[flashback] steal the sky.

by **Caelum** on July 8th, 2011, 10:05 pm

OOCPast lives become present era at the end. Permission to create and self mod Mura NPC Maeclair Solduvan granted by Cachet.
This is a prequel to: and all our orisons.

Her kind walk amidst the flotsam
of lives they have sacrificed,
for their own purposes,
till friendless and alone
they needs must make the final sacrifice.
the sandman: neil gaiman.

Timestamp: An Age Beyond Dreaming

A voice whined low at the closed door. Nails scraped. The bard sitting at the desk with a tattered book open before him in the candlelight paused with his eyes closing for a moment. The sound rent at his heart. He knew the voice. Knew what hand tried the door and failed to open it. He didn't wait for a second time, but pushed the chair back from the desk and walked on bare feet across the wooden floor.

Night air washed in when he opened the door. The scent of winter came, cold and crisp, sharp with the brisk wind. Carefully he knelt down, worn leather creaking softly as he crouched with his hands stretched out and silver rings glinting in the starlight.

"Oh, little brother," whispered Matrem as he cupped Collyn's branch-cut face. Dirt smudged the younger man's high cheekbones. The wood brown eyes refused to meet the deep blue of the oldest twin's. "What is it? What happened?"

Few thought of Matrem as gentle. Olyvar was the gentle one of the pair. Or had been before the priests made their ruling a decade ago. Matrem walked through the waking world strong in crafts of war, of strategy, or weapons while his brother knew the secret names of trees and poets even the blind old priests forgot. It wasn't completely true, of course. They were opposites and the same in a breath. Matrem remembered paths only the lark and wild hart took at midnight. Olyvar wove fine fingers into a man's bones with enough skill to snap them if he wished it. What the priests did only strengthened some aspects of their sacred selves.

But Collyn, Collyn was like neither of them. Collyn, the wolf. Their wild brother who found little comfort in their unlikely cities others would consider little more than villages at best of living trees. Collyn who wanted nothing more than to run free through the wild woods tracking what pleased him and returning when custom and duty claimed he must. Their youngest sibling who spoke so rarely with the low voice rusted from disuse and copper hair often tangled and snarled with twigs and leaves.

Yet, he was here now. Crouched much like Matrem was himself on the woven step of branches before the doorway blinking in the light before ducking his narrow jaw down with one hand rising to shadow his face. The pattern twisting along his fingers and wrist were the color of old bark. Rich and twining intricate.

"Zolyn," Collyn whispered. "Zolyn needs you. She's." He didn't pause. He stopped. People often imagined Collyn was slow. Or worse, stupid. In truth he was neither. He had no desire for words like this. "She's ill."

Matrem ran his hand over his mouth as he listened to these carefully decided upon words. He knew if there had been another way to express this it would have been given. In howls. In the language of the wind. But this was faster. And the eldest of the three brothers didn't bother with asking questions. He only nodded and looking a moment past the youngest's shoulder while wishing for their middle brother. For no reason than he missed Olyvar more than he would ever admit to. Part of himself was far away and it left a hollow behind.

"Take me to her, Collyn," he said and straightened to his feet, but it was not nearly as fast as Collyn did. By the time he closed the door behind him, the younger brother bounded down the winding cradle of stairs to the frail bridge arching above the river. Matrem followed under the stars and under the arching branches of the trees until they reached the ground and paced from the city-village into the wild wood.

Collyn said nothing more as they moved silently through the shadows. Foxes paused with muzzles silvered from drinking at quiet ponds. Owls glided past them on soundless wings. Sleepy birds rustled on their branches, paying no mind to the men running below them. Just as the hind and hart ignored them with the hares nestled in their beds of long sweet grass.

The younger brother followed an old path, mostly overgrown and no doubt hard to find during the day let alone at night. Matrem matched him and felt little worry of being lost through the bracken or the briars. Collyn knew the paths that animals took and better the paths Zolyn took for she was one of the few who spent time with him unworried by his behavior or lack of conversation. Gradually the woodland thinned. The trees spread into holdings of silvered birch and black oaks standing alone with gnarled limbs lifting up into the sky. The grasses grew thick on delicate hills and appeared nearly white. Mist rose where ponds hollowed the land and low streams branched from the river.

"There," Collyn pointed. He paused with long limbs bending to fold him into the grass. His eyes were on a hill standing a bit taller than the trio before them. A forth where a slender figure stood against the darkness of the sky.

Matrem gazed ahead, his heart easy in his chest, and gave a glance to the paler haired man beside him. Without a word, he reached out to touch Collyn's shoulder and felt the strong muscle there under the tattered leather repaired so many times. He merely gave a nod. He saw her, their last priestess, raising her arms to the sky. On silent feet, he began the walk to her.

He remembered when he first saw her. He and Olyvar had been children, holding their mother's hands, pressed against her flowing skirts as they peeked around at a tall woman dressed in rich blue embroidered with a pattern of leaves against the draping sleeves and hem of gown. Her hair trailed, heavy and the palest gold, into the grass where she stood even though it was bound into numerous braids laced with silver and drops of crystal that looked like dew. Their mother curtsied deep and nudged them both to bow. Which they did and kept their eyes on her bare feet, which were patterned with whorls of silvery gray unlike anyone else, they ever met. When she extended her hands to them, they were the same with the pattern sliding up past her wrists. Olyvar told him later, as he looked being the more curious, that it even stretched along her throat.

Matrem found out later exactly how far those whorls tracked across her pale skin. Along her slim shoulders. Over narrow hips. Across frail ribs. The inside of her ankles, of her thighs. He followed them all when he was older. When one moonlit night he saw her, saw her perfectly, and sought her out. He'd been younger then and she laughed like a stream with her fingers tangling into his hair saying he didn't know what he did. But he knelt to her anyhow. Kissed her feet. Slipped her robes from her under the moon.

She was, he found out later or perhaps he knew before, the last of her line. The last of their god born priestess. She remembered events some believed were only stories. She remembered a time when there had been kings and priests, before they became one. Once he asked her age and she only laughed that windchime laugh of hers, put a finger to his lips while saying it was better to keep secrets. A woman should be a creature of mystery.

Thirty years ago, he supposed. Thirty years as her lover. Her friend. Her companion. And in the past decade, since they banished his brother's lover, twisted Olyvar's fate into something cruel and strange, he watched her slowly drift into something else. It was always there as she often disappeared, wandered in her own way, vanished like mist only to return when she wished it. This was different.

And when he reached the top of the hill where she stood, he thought his heart broke into pieces at his feet.

Zolyn remained in the stance he first saw her from a distance. Arms lifted above her head. Her gown fell in shreds about her. Gray as snowmelt and stained dark in places. The edges ragged at her ankles, at her biceps from where it fell back. In the breeze, her hair should have fluttered, should have bannered in some fashion away from her face, yet he saw nothing of it.

He blinked, thinking his eyes played a trick on him.

But no, there at her feet. Handfuls of pale silk. More than handfuls. Heavy looping braids coiled like sleeping serpents. Twining curls he so often wound his fingers through. All of it lay about her shadow.

The gleam of silver was the edge of the blade she'd used to hack it off.

"Ah, gods," he breathed at last.

She turned to him, eyes studied him as she lowered her arms to cross over her shallow breast. Those eyes would be gray as the dawn in early spring. Gray as wind. Gray as goslings. Serious now when they could be merry, as merry as they could be mad. No madness lingered here now. Blood streaked upon her cheek, above an ear.

"They're coming, Matrem. They're coming and soon. We won't stand. They won't let us stand." Her slender throat worked as she turned her face up to him.

When he was younger, he thought her so tall. Towering like a tale's sorceress. And now, she remained tall. Taller than the child who sailed across the sea with his brother. Taller than a good many of the women with her fine bones that called back to a time captured only in story. He didn't ask which they she meant. Two distinct groups were upon them. Their own priest-kings that intended to bring their destruction and the enemy who would grant their rulers this disturbing desire.

"We'll stand," he told her and drew the last of them into his arms. "We'll stand regardless of priest or invader." He cupped her cheek to one palm, followed the curve up to the ragged stubble of her hair.

Her lashes swept down. The breath the escaped her brought her forward until her head bowed under his chin. He felt the rapid beating of her heart against his ribs. Gently, as if he imagined she would crumble into pieces, he wrapped her up to him. Her fingers twisted into his shift, worked hard into the linen and the howl of grief that escaped her tipped her head back to the sky. It surprised him. Enough to draw her even closer. But what didn't was the echo of his brother's.

A wolf's cry beseeching into the night, born by the increasing wind.

by **Caelum** on July 9th, 2011, 4:32 pm

Timestamp: A Different Age

There had been a great wailing from the women of the priest’s clan when his favorite daughter stepped out of the perfumed chambers filled with emerald and turquoise silks in little more than a shift and her black hair unbound down her back. The cries echoed in her ears as robed men circled her, pinched her flesh, brought her downcast gaze up to meet their own. She tried to ignore the prayers and sobs from her mother and mother-sisters, from the other girls near to her own age. But she understood too well what they did. They mourned her as one dead. They would burn, later on that night, every article of clothing she’d worn, the silks and furs she slept in, the books she’d read and let her jewelry turn into runnels of gold sparked with garnet and onyx.

She was, she knew, dead to them already. She died the night before when the summons came and ordered her to the courtyard at dawn dressed as she was now. She didn’t know the men who spoke to each other in whispers, their faces hidden by cowls and hoods. She wasn’t meant to know them and she would, she believed, never see them again. They were only to escort her to the edge of the vast sandy desert where they would leave her with only a skin of water and a satchel of bread and dried fruit. If she was careful, the food would last her a week. The water, with luck, that long.

A week so she might lift her voice to the gods and beckon them to her. A week to prepare her soul. A week to begin the slow wasting that men and women feared more than the demons prowling the dunes.

In more than a week, ten days perhaps, she would die. Truly die. And the sands would devour her.

Unless, of course, she was blessed. Her mother told her to be chosen like this was a blessing, that the gods had bent down and found her worthy of this task, this new life opening before her like lotus petals on the still surface of the water garden. It was rare, her mother said with kohled eyes glistening, for a girl to be chosen so young. It was an honor. It was a sacrifice.

It was, the girl knew, a curse as well. A two-fold gift. A price beyond compare.

She would be favored more than the priest’s first wife. She would be able to stretch her hands through secrets and mysteries both sacred and profane. She would be changed, forever marked, and leave everything she knew and loved far behind her.

If the gods listened.

If they bent down.

If she moved past life and walked through the shadowlands and stepped back onto the sands.

So many ifs, she thought as the men walked with her through the ornate gates to the street where she had never set a foot. She never knew life beyond the safe enclosed walls and comfortable decadence of the court. Being shown to the people gathered, also weeping and tearing at their clothes, was more distressing than she’d imagined it would be. Not because of what she was set to embark on but because she felt so naked in the shift with her hair free and face showing to the world.

None of it would matter, of course, if she succeeded. If she came back.

If.

Three years and one day, she returned to them. A wasted figure of a woman who had recently left childhood behind. The guards of the palace stared at her openly, this wretch stumbling up the marble steps with knotted hair and skin bleached beyond color. A shout rang up from them. A shout that carried past the entrance and long halls to reach every corner. Courtiers and servants alike scurried to windows and verandas to peer at the girl, the woman, collapsed on the priest’s grand stairs.

Silence fell shortly after. Silence that could only be commanded by the priest himself as he strode past those gathered and stood looking down at the bundle of bones and thin skin.

“Give me your name, girl,” he demanded of her.

And drew back when eyes as pale as the sky rose to meet his without fear, without humility. He knew her eyes for they were the eyes of his favorite daughter, of his son now serving in lands far away.

The eyes of his daughter stared at him as she pulled a slow breath.

“Zolyn,” she told him and said nothing else.

The name was old. Older than the stones his city stood on. Old as the sand rubbed into her skin. Given only to those who passed the most brutal of initiations. And then only to women who rose beyond possible thought. The last woman with such a name had turned to dust more than five centuries ago. As it wasn’t truly a name, but a title.

One that made the priest tremble in fear for laying before him was his daughter returned to him and with enough power that she could make him less than a memory if she ever desired to do so.

She had been sixteen on her return to the city of her birth and the perfumed halls of the women’s quarters, which were now silent as tombs when she passed. For three long years she endured this unease, knowing the women here feared her as much as they found her curious and strange. She could have gone anywhere. Few would have stopped her from doing as she wished. A household of her own. A sprawling estate near the sea or in the shadow of the mountains or in the heart of the city itself were all ripe for her picking.

But she never made a choice of such a nature. She had wanted only to return to the arms of her mother and weep for what she lost, for the price paid, for herself and the death of a girl named Tabiel while this imposter called Zolyn took her place. Her mother comforted her as best she could, but it was a frightened comfort and slowly Tabiel who thought of herself so rather than the title all used pulled away knowing what she desired caused more grief than joy.

How, she asked herself in the royal gardens under the moon, does one comfort the dead? For that she no answer as she was not a comfort to them either. She was not of them, but she was no longer of this life either. Rather a balance of everything between.

So she waited because there was little else for her to do. The court didn’t know what to do with her, though she heard whispers. The women found her haunting. The men, well, she never spent much time with any men save her brother and he was far from her and letters were poor when a real voice was wanted.

There was little for her here now. The dead took her as it had been hoped and the gods listened to her prayers, which they answered. The desert burned her white as the caps of the mountains so far away and turned her bones into glass.

She remembered the desert in a piecework fashion. She remembered catching small animals, rodents of some sort she supposed, and ripping them open, of eating everything though it gagged her and made her ill. She recalled dying under the sun and how easy it had been to turn away from the ragged thing her body had become. She knew there had been voices and hands and hushes in languages distant from her own.

But it wasn’t perfectly clear. She was told, or thought she was told, someone would find her that would make all right, that would sift through the sand of her and find what was hidden. A person that wouldn’t flinch from her cold hands or white skin or think too much about what had once been bone.

So she had waited. By day in her rooms which were far from the other women now. By night in the gardens where she listened to birds and cry of foxes.

And when he came, bearing this time the name of Yosef from the tents of Gowan, she left with him. There was no mourning for her or for those she left. There was no grief or anguish over her fate.

Tabiel had died six years ago in the desert.

Zolyn lived in her place but had no place of her own.

Leaving was simple. She managed it before. And this time no ifs rang through her mind.

by **Caelum** on July 12th, 2011, 3:06 am

Timestamp: An Age Closer

It was a dirty job. Fortunately, she was just the girl to do it as, despite appearances to the contrary, Marie Landgrave knew how to work hard. Not born with a silver spoon in her mouth but with a gold spoon held tight in her father's miserly fist, she had earned every morsel of affection thrown at her since the night her mother took a swan dive off the roof of the temple in the name of inequity.

Ignoring the way memory was taking shape in the doorway, Marie steeled herself, squeezed her eyes shut, and threw open the walnut chiffarobe. The faded aroma of dust and perfumed oils wafted out. She squinted one eye open in wary regard of the chiffarobe's contents. When nothing leaped out at her with claws bared, she blinked both eyes open and exhaled. A glance was given over her shoulder at the glyphing she had drawn on the honey-oak floors and, feeling a little stupid, she bent down from the waist in a coiling spill of hair to blow the candle out.

A sigh rippled the needle of smoke slithering up through the lamplight as Marie straightened. Pushing a golden vine over her shoulder she turned her attentions to the stores of her mother's clothes. It was a selection that had been handpicked by her father years and years ago, stored, and kept for a purpose that eluded his only child save that, perhaps, he had loved the woman. Sable furs and sleek satins unwound to the floor as she drew them out, one by one, and let the dead slip out to join her in her orphanhood.

Drawing a hand down the intricate beadwork of an evening gown, Marie remembered.

Looking down through a tide of no return was a field where the corrupt no longer grew, where creek beds chuckled at cypress knees on the way to the river and from there the sea. A place where a child they all once hid turned great, swooping circles in the yard with her arms outflung, shrieking until the gods-be-damned with laughter. A woman with hair dark as sin and eyes of mist caught her wrists to swing her up, and up, and up again in flying, circling spins.

Through the forest, into the marshes, to the black speckled shores that gnawed on the corner of the child's protected world the same woman taught her how to dance around a bonfire that flickered celadon, then cerulean, then chrysanthemum because a man with yellow hair and hard smile had been challenged to magical alliteration.

Down the flower-lined walk, over the flagstones, to spy that same man in conversation across the street and lunge with excitement off the walk, wanting to run, run, run into her father's arms only to be caught by other's. Held back and protesting as a mother's soft voice hushed truths into her ear: watch for things bigger than you and look before you leap. Released, the child poised on the walk in preparation to leap and saw there many things bigger than her. A small hand grasped back, searching for her mother's, wanting to be led through this dangerous storm. But the woman's fingers only brushed her daughter's as a voice called from the opposite walk, she's too old to have to hold somebody's hand. Come here, Marie. I want you to meet someone.

Too bright eyes locking on her over her father's shoulder, things seen in them visible only to a child who recoiled out of instinct, pressing back against her mother's legs. Marie, her father called again, irritably now, come here. Words of encouragement from gentle-kissing lips and the heady, sweet scent of spicy perfume as her mother looked both ways for her and pushed her gently into the road.

Whispered words not meant to be heard, a quotation and clip of something bigger, supposed to have drowned in the grumble of gathering storm clouds and her father's voice muttering at the stranger with a monster's smile. Her mother, turning, muttering.

There but for the grace of gods go I.

Mocked by the rain that beat the heavens' bowl, she hid behind her mother's legs while accusations were flung at the sky. Touch my child again. He is a monster and I will not have.. Glad he's dead. More than just an heir.. Not a sword to be tempered.. Daughter, daughter, daughter. I'd do it again. I'd do it a thousand times. I'll dig him up just to.. Run, darling, run, close your eyes. Close your eyes.

Through the facades of justice, red hands equate black soul. She reached up, grasping for her father's hand, eyes like mist terrified and confused, mother, mother? But she doesn't have any wings! Justice. Couldn't face up to the justice. Just justice, lioness. Honor. Suicide.

Back through the creek beds, up a flower-lined path, poising on a walk. A ghost with inky hair on the other side, but when she'd reached back for a yellow-haired man's hand, hers had been slapped away. Cross the road alone, stop in the shadow of an oak tree and spin, spin, spin. But no hands grasp your wrists and you learn that flying ends with something called suicide.

Sleep that night on a back porch to be closer to something your father called justice. Wake up four years later when taking your seat. Small hands folded about a sword hilt. Mirrors covered everywhere with muslin and turned into black holes. Poised with a storm ahead of you, magic bursting in seas of thunder, whips of hurricanes. Wind singing your name, braiding, unbraiding, winding and twining. Every eye on you.

Lioness, Landgrave, hero girl.. Mouth the words, bow your head, brace yourself. Don't look at your priest with yellow hair. Don't look at man with bigger things in his eyes. Tierny, weaver, storming girl.. Kiss the blade. Let it come. Let it come rip you open. Don't speak. Let it ride you, learn it, then you tame it. Be perfect. Perfect. And let it come.

Most of all look out for what's bigger than you and look before you leap. Marie, daughter, dancing girl..

In her father's old bedroom in the westernmost corner of the house, Marie slid her hands down the linen worn cloud-soft of her mother's favorite nightgown. Felt her flesh taut over muscle beneath, warm in the cool night air. Ghosts of perfume dissipated and she heard the sound of the back door banging shut and low voices of men filling her life.

It would be Jamie, come to help Josiah decide his sister-in-law's birthday present. The hazel eyed Julia had a passion for the tomes of lost years and her husband Jonothan and his brothers wished to gift her with an antique collection of biographies. If Marie closed her eyes, she could almost see Jamie laying out his case of carefully worn books and displaying their flaked enamel titles to the magician. It was Joe's turn to stay the night at the big house, watching over the secrets of their former priest and the daughter who had inherited them.

Marie looked down at the boxes into which she had folded and packed her mother away in, fingering the lacy strap of the chemise and enjoying the way it floated around her thighs. She would keep it, she decided, this one thing. As she went to close the emptied chiffarobe for the final time, the voices from below hummed up through the floorboards and the wind chimes hung from the porches' eaves clattered faintly. It was not until then that she realized she was crying.

The tears were cold on her cheeks, the back of her hand pressing to her mouth as she stilled. Marie, daughter, dancing girl.. Grief. Old grief made fresh with the blood of new grief. The smeared remains of chalk beneath her feet reminded her of her life, once so precise and orderly, powerful and purposed, now flakes and ashes that just marred the beauty of what they laid upon.

A floorboard creaked behind her, a scent of something known, and muscles tightened in preparation to turn when lips touched her throat from behind. They were sipping up the remnants of her tears. A sob choked in her throat and she spun, hands grasping the soft material of a sweater as she buried her face in the hollow of his throat. For once, she just wanted to be held.

"Adin," a watery croak, trying to express what she hardly understood herself, as rangy arms tightened around her.

"Shhh.." He hushed and stroked a hand down her back. "I've you, Marie. I've you. Let it out."

"I want.. I want my.." Hot tears that burned her eyes, scalded her throat as she clutched at him. I want my mother. The truth of that crashed over her, weighing on her bones and releasing the floodgate. How many times over the years had she subconsciously yearned for the woman who gave her her eyes? Ached for the protection of her arms, the comfort of her lap. When sword practice had ended with her battered and with bruises needing kissed. Turning thirteen and finding blood had come to stain her thighs. Certainly when she'd lain with a man for the first time and been left cold, and uncertain, ashamed as if she had just thrown away an invaluable gift. And, gods, when her belly was growing with a child. A perfect, tiny little girl whose blue lips would never form the word mama.

A hand pressed to her stomach, feeling anew that pain, the contractions that had wracked her body three months too soon; and she cried as if she had a heart still whole enough to be broken. She wanted her mother. It got no simpler than that, and in realizing it she felt as if a weight was being slid from her shoulders. Human, just human.

"It's alright," he murmured in her ear. "I've got you, Marie. I've got you now and I'm not letting go."

"I'm sorry," a thick mumble as she unclenched her hands, smoothing at the ruin she had made of his sweater. Then she lifted her face, wanting a kiss, or a smile, and found the sharp lines of his bones and cruel shaped mouth that could be so very kind. Eyes rose to meet his. "It's just.. Just that.."

The words collided with the backs of her teeth. His eyes were black. A dull, ashen black like soot.

"Adin?" A tremulous whisper.

"Marie!" Josiah's shout struck the room from below stairs.

Marie threw herself backwards, bright pain rippling along her skull as the pretender was left with strands of golden hair in his hand. A crash sounded from below and she fell over a box overflowing with old clothing, striking her shoulder hard against the chiffarobe. Scrambling up to her knees she groped for the lantern on the bureau and heard the unmistakable sound of a sword being drawn.

A fallen sword. Only stars hummed like that when oxygen hit them.

The bureau mirror shattered as she dodged the blade blind, silver-polished glass sounding like rain as it littered over the floor. She ignored the needles of pain in her soles and ran into the hallway.

"Switched!" It was a scream, meant to warn the men below as she collided with the banister and side-stepped, needing to reach her bedroom, her sword. She glanced over the balcony into the sunken main room below, wanting to know how many there were; but she saw only Jamie and Josiah.

They were fighting each other.

The sofa was overturned, the shards of an urn strewn over the thick carpet. As she watched, Jamie brought his sword down in an overhead hacking motion for his friend's shoulder. Missed, missed by a bare inch as Josiah stumbled to the side.

Then it hit her. They had meant to distract her. To keep her from interfering with the theft of two council seat holders.

Senses returned to Marie in a volcanic rush, and only as they did so was she aware that she had stopped moving. A cold hand grabbed her elbow from behind and she jerked back into reality.

"We're here for the Ionu, not you," a sea-washed voice hissed, still mimicking the rounded vowels and canted consonants of the blue-eyed Adin. "It's alright, Marie. Don't worry. I've got you."

The vorike's slippery laugh was choked off by the elbow Marie punched into his windpipe. Closing one hand over the banister railing as he staggered back, she hoisted her knee to the rail and tumbled over it.

It was not thinking. It was acting. A switch in her brain had been flipped, going to auto as a dozen, and hundred, a thousand fought battles remembered themselves in her bones. Tucking her knees to her chest she somersaulted through the air and landed not in a crouch but in a spill that left her rolling over a splintered table and knocked all the oxygen out of her lungs.

Look before you leap, a voice chided in her mind.

"Out!" A choked curse for the vorike to depart her head as she crawled to her feet. There was no time to do anything but pray. The room blurred until she recognized Jamie's back, still fighting fighting Josiah. Before she thought about she was wrapping her fingers around the neck of a crystal decanter and swinging it in an arc at Jamie's head.

The illusionist ducked the whistle of Josiah's sword and in consequence the decanter as well. Josiah's brown eyes widened as they met hers and he yelled, "Switched!" before Jamie came up and shoved his open palm over the sun lover’s face.

Josiah went still as the dead and the stench of rotting, primordial things swallowed up the air.

The pieces of soul were being split.

Ceramic crunched beneath a boot heel behind Marie and she whirled, decanter still in hand, to face the vorike who had shoved the shadows of possession into her friends. The others were still morbidly frozen behind her as one soul-splitter marked the next. The vorike still wore the face of her first friend, those achingly gorgeous features stamped with wicked enjoyment.

"Come, Marie," he smiled Adin's smile. "Step aside and let the guardians walk with us. I promise we will welcome them with open arms."

A breath hitched her chest, and it came out as a murky, "Petch you," as she threw the decanter at his head. The vorike ducked and she dropped a shoulder, twisting her body around to deliver a round-house kick to his now unguarded temple. Ignoring the kiss of razor crystal against her thigh, she shoved a fist under his jaw and they fell together to the floor. An elbow to the bundle of nerves at the base of his wrist and he dropped the sword. Nails like claws raked down her ribs as she made a grab for the blade.

She yelped as it's charmed hilt burnt her hands.

A low, cemetary wail had begun from behind her, signaling the end of the twisted ritual. The vorike was laughing now, sprawled on the floor beneath her as she scrambled back to her feet, his sword in her hand. Ignoring the pain. Laughter like nettles and swarms of wasps as the illusions the switched worshipper of Ionu had formed thinned. He stopped laughing when, with both hands gripping the blistering hot hilt, Marie shoved the sword into his heart.

Blood performed a miniature explosion like fireworks as the god magic died. Sharp features peeled aside to reveal a masked face, long bones shortening and a glimpse of oily black before the unveiled vorike became nothing but a cloud of settling ashes.

A rasped exhalation and she jerked the blade free. So long as it did not burn flesh into blood, ruining her grasp, it would do. It would have to do. The sword was brought up in a slow arc as she turned to face the vorike, knees bending and balance found on the balls of her feet in a defensive stance.

"You really shouldn't have done that," Jamie remarked with a patronizing smile.

"You could have had your life," Josiah said while stepping up to the illusionist's shoulder.

"You're worthless to us," Jamie absently twisted his sword, it's tip pressing against the littered floor.

"These boys are all we wanted," Josiah bent to retrieve his fallen sword.

"But now you killed one of us."

"And that makes us mad."

"You killed a lot of us."

"That makes us mad too."

"Now we think perhaps you should join us."

"Our dead fellows, that is."

"Before we take the toy soldiers home with us to play."

The vorike smiles were identical in dark calculation. Together, they raised their swords and said, "Do you still want your mommy?"

Please, please, please somebody have heard, a tiny voice prayed in Marie's mind. Please, please, please somebody have heard.

Then they were upon her.

Crystal sang as it clashed with steel. Marie was at an acute disadvantage because her goal was to keep all three of them alive until reinforcements arrived. Their goal was to kill her. And if one of the council seat holders died in the effort of it, that did not matter overly much either. It would spare the vorike waiting in whatever lair that had chosen the effort of it, though they would have preferred the victory of having them walk in on own legs, into their arms, so their flesh and the djed within could be feasted upon. And they grow stronger with it.

Marie would dodge one sword only to be confronted with another. Blood smeared the floor of the main room and then the foyer as she attempted a strategic retreat, muscles burning with wear and pain shoved deep in the recesses of her brain. Light on her feet, half-dancing, watching, waiting for an opening.

Then it came. Bringing her borrowed sword up in a reverse butterfly, she spun on her toes into Jamie, blocking his sight of Josiah's sword so that instead of meeting her flesh it met the steel of his partner's blade. The force of that blow staggered the illusionist and in the second he took to recover Marie twisted her elbow up and slammed the hilt of her sword into his jaw with all the strength of her body.

Jamie dropped cold to her feet and with her right hand she snatched his sword out of the air before it hit could hit the floor. A slight toss to bring her grip down it's hilt as she spun to face Josiah.

There was a vorike's fury blazing behind his velvety eyes. She had robbed them of one of their prey. Marie merely exhaled, a shallow breath, a bead of sweat stinging her eyes and the exhausted tremor of her muscles unheeded. She waited for him to attack.

Please, please, please let them come soon.

Only the healer allowed his sword to wilt down. Anger clouded his mocking words. "Nicely done, little girl, but you forgot to watch out for things bigger than you."

Marie had all of a split second to wander what he meant by that before a wall of power exploded over her.

It tasted like summertime air and ozone. It was scented with rain and sparkled with the divine magic a council seat holder had to spare. And it stole every iota of oxygen from her lungs. She choked and lunged for him, desperate now with the inability to breathe. Only he made no move to block the twin crescents of her swords, no effort to dodge; just stared at her out of Josiah's face and smiled when she pulled the blows back. Startled, she had only a second to realign her defense, back to trying to knock him out as she could not just stand there and hack at the body of her friend.

It wasn't long enough.

The side of his hand slammed into the inner curve of her elbow and Jamie's sword clattered to the floor as her arm went numb. A shove rocked her hard back against the front door and when instinct brought up the crystal blade to catch him in the shoulder, the force of her own delivered blow knocked it's hilt from a blood-slick hand.

By now her chest was jerking in tiny, soundless hiccups trying to take in air that wasn't there. A hand fumbled behind her for the doorknob, slipping, then grasping with a twist. The door swung open and she stumbled backwards out onto the porch, away from his advancement as the cool summer air slapped her face but could not breach the magical barriers to make it past her lips, up her nostrils. Embers of shadow began to flicker at the edges of her vision, and she brought up an arm to block his attack; but it it's nerves were still singing from the elbow hit and she hit the porch post only to slide to the boards.

"So this is the Landgrave? Lioness and hero girl?" The vorike jibed as she pushed up to her hands and knees. She flattened a hand on her throat, clawing even while trying to stand back up. He kicked her in the ribs, a splintering, sick burst of pain that left her falling down the steps into the yard.

The world spun and greyed. From far, far away she could hear his footsteps as he stepped into the moss and flagstones of the flower-lined walk. Felt the nudge of his boot rolling her onto her back. Heard the quiet scrape of steel as a sword was lain on the flagstones. Slim shoulders were jerking now, hard, harsh jerks that rocked her whole body, fighting the inevitable blackness, fighting for air. And she looked up through dying vision down the path of no return as he crouched over her and slid his hand up the inside of her thigh.

"Tierny, weaver, storming girl?" He murmured, almost sweetly. Strands of golden brown hair brushed her face as he bent over her. A hand cupping between her thighs, a sound like thunder hoofbeats on the street so very far away. "What a petching waste," he spat into her face. Then he was pressing his mouth over her cold, blue-faded lips to steal the last resource of life from her.

No! No, no, no.

She groped out a hand over the ground as her body convulsed beneath him, almost like contractions steadily slowing themselves down to an end, a miscarriage, a death with her on her back as all that was bigger than her surrounded. Something cold beneath her fingers, the hilt of a sword. Josiah's sword. She closed her fingers, felt it slip through the blood, tried again to get a hold of the blade but it kept sliding from her grasp. It was only the hilt she could hold. It was only the hilt.

Opening her eyes, she looked at his face through the drawing black veil. Remembered a fourteen year old boy with a drawn face sitting with his brothers. A laughing man dancing at Julia's promise ceremony. Saw the way his lashes glinted almost gold against his cheeks, lowered now as he sucked everything she was out of her.

I'm sorry, she whispered in her mind. I'm so damned sorry.

She drove the sword deep into his side, one arm wrapping around his shoulders as he jerked above her. A bubble of blood on his lips, eyes opening wide and all the wasping shadow fleeing from them like ashes until she was staring into her friend's eyes, and her friend's alone. He mouthed something she couldn't make out, fingers digging into the flesh of her thigh in a final spasm, and died.

Forgive me. Forgive me. O, gods. O, Syna. "Forgive me," she rasped as the first lungful of air slid down her throat.