Forest of Darkness
Even at the height of day the canopy pressed down thick enough to choke out the light, leaving only a permanent, bruise-colored dusk between the trunks. The trees here grew without the courtesy of space between them, bark pressing bark, roots braiding into a floor that offered no flat ground and no welcome.
Somewhere above the treeline, the Demon Castle sat on its plateau of black stone, and above even that was a box floating between the forest's tallest pillars of ancient wood.
Its light was pale blue, the color of ice before it breaks.
It cast no warmth.
Every few seconds the box shuddered from an impact inside it, the muffled percussion carrying down through the canopy, sending leaves skittering in a cold gust that moved through the branches and out again like a held breath released.
Dobrota stood at the forest's edge with his book open across his forearm, his eyes on the box. Reayop stood beside him. Neither of them had spoken for some time.
"Dobrota." Reayop didn't look away from the box when he asked. "Does it hold against attacks from outside?"
Dobrota turned a page without looking at it. "Father," he said, with the clipped, faintly exhausted patience of someone who had answered a question far too many times, "you already know the answer to that."
The box shuddered again, and another cold gust moved through the leaves.
.......................................................................................................
The inside of the box was a world unto itself.
The shockwaves moved through the air in visible rings, rebounding off the curved walls and overlapping each other into a constant, low hum. Blood stippled the far wall in a fine spray and the floor had taken enough impacts to map every fight that had taken place here.
"HYAAA!"
Tiabishi's foot connected with the princess's leg with everything she had. The sound of it was wrong in a way that made the air feel smaller. A few drops of blood flew sideways, catching the pale light of the box as they went, and Tiabishi hit the floor and stayed there, curled inward, shaking in that involuntary way that muscles shake when they have nothing left to give.
"Same power." The princess's voice had the quality of something sharpened on a wheel. "You're not improving, Elf."
Tiabishi pressed her forehead to the floor, breathing through her teeth.
"Pain is an emotion." The princess crossed the distance between them in four steps and stood over her, pointing one finger down. "Ignore it. Silence it. You are going to keep kicking until I say you can stop."
The silence stretched out.
Then Tiabishi pushed herself up.
She found her feet slowly, unsteady, a few short steps toward the princess and something changed in her eyes.
Not the look of determination.
Not the blank face of someone pushing past pain.
Something behind the exhaustion slid out of the way, and what was left behind it was the color of lit embers.
Bright red.
Wall to wall.
The princess recognized it. She took a step back and began to raise her guard…
The pillar came through the box wall sideways.
It wasn't precise.
It was enormous, filling a full quarter of the interior, its tip broken and fractured where it had punched through the barrier. It struck Tiabishi mid-motion and carried her into the opposite wall, and she went still against it like a coat hung on a peg.
The red faded from her eyes.
The princess let her guard down slowly and looked at where her father had been standing outside. He was already walking away from the box, his back to her, his stride unhurried. Beside where he'd stood, Dobrota had dropped to one knee, staring up at the pillar, his book pressed open against his chest and his eyes very wide.
The princess followed the pillar's line from the entry point to where the tip had snapped off. The cracks in it ran all the way down.
"What was..." She didn't finish the sentence. "...that."
.......................................................................................................
Tiabishi lay still in the bed. Her breathing was slow and even, whatever had inhabited her retreated back somewhere deep, and she looked, in sleep, almost peaceful in a way she never quite managed while awake.
The princess stood at the foot of the bed with her arms crossed when Reayop came through the door.
"Father." She didn't raise her voice. "Why did you use your most defensive pillar? A standard one would have stopped her."
Reayop moved to the bed and sat down on the edge of it, looking at Tiabishi the way someone looks at a thing that requires caution. He placed one hand on her shoulder, briefly, and then withdrew it.
"If I hadn't used the pillar of force," he said, "you would have died."
The princess said nothing. Her eyes went to Tiabishi, and stayed there.
"She carries a rare skill," Reayop said. "In Sindarin." He kept his voice even, as though he were explaining weather. "It elevates every stat she possesses by a factor of one thousand. For two minutes. The problem is that she has no control over it and the skill takes her rather than the other way around. When it surfaces, she goes with it, and the girl you were training is simply not home anymore."
The princess held his gaze for a moment. Then she clicked her tongue, turned on her heel, and walked out.
"I'm sorry, daughter."
The words followed her through the door. Reayop sat alone with the sleeping girl for another moment, then rose and walked in the direction she hadn't gone.
The throne room had no light in it.
Not simply dark, it was empty of light in a way that felt deliberate, as though the darkness had been installed rather than occurring naturally. No wind found its way in through any gap in the stone. The cold, however, was complete. The kind of cold that found its way through cloth, through skin, settling into the cartilage of the ears and the backs of the hands with patient thoroughness.
Reayop crossed the floor without hesitation and sat down on the throne.
The room came alive.
Twenty-six pillars lit simultaneously across the full length of the chamber, each one holding a blue candle at its head, their light spilling down the carved stone and pooling in a ring across the floor and ceiling, filling the space with a cold, steady glow that left the far corners to their own devices. The flames stood perfectly still. There was no air to move them.
"FIRST!"
His voice rolled through the chamber. The candles flickered once, all twenty-six of them, and then steadied.
What came in through the far entrance was large. Its upper body was enormous, four meters from floor to shoulder, and sat atop legs that barely reached a meter in height, giving the whole creature a squat, front-heavy look, like something designed for mass rather than speed. Its skin was a dull green. In its hand or above its hand, or perhaps simply near it, it carried a cup.
It as silver. Ordinary-looking, the size a human might use for water. The space in the immediate vicinity of the cup was bending slightly, the air around it warping like heat shimmer over stone, though the room was cold.
It set the weapon down on the floor beside it and lowered its head.
"General First," Reayop said. "Did you find the boy?"
"No, my liege." The voice was slow and careful, like someone threading a needle. "I have not been able to locate him. The last confirmed sighting was in Liopetras."
The corner of Reayop's mouth shifted. Not a smile, the ghost of one, carried on one side of his face only.
"You don't have to find him anymore." He closed his eyes, settling back against the throne. "He'll come to us. Once he learns that his little lover is here…" He laughed. It started quiet and built into something that filled the cold room entirely, sending the candle flames sideways in their sockets…
Then the cough hit.
He cut the laugh off, one hand pressing briefly to his chest, and waved the other toward the door. "Go," he managed, voice thick.
The General retrieved its cup without a word, and both it and the weapon vanished, their light winking out a half-second after they'd gone.
.......................................................................................................
The cave mouth was unimpressive. A crack in the rock face near the demon mountains, narrow enough to require turning sideways to enter. But the interior opened immediately into something else entirely—a chamber of smooth white walls and a ceiling vaulted high enough to lose detail in the dimness, every surface polished to a finish that reflected movement back as pale, wavering shapes.
The floor was the same: seamless, cold to the touch, catching the light of the orange orbs that hung in the hallway beyond in long amber streaks.
The podium at the far end of the main chamber held a horn-shaped device mounted on a stand of red diamond, its purpose unclear from any angle. The whole space had the feeling of something recently made to feel permanent.
"The Chamber of the brother is done, Myogafu." The man with the stone crown spoke with quiet satisfaction. It sat slightly off-center on his head; a few small gems pressed into the surface at uneven intervals. "The base is invisible to anyone who comes close. No detection spell will reach us here."
Myogafu looked up at him from somewhere near his chest. The form he occupied today was that of a small boy, green hair, blue eyes, a child's proportions, though nothing about him suggested childhood. "Good work, Hiyendel. Your way with artifacts remains extraordinary."
Hiyendel inclined his head.
The two of them moved toward the far wall. It recognized their approach and opened, revealing the hallway beyond: stone carved smooth, hands emerging from the ceiling at intervals, each one curled around an orange glowing orb that cast the passage in warm, amber light. It might have been welcoming, in a different building, for different occupants.
A scream carried from one of the rooms further down.
Heavy. Adult like. Followed immediately by a man's laughter that had nothing restrained in it…the laugh of something enjoying itself without reservation. "Come on, human! Do better than this!"
The scream stopped.
Then the laughter stopped too.
A body flew out of the room without its head, moving fast, and struck the wall of the hallway before sliding to the floor. The fine red robe that followed through the doorway a moment later belonged to Adrain. The fangs of several different creatures were stitched into the fabric, decorative, rattling softly as he moved. He looked at the body on the floor the way someone looks at a plate they've already finished, then at Hiyendel.
"She was no fun at all. And her blood tasted awful." He leaned against the doorframe. "Never bring me a sixteen-year-old again, Hiyendel."
Hiyendel regarded the headless body without particular expression, then regarded Adrain with roughly the same amount of it. "I thought that was your preference." He reached out with one foot and rolled the corpse down the hallway, where it came to rest near Myogafu. "Next time, at least clean up after yourself."
Myogafu's mouth opened.
It opened too far. Far further than a mouth ought to go, unhinged past any natural limit, and the body disappeared into it in a single, unhurried motion, one long swallow, and then closed again, and Myogafu stood where he had been standing, the same size, the same shape, as though nothing had occurred.
"Awful," Adrain confirmed. "Barely any mana in the whole thing."
"You are right," Myogafu said pleasantly. "Entirely unacceptable. We'll be more discerning in future." He folded his hands together. His eyes moved between Hiyendel and Adrain until he was satisfied he had both of them, then he let the pleasantness settle into something else.
"Gentlemen." His voice carried down the hallway to its end, bouncing off the white stone. "The Brothers of Mercy have a direction now. We recruit. Monsters, villains, anyone with the desire and the power to matter. Go where you need to go, take what recruits are worth taking, and kill whoever stands between you and them if you have to."
Hiyendel smiled. Adrain's expression shifted into something wicked and comfortable.
The orange orbs burned steadily in their stone hands, and the cave was very quiet.
.......................................................................................................
Far below Libertatis, the pegaluve of the lower city watched the mountain shake.
From the ground it was visible…the tremors, the occasional chunk of stone falling away from the underside of the floating island, the ripple that moved through the city's lower edge when something above hit something else with enough force to carry down. The gray-winged elder stood with a group of them at the edge of the lower district, all of them tilted back to watch.
"Hey- look!" He pointed. Something was descending from above: a sphere of ice, massive, shedding cold air as it dropped, trailing a faint cloud of vapor that dispersed into the wind.
"What's inside it?" someone asked.
It hit the ground with a crack that sent a ring of cold air outward through the crowd, and the shell split open. Steam and frost rolled out across the stone, and a young pegaluve girl half-fell, half-stumbled out of the break in the ice…blonde hair, blonde wings, eyes wide and still seeing whatever she'd seen inside. A man nearby moved to her immediately, steadied her with both hands, and looked into her face. She didn't look back.
Others leaned in to see what else the ice had brought.
Several of them stepped away quickly. Whatever was inside, it showed on their faces.
The elder looked up at the floating city and said nothing. The mountain was still shaking.
.......................................................................................................
The battlefield was beginning to recede.
Streets that had been cracked open and overturned were slowly reasserting themselves—the stone flowing back toward its original placement, houses reforming around the shapes their foundations remembered, the city trying to heal itself in the quiet between engagements. It was slow work, and incomplete, and the air still tasted of dust and blood, but the geometry of Libertatis was returning piece by piece.
Achlys stared at Qyioza. The floating paper behind the man continued its slow rotation, gray light pulsing through the written laws inscribed across it…steady as a heartbeat, patient as stone.
"The law magic," he said, turning to Crevial. "Is there a way to break the laws?"
Crevial looked at Qyioza. Then back at Achlys. "Not that I can think of," she said. "But perhaps there's a way to kill that beautiful, charming man." Every syllable was coated in something she didn't bother to make pleasant.
Achlys nodded once. His sword hand tightened.
"New ability," he said. "Time to find out."
His body expanded, subtly, a few centimeters in every direction, and then contracted back inward, and then the mist came. It poured from him in every direction at once, not like smoke and not like fog, but something between them with more intent than either. It moved through the streets with purpose, finding every open space between the buildings, climbing the facades of the recovering houses, rolling along the ground until it had covered the whole of the inner city in a thin, shifting layer.
Shapes formed inside it.
Silhouettes at first, standing and watching. The same height, the same posture and the same stillness. Then the details resolved: the same clothes, the same cape, the same weapon at the hip and the same marking visible even in the mist. Dozens of them. Hundreds, perhaps, spread across the whole width of the city, standing in every street and on every rooftop with their faces empty of expression, watching the center of the field where the real one stood.
"This is incredible, Achlys!" Cryo's grin was audible before it was visible. "Although…are you sure you're not using it a little generously for a first attempt?"
Lecia smacked the back of his head without turning to look at him. "The stone is going berserk because he's never used it before, you dumb bird!" She leaned in close to his ear to deliver the last three words at full volume.
Cryo covered both ears. "You are physically too loud, failed angel."
"YOU ARE TOO QUIET, HALF-FROZEN IDIOT-"
Achlys was barely upright.
His legs were shaking under him, the effort of holding the ability outward written across every part of his stance, and the clones around him watched with their empty faces as he fought to keep them together. They didn't waver. They waited, perfectly still, perfectly him, with none of the cost he was paying showing in any of them.
"Listen." His voice carried far enough. The bickering stopped.
"The clones hold position and keep Qyioza's attention. Guards! you stay with Cryo. Protect him. He'll be supporting the whole fight from the back." The guards nodded. Cryo's expression settled into something focused and ready. "Lecia. Crevial. You're on Polo."
Crevial's eyes widened slightly. She looked down for a moment…just a moment…then nodded.
Lecia moved to her side without being asked. She put a hand on Crevial's shoulder. "We'll get him back," she said. The smile that came with it was smaller than her usual ones, no edge, no performance, nothing designed to fill space. Just the offer that was made plainly. "That I promise."
Crevial exhaled through her nose.
"Lisare and I take the Governor."
Lisare looked up from where she'd been watching Qyioza's approach. She said nothing. Her nod was single, complete.
"One more thing." Achlys turned to Cryo, who was already reaching into the cold air around him, his fingers finding the shape of what was needed. He produced the ice chunks…three for each of them, small enough to hold in one hand, dense enough to feel like something…and pressed them into waiting palms one by one.
"When you need them," Cryo said, "throw them into the air. Say my name. Tell them what they need to become."
Nods moved through the group like a current through water. They spread, guards and Cryo pulling back, Lecia and Crevial angling toward Polo, Lisare falling into position at Achlys's shoulder.
Achlys straightened against the weight of the mist and raised his sword.
Every clone across the city raised theirs in the same breath.
"The fight of liberation," he said, his voice carrying out through the streets, bouncing off the half-rebuilt walls, finding every corner of the city that still had corners to find, "will be our victory!"