Dawn Of The Blood Sovereign

CHAPTER 10: THE COLD ARCHIPELAGO

Prince Malakor's screaming did not last but it had had the wet, structural crash of a collapsing kingdom slicing through the Red Basin.

Kaelen didn't turn around as he marched with the slow deliberate stride toward falling ash his charred forearms smoking in the damp air, walking to the edge of the glassed crater where his boots sunk into cool black sand. Yuri sat in the middle of the ruins with soot smeared across his face, his little hands trembling, but when Kaelen approached the boy did not cower, looking into the fading molten gold of his father’s pools from eyes to Kaelen’s own burned bark-arm to his ruined black forearms.

Without a word Kaelen reached out.

It lacked his usual divine heat as he took hold of his son rough worn and thoroughly human; he hefted the child with his good shoulder tucking him against his chest while his own little hands wrapped around the remains of the dark sovereign robes’ torn silk. “Oi,” Kaelen rasped from somewhere in the ruins. Oi stumbled from the ash and lingering smoke his own hand clutching the bloody flank of his torso his breath catching as he looked to the valley floor. Behind them the battlefield was already transforming into absolute wasteland; the second Warden was out from the earth in its fully scaled torso with magma blades burning across the faces of the remaining imperial soldiers, and the stone titans, fully awoken, crushed standards and shields into red soil that wasn’t theirs nor Malakor’s, but Aethelgard’s itself.

“The northern pass is still open,” Oi coughed to the north, gesturing toward the peaks where Vanya’s archers had stood before.

“Vanya’s marksmen are protecting your retreat; her entire train, her logistics, her gold has already crossed the ridgeline; she didn't stay for the after party.” “Wouldn't,” Kaelen stated with eyes scanning the jagged peaks where Vanya’s white horse had stood-and had been -only minutes before. Green and red flags had already disappeared from the distant cliffs, leaving only barren stone foundations behind; Vanya had melted with her resources before the titans could see where she’d gone; she'd given him his win; she'd taken his empire with her.

“Where to,” Oi demanded, shifting his jittery horse uneasy as another nearby titan punched an imperial food transport into a fine mist of dust and supplies. “Aethelgard is on its knees-the deepest rifts are splitting the throne chamber from its foundations.” Kaelen adjusted his grip on the now trembling Yuri feeling the boy's rhythmic heartbeat against his ribs, looking up to the black granite towers that scraped the bleed-colored sky-empty walls that now marked the demise of the southern merchant lords, fractured from coin and fear.

"We ride to no fortress," Kaelen said, turning his horse into the torturous, narrow paths which led farther south, beyond the outer Marches, into the unknown, lawless wild of the broken coast. "Aethelgard was a wall. A wall only ever keeps you inside the house of your enemies."

"And the High Kingdom?"

Oi asked, throwing himself onto his horse with a groaning snap of pain. "Malakor is dead, but the capital lives on. The Lords will have themselves a new wolf to carry the crown before the moon is through its cycle." Kaelen slung the shattered remains of the Sun-Cleaver onto his back. The celestial silver inlay was dark and the dragon bone cold.

"Let them have the wolf they please," Kaelen said, the edges of his golden irises narrowing into points of ice.

"They will spend this winter fighting the things that climbed out of my floor. By the time the snow melts, there will be no kingdom to conquer, only a burial ground." Weeks later, the air no longer carried the stench of sulfur and blood, but the clean, biting scent of salt and the immense, crushing dampness of the Sea of the South.

Inside a small, wind-worn stone keep dug into a grey cliff face, a single candle of wrought iron flickered on a rough table made from timber. Vanya, a cloak of pale fox-fur replaced by thick dark green wool, sat on a tall-backed wooden chair, her black hair unpinned, spilling over her shoulders as her finger traced lines on a map. Not a map of countries and empires, this, but of shipping lanes and silver mines and forgotten bays.

"The transition is complete, Lady Vanya," Logan said as he entered and laid a bound leather ledger on the table.

"The Aethelgard treasury has been dispersed among four banks in the Free Ports, and the clan leaders who remained have been allocated stakes in the new eastern trade routes.

They are satisfied."

"And the High Kingdom?"

Vanya asked, the single flame on the table reflecting in her jade green eyes.

"A charnel house," Logan replied grimly.

" The stone giants are beyond the Red Basin, and the capital of the empire sits under permanent siege. Coin is no longer produced in the capital; coffins are now printed there. Vanya," Vanya let a long, silent breath spill from her mouth, her finger running along the coastal map once more.

She had lost a fortress, but she had saved the wealth. The ledger added up, and she had won. Yet her gaze strayed, in spite of her, to the unmarked, white expanse at the bottom of the chart, the unexplored islands where ships could not sail.

"Any news of the exiles?"

she asked, her voice dropping to an unusual low register. " He has established a camp on the sharp, jagged isle of Oros," Logan said, lowering his head. " Oi is recovering. His first wife is with the prince, and the boy, and they say he spends the day on the cliffs, watching the ocean.

The bow is gone.

They say his skin remains blackened by the sunfire." Vanya said nothing, merely closed the ledger, her lips taking on that cruel upward tilt they took whenever she had reached a final, calculated answer. "He will return," Vanya whispered, her jade eyes shifting from the parchment to the black window pane where sea- spray lashed violently against the glass.

"A god of war knows not how to fish. He will need swords; he will need grain. And eventually, he will remember who holds the ledger."

In the black, glistening sand of Oros, Kaelen stood at the lip of the freezing surf.

Waves crashed about his ankles, the brine and spume stinging the darkened skin of his forearms. Yuri was attempting, not very successfully, to skip a smooth grey stone across the choppy waters, the flat pebble plunging in and vanishing into the white froth at his feet. Kaelen watched the effort. He offered no advice, no help.

He only dropped to one knee, took the boy's small hand, and placed the only fragment of his father's divine weapon not reduced to dust within the Red Basin into the palm.

"The world is to change now, Yuri," Kaelen said, the deep vibration of the ocean tide pulsing through his words. " The walls have fallen.

The kings have fallen."

Yuri looked from the gold up to his father's face.

"Are we safe here, Father?"

Kaelen rose, his eyes fixed on the northern horizon, where the faintest and perpetual pinkening of the sky marked what remained of the world to his north.

"Nobody is safe," Kaelen said quietly, the molten gold in his eyes flaring for an instant of glacial fire that made the next wave halt abruptly at the shore.

" But here they must swim to us."