I am the god of ardent day
The early trickling of light
Of joy festivity and bright
My single eye will watch the land
And carry out my dying wish
So ne'er again will evil wax
But cower, fear, and flee my sword
The ray of dawn that slays the night
I am the god of ardent day
I am the god of tranquil night
Of fascinations strange and fey
The gloom that cloaks the sleeping prey
I am the promise of relief
From all your waking fears and dreads
So shed your worries, rest your eyes
And share in my sweet orchestra
The final gasp of dying day
I am the god of tranquil night
There is no light, no sound, no feeling. Existence does not extend past your skin – beyond you there is only an absence that extends infinitely in all directions, a blanket of nothingness that envelops you completely.
And then there is a sound.
And then there is warmth.
And then there is light.
It starts as a single mote of being in a vast abyss, a tiny point of light on a distant horizon. Then it grows, brighter and brighter and brighter as it races through the void and slams into you with enough force to make your heart skip a beat. In an instant you are awash with it, and its fury strips the skin from your muscle, the muscle from your bone, the bone from your marrow. Then even that is gone, so that only your soul remains, naked in the light. You cannot scream, or move away, though you want to with a savage desperation. You can only revel in the light, the heat, the power that engulfs you.
You feel your soul churn, like iron turned to liquid by the intensity of the heat. The light slams into you, guiding your now malleable essence this way and that, shaping it like the hands of a sculptor might shape clay. Hammering it into shape, like a blacksmith might shape a sword.
Then, when the pain is so unbearable that you cannot take another instant, it stops. You gasp as your self rushes back to you, marrow surrounded by bone, bone coated in muscle, muscle painted with skin. Your eyes coalesce in the sockets of your skull, two points of blue-violet light, and though the light drowns them in its onslaught, you are not blinded.
You feel the touch of fingertips on your cheek, the lightest caress of lips against your forehead, and you weep from the tenderness of it.
When you wake, all you know is panic.
Your eyes snap open and are filled with light – not the light that had torn you down and remade you, absolute and terrible and holy, but ordinary light, mundane and fluorescent. The taste of wood is in your mouth, a slab of something hard between your teeth, and you jerk a hand up to rip a thick piece of wood from between you jaws, edge covered in teeth marks.
Fingers find your wrist but they are brittle and weak, and you tear your arm away with hardly a thought. Dimly, on the edge of your awareness you hear words, panicked and shouting, but you can only drag yourself into a sitting position and swing your legs out from the bed you find yourself in. You feel as though you should feel frail, delicate and newborn, but instead you feel strong. You feel right, as though you had been walking with a limp all your life and were only now rid of it. You stand, and the linoleum is cold beneath your bare feet. There is something in your veins, in your bones, rippling in time with the rhythm of your heartbeat.
Something tugs at your arm and you look down to see a tube feeding clear liquid into your veins. You grasp and pull it, ripping the needle free of your skin, and stagger through an open doorway into a long, featureless hallway. Someone rushes out the door behind you, screaming words you can't understand. Figures approach you, frames heavy with armor, pistols slung along their hips, raising hands to stop your approach. One of them touches your shoulder and the panic flares anew. The thing in your veins spasms.
Words echo in the back of your heart, too quiet to catch.
Then power explodes out of you, tendrils of black energy tinted with purple bursting out from under your skin. The tendrils snake around your body, merging and solidifying into a material halfway between cloth and armor. It gleams a glossy black in the fluorescent light, violet cords crisscrossing through it in strange, arcane patterns. The figure jerks his hand back and his partner steps forward, as if to shield him, but your hand snaps out and grabs the first figure by the throat, fingers digging into his windpipe and lifting him off the ground as easily as you might heft a small child. You can see the shock and fear in the man's eyes, and the armor that surrounds you ripples almost hungrily, urging you forward.
You hesitate, your thoughts slow, dragging themselves through the muddy battlefield that is your mind. You want to hurt the man more than you've ever wanted anything in your life, want to squeeze until his throat crumples between your fingers and the life leaves his eyes, but you can't remember why. Something dark and alien in your blood howls, enraged by your indecision. Your heart hammers in your chest, prestissimo, and your eyes burn with confused fear.
"Macaulay," says a voice.
Macaulay. Your name. You seize that concept, hungrily grabbing hold and clawing for more of your identity. In the void, you were nothing, and it had been good – but here you crave yourself, your name a taste of something rightfully yours.
"Macaulay," the voice says again, a careful, feminine soprano. "Macaulay, put the Heraldry away."
Your eyes are locked on the hand that grips the man by the throat, the light dancing unnaturally across the fabric. A Heraldry. The Sun's gift to a waning humanity. The weaponized soul. Your weaponized soul, you realize with a start, although the idea seems so ridiculous as to be laughable. The slam-slam-slam of your heartbeat against your ribs intensifies, drowning out thought. "I…" the words catch in your throat. "I can't."
"You can, Macaulay," the voice says again, closer this time. She must be right behind you now, walking with slow, measured steps.
The man's face purples, his fingers scrabbling uselessly at your wrist, but you hold strong. "I can't," you say again, panic creeping into your voice. "It won't let me!"
"The Heraldry is you, Macaulay," the woman says, her voice at your shoulder. "It's reacting because you're afraid. Breathe." She lays a hand on your arm, delicate fingers cool against the strange fabric. You hiss, but the fabric doesn't react. "Remember where you are, Macaulay. You're safe here."
You force your eyes closed and exhale, relishing in the way the breath streams over your lips, your tongue, your teeth. There had been no breath, in the void. Here, every lungful is a luxury. You feel the thing, the Heraldry, in your veins, hot and angry and desperately afraid, and you try to remember where you are.
An image comes to your mind, a city of white stone and red tile roofs, of building packed so tightly together that a man could hardly fit between them – some tall and thin, others short and squat, some that curve and spiral and others carved into stark angles…but towering above all of them the pillar of steel and glass men call the Sunlit Spire, climbing so high that it's apex pushes past the clouds to scrape the heavens themselves. The city stretches out beneath it like children sprawling at the feet of their father, and yet the Spire casts no shadow – for the Sun hangs directly overhead, its light a dying god's final gift.
You breathe in. That is where you are, you think as you loosen your grip on the man's neck. He falls to his knees and gasps in air, and the fabric around you dissolves into tendrils of a smoky, liquid light that rush back into your skin until it is although they were never there at all. The power settles into the recesses of your heart – still, but poised to leap again at a moment's notice.
You sag, and the woman's hands are there to catch you, whispering your name softly as she guides you back to the bed you had awoken in. You sit back down and stare at your trembling hands, as if hoping to catch a glimpse of the power that had animated them just a minute ago.
The woman flits around you, giving you space as she checks her readouts and straightens a few of the machines you must've jostled when you woke. She's older, maybe fifty or sixty with a heavily lined face, but her movements are quick and steady. The two golden bars sewn into the shoulder of her lab coat mark her as a military doctor, and after a chance to catch your breath you remember a name – Isley.
"Doctor Isley?" You ask after a moment. Your voice is scratchy and weak as if from disuse.
Isley doesn't look up from her tablet, one finger swiping across the screen. "Yes?" She asks. "Are you feeling better now?"
"I…think so." Your hands have stopped shaking, and clarity is returning to your mind. You remember taking the trip to the city of Sunrise, and the Sunlit Spire that stood within, a weeks-long train ride that taken you through ten different worlds, nearly half the queendom. You remember registering for the procedure – not because you actually expected to be the one-in-a-million who manifested a Heraldry, but because they paid every applicant, and you had been desperate. You remember the void, the light that had stripped you down to the purest expression of yourself. You remember the feeling of fingers on your cheek, and lips on your forehead, and you shudder. "I didn't – did I hurt anyone?"
"Of course not," Isley says, looking up at you. Her eyes are two pale chips of ice, and they soften as they see your face. "Maclauley," she says.
"Mac," you interrupt, then duck your head, to hide your eyes between shaggy blonde bangs. "My friends call me Mac."
Through your hair you see Isley smile slightly. "Everything is fine," she tells you. "I won't have you feeling responsible for this, Mac. What happened is entirely my fault. She gestures at your arm, and when you extend it she wraps an inflatable cuff around your bicep to measure your blood pressure. "Induced manifestation is generally more dangerous for the subject than those around them, but cases like yours aren't unheard of. I should've been here."
"I didn't know what was happening," you tell her. "I woke up and everything was so fuzzy. I thought…" you frown, working to piece it all together. "I was so angry."
"Manifestation is stressful under any circumstances," Isley says. She unwraps the cuff and puts the device away, then meets your eyes. "Are you calm now? Are you feeling yourself?"
"I am," you promise.
Isley nods. "Good. An administrator is on her way to pick you up."
You swallow. You remember what the papers had said, the ones you had signed in order to undergo the induced manifestation. The moment you had woken up with a Heraldry, you had no longer been a citizen. You are a Knight now, and your life belongs to the Chivalry. To Queen and Country.
"Are you nervous?" Isley asks.
"No," you say, and though you're surprised to hear the word come out of your mouth. What was there for you, out there? This time yesterday you had been a few missed meals away from starvation. At least the Chivalry will feed you.
Isley sniffs. "You're either brave or stupid, then," she says. "Still…" she taps a fist to her heart in a salute. "It's been an honor, Sir."
"Same." You want to say more, but there's a polite cough from the doorway and you turn to see a young woman in a military uniform – high boots, immaculately pressed pants, a double breasted jacket with a high collar. The majority of the outfit is black, but the edges are trimmed with the Queen's colors, white and gold. Atop short cropped blue hair is a garrison's cap, ever so slightly askew.
"Macaulay Perth?" The woman asks. "I'm Sergeant Hawley. I've been sent to fetch you."
"Off you go," Isley says, giving you a reassuring pat on the shoulder. You slide off the edge of the bed and suddenly realize that you have no idea where your clothes are – you wear only a hospital gown, which while thankfully closed in the back, still leaves you feeling a little exposed.
Hawley seems to sense your discomfort. "Clothes will be provided for you," she says, looking down at her watch. "It isn't far."
"Right." You take a few hesitant steps, then when you're confident your legs aren't going to buckle under you, follow Hawley from the room. She leads you down the long hallway, passing room after room that seem identical to the one you were just in. "Are these all induced manifestations?" You ask, stepping out of the way of a few doctors talking quietly amongst themselves.
"Not right now," Hawley says. "We reach our peak for that procedure during the summer. Long days, easier to travel. Right now it's mostly just general medicine. The Spire's hospital is the best in the queendom, it's always in high demand." She touches your elbow to stop you in front of an elevator and places her palm flat against a biometric scanner in the wall. "Right here, please."
You shift from foot to foot as you wait, filled with a strange energy. Your body feels supernaturally light, as if every step could catapult you multiple strides. Hawley glances over, but all she says is, "Reports say you got in around noon yesterday."
"That's right." You frown, not understanding her point. "Why?"
"You'll see," Hawley says, and though she looks away you can see her smiling slightly.
A soft ding announces the arrival of the elevator, and when you step past the sliding steel doors you see the opposing wall is one floor to ceiling window. Through the glass lies the center of the Spire, nearly two miles of empty space separating this wall from the far one. You look down, but all that greets you is a chasm extending endlessly into the earth below. "It's dark," you murmur, glancing up at the sky – a blanket of darkness punctuated by staccato points of silver. "Is it late?"
"Early," Hawley says. She follows you into the elevator and presses a button near the top of the selection. "Just about a minute before sunrise." You turn to face her, eyes wide, and her smile grows. "Never seen it before?"
"No," you breathe, eyes darting back to the window. "I'd heard, but…"
"Watch," Hawley says pointing to the depths of the chasm far, far below your feet. "Here it comes."
It starts as a single mote at the end of the abyss, a tiny point of light on a distant horizon. Then it begins to grow, brighter and larger, brighter and larger as it makes its ascent, climbing up past the ground level of the Spire and into view.
The Sun. A churning ball of gold and white fire nearly two miles across, it grows brighter with every floor it climbs, until you're almost afraid to look at it. "Don't worry," Hawley says, sensing your hesitation. "It won't blind you. It isn't bright enough until it clears the top."
"I never thought…"you murmur, watching it climb higher and higher. It is eye level with you now, moving in time with the elevator that carries you closer and closer to the top of the Spire. You are well and truly past the civilian sections of the tower now, you know – these floors are reserved for the Chivalry, and for the Eleven Regents. Even when your elevator comes to a gentle stop the Sun keeps climbing, up and up and up, until it clears the top of the Spire and expands outward, growing ever larger as it takes its place in the sky.
Once it has stopped climbing you turn back to Hawley, breathless. "It does that every day?"
Hawley laughs. "Every day," she says, leaning her forehead against the glass. "Never gets old, though. There are viewing areas throughout the Spire…every one a marvel."
You shake your head. "There aren't words."
"There shouldn't be," Hawley says. "Not for that." She leads you out of the elevator and into a new hallway, where you are greeted not by stark white hospital walls but a massive, continuous mural, painted in painstaking detail, which stretches in either direction as far as you can see. "The wall of triumphs," Hawley explains. The two of you walk past a black armored Knight wielding a sword against a massive, four-armed Sidhe. Each image transitions smoothly into the next one, but the mural is structured so that it's relatively easy to tell separate pieces from each other. "The greatest moments in our history are recorded here, by order of the regents." She turns back and flashes you a smile. "Who knows? Maybe I'll lead rookies past a painting of you one day.
"I think I'll settle for smaller goals right now," you tell her. "Maybe surviving the first day."
Hawley snorts. "You'll be fine. We actually had two other kids manifest today, so you'll won't be alone for the brief." She glances over at you, and something about the look on your face sends her talking again. "I know this is all happening fast," she says. "But it's important that you get the spiel today. In here, please." She gestures to a gap in the mural that you recognize as a door, and you push it open.
Inside sit a boy and a girl about your age. The boy is tall and slender, skin heavily tanned, with a shaved head and sharp features that give him a stoic, serious air. The small star tattoo in the middle of his forehead marks him as one of the queendom's nobility, and you notice that diamonds glint in each ear. The girl is far shorter, a swathe of freckles running across her nose and cheekbones. Her hair, cut so close that it barely touches her ears, is such a brilliant orange that it makes you do a double take. Nobody in your hometown would've dared to go out with hair that close to scarlet, but you suppose things are different in the capital. Like you, both of them are dressed in hospital robes, though neither seems quite as uncomfortable with that fact as you are.
"You're here!" The girl says, rushing up to you and extending a hand. You take a hesitant step back and take it, and she shakes your hand with enough vigor to rattle your whole body. "I'm Alaska. Alaska Alton." She beams. "Am I all up in your face? I don't mean to be, I'm just so excited! We saw the sun rise just now, did you see it?"
"I-"
"I'd never seen it before, not like that. Lived day's train away from the Spire my whole life but never went. So stupid, right? It really changes you, or it changed me, at least. Or I think it did. It's only been a few minutes, I guess. But I feel changed. Oh, and that back there is June. Say hi, June!"
June nods at you. "June de Hailong."
Put together, they nearly average out to a reasonable number of words. June's accent is significantly more posh than Alaska's, but they both speak with a crisp, urban cadence that makes you acutely aware of your own country drawl. You know his family, of course – their name had been stamped on nearly every piece of property in your hometown, in bold blue letters. "I'm Macaulay," you say, returning June's nod. "Mac." You turn to ask Hawley a question, but she seems to have stepped out while Alaska was monopolizing your personal space. "You both just manifested too?"
"Late last night," Alaska says. "Crazy, huh? I really wasn't expecting to be chosen, my dad just took me because I turned sixteen and he says it's our patriotic duty to be tested, right? I couldn't move for like an hour afterwards, but they brought me food and stuff and that helped a lot. I'm so tired though, are you tired? They wouldn't let me sleep at all though, even shook me a couple times to keep me up. I wonder why? I bet it's like eating and swimming, you know? Where you've got to wait before you do it?"
You run over her speech in your head once or twice. "Do you think you could narrow that down to one question?"
"She can't," June says.
Alaska scowls at him, puffing out her cheeks. "Well excuse me for trying to be friendly, Lord Hailong." She flourishes as if dipping into a curtsy, but halfway through the motion shoots June the bird with both hands. "We didn't all go to cotillion and learn to be proper Dukes and Duchesses. Some of us had to work for a living. Mac knows what I'm talking about, right Mac?"
You rub the back of your neck. "I never went to cotillion…but I don't know if you can really call what I did working for a living." Honest work had never agreed much with you, though you had managed to put together enough irregular employment to fund the trip from your hometown here to Sunrise.
"Your accent," June says, before Alaska can pipe up again. "I can't quite place it. One of the outer worlds?"
For a moment, you consider lying, or just brushing the question off, like you had on the train. It would be easier that way. But Alaska and June aren't just travellers passing through, here one moment and gone the next – they're your brother and sister in arms, and avoiding the question here will only make it that much harder when the truth finally comes out. So instead you focus on keeping your voice light, steady. "As far out as you can get," you say, quiet. "Tintagel."
June thankfully has the decency to stay silent. Alaska, for her part, doesn't seem to be capable of wordless introspection. "Tintagel?" She asks, glancing back at June, eyebrows knitting together. "But it was…" then realization hits her face, and genuine pain mixes with pity in her expression. "Oh, Mac," she says, laying a hesitant hand on your arm. "I'm sorry."
You try to smile reassuringly and don't really succeed. You had been born in Tintagel, like your father, and his father, and his father before him, back and back and back so far that your family legends outstripped the history books. A thousand thousand generations of Perths had lived on that soil, your father had said. But that hadn't stopped the forces of darkness from putting the entire province to the torch, a million souls snuffed out in a single day. The largest attack on Camelot land in history, the papers had called it. The rape of Tintagel, a reporter had coined. But you had been there, in the fire and devastation, and you know the name it truly deserves.
Hell.
Who is responsible for the rape of Tintagel?
((Mac will gain combat bonuses against the enemy you select))
[x] The Unseelie Empire
Multiversal butchers led by a narcissistic king. A highly stratified caste society, the ageless True Fae sit at the top and command legions of specially bred soldiers – Goblins, Trolls, Ogres, Pixies and more. They see humanity as little more than playthings and delight in needless cruelty.
[] The Lucidians
A nomadic people who travel the many worlds in massive city-ships and bear an ancient, personal hatred for Camelot. They wield weapons and magic controlled by complex clockworks.
[] The Simian Hordes
A race of barbarian tribes that more resemble apes than men. They gain strength by eating the hearts of their foes. The Hordes are generally content to fight amongst themselves, but occasionally a chief will unite a number of tribes and wage holy war across the many worlds.
[] The Infinite Dream
A collective hive-mind bound together by powerful neuromancy, the Infinite Dream believes that reality is governed by perception, and that by subsuming all life in the multiverse they will become God.
[] The Ladies of the Lake
Priestesses, once human, now the hosts of their parasitic god-husbands from beyond the known multiverse. Heads of a religion that predates man, they wreak death and destruction in the name of their inscrutable gods.
[] The Terracotta Men
A magical war machine built by a race long dead. The Terracotta Men are artificial soldiers still marching under ancient orders to annihilate life wherever they find it. As long as one survives, they will rebuild and return.
Some of you might recognize the similarity between this and one of my earlier quests, Dark Prince of Camelot. This is something of a spiritual successor to that quest, part-reboot and part-sequel. Characters, ideas, and lore from Prince will reappear in Knight, and you might be able to puzzle out a few of the mysteries by comparing the stories.
However, YOU DO NOT NEED TO READ PRINCE IN ORDER TO UNDERSTAND KNIGHT. Knight serves as a jumping on point for new readers, so don't feel like you're missing out if you don't go back and slog through Prince.
For mechanics, I'll be using a stripped down version of Genesys, which uses a system called narrative dice. I'll explain them in more detail when they become relevant, but basically they use symbols instead of numbers, with different combinations of symbols creating different scenarios (allowing you to succeed while also facing a complication, or fail while simultaneously gaining something of value). The quest will, however, trend towards the narrative end of the spectrum, with crunch used mainly as a way to show Mac's progression and give the questers a grip on how difficult certain tasks might be.
Very excited to get going with this! Hope y'all enjoy it as much as I do.
Alaska looks like she wants to say more, but thankfully the three of you are interrupted by the door opening. This time it's not Hawley who enters but an older woman, dirty blonde hair streaked with grey. One eye, clouded and blind, sits amongst a nest of old scars. The uniform she wears resembles Hawley's, but lacks the hat and is far more ornamented.
June stiffens at the sight of her and snaps into a salute, eyes staring straight ahead. It only takes you and Alaska a moment to get the hint and copy him. The woman examines the three of you for a moment and then waves her hand, signaling you to be at ease. "Thank you," she says, and she sounds weary, as if every syllable is a herculean effort. "Alaska Alton. June de Hailong. Macaulay Perth. Welcome to the Chivalry."
You shuffle from foot to foot, unsure of what to say. The woman takes a moment to look out the window at the inside of the Spire before speaking again. "I am Knight- Legate Zamir."
That gets you attention. The Knight-Legate sits at the head of the Chivalry. Though technically she shares leadership of the order with the Knight-Consul and Knight-Augur, her domain of primacy is war – and in a queendom under eternal siege, war is everything. She must of course answer to the Eleven Regents, but the Knight-Legate is the most powerful individual in Camelot. And now she stands not five feet from you, looking for all the world like any aging woman you might see on the street. She walks to the far wall and begins to fiddle with a computer, activating a projector with a few taps of her fingers. "As you can imagine, I don't normally give orientation. But I was nearby, and I try to meet all the rookies eventually." She looks up and gestures to the desks in front of her. "Sit. I'm a busy woman."
As the three of you scramble to take seats, Zamir pulls up a painting of a beautiful, raven haired woman, her eyes a striking violet.
"Your introduction to the Chivalry will be extensive," she explains once all of you are at attention. "As newly-made Knights, there is much for you to learn. But you have all had stressful days, and I imagine you are very tired." Her eye seems to linger on you as she speaks, but the next moment she glances casually away. "Your true instruction will begin tomorrow, but there are things that it is imperative you know now, before you sleep. Your Heraldries have changed you, mentally as well as physically. Your dreams are no longer the random firings of neurons…they are a doorway to a much deeper collective unconscious, a web of magic that stretches across time and space. With practice and training, you will learn to control this ability. But until then…" She looks at each of you in turn, making sure she holds your attention. "Until then, the doorway doesn't lock, so to speak. As easily as you can go out, other things can come in."
"Come in?" Alaska squeaks, shifting uncomfortably in her seat.
Zamir nods. "The power of the Spire is great, and will protect you from most of the common pests. But there are things which can circumvent even its defenses." She gestures towards the screen. "Chief amongst them is the Whispering Woman."
She pauses, and in the silence you can't quite suppress a laugh. Zamir turns to you, her expression hard. "Is there something you find amusing, Perth?"
From the way she looks and sounds, you're guessing that you really shouldn't have – but you have to at least defend yourself. "I don't…" you pause, getting a grip on your words. "It's just, the Whispering Woman? Like in the rhyme?"
"The very same," Zamir says, crossing her arms.
You glance over at Alaska, who gives a tiny shrug. "But she's…just a fairy tale."
"I'm aware of the belief," Zamir says dryly. "Hence the briefing. The Whispering Woman is most assuredly not a fairy tale. She is very real, and she is incredibly dangerous." She gestures towards the picture again. "She most consistently appears as a young woman matching this description, but she is a shapeshifter, capable of assuming almost any form…cats and birds seem to be a favorite. The best way to identify her is by color scheme. White black and violet. Check skin, eyes, hair, clothing, fur, feathers, whatever it may be. If you can't find a color other than white, black or violet, then do not engage. Whatever it is."
The seriousness of her tone makes you suddenly nervous, and your disbelief tastes sour in your mouth. "What will she do?"
"Talk to you," Zamir says. "She will know things about you, personal things, and she will use that as bait. She will offer you things. Knowledge. Power. She will propose deals. You must not take them." She looks at each of you again in turn. "I cannot stress this enough. The Whispering Woman is one of Camelot's most dangerous enemies. Give her power over you and she will turn you into a weapon, wield you against the Chivalry, and discard you when you are no longer useful. If she visits you, report immediately to a superior. If you have reason to believe that she visited another Knight, report immediately to a superior. If we discover you hid a visit from us, and we will, you'll face court-martial so fast your head will spin."
The three of you are silent for a time, processing that. It is June who recovers first. "If we are visited, and we tell you, what then?" He asks. "Is there any way to prove that we didn't listen to her?"
Zamir nods. "An excellent question. You'll be quarantined for a time, while we examine you. It isn't perfect, but if you're honest and work with us, we can ensure you're not punished for an event that's out of your control." Her eyes are on you now, boring into you with a cold intensity, and the thing within you shudders and retreats, racing through your veins to the safety of your heart. Then Zamir's eyes flicker over to Alaska. "Alton. You have a question."
Alaska sputters, and you'd bet your last dollar that her Heraldry is reacting much as yours did. "Me? No. Ma'am. Crystal clear. I-"
"Out with it," Zamir growls.
Alaska's face turns as red as her hair, then redder. "Is it true that she has to give you what she promises? That's what…all the stories say." She looks away, as if ashamed to have asked the question.
Zamir merely nods her head. "That's part of the deal she offers," she says, and her voice is quiet, serious. "But if you've heard those stories, you know what happens to arrogant little boy or girl who thinks they can get one over on her."
Pain. Suffering. Death. A wish twisted by irony until it's more punishment than reward. Stories of the Whispering Woman had been common, in your childhood. You and your friends had swapped them like trading cards, when the night had come, seeing who would be the first to leave or turns the lights on, shaking. You shiver, and choose to blame it on the flimsy hospital gown. The idea that the Whispering Woman might be – is – real throws the memories of those nights into a harsher light.
"I can tell that you're all taking this seriously," Zamir says, and there's a gentleness to her tone that wasn't there before – or maybe it's just the weariness again, sanding away the sharp edge of authority. "It isn't my intent to scare you. Although a little fear is necessary, if you want to be effective in our line of work." She shakes her head. "We just want you to be prepared. In case the worst happens."
That night, you dream of the Whispering Woman.
*
She appears to you in the form of a woman, similar to the picture Zamir showed you but older, with the beginning of crow's feet at the corners of piercing violet eyes. She sits on a throne of bleached white bone, and the land around her is scorched and burned, ashes stretching as far as the eye can see. The night sky above is black and empty, devoid of stars – but something huge and circular hangs in the sky, illuminated by a faint silver light. The woman smiles when she sees you. Her lips are violet, her skin pale ivory.
"I couldn't see you," she says. Her voice is an orchestra, low and sensuous, a melody that stirs something deep in your mind, a dream only mostly forgotten. "You were lost to me, and I was worried."
You stumble backwards and fall onto your ass, the impact throwing ash into the air around you. The ground is still warm to the touch. Grief flashes across the woman's face for the briefest instant before it is replaced by a tranquil blankness. "She has broken you," she says.
You scramble away from her, regaining your feet, and hold one ash-covered hand up as if to ward her off. "Don't talk," you tell her, and to your surprise you sound far more confident than you feel. "I won't listen to you."
"You think I don't know that?" Amusement dances along the words, or perhaps it's rage, only barely restrained. "She got what she always wanted, don't you see?" She stands and throws her arms out, spinning in place. Her throne is gone and now there is only blasted wasteland. "She put your fire out, fed upon it to fuel her own, and while you were weak and empty they filled your head with fear."
She vanishes. You look left, then right, and then realize that she is behind you, her face at your shoulder, her lips at your ear. "I know what they told you about me," she whispers. You feel the fear surge in your gut like bile and you reach for your Heraldry – for the strength that filled you in the hospital, and made you angry and powerful. But the only thing that greets you is an aching emptiness, like a tiny piece of your heart has been excised from your body. You whirl to face her, and she is gone. "They told you that I was dangerous," she says. Her voice drips with mockery and seems to come from everywhere at once. "They told you that I would use you."
You whirl again and suddenly she stands in front of you. She reaches out and her fingertips brush your cheek, cold as stone at night. "I would never use you," she says, "and you loved me for my danger, once." You pull back from her touch, but the instant her fingertips leave your face she vanishes once again. "Now look at you."
"What do you want from me?" You shout to the night. Your voice echoes across the endless plains, as if you are in the bottom of a great chasm. "I won't give you what you want."
The ashes beneath your feet twist and shift, and suddenly you are falling, falling, falling. The woman's voice reaches your ears, the barest whisper above the rushing wind, but no matter how you twist and turn you can't find her. "Of course not," it says, full of a raw and terrible truth. "A prince is not a sword, to be drawn and swung at will."
"What are you talking about?" You strain your eyes to see what you're falling towards, but nothing greets you except an endless pit, devoid of even a mote of light.
"Understanding will find you," she says. "When you find what you have lost and shed these…silken chains around your mind. And when you once again know yourself, it will be you who seeks me, and not the other way around."
You awake with a start in sweat-soaked sheets.
The room around you is quiet, still. Hawley had led you here, after Zamir had dismissed you, up the elevator to an even higher floor, and then through twisting, winding hallways until you reached your assigned room. Your meager possessions had been waiting for you, clothes and a backpack folded neatly on a bed, but other than that the room had been empty, spartan. You would have time to personalize it later, you had been promised. Every Knight had a home in the Spire. But before you could put much thought into it you had slept, the electric energy of manifestation having seeped from your bones and left only exhaustion in its wake.
The room is dark – no windows, no lights, not even a glow from under the door. And yet despite the darkness, you find that you can actually see fairly well. Unusually well. Zamir had said that the Heraldry had changed you physically as well as mentally. There are countless legends of Knights being more than human, though you can't remember one that mentions night vision specifically.
You run a hand through your hair, and it comes away slick with sweat. Every inch of you is dripping, and your heart pounds against your ribcage, frantic. The dream…it had seemed so real in the moment. The woman's face flashes in your mind's eye. Her touch echoes on your cheek. It all feels so eerily familiar, a sense of déjà vu that pervades your body, mind and soul.
She had acted like she knew you. She had said that you would seek her out, some day, and your heart seizes at the mere memory of the words. There is truth to them, you know, a painful truth that tastes like bile on your tongue.
You blink in the darkness, once, twice. Each breath makes the world feel more normal – each passing moment brings your heart closer to a slow, steady rhythm. You have no idea what it means, that the Whispering Woman appeared to you in your dream, but you know that you can't go and face the Chivalry now, not after what she told you. You don't like the sound of court-martial, but you like the sound of being branded a traitor even less. And so you wipe the sweat from your eyes, turn your pillow over to the cooler side, and settle back into your bed – and a restless, though thankfully dreamless, sleep.
*
Early the next morning, Hawley appears to take you to the Knight-Augur's chambers.
For a moment, fear seizes your heart. Does the Chivalry know? Can they see into your dreams, detect the Whispering Woman's presence within your mind? As the Knight-Legate is to war, so the Knight-Augur is to magic and learning – who better to rip the secrets of your dreams from your skull? But Hawley only laughs, mistaking the panic on your face for mere nervousness. It's a routine procedure, she explains. Like Dr. Isley had examined your body, to ensure it was in good enough shape for active duty, now the Knight-Augur must examine your soul.
Hawley leads you back through the winding hallways to the elevator that had taken you up the Spire. There are no buttons, but when Hawley presses her palm to the biometric scanner the pad lights up green, and you hear the elevator spin into action. When the elevator arrives, you step inside and take a moment to stare up at the sun, already in its customary spot high in the sky. Its presence calms you somewhat, washes away the ragged edges of your dream. There is a reason the Whispering Woman comes at night, you think as the elevator climbs higher and higher, all the way to Spire's penultimate floor. She and things like her cannot stand the light of divinity.
It's not until you step out of the elevator that you notice the spatial impossibility of the floor.
The Spire maintains a consistent construction from the outside – a hollow, circular tower with an inner ring two miles across, a fact that holds true both at the base and the very top. And yet the floor you emerge onto does not match this description. Rather than a long, curving hallway, you step from the elevator into a small circular room, facing three doors. A wave of dizzying nausea sweeps over you, and Hawley is forced to throw your arm over her shoulder supporting you long enough to make it to the door to your left and make use of the large knocker built into the center.
The door swings open almost before you're finished knocking, and you are put face to face with more geometric nonsense. A vast library greets you, tall wooden bookshelves packed with hundreds of tomes leaning at odd and impossible angles. Candles float through the air like lazy fireflies, their light warm and comforting. As you step inside you turn to see that the door shares a wall with several windows, which – even though you know must look into the circular lobby you just entered from – show instead more library.
"First time in a tesseract?" A woman's voice asks. You spin to face her, but the movement upsets the delicate balance of your stomach and you gag, clutching at it.
Hawley snaps as much of a salute as she can manage, given that she's still supporting most of your weight. "Knight-Augur Kumori."
Kumori waves her off. "No need for that," she says. "Thanks for bringing him up here. I'll get him a seat." She purses her lips and gives a sharp whistle, and a small wooden chair leaning against one of the bookshelves pops up and skitters across the floor towards you, legs flailing manically until it comes to a stop next to you.
You stare down at it, the sight of it skittering doing nothing to help your churning stomach. "I don't…want to."
"Oh relax," Kumori says, rolling her eyes. "It's animated, not alive. It won't bite, or cop a feel or anything."
You glance over at Hawley, but she merely nods encouragingly up at you. This doesn't entirely drive away your doubt, but your stomach threatens insurrection and so you collapse into the chair, holding your head in your hands. After what seems like hours, but is likely only a few minutes, the nausea begins to subside, and you dare to take a look around the room. Hawley, again, is nowhere to be seen. She seems to enjoy leaving while you're otherwise distracted.
Kumori, though, is impossible to miss. Though clearly several years your senior, she still seems a few decades too young to hold a post as prestigious as Knight-Augur – but you suppose appearances can be deceiving, especially when talking about the queendom's most powerful sorceress. Still, you had imagined someone slightly more dignified. Her chin-length brown hair is tousled, sticking every which way, and she wears a quilted robe knotted at the waist, covered in pockets and various stains. She is seemingly unaware of your staring, her nose buried in a heavy leather bound book. Her lips mouth words in a language you don't recognize, her eyebrows creasing slightly as she makes her way across the page. Then she looks up with a start, as if only just realizing your presence. "Feeling better?" She asks. "Do you want a smoke?" She fishes around in a few of her robe's pockets and produces a pack of cigarettes, which she offers to you.
You frown up at her. "I am. But no, I don't smoke."
Kumori nods, slipping one cigarette from the pack and popping it into her mouth. She snaps her fingers and one of the many floating candles makes its way over to her, weaving deftly around a bookcase bent so far over that it forms an arch high tall enough to walk through (though the books somehow continue to cling to the shelf, in defiance of all the laws of gravity). Once the candle is close enough, Kumori uses it as a light and then shoves it away, watching as it wobbles and spins. "Probably a good choice," she says, taking a deep inhale and holding the smoke in. "These things'll kill you." She exhales, and the smoke dances in the candlelight. "Oh, actually they won't. Heraldries are great for lung cancer. Clears the carcinogens right up." She smiles, the barest hint of teeth behind red lips. "You feeling alright?" she asks, twirling the cigarette between two fingers. "Any trouble sleeping?"
The panic surges through you again, but this time you're prepared for it, and you're able to clamp down on the emotion before it can manifest on your face, in your posture. "It was nice to have a real bed again."
"Amen to that," Kumori says, her smile widening. "Most rookies don't know the value of a good mattress until their first deployment." She gestures at you to stand. "Now come on, get up and get your shirt off. We don't have all day."
You feel a flush creep along your neck and face, but cover it by pulling your shirt over your head.
Kumori takes another drag on her cigarette and whistles, high and sharp. Not a minute passes before a large, heavy desk thunders around the corner. It runs more smoothly than the chair, with a curious animal grace, and as it moves you can see an intricate webwork of shock absorbers placed between the legs and the top, keeping numerous instruments and liquid-filled vials safely in place despite the motion. Kumori scratches it idly under the lip and begins picking through some of the instruments – a brass telescope, a set of dice carved from bones, a pocket watch that ticks irregularly and leaps across the clock face seemingly at random. She picks each of them up in turn, then sets them down, and then begins staring off, unfocused, into the distance.
This continues on for several minutes before you finally summon up the courage to speak. "Ma'am?"
"Kumori," Kumori corrects, blinking. She looks back at you. "Did I just…"
"Zone out?" You offer. "For a few minutes."
Kumori groans and claps her face between both hands. "I'm sorry," she says, leaning heavily onto the desk, which shifts somewhat to better bear her weight. "I've been running some rituals. Paratemporal stuff. My sense of time is all over the place right now." She frowns. "Or maybe then."
"Paratemporal?" You ask. "You're fucking with time?"
"Exactly!" Kumori beams, eyes twinkling. "Although it's less a fucking and more a gentle…ah, not much point trying to explain" she says. "You're still probably only at the first perception threshold. But you'll get there."
You rub the bridge of your nose, but it does nothing to ease the rapidly growing ache between your temples. "I think I lost you at perception threshold."
"Oops, sorry," Kumori says. She plucks a jar of thick yellow paste from the corner of the desk, and then after a moment of thought, grabs some kind of multicolored cube as well. "Forgot you were from the middle of no…from the country. You'll learn this stuff soon enough, but for the purposes of our conversation," she hands you the cube, and you turn it over in your hands. It seems to be made of dozens of different colored squares laid out in rows and columns, which you can twist with your hands. "That's a puzzle cube," she explains. "The game is that you try to twist everything so that every face is one solid color, get it?"
You play with the cube for a moment, twisting and turning it, and nod. It seems complicated, but you can see how someone might be able to figure it out, given time. "Sure."
"Magic is a lot like the puzzle cube," Kumori says, snatching the cube from your hands. She holds it up so you can only see one side. "Imagine you could only see one face. That you didn't even know it was connected to a larger apparatus, right? You could twist it a bunch, even make some headway. But it would seem random and confusing, and you could only ever get the one face." She turns the cube, exposing more faces. "But then imagine that someone comes along who can see the rest of the cube. They could twist it and turn it with full context…" the rows and columns dance beneath her fingers, and before you know it she's solved the cube, each face a different, solid color. "Now, you might call that person a witch, or a wizard, or a sorcerer, or whatever, but the truth of it is that they just saw more of the puzzle. Get it?" She grins. "Perception threshold."
"So as I learn more magic, I'm going to get better at seeing how things connect?"
Kumori shakes her head. "More like the other way around," she says, uncorking the jar of yellow paste. "Now hold still." She dips her fingers into the jar and then uses them to draw thick, solid lines across your face. A foul smell fills your nostrils, but you do as you're bid and stay still, thinking over Kumori's words. Your mind can't help but drift back to the Whispering Woman, to the warning Zamir had given you yesterday. How powerful must the Woman be to circumvent the power of the Spire? What perception threshold must she be at? "It seems like…" you say after a moment, struggling to put your thoughts to words, "it seems like it would be hard for someone on a lower perception threshold to figure out the motivations of someone on a higher threshold."
"Well, sure," Kumori says. She has finished with your face and has swapped the paste for oil, which she now paints in delicate spirals across your chest and back. "The less perspective you have, the more danger of making mistakes you're in," she explains. "A yellow square might think that him getting turned is all about him. But in reality, it's about the red square on the other side of the cube. Which is why rule number two of magic is to never forget how little you matter."
Maybe it's the arguments Kumori is making, or maybe it's the soothing tone of her voice, or maybe both – but you begin to feel the knot of tension in your stomach unraveling. You had thought that it was just the nausea, but now that it's beginning to abate you recognize it as a nervous fear. It is entirely possible that the Whispering Woman's message was not truly for you - that it was merely one twist in a puzzle too vast for you to understand. "So…what's rule number one?"
Kumori holds the bottle of paste up to her nose and sniffs, frowning. "Always triple check your ingredients," she says. "Like I thought this was Alder pulp, but now I'm thinking it might be bat dung."
You recoil, shouting, and Kumori breaks into hysterical laughter. "Kidding!" She says between wheezes. "Aw, c'mon kid. Job like mine, you gotta take your kicks where you can get them, you know?"
"Permission to speak freely Kumori?" You ask, struggling to regain your composure.
"I guess I owe you that."
"I'm not really sure whether I like you or not."
That only gets Kumori laughing harder, and it's several minutes before she can finish her work with oil. "Now just stand there and don't touch anything," she says, turning back to her desk. She pokes at a small sphere, sending it into a fit of buzzes, then takes a seat and opens a book.
"How long is this going to take?" You ask. The smell of the paste hasn't gotten any better, but you've gotten used to it, somewhat, and now you're mostly just bored and tired. You feel yourself yawning and forcibly stifle it.
"A while," Kumori says, not looking up. "And if you mess any of it up then it has to start all over, so try not to talk so much."
You roll your eyes but fall silent, amusing yourself by following the gently floating candles with your eyes. It strikes you as incredibly dangerous to have so many open flames in a library, but the candles seem almost as if they're aware of the danger, constantly bobbing and weaving away from anything easily flammable.
Nearly fifteen minutes pass like this – Kumori flipping through her book, you fighting off sleep – before a soft rustling from behind you catches your attention. You turn, expecting to see another animated piece of furniture, but are instead greeted with the sight of a man.
He is tall, though hunched over, his form hidden within an oversized travelling cloak. His hair hangs lank around his face, and his beard is rough and wild, more the result of being too long away from civilization than any specific fashion choice. He leans heavily on a carved wooden staff nearly as tall as he is, and a bluejay sits perched atop his head, regarding you quizzically. Both the bird and the man are soaking wet, a fate they are rapidly inflicting on the carpet beneath them.
You gape for a moment before regaining your senses. "Is it raining outside?"
"Not here," the man says, brushing past you with hardly a glance. "Chisaki," he says, and his voice is urgent, "I need to speak with you."
Kumori doesn't so much as look up from her book. "Well, aren't you?"
"Alone."
"I'm busy right now," Kumori snaps. She closes the book and places a hand on his stomach, pushing him gently back. "And you're getting water all over my desk."
The man looks back at you, and his eyes have a strange, crazed redness that you remember from the refugees fleeing Tintagel. "Who is this?"
"A rookie," Kumori says. "I'm giving him his physical, so don't get so close."
Ignoring her words, man walks up to you, a hand emerging from under his cloak. It's wrapped almost entirely in bandages, and when his fingers touch your chin you can feel…something a wrongness that reaches you an instinctual level, as if you're about to touch a hot pan. Heat without heat. The man's fingers force your mouth open. "Careful!" Kumori shouts, but the man ignores her, peering into your mouth, then prying open one eyelid to stare into the whites of your eye. You remain still, partially from shock and partially from confusion, until the man lets you go and his arm vanishes back under his cloak.
"His Heraldry's fine," he says. "Let him eat. We need to talk."
Kumori clenches fists. "You're insufferable," she says. "This is delicate spellwork, and you're touching him? Someone like you could throw this entire ritual out of whack just by standing too close!"
"I know what I'm doing," the man says.
"Oh, I've heard that one before," Kumori says, crossing her arms. "You haven't changed a bit. Come back later, if you need to talk. Sun's light, let me do my job."
The man inclines his head slightly, staring Kumori down, and for a moment it looks like he wants to argue – but then the bluejay sitting on his head flutters down to his shoulder, and he turns away. "Fine," he says, heading back for the door. "I will be back, though."
"Honestly, I don't know how you of all people always manage to come at the worst time," Kumori shouts after him, but he closes the door behind him before she's halfway done with the thought. She groans and returns to her desk, staring at the closed cover of the book she was reading just a moment ago.
Your eyes flit from nowhere in particular to nowhere in particular, and you shift uncomfortably in your seat. You can't shake a feeling of awkward out-of-placeness, as if you walked into the wrong room by mistake and caught the tail end of a very long argument. "Um…" you manage after a minute. "Who was that?"
Agility
Manual dexterity, hand-eye coordination, and body control. Characters with a high Agility have flexibility, a good sense of balance, and deft hands.
Brawn
Blend of brute power, strength, and overall toughness, as well as the ability to apply those attributes as needed. Characters with a high Brawn are physically fit and hardy, rarely get sick, and have strong constitutions.
Cunning
How crafty, devious, clever, and creative your character can be. Characters with a high Cunning are savvy, quickly pick up on vital social and environmental clues, and can more readily come up with short-term plans and tactics.
Intellect
Intelligence, education, mental acuity, and ability to reason and rationalize. Characters with a high Intellect can extrapolate and interpolate data, can recall details and draw from previous experience, and can think of long-term strategies and envision the ramifications of present actions.
Presence
Moxie, charisma, confidence, and force of personality. Characters with a high Presence make natural leaders, draw attention when they enter a room, can easily strike up a conversation with nearly anyone, and are quick to adapt to social situations.
Willpower
Discipline, self-control, mental fortitude, and faith. Characters with a high Willpower can withstand stress and fatigue, remain composed during chaotic situations, and exert influence over the weaker willed.
Had you not lived through the rape of Tintagel, the first month of training at the Sunlit Spire would've been the most miserable thirty days of your entire life.
Your days begin in the dark, long before the sun even thinks to rise. By lamplight you tackle your assigned reading – a pile of texts that only seems to grow taller, no matter how many you finish. History, magical theory, strategy and tactics, wartime journals written by Knights long since dead. Biology, chemistry, physics. Poetry, scripture, collected fairy tails. It seems as if the Chivalry wants you to read every book in Kumori's library, which you have since heard is rumored to be infinite.
After you get your fill of the written word you report to the mess hall, to receive a breakfast large enough to feed a family of five. That part isn't so bad, at least, though you could probably do with a little less of Alaska's chatter.
"I didn't get through the Thirty-third Revelation," the orange-haired girl says around a mouthful of scrambled eggs, already loading another prodigious bite onto her fork. You've never seen anyone eat as quickly or efficiently as Alaska, and it doesn't seem to even slow down her talking. "Can someone summarize it for me?"
June takes a much more measured bite of his own breakfast. "Honestly, are you ever going to actually finish a reading?" he asks. "You're almost a week behind already."
Alaska sticks her tongue out at him. "I was a week behind last week," she says, twirling her fork. "It's more like a week and a half now."
"You didn't miss much," you tell her. "The back half of the thirty-third reads a lot like the first thirty-two."
June closes his eyes and places his forehead against the table. "Both of you are hopeless," he says quietly, and you and Alaska exchange a small grin. "The thirty-third is foundational to the themes of the Revelation. It explains the eclipsing of the sun and the resulting famine."
"Ugh, I know," Alaska groans. "Don't even get me started on that. Like, what the hell is an eclipse?"
"Well nobody knows, exactly," June says, leaning forward. "The prevailing theory for years has been that it was some kind of ancient war-magic, but the Knight-Augur wrote a paper last year arguing it was more a natural disaster. The Revelations doesn't mention many specifics, but in Marcus Aphelios' Lamentation-"
Alaska's mouth drops open slightly, hash-browns falling from her lips. "Bluh?"
"Next week's readings," you tell her. "I think June's already done."
"Oh, no way I'm getting to that," Alaska says, rolling her eyes. "It's not like this stuff is important, right? They're just stories. Nobody really believes any of it anymore."
June bristles. "Even if that were true – which it isn't, since the Orthodox Equinoxists are still very much a thing – the Revelations are cultural and historical lynchpins of-"
Alaska makes a noise like a fart with her mouth and hands. You bend down over your breakfast and do your best to tune them out. You've been working on perfecting the micro-nap…
After breakfast, the three of you head down a few floors to start physical fitness. Your Heraldries grant you a near superhuman strength, speed, and coordination, but there are limits to the lengths you can push your bodies to, limits which you can extend by training your muscles the old fashioned way. The exertion is brutal, more physically demanding than anything you've had to put yourself through before, but you can't say that you entirely hate it. There's a serenity in the exhaustion it brings, a focus that only emerges once you've pushed yourself well past your limits. Whether it's running or swimming, lifting weights or stretching, the rest of the world seems to slip away, and for the first time since you lost your home you feel a semblance of peace.
June doesn't share your zen embrace of exercise, something you can't really blame him for. After a particularly painful set of squats he collapses to the ground, skin slick with sweat, every muscle shaking. "Sun's light," he swears, putting his face in his hands. "Just let me die already." He leans his back against the wall and glances over at Alaska, who is entering hour two on the treadmill. "How in the hell does she do it?" He wonders. "I swear, I don't think I've ever seen her get tired."
"She grew up on a farm," you say, adding weight for your turn with the bar. "A lot of long days in the hot sun, it'll toughen anyone up."
"A farm," June murmurs, his eyes not leaving Alaska. "I think my family used to own a few of those." You would expect a shade of bitterness in his words, you find only weary resignation.
"They did," you tell him. "Hailong Agricultural Works. A couple of my cousins drove your harvesters." June glances up at you, and you shrug. "My dad worked in the mines, my mom in one of the factories."
"I'm sorry," June says, looking away. "I didn't mean to drag up tough memories."
"You didn't." Though the rest of your family had never been overly concerned with company loyalty, your father had been a Hailong man through and through. Hailong money had saved Tintagel when nothing else would, he had been fond of saying. And when the Unseelie had come...well, you had seen the stock reports. June's family hadn't been caught in the attack personally, but they hadn't escaped unscathed. You extend a hand to June and do your best to smile. "Come on," you say, as he clasps your hand with his own. "Miles to go before we sleep."
Fitness is followed closely by lunch, and then by the closest thing you get to a break – meditation. But even sitting cross-legged in a candlelit room for two hours doesn't offer the rest you crave, because you're forced to spend it repeatedly slamming your head against the scholastic wall that is learning your Heraldry's name.
Ever since it manifested your Heraldry has been with you, simmering under your skin, always eager to burst forth into the physical world in an explosion of light and power. Every time you call it you can hear it speak to you, an insistent whisper that you're never quite able to make out.
"Breathe," your instructor tells you, her tone level and practiced and endlessly irritating. "Focus on the rhythm of your Heraldry." The rumor is that Kumori's younger apprentices who draw the short straw are stuck overseeing meditation, and you can see why that would be – it's a job that seems to consist mostly of repeating the same clichéd platitudes often and loudly enough that the students don't fall asleep. The girl working today seems especially bad at that, considering she hasn't yet noticed June and Alaska have fallen asleep leaning on each other, but perhaps she just doesn't care. You certainly wouldn't blame her.
Even your Heraldry seems annoyed by the exercise. It stalks back and forth within you as if agitated, and every time you try to match yourself to its rhythm you feel the rising urge to leap into the fray, feel iron crack against the strength of your armor, feel flesh part before the sharpness of your sword. The same rage and panic that had subsumed you upon manifestation returns, clawing at your mind, until you wrench yourself free and take a moment to breathe, your heart hammering in your chest.
It is during one of these respites that the instructor finds you. "Having trouble?" She asks taking a seat in front of you. She has tattoos on her cheeks, colorful lines that extend down her neck and vanish under her shirt, only to reappear on her hands.
"I don't think my Heraldry likes sitting around," you admit, still breathing heavily.
The instructor nods slowly. "That can happen," she says. "Some Heraldries are more excitable than others."
"I don't know if I'd call it excitable, exactly. More…" you pause for a long time, trying to find the right word, "murder-y?"
The instructor blinks once, twice. "Breathe," she says finally. "Focus on the rhythm of your Heraldry."
You close out the day with combat training, which is hell in a sparring ring but is so much fun that it's worth it.
In the old days, Knights would fight with archaic melee weapons – swords and axes, staves and hammers – and for tradition's sake you still do a little learning with those. But times have changed, and the current line of thinking amongst the Chivalry's top brass is the modern problems require modern solutions.
The practice guns they give you are designed to be as close to the real thing as possible, but instead of throwing lead at supersonic speeds, they hurl paint. You, June and Alaska spend the hours using your newfound super-athleticism to bound across a specially designed obstacle course, peppering each other with so much paint that by the time the exercise is over all three of you look like modern art exhibits.
Hand to hand is significantly less exciting and more painful. The paint guns aren't really capable of causing you pain through an expressed Heraldry, but the fist of another Knight is a different beast entirely. By the end of the first week, June and Alaska have broken your nose so many times that even your Heraldry-accelerated healing can't get rid of the crookedness, and even when the paint comes off, the sheer number and variety of bruises you bear mean it's hard not to draw the comparison to modern art
In combat, Mac excels…
[] In close quarters
+Melee
+Light Guns (Pistol/SMG)
[] At range
+Heavy Guns (Rifle/Sniper)
+Gunnery (Machine Gun/Grenade Launcher)
After a month of grueling, non-stop training, just long enough for you to convince yourself that the endless grind is all your life will ever be, you are cleared to take a day off.
Alaska and June both schedule visits with their families (though Alaska seems far more enthusiastic about the chance), but for obvious reasons that is not amongst your options. You briefly consider catching up on sleep, but no matter how alluring a long, uninterrupted nap might be, you know would hate yourself tomorrow if you woke up having slept your break away. The Spire is a massive, gorgeous structure, practically a city unto itself, and truth be told you've seen precious little of it since your enlistment into the Chivalry…but the last month has made the Spire seem more a prison than a home, and you figure it would be best to get away while you can.
Thus, the morning of your break finds you walking out the Spire's front lobby and into the city of Sunrise.
As both the seat of Camelot's civilian and military authorities and an intensely magical tower that predates the queendom itself, the Spire forms the basis around which Sunrise is built. You've found that it helps to think of Sunrise as a fan built from a series of gradually expanding semi-circles, with the sun and the Spire serving as the base. Directly outside the doors is a large, circular courtyard of old cobblestone, filled with civilians and government officials alike – eating from the many food trucks, conversing with each other on old benches, and enjoying the light of the sun that hangs stoically above them. Beyond the courtyard are small parks – oases of nature amidst stone, steel and concrete, trees and bushes and flowers occasionally broken up by a gently gurgling fountain. The parks are similarly filled with people, but you notice fewer government personnel and more families, children running and playing under the watchful eye of young parents.
It is only once you get through the parks that you find yourself in Sunrise proper, the parts of the city that begin to resemble the images you see on postcards and televisions. Admittedly, the areas of the city closest to the Spire are the richest, and the buildings here are not nearly so crowded as they become the further you walk – but still, they bear Sunrise's distinctive architecture, white stone buildings and red tile roofs. Here, the cobblestone streets are swept clean, and happy, well-dressed pedestrians gather around expensive shops and restaurants to talk, laugh, and play with their phones.
Perhaps the most unnerving part of Sunrise is the near complete lack of cars. Though you'll occasionally spot a vehicle parked on or rolling down one of the winding streets, more often than not they're government owned, and the privately owned cars get rarer and rarer as you move away from the richest parts of the city. The people of Sunrise either walk or take the underground – something that would've been unthinkable in rural, spread out communities of Tintagel.
By the time you find yourself in the middle-class part of the city, you start to notice the near constant press of bodies that Sunrise is famous for. The narrow streets, relatively small square-mileage and massive population means that dozens of people are squeezing into streets where it would be difficult for three to walk abreast. As you make your way deeper into the city, your sense of claustrophobia gradually increases, the unwanted contact with strangers becoming more and more frequent. Even the buildings begin to tower over you, multiple complexes stacked haphazardly atop one another. When Sunrise had hit the limits of its expansion and still felt the need to grow, it had given up moving outward in favor of moving upwards – and despite the closeness of the sun, the sheer number of buildings mean you are constantly drenched in oppressive shadow. Your pace increases, and as the hours wind by you start to notice the shift from middle to lower class. The streets here aren't quite so clean, and colorful graffiti covers the sides of buildings, vast patchwork murals of clashing colors and styles. Private cars have all but vanished, and yet you see more police vehicles than ever before, stalking through streets that empty as soon as their headlights appear. The people around you sport hats and hoods to shield their faces from watchful cameras installed at intersections, but when you can see them clearly you find an above average number of body mods – colorful tattoos, sharpened teeth, tiny horns that jut from otherwise human foreheads.
And that's not all you notice. Your mind and senses, charged to hyperawareness by your Heraldry, are drawn to weapons whenever they can catch a glimpse of them. You notice the handles of knives sticking from belts, the bulge of handguns through pants, the flash of brass knuckles in the late afternoon light. A group of small children surges around you, shouting and cackling as part of some youthful game, and half unconsciously you smack aside a small hand as it reaches into your pocket. One of the kids yelps and spins away, and the entire group vanishes behind a corner.
You're not entirely sure what it is that pushes you onwards – you know only that you're not tired, and if Sunrise is to be your new home, you want to become accustomed to it. Your trek doesn't stop until nearly an hour later, when you reach the edge of a large crowd gathered around a makeshift stage.
The stage is occupied by an older woman with wild, untamed hair, clutching a sun medallion in one hand that she waves fervently as she speaks. "You all know the story!" She shouts to the crowd, and two hundred voices shout wordless agreement back at her. "Our Queen, chosen of the sun, sleeps in Avalon! But one day she will return! She will wield a sword of fire, the soul of the sun itself! She will face the darkness, and it will cower, fear, and flee before her!" She holds up a hand. "We know this to be true!" She shouts. "It is the most ancient covenant, the promise that this queendom is built upon! And yet…" her voice drops. "And yet I do not see her."
Her words bring objection, a cacophony of voices raised at once. The crowd churns like a restless sea, and though you've tried to keep your distance, more onlookers come from behind you, pressing you forward until the crowd has swallowed you up entirely. You are jostled back and forth as the mass of bodies surges around you - but you can still hear the woman's voice, which effortlessly glides above the ambient noise. "The stories tell us she will come when our need is greatest!" She shouts. "But her queendom is under assault! Her subjects have been put to the sword! Tintagel is lost! And yet she is not here! Our need is great, the greatest it has ever been, but she is not here! We long for her, we beg the sun for her, but she is not here! And why?" She holds the sun pendant up high, so that it gleams gold and white in the light of the sun. "Because we have not made her welcome!" She calls. "Because we have let cowards take her birthright!" She points an arm towards the Spire, which even here towers above the city, a sentinel of steel and glass. "These…noble," and when she says the word her voice drips with venom – "men and women who have claimed power in her place have brought us nothing but injustice and greed, and we sit by and let them pollute what is rightfully hers with petty, mortal ambition."
The crowd goes wild, roaring approval, stomping their feet, screaming at the top of their lungs. You catch a glimpse of the woman's face through the chaos and it is split with a savage, zealous smile. "We must make room for her here!" She shouts, and the crowd shouts with her. "We must cast the children from her throne and make it clean for her again!"
Then there is another noise, one which cuts through the raucous noise of the crowd like a knife – the whoop of sirens. The men and women around you freeze for a single heartbeat and then explode into mindless stampede, tearing off in every direction, a panicked frenzy. You spot the woman clambering off the stage, making a break for a nearby alley.
Her words were treason. You're no stranger to grumblings against Camelot's civilian governance, the Eleven Regents and parliament below them, but back in Tintagel those grumblings had always been focused around electing a new representative, someone who better understood the plight of the border regions. This woman, this preacher…had been calling for revolution. For violence. Did she really believe that would bring the Queen back? You try to imagine what the city would look like if this woman got her way, but the only images your mind can summon are those of Tintagel, burning.
[] Pursue the woman (ROLL: 2 Proficiency dice; 3 Difficulty dice)
[] Just get out of there
TLDR: A roll of 2 proficiency dice and 3 difficulty dice leaves you slightly more likely to fail than succeed
The narrative dice system uses multiple "symbol dice" rather than traditional number dice. The dice, and their symbols, are distributed like so:
The (Sun) symbol is a success. It is countered by the (X) symbol, a failure.
The (Arrow) symbol is an advantage. It is countered by the (circle and diamonds) symbol, a threat.
The (Sun in a circle) symbol is a triumph. It is countered by the (X in a circle) symbol, a despair.
When the dice are rolled, you tally the symbols to determine the results. Counter symbols cancel each other out: so 3 successes and 2 failures results in 1 success, and vice versa.
Successes and failures determine whether you succeed or fail.
Advantages and threats are consequences and side effects. For example, you can succeed on a task but roll a threat as well - so you succeed, but something else happens to put you in danger. Similarly, you can fail a task but roll an advantage.
Triumphs and despairs are "super-advantages" and "super-threats" respectively. They also count as a success and failure, respectively, for the purposes of determining how you succeed or fail.
NOTE: Although the success & failure aspects of a triumph or despair roll can be countered by another failure or success roll, the "super-advantage" and "super-threat" aspects are never cancelled.
I know this is somewhat complicated, but I think it offers a fun, less binary system and I'm eager to try it out. If you have any questions, feel free to ask.
