Chapter 5
Chapter Five
Ethram takes the armchair in the parlour. He does not expect to sleep much.
It’s not even the uncertainty of an unknown in his sanctuary, because for all he knows Ky is still a threat, he hasn’t felt like danger since Ethram had spoken a fragment of his name. It is as if that single syllable is a tether, keeping him present. Keeping him calm.
Perhaps it is understandable. Ethram cannot imagine not knowing his own name, his own nature. For all his life has shifted and upended, he has always known himself. And until the archives, he had always trusted his own mind.
He traces the aether scar on his arm, watching it shimmer faintly in the firelight. The healers who took care of him hypothesised a stormbeast might have been hiding beneath the city, sustained by Esk’s natural aether.
Ethram has never formed a better explanation. He glances towards his closed bedroom door, and wonders if now, he can. Not a stormbeast, Ky had said. But not a regular man, either. What, then? What could he possibly be?
Ethram had been born to the north and to the west. Not so far north as to be a true northerner, built big and hardy, and not so far west as to be naturally disposed to magic and superstition. He is not a fanciful person.
When he’d been a child, Esk had been a children’s tale he’d barely believed in. A place of golden palaces and shimmering streets and magical hot springs that cured any wound. It hadn’t seemed real until he’d made it there.
And Esk is all those things, but it’s also made of dusty boarding houses and scholars hissing at each other in airless debating halls and storm-broken airguards dragging themselves through the streets hoping the healing springs will fix them, again and again.
It’s a shining, beautiful place full of some of the most talented people he’s ever known.
It has some of the dullest people he’s had the misfortune of meeting, too.
And much like the ruined temples he spent his childhood scrambling through, Esk has secrets buried like foundation stones, deep beneath the streets and houses.
Ethram has made a career of seeking those secrets, and so he figures he can’t truly be surprised when some of those secrets seek him out in return.
He’s known for years that there are things stirring in Esk beyond anyone’s knowledge. Not even Sabine Casca, one of the oldest history-keepers in Esk, could help him understand what he had encountered in the archives.
“Whatever it was,” she had said as she’d tended his wounds. “Don’t meet it again.”
He had never intended to.
He stares at the closest bookshelf, the one with his own writings and papers, and finds himself drawn to one of his oldest student notebooks.
He doesn’t need to open it to know what is inside.
He remembers all the studies he has ever undertaken, and every notebook on that shelf is about Esk’s rituals.
More specifically, its oldest rituals. He has documented all the festivals, every single one, and annotated his battered copy of Legacies of Esk with enough notes that he has an idle thought of making an updated edition one day.
He remembers being a student and still delighted by all of Esk’s secrets—before the archives, before the monster in the dark—and diving into the darkest of rituals with a sort of detached glee.
The Blooding of the Heirs is perhaps the darkest he has explored in his career, and the riskiest. He remembers his mentor at the time pursing her lips and trying to dissuade him, and his own doggedness in return.
Such things had been a curiosity to him then. Myths worth unravelling.
He wonders sometimes whether he’d have picked a different path if he’d known what lay in store.
It hadn’t been the Heirs that had first interested him.
It had been the Well. The Well was the source of Esk’s wealth—a natural upwelling of aether magic far more concentrated and potent than any other in the archipelago.
That much raw aether might well wipe out any settlement, but in Esk, two things kept it under control.
The Gardens and the sacred healing springs that counteracted the harsh damage caused by exposure to aether, and the Crown and Heirs that dedicated themselves to the Well, containing the aether and keeping it from overflowing.
Ethram has studied both in his scandalous career as a scholar, and both studies had been sparked by the strange aetherburns from the archives.
The Gardens’ work had been a repayment for the care the Gardens had given him in the months after his injuries.
The Blooding of the Heirs had been a study he’d undertaken in an attempt to understand the effects of his injury on his body, because the Blooding of the Heirs involved aether. Quite a lot, in fact.
The Crown does not govern Esk exactly, but protects it.
The House of the Crown is the closest thing to a temple that Esk has, and within its walls, the Crown scries for storms and sifts through the endless currents of the Well, trying to calm the aetherstorms that bloom across the wider archipelago.
It is dangerous work for a mortal body, and the Crown’s heirs help balance and carry the power of the Well.
He might never have thought to study the Blooding as closely as he did if, one day, young Zanthi Ilyston had not gone missing in the archives.
Ethram doesn’t even know she’s down there until she comes hurtling out of the dark, crying and soaked wet through.
He gathers her up, grateful he delved deeper that day.
No one goes this far in the archives, beyond the realm of the safely marked university territory.
Only Ethram, with his insatiable appetite for Esk’s secrets and his disregard for superstition and tradition.
If it were not for him, the child might never have been found.
He takes her back to her mother—who should have never let her down there—and the whole way back she talks of all she has seen in the dark, all the terrors of her imagination.
She sobs of rivers, and fish, and flames in the darkness.
Imaginative brat, he thinks. Might be a writer one day, or an artist full of fancies.
But her words stick with him, slip into his dreams. And so a few days later, he goes back to explore. She’d seen an old fresco, he assumes. Some sort of mural. Perhaps a carving? Something to frighten her. He wants to find it.
He finds what had frightened her. It isn’t a mural.
It is alive, a great, shifting creature rushing through the darkness. He cannot remember much of it, just a strike of fear, a roar in the shadows. A clawed hand, reaching for him. A brief touch leaving burns blistering his skin. He runs, and it does not chase him.
It is rare for aether to mark permanently, but his marks stay.
Scars happen sometimes on airship gunners.
On anyone else? They’d be dead first. But the burns stay, silver and gleaming, and they sting when he’s too close to aether.
It feels like being brushed with nettles when he touches an aetherlamp or leans too long against the wall of a tram.
It leaves him with a connection and awareness of aether that he didn’t have before.
Other than airship captains, only the Crown and heirs have such a connection with aether.
That is why, when he hears a new heir is being offered to the Well, he applies for permission to witness the Blooding.
His meticulous documentation of the sacred ritual is the vital work that wins him his Luminary robes, but it costs him another month of nightmares.
The heir, Auguste, is not yet fourteen when he is Blooded.
The child kneels at an ancient altar stone in a closed garden of the House, wearing nothing but a linen shift.
He is clear-eyed and brave, but he’s so clearly scared, shaking like a lamb being offered up for sacrifice.
He lights from the inside in an overflow of aether so bright that Ethram can see it for the first time in his life with his bare eyes.
The heir burns like an aetherlamp, and then, when the light fades, his eyes roll back and he falls over, insensate.
Ethram knows what aether feels like, scouring under the skin. He knows the way pain gnaws into the bones and makes itself a home there. But that had been a single moment, a single touch. Just his wrist. Just his arm. The heir is submerged in it.
The Well’s aether changes the child, wakes him up as something other than he was when he had fallen. Something different. Something fey.
In the end, Ethram learns nothing more about his own strange, persisting injuries and failing health. He only learns that he has something in common with the heirs.
In his life, there was before the creature in the archives, and then there is after.
And in the after, he never again feels the same as he had been.