As could be expected after such a weighty comment, silence again reigned between the cousins. They continued through the barren wasteland, with its furiously naked trees, its cracked ground and its dusty winds, until mountain peaks began to appear on the horizon. It was at this point that Seyashen realized that the sun had neither gone up nor down throughout this entire journey. Not once had he experienced anything that remotely resembled midnight, afternoon, or early morning. There had simply been a steady, shadow-eating noonday, occasionally obscured by the loose soil in the stronger gusts, that pressed down on Iaden and Seyashen minute after minute, hour after hour.
Seyashen wondered what time it could possibly truly be, immediately before groaning to himself that time probably meant absolutely nothing to Afflux. Infinite beings, he believed, were fairly unconcerned with the finite's obsession with time. They would never be late, or grow old or die- their lives stretched on into the unimaginable future, making their connections with the mortal beings who believed in them inconvenient at best and fatal at worst. After all, who had not heard of priests starving or beating themselves to death before their god deigned to answer their desperate prayers, or of seers caught so strongly in a vision that they starved or went without water for days? Perhaps such sacrifices sounded glorious, to believers, but they sounded pointless to a male who wondered what such a seer might smell like, especially if they sweat under pressure, or if their bladders were full to bursting upon their awakening.
These thoughts were interrupted by Iaden's sudden halt.
"What in Baator could those be?" he muttered in a halfway concerned voice. When Seyashen turned his gaze toward the direction in which Iaden was looking, he noticed that a few of the mountain peaks sported dark violet clouds that spiraled upward into what looked like upside down windstorms.
"Don't ask me," Seyashen replied, although he knew Iaden hadn't expected an answer. "I thought this place was supposed to be a labyrinth, not an open safari."
Iaden shrugged and sighed, leaning his head back and putting one hand to his shoulder to massage it for a few moments. "Labyrinths have walls. In a place with walls, it's clear that you want to get out of the walls. You can get used to certainty like that. If you're used to the darkness and being blocked in all the time, a place without those confines is worse than the dankest prison. Out here, there's no real direction, but in there, you can feel safe-"
"To the point where you don't even really want to get out of the walls," Seyashen noted. "It's a comfortable challenge, a test that you already know all the answers to, but that you don't want to pass because you don't want to go on to the next level." With a snort, he began moving forward again, causing Iaden to have to trot a few steps to catch up with him.
"I don't like it either," Iaden offered when he made it back to his cousin's side. "Maelvalle- where I was born- was more open, with manses surrounding the village that was pretending to be a city, but Vor Kragal was...cramped. Busy. Too many streets, too many bodies. Isha didn't know any better. She played in the shadows that the buildings cast, and never saw any problem with doing so. But I never really got used to the place. And Avernus is chaotic, some half-paved streets crushed between one demigod's tower and another, and then vast, empty plains- you've never seen so many-"
And Iaden stopped talking, the rest of his sentence stolen by an effortlessly lovely woman whose sandy brown hair cascaded in unkempt ringlets over her pallid, bare back. She hung her head between her bowed shoulders as though her upper body was much to heavy to hold erect, and her hands laid open on her crossed legs. Her pose evoked the idea of meditation, but the soulless way in which she rested made it seem as though she were either near death's door or just freshly passed through it. Seyashen noticed that she was covered in bandages, much like the Master Inquisitor, and wondered what he had to do with this appearance.
"Eiko?" Seyashen breathed, forgetting for a moment where he was. Against Iaden's better judgement, Seyashen ran forward a few steps, and the lifeless body picked her head up without turning her gaze toward him. When her hair moved, an unearthly electric blue tattoo became visible on her left shoulder.
"Yasha," came the simple thought. But the power of that thought staggered both Seyashen, who momentarily dropped to one knee mid-stride, and Iaden, who unconsciously began to ready his weapon. It seemed to the magic-less warrior that the diminutive form of his cousin's name had somehow sounded with thunder that reverberated with a force that shook the bones in his body.
Seyashen, unfazed by the mental strength that had so bothered Iaden, continued running forward for a few more moments, stopping just a few feet shy of the motionless young woman.
"A gift awaits you."
Seyashen took a few moments to absorb her words- as indeed the physical force of her thoughts jarred him- then sat down just off to her left. "Thank you," he began quietly. "So- he- did it, at last?"
"No."
"Then- did you leave the village?"
The woman smirked, evoking a sigh of relief from Iaden. Without that shred of normalcy, her face seemed doll-like in its eerie, seamless beauty. "I am not dead. That is what you wish to know."
"Yes," Seyashen admitted, "but it's not all I wished to know."
"Good. Afflux does well." For some insane reason, it seemed absolutely appropriate for this slender female to be giving a god her seal of approval. Iaden got the distinct impression that the immortal spirit ought to be grateful for this particular mortal female's esteem. She moved with little effort, seeming to somehow disappear from view while sitting and reappear standing and facing Seyashen. When she extended a hand to him, Iaden noted that her fingers were artfully long, and that the underside of her wrist also bore that shocking blue tattoo. "Still, you tremble."
"You can't have forgotten the house we turned to a heap of char," Seyashen sighed heavily. "Just a glance at you, and I-"
"And where around here is there a single blessed shack?" Iaden promptly goaded, leaving his weapon and crossing his arms in disgust. "Hold her blasted hand, you coward."
Seyashen thought better of snapping back at his cousin, getting up slowly to look at the slightly shorter Human female. When he reached out his hand to her, however, she smiled and took a tiny step back. He stepped toward her instinctively at first, but surged forward to grab her when she simply stepped back into the wide, dark river on whose banks she'd previously been sitting. Knowing that living things didn't tend to do well once they touched its waters, Seyashen thought of nothing else but saving the woman to which he'd once been very close.
But she didn't wither and die, nor did she show any signs of being poisoned. Unlike Iaden, however, she didn't simply ignore it, either.
Out of the perfect porcelain-toned forehead burst iron satyr-like horns, and from her back suddenly pushed a tapered, spiked iron tail. Apparently pleased with her change, Eiko spread her arms with the palms of her hands facing down toward the water. Two pillars of water built themselves up to touch her hands, then followed as she raised them above her head to form an arch of dark water that steamed as though it were blisteringly hot.
Seyashen, now more amazed than concerned, stood on the bank of the dark river and nodded slowly. "Masterful matter agitation. But the energy-"
"Loss." The word, while spoken with a calm tone, echoed in howling cries from all points surrounding the two males. Iaden so much as looked around to see who or what were suddenly accompanying them.
And the memory of Iaden's heavy declaration that he was not the only one being tortured nagged at Seyashen's mind. Looking straight into Eiko's brilliant eyes, he stepped down into the river and was instantly filled with a strange confidence and a sensation of strength. "Your father was right, then. Humans who consort with Tieflings lose their humanity as though they had made the ancient pacts themselves."
"One cannot lose what they did not once possess," Eiko replied, her thoughts actually causing the ground to tremble. "Come."
Iaden said nothing when Seyashen slowly sloshed against the flow of the river toward what he now believed to be a lost lover. Eiko reached out her hands to Seyashen, and the dark waters that had been creating an arch above her crystallized into bony wings that implanted themselves into her back. Iaden fully expected to be left behind when Seyashen went forward to take her hands, but instead, in one blink, all three stood on a craggy peak, looking down into a fenced area with a battered wooden table and two chairs.
There Akmenyn and Vashen sat, playing five finger catch with what looked like a sharpened bone.
Eiko's image faded slightly, and Seyashen drew her into an embrace.
"You will return," Eiko said, her voice disappearing along with her presence. "I will not lose you twice."
"Long story, I bet," Iaden said affably as he watched the slender female dissipate into thin air. "Sad tale of a headstrong young boy and a overly protected young girl?"
"And a million bard's tales must begin the same way," Seyashen sighed, leaning on one of the standing stones. "But she was not in any way a favored child. Imagine being born a psion to a father who believed that all magic was from Baator. He branded her as a pariah and had her tongue cut out at five years old, leaving her for outlanders and bandits to raise."
"He's a fool," Iaden spat immediately. "If my child were born a werewolf, he would still be my child, and no power could turn me against him."
"Your father was a fortunate man, to have a daughter as resilient as Mi'ishaen and a son with a backbone like you," Seyashen nodded. "That war cost him too much to have ended in a truce."
"I'm surprised that you, the learned historian, don't know that it didn't," Iaden noted. "It ended because Asmodeus kept his end of the bargain, otherwise the Dragonborn would have succeeded in wiping both races out entirely. They're all or nothing, those leatherfaces."
"Asmodeus? In a bargain in addition to the one he struck with the gods?"
"Asmodeus underwrites all the demons' deals, like the empire backed the banks when they ran out of liquid assets. Anyway, as I was doing my job in Avernus, I heard talk of how the capitol city was surrounded by these gigantic, bleeding ebony spikes that closed over even the highest parapets of the place. Apparently, Vor Kragal disappeared into the earth with those things around it, as though Asmodeus himself reached up from Baator's basement and pulled his city down to him."
"If that's true, then he takes our existence rather personally," Seyashen mused. "You don't see the great Silver Dragon tearing the sky open to receive Io'vanthor into his claws."
"Because he cares not a whit for them," Iaden shrugged. "The Dragonborn ought to be grateful to Asmodeus, since Bahamut seemed fine with allowing them to tear their own empire to shreds along with ours. But you try telling that to a leatherface, see what kind of reception you get."
A holler brought both males' attentions back down into the low ground with the table.
"A deep cut?" Akmenyn asked affably, looking not at all concerned. He was sinewy, but not bulky, and sat back comfortably with his legs crossed at the ankles. While he didn't seem imposing at the moment, Seyashen could tell that he was looking at more than a common pageant prancer.
"What will it do to me?" Vashen scoffed, leaning forward to plant the bone knife into the table. "You're playing with a dead man, it's not as though I'll bleed myself dry."
"Just asking, brother," Akmenyn replied, pulling the knife out of the table and flipping it into the air. He passed a few moments catching it at the blade and flipping it back into the air before Vashen knocked on the table.
"I'm fine. Your pass, m'lord."
"Ah," Akmenyn said. His tone was much less than surprised, but not at all derisive- this was the voice of a man who'd survived more than a few temper tantrums. "As I said, the entire house was on my back, and of course, if the Dragonborn had their way, we'd all have been so much dust underfoot, so I figured I may as well."
"But you could have told that noble that you wouldn't go, Menye," Vashen argued, leaning forward to reason with the male before him. "You could have stood up for your family right there in the small town, before they whisked you out to Kragal."
"You think that, but it wasn't so easy with the elites all over the place," Akmenyn said, frowning as he worked his way around his fingers with the knife. "They knew me- everyone knew what type of man I was. And when they got their hands on Ani, well, the book was closed."
"And so the man who once had the courage to put a throwing knife through an elite's throat was cowed into serving covert missions for the Turathi power mongers," Vashen sighed, leaning back. "You don't see anything wrong with that?"
"Of course there was something wrong, Vash, but it wasn't with me. I was one man. One man with two children and a beautiful wife. Everything I did, I did in hopes of protecting them."
"And I was one man with over twenty partners and who knows how many children," Vashen laughed. "When there's a cause to uphold, sometimes one must allow the innocent to find their destiny as martyrs."
"See, that's where we- ouch- differ," Akmenyn managed, handing over the knife and sticking his right thumb in his mouth. "My left hand could use a little work, you think?"
"You're ambidextrous," Vashen spat. "You'd win this blindfolded, if we weren't talking. It's doing this while talking and thinking that's putting a damper on you." He began tapping his way around his fingers, but not without casually glancing up to the place where Seyashen and Iaden were standing. "Oh, little ears."
"You saw them as soon as I did; we've both stolen the eyes from the eagles," Akmenyn smirked, shaking his right hand lightly. "But as I was saying, I was focused on protecting my home, for all the good that did them. And your more honourable way was to escape the government's call and try to end the war in whatever way possible. I don't disagree with you. We just had different opportunities and different values."
"And because of those opportunities and values, we wound up fighting two different wars," Vashen retorted. "You let yourself become a pawn of the empire, for what? For the home that they greedily took apart the moment you stepped across the threshold?"
"They had already taken it apart, understand," Akmenyn sighed heavily. "Ani was in the court, chained to the wall. They split my children up and put them with their mentors- and Isha was hardly of an age to be stuck with that hideous old crone-"
"And because you tried to save them, you lost them," Vashen cut in, slamming the knife on the other side of his thumb. "Once others realize what you value, they can make a puppet out of you with it."
"Big talk for a man who got hung because he got caught at shooting a soldier who raped one of his various daughters," Akmenyn sliced. "But I bet you don't regret taking that creature down to Baator with you. Because as much as you pretend to be okay with making martyrs of your flesh and blood, the memory of her screams makes your skin crawl."
For a moment, both pairs of males looked at each other in silence.
"Curse your name, Treva," Vashen finally hissed bitterly. "I died for my cause."
"And I for the defense of my family. Both honourable, in their own ways," Akmenyn nodded graciously. "By the by, curses on your name, as well- whatever it may be."
"What about vengeance, father?" Iaden called down. "Is that honourable?"
"Of course, son," Akmenyn hollered back without even looking up. "Your tio Vashen here rounded his career up with a touch of vengeance; he knows how that feels."
"Indeed," Vashen allowed, signaling to Akmenyn that it was his turn to go around his hand with the knife. "Vengeance is a- respectable motive."
"And what about anger?" Seyashen dared, turning away from the low ground and sitting down.
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