notes: Flashbacks are a desperately lazy way of conveying information, but I have an unfortunate predilection toward them anyway.
For the curious, yes, this will eventually be an Albel/Fayt fic, though it will also contain Nel/Clair, Arzei/Elena Frahm, and potentially some others (i.e. whatever I come up with at the last moment.) Also, standard warnings for gore, violence, and general long-winded introspective prattle.
- - - -
The walls of Airyglyph Castle did nothing to protect Duke Vox from the cold; they seemed to bow and give way under the wind, and it seemed no warmer inside the castle's chambers than it was atop the Traum Mountains themselves, limned in a halo of ice-white; the snow sharpened the peaks against the ever-dark sky, diamond-hard and glistening.When not even the fineries of high society could warm him, Vox knew it was time for a good, stiff drink. So there he was, settled into a gilt chair like a king—or, at the very least, a king's uncle.
Not a moment later Albel appeared, seemingly out of the ether; he glimmered with beads of melted snow and, by all appearances, was utterly unaffected by the cold. He too seemed diamond-bright under the lambent glow of the torches on the wall; training, alone, in the cold again.
"Shouldn't you be in your bed?" Vox said, sipping some pale chilled liqueur. He regarded Albel with a cock of the head, the raise of an arch eyebrow.
"Shouldn't you?" Albel replied laconically.
"Well, I merely meant that someone your age should get their rest," Vox said. "Wouldn't want to be cranky next morning."
"Funny, I would have thought the same of you."
Vox favoured him with a tight-lipped smile. He regarded the cool drink in his glass for a brief moment; surprised, perhaps, that it hadn't yet developed crystals of ice. All pretense forgotten, he said, "I'm not entirely sure what gives you the idea you can wander about the castle during all hours of the night at your leisure. You should know your place, boy."
"I could say the same of you. For all your vaunting you still have not recognized me as an equal. Perhaps it is your pride." Albel regarded him insolently. "But his Majesty appointed me the captain of the Black Brigade for a reason." His tone held none of the usual cockiness; Albel sounded as though he was stating a simple fact. He continued, "And after all, aren't you always saying that the King's word is utterly infallible?"
"Hm. I also never thought His Majesty's judgment could be so easily swayed by a warm body and a pretty visage."
"You flatter me," Albel said, feigning coyness.
"My, is that what passes for flattery nowadays?" Vox's expression became a parody of surprise. "Why, in my day insinuating someone had sullied His Majesty's clean hands would have been a grave insult. What a time it is we live in..."
"True enough; I've always thought 'your day' was long past, worm."
"I, at the very least, am old enough to know what's best for me."
"And stupid enough to never do it, apparently."
Vox coldly laughed the comment off, swirling the drink in his glass. It was a true Glyphian's drink, strong and near-unpalatably bitter, but in time it numbed a man utterly. For that purpose it worked faster than the snow, and, at the very least, was better than the swill of the common soldier.
"You look a lot like your father, you know." Vox's voice had a hard edge. "I often wonder if he swayed His Majesty in the same way you did. You know the old adage: like father, like son, and all that."
Albel clenched his jaw.
He would have cleanly decapitated him, were he any other man. He would have eaten Vox's heart himself if he could have, but Vox was the only man in all of Gaitt, probably even all of Elicoor, who had the right to say he could kill Albel the Wicked at his leisure.
Albel knew when he was bested.
Quickly composing himself, he said, "You jealous old fool." With a white-knuckled grip on the hilt of his katana, he abruptly turned on his heel, stalking off.
"Do be careful not to wander into any air dragons' lairs," Vox called out after him, seeming almost joyless in his victory. "We wouldn't want anymore... mishaps, now would we?"
- - - -
chapter I; red everlasting
walk the cramps off
go meander in the cold.
- - - -
It was still bitingly cold in Airyglyph Castle, but, at the very least, Vox was no longer around to feel it. Albel took some small comfort in this fact, but he certainly did not relish that it wasn't by his own hand. The man had died in some spectacular blast of light and colour, and hell, Albel hadn't even been around to witness it, while other times...Albel's right hand unconsciously gripped the Crimson Scourge at his side.
"Vox's jibe against your father still stings, doesn't it?" it said in his mind. Albel was fairly certain that the Scourge could not laugh, let alone in a mocking way, but it seemed to be doing so nonetheless.
"Nonsense," he scoffed aloud. "...I was a different man when I was seventeen," he added with an air of uncertainty.
He had had nothing to antagonize as of late, and that lead to boredom. Boredom lead to thinking, and there were a lot of things he would have preferred not to think of; there was perhaps some unspoken universal law that meant that he had to think of those things most.
It also meant that he was rationalizing with himself by talking to a sword.
He shook his head.
In the past months he had taken to sitting atop the castle's perpetually snow-dusted watchtower, keeping no particular vigil at all. Yes, it was still bitingly cold in Airyglyph, hard and barren and fruitless; everything was absolute, and Albel thought he probably liked it better that way. Irisa, Palmira, Aquios—they were all too lush, too verdant for his tastes; the atmosphere there begat weakness. Airyglyph was a place for the strong, and in Airyglyph, survival was a privilege, not a right. Mothers toughened their babes by sheer force of will alone.
Of course, Albel's mother had always liked Aquios better.
He liked to think he had inherited weakness from her, as if everything was somehow her fault.
He began down the icy stairs of the watchtower. He could remember the first time he had seen Aquaria XXVII, painted in some saccharine likeness and hung on a wall somewhere, and gods, it was like his mother had become oil on canvas and was staring back at him; save, of course, for the sigil on the Queen's forehead, the embellishments draped over her head in lieu of a crown. It was those vermilion eyes—those Aquarian's eyes, people used to say. They said his mother would have been much better suited to life in Aquios, kept out of the snow and the perpetual dust, and of course, they were right—Albel loathed the analogy, but his mother had been like a pretty flower that had lingered too long in the cold.
It was a stupid sentiment, really.
He rounded a corner and strode purposelessly out, again, into the cold of the training yard, the brittle ice-tang of snow heavy in the air.
Perhaps it had been different when his mother was a girl. Perhaps the fields had been fertile and the snow didn't linger well into the spring months; maybe life had been easier. Perhaps at this time of year things were lush and quiet instead of frozen and iron-hard. Perhaps she hadn't hated the Airyglyph of her childhood.
As a woman, it was different; there had been unrest in her, a need for movement—before the war, Albel's mother had used to take him to Aquios.
He wondered exactly when that microcosmic paradise had become such a hateful place in his mind.
- - - -
Then, the whole world seemed to have been lulled into somnolence; to Albel's young eyes the view from the Aquios bridge seemed endless; in the twilight hours the light from the sunset would become absorbed by his mother's amaranthine eyes. In that world without winter, his mother had seemed to fit into place perfectly, no jagged edges, no holes to fill.She had seemed happy.
She took Albel by the hand and led him deeper into the city, passing by carts of fruit and painted signs, other children playing with wooden dolls and girls carrying baskets of flowers. Finally she led him into a small shop at the end of a narrow and plant-choked street; inside it was warm and tidy, and the shopkeeper meandered about, lighting stout tallow candles in brackets on the walls. Dusk had settled deeper in, and the candles gave light to the burgeoning darkness.
"May I help you?" he said, and moved behind the smooth-polished expanse of counter; it was strewn with a rainbow of berries and seeds, each sorted into their own basket. "Blueberries and blackberries are on sale—five hundred Fol for a bushel of each."
"Yes, I know, it's why we came," she said, one of her rough hands tracing along the edge of a basket. "My boy and I were picking strawberries in Granah a few days past, but it's not the same. I thought perhaps we ought to come here."
Things are nicer in Aquaria. It was not spoken, yet it was implied; it was there in her tone, as it always was.
"Are you from Kirlsa?"
"No, we came all the way from the capital. Didn't we, Albel?"
Albel looked up from the wooden barrel full of lansium seeds he had been inspecting and nodded absently. His mother continued talking to the man, still in her ever-melancholy way, and he wandered to the other side of the shop. All along the walls were were baskets of fruit and shelves lined with vegetables; mangosteen and sapodilla, corn still in its husks and tiny radishes. Piled up in the corners, where the burning-tallow-smell was strong and acrid, there lay piles of untouched wheat and bales of hay.
Truthfully, he had never seen such food in his life, so healthy and plentiful. It was quite the contrast to the iron-lined walls of Airyglyph shops, where spears and armour were hung in place of bountiful food.
How foolish it was of him, he reflected now, that he preferred it that way—and how foolish still that his opinion had not changed. Better to be raised on steel than to grow soft and water-fat; his mother had not thought so, of course, she with her patina of serenity, her placid veneer of skin over brittle bones. She had always liked to think herself a martyr; recalling the painting of Aquaria XXVII he had seen, Albel thought that could be true, if only in static art form—it was all so overwrought otherwise, but she would have made a fine painting of suffering.
Once night had fallen, they stayed at the Aquios inn, his mother docilely folding her traveling cloak while Albel sat on one of the carven chairs. The two of them seemed so small and threadbare in that vast room of glittering fineries.
"What did they have all that food for?" Albel asked, bare feet just touching the plush and leaf-patterned rug beneath his seat.
"It's nice to have lots of food," his mother said serenely, and smoothed out the wrinkles in the brocade tablecloth with a kind of concentrated sincerity, much like all of her other pursuits.
"Why don't we have that much food?"
"Because Airyglyph is dying." Calm and quiet as ever.
"We don't need that much food," he scoffed.
With a scornful sort of smile, she said "You are very much your father's son."
- - - -
His mother stood in the doorway, her countenance blank; she stood just at the line diving snow from hard-packed floor, like a thin and wooden horizon."Albel," she said, picking absently at a scab on the flat of her hand, "please help your father feed Silsa."
Albel had been given the task of slaughtering the last Lum; its blood had melted half the snow and beneath lay stunted grass and dirt. There would be no need to eviscerate it; air dragons liked their meals whole and entirely organic, flesh and bones and fur all.
The week last this Lum had pulled a cart of tiny fish and shriveled root vegetables from Granah to their door—all that food was long-gone now, never enough to sate, never enough to fill out flesh; now it was useful for nothing at all.
He picked it up by its hind legs and began dragging its carcass toward Silsa's pen, leaving a trail of steaming blood and fur.
Glou and Vox stood outside the enclosure, noses red with cold, talking like old comrades; Vox's voice had its usual undercurrents of sarcasm, of strange and seething vanity. Vox would visit from time to time; he would speak fondly of his three beautiful daughters, of his kind and tiny duchess who whiled away her time alone in their vast and verdant summer home at the edge of the sea; of all the sordid details of the court.
His fondness for all the horrid little tales of the castle was largely because they were of his own making.
"He really is a fine dragon, Glou," Vox said archly, brushing the ice crystals out of his beard. "Quite magnificent indeed; fine, shining scales, claws perfect for rending apart helpless things—why, speak of the devil, here comes Albel with a fresh-caught meal!" He smiled indulgently, in the parody of a distant, benevolent uncle. "Did you catch that all by yourself?"
Albel said nothing. He gracelessly let go of the Lum's hooves and some its blood spattered on the edge of Vox's dire wolf fur mantle; he pulled the striated black-and-white collar closer to his throat and guardedly paid it no heed.
The smell of the meat made the dragon shift impatiently, smoke curling from its nostrils. Albel stared at it balefully, but its bright and hungry eyes were fixated on the Lum.
"Vox, would you mind terribly helping me lift this?" Glou asked amicably as he could, rubbing his wind-chapped hands together.
Vox looked as though he would mind terribly, but nevertheless he made a show of sliding on a supple new pair of chimera-hide gloves, and together they swung the carcass over the fence of the pen.
"Why can't we eat the Lum?" Albel muttered, breathless from the cold. He watched the dragon devour its viscera, and out of the corner of his eye he could see the white of Vox's teeth above his cloak.
"It's my duty as a soldier to keep my dragon healthy, Albel," Glou said, and put the red ruin of his hand on Albel's shoulder. "You know that."
Albel stared down at his gore-covered arms, wan and ashen, at the red line that was his mother shivering like a wretch in the doorway; he said nothing.
"When I die," his mother had said later, "I should like to be buried in Irisa Fields. I wouldn't want the worms to go hungry."
His father had not spoken to her for the rest of the night.
- - - -
Albel flexed his claw, and with a horrific scrape he ran the last of the straw-and-wood dummies through. It yielded no spray of blood, no tumble of organs, only dry silence.He withdrew his blade.
"I thought I might find you here," a thin voice said from behind him. Woltar stood in the snow, arms folded behind his back; he looked as placid and benevolent as a priest.
"What do you want, you old worm?"
"His Majesty has matters he would like to discuss with you."
"Concerning what?"
"Marriage."
"Does he intend to propose to me?" Albel scoffed, sheathing his katana. "What am I needed for?"
Woltar's face tightened into a smile. "That is for His Majesty to say."
"Very well."
Albel strode past him and stepped into the cloying warmth of the castle, Woltar remaining in the cold; Albel only hoped His Majesty had more sense than his father did.