Every Scar on My Armour Maps Where I Refused to Kneel

The amount of silences I manage to leave behind me could fill a well to bursting.

“So... that’s why ya don’t like her?” Sels is the first to break it.

Looking into those dark little eyes, I’m not sure if I want to lay out the rest of it, yet. Maybe to the others, but not to her. That won’t be her fate in this world. “More or less.”

“Haimilia...? Why would she...?” Jeanu shuts his hanging beak. “Yes, she’s cold, sometimes, but she cares about the empire and its people—”

“Greshol,” Meil whispers, and the table falls silent as if she sliced a knife through it. Her eyes turn up from the wood, piercing me. “Did she have anything to do with that?”

I... haven’t looked into that, yet. I should have. “I don’t know.”

“What do you know?”

I turn away from the intensity of that stare. “I know that for two hundred years we fought to defeat every general Noruaas threw at us, until it came back, itself. Before we had a chance to kill it, once and for all, she....”

Jeanu does have a point. And I don’t know. I don’t know. If we fought for all that time to.... Then why.... Why in the end would she...? What power could she possibly gain with everything destroyed? We knew by the end that there was no hope of even a handful of our people surviving, unlike the Angrilans. The world was gone, there was nothing left. So why—?

I haven’t thought about it since that day. All I know to do is make sure it never happens again.

Or at least... I thought....

“Do you have a headache, Lonn?”

That’s Meil’s healer tone in full-force, cool and professional. I take my fingers away from my forehead. They’re shaking, faintly. “It’s... been a long day. I think the noodles were too much.”

I think I’m also developing a migraine. It’s uncomfortably hot in here— hard to breathe.

“Uh, ya all—”

Sels cuts off, and I catch a flick of Meil’s fingers, the back of her hand pressing to my forehead, brushing the mask—still dark, but imbued to a simpler design. “Let’s leave this discussion for another day. I don’t like it, but we don’t know how Haimilia changes over the course of two centuries or so. Perhaps Noruaas simply... got to her.”

“Maybe.” I snort, massaging the vice easing its grip around my temples. There was something going on for years, but I couldn’t see it. Blinded by distance. And then she— I hiss softly between my teeth. “I need to get rid of this damn chain.”

“Why?”

I pick up my bowl and stubbornly resume my meal. It’s too good to leave half-finished. “Mmf. Just in case.”

I don’t miss the befuddled looks Akir and Jeanu exchange, Sels shrugging at them, Meil dismissing the questions in their expressions with the flick of a hand. She always guards my back.

Finishing with a sigh, I let my chopsticks drop into the bowl, now overfull but more or less pleasantly. “In any case, we’ll need to keep our ears to the ground. These ‘Angrilans’ are bad news, and I doubt this will end well.”

Ξ-Ξϟ†ϟΞ-Ξ

I half-expect to be ambushed on my way back to the palace, seeing as it happened last time. Despite my misgivings, Sels insists on coming along instead of staying with Meil, or Jeanu and Akir at his mother’s place, for the night.

She may be disappointed when nothing happens. I can’t say I’m exactly relieved, but....

No, actually, I can’t find anything good in a delayed assassination. It only means they’re planning something else that might turn out worse.

Damned if I am, damned if I’m not....

Later, with Sels safely snoring inside, my hand touches the sealed entrance to the cellar, imbuing myself a tunnel through layers of rock and dirt. The darkness yawns open with the biting stench of evil and ruin, all too familiar from when it lay thick over this land.

That at least indicates it hasn’t chosen to kill itself drilling through its box since the last time I checked in on it. How funny would that be, to find nothing but a sludgy puddle.

At least it would be easier to handle.

Carefully sealing the way behind me, imbuing the box to shape myself an opening without letting out a cascade of holy water, I’m met with the blue-lit shadows turning to give me a soulless, grinning pantomime of myself, once again.

“I thought you’d never come talk to me,” it purrs.

I reflect its grin, and that bravado shifts into a wary coil. “Pleased with ourselves, are we?”

All frissions have a connection with Noruaas, whether speaking or not. This immissure is just another mouthpiece—one of the many hands clawing from that ugly sludge monster, choosing my face as a mockery. The first time I saw that, it did unsettle me.

When you’ve seen it a thousand times, it starts to get rather old.

“You’re going to ask me what Master’s plans are.”

“No, I know you won’t talk. Ilempo can obviously do without you, so you aren’t worth keeping alive if I threaten to kill you.” I draw Atsukute’s glimmering edge lightly across the back of my arm, a cord coiling its languid way up. “You’re worth more trying to get into my head, aren’t you? Information goes both ways.”

“You are losing, touched one. Weak, crippled... if only you had blood, you could be free.”

“Try to kill me, try to turn me.” I smile. Genuinely, it’s quite amusing. “I thought I was a nuisance? Has Ilempo decided in all his wisdom that I’m as easy to sway as my sister?”

My cord coils forward, curling around its neck before it can speak. “But I will take one of your offers. You want to weaken this chain, I want it weakened, and I can’t do it myself. How about you help me, hm?”

It’s dangerous, to make deals with the devil.

It watches me with its flickering red coals for eyes, and slowly curls jagged fingers around the crimson cord. “How could I deny such a sssweet request?”

I smile.

Ξ-Ξϟ†ϟΞ-Ξ

One doesn’t try to trick a devil.

If one tries at all, one has to do it carefully. It can’t be done by force, just as no amount of strength is enough to hold water. It can’t be done by promise, as a promise is only something to be broken. It can’t be done by deceit, unless one wants to become a devil himself.

I have spent years finding ways to trick devils.

And Ilempo.... He was an accident. A pure coincidence. A frission crawling beneath our feet unknown until it was too late.

Unknown to all but one.

When I first saw those two at one of those ordinary banquets sister had become obsessed with throwing—their perfect porcelain skin and delicate ears, eyes as beautiful as my mother’s—I didn’t know why the scars on my face burned or nausea slid an uneasy knife under my breastbone. I found out the hard way as things unravelled beneath my feet.

Meil, Sels, Akir, they all dragged me out of my pit of despair, only for it to open wide and swallow the world whole.

I’ve been here before, many times. Here I stood in the ruins above the crumbling hole, sword in hand, face bared to the horrified world I couldn’t let die, eye-to-eye with the monstrosity itself.

It was only because he underestimated how much of myself I was willing to give, that I defeated him.

Yet still, I didn’t win.

Agony filled my veins, my vision darkened, and I died only to return.

Agony filled my veins, my vision darkened, and it didn’t end.

I felt a crack split me from head to toe, fire pouring in until I couldn’t taste anything but ashes, drowning in it. Like my body had been skewered on the claw of a giant, thrashing like a bloated tick.

That’s not right....

I struggled under the weight, gasping under the whisper of hands pressing in through my melting skin, louder than the rush of the waterfall in my ears. Too loud to ignore, too many to understand, spilling together until they became one voice.

KNEEL.

No that’s not right—

My knees cracked through the ground, too heavy to hold.

No— I never—

It laughed at me. It laughed until something searingly cold twined around me and snapped taut. A white spark snapped through the dark, grabbing hold of it with glimmering claws, pulling.

And we burned.

I snap up to the phantom pressure of chains tight around my throat, its hum buzzing around the chink, the cracks vibrating. Trembling fingers touch my dry throat as if their icy grip can pull it away, panting in the quiet dark.

I don’t know... what that was.