CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
C HAPTER T WENTY- S EVEN
Yerdos awaits her, and the closer Dawsyn comes, the less afraid she feels.
Perhaps it is that she knows she will die, whether it be by the hands of this saint, or the Chasm she created. Her mind parts from the fear that bids her to run and she relents to whatever conclusion comes now.
She has walked all she can. Fought all she could.
And though vicious swirls of hatred and anger deep inside still leak into her mind like poison, she will not fight anymore.
She was wrong.
She has failed.
She will succumb now.
Dawsyn’s hand around the ax handle is limp. She only holds it to feel something familiar. She keeps her eyes on the woman of fire. The mage. The saint. The hawk.
She is beautiful. And terrible.
Her auburn hair matches the flecks of her cheeks, her elegant neck slopes gently to her collarbone, her wild eyes are framed in pale lashes. Her black teeth are bared and her palms smoulder with the heat of her wrath. But, beneath the anger, she appears a young woman not long after reaching maturity.
“Moroz,” she says to Dawsyn and this time her voice does not echo around the chamber. It simply falls from her lips.
“I am not Moroz,” Dawsyn says again, lifting her chin just slightly. “I am Dawsyn Sabar. And I have not come to kill you.”
Yerdos smiles, but it is not the smile of the wicked toying with its plaything. It is a veneer that conceals uncertainty. “There is no hiding from me, Moroz. I can feel you.”
Dawsyn feels the iskra roil inside her, weak and afraid.
“It is the cold you can feel,” Dawsyn says. “Not Moroz.”
“The very same.” The words hiss into the air, sizzle into specks of ash. “One and the same.” She holds her palm up toward Dawsyn, fire dancing over the skin. “Ready yourself, Moroz. Let us see how the frost fares here.”
She waits for Dawsyn to lift her own palm. She wants to defeat Moroz as an equal.
But Moroz is not here.
Moroz is no one.
The cold is not alive.
Dawsyn takes her last look at the woman named Yerdos. A woman turned slave turned saint. She closes her eyes. She does not look into the depths of herself to find the iskra. She does not try to call it to her palms. Instead, she reaches into the corners of her mind. She tries to find the faint speck of glowing light, as Baltisse taught her to.
She thinks of Ryon’s hands, guiding her over the terrain. She thinks of his lips against hers, the sweet eclipse of her thoughts when she feels his breath against her neck. She thinks of his lips parting to reveal a smile. A smile the dark tried to deny her.
And there she finds it – that flickering spark. It strengthens with each thought, reignited by every stroke of remembrance. She feeds it more images, things she has memorised and safely guarded: the lines of his palms, the shape of his brow, the feel of his fingers laced with hers. The beat of his heart beneath her ear. She brings it all to mind. And knows that if Yerdos fells her where she stands, at least she will leave this world filled with thoughts of its greatest creation.
Dawsyn opens her eyes to the sensation of mage light, trickling down her arm. It is thin, weedy, but tangible. It collects in her palm.
She grips it tightly, lest it retreat, and then locks her gaze with Yerdos.
“Igniss,” Dawsyn says, and a small flame appears.
It flickers calmly atop her palm, as small and wonderful as the first time she conjured it. Useless in battle, pitiful beside Yerdos’ molten lake, but still beautiful.
Yerdos’ eyes widen. They lose the edge of madness. She stares at the flame in Dawsyn’s hand and her lips fall back over her exposed teeth. “Mage light?” she asks, almost whispers.
Dawsyn exhales, feeling the pull of her lungs as it strives for oxygen amongst the sulfuric air. Still, she manages to nod. “Yes.”
Yerdos’ own palm falls slowly, finally lowering to her side, where the fire recedes. “You are mage-born,” she murmurs. Her expression turns suddenly wistful. She watches the flame dance on Dawsyn’s hand as though it were something precious.
“I am,” Dawsyn breathes, and she allows the mage fire to sputter out in her palm. She cannot hold it anymore. She is so very tired.
“As was I,” Yerdos says. Her eyes turn distant. She does not seem to notice the heat that scolds Dawsyn. “I was born of a clan on the mountain.”
Dawsyn nods. She feels grief exude from Yerdos in waves. “I know.”
“My sisters. My family,” she continues. “We protected the mountain. And it guarded us. Provided for us.”
Dawsyn watches her carefully. “Kladerstaff,” she says. “He captured you?”
Yerdos closes her eyes. Tears fall down her cheeks and suddenly she is nothing but another soul who suffered and fought and lost. She is neither mage, nor saint, nor hawk. She is a woman, trapped in the throes of her own rage and sorrow, unable to break free of it. “His guards slit their throats as they slept,” she says. “I was a child. Too weak to stop them.”
“A… child?” Dawsyn hesitates to ask. Even now, she looks young. Too young.
“Ten and five,” she says. “Ten and five.”
Fifteen, Dawsyn thinks. A girl.
“I vowed to my dead that I would kill every last soul in the valley. I swore I would rid this earth of those that take and take and leave nothing. And the Mother…”
Yerdos pauses. Her eyes open. “The Mother tried to take me. I refused.”
“You went back to your mountain,” Dawsyn says for her. “You protected it.”
“And the Mother sent Moroz,” Yerdos answers, anger returning to her tenor. “And she smothered everything, suffocated it all – all but the mage-born.”
Dawsyn hesitates. “The mage-born?”
“Kladerstaff could not bleed them all,” Yerdos says, her gaze far away, hundreds of years removed from this place. “He could not find them all.”
“There was still a clan on the mountain,” Dawsyn says, realisation dawning. “The mages, they originated on the mountain.”
“And Moroz chased them into the valley. Moroz took them from our mountain. Just as I had been taken.”
Dawsyn breathes. She remembers Baltisse telling her of the mages that still lived.
“Are you the last mage in Terrsaw?”
Baltisse rolled her eyes. “No. But you will not find the others.”
“Why?”
“They do not want to be found.”
“We knew the mountain’s secrets and it flourished as we flourished,” Yerdos continues. “We bled into its streams and absorbed the energy from its soil. We travelled the ridges and caves and it cradled us. We took and it took. We gave and it gave.”
Dawsyn watches Yerdos’ face vacillate between hatred and yearning, all at once young and ancient. “Kladerstaff took you from your home,” she says carefully, gently. “And then Moroz took your home from you.”
Yerdos’ eyes turn molten, as Baltisse’s once had, as lethal and scorched as the pit below. And in them, Dawsyn can no longer see a great creature of brimstone, nor an ancient saint of legend. She sees a woman burning.
She sees her grandmother, bitterness etched in her brow, smothering anything soft.
She sees Briar, lost in grief and pitching herself into its depths.
She sees Baltisse. Baltisse. Incinerated by guilt, slowly boiling from within.
And finally, Dawsyn sees herself, cloistering into a pit of rage that she made her own, unable to claw her way out.
Dawsyn sees a woman forged in anger, in a wrath vehement enough to split a mountain in two.
“Moroz endures still,” Yerdos says. “And the Mother does nothing. ” This last word turns vicious. It reverberates around the cavern and pounds in Dawsyn’s blood.
But Dawsyn hears again that old mantra, the one that kept her among the living in a place meant for the dead. The words her grandmother passed to Briar, who then passed them on to her, and it saw her through the very worst Moroz could brandish.
“The cold is not alive.”
Yerdos’ churning eyes land squarely on hers and Dawsyn can feel the heat of their touch. Her lip curls back. “Moroz endures.”
“Moroz endures,” Dawsyn agrees, nodding her head slowly, carefully. Her heart breaks for this woman, trapped for an eternity in a hell of her own making. “But the cold does not live. It does not breathe, or move, or hold a sword,” she urges. “It… it does not love .” The words come hoarsely, with the last vestiges of her breath. “And so it cannot die.”
Yerdos’ chin quivers, her eyes closing again. “No.”
“The earth… she gives and takes in equal measure,” Dawsyn continues, speaking words of a friend she would die to see again. “Every season comes to a close.”
Yerdos cries then, but it is not a terrible shriek this time. The sound is horribly human, a thousand times more painful. It is broken, and cracked, and utterly pitiful. Her lips part around the whimper and her shoulders sag. She bends under every ounce of sorrow she holds.
And as though she stood before Dawsyn herself, Baltisse’s voice rings through her mind once more. It cuts through the boil of lava and the hiss of smoke. It takes her back to a forest where an edelweiss flower settles into Baltisse’s touch. “Sometimes you need to reteach a thing its loveliness.”
Dawsyn wonders if a creature such as Yerdos can be taught. “No one seeks to harm you anymore,” she whispers, though her body trembles with fear. “Not even Moroz.”
Yerdos shakes her head, and her long wisps of red hair catch alight, whipping smoke through the air, but it is a half-hearted movement. She holds her hands to her chest as though she seeks to rip out her own heart.
“You do not need to stay here,” Dawsyn tells her.
But Yerdos shakes her head again. She breathes heavily, her shoulders rising and falling. There is a long silence, and then she says, “As long as Moroz remains, I burn.”
Dawsyn knows there is nothing more than can be said to Yerdos the Saint, so embroiled in her own animus.
“You are not Moroz,” Yerdos says now, her eyes searching Dawsyn’s body.
“No.” Dawsyn shakes her head. Her legs are moments from giving way.
“Yet you seek me,” she says, then waits, a question in her eyes.
Dawsyn tries to swallow. Fails. “No. We only sought an end to the Chasm,” Dawsyn says. “Another side.”
Yerdos’ eyebrows lift. “No end lies this way.”
Dawsyn’s chest deflates and her legs do give way then, sinking to the scalded wood of the bridge. Yerdos only watches her, a deep curiosity changing her face. “You seek an end.” She looks suggestively to the fiery pit below, then back to Dawsyn.
“No,” Dawsyn murmurs, the heat colliding with her, overwhelming her. There is little air to breathe. “No, not yet.”
“Then return to our mountain,” Yerdos says. “And reclaim it. You are mage-born.”
Dawsyn catches herself on her palms as she falls forward. “I am Ledge-born,” she corrects. Her eyes closing against the sting.
“What is your name?” Dawsyn hears. Someone bends over her; she can feel the heat of their breath.
“Dawsyn Sabar,” she utters, though she cannot feel her lips move.
“Return to the mountain, Dawsyn Sabar. Seek a different path.”
And then Dawsyn feels the impossible collapse of her being as she is reduced to a slither, to nothing at all.
She looks her last at the Chasm, and then she disappears.