Being sick at heart and too weak to stand, I remember little besides the weather of the journey toward the White Barrow. Betimes it was cool and clear, the distant Atreian sun casting my world in dusk, then seeming bright as an Elysian day to my untrained eyes; betimes it was warm and muggy, the broad handfuls of leaves high above shading us from the light. But mostly, it rained. On and on and on, endless rain, hot as kettle-sweat or cold as spears of ice, obscuring the road both fore and back, till it seemed as if we would perpetually travel this road, caught in a cruel loop of time like Vyra Lightning-Branded and her band of ghosts, winging always and forever for the base of the broken Tower, never reaching their destination.
I lay in the straw in my cage and watched it all pass with unseeing eyes, reciting my coraline over and over again in my worst moments, the beads wrapped tightly around one fist. They were fobbed at the end with a septagon etched with the ancient Twinned Duchy seal, created before Carcarron was united, a pair of falcons locking claws in conflict. At some point I had flipped the septagon into my palm to hide the image in my flesh, though I do not remember having done so.
Thinking on the Twinned Duchy, my chest ached as I recalled Raum, Jareth and I as children in the great library at the Keep, hunting treasures, and if not that, then books about treasure. Raum had been very smug and proud, relaying the history of the lands that would one day have been his - if not for my failure.
Sometime during the journey, I know not how many days after setting out from Carcarron, I found myself softly singing the seventh verse from The Lay of a Broken-Winged Sparrow. Those guards that heard me shivered and glanced away. I likely should have stopped, given the song's history, but I did not. The haunting refrain of the tragic ballad somewhat soothed my wounded heart.
It was somewhere around the tenth stanza that the Elyos came down from the mountains, silver wings purple in the Asmodian dusk, silent and deadly as owls on the hunt.
There were no Daevas among my escort; that breed was increasingly rare among us as the long war raged ever on, and new souls did not ascend in their places. I realize now that they are only slightly more numerous among the Elyos, but I did not know it then. Even through the thick of my broken-hearted depression, I saw their band descend from on high, feathers and armor shining, a half-dozen white-winged Daevas more than a match for a troop of mortals twice their numbers.
I had not the energy to lift my head from the straw, but I bore witness to the massacre that followed, and my claws scraped the back of the septagon as I clenched my fist.
The beasts broke first. Having never seen an Elyos, much less a Daeva, they panicked and reared and kicked in the harness, each powerful beast pulling in opposite directions. The first broke a leg in its scrambling and went down lowing and shrieking; the second won free of the cart and dashed for the safety if the violet trees, half the harness and assorted bits of tack jangling from its withers. It trampled a soldier and knocked another aside from where they stood at the vanguard of the convoy; the second soldier was cut down by an Elyos blade before he could regain his feet, and the first given release from his injuries in the form of a pierced heart.
They moved through my escort like a wind scatters leaves, cutting down whomsoever dared step in their path. No magic; pulls on the Aether would have alerted anyone tied to it from miles away, spurring investigation, and if this attack was anything it was quick, quiet and efficient. That was something the Elyos excelled at - hit and run tactics.
I forced myself to listen to them die, the brave fifteen or so who had been destined for an uneventful journey and a sedentary posting at the Barrow. I bring death to everything I touch, I thought bitterly, hearing their screams, the gasps as they were disemboweled, the gurgles as their throats were slashed. The enemies were cloaked, their faces masked with darkness, but I stared at their wings, memorized what subtle differences I could discern. Four men, I guessed, two women; though my body was sunken into the straw, in the heart of a battle my mind was honed keen, and only faltered once. A pair of grey knife-blade wings, pointed and sleek, like those of a gyrefalcon. A paler pair, stubby, barred with gold like an owl's, short but powerful. Broad pure white wings, that of a swan. A slender set, slate and bluish, tipped gunmetal silver - a peregrine. I only caught glimpses of the last two, and would know them for what they were later: an immense albatross, the span of either wing greater than he was tall, paired to a tiny, indescribably violent young woman with the wings of a shrike.
Fifteen men and women, caught by surprise on a journey that should have had nothing to commend its normalcy. They fell in a sickeningly short amount of time, at which the six assailants gathered at my cage, and the gyre and the owl peered through their hoods into the depths of my bars, the owl leaning forward as if fascinated by the animal in the cage.
I eyed them all, prone, claws digging furrows in Raum's jade coraline, hoping that at last here was the face of my salvation. They spoke then, tongue lyrical and flowing, and tantalizingly familiar; I was briefly caught listening intently, hearing gasps and snatches of words that might once have been the language I know. Separated for millenia, we yet were born to the same cradle, eons ago, a fact both races have forgotten. The owl-winged Elyos was clearly their leader, speaking the lion's share of the piece in a deep, belling voice, and even the gyre deferred to him, head bowing. There was much discussion, included a heated series of remarks from the swan that needed no translation, but eventually even he bent to the owl's will. As I was attempting to puzzle out their intent, all but the owl began to move, the littlest one up into the air to act as a scout, the others freeing my cage of the great wooden wheels binding it to the road, to loop rope about it as if they meant to carry me off.
Realizing their intent, I felt a sudden burst of energy from within my soul as never I had before, deep reserves of fury and desperation that I had not yet even begun to tap flaring to life. I surged up from the straw and slammed into the cage's wooden bars, inches from the owl as he took a prudent step back. My claws reached to snatch him and shake him until he did my bidding, the coraline pendulous and swinging erratically. My hands missed, unfortunately, catching only a hem and revealing briefly a golden eye, but I was not yet done; I railed against the bars, beating my fists and the coraline against them, bellowing every foul word that I had ever heard spoken in Carcarron. "Kill me!" I commanded, begged, fire in my veins in a last desperate effort to provoke the Elyos. I would not willingly be their prisoner, their caged Asmodian nightingale, there to poke and prod whenever they pleased. "I know you know that word," I snarled at him, "you've heard it often enough! Kill me!"
Work paused overhead, and the owl's hood seemed to glance upward, nodding, giving permission. A face then appeared from over the top edge of the cage, upside-down, the hood spilled open by gravity to reveal proud masculine features, sharp cheekbones, wisps of rebellious pale hair. What pinned me in place were his enormous, liquid, shockingly black eyes - I had never heard of such on an Elyos, even in the old tales. Anger tightened them to narrow slits, made of his mouth a scowl.
"No," said he then in a clear, resonant tenor, and I stopped cold in shock and sheer surprise, to hear an Elyos speak a word of Asmoth. His voice gave feathers to the face - the gyrefalcon.
"No?" I echoed, dumbly, hands trembling on the bars. I suddenly felt very, very cold, the heat of my temper leaking out of me.
"Your life is a property," spoke the gyre, with a strange lilting accent but in words clearly of my speech, "that now belongs to the house of the sun."
I had thought I knew what despair was, when Raum died. It dawned on me then, in the face of the gyre's hostility, that I had not even begun to fathom its depths.
And yet, staring at the enemy, it was not in me to surrender to their keeping.
The gyre flared his knife-blade wings then with a great rush of air, signaling the end of his half of the brief conversation, though I pressed against the bars and still attempted to heckle him into speech. Whatever I called, I do not remember, only that I cursed him with all the fluency and creativity that I had, and in the thickest Carcarrese brogue I could muster to boot. I craned my neck this way and that, and I could just see from where I stood where he tied clever knots with his pale hands, creating something akin to harness, something four Elyos could carry aloft. I slammed my fist against the bars once more, impotent anger returning to my aid, giving me strength, and the cage shuddered under the gyre's feet. "What the hell are you doing?!"
No response, though owl and gyre both eyed me disapprovingly; there were more calls in Elyan, their native tongue, and I railed at the bars, climbing feet and hands with the claws on each to brace at the wood and shake the cage entire. There was a feminine voice from above, of warning as one of the bars groaned and budged at last under my fury; then the owl shot into the air and the gyre and his kind followed, four strong Elyos yoked in tandem, and there was the edgeless sounds of a flock of mismatched wings as they strained to gain the skies. The cage shook again, this time with the force of the Elyos fighting gravity.
I worked frantically, using all my strength and weight to work the wooden bar out of its cladding - if I could get it out quickly enough, I could escape before the Elyos gained any altitude - or drop from the height, and end my misery the hard way. I heard the owl shout, another male bellow with effort, heard the groan of rope above and of wood below. A line holding my cage had whipped free, as had the lower edge of the bar in my hands, just above the cladding. I kicked it loose, somewhat more viciously than was strictly necessary, and it fell and kept falling; the Elyos were gaining altitude far more quickly than I could have ever hoped, and as the ground rapidly abandoned me, I smiled bleakly.
Another call as they noticed the wooden spar now angling like a star for the earth. In a trice they would see my intent and likely do all they could to stop it, but I meant to be long free of that cage by then, and leaping to action I worked myself through the gap between the remaining bars. Though my mother was slender by Asmodian standards, training broadened my shoulders, gave me slabs of tough sinew where she had had none. I ended up wedging myself in the wood, struggling to writhe free, all limbs strained to their strength, my vision purpling as my lungs were compressed. There was a long, long moment, spots playing games in my eyesight, when I thought that the cage would squeeze the life from me and I need not go through the trouble of escaping the Elyos -
I slipped free, but just as the flailing rope was secured, and my cage realigned itself with the Elyos ferrying it rather than with the winds that buffeted them all. I began to fall, one leg below the knee still within the bars, but the pit of my stomach rose and I laughed that horrid laugh of the damned, knowing that once I was out of the backwash of wings, it would take precious seconds for the Elyos to disentangle themselves from the ropes and drop the cage. The sky reeled before me, and I welcomed the fall. By then, not even the peregrine could catch me...
Ah, too soon I celebrated my morbid victory. The cage took another strange tilt in the air, and my calf and leg dragged the wooden floor, the calf mutilated by the splintered cladding, and my ankle trapped in that narrow space between it and the next bar. I found this out in such detail as was necessary later; all I knew then was that my leg was suddenly in blinding white agony, my head snapping back from recoil, and I was dangling from the cage with all the blood in my body rushing to my brain.
"Damnation!" I twisted this way and that, my temples swiftly beginning to pound, and screeched when I wrenched my knee and ankle in precisely the wrong way. Blood began to drip down the back of my thigh, warm and thin as water, but I refused to think of it as my own blood, my own leg, trapped like a fox in a bear killer. That way lay only panic, and I needed a cool head both to thwart the Elyos and to achieve my goal of reaching my end.
Someone else's leg up there, grinding bone against shards of metal and wood. Someone else. I took a gasping breath, tears stinging my eyes, and amidst a wave of pain so scarlet and strong that I thought I would pass out then and there, I tried to wrench my body upright, to reach my ankle.
I failed. My hand brushed the knee, my other leg flopping uselessly in the air, and ripples of agony thundered across my leg and back and skull. I came very close to the blackness then, the world spinning madly around me, sky below and ground above. I wondered for one crazed, manic second if this was how the Elyos always saw Asmodae, land for the ceiling and sky for the floor.
The frenetic bellowing of voices in Elyan, a musical tongue turned invective. Head throbbing, I swept my gaze across what little I could see that was not great clouded expanse or rolling indigo forest or farmland. The Elyos had little enough attention for me, and when I detected a note of relief in their voices I quickly saw why: I had read of the larger ones, the great stone edifices that demarcated the edges of the enormous and ancient Portals, but there were none such in Carcarron or any of the surrounding lands. The Elyos had instead constructed a smaller one, maybe ten feet across, wood and stone and the bones of the fallen, a strange sight saddled amid an empty field, even stranger seen upside-down. A strike team, then, I thought woozily. No camp, no occupying force, only swift, disorienting attacks and a hasty retreat before the enemy realized what had happened.
The six Elyos dove as one, owl and gyre and peregrine, winging together for the makeshift portal and the safety that it provided. I, coming all too late to its horrors, unabashedly screamed.
It was a close fit; the owl was through first, his stubby wingtips brushing gently the fragile edges of the portal, and he disappeared into the swirling void of orange mist. The shrike followed him, too fast for my eye, and then the cage bearers were upon it and I realized that there was no way in all of Atreia would four winged Daevas, the cage and myself all fit. It happened quickly, the two forerunners releasing the cage, winking their feathers to dust and aether, and diving bodily through the portal; the two behind them, gyre and peregrine, followed a heartbeat after, sure above all things to get themselves clear of the wreckage of the cage that rode their wake.
I, in the grip of a fear I had not felt since I was a child, was dragged along for the ride.
I hit the mist, and my stomach rebelled at the sense of being flung through time and space, but was so brief that I managed to retain that dignity, and not evacuate the contents of my belly. The scenery changed abruptly once across, no longer outdoors but in a bright-lit chamber, so bright it hurt to blink. The cage skidded to a stop on stone floors amidst a scattering of Elyos, some vaulting out of the way to avoid being run over by the battered wooden conveyance. I struck my head sharply on the flagstones on entry, the makeshift bindings of the portal crumbling behind me, but otherwise tried to curl in on myself to prevent further harm. Once I was no longer moving, no longer throbbing with adrenaline, the pain from my leg came back and overwhelmed me; I lay on my back, unmoving and dazed, and I do not think that if Ariel Lady of Light Herself had promised me freedom and a cadre of Daevas as personal attendants, that I could have stirred from where I had fallen.
My eyes, wincing at the brightness, sought some sort of touchstone in the alien place. Stone walls, an entire legion of candles. A tall, young-looking man with a wild fluff of golden hair, two days of stubble, an irrepressible smile and the sense of eons of age and experience. He wore the robes of a sorcerer, and as he bent over me his face swam, as though I looked at him through a glass of water. He asked me something in Elyan, or at least it seemed so at the time; I stuttered an "I don't understand" in Asmoth, and he looked away to glance at someone I could not see, a scholarly concern lighting his cyan eyes. I heard the gyre speak again, his words like ice, the owl's baritone calm, persuasive.
Lassitude flowed through my veins, the pain dropped to the background, and I felt the sudden need to sleep. I found it difficult to care that the owl, the gyre and the sorcerer had sparked a sudden argument, the Elyan words, so tantalizingly familiar and yet so foreign, flowed too quickly to gain even the barest sense of it. After a moment, I sighed and allowed my eyes to close, too dizzy to stand, too tired to fight.
Let Aion have me, if he will, I thought, willing myself to dreams and finding, for once, that they came easily. The bickering Elyos faded away, and blessed silence claimed me as I sought the long path down into darkness.
I heard a man's chuckle, distant like a rumble of thunder, and thought no more upon anything.