Chapter Text
“Essek, you must be careful. You are the hope of Vorastal, you must be the shining light. You and Verin both. You cannot be caught doing as you are.”
“We won’t, Umavi.”
“Essek.”
“... we will be careful. I promise.”
~
Essek startled from his trance to the sound of banging. It was still night outside, by the estimate of his internal clock and, rising from the bedroll laid out in the corner of what had become his room only in the last few months, he began to move towards the doorway to the main room. A quick glance to the only window confirmed his suspicion, the only light outside from a lantern fixed near one of the larger buildings in the Dusk.
A barely audible creak pulled Essek’s attention to Verin’s room, the only room with a door in the shack they called home. Verin walked silently across the room, his bare feet coming to rest carefully with each step. Essek focused on the floor, placing his feet against the planks that did not creak underneath his weight. He came to stop on the left side of the door and raised his head to meet Verin’s eyes, his breath held. Even in the darkness, in total silence, Essek could see the fingers Verin held up, counting down before he opened the door, allowing only his face visible.
“Light, Ireen,” Verin breathed a sigh of relief. He allowed the door to crack open further to allow the young girl, appearing no more than eight, to slip into the shack. Essek let out a breath of his own and shifted, rubbing his hand wearily across his face. “Could this not wait?”
“Sorry,” Ireen said, sounding far from apologetic. “You said to bring information as I heard it, veta.” She bared her teeth threateningly at Essek when their eyes met. He raised his eyebrow and, in turn, she gestured rudely at him, turning on her heel to ignore him and face Verin. Light save him from the impertinent children that functioned as their spy network. Essek let out a hissed breath through his teeth.
“What’s the information?” Verin prompted after a moment of silence. Essek began to make his way back to his room; Verin could fill him in after Essek had tranced a proper four hours.
“Scourgers.” Essek froze, turning slowly to face where Ireen and Verin stood, hardly daring to breathe.
“What?”
“The scourgers are back, they said,” Ireen said. Verin cursed.
“The window-” Essek managed to spit out as Verin’s hands moved in the shape of a spell. He hurried across the room to pull the curtains of their singular window closed, following it with the boards of wood that locked tight, shuttering the window completely. Verin produced four globules of light, sending them to the corners of the room.
“Sit,” Verin said, gesturing from the girl to the table. He gestured again, more firmly, when Ireen didn’t move immediately. Once seated, Ireen swept her hair, nearly as short as Essek’s own, back from her face with a huff, and crossed her arms. “Explain. Where did you hear this?”
“The Outskirts, by where the Slip is,” Ireen tapped her fingers against her arm impatiently. “Reti and a few others were out there.”
“The patrols at the Slip have been sparse recently,” Verin said, nodding his head in understanding. Ireen pursed her lips, fidgeting. Essek’s eyes caught on the way her fingers pressed against the scar across her wrist.
“Reti said the soldiers said the Zemnian was coming back.” Essek slowly lowered his head to his hands and sank down into his own chair as Verin cursed again. Even a deep breath was not enough to calm the paranoia sparked by that sentence. Zemnian didn’t just mean scourgers. It meant Bren.
Scourgers were not an unfamiliar sight to those who lived within Vorastal. It was a simple fact of life within the encampment: the scourgers were always around, watching, waiting, and they performed raids when they thought the rules were being broken. No magic, no weapons, do as you are ordered, work where you are told, and no one would be killed.
From what Essek had come to understand, the encampment was likely a training ground in patience for the newest of scourgers, and functioned as some form of punishment for the less-fresh. Over the last century, the Umavi, and then Verin and Essek when she had been murdered, had collected records of the scourgers as they came through. Some were more willing to talk than others; it was the only way they were able to update their records, keeping track of the scourgers as they died while doing their respective duties.
But Bren was a thorn in Essek’s existence. He had been among a larger group of newer scourgers at first, his red hair causing him to stand out among the group. But it was his eyes that caught Essek’s attention. There was a cleverness in them that Essek worried about, a worry he soon learned was not unfounded. In the first two months of Bren being stationed at Vorastal, Essek had watched as Ilvara Mirimm, Kyzrae Briylin, and Veldrin Tasithar were killed. He had stood in the crowd, as silent as the rest, as Bren’s face lit up in satisfaction, as Ilvara screamed, burning alive. As the female scourger to Bren’s left, Astrid, had encased Kyzrae in a block of ice and shattered him. As the dark-haired scourger to Bren’s right, Eadwulf, had wrapped thorny vines tightly around Veldrin, as the vines under his command forced themselves down Veldrin's throat.
Their sin had been teaching. Few had been brave enough to even attempt such a thing in their encampment, fewer so after the last century of cruelty. And certainly not for the four-year period those three scourgers, seemingly inseparable, had been stationed there. The three seemed far more intelligent than the lot before them, conversing amongst themselves in Zemnian to avoid possible sharing of information.
Essek hated them.
“Tell Reti classes are cancelled until further notice,” Verin said, his eyes settling on Essek’s form, tense and unmoving. “Pass the message through the Lens. We lay low, until they are gone, and stay on guard. Orders will come as we think of them. For now, destroy anything that might put any of us at risk.”
“Yes, veta.” Ireen saluted, a bastardised bow that Essek could remember once being taught, for when he would meet the Bright Queen. How quickly things changed; he had never had the chance to meet her.
“Ireen.” The sound of his own voice surprised him. He raised his head slowly, making eye contact with her. “Avoid the Slip. All of you. We don’t know if they know of the break in their defences.”
“Obviously,” Ireen rolled her eyes and turned. As she reached the door, Verin dispelled the lights. The door swung shut behind her, leaving them in silence and darkness.
“Are we fucked?” Verin asked, after a long few minutes of silence. Essek let out a choking laugh and dropped his head again, his forehead hitting the table with a quiet thump.
He couldn’t get his mind to rest for the remaining hours of darkness. Instead, he paced in the silence of his room, bare save for the bedroll and short table he used as a desk. The sharp pain in his shin as he walked into the corner of the table wasn’t enough to draw him from his thoughts; he barely shook his leg out before picking up his pacing again. In the other room, he could just barely hear the sound of creaking, of Verin’s weight shifting. He was probably pacing too, Essek reasoned. He spun on his heel and slipped out of his room, pausing in the doorway to the other room.
Verin’s attention didn’t shift visibly to him, gaze steady on the empty space in the wall as he extended his arms, first his right to the front, and then slowly his left back behind him, and shifted his centre of gravity. It was all they had left of their father now, a century later, the choreographed forms that would have eventually evolved to training with proper weapons, had the attack on Asarius never happened. Just as the jewellery they kept hidden was all they had left of their mother; a ring Essek wore daily, under layers of illusion, a chain Verin wrapped around his wrist, tucked carefully into the sleeves of his shirt, worn so tightly that an imprint would forever be branded into his skin.
“Do you intend to just stand there, or are you going to say something?” Essek blinked. Verin’s expression had shifted to one of amusement as he glanced over. “Close the door, light the room.”
The door shut, a single ball of a purplish light floating in the space between them, Essek let out a long breath and tilted his head back until it hit the wall behind him, sinking to sit on the ground. “We are fucked.”
“Are we?”
“We have to assume they have figured something out, if those three have returned.” Verin’s countenance twitched, giving nothing of his thoughts away. “Either they are aware that someone has been teaching the children - in which case, it is only a matter of days until I am killed - or they are aware we have been attempting to find a way to contact Rosohna. In which case, we are all living on borrowed time, and they are just as likely to burn Vorastal to the ground as torture us merely to make a point any day now.”
“Grim,” Verin said. He sank to the ground next to Essek and stretched his legs out in the cramped room, shoulders sinking in defeat. “But you aren’t wrong. We need to know why they’re here. But-”
“But you won’t risk the children.” Essek sighed, roughly scrubbing his hand through his hair. The shift in his movement and lack of real concentration caused the light to bob in the air, flickering out of existence. Essek recast the cantrip and let out another breath. “We don’t have enough to make any real play, not against one scourger, let alone three. And most certainly not those three.”
The silence that fell over the room felt like a heavy blanket, thick and suffocating. Essek stretched his legs out, wincing at the catch in his right leg. He massaged his hand over it until the piercing pain faded, tilting his head back to the wall once again. “We have to assume they will eventually be smart enough to translate, if they aren’t already,” Essek whispered as the quiet seemed to stretch on endlessly. The workers would be rising soon, and Verin and Essek both would be expected to rise with them, to attend to their workstations. “We cannot rely on the Empire’s arrogance, that they should not expect retaliation even after so long, that they needn’t bother to learn our language.”
“We’ve been careful,” Verin said, though he sounded as doubtful as Essek felt. They had been careful, but never careful enough. Not with the ease of responding to calls to veta and likaya, the titles leaving as easily as their name from the mouths of the surviving drow of Vorastal.
“We’ll need to be more careful,” Essek murmured. Verin nodded.
They both flinched at the noise, not unlike a sharp crack of thunder, that echoed through the streets. It was time to rise for another day of labour, another day of exhaustion. Verin pulled himself from the floor and offered Essek a hand. Essek gave him a grim smile and slipped from the room to prepare for the day.
~
“Vorastal is not an often requested assignment. You have requested it thrice now, Bren.”
“Yes, Master Ikithon.”
“Why?”
“There is more to it than meets the eye. I am curious.”
“... you have always been excellent at puzzles. Very well. Take Astrid and Eadwulf with you.”
“Yes, sir.”
~
Most others hated working Vorastal. To some regard, Bren could understand. It was often boring, with little to do besides watch nearly four thousand of the surviving citizens of what was once the City of Beasts work and occasionally glare at the Imperial forces that remained on watch at the encampment.
But none of the other encampments had cricks quite as tenacious as those within Vorastal. And most other Volstrucker seemed to miss the personality entirely.
They called Vorastal a punishment of an assignment. There were far more interesting things to be done, those who preferred to be stationed undercover on long term assignments, or those who preferred the quick fight of assassinations and, on the rare occasion, honeypots. Vorastal brought nothing but paperwork and plenty of time for personal projects.
Bren liked time for his personal projects, but perhaps more importantly, Bren liked puzzles. And Vorastal’s current hierarchy was a puzzle no one had yet solved. It had led him to devouring the few textbooks on Undercommon that Ikithon had, seeking out others at the Cobalt Soul Archive when he had run out of initial books. At least, until a particularly irritable librarian had thrown a workbook on the language at him and banned him from the archive.
He had solved the most recent puzzle of the Dens at Vorastal. The Olios family had been destroyed, and the three who had worked as tutors, members of Dens Mirimm, Tasithar, and Biylin, were killed publicly to make a point. Bren had seen the paperwork from two decades previously, when a Volstrucker had uncovered the political importance of Den Thelyss in Asarius, and had arranged for the public executions of the heads of the Den. The surviving members of the Thelyss family were both men, Bren knew, and they had known for a long time that the Dynasty was a matriarchal culture.
Ikithon had thought it enough. Bren wasn’t so sure.
“Let it rest, for gods’ sake, Bren.” As though they were children again, Eadwulf was on the bed, his head hanging off the bed. Every few seconds, he tossed a ball of pure magic in the air and caught it with a small burst of light, his fidgeting a much familiar sight in the room.
“He won’t. Not until he proves there is a puzzle to solve in the first place,” Astrid said, from the desk, head bent over the paperwork. She lifted her hand and tucked her hair behind her ear, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. “Wulf, check my equations.”
Eadwulf gestured lazily from his position on the bed. When it became clear Astrid wasn’t lifting her head to look at him, he sighed. “Ja, fine. Bring it here then.”
“Fine.” Astrid huffed, turning the chair with a harsh scrape across the floor. Bren didn’t move, scanning his notes a few more times. Conjugation was a terrible thing, and he was growing tired of reviewing the past participle. Astrid’s foot caught his side as she passed him and Bren inhaled sharply, throwing a glare in her direction that she ignored.
“There is something still happening, I’m sure of it. They fought for nearly two decades to keep our people from reaching Asarius. They didn’t go willingly to Vorastal, and we have squashed rebellions twice in the last century,” Bren said distractedly, turning back to his papers. “It doesn’t make sense that there would not be some infrastructure we are not yet aware of, some hierarchy to their everyday. I’m going to find it.”
“He needs to be the best,” Eadwulf rolled his eyes. “Here, Astrid, this part. Fix it.”
“Fuck you.” Astrid took the papers back and, as she passed him, nudged Bren in the side again. Bren ignored her, chewing on the inside of his cheek. He was missing something, and he knew it. It would be eating at him until he could find it.
“Did you have to drag us with you, though?” Eadwulf asked after a minute of silence, rolling and propping himself up on his elbows. “You want to be at Vorastal, fine, but Astrid and I don’t.”
“Speak for yourself.”
“Look me in the eyes and lie to me.”
Bren raised his eyebrows first and his eyes second, to catch sight of the heated glare his partners were sharing. “I want to be at Vorastal,” Astrid said icily. Eadwulf snorted and broke eye contact.
“I did not ask. He suggested it,” Bren said. Both of them turned to him at the same time. “You know he is committed to keeping us together for the time,” Bren waved his hand vaguely; “keep us codependent until he feels like driving a wedge between us.”
“And just how would he do that?” Eadwulf asked, leaning forwards, as though this were new. As though this thought experiment wasn’t one of their favourite things to do at night, piled atop a single bed together, each listing off new ways they would break themselves, creative ways turn them on one another. There was no better way to be prepared for the inevitable.
“A well-placed ‘modify memory’ coinciding incidentally with Astrid’s obvious desire to replace him in the Assembly, thus making her a perceived threat to the Empire,” Bren drawled, bored, looking back down at his papers. “May I take point for this assignment?” He glanced up in time to catch Eadwulf’s nod. They both looked at Astrid, seemingly lost in her spellbook, her finger tapping against the ink pen she clutched so tightly. After a moment, she looked up, as if sensing their eyes on her.
“Yes, sure, fine. Whatever.”
The sun hadn’t even begun to rise yet, and Bren could feel the heated glare from Astrid behind him as they walked through the dirt streets of Vorastal. Drow walked the streets already, heading to their respective assigned labours. Most avoided even looking at the three Volstrucker walking in the street, averting their eyes the second they recognized the well-kept grey uniform the Volstrucker seemed to wear around the encampment.
It was easy to pick the remaining members of Den Thelyss out of the crowd. Bren remembered watching as one of the older Volstrucker had grabbed the elder of the men and shoved him to the ground, cutting his long hair down to nearly nothing for no crime other than making eye contact with the wrong person. The younger of the two men had held his brother after, as if stopping him from attacking. Now, they walked together; the one with short hair still walked with his head tucked low, pointedly avoiding eye contact with anyone. The taller man held himself with a little more confidence, though he too avoided eye contact. They spoke quietly to one another, inaudible at a distance. Bren itched to hear what they were saying.
“Essek and Verin Thelyss,” Eadwulf murmured behind him, nearly silent. “The reports said the elder, Essek, had made a point of keeping his hair short since Adian cut it.” Astrid and Bren both turned, raising their eyebrows. “What? I reviewed the reports.”
“Obviously,” Bren replied dryly. Eadwulf smirked. “Follow some children, see if you can find where their attention goes if they believe they aren’t being paid attention to.” Eadwulf nodded sharply and split off from them, slipping into the darkness of a large building. When he left the shadow, an illusion had settled over his form instead, and Eadwulf followed the stream of cricks heading to work until he split off, searching for a group of children.
“And what would you have me do, Bren?” Astrid asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Draw attention to the labour assignments. Hurt a few of them, I don’t care.” Her eyes glittered and a smile tugged at the corner of her lips, a cold cruel smile that was far too fetching on her face.
“And what will you do?”
Bren smiled at her. “Research. It is, after all, what I do best.”
~
“If there is anyone in this world you cannot trust, it is one with knowledge of the arcane. They are inherently selfish, longing for knowledge that should be well beyond the reach of any living creature.”
“But, Umavi, you wield magic. And you’ve taught me.”
“You must use it for good, though, Essek. Not for selfish reasons.”
“What if the reasons are selfish, but also good?”
“... they won’t be, child.”
~
It was the Zemnian trio of scourgers. Essek kept his chin tucked low, his hands tucked into the pocket of the coat Mallon had sewn when the first winter hit and Essek had grown ill. It seemed he was prone to illness out here, on the edges of the Empire.
“Are they watching us?” Essek muttered as they walked through the streets. Verin tilted his head slightly, glancing around.
“Not directly. One is gone now.”
“Which?”
“The dark-haired one.”
“His speciality is illusion,” Essek muttered, reviewing the notes in his mind’s eye. He glanced around, snagging the elbow of one of the passing children. “Danifae, warn the others. Do not trust anyone you cannot explicitly name.”
“Yes, likaya,” Danifae responded immediately, eyes lighting up. She was one of the younger children, light on her feet, and quick. Essek had no doubts, as he watched her take off in the direction of the Crest.
“Now they’re watching,” Verin said out of the corner of his mouth. Essek cursed and pulled the coat tighter around his body. His hand hidden in his pocket, Essek fingered the ring he wore, rubbing on it as though it would give him any amount of confidence in the moment. “The woman is following.”
“The other one?”
“Still standing there.”
Essek frowned, straining his neck to glance at the scourger. Across the road, their eyes met for a brief moment. Essek hurriedly ducked his head again and began to walk, feeling the hair on the back of his neck rise as those sharp blue eyes stayed on him. Verin let out a string of quiet curses and jogged to catch up to him. They couldn’t linger. He didn’t want to see how bad of moods the Imperial soldiers would be in, if they were late to their assignments.
They worked fields that would rarely grow anything. It had long since become clear that they only worked the fields for the sole reason of being given something, anything to do to keep them busy, subdued. The shifts were long and slow, the days burning skin and eyes alike. Six days they worked for ten, twelve hours in the fields, and six days they rested while the other half of Vorastal worked. Essek hadn’t known rest since the camps had been established; he spent his six days of rest teaching the children cantrips, teaching them to reach for the weave, to feel it at their fingertips, teaching them to read and write Undercommon. Each night he spent in spiralling paranoia of his inevitable death.
His leg ached, a dull pounding ache, by the time they got to the field. He would have a headache to match it by mid-morning, there was no doubt. On any other day, Essek would have breathed lighter, as Verin and Valas and Zesyr would have worked harder, to cover the land where Essek would have failed.
But the female scourger had followed them to the field. She stood near the Imperial soldiers, ignoring them and squinting in the dawn light. Essek paused a moment to consider her; she had often been overshadowed by Bren in his eyes. She was plain-looking, human, with short sandy hair and a burn scar on the left side of her face. Astrid Beck, his brain supplied helpfully as he watched her. Even in her frozen stature, her fingers twitched ceaselessly by her side; he recognised the somatics for mage hand, for infestation, for acid splash. Her eyes seemed to find something out in the field and a curl of a smile started just as a pit sank in Essek’s stomach.
“Essek,” a voice hissed from somewhere down the line. He snapped to attention, just as a streak of something caught his eye, flying in the direction of Verin. He had no time to do anything besides throw himself down the line, taking the full brunt of the spell with a choked grunt. Hitting the ground, the air was knocked from his chest and the sky above him began to spin, his head already pounding; Essek began to cough, taking pained breaths.
“Essek!” That voice was Verin’s, certainly, but it wasn’t his hands that helped Essek to his feet. Essek staggered, as a mage hand helped him up from the ground, only to promptly shove him back down.
“That wasn’t meant for you,” Astrid said, striding through the field. Her voice wasn’t raised nor magically amplified, but Essek felt it in his chest, in his head. The world spun around him and he staggered, pleading silently for his leg to hold his weight, please. “You got in the way. Do you want to hurt that badly?”
“He did nothing wrong,” Essek bit out; “if you should be upset with anyone, it is me.” She tilted her head at him, expression impassive. Light help him. “I wasn’t working. He only spoke to get my attention.”
“Is that right?” She gestured forward towards the soldiers who had formed a half-circle behind her. A brief look of discomfort crossed one of the soldier’s expressions before he was pushed forwards to her. The soldier was practically a boy, Essek realised, looking no older than a teenager. Astrid seemed to notice it too, though she bore none of the same shock that Essek knew showed on his own face, instead only a stone resolve. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Archie, miss,” the soldier — the boy — said. Another soldier behind him coughed and the boy, Archie, flushed red. “Archie Altschul, ma’am.”
“Archie,” the scourger repeated, her eyes turning back to Essek once again trying to pull himself back to his feet. “Archie, dear, hit him.”
“Ma’am?”
Essek bit the inside of his cheek, drawing himself up to his full height. He took a deep breath, surrounding himself in cold acceptance; he would die here today. He held Astrid’s gaze as he unbuttoned his jacket, slipping his arms from the sleeves, and only looked away from her to toss his jacket to Verin.
“Hit him,” Astrid said. She gestured her point towards Essek. “Hit the fucking crick.”
Essek set his jaw, even as the boy approached slowly, uncertainly. He inhaled sharply when the boy’s grip on his club shifted, his fingers curling more certainly around the grip. Essek closed his eyes and silently prayed, as the air shifted around him and with a sharp noise, pain blossomed from every part of him and he collapsed back to the ground, sinking into the warm blackness that spread, expanding into a comforting hug.