Down In Yon Forest
The ice sparkles as though champagne were poured over the top of the snow, dripping off of the ghost-pale branches of the wyrwood. The crescent moon sings softly.
Beneath the branches of the trees, the Progenitor walks. Her feet are bare as the white branches overhead, and she leaves no footprints. Light glimmers within the curve of her throat, the dusky skin spangled with constellations of blue and green. The wyrwood stirs for her as she raises a hand, the winter air steaming against her shining skin, and the branches move, angling a path down towards the river.
There is a road through the wyrwood now- architects from deeper in the Lightweaver’s territory laid it nearly a hundred years ago. It is still a new road, by the Progenitor’s long and aching reckoning of the years. Her Guardian, Baleen with the ocean eyes, came not long after it was completed. It is only Baleen who has stayed, though many come along the road and seek hospice. (Though the wood has not been cursed in living memory, time still flows a little differently in the Progenitor’s land, like amber, like syrup. Baleen looks little more than thirty, even now.)
The last merchant caravan to pass through before the snows came stopped briefly at the House, and a silk-voiced Wildclaw told them of the elemental magic surging around Sornieth. Emperor, he had whispered, his crest of feathers standing on end.
Emperor. They say it as an ugly word, and they always have, ever since the first. The Imperial dragons do not speak it at all. Do not permit the desecration to pass their lips. They do not bury their bodies in the ground, for fear of that disease which eats bone and blood and makes it into something savage and new. (“If I die here,” her love had said, long ago, when he had drunk just enough to think about it, “Be sure to burn my body. Bury the skull apart from the bones.” And then he had downed the rest of his drink and looked out the window at the slow dance of the stars.)
There is something lying sprawled across the river, blocking the flow of the water making its rambling way to the sea. Rivulets of overflowing water spill over the banks and track lines of ice in the snow. The creature has a mane of thick fur made heavy with frost, and as the Progenitor approaches she sees one pair of silver-blue eyes blink open, and then another, and then a fifth eye slits open to gaze at her as it exhales, rising steam billowing from its fanged mouth. The Progenitor looks at it, for a long time. This is not an Emperor, but it is something likewise ancient.
“Are you wounded?” she asks. Her voice crystallizes like the starlight in the cold. “Do you have a two-legged form?” Lightfooted, shadowless, she steps closer. Another pair of eyes open, pale as mercury.
I am wounded, it answers. The length of its mouth peels open to reveal rows of ivory teeth.
Here. Lifting a foreleg and wing- the stomach is gleaming and pearl-colored, but scored with red as vivid as a scream. Blood drips down into the water, and clots darkly along the edges of the wounds.
Beast attacked me. It coughs a little, dark stains spreading along its teeth.
Emperor.
“What are you?” asks the Progenitor. She places a hand upon its stomach, magic gathering beneath her skin as slowly- slowly- the torn flesh knits back into scale and fur. “I think I dreamed a thing like you, long ago. When I was a girl.”
It inhales slightly, tasting the air like a cat. In this draconic form, it is as large as an Imperial, at least.
You are ancient too, but not like me. I was born in the great glacier. My people were made when the mountains and the rain were young. Nutaikok decreed it thus. The accent of its words is strange to her. Northern, and yet not.
She moves to the next wound. Blood and light and water run between her fingers, onto her wrists. The blue silk of her sleeves is stained with blood. Ankle-deep she stands in cold water, but the Progenitor does not feel pain unless she chooses to do so. “They named me Souhayla,” she says. “Souhayla the Sunbringer. Souhayla of the Empty Hall. The Progenitor.”
I am Tekkeitsertok.
In a great rush of movement, he rises to his feet, blood running in sunset-red gouts from his stomach and side in the moonlight. The river water glitters in his fur, and then he folds in on himself with a ripple of magic. It is always difficult for large dragons, to turn themselves back and forth, but the man who collapses upon the side of the riverbank in the bloodred, copper-reeking mud is not so much larger than Souhayla herself. Perhaps a head taller. Broad in his shoulders. His many eyes still open and close- on his bare shoulder blades, along his arms, on the backs of his hands. The color of frost.
“I will bring you to the House,” the Progenitor Souhayla says, placing one hand on the bleeding gash on his stomach to seal it and looping the other arm through his. Tekkeitsertok nods, his breath still coming in ragged pants.
I am of the Keepers, he says.
A second order captain. His voice still comes in a rumble from somewhere far away. Somewhere filled with ice.
“Be at peace, now,” the Progenitor murmurs. Her skin glows softly through her sleeves stained with water and blood, casting a faint light on the ground. “I will bring you home.”
