CHP14

Briel plucked his sword from the ground, snorting and rubbing at his nose as his feet staggered to the side.

He’d woken with a bloody lip and highlighted his day with a hangover and a bloody nose.

“Maybe if I break your nose again the right way, it’ll straighten it out!” Shythe stood out before him, arms crossed, eyes simmering with cold anger.

“I think it’s been broken plenty!” Briel said as he shook his enormous wings, each longer than he was tall. He pulled them up against his back, hackles raised. The sun glinted off the white dappling and tips of them. A gold sheen lit from his wings in the right light, gilding their shape.

“Again!” Shythe shouted as Briel wiped at his nose.

Briel turned on his foot, the balls of his toes planting as he shifted in loose dry dirt. Shythe stood, sword in hand, turning to the side to wait as Briel charged, swinging his sword overhanded to catch the edge of the blade. A loud clang reverberated across the grounds, bringing with it a snapping sound and a horrifying moment where Shythe cried out in pain.

“REVIK!” the vision of white shouted like a swear, staggering away and holding his arm, what little of it remained attached just past the elbow.

One of a few onlookers winced in horror as another bolted off into the distance.

He tugged a strapped leather band on his arm and jerked it taut, holding it as a gush of blood slowly pulsed to a bare trickle.

“DISARM, Briel, DISARM! What part of ‘disarm’ sounds like ‘lob my dascha hand off!?” Large white wings spread out and over the man’s shoulders, sheltering his body from the pain of the sun on his flesh.

“The sword BROKE, Master! How am I supposed to stop a sword from breaking?” Briel argued.

“BY NOT-.” Shythe shouted back, interrupted by Zaien.

“Technically, you are disarmed,” Zaien laughed.

“Don’t you start! He’s all brute force and no finesse!” Shythe snapped as he kicked dust in Briel’s direction.

Briel withdrew a bit from the gesture and looked off into the distance as a robed man hurriedly ran across the field, wings out. Revik always had his wings out, tawny solid grey things—strange in shape and color.

His brown hair fell about his ears and shoulders, not long like they kept their hair—strange.

Revik glared at Shythe for a lingering moment before letting his eyes fall to the injury, where his arm dangled by skin and shattered bone. Shythe’s eyes drew into fierce pinpricks.

“I need healing, Revik.” Shythe growled.

“Yeah, I can see that,” Revik muttered before reaching out to the injury.

Revik moved seamlessly, lining the limb up as his green fire surged around Shythe’s arm. The strange healer tugged the cinched leather band to release blood flow in synch, and Shythe growled to the sky with pain and exasperation. Revik slapped over the tender injury just as he finished.

“There, all better.” Revik turned on his heel and stormed off.

Shythe did not like that man.

He lifted his arm, whole and healed with barely a line where the sword hit. He clenched his hand slowly and sneered at Briel.

Blood still dripped from Shythe’s arm, on the ground around him.

He looked to Briel, approaching him with malice as he drew his hand back and slapped it across the boy’s face. Though Shythe was shorter and smaller than him, Briel feared him.

Briel turned his head and closed his eyes to the slap, metering his breathing before turning his head back. His expression changed in a flash, and Zaien stepped in quickly, putting an arm out in front of Briel.

The boy’s tongue played with his teeth.

Zaien shot a glance to Shythe to back off.

“Try it again,” Briel spoke, spitting in that strange accent. He bent low to the ground and picked his sword up once more. Shythe plucked his sword pieces from the ground and fiddled with the blade, holding the two pieces together before gripping his hands and charging his fires through it. The two halves absorbed together, melding back into an unbroken sword. A blue fire prickled around his fingers as he did so.

Shythe held his blade out, and Briel moved his grip from two-handed to one. The sword could be wielded either way, but Briel preferred two hands for the extra force it gave him. The boy’s arm angled, cocked in a different stance while his feet shifted. Shythe did a quick assessment of Briel’s posture and charged.

Briel spun on one heel, shifting his grasp and twisting his blade arm to block a strike.

Shythe’s sword glanced off Briel’s and staggered back. Then, he spun, shifted his angle, and used his proximity to Briel’s back and side to strike. Briel’s eyes slanted quickly, calculating the strike that came at him. Then, he slipped the blade around with another fluid movement, deflecting Shythe’s blade.

Blood still stained Briel’s blade, and a few droplets flew with his quick motion.

Zaien stepped out of the way and watched as Briel showed a mastery he didn’t have weeks before.

Despite an elegance in his posture and obvious discomfort with his body, Briel showed a new grace. But, oddly, it didn’t match Briel’s former inelegant posture and clumsy stance.

Briel was not, in fact, not all Briel.

Shythe slashed his sword, deflecting another strike.

“In this life, I can call you the little one!” Briel laughed as he palmed the blade and deflected another one of Shythe’s strikes. The blade sparked in his hand.

Shythe heaved a panting breath.

“You know you’re a halfbreed this time, a damned son of Vrahe?”

Two parts of Briel warred within himself, two halves becoming whole.

“I cut my lip on his… my teeth… I felt my own tail. I think I know this, snow child,” Briel spoke to his master, losing all pretense of respect towards Shythe.

“And you want to hold yourself high because you are bigger?” Shythe wheezed as Briel drew his blade to counter Shythe and took the opportunity to swing back.

“I’ll take what I can get at the moment.” Briel shifted his shoulders, swung his blade wide, grinning as Shythe dodged. He then turned, countered his own sword, and found his thin wrist caught in Briel’s thick grasp.

Briel held them there and stared.

This was not the Briel he had raised. The Briel he raised was a timid boy, heavy-handed and respectful. The voice that came from his lips, the slur of his speech, and the sharp voice came from someone else, another soul that lay dormant within him.

From the first days of their kind, fallen from the skies of the creator’s book, two seraphim fell from grace. Eternals by right, they lived, they died, and they lived again, inhabiting stolen bodies. The seraphim were two of the creator’s songs, the thrum of cadence and the tremor of melody.

They took for themselves lovers. The black seraph, Vrahe, took a wife, bore her many children and grandchildren. When the next child came to seat his throne, he chose the body of his own grandchild, repeating the cycle ever since.

The white seraph, Sai, the melody, she took a lover, plucked from her suitors the most treacherous, violent, and cunning of them all. She claimed him, as only she could, his match. She shared with him her power, and they lived together, died together, and lived again.

In each incarnation, a child of their land would be born still, quiet in death. And on that night, the child would cry with life stolen, revived to carry on the soul of another, the warlord and the Seraph.

Briel had been that child, born and stolen away on a cold winter’s night, delivered into Shythe’s hands. His cries had long since gone silent, and they had not yet known that Acryan had died.

In their mourning, they set a funeral pyre to give Briel a quiet cremation. Just before he was to be laid upon the fire, his lungs filled with air, eyes opened, and he screamed his sharp song into the night sky. In mere hours they rushed the babe to Sai, her reincarnation at that time. She still had tears in her eyes from hearing that Acryan, her warlord, had passed again, leaving her alone once more.

She held Briel, looking at him with serious eyes.

“Acryan? You’re a bastard.” She whispered and handed the child back, affirming that her warlord’s soul had carried on.

She wasted away not long after, quietly passing in the night, and where Acryan was so easy to find and confirm, Sai was not. So Sai had to be hunted—found—and in this reincarnation, Acryan’s soul woke first, and she had still not been found. He could hear her calling to him, but not a soul knew where she would be found.

Nobody had told Briel as he grew, a child of royal lineage, a bastard child born from two forbidden lovers, a princess of the line of Sai, and a King of the line of Vrahe.

Briel was the perfect vessel for Vrahe’s spirit, kept at bay by the presence of the one man that Vrahe ever feared, Acryan, the warlord.

Briel stood bravely, holding a sword in his hand, fending off his childhood master as the stolen soul started to take slow possession.

Acryan didn’t take right away—his memories. It would be a punishment to wake in an infant every time. It would be unfair to parents who’d never get a chance to raise a child. It turned into an honor to watch as their mind finally began to take the memories to meld with their soul.

He leveled his sword at Shythe.

“I think this is enough for today, and please, don’t hit me like a child anymore,” Brielle hissed between his teeth in warning before he blinked and let the blade fall from his fingertips. The clatter startled him, and he looked to the exhausted Shythe.

“I’m sorry,” Briel said as his mind caught up with him, the things he said and did. The two sets of memories, lives, and personalities started clashing.

Acryan came in moments of weakness, fear, and strife. It happened naturally, sometime in the teens, and Briel, at sixteen, started drinking at night, hiding away with a bottle to, unbeknownst to him, coax out the soul’s hidden memories.

“Master?” Briel asked, blinking as he stepped back and shook his head. His mouth tasted funny. He couldn’t line up his speech and teeth like he had memories of a smaller mouth, squarer teeth, and thinner lips.

“Not much else I can teach you, then,” Shythe said, dropping his sword.

Briel knew the moment that Acryan’s voice had spoken in his head, knew the moment their minds shared a thought, and everything made sense. As a halfbreed, he should have been shunned, but he was being groomed for greatness, albeit in the only way they knew to treat a halfbreed. They merely waited to make sure that Acryan’s soul came before Vrahe could take his chance to claim his body.

Rumor had it that Briel’s brother, a half-brother, had taken that soul, and their fears of his black wings heralding the son of Vrahe was over. Briel, now, was no longer of the line.

Quietly, Briel sat down on the ground, closing his eyes, resting his head over his arms.

“I have the worst headache,” He muttered, and Zaien offered him water.

“We’ll find her,” Zaien promised.

“I didn’t realize how alone I really was. Now it’s this hole in my chest,” Briel breathed, tears starting in his eyes.

“Come on, don’t start,” Zaien said quietly, shoving Briel a little. “Things are about to get interesting.”