Chapter 6 Eoin
EOIN
The rogue Vrakken snarls, a sound unbecoming of our kind.
His name was Lyros. He was once a scholar, his mind a precise and beautiful instrument.
Now, his silver hair is lank and dull, and a tremor runs through his left wing.
But the worst sign is in his eyes. They are wild, chaotic, filled with the most vulgar of emotions: fear.
He is afflicted. The Fading has taken root.
“You will not take me, Enforcer,” he hisses, crouching like a cornered animal. “Brinda will not make a specimen of me.”
I do not respond. Words are a symptom of the decay, a frantic attempt to give shape to the chaos that is consuming him. My purpose here is not to debate, but to conclude. My stillness is my only statement.
He lunges. His movements are sloppy, telegraphed.
A desperate, clumsy attack where once there would have been lethal grace.
I sidestep his charge, my own motion, a fluid, economical whisper of displaced air.
My blade, forged from the heart of a fallen star, is already in my hand.
It makes no sound as it slides between his ribs, a clean, cold kiss of finality that severs his connection to this world.
His eyes widen for a moment, the fear replaced by a flicker of something akin to gratitude. Then the light fades completely, and he collapses to the frozen ground. Another one of our kind erased.
I withdraw my blade and wipe it clean on the pristine snow, the crimson blood a stark, ugly stain.
I look at my own hand, at the skin that is as pale and flawless as sculpted marble.
Almost flawless. On the back of my wrist, hidden unless I look for it, is a small, thumbnail-sized patch where the natural, faint luminescence of my skin has dimmed.
It is barely perceptible, but I know what it is. A beginning. A timer.
The Fading. It is the great, unspoken truth of the Vrakken.
A slow, creeping decay that leeches our power, frays our minds, and unravels our immortality.
It begins by stealing our connection to the future—it has rendered all Vrakken of my generation barren, the strongest of us.
Then it comes for our control, replacing millennia of discipline with the hot, messy chaos of emotion.
In the end, it takes our bodies, turning us into the quivering, terrified creature I have just dispatched.
I have watched friends, warriors I have known since the world was young, succumb to this quiet plague.
I have been the one to grant them the mercy of a clean death when their minds finally broke.
And I have done so with the cold, practiced detachment that is the only true shield against the terror of our slow extinction.
Apathy is not a choice; it is a necessity.
A summons echoes in the silence of my mind, a chime of pure thought that bears the signature of Matriarch Brinda. It is time. I sheath my blade and take to the sky, the execution of Lyros already a memory I am walling away.
The Vrakken citadel of Kryll is a spire of black ice and obsidian that pierces the clouds, a monument to our cold, ordered existence. I land silently on the balcony of the Matriarch’s chambers and enter.
She stands before the vast, crystalline window that overlooks the frozen peaks, her back to me. She is even more still than I am, a being so ancient she seems a part of the stone itself.
“The rogue has been culled,” I state, my voice a low monotone that does not disturb the chamber’s oppressive silence.
“As expected,” she replies, her own voice like the grinding of glaciers. She turns, her starless eyes fixing on me. “A report has arrived from one of my spies in the southern territories. A matter concerning an old mission of yours. The dark elf stronghold at Valthos. Aethel.”
My composure does not shift. My heart rate does not elevate. But deep within the walled fortress of my mind, a sleeping beast stirs. The memory of a cellar. The scent of blood. The taste of fire.
“I recall the mission,” I say. “It was a failure.”
“Your assessment was incomplete,” Brinda corrects, her gaze sharp, analytical.
“The human slave you encountered. The one with the anomalous blood. We believed her to have been disposed of after your escape.” Brinda pauses, letting the silence stretch, a tactic for which she is renowned. “We were mistaken. She lives.”
The information is a stone dropped into a deep, silent pool. The ripples are contained, but they exist. The Anomaly. The source of my single greatest failure of discipline.
“An insignificant variable,” I state.
“Her insignificance has changed.” The Matriarch’s words are precise, each one a carefully placed scalpel. “She is not merely alive, Eoin. She has a son. He is five years of age. His hair is the silver of a winter moon.”
The air in the chamber seems to thin, to grow sharp and cold.
A child. The logical part of my mind immediately rejects the premise.
The Fading makes us sterile. It is a known fact.
My weakness, my shameful loss of control, could not have resulted in…
progeny. It is a biological impossibility.
A contradiction in terms. And yet, Brinda does not deal in rumor.
“He shows no signs of The Fading,” she continues, her voice dropping, and I recognize the tone.
The sound of a scientist who has just made a breakthrough.
“He is healthy. Vibrant. A perfect hybrid of Vrakken and human, with the Purna vitality of his mother. A specimen that should not exist, and yet, it does.”
I remain perfectly still, a statue of pale stone and silver hair. But inside, the logical contradiction is a fracture spreading through the ice of my control. My failure bore fruit.
“I have a mission for you, my most trusted Enforcer,” Brinda says, her eyes pinning me in place. “This… creature… could hold the key. Its unique biology may be the cure we have sought for centuries. You will go to the south. You will locate the female. And you will retrieve the specimen.”
Her words are carefully chosen. Specimen.
Not child. Not son. Retrieve. Not rescue.
This is not a paternal matter. It is a clinical hunt for a cure.
It is a mission, clean and logical, the kind I have executed a thousand times before.
She is giving me an equation to solve, a way to frame the illogical, chaotic truth in a way my mind can process.
A way to redeem the greatest failure of my existence.
“At all costs,” she adds, her meaning clear. The female, The Anomaly, is expendable. Only the cure matters.
I bow my head, a shallow, formal gesture of acceptance. “It will be done, Matriarch.”
My face is an impassive mask, my voice the perfect monotone of her most effective weapon.
She will see nothing else. She will not see the ghost of a memory that now burns behind my eyes.
She will not feel the phantom fire, the echo of an addictive, terrifying power that I have suppressed for five long years. The power in her blood. The source.