A/N: This fic is probably better read over at AO3, simply because there is ABSOLUTELY NO WAY TO EMBED AN IMAGE ON FFNET. Sorry, rant over, moving on. This fic is hopefully going to be a collection of Uncharted Realms-style stories written as part of the custom set that I am (suuuuuuper slowly) working on. All the planeswalkers and characters in this particular fic are OCs (which is kind of a first for me, I very rarely write fanfiction rather than original fiction with OCs, but MtG is a good fandom for it). This does tie very loosely to the Counterflux 'verse, as Iskra is a relatively major character to the storyline.
Between Sunlight and Shadow
"In the morning, when Sadra Efrosyni returned, she found the church deathly silent. Every cleric was dead, each one with two neat holes in their throat and drained entirely of blood. All because someone fell asleep when he was supposed to be guarding the door."
Hyrios rolled his eyes. "I'm not going to fall asleep on vigil. And, while there may be many gruesome creatures out there, I've never heard tell of one that fed on human blood. Most monsters aren't that picky."
Brodros Photios grinned back. "I still think it's a good tale," he rumbled. "It certainly keeps the children indoors at night."
"Well, I am not a child." Hyrios, though he had been raised in the nearby village, had officially joined the Church of the Golden Hill only recently. He had spent the past five years in the company of one of the Silsing merchants, traveling from the deepwoods to the steam fields and even, on one memorable occasion, to the White Citadel itself. Seeing new places, learning new things—conning his way into the vast Enumian libraries in some of the elves' towering cities—that was a dream come true for the young scholar. It was only now that he had returned home, after a letter from his sisters telling him that tensions seemed to be brewing—not between the humans and their treefolk neighbors, but within the church itself.
Thus far, Hyrios had seen no sign of the tensions that she spoke of, but he was content to spend at least a few years working off the debt he felt he owed to the church that had practically raised him and his two siblings after their parents died in an accident. Though the past years had been eventful, there was something joyful about the slow calm existence he enjoyed here, although he would have preferred a larger selection of available books. He had already ready every volume in the tiny library and had begun, slowly, to pass the time by attempting to put his recent experiences down on paper.
"How's the book going?" Photios asked, as Hyrios settled himself against the sun-warmed stones of the large front archway of the church, preparing for the evening vigil.
"Slowly but surely." Hyrios smiled. "It's hard to see the best way to put it all together."
"Ah, you have surely seen many things that old Photios can't even dream of." Photios shook his head. "I'll be able to read it when you're done?"
"Of course. Though it may take me as many years to write it as it took to live it." He laughed a little self-deprecatingly.
"Well, that's all right. That's how I like my excitement. As vicarious as possible." Photios chuckled. "You'll be all right if I leave you to it?"
Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Hyrios nodded. Of course, Photios had known him since he was a child, but it was still irritating that this was the first time the man had trusted him to stand vigil alone. Perhaps sensing how he felt, Photios held up his hands in surrender. "I'll go along, then."
"Thank Zolota," Hyrios muttered, but too quietly for Photios to hear him. As the older priest left, he settled back against the wall, watching the sun descend slowly across the sky. As its round, orange bottom touched the horizon, he saw Kiki skipping across the fields toward him.
"I brought you dinner!" she said cheerfully, only a little out of breath. "Just bread and cheese today, sorry. Georgia's escorting the Witchmother home, and you know how I am at cooking." Her sword rattled at her side, the belt at least a full size too large for her.
"I'll make sure to bring you nothing but bread and cheese on your own vigil next week," Hyrios needled his sister.
She pouted at him. "You cook just fine," she said accusatorily. "It's not my fault it was this or burnt eggs."
"Maybe if you didn't spend the whole day practicing with your sword in the fields," Hyrios said mildly. "But never mind. If some pumpkins attack the church, we'll be well-prepared."
"I am an exceptionally good swordswoman," Kiki said frostily, handing him the dinner basket. "You just don't appreciate it because you would cut off your own hand if you tried to wield one."
"The pen is mightier than the sword," Hyrios responded, brandishing his at her. A dot of ink landed on the bridge of her nose, and she squealed in surprise. Trying to rub it off, she only succeeded in smudging it.
"Take your damn dinner," she said, giving up after she'd rubbed ink across her cheek. "I'm going to go home and practice." She paused. "Actually, since you're on vigil, and I'll probably just go home and read…would you like to have it for tonight?" Her hand went to the sword at her side.
"It's just vigil," Hyrios said.
"I know, but it's technically your first one by yourself. I'd feel better if you had Obsidian. She'll take care of you."
"All right," Hyrios sighed. "As long as I don't have to actually draw her. Maybe she'll scare off any pumpkins that try to kill me."
Still, despite his confident words, despite the fact that he knew that these days standing vigil was about as dangerous as sitting in the library and reading—and he'd been in actual danger sometimes while traveling—Obsidian was a comfortable weight against his side.
Once Kiki had left, Hyrios ate his dinner quickly, then began the evening prayers. First, he lit the torches in their large sconces around the door, then the ornate lantern, heavy with oil, above it. Finally, as the sun dipped below the horizon, he lit the candles in a half circle and murmured the nightly prayer to Zolota and Avtandil. Silently, as he had done for several years now, he added prayers to Halashk, Lampyridae, Ruzai, and Aguin. He knew it wasn't exactly proper for an Obiru cleric to pray to the other witches, but, Hyrios thought wryly, it never hurt to have more entities on your side.
Then he sank into a cross-legged position in the front of the door and began to sit vigil.
It was dull and sleepy to sit vigil alone. The flickering candlelight, rather than being distracting, was soothing, and several times, Hyrios found himself having to pinch himself to stay awake. Once, he drowsed off and only woke because he knocked himself on the forehead with Obsidian's pommel. Fortunately, the pain and shock from actually falling asleep were enough to keep him awake from then on.
A little after two, according to the mark on the central candle, he heard the muffled clatter of a door, but as it was coming from within the church, he paid no attention. He was seated in front of the only way to enter the church from the outside, after all. Half an hour later, he heard what sounded like a short scream from somewhere behind and down.
Hyrios' brow furrowed. On the one hand, he definitely should not leave his vigil. And the noise had probably just been one of the novices either having a nightmare or stubbing their toe or something. On the other hand…
On the other hand, he had an ugly feeling in the pit of his stomach. Georgia had not returned with the Witchmother yet, and it wasn't that far down the Sweetwater to the Church of Golden Bones, which lay at the very edge of the Silsing. "Zolota, forgive me," Hyrios groaned, and he got to his feet, one hand seeking the pommel of the sword that Kiki had lent him.
The church was eerily quiet, and the shadows seemed longer than they ought to be. Hyrios paused at the novice dormitory to steal a candle and peer inside. Most of the beds were occupied, but Georgia's, of course, was empty. So were two others—Photios and a new young woman who had arrived a month or two ago from the Church of the Golden Bones were gone. Hyrios couldn't even remember her name, though he ought to know everyone by now.
Wishing he could call flame as some of his erstwhile traveling companions could, Hyrios paused for a precious moment to light the candle with flint and steel.
"Hyrios?" A small voice. Yeshim, the youngest of the novices, was sitting up in her bed. She was eight years old, an orphan like Hyrios, Georgia, and Kiki.
"Shhhh, go back to bed."
"I had nightmares. Can you get me some hot milk?"
"Not—right now, Yeshim. I'll come back in a little while, okay?"
"But I'm scared." Her voice was rising at the end. Hyrios gritted his teeth. He didn't have time for this.
With a sigh, he leaned over and woke another one of the novices. "Can you get Yeshim some hot milk? I have to go check on something."
"Hyrios? Aren't you on vigil?"
"Just—just get her some milk and get her back to sleep, all right?"
Another sound broke the eerie stillness, not a scream this time, but a rising shout. Yeshim flinched. Hyrios left the dormitory at a fast trot, his hand tightening on Obsidian's pommel.
The noises were coming from the stairs leading down into the basement. As he took the first steps down, Hyrios realized he could hear a low, rising chant coming from below. He raised the candle high, looking at the stairs. The prints of two feet showed clearly in the disturbed veneer of dust.
The chanting grew louder as he neared the bottom, and he could see that light was filtering out from beneath the door at the bottom, which Hyrios knew led to a storage room filled with old and mostly broken artifacts. In fact, it was where Kiki had found Obsidian several years ago. She had written him excitedly that the Witchmother had said she could take the old sword to practice with, as no one else had clearly used it for years and years.
Taking a deep breath, heart thumping, Hyrios put a hand on the door, then paused and blew out his own candle, waiting for a moment for his eyes to adjust a little. He pushed the door open.
The room was lit by hundreds of candles in neat concentric rings around the floor and melted to the walls, a hasty echo of the correct ritualistic invocation to Zolota, except that every single one of the candles was made of black wax. Georgia, eyes wide open and fixed on nothing, stood at the far end of the room, mouth open as she chanted something unintelligible. The light gilt covering had flaked off of it, or been scraped, and it was black with thin streaks of glittering gold. Seated in it, a wide, rictus-like grin drawn across her face, was the Witchmother. In the flickering candlelight, the shadows pooling beneath the chair seemed too black, writhing like living things toward the black stone slab in the center of the room.
Photios was bound to the slab, and the novice from the Church of the Golden Bones stood over him with a black knife. She was also chanting, but unlike the emptiness of Georgia's expression, there was a lurking glee glittering in her dark eyes.
Obsidian was in Hyrios' hand before he even realized it. "What in the witch's name—"
The knife came down before he could take another step, opening Photios' throat from side to side, an ugly dark gash in the weird golden light. Photios thrashed and gurgled, black blood spilling from the cut onto the black slab beneath. Hyrios' breath caught in his throat, and he found himself unable to move as he watched the fear rising and then draining from Photios' face, swift as the blood pouring onto the dark altar.
"What—what have you done?" he croaked after a moment, taking another step into the room. His stomach heaved, but he managed not to throw up.
The Witchmother giggled, a shrill noise that swiftly deepened as the shadows around her began to wrap around her and rise. "We will turn the witch's robe black with blood," she rasped.
"Oh, Zolota, too long you've been held back by the weakness of the outlying churches," moaned the girl whose name he still couldn't remember. "We will bring you to ascendancy over the other witches and their inferior creations."
Sheer anger boiled up inside Hyrios. He drew the sword out of its sheathe and took two steps forward, trying to run it directly through her. The sword went in easily enough, but caught on something, jarring his arm and making him stumble forward. "Georgia, wake up!" he shouted, and something cold and horrible touched his outstretched arm. The girl laughed.
"Not enough to kill me," she crooned. "Certainly not enough to kill her." Behind her, the Witchmother was rising. The shadows came with her, and she seemed to grow, the lower half of her body beginning to bloat into a swollen mass of darkness.
"Avtandil's heart," Hyrios breathed.
"We will make the splinters whole and rule them all!"
A hand, shadows dripping from it, reached out and seized Hyrios around the throat. He jerked and gasped as he was lifted off his feet, but managed to hold onto Obsidian and tugged at the hilt desperately, trying to free the sword for another attack. Wild laughter sounded in his ears again, and he was thrown backward, along with the sword. He hit something hard, then fell, leg crumpling beneath him as he landed awkwardly on the floor with a gasp of pain.
"But first," said the Witchmother, her voice deepened almost beyond recognition. "First, we will kill the heretics." Her madly skittering eyes fluttered upward to the ceiling. Oh, Zolota, no.
"Georgia," Hyrios begged. "You have to get the novices out. Please. Listen to me." Gritting his teeth, he managed to call to mind one of the few spells he knew that might be useful, a quick chant he'd learned from an elemental to dispel magic. One hand on the wall, he tried to get to his feet, but pain flashed through his ankle, and it gave out. On the other side of the room, his sister's blank eyes flickered from him to Obsidian to the Witchmother. She gave a sudden, startled gasp, her own hand reaching to her side—but if she had had a sword, it was gone now.
"Georgia, please." Hyrios slumped back against the wall, frantically scanning the interior of the room. There had to be something around here that might help. He got onto his hands and knees just as Georgia shook her head again and bolted for the stairs. The Witchmother drew herself to her new full height, the top of her head brushing the ceiling, like a snake readying itself to strike.
Without thinking, Hyrios launched himself forward, driving Obsidian through the curtain of shadows at the base of the Witchmother's form. He jarred his arm again, but the sword went down and into the earthen floor, and the Witchmother fell at the base of the stairs, just below Georgia, who gasped and ran faster. The Witchmother turned, roaring with anger, and the novice reached down, tearing Hyrios' grip off of Obsidian and reaching for it herself. She shrieked with pain as she touched it, backing away. "What did you do?" she hissed, rounding on him.
Gasping, Hyrios didn't bother answering, instead rapidly scanning around the room again. Much of the old junk had been pushed to the sides, though some of it had been left in place beneath the black candles. Something large and oblong gleamed beneath the lantern light, and it niggled at the back of his mind, until he suddenly remembered the time he had been trapped behind the cave-in near the White Citadel, and the dwarves they had been with had blasted the passage open. It wasn't a magical artifact, it was just an explosive, neatly tucked just inches away from the nearest candle.
The fuse on such a device meant that it didn't explode instantaneously, but it would only have a delay of a few minutes or so. He didn't even know if a blast of that magnitude would be enough to kill the creature the Witchmother had become, and—he felt a twinge of pain run through his ankle—it was highly unlikely he would be able to outrun it. He shook his head. Never mind that. Would Georgia have enough time to get the novices out?
The Witchmother's helper grabbed his throat again, dragging him upright. "Take the sword out," she hissed, "or, by Avtandil, I will kill you where you stand."
Hyrios laughed weakly. "Then how would you free her?" he asked.
"Don't kill him," rumbled the Witchmother. "Hurt him." The novice slammed Hyrios into the wall, her nails digging into the flesh of his throat, and he gasped for breath. Just as spots began to swirl in front of his eyes, the pressure relaxed slightly, a tiny amount of air into his straining lungs, just enough to keep him conscious, before she pressed down again.
"Take the sword out," she said. "I can do this all night."
Hyrios shook his head weakly, wondering if he could get her to drop him. He still had his flint and steel, heavy weights in the pockets of his tunic. But how long? How long did he need to stall? How long could he stall? The Witchmother roared and strained forward again, but Obsidian kept her anchored.
Pain shot through his arm again as the woman holding him twisted it. If she broke it, he wouldn't be able to light anything. "All right," he gasped. "I'll get the sword out. Put me down. Please."
She set him roughly on his feet, one hand still holding onto his arm, and guided him toward the sword. Meekly, he let her take him to it and bent over, putting both hands on the hilt. Taking a deep breath, he yanked Obsidian out of the earth and whirled around, slashing wildly. The girl cried out as the point scored along her face, and he turned back and drove it through the Witchmother once again before throwing himself to his hands and knees and scrambling across the room.
Miraculously, he reached the explosive without anyone stopping him, and even more miraculously, he managed to fumble his flint and steel out of his pocket and into his hands.
"What are you doing?" the girl shrilled, her voice suddenly high and laced with terror. "Is that a—"
How long? How long did he have? The flint and steel shuddered in his hands. If this was too early, he could kill all the novices. If it was too late, he could be killing himself and letting the Witchmother go unharmed, for all he knew. The Witchmother was turning towards him, understanding dawning in her wide, dark eyes. No other choice.
The flint scraped against the steel and a spark leapt from it, landed on the fuse, which ignited with a soft hissing noise. He kicked the bomb backwards as the Witchmother reached for him, hoping desperately the fuse wouldn't be snuffed out. There was a sudden, hard blow to his lower abdomen; he coughed, filling his mouth with the taste of copper, and stared down stupidly at the black shadow that had punched its way through his stomach. Blood was soaking through the front of his white tunic, forming a rapidly-widening stain around it.
"I will rip out your entrails," snarled the Witchmother.
"I'm not sure you have the time," Hyrios responded, then screamed as the shadow moved viciously inside him, choking and gasping against the pain. Zolota, just make it stop, he begged, watching in horror as the writhing shadow pulled back, dragging something wet and bloody and—
The explosion was almost a relief.
Hyrios wept at the pain that pulled him back to consciousness. He gasped, but he could barely get any breath into his lungs. There was a little light on his face, and he could hear something dripping far away, but he couldn't move. There was an awful dull ache in his ribs, but at least the pain in his stomach was gone. Everything beneath his waist felt numb, disjointed, light.
It wasn't fair. He ought to be dead already, not trapped and slowly bleeding out beneath the rubble of the church. Wasn't that the least that the witches or the universe or someone could do for a hero?
"Ah, but, you see, we could do more." A feather-light touch brushed across his cheek, and warm breath ghosted across his ear. "Your sisters are praying for you, Hyrios. Pleading for your safe return. They did not see your entrails spilled across the floor, and they cannot see you trapped and dying here, or perhaps they would only pray for your swift death."
Hyrios closed his eyes. Was it Zolota speaking in his ear? She sounded cold, almost cruel.
"I am not my sister Aguin, nor my sister Halashk," Zolota answered. "I cannot feel as they do, but I will not abandon you, Hyrios. You have saved me from the obsidian mantle and the golden sword, and that is not the aspect that I prefer to take on."
"What?" Hyrios' voice sounded dusty and cracked, soft as a whisper that was all the air he could force into his compressed lungs.
The witch sighed. "I cannot ask you to decide like this; pain will do it for you," she said softly. There was a soft little noise like the birth of a spark, and then the world around him seemed to peel away, the compressing rubble and dark earth splitting back to reveal a soft white fog, and, at the horizon, a brilliant orange sun turning the whole area golden. Hyrios heaved in a breath and coughed in surprise at the relief.
"Temporary measures, I'm afraid," said Zolota, and now he could see her, a human woman half a head or so taller than he was. Her skin was as dark as the elementals who lived in Megiddo, but her eyes were faint gold, a sheen that was matched by the shimmering cloak around her shoulders. In one hand, she held a sword, black as ink, and it took Hyrios a long, surprised moment to identify it as Obsidian.
"I have more than one aspect, you know," she said, with a faintly amused smile. "If I stood in the Church of Golden Bones, I would look like this instead." For a moment, her form flickered: dark skin turned pale, gold eyes and cloak black, and the sword glowed with an unearthly light. "But then, I probably wouldn't be bothering with one single mortal if I wore the obsidian mantle in place of the gold. Not even a hero." She laughed lightly. "Well, hero Hyrios—you have a choice. I can let you die, swift and painless. Your sisters will find your body in a few nights—perhaps a week. They will mourn, and they will move on. Or—I can make it so you do not die for a very long time, but that—will not be painless."
"I don't want to die," Hyrios blurted before he'd had a chance to think, but the thoughts followed quickly. If he died, there was no one to tell the others what had happened to the Witchmother or warn them about the Church of the Golden Bones. Kiki and Georgia had been right when they called him home—it was clear that the church was splintering, and the consequences of the wrong faction coming out on top were horrific. He sucked in a pained breath at the thought of Photios' convulsing face as his blood drained away on the top of the altar. "I can't die," he said quietly. "I have to keep your mantle golden."
"I must say that I appreciate your dedication," Zolota responded. "But I will give you one more chance. Are you sure?"
He didn't want to be given the choice; it was worse than being forced to deal with whatever presented itself. But he couldn't ask, because if he asked about the pain, he might not be able to stick with his decision. Swallowing, trying not to remember what it had felt like, trapped and bleeding and dying, he nodded.
"Very well," murmured Zolota. "As your sisters have prayed and given me blood for your safety, I shall give you blood in return."
The world around him seemed to invert, his senses reeling, as he swung without moving from standing up to lying on his back. Above him, Zolota took to the sky on golden wings, her dark hair swirling out around her head. She drew the obsidian sword from its place at her side and slid it through her hand. Turning the hand over, she let Hyrios see the dark line of blood it had left across the palm, and then she held it up and squeezed her fist. Blood collected at the bottom and began drip in a thin stream downwards, landing in Hyrios' open mouth.
It didn't taste of copper the way his own had. Instead, it was almost honey-sweet, but it left a prickling, painful discomfort as it passed over his tongue that turned into the sharp bite of spiciness as he swallowed. Then it hit his stomach, and he tried to gasp, but he couldn't move his lungs any longer. Fiery heat followed by pain surged from his stomach outward into his veins, blood pounding in his ears. He felt his heart thud heavily once and then shiver to a halt, but the blood didn't stop moving. His muscles twisted and twitched, arching his back and snapping his head back, his limbs juddering out of his control like a puppet's. He tried to scream, but he couldn't, and then the fire in his blood was followed by pain splitting through the skin of his back and stomach, as if someone had taken a knife to him and was slowly tracing some kind of intricate pattern across his flesh with it.
Please, he begged, but he didn't know what he was begging for. A choked gurgle caught in his throat as his lungs hiccupped and froze, unmoving, the pain of suffocation flooding into his chest. Was all of this just a fever dream as he died?
Zolota's figure above him was blurring, behind the haze of liquid across his eyes. She seemed to be hovering near, however. "I may have tricked you a little," she murmured in his ear. "You're still going to die, but this way you'll at least come back."
He felt her fingers playing across his chest and stomach and legs and back—all at once. Then there was a snapping noise as one of the hands sank through the front of his chest. Hyrios tried to scream, but no sound came out, and he choked instead, copper rising in his mouth. He stared with horrified lucidity as her hand came up again, holding an unmoving lump of red. She brought to her mouth and blew on it; gold seemed to solidify over the surface. The scene seemed to freeze and ripple as it began to fade in one final burst of pain.
He was trapped in darkness again, but he wasn't numb any longer. Instead, every inch of his skin felt as if it was on fire. He moaned and coughed; something overhead shifted. "I found him—I think I found him! He's moving!" It was Kiki's voice, high and almost childish in quality. "Come quickly!"
The darkness above him changed in quality, growing grey and then pale. Light broke through as the rubble above him was shifted. The sunlight was hardly better than the darkness; it prickled on his skin with the same burning sensation Zolota's blood had left inside him, and it pierced his head with pain through his eyes. He blinked and moaned, trying to cover his face with his hands.
"Hold still, we don't know how badly hurt you are," Georgia's voice said.
"I'm not hurt," Hyrios croaked. In agonizing pain, yes, but he didn't think he was hurt. Forcing himself to move, he managed to shift the rubble above him in tandem with whoever else was working.
It was almost like swimming, very painful swimming, through a remarkably solid substance, but eventually, he found the weight above him easing. Hands landed on his shoulders, helping him up into the dizzyingly bright sunlight. He stumbled forward and fell to his knees, his stomach turning over as he vomited bread and cheese mixed with dark red blood.
"Quick, get the healer," Georgia said to someone, and Hyrios lay and blinked at her.
"Are they safe?" he rasped. "The novices—are they—"
"They're fine," she said. "We had plenty of time—we ran—and then we heard the explosion. Zolota, I thought you—I thought—" She was trembling. "You must be in pain."
"Witches' breath, yes," he managed. "I am in so much pain right now."
"There's—blood all across your front. Are you still bleeding?"
The sun on his skin was too hot, a fire baking him inside and out, but he felt whole. Slowly, he pulled up the front of his tunic, which was stiff and sticky with half-dried blood. Beneath it, there was no fresh injury, but there was a ragged scar across the lower part of his abdomen that hadn't been there before, off which branched a raised red incision that went all the way up his sternum and nearly to his shoulder. "No," Hyrios said softly. "I—I'm not still bleeding."
But, he thought, in a strange, clinical way, he could smell blood, the copper tang heavy in his nostrils. Just looking up at Georgia, he could see the repeated pulse of the blood through her throat. He heard Kiki's voice; she and the healer were rapidly approaching.
"I—I need—" Hyrios choked out. He didn't know what he needed. He was cold and he needed warmth; too hot, and he needed something to cool him down.
Georgia reached out and put her arms around him, almost hesitantly. The three of them had often touched one another as reassurance, but somehow this was—different. Hyrios buried his face in the junction of her shoulder and tried not to smell the blood rushing and pulsing just beneath the skin. The scent was a weak echo of the taste of the witch's blood, but tantalizing all the same.
He shut his eyes, concentrating on Georgia's trembling hand in his hair. The witch had said it would be painful. But someone had to stop the golden mantle from turning black. And it looked as if it was up to him. There was a long road ahead of him, but at least, he thought tiredly, he did enjoy adventures.