Chapter 49: Monster

(I drew this using coloured pencils on handmade Khadi paper - Chaiga T. Cheska)

The moment Nix shared this, they all looked through the shadow lattice at once, straight to where Olis sat beyond the fire, and for one held breath none of them had chosen to hold, it seemed the scribe had turned his head and looked back.

Turning to each other again, Bran found his heart hammering, and wondered whether that had more to do with the throbbing in his head and shoulder than the lateness of the hour. Beside him, Tavik had gone still and faraway, watching Nix in the particular way that meant they were talking through the tether again, and Bran wished, not for the first time, that they wouldn't. He wanted to know what was being said too. He let out a frustrated sigh, and Oren, seeming to feel much the same, set a hand on his shoulder and leaned close. "Use your Portalsight, come on, little brother. No need to suffer."

Bran rolled his eyes but did as he was told, anchoring his magic in the stone at his back the way he had before, then turned his Portalsight inward. Colour leapt from shoulder to forehead in time with the ache, and he held it there, calmed it, until the throbbing eased and he felt more himself, though sleep still tugged at him. Opening his eyes, he caught Oren's look and wondered, briefly, whether any magic in the world could give back lost sleep. Oren nudged Tavik. "Come on, don't keep us out of your conversation, Tav."

Tavik and Nix sat up in perfect synchrony, which fascinated the other two. "We think Olis can hear us," Tavik said, barely above a whisper. "He's a scribe of MirMarnia, after all. Half-brother to Faolin, a mythical creature!"

Bran and Oren turned to find Olis watching them without any pretence of not doing so, Liv beside him, just as still, just as attentive. "We have to return to the fire," Nix whispered. "Face this together. Come on." He rose in a careful crouch, mindful of the low stone overhead, and the others followed. Oren reached behind him, and Bran caught his hand for a moment, felt the reassuring squeeze, then let go. They walked straight through the shadow lattice as though it were smoke, out into the reach of the firelight, and settled close together once more. Tavik took up his stick and coaxed the dying embers back to life, working hard not to meet Olis's steady gaze.

Bran glanced at Liv and sighed, and Oren distracted him with a nod towards his bedroll. He unrolled his own alongside it, pulling out an extra cloak against the chill that still crept past even the elf's barrier. Tavik watched them settle and decided he'd rather sleep too, though he didn't bother with his own bedroll. He simply turned his back to the fire, lay on his side, and breathed deep and slow, willing sleep to come.

Nix sat cross-legged and watched Liv while his cousins settled around him, their breathing slowing into the steady rhythm of sleep. He was tired himself, bone-tired, but not relaxed enough to close his eyes, not while he still didn't fully trust the elf, or the scribe, or the dark beyond their small fire. Something in him, protective and old, kept watch over the others whether he willed it or not.

In the long quiet that followed, with only the sound of sleeping cousins and the crackle of the fire between them, Nix looked across at Liv and asked, softly, "What do you fear in me?"

He watched something shift in her, small and careful, as though his boldness had caught her by surprise. Her eyes narrowed. "You are not of this world, though you were born in MirMarnia. You smell of other lands, other peoples." She tilted her head, studying him across the flames. "I fear your makers. Not you."

He frowned, glanced once at the scribe, still and watchful, then back to Liv. "I fear my mother." A pause, the words costing him something. "And I've recently learned that my father died the moment I was conceived." The realisation was still raw in him, freshly torn, but he let it show on his face rather than hiding it, as he usually would. Perhaps, with this elf, honesty was the better strategy.

Liv studied him, felt the rawness of it, the plain unguarded suffering, and found herself sorry for this woebegone boy who seemed to belong to no one but the sleeping cousins beside him. Her eyes softened. "Why do you fear your own mother?"

He couldn't hold her gaze then. The question reached the answer he'd kept hidden since the moment his mother had torn back into her true form, since the moment his own magic had erupted from the shock of watching her do it. He looked at Liv, then let his eyes drop to the embers, and spoke almost to himself. "Because she is a monster….a killer…..and….and I'm afraid I might be one too."

His voice thinned to nearly nothing, and Liv had to lean in to catch the last of it, the pain plain across his face. She made herself go still and soft in her body, the way one might around a wounded predator, a creature that wanted no sudden movement, only a witness, and nothing more. She studied him properly for the first time. Sixteen, perhaps, with the stretched, unfinished look of someone freshly grown into a body they hadn't quite settled into. It called something up in her, unbidden, of being that age herself, over a hundred years gone now, before the sickness had taken her people, before her mother had died, when the world had asked so much less of her.

She lowered her voice further, bringing the kindness back into it, aware all the while of the scribe listening beside her as though every word mattered. "I am sorry to have judged you so harshly, Nix. I did not know the weight you carry." A moment of silence. "I do not see a monster before me. Nor a killer. I see a boy who has yet to learn who he really is."

Nix looked up and met her eyes and found truth there, and it startled him faintly that she'd used his name rather than simply calling him boy. Perhaps honesty had been the right choice after all. Something in him loosened, some old fear finally spoken aloud and not thrown back at him. He was glad, at least, that his cousins slept on and hadn't heard it. They wouldn't have understood, not really, not this.

He sighed, glanced once more at the sleeping shapes of Oren, Tavik and Bran, and decided he needed rest too. Glancing up, he gave a small, tired smile to Liv, and then curled himself down between his cousins to sleep.

She watched him settle, then sat on with Olis in the stillness of steady breathing all around them. Overhead, the moon rode high, slipping in and out between banks of gathering cloud. Olis drew his cloak closer and reached out one hand towards the dying fire, coaxing new life into the embers before tucking his hand back into his sleeve and appearing, at last, to drowse.

Liv watched him a moment longer, then turned her back to the company and faced out towards where the moon was setting into cloud. Her forest glittered around them, crystal and stone and old bark catching the shifting light in green and blue and gold, and she reinforced the charm at the edge of their small camp, holding the chill at bay a while longer, and thought about these strange half-elvish boys, about what she would say to her father, about whether she would bring such strangers before her kingdom at all. A foreboding sat low in her, one she couldn't place. Not from the boys, she thought. From something else. Something not yet arrived in the Crystalsong Forest.

Oren had kept his eyes shut and his breathing steady throughout, but he'd heard every word between Nix and Liv. He lay wondering what the day ahead would bring, and how he might help a cousin who feared, above everything else, being seen as a monster. He sighed and glanced sideways at Nix, curled catlike between himself and Tavik.

Nix slept deeply for the first time in longer than he could remember, and no dreams stirred beneath the surface of it, for which he was grateful. It had been a long while since he'd felt safe enough to sleep so completely. Perhaps every deep secret needed telling before a person could rest.
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Four hundred years in the future, beyond where Oren, Tavik, Bran and Nix lay sleeping, that same moonlight was already fading. The first grey light of dawn crept through a canopy of scraggly trees and boulders furred with yellow lichen, roots and branches threading through crevice and hollow in a stretch of MirMarnia fed by the Ravines. It was a dark place, and a shadowed one, full of the cries of creatures who preferred darkness, because in this region even the sunlight barely penetrated the canopy, more stone than tree.

Pathways twisted between the rocks and trees here, some leading with a destination in mind, others existing only to confuse. A wanderer might turn and double back and turn again until fear itself began to feed the paths beneath their feet, and that was when the Obridan came. That was the moment to worry. They were of an ancient elvish line, the Obridan, but not the kinder sort found elsewhere in MirMarnia. Somewhere far back in their history lay a kinship with dragons, the claiming, killing kind, bred to primal instinct and the hunt.

Simi had fled the Ravines and stumbled into this region, fury burning through him, his head full of ways to take revenge, not only on Nix, his younger half-brother, but on his mother too, who had so clearly chosen sides, who had chosen those weak boys claiming his brother as their own. He scrambled over root and stone, and the small creatures of the undergrowth fled before him. His thoughts churned and tumbled. How could she favour Nix over him? The magic should have been his by rights, not wasted on that feeble boy. If he'd only been faster, he could have ended Nix there and then, and the magic would have come to him at last, the way it should have been all along. How unfair the whole of it was. And he'd left his sword behind, too, of all the stupid things.

He rounded the corner of a huge, lichen-crusted boulder and collided full force with a tall, unmoving figure that barely stirred at the impact, only peered down at him as he untangled himself from his bow and scrambled up, ready to fight.

The figure's skin was almost silver-black, glistening as though carved from polished stone, and unmistakably elvish beneath it: pointed ears, a certain angularity to the bones. But strange ridges ran from the crown of its skull down its spine, something closer to scale than skin, and its two long fangs caught what little light there was. One eye was green. The other, blue. It looked him over slowly, unhurried, the way a hunter takes the measure of something before deciding whether it's worth the trouble, and when it spoke, the guttural whine of its voice raised the hair on the back of Simi's neck.

"We have been expecting you, Simi."

Simi fumed, glanced back over his shoulder in case his treacherous mother was somehow following, then rounded on the creature with a growl. "You have no right to my name! Get out of my way!"

He glanced up at the boulders hemming them in, then reached out to shove the wretched thing aside so he could find another way through and get back to hunting Nix, hoping against hope his mother had gone somewhere else.

The creature sidestepped him easily. In one motion, black cord poured from its fingertips like tar, winding round him before he'd even registered the movement. His bow and arrows fell. His arms, pinned tight to his sides, began to go numb almost at once.

He gasped, roared, bucked and writhed against the binding, but it did no good. The creature pushed him towards what he'd taken for a deep shadow at the boulder's side, and the shadow proved to be a doorway, opening onto a chamber darker still.

Just before the door swung shut behind him, he heard an answering roar from far off in the Ravines. His mother. She had felt it, then, the moment of his capture.

In the darkness he became aware that he was lying on his side, still bound, his arms gone past numb into nothing, and that something was kicking him along a floor of cold, smooth stone, rolling him forward inch by inch.

The dark was absolute. He could see nothing, only feel the cold beneath him and the sharp kicks that kept him rolling. "Stop!" he bellowed, and the word came back to him in echoes from every direction, bouncing off walls he couldn't see, until he shrank from the sound of his own voice.

He rolled again, sick with it now, wondering whether his mother had reached the doorway yet, how long it might take her to find him. He was still furious with her. But surely, surely she would come for her first-born son.

The kicks kept coming, sending him rolling sideways across stone so smooth it must have been polished, cold enough to bite through his tunic, and still there was nothing to see, nothing at all.

Another kick sent him into a wall, and this time what met him was not stone but a rough, splintery plank of wood. He barely had time to register the change before it gave way beneath him, and he was falling, plummeting through pitch darkness, a scream torn out of him before he could stop it.

He landed hard in what felt like straw, which burst into dust around him, setting him coughing and sneezing as he bounced and rolled to a stop.

A full minute of coughing and gasping passed before he could breathe properly, blink his stinging eyes open, and make out a dim grey light in the far corner of what seemed to be a room heaped with straw.

His arms had gone entirely numb now, still pinned tight against his sides, and he didn't dare move much for fear the floor beneath him would give way again. He craned his neck towards that grey smear of light and decided it must be a door, or come from beneath one. If only he could get free of this cursed binding….

Something rustled in the straw nearby, and he went completely still, listening. It was big, whatever moved there, and it dragged something behind it, a tail perhaps, judging by the swish and scrape and patter drawing closer through the dark. The hair rose on the back of his neck as it reached him, near enough now that he could feel it. He shut his eyes and wondered whether this was how it ended, whether his mother would avenge him properly this time, or whether he'd simply die here in the dark, owed by the universe and never paid.

"Would you like ssssome help?" came a guttural, hissing voice, close by his ear.

He jolted, recoiled from the nearness of it, then made himself go still and alert instead. "If by help you mean releasing me from this binding, then yes." Best to establish boundaries early, he thought, in case this creature's notion of help differed rather sharply from his own.

There was a scuffling sound, and then he felt something nibbling carefully at the cord around him, working it loose tooth by tooth. Whatever this was, it clearly wasn't what had captured him. It had a tail. It had, he suspected from the delicate precision of the gnawing, rather a lot of very sharp, needle-pointed teeth.

Within a few moments he was free, and lay where he'd fallen while feeling surged back into his arms in a painful rush. When he could finally use them, he pushed himself upright and peered into the grey dark. A long-snouted shape watched him back, eyes glowing a pale green, tail swishing through the straw behind it, its small, almost comical arms clasping and unclasping in front of its chest as though it couldn't quite decide what to do with them.

"What are you?" Simi asked, still trying to make sense of what he was looking at.

The creature tilted its head, considering him, wrinkled its long snout, and opened its mouth to show rows of long, needle-sharp teeth. "My name issss Rima," it said, "and I am a SSSSSaurososusss. What are you?"

Simi rubbed at his tingling arms, gave the Saurososus's teeth one more considering look, and said, "I'm Simi. Half Tiorian Lightweaver, half Earth Viking Berserker."