Windsom Indrath
From my vantage point amongst the winds and clouds, two thousand meters above the newly resurrected Sun Theatre, I watched the chaos subside.
The Red Gorge—as the lessers had so crudely named it—lay sprawled beneath me like a wound that had healed wrong, its Djinn architecture now fully exposed to a sky that had not witnessed its glory since before the cleansing of the peaceseekers.
How peculiar.
When Lord Indrath appointed me Overseer of Dicathen, I had accepted the position with the quiet certainty that my duties would involve little more than observation and occasional subtle guidance.
Truly a boring a tedious task, far beneath even the lowliest Asura.
The Djinn were gone. Their works were ruins. Their legacy was ash. My Clan had seen to that with a thoroughness that should have precluded any possibility of resurrection.
And yet here I was, watching one of their greatest structures rise from its grave.
I blinked—a gesture so slow, so deliberate, that it would have spanned the lifetime of a lesser's generation—and my gaze found him.
Corvis Eralith. Prince of Elenoir. A child of four who should have been learning his letters and playing in sun-dappled gardens, not crawling through dungeons disguised as a dwarf while a Lance of Darv harvested the core of a Phoenix Wyrm behind him.
"Useful." I murmured.
The word came unbidden, cold and clinical. Corvis Eralith was a mage at four. He was already working with a foreign Lance, already maneuvering through political minefields that would have trapped lesser minds decades his senior.
He was, in the calculation of Asuran strategy, a piece of unexpected value on a board that had grown tediously predictable.
I had watched him born, you see. Both him and his twin sister. They had registered as slightly more interesting than the usual crop of lesser infants—a faint shimmer of potential, a whisper of future relevance—but lessers they remained.
Interesting insects are still insects.
But perhaps, when Lord Indrath finally decides that the time for patience has passed, this particular insect could be forged into something sharper.
A pawn, certainly. Pawns are always useful even if sacrificed after a single turn. But perhaps a pawn with the potential to become something more—a knight, a rook, a piece that could actually influence the shape of the board rather than simply being swept from it.
The Sun Theatre gleamed below me, its ancient stones drinking the light of a sun the Djinn had worshipped. My kin had taught them that such worship was misplaced. Had taught them so thoroughly that they no longer existed to worship anything.
And yet their works endured. Their structures rose. Their legacy refused to stay buried.
I would need to report this. My Lord would find these developments... amusing.
I lingered a moment longer, watching the dwarf boy limp away from the ruin with his Lance protector. Watching the Phoenix Wyrms flee toward whatever sanctuary they imagined awaited them.
Watching the lessers below tend their wounded and count their dead and imagine that any of it mattered in the grand game of the war that was coming.
They had no idea. None of them had any idea.
I turned and ascended, leaving the Sun Theatre to its resurrection and its secrets. Behind me, the mountain continued to crumble, and the Djinn's last monument continued to rise, and a four-year-old prince continued to defy every expectation I had formed about the nature of his kind.
Amusing, indeed.
I have a report to prepare.
Corvis Eralith
Olfred's hand closed around my arm the moment the chaos subsided, pulling me away from the stage, away from the carnage, away from the smoldering remains of the Phoenix Wyrm whose core now rested in one of the storage rings I had borrowed—borrowed, I insisted to my conscience—from Grandpa's study.
The ring felt heavier now. Or perhaps that was just the weight of what I had done to earn its contents.
"Damien!" The protest escaped me before I could stop it, a childish whine that embarrassed me even as it left my lips.
I was four. I was exhausted. I had died in this place, and now I was being dragged away from it like a sack of potatoes.
"We are late." Olfred didn't look back. His voice was flat, clinical, the voice of a man calculating travel times and political consequences.
Then he added, almost as an afterthought: "Prince."
I blinked. Right. Right. In the warm glow of survival, in the dizzying relief of having actually done it, I had forgotten the most crucial part of all this plan to not make it turn into a political nightmare.
We were on borrowed time. Back in Zestier, my parents were probably already connecting dots, already summoning Alea or Aya and preparing to tear the kingdom apart searching for me.
Albold—what would happen to him when they discovered my absence?
What an ungrateful child you are, Corvis.
The thought was a lash across my already raw conscience. For a few blissful days, I had let myself be Finn Warend. I had enjoyed the simplicity of it, the freedom from the weight of knowing the future.
Finn didn't have to save the world. Finn just had to survive. But Finn was a mask, a comfortable lie I had wrapped myself in, and masks had to come off eventually.
And yet despite this longing for the simpler, if more immediately dangerous, life of Finn I couldn't suppress the small voice, the child's voice, that simply wanted to go home.
To lay in my own bed, in my own room, with the familiar ceiling of logs and branches above me and the muffled sounds of Tessia's theatrics through the walls.
To let Mom fuss over me and Dad pretend he was the cool and stoic king he presented himself to the qorld and Grandpa tell stories that I had heard a hundred times before.
"Can't we say hi to the Twin Horns?" The words escaped before I could cage them, soft and plaintive and utterly, shamefully young.
They had been my companions, my protectors, my... friends? Could I call them that, after I had lied about everything, after I had nearly gotten them killed, after I had used their kindness as a shield for my own desperate mission?
"Pfft." Olfred's scoff was half amusement, half dismissal. "No."
But he didn't say it unkindly. There was something in that sound, that single syllable, that almost resembled warmth. Almost.
We reached the outpost—deserted now, its inhabitants either fled or still trapped in the chaos behind us—and found the Darvish Highcolts exactly where we had left them.
The two massive steeds stood impassive, waiting, their patient eyes holding no judgment for the destruction we had caused or the lives we had left behind. They were beasts of physical burden, not conscience. I envied them.
"Shouldn't we help the injured back in the Red Gorge?" The question came as Olfred hoisted me onto the saddle.
Guilt gnawed at me, a persistent, nibbling thing. I was royalty—even if the people down there didn't know it, even if they saw only a dwarf boy fleeing the scene.
Protecting Dicathen, protecting its people, was supposed to be what gave me strength. What gave me purpose.
I was leaving them to bleed.
"I am not a medic." Olfred's reply was dry, practical, utterly devoid of sentiment. He swung onto the saddle behind me, his presence a warm, solid wall at my back. "And neither are you."
I didn't argue. I couldn't argue. Every word would have been a lie, and I was too tired for lies. The adrenaline that had carried me through the reset, through the snarlers, through the very death I had somehow survived—it was gone now, leaving behind only the hollow ache of exhaustion.
My bones felt like they were made of glass. My eyelids weighed more than the mountains behind us.
I yawned. It was an enormous, jaw-cracking yawn that seemed to originate somewhere in my toes and travel upward through every exhausted muscle. My head, too heavy to hold upright any longer, came to rest against Olfred's back.
He grunted. An annoyed sound, a sound that clearly communicated his displeasure at being used as a pillow by a four-year-old who had made his life exponentially more complicated over the past several days.
But he didn't move me.
"Sleep well, kid." His voice, when it came, was softer than I had ever heard it. That strange, rolling accent of his—the dwarven cadence that reminded me of Scottish burrs from another life—wrapped around the words like a blanket. "You have been terrific."
Terrific. Such a small word for surviving death, for facing down a Phoenix Wyrm, for earning the respect of a Lance. Such a small word, and yet it settled over me like a benediction.
I closed my eyes, and I let myself believe that maybe I was not entirely doomed.
The Highcolt's gait was rhythmic, soothing, a lullaby of hoofbeats carrying me away from the fire and toward whatever waited next.
And stashed safely in the storage ring on my finger, a Beast Will waited to be claimed.