Felun

The air was always stifling at the base of an Archival ravine. Warm, pulsing stone loomed on all sides, shot through with mineral veins. Dim light filtered down, striped blue-black through layers of rustling, papery sedge. The air smelled like burnt meat and incense. And yet, working with Archivist Zekore was a surprising respite.

“You don’t need to use the title,” Zekore always said. “I’m fresh-hatched, hardly feel like one. They all miss Themis; I know they must.”

But his wings would flicker with the blue-greens of self-satisfaction when he said so, and Felun was court-trained enough to know when a subtle stream of flattery was useful. Unlike Iolite, Zekore gave him a lot of breaks. It also helped that the Archive was already beyond saving.

“It’s reaching a steady state,” Zekore said, dangling his legs and some of his tail into what looked like an open mineshaft. “Just that one down there once you’re done eating, and that will be enough for now.”

This particular Archival borehole was thirty feet wide and ribbed like the inside of a windpipe. The door that Zekore pointed out was large and square, several meters down and pale violet in the low light.

Felun washed down his meal with a swig of water. The work wasn’t difficult, but there was a lot of it; enough to make him ravenous every few hours. He squinted at Zekore again, gaze settling on the pulse of magic within his shell and the thread which could unravel it. It was brighter than all of the others he’d seen. Stronger. He guessed it would take about twenty seconds to navigate and fatally unravel, instead of less than five. He wondered, with a twinge of unease, what Iolite’s looked like.

“Okay, carry me down to the rightmost ledge.”

“That other platform is wider,” Zekore pointed out.

He shook his head. “Yes, but it looks older to me. The anchor spells are probably eroding.” It was so much easier now, being able to see the dying flicker as plain as bad calligraphy. Snares and trapdoors couldn’t hide from him; he’d evaded two already, just by looking at the walls and floor. If he’d known this back in Ironport…

He brushed the thought away, burying old despair with fresh annoyance.

“Alright,” Zekore said, blissfully oblivious. “Grab my arm.”

Felun studiously ignored the proximity of Zekore’s life-on-a-thread as he was lifted down into the fissure. Zekore hovered carefully within reach as Felun knelt on the ledge, holding out his open runebook for more light. It was just as well; if he cast a glance over the edge, there was no end in sight. Just spell-gauzed gloom, sparks of enchantment muffled by thick and increasingly impenetrable darkness.

He turned his attention back to the door. It had a handle carved to look like a serpent’s head, reared back to strike. The surface was wrinkled and lumpy, as shiny as scar tissue. Twin keyholes glared coldly at him; when he peeled them apart with spell-sight, he noted that they led to nothing but enchanted teeth, intriguing enough to divert an amateur Breaker’s attention from the spell holding it closed.

“What’s in this one?” he asked.

He could make out a dampened scatter of magic beyond the half-foot thickness of the door, but all it told him was that whatever lay beyond was dormant. So far, Zekore had asked him to retrieve numerous jars of glowing goo and silk-wrapped crystals, an inch-thick metal lockbox and pieces of planispiral shell. Fodder bodies, Silverwater had said, and it seemed to him as if the Hive was set on making even more.

“I think…a weapon,” Zekore said cautiously. “Special order from Iolite. So be careful.”

Felun frowned and ordered his spellbook to float alongside as he painted a circle across the door and gloved his arms with shielding runes. The glow of the enchantment promised it’d be hard to chew through. Pale, golden wisps floated around the main core: ephemeral diversions, he guessed. Flashes of gore and the worst memories polished to a shine, trying to deflect his breaking, make him flinch, open him up for a lance of flame or lightning. This sort of thing hadn’t worked on him since his earliest days, but he still had a faded burn splashed across his ankle to show for it.

When he dived, it was exactly as he expected. Images crowded into his brain, one part Breaker-sense and two parts vivid visual hallucination: boiling metal, flesh multiplied, hands reaching with their skin seared away to the bone. Fear sloshed in his stomach, cold and instinctive. The illusions taunted him. He saw himself standing over his own lifeless body and felt blood on his hands, sticky and half-dried, but it wasn’t real. Then the cold, wet pain of a knife in his back and an upward ripping motion, but that wasn’t real either.

He blinked and saw the lattice of spellwork, weak points shining, nodes announcing their presence. Cracking them was not so hard—like eggs into a battered campfire pan, the flick of the wrist, a gentle tap like an old memory—and the mists faded. After that, the actual locking enchantment was as standard as they came—like feeding swords to screaming mouths, hurtling down a twisted and ancient tunnel—and its last defenses extinguished themselves on his protective circle in a burst of shrieking red lights.

“Are you alright?” Zekore asked as he came back into his body. He’d hovered safely out of reach. “A lot of fire in that one.”

“Fine,” Felun said. His eyes watered. No nosebleed though, and his fingers didn’t ache. He’d gotten better at this, he mused. The spell-sight had helped with the first part, but unraveling the meat of the enchantment had felt painless for once. He crept backward along the ledge, back pressed firmly against the corrugated stone. “Can you get the handle? I think it opens outward.”

The door swung soundlessly, revealing a lightless, low-ceilinged pocket of melted wax. He could make out a chest of drawers taking up most of the far wall. Several spots of magic blazed within its depths: a gleam of dormancy, half of a what might be a float rune.

“Is it safe?” Zekore asked.

“I don’t know. But I’ll go first, of course.” The spell-sight couldn’t tell him whether an enchantment was harmless; he needed to be able to recognise it for himself. And though Orhan had been a good teacher for a drunkard, some of the signs and weavings before him were totally unfamiliar. “Wait—this weapon—shouldn’t you know that?”

“Not in these parts,” Zekore said quietly. “This is all ambient creation. New growth. The places I was born into have all collapsed, now.”

“Oh.” He coughed awkwardly. “…Sorry to hear it.”

“It’s alright. Archivist Themis was a good caretaker. It was not her fault. And then Iolite did what had to be done.”

Felun’s interest pricked at that, but he said nothing.

“Are you ready?” Zekore prompted.

Felun shielded and stepped forward. His spellbook flipped open to a double-page spread boasting twin beacons. Light flooded the waxen room, soaking the walls into pale translucence. It felt like being in the belly of a candle.

The chest of drawers was made of ordinary wood, its back half-engulfed by the wax wall. Every drawer looked unwarded, and some were devoid of any enchantment at all. He chose to open one of those first. A tangle of small objects greeted him: broken quills, strings of rusted keys, chipped buttons, dried seeds, candle stubs, stray coins, tiny lumps of hardened tree sap, playing cards bundled together with twine, a jar of moldy tallow, a crumbly-looking matchbox with a grinning cat on the cover.

“This isn’t faery stuff,” he observed.

He heard Zekore shrugging with a subtle click of spines and exoskeleton. “I said it was new growth, didn’t I?”

“If it’s new, where does it come from?” Another drawer held nothing but a cup full of unidentifiable teeth. “Is this place alive? Stealing pieces from other places? Someone had to have made that door.” Unless, his mind supplied, everything here had grown like the Songian labyrinth, shaped by the ghosts of lost echoes. He was disturbed to find that part of him didn’t think it impossible.

“It is similar to a branching tendril, if I had to guess. A feeler reaching out and begging. Acquiring what resources it can, rearranging and melding old with new.” Zekore patted the wall, and his wings drooped. “Poor Archive. It’s doing its best.”

“Are we still in your Hive?” Felun asked sharply.

Zekore hesitated. “We’re in the Archive.”

“I’ve seen places like this before. How can you Archivists be sure they aren’t connected? All the one same place?”

“No. The first Titanias might’ve forged spaces from the Realm, but they’ve had plenty of time to grow into Archives. Nothing more, nothing less.” Zekore paused, shutting his third eye. “I may not be as strong as Themis once was, but I can at least sense the boundaries. I can feel where it’s died and rotting, and where it ends. Leading to infinity isn’t the same as being infinite.”

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“I have to say that doesn’t completely make sense to me.” His puzzling caught on a strange detail. “The first Titanias? The ones who lived in the shattered lands?”

“Not quite,” Zekore said with a flick of spines. “They came from the Realm. Spearheading. Spillover. Searched for a kinder world and found it. Shattered lands first, then more. Hungry for open spaces, empty territories. You told me you saw Hives on your home continent? Then we’ve truly carved out enough for survival here. They were like Lords more than Titanias, until the necessity. The wars with your kind. Vicious. Enough to destroy a continent. A long, long time ago.”

“How many Titanias down is Titania Fauna?” he asked curiously.

“Hundreds, at least. No exact number. The earliest ones died fast. Replaced fast. Weren’t able to be Archived. Anything good in there?”

“No.” Felun shut the last of the mundane drawers—a round blue tin filled with thread and needles—and moved on to the first of the glimmering ones. “I feel like this one has something, though.”

The drawer slid open with several clicks of smooth stone.

“Oh,” Felun said. “Is this what Iolite was looking for?”

“Hm?” Zekore picked up a preservation tablet, before putting it back down again. “Float runes? No.”

There were a dozen small, stone tablets in the drawer. The runes sunk into each were large and multi-layered, of jaw-dropping craftsmanship. It would’ve taken several hours to weave one, he guessed, and heavens knew how old they were. There were shielding signs, float symbols, even half a dozen single-use concussives like the one he’d spent back in the kingdom Library.

“Can I have them?” he blurted out, before he could lose his nerve.

Zekore blinked. “I don’t see why not.”

They were just like the puzzle balls of his youth. He wanted to pick them apart and memorise their structure, just so he might have a chance of replicating even half of what they were. There was no time for that right now, though; he lifted them carefully off the runestone and safely into his spellbook instead.

“Thank you,” he said hastily, unsure if Zekore knew the significance of the runes. Surely he must—he was an Archivist, after all. But Zekore only gave a flicker of wing, polite acknowledgment before he asked about the rest of the drawers.

Three other compartments had the glow of magic within them, and Zekore dismissed the first two: embroidered handkerchiefs and an ominous witch bottle filled with bent pins and splintered bone. Felun squinted at the last drawer, resisting the urge to shield his eyes from its glow. No further safeguards, he confirmed. But there was a fierceness to the sleeping enchantment that gave him pause. He scribbled an extra shielding rune across his hand before tugging the drawer open with a creak.

“That’s what she wants?” he asked.

It was vaguely knife-shaped, but one lump of a thing. All cast from the same dull, dark material. It reminded him of the shipyards in Ironport, or maybe just the bleakness of it all: fogged-up air, industry chomping at the bit, a sunrise the colour of dishwater.

“Yes.” Zekore paused. “Can you carry it? I don’t think it would be healthy for an Archivist to hold.”

Felun bolstered his shield and picked it up reluctantly. Then he almost dropped it as the end seemed to melt. It twisted with a spray of gauzy ghost-light. Translucent, six-fingered hands sprouted from its surface. They grasped the dark material and began to mold it. The handle melted swiftly into its blade and elongated, growing heavier as it stretched into a slender pole. One end sharpened into a symmetrical point, like an old-fashioned spear. Felun glanced over at Zekore, whose gaze was fixed squarely on the end of the weapon and not on any of the dissipating hands.

“Oh,” Felun said carefully and casually, with what he hoped was the correct amount of innocence. “It’s adaptable, like Suria’s chitin skill?”

“Considerably more dangerous,” Zekore muttered. He leaned in, then away. “It smells like the old wars…yes, I think this is the very Hand of the Archives. Don’t nick anyone with it. Especially not me.”

“That sharp?” He peered at the cutting edge and shivered as the spell shifted at his observation. The hands didn’t reappear, but the magic rearranged like a courtier making himself presentable. No, he thought. It was less human than that. Like flowers turning to face the sun. “It reaches into the body?” That was as much as he could interpret of the restless power bubbling at the surface.

“Don’t hope that any wound it inflicts can be bound shut in the ordinary way,” Zekore agreed.

“Do you mean to keep it in that lockbox you had me find earlier?”

“Yes, quite exactly. Can you encourage it back into a smaller shape?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted.

He peered into its magic again, the threads woven so densely they seared bright spots into his vision. The enchantments flexed like muscles. Fingers beaded to the surface and the spear twisted, shrinking under the grip of ghostly hands. Shadowy substance folded and compressed, going blocky and rectangular before solidifying again. In moments, he held the silhouette of a book.

Zekore hissed, soft and slow. “Don’t open that.”

“Wasn’t going to,” he replied with more ease than he felt. The back of his neck prickled.

Something rumbled across the ground and up the walls, a gurgle of shifting stone. Clumps of dried wax pattered down from the ceiling.

Felun froze. “What’s that?”

“Ordinary destabilisation. We’ve removed several items from their cradles, and this one was clearly quite weighty.” Zekore tilted his spines at the shadow-book in his hand. “It is like…what is an expression you would use? Like lifting an anchor away. Don’t worry. An Archivist is also a sort of anchor. Nothing will break while I’m in here.”

Felun swallowed, pulse quickening. “Let’s get this thing into the lockbox.”

“Yes,” Zekore agreed, and flew them back up into the light.

Behind them, the borehole crumpled and closed like a throat swelling shut. Its reverberation ground Felun’s teeth together. Distantly, he could hear the creaking of failing beams and falling parchments.

===

Felun was halfway back across the desert when the barrage of alarms hit him.

It was like being bludgeoned with a hundred little pebbles at once. He startled awake, choked on his own spit, and thrashed upright in the cocoon. It barely jostled. His faerie bearers flew on, unaware.

He hadn’t thought they’d be back in range so soon. In truth, he hadn’t thought the wards would be broken at all. Tampered with, sure—his father was always nosy, ever-intrusive—but not broken. He’d set three layers of full-strength safeguards. Three. His thoughts whirled in a sickening pinwheel. He hunched over in the belly of the false-skyfish, blinking against the delayed onslaught.

No one in his family could undo his work without losing a finger or two on the first layer, much less the sections he’d reinforced with the dead Breaker’s sigils. But his alarms didn’t lie. Their ringing signals echoed against his consciousness, bruising his thoughts, as real as the blisters on his hands. Someone had broken his wards. Worse yet, they’d broken them quickly enough for the alarms to be spaced together, never mind the distance they’d travelled to reach him.

A strange, sickly calm descended. He watched the dunes pass beneath, warped and wrinkled through the translucent layers of spell-cocoon and skyfish illusion.

A Breaker must’ve undone his wards. Not a very good one, judging by the way they’d bludgeoned straight through the alarms, but a Breaker nonetheless. And if a Breaker had undone his wards, it meant that mother had already sent for one. She must’ve anticipated needing one around long before the attack on that princess. Long before the Magicians insisted on close liaisons. It made sense; Breakers were useful in lots of little ways, but it wouldn’t do to rely on him.

They were waiting when he landed. Father had a staff in his hand, had cinched his robes using the belt with a bird’s bill buckle. Felun still remembered the sting of it across his hand. Mother glided up a moment later, her robes trailing black and gold like some rare and poisonous moth. A trio of guards waited at their backs; even if his parents weren’t in the habit of greeting him on return, three was one more than formality dictated. Yichen was here too, leaning against the railing.

They landed with the moonrise. His cocoon unfolded, evaporating from the top down. The faeries turned and flew back the way they’d come, illusions still intact. Possibly the guards thought they were actual, trained skyfish.

Felun was left standing alone, unarmoured, a runequill drooping in his grasp.

“Well,” said father, breaking the silence. “What do you have to say for yourself?”

When it came down to moments like this, experience had taught him there was nothing he could do. Nothing but a sinking resignation clotting in the back of his throat, stopping up any excuse he could have spun.

Father waited one moment, two. Then he stepped aside and made a gesture; the guards behind him parted to reveal a pair of strangers flanking a familiar pile of luggage. One had spell-slips on his belt and one arm in a sling. The other wore a bright green runequill perched behind her ear. Both sported fresh bandages up to the elbows. Felun felt a savage pang of vindication despite himself. At least he had cost them something.

Father strolled over to his trunk and kicked it open. It had been emptied of everything but the wooden legs.

“Did you think you were being clever?” he asked.

Felun fought the urge to scream something foolish, something like I was trying to undo the bullshit you’ve done! The questions always meant nothing. They were only giving him rope to hang himself with. It was futile, but his head ached with rage anyway. He stared them all down, Yichen included. Had he told them? Or had father decided to of his own accord? What did it matter now?

“We really expected better from you,” mother interjected. She met father’s gaze and gave the briefest of nods.

Father raised his hand and clicked his fingers. The air seemed to scorch; a split second later, his luggage was ablaze with crimson spellfire, burning as hot as the real thing. The wooden prostheses crackled and split, blackening under the onslaught. Felun felt his jaw clench. He thought of Ishaan, and then of Mahir, the woodwright. All that kindness gone to waste.

“You will be expected to remediate your actions,” father added imperiously. “As for your friend—”

There was a tearing sensation inside his skull, thoughts sinewing open like a muscle stretched too far.

“He didn’t do anything wrong,” Felun said, voice rising despite himself. “You don’t have the right to imprison him. Let him go back to his family, for sky’s sake.”

Father sneered. “You have always been singularly thoughtless. Have you forgotten your gratitude so quickly? We own his life as much as we own yours, Haoyu.”

Felun laughed before he could stop himself: a single, choked sound of disbelief. He’d thought there was nothing left to break. No more foolishness, no more rage left to give. He’d been aware of what father was saying. He’d known all along, but it was another thing entirely, to hear it out loud. In that smug fucking tone.

His spellsight picked out the guards’ bespelled armour, the standard-issue charms on their blades and scabbards. They were a good several feet away but he reached out without thinking, his mind like a grasping claw, and wrenched the protections apart with one good pull. He shifted his stance. The strap of his satchel dug into his shoulder. A bead of blood trickled from one nostril and drew a thin, warm line down his face.

The self-satisfied contempt on father’s face shifted into the beginnings of a frown.

Don’t, he saw Yichen mouthing, but there was no stopping it now. No more running away. The rage coursed through his veins like molten fuel, hateful and glorious. A burst of Breaker magic surged on its heels. He was brighter and more alive than he’d ever been.

“No,” he said forcefully. Then he raised his voice, louder than he’d ever dared before, fully shouting now. “No! Go to hell—I’ve had enough.”

He lunged before father could open his mouth to reply.