Lonely Devil (Exalted)

[Gazetteer]

Seven-Stars Prefecture,
The Tarpan Wastes,
The Blessed Isle,
Realm Year 770

Many centuries ago, in the Time Before, a golden queen stood upon a high mountaintop and looked down on a barren plain. It was a place of dust and rock and arid salt pans, where food and water were scarce, where only those plants and animals that could do without much of either could survive. Few humans lived on the plain, but they were still home to bands of nomads and the small gods they worshiped. Not a thriving culture, but a vibrant one in its own way.

The rain was stolen away by the neighboring mountains, by myriad natural processes, by the vagaries of fate. It was simply how the plains had been made, how they'd been since time immemorial.

But, fuck geography, and fuck nature, and fuck fate. The queen wanted a nice garden and a lake house.

With sunlight shining on her brow and dread sorcery in her hands, she created an eternal spring deep within the mountain, carved a river down through the plain until it flooded the salt pans. Not content with this alone, she dotted the landscape with manses of wood and water until the desert was gone. In its place was only lush grassland with a shining saltwater lake at its centre.

The queen built her garden and her lake house at the centre of the lake, and generations of mortals came to work the land, make homes, and start families. These people endured even after the queen's murder by her own servants, even through the horrors of the Great Contagion. They clung to their green and verdant land as if it were a lifeboat in a storm.

Now, it wasn't verdant or green anymore. Looking out at what was left, I almost could have tricked myself into thinking I'd never left the South. A long, dusty road stretched out in front of me, the flawlessly cut blocks of its construction burning hot under an unforgiving sun. To my left, I passed a stand of dead trees. They stood dessicated and limbless, bleached bone white by the elements. A sad reminder that something had grown here once, beyond the coarse grasses and stubborn shrubs still holding on. Whatever forbidden magic had maintained the Tarpan river had long since failed, and the desert had risen from the dead to reclaim domain stolen from it so long ago.

I squinted at another tall, thin shape on the horizon. This one wasn't another tree — it was too tall, too straight. "Don't worry, girl," I muttered, leaning down to pat my horse's neck. "Hopefully, that's a water marker." Maizee didn't make any acknowledgement of this reassurance. She was a faithful, stolid beast, and I had already grown quite fond of her in the short weeks we'd been together. It was nice to know that there was someone on this continent that was actually on my side, even if she was a horse.

In an uncharacteristic fit of optimism, I pulled my water skin off of my belt, tipped my head back and held it over my mouth, shaking it a few times as if some stray drop of water might have been hiding where there had been none before. I can last longer without water than the horse can, but that doesn't make it fun. Maizee and I persevered, forging ahead through the hot, gritty wind, eyes fixed on the foot of the pillar ahead. This was a mistake, as it would turn, but the gods all know, it wasn't the first I'd ever made. To my immense relief, I spotted what I had been hoping to find: A slightly raised stone basin, covered by a wooden lid to protect the contents from the elements.

Drawing up close to the pillar, I kept my eyes fixed on the well. Sure enough, the characters for "water" were written on the wooden cover in chipped, blue paint, along with the mon of House Mnemon and a date indicating the last time the enchantment had been renewed. It wasn't recent enough for any real comfort.

When I dismounted and slid the lid aside, I was greeted with a scant layer of water shimmering at the very bottom of the stone-bricked staft. With a grimace of disappointment, I lowered the bucket down into the well, and scooped up what water I could. It was less than I'd hoped for, certainly. I filled my waterskin up halfway, then set the bucket down in front of Maizee, who wasted no time in drinking it all.

"Good day, traveller," said a voice from above me. I jerked with surprise, hand half raising to the firewand on my back. I don't often allow myself to be so easily taken unawares. "Peace, traveller!" the voice said. Squinting against the afternoon sun, I stared up at the speaker. Someone had been sitting completely motionless atop the pillar, watching me the whole time. I was still trying to get a better look at them when they stood up, and somehow slid down the vertical surface, one hand and one foot sticking fast to the smoothly curving brick. They landed in front of me with a heavy thump.

I was looking at a woman, small in stature, and with a shaven head. She was clad in undyed hempen robes, and the kind of patient, peaceful bearing that, in my experience usually disguised someone completely confident in her ability to beat your head in. On most days, the confidence was probably not even misplaced in her case: Her skin had the rough, grainy texture of hewn sandstone. Like someone had carved a statue in the shape of a woman and then brought it to life.

"Apologies, sister," I said, raising my hands so she could see that they were very far from my weapons. "You took me by surprise." I smiled, as if a Dragon-Blooded Immaculate monk wasn't the last thing I wanted to meet right now.

She nodded, seemingly unoffended. "No harm done, traveller. Where are you headed?" She was looking at the foreign cast of my clothing, her gaze lingering on the distinctly-Southern weapon I'd nearly drawn on her. I didn't blame her — a barrel of shining brass ending in a wooden stock, a firewand was certainly eye-catching in this part of the world. Mine was particularly fine, the metal and wood both polished to a warm glow, and intricate scrollwork carved into the stock.

Her warm, brown eyes returned to me. I found my tongue to answer. "Voice-of-the-Tides Prefecture," I told her. "I've been away from home for many years." The best kind of lie was a half-truth. This road would certainly take me all the way to the prefecture of my birth, eventually. If I followed it all the way out of the Wastes, through Justiciar, and across the Serpentine River, I'd be at the base of the Silk-and-Pearl Peninsula, and it would only be a matter of following the shoreline until I came to the western-most tip. A long and arduous journey, but not an altogether unbelievable one. I even had travel papers for it and everything, although I'd rather not lean too hard on those, given that they were forged.

The monk nodded again at this story. Fortunately, I looked the part of a commoner from Voice-of-the-Tides. The descendants of Western islanders were by far the most numerous of that prefecture's peoples, and I had inherited the bronze skin and deep purple hair of my foremothers. "A difficult trip to take on your own. More even than you may remember, if you have been away from the Isle for so long."

Maizee's drunk up the last of the water from the bucket, her black-and-white head nudging it over as if hoping it might contain more. "I had noticed that the maintenance of roadside springs seems to have fallen by the wayside, sister," I said. I kept my voice respectful and ducked my head as I spoke — I didn't want to be taken as casting aspersions on the diligence of the Exalted engineers of House Mnemon. Even after however many years it had been, the little social niceties of life in the Realm came back as easily as breathing.

As she nodded again, the monk's smile dipped for the first time. "Many things have fallen by the wayside of late," she agreed. "Even armed, it is not safe to travel the wastes alone at night. There are dangerous spirits who creep out of hiding in the dark, as well as more human threats."

"Bandits?" I asked. "I recall there being talk of them when I passed through Kissed-with-Jade." I kept my voice deliberately casual, careful not to betray too keen an interest.

"Yes," the monk agreed. "They have mainly been raiding caravans, but I wouldn't put threatening a lone traveller past such villains." She paused then, eyes returning to my firewand. "It has been said that the thieves make use of flame weapons." It wasn't an outright accusation, but I was aware of how suspicious this might look.

"Well, I promise you, sister, I have nothing to do with those criminals," I said.

She looked at me long and hard, scrutinising my face for any sign of falsehood. I returned the gaze calmly, inwardly preparing to draw on her at the first twitch toward me. I'd need to kill her if it came to that, but I might get away with it if I could take her by surprise and finish things fast enough. I honestly wasn't confident that I could manage that, though. Earth Aspects were famously durable, and just from the look of her, I thought that this particular monk would probably make things messy for me if it came to a fight.

She inclined her head, and smiled again. "Of course. I would never dream of accusing you of such a crime without cause."

"I am relieved to hear it, sister," I agreed, relaxing a little. "I'm certain that these thieves will be brought to justice soon enough."

"That is my hope," she agreed. "A party from Lord's Crossing is hunting for them already. With any luck, they will soon trouble the people of the Wastes no longer."

"With any luck," I said. Damn it all — a group of soldiers getting underfoot is only going to make this trickier.

"If I might make a suggestion," the monk continued, "there is a village — Dinar. You would be able to reach it well before nightfall, if you continued on at your current pace. The villagers are good, honest folk. They would be more than happy to sell you a decent meal, put you up for the night, and water your horse properly."

"Thank you, sister," I said. I was probably going to need to take her up on that. As much as I'd wanted to avoid contact with the locals wherever possible, I couldn't very well have Maizee dying of thirst on the way. "How would I find this village?"

"Continue down the road until you come to a small fork," she said. "Take the road going east. It's not long, but it will take you up the hill to Dinar. You may tell the villagers that Sister Dust told you of them, if they are... curious. They know me well there."

Curious was a very polite euphemism for suspicious and fearful of armed strangers. "I will sister," I said. Then, because courtesy now demanded it, I added: "I am called Breaking Wave."

"Well met, Breaking Wave," said Dust. "I wish you good fortune. May Pasiap guide your steps."

It's amazing — as many years as the Immaculate Order has wanted me dead, as many monks as I've fought or killed... there was still a part of my Realm-born heart that soared at those words from someone like her. "You honour me, sister," I said, bowing. With Maizee finished her drink, I took a sip of my own from my waterskin, and swung myself back up into her saddle once again. "Farewell." Dust nodded once again, watching me leave with an unreadable expression on her face.

Of the lies I'd told her — and there had been several — the most egregious had been that I had nothing to do with the bandits. After all, someone had first put a weapon into their leader's hands. Now I just needed to find her before someone else did.

 

[Gazetteer]

City of Chiaroscuro,
The Near South,
Realm Year 759

When I first met my greatest failure, she was in the process of getting herself murdered.

The sun was just beginning to creep over the stunted remains of shattered towers, the light catching their steel-hard glass in a riot of prismatic colour. Even as a maimed shadow of its ancient glory, even apart from its role as the largest port city in the Southern Threshold, Chiaroscuro remained one of the great wonders of Creation. Tired and hungry after a very long night, I was on my way to buy a much-needed breakfast from my favourite food stall. Still, no matter how many times I'd seen it before, I took a moment just to appreciate the sight. Looking up as I was, I almost missed the four figures down a narrow alleyway as I passed.

One was in the throws of desperate, life and death struggle, lit from beneath by the ruddy glow of the filthy paving glass underfoot. She was young, maybe twelve or thirteen, pinned to a wall by her throat and kicking desperately at the snarling man holding her there. A bloody slash had been carved across his face, the knife responsible laying a short ways away. The man's friends or lackeys looked on, but their attention was more taken up by rifling through the girl's fat purse than the brutal act of child murder taking place a foot away from them.

I took this all in at a glance. It told a clear enough story — she'd walked down the wrong street at the wrong time of day, been grabbed for her money, and then had made the mortal error of fighting back. For all the stately beauty of its crystal streets and towers, Chiaroscuro was a city like any other, and moreso than many. It was treacherously easy to slip through the cracks of its polite veneer and land somewhere altogether less pleasant.

I had a choice, then. The same choice that everyone else who passed by this filthy dockside alleyway while this was happening had been given. Everyone before me had averted their eyes and walked away. I won't lie — I contemplated doing the same for a moment. The walls of the alley were new construction, these buildings made of sandstone brick that blocked out most of the sunlight rather than the luminescent glass of the older structures, and it was easy enough to pretend not to have seen anything.

Watching, the words of an old man I'd betrayed drifted into my head: No matter who you are or how mighty you grow, there are things beyond your power. You cannot right every wrong on Creation. But when you are confronted by an evil you can stop, do not stay your hand. Do not suffer a villain to walk free when your flame can punish them."

Gods all know, I'd disappointed that old man a hundred times before in a hundred different ways. For some reason, though, that particular morning, those words meant something. Or, they must have, because the next thing I knew, I was striding down the alleyway, the well-polished brass and wood of my firewand coming off of my back and into my hands.

It was one of the two counting the girl's silver who noticed me first. Her eyes went wide as she took me in, and they damn-well should have. Straight-backed, square-shouldered, steely-eyed, the sun at my back, the distinctive shape of my weapon held in close combat position. I knew that I cut an imposing figure. "Boss!" the woman hissed. "Trouble!"

The man with the cut face looked up, finding me right away. "Word of warning, friend: piss off."

"No," I said, voice flat. He was still choking the girl, whose wild eyes locked onto me in beseeching confusion. In that moment, seeing the true depths of her terror, I made up my mind that I was not going to be gentle with these people.

"Don't kid yourself," the lead thief scoffed. "At this range, you've got one shot. You burn one of us, and the rest gut you like a fish where you stand."

"It's not loaded," I said, meeting his gaze steadily. It wasn't even a lie.

The man with the cut face jerked his head to the side, and the woman who'd first spotted me lunged forward. The butt of my firewand made solid contact with her jaw, and I felt the familiar sensation of bone cracking under the impact. She went down hard, head bouncing on the crystalline street.

The third thief went for a knife from within his robes, but I was already on him — my kick stole the weapon from his hand, and a swinging blow from the length of the firewand smashed his nose in. This was when I ducked to avoid a knife slash from the lead thief, who had let go of the girl and tried to get the drop on me from behind. I swept the leader's feet out from under him, and turned back to the second goon in time to ram the barrel of the firewand hard into his solar plexus. He gave a harsh, ragged gasp and fell to his knees, the blood pouring from his nose blending in with the ambient glow of the street.

Then it was just me and the lead thief with the cut face. He stared up at me, conscious of how quickly I'd taken apart his little group of street toughs. He acted faster than I was anticipating, though, lunging not for me or the spilled silver or the mouth of the alley, but for the girl. I'd picked a fight with three armed thieves over her — she'd make a good hostage, he was clearly assuming.

I bought a booted foot down on his knife hand and felt the familiar sensation of fingers breaking under my heel. He hissed with pain, his weapon slipping from his grasp. "I judge you a coward and a bottom feeding scavenger," I said, voice hard as I let my firewand fall from my grasp. I hauled him up by the collar of his roughspun robe. From a sleeve pocket that shouldn't have been anywhere near big enough to hold it, I drew a flame piece out into my free hand, its silvery surface reflecting red in the light of the street. This one was very much loaded.

The thief stared down the barrel. "Wait!"

I pulled the trigger. There was a flash of cobalt flame, so hot that he just barely started to scream before he couldn't anymore. I was grateful for that — guards will only ignore so much before they're forced to protect something other than the goods of rich merchants.

Letting the body slump to the ground, I turned to the girl. She was still kneeling, clutching her throat, staring up at me with a mix of fear and defiance. Like she didn't quite trust me to have really done all this to save her. Honestly, I liked that a lot.

"You alright, kid?" I asked, bending to offer her a hand. "I know that wasn't fun-times, but we don't wanna stand around on top of those three forever." Two of the thieves weren't getting up for a while. One of them was never getting up again.

"I... I'm not hurt. I'm only... I'm only winded!" She answered in the same language I'd asked in, confirming a suspicion that had began to form in the back of my head. Her voice was pained from strangulation, but beneath that, the tones were educated. Her clothes were the sort of plain that a sufficiently sheltered girl might think of as inconspicuous, never mind that they looked closer to something you'd buy in Arjuf Precture on the Blessed Isle than in Chiaroscuro. It was a pity, too — in different clothes, her dark complexion, hair and eyes could have passed for local. Even though I was willing to bet she'd been skipping meals lately, her build spoke of a well-fed childhood. You sure didn't get that healthy, baby-faced look from a life of privation and hardship. Some runaway Patrician brat, I thought at the time.

When she didn't take my hand, I lowered it, instead picking up her knife. She flinched, but looked a little abashed when I only cleaned it off on a rag from my jacket pocket, then offered it back to her hilt-first. She snatched it up, sheathed it, and scrambled up to her feet.

"Come on, get your money and let's go," I said, stretching as I straightened. She was staring at me, maybe confused by the difference in my demeanor between now and a moment ago.

"Go?" the girl croaked. She still pounced on her fallen purse, hurriedly stuffing silvery coins and paper bills back inside. I hadn't reckoned on the paper — no wonder she'd been singled out as an easy mark. Who carried that much money around on them in this part of town?

"There are guards in this city, believe it or not, and honestly, the company here's just not that charming." I looked down at the group of harshly punished thieves. Of the two living ones, the man was still wheezing for breath and the woman was whimpering and clutching her jaw, looking at me fearfully. I disregarded them both, slipping the strap of my firewand back over one shoulder. "What's your name, girl?"

"Te— Joti," the girl said. "Just Joti."

I ignored the slipup. "Call me Breaking Wave. Wave's fine. When was the last time you ate?" I asked.

"Yesterday," Joti admitted. Her stomach growled, voicing its own opinion, despite the half-queasy way she was pointedly not looking at the burned face of the dead man. "Wait," she said, realising something all at once. "You're—"

"Speaking Realm? Yes, it's my mother tongue as well, believe it or not," I told her. "You look surprised! It's the hair, isn't it? I grew up on the Silk-and-Pearl Peninsula. Purple's common there, I'll have you know. Come on, though — you're buying us breakfast." With that, I strode back out of the alleyway, and back out onto the street.

"Says who?" Joti demanded, hurrying to catch up.

"Says the woman who just saved your life," I told her, grinning. "Stay close. You more or less have a giant 'rob me, I'm rich' sign hanging over your head."

"I'm not rich!" she said, a little too quickly.

I gave a quiet snort of derision. "Believe me. In most places, the amount of money you're carting around in that purse makes you rich enough to rob. How long have you even been in the Threshold?" I was entirely certain that the answer to that was 'about five minutes'.

She looked away from me, and nearly tripped over the foot of a man sleeping along the side of the street. She was forced to scury to catch up with my longer stride. "Well, a couple days, I guess," she admitted.

"I thought so," I said, nodding. "Well, I could probably give you a few pointers at least. You're like a little lost lamb who stabs the wrong people."

"I am not a lamb!" Joti insisted, voice thick with adolescent rancor. "And why would you want to help me like that?"

"Well, you're buying me breakfast," I reminded her, grinning back over my shoulder. "And, I suppose, I had people who helped me as well, when I first landed in the South all on my own. It's good luck to pass the favour along."

Watching her glower at me on that day, I would have never guessed that I was talking to a girl who would one day be the death of me. Everything was sharper in hindsight.

 

[Gazetteer]

Seven-Stars Prefecture,
The Tarpan Wastes,
The Blessed Isle,
Realm Year 770

When I rode into the village, Dinar struck me as an old woman a step away from her deathbed, stolidly pretending otherwise.

The town of Talent had been built around a powerful Wood manse that had managed to preserve a tiny slice of the green paradise-that-was for long years. The people there were able to grow enough food for their own needs and then some, selling the surplus to their less fortunate neighbours.

When the magic had finally gone bad, it had all come crashing down, and most of Talent's residents had fled like rats from a burning ship, moving to other towns or to chance their luck on the streets of Kissed-With-Jade or Ashara.

Some few, though, had refused to run so far afield. Of all the enchanted springs formerly feeding Talent's manse, one yet survived. It may have been the smallest and most humble of them, but it was yet enough to support a fraction of Talent's population struggling to get by.

Dinar sat in a cleft in the hills, small buildings of weathered wood and dusty stone taken from the corpses of greater structures. The spring that sustained this place sat at its heart like a life-giving shrine.

In the manner of the Wastes, villagers and buildings both were adorned as colourfully as possible. The people were dressed in garishly dyed cloth, jewellery of bright copper and polished glass. The buildings were painted in cheerful hues, the reds and yellows and bright pinks standing defiant against the bleak existence these folk must have led. Most of them scratched a living off of salt collecting and what meagure agriculture the small spring could provide.

Stares greeted me first, an armed and travel-worn stranger of a foreign cast. An old man paused in carrying a sack of grain. A young woman looked up from stirring a pot outside her house. A group of dusty looking children stopped their game to peer at me curiously from over the top of a crate they were hiding behind.

After a protracted silence, the second thing to greet me was a formidable looking woman: "Good day, traveller," she said, looking up at me with a wide smile that didn't reach her flinty eyes. "Are you lost?"

I looked at her and the others I could see. She was sturdy, middle-aged — broad shoulders and brawny arms the evidence of a fit build gone a little to seed. I didn't think it was just from hard work and heavy lifting. The straight posture, the way she placed herself so casually between me and her neighbours, the familiar manner with which she regarded my firewand all screamed Imperial Legion to me. The others hung back, going through the motions of everyday life, but clearly tense, watching for how this resolved. It wasn't a complete surprise to them that I was here, though — someone had seen me coming up the road and ran here ahead of me. A community like this needed that kind of measure in the Wastes.

I swung down off my horse, offering the woman a respectful bow. "I certainly hope not. This is Dinar?"

The woman nodded. "It is! We don't have much to interest travellers, however."

I smiled. "I merely hope to find food and lodging for my friend and I." I patted Maizee on her dusty side. "I was told folk here would be willing to sell me some?"

She relaxed very slightly at 'sell' rather than 'give'. Still, she asked: "Who was it you heard about us from? We're a little bit out of the way."

"A monk — Sister Dust," I said. "I met her on the road, and she spoke well of your village."

There was a genuine easing of tension at the mention of the Dragon-Blooded monk's name. "Sister Dust honours us greatly with her regard," the woman said. "If she has sent you here for our help, then I would be glad to offer you my family's hospitality. I hope that my caution hasn't offended you, sir — plenty of trouble on the roads these days." Her eyes flicked to my firewand again.

"Of course," I said, bowing. "I am a well-armed man travelling alone, far from home. A degree of caution is only understandable." The villagers were taking their cues from her — as she became obviously at ease with me, they stirred back to normal life, still curious, but willing to consign me to strange gossip rather than wonder if I was a potential threat to their safety.

"Well, we'd best get your beast taken care of," the woman said. "We have room to stable her with our donkey. I hope you don't mind the hayloft for yourself."

"It's a definite step up from the ground," I said. And it was, but honestly Maizee's wellbeing was more of a concern. I didn't exactly need her, in the strictest sense, but being a stranger on horseback was at least a mundane sort of curiosity. Faster travel methods, if detected, were decidedly less so, and this was the Blessed Isle. Discretion mattered more than speed. Things would go very bad eventually, more than likely, but it was always better to put that off as long as possible. I bowed once again. "You have my sincerest thanks."

Her name was Twining Flower, and I'd almost been right about her — a former career fanglord with the Tepet Legions, rather than the Imperial Legions. She'd fought with them since she was a young woman, until finally being forced into retirement by an injury that I could tell still gave her pain. She didn't show it that evening, but probably limped on bad days. Flower had settled back here with her wife, and was raising the children of her late brother.

I asked how long she'd been out of the Legions, and she told me six years. There was a small, tense silence then. Some would call retiring a year before the force she was part of had been utterly decimated in a brutal war a stroke of good fortune. She didn't have to say anything for me to know that she was the sort of woman who that fortune would only taste like ash to.

"Dragons, why is it so easy to talk to you?" Flower muttered, glancing away. "I don't usually drop my entire life story on the first stranger I meet."

"I get that a lot," I said, almost apologetically. "Are we here?"

We were. Flower's home was at the very edge of the village, a humble, two-room affair with a small stable built alongside it. The stable was currently playing host to a donkey who cast a strangely haughty look in my direction.

Before too long, Maizee was saddled and nosing through a manger of bedraggled looking hay, and I was joining Flower's family for supper.

"Are you a bandit, Mister?"

It had taken many minutes of the child's silent staring before he'd finally spoken up, small voice deadly solemn.

"Do I look so much like a bandit?" I asked, pausing over my rice.

The boy nodded. "Sparrow says you've got a flame-spitter, and you sure look like a barbarian."

His sister, Sparrow, was indigent enough at this betrayal of confidence that she tried to kick him, before Flower restrained her niece with one strong arm.

"Swaying Grain! Show more respect to our guest!" Flower's wife admonished, giving the boy's ear a sharp tug. She was as thin as Flower was stout, her words coloured by a strong Arjuf accent. I wondered if the life she'd chosen for herself had been hard to adjust to, after coming from one of the great port cities of the Realm, the gate through which all the wealth of the South was drawn in.

"Sorry, Aunt Naadia!" the boy whined.

"I'm not offended," I assured her, flashing a small smile as she released the boy. We were sitting in a cozy, humble space, the walls decorated by homemade bead hangings, the room warm against the cold of the desert night. It was amazing how much better cheap black tea and meagre food could be with a little company to liven it up. "And, I'm not a bandit," I told Grain. "Flame weapons are common where I've been living. And I'm not a barbarian, either." He'd meant a foreigner — that's one thing I still technically wasn't.

The boy blinked at this last, trying to square that with my Western-islander features and the colour of my hair.

"You sound like a Tider," Flower said, glancing at me as she released the pouting girl.

"I didn't realise I still had the accent," I admitted. Being on the Isle again after so long, it seemed, was making my old dialect reassert itself after many years of speaking almost entirely Flametongue.

"Just your hard vowels," Flower assured me. "And you have the look. Saw a lot of that in Navy sailors over the years."

"My brother was in the navy," I acknowledged. "I haven't been home in decades, though."

"Are you going to see your family, then?" Naadia asked.

"Yes," I said. And it wasn't even a lie, even if I had no intention of ever going back to Voice-of-the-Tides. The person I was looking for was the closest thing to family I had left, however unpleasant the eventual meeting would prove to be.

"Family is what's most important," Flower said, approvingly.

The girl, Sparrow, looked down at her plate at this. "Our parents were killed by ghosts," she said, quietly.

The adults exchanged a sad look, and Flower extended a hand to Sparrow's scrawny shoulder, giving her a reassuring squeeze. "My brother and his wife were caught out in the Wastes at night, harvesting salt. It isn't safe after dark, these days."

"Sister Dust got rid of those ghosts, though!" the boy said. "I'm going to protect people like she does when I'm older." He said it with all the pride and conviction of a six-year-old.

"She's Dragon-Blooded," Sparrow said, loftily.

"She says I can still train at the monastery when I'm older," Grain said. "You don't gotta be Exalted to be a monk!"

He was right, although I had to wonder if the ascetic lifestyle of an Immaculate monk would still appeal to him in another decade or so, when he could actually make the trek to the nearest monastery. There were always willing supplicants to the Order, of course, but the Great Houses stood on the very brink of tearing each other apart in earnest. This child's young life would be more eventful than he'd prefer between now and then, and war changes much.

"Are things as bad as they say?" I asked. "Dangerous ghosts and rogue gods and human bandits?"

"Bad enough," Naadia said.

"The spirits have been a problem for many years," Flower said. "It's gotten worse lately — many monks have left the Wastes to attend to larger troubles."

"And now we have that fire dragon," Naadia added. "She flew in one day and set up in the old burning manse." There was a note of wonder in her voice more than fear. It was difficult for Immaculates, raised to venerate the Immaculate Dragons and the Dragon-Blooded, not to be a little dazzled by the lesser elemental dragons of the world as well.

"It's not the dragon that worries me," Flower said. "It's those bandits."

"They use flame weapons?" I asked.

"Some do," Flower said. "They rob tax caravans and merchants on the road, and then vanish back into the desert like a mirage. No one's stopped them yet. How long until they're bold enough to try their luck against one of the towns with something worth taking?"

"Sister Dust mentioned you have a pair of Dynasts hunting for them, though," I said.

"Two scions of House Tepet," Flower said, not without a note of pride in her voice. "One a Sublime Armiger, no less." But her voice became very carefully respectful as she added: "They are few, though. And these bandits are cunning."

"There are rumours," Naadia said, even more carefully, "that the leader of these outlaws is herself a Fire Aspect."

"Rumours," Flower said, voice a little disapproving. "Let us not put too much stock into them."

"Rumours," I echoed, as if in agreement. The rest of the meal passed in more pleasant conversation. Nonetheless, privately, I was now absolutely certain that I was looking in the right place. She was here.

It was colder in the hayloft, but I had a roof over my head at least, and a warm blanket. With a full belly and the peace of night outside, I slept very well.

Or, I would have. I awoke well before dawn, to the sounds of horses outside and the hushed voices of their riders. At least a dozen, their creeping movements broadcast by the subtle sounds of metal armour.

I didn't waste a lot of time on contemplation: I rolled over, discreetly peering through a crack in the weathered boards of the stable's wall. Under the light of a full moon, I saw soldiers outside, bearing the distinctive, single triangular mon of House Tepet.

Evidently, I wasn't the only one Dust had been speaking to.

 

[Gazetteer]

The Dhezlan Steppe,
The Near South,
Realm Year 760

"Breathe in, pull the trigger and breathe out with the flame."

The burst of red fire streaked through the air, going well wide of the painted target and splashing harmlessly against the exposed stone around it. Joti scowled, already turning and walking the short trip to the bags of firedust sitting on the overturned barrel behind her to reload the firewand. She poured the glimmering black powder down the barrel in a carefully measured amount. Less diligent was how she shoved the wadding down behind it as though the ramrod were a spear she were driving through the heart of her worst enemy.

"Why do you never seem to use one of these?" she asked, brandishing the ramrod at me. "I don't even know how you reload as fast as you do!"

"There's a trick to it," I said. "You need to crawl before you sprint, though." That was true enough — there was a trick to the Cloud of Ebon Devils technique. Unfortunately, it was one that fell a little ways outside of the bounds of the mundane techniques I'd been teaching to her. There were things I could do that she might never be able to. That was a conversation I was still putting off having, though. It was a little cowardly on my part, but even after knowing her a year, she was Realm-born and raised Immaculate. I wasn't entirely sure how well she'd take the truth.

The two of us were travelling with a caravan going across the plains toward Paragon. Things had finally gotten too hot in Chiaroscuro — Joti hadn't pressed too hard about what exactly I'd done to make us need to leave in such a hurry, but I knew she'd noticed. I was covering my passage by playing mercenary guard, but they'd taken a chunk out of my pay for Joti. My student or not, she was still a fourteen-year-old girl. All around us, gently rolling grasslands flowed into the horizon. The sky overhead was wide and blue and cloudless, and the cruel sun beat down on everything it touched.

The caravan had stopped to rest during the hottest part of the day, the others finding shelter beneath hastily erected tents while we worked in the dubious shade of this incongruous pile of rocks that otherwise marred the view, just far enough away from a pile of cargo to be safe from a novice with a firewand.

Joti assumed the ready stance, the firewand gripped in both hands like I'd shown her, ready to bring it up for her next shot.

"Calm," I reminded her. "Steady. Still. Like an osprey sighting its prey."

She frowned at me like I wasn't making any sense. "An osprey?"

I grinned. "Big, predatory bird. You know, a sea hawk. Sharp beak, deadly claws..."

"I know what an osprey is," Joti says, trying not to sound too frustrated with me.

I kept going. "When an osprey sees its prey, there's an instant before it dives. It judges the distance, times it perfectly, sets up the perfect angle — all so fast that you can't even tell that anything so deliberate took place. It doesn't hate its prey, it doesn't feel anger for it of any kind. In the moment, it kills because that's what it is. That's what it's for."

Joti sighs. "Sifu, what does a seabird eating fish have to do with shooting fire weapons straight?"

I reached out and gave her forehead a flick. She flinched a little, but her stance didn't budge. Good girl. "That's what you need to be," I said. "A predator hunting the wicked. The target is your prey, the flame an extension of your will and your energy. Look at your target, let it become your whole world for just an instant, just the space of time it takes to breathe in and taste it. Then pull the trigger and force your intent out into the world along with your breath, will your flame to cleanse its corruption from Creation, "

"Did this make sense when your sifu told it to you?" Joti asked.

"Yes," I said. Which was only partially true — the osprey metaphor was mine, but it made so much sense to me I honestly thought it would help. "But then, he was a much better teacher than I am. Now, stop stalling." Especially because I didn't like thinking too much about the old man whose teachings I had betrayed in my youth, even if I was doing my best to replicate them for this girl's sake.

Joti took in another deep breath. She brought up the firewand, sighted down the barrel, the hot brass gleaming in the afternoon sun. Then she fired, not even flinching at the roar of the weapon, or the way it bucked in her grasp.

And once again, she missed.

Joti stared for a long second, not moving a muscle. Then she gave a cry of frustration, and actually hurled the firewand at the ground. I snatched it out of the air before it could impact, ignoring the pain from the hot metal against my weathered palm as I glared at her. All jocularity was gone from my bearing as I said: "You will not treat any weapon I give you this way again."

"What does it even matter?" Joti demanded. "Just another thing for me to be a failure at!" She didn't talk about her background, where she came from, why she'd left. In moments like that, though, it was always insecurity that bubbled up, the sense that she was measuring herself against a standard she had never been able to meet. Regardless, as always, I softened in the face of it. I never wanted to be the one to deal that blow she was always expecting.

Maybe I'd already begun to reconsider my early assumption that she'd come from a patrician family, even then. The signs of what she really was had been there, a childhood of staggering opulence and emotional neglect. The truth was, I hadn't wanted to think about the complications the truth about her would bring, up until the choice had been taken from both of us.

For some reason, it was getting hotter. I was too distracted to think about that, let alone recognise what it actually meant. "You don't master anything in a few months," I told her. "You know this."

"Why do you even care?" Joti called over her shoulder, already, stalking off. "Why even bother with me?"

Because once someone had bothered with me. I'd opened my mouth to tell her as much once again, when I saw the smoke. Thin trails of it snaked up from her hair, her shoulders, her hands, the grass at her feet. I looked into her eyes, and I saw something in them surge to dancing, flickering life. That was when I finally did recognise what was happening. I looked at our supply of firedust, the cargo beyond it — with the direction she was going in, these now both looked far, far too close to Joti for comfort.

In the split second before everything caught fire, I put on a burst of speed, seized the girl around the waist, and half carried, half tackled her clear of it all. She hit the ground, too stunned to speak, staring at me wide-eyed. I was already rolling off and away from her, frantically beating out the flames that had caught in my travel robe.

Beside me, flames roared up around Joti, bright blue and blisteringly hot, an inferno that spread around her on all sides. Through it all, she stared at me, torn between shock and obvious elation as she sat there.

"Wave!" a man's furious voice cut through the air, speaking rapid Flametongue. "What in the name of all the gods are you doing with that firedust, woman?" Dosan the caravan master, heavyset and quivering with agitation, came around the stand of rocks to see why a column of fire was now looming over his camp. He came up short when he saw Joti, mouth snapping shut in wide-eyed astonishment.

"Trying not to catch fire!" I told him, putting yet more distance between myself and my student. The rest of the guards and many of the passengers were right behind him, forming a rough semicircle to stare at the spectacle Joti had become. It was sometime before she burned herself out enough to approach again. The blue flames went lower and lower, before finally guttering out.

Then it was just Joti sitting there in a circle of blackened grass. She stared up at me as I walked toward her. The dark of her hair and eyes had been burned away, both replaced by the same blue as her fire had been. The ends of her hair seemed to flicker and waver of their own accord, ethereal and flamelike. Despite the intensity of her newly-awakened Aspect markings, looking at her, the thing that struck me most was her mixed emotion. The natural thrill of Exaltation — relief going across her face, for some reason — was swiftly tempered by a self-conscious sort of worry, a sense of genuine confusion. As if, somehow, she knew that this would complicate things between us, and thought I might cut her loose.

I offered her a hand. Hesitantly, she took it and stood, still unused to the elemental power now coursing through her veins. I grinned at her, then turned to face Dosan. "Why don't we revisit the issue of whether or not she gets paid as a guard?"

There was some startled laughter from the crowd, even from Dosan. More importantly, I saw the stiffness leave the girl's body at my words. And, as a bonus, I did manage to talk him around to it, in the end. A fourteen-year-old Exalt is still an Exalt.

Nonetheless, as everyone began to go uneasily back to their shelters, I caught her looking from me to the spot she'd been standing in when I'd grabbed her. She was noticing, perhaps, how far and how fast I'd carried her without visible effort. She wasn't all that heavy, but I hadn't even been breathing hard. That was still a conversation I'd be able to put off for a good while longer, but...

I think we both started to realise something about the other, that day.

 

[Gazetteer]

Seven-Stars Prefecture,
The Tarpan Wastes,
The Blessed Isle,
Realm Year 770

The soldiers arrayed outside the house weren't even the worst of it. As a fanglord dismounted to rap on the door and rouse the family, I watched a woman near the back of the group climb down from her own horse, graceful as falling snow. Even from this distance, her presence was like winter's chill come early. A tall, pale creature, snow white hair unbound down her back, eyes as blue as the white sea, white robes implausibly pure and clean. The very picture of an Exalt holding herself above and apart from the mortal rabble. On the ground, she carried herself like a thing insubstantial, feet barely disturbing the dust at her feet. Even without the pair of chakrams hanging at either hip, one look told me that she'd had some instruction in Air Dragon Style — not a master, but proficient enough to be dangerous.

Beside her, a man in the ceremonial paint that marked a Sublime Armiger of House Tepet dropped to the ground with a muted, metallic clatter. He wore a lamellar of alternating black and blue jadesteel, the segments forming the mon of his house several times across his chest. Even more eye catching was the massive weapon slung over his back. A powerbow of strangely crystalline construction, strung and ready to be taken up at a moment's notice, despite the seeming lack of any arrows. Tiny arcs of lightning played across his body, his limbs, his electric-blue hair. The Armiger stood half a head taller than the other Air Aspect, but from the way he looked to her, it was clear who was in charge.

Sister Dust seemed very small and drab beside those two as she slipped down from the Armiger's horse, where she'd been riding behind him. She didn't look terribly pleased at this situation, a frown creasing her sandstone features.

"Open the door, in my lady's name!" the fanglord shouted, still banging on its rickety surface.

"I still question the necessity of all this," Dust said, voice pitched only for the two Dynasts. No one ever counted on my hearing being as good as it is. "These are good people. I wouldn't have sent the traveller here if he seemed an active danger to them." Speaking to them, her High Realm had a too careful, learned-by-rote quality about it that had been entirely absent from her Low Realm before. A peasant-born Dragon-Blood who had chosen the razor of the Immaculate Order rather than the coin of the Imperial Legion — it was a common enough story.

The lady-Dynast laughed, a delicate, faintly condescending sound. "Oh, you really haven't changed at all since the Cloister, have you? Always ready to give the benefit of the doubt, simply too trusting for your own good. Fortunately, you have me."

What grated the most was that, dammit, she was right. Dust had been wrong to trust me, and that bred just enough affection for her in me that I resented hearing her being talked down to like that. Of course, I had no intention of sticking around to defend the monk — I was already leaping down from the hayloft, landing in a crouch on the stable floor. Maizee and the donkey, already awake from the sounds of horses and soldiers, stared at me with wide, equine eyes. As Twining Flower's alarmed voice was heard coming from the direction of the house, the donkey began to call out nervously. The noise carried.

"I'll check the stable," The Armiger said, without waiting to hear more from Flower.

"You two: Go with Aresh," the lady-Dynast said.

"I'm fine to stick my head in on a lone drifter without an escort, Laera," he complained. Still, three sets of feet were already approaching.

I took stock of the situation. Three Dragon-Blooded and a small force of mortals, all with horses of their own. This was a situation where making a stand would accomplish little other than a lot of death... including mine, very likely. And sadly, trying to ride out of here on horseback would only delay things, even if it would take the confrontation away from the village.

"Sorry, girl," I muttered to Maizee, digging through the saddlebags where they hung nearby. I just had to hope that the people here would be kind to her, whatever they might come to think of me. She whickered softly, as if she knew I were about to leave her behind.

"You. Step away from the horse." Well, damn. There went slipping away unobserved.

Just having hooked the last of my firedust pouches to my belt and slung the firewand over my shoulder, I complied. I stepped away from Maizee and turned to face Tepet Aresh, Sublime Armiger. Up close, his presence brought with it a certain humming charge in the air and the fresh scent of ozone. He glowered at me from beneath a layer of blue-white face paint. Behind him, the two soldiers guarded the door, one carrying a lantern.

"Good evening, my lord. How may this humble traveller be of assistance to you?" I asked.

In a way that none of the other extant Houses are, House Tepet was old. Older than the Realm, older than the version of the Immaculate Philosophy that it espouses. Tepet himself was the ruler of a rival power on the Blessed Isle in the first century after the fall of the Shogunate, a rival to the Scarlet Empress who had fought well and valiantly, but lost. Instead of destroying his people, she had been brought into the Dynasty with honour with Tepet as her consort. This unique history had allowed them to retain their own blend of religious and martial traditions dating back to the Gentes of the Shogunate.

The Sublime Armigers were one of these traditions, an ancient warrior order dedicated in worship to the Immaculate Dragon of Air, Mela. Artifact weapon specialists who each took up one of the greatest treasures of their House, and devoted their lives to understanding it, to emulating the revered ancestor who first took it up. As with all of Tepet's elite forces, the lion's share of them had ridden North to make war against an Anathema warlord less than a decade before, and had never come back again. So really, it was just my luck to blunder into one here.

The bow, I could now see, was a marvel. Strands of blue jade stone were interwoven with a clear, blue-tinged crystal I finally recognised as real adamant. All true artifact weapons were both unique and priceless. This bow, though, could only have been forged — if you could even call it forging — in the murky reaches of the First Age, and was likely worth more than most lesser satrapies in their entirety. It could only be the famed Wrath of a Weeping Sky.

"What is your business here?" Aresh asked, eyes cold and appraising.

"This humble traveller is only stopping here for the night, my lord. On the way to visit his family in Voice-of-the-Tides." I bowed my head respectfully, but I could already tell he wasn't buying it.

Aresh's frown deepened, creasing the Fan of Mela painted on his forehead. Somehow, it was in the frown where the family resemblance leapt out at me. It was Joti's frown, and her same upturned nose. The blue hair and eyes might just have been a coincidence, but what did I know about how Aspect markings were passed on across different Aspects? "And you're getting ready to leave in the night just for the pleasure of it? Let me see your travel permit."

"Of course, my lord," I said, producing the rolled piece of parchment in its leather case. As he took it, examining it in the lantern light, I could already hear the others approaching. Presumably Flower had directed them my way — I didn't hold that against her, all considered. It was important that the Dragon-Blooded be convinced of the family's ignorance, with what was likely about to come next. Aresh kept on frowning as he scrutinised the seals and lettering on the papers. They'd fooled two mortal officials before this, and for a moment I thought they were actually going to fool an Exalt as well. He looked up. "The Fastidious Keepers' seal looks correct, but it... isn't. This forgery is unnatural."

Well, the game was really up. I didn't say anything, just subtly tensed for what would come next.

"Tell me what you know about this 'bandit queen'. The Fire Aspect terrorising the Wastes." Aresh took an intimidating step forward, trying to impress me with his greater size. A mistake — an Exalt was an Exalt and not to be underestimated, but he was an archer, and he didn't yet understand what he was putting himself in arm's reach of. If he'd been alone, it would likely have been a fatal mistake.

I let an insolent grin slide over my features. When I answered, the careful respect was gone from my voice, and I deliberately broadened my accent. "Why? Kin of yours? Cousin? Sister?"

I knew I'd been right on the second guess, because that was when he tried to backhand me across the face. I evaded the blow, stepped inside his guard, and seized him by the throat, lifting him an inch off the floor. Aresh barely had time to widen his eyes in surprise at my strength before I hurled him through the far wall. "She doesn't want to be found by you," I said. Anymore than she wanted to be found by me.

Then I had the firewand in my hands, stock slamming hard into the face of the nearest soldier. He went down choking on his own teeth. The second was already drawing her sword with a startled curse. With one hand, I pulled a firedust pouch free of my belt and with the other, I flipped the firewand around. Somehow by the time the muzzle was pointed at the second soldier, it had been loaded. A blast of blue flame took her full in the chest, searing through her armour with a reek of burning leather. The lantern smashed on the floorboards and guttered out. This all took seconds. The animals reared and screamed, and darkness hadn't even had time to settle back over the stable before it was lit by a cool radiance centred on me.

I had just stepped over the nearest of the prone soldiers when Dust burst into the stable. She didn't need more than half a second to take in the scene before her — the bodies on the floor, Aresh nowhere to be seen, and me: A silver disc shone from my brow like a miniature full moon, instantly recognisable to any Immaculate as the Mark of the Frenzied. Lines of glowing moonsilver seemed to seep up out of my skin, my power revealing the ritual tattoos even through my clothes. My eyes were a piercing, avian yellow as I looked back at her.

That half a second's shock was all I needed, though. The firewand was already reloaded as I inhaled. As I exhaled and pulled the trigger, another burst of blue flame streaked toward her. Dust braced herself, arms raised in front of her in a static block, Earth Essence hardening her flesh against the scouring fire. When the flames cleared, she was only scorched... and I was already gone.

She whirled, trying to catch me with a blow as I streaked past her, and I caught her small fist on my firewand. The metal rang as if struck by a hammer, but I leapt past, landing out in full sight of Tepet Laera, the remaining soldiers, and Twining Flower. All of them looked at me as though death itself had just come to call.

"Anathema!" Laera shouted. Unnecessary, but someone always had to shout the word to make it official, in my experience. She hurled a chakram at me, her white hair flying behind her, forcing me to dart aside to avoid the spinning ring of steel.

The soldiers — brave, stupid men and woman — drew their swords and held their ground as I ran at them, but they didn't prove much of a barrier. I leapt clear over their heads. As I passed, I just barely caught sight of Twining Flower, staring at me in the full grip of a profound horror of the demon she'd allowed into her family's home.

I came down in roll just ahead of where Laera's next chakram sliced into the dirt. My firewand snapped up as I stood among the scattering horses, ready to give her a parting burn at least, but the burst of cobalt fire went wide as a streak of light tore through the night, nearly spearing me where I stood. I barely dodged in time, and it carved a line of electric pain along my side as it passed, drawing out a pained cry. It kept going past me, sparking and quivering where it stuck in the ground: An arrow formed out of lightning made solid, too bright to look at without pain. I had always known that it wouldn't take too long for Aresh to pick himself back up again. The worst injury he'd taken had been to his pride.

I turned and ran, sprinting out across the plains in a zig-zag pattern. The second lightning arrow went right past my head. I leapt again, and the third was aimed precisely at the place where I would come down. Fortunately, for me, I didn't come back down.

My body shone silver, giving way to a different shape entirely. Powerful wings caught the air, grey feathers still lit by lines of moonsilver as they heaved me up into the night, an osprey very far from the water. A final arrow passed too far below me to do much damage — my sudden transformation had thrown off Aresh's aim.

I wheeled up and away, knowing I'd escaped for now. Getting away was always easy enough when you could turn into a bird. It was when you had something that kept you from running far enough — something to accomplish, something to protect, something to find — that things got dicey where a Wyld Hunt was concerned. And this would absolutely become a Wyld Hunt now, with me as its quarry. I had just shown myself for what I was in the middle of the Blessed Isle, in front of two Dynasts and an Immaculate monk.

My timetable had just been shortened considerably.

 

[Gazetteer]

Port of Chalan,
The Near South,
Realm Year 762

Before I got to work, I took a moment to whisper a prayer to Ingenious Flame, goddess of flame weapons. Unnecessary, some might say, given that I was only cleaning empty weapons, but I liked to give this particular goddess her due whenever it made sense. She reserved most of her heart for inventors and flame weaponsmiths. This left only a little to be divided up among those of us who merely used those inventions to burn things to death.

I'd only met her the one time, and she'd told me as much to my face. When she grudgingly admitted to feeling obligated to favour her grandson's students, I'd promised myself that, going forward, I'd butter her up as much as possible. Just in case she ever found out what exactly my old sifu thought of me these days.

I knelt on the boarding house floor, a private little nook that only had room for two beds, which amounted to a private room for the two of us. With my prayer finished, I set about cleaning out the barrel of my firewand, a time-consuming and annoying process that I made certain to undertake at least twice a month. Soot buildup could affect performance at the worst times, and I relied on this weapon for too much to allow that. Once it was taken care of, though, I moved on to my real treasures.

I drew a pair of flame pieces out of their impossible hiding places up my sleeves, setting them reverently down in front of me. Maintaining these was both more and less difficult than the firewand. They were of profoundly complicated construction, with numerous moving parts and an ostentatiously ornate appearance. But their silvery surfaces rippled like water in the sunlight, save for the ominous blackness on the inside of the barrels, concealed beneath muzzles in the shape of snarling wolf heads. Anyone with even a passing knowledge of such things could tell that these were no mundane pair of flame weapons to fail or jam. These were real devil casters, objects of ancient power in their own right. They still deserved a thorough polishing whenever I had a good opportunity.

The pair of them had been forged by one of my past lives. A gift worthy of a queen that had been grudgingly bestowed upon his most hated rival, his Solar bond-mate. It had been her prize for defeating him in a contest of skill, and he'd poured all of his aggression into the moonsilver that I now held in my hands, each devil caster concealing a barrel of hateful soulsteel. I'd dreamed of this reluctant forging every night, until I'd finally tracked down the long-dead Solar's tomb, and stolen them. The Solars had been all but gone for a millenia and a half — it wasn't as though a new incarnation of my mate was going to spontaneously turn back up looking for them now, was it?

I was most of the way through the second of them when the sound of footsteps on the stairs told me I'd lost track of time. I whisked the silvery devil casters back out of sight just as the door burst open, admitting a sixteen-year-old Dragon-Blood. Joti came in backwards, her arms full of coffee and honeyed pastry balanced on a wooden tray, a pair of her own flame pieces on either hip. I thought her eyes lingered on the hem of my sleeve just a second too long, before she swept into the room with a crooked grin. "Morning, sifu," she said. "Well, closer to noon, but who's being particular?"

"I'd wondered where you'd gotten to," I said. I held up a hand, showing her what kind of state it was in after working on my weapons all morning.

"Don't worry, the girl at the coffee house lent us the worst cups," Joti said. She perched herself on the edge of a nearby bed, balanced the tray on her lap, and distributed the coffee from the hot cezve into two small, battered cups.

"Oh, so that's why this took you so long. Was she pretty?" I inhaled the scent from my cup. I hadn't grown up with coffee, but the South had taught me to appreciate the bitter drink in all its many varieties over the years.

"Oh, leave me alone!" Joti said, speaking around a mouthful of triangular pastry. "You found me with a boy one time!"

"You didn't answer the question, I notice," I said, smiling.

Joti scowled in the particular way that meant her face was heating. "She was— never mind that! I maybe found more work for us."

That distracted me from teasing her for a little while, at least. "What kind of work?"

Joti was nothing if not eager to change the subject. "Some kind of fae creature on the trade road. It's playing daring-bandit-folk-hero."

I raised an eyebrow. "Daring bandit folk hero?" I asked.

"Oh, you know! Stealing from tax collectors and rich people no one likes anyway, feeding the poor, rescuing slaves, that kind of thing." She looked a little self conscious as she added: "I used to think that kind of thing seemed romantic, when I was younger. In books, you know?"

"And you still want to go hunt her down?" I asked. The reality of such a life was considerably less glamorous than the picture cheap Realm adventure novels would have painted.

Joti made a face. "Well, it also keeps eating peoples' souls. So, there's a reward and everything."

That did sound like a real problem, and the kind we were equipped to solve. But still... "You're in quite a hurry to rush off again," I told her. "We've been here less than two days."

"Well," Joti said, playing with a strand of blue hair, "we probably should move on. Since... you know." When I only raised an eyebrow at her again, she glared at me. Joti had never exactly been a placid girl, and her soul having been infused with the essence of Fire hadn't made her any moreso. "Do you think I'm stupid, sifu?" she demanded.

"I don't," I said.

Joti looked away, gazing out the window. It allowed a very pretty view of the port, the water glittering jewel-like in the sun. The mons of House Simendor and House Mnemon flew from the two stately palaces on either side of the harbour. "That crooked judge you were playing Hunting Cat with last night," she said.

I tried to laugh it off. "He wasn't that sore a loser."

She looked at me, suddenly full of nerves. When she spoke again, her voice was careful in a way it usually wasn't. "I heard about it in the coffee house. Early this morning, he went into the Prince's Market, stood on the plinthe of the statue of Simendor the Hellblade, and confessed his crimes for all to hear."

There was a slight pause before I responded to that. Too much to hope she hadn't noticed it. "Well, all that drink must have made him do more than lose at board games, I suppose."

"He ran off before anyone could catch him. When they dragged him out of his bed an hour later, he was screaming that he'd been there the entire time, despite the whole market having just seen him."

"I guess he had second thoughts."

For a moment, she looked like she might drop it there once again, like so many times before. But she was done pretending not to see these things. "You weren't in your bed this morning."

It had been a little reckless on my part, admittedly, as much as my heart swelled with vindictive pleasure at the thought of that judge being hauled away in chains. When the rage of Luna surged within me in that particular way, it was either this, or tearing someone's heart out. Some of the things he'd taken silver to look the other way on weren't anything the Simendor would be able to sweep under the rug now that they'd come to light so publicly. Not without incurring the displeasure of the Mnemon satrap, anyway. Joti might have had a point about skipping town sooner rather than later, though.

"Maybe I just went for a walk," I said.

She sucked in deep breath, as if steeling herself. "Sifu, when you put all our money down on that game last night, you told him: 'If I win, I'll be happy with a round of drinks and your face when I beat you in three moves.'"

"It was a very funny expression."

"No, don't do that! This isn't... I notice things, alright? I've seen the way you fight, how you never get tired, how you heal as fast as I do. Those devil casters you keep hidden, somehow. Your eyes are wrong sometimes! I'll look at you, and for a second, they'll just look... different." She looked at me with an almost fearful sort of challenge in her eyes, holding my gaze with no indication of wanting to back down.

Today was the day, then. With a stretch, I rose, moving to sit on the windowsill, one leg curled beneath me, still sipping my coffee. "Let me tell you a story."

She blinked. "Sifu?"

"It's the one you're asking to hear," I told her. "So. You know I grew up in Voice-of-the-Tides Prefecture. Have you been there?"

"No," Joti said. "But my favourite cousin married into— well, into a family there."

"House Peleps?" I guessed. Joti gave a start, looking at me with surprise. I'd never pried into her past, or given any indication that I might have guessed so much of it on my own. But, if we were sharing, then we were both sharing. Slowly, she nodded. Satisfied, I continued:

"I was a peasant," I said, grinning at her. "My family lived on the shore of the Gulf of Daana'd, fishing mostly. My brother ran off to join the navy when I was younger than you — our father was dead set on me staying to help him bring in the catch."

Looking out the window at the port and the Inland Sea beyond, I could remember the coastal waters of my youth. The salt spray, the wind in my hair, the many small pains of my mortal body as I'd hauled up fishing nets and pulled on oars. The weight of expectations I was ill-suited to live up to. The relationship with my father that had, over time, curdled into something dark and spiteful.

"When I was in my twenties, I left. I got into a fight with my father one night, stormed out of the house, and just... decided I wasn't going back. I didn't know where I was going or what I would do when I got there. So I just walked along the beach, watching ships sailing out to sea." The wind had been cold and unforgiving, the water reflecting the setting sun over the distant mouth of the Gulf. I'd been bleeding from a split lip and split knuckles, with no money, and no possessions at all beyond the ragged clothes on my back.

"I thought I might walk all the way to Bittern, sign on with a warship like my brother, or find some other drudge work in the city. I didn't want to do any of those things, but... it was at least a change. The sun was just about gone beneath the horizon when I rounded the bend and saw him."

"Him?" Joti asked, interrupting for the first time as I paused.

"An old man sitting alone by a cooking fire." The scent of smoke and boiling mussels drifting through the air, hitting my empty stomach like a blow. The easy smile on that leathery face somehow so welcoming that my feet had started taking me in his direction before he'd even started to wave me over. "He shared a meal with me, and a bottle of wine, and talked to me for hours." Time had blurred in that encounter, hours rushing by one moment, minutes stretching out in others, the wine going profoundingly to my head as I'd layed out all my woes to this kind stranger.

"He asked me if I'd really be happy on a ship, risking my life, breaking my back at someone else's command and for someone else's profit. I realised I wouldn't be." How trapped I'd been had come crashing down on me all at once, and I had sobbed, long and hard. The old man had laid a weathered hand on my back, gently consoling.

"Eventually, he told me I could still chart my own course, if I were brave enough to try despite the danger." He'd told me that I could fly if I wanted to, but that many would try to drag me down again if I did. With a throat raw from crying, I'd said yes. "He poured me one last cup of wine, toasted me, and well..." I shrugged. I didn't try to describe the Second Breath — she'd taken it herself, after all.

Joti frowned in confusion and growing unease. "But... who was he?" she asked.

"He was Luna," I said. For the first time in front of her, I let my tattoos seap back out of my skin, moonsilver gleaming in the shapes of cresting waves flowing around my arms and my neck and my torso. The true shade of my eyes — raptor yellow — was on full display. Joti stared, her expression blank, a moment away from bolting for the door. Suspecting isn't the same as knowing, after all. I wasn't finished, though.

"He told me to run." To run and run and run until I reached the threshold. To never tarry or look back, because the Blessed Isle would be my death, a proclamation made with all the weight of divine prophecy. "So I became a bird for the first time, and I caught a fish. And then I became the fish, and I swam across the Inland Sea until I dragged myself out onto the Southern shore."

As the fearful silence stretched out between us, I looked away from her face, voice going very quiet. "Joti, three years you've travelled with me. Have I ever hurt you?"

She swallowed, forcing herself to relax inch by painful inch. "You haven't, sifu," she whispered.

"That's not going to change," I told her.

"It's just..." she didn't seem to be able to articulate exactly how she felt, knowing she'd been training under a Lunar Anathema this whole time.

"I know," I told her. "I was raised Immaculate too, remember?"

She nodded, hands balled into fists on her lap, and we were both quiet for a long moment.

Once again, I broke the silence first: "I was half-surprised when you didn't go back two years ago. After you Exalted."

She ran a hand through her hair again, still not looking directly at me. "Do you know what a leftover child is?"

"Yes," I said. The hereditary Exaltations of the Dragon-Blooded were more likely to be passed on if the parents waited a certain amount of time between children. In the Realm, conventional wisdom was to space them out by at least a decade — entirely reasonable, when you have a lifespan in the hundreds. Parents who had children too quickly were considered irresponsible at best, and the children themselves... Well, they'd been made with the 'leftovers'. Little was expected of them, and it affected their status and the treatment they could expect.

"Even if you were though, you Exalted anyway," I said. "And not even late. You could have turned up back home in time to start Secondary School."

Joti laughed. "After missing two years of Primary? That would have been fun. Roughing it out in the Threshold like this wouldn't have exactly done me many favours as a Dynast." It was the first time she'd ever admitted to what she was.

"Still," I said, "a Prince of the Earth."

Joti's face took on a bitter cast. "Mother was very highly placed in our House. My great aunt is Matriarch Tepet Usala — at one point, mother was being groomed as her chosen successor. Then I was born four years after my older brother. It was enough of a scandal that mother lost a lot of status."

"She took it out on you?" I asked, quietly.

She shot me a mirthless sort of smile. "Yes, she took it out on me. Everytime I saw her — a few times a year — she would tell me how poorly my studies were going. How badly I compared to my brother. I was kept out of sight in the house almost all the time, every mistake I made was punished twice as hard. Then my brother Exalted — at twelve, because of course he did — and it just got worse. A few years ago, Mother decided my nanny was coddling me, so she dismissed the only person in that entire household who cared at all about me. They don't get to do that, then have me back once it turns out that against the odds, I'm useful after all." Joti stewed on that anger for a lingering moment, before she deflated, ruffling her hair once again with one hand, shooting me a deeply self-conscious look. "I know this isn't... Look, I know I was fed and clothed and lived in luxury all that time. I know how sheltered I was when you found me."

I nodded. "Like a little, overbred dog struggling for life in the wild."

"Hey!" she shouted, forgetting that I was a demon long enough to glare. Then she laughed again, conceding the point. "I just mean, I've seen how most people live. I know these aren't... real problems."

I shrugged. "Fake problems don't make a thirteen-year-old flee across the Inland Sea."

She looked a little relieved at the reassurance. "I didn't expect it to work. I kept expecting someone to stop me, the whole way. Then... Then I was in the Threshold, and I had no idea where to go. I'd be dead if I hadn't met you, wouldn't I?"

"Oh, I don't know. You were at least a scrappy sort of overbred dog. You might have lived, if those thieves didn't slit your throat."

Joti shot me a dubious look, but gave a weak smile in return. It faltered a moment later as she asked: "So, what now?"

"Oh, well, now I reveal that this has been a years-long scheme to turn you against the Realm and manipulate you into supporting my evil machinations," I said, voice deadpan.

She laughed again, this time long and hard. I let her work it out before I said anything else.

"It doesn't have to change, as far as I'm concerned," I said. "I'm not exactly going to bring you around Golden-Leaf Liseli if I can help it, but the Pact can't tell me who I associate with, even if it is a stray Dynast. Especially under your circumstances."

"Who?" Joti frowned in confusion. "And what Pact?"

"We'll talk about it later," I said, waving the topic off. "The point is, you're my..." If not a daughter, at least a younger sister. I felt more protective, familial affection for the girl than I'd felt for anyone else in decades. "... Student. And your Kiss of the Sun Concentration technique is still much too sloppy for me to have you going around on your own, telling people that I taught you like that."

She scoffed, smiling again in spite of herself. "I can draw... nearly as fast as you, now."

"Speed doesn't matter if you can't hit anything, kid. Not to mention looking good doing it." I grinned back. There was a lightness coming into my chest — it looked like I wasn't going to lose her after all.

"Fine, fine. I know," she admitted. "I still don't know why you bothered with me in the first place, though."

"Weren't you listening?" I asked, leaning forward on the windowsill. "When I was lost and alone and had nowhere to go, someone gave me the power to pull myself up. For too many years, I behaved selfishly. I didn't use that power to carry that deed forward at all. That day in the alley, though, I just... needed to change things. I couldn't just keep walking, and I couldn't leave you on your own afterward."

Joti nodded slowly. Her lip trembled. With a growl of frustration, she scrubbed at her eyes with a forearm, trying and failing to mask her sniffling. "You're... you're the only one who's ever... I don't even care if you're an Anathema."

Rising from my perch, I crossed the room to Joti, and put a soot-stained hand on her shoulder. "No sudden surge of patriotism spurring you to slay me?"

She cracked a tearful eye, looking scornfully up at me. "Dragons, no. House Tepet will be fine without one more Dragon-Blood. Never mind the Realm."

"Well, that's certainly going to help me sleep a little more soundly tonight."

In later years, I would often look back on this conversation. In 762, even as we talked in that room on a beautiful day, all of Creation teetered on the precipice of what would later be tritely referred to as the "Time of Tumult". When Joti said these things, House Tepet had been ascendant all her life. It was the most powerful military House in the Realm, its legions the envy of the Dynasty. She couldn't possibly have known what was coming anymore than anyone else.

Later that same year, the Scarlet Empress would order the Tepet Legions to make war on the Anathema warlord, the Bull of the North. Within three years, the Empress vanished, and those legions were utterly shattered in battle. Joti's mother would limp back to the Blessed Isle, so maimed that her fighting days were entirely over. Her father, all of her siblings save for one, her matriarch, and many, many of her cousins would simply never return at all. House Tepet was a shattered husk of its former glory, left weak and at the mercy of vicious rivals.

Joti was in the grip of the two great delusions of the young Exalt: That she could do as she pleased without consequence, and that there would always be time to change her mind later. With centuries ahead of her and her estranged family heavily Exalted themselves, why wouldn't she be able to turn up in another twenty years to smirk in her mother's face, if the fancy took her? A harsh lesson that the mighty all eventually learn too late is that no matter how powerful you feel, Creation doesn't wait for you.

On that day in Chalan, though, things had been good. We'd departed in a hurry on the fae bandit's trail, hunting her down from hideout to hideout, until we'd finally cornered her a week later. Joti had gotten the kill.

 

[Gazetteer]

Seven-Stars Prefecture,
The Tarpan Wastes,
The Blessed Isle,
Realm Year 770

An osprey's talons were specialised for fish. That morning, they worked well enough on an insufficiently wary rabbit. Cooking fires were a luxury I couldn't entertain at present, so I made due with a quick and bloody breakfast, finishing just as the sun had finished rising.

Stomach full, I flew over the Salt Road, keen eyes scanning the ground for signs of a very different kind of prey.

How much time I had depended in part on what the Dragon-Blooded did next. They would almost certainly warn neighbouring settlements and send for reinforcements regardless. The ones close enough to be a problem would be warrior monks from Trigram Monastery, and troops loaned from the garrisons of the cities of Ashara and Kissed-With-Jade. The real question was how aggressively they would pursue me before receiving those reinforcements. Three Dragon-Blooded and a smattering of Tepet Legionnaires was short of what was desirable for a proper Wyld Hunt, but it was enough to be dangerous to me, particularly when I didn't exactly have time to pick them off individually.

I could hope they didn't know what — who — I was here for, but Tepet Aresh had guessed at a connection to Joti's group before he'd so much as known what I was. They had some tenuous reason to assume I might stay in the Wastes. The only reasonable course of action was to assume that they would be as hot on my metaphorical heels as they could manage.

Not for the first time that morning, I spotted the glint of metal below, and began to spiral my way down to it. A wagon had been burned there, now laying in a heap of charred wood. I landed beside it, a man once again, and began to pick over the scene.

A caravan had been attacked in that place — there were signs in the dry earth of people and wagons and horses that had been driven off the highway, and of a struggle that had ensued. I knelt by the burned out wagon frame, running a finger over the blackened metal of a wheel bearing. The bronze was partially melted, and the residue that came off on my hand had the distinct, acrid scent of spent firedust. Joti had definitely been here.

I spent a while longer on the ground, inspecting the fading impressions left behind. All the bodies and valuables were long gone, the survivors among the caravan having been allowed to limp away with their lives. It was the third such site I'd found, if also the freshest. As with those others, I began to follow the tracks left behind by the fleeing thieves, heading back out into the Wastes.

Maybe twenty bandits, all told, and on foot. I decided this while walking half-bent, not wanting to lose track of the trail despite the sun beating down harshly on my neck as I went. One would expect them, heavily laden down with loot, to have needed horses or some other mode of transport. Instead, as before, the trail simply ceased.

They had stood together here, organised into a line. Then, seemingly, they'd vanished. I crouched down to frown at a particular mark on the ground amid the bandit tracks, a footprint far too large to be anything like a human or a horse. Four reptilian claws had dug into the dirt there, with a matching print a ways off.

I was still puzzling this over when I felt a certain prickling at my back, the strange certainty that I was being watched. I glanced up, peering around at the Wastes surrounding me. A heat mirage shimmered out of the corner of my eye, among a stand of long-dead trees. Slowly, I straightened, not letting on that I'd noticed anything, and began to keep walking. Whatever it was followed.

That morning, I had already covered more ground on the wing than I would have all day on horseback. I could hunt my own food, sleep in any abandoned structure or skeletal stand of trees, and avoid human settlements whenever possible. And this was why, on the Blessed Isle, that still wasn't enough.

The Isle was not as safe and controlled as the Realm liked to pretend. The Wastes were a good example of that on their own, but beyond that, there were expansive stretches of wilderness, whole mountain ranges, another large desert aside from this one. The Blessed Isle was, in truth, a vast continent onto itself. But all it ever took was one minor spirit spotting you and whispering in the ear of the Immaculate Order. The spirits of the Isle knew who was in charge, and had little to gain from aiding a Celestial, compared to currying favour with the Immaculates. You might find the odd older god who resented the current state of things enough to be nostalgic for the time when we had dominated the Isle, but that was far from a safe bet, and the Order's wrath would be terrible for anyone caught sheltering an Anathema. This situation would have been treacherous even for a Changing Moon infiltrator or a No Moon shaman, and I was neither.

I walked in the direction of a deserted farmhouse, its roof gone, its walls desiccated. Stepping over a long-ago streambed, I walked around to its far side as casually as I could, then waited, my back to the wall. I strained my ears to listen for a sound that didn't truly exist in any physical sense, until I just barely detected it:

Nothing walked around the corner, and I lunged for it. My hand closed on thin air, seizing hold of a handful of ragged finery that I forced to be solid and visible. With one hand, I slammed the thin figure who appeared against the wall hard enough to make the wood groan dangerously, drawing my firewand bayonet with the other. Blue Chiaroscuran glass, stronger and sharper than steel, pricked a scrawny throat, drawing a bead of divine blood. "Talk," I growled.

"Unhand me at once!" the spirit demanded, voice tremulous. From a single look, I could tell he had been a harvest god, once. Threadbare robes of office hung awkwardly on his frame. A crown of grain stalks, all dried out, half broken, perched atop a head of filthy hair. In another time, when this land had been green and good, he would have had festivals in his name. He would have stood as a distant and mighty figure to the mortals under his care, a vital god for some stretch of farmland that no longer existed. No trace of that dignity or authority remained now as he stared up at me.

"Why were you following me?" I asked.

His flax-coloured eyes shifted back and forth, as if trying to find an escape. "Following you? Of course not, I would nev—"

I flared my Caste Mark, yellow eyes boring into his, and his words died in a pitiful squeak. "I am Breaking Wave, Chosen of Luna and Righteous Devil. You will not lie to me."

His face, already the exact shade of sun-dried grass, visibly paled. "M-M-Mercy! Please, mighty Lunar, spare this wretched spirit!" Any Exalt was a potential threat to a petty god like this one. Dragon-Blooded could break him. Drive him from their lands, disperse his form again and again, imprison and chastise and reduce him in a thousand different ways devised by the Immaculate Order over the centuries. But, without rare and valuable artifacts or the most prized of secret martial arts techniques, they could not easily destroy him outright. A Lunar, though, could rend apart his essence and devour it, never to take form again. I could see that knowledge burning in his panicked eyes.

He needn't have been quite so concerned. As I've said, I wasn't a No Moon shaman. My own talents stopped at forcing him to materialise. I could hurt him very badly, but he'd bounce back from whatever I did to him eventually, even more diminished than he was now. I wasn't about to offer that as a reassurance, though. "Who are you, and why are you spying on me?"

The god swallowed. "Lodan Greenheart, Mighty Lunar. This wretched spirit was just... I'm only doing what I was told! Watching the road, being on the lookout for... for anyone like you."

"Like me?" I asked.

Lodan cringed in my grip. "Armed strangers! Especially armed with that!" His eyes flicked to the Firewand slung over my back. "The Lady of the Wastes will reward any who bring her word of the thieves!"

I frowned. "What Lady?"

"Tharasht Tears-of-Dust!" Lodan said. The goddess of the Tarpan Wastes herself was keeping tabs on Joti's band of brigands. Now that was interesting. "Where can I speak to her?" I asked.

Lodan blinked. "To... to Lady Tharasht?" he sounded startled. She was not the sort of goddess anyone sought out if they didn't have to, so much as the sort they appeased to convince her to stay away. I was short on time, though, and I'd already been made. One frightening deity was the least of my concerns. Under my look, Lodan kept talking. "Here! Anywhere in the Wastes. I can call her for you!"

I held him for a moment longer, then released him. Lodan fell heavily to his knees, frantically fishing within his robes for something. What he pulled out was a human skull, bleached white and jawless.

"What is that for?" I asked, sheathing the glass bayonet back at my hip.

"The bones of a woman slain by the Wastes," he explained, voice hurried. One hand straightened his crown, the other set the skull down in front of him. "She can see through the eyes of all such remains." Charming.

As I watched, Lodan prostrated himself before the skull, and began to address it directly, even more reverently than when he'd been begging me for his life. "Oh great goddess, she who turns rain to ash on the breeze, she who steals the very life from the tongues of the unworthy: Please attend your unworthy servant."

Nothing happened at first. Lodan didn't move and the skull simply sat there, staring back at us. A crow cawed in the distance. Then the sky began to gradually darken and a hot, dry wind picked up. It dragged with it a great cloud of dust and I shielded my eyes against the biting grit as it concentrated into a dust devil centred directly above the skull. As we watched, the whirling dust eventually took shape.

There was a story told by the folk of the Wastes. When the Tarpan river had flowed pure and true, it had a goddess both gentle and kind, first among the many river deities of the region. Beloved of the people, she had kept fields green, healed the sick, saved the innocent from drowning, and shared the bounty of her river with all. Every town and village had thrown lavish festivals in her honour whenever the Prayer Calendar permitted. But when the waters of the Tarpan had begun to shrink, so too had her heart, becoming as hard as a stone and as dry as the riverbanks she'd presided over.

I didn't know if that was Tharasht's story. What was indisputable, however, was that when Heaven had deemed it necessary to appoint a deity of the Tarpan Wastes, Tharasht Tears-of-Dust had been there to accept.

A woman both monstrously tall and frightfully gaunt looked down on us with pitiless, black eyes. She had ash-grey skin, and brittle, bone white hair. Dust wept continuously from her eyes, and poured from her chapped lips as she spoke in a voice that parched the throat just to hear: "Lodan Greenheart. What news have you brought me this time?"

"Oh, Great goddess," Lodan said, not raising his crowned head, "A... man wishes to speak with you."

Tharasht seemed to blink at that, looking at me for the first time. She took in a deep, rattling breath, and tasted my power on the air. Narrowing her gaze, she swept forward, the tattered hem of her dress swishing past Lodan as if he were nothing. Lodan wore rags as a sign of his vagabond status. Tharasht wore them as a badge of office in their own right. "You should not be here, Moonchild," she said. "This land is not for you."

"My goddess told me much the same, when they Chose me," I said.

"Why do you seek me, then?" There was a wary curiosity there, but no warmth.

"I do not seek you," I admitted. "I seek a woman. A Fire Aspect named Tepet Joti, who carries a pair of moonsilver devil casters."

At this, Tharasht ground her teeth. Not wincing at the stone-on-stone shriek this made was one of the harder things I've ever done. "The thief," she spat. "The pet of that damned snake."

"What snake?" I asked, mind already racing.

Thrashed bent down to look me in the eye. "Why do you want to find the thief?"

I told her the least complicated of the several truths I could have shared. "She betrayed and robbed me."

The goddess looked at me for a long, uncomfortable moment, the dust falling away from her face. I didn't blink or look away, and finally, she spoke a single name as though it were foul in her mouth: "Splendid Cinder."

A 'snake'. The strange claw marks. Naadia's story over dinner last night. "... the dragon," I said.

"The dragon," Tharasht agreed, hate filling her skeletal features. "Not even half a century old, flying in here like she owns the place. Gathering up her court of common elementals and broken gods and ghosts, of all the lowly things. One day, the monks will break her. And I will laugh."

"And Tepet Joti is being sheltered by Splendid Cinder?" I asked, trying to keep things on-topic.

Tharasht straightened, looking down at me from her full height once again. "Yes."

"Where can I find Splendid Cinder?"

Tharasht considered this for one long minute, clearly torn between what was good for her, and what was bad for the dragon. "I will show you," she decided, "but only so that you might bring woe down on the head of the upstart. Do not look for my aid or friendship beyond this."

"I would be grateful for that much," I said. Only a fool would look for friendship from such a creature. "Are you not concerned about what the Immaculates will do if they find out you've helped me even this much?"

Tharasht gave me a small, deeply unpleasant smile. "I know exactly what to tell the Dragon-Blooded," she said, ominously. "Lodan." She didn't even glance at the lesser god as she spoke his name.

"Yes, great goddess?" he asked, voice strained.

"You will take the Moonchild to that which he seeks."

"Of course, great goddess!" Lodan said. "It will be done!"

She nodded once, casting me a final glance. "Good luck with your vengeance, Moonchild. Enjoy it before they come for you."

"I'll do my best," I said. Without another word, Tharasht raised her arms to the sky, and scattered back into dust.

As the sky lightened, Lodan remained on the ground, taking a moment to compose himself. Looking down at him, pity stirred in my heart. "Here." I bent down, offering him a hand up.

Lodan flinched at first, before realising I wasn't going to strike him. Hesitantly, he took my hand, and allowed me to pull him to his feet. "Will we leave now?" he asked, not quite looking me in the eye.

"Immediately," I agreed.

Lodan nodded, turning to face the right direction.

I didn't trust Tharasht Tears-of-Dust anymore than I could throw her, but she'd given Lodan a straight enough order, and I believed her when she said she would use me to spite a rival. It looked like I would see Joti again soon enough.

 

[Gazetteer]

Nameless town along the Diamond Road,
The Burning Sands,
The South,
Realm Year 767

The Diamond Road stretched down the length of the South like a great serpent, slithering its way from the Lap in the Near South all the way to Gem and the other mining settlements amid the glittering extremes of the Burning Sands. It wound its way along the contours of the Firepeak Mountains where it was practical, oasis to oasis where it wasn't.

It was one of the great trade routes of Creation, bringing the wealth of queens north in the form of precious mineral wealth, firedust, petrified smoke, and other wyld-touched substances found only near the Southern edge of the world. In turn, the wealth of queens was sent south as well, in the form of grains and textiles that keep the cities of the Far-South from starving outright.

Merchant caravans made the long, harrowing trek in staggering numbers, praying always that their next source of water would still be where they expected it to be, death surrounding them on all sides in the largest desert on all Creation. Thirst, starvation, savage beasts... and thieves.

The town the two riders made their way toward was one of those that the ghost towns of the Tarpan Wastes would remind me of, years later. It had been built around an oasis, an island of green amid sand and hard packed earth to every side. Then the water had gone away, and so too had the people. The empty shell remained, walls and buildings of mud brick, their contents long picked clean.

As the two women neared the place where a gate had once stood, the older of the pair turned to the younger. "You're sure this is the place?"

"Of course, lady," said the younger. She was little more than a child, and beneath the scarf that protected her from the elements, she was plainly fearful.

"This is where your family is being held by 'the bad man'?" the woman asked her.

"Yes, my lady!" the girl lied, eyes wide and earnest. She was overselling it, frankly.

The woman smiled, pulling back her wide-brimmed hat so that it hung on her back by a strap, bright blue hair spilling free. From that smile, I could tell that she wasn't buying this story for an instant. Still, she dismounted, tying off her horse at a convenient post. She was twenty-one, as tall as I was, and bereft of any of the residual baby fat and furious self consciousness she'd displayed in her younger years. As she walked through the gate, a flame piece at either hip, she had the upright, straight shouldered confidence of a true Righteous Devil.

Joti didn't even look up as the very moment she passed through the broken wall, the girl spurred her own horse away in a frightful hurry, letting out a shrill whistle that carried far over the desert air. Signalling anyone who might be waiting within the dead town.

As Joti walked into that place, all was still. Empty mud brick houses stared at her from all sides, grouped closely together to offer shade from the sun. Overhead, a bird circled, riding high on desert thermals.

The ambush was finally sprung as Joti stepped into the next narrow street. A man stepped out into the path, blocking the end of the street. He held a curving sword ready in his hands. Behind Joti, a woman blocked the way she'd come, clutching a long knife.

"You shouldn't have come alone!" a voice called from overhead. From rooftops to either side of the street, figures stepped out, four more outlaws, all holding flame weapons of their own. The leader, a lithe man dressed in black, leaned down with a sneer on his handsome face. His complexion was a warm brown, and his eyes danced every colour of a fiery rainbow. "You killed my mother, Devil."

Joti frowned for just a moment, then made the connection. "Five years ago. The raksha bandit queen. Your mother was a soul-devouring monster, changeling."

He glared, pointing his flame piece down at her. It was a masterwork of steel, forged by the famed smiths of Gem. "She was still my mother. And I won't hear that from you. I know what trained you to fight, Devil. And it's not here to save you."

Joti drew both her own flame pieces, good Varangian brass glinting in the sun. "I don't need her for this. Onyx Shadow, the Despot of Gem is willing to pay your weight in silver if you're brought to him alive. Half that, if you're dead. And half a dozen other rich bastards are nearly as eager."

"You're outnumbered," Onyx Shadow said. "We have you six to one."

Joti grinned up at him. "About to be less than that." She brought her flame pieces up, already loaded, and fired. Twin blasts of cobalt flame struck an outlaw each overhead, poisoning the air with screams and the scent of burning human. She darted aside in time to dodge the return fire from their companions.

To either side, the man with the sword and the woman with the knife rushed Joti, and she flicked open the attached blades on each of her flame pieces. She caught the descending sword stroke with one, stabbing its wielder through the throat with the other. Then she twisted aside from the knife, shoving the dying swordsman hard into his ally so that they both went down in a tangle of limbs and blades and blood, the sword driven through the woman's chest.

Up on the rooftops, the remaining outlaws were still reloading. Joti simply ran up the side of the nearest building, rising as steadily as an ember from a furnace. As she crested the top, her anima flared fiery blue around her, both flame pieces filling up with pure Fire Essence. She fired.

One outlaw fell writhing and burning off the edge of the roof, and Joti landed on its very lip. She whirled to fire her second flame piece at Onyx Shadow, standing alone now on the other rooftop. He had his own weapon reloaded in time to fire back at her as he leapt through the air to avoid her attack, landing in a roll and popping back up with an acrobatic flare.

Joti had twitched aside from Shadow's shot, but hers had grazed him painfully along one cheek. "You've studied Golden Exhalation," she said.

"I have," Shadow said. Masters of Golden Exhalation teach their students that to stay still is to court death. They learn to fire and reload while constantly on the move, turning every fight into a spectacle. It was always particularly stark when contrasted against its frequent rival, Righteous Devil Style. A Righteous Devil learned the stillness of perfection, and the killing power of moral judgement.

Shadow tossed his over robe aside, revealing a bandoleer of flame pieces across his chest. He dropped the empty masterwork in his hand without hesitation, replacing it with a lesser flame piece, and fired all in one motion, using his style's characteristic dancing movements to send a long, winding trail of red-gold flame at Joti.

For a mortal, it was an impressive move, and Joti responded to it in the cruelest way possible: She let it hit her. Her anima surged for just a moment, and took in all his flame as though it were nothing but a warm breeze across her face.

Joti smiled. "I am Fire. You just play with it."

With a wild howl, Shadow dropped his second flame piece, drew another, fired. Then another and another and another, weaving a curling lattice of death, utterly emptying his small reserves of essence along with every loaded weapon he had, desperate to burn her.

When the smoke and flames cleared, Joti's hat was burning, drifting away on the breeze. And she was still smiling, completely unharmed. She raised a flame piece and filled it with Fire Essence yet again. Her anima banked still higher, waves of heat rolling off her. Her hair moved luminously in time with her anima, her eyes alight. "Onyx Shadow, I name you thief and murderer. Beg for your life, and I may grant it to you."

The fae-blooded man, his allies gone, his weapons exhausted as well as useless, faced with an Exalted foe more terrible than he'd ever imagined, turned tail and ran. His long legs carried him over the rooftops, desperate to put as much distance as he could between himself and Joti.

She didn't follow him. Instead, she stood stock still, her arm as steady as iron, weapon trained on his retreating back, power building up within the barrel. The muzzle of the flame piece sprouted wings of palid flame. Joti took a deep breath, tasted the corruption of the world. When she breathed back out, she pulled the trigger to burn it clean.

A bolt of cobalt blue flame, darker than her anima, exploded out of the barrel, carried on eye-searing wings to fly fast and far and true. It struck Onyx Shadow in the back, and sent him tumbling off the edge of the final rooftop. Onyx Shadow, condemned and burned, landed in the dirt with an agonised cry. With one good hand, he tried to crawl forward, and came face-to-face with a pair of boots: Mine.

"Give it up," I told him. "You're not going anywhere on your own like that."

For a moment, he almost looked like he wanted to protest. Then his strength failed him, and he collapsed. I crouched down to check his pulse. Maybe it was the fae blood, but he was holding on, at least. He might even live long enough to be handed over to the Despot, but he certainly wouldn't live well. The burn on his back was terrible, and the air around him smelled like firedust and charred meat. My heart didn't move too much to pity, though: I knew too much of what he'd done, even if he hadn't just tried to lure Joti to her death.

That was how she found us — me crouching over his unconscious form. As she dropped down from the rooftop, she was grinning, obviously pleased with herself and her victory. When she saw me, the smile vanished. "You followed me?" she demanded.

I straightened, eyes narrowing. As was often the case in those days, looking at her left me torn between deep pride and intense frustration. I'd seen the whole fight from the air, and she'd applied all my lessons perfectly. When I opened my mouth, though, as always it was the frustration that came spilling out: "You told me you were going to wait for me to come back before you tracked him down."

"He was baiting me out!" Joti said. "I knew exactly where he was. And you were supposed to be weeks! What happened to smoothing things over with Liseli?"

"I... had a feeling," I said. Golden-Leaf Liseli would keep, I hoped. I'd caused them a setback with that caravan incident on our way down here, but they were the type to take individual setbacks philosophically. One didn't live to be a thousand-year-old No Moon by putting all of one's plans into one basket. Of course, I already was somewhat outside their good graces, even before this...

Joti was unimpressed. "Meaning, you just didn't trust me!" Her anima flared a little more around her.

"Should I have trusted you?" I asked, gesturing around at where we were. "You went after a gang of murderers on your own, days after you thought I was gone!"

She scoffed. "He only had five with him!"

"You didn't know that when you came out here. What if there had been another twenty out of sight?"

"They were using flame weapons!" she said. "flame weapons, against me."

"You didn't know that!" I insisted.

She took a step forward, stepping around Shadow to look me in the eye. "I'm Exalted too, Wave! I can handle one changeling and a pack of common thieves in the desert without you hovering over me!" She was shouting now — Joti only ever used my name when she was particularly angry.

For years afterward, I'd look back at this moment more than any other. Was I being unreasonable? Yes, in a very real sense. Joti was Exalted, and a grown woman. I could have backed down, could have apologised. I could have told her she'd done well that day. I could have admitted that it was the thought of coming back to find her dead that was making me act like this. That when I looked at her, I saw the woman... but also that mortal girl from the alleyway eight years before. The teenager who had held herself together for weeks after hearing about what had become of the family she'd left behind, until she'd finally broken down, crying into my shoulder. I could have tried to find the words then and there to try and make her understand any of this.

Instead, what I said was: "That doesn't make you invincible, Joti. Do you have any idea how many Dragon-Blooded die at your age?"

"Not as well as you would, I suppose!" she said.

"That's not what I mean, and you know it," I said.

She waved that off. "Oh, we both know you've killed your fair share. It's not as though you haven't thrown yourself into danger when it suits you, over the years!"

"That," I said, "is not the point."

"Do you know how I felt today?" Joti demanded. "Fantastic! Alive! Unstoppable! Like a hero."

I remembered that feeling, and how easy it was for it all to go wrong. "Burning a few bandits in the desert doesn't make you a hero," I told her, harsher than I meant it to sound, with the memory of my own actions from years past in mind.

Out of everything, this was what made her reel back as if slapped. "You think so?" she asked, voice dangerously quiet. "If I walk up to any major settlement along the Diamond Road with him in tow," she jabbed a finger at Shadow, "after taking out six armed outlaws singlehanded, do you think they wouldn't call me a hero? Do you think they wouldn't shower me in silver? That I wouldn't have my pick of pretty girls and boys lining up to hear the story? Onyx Shadow was wanted all the way from Lock to the Lap! How many people has he killed, or left for dead, or sold to the raksha? I thought that this was what you wanted! I thought that hunting down villains like this was why you trained me. But it's not good enough, is it? It's never going to be good enough! What's even the point of doing this?" Her voice grew louder and louder as she went, and she was nearly screaming at me by the end. Finished, she stared at me challengingly, waiting for me to say something.

The dead silence was broken only by Onyx Shadow's faint groaning, and the call of buzzards that had begun to circle overhead. Finally, I said: "If you're stopping men like Onyx Shadow so you can be fawned over by pretty girls, you haven't learned a thing." It hadn't been what she'd meant, and I should have known that. When had I started to sound so much like my sifu?

For an instant, Joti was angrier than I'd ever seen her. Incandescent, trembling with barely contained hurt and outrage. I expected her to explode again, to yell and scream, to storm off or even draw her flame piece on me. Instead, all at once, she deflated, closing her eyes and heaving out a deep breath. When she opened her eyes again, she looked tired and strangely resigned. "Just help me get him tied up, sifu," she said. "I'll go look through their supplies." Then she turned and walked away, anima still churning around her.

We barely spoke a word between then and nightfall. There had been bodies to burn, Shadow's wounds to treat, supplies and horses to take stock of. The outlaws had had enough food and water to see them all through at least a week or two out there, so it was more than enough for our purposes.

We holed up in one of the empty buildings for the night. I laid out a bedroll on the empty main room of what had once been a family home. Onyx Shadow was laid out in the next room, his wounds treated, but unconscious. Joti had wordlessly gone up to the roof to be alone, despite the cold of the desert night. I had resigned myself to days of steely silence and periodic, heated arguments. We'd forgive each other eventually — we always had before.

I was polishing the moonsilver surfaces of my devil casters, more for my own comfort than out of need, when I became aware of Joti standing in the doorway. "How do you feel about some target practice?" she asked, oddly calm after what she'd sounded like earlier.

I glanced up. "Why?"

She gave a smile that seemed more than a little forced. "We can make a game of it. Six shots each, smallest scorch mark wins. If I win, you finally let me try those out." She nodded at the devil casters.

I raised an eyebrow. "And if I win?"

Joti grinned nervously. "How about my face?"

That got my attention. I looked at her in surprise for a long moment. It wasn't the kind of offer I'd expect at the best of times, let alone so soon after so bad a fight. I spoke carefully: "You know, once I have it, you can't exactly take it back afterward if you change your mind."

Joti shrugged, an odd look that I couldn't identify on her face now. "You can't take back a lot of things, sifu. Do you want it or not?"

I couldn't deny that I did. Not necessarily to use, but the trust that I thought the offer represented meant far more than I could make myself say to her. I set down the devil casters and followed her outside.

For reasons that will soon be obvious, my memories of that night were hazy. Looking up at the moonless sky and dedicating the coming 'hunt' to Luna. The feeling of Joti's flame piece in my hand. Flames carving the night, mine and hers for the last time, splashing over the targets we'd roughly set on a crumbling portion of outer wall. I'd won, which I think we'd both expected, and after that, we'd slid to the ground, our backs against the wall, looking up at the stars.

Joti offering me a wineskin.

Why wouldn't I have accepted it?

The wine hitting me like a hammer to the head after only a few mouthfuls.

The quiet words, "I'm sorry, sifu."

Then nothing but formless, surreal dreams, and I was truly dead to the world.

When I finally woke up, piece by bleary piece, it took several long moments to realise anything was wrong. Illusory flowers and bursts of light still bloomed in the corners of my vision as I tried to crawl out of the bedroll I'd been left in, back inside the building we'd meant to stay in.

Rude sunlight streamed in through the doorway, and I had to cover my eyes against the pounding in my head. With a groan, I consulted my moonsense to see what time it was, how much of the day I'd wasted in bed. It was almost noon... three days later than it should have been.

I shot to my feet, nearly falling over from the aftereffects of whatever Wyld drug she'd found in Shadow's things to lace the wine with. I staggered through the building: No Joti, no Onyx Shadow. No horses outside where we'd left them. It was only after I'd spent a hot, desperate hour staggering around the town, calling her name, that I'd even registered that my devil casters were missing from where I'd left them as well. That would matter later, but it barely registered at the time.

I've been hurt in my time. I've been stabbed, burned, bludgeoned, and shot with arrows. I've been poisoned before this, broken bones, felt my skin scraped raw countless times. I put a bone fish hook through my hand when I was eight, nearly drowned when I was fourteen. In the first decade after my Exaltation, I'd had so much electricity pumped into me by an Air Aspect monk with a Wyld Hunt that I'd barely been able to see straight enough to fly away.

None of it compared to that day, waking up alone in that desert, realising what had happened. What Joti had done. There was no rage yet. No furious urge to hunt her down and demand she answer for everything. That would come later in fits and spurts. But then and there, there was only room for the bitter, stinging knowledge that the one person I'd trusted most had deliberately gotten my guard down so that she could betray me.

With no one to see or hear or care, I put my head in my hands and wept long and hard.

 

[Gazetteer]

Seven-Stars Prefecture,
The Tarpan Wastes,
The Blessed Isle,
Realm Year 770

At dinner the night before, Naadia had said that the fire dragon had moved into "the old burning manse." The term of familiarity had blown right past me at the time.

Talent, the town that had come before Dinar , was large and once prosperous. It had been built around a manse aligned to the element of Wood, one of the structures built in ancient times to seal life-nourishing magic into the land. Even once that magic had failed elsewhere, Talent's manse had made all the crops and livestock for miles around it supernaturally productive.

But little by little, the Dragon Lines that had fed the manse's magic had shifted, Wood Lines replaced by Lines of Fire and Air. At first, this had only meant that the miracles that fed the town had weakened. Then one day, a tipping point had been reached. The manse's living wood had begun to smoke, then had outright caught fire. This many years later, the situation had only gotten worse. The buildings of Talent were cloaked in an eternal, smokeless flame. At the centre of it all, the manse — a fortress of beautifully carved wood — stood out like a pyre for all that had been lost. The whole thing was dazzling in the night.

I looked down at this spectacle from my perch on the naked branch of a dead tree, overlooking Talent from a small hill.

"Here it is," Lodan whispered. He was trying to hide behind the tree, as though Splendid Cinder might see and recognise him all the way from here otherwise.

I leapt down off the branch, flapping my way to the ground, and standing up in my true human shape. "Can I even walk into that?" I asked.

"The flames in the manse don't burn you, since Splendid Cinder claimed it," Lodan said. "You can go in... if the guard lets you pass."

I laughed, shouldering my firewand. "I think I'll manage."

Lodan also laughed, but it had a shrilly nervous quality to it. "Yes, of course you will." He paused, then asked: "May I go now?"

It had been a trying day for him, and he'd followed Tharasht's directions to help me without complaint or hesitation. It was much more out of fear of her than any positive feeling for me, I knew, but it had still been welcome. "Oh, Lodan Greenheart," I began, not taking my eyes off the manse, "this humble traveller beseeches you: Wish me well, and find your way home."

Lodan gave a start at my reverent tone, and caught the prayer like a beggar being tossed a siu when he'd expected a sharp kick. He was silent for a moment, then whispered: "I wish you luck, then, Breaking Wave. Whatever your errand may be." After that, he was gone.

I entered the town on my own, navigating between homes and businesses that were all too hot to approach. It was unpleasant going, if not particularly difficult. Merely a matter of picking my way between infernos on my way to the largest of all.

It was only a matter of time before I was standing before the manse itself, seperated from it by only a stretch of open ground.

The doorman was easy enough to spot. A large, shaggy, silver-bearded buck stood before massive doors, the flames of the manse not seeming to bother him. As he surveyed the night, there was a look of thuggish boredom in his eyes. I recognised him as kri right away — an elemental of Earth, usually found in service to more powerful spirits. At first, he seemed to be digging at the dirt with the central-most of his three impressive antlers. Looking closer, I could tell that he was playing solitaire with a battered Gateway board, even if he wasn't playing well.

There were many ways I could have dealt with this. Announced myself at the gates and demanded to see Splendid Cinder directly. Quietly bribing him with a bit of Essence. Befriending him over a game, until he agreed to let me in. I could also have just killed him — I was in a hurry, after all.

But, being a Lunar gave me unique options. This kri would have snapped to alertness had a person, human or spirit, approached. He didn't notice a dark-furred rat slipping under the doors behind him.

True to Lodan's word, despite the flames dancing on every wall, the manse didn't hurt me. It felt pleasantly warm, the air thrumming with Fire Essence, frenetic and excitable. It reminded me of Joti, and the already confused knot of emotions in my chest tightened a little more. I left the rat shape.

Even back at full size, the long hallway I was in was grand in scale, lined with many doors. The walls, floor and ceiling were carved with scenes of growth and the hunt, rendered hellish by their cloak of flame. I ignored all the doors to the side — the set at the far end of the hall were ajar, and through them came the sounds of music and laughter.

I reached them after a small eternity — less than a minute — planted a hand on each of them, and heaved them open.

There were many kinds of spirit court. There were still the officially sanctioned Elemental Courts with duties assigned by Heaven and strict hierarchies within themselves. These days, though, many more courts were ad hoc affairs, a handful of powerful gods banding together for mutual benefit, sheltering their lessers in exchange for following their rules. Finally, there are the others, little better than a protection racket. The strongest spirit in the area gathering up what lieutenants they can, using their court to extend their own power and prestige. Based on everything I knew of Splendid Cinder, this court was of the latter variety.

The atmosphere within the great hall was closer to that of a gambling den than to anything measured or stately. I could hear the rattle of dice, and see wine flowing freely. The patrons were spirits — petty gods like Lodan rubbing shoulders with a handful of lesser elementals in an array of shapes and colours. The lovely, mournful voice singing over the din belonged to the ghost of a young woman. She hovered in one corner, her pale form flickering between an ephemeral beauty and an emaciated wretch, depending on what angle one looked at her from.

The walls here were carved with scenes of farming, stewardship of the land, and great feasts. The ceiling had a large, open skylight — the moonlight falling through it set my tattoos aglow as I moved between the rows of heavy tables. It must have been a particularly unnerving sight alongside the flickering lighting of the walls. Spirits stopped to stare at my approach, their games stilling, their talk and laughter dying in their throats. As I crossed her line of sight, the ghostly singer eyed me warily, but gamely continued her performance.

A surprise visit from a grim-faced Celestial Exalt will make most people nervous.

At the back of the room, near to a large and empty dais, a group of humans were incongruously taking up space at a few tables. They came from all over the Isle, Legionary deserters and the dispossessed -- those stripped of their rights for debt to the throne or other lawless behaviour. Now, they were eating and drinking and generally having a good time. As I approached, one of them seemed to be flirting outrageously with a small, green, red-haired woman carrying a platter of drinks that seemed far too big for her: A flame duck in human shape. The Fire elemental laughed the advances off, and spun away.

This much contact between mortals and spirits was deeply immoral by Immaculate standards, under which even a prayer was to be mediated by the ever watchful Immaculate Order. And yet, in the heart of a dragon's court, here they were.

Then a particularly bulky elemental stepped out of my path, and I saw her. I stopped dead in my tracks.

The dais wasn't quite empty after all. Perched on its very lip, drink in hand, sat Tepet Joti. She wore her blue hair in a long braid, the tip wavering like a flame. She'd picked up a very expensive looking black overcoat adorned in blue flame, the same colour as her hair. At her hips were a pair of devil casters, as perfect as the day she'd stolen them. The arm not busy bringing a drink to her lips was being clung to by a small, pretty woman who was practically draping herself over Joti with a strong air of self satisfaction. This woman's hair was black and elaborately styled, her skin very dark and covered nearly as much by jewellery and makeup as it was by a scandalously-cut dress in red and orange silk.

The flame duck noticed me first, turning to catch sight of me by chance and nearly toppling over a few of the cups she was carrying in surprise. She spun on her heel, hurried up to the dais, and tugged at the trailing sleeve of Joti's companion. The woman leaned down to exchange a few words with the servant, looking up sharply to spear me in place with her gaze. Then she gripped Joti's chin in a manicured hand, and physically turned her head in my direction. Our eyes locked for the first time in three years.

Joti's expression went from confusion, to recognition, to shock. She stood up all at once, hands hovering over the handles of my devil casters.

Finally, I managed to breath properly again. I took a step forward, eyes hardening. "Joti!"
Her brigands scrambled to their feet, lunging for their weapons. The spirits fell completely silent, even the singer trailing off.

It took Joti a moment before she found her tongue. "What are you doing here?" she demanded, sounding almost flabbergasted.

I kept walking forward. "What do you think?"

"You said you'd never come back to the Isle!" she said, panic in her eyes.

"People lie sometimes," I said. "Apparently."

She actually winced at that, to her credit. Her jaw worked for a second or two longer. Then, with the air of being unable to avoid asking something unimportant, she blurted out: "Why are you a man, though?"

I actually laughed at that, although there was more scorn in it than mirth. "I was always a woman while I was with you, but you know I've gone back and forth. I told you about it." Immaculate societies in general were relatively accepting if you could just tell them one or the other. Following the example of the Immaculate Dragon Daana'd, it was acceptable for a child who had been raised as a boy to declare herself to be a girl, or vice versa. The Realm only wanted a box to put you in, a role for you to follow, and a set of standards to compare your actions against. Where they balked, though, was if you couldn't pick one or the other, or changed your answer day to day, year to year. Hence Joti's surprise.

Luna seemed to have a soft spot for those of us who didn't fit within the confines of the culture that raised us. And just as Luna themself appeared to each of us in a different shape, I was often a specific version of myself with specific people. A woman while I was with Joti, a man while I'd been learning under my sifu, and neither with Liseli, who had given me my tattoos themself.

Without softening my expression at all, I changed, if not so dramatically. My features softened, my frame got a little slighter, I lost maybe an inch of height. My clothes adjusted themselves to fit. I was once again the woman who Joti recalled, the one who she'd drugged and abandoned. "Does that make you feel better?" I asked.

"Not a bit," Joti said. I didn't entirely believe her — she still looked like she thought I might try to tear her apart then and there, but there was still something about this face, this voice, that she responded to. "What do you want, sifu?"

"You tricked me, drugged me, robbed me, and then dumped me in the desert. And you're asking me that?" For the first time since we'd known each other, I outright glared at her. My Tell wasn't concealed, and a distant part of me was still proud of her for not flinching away from my baleful, yellow eyes.

"You would have just followed me otherwise," Joti said. "Don't pretend like—"

"Don't!" My voice cracked with genuine hurt. But the shout had been enough for the devil casters to clear their holsters. My firewand was in my hands. We stared at each other, one twitch away from violence.

"Enough!"

The other woman stood apart from Joti now, hands on her shapely hips, staring at me with eyes that burned. "This is the Lunar you've spoken of?" she asked Joti.

Joti nodded. "Yes, this is her, Cindy."

As the girl stared imperiously down at me, I started to get a very good idea of who I was looking at. "Splendid Cinder?"

"Naturally," Cinder said, voice cold. The bracelets on her thin arm rattled as she pointed a finger in my direction. Her nails were filed into pointed talons, lacquered black, and adorned with jewels. The only exceptions were the first two fingers on her dominant hand, which were kept short and merely painted. Speaking as a fellow shapeshifter, this was a very deliberate statement. "You barge armed into my home without so much as a courteous greeting, and you threaten my lover? You have nerve, Lunar."

"My business was only ever with Tepet Joti. Not with you, dragon," I said, trying to steady my voice. It was hard to stay calm with Joti right there. Hard to care about the room full of bandits and spirits, or the powerful elemental I was speaking so dismissively to.

"Not with me?" Cinder demanded. "I disagree." There was a blast of heat and a flash of blinding flame, and the woman was gone. Something else had taken her place, filling up the entire dais with black, serpentine coils.

Truth be told, the 'lesser' in Lesser Elemental Dragon did a great deal of work. Any elemental that reached a certain degree of strength, no matter their original shape or variety, became a dragon — it was simply the shape their power took in high enough concentrations. There were mightier than Splendid Cinder and her ilk in existence, but the Lesser Elemental Dragons were nothing short of the most powerful elementals active on Creation.

Splendid Cinder's true shape was like a vast, four-legged snake, complete with a viper's head. Her scales were glossy black and dusted with gold at the tips, a furnace glow bleeding out from beneath each one. When she raised her great head, a forked tongue of flame darted out to taste the air, sending embers trailing up into the air whenever it emerged. She wound her coils protectively between Joti and I before she spoke again in a hissing, resonant voice emanating from deep within her: "I will teach you respect if I have to sear it into your bones."

"Cindy..." Joti began. I never heard what she'd meant to say.

Cinder's head reared back, maw opening to reveal fangs the length of my forearm. She spat a stream of liquid fire directly at me. I leapt aside, brought up my firewand, and fired. The roar filled the chamber, sending a chill down my spine. The mortals all covered their ears in pain, the ghost singer simply winked out of sight entirely, and many of the other spirits likewise fled.

A line of scales running along Cinder's jaw was no longer shining and lustrous. Instead, it was dull and charred. "You burned me?" Cinder demanded, disbelief starker than pain in her voice.

"Your guilt burns you," I said, taking the opportunity to snap my glass bayonet onto the end of the firewand, deliberately ignoring the blistering heat from the puddle of venom to my left. "You shelter thieves, dragon. Why? So that when the problem persists, the mortals will turn to praying to you?" It was a little odd seeing a spirit so large and fierce looking shifty, but I could tell that I was right. She was a fool to think that the Immaculate Order would stay blind to what she was doing, but she was very young for a dragon.

"Leave her alone!" Joti stepped out from behind Cinder, eyes furious, devil casters pointed at me. A growl emerged from the wolfshead barrel of each, their soulsteel interiors lending the sound an unearthly menace. Joti might not be able to attune to moonsilver as deeply as a Lunar, but the weapons held no loyalty to me or any other former wielder, and they were still deadly in her hands.

"I've barely touched her," I said. "Worry about yourself."

Joti narrowed her eyes. "You can't take both of us, sifu." She was probably right. I might be able to burn Cinder, but there was a long way from that to defeating her. That was without Joti herself taken into account, and her troops. I might be able to escape with the devil casters if I focused on Joti. I could close quickly enough to take her by surprise, force her into hand-to-hand, and overwhelm her defences. Maybe even...

Even what? Kill her? Kill Joti? Was that really what I'd come all this way for? Why I'd chanced my luck by returning to the land that Luna had so bluntly warned me against ever setting foot on again? Was that what I wanted? For us to fall to killing each other over a fancy set of flame pieces and a dragon's wounded pride? No. This was wrong.

"I know I can't," I admitted. I forced the next words out, lowering my weapon slightly. "Joti... can we just talk?"

Joti scoffed. "Like you just talked with Cindy?" Cinder was eying me warily, an angry hiss coming from her mouth, but I got the impression that she wasn't overly eager to feel the sting of Righteous Devil flame again, if I wasn't here to start a fight. Despite her words, there was a slight hesitation from Joti as well, the faintest of twitches toward lowering her devil casters.

That was when a thunderous, animal bellow came from outside — the kri doorman, locked in sudden, brutal combat.

"What is this?" Cinder demanded, as if it were my fault.

"I don't know!" I insisted.

Then, with a crash, the front doors of the manse burst inward, landing heavily on the floor of the entrance hall along with the kri's remains. And through it came a host of soldiers, three Dragon-Blooded at their head. The powerbow that had just blown the doors clean off their hinges still sparkling in Tepet Aresh's hands.

On the wind that rushed in behind them, I could hear the sound of Tharasht's cruel laughter.

 

[Gazetteer]

Seven-Stars Prefecture,
The Tarpan Wastes,
The Blessed Isle,
Realm Year 770

"The court of Splendid Cinder. And sheltered within it, the thieves and the Anathema both." Tepet Laera's voice rang out with frosty condemnation, filling the silence the Dragon-Blooded's entrance had created. What spirits hadn't fled before fled now, leaving the hall's human occupants alone with Splendid Cinder. "Just as we were warned they would be."

"Who told you this?" Cinder demanded. She knew as well as I did — everyone had heard the laugh.

Sure enough, in the centre of the vacated hall, ahead of the Dragon-Blooded and their forces, a column of grit and sand came together into the towering figure of Tharasht Tears-of-Dust. "Don't play dumb now, Snake. The evidence of your crimes is here for all to see. Word has already been sent to Trigram Monastery that you have sheltered Anathema and their allies." She could have told someone about Cinder working with Joti before this. But Tharasht hadn't wanted her rival chastened — she'd wanted her destroyed. My mere presence had given her a way to do so.

Cinder's eyes blazed with inhuman anger, the fiery glow contained within her roiling out to wreath her sinuous form. I doubted that anyone in the room but Joti could have stood being so close to her. Cinder didn't plead her case, didn't try to explain that I had burst in on them so shortly before. Instead, Cinder reared back, and struck out with her viper's head at the place where Tharasht stood. Tharasht flew up and out of the way, laughing as the desert sand carried her out through the skylight, grit fouling Cinder's scales and stinging her eyes. Cinder gave a roar that shook the entire manse, and hurled herself after the escaping goddess in a rush of hot air.

"Cindy, wait!" Joti cried. "She's baiting you!" But she was too late. Both spirits disappeared from view, but the sounds of a vengeful dragon were still plainly audible. Joti cursed passionately in Flametongue, using a few words I certainly hadn't taught her.

"Some girl you've got there," I said.

Joti glared. She had one devil caster still aimed at me, the other pointed at the newest group of intruders. As she did, though, flame the same colour as that which burned on the manse's walls surged up around both her and her bandits, protecting or bolstering them or both. Evidently, Cinder hadn't entirely forgotten about Joti. "Some girl," Joti agreed, colouring it with a note of actual pride, despite the odds she was facing. Personally, I still wasn't sure that the kind of temperament Cinder had revealed so far was a good combination with Joti's, but this was far from the time and place to voice my disapproval with Joti's lovelife.

The three Dragon-Blooded I'd fought at Dinar stood at the head of a scale of troops — twenty-five veterans pulled from what was left of the Tepet House Legions, minus the two I'd killed before. They were all armed and armoured as heavily as the heat would allow. Laera had a chakram in hand, trying to keep an eye on both Joti and I. Tepet Aresh had his powerbow drawn, the crystalline structure bending smoothly through impossible feats of engineering. Raw Air Essence jetted out of the jade, and was focused and sharpened by adamant lenses to create an arrow of crystallised lightning. One was currently pointed directly at my chest, which was fair — my firewand was pointed at him in turn.

Sister Dust stepped out ahead of the two Tepets. There was no trace of kindness left in her eyes as she looked at me. There was a moment's uncertainty, but she pushed it away quickly — man or woman, I was very obviously myself. "Trusting you was my greatest folly, Anathema. Only through your death can I begin to atone for inflicting your evil on the good people of Dinar."

"I was never going to harm that family, or their neighbours," I told her, voice oddly weary, despite my battle-ready stance. "I came to the Wastes with a singular purpose: It was not to slaughter innocents."

"Your word means nothing, monster," Dust told me, still staring me in the eye.

"It means more than you'd think," said Joti. I wish hearing her say that wasn't so gratifying, despite everything.

"I wasn't sure it was true, when mother told me," Aresh said. He didn't take his eyes off me even as he spoke to Joti. "I thought we might find some lawless outcaste here — we all thought you were dead these past nine years, sister."

"Aresh," Joti said. "So you really are an Armiger now. Honestly, I'm surprised you noticed I was gone." Her voice was thick with old resentment.

Aresh's painted face betrayed startlement and hurt. His grip on the weapon still didn't waver — if it had, I would have shot him in a heartbeat. "We shared a childhood," he said. A rarity among Dynasts, with children typically spaced out by a decade or more. "Father wept when he had to accept you were gone. You have his Aspect as well as his bearing, now."

Joti held firm in the face of the reproach in her brother's voice. She didn't lower her weapons anymore than he had. Still, she couldn't stop herself from asking: "How did he die?"

Tepet Laera was the one who answered. "Cathak Sharik was slain in personal combat with the Anathema, Nalla Bloodaxe. Defending his wife and commander, Tepet Azira, while she lay mortally wounded." There was a cold anger in Laera's words, but in her eyes, I could see the shadow of true horrors witnessed, not merely relayed. She had seen this for herself — she had fought in the Battle of Futile Blood. "He was not born of our House, but still, he laid down his life to defend the Realm from demons alongside us. Small mercy that he never had to live to see his last remaining daughter standing with one now."

Joti's jaw clenched. Overhead, Cinder roared in pain or anger once again. Before Joti could say something rash, Dust spoke again: "And yet, her weapon is aimed at the Anathema as well, Laera. There is time yet for Tepet Joti to atone for her own crimes."

"... If they were truly her crimes to begin with," Aresh said, as if the idea had only just occurred to him. "Here we find an Anathema with a flame weapon, among the bandits supposedly led by a rogue Dragon-Blood." And so, who was to say that I hadn't done it all? I didn't think that Aresh truly believed this himself, but it was a way to bring Joti back into the fold of House Tepet, while clearing the family of the shame her criminal actions would have brought. There would still be doubts, of course, but with a Lunar Anathema dead, would they really be so great?

And I would be dead, if I had to fight them four-on-one. Two Immaculate martial artists, a Sublime Armiger, and Joti, my own student. I'd been up against worse odds once or twice, but never alone.

"Boss?" one of the bandits asked, looking worried. Her lieutenant, perhaps — the others were clearly looking to him for direction. Joti glanced at me, at her bandits, and at Aresh, her only living sibling.

"You cannot be serious!" Dust exclaimed. "This woman has committed grave crimes, terrorised the Wastes for months, subverted the Perfected Hierarchy by inducing mortals to treat with criminal gods! Due consideration for aiding us against a greater evil is one thing, but she must answer for all that she's done!"

Laera rolled her eyes, and ignored the monk's outburst. "Now or never, cousin," she told Joti.

"Come home, Joti," pleaded Aresh.

I didn't say anything. But Joti glanced at me again, one more time. And then she snarled: "Dragons all curse it!" She brought both devil casters around and fired. Twin wolf howls erupted from them alongside jets of cobalt flame, one aimed at Aresh, the other at Laera. Instantly, I fired at Dust. A Chakram flew through the air, and the powerbow went off. The soldiers and bandits both surged forward.

The arrow slashed me across the forehead, having nearly taken me directly in the eye. As everything sprung into frantic motion, I could see a trickle of blood on the side of Joti's neck, Laera spinning out of the way, white robes singed, a protective mist still lingering around Aresh, where the jade of his armour had summoned it.

Dust once again had thrown her arms up to protect herself from my fire, the heat of the flames driving her to her knees with a cry. Scorched, but still in the fight. Against her, it was only fire. I had no righteous condemnations for a monk who'd dedicated her life to defending the people of a quiet and forgotten corner of the Realm.

"The eastern hall!" Joti shouted to her lieutenant in the split second before legionnaires surged in. "Secure an exit!"

"Right, boss!" he shouted back, a look of deep relief on his face that Joti hadn't just hung them all out to dry to save her own skin.

I caught the lip of the dais ahead of another lightning-arrow and heaved myself up onto it. I reloaded my firewand as I leapt, my anima flaring silver-white around me. Landing, I shouted: "Righteous Devil Style: Swell of Blue Flame!"

I pulled the trigger a split second before Aresh could draw back another arrow, while Laera was poised to leap up onto the dais after me or Joti. Out of the barrel of the firewand poured a sea of cobalt flame, waves rolling out in a broad cone ahead of me, surging over the three Dragon-Blooded and their soldiers. I caught sight of Laera flipping up and away from the inferno and Dust throwing one of the heavy tables down in front of her and a knot of soldiers, then the fire washed over them all.

"What was that?" Joti asked. She gave the handles of the devil casters a light squeeze, and from each, a long, wicked blade of moonsilver seemed to flow out of the metal itself, just under the barrel. The question was fair — it was a technique of my own invention, and it hadn't been ready when she'd last trained under me.

"I taught you everything you know," I told her, already having to blink away the blood flowing into one eye. "Doesn't mean you don't still have a lot to learn." With that, a pair of osprey wings sprouted from my shoulders, grey-brown and longer than I was tall, and I leapt up into the air.

The flames began to clear. Down below, I could see dead and wounded soldiers, some horribly burned. Down among them, Aresh staggered to his feet, his anima crackling around him, along with yet more protective mist from his armour. Beyond him, the soldiers who had escaped my flames were engaging with Joti's bandits. Between the two, I decided not to give Aresh a chance to stand up — he wouldn't expect an attack from above yet.

Laera's chakram caught me between the shoulders, sharp and painful. I wheeled around, one hand reaching back to flick the weapon away where it had buried itself less than an inch from my spine.

She stood balanced on an impossibly narrow ledge, just a border carved into the wall to separate a harvest scene below from a festival scene above. Laera ran along its length as though it were open ground, ignoring the false flame that roiled around her. I fired the shot I'd intended for Aresh, and she cartwheeled through the air to evade it, landing on the next ledge below. Her third chakram spun past my head as I lunged through the air after her, nearly running her through with my bayonet. Her last chakram parried the blow, Laera's whole body trembling with the effort of turning it aside.

"You survived Futile Blood just to die here?" I grinned at her, ignoring the icy wind cutting through the air around her.

"Silence, demon!" Laera screamed, using the chakram to cut under my guard. I pushed back with my wings, evading it.

Down on the floor, Joti was keeping Aresh busy, lashing out at him with blades extended from her devil casters, keeping him from firing. Aresh was forced to fend her off with the bow itself or the jade segments of his armour.

I swooped back at Laera, too fast for her to evade. The bayonet parted the mere cloth of her robes and bit into her stomach, drawing a ragged scream from her. Before I could finish the job, I was hit by a flying table.

The table was massive, carved from supernatural wood, and strong enough to have survived my flames without a scratch. The blow set my head to ringing, and made me lose far too much altitude, before I could get out from under it. Enough altitude that Sister Dust was able to follow up the throw by leaping up and landing a punch against my ribs, her fist as unyielding as any stone. I slammed the butt of my firewand into her head, but she barely let it slow her down.

Above us, Laera toppled off her ledge, falling limply through the air to land hard on her back on one of the undisturbed tables, her hands still scrabbling to try and keep her guts from spilling out of her wound, the pure white of her hair and robes splattered with blood and ash.

On the other side of the hall, Joti slashed Aresh on the leg, moonsilver blade slipping between the segments of his lamellar like water through a sieve. He roared in pain and fired an arrow directly at the floor. The shockwave that this created hurled Joti bodily away, and she landed painfully back on the dais.

With some breathing room, Aresh took stock of the larger fight, eyes darting from me and Dust to the legionnaires. They were better trained and equipped than Joti's forces by far, but between my attack having decimated their numbers and the strange magic Cinder was imbuing the bandits with, they were struggling dangerously. Aresh drew back the Wrath of a Weeping Sky, aimed up over the heads of the mortal combatants. It seemed that every time he fired an arrow, the crackling glow coming from the bow itself intensified. Now, it gathered visibly.

I didn't have time to help Joti or her band of thieves, though. As I landed, Dust came at me like a small avalanche, not giving me a chance to fly over her head again, surrounding both of us with biting, whirling sand as her anima banked higher and higher.

I caught Dust in the chest with a savage kick, but it was like striking a half-buried stone: she slid back, but not far. "I don't want to kill you!" I shouted, my hands reloading the firewand in a blur all the same.

"But you have no hesitation for the soldiers you've burned?" Dust demanded. She moved back in toward me again, but had to brace herself again as I snapped off a blast of cobalt flame. Her robes were looking distinctly tattered by this point, revealing ugly burns and bruises in her stony skin.

"Well, I tried," I said.

Aresh's drawn back arrow multiplied into an entire volley's worth, somehow all held in place by his one hand. As he loosed them at once, his anima went into full flux, a dragon of lightning roaring its defiance flaring up around him. A cloud of arrows arced up through the air, each of them coming down to strike a different bandit. Men and women screamed and died and fell back, the survivors turning to outright flee down the hallway that they'd been holding at Joti's command.

I caught Dust's next blow on my firewand, and the brass groaned in protest. I brought a bayonet slash down at her throat, and Dust caught the blade between both hands, blood trickling down her wrists, arms shaking with the effort of holding me back. I bore down on her, the silver fire spreading out to form a greater set of wings behind me, feathers falling all around us like motes of white flame. Her grip failed, and the bayonet raked down across her chest, drawing a line of red there too.

With a warrior's cry, Dust lashed out again, and this time when I parried with my firewand, her first shattered it. Shards of hot brass flew from my hands, burying themselves in my flesh and raining down on the floor. Her fist kept going, and struck me in the jaw. I reeled back, the bones of my skull creaking, stars dancing in my eyes, and I felt the bite of her anima grow to a flaying intensity. It rose up around her like a sandstorm giant, a defender who would always put itself between the innocent and the monsters of the world, whatever the cost.

This unbalanced me long enough for Dust to get behind me and seize me in a brutally tight arm lock, weighing me down like a boulder, trapping my wings between our bodies, and holding my arms apart. She had the leverage to overcome my greater strength and stop me from overpowering her immediately.

"Aresh!" Dust called. "Shoot her!"

Aresh hesitated as I struggled against Dust's hold. "I may hit you as well her!"

"Do it!" Dust shouted.

Aresh's face twisted in pain at the necessity, but he still drew back the bow again, another volley of lightning arrows gathering on the string. Just as he was finishing, a howling vortex of fire rushed toward Aresh and consumed him, flames mingled blue and black, shrieking with the unquenchable fury of a long-dead smith.

It was the bite of my stolen devil casters, unleashed by Joti who stood again, now bathed in her own blue flame. Aresh's armour struggled to protect him, and he gave an agonised cry. He turned on his sister, and unleashed the volley he'd intended for me.

At first, I thought that's all it would be. A storm of arrows, survivable for a skilled Exalt, who might dodge or turn aside many of them. Instead, the arrows converged together into a spiralling, crackling mass, homing in on Joti like a flock of lethal starlings. Through the sting of Dust's anima, I saw her eyes widen in fear, right before she fled through a door behind the dais. Joti ran with the explosive speed of a flashfire.

I could already tell that the arrows would be faster.

I made my bones shift and, not without some pain, I wrenched myself out of Dust's grip. My foot flipped the fallen bayonet up into my hand, and I drove it into the space where her throat met her collarbone, burying the Chiaroscuro glass up to the hilt in Dust's reinforced flesh. Our eyes locked for just an instant as the blade found her heart. Then her anima went out, and her grip failed.

The common people of the Wastes would need to find a new protector. I didn't even watch her fall — I didn't have time.

I leapt up into the air again, wings spreading, and went into a plunging dive aimed straight through the doorway Joti had just run through. I was carried on my own power as much as my flesh and blood wings, flying almost neck and neck with the lightning-arrows in their crackling, chittering multitude. Ahead down the hall ran Joti, still cloaked in blue fire. Seeing her own death close behind her, she tried to avoid it by throwing herself flat to the floor. It wouldn't work.

I put everything I had into one last great wingbeat, muscles straining and shifting to spur me ahead. For just a moment, I was going so fast that time seemed to stand still. Just long enough for me to get ahead of the arrow swarm, brace my feet hard against the floor, and plant myself in front of Joti's prone form with my arms and wings outstretched. I felt too triumphant to care about her anima already making my feathers blacken and curl.

Or about the one hundred eight lightning-arrows piercing my chest, my lungs. My heart. Silver anima guttered out as surely as Dust's had.

I fell to my knees just as Joti pushed herself back up. "Sif— No! No, not for me!" She started to crawl toward me, then realised her anima was burning me the closer she got, and cursed.

"Who else for, if... if not for you?" I managed. I broke off into a ragged cough, blood splattering the floorboards.

"Hang on!" Joti held up the devil casters, and used her own anima to consign them to Fire for later retrieval. The blue flame went down, still hot, but not actually injurious for me to be near. She caught me as I started to topple over, staring in horror at the fletched shafts of lightning bristling out of me. "No," she moaned again. "No, I'll... we need to leave, before he catches up to us!"

I suppressed a gasp of pain as she scooped me up into her arms, wings and all. As she turned and ran the way she'd been heading, she looked down at me and whispered: "Why?" Darkness was beginning to creep into the edge of my vision, and I had to force myself to concentrate on the question. The answer did come to me, the reason why.

I remembered a day two years ago, when someone else had lain dying.