Chapter 1: lokabrenna
Notes: prequel fic to astrobólētos
[countdown completed, commencing regression sequence]
"He is so… quiet. It is unnerving."
The boy remained where he was, kneeling on the floor amid the strewn-about flower petals, form still and unmoving save for the regular rise and fall of his chest as he took deep, slow, meditative breaths, the movement the only other indication of his awareness other than the shimmering star-shaped mark on his neck that pulsed faintly with light in time to the steady rhythm of his heartbeat.
"Yes. It is interesting, is it not? Most unlike the other subjects who experienced the visions of the Ancients in the Alruh. Those ones, they usually started screaming, or weeping, or become manic and frenzied. But the boy has not made a noise since Al-Azhdaha first brought the knife to his skin."
"Your other subjects did not have strange patterns carved into their flesh with a knife, Al-Rabisu. He is likely in shock."
"My other subjects also were not a Sage of the Ancients, Al-Ghul. Besides, we are merely following the instructions that Those Who Came Before left behind for us."
"Fools, both of you. He is stronger than he looks. You would be wise to be more cautious, Al-Azhdaha."
"Indeed."
[regression sequence completed, terminating transmission]
The star winked out, the strange marking on the Sage of the Ancient''s neck going dark once more. A slow, steady exhale, and then dark lashes fluttered open to reveal eyes now colored a permanent shade of aquiline gold that almost seemed to glow.
Lips stained red-gold by a line of blood that tracked steadily from a carefully made laceration along his cheek parted, and they crowded forward, jostling one another, eager to hear the first words the reborn Ancient would speak;
"How… long… has it been?"
Holding up a hand imperiously to forestall any excited chatter from her fellows, Ra's Al-Af'a stepped forward, spreading her hands in a grandiose gesture and inclining her head in subservience.
"Greetings, Al-Najm.", she said softly. "You have died, and been reborn."
Roshan paused in the window frame, staring down at the scene laid out before her with a creeping dread.
A pile of rags against the wall, dark and tacky, slowly going stiff as they dried, tossed carelessly to the side. The air, heavy with the iron tang of spilt blood. A heavy fixture of cold iron bolted to the floor in the center of the room, an anchor point meant for chained restraint. The cold stone floor around it dotted with more splatters of sticky red that glinted orange-gold in [more than just] the flickering torches' meager glow. A wide assortment of knives, scalpels, and other implements, laid out in neat, clinical rows on a table to one side.
All of it painted a grim picture, one that she did not need her second sight to see.
Roshan swore softly to herself, cursing Dervis' thoughtless tongue and her own carelessness.
There was no time to sit and deliberate on what might or might not have happened had she just done something, said something different - her self-appointed mission had just become infinitely more complicated.
She surged through the open window, pushing down the feeling of dread that had lodged itself in her chest from the first moment she had realized that Dervis' young protege—the very person the Order had descended upon Anbar like so many hissing vultures for—had just walked directly into their clutches - and had not returned.
She had not planned to spill blood tonight if she could avoid it, but she would not hesitate if the need arose. She spared another brief, grim glance for the blood slick floor and the implements of torture, and then crossed the room and tried at the door, finding it unlocked.
She had a feeling that this night would see more of that same tainted blood staining the Winter Palace floors before it was over.
Rayhan had not understood her insistence on the danger presented by the Order's movements on this matter, far more concerned with the minutiae of the politics of the region and perpetually occupied with maintaining the necessary balance between appeasing their Tahirid protectors and selectively fostering sentiments of rebellion to disrupt the Caliphate's choking stranglehold on the common people.
An exercise in futility that amounted to very little progress. Politics were eternal, and meddling too much in them seemed a useless effort in Roshan's eyes.
No one else among their Brotherhood save her former mentor seemed to realize the gravity of the plot the Order was setting in motion, preferring to dismiss the slowly accumulating pile of evidence that pointed to a slow, steady and sure search for something not of this time as mere delusional occult nonsense.
But Fuladh and Roshan had seen otherwise. Had painstakingly pieced together warnings from fragments of fading script, had heard the surety in their targets voices as they spoke of the new world that was to come, belief plain on their faces even as they bled out and died for it before they could ever even see it. Had paced and worried at the edges of a plan that promised the imminent awakening of a far greater threat to mankind's freedom than the Order alone could hope to present.
The others may have forgotten, concerned with the petty minutiae of the now that they lived in, but they two remembered. There was a future, too, far flung and distant, one to whom they owed just as much a duty as to their own days.
Their brotherhood was not meant to guard mankind from internal, self-created threats alone.
Nor were the artifacts and temples left behind by The Ancients mere toys and trinkets to be squabbled over by the Brotherhood and the Order, like a pair of spoiled children in the markets.
The safeguarding of free will went far beyond mere momentary freedom from oppression.
Between the smug, resolute silence and giddy, manic, blood-flecked mocking refusal of answers, between the pages upon pages of notes and remains of books half-consumed by fire, between the dig-sites uncovered and then hastily buried again; they had begun nonetheless to glimpse the outline of the Order's plan, the shape of what they were searching for, the steps of the path that they would tread when they finally found it.
It had been a stroke of luck, she had thought, that instead Dervis had found it first.
Luckier still, like avoiding the strike of lightning twice, that she had followed the Order's creeping influence to Anbar, and found what he had found.
A feat of impossibility that she should have arrived just as the snare had been laid within Anbar.
With skill, they could avoid it, she had assumed.
Assumed. Fool of fools that she was. Two of her acolytes had paid in blood for this foolishness, and now a third life had likely been lost to a fate far worse than mere death.
Instead, with her lack of caution, she had only served as the Order's coursing hunting hound, flushing their unwitting prey from its hidden den and straight into their waiting jaws.
Worse still, not only had her abject failure sent the object of the Order's search straight into their waiting, open arms, but had left them with every tool they needed to see their supposed "Great Work" through to its bitter, bloody end.
The artifacts would only wake at the touch of Tainted blood, of one descended from the Ancients who the Order worshiped. Roshan knew this. Fuladh knew this.
And now, apparently, so too did the Order.
The boy had likely—unfortunately, unwittingly—taught the Order everything they needed to awaken their reborn god, the artifact waking beneath his touch.
Clearly, the Order had wasted no time in putting his teaching to use, evidently subjecting the boy to a mimicry of whatever torture they saw enacted by Those Who Came Before.
She did not know what was contained in the artifact they had brought to Anbar, but if it was anything like the one they had managed to recover…
Well.
The bloody scene she had left behind her spoke to the likelihood of that.
So be it.
Roshan would sooner bloody her hands and stain her reputation alike with mercy for the innocent whom she had failed to protect than ever let the Sage set foot outside these Palace walls alive.
Blue.
There was shouting, and she was dimly aware of blood running down her face and into her mouth from a stinging wound across her cheek where the guard, now restraining her left arm and half-dragging her with him in a hurried pace towards the doorway before them, had caught her with a lucky hit, but all Roshan could see was bewildering, unchanging blue.
—blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue blue—
She was struggling for breath in an ocean of the most vivid, purest shade of blue she had ever seen. Her vision flickered from the gray of her second sight to the waking world and back again, but it still did not change what she was looking at, nor did it provide any further explanation for what she was seeing.
—blue blue blue blue blue blue blue—
Such was the immovable, unchanging inflexibility of its hue that it still tried to steal all the air from her lungs even as she was thrown roughly into the room beyond the doorway and forced to her knees across from the Order's bloodied and beaten 'god.'
Her hood was wrenched back from her face, and she winced, turning her head as she willed the afterimages of blue-blue-blue of the other's aura to fade from her second sight.
For a moment, all was silent. And then;
"...And what is this?" It took her a few moments to realize who was speaking, so strange was the speaker's voice. She almost would not have recognized it for belonging to the boy across from her were it not for the direction it had come from.
"A Hidden One, Al-Najm." The masked idiot paused, lingering uncertainly in the silence when this pronouncement failed to evoke any further response from their 'god', before nervously and eagerly blundering onwards.
"These wretched fools have sought to stymie our Great Work at every turn, to prevent your glorious rebirth - and this one, this 'Daughter of No One', is chiefest among your enemies - she has personally been responsible for the loss of several others of your kin."
Basim- if this ...thing could still be called by that name, as though there was any trace of that bright and earnest soul still left inside him, Roshan despaired - roused from his seemingly half-asleep meditative state in interest at that. He tilted his head, turning to look at her with a strange smile and calculating look in his eyes it seemed only she could see; their captors were still prattling obliviously on.
The chains at the boy's wrists clinked softly as he shifted.
Ironic, she muses, that their "god" is still chained, bloody and beaten and kneeling on the petal-strewn floor just the same as she is. It is as good an indication for what future they had envisioned for the Sage as any.
The amused look that crossed the Sage's face as he glanced down at the chains and then back up at her with one one eyebrow raised, and then barely tilted his head in a wordless gesture of quiet, smug contempt towards the blathering Order member, told her that he knew it too.
The way he turned his head with a sharp, aquiline movement as the fool stepped closer, eyes lingering on the silvery curved dagger at the Order member's belt with something almost like a hunger in his gaze, told her that he had never held any plans on even entertaining such a future.
The fools. They had no idea what they had done.
"...Really?" he purred at last, too-bright golden gaze dragging up and down her form, the quiet, knowing self-assurance of something older than the ground this Palace had been built upon ill at odds with the boyish features of his face, eagle's eyes lingering with silent levity on the undiscovered throwing knives she'd managed to tuck into her boot before her captors had finally overwhelmed her.
Hearing him speak again now confirmed as truth what she had only suspected moments before; his voice had changed, and she suppressed a shudder at the wrongness of it, the unidentifiable accent that has steadily crept into the young man's voice - just far enough removed from the one he bore only that morning that it seemed alien and strange to her ears. "Is that so?"
He was calm - eerily so, relaxed and seemingly unbothered by the bloodied mess that the Order had made of his back and jaw, and regarded everything with the same unshakably serene smile - but Roshan could see what their captors could not; the look in his eyes told her of a mind behind them that moved faster than a hawk on the wing, and left nothing unnoticed, and the quiet grace with which he held himself was not the meek placidity these masked fools took it for; this, she recognized, was the languid, lazy surety of a predator without fear.