37. First Blight
First Blight
Auryn held her breath as she stepped through the portal.
The magic snapped shut behind her, but its aftertaste lingered—bitter, metallic.
Her limbs shook, knees weak, and heart pounding.
She slid to the ground, expecting to look up and see the familiar black and crimson marble of the Resh’Agar’s wing.
Instead, she drowned in screams.
Smoke.
Ash.
The acrid taste of burning blood.
Her eyes watered, and she scrambled back in panic.
She wasn’t in the Jade Lattice. The portal had taken her to the Han District instead.
Or what was left of it. The ground quaked beneath her.
The stone and crystal at her feet were hot to the touch.
When she breathed, her lungs burned as though she’d swallowed live coal.
People were running, trampling each other, tearing at each other’s clothes.
Solutus horns wailed, cutting through the air like blades, so loud that Auryn had to cover her ears.
All around, Reskala swarmed, ripping people off one another, trying to sign orders only to be pushed back by shrieking citizens.
Fire everywhere.
Manafire.
The air bent and howled and bled with it.
Vargrún rumbled in her thoughts.
This is not a city street. It is a place of death.
Not far from where she knelt, a Companion’s palanquin lay on its side, the wood burned to black.
Once so splendid it could have drawn the eyes of all who gazed upon it in awe, the structure was now a burned corpse—gutted—its innards spilling onto the streets in bursts of bright silks and veils.
And there, among the wreckage, a slender hand lay mangled, coated in blood.
In a series of low hums, the Polis lights flickered and died, leaving everything in suffocating darkness.
But the screaming didn’t stop.
The People had no words. They weren’t allowed to speak. But something had interfered with the magic of their chokers. The emeralds flickered, and so they screamed and screamed, unable to call for help, unable to say what frightened them—shrieking and crying out in a single dissonant song.
Hands grabbed at her shoulders. Auryn whirled around, her heart hammering in her chest.
Familiar hands.
“Lu’ma,” she whispered, and the grip tightened. “We need to find shelter.”
When Auryn reached for her key sigil bracelet, the portal count did not light up. She funneled mana into it, but it only pulsed once then went dead again.
The very air was wrong.
Too much mana.
Burning.
Writhing.
“An explosive,” she breathed. “Did the Solutus…?”
But no. This wasn’t just a bomb. It was something else entirely.
Auryn swallowed hard and forced herself to focus.
She closed her eyes, reaching not for the city’s mana, but for the golden thread that lived in her own chest—the quiet current that answered only to her.
She pulled. Twined. Shaped. Light bloomed around her in a sudden halo, silver-gold and steady in the void.
Smoke eddied back from it. Faces turned toward her.
The first to see her whispered it—hoarse, cracked—like a prayer that had been waiting for light to take shape.
Sokar.
The word caught and spread. One voice became ten.
Ten became a mob. Hands reached through the smoke.
Fingers caught at her robe, her sleeves, the hem of her hood.
Nails pulled at her braid. They scrambled to capture the light as if it might cling to them, as if touching her might hold back the darkness.
Praise, prayer, panic—indistinguishable in the black.
The sound filled her skull until her mind rebelled against it. They begged—mouthing words.
Save us. Save them. Save me.
More pressed close. The light made her visible from blocks away, and the crowd surged toward it. Toward her. Nails scraped her arm. A hand fisted in her sleeve and shook. Someone clung to her wrist, kissing the fabric there, sobbing against her skin.
The circle tightened until she couldn’t see Lu’ma through it.
They will consume you, emberling.
She couldn’t stand still. A statue would be crushed beneath this desperation. But a leader would be followed.
She took a breath, forcing her fear down, down—into the farthest recesses of her awareness. Just like all the times at Council. Just like all the times when she walked the halls and knew someone followed.
“This way,” she called. Then louder, “Come with me! To shelter! To shelter!”
She pushed forward, the light spilling ahead of her, cutting a pale swath through the dark.
The press of bodies swayed with her movement, some stumbling, others breaking into a desperate half-run to keep the glow in sight.
Smoke and heat folded in around them. Distressed stone groaned overhead.
Boots slapped against pools of water from a burst main.
Somewhere behind, a voice sobbed her title again, ragged and raw.
Lu’ma broke through the knot of people, ward-sigil glowing in one hand as she shoved back the nearest bodies with the other.
Auryn felt the pull on her shoulder as Lu’ma closed ranks beside her, ripping away fingers, pushing those that got too close, guiding them toward the jagged silhouette of a collapsed pillar.
They crossed into the shadowed ruin, the walls still warm from fire. The light pooled on broken tiles and fractured mosaics. Auryn turned, ready to beckon in the last of the stragglers, and froze.
A tremor, not through the ground this time, but along the Bond.
Kailorien.
It was impossible; they could only ever feel each other this sharply when they were near. Her heart kicked against her ribs.
Kail, I’m here. Don’t use magic. The mana is scorched. It could backlash!
She pushed the words across the connection like she might push breath into his lungs. The answer was silence.
Worry for yourself, not for the Resh’Agar. Even now, he is likely bathing in the blood of those that caused this. While you, little ember, are fading fast.
The words slid through her like ice. Her light sputtered, dimmed. The warmth in her limbs leached away. She tried to draw another breath, but it came shallow, catching high in her chest.
Hands still reached for her. Dozens. The first touches had been cautious—trembling fingers brushing her sleeves, the hem of her skirts.
Now they clutched and pulled. Someone seized her wrist. Another grabbed her shoulder hard enough to bruise.
A voice sobbed in her ear, begging for salvation she could not give.
Her knees buckled. The light haloing her faltered again. Faces swam in darkness, teeth bared in desperate pleas. She tilted, the world sinking…
Lu’ma’s hand cut through the chaos, firm and unyielding. She caught Auryn’s arm, swung it over her own shoulders, and without a single word, pushed through the mob. Her other hand signed sharp, silent commands—clear enough to cow even the most frantic into stumbling aside.
They moved. Staggered. The noise fell behind, but the air still burned her lungs with every inhale.
Auryn tried to speak—about her satchel, about the people—but the words dissolved into the rattling of her breath.
The darkness grew thicker. Somewhere far off, the horns still keened, and the ground shuddered.
Their boots scraped over broken stone, then into a narrow hall.
The walls here pressed closer, cold under her palm when she tried to steady herself.
Cold—Void, she was so cold. Her teeth began to chatter. Black lines crept at the edges of her vision.
The corridor stretched on far longer than it should have. Then, without warning, light bloomed overhead. Polis lamps blinked alive one by one, following their path like wary eyes opening in sequence.
They were not alone.
The sound of boots—soft leather, deliberate—echoed in the corridor.
From the deepening glow stepped a Glider unlike any Auryn had seen before—smaller than the warriors, feathers like molten gold dulled with dust, mismatched eyes watching with unsettling calm.
Her black hair was bound in Glider braids, but her folded wings told the greater truth: the feathers were mottled, ragged, incapable of flight.
Auryn tensed, but the female did not rush them.
She prowled. One slow step to the left, her gaze never leaving Auryn.
Then another, skimming the curve of the corridor wall like she might find the perfect angle to strike.
One aquamarine eye and one gold flicked to Lu’ma, narrowing, as though weighing her worth as a shield.
Lu’ma responded with a hard shift of her stance, one foot sliding back into guard. A ripple of mana coiled in her palm as she pressed it outward, casting an earth ward that shimmered in the lamplight.
The Glider tilted her head, expression unreadable.
“You cannot speak, girl, and yet you bark.” Her voice softened to mockery, though the weight in it never lightened. “Do you snarl because she is your Host? Or do you have a claim to her?”
Lu’ma’s jaw clenched. She didn’t move.
The Glider stepped closer, so close Auryn could see the faint scars that mapped the inner curve of her wings. Her gaze slid down to Auryn’s throat—and froze.
Her pupils constricted.
“Veil Drift,” she murmured, tasting the words like they were both diagnosis and sentence. The name hung in the air between them. “Well, then…” her eyes lifted to Auryn’s again, sharp as a hawk’s talon, “…it seems you are more than just a symbol after all.”
The Glider female crouched, her golden feathers reflecting the fractured light from the Polis lamps like mirrors. The potent scent of salves and crushed herbs drifted from her—clean, sharp, and strangely intimate in the choking ash.
Lu’ma stepped forward, a barrier between them.
“Move, child,” the Glider said in a voice accustomed to obedience. “Unless you want your Host to die.”
“It’s…alright,” Auryn rasped from behind her, every word dragging over raw lungs. “She…means no ill will…”
Lu’ma’s hands moved in sharp, urgent bursts. 'Your Radiance, you cannot be so trusting!'