CW: Gore, Death, Child Death, 

"Mama, what's that in the reeds"

The woman looked up, two-fingered hand on her hip holsting up a woven basket filled with the waterways bounty, using the other to shield her eyes from the hazy sun that permeated the mists. In the tall reeds, through the yellow-ish murk that seemed like a caul over the water, there was no movement but there was… a glisten. Something shiny, bobbing slow. "I do not know, child, but do not go a-running now, we’ve got to get these to the shaman by nightfall."

The young troll girl nodded, but her eyes went back to the thing that glimmered.

Her mother sighed, and turned away. "Been too foggy around here, too much of something coming out of the water. Stay close, Shakza."

She turned her head to make sure her daughter had heard, but without a sound– without a splash, she was gone.

The mother dropped the basket. "Shakza? Shakza!" She lurched several steps, looking wildly around. The fog was thicker now, cloying, yellow like bile. Wildly turning her head, she plunged deeper into the waters of the sink, gray-ochre mud slapping from calf to thigh and then hips. "Shakza! Shakza!" She screamed, voice growing hoarse.

"Mama?"

She froze as she neared the small islet, her daughter sitting at the edge. "Shakza?" The girl was very, very still, her back to her mother.

"Mama, I’m scared."

Without thinking, the mother lurched up the embankment, heart in her throat. "Shakza you fool child, you scared me to–"

She did not finish. She never would.

Fidgeting with the golden thing around her throat, the girl who had once been Shakza hummed as she turned what had been her mothers body over, fingers too sharp for a little girl. She narrowed them, plunged them into her mother’s chest, found the heart that still beat, if only just. She ripped it free in one smooth motion.

It bled such a deep, and pretty red. She opened her mouth, just for a taste--

And snapped back, unseen hand holding her. She whined.

Come to me. You will have all you have earned, little one. That was our deal. You wanted the shiny, and it is yours for all your life. Now come, let me reward you with more. 

On unsteady feet, she lurched upright, and began to walk, deeper into that yellow fog.

How miserable a thing was a witch.

So long had it been attached to bloodlines that it had seen them, from their most noble to the most depraved. And how pathetic they were.

(How it coveted)

All blood and sinew and sin. All calamity, made small. Reflections of their world and outside of it at once. Contradictions. Ambivalent in their means and desires, trying to heal with their harm and hurt with their healing.

(All pretty, usable things were they)

But it was at the end of its witches. One left, the others severed from the potent power it had been forced to offer. One, and unlike her mother, she would not bear babes to shuffle the suffering along. Just the one, this time. The last of them.

Use her up, and all was done.

(Keep her, because oh the fun)

It is not the cards that hold her hostage, is it?

It is the duty of the knowing. The warnings, the need to change the threads to brighter colors, happier patterns, more just designs.

She slips through nothing, a card drawn, a Fool for the use of the world. She is her cards. Her cards are not her, though, spreads that contain the people who have shaped her and flipped her and cast her.

The ties that bind draw taut. She is not herself. She is more than ever before.

Elleynah. Little Leyna.

The Fool The World ꓕɥǝ Ⅎooן

Sit, sit little Leyna. Let me tell you a tale while we protect you from the Thing That Waits.

Once upon a time there was a girl. She was clever, and cautious, and all things that her people were supposed to be. She had no mother but the midnight sky; no father but the deep shadows in the woodlands. She was kin to all, and beholden to none.

One autumn, she went a-roving, far from her forest home. She went to the south, where the jungles were haunted by the spirits of beasts turned into something grander, worshiped by her cousins. She went to the west, over the waters, and saw lands her kind had never known. She went north, where spires of gold pushed against the crown of the world.

And there, she tasted what power really was.

But though they were so similar, the powerful kin in the tall towers would have nothing to do with their sister from the earth. No matter how she tried, she could not scale to the heavens the way they did.

Stop fidgeting, or the bleeding will be worse, Leyna!

In the streets, she showed them her skills. In the grand halls, she shared with them her knowings. In the towers, she revealed the secrets she had stolen from all other kin. She wanted the power they drank like water, she wanted the wealth they spent freely. No matter how she tried to placate, to pander, to cajole, they would not see her. She was mud on their streets, and they sent her to their own dark corners. 

Aggrieved, spurned, she turned her back on the city and its gold and majesty. No kin of hers, she said, would ever look down on her again.

Hush! Hush. You are done for now, It cannot find you.

The bleak Black Sand Desert wind whips her short orange curls around her ears, the arm that holds her shattered scythe burning as she lifts it in an impatient arc, pulling the magic from freckled skin part the veil. It flows through, out, in strange colors she knows the keepers of Oribos have the words for but her mortal realm never learned. She leaps from the black sand into a field of silvery grasses, the air still and gentle. It feels stagnant, compared to the chaos of the Desert.

As she walks through the noon-bright sanctum, there is nothing at her heels. Not dark, no whisper, nothing. Silence. For the moment, she’s outrun it. The murmur of the deck of cards at her hip is so clear when It isn’t there. So is her aching heart. She wants to be home, with him, with the life they can finally start.

It will return, though. At her heels. Inside her shadow. Too close. Too Powerful.

Elleynah walks by a pond she remembers; the one it had held part of her inside. There, the copse of trees she had seen in visions. It had been here so long, keeping her parts separate. 

Before the dive headfirst into the endless, monstrous void, she’d hated herself for different reasons. Not being enough, being too much, the trauma, the worthlessness. Not doing enough, she had closed the raw, real herself behind the layers of her office and her duty and never truly let anyone in. Had forced every negative thing down, sanded off her edges and her needs and herself until all that was left was a title and a role.

There was a time she had been split from that. Free to be violent, and desperate, and cunning. It had saved her life. She had not wanted that back.

Her lips twist. If only her problems could still be normal.

Her boots reflect in the still waters, the familiar sigils rendered reversed. Her face looking back is so similar to that girl; the one who had crystallized to be a leader, a mender, a lover, a friend. Who thought her lack of wholeness precluded her from it all. The long hair she had grown in the Shadowlands all cropped back, a return. Her gloved hand reaching up to touch the curls, knowing she is wasting time and yet…

As she looks at the place where those feelings had been held, suspended and apart from herself, Elleynah does not have the heart to push them down.

But she also does not have time for it. Her lips twist into an ironic grin, and that is an expression that version of her never bore. Not even in her second life was there ever enough time!

Elleynah leaves her reflection, and does not wonder if it lingered.

Her steps hasten as she nears the treeline. Here, she remembers. Here she had hidden it. When It wasn’t watching. When she had seen herself, sitting blithe. It was hard to frame, a sketch of stairs that ascended and twisted and curved back impossibly, but she had done it and now needed to remember more.

“Where are you~,” She singsongs to herself, the voice both teasing and desperate. “Dying is such a blow to the mind, you’d think I would remember…” She traces her steps back, one pace, two. Three past the anchor point. And that was…The tree… the tree with…

There.

The tree whose bark twists like a phoenix, the blue shades of the grain mixing with the shadow to render it almost purple. Leave it to Elleynah– past, present, future– to love Zalin enough to always gravitate towards anything of his.

“And that means…” She knows now. She races, eyes scanning, breath short. One, two, three, and–

The tree was in the middle of the copse, but at the edge of a small rise. It is gnarled, smaller than the others. Perhaps overlooked by the high-flying Kyrian. Whatever the case, its roots have pulled away from the sandy ground, and she dives on it.

She pulls up clods wildly, all care forgotten as she glances up at the sky and down below her. Still no shadow. She hadn’t wasted it yet.

Elleynah’s nail breaks on something hard, and she smothers a yelp. Shaking the hand out, she drags the object free. Uncaring for its edge or the dirt on it or even looking at it too hard, she shoves it between her bodice and her tunic, tightening the laces, until it fades invisibly against her body– not even its shape apparent in her silhouette.

She steps away from the tree, and back into the eternal light, and before she can think about it, she hurls herself down the edge of the ridge, elbows tucked hard to her sides.

When she lands, she is far and away from the tree and the lake, and whirls to look around. “Where is it, where is it,” She says, trying to pitch her voice just so, trying and–

You still can’t find it? How troubling. And after we spent such time together.

Elleynah’s shoulders sag.

“It’s here. I know it.” Her voice is firm to her own ears, and beneath her, the shadow in her shape laughes.

Is it? Do you think you’re close.

This time, she does not try to hide her determined smile. “I know it.”

Before the Power could frame its mocking reply, there is a tilt to the world– or just them two. Power and Oracle. They... thin, and stretch, and flatten into the suggestion of an elf, of a shadow, before neatly disappearing. Like a card, drawn from a deck.

Elleynah's laugh is the last thing that remains of them in Bastion.

The Sword draws from the deck, and the Fool must answer.

It's the burn of greasy smoke in their throat, the acrid tang of spilled, fresh blood. The mouldering of leaves not enchanted away. The stench of a city let to rot. Ezrae breathed it in through their teeth when it got too thick, but the scent remained. Like this, they felt like the creatures in the stories that sold above the Row; the hardboiled investigative knights who helped those femme fatales in the rooms barred by shadows in the glowing of arcane lights, the corrupt magisters, the hedonistic, broken row rats.

The pain of an entire layer of their own home, rendered like fat, into something palatable. Perched on the window ledge, their leg swung three stories above the broken, unkempt streets of Murder Row.

Some were more plain in their uses of the row. The pale-haired Magister who gathered heroes to his supposedly-hidden sanctum. Worst kept secret. Stank like blood and bad magic, worse than the red Anima that had flowed through it years before. Worse than the charnel house smells of before that.

Blood thistle muted it, for a time. But nothing could make it palatable. They brought the cigarette to their lips and breathed in the herbal smoke.

Arms wrapped around their middle, thin and pale. "Come back to me, Ezrae." The woman's voice was cloying, her perfume strong enough to taint the air even beyond the reek of cheap wine and shared drugs. Fingers crept over the flat plane of their belly. "I don't have to be back to the academy until this afternoon..."

Ezrae breathed in. Out. Let it all pool in their lungs. The thistle was burned down to nothing.

"Then get on the bed, girl." They flicked the burning ember of thistle down. Pretty things could mute it too, for a time.

Dylaine knows of this shadow in ways he wishes he did not. 

Even far from the dark, churning storm, even tucked between the trees in an arcane hideaway, he knows the shadows. They’ve been building, Myro said. The cults. The Highlands. His network, all spies and brokers of intelligence, have been growing louder and louder– their messages fill pages now, the fear of what is to come making even the thriftiest of them share. 

Now, it roils and rolls over Quel’thalas. Waves like slate reflect it, turn onyx and charcoal beneath the shadows. The far-flung isle which should glow now settles under it, a wounded animal beneath the belly of a yawning, hungry predator. 

His tongue wets his lips as he remembers the taste of rage, when stirred by shadows. He remembers how it felt to bleed when Sofie and Rojan brought him down. 

He remembers Prisa’s darkness in his veins and how it felt like the end of the world.

Dylaine turns his amber eye to Quel’danas, perched on the Lighthouse roof, the wind buffeting him and whipping his long tail of dark hair stingingly against his cheeks and neck. Below, the port of Shallowbrook seethes, too many bodies, too many questions as everyone finds places to high enough to see past the ridges and trees to the darkness. The brassy spyglass is cool against his hands as he raises it once more. 

The tomb on the island.

The medical bay.

And now, here. So far away and yet far, far too close. 

“What is it, lad?” The harbormaster’s voice chimes from the sendingstone, and Dylaine lifts it, keeping the glass pressed to his good eye.

“It’s void.”

“Void?”

“Aye, sir. Shadows.” He feels the ache of it somewhere under his sternum, where the lingering bits of Prisa’s nightmare still outrace the burning magic he took from his kin. “Lots of ‘em. Massive.” He should say more. But one of the titans of darkness lurches, and he feels like its him on those shores.

The elf curses through the stone, and the line quiets. 

Reaching to his earring– a sun, today– he presses it hard enough into the pad of his thumb it will leave a mark. 

“Myro.”

A beat. “Yes, Dylaine?” The voice is subdued. Maybe he’s seen it. Maybe he just feels it.

“It’s here.”

If he could steal the pain, the panic in those silent seconds, he would– he would bear them alone, or rip them apart. Instead, Myro breathes deeply, and even without seeing it, Dylaine knows the pages of his book have turned. 

“We knew it would be. It’s time to get to work, then. When can you return?”

Dylaine feels the fire in him roar at the bravery in his lover, his friend, his everything. An information broker and a sailor, what can they do against the dark? 

“Now. I’ll be there soon.”

Enough. 

Silver outlined the leaves that rustled in the early morning breezes, the sun barely a smear of brightness along the coast. Elleynah sat, perched on the edge of a planter so high above the city that she could see all of it– every tower, every street, the oceans to either side lapping in the dark or the gleaming of dawn.

She rubbed at the backs of her arms, the blood under her nails flaking away.

Ah, she wakes.

She would not look to it, in her shadow, where the pooling dark splashed at the roots of the overgrown, unkempt goldwood.

The Oracle, with nothing to say?

It lapped around her thighs, splashing and dissipating, purple like void and red like nightmare and green like fel and so much more. Kaleidescopic. It seeped out from her scars, and she could feel it ooze on her ribs, from her thighs. Around her throat, like a collar.

The shadows coalesced there, fingers laving her clavicle. I know you so well, Oracle. From bloodline and history, I know you. I kept you alive in the lands of shadows and I wring from you the words you need to speak. She felt it in her curls, pressed against her scalp like lover’s lips.

“I ask nothing.”

The sun pushed higher, and the shadow diminished. You will, though. Someday you will need answers.

“I will find my own.”

And they will all be endings, losses, broken. I will be there to rewrite them.

Pale light, golden at its core, crept up the sides of the creamy marble city below. The pooling Power shrank, pressed tight to her back, like it too was sitting on the grass and looking away.

“All things end.”

She closed her eyes as the light hit her, and without warning, launched herself from the gilded edge, leaving the whisper and the Power behind.

Elleynah Stormsummer was always falling.

Her hand– the shards of the scythe within– extended as she fell through the glimmering, shining sunlight, and for a moment, she cast no shadow.

When the elves of the city looked up, there was, briefly, one more bird against the blue of dawn. And then, in the blink of an eye, she was gone. 

The room is empty.

It has been so since they purchased the townhome, since her families coffers had flowed into the city on her heels like a tide, pushing aside the detritus and the meager with her majesty. Cylean had designed most of the spaces– he was the artisan– but she had spent hours on this room. The bedroom, the courtyard, and here: and this room, its domed ceiling and latticed windows, had claimed the lions share of it.

Kacia Firestorm, once Dawnblade, ran her overlong nails over the plaster that was painted a soothing, cool blue, lavender and gold in the west, and navy as dark as ocean depths in the east. A sunset, now, to reflect the time of day: in the morning, it was all peaches and buttery yellows, at noon a blue so rich and charming it sang. Now, the twilight rippled beneath claws, the fel inside her fraying the edges of the enchantment.

They never made the furniture; it would have come from friends, their families, the people who served them. Such was the way of it, for her kin. So the room stood barren.

Her eyes swept it, narrowed, vicious. Wounded.

The wall crunched under her hand, and the evening sky flickered– contorted– turned dark, stormy, fel limned clouds whirling– before shattering, the dust falling in shimmering flecks through what remained of the evening light.

Violent lines of fel surged up her arm, and she snarled as her own illusion faded. With eyes that burned, with skin cracked and pitted and glowing, she raked her claws over the crater and the plaster– the marble beneath– crumbled, dust billowing around her feet. She spat, and the bloody, glowing mess burned through, as the last light of the sun faded.

All that remained was her, and the hollow place she had built; mirror to the one she had tried so hard to fill.

Kacia turned her back to the ruin of it. Let its next masters fix this mess.

She was done with this city, and empty hopes, and empty, never filled nests. Her broken promises could not mock her from the towers of Shallowbrook.