AETHORIA:The hollow king

Ashenveil

They smelled Ashenveil before they saw it.

Woodsmoke. Bread. The particular human smell of a concentration of people living in close quarters not unpleasant, more like proof. Proof that something was still here, still burning, still fed.

The canyon entrance was hidden by a deliberate rockfall that looked natural and wasn't  Sera walked directly to a section of it, pressed three stones in sequence, and a section swung inward on a counterweight system of remarkable engineering for a resistance group working with stolen materials. A guard on the other side had a crossbow levelled before the door had finished opening.

"Sera Voss," the guard said. Not a greeting  identification. He was young, maybe Karl's age, with the particular wariness of someone who had been frightened for long enough that it had become a resting state. "We expected you two months ago."

"I was delayed," Sera said. "This is Karl Dun. He's with me."

"He's Aethless." The guard had read it immediately  Karl wasn't sure how. Maybe the registers were circulated even here.

"He's not," Sera said flatly. "And I need Commander Rhen within the hour."

The guard looked at Karl for a moment with the expression of someone revising their threat assessment. Then he stood aside.

— — —

Ashenveil was carved into the canyon walls  rooms and passages cut directly into the stone, supplemented with wooden platforms and rope bridges that spanned the gorge at different heights. It held perhaps three hundred people. They moved through it with the efficient quiet of people who had been keeping a secret for years and were not sure when the secret would run out.

Commander Rhen was a woman of perhaps fifty, with the build of someone who had once been a soldier and the face of someone who had been a commander for long enough that the two had merged into something harder than either. She received them in a stone room with a map table and three lamps and the specific attention of someone who had learned to make decisions quickly and live with the results.

Sera put the Harvest document on the table without preamble.

Rhen read it in silence. Karl watched her face as she read and saw the moment when the scale of it landed  a slight whitening around the mouth, a fractional stillness. Then she continued reading. When she finished she set it down and was quiet for a moment.

"How certain are you of its authenticity?"

"Certain enough to have run for three months and lost two safe houses," Sera said. "And certain enough that an Arbiter has been tracking me since I crossed the Draeven border."

"Vessin."

"Yes."

Rhen looked at Karl.

"And him?"

"He's a Mirror," Sera said. "Absorbed fire-Aeth from a Sear during the Durnholt quarter-burn four days ago. Vessin is after him too."

The silence that followed was different from the previous silences. This one had weight.

"A Mirror," Rhen said. She said it slowly, like a word in a language she knew but rarely used.

"Yes."

"Can he control it?"

"He's learning."

Rhen looked at Karl directly. He had the feeling she was doing something analogous to what the Aeth-readers had done when he was six and twelve  looking for the thing inside him that would tell her what he was worth. But she was looking at different things.

"Why are you here?" she asked him. Not Sera .

"My village was burned," Karl said. "I want to do something about that."

"That's a motivation, not a reason."

"Then because someone handed me a weapon I didn't ask for and I'd rather use it on the right side than waste it." He paused. "And because I've read enough of what she found to know that if no one does something, the Greywood is going to be the last place in Veldrath where anything lives free. And I don't particularly want to live in a forest."

Rhen looked at him for another moment. Then something in her face resolved.

"All right," she said. "We should talk."