Anadar IV/II

VII

The six of them stood around the broken opening in the floor of the tower, and above them the Tri Crown hung in the sky like a silent judgement.

The three moons shone so brightly that shadows fell sharp on the rock, and Jonus, small and red, burned beside them like a dot of old blood. The sea had withdrawn and surged back again, the tides were already unnatural, the water struck the cliffs below as if something in it too had grown restless, and from the opening beneath their feet the stench rose up, heavy, damp, greasy, like something that had been sealed away too long and was suddenly allowed to breathe again.

Shara gagged once more and had to turn aside. She braced one hand against the tower wall and vomited again, dry and painful, until only bile came. Morgut and Sinadie did what mages always did in moments like this: they became quiet, factual, precise. Morgut produced chalk and small phials, Sinadie was already murmuring words, laying protection upon protection over skin, lungs, membranes, as if she had to raise a shield not only against poison but against disgust itself.

In Anadar’s head, the voice sounded almost afraid.

This will be brutal, said Naarstr.

Not with his usual malice, not with that half ironic relish with which he otherwise commented on any horror, as if he had either witnessed it himself or were deeply delighted that others now had to share in it. There was real fear in it, and that was what made it so frightening.

Anadar looked around. Miene and Sindra stood close to the edge of the opening, tense, pale, both striving to show nothing. Both wanted to go down, of course they wanted to. They were young enough to still believe that courage and presence were the same thing.

He went to them.

“You stay here.”

Both protested in the same breath.

“No,” Anadar said, sharper now. “No argument. We need you up here. Get help. Get Son. Get Indra. And above all Isidre.”

At the last name his gaze slid, unwillingly, back to Shara. She had moved a little away, but her back was tight, her shoulders still trembling from nausea. The stench made her almost unfit to fight, and he wanted to tell her to stay above, to order it, to take the decision out of her hands. But he could not bring himself to do it. Not because it would have been wrong. Because he knew she would never accept it. And perhaps because a part of him wanted her close, precisely now, when the air itself tasted like bad foreboding.

“Anadar,” she rasped, still half bent over the stone, “I can’t do this. The smell…”

Her head dipped and she vomited again.

He went to her, laid a hand on her back, waited until the spasm in her body eased a little, and said softly, “I need you up here.”

It was neither plea nor comfort. It was more like a truth that hurt them both.

Anadar laid the last spells over himself. A fine mesh of hardness, resistance, breath control, cold warding, inner focus. He felt Naarstr’s growing reluctance under it all, like an animal twitching. Then he stepped to Sinadie.

“Are you sure you don’t want stone skin?”

She smiled faintly, not uncertain. “No. I’ve given myself whale hide.”

Humour even now, Anadar thought, and only nodded.

With one last, brief, worried look at Shara, he began the descent.

The spiral stairway wound down long and unyielding into the depths. The steps were damp, slick in places, worn down by years or decades, perhaps by something older than both. Cold met them, wet and heavy, and the stench rising from below was so constant that you did not get used to it, you only learned to stay on its edge, like on the rim of a nausea that does not pass, only waits.

Anadar kindled a globe torch above them, a hovering light that gave them at least a small circle of brightness. It did not reach far. It only ate the nearest shadows and made everything beyond them seem darker.

They went deeper.

The walls were not smooth throughout. Again and again there were bulges, small chambers, niches, rooms that seemed gnawed into the shaft like hastily used air holes in a depth that was too tight. In some stood devices, scaled over, rusted, heaped together. In others lay books, rolls, boxes, stowed away roughly, dampened, but never wholly abandoned. Once they passed a narrow bed, a rotted blanket, half collapsed containers, a chair that down there felt more ominous than any instrument. Everything was disorderly. Not chaotic in the sense of deserted, but disorderly in the sense of being used too long by someone who had strength for order only where it served the purpose.

They kept descending.

At some point the space widened. The stair lost its narrowness, the light of their globe torch suddenly seemed small and pitifully weak, and at last the steps ended in a hall so large that at first you did not even grasp its true extent.

Sinadie lifted her hand.

“Out.”

Anadar extinguished the globe.

At first the darkness seemed to grow worse. Then they realised the room was not truly dark. A faint glow seeped from the walls, barely perceptible, a wet, sick shimmer, as if something had settled into the stone itself that could not quite decide whether it wanted to be light, or the memory of it.

They stood in silence for several minutes until their eyes adjusted.

Then they heard it.

Waves striking stone somewhere. Drips. A distant rush. The dull echo of a body of water far larger than one would expect beneath a tower. Their steps rang as they moved forward carefully, and the floor under them was all stone, smooth, cold, damp through.

Ahead lay a cavern, or rather something that might once have been a natural pocket of rock under water, later brutally cut into shape, expanded, used.

Anadar’s sword was quiet.

But he could almost feel the fear running through Naarstr.

They moved toward the brightest patch, slowly, concentrated, every step weighed, every breath deliberate. Soon they stood on a ledge with a stone railing. Stairs and a broad sloping ramp led down to a lower level.

And down there the horror revealed itself.

None of them spoke.

It was a battlefield, but not of combat. A battlefield of experiment. Tables. Frames. Crosses. Benches. Hooks. Cages. Cutting tools. Bowls. Basins. Everything covered in stains, rot, dried and re wet decay. Dead and rotting octopuses lay everywhere, fish, fish parts, slimy scraps of skin, bony remains, and among them human bones, human ribs, human teeth, needlework and tools and things that looked as if they had to be taken from two worlds at once to attempt a new sacrilege down here.

At the far end of the lower level a great basin was set into the floor, filled with water whose surface moved like small tides without any visible inflow. The water almost breathed. Rose. Sank. Moved to an unseen beat.

They stared down, rigid.

Only with closer looking did the full extent of the abomination become visible. On some tables lay torsos, human in chest and arms, but ended in fish heads whose gills still seemed half open, as if something in them wanted to breathe that should never have existed. Elsewhere strips of octopus skin had been sewn onto human bodies with coarse, cruel workmanship, as if someone had been convinced that enough force and enough time could wring a new truth out of flesh. Organs lay open, joined, separated, stitched together again. It was butchery and scholarship at once, and that combination was what made it so vile.

Along the ramp leading down from the ledge, stakes had been driven into the ground.

On them were impaled human bodies.

Or what was left of humans.

Naked, emaciated forms, drained of blood, with octopuses as heads, slumped over the stumps of neck and shoulders like a final mockery of life. Some arms still twitched, almost imperceptibly. Or perhaps it was only the wall glow. No one wanted to know.

Between the basin and the ledge, niches had been cut into the walls, placed so that from above you could not fully see into them. Hiding places. Observation holes. Or sleeping spaces. Or something else.

“This,” Anadar said at last, his voice dry, strange, “is brutal.”

Nothing more came to him.

Sinadie stood beside him, pale. “What was he trying to do here? Hybrids?”

“How could that…” Anadar began, and broke off mid sentence.

Because there was no word that could carry the sight.

Because even Morgut, who otherwise found an analytic distance to any horror, stood silent now like someone whose mind still lagged behind what his eyes had already understood.

Then they went down.

Not brave. Not decisive. More like people who knew the truth was below, and that every step toward it was another step away from everything they had considered unspeakable ten minutes earlier.

They spread out.

Sinadie turned toward the impaled bodies. Anadar walked among the tables, through rot and excrement, through rotting fish heads and human bodies whose limbs had been joined with needles, wire, thread, and some slick substance. His disgust showed openly in his face. He saw the attempt to fuse organs, to set gills into ribcages, to drive flesh under flesh, to connect tendons, to pull skin over, as if you only had to work stubbornly enough against the blueprint of life to force a new species out of pain.

“Anadar.”

Sinadie’s voice cut through the hall.

“These things here… they’re still alive.”

He spun and moved, just as Morgut, now almost at the basin, said, “That can’t…”

No more came.

With a tremendous roar, a huge octopus arm shot out of the basin.

It seized Morgut completely, fast, precise, brutal. It wrapped around chest, throat, head, pinned his arms to his body and lifted him half off the ground before his scream had even properly formed. In the same instant, tones filled the hall, notes, sounds, a music that did not come from instruments but from the creature itself. Not melodic in any human sense. More like grief, hatred, and ancient despair poured into sound.

Another tentacle snapped toward Anadar.

Too late to hit. He was still far enough away that the whipping mass only struck the air, water sprayed, and the music notes shattered even more sharply in the chamber.

Sinadie cried out.

Anadar turned.

A woman, almost naked, clad only in leather bands, barely distinguishable from the background, had come at her from one of the niches. Her skin, her posture, even the way she moved was so perfectly matched to filth, stone, and half light that she only became visible in motion. She drove a jagged blade with incredible force into Sinadie’s body below the breast. The knife went in deep.

At the same time, at the last moment, Anadar sensed someone else bursting from nowhere behind him.

The attack came fast, silent, with a precision that spoke of practice and fanatical repetition. In the final heartbeat he twisted half out of the line and parried. The blade slid off his stone skin, scraped across it without sparks, without doing harm.

Instinctively Anadar drew his sword.

Naarstr screamed.

Nooooo! No old blood!

But it was already too late.

The blade went through the attacker’s body. At once it drew blood, not as an ordinary sword takes blood, but like something grabbing at a meal long denied. The demon in Anadar’s head went mad at once. Screeching. Pain. Frenzy. A panicked thrashing. Anadar flung the sword away from him, far, away from his body, and in that same instant the bellowing in his mind fell silent.

She was already on him.

The second attacker sprang at him blind with rage, without mind, without tactic, driven only by a frenzy that down here seemed to break faster than any clear thought. She stabbed again and again at him. Steel bounced off stone skin, slid away, sought gaps, found none. Claw like toes raked over his armour, tore cloth, and still found no way in.

Anadar gave ground under the force of the assault.

Not from fear of the knife. Because behind everything else, Morgut still hung in the octopus arm and Sinadie stood bleeding.

Then something struck from the side.

A noose snapped around the attacker’s throat and yanked her off Anadar with a brutal jerk. Sinadie held a whip in her hand, or rather a band of condensed water and current, barely visible in the half light. She sent a shock through it at once. The woman jerked, seized, collapsed. Sinadie herself dropped to her knees in the same moment, as if the violence of the spell had torn strength from her own body too. Blood ran down her side and dripped on the stone.

Anadar flicked a look at her, then turned back to Morgut.

He still hung in the octopus arm, bound tight, especially at throat and head. His face was no longer visible. Anadar lifted his hand, concentrated, and the first shape of a fire whip was already twitching from his fingers when another tentacle shot from the water.

This time it hit.

He was too close. The octopus body rose half out of the basin, immense, heavy, gleaming, and the tentacle lashed for Anadar’s arm. In slow motion he saw the suckers clamp around his wrist. One set itself on bare skin where the armour did not cover. In the centre of the sucker sat something that looked like a thorn.

He felt it pierce.

Then he heard the music.

Not only in the hall.

In his head.

Pain and images flooded him at once. Images of his life. Images of his brother. Images of Shara, of the Mother, of the schools, of childhood, fire, stone, water, dreams, guilt, power, exhaustion. This being was intelligent, very intelligent, Anadar felt it immediately. And old. So old that even the word age felt small beside it.

It reached deep into his mind.

Not probing. Not hesitant. It searched. It rummaged through him. It studied him. It grasped for what lay in him as if his skull were a hall in which it hoped to find something specific.

Stop, Anadar cried with every bit of strength he had.

He pushed back. He blocked. He braced against the intrusion, gathered will, form, concentration, and his resistance had effect. The creature stopped. Not completely. But enough. The violent ransacking of his mind slowed, became something else, as if the octopus had either found what it sought or recognised that this mind could not simply be taken apart.

Music.

Of endless sorrow.

And then Anadar began to understand.

This being was not here to attack them.

It was here to release its children from their endless suffering.

The images pressed clearer into his head.

Xoiun. Tring. Tiang.

The hunt in the depths of the sea. The three in shark bodies, armed with magic and greed, how they searched, lured, hunted. The octopus and its children had hidden for eons, from mages, from the hunt, from everything that came from above and reached into the deep. An ancient instinct of flight. An ancient knowledge that mages and hunger for power bring nothing good.

But these three had found them.

Captured them.

Brought them here.

Chained to the basin, with grates that cut off the way back to the sea.

They had taken her magic. Her sounds. Her songs. Her secrets, tortured out of her again and again. They laid bans on her that prevented her from fleeing, from singing, from calling. Then they took her children.

And they experimented on the children.

Sewed them.

Bound them.

Cut them apart.

Made chimeras, sick hybrids, forced into life in a state that was neither life nor death, only continued pain.

The children were still suffering.

And the mother was chained, robbed, bound, forced to watch.

Then more images came.

The night everything changed. Panic. Flight. The three stumbled down, careless, hunted, too close to the basin, too close to the one power they had tormented all that time. And there she seized them. First the twins. Then Xoiun. How she wove them. Cursed them. How she made the monster out of them. Not from hatred alone, but as a cry for help. As a chimera. As a horror that had to be so large, so visible, that someone would finally see it, hunt it, find it, follow it to this place. Before the monster’s head Anadar saw two glowing sound bodies, the dead twins, bound, singing, part of the curse. The monster was frenzy and call at once. A scream into the sea.

Then other images.

Two figures.

Friends.

Old.

They swam through grates. Through water. Through darkness. And behind them a realm.

An empire under water, of such beauty and size that Anadar’s mind could hardly accept it. Towers in the sea, halls of current and stone, shimmering forms, thousands of these beings, peaceful, ordered, alive in a world deeper, older, and far less human than anything he had ever seen. And the octopus at its centre. Not as a monster. As a being.

Help had come.

At last.

Today those who had heard her call had come.

And unfortunately you three as well.

Before the two could fulfil their task.

Anadar understood.

Terrible timing, he thought, oddly matter of fact.

And he understood something else.

He asked, carefully, more in thought than in word, whether he should release the children from their suffering.

The octopus answered with tones that were not a yes in any human sense and yet could mean nothing else.

Anadar tried to cast.

He could not.

The octopus grip hindered him, not violently, more like a continuing ban, and at the same time the creature pushed images into his mind. Chains. A chain running along the basin wall. Silver gleaming. Exactly at the waterline. The ban. The shackle. The cause.

Then he saw Sinadie.

She had hauled herself upright again, white faced, trembling, but standing.

“Sinadie,” he gasped, “kill the creatures.”

He pointed with his free hand toward the impaled bodies.

It took her a heartbeat to understand.

Then she nodded.

Her knife would not be enough, she knew it herself. So she gathered herself, murmured words, and with each sound the hall grew colder. Not pleasantly cool. Not winter cold. Dead cold. Hard cold. Ice crept over the impaled figures, first white, then glassy, then deep and brittle. They froze through to the core, steaming in the sudden hell of cold.

Then Sinadie went from one grotesque figure to the next and smashed them with the pommel of her knife.

The deep frozen bodies shattered like glass.

Loud. Final. Merciless.

With every chimera she destroyed, the octopus music changed. It grew lighter. Not bright. Not happy. But relieved. As if something fell from it that had lain there too long. Out of the water rose an eye, huge, dark, and in that eye there was none of the hate Anadar had expected.

Only exhaustion.

And gratitude.

When the last figure had splintered, Sinadie sank to the ground herself. The effort had nearly emptied her. Her blood still ran down her side. She braced one hand on the stone, breathing hard, and yet her face was strangely calm now.

Anadar felt the creature’s relief like a warm wave beneath all the horror.

Then he looked toward Morgut.

He still hung limp in the octopus arm.

Then the music changed.

It widened, deepened, filled with images, as if the being beneath them had understood that words would not be enough for this part, that even pain, plea, and gratitude were too small for what it now wanted to show him. Again the thorn reached into Anadar’s mind, but this time not with force. More like a hand opening a door that had always been there, only never used.

And the world sprang open.

Not the world as Anadar knew it. Not this tired, splintered world, covered in cities, schools, borders, seas, and mistrust. But another one. Older. Larger. One so saturated with magic that even his boldest childhood fantasies seemed like paltry sketches beside it.

He saw cities in the water.

Not just the one he had already glimpsed in the first vision, but entire realms, deep beneath the surface, immense domes and towers built of coral, black stone, and something that seemed to glow within the water itself. Streets no feet walked on, only currents. Halls where beings drifted in silent formations, fine, alien, graceful. Music ran through everything, not played, but lived, as if sound there was not art but a mode of existence.

Then the image lifted.

Deserts.

Not empty, not dead, but golden and boundless, and above them stood sky storms, spiralling, threaded with light and dust, and within them cloud fortresses carried their shadows, stacked high from white stone and blue shine, inhabited by beings with long bodies, bright faces, and wings that did not flap but cut the air in slow, sure movements. Angels, Anadar thought, and knew at once that the word was too small, too human, too blunt for what lived up there.

He saw forests.

Enchanted forests, and even that was a poor word. Trees whose crowns held colours his world scarcely had anymore. Leaves that carried light like water. Roots that glowed under the earth. Between them moved figures, slender, old, beautiful, and far from any human haste. Elves, he thought with the same discomfort with which one must call a great mountain a stone, because one’s language has nothing larger.

And he saw dragons.

Not as animals.

Not as beasts.

But as ancient, colossal beings, roaming freely over land and sea, so powerful that the very air seemed to arrange itself differently around their movements. There was peace among all these realms, not perfect unity, not that foolish harmony born of sameness, but something greater and more demanding: a structure. Everyone had their place. Everyone their strength. Everyone their measure. Magic flowed freely between them, not wild, not unbound in the later sense, but as naturally as water flows or fire burns.

And humans were there too.

Small at first. Restless. Learning.

The other beings taught them. Not all of them, but enough. They passed on what could be passed on, so the young, brief, hurried creatures could find their place within the structure. At first, it even seemed to work. Humans learned magic, and for a time they fitted in. They built, they studied, they joined themselves to the larger orders of the world. They, too, had their space in that vastness.

Then darker tones entered the images.

At first barely audible. A wrong chord. A pressure. A will that did not merely want a place in the structure, but wanted to bend it. Some humans began to draw power as well, to create servants for themselves. Djinn. Spirits. Goblins. Bound beings, summoned, shaped, forced. Much of it was grand and beautiful, but not necessary. Servants for labor, protection, knowledge, war. Then the summons grew deeper. Darker. Greedier.

And some of these servants were evil. Not evil in the small human way of envy or whim, but evil like something that understands power as its nature. Some were powerful. Very powerful. And the horned demons, once they had been called into the world, did not want to serve.

They wanted to rule.

Anadar saw how they fought their masters and killed them as well. Not all at once, not in a single uprising, but first one here, then an entire line there, then elsewhere a city, a court, a circle that had believed it could bind something with chains and seals, something that had only been waiting for the right moment. After that, the demons were free on this earth. And they brought their nature with them.

War.Death.Destruction.

They went against dragons, against winged beings, against elves, against devils, against humans, against everything in this world that lived and carried power within itself or stood against power. No order was safe anymore. No realm far enough away. It was not merely a war over land or dominion. It was a war against the structure of existence itself, and the images the kraken showed him were so immense, so filled with terror and fire, that Anadar could hardly grasp how any of it could ever have healed again.

He saw battlefields stretching across entire horizons. Dragon bodies falling from the sky in flames. Winged carriers torn apart in dust storms. Forest realms swallowed by black fire. Seas where light and blood stood together. Over everything, a struggle for existence, for the world, for the universe itself.

And then he saw the banishment.

You could not kill these beings. Not truly. You could break their bodies, yes. You could tear them apart, burn them, smash them. But their essence remained. So the peoples finally understood, after too many had fallen and too much of the world had been in flames, that only banishment could succeed. And so it happened, in a way that only the cooperation of nearly all remaining great powers could achieve. An army of beings, not humans alone, not winged beings, not dragons, not elves, not the water realms alone, but all together, fought the last war. Not for victory. For survival.

They bound the demons into a Nameless Dimension with no exit, no way out, no hope.All of them.

No matter how powerful.

No matter how old.

No matter how many.

They locked them into a dimension that was not world and not quite non-world, a sealed depth from which there was to be no escape. Gates were nailed shut. Passages were barred. Formulas were written into the foundational walls of reality. A prison beyond light, beyond air, beyond everything life requires. There they were to remain, so that they would never again see the light of the world.

The images flickered.

Rebuilding.Growth again.

Cities, fields, paths again. But nothing was as before. Too much had burned. Too much had been erased. Too many of the great old peoples had been broken, decimated, forced into retreat. Magic withdrew from the world. And now Anadar felt a new element in the images, something that had been absent from the old harmony.

Distrust.Fear of the Other.

Fear of magic.

Fear of passages.

And once again, humans stood at the center of these images.

At first, just individuals. Powerful individuals. Hungry for rule. Restless. They tried to create passages to forbidden places, to sealed dimensions. They did not want to banish the demons, but to use them. Again. This time as a weapon, this time smarter, more cautious, more hidden. And they succeeded. Not completely. Not in great numbers. But enough. They brought demons back. Put chains on them. Coercion. Binding. Contract. And these bound horrors hunted across the world again, hating their summoners and wanting to grow back into their old, greater selves.

What followed hit Anadar harder than the war before.

Because it was no longer open war between realms.

It was a hunt.

A systematic, cold extermination of everything that was different, fueled equally by power and fear. A holocaust against everything non-human. A genocide born not of frenzy, but of a decision to “cleanse” the world. Demons on chains were driven against other beings. They tracked down magic, searched out hiding places, dragged from forests, from mountains, from cloud fortresses, from depths and ancient ruins whatever remained of the peoples of the earlier world. Winged beings fell. Dragons were hunted. Water realms sealed themselves away. Elves fled into enchanted forests that grew smaller and smaller. Everything that was different was pursued, burned, broken, or driven into darkness.

The images showed magnificent beings who had once moved freely and peacefully across the world, now packed into caves, underground, into hidden cities, into the last corners of existence, fearing only survival.

And magic grew weaker.Anadar felt that too. Not only in the images, but like a creeping loss moving through the centuries. Less abundance. Less density. Less open current. As if the world itself had lost depth under banishment, war, hunting, and separation.

And so, image by image, Anadar saw the rise of humankind.

Not as natural maturation.

As takeover.

As dominion.

As the result of centuries of exterminating what had once made the world more varied, more dangerous, and larger.

He received these images with a shudder. They told of a time before any time he could think, a history so immense it felt as if he had been there himself, not merely a witness to another mind’s memory. He felt awe, revulsion, wonder, and a strange growing nausea, because suddenly things found their place that had once seemed only fairy tales, fragments, or delusions.

Then the octopus pushed deeper into his mind again.

Searching this time.

Questions.

Not in words, but as a probing grasp toward the sword lying off to the side on the stone. Toward the presence in Anadar that was not entirely his own. Toward the demon in the sword. It showed him something, or began to show him something, a comparison, a recognition, an old knowledge of what was wrong with Naarstr, and then…

Noise.

From above.

Steps. Voices. Magical movement, hurried and loud. Then light, different light, bright battle light, and the hall filled with presence. Grot. Roto. Son and Indra. More mages. They came down like people who believe they already know the ending while the story is still in its first rumblings. They saw the basin, the huge octopus, Morgut in its arm, Anadar on the ground, and Sinadie bleeding among shattered chimeras.

And they did what their kind usually did in moments like this.

They attacked.

No questions. No pause. No time to understand. Spells tore through the hall, water lances, flashes of light, pressure waves, a fiery cut from somewhere to the right, and words, shouts, orders. The octopus, which had just been wholly in Anadar’s mind, flinched. The last images, half formed and half already slipping away, flickered through his head.

Now.

It released him.

Anadar reacted faster than he could later explain. Perhaps from understanding. Perhaps from defiance. Perhaps only from the naked knowledge that if these mages down here now did what mages always did, everything would be lost. With the last strength left in his body he lunged forward, gathered power, and hurled it against the basin wall, exactly where the octopus had shown him the silver shining chain.

The strike hit.

Metal screamed.

The shackle snapped.

Morgut fell to the floor in the same instant, hard, heavy, twitching, half unconscious. And suddenly bright music filled the hall. No longer grief. No longer hatred. Something more open. Larger. Light answered it everywhere, on the wet walls, in the basin, in the niches, as if with the breaking of the chain not only metal had been freed, but a ban in the air itself.

The octopus dove under.

For a heartbeat Anadar thought it was gone.

Then it surged up again, ripped away the grate that sealed the way back to the sea with a strength that made even the attacking mages falter, and in the same motion seized the bodies of the two foreign figures who had come to save it. The dead? The dying? Anadar did not know. Only that it did not leave them behind. Then it pulled itself into the depths.

And as it vanished, the newly arrived mages poured everything they had onto the monster.

Light. Water. Shockwaves. Fire. A hail of power that made the basin boil, the walls tremble, and the last tones of the music shred into torn echoes.

Anadar crawled to Morgut.

His friend lived. He saw it at once, even though the sight was awful enough. Blood at mouth and nose. Eyes half open. The throat marked by red dark pressure bruises. Morgut stared at him, dazed, furious, incredulous.

“Why,” he demanded, and even now he still had the strength for accusation, “didn’t you tell me what you’re carrying with you?”

Then his eyes rolled away and he lost consciousness.

Anadar checked the breathing quickly. Regular enough. Life. Still. He left his hand on Morgut’s shoulder for a moment, more to steady himself than to hold him, and then looked around at the scene.

Isidre was there.

He had not even noticed when she arrived. She was kneeling by Sinadie now, tearing cloth, pressing on the wound, speaking softly, calmly, with that disarming matter of factness healers sometimes carry even through a battlefield like their own small peace.

But in the middle of the hall stood Roto and Grot.

And they were already celebrating themselves.

Not with loud cheers, even they were still too shaken by what had happened, but with that puffed up excitement that was almost more revolting. Triumph sat in their voices. The evil sea monster that had even overwhelmed Anadar had been driven off by their decisive intervention. That was how it already sounded in the first sentences they threw into the hall, as if they wanted to stamp the story with their mark before anyone else could even breathe.

Anadar looked at them.

Saw their lack of understanding. Saw their vanity. Saw how quickly a horror they had not grasped became a tale in which they appeared as victors.

With his last strength he crawled to his sword.

It lay several steps away, where he had thrown it in the first attack. Each pull across the stone cost him something. His muscles were empty. His mind still half full of images of a foretime that no longer wanted to be only foretime. His hand closed around the hilt.

And in the moment he touched the sword, Naarstr screamed inside him.

Hungry.

Raw.

Not for blood.

For old blood.

Those were the last words Anadar truly heard before the hall, the moons, the voices, the light, and the stench collapsed into one another and unconsciousness took him.

Formularbeginn

Formularende

VIII

Xian still clung to her armor like a desperate child clings to its last toy, to something that no longer truly offered protection and had long since come to smell only of sweat, blood, old filth, and all the days that had slipped through her fingers. But even she had to admit that the stench had become unbearable. Not merely unpleasant. Not merely stale and damp, but so deeply soaked into cloth and leather that it remained even when Unda brought cold water and helped her clean herself as best she could. It was a smell that said: captivity. Powerlessness. Too long within the same four walls. Too little light. Too much fear.

When Unda asked her for the third time whether she would rather have other clothing, Xian finally agreed.

Only the amulet stayed with her.

The amulet.

Unda had already asked about it earlier, casually, as if it were the small, incidental things that caught her attention most. A shape here, a stone there, a fine chain, a clasp that seemed too artful for someone who claimed to be nothing more than a hungry girl from the south who had come north hoping to find prey. This time, when Xian closed both hands around the amulet because she had to loosen the straps of her armor, Unda stepped half a pace closer.

“Where did you get that amulet?” she asked in a tone that wanted to sound friendly, and on the surface did. “It’s shaped so beautifully.”

Xian held it for a moment and looked at it herself, as if she were seeing it for the first time in a long while. The metal felt cool. Reliable. Almost comforting.

“A friend made it for us.”

Unda lifted her brows slightly.

“Is it something special?”

Xian did not look up at once. “To me it is.”

Unda held her gaze on her for a moment, then smiled as if she had accidentally asked something too direct. “Ah, forget I asked.”

But Xian did not forget.

She forgot nothing Unda asked, no matter how casually or warmly the old woman wrapped it. She did not forget when she fell silent. Not when she changed the subject too quickly. Not when her eyes flicked, almost imperceptibly, toward the door, toward the narrow viewing slit behind which those dark eyes kept appearing, motionless, expressionless, like something that did not understand, only watched.

Unda helped her take off the armor. Piece by piece. Carefully enough not to hurt Xian more than necessary, but not with the kind of gentleness that would let you forget that two things could be true at once: helpfulness and calculation.

When the leather finally slid from her shoulders, Xian felt only then how heavy it had become. How she had not worn the armor out of loyalty anymore, but because without it she would have felt even more naked. Unda took the bundle, held it briefly away from herself as if even she recoiled from the smell, and tossed it toward the door. There it lay, dark and limp like a skinned animal.

The eyes in the slit examined everything.

Again and again.

The room. Xian’s hands. The amulet. The discarded armor. Unda. The wall. The floor. Again and again the same motionless, tireless scrutiny.

Xian remained chained to the wall.

But her body was slowly coming back to itself. The wounds were closing. The headaches eased. The dull pounding behind her eyes became rarer. Even strength returned to her arms and legs, piece by piece. Only time had no meaning anymore. She guessed she had been here for weeks already. Perhaps more. Perhaps less. There was no measure for it. Only repetition.

Unda came again and again.

Again and again she brought water, something to eat, cloth, a rag, a bowl, sometimes new clothing, questions, closeness, a voice that carried almost human warmth into the room, and was therefore dangerous. Again and again she sat near Xian as if she had all the patience in the world. Again and again she asked seemingly trivial things, about origin, routes, weather, wounds, dreams, stories, names, gifts, habits, hunger, north, south, friends, brothers, bears, snow, flight.

Again and again she deflected as soon as an answer came too quickly.

Again and again she left.

Xian knew exactly what it was.

Interrogation.

Not the hard blow. Not the shout. Not the pincers. The soft, slow, grinding kind, where questions look like conversation and conversation looks like care. An opening here, a repetition there, a small deviation in the answer that gets picked up the next time, a name that seems forgotten and yet returns, a gap the prisoner is meant to fill with truth just to stop the silence.

So Xian played along.

She acted unsuspecting.

She acted friendly.

She evaded without seeming to evade.

She gave the same answers again and again, in the same coloring, with the same small digressions, the same pauses, the same shrug in the right places. Superficial. Calm. Enough truth not to sound like a constructed lie. Enough lie to reveal nothing essential.

When Unda was gone and the dark eyes in the slit disappeared, the other work began.

Then Xian pulled at her chains.

Not in the hope of simply breaking them. She had abandoned that hope long ago. But you come to know metal when you hang from it long enough. You learn where it yields. Where it does not. Where the ring in the wall changes tone when you put weight on it. Where the chain may have bitten a fraction deeper than the day before.

Then she knocked on pipes.

At first carefully. Then in a beat. Then in a rhythm that was not language and yet could only mean language.

And she got an answer.

From her brother.

He was alive.

That certainty alone was worth more than all the water Unda could bring.

Nigk answered in the old code they had developed as children, first for fun, later out of defiance, then out of habit, and now, as it turned out, for exactly this case. Two knocks for yes. Three short, one long for no. Pauses that were numbers. Sequences that became names. Simplified agreements only siblings understand, because they come from the same childhood and the same secret games.

They assumed their cells were close together.

And that Xiodri had to be nearby as well, even if they never received an answer from that direction.

Nigk had visitors too.

A man this time, not Unda. With him the same questions. The same circling. The same patient drilling. The same repeated refrain. And so they coordinated as best they could. In pauses, between walls, across metal. Their story had to stay close to the truth as soon as Xiodri entered it. Everything before that, however, was pure lie. Carefully built. Long before they were captured. The first thing they had done when they came north had not been hunting and not raiding, but inventing a story together, for every case in which questions would be asked that they could not dodge. They had not been foolish. Not completely.

Now the case had come.

They had to get information, and they could not become a source themselves.

They had to survive. Observe. Wait. Then flee.

They still did not know how. They did not even know where they were. The questions they themselves asked were always answered differently, if at all. Small lies. Little truth. Enough to neither feed hope nor kill it entirely. They were trapped. But not alone. Trapped. But not helpless. So they waited for the moment something shifted. A carelessness. A change. A sound. A key. A door. Or at least the return of their equipment.

Xian waited.

By now she could hear Unda and the uncanny guard from far away. She could almost set her watch by them, if time still had a watch. Their footsteps differed. Unda walked lighter, with a faint dragging afterstep in her right foot. The guard was heavier, more even, without any personal measure at all, as if walking were not movement for him but duty.

The door opened.

“I’m so glad to see you, Unda,” Xian said before the woman had fully entered.

It was not exaggerated enough to sound false. That mattered.

Unda smiled. “I’m glad to see you again too, Xian. How are you?”

“Better. Much better. The wounds are healing.”

“I’m glad.”

Unda set down the bowl, this time with something warm in it. A thin mash that smelled of root and fat. Not good. But nourishing enough.

“How is my brother?” Xian asked. “Have you heard anything?”

Unda lowered her eyes for a moment, as if she had to perform gentleness. “He’s still in a coma, Xian. I saw him briefly. He lives. He is healing. Soon you can go to him.”

Xian felt a cold fury rise inside her because she did not know which part of that was a lie. But her face stayed still.

“Tell me the story again,” Unda said while she rinsed the cloth in the bowl. “It’s so big. How did you manage to come here against all odds?”

There it was again.

The same question wearing different clothes.

“Unda,” Xian said with a tired little smile, “it’s as I told you. We saw the streams of refugees and knew there was something to take up here in the north. Gold. Or other valuables. Plunder, without having to murder or fight. We only wanted to go up quickly, stuff our pockets, and leave again. Then we got snowed in. Then the bear came. And then that strange woman who wanted to show us the way home.”

Unda nodded as if she were hearing it for the first time.

“And the amulet? Where did you get it?”

“A friend. It was a gift from a friend.”

“A very noble friend,” Unda said, almost dreamily.

“I wouldn’t know. Just a gift.” Xian shrugged. “Look at me. There’s nothing noble about me.”

Unda did not smile. “And the other objects? Gifts too? The bows. The knives. The glasses. The sack?”

“Things we were either given, or they were in the family.”

The same lie again.

The same calm again.

And again it lacked the one thing Xian would not reveal.

The band.

She still carried it, tightly folded and hidden between her breasts under the amulet, where no one had searched so far, or where the searching had been stopped by a last scrap of caution. Perhaps luck. Perhaps negligence. Perhaps the amulet itself. Xian did not know. Only that the band was still there.

And that it was waiting.

For her.

For her brother.

For the moment when both of them understood, at the same time, that every other possibility was over.

IX

The spectacle went on all night.

As long as the moons stood in the sky, the dripping did not cease, and with every hour what Gudi had first admired as a strange mechanism became something larger, almost sacred. It was not merely a play of light and water, not merely a clever device that ancient hands had once built with inconceivable precision. It was a rite, even if no one spoke it. A silent, perfect interplay of moonlight, the pool, and that hovering apparatus that gathered drops, guided them, sealed them, and released them again, without any hand touching it.

One vial after another filled.

No intervention was needed. No one stood below at the struts. No one had to move levers or realign channels. No glass jammed, no drop missed its path, no bracket caught. Everything continued with that soundless inevitability that only things possess which were either made with flawless craft, or have worked for so long that they seem less a work of hands than a part of the world. The full vials released themselves, as if by ghost hands, slid down the framework, and settled into the waiting cases, one after another, neat, orderly, infallible.

So one crate after another filled.

And all night the hall was filled with colors and sounds that could not be separated from each other. The deep blue of the moons. The small red tone of Jonus. The silvery glow of the pool. The shimmer of the moon-drops in their glass vials. Everything flowed together. Everything breathed in the same rhythm. Even the Sondra, standing motionless in rows and looking down, no longer seemed like guards or warriors in that light, but like figures in an old image that becomes visible only under the right stars.

Gudi forgot time.

Only when the night began to tilt and the moons slowly sank did the spectacle falter. The pulsing of the pool weakened. Drops rose less often from the surface. The light changed, losing its immediate sharpness and falling back into a dim afterglow. What remained was the glow of the filled vials, that majestic blue with the fine red core inside, which now lit the hall on its own, as if the drops had captured a piece of night and refused to let it go.

From the murmured conversations around her, Gudi gradually understood that this harvest was extraordinary.

Not merely good.

Not merely sufficient.

Extraordinary.

The voices, usually terse and restrained, had taken on a kind of excitement, even though no one grew loud. People did not speak to everyone, but in small, muted sentences, as if too much joy might offend their luck. Gudi caught fragments. That the last harvests had been meager. That sometimes there had been only five vials. Five. Barely enough to survive. Never enough for reserves. Never enough for safety. Never enough to do anything but reach the next cycle.

Five.

She looked at the many crates and could hardly imagine what that contrast must have felt like.

They were already speaking of how the stores must be replenished first, before any of it could be used for anything else. Some seemed to want to think further, bolder, more wasteful perhaps, but Zars, who had stood at the center of the whole night, said nothing. She let the words circle around her, calm, almost indifferent, as if she knew perfectly well that in the end only the weight of her decision would matter.

Then she stepped to Gudi.

With a curt gesture she signaled for her to come.

She led the young mage down the stairs in silence, back into the great hall. As they passed, Gudi could now see the crates more clearly, dozens of them, each filled with twenty-four vials, all nestled in rows, all glowing in the same miraculous way, as if each one carried a sealed sky inside.

Zars barely spared the crates a glance.

She went straight to the apparatus.

Only a few vials still hung there. One of them was nearly full. With a practiced motion Zars detached it from its track, caught it before it could glide onward, and sealed it with a small stopper. She did it so deftly that only afterward did Gudi grasp how often this woman must have done it.

“You are probably curious why we need these drops so desperately,” Zars said without looking at her. “Come. I will show you one of their secrets.”

Again she drew her veil tighter over her face, and Gudi followed. In the background she noticed how the other Sondra packaged the crates with great care. No frantic grabbing, no disorderly hauling away. Everything was gentle, almost reverent. Gnok joined them at a slight distance, without a word.

They climbed the stairs.

A soft click.

And they were back in the morning light of the city.

Ashambrat was only just waking. It was still early, hardly anyone on the paths, hardly any voices. The coolness of the night was slowly giving way to the dry heat of the coming day, but a rare moment still lay over everything, in which even a hot city holds its breath for a little while.

Zars carefully opened the vial.

Then she reached under her veil with two fingers and drew out a single golden hair. It was long, fine, and in the morning light brighter than the other strands Gudi had only guessed at before. Carefully, Zars dipped the tip of the hair into the neck of the vial. A tiny glow caught on it, a hint of blue, barely more than a shimmer. With the same hand that held the vial, she sealed it again, fast and sure, as if even that were an art made invisible through practice.

Then she put the vial in Gudi’s hand.

With her free hand she made a small, casual gesture.

At once a cloud formed over Gudi’s plot.

Not large. Not impressive at first glance. A small, dense rain cloud, suddenly hanging there as if it had always belonged to that spot. Zars lifted the hair, on whose tip the almost invisible remnant of the moon-drop still shimmered, and blew lightly on it.

Gudi saw the tiny trace of the drop drift into the cloud.

Instantly it turned blue.

At its center, a tiny red core remained.

Then it began to rain.

Not violently. Not storming. But in a perfect, even, gentle fall, landing directly on her plot and nowhere else. Drop by drop the glow seeped through the water. The rain glittered as it fell, blue and red at once, and the moment it touched the ground, it happened.

The wilted leaves lifted.

Not slowly, not the way a plant returns over hours after a good watering. No. Visibly. Before her eyes. Yellow became green. Slack became upright. Cramped stems tightened. New shoots pierced the soil as if everything beneath the surface had been waiting only for someone to speak the right word at last. Flowers opened. Herbs regained their color. A fine, almost audible pressure moved through the beds, as if growth itself had suddenly become a music that could no longer hold itself back.

Gudi could hardly believe her eyes.

In the shortest time, a garden stood there again.

Not merely saved.

In full bloom.

Lush.

Beautiful.

For a while the plants kept growing, visible, slow enough to follow, fast enough to remain a miracle. Then the movement eased, diminished, and settled back into an ordinary measure. What remained was a plot that looked fuller, richer, and more splendid than it ever had before.

“Keep it safe,” Zars said.

She left Gudi standing there with the vial in her hand and her gaze fixed on her garden, turned half to go, and yet paused again, as if she knew the real part only began now.

Gudi stood there, mute with astonishment.

Then Gnok came to her side.

Not close enough to crowd her, but close enough that his voice was meant only for her.

“If anyone asks,” he said, nodding slightly toward the plot, “then one of your spells went wrong. You do not mention the drops. To anyone. Not even to your brother.”

He did not sound threatening. That was what made it so serious.

“I hope you understand that this must remain secret.”

Gudi nodded slowly.

She understood.

Or at least she believed she did. Because beside what she had seen in the night, even her own amazement felt small. This was not a pretty secret. Not a clever trick. It was a foundation of life. Survival. Power. Perhaps more. And suddenly she understood why the Sondra killed for it, stayed silent for it, protected it, and lied.

Gnok looked once more at the garden.

“For now,” he said, “it is better not to make too many friends in the school with growth like that.”

Then he smiled.

And for the first time since all this had begun, that smile did not look narrow, not dry, not evasive, but almost open.

“Speaking of a botched spell,” he said, and now there was even a trace of real amusement in it. “There are people who try to construct what you managed for an entire lifetime. That vortex.” He turned slightly toward her. “Do you think we can sit down and try to reconstruct it? Putting it on paper so it can be repeated would be of some use.”

Gudi looked at him.

Only a day ago she had suspected him of betrayal, perhaps worse. Only a few hours ago all her mistrust of him had been alive, sharp, and justified. Now this old mage stood beside her with the morning on his shoulders and one of the most likable smiles she had ever seen on him, and something in her that had resisted him for so long quietly collapsed.

Not because all questions had been answered.

Not because she suddenly trusted him blindly.

But because she realized there was more here than betrayal and more than secrecy. A necessity. An old fear. And perhaps, just perhaps, on his side too, a trace of genuine regard.

And with that smile, the last remnant of her suspicion of the old mage finally drifted away.

X

Waking was not really waking. He drifted across into consciousness, slowly, unwillingly, as if he first had to claw his way up from a depth that still wanted to keep him. And with the first clear thought, it became painfully obvious that everything hurt.

Not only in the ordinary way of an injured body. Not just muscles, joints, neck, arm, ribcage. It was more as if he had been torn out of the world in several places at once and shoved back in badly. Yet even those physical pains faded next to the real misery.

Naaarstr was screaming.

It was not simply screaming in his head. It was raging there. A voice dripping with hatred and contempt, with greed, with frantic, impatient fury. It demanded blood. Old blood. It wanted to hunt. To tear apart. To annihilate. Again and again it roared for freedom, for the chase, for prey, and every word drove into Anadar’s thoughts like a thorn.

Let me out.Let me hunt them.Let me kill.I want to destroy them.Set me free.

Anadar gathered himself as best he could. It was difficult. When he finally opened his eyes, Isidre was bent over him. Her face appeared blurred at first, then clearer, calm, friendly, almost absurdly normal in all that inner noise. She smiled at him, not broadly, more with that quiet warmth healers sometimes carry, as if they did not contradict pain, only made it a little less lonely for a moment.

“How are you?”

“Uh,” was all Anadar managed.

He did not only have that roaring demon in his skull. He also had a headache, a stiff neck, an aching arm, the dull aftershock of the fight in his shoulders, and the sensation as if that suction cup with its thorn still lay on his skin. He sat up slowly. His hand was bandaged. Blood was already pushing through the cloth again. He felt the puncture point with unsettling precision, as if his body itself had not decided yet whether it was a wound or an entryway.

Beside him, Morgut lay on a second bed, still asleep.

Shara sat on the other side of the room, motionless, watching him closely.

Isidre laid a hand on his forehead, checked temperature, gaze, response, and when her fingers merely brushed the wound on his hand, Anadar flinched.

“The wound on your hand,” she said softly, “I have never seen anything like it. It is not healing well. Not the way it should. I will try to make a paste so it heals better.”

She smiled again, as if even an unknown wound could at least be tamed by good hands.

“Morgut is more or less fine,” she went on, glancing at the young mage. “Physically, at least. Mentally he is still a bit shaken. Restless sleep. But at least he is no longer unconscious. The boy will come back to himself.”

Anadar nodded.

“How is Sinadie?”

“She lost a lot of blood,” Isidre said. “The stab missed heart and lung, but it was deep. It went through. She was very lucky.” Then, with a faint, almost appreciative snort: “Seems like a tough little mistress.”

Anadar closed his eyes briefly.

“But you are right,” Isidre said, as if she could read the next thought on his face. “I will check on her again in a moment. She is one floor above you. I made sure she is not carried far away. From what I have heard, you need to speak with each other urgently.”

She stroked his forehead once more, almost motherly, and left the room so quietly it was as if she did not want to disturb anything that had only just begun to knit back together.

No sooner had the door clicked shut than Shara asked, “What happened?”

Her voice was calm, but not gentle. Behind it lay tension. Exhaustion. Anger. And something else Anadar only fully understood in the next few minutes.

“I have had to listen to the stories of those idiots,” she went on. “And with every retelling they get more fantastic. Soon you are the monster they drove off, and they are the saviors of the world. They twist everything to their advantage.”

Anadar sat a little straighter.

“Quiet,” he said loudly.

So loudly that even Shara startled and looked at him sharply.

He raised his hand. “Not you.” Then he tapped his forehead and pointed at the sword, which stood propped against the wall some distance away. “My guest is losing it.”

Shara’s gaze slid to the sword. “I can almost hear it too,” she said quietly. “So? What happened? I can’t read you. You’re blocking.”

“It…” Anadar dragged both hands over his face. “It was so much different than we thought.”

But while he said that, the demon in his head was reveling in an orgy of violence. It ranted about torn-off heads, desecration, the hunt, blood, old fury, freedom and destiny, and Anadar could barely hold onto a clear thought. He forced himself to tell it anyway. Haltingly at first. Then a little steadier.

He described the descent.

The spiral staircase. The stench. The rooms carved into the walls. The hall. The balcony. The tables. The experiments. The chimeras. The disgust that had struck them down there like something that still clung to their fingers.

Then he spoke of the attack.

Of the two almost human beings who had blended into the background so perfectly. Of Sinadie’s wound. Of Morgut at the basin. Of the kraken.

While he spoke, Naaarstr raged on, demanding to drink old blood, to bathe in it, to cleanse itself in it, as if that were the only state in which it could ever be whole again.

Anadar told of the contact.

Of the mental interlocking.

Of the images.

He spoke of Xoiun, Tring, and Tiang. Of what had really happened to them. Of the birth of the sea monster. Of the cry for help that had not been an attack, but an act of desperation.

Beside him, Morgut groaned.

He woke up.

Shara was at him immediately, leaning down slightly, as if she wanted to stop him from falling too quickly from pain into reality. Morgut tried to sit up and groaned loudly. After a short, difficult struggle, he managed it. His face was gray with exhaustion, his eyes deeply sunken, but when his gaze landed on Anadar and then on the sword, he snapped fully awake.

“What did you do back then?” he asked.

No greeting. No lead-in. No attempt at gentleness.

“You didn’t kill it. You locked it up and you’ve been carrying it around ever since?”

Anadar looked at him.

Morgut kept going now, with a disbelieving snort.

“You fed it?”

Shara put a hand on Morgut’s arm. Anadar felt a moment of real worry. Not for himself. For Morgut. Because this was the moment when everything could tip.

But Morgut did not tip.

He held Anadar’s gaze, long enough that Anadar was the one who looked away first.

“You didn’t see another way,” Morgut said at last, far more calmly than Anadar had expected. “Did you?”

Anadar looked back up.

Morgut met his eyes, and there was no accusation in the simple sense. There was anger in it, yes. Reproach, yes. But also understanding. Or at least a determined attempt to understand before judging.

“I get it,” he said. “You trapped it. That was probably the only right way to keep that monstrosity from being let loose on the world again. What you didn’t consider, or underestimated, is that this thing is bound to you now. Right?”

Anadar stayed silent a heartbeat too long.

“It’s more complicated.”

“Of course it is.” Morgut pulled a face and now sat fully upright. “With you it is always more complicated.” Then, more bitterly: “Your only mistake was that you didn’t trust me with it sooner.”

Shara looked from one to the other.

Morgut drew a deeper breath. “It talks to you, doesn’t it?”

“At the moment it isn’t talking,” Anadar said. “At the moment it wants to be let out so it can hunt.”

He shrugged and gripped his head with both hands.

Morgut smiled faintly, almost pleased by a realization that had come to him at the worst possible time.

“Our many-armed friend left me something, a little song.”

He reached into the chest of his garment and pulled out a small flute.

Plain. Light. Barely longer than his hand. Nothing about it looked important, and that was exactly why, in this moment, it felt like something not made for eyes, only for effect.

Morgut lifted it to his mouth and played a few notes.

Fast. Clear. A sequence that sounded meaningless to Shara, but hit Anadar instantly.

The roaring in his head went quiet.

Not completely. But deep enough, sudden enough, radical enough that for a moment Anadar simply stood there and thought nothing at all.

Silence.

Pure, simple, unimaginably precious silence.

Then the demon hissed, much quieter now, much farther away:

Make him stop.I demand that he stops.

Anadar looked at Morgut and wordlessly motioned for him to keep playing.

The flute sounded again.

And now it was no longer threats, but whining that rose up from Naaarstr. Pleading even. That the music stop. That it had to stop. That you could not do that to it.

Shara watched it all and felt shut out.

It hit her harder than she admitted to herself in that first instant. They had lived through something together. Something decisive. Something she had almost lost because the nausea had taken her again, like it did every morning now. Not seasickness. She knew that now. That explanation had become too small. Too harmless.

And now the two men sat in front of her, sharing a secret she could not reach. She heard the flute, saw Anadar’s face brighten, saw the hardness fall out of him, as if years slid off his features, and she thought, shaken: What must this man be carrying.

Then the images of the night flooded her mind.

Not in words.

Not as a report.

Anadar let her in.

He led her into it. Into the descent. Into the stench. Into the hall. Into the attack. Into the kraken. Into the images. Into the demon. Into the history.

It happened within a few moments, and yet it was more than some people grasp in an entire lifetime.

Shara saw it.

The tortured beings. The truth about the sea monster. The old world. The war. The banishment. The hunt. The demon in the sword. And with every image grew in her the shattering certainty that all of this was part of something much larger, a greater horror, an older guilt, than she could have imagined even yesterday.

Everything about this story was horrifying to the marrow.

Anadar had not felt such a sense of freedom in a long time as in the moment the melody rang out and the demon withdrew from his thoughts as far as it could. Not gone. Never entirely gone. But far enough. Finally they had something other than blood. Finally a tool. A form. Something that could bind this creature, weaken it, hurt it, or at least silence it.

The kraken had given them that.

Out of ancient hatred for beings like this.

Or out of knowledge.

Or both.

In Anadar, an understanding rose, large, clear, without comfort: he had to banish the demon. As quickly as possible. That now took priority over everything else. Over politics. Over Roto. Over Grot. Over the Conclave. Over the North. Over everything.

If such a being ever became unbound on this earth again, no one could stop it.

It had to be banished.

And every access to the dimension of demons had to be sealed forever.

His next path, he knew now with the coldness that sometimes comes with decisions, would lead to Sontor.

To Fantor’s tower, to pick up a trail.

XI

The recovery went quickly, and it went well.

Even the wound in his hand, which at first had reacted badly to everything Isidre put on it, finally began to close once she found the right salve. She had mixed the paste herself, with a patience and expertise that reminded Anadar, once again, that healers could be just as dangerously precise in their own way as firemasters. When she told him the recipe, she did so with the casual hope that he might remember it. There were some specific kinds of algae in it, a ground salt from the deeper trenches beneath the islands, and something she only called “the third film from the underside.” Anadar decided he would rather not know, in detail, what exactly was on his skin. It helped. That was enough.

And since the demon was no longer torturing his brain without pause, he could think clearly again.

That alone was almost a kind of healing.

The flute Morgut now carried like a second weapon was never far away. He did not always have to play it, not constantly, not in the simple, endless repetition Anadar had feared at first. A few notes at certain intervals were enough, a short pattern, a reminder of something ancient that Naaarstr hated as much as it feared. The being in the sword remained. It snarled. It rumbled. It demanded. But it no longer howled without end. For the first time in a long time, Anadar could think without having to defend his thoughts against a second, greedy will.

The Conclave was imminent, and Anadar was painfully aware that he was obliged to attend.

If it had been up to him, he would have avoided it. He would have left the Islands of the Winds on the very first day after waking, not out of cowardice toward Roto and Grot or out of duty, but out of disgust at the waste of time. His brother was still missing. The North was still an open mystery. What the kraken had shown him still burned inside him. At least they would deal with the sea monster. And with every hour he stayed here, the feeling grew stronger that the world elsewhere was already beginning to slide further out of place while the schools still argued over words.

But obligation was obligation.

In those days, Master Sinadie received him again and again in her room one floor above, where Isidre had banished her to bed under strict instructions. The young dean proved surprisingly sharp, with a tongue even sharper. She was clever enough not to spend her words wastefully, and that was precisely why they often landed more cleanly than the long speeches of other masters. Anadar quickly understood why she had become dean at such a young age. Not merely because she was gifted, but because she read situations as if people were just another form of text.

Isidre kept warning them to be careful. More than once she explicitly forbade Sinadie to even sit up, let alone leave the bed. Sinadie ignored those instructions with exactly the politeness required to avoid openly defying a healer while still contradicting her in everything that mattered.

“We need to get out of here soon,” Anadar pressed. “It’s urgent.”

Only Sinadie, Shara, and he were in the room. Outside in the corridor it was quiet, and through the half open window the salty sea air drifted in, making every room on the Islands of the Winds feel a little damp and alive.

Sinadie lay propped up in bed, her pillows stacked higher than Isidre would ever have allowed. She smiled, briefly.

“Inconspicuous, you mean? You, Anadar? Nearly every damned mage on these islands is after you.”

She gave a short laugh. It was bright, astonishingly youthful, and it did not fit her pale face or the carefully hidden wound beneath her gown.

“They all want to make a name for themselves,” she said. “Through you.”

Anadar leaned against the wall and snorted.

“Two have already managed it, if you believe their stories. They saved me from the monster I either am, or supposedly summoned. They have not quite decided which version they prefer.”

Shara folded her arms. “This is serious, Anadar. They want to twist it so it sticks to you.”

He only shrugged.

“At the moment we have other, more urgent problems,” he said aloud.

And in thought, for Shara alone to hear, he added: And if we look at it soberly, they are not even wrong to demand an investigation.

As he thought it, his hand tapped the pommel of his sword without meaning to.

Sinadie pulled a face. “Why do I always feel like I’m only hearing half the conversation?”

Shara shot Anadar a brief, crooked look, but said nothing.

Sinadie chose to change the subject. “So what actually happened? The kraken was not the sea monster, am I right?”

Anadar looked at her for a long moment.

“You had a very malicious mage,” he said at last, “who carried out very strange experiments.”

Sinadie nodded slowly. “We noticed that ourselves. That’s why we wanted to confront him. And then suddenly too much happened at once.”

“He and his students went too far,” Anadar said. “They were doing experiments they had no right to do. Bottomlessly evil. No longer ethically defensible. You saw the bodies.”

That slow nod again.

“You know more,” she said then. “But you don’t want to report it. Maybe.”

Anadar exhaled. He stepped closer, leaned in slightly, and looked her straight in the eyes.

“I don’t fully understand much of it myself yet. I only know we have to move on. My brother. The North. None of that is resolved.”

“So there’s more coming than just small sea monsters,” Sinadie said.

Anadar nodded. “The sea monster should be history.”

At that moment Isidre came in and stopped right in the doorway, as if she did not need to check what she already knew.

“I told you,” she snapped sharply, “that you are not to sit up.”

Her gaze struck Sinadie first, then Anadar, then Shara, and even Anadar, who was not easily scolded, felt an urge to be at least half guilty.

“You’re pushing yourself too hard,” Isidre continued. “And you two,” she pointed at Anadar and Shara, “out. Now.”

They left under her curses and went back down to the room they had been assigned.

Morgut was there with Miene and Sindra. The young mage was paler than usual, but seemed fully himself again. He looked up as they entered, and there was something hopeful in his eyes that he hid too poorly to pass as casual.

“You have a plan?” he asked.

Shara looked at the three of them. “Forward,” she said. “After the Conclave. Before that it will be difficult. It’s better if our great Anadar attends and at least steers things a little.”

Morgut grimaced. “Steer things. I was hoping we could simply disappear.”

“That would be less steering,” Shara said dryly, “and more running.”

Two days passed.

Roto and Grot moved around the island with the self assured posture people adopt when they believe history has already chosen their version. They barely spoke a word to Anadar. If they looked at him at all, it was only with that mixture of disgust, expectation, and triumphant impatience that made it clear they were already rehearsing their accusation inside their heads.

On the evening of the Conclave, Isidre joined them. She would enter the hall as well. Sinadie was absent.

“Bed rest,” Isidre said sharply before anyone even asked. “And if any of you think that’s an excuse to drag her along, you will regret it.”

All four of them walked with Master From along the corridor that led to the entrance, and entered one after another to find the other masters and deans already inside.

This was one of the old oddities of the Conclave. It belonged to no place and to no school. It was a space between the schools, old, neutral, and covered in so much protocol that even its walls felt like part of an agreement. The entrance could be opened by any school. The chair was held by the Wind School of Ashambrat, by Dean Hokf’n. Only after this Conclave would the chair pass to the Mind School.

Hokf’n would open, conduct, and close the session.

And only at the end, after all resolutions, reports, motions, and rites, would the staff be handed to the Mind School so that the next Conclave would stand under its sign.

When they entered, Anadar was almost relieved to see Manador.

He greeted him briefly, greeted his brother Loon as well, and sat to the right of his dean. Manador leaned toward him at once, before the hall had even fully settled.

“Can you return to the Fortress, my friend?”

Anadar looked at him.

“Whenever you can return,” Manador whispered, “it is important.”

As he said it, he slipped a letter under the table without drawing attention. Anadar let it disappear into his clothing without any change in his expression.

He had hoped to see his brother back in his seat by now, but the chair beside Dean Tranda of the Earth School remained empty.

Tranda himself looked unwell. He coughed often, seemed weak, almost drained, and Isidre’s gaze kept sliding toward him with undisguised concern. Only the Life School and the Mind School were fully present. Master Roto also looked visibly surprised not to see his brother Kolnidranooora at Dean Fontal’s side.

“There has been neither visit nor message from Master Kolnidranooora,” Fontal said in response to a quiet inquiry, and although her voice stayed controlled, her irritation showed. Roto seemed unsettled by that.

The beginning of the Conclave followed the old formal pattern.

Hokf’n stepped forward with the staff in hand, a long, pale wood set with metal rings that chimed softly against each other with every movement. Behind him the seat of the Mind School was already prepared, as custom demanded, because the school to which the chair would pass had to remain visibly present throughout the entire session as a reminder that power in the Conclave was only ever borrowed.

First the names of the schools and their present representatives were read out. Then the absences. Then the dead since the last assembly. After that came the brief, sober moment in which each school confirmed that its archives were intact, its seals unbroken, its successions in order, and that no grasping for power could be found. The Water School said nothing about the cause of its recent unrest and referred to a later report. Only after these formalities were completed did Hokf’n lift the staff once more, let the rings chime, and open the floor.

“There are reports,” he said, “of incidents on the Islands of the Winds, of a sea being, of a renegade master, of injuries, and of interference by outside masters in the affairs of this school. I open the hearing.”

Grot rose almost immediately.

He did it with a kind of practiced gravitas that showed he had rehearsed this moment more than once. He stood broad shouldered, both hands on the table, his gaze fixed first on Hokf’n, then deliberately wandering across the hall before settling on Anadar, as if everyone had to see where the line of his speech was aimed.

“On the night itself, when matters finally escalated, we were alerted by the mages Miene and Siendra. Both came in visible agitation and reported that Master Anadar, Master Sinadie, the young Morgut, and others had gone to the tower and had disappeared under circumstances that were, in themselves, suspicious. Since the situation allowed no delay, Master Roto and I did not hesitate. We gathered further forces and hurried to the tower at once. There we found the hidden access, which until then had apparently escaped anyone with sufficient resolve, or at least had not been opened, and we descended the concealed spiral stair, since even the stench that struck us was enough to show that nothing was hidden beneath that tower which could be lawful, clean, or even remotely compatible with the order of the schools.”

“Now,” he continued, “when we arrived, Master Anadar was in the process of…”

He paused with theatrical care.

“… making a bargain with the sea monster.”

A murmur ran through the hall.

Grot described the kraken reasonably well. Not brilliantly and not with understanding, but precisely enough in size, form, and danger that no one could accuse him of inventing it. Then he pressed his interpretation.

“Morgut and Master Sinadie were already down when we arrived. We saw that Master Anadar was kneeling on the ground, and it seemed as if he were seeking contact with the monster. As if he wanted to negotiate with it. Perhaps to enter into an alliance.”

Roto nodded at every second sentence, loudly enough that it could be heard.

“Again,” Grot said now, sharper, “we find the Master of the Fiery Fortress in immediate proximity to a monster that must be bound. Is it truly coincidence that this monster and the one that attacked the Fiery Fortress appeared in the same span of time? Is it coincidence that wherever something forbidden, monstrous, unnatural rises from the depths of this world, Master Anadar is already present, or not far away?”

The murmuring grew louder.

Roto, in particular, fed it with audible agreement. Fontal stayed silent, but her silence was not neutral. Hokf’n listened with an unreadable face.

“Master Roto and I,” Grot continued, “were able to attack this monster and drive it into the sea after Master Anadar failed to do what should have been done.” He raised his voice. “I hereby and now demand an investigation into these events and into Master Anadar’s role in them!”

Manador leaned slightly toward Anadar.

“This is absurd. Are you not going to respond?” he asked quietly.

Anadar snorted, rolled his eyes, and smiled as he stood.

Grot pointed at him at once. “Ha. Now you want to wriggle out of it.”

“Master Grot,” Anadar said, and his voice was so calm that several heads turned toward him before the words even landed, “I must agree with you.”

He let a pause fall. It threw the room off balance in a single blow.

“An investigation is exactly what I would propose here.”

Another pause, and he looked Grot directly in the eyes. The smile drained from his face.

“After all, it was you who asked me for exactly that.”

The room grew quieter.

“You intercepted me in Tandor,” Anadar continued, “and kept me from searching for my missing brother. You asked me to come with you to the Islands of the Winds because you suspected a renegade master of your school had used forbidden magic and had something to do with the sea monster. It was you…” and now Anadar, in turn, pointed at Grot “… who asked me for help clarifying this matter here. And I was very glad, within the bond of our circle, to grant that request.”

An uneasy murmur ran through the hall.

Grot flicked a brief glance at Roto, not asking for help, but because even he understood in that moment how cleanly Anadar had turned the matter.

“And now,” Anadar said, his voice taking on that softly dangerous tone that usually hit harder than open anger, “you stand here, the one who asked for discretion then, and accuse me publicly. Is this the kind of gratitude you offer those who help you? Or was it your plan from the beginning to force me into a situation like this?”

Some heads shook. Others nodded. The Mother already smiled faintly while also tipping her head in disapproval, as if she had to admit that Anadar was still good in an attack.

“Was that not also the reason,” Anadar added, “you voted against an inquisition at the last Conclave? Because you already knew something had happened here that was undoubtedly worth investigating? And now you try to connect two things to shift the blame onto someone easier to display than your own failures.”

Now the chaos broke.

Several masters stood up. Voices overlapped. The Life School demanded to know what discretion he meant. Roto shouted at Grot. Fontal demanded order before Hokf’n could restore it. Roto spoke to both Grot and Hokf’n at once. Loon only leaned back slightly, as if he had expected exactly this moment. Hokf’n slammed the staff hard on the stone floor, but even that took several strikes before the roar diminished.

Anadar sat down again.

He looked at Manador. “Like that?”

Manador smiled. “You set fire, my friend.”

Then, more quietly, within the lingering tumult: “Whatever happens, be assured. We stand behind you.”

The Mother looked at him too, and though her head still tilted slightly, there was a silent smile in her gaze that was worth more than any open approval.

When enough calm had finally returned, Hokf’n spoke again.

“Very well. It seems we have a matter to examine. That means we proceed by protocol. This includes the dispatch of inquisitors from three schools to review the case. Until these inquisitors are dispatched and arrive, I propose that all involved remain in their place on the Islands of the Winds. I would propose inquisitors from Earth, Wind, and Life. These are to be appointed by the relevant schools and sent within the next week.”

Anadar did not like that.

Not at all.

It would mean waiting. Letting himself be pinned in place. Or knowingly acting against the Conclave’s directive, which would be a clear violation. He was about to open his mouth to object when someone spoke first.

“Excuse me,” a voice said from the doorway. “I am a bit late. Did I miss anything?”

Every head turned.

Sinadie stood in the entrance.

She leaned on a staff, still pale, moving with visible pain, yet she smiled. Not broadly. Not insolently. Just enough to show everyone in the room that she had not come to sit quietly and be questioned with gratitude.

Isidre shot her a look that bordered on pure murder, but she stood and hurried to help her. Sinadie accepted the healer’s support with a matter of fact ease that was almost shameless, let herself be guided to her seat, and sat down with a soft, pain tightened exhale.

“I assume,” she said, lifting her gaze slowly to the circle, “I missed the accusation?”

A few laughed. Too many did not.

She turned her head slightly toward Grot.

“Well then, ladies and gentlemen. As you have no doubt noticed, we have a small problem that requires investigation. First, however, I wish to express my full thanks to Master Anadar and to the young acolyte Morgut.” She nodded to Hokf’n. “You have a splendid young fellow in your school. Those two came to our aid in our need. At risk to their lives. Despite many other urgent matters Master Anadar is pursuing. For that we owe them lasting thanks.”

She paused and let the words settle.

“As for the investigation,” she continued, “we actually have enough masters present here as witnesses. Master Roto. Master Isidre. Master Anadar. Master Shara. Master Morgut, as well as the two mages of the Mind School, Miene and Sindra. All were involved in one way or another. We could just as well begin the investigation here. Or at least hear the reports.”

She lifted her hand slightly before anyone could interrupt.

“For my part, I must admit that we had a renegade master who, together with his students, committed a singular crime. That falls under my responsibility, or ours.” She glanced briefly at Anadar. “As Master Anadar has assured me, Xoiun has already been brought to account and no longer walks among us.”

It landed.

It was cleverly placed. She admitted just enough guilt to sound credible and shifted the center of gravity away from Anadar and toward Xoiun and the Water School itself. Suddenly the question was no longer, must Anadar be investigated. It was, how far does the crime of a renegade master reach, and who failed to see it, and for how long?

Nevertheless, Hokf’n insisted on an external inquiry.

Fontal supported him loudly. For her, any procedure not removed from the immediate influence of those involved was already suspect. The Mother and Manador only shook their heads. Tranda gave the convincing impression of having drifted off during part of the session, and that was silently counted as abstention. Sinadie abstained as well, explicitly on the grounds that as dean of the affected school and part cause of the situation she could not vote objectively, but she wished to state clearly that Anadar was not to be the target of the inquiry, only the events around Xoiun, his students, and the monster. Much to the displeasure of Grot and Roto, who had expected a different outcome that evening.

In the end, the Mother proposed a compromise, and because it came from her it sounded sober, and therefore hard to challenge.

The external inquiry would be dispatched. Yes.

But its mandate would be formally limited to the events around Xoiun, the tower, the experiments, and the sea being.

Master Anadar would not be treated as the accused, but as a witness only. The inquiry would be limited to the events on the Islands of the Winds.

And, which was the real victory, after the inquisitors had questioned those involved, the inquiry would be presented again to the Conclave.

Hokf’n accepted it with visible reluctance.

But he had to. It was the only path to any majority at all, and even that majority was narrow.

When the formula of resolution was spoken, the tension in the room did not disappear, but it changed direction.

Roto and Grot had not gotten what they wanted. They had not pulled Anadar into the center of the accusations, and for the moment that was enough.

End Part II