The Aeterna Empire

Chapter 14 - Fight of light and darkness

Dyson exists trapped in a cycle of conflict day after day. The sun shuts its eye, order sleeps, and creatures of the night, of chaos, go on the hunt. Yet even in the night there are hunters and men of order called the Numerenai. In like manner the sun opens its eye, the night and its denisions are banished into the soil and its hiding places, and order awakens with it. Yet the day is not without its hunters, as the Cynn-Blood rebel against the greater powers during the day despite the sun's eye being death.

Wards lit at night and shadows in the day are the refuge from the masters of those times.

Yet, here I sat, with a torch, hunted.

"Could I have my Kingslayer?" I whispered outloud. "At least a knife? Something? I'd settle for a book of profane gestures."

The night did not answer but to offer taunting gusts of the wind and hidden monsters behind its veil. So I sat alone, with naught but a ward at my lap and the end of multiple ropes in my hand. I was careful not to move, not so much as twitch, though the pimply claws of branch-witches and rivers-that-had-to-be-Night-Blood poked through my imaginative reality.

I breathed in and out. I did it many times, but the knowing of the 'what' and 'who' and 'how' in the absence of 'when' left the exercise a pointless gesture. It is an unfortunate flaw of man that attention is not a constant and the full knowledge of this weakness only intensified my nerves as the slightest inevitable weakness in mental fortitude, that is most damaging in its certainty, would result in what would be my final absolute.

Feeling panic start to take hold, I changed tactics and brought my mind to the time before I had witnessed the Aeterna's rise, to a simpler time of lessons, politics, parties, feasts, dancing, a few woman, and a planned future. I hummed.

The humming did its job. The aches and concerns washed away and I was no longer surrounded by the mystical and hidden, but by a promised one.

A branch creaked in the distance behind me, not in time with the wind and far too heavy to be a small animal, and instinctivly I turned. As I did so, in front of me, just out of arm's reach, the air expanded in a brief explosion and in its place was a woman in black armor. The woman reached out for me and I leaned back shutting my eyes tight, but it was too late.

For her.

The explosion of air shook a number of containers planted half-way into the ground and they reacted with blinding light and deafening noise. I was prepared enough to open my eyes right after, and as planned, she wasn't. She clutched the face of her helmet, probably screaming from the noise. Wearing a helmet wouldn't have made it any better. A second later she rocked forward, a wooden projectile had shattered in the back of her metal helmet. While she was still falling forwards I jumped up and pulled on the ropes I held in my hand. All around me, a net was pulled. Twisted and tangled up to her ankles, her feet were pulled out from under her and she landed hard on her back. She started to roll slightly, disheveled but not unconcious, so I took the nearest of Izthark's inventions and smashed it into pieces upside the side of her head. Between the impact and resulting disorienting reaction, she stopped moving.

Izthark came running out of the darkness and mouthed something. He could have been yelling for all I know, but the noise had yet to leave me. 

"What?!" I yelled.

He mouthed it again. My poor lip reading skills decoded it as 'you're an idiot'.

"No, you're an idiot!" I balked.

He gave me a rather rude gesture and gave up the pretense of talking. He looked over the woman. Her body was entirely covered in armor and veils so that there wasn't a single place he could check for a pulse, so he removed the helmet.

She was a Cynn-Blood. 

Horrible burn scars covered a part of her neck and chin, by no means an uncommon thing even among free Cynn-Blood who must traverse the shadows carefully, but I knew if she was to be stripped what I would see. Memory of hunting parties, of war meetings, of history, of punishments and lashes, of starvation and sickness, and more struck me all at once and a paltible guilt sucker-punched me, bending me over and vomitting out my dinner.

"She's fine." Izthark said, his fingers on her neck. "But that migraine is going to be a bigger bitch than she is. For a short while she might actually want me dead more than you. Nice touch with crushing the noise-bomb on her head. I honestly would have thought the blunted arrow would be enough to knock her out, but she has a strong will, this one."

"She's a Cynn-Blood?" I asked in disbelief. I was witness to it, but I doubted my own eyes.

"Well noted."

"Did the light..." I left the rest unsaid.

Izthark tangled her up further in the netting and started to nail the net into the ground. However, he stopped at my words. "No, the artifical light doesn't hurt Cynn-Bloods. What does it matter what she is? What would you have done had you known?"

The used her own helmet to hammer in the nail for lack of a hammer. I, however, could not answer him. I hesitated. Noting my uncertainty, he paused, "Would you have given yourself over to die?"

"I..."

"You haven't done shit to her, and even if you had, you are on a mission. Do you think your quest and resistance to the Aeterna is less important than her feelings and vengeance?"

"No. An apology and changes made, sure, but no. You're right. I would have hesitated, even to the point of dieing as a result, so I am thankful to have not known; but I wouldn't give myself over as a sacrifice to satisfy her demons. Too many depend on me to allow it."

"Exactly. Adam thinks nobles and kings should be judged by the people, but not by every single one. No matter where a line is drawn to include everyone within your good intentions, there will be someone still left outside excluded to suffer. I can't say I agree, but then I don't know what I think."

I stared at him for a moment as he finished rooting her down. I marveled for a moment at the teaching of Adam, and to some degree agreed. Not fully, but enough to find Adam wiser than he might let on at first glance.

"There!" Izthark tugged at his work to test its strength. His work did not budge. He put the helmet and veil back on her head and made sure there wasn't any skin revealed. "Lets see her use her power on that. Can't take the whole damn infinite soil with her if she wants to jump around. Its still missing something... Oh!"

He reached into his bag and, pulling out some chalk, drew a smile on her helmet.

I stared at it as he walked by me. "Lets go. We have ground to make up."

"She is going to kick you in grandkids." I muttered.