8: The Queen’s Spite, The Queen’s Fury, The Queen’s No Longer (Part I)

Chapter 8: The Queen’s Spite, the Queen’s Fury, the Queen’s No Longer (Part I)

The Time: Present day, 720 A.E.

The Place: Central Saimr

Grand Matron Hvasira’s impromptu command tent smells strongly of sweat, blood, ritual herbs, and sacred incense—the fourth employed largely to cover up the first two, with mixed success.

The tent is barely large enough to suit its intended purpose. There is just enough room to squeeze the delegation’s leadership into one half and two corpses on rolling cots (plus one unconscious preceptor on a bedroll) on the other. Matron Tanavi’s hastily-erected dividing curtain does nothing to blot out the wet sounds of Mother Misery rummaging around inside the dead interlopers. A tea service and a bowl of roasted walnuts sits on a low table, butunderstandably no one appears to be in the mood to partake.

Against the pleasant backdrop of crackling lanterns and parting flesh, three glum matrons, one conscious preceptor, and one indifferent Matron Enahi now swaddled in proper bandages stand awkwardly close together around Grand Matron Hvasira’s makeshift war table.

“Soooo,” Matron Jairani begins, twining the end of her braid around her finger, “we’re gonna be late for the festival, then…?”

Grand Matron Hvasira grunts and removes her golden mask, revealing a pair of tired, bruised-looking dark eyes. It’s been many hours since the battle in that nameless village, and the sky has long since blackened.

“Enahi,” she says sharply, completely ignoring Matron Jairani, “you couldn’t have left one of them alive for questioning?”

Everyone around the table discreetly looks anywhere but at Matron Enahi, whose pale pink lips pull into a snarl at the Grand Matron’s reprimand.

“You aren’t that naive, Asazim. They were heaven-born outriders—if I hadn’t killed them, they would’ve killed themselves before they allowed us to capture them.”

Of course the Grand Matron knows this, but her frustration at the coven’s helplessness has bladed her tongue. She chews on the inside of her cheek in irritation.

“Anything, Mother Misery?” she calls through the curtain.

Mother Misery’s whispery hum passes between the ears of everyone gathered in the tent. “Plenty of interest, but nothing of use. They came prepared. Their spiritual anchors were posthumously severed; I couldn’t call their souls back if I was the Fell Empress Herself.”

Grand Matron Hvasira’s eyebrows scrunch. “Posthumously?”

“Mm. Probably from an embedded self-immolation spell. Little Enahi is lucky they didn’t trigger during their fight.” Mother Misery’s laugh is like the rustling of dry autumn leaves.

“Lucky,” Grand Matron Hvasira murmurs flatly.

Matron Enahi examines her nails.

Matron Tanavi rubs her browbone. “Mouse?”

“Ah—yes?” the fretful matron of the Physicker Branch replies, peeking through a gap in the curtain. She never manages to look entirely put-together, but at the moment she’s even more frazzled than usual. Her long, thin face is wan, and her watery blue eyes seem even more miserable contrasted against the dark bags beneath them. Her gray-streaked red-brown braid is frizzed beyond salvation.

“How’s our preceptor?” Matron Tanavi asks her.

Mother Mouse’s thin mouth grows thinner. “Better than I would have expected,” she answers, though her tone isn’t as cheerful as one would anticipate from a healer delivering good news. “Much better, in fact. She should be comatose.”

“But?” Matron Tanavi prompts.

Mother Mouse shakes her head. “What can I say? She looks fine. No damage to her spiritual circulation, no lasting impact on her cardiac or respiratory systems, no necrosis, no seizures, no obvious cognitive deterioration, not even a rash… If we’re speaking of luck, the young lady must have it in spades.”

Matron Enahi’s sneer deepens, but she says nothing in response.

No one else says anything either. To face such a bizarre and unexpected incursion is one thing. To come away from it largely unscathed is… fortunate beyond measure. Almost unbelievable, even.

Grand Matron Hvasira sighs in frustration. “It just doesn’t make sense. We’ve had scouts scouring that village for hours and they haven’t turned up a damned thing. What in the hells were they looking for in a place like that? How did they get there?”

These exact questions have been posed many times, but no one has concocted a real answer.

The world of Ansera had never before made meaningful contact with the Eight Heavens. Outside of a few coven elites, no one even knew that the False Prophet Seda had originally been a Hierophant from the First Heaven, Harzai, Wellspring of the True Flame (if she’d spoken truly of her origins, and it was entirely possible she had not).

Of those coven elites, none were privy to the details of the False Prophet’s exit from Harzai. She’d never explained how or why she arrived in Ansera. Perhaps she’d been exiled. Perhaps she’d left of her own accord, a noble missionary for the True Sun. Whatever the case, she’d spoken sparingly of her past life to her commanders—and to her devotees, not at all. As far as Hvasira knew, she’d never again connected with any of her old allies. She’d seemed entirely content to close that chapter of her life completely.

During her sermons, Seda had presented the Eight Heavens as bastions of the True Sun, celestial realms awash in holy light and filled to the brim with the Fell Empress’s most devout followers. Those who proved themselves worthy might ascend to one of these heavens in time, their souls preserved into eternity by the True Sun’s brilliance.

Hvasira’s faith in the True Sun is absolute. She’s felt its power, its beauty, its harmony—she feels it every time she draws upon its strength. Her faith in the False Prophet’s teachings, however, is scant at best. As such, what she’s confident she knows of the heavens is hardly enough to fill a thimble, and she can’t hope to divine the intentions of these outriders. Had they come for Seda? For the new queen? For something else entirely? Who fucking knows. The best she can do is gather all the information two corpses might provide and report it to the queen as swiftly as possible.

Of course, there are… other concerns, as well.

Preceptor Lenara—a sturdy woman with a handsome but weathered tan face and cutting blue eyes—scoffs. “How much longer are we all going to stand here and pretend this doesn’t smell like horseshit?”

Matron Tanavi winces. Matron Rusala purses her lips. Matron Jairani adopts the longing expression of someone who wishes they had a drink to enjoy with their show.

And Grand Matron Hvasira crosses her arms and stares at the tent’s opposite flap, expression unreadable.

Matron Enahi tilts her head mockingly. “Please do share, Preceptor. What do you imagine happened out there?”

Preceptor Lenara glowers at her, her dark brows drawn low. Despite the late hour and the faint sheen of sweat coating her lined face, her posture is ironclad.

“Mother Misery,” she calls, though she doesn’t look away from Matron Enahi for a moment, “How deep do the spiritual veins on those bodies run?”

There’s a slight pause before Mother Misery answers. Her voice is filled with a wicked glee. “Oh, quite deep. They’re very defined. If I had to guess, I’d say these two were ranked in the mid-to-upper Third Echelon.”

Preceptor Lenara’s lips twist. “And Enahi-azim dispatched them both with hardly a scratch. How impressive.”

“This venerable lord is,” Matron Enahi says drolly.

Matron Jairani coughs lightly to disguise her laugh.

Sticking these two in the same room is like pouring a cup of water in a pan of hot oil. Lenara-sahan might not get along with Ari-sahan either (or most anyone else), but when it comes to everyone except Enahi-azim, Ari-sahan is like a good-humored wall of rubber: even Lenara-sahan’s sharpest barbs tend to bounce right off. Enahi-azim, on the other hand, is a pit of boiling tar. Anything that falls in won’t be clambering out unharmed.

Preceptor Lenara’s eyes narrow, but before she can wade deeper into the tar pit, a muffled groan comes from Preceptor Ari’s bedroll.

Mother Mouse’s sparse brows lift. “Oh–!” She disappears through the curtain in a flash.

As everyone is regarding the space she vacated with some curiosity, no one notices the very faint knot of tension in Matron Enahi’s shoulders loosening.

*

When Ari finally wakes, it’s to the aches and pains of a body that feels like a cow patty flattened beneath the wheels of a dozen passing carriages.

“Gurgh,” she says pitifully, cracking her eyelids just enough to make out the canopy of deep blue fabric overhead. It’s dim in here, thankfully, and after a moment she’s able to open her eyes completely without suffering a splitting headache—or at least, no more of a headache than she already has.

Ugh. She just woke up, but she’s already exhausted. Her mind has been running like a rat in a maze for hours, tormented from dream to dream— some bizarre, some frightening, and some heart-wrenching. It’s the last one that stays cobwebbed in her brain: her final, embarrassing, ill-fated meeting with Sahan. The pain, pulled apart and examined from every angle over the years, is no longer gut-wrenching. Now it hurts like a toothache, dull and ever-present, easy to ignore until something pokes it.

She doesn’t want to deal with it right now. Not the flu-like ache in her bones and not this unwanted passenger that’s hitched a free ride in her head for five years.

She’s beginning to slink shamelessly back to sleep when Mother Mouse’s head pops into her field of vision, hair pins hopelessly askew.

“Awake already!” She says it like she’s delivering a scolding. “Goodness. The hardiness of the young, I suppose.”

This is an audaciously bullshit claim and they both know it.

Caught in the act, Ari has little choice but to grimace in defeat and drag her eyes back open. “M-Mother Mouse… It… It hurts… I’m so tired…” she whispers with all the abject misery she can muster.

Another physicker might cluck her tongue sympathetically and urge her to go back to sleep. Mother Mouse frowns and jabs two fingers ungently into her solar plexus. Ari grunts, miffed, as Mother Mouse sends a questing wave of spiritual energy down Ari’s pneumatic veins. It doesn’t hurt, but it feels a bit like the spiritual equivalent of having an uninvited guest barge in and start rearranging the furniture. Ordinarily she could resist such an intrusion, but at the moment she’s too weak and sluggish to do more than lie there like a dead fish.

Instead, she follows Mother Mouse’s progress through her body inquisitively. She hasn’t exactly had time to assess herself, after all. She is, naturally, intimately familiar with her own three essences—pneuma, soma, and psyche—but locating hidden abnormalities in any of them still takes time and effort.

If she focuses, she can feel Mother Mouse’s numina purging what remains of the demonic toxin, the soft blue glow of the Cleansing Flame igniting in her spiritual veins as it painstakingly hunts down drop after drop of black sludge. But that sludge is formidable: no wonder even Mother Mouse hasn’t yet been able to purify it completely. It flees from the Cleansing Flame’s scouring warmth like a living thing, burrowing away in the nooks and crevices of her pneumatic circulatory system. The more it hides, the brighter Mother Mouse has to burn to find it, and the higher the risk the Cleansing Flame will begin to slough away more than just impurities.

What a dastardly little son of a bitch.

But… there’s something else, too. It’s so well-concealed, so swift, that if Ari hadn’t been paying such close attention, she would have missed it completely: there’s another arcane presence in her spiritual veins.

Ari isn’t moving, but her body freezes up on instinct anyway.

What… is that? Automatically, she frowns and closes her eyes, allowing the material world to drift farther away as she sinks deeper into meditation. Soft strains of conversation float off, petals in the breeze; the ache in her joints dissolves like butter in a warm pan as she chases the traces of that foreign presence. Mother Mouse doesn’t seem to notice it at all, and Ari can’t blame her: even though she knows it’s there and is actively searching for it, it mimics her own spiritual energy so closely that she can’t make out anything about it save that it exists in her somewhere. Somewhere she can’t fucking find, apparently.

The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

It doesn’t seem… malicious, at least? After several long moments of painstaking observation, she realizes that sometimes little clots of toxin will just—disappear, without her or Mother Mouse’s intervention. Like something else is swallowing them up. It’s shockingly stealthy, striking like an ambush predator and leaving not a scrap of evidence behind.

Eventually, Ari’s beleaguered mind floats back to surface-level awareness. Agh, her head… She can’t sustain this level of mindfulness for long in this state. When she cracks an eye, she finds Mother Mouse still absorbed in her task, evidently none the wiser. Should she mention it…? No, no. The last thing she needs is Mother Mouse deciding to take a deep dive through her core. Her soul is so wrapped up in concealment spells that she’s probably half glyphwork at this point. Even though Ari is (to toot her own horn) probably the kingdom’s second most preeminent spiritualist after the queen, there’s no point in taking stupid risks. Later, when she’s alone and perhaps better-rested, she can analyze her core more thoroughly and try to figure this out. For now, the presence doesn’t seem keen to do her any harm, so she might as well ignore it. And even if it is some kind of delayed fuse, if she can’t disarm it, Mother Mouse certainly won’t be able to either.

With her worries thus discarded, Ari endures the rest of Mother Mouse’s poking and prodding with grace. Having nothing else to do, she turns her attention to the mess the Grand Matron’s impromptu command tent has been reduced to. Somewhere in front of her, she can sense that pair of corpses and the telltale hum of Mother Misery’s magic at work. Regrettably, they probably won’t be able to get much from the bodies. Even the cleverer mortalborn witches of this realm take precautions to prevent necromancers from prying secrets from the dead. Surely a pair of heavenborn interlopers would’ve taken more strenuous measures if they planned to—

All at once, the niggling theory Ari’s subconscious mind pieced together in her dreams slaps her soundly across the face. She nearly jerks upright in alarm, stopped only by Mother Mouse holding her down with a put-upon huff.

Oh no. Ohhhhh no no no. Aghhh, how could she have forgotten?!

Ari bites down on her lip as her thoughts crash around in her skull like a troupe of drunk minstrels. If she’s right about this, then she knows exactly what that foreign presence in her core is, and she knows exactly what those heavenly scouts were looking for. She could be wrong, of course. She doesn’t have all the information! Maybe she’s totally out in the weeds! But… it would make a lot of sense, her theory.

In… some ways, at least. In others…

Ari keeps gnawing on her lip. Ow. Seems like it’s already split? She must be dehydrated.

On the opposite side of the curtain, there’s an argument taking place. Distracted as she is, Ari only catches snippets of it.

“—so what happened to the third corpse—”

“—already told you that the nexus must have dissipated without an anchor—”

“—you think we’re all bloody stupid–”

“—clearly—”

But suddenly, a sound pierces the night, one that freezes everyone who hears it. It’s long and loud and mournful, a low wail that carries over miles with ease.

A scout’s alert horn. All the blood drains from Ari’s face.

That blast silences the command tent. Even the insects outside fall quiet.

“What–” Mother Rusala begins, but before she can get another word out, a second blast sounds, right on the heels of the first. Then a third. A fourth. Overlapping howls, like a pack of wolves calling across the dark.

“Fuck,” Grand Matron Hvasira says forebodingly.

Outside the command tent, there’s the sound of startled shouts, of sleep-stiff bodies staggering from their bedrolls. The barghests groan and yawn, some of them lifting their muzzles to join the chorus of horns.

Ari is up and moving so fast the pain has to sprint to catch up with her. She pushes bodily through the curtain, heart pounding in her throat. “The hell’s going on?”

Matron Jairani glances at her, for once not a smile in sight. She opens her mouth to say something and is drowned out by the blare of another horn—this one cut short as something in the far distance booms.

Ari whirls around and happens, incidentally, to make eye contact with Enahi. Or… well, eye-to-browband contact. It lasts for only a few heartbeats, but it’s long enough for Enahi’s mouth, which up to this moment had been drawn into her typical scowl, to abruptly morph into a cold, secretive, intimate sort of smile. There’s no good humor in it, no joy, just a sliver of knowing.

Ari’s mouth runs dry as sand.

And then Enahi turns and disappears through the flap of the command tent without a backwards glance, and Ari is left to stagger over to Mother Mouse. “Where’s Va--Baza?” she demands.

Mother Mouse’s eyes are huge and frightened, but she points to a corner of the tent clumped with supplies. Ari rushes over without another word as the world outside erupts into chaos, digging through assorted detritus until her fingers brush a familiar blade. Yet as she draws Varul—reverted to that same plain dagger—into her hand, she finds her connection to her weapon muted and dull.

What now?!

Ari swears under her breath as she turns Varul this way and that, fingers trembling, gelid sweat gathering on her brow. She can’t afford to freak out right now. It takes nearly all of her willpower to shove aside the panic threatening to grab her by the throat, but she thinks of her three peeping ducklings out there in the tumult, lost and frightened, and a wall of forced calm bisects her mind into “shit to worry about now” and “shit to worry about later”.

Even when she channels a thread of numina into Varul, there’s no response. Shit fuck shit. Was it the Harbinger? Did it give her spiritual indigestion or something?

She wants to scream, but she swallows it down and tucks Varul safely back into her sheath. Fine.

Grand Matron Hvasira is barking orders left and right when she emerges from the tent alongside the others.

“Formations!” she bellows. “Sentinels, defensive arrays! Get the kids behind them! Warcasters, arm up! Scouts, report! Enahi—”

Grand Matron Hvasira whips around, searching, but the Lašar Commander is nowhere to be seen. She makes a rude gesture and turns to Ari. “You! Aethersight!”

Ari wordlessly shuts her eyes and drops into the Aether like a rock in a pond. The material world fades, overlaid by tides of anima. The discord of her immediate surroundings takes a few seconds to sort through, and then Ari casts her awareness farther, past the bounds of the camp and into thesurrounding woodland.

What she finds twists her stomach into a bow.

She snaps back into her body with a gasp, suddenly light-headed, her chest squeezing. “Demons,” she wheezes past that tightness, “fucking lots of them, a bunch of little ones and two big guys. All connected. Someone’s controlling them. Maybe five minutes out?”

For maybe the first time ever, Ari sees the Grand Matron totally lost for words. Her fawn-colored skin is the color of old ashes; her dark eyes are blank.

“They have to be coming from that village,” Ari continues. “There must be another rift there; it’s the only place unstable enough to support one.”

She doesn’t wait to be commanded. She takes off, shouldering through the crowd, sorely missing Varul’s reassuring warmth at her side. Her palm clutches the dagger’s hilt anyway.

It only takes her a moment to find her disciples, who are frantically throwing on proper clothes in front of their tent. Ambren spots her first and shoots upright with a boot still in one hand, long ears twitching rapidly, his expression a blend of relief and tremendous anxiety.

“Sahan!” he calls. “You’re—are you okay?!”

“Fine,” Ari says shortly as she draws to a stop before them. “All of you, find Mother Mouse and get behind that barrier.”

“What’s going on?!” Tselai snaps, his already pale face turning even whiter.

“But—Sahan!” Ranan protests.

“No buts. Get in the protective circle now.”

The kids make a few more token arguments, but Ari herds them relentlessly towards the command tent, where Mother Mouse, a few physickers, and the Lašar sentinels are rapidly erecting the first of many layers of a potent defensive array. A few scouts are rousing the barghests; Matron Tanavi and Matron Jairani are stationing a handful of warcasters around the perimeter of the barrier.

In the crush of bodies, Ari grabs Ranan and Tselai by the shoulders and glances at Ambren. “Ambren—go help with the barrier. Tseba, call your bow. If you have a clear shot at something, take it, but don’t start acting stupid. Ranan, I want you standing with the youngest disciples. Don’t argue; if shit goes really sideways, I need you to look after them. Can you do that?”

Ranan’s whole face turns red with the force of his desire to dissent, but after a moment’s hesitation he nods.

Tselai makes no argument and instead raises his hand. “Najasa! Bilim!”

In a flash of light, a fine silver bow appears in his grasp. Being only a disciple, Tselai of course has no spiritual weapon, but he does have an enchanted one courtesy of the Royal Governor. Najasa isn’t nearly on the level of a work of art like Varul, but it’s no standard-issue longbow either.

Tselai holds Najasa to his chest, his eyes brimming with nerves but his chin jutting out stubbornly. “Stay close to me,” he tells his creed brothers with admirable confidence. Ari tweaks his nose and makes herself smile.

“I’ll be right in front of you guys. Just breathe. I won’t let anything happen to you, okay?”

Ambren stares at her with wide hazel eyes, his ears pinned flat against his skull. “I’ll keep them safe,” he whispers. He’s already looking a little out of it. That’s no good. The last thing anyone needs right now is Ambren losing control. Ari reaches out and grasps his shoulder—merely a reassuring gesture on the surface, but through that point of contact she funnels a short burst of soothing spiritual energy into his turbulent core, slowing the choppy waves of his numina into gentler ripples.

“Breathe,” she reminds him quietly. “You’ll be alright.”

Ambren’s eyes flutter shut, his snow-white lashes dusting his golden cheeks. When he opens them again, he looks a little steadier, more composed. “I—thank you, Sahan. Yes. I’ll—help with the barrier.”

Poor kid. Sighing, Ari ruffles his sleep-mussed curls before clapping the younger boys on the back and shooing them off to join the huddle of nervous disciples in the center of the protective circle. The defensive array is swiftly taking shape, but it won’t be fully deployed before that first wave arrives. They’ll have to push back hard, give the sentinels time to work.

Ari peers around until she spots a flash of chestnut. She lifts two fingers to her lips and whistles, loud and sharp. “Techa, come!”

From the pack of barghests, Techa emerges with a happy yip, tail wagging and ears perked. Thank the Fell Empress she made it back to camp. Ah—Ari takes another precious second to look for Qovar and spots him in the bustle of fur. Her heart, already hanging despondently low, drops further.

Well. “Enahi” doesn’t really need him, does she?

Nope, can’t think about that right now. Ari swings herself up onto Techa’s bare back with a grunt, spurring her towards the front lines of the formation and away from Tanavi, Jairani, and Hvasira.

Jairani will probably be the best-suited to spearheading their defenses. She has good range and great control of the True Flame. The greater demons might be able to resist her, but the lesser demons likely won’t be as lucky. She can do a lot of damage in a wide area, and fast. With her spiritual weapon, she’ll be most effective at mid-range—she can hit the middle of the pack and reduce the enemy front lines to stragglers that Matron Tanavi can pick off.

Grand Matron Hvasira’s Devouring Flame is potent but double-edged: she’ll have to restrain herself to avoid hitting her own allies with the effects of her spells. Matron Rusala—isn’t a diabolist but is still a master of the Beguiling Flame, the root of diabolism. She’ll have to stay in the back lines, but she might be able to disrupt the handler’s control of their beasts. Mother Misery is a corpse-raiser; the more enemies fall, the more effective she’ll be. And Enahi…

No. Ari pinches the bridge of her nose. Why bother keeping up the ruse?

Lord Suyan—the Queen’s Spite, the Second Heavenly Blade, the Lord of Fathoms, the Eyes in the Night—will be their target.

There’s only one person she knows with the power to reach out to the heavens. Sahan must have lured them here by using Suyan as bait. After all, she’s one of the Heavenly Blades, weapons forged from pieces of Sahan’s soul using (allegedly) the raw energy of the True Sun. Surely there’s some heavenly warlord out there who would jump at the chance to claim such a prize. If Varul could become Ari’s spiritual weapon, perhaps there’s some way to strip the rest of the Heavenly Blades from Sahan as well?

Sahan has never talked about her past outside of Leviathan, but you’d have to be an even bigger dumbass than Ari not to realize she’s no more native to this realm than Seda was.

Ari doesn’t have any proof that this is one of her master’s plots, but she can imagine it so clearly: Suyan sneaking away from the convoy to plant some enticing shard of her essence in that little village (easier to hide that it is only a shard in a populated place, isn’t it? And if a few worthless peasants died, what of it? A cheap price to pay for valuable information). Had she been meant to capture those outriders, or was all that just a prelude to the coming assault?

Ari can’t begin to guess what she’ll do now. Hide until the enemy’s forces have been whittled down? Strike first and scatter their resolve? Run away entirely and leave this mess to the poor saps she’s strung along for the past two years?

A bitter foulness springs up in Ari’s heart. What Suyan decides will depend entirely on what the Queen wants from this. As ever, Ari can’t bring herself to try and decipher that cold, dead heart. Better to take Suyan out of the equation entirely—she can’t base any of her calculations on what the Queen might or might not desire.

Besides that, Ari’s never actually seen Suyan in action. Sure, she’s seen some of what “Enahi” can do, but Sahan never made extensive use of her second blade when they fought together. But if she’s anything like Varul, it’s safe to assume that she’s a solid hand at every discipline under the Holy Shadow’s umbrella. Either way, without “Enahi” commanding them, the Lašar won’t be as effective, and the coven doesn’t have a secondary master of the Holy Shadow.

Ari shakes herself. This is all thoroughly in the “shit to worry about later” category.

She casts one last glance at the formation. The defensive array is surrounded by a thin layer of scouts and warcasters, the matrons and Preceptor Lenara studded at regular intervals along the perimeter. A few other casters are mounted, but most remain on foot. Grand Matron Hvasira—still absent her mask—catches her eye. In the oppressive darkness broken only by silvery moonlight and a handful of torches, the exhaustion on her face has been subsumed by stony determination. She gives Ari a nod—tacit approval to do what she believes is best. Ari winks at her with far more confidence than she feels.

At that precise moment, the first shrieks and chitters of the approaching force rend the air. Ari grimaces. She hadn’t bothered trying to get an exact headcount earlier, but there had to be hundreds of lesser demons on the march. And, of course, somewhere in that roiling mass is their handler. Ari hadn’t been able to clearly spot them before (though she admittedly hadn’t been searching too hard), which isn’t a great sign. It takes a staggering outpouring of magic to control this many demons, and to do it while disguising their presence means they’re either ridiculously powerful or they have help. Neither is good. The handler will be a master at minimum, but more likely they’re a grandmaster—a caster in the Fourth Echelon.

Unconsciously, Ari reaches for the thread connecting her to Varul and gives it a tug. Nothing. Dammit. Suyan must have done something to her, but what?

Before she can consider it, she catches a ripple of activity in the Aether. Not just from one side, either; it’s all around them. She whips around and checks the defensive array. Almost done…

“Get ready!” she shouts.

Well, if Varul is out of commission, she’ll just have to rely on another option. Varul isn’t the only weapon Sahan ever gifted her, after all—she had to use something since she’d never cultivated her own spiritual weapon.

As the booming of hundreds of charging demons rocks the ground, Ari raises her arm. “Aleneth-Dal! Enyoša!”

Serve me.

In the clear night sky above, there’s an ominous burst of crimson light and an answering rumble, a clap of thunder that drowns out even the snarls of the approaching beasts. A beat later, a streak of sizzling red lightning screams down to meet her outstretched hand. Someone shrieks in alarm, but when that dazzling brilliance disappears, Ari is unharmed. In her hand is a smoking golden javelin inlaid with fingernail-sized rubies, crackling furiously with blood-red sparks.

Aleneth-Dal. Stormchild. According to Sahan, this javelin had been plucked from the heart of a storm by Imperator Ruloryn and used to strike down the elven Sky-Queen centuries ago. It was lost in the chaos of battle, hidden in the rubble of the Sky-Queen’s shattered palace for years until Sahan recovered it.

Of course, no one here knows that old story, except maybe Ambren. But they probably have heard of Dreadsaint Batira’s storm-calling javelin. Oh well. The hell does it matter now? Suyan knows who she is. That means Sahan—

Thankfully, she doesn’t have time to ruminate. The underbrush parts violently as the first wave of demons charges.

*

Pronunciation Guide

Aleneth-Dal: Ah-LEH-nehth Dahl. Elvish for “child of storms”.

Enyoša: Ehn-yo-SHAH. Heavenstongue for obey, serve.

Najasa: Nah-JAH-sah. A Saimerian women’s name meaning “autumn breeze”.

Suyan: Soo-YAHN. “Resentment” in the Heavenstongue.