behind her, the screen illuminated, Nelathiel improvising alongside her.
“…It’s a story about a dragon.”
Horns and wings flitted across the screen, earning gasps from the youngest viewers.
* * *
Our tale happened not long ago — and not far from here.
On a sunny day during the summer festival, people from all over the eastern woodlands were here in the Eastern Vale. Children like you were gathered in a tent like this one, playing games and having fun, while the adults were playing games of their own, singing and dancing and spreading happiness all around.
Some families were up at the lake, north from here, enjoying the sunshine on the sandy shore. The sun was blazing in the sky, but the breeze from the lake was cooling where it blew across them–
How do I know how it felt?
Why, I was at the lake! I saw what happened.
Everything was peaceful; no one expected anything terrible.
Yet up in the clouds was something strange. A few people on the beach pointed, trying to decide what they saw. Have you ever looked at the clouds and seen trees in them? Or animals? That was just what it was like. One of the clouds looked very odd.
Was it a beast? It had arms and legs, and even a tail, but it also had wings.
Was it a bird? It had wings, but they weren’t feathered, and it also had horns.
What was it then? Can any of you guess?
Yes! It was a dragon.
* * *
“But my mother says there aren’t any dragons in the woods.”
Saphienne smiled and crossed her legs, genuinely fond of the boy who kept interrupting with helpful questions. “There usually aren’t! Nobody had seen a dragon in a long time. That was what many on the beach told themselves, when they saw what they thought was a cloud gliding down toward them.”
Another child – a girl with paper blossoms stuck to her braids – spoke up. “How did the dragon get here?”
“It flew! Dragons have strong wings, and they fly so very fast, so fast that you couldn’t run away if you were chased…”
Nelathiel coughed.
Saphienne accepted her prompt. “…Would you like me to tell you about the dragon?”
* * *
Dragons are fierce. They’re big and covered in scales, tough enough that not even an arrow from a Warden of the Wilds can pierce their skin. They’re powerful too, with muscles that can knock down trees and wicked claws that tear up the ground wherever they walk. Like hunters, they have horns on their heads: and can you guess what they hunt?
No!
Dragons don’t just hunt bad children; they hunt everyone.
That was why all the people ran away when the dragon soared down. They ran and they ran, and they didn’t stop running, shouting to warn everyone: a dragon had come to eat the elves! Even the servants of the gods ran away, for no one can fight a dragon.
But there was someone who didn’t run.
Near the water where the dragon splashed down, a girl was sitting–
* * *
“Was it you?”
One of the children at the back had blurted his question out, his blush betraying that he hadn’t meant to speak.
Good; she had them enthralled. “…Now, whyever would you ask me that?”
“You said you were there,” retorted a girl beside him, coming to his defence. “And that shadow looks like you.”
“Perhaps we’re just related.”
Encouraged by his friend, the boy grew bolder. “It must have been you! My father said that a dragon attacked the woodlands, and was stopped by a girl.”
An equally formidable, angry girl in the row before him twisted around. “You should stop spoiling the story!”
Dependably, the boy in the front row had an opinion. “He can’t be spoiling the story — she told us no one can fight a dragon.”
A younger child, so young that Saphienne wasn’t sure whether they were girl or boy, regarded the storyteller with frightened eyes. “Did it eat everyone?”
The older children giggled.
Amused, Saphienne posed for her audience. “…Do I look like the dragon ate me?”
Grinning in mischief, the older girl at the back stirred the pot. “It could have spat you back out!”
One of the caretakers disapprovingly called the girl by name.
She cringed. “…Sorry.”
“These are all good questions,” Saphienne commented. “The dragon could have eaten everyone — it certainly wanted to! But if a dragon had spat me out, I wouldn’t look like this. Do you know what dragons do before they eat someone?”
Every little face was upturned, rapt.
“They cook them. Dragons breathe fire!”
All of the children rocked back as the shadow behind her spouted curling flames.
“That’s how you can tell a dragon’s nearby — they set everything on fire, even the littlest of children.”
She observed as the caretakers all shifted, uneasy, worried that her narrative was going too far.
Let them interrupt if they dared; experience made Saphienne confident that the elves would passively stand by. “Dragons smell like smoke, and you feel their heat long before you see them. They’re like snakes, you see. They love sunny days – just like this one – because they warm themselves before they set out to hunt.”
Clutching the hand of his defender, the boy who’d recognised Saphienne was compelled to ask, “But the dragon who attacked us was defeated, wasn’t it? It died.”
Dispassionately, she clasped her hands. “Is that what you were told? Your father was mistaken. The dragon that visited here isn’t dead…”
Now was her chance; the youngest were on the verge of tears.
She peered up at the tented ceiling, speaking as though she thought aloud. “…No one knows where it went. We might see it again.”
Stationed by the entrance, a caretaker finally shook her head, stepping forward–
Saphienne sniffed and peered back at the screen, dropping her colourful cadence and adopting blunt alarm. “…Do you smell that?!”
Everyone in the pavilion inhaled.
That was when the smouldering fabric of the back wall burst into flames.
* * *
Screams; panic; mortal terror.
Not even a dozen wardens could have stopped the tide of children who ran shrieking from the pavilion and scattered out into the festival. Some were caught by the volunteers, but Saphienne knew there were insufficient caretakers to chase every boy or girl, especially when the burning tent demanded urgent action.
Of course, the elves were prepared for small fires. The vale was very dry in summer, and sorcerers, wizards, and priests were expected to conjure water in an emergency. Nelathiel proved herself heroic by immediately containing the fire, her puppets barely singed when the flames were doused.
Saphienne didn’t linger. She joined a trio sprinting after the escaped children, slowing as she disappeared into the crowd near the art exhibits, wandering leisurely along the grove.
Her stage was set. All that was left was to alight the pyre.
* * *
Swooping between the clouds, impatient to feel them as more than suggestions, the cataclysm to come had also made her rounds. Jade bonfires dotted the forest about the village below, unrealised, tongues stretched out in yearning for the foliage that cradled them.
She rolled and dipped, then climbed in accelerating cadence. Her aerial performance was not merely for pleasure: she was to be visible to those with eyes to see.
And then?
Someone saw. She felt their marvelling, her purchase on the world less tenuous as they fed the spell comprising her imaginary flesh.
More contributed as disbelief gave way to distress. She asserted her existence to the young elves, and they in turn alerted other children, inebriated adults puzzling over her hazy contours as they followed the pointing.
However, it was not enough.
Not yet.
* * *
Calamity announced his mistress to Saphienne, who heard the tumult caused by him and moved behind the nearest stall.
“Calamity! Heel!”
Vestaele had the drake leashed, dragging him after her flowing festival garb – luminous white that shimmered violet – as she strode through the parting throng. Irate, the sorcerer was headed in the direction Saphienne had travelled from, Calamity excitedly barking at the startled elves whom he seldom walked among.
He abruptly quietened, tail rigid as he stared at the sky.
Then he bolted — pulling his leash from Vestaele and a curse from her lips.
“Good boy,” Saphienne murmured. “Keep her occupied.”
Rejoining the masses, Saphienne quickened her step, overlapping melodies carrying to her from the distant stages where elves would be dancing in complementary rhythms. She couldn’t dawdle: Tolduin would be somewhere amid the meadow of tables she was passing, admiring the craft behind the art on display.
“Saphienne.”
Veiled as she had been since ancient days, Eletha called to Saphienne from behind her glittering jewellery.
Delay risked everything. Saphienne carried on–
“Must I find you to claim my favour?”
–And stumbled beneath the trees.
What was a dragon who didn’t abide by her principles? Hadn’t she promised herself she would honour her word? Was she not obliged to attend, out of respect for herself?
Grim with foreboding, her visage was cool as she approached the stall.
A decade had passed since Saphienne made her promise, and the magician could now recognise the hush over the table as the consequence of an occultation surreptitiously cast by Eletha. No one noticed the reclusive master whom she didn’t wish to perceive her; only fellow practitioners of the Great Art stood a chance of resisting her fascinations.
As did dragons. “Eletha.”
The woman who disguised herself as a mere master of jewellery gestured to the display.
Saphienne examined each adornment. They were all exquisite, naturally, every piece discerningly elaborated with a taste that knew when to show restraint.
Yet an odd work drew her eye. A twelve-sided die gleamed in the same pale gold as her willed, draconic scales — perfectly formed, as if conjured. Curiously, the numerals on the faces had been culled, one half blank and the other half bearing a singular figure: ‘one.’ Eletha was too proud to have employed magic in its fashioning, but quite how she’d forged the piece eluded Saphienne.
“The die is cast,” declared Eletha, lifting her veil.
Saphienne raised her head. She studied the sea-green gaze that had determined the course down which her life had surged, therein belatedly identifying a glimpsed sea that a High Master had hurried to shroud lest she know whose vale she was born into. Her stare drifted to the pin that held in place the gauzy fabric upon Eletha’s head…
A sprig of mugwort; a cutting of absinthe.
“…It was all you.” Saphienne crossed her arms. “I’d guessed you and Lenitha were fighting over me… but she acted on your behalf.”
“My first apprentice did only as I asked.”
“You were behind everything. You made sure Almon couldn’t divine my past.”
Eletha shallowly bowed. “Wormwood scried the first time; Taerelle the second.”
“And today?” Saphienne demanded. “Did you delude the auguries for today?”
“There was no need. What you are doing is unimaginable to them.”
“But not to you,” the dragon retorted, scornful. “This is your design…”
Faculties fully restored, she reasoned through the implications with mounting astonishment–
“But that means Lenitha doesn’t know about my recovery, does she? She’s never known the whole story. You’re not trying to stop me.”
–Along with the dangerous possibility they presented.
“Are you…” Saphienne swallowed. “Did you author the curse?”
Eletha sagged against the stall. “I am the cause of the curse — not its author. My magic birthed it, but I was tricked. No one but myself could have bound my wyrd.”
“…Your wyrd…”
“You, like those who came before you, play out the parts it demands.”
Saphienne reeled. “But… why? Why did… why did she curse you?”
“At first,” Eletha confessed, “I refused to choose between them. My eldest and youngest apprentices both beseeched me, and I remained aloof. But, as the conflict unfolded and blood was spilled, my eldest came to me again…”
“You chose Lenitha.”
The woman who had rescued and named the High Master closed her eyes. “I chose unwisely. I betrayed one for the sake of the false peace established by the other. And then, when the time came, I went with the strongest from Lenitha’s vale to put an end to things…”
A confrontation that had imperilled the world.
“…But my greatest apprentice was waiting. She put up no fight. She claimed to have augured what would be, and that all she had done was not in vain — that, come the new dawn, I would be proven wrong.”
Wormwood had taught Taerelle about curses, and curses were commonly of one discipline. “You were the best diviner.”
“I am yet the greatest.” Her lips contorted. “And this is the arrogance that pushed me into her trap. She knew me too well, had prepared my fall, and the moment my augury was cast I knew my fate was bound to what she willed. It could only be unbound by two means: my death, or through her forgiveness.”
Eletha drew herself up.
“I would not die; and so I could not let her be killed.”
Saphienne’s mouth was dry. “…The other seven, who perished?”
“Not by her hand.”
They lapsed into silence, dimmed merriment surrounding them.
What hadn’t been explicitly revealed wasn’t difficult for Saphienne to intuit. “You called them members of Lenitha’s vale; you weren’t like them. You never joined the Luminary Vale, did you?”
“I was always solitary in my art.” The witch’s gaze flicked to her jewellery. “Upon my return to them, Lenitha and the remaining ‘High Masters’ declared I was their peer, even while they abolished the tradition I followed. Many of their detractors had been slain while I was abroad.”
“And so you’ve bent your curse against them,” Saphienne concluded, “driving me to destroy the woodlands.”
“No.”
Saphienne blinked.
“I have never been able to compel you. What shall happen to the woodlands was never to be decided by my wyrd; I cannot be punished through that which I do not adore.” Eletha steepled her fingers. “The favour I now ask is personal.”
…Not fated…
Saphienne unfolded her arms. “State your request.”
Eletha paused; and in that pause Saphienne spied six millennia spent in hope, crowned now by unspeakable fright.
“Do as you will,” the jeweller implored, “for weal or for woe… only grant me this plea. Spare your mother; she loves you more than you can know.”
Bile filled Saphienne’s throat. She turned to leave.
“When you see my young friend,” Eletha added, “tell her she has been vindicated. Tell her I was wrong.”
“Go to hell.”
Eletha gazed into the joyous crowd. “Why, this is hell; I cannot escape from myself.”
* * *
Turning and turning in a narrowing gyre, Saphienne’s judgement upon the woodlands devoured the belief offered up by her multiplying witnesses in the valley, resonating with the ley lines that had become her extension.
No longer did the magic of the woodlands flow in harmony with the comings and goings of woodkin and bloomkith; instead it pooled around the spectral blazes spread all across the vales, sustaining them despite their distance from the easternmost village.
And those fires, like the great beast who had set them, were more than figments.
Disbelief could not disperse them — so long as the wizard who maintained the spell believed, they would not collapse. But to attain their full potential, their forms needed to be sculpted on a scale and in detail that exceeded what any single magician could conceive.
A threshold approached. She hissed as Transmutation that was Conjuration gathered up sunlight through Invocation and suffused Fascination and Hallucination with more than the mere suggestion that she was real; the familiar banked into the concealment of bright clouds that then rolled with thunder.
In sympathy, the ley lines hummed with vividly envisioned fears. This was fuel enough for the closest bonfires to catch.
* * *
Despite the loud music played by the band, Saphienne heard faint cries in the distance as she climbed the steps to the edge of the stage where dancers elegantly whirled. She counted the beat, awaited her opening, then when the participants reversed direction she darted through them to the centre, where she spun and leapt and lunged, indifferent to the rhythms that moved elves.
There was puzzlement; some laughed, some jeered.
But she had no care for them. She gave herself to an invisible partner, a woman with brown eyes and short hair and ears that were blunted, who matched Saphienne’s grace with dignity that poorer agility could not tarnish, who guided her as the mortal elf always had done, and always would do, until the dragon went into the ground and found peace.
A fever in motion, she was eerily un-elven, and undeniably beautiful.
The music dwindled in confusion–
Then smoke poured from the woods to blanket the stage, flames flashing into being among the boughs. Golden fire with a viridian heart swept down the trunks, driving the elves from the stage in a stampede which Saphienne swayed through, her eyes closed and her lips smiling, her silks billowing, embers settling on her gown.
Someone was screaming about a monster. She didn’t look, trusting that the forest fire behind her would cover the heavens and spread through the grass about the stage.
“Saphienne!”
Marvellous; he was exactly where she wanted.
“Child! Hasten hither!”
She glanced from the corner of her eye to where Tolduin was conjuring water over the lapping tongues barring her path from the stage. He was too concerned for her wellbeing – too dismissive of her agency – to understand what her dancing signified.
“Come now!”
She pirouetted to a stop. “No.”
“By the gods, child–”
“You dare invoke Their name?” Her cry projected further than her smoke-filled lungs ought have allowed. “You who abused Their messenger and sought to thwart Their will dare call upon Them now? You dare believe that you can countermand what They have decreed?”
The priest was stunned. Behind him, the disarray stilled as the crowd bore witness to her magisterial fury.
“I tried to show mercy!” She raised her gaze to her audience. “I turned away the dragon — taught you the sin for which you were judged! Yet you abide the evils done in your name, and let the worship of false idols blind you to your cruelty.”
Tolduin’s lips moved, a name spoken thrice, an autumnal gust called to possess him.
She pressed on, repurposing scripture. “Inglorious! Unworthy, you who glut with ease! No sacred sound may sweetly sing from these false works! Their way They gave you, Their prey They make you.” Her arms upraised, her gown and hair greying with ash, she embraced the role thrust upon her. “See now Their bow strung, Their arrow notched!”
“Cease!” Yellow lit the priest’s gaze as Mother Oak borrowed his lips, her command rising above the crackling flames that Tolduin fought. “Thou art maddened! Lunacy hath taken thee. Thou art not Their messenger–”
“No,” she laughed bitterly, “I am not! That sweet girl was sent to show Their will — to beg for the mercy you withheld from mortals. She was belovèd by the gods, and you – not They – destroyed her!”
Slowed by the varnish, the flames neared her feet.
“Yet though I am Their messenger no longer, I too am belovèd. They have sent me unto you again — now armed with Their implements!” She darkened in countenance and dress as she rose in service to her cause, throwing down her arms in signal. “This is my chosen moment, the flames my scythe–”
And the dragon she would become crashed through the trees to land and rear behind her, wings like rivulets of molten gold outstretched, horns that curled to verdigris upraised, teeth that were sickles come to reap the elves bared as she took a mighty breath.
“–And these are my scales!”
Saphos roared.
* * *
Belief in the dragon – in her vengeful fire – snared the elves and bent them in service to her design. Vistas of endless burning filled their minds as they beheld Saphos, and what they foresaw in their dread completed the spell.
Cascading outward along the ley lines from the Eastern Vale, the illusory fires across the woodlands roared into existence. Some were in the wilds; some were in the villages; some instantly engulfed elves who had been oblivious to their peril.
Yet Saphos was made in the image of Saphienne. Not all who felt her touch would suffer the same.
Children, animals, and those judged innocents were stung and sent fleeing. Adult elves and spirits believed they burned, enduring the same hallucinated agony as had been inflicted on young Saphienne in her test of meditation.
And as for the trees?
Behold the First Vale scoured with dragon’s fire, tens of thousands of acres blasted as the petrified trunks weathered a verdant conflagration.
They neither burned nor melted. A majority shattered, a minority cracked, a scant few held firm until sprouting verdure would later wind around the likenesses carved into them. What had been a prison was no more, every last sentence mercifully commuted.
But though the spirits of the woodlands could not change themselves, six millennia had taken a toll. Torment beyond mortal measure had driven mad hundreds — thousands more seething as they howled into the heavens, intent on taking revenge.
They were preceded by a great tide of their sisters who simply fled, a euphoric host that sang out in gratitude as the spirits tore new ley lines through the carefully planned woodlands and the inflexibly ruled protectorates. This flight at last reached the separate ley lines that demarcated the border, spreading Saphos’ influence to them and disrupting the eternal dance that stirred them.
One by one, the wards of the boundary stones fell inert.
That the woodlands were no longer protected did not go unnoticed.
* * *
“Flee!”
Saphienne screamed into the clearing as Saphos lumbered forward.
“Flee before the wrath of the gods! Flee to Their shrines! Flee to the sacred glades and beg Their forgiveness!”
Yet one among the many elves did not retreat.
“Do not listen!” Tolduin had clambered onto the stage to face her, insulated from the fire by smouldering, gnarled bark grown by the matriarch possessing him. “This is naught but trickery — the gods are kind! These are the ravings of a sick mind!”
She glared at him from within the flames. “Apostate! You will perish for your sin.”
“The gods are with me — for we walk on holy ground!”
Discarding the bark, he stepped forward on bare feet–
The flames receded before the priest, unable to overcome his disbelief.
His example diminished the terror of his congregation.
“See!” He laughed like a child. “We have Their love!”
* * *
What should Saphienne have done?
Saphos couldn’t burn him, but she was real enough that she could bite him in half.
He deserved it. He’d given Saphienne every reason to let it happen.
Yet she didn’t want to be a murderer.
That left only one recourse.
* * *
“Fool!” She cackled as the fire rippled over her silks. “You were never blessed! Your life is a lie!”
Tolduin had been resolute, but the reaction of Ansuz within him made him hesitate.
Saphienne clasped her hands to her blazing breast. “You were not saved from death by a goddess! The words I brought to you were not meant for your ears. Tyrnansunna was the spirit who mended your wounds, and for that selflessness she was imprisoned in accordance with the ancient ways — until I freed her!”
“You lie–”
“Ask Mother Oak! Ask her why she declared me an apostate — why Hyacinth was made my guardian spirit!”
His unfocused stare betrayed the inquisition within, disdain for the notion warping by degrees into suspicion, then consternation. For the first time, the priest doubted.
She tilted back as her hair combusted, peering down on him. “Ask her whether it was love or pity that drew her to your side!”
And Saphienne beheld his world shatter.
“…No…”
But Tolduin was not only a priest.
“…No…”
As the fire seared them both, Saphienne grasped with dawning horror that her revelation hadn’t sundered his belief in his gods: she’d destroyed his magical praxis. No longer the righteous servant he’d known himself as, his self-conception fell apart, tearing down the sigils he’d internalised to expose the passions beyond.
“This cannot be!”
She herself knew what happened when a sorcerer’s mind collapsed.
“I will not let this be!”
Saphienne reached for him–
Yet Mother Oak had quit his gaze, and Saphos had taken to the air, both recognising the gestures he made as he cast the spell that was symbolised by the death of his faith, a spell that spontaneously arose from his grief, a spell of martyrdom that no sane magician would ever cast.
Tolduin abjured all magic around him.
As he fell dead, the hallucination Saphienne puppeted dissolved into silvery sparkles.
* * *
On the shore of the lake she paced along, the backlash knocked Saphienne over.
Or it would have done, had Laelansa not taken her weight. “Fuck! What’s wrong?”
She couldn’t speak, couldn’t move, clutching her brow as her magic writhed and her sigils shivered, destabilised by her brush with annihilation. There was no possibility of holding on to all her active spells; she relinquished the compulsion on Sundamar, then the veil of Ignored Presence around herself and Laelansa, then even the abjuration that had defended her from Celaena, placing all her effort on retaining her influence over the wizard in the vault.
The surprise of the frantic families around them told the novice witch that they were no longer hidden, and she slid an arm under Saphienne and carried the magician across the stepping stones ahead, to the island where most of the elves were seeking refuge from the approaching wildfire. None of the people they pushed through were aware of their involvement, and worried young children made way for them as Laelansa set her beloved down beneath the squat pine that had been grown to shade the statue of the dancers.
“Talk to me,” she whispered, brushing her shortened locks aside.
“…Tolduin…”
“What did he do?”
Saphienne panted, streaked in sweat, feeling the worst of the pain pass. “He’s dead. Killed himself. Abjured all magic.”
Laelansa didn’t pale until she realised the implication. “Your hallucination–”
“Everyone there knows I’m alive.” The dragon managed a rueful smile despite the stabbing in her brain. “We burned your hair for nothing.”
Snorting, Laelansa reached into Saphienne’s satchel. “I never liked it long.”
Nodding would have made her sick. She adjusted the tail she’d made of her own hair, grasping the end where the knife was concealed. “We’re in danger.”
“I’m calling her now. Hyacinth, Hyacinth–”
On the third repetition the bloomkith emerged into the cutting Laelansa had taken from the satchel, then startled people nearby as she grew a petalled body. “My love! You are with us?”
“Yes, but forget about me.” Still, Laelansa hugged the flowers. “She needs–”
“No I don’t.” Saphienne brushed Hyacinth’s offered limb away, shivering uncontrollably. “The less noise in my head right now, the better. Peluda?”
“Safe within the glade…” The spirit hesitated. “…I found the door open, for the house had been ransacked, clothes missing and pantry emptied.”
So Filaurel had the good sense to disappear. “That doesn’t matter. We need to–”
Screams erupted as fragments of engraved sandstone rained down around them, and Hyacinth pulled both her lovers from underneath the animating tree.
“Apostate!”
Mother Oak dispelled the transmutation that had made an awning from the fir, ululating to call her kin, shaping her wooden flesh into spearing points that plunged down on Saphienne–
And were snapped aside by Hyacinth’s lashing tendril. “You will not hurt her again!”
The matron wrenched her roots free from the earth, stepping over the elves who had been struck by the stone she’d shaken off. “Thy hand runneth red as hers! What she hath done, thou shalt suffer for!”
Bystanders were dashing for the beach, the whipping winds of spirits carrying smoke from the south as Saphienne clung to Laelansa for support and the bloomkith shielded them against a rage of splintering wood.
“My sisters!” cried the matriarch, “To me! Slay this vile–”
But a whistling gale staggered the woodkin, several of her shed branches contorting and rising in shapes that had not bestrode the woodlands in six thousand years.
Not only wood was possessed. A boy with yellow eyes stood and grabbed her trunk with a hideous snarl. “Did you forget about us, craven sister?”
A woman wreathing in briars leapt into her branches. “We have not forgotten you!”
Laelansa and Saphienne backed away, blood raining down as Ansuz ripped at the hosts of the spirits who tore apart her wooden aegis faster than she could regrow it, Hyacinth joining the frenzy as the bloomkith’s flowers twined around the tall tree and wrestled her to the ground. A moment later the matriarch rotted, putrescent bark sloughing off, her attackers preventing her escape as she decomposed with the tree.
“Hyacinth!” Saphienne shouted, finding her footing. “We need to go!”
Sated, the bloomkith rewove herself into elven form. “‘Tis good as done. Better than she–”
Another breeze stirred her petals, and Hyacinth rooted herself to the spot, marigolds blooming like a rash across her shell.
“You’re going nowhere.”
Flanked by half a dozen wardens armed with bows and Rods of Repulsion, trailed by a leashed Calamity brought to heel by a fascination, Vestaele splashed onto the island with a wand in hand and ire in her imperious glower.
A xanthous bolt from the wand dispersed the ancient spirits who’d murdered Ansuz. “Surrender or die; I’d prefer the latter.”
Danyn drew back his bowstring, aiming an arrow with a dull grey tip. Beside him, a furious Sundamar – armoured in marigolds – unsheathed the sword he’d brought from the vault, drawing a mythril blade that shrieked with conjured, blue flame.
Saphienne was dumbfounded. How had he arrived so quickly? She’d only just released him from the–
And then she spied the pendant hung around his neck by Celaena, a silver feather Saphienne had enchanted to abjure against fascinations.
Hyacinth squealed as she was torn apart within her flowers, another figure budding off from the invasive marigolds as Ruddles took shape. “Release Laelansa from thy clutches, fiend!”
They thought she was fascinated — a hostage.
Laelansa stepped in front of Saphienne, imitating her as only a lover could. “I think not! This girl belongs to me. If you wish Laelansa to live, you will surrender Hyacinth to me and–”
“You’re ruthless,” Vestaele sneered, “but not ruthless enough. Danyn?”
Instinct drove Saphienne to unleash her fire, intercepting his shot.
Alas, no dragon’s fire could melt adamantine.
His arrow pierced Laelansa’s face, protruding from the base of her skull.
She crumpled to the ground.
* * *
Spirals. All Saphienne could see were spirals.
Her roar called forth a fire so hot its beam was blinding as she dragged her flame toward Vestaele, narrowly missing when her wrists were yanked up by blossoming vines.
“No!” screamed Ruddles.
Roots plugged her throat, the matron burrowing into her body.
“Ruin! I shall ruin thee!”
Vestaele picked herself up. “Stop fucking around: kill the bitch.”
* * *
Surveying the chaos in the vale, Saphos heard her fellow dragon’s cry; she spied the beacon of fire through the smoke.
Her wings folded, and she dived toward the lake.
* * *
Helpless, excruciated, detached, Saphienne could only observe as the advancing elves heard the answering roar overhead.
Vestaele was undissuaded. “It’s a figment — it dies with her.”
Sundamar loomed over Ruddles, ready to slay the dragon she choked. “Move!”
The matron of the woodlands ignored him, raking thorns through Saphienne’s lungs and biting her flesh to drench the bloomkith’s marigolds in glittering red.
“I said move!” He kicked the spirit, to no effect.
As silhouette expanded in the plumes of soot.
Saphienne heard Danyn’s uncertainty. “…Vestaele?”
“That’s no dragon. It can’t hurt us.”
Calamity spotted Saphos, and shook off the fascination, barking a warning as he tugged on his leash.
“…Vestaele,” Danyn repeated, adding, “are you sure that it isn’t real?”
Snapping as she tightened her hold on the leash, the sorcerer threw aside the wand and cast an Abjuration spell to shield herself. “Stand behind me if you’re a coward! Sundamar, just prune the idiot.”
The warden brushed the constricting leaves with the flat of his blade; Ruddles screeched, peeling back from Saphienne–
Who snatched up the knife hidden in her braid and stabbed it into Sundamar’s leg.
He gave a cry that was abruptly strangled, dropping his blade as he pawed at his throat in panic. Saphienne strained for the hilt–
But Ruddles was back on her, and wrapped vicious roots around the dragon’s heart, crushing it.
* * *
In the vault, the wizard who had called himself Almon twitched, startling Celaena where she sat beside the circle.
“Master?”
He blinked. Scales fell from his eyes as he comprehended what had been done to him.
“Master, can you hear me?”
He sensed that Saphienne was in trouble… but her direct control over him was gone.
“Master Almon!”
As soon as he abandoned the spell, the horror would end.
“…Almon?”
All he needed to do was stop believing Saphienne was a dragon.
* * *
Frantic, the drake lunged for his master and bit her ankle.
“Calamity!” Vestaele dropped his leash in shock; Calamity was loosed to run howling down the vale.
Sundamar landed on his knees, pulling out the knife and tossing it aside. He retched as his breath returned.
Danyn – along with the other wardens – swung between the corpse of Saphienne and the shape that hurtled from the sky; his nerve frayed. “You said it’d stop!”
The sorcerer stood her ground as the clouds parted. “I know about dragons, and this thing is no dragon! Whatever she’s made, it can’t harm us.”
Yet the men and women who had followed her had been on the beach when Parthenos descended, and the memory made them break from formation and scramble for the shore, leaving Danyn and Sundamar with Vestaele and Ruddles.
Saphos saw Saphienne’s body, and she opened wide her jaws.
* * *
Reflecting back on what happened to Iolas, apprentice, the reason his ears bled is because your spell convinced him that they ought to have burst. I must confess to being impressed: most wizards lack the belief to cause harm with their hallucinations.
…That’s an interesting question. I have often pondered the limits. Could a master of Hallucination like myself inflict lasting harm? Possibly. Death? Unlikely. We are ultimately limited by our discipline’s purview.
One simply cannot convince someone that they are dead; certainly not another magician.
* * *
Vestaele’s ward lasted for five seconds. The dragon’s fire collapsed her abjuration as she screamed in terrified incomprehension, and then the sorcerer was vaporised.
…Or so she believed. Her heart stopped, then Saphos crushed her into the ground.
Sundamar threw himself from the burning isle into the lake to smother the flames; Danyn ran in a blinded circle until the dragon snatched him up in her jaws, shook him apart, and hurled his remains into the dirt.
Then Saphos launched back into the air, chasing the rest of the wardens.
Where Mother Marigold had smothered Saphienne, her petals burned.
* * *
Black waters rose around a sinking isle to lap at a dying willow tree.
Disorientated, Ruddles spun around. Possessing a corpse was an unpleasant gambit for survival, one she hadn’t done often, and never had she encountered more than a void while the brain decayed. Overhead, the stars were winking out, save for a verdant spiral that was slowing as the sea reclaimed the beach.
Odd, but unimportant. She could feel the flames abating, and she reached–
Saphienne tackled her to the ground — claws embedding in her throat.
“You’re going nowhere,” snarled the dragon. “If I die, you die!”
Savaged by the dragon, hysterical, the spirit of marigolds submitted.
* * *
Saphienne’s still-raw heart resumed beating.
She gasped.
* * *
“Release me!”
“In good time. We have a few minutes while I recover, time enough to trace your roots and find–”
“Stop!”
“How pretty! What a poetic name you have; Laelansa loved sunsets.”
“I beseech thee, show mercy! I intended not–”
“Good intentions were all you ever had. I think ‘the summer redness in the west’ should act more in keeping with her mournful name. Let me cut away these stems; you shan’t be needing to fight, nor preach, nor do anything much but go into the west and darken.”
“…I…”
“Do leave some flowers atop the graves when you pass through the Vale of Tears.”
* * *
A tepid breeze dispersed from Saphienne.
She ached; and yet she was too numb to cry.
“Hyacinth,” she murmured. “Hyacinth. Hyacinth.”
The spirit didn’t answer. Ruddles had injured her, perhaps fatally.
Saphienne’s head was swimming. She sat up–
Sundamar struck her jaw.
“Fuck you!” His blows rained down. “You’re a monster!” His skin had been horribly marred by the burning flowers that had driven him underwater, direct contact causing the destructive effect to bleed into him through the magical sympathy of space. “You’re evil!”
Her fire — she tried to conjure it, but he choked her before she could roar.
“Go into the ground and–”
Hyacinth-Laelansa swung.
Sundamar yelled, rolled away, clutching the cauterised stump of his ear.
The woman with yellow eyes bared her teeth across her incandescent blade. “Now you match well the ugliness inside you.”
He grew pallid. “…My ear…”
“Come and lose the other!” She swiped at him–
And the coward buckled and fled.
* * *
Once he’d vanished into the thickening smoke, Hyacinth-Laelansa dropped the sword and slumped to the ground.
Saphienne dragged herself upright. She stood on the second attempt, offering her hand to her lovers. “He’ll send others. We have to go.”
How sad the spirit and the elf were as they met her gaze. “We cannot. Laelansa’s injury is too great; Hyacinth’s is no lesser. Without her lover as her vessel, Hyacinth would fall back into eternal sleep; without Hyacinth to make beat her heart and stir her lungs, Laelansa would perish before she could heal.”
Fumbling with her satchel, Saphienne found her spellbook. “I can help… I can mend you…”
“You do not hear us: we cannot go with you. Too much time elapsed before Hyacinth joined with Laelansa. We are each too grievously wounded; time alone might heal what has been scarred–”
“They’ll kill you!”
“Hyacinth will attest that Laelansa was bewitched; a thousand years sealed away will not seem long, for she knows you will come–”
“I’m not leaving you!”
Her tears ran down the palm that stroked her cheek. “You must; for we love you.”
Keening, Saphienne fell into Hyacinth-Laelansa’s arms.
When her eyes could cry no more, they kissed.
Then Hyacinth-Laelansa pushed Saphienne from her breast, slipping off the finger rings to press them into her partner’s palm. “Go now! Away thou! Race, that elves may chase thy pretty face but never catch thy tail! Thy dragon’s grace permitteth relentless pace to flee this place — so fly! Quit thou this vale!”
The blaze had arrived at the shore. Cursing, Saphienne kept her lovers in view for as long as she could as she waded through the water, until they were lost to her in the endless night that arose from her fires.
* * *
The vale climbed. So did she, outpacing the burning. There was no one else in the trees.
Ah, but above them? Curiosity had drawn a visitor to the woodlands.
Dark scales edged in silver, underbelly hued like dusk, the wyrm swooped over Saphienne’s head and landed before her with weight enough to crack the stony slope, appraising her through tawny eyes.
Of course.
She didn’t react; she just kept walking.
Displeased, the dragon reared and bellowed a challenge.
She stared straight through the behemoth, continuing to advance.
This unnerved the serpent. Roused to anger, sharp teeth displayed–
He sniffed.
His narrow pupils widened as he spotted the glittering smeared over her skin, spread further as he beheld the calm suffusing her. He roared a second time, less confidently.
Her fists balled–
The dragon shrank back.
He moved aside to let her pass, mystified by his peer.
When she drew abreast, the dragon addressed her in accented Elfish. “What has been done to the elves: this was your doing?”
She didn’t slow, replying in the draconic tongue. “They gave me cause.”
And the young dragon hissed. “…Impressive…”
He unfurled his wings and departed, eager to explore.
Saphienne didn’t care. She hiked on, up to the overlook…
…Where Filaurel was waiting.
End of Chapter 149