AETHORIA:The hollow king

What She Is

Sera walked like she had been born in the Greywood  sure-footed on root and stone, ducking branches half a second before Kael walked into them. He followed her deeper into the dark, close enough to keep her coat in sight, far enough to feel like he still had a choice about it.

She did not speak for a long time. Karl had met people who were comfortable with silence  his mother had been one and people who used silence as a weapon. He was not yet sure which kind Sera was.

"Arbiters," she said finally, without looking back. "There are nine of them. One per active campaign. They're Solmere-born, all of them, but the Aeth-bond isn't fire. It's something older. They call it Threadwork."

"I've never heard of Threadwork."

"You wouldn't have. It's not in the standard registries. Solmere classified it three hundred years ago when they realised what it could do." She stepped over a root that Kael nearly tripped on. "Threadwork lets them see Aeth-residue. Not just sense it  see it. Like following a trail of blood in snow. You left a significant amount of residue back there when you absorbed Calder's officer."

"So they can find me anywhere."

"They can find anyone anywhere. They've never lost a mark." A pause. "Except one."

Kael waited. She seemed to be deciding something.

"Shadow-Aeth interferes with Threadwork. Draeven magic operates on a different frequency  it's the reason Solmere hasn't invaded us yet. Shadow doesn't leave a trail. It absorbs light, residue, heat. It erases." She stopped walking and turned to face him. In the dark, with no light catching her eyes, she looked like something carved out of night. "I can mask your signature. Wrap enough shadow around you that even Vessin can't follow."

"Vessin?"

"The Arbiter they'll send. He's the best of the nine." Her voice carried something that was not quite respect and not quite fear. "He's the one who found me in Draeven. The one I've been running from for fourteen months."

Karl studied her. She had offered information he hadn't asked for the first real crack in her careful pragmatism.

"You said you need protection. Protection from what?"

"From what I know," she said simply. "And what I stole."

"What did you steal?"

"Something Solmere wants back very badly." She turned and began walking again. "When I know you better, I'll tell you what it is. When you know me better, you'll understand why I don't tell people things before I know them."

Karl supposed that was fair. He didn't tell people things either. He'd spent seventeen years learning to keep his face blank and his voice flat and his anger banked like coals. The difference was that his secrets had never been worth anything. Hers apparently were.

— — —

They made camp  if you could call it that  in the hollow of a downed tree trunk wide enough to stand in. Sera produced a small fire-stone from her coat pocket, knocked it against her thumb ring, and created a flame the size of a fist that gave heat but no light anyone outside the hollow could have seen. Karl watched her do it with the specific attention of someone cataloguing a skill they might need later.

"Don't," she said, without looking up.

"Don't what?"

"Whatever you're thinking about doing with your Aeth and this fire. The first time a Mirror tries to consciously call power they haven't practised, they either burn out the surrounding area or burn out themselves. Sometimes both."

Karl lowered the hand he hadn't realised he'd raised. The warmth in his chest had been reaching toward the flame like a plant toward light.

"You know what I am."

"I recognised it immediately. I've studied Mirroring  it's the subject of more classified Solmere documents than almost anything else. The last confirmed Mirror lived three centuries ago. His name was Aldric Dun."

The name landed in Karl's chest like a stone in still water. Dun. His family name. A coincidence he could not afford to examine right now.

"What happened to him?"

Sera looked at him across the small flame for a long moment.

"He ended the First Kingdom War," she said. "By absorbing the Aeth-bond of every general on both sides simultaneously. He was nineteen years old." A pause. "He died from it. But the war ended."

Kael sat with that information. He poked at the fire-stone with a stick and did not say anything for a while.

"How do I control it?" he asked finally. "The Mirroring."

"Slowly. And carefully. And with someone who understands what you're doing." She met his eyes. "Which, for now, is me."

Outside the hollow, the Greywood made its noises.. the kind that had kept soldiers from following him in, the kind Kael was now realising he should probably ask about. He would ask tomorrow. Tonight was already full.

"Why did you leave Draeven?" he asked instead.

Sera was quiet for long enough that he thought she wasn't going to answer.

"Because something is happening there," she said at last. "Something quiet and wrong. And when I found out what it was, someone tried to kill me. So I ran." She settled back against the log. "Same as you."

Kael looked at the ceiling of wood above them, the centuries-old grain of it, and thought about a man named Aldric Dun who had ended a war by drinking up its power and dying from it. He thought about fire in his veins and a grey sky and Maren on her knees in the mud. He thought about what it meant to run and what it might eventually mean to stop.

He fell asleep before he arrived at any conclusions. The

fire-stone burned steadily until dawn.