Prologue: Love Will Tear Us Apart
"When routine bites hard and ambitions are low
And resentment rides high but emotions won't grow
And we're changing our ways, taking different roads
Love, love will tear us apart again
Love, love will tear us apart again" — Joy Division
Beneath the burgundy sky of Hellisia, through Straylight Keep’s obsidian corridors they came: seven Lords and Ladies of the Ascendant Houses of the Upstart Nations, each an aristocrat honed by their own hungers. Their footfalls were small verdicts on black flagstone, precise and inevitable. Around most clustered beast-folk — hulking warders with stitch-scarred muzzles; shadow hounds that moved like cutlery through fog; grimed things with too many teeth and not enough eyes. These things were left at the entrance to shepherd the bodies who had gone to press the wizard Yashan, and never returned.
Lady Kiben led; a striking figure gifted with an overabundance of physical beauty, in all the ways that made others jealous. Her hips swayed with each firm step, she moved as a blade in fulsome cloth, the chamber folding itself to accommodate her assuredness. She stood no more ahead of the others in power, but what she possessed she wielded as a scepter over even her peers. At her elbow, her personal mage in red robes and of gentle features, Iathon.
Behind her, Lord Ryusk’s old silence watched, his cracked marble face betraying nothing; Lord Valdicott’s vanity measured the room as if it were an audience, his long blond hair catching the light like gilt thread; Lady Ahreese, small of frame, was accompanied by an equally diminutive filth elf, her skin dark and the sclera of her eyes black. In her own gaze, Ahreese kept a ledger far longer than her apparent years, the blue ringlets of her hair bouncing with each step. Lord Xixen, tall and armored, his face scarred and bald head tattooed around the crown, moved like a storm front, while Lady Neylan, usually calm, clutched her own wrists as if to keep from tearing something apart. Xylus, robed and hooded so as to give nothing away, brought up the rear, his scholar’s stare from the shadows taking measure of everything it could translate.
"We should have sent minders with him," Lady Kiben snapped, often loud enough that the others learned to account for her voice as if it were the weather.
Ryusk tilted his head, the motion slow as carved bone. "No one could have expected the wizard to have gone to such… extremes."
Valdicott’s long hair framed a face practiced in beauty; an eyebrow arched like a question in gold. "Really? Near-impossible soulcraft, and Yashan did it not once, but thirteen times. And we ordered him to destroy it."
"We ordered him to destroy weapons, " Kiben corrected. "Weapons designed as annihilation engines, should our war with the Old Guard turn desperate. The war is over. We won. "
"You ordered him to destroy weapons," Ahreese’s voice was narrower than her years, oldness hiding under the blue ringlets. "You feared one of us would use them to overthrow the others. Yashan has always been an ally. You put him in an untenable position."
Xylus’s face retreated into shadow except for the spare line of his mouth. "The wizard has always been an idealist," he said, with distaste that wore the veneer of a lesson. "Idealists make poor servants. Or survivors."
"Aren’t we all idealists?" Kiben snapped. "We overthrew the ancient ones because our world was dying around us."
"The road to Hellisia is paved in good intentions," Ryusk observed flatly.
Valdicott, who kept his face for performance, spoke with a practiced dismissiveness, "What does that even mean?"
"It is an old human saying," Xylus supplied. "When their armies, led by their greatest champions, tried to cross the gateway to the Hellisian Fields of Averon and were cut down by the Old Guard's soldiers. It means the best intentions can end in ash."
Neylan’s fingers twitched, her usual calm fractured by something unseen. "Enough philosophy," she hissed. "We came for answers, not riddles and posturing."
For certain, they had not come for courtesies. They had expected excuses, or the thud of a wizard’s defeat, the soulcraft delivered, sealed, or burned at their command. Lady Kiben’s envoy had promised compliance: retrieve the masterwork, annihilate it, report. Instead, the envoy had vanished along with thirty enforcers. The silence tasted of treachery. Thus, the Lords and Ladies came themselves, each with detachments in tow, and found the specter of treachery answered by spectacle — thirty-one bodies displayed on spike and chain about the grounds of Straylight Keep. Not crude, but crafted: magic’s cruelty arranged with a neat, terrible artistry.
Together they breached the gates below and then the crown chamber above: a circle at the keep’s apex, all gears and glass and brass lenses that held suns like stolen coins, filigree mirrors threaded into an impossible lattice. The instruments glowed with a patient, dangerous thirst. The air sang old mathematics — bound thresholds and folded promises — and smelled of honey, ozone, and the faint smoke of a dragon that had not left the hearth in years.
Yashan sat small within this circular chamber, the stairs upward behind leading to windows, which looked out upon the realm beyond. Wrapped in pale robes, hair the color of frost, the old wizard Yashan, with his pale blue skin barely acknowledged their entrance. He did not rise. He did not bow. His hands were busy with the mastercraft’s remnants — not destroying them, not handing them over, but folding and rethreading: patterns made into mosaics, motifs coaxed into potion vials, memory coaxed into shapes that would hide from a searching eye. The lattice around him muttered in small tics of its metallic tongue.
"You lied," Kiben barked, her voice low and cruel. "You promised compliance and gave silence. We sent enforcers, and they are dead. "
"They chose poorly," Yashan’s voice was simple, tired, and certain. "You ordered me to destroy my work. I swore I would." A small self-assured smile creased his thin lips. "I lied."
Outrage rippled — half surprised, half the satisfaction of being proven right. Valdicott’s lip curled. "You betrayed us."
"I betrayed not you, only your certainty of obedience, " Yashan said. "I betrayed the notion that weapons alone secure…peace. I could not hand over the soulcraft to be ended, nor allow it to be folded into instruments that would erase what our kind once prized: self. I made it to do something else."
Kiben’s laugh was cold. "Tear what you hide into the light and we will finish it for you. Bring it now, and we will allow you to live."
Yashan smirked without humor. "Leave it to you to misunderstand craft; without souls you cannot wield it. This is not a thing carried like a blade. It is a slow work. They sit within — little vaults of purpose and instinct — unfolding over time." He looked at them steadily. "When the winds of your war against the Old Guard turned dire, you wanted my finest work: soulcraft forged to place within a homunculus and shaped to walk battlefields. Now that you have won, you demand I burn the masterpieces I made." The sick disdain of the years settled in the creases of his face. "How dare you."
Xylus stepped forward, silk whispering like dry leaves. "You gambled with our patience and our blood," he said. "You have one hour between defiance and death, old friend. Give us the weapons. or how they're made and where they are dies with you. Lost is much the same in outcome as destroyed. For you, is it worth your life?"
Yashan’s hands moved then — not begging, but performing an old ritual of concealment and opening. Mirrors tilted; lenses arranged themselves like an orchestra tuning; thread and glass braided into a seam of light. He was not making a road. He fashioned a doorway in the air between them as a ragged tear: a seam small and honest, the sort of aperture you force only if you intend to send something small through. The chord that sang from it was thin, urgent. "There," he said simply, as he rose to his feet.
"You give us a seam?" Kiben sneered, glancing to the mage who accompanied her. "To mock us?"
"To grant an answer you cannot yet use," Yashan said. "To give a way that costs more than pride to follow." He did not lower his voice; the chamber swallowed the phrase and kept it. "I am my craft. If you take it from me, death is preferable."
Iathon the mage, raw and eager, stepped forward as if to force the seam. He spoke incantations of borrowed magics, drew the practiced motions — glowing runes, drifting sigils — and for an instant light rose, only to fray and drift away like smoke.
Xylus watched with a scholar’s pity that folded into calculation. "The seam is a seed," he said. "With time, learning, patience — and the right knowledge — it may grow. If you have the patience, and can steal the knowledge, you can pry it open."
Kiben’s teeth flashed as snarled at her mage. "Steal it. Find a way to reach what lies beyond."
"I will tell you where," Yashan said as he moved around the opening, a clever smirk on his face. "Earth."
"You took them from Hellisia," Xixen growled, "And left them on that damnable world?"
"The Old Guard forged the boundary to keep humans of that world away for a reason," Xylus offered in simple council. “And you breached that barrier?”
But this gave Lady Kiben comfort. "But they are avaricious, the humans. They will trade everything for magic and gain." With a tilt of her head, she considered the rolling seam of light. "We can use that."
"Humans are not tools," Yashan offered. If it had to come to a moment such as this, he welcomed it. "They are kin, in strange ways. The soulcraft I hid there cannot be harvested by force in the ways you understand."
"Everything can be harvested by force or temptation," Valdicott said coolly.
The wizard's eyes moved toward the distant workbench, and the creature perched at the edge of the highest shelf above. No larger than a dog, but scaled like burnished copper, it sat with wings folded round its forelegs, smelling faintly of coal and ink; its round eyes blinked slow and uninterested as it regarded the intruders. As Xylus noted it, the small wyvern thrust itself free, spreading wings while Kiben’s mage reached into a pouch. In a heartbeat the copper creature folded in on itself, darted by Yashan’s head and slipped through the seam.
"You would send a bastard dragon through my seam?" Kiben snapped. "As spy? A pet?"
"He is neither," Yashan said, amused.
"Bind him," Valdicott ordered his escorts, then turned to Iathon. "Seize it."
Before the guards could close, Yashan catalyzed the seam with a quick, precise motion. The chamber’s air shifted; he twisted frail wrists behind him as the mage chanted his craft. Quiet until then, Lady Neylan flared — the rage of restraint broken — and swept a table clear: bottles and papers crashed to stone.
"You should have left," Xylus said, eyes hard on the broad backs of Valdicott’s troops.
From beyond came the small, mocking sound of Yashan’s voice. "I haven’t?" The mage looked back across the faces of the lords and ladies; the escorts, catching only the trailing robes, found nothing more than that. The wizard was gone.
After a thorough search they departed Straylight Keep with hunger unspent and plans recalculating, anger sitting like a new weather in their bellies.
On the distant side of the seam, across worlds and barriers, in a frigid body of water called the Lake of Irons, the portal breathed its passenger into a world not built for dragons. Fluvaxis’s first gasp for air was silent and wet — rust and old engines on the tongue; his wings beat against thick, alien pressure. Bubbles rose in slow, panicked fingers. The seam’s light dimmed and closed below like a lid.
Below the lake, the small dragon scrambled, his fate turning in slow circles in the deep, unsure which direction was mercy and which was escape.
