2. Archer
Archer
PRESENT DAY
“The bookbinder is dead, Ke-Vor,” Rook declares as he enters the communal area we call the yard.
“Who told you that?” I demand, dropping the design sketch I was showing Cahir.
Rook leans against wall, crossing his legs at the ankles. “I heard it in the wind from the Wailing Wilds. The air is full of whispers today, even down here in this cesspit.”
My chest feels like it caves in, while my heart thuds dully against my sternum and blood roars in my ears. “You’re sure?”
“Yes,” he replies in his smoky voice, watching me intently with his odd colored eyes, one blue, one hazel, both gleaming in the torchlight. “The whispers do not lie. Now will you tell us why you were hunting the poor man?”
My limbs feel suddenly heavy, and my head spins. For a decade I have tried to get back to Bergmunn, and for a decade I have failed. Only for him to die now. “Shit.”
Cahir taps the chair in front of him, motioning for me to take a seat.
For a second I consider refusing but ultimately decide against it.
Cahir is the giant of our trio, thick through the neck and chest, he’s powerfully built, with the ink to match.
A dense composition of snarling wolves mid-lunge wraps around his left shoulder and down his upper arm.
With my magic I could best him, but without? I don’t want to test that theory today.
I sit in reverse on the cold metal frame, bracing my arms against the backrest, fighting the urge to fling the damn thing at the bars to the yard.
It would only get us thrown back in our cells, or worse.
I do not care for a visit from the souldren elite today.
They are Malevron’s commanders—towering, armored figures with masks of soulless black mirror who can emanate waves of dread that can paralyze enemies or drive them to madness…
But thankfully, I am in still in the yard, with a sharp needle now puncturing the skin on my back, courtesy of Cahir himself, our resident inkmaster.
“What does the death of the bookbinder mean?” he asks with a frustrated click of his tongue. “Are you finally going to explain this quest of yours to us?”
“Yes,” I reply through gritted teeth as he tattoos a particularly painful patch of scarring on my spine with his inked needle.
The burn of it is addictive—the only sensation I’ve felt in decades that reminds me I once had flesh, once had nerve endings that could scream in protest. I grip the rough stone beneath me, savoring even this small proof that I still exist.
“It means that Malevron couldn’t bend the mortal binder to his will, and that he has regained enough strength to find another way to retrieve and repair the Confluence,” I tell them. “His patience grows thin.”
“But what does that mean, Ke-Vor? He shares the same curse you do. By his own hand he cursed you both. How is it that he has power? How can he search for the book and binder when you cannot?” Cahir pauses to consult the sketch I gave him and adjusts the ink in his needle.
“You’re barely able to stay beyond the prison gates for more than an hour at a time. You are weaker.”
“No shit. As he grows stronger, what little magic remains within me weakens by the day,” I tell my friend, hating the taste of the words as they leave my lips.
Pinching the bridge of my nose, the horrors of the Reckoning flash before me, the thought of the Confluence in the hands of the Silver-Tongued Deceiver causing me to break out in a cold sweat.
The book holds the secrets of our creation as weapons for the old gods, of how to unravel the stabilizing knots of the Weave itself.
Nausea hits me as I imagine what Malevron might do with that information.
“It’s possible our threads to the Weave were tangled together when we fought one another in the war.
When he cursed me, the magic intended to strip me of my full form, travelled along that shared tether and took us both.
But it’s Malevron’s magic. While my reflection remains trapped in his mirrors here, he is out there, moving pieces on the board into place through his captains and monsters.
I don’t know how he is regaining power, but I hear his commands in Eztherian through the Weave…
We feel him through our brands.” My hand drifting to the scarred skin on my neck and I suppress a shudder.
“We know he has been a ghost plotting in the shadows while the rest of the world believes him dead. But his form has been limited for all these centuries, too, Ke-Vor. Take comfort in that.”
“Comfort?” I laugh darkly at my friend’s words.
“When was the last time you felt comfort? My recollections are murky at best.” It’s an understatement to be sure.
My memories are fragmented, stitched together by fraying thread, just as I am.
Sometimes I wonder if it was a choice I made, or a survival instinct—to block out what was done to me, and what I’ve done in return.
I am incomplete—the Azkari curse, hollow not just from the origins of my ancestors, but from centuries of captivity, and from the ministrations of the souldren elite.
I clear my throat, the sound bringing me back to the present. “There’s a lot I don’t remember.”
“That’s because you’re an old bastard,” Cahir retorts, his needle digging deeper into my tender flesh. “And you spent much of the time before the war drunk on wine and women.”
“Doesn’t sound like me,” I mutter, unable to picture a time when I was that carefree, when I felt anything other than pain, anger and regret, when I wasn’t shackled to this place, to our tormentor, waiting for the next session of pain.
Within these walls, I’m all but powerless, my magic muted and chained.
“You wouldn’t know that version of you if it stood before you and kicked you in the balls,” Cahir replies. “Thankfully, there were witnesses.”
I merely grunt in response. I glance down at the yellowed parchment with my latest tattoo request: a drawing of flowering yarrow.
I spent hours perfecting the feathery, fern-like leaves and the tight clusters of petals, for I had no shortage of time.
I can only hope that Cahir isn’t completely full of shit and has maintained his usual quality of art, but who knows.
He’s just as likely to ink a massive cock on my back and tell me it’s a fucking rose.
I’m not sure what would be worse—that or the scars he’s currently covering.
Of course, the new tattoos won’t outlast what’s done to me on the tables, but at least it’s a pain I’m choosing.
Cahir wipes away the blood and ink with a cloth—fuck knows where he found it.
“We have known he was out there all this time, Ke-Vor. But he doesn’t have a full physical form. Do you think it’s possible? That he might—”
“Yes,” I cut him off. “It’s only a matter of time until he appears in reflections and mirrors once more. And from there, he will find a way to regain his body. He grows stronger by the day; I can feel it. When he finally returns to himself… what do you think he’s going to do, Cahir?”
“War?”
“War,” I agree.
Rook strolls over, picking up my sketch and examining it with a furrowed brow. “You find this growing here?”
“You know hardly anything grows here,” I snap, “besides the miracle that is your ego. But there were new bushels of it on the border of the Wailing Wilds.”
Down in the dungeons they are used to my foul moods and harsh words, and most of the time, like now, it doesn’t faze them.
Rook shakes his head and drops the parchment into my lap.
“You and your plants of suffering, Ke-Vor. You’re running out of room on your back. Perhaps your forehead should be next?”
I resist the urge to snap again. I don’t remember the last time I tasted something other than prison food.
Or since I’ve felt the warmth of a fire on my skin instead of this eternal bone-deep cold.
So what if I like things that bloom in the dark?
Something fucking has to. I need the permanent reminder that there are living things that survive without light, without hope.
“What about you, Rook?” Cahir teases. “When are you going to grow a pair and let me get some ink on that plain, boring canvas of yours?”
Rook snorts, shoving his wild hair off his face. “When you look less like a butcher and more of an artist.”
“Come now,” Cahir pushes, waving his ink-tipped needle. “Just a little piece, right above your—”
“I’m fine just the way I am, thanks,” Rook declares, motioning down his fighter’s build. “Perfect, immaculate, even, unlike you.”
I survey his golden dark brown, curling hair that’s tangled and threaded with bits of earth and gods knows what else, and the unkempt beard shadowing the hard line of his jaw. “You’re a fucking vision, Rook.”
“It’s alright to be jealous, Ke-Vor. Everybody is.”
I don’t dignify Rook with a response, but my fingers reach for my brand. The tingling flesh on the side of my neck tells me I spent too long attempting to travel the lands beyond the prison.
Rook’s hand goes to the identical mark on the side of his neck—ugly raised scar tissue in the shape of an eye, its large, prominent pupil positioned where it naturally catches light, even in the depths of these Triad-forsaken cells.
All of those in Gravereach bear one—a mark of ownership, a mark of shame.
An anchor to a magical tether that connects us to Malevron through the Weave, a way to control us.
During the Reckoning, all of Maleron’s allies and supporters took it willingly as a sign of loyalty.
For them, it was a point of pride, but for us?
The brand was forced upon prisoners of war as a way of demoralizing us, and a way to muddy the waters with our own forces, should we ever be free of Malevron’s chains.
Cahir wipes the blood from my back and taps my shoulder to signal his work is done. “What is there left to do, Ke-Vor? The bookbinder is dead. And you haven’t been able to find your woman from all those years ago. The one who could see you.”
I turn to them both, taking in the lines of their weathered faces and the weariness in their gazes. Imprisonment in Morzanmyre weakens even the most powerful of Azkari magic. We are not meant to age, but in here, time is not kind to us.
Cahir offers a sad smile and pats my hand. “Even if you did manage to regain some of your power and get out of here, the key to all your plans is no more… It took you all that time to find him at all, and now he’s gone. There is no hope, Ke-Vor.”
Both Rook and Cahir look at me with pity, as though my mind is addled and my grip on reality is slipping.
Perhaps it is. Perhaps it has been for a while now.
After all, there’s no knowing what two centuries of imprisonment will do to an Azkari.
My skin prickles as my companions leave me to stew in my frustrations—they learnt long ago when solitude would serve me better, for all our sakes.
Their words echo in my mind, taunting me with their reasoning, with their reminder of what I am.
Cursed with a half-form. Forever incomplete.
Only… I remember a time when that reality was questioned.
A darkened alleyway.
A golden-haired, silver-eyed mortal.
And a bead of blood on my neck.
Though the memory is as clear as day amidst the rest of the fog in my mind, despite the decade that has passed.
The only person who didn’t bear a brand on the outside in two hundred years…
who saw me. Part of me gave up on her a long time ago…
that I’d find her again. Perhaps the others are right, that it’s time to accept our fate.
Standing up, I pace the yard to stretch my legs, ignoring the hum of chatter from my fellow prisoners, ignoring the tight burn across my back from the needle’s punctures. I lose count of the laps I’ve done when my gaze falls to something in the dark, dank corner, between the cracks of the stone…
Dazed with disbelief, I reach for my sketchbook and stick of charcoal. As the new ink settles into my skin, covering the pain inflicted there over the centuries, I see it: life thriving in the harshest conditions.
I begin to draw, and as I do, my purpose becomes clear once more.
I don’t know how, but I must find her.
The silver-eyed woman.