17.7
Jewel looked down upon the iron gray and rust red face with eyes that burned like hot coals.
Her guest quarters in the capital were high vaulted, but with so many pillars that she had to be careful to not squeeze between her coils when she slept. By the smell this room had been used to store wine, but she accepted it, the staff had done their best, for the number of rooms that could accommodate Jewel’s bulk comfortably were becoming vanishingly small.
Erhard looked up to Jewel and spoke the words that had summoned her to Burning Depth’s Ford.
“Mathias is dying.”
As if it had not been obvious when he could not even stand to welcome her as was proper, or even attend the feast at all, his wife taking the High King’s place. As if it had not been true twelve days prior when a bird had come for her in Valasect summoning her to the Capital, to aid the Court Wizard and further to be ready with the other vassals with electorship when a successor would be chosen.
Imre and Gwenn had joined her when she crossed into Arva and together they had come to answer the call. Jewel had known the High King was dying since her triumph after the war with Magarska. Yet Erhard announced it again to her in her ‘guest chambers’.
However in person rather than upon parchment, the words of the wizard were brimming with excitement. Not to the ears of her spawn, but plain as day in wyrmish perception.
“You mean to try your latest elixir?”
Erhard nodded, face flat and plain, voice a monotone, but whatever spirit she could sense and her spawn did not was bright, sharp, cheerful.
“The reborn have proved a failure, with every year past their births less of the soul retains itself, by the time they can speak there is little left of their former lives, the souls are changed by the body, changed by living.”
If she was speaking to him only as one of her spawn or did not know the Wizard it would be so easy to think he was ambivalent or even disappointed. Years of work to try and retain the spirit of murderers and other executed criminals in the wombs of women amounting to nothing, a waste.
But as a wyrm, she could see he practically was trembling with delight, failures in his assigned task only spurred the wizard onward.
Jewel considered him.
“Why have you come to me tonight if your path is already chosen Erhard Ironhand?”
He stared at her with the same expression, the same glowing eyes, but his excitement seemed to finally be dimmed.
“My working is incomplete, the Elixir's cage preserves the soul but it does not allow it to live or grow, it cannot speak without the intermediary of the gods, it does not learn, the process imprisons the spirit unchangingly. It has so far been deemed unacceptable by the Archpriestess and the High King both, not a solution. Something of absolute last resort.”
Jewel stared at him, waiting for his real answer as his excitement at the prospect of freezing a man’s soul was only slightly dimmed. His disappointment only at the inability to satisfy others with his work.
“It is not my truth to make living things, growing, breathing things. High King Mathias Stein would become nothing but a bauble of memory with my present Elixir, but your sorcery does not hold my limits, you can speak and the world will obey, what more you have commanded life to the dead before. Have resurrected your own spawn.”
She flexed her wings, Erhard did not care how she reacted, she did not have to hold her composure, wings flaring out to touch her knuckles and the thin membrane between the fingers into the stone of the vaulted ceiling, pressing just enough against the old cantor construction to make it creak.
Her neck tightening behind her head, withdrawing her face out of danger, preparing to release her obliterating dismissal or launch snapping jaws forward into a bite.
Her words came out a whispering hiss.
“You want me to hatch the High King as my spawn?”
Erhard actually blinked at that, the sound of metal grinding with the motion, the furnace of his eyes closed off, before slowly clicking open with a tinny echo.
“No, Of course not Countess, I wish for you to amend a working of your own upon this elixir, to command full life into the quicksilver and alum salts within. To not just hold form and memory but also change and will.”
He twisted his wrist and a clay bowl was suddenly in his palm, held aloft, as tall as it was wide, curving inward at the sides, the width of a man’s head, filled with a liquid that shined like silver. She blinked, there was a heaviness to the bowl, a weight beyond appearances. The whispering sorcery of the wizard was thick upon the fluid within as well. Intricate and complex in a dizzying manner.
Jewel stared down at the sloshing silver as it settled to a flatness of a still lake, reflecting her own eyes back to her.
“I do not know the ‘words’ of sorcery to do what you ask Erhard, and the world is fickle and wild when I command something rashly. It is liable to do not what you ask if I attempt this.”
The face did not change, the iron hued cheeks, the dull metal curls of his beard and brows. Erhard was much less a man in appearance then when they first met, perhaps not quite fully a Weird but further along then he had been in Magarska’s court when Murad struck him down.
Ever so slightly more of a statue than a man, but her words delighted him, enthralled and excited him, stoked his spirit so strongly his eyes began to blaze.
“Of course, I could hope for nothing better, please impart your sorcery so we may see it triumph or fail, for the sake of the Leuhtą Project, for the sake of all the daughters who will have to live with only the echo or lie of their fathers. For the High King.”
His delivery was flat, and even the fervor she felt from him did not really touch the words he said, the earnestness of his desire was plain, the wizard did not actually care, he said the words to try and move her. To comfort and absolve her worries, but he only wanted her to assist him in the task.
She considered the horror that had been made of an empty, soulless living corpse, of Muriel’s body that had to be burned alive but empty. But it was not a fleshy thing, not this elixir, it was still and mostly restful and content, it felt of metal and sorcery, many workings together constantly whispering back and forth as if the meanings of them were bouncing about in a jumble in the draught.
Jewel knew he did not feel or care for anything but the task before him, but it didn't make him wrong. She remembered Gwenn’s anger and pain at Gem’s death, she remembered the tears of wonder and joy when her sister embraced “Gem the Second”.
While she searched for Muriel and her Father’s souls, things which Celsus did not even think still existed, there were fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers and sons dying and being either lost or destroyed entirely.
There were wars heaping the dead into mountains.
Mathias was a sick man desperate to live, but he still had commanded Erhard, Ursula and Jewel to find a solution for all the Realm.
Could she do nothing?
Jewel found in her heart and flame that she could not.
She reached for her will, for her flame, for the command Erhard had asked for her. She tried to shape what he had asked of her into something in the manner that the world listened and understood. To bring change to the Elixir in the way he asked.
Pulling on the memories, the sensation of becoming Gem the Second, the proverbial fluid soup of Jewel filling a vessel to once again become her first daughter in new flesh.
“Live, Know, Remember.”
The sapping draw on her flame was sudden, sharp and then over all at once. It had been substantially more than she expected to change the strange bowl of liquid silver, but in one breath it was fading, by three she barely even noticed any lapse in her reserve.
Erhard drew the bowl back to hold with both hands, he stared down into it, intently, gently whispering to it, the silent speech of a wizard with the world so different from Jewel’s own command. But she could hear echoes of her sorcery and flame within the elixir now.
Then she saw his eyes dim and flare bright before he looked up at her, the intensity of his joy evident.
“It worked, Excellent Shining Countess, now come we must administer the elixir before the High King diminishes any further.”
She blinked at that.
“Right now?”
The wizard nodded hard, then turned to leave, the latch of her door coming undone and swinging open before he began marching with a steady pace away from her. That he did not disappear in a clash of sparks and iron was deeply telling. The fluid held in his hands not even rippled with the vibration of his steps.
He stopped just a few feet past her door, spoke out to the air but Jewel could tell he intended her.
“Quickly Countess, we will only have one chance to possibly preserve the High King’s soul, I’ve only managed to gather the resources for this one treatment of the Elixir and I’d have your presence to observe and give insight.”
Jewel shifted carefully, filling portions of her coils with flame while sapping it from others, letting her claws drag heavily so that they would easily find purchase on the stone tiles. While she tried to make the rest of her as light as possible.
Unwinding from around the pillars of the once wine cellar.
Did you know this story is from NovelFire? Read the official version for free and support the author.
As soon as the wyrm began to emerge from her ‘bed chamber’ Erhard began walking again, steady, his hips, waist, torso and shoulders shifting with every single step so as to prevent disturbing the bowl in his hands at all. Curiously not a single whispering word of sorcery was made to steady the vessel.
If anything the Wizard was trying to surround and insulate the elixir from the world around it.
They marched in silence, from the guest wing that Imre and Jewel’s staff and households had filled to the depths of the palace, the royal chambers of Mathias and his family.
Initially the ostentatious work of marble and stone grew as they passed the guards, all of them dressed in Erhard’s Halberdier armor. But then the halls became plainer, as they passed into the inner most portion of the wing the walls were mostly bare.
By the time they came to Mathias’ room there was hardly any decoration at all, his bed was fine, the blankets were the familiar tingling presence of Jewel’s own wool, as was the mattress full of felted fleece from the same.
With a whisper of sorcery the guards all left the room as soon as Erhard arrived.
It all happened so quickly, the rush to get there very much left Jewel feeling like when she had first stumbled into the Vah.
Archpriestess Ursula was there, beside the bed, a gentle, constant flowing thread of divine intervention passing from the Heavens above, down through her and into her hands, where they clasped the frail fingers of Mathias Stein.
He did not look like a King, he wore no finery, just a simple smock of Jewel’s own spun wool cloth. The blankets were up to his neck, thick and heavy and the room stank of sickly sweat. His eyes were open, flickering from left to right, catching on those they could but his neck trembled without even lifting his head.
“Erhard? Are you there?”
The wizard stepped, smoothly, in that uncannily even manner he’d walked the entire way, coming to the head of the bed. The miracles in Mathias were thick and constant now, moving into his chest, over his brow, into his stomach. They were pulling on his lungs, squeezing his heart, wicking heat from his brow.
“I am here High King, the Elixir is ready, are you still certain?”
The man could not turn his head, Jewel saw him try, the muscles trembled but he was left facing up, his eyes bent towards Erhard’s voice in a pained way. Even his throat was laced in miracles, allowing him to speak.
The scent of death was heavy upon him, death and sweat that was far too close to how Muriel had been before Jewel’s ill fated attempt at healing the woman.
“I want to live, The dark, it’s there, I can feel the dark, it’s waiting for me behind my eyes, do it, save me, please-”
He shuddered, a stronger flow of miracles flooded into him, pushing his chest to pull air in.
“Please, I don’t want to die, I want to live, please, please, I want to live, save me, please, the dark, I can feel the dark.”
His voice was so weak, so pleading, so terrified. Even with miracles squeezing his throat for him to let him even manage that much.
Erhard nodded then turned to Ursula who scowled but nodded back in turn.
“It is his command.”
At this acknowledgement the priestess reached up to grasp Mathias by his shoulder and the back of his head. Raising the frail wasting form of the man upright, revealing how withered his chest and shoulders were under his clothes.
How were they going to even get him to drink the elixir?
Erhard leaned over his lord, his king, raising the bowl up over Mathias’ head, then smoothly placed a single finger on the very crown of his skull. Ursula was scowling, face tense, trembling as she held Mathias just barely upright, the miracles and their cutting changed, the pulsing rhythm keeping Mathias alive joined by a bracing tension that wrapped around him, locking his jaw and neck rigidly in place, pressing hard enough to bruise into the frail flesh.
What were they-
Erhard’s arm was a blur, the force that raised hammers to strike iron coming up and then down, funneling all that power through a single finger. The thick sound of bone pulverizing under the blow, then the wet sickening crack and peeling tear of flesh coming apart.
Jewel stared, transfixed as Erhard murdered the king!?
But no...
The blood however did not stain his bed, did not even flow down his still pristine face, no it flowed up, held in place, splaying out and cycling back into his wound as Mathias’ head opened behind his brow. The desperate flurry of his eyes going left to right, he struggled to speak, but his voice however was trapped, the divine miracles allowing words to form had vanished in favor of keeping him still.
Jewel could still see the man struggling to speak, she was stepping forward towards the two of them, to stop this, whatever it was assasination?! Treachery!! Torture?!
But there was no malice in the Wizard, only determination and intense focus. It stilled Jewel’s approach. Then Erhard poured the bowl of silver into the split open fruit that had been Mathias’ head. It did not flow like water, it was heavy, it came from only the height of a foot and yet that spout of shining metal jolted Mathias like a hammer as it fell into him.
He poured, and poured, and High King Mathias’ eyes rolled in his head, his cheeks and lips quivered, subtle, weakened tremors coursed up and down his face. But the miracles held him firm, forced his chest to breathe, his heart to beat even as the body tried to fall into chaotic spasms. The Court Wizard’s sorcery kept his blood flowing around the wound, not spilling even a drop. He must have been carrying the vital fluid with the iron he’d warned Gem of.
Ursula shivered, her teeth clenching hard enough for Jewel to hear. There was far less certainty in the woman’s scent, she was distraught, angry, but braced and focused in her own way.
And Jewel could feel the sorcery, the working coming to play, the elixir had been emptied from its clay vessel directly into Mathias’ open skull. The now empty bowl was set aside, vanishing in a clash of iron and sparks. The body of the King breathed, its heart beat, but its eyes were all white and inflamed pink as Erhard brought his hands down to either side of Mathias’ face and then pushed the skull closed again.
Jewel was left frozen by the realization, this was the intended course, this was Erhard working exactly as he thought was needed.
There was a crawling sound inside the man, it scraped, scuttling over bone from the inside, like squirming things, rats and vermin and so much more. The world spoke to her and she could feel the whispers of the previous working meshing with that laid down by her own flame.
Jewel stared as a trembling seized Mathias’ face once more, twice, and then finally went slack. The sound stilled inside the man’s skull.
Her voice filled the sudden terrible quiet of the man’s corpse breathing.
“Th-that was the treatment? That was the elixir? To save his soul you had to murder him?”
Jewel smelled triumphant vindication from Ursula even with the pungent stink of blood and shit that was filling the air.
Erhard however was too intent on staring at Mathias’ skull, hands on either side, pressing the split closed, the sorcery was still working, still moving inside, flaring and throbbing and squirming even as it also seemed to branch and thread and split. It was only the sound that had stopped.
“For now, it is the method known to work, more refined and less intrusive means are being sought but they have never been tested. I could not risk them upon the High King.”
With a wet, horrible crack he pulled open the back of the corpse’s head again, still the body was breathing, miracles forcing air through lungs, heart to beat, blood to flow, but Jewel could feel that the rhythm would fail entirely if left bereft of the divine touch.
The lack of blood spilt, of horrible mess was disquieting, she had approached even closer and lowered her head to properly see the horror that was being done to her liege. His face was distorted now, pushed in from the sides by the meat around the bone, like clay, Erhard reached inside a fuzzy mess of dull gray brush revealed in the once again open wound, ashy moss mingling in red gore filled Mathias’ skull.
The red muck and fluffy gray-white was pushed aside and did not cling to Erhard’s hand, it fell away like water off a duck’s back from his fingers, knuckles and then wrist as he reached through it.
Out of pale white and red he pulled an orb, intricate, etched deeply in swirling patterns, just slightly offwhite, almost like snow or chalk. whorls of dull pale metal that was etched so finely it looked more like tapestries or the finest branches of brush, fern or reed. It whirled with wyrmfire and sorcery, Jewel’s wyrmfire, Erhard’s whispering sorcery, and something else, something she realized she had commanded but was no longer of her.
It was made of metal, but just as Jewel had ordered it now lived.
Red slime came free from the deep cavities of the object in thick strands as it was extracted from the mess. Pulled up and away, until the last strands were let to fall back into the corpse with a snap.
Leaving a sagging red and white muck behind.
Then Erhard was leaning back, and a hot stink of burnt flesh and hot iron filled the air, Jewel glanced back at Mathias, saw his head pressed back together, presumably pulled by his own blood, she smelled the slight burn of hair where the split of his skull was sealed.
Ursula heaved a heavy breath and released the miracles holding the corpse up, that made its lungs breath and its heart beat.
The Archpriestess let the slack face rest back upon its pillow before stepping back.
Not a single drop of blood hinted at the violence that had just occurred. For all appearances Mathias had died in his sleep peacefully. Jewel turned to stare back at Erhard, holding up the dull white-gray orb, no smile on his face, just intensity in his eyes. But she could feel a warm triumph.
“My lord, how do you feel?”
There was silence, and then a whistling of air, a chiming of bells, a tone of metal ringing, and a voice, both alike and not to Mathias, it lacked the weariness and age, more like how Jewel remembered from her youth. A voice that spoke from the thing in the wizard’s hand.
“Erhard? I cannot see, it is dark. It is so dark, I cannot see, I hurt and sting, cold and hot, the dark, where is the light, I cannot open my eyes, please Ursula open my eyes, please, please I want to live, I want to live, I want to LIVE! Erhard bring the elixir I want to live I-”
With a whisper of sorcery from the wizard the voice cut out. A single part of the workings that suffused it now silent. But Jewel could still feel whispers and wyrmflame churning inside the bauble. He turned to look at the Archpriestess, voice as flat as ever, the mood that only Jewel could feel giving signs he was pleased, triumphant, confident.
“An improvement on the previous attempts, He could respond, recognize me, feel sensation, continue to live and be and know what has happened, some refinements are still needed though.”
The Archpriestess glared at him, then with a deep sigh of resigned familiarity she turned from Erhard to the corpse settled on Mathias’ bed.
“The High King is dead, we must make arrangements for the funeral, contact me when you have finished your ‘refinements’ wizard and we can make a new attempt and discuss our next steps.”
In a clash of sparks Erhard was gone, taking the orb he had extracted from Mathias’ skull with him.
Jewel stared at the corpse, her flame awhirl with what she had just seen. Ursula, Archpriestess of Asharah turned back to Jewel gazed intently at her face and nodded.
“Go return to your chambers Lady Jewel, there will be much work for you and the other electors come morning.”