The Shining Wyrm

Jewel glared down at Leo and the Elder of Rochford Village, how did she let Paul talk her into this? Why did Paul let Leo command the poor man to make the journey to Kaeketeh? She had failed her Father and Muriel, she had led them to die from her own foolishness and pride, and wasted thousands of lives more in a pointless war.

She did not have time for this, her table piled with duties.

Mathias was all but ordering her to come to the Capital and “Show her peers the glory and power of the Realm’s victorious Lady of War as soon as possible”.

Jewel shouldn't be here in her study with a Priest and an old man when there were so many things requiring her attention. So many missives and letters and visits she had to plan.

So much parchment piling up on her desk, seemingly growing no matter how many days she spent in that room staring at it. She didn't have time to be turned away from her desk, especially not for Leo to call on the Vales to invoke the souls of the dead!

Especially not to call up her Father and Muriel of all people!

Her father’s rest should not be disturbed by the summons of such a wretched daughter and Muriel must hate her, for dragging her into the maw of winter where she suffered a living death, Jewel did not deserve to speak with either of their souls!

Yet, Paul didn't listen to her!

Heaven’s Fortunes to that man and his words! When he’d first suggested it while she was bathing Jewel could have sworn she nearly cursed him in her anger! He needed to be more careful of her moods! What if she had turned him into a dog?!

But her denial then had not been the end of it!

Stubborn, awful, precious Paul had held to their promise, to always treat each other fairly and as equals in the bedroom, every night he badgered her, hounded her, refused her arguments! Night after night! Until finally he broke her resistance, when he said those terrible words! When he finally forced her to agree to Leo’s plan, to come here and bare her heart to the hate of her Father and Friend’s departed spirits.

“If you truly believe they think so poorly of you, shouldn't you give them the chance to say it themselves?”

So Leo summoned the poor Elder from Rochford, and Jewel came here into her study, with its precarious pile of missives and tallies and messages from Adelyne she still had not read.

To sit here as the brazier was filled with wrapped chords of herbal offerings and carefully chosen willow wood. Bound and placed in the brazier, anointed in oils and then lit, as Leo chanted and the Elder sat on a stool before the embers and breathed in the smoke.

Jewel could feel the heavens shifting above, the stars drawing nearer, their cutting touch sinking down and down from the sky to this simple room, moving somehow around the stone of her manor house into the air above the offerings then spreading out until they touched the two men in the room. They brushed over Leo and then passed over him and turned inward to join the others in the elder, divine contact cutting, slicing, sweeping through him like blades, like ice, more and more, like frost slicing through the world within him.

He breathed in the smoke and exhaled it, first with a cough, and then with a confidence, an ease, she saw the heaven’s presence in his lungs move, the world of his flesh ceasing their struggles as the smoke no longer burned or blighted them.

She could not judge if it was the Veles or another, Leo said he would try to call the god of winter to which Jewel had so many close contacts with and this old man held the way to fit that old god into himself best.

Apparently that was important in making this work when they were well out of season for a particular god.

Jewel’s studies mostly agreed but she was not a learned priest in the matter.

That was Leo’s job.

“Lo who goes there, we have called upon the Veles, the keeper of the underways, the bringer of waters, the taker of beasts, wisdom giver and light stealer, greatest beneath the dark of these lands.”

Her priest spoke first to the being that had slipped into the old man and now peered intently at the fire and then each hand, flexing them before speaking, voice like the man and yet so much more like the voice she heard every time she could attend the Longest Night in Rochford.

The presence in the old man closed his eyes and then opened them again, standing up straighter, fingers feeling at the clothing upon his chest with a look of confusion.

“You have called me out of my time man whisperer to the stars, you have called me in the season of Perun’s rising, on a hill close to his thunder. What business have you to bring me here out of my place and time? In these restrictive garments.”

Leo gestured towards Jewel, drawing the old man’s eyes that had astoundingly failed to fall on her once since the divinity had filled him.

“There is an intercession needed for my Countess, a service to render to she who you know and have held cordial council with before.”

As her priest spoke the gaze in the old lined face went foggy, the eyes scattered over her and then a wide smile cracked those lips showing sparse teeth as the eyes finally locked onto hers. A warmth to the expression.

“Ah, the Wyrm child is grown, yet still young! But what business could the Veles have for you? one who no prophecy of earth or sky may touch? Whose destiny is solely her own dominion?”

Jewel felt her throat clench tight in sudden terror for what they were about to do but Leo spoke for her as was his place.

“The Countess, The Shining Wyrm of Viznove, the Child of Jonathan the Third of House Rochford wishes your intercession to call forth the soul of her father.”

Her heart clenched, her chest felt too small to breathe.

Jewel could no longer stop it, it was too late now, there was nothing more she could do, the God clothed in the flesh of a man would call forth her Father, she had read of this many times. It was done, it was warned against.

What she had dreaded and hoped for ever since Paul had convinced her to try would happen! To hear his hate for her, his disappointment, his judgement in her as the failure of a daughter who ordered him to his doom. The eyes of an old man heavy in the sight of the divine stared up at her, then turned to look back at Leo and spoke with a soft strained creak to his voice.

“For the price offered and the love of a daughter it would be done, but where is Jonathan the Third of House Rochford?”

Jewel’s worries wrenched and collided into one another, as if she had galloped down a street and then suddenly tried to bring herself to a halt with her forelegs alone. Leo’s eyes boggled to the point she feared they would actually pop from their sockets, his mouth gaping open and closed before that sudden deep calm fell over his features.

Her priest’s heavily controlled voice filled the silence.

“He is dead, departed, passed on to the after. We call on you to invoke him, bring his soul forth to us as has been done by the gods with mortal men since time immemorial. As the rights and pacts have laid down.”

The Veles continued to stare at Leo over his shoulder, head tilting to one side, then the other, then slowly turned back around to look at Jewel, spinning on his stool in a way that seemed eerie to see for he did not push himself in any discernable way to do so, only the cutting brushes of the heavens into the air and floor showed Jewel how the man’s body moved.

“There are none of those dead here for me to call, The Wyrm is inviolate, there is nowhere within her that I can reach her father, she cannot be touched by any destiny and this star whisperer carries nothing of the soul you seek.”

Leo’s face somehow went even more still, Jewel could only gawk, all of her confusion, her anguish, her worry over what her Father would say gone, blown into nothingness as if she had commanded it to cease. An empty void in her thoughts made by the words that had just been spoken.

And from that nothingness she felt her own words rasping into the air, barely voiced, shrill and inhuman as only Wyrm's voice could be.

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Hissing, buzzing, gratingly horrific.

“What do you mean you cannot reach him within me? He wasn't anywhere near me when he perished! He died away from me! His body was burned by my brother and his spirit was sent into the heavens!”

The Veles stared up at her, eyes wide, a grin splitting his lips even wider, the missing teeth within his jaws somehow seeming to be joined by glittering phantoms of far more. Far sharper things then should fit in an old man’s jaws.

“Ah, the brother! Yes, bring the brother and from it a Father’s Soul could be called, the Brother’s destiny is open to the stars, a soul can be made from his past. And the service given.”

The voice was strange, pained, confused, addled, not like how the Veles normally spoke at the Longest Night. Jewel felt a terrible revulsion the way it spoke of a brother, not Alexander, not anything like anyone should be spoken about. It said the words like Dariusz spoke of slabs of pigmeat.

Like ingredients for a stew.

“What do you mean by made?”

Leo’s voice was flat, strained in a way Jewel had never heard it before, but held firm with a skill she had only heard a hint of when Gem stood with him against Vampyres.

The Veles began to turn its head towards Leo, but before it could finish he snapped out in firm, solid, flat tones.

“No, not to me,it’s not my question oh wise Veles, I am servant of the Countess,I ask for her, tell the Countess, the Shining Wyrm of Viznove for her what that means. My heart is mine but my words are hers!”

The head locked in place, stopping like it had been pinned in place, a tremor rose and fell over the old man, his skin rippling like a pond, Jewel saw one eye twitch, its gaze rolling about, then slowly, with sharp jerks like a slate dragged badly along gravel, so nastily was the motion she feared she would hear bones snap or grind, the thing wearing the old man turned and fixed that grinning face with teeth that were not there towards her.

Then tilted up and locked the whirling eyes to center on her.

A voice strained, cracked, gurgled and then found itself again forming in the throat, the cutting of a star’s miracles breaking and remaking the neck that housed the words.

“iS tHiS tRuE yOuNg wYrM, aRe tHeSe wOrDs sPoKeN bY mAn aNd fLeSh yOuRs?”

Jewel stared at the man, the thing that wore him, she glanced toward Leo, at the absolutely and utterly still flatness his expression had fallen into, she remembered the words she had read as Gem about the danger of a man’s heart and fears when dealing with gods, she saw a drop of sweat beading on his brow.

This was important, this was something that had not only surprised both of them but terrified Leo, that had shocked him so much that even this desperate gambit of his to have her speak to her father was suddenly diverted by his strange request, his plea for her to accept his words as her own in this.

She saw nothing of his thoughts in his expression, she smelled barely a hint of fear, heard just a slightly greater pace of his heart.

But in the roiling confusion of dealing with gods he was her advisor.

This was precisely when she was supposed to listen to him most. Something very wrong was happening with a god and he had said something very peculiar to try and help her?

Jewel took a breath and nodded to the thing wearing the poor elder’s flesh.

“Yes Veles, those are my words, please answer my question.”

The face stared at her, the expression of a smile stretched, the lips pulled back further and further, the eyes widening, it should have split, it was pulling back against his skull, wrinkles curdling in the cheeks as his mostly toothless and yet also horribly, phantasmally fanged jaws were revealed, gums and revealed in glistening shine, silvery light glinting off of it despite the warm yellow of the smoldering coals.

Something should have torn well before a rictus like this could form on that face but the heaven’s touch upon the meat and bone moulded and repaired it like wet clay.

The jaw moved, the throat convulsed, voices occurred and words were not so much spoken as wrenched into place, carved into air, torn from flesh into wet terrible existence.

“There is no Father’s soul here, the only souls here are Leo born in the Haystack, the faceless woman who left him there, the smell of grain in the wind, the matrons who taught him well, but no Father’s soul.”

It began to turn slightly towards Leo, but the eyes never left Jewel’s own.

“But there is a brother, the Leo. He bound his open wound in his left palm to a brother’s right and made a pact under the second summer’s star to be one forever, he whose breath went foul and chest filled in fluid and perished. That he called to speak too thrice a season after he drowned in his own lungs, until the elders refused him.”

Leo was utterly still, he didn't even breathe, he didn't move.

The thing beneath the man’s body bent, not turned, not looked, but bones began to melt and ooze as it bent and shaped its neck back over its shoulder to finally gaze at him with whirling eyes, before twisting back to fix its spasming pupils on her, the breath of the lungs pushed out ribs, but they expanded like the knuckles of fingers. A hand reached out towards her, the heavens cutting through every shred of flesh. It bent in the wrong place, it stretched out like threads of wool.

Inside the man’s head she could feel the world screaming, his flesh crying in joy, the light in his eyes shining brighter and brighter. Skin curdling, bone twisting, shaping, coming undone, reknitting, inside she thought she could hear the man being twisted screaming, the living flesh of every pore crying in joy and pain.

“A Father’s soul is nowhere that can be touched, destiny cannot reach within the wyrm, the all cannot touch you, but... we could make a Father’s soul, the brother, the brother has it? but which brother?! a service can be made, bring the brother, his destiny, does the young wyrm want the Father soul? Father flesh? A becoming? Destiny cannot see you, cannot know which brother! tell us, flesh of man tell us the will of the tyrant wyrm! The all would give for a boon for-a-”

Jewel did the only thing she could faced with the shape that had long surpassed and distorted the poor old man she had summoned here. Towards this distorted abomination she wanted only one thing.

For this horror to cease.

And in a splash of white hot wyrm fire it and all the contorted twisting touch of the heavens within that room was gone. The Veles, or whatever the accursed fortunes begotten horror it had become had vanished into nothing but ash and air.

Silence filled her study, the dim light of her candles and the spilled coals of the brazier that had been half caught in her flames the only light. Jewel found the will to breath only after her vision began to darken from lack of air.

Leo’s own breaths were so shallow she feared he might feint.

“Leo, what by the fortunes and thepits of the world was that?!”

Her priest, the council that she depended on in matters of the heavens stared up at the ceiling with a look of absolute stillness. Jewel’s attention turned upward as well where she could feel a teeming shifting ‘cutting’ presence in the air over her manor lashing and twisting above.

Frenzied miracles groping at the sky over Valasect like blind fingers.

With a voice held flat and rigid, her court priest spoke with a strain she knew he was feeling for how his throat kept clicking as it clenched between words.

“Countess, it is my sincere advisement we do not discuss a single word of this with anyone until we are safely under daylight.”

And then the priest that had asked for her to go through this whole endeavor in the first place laid himself flat on his back in the middle of her study and then apparently forced himself to pass out?!

Jewel could only stare with her heart thundering in her chest trying to grasp what any of that had meant!