Ch. 2.27 | Dissolution of Light
PoV: Aisha
Aisha stood and Fazl floated off to the side of the ceremony's space while the priestess of Heliux and her assistants worked to get everything ready. One of her assistants was Fajr.
The two suns shone from the horizon, casting a shrinking orange glow across the sky. The dark blue and black of absence continued to crawl across the sky.
The sunset was important for this—something about Heliux putting out its light in a moment of silence for the dead. Aisha did not really care about this whole religion thing.
A bird fluttered down from the guild hall, a furled note in its beak. It looked for a place to land, gave up, and dropped the note in front of Aisha before flying off. She caught the note in her hand before it could touch the floor—not that it would get any dirtier.
Cold, slimy raven mouth fluids coated the note and clung to Aisha’s palm and fingers as she unfurled the note and read it.
Her face creased. Then furrowed in anger. A rage built up within her that she tried her best to push down.
“What is this about?” Fazl asked, moving beside Aisha to read the note.
Zulfaqar took Glorestra. They march on Hope. Something about the most likely timeline to goad into sending the Voidwitch.
. . . What's “goad” mean?
On my way to the funeral.
Aisha used basic Thermal magic to ignite the note in her hand, raising its temperature. It crumbled to ashes and she let it sprinkle to the floor. The heat also helped to dry her hands of bird mouth goo. Aisha was attuned to all affinities of Elemental magic, most of it granted to her via subsuming the First Prince's magic.
“She could have just said that once she got here,” Fazl said with a shrug.
Aisha clenched a fist. “I'm going to murder Zulfaqar. I knew I should have done it during the negotiations.”
Fazl ignored that, instead, stating the obvious. “He wants you to send Sanya.”
“Yes.”
“We can use Sanya and Mai to ferry adventurers and soldiers to Hope. Can we send the whole army?” Fazl turned towards Aisha to converse with in a much more amicable way than standing side by side with her. Or in his case, floating side by side. Fazl chose to focus on the “marching onto Hope” thing and decided to begin planning with Aisha.
“With Sanya, it is a slim possibility. Though we're still outnumbered five to one.” Sending the whole army and yet not sending Sanya would just sentence their soldiers to death. They needed Sanya to turn the tides.
Attacking the city with the academy, and currently less guarded would be the best way to poke the sand shark. Although, if Zulfaqar went after Calderae, perhaps the same would be true. They would, of course, still be outnumbered, and would still need Sanya.
Perhaps forcing Sanya to teleport everyone would drain her mana. Not to mention Mai had banned her from using teleportation spells for some weakness Sanya had—something about her eldritch parasite.
“Twenty thousand soldiers,” Fazl murmured. “That's as many people as the entire population of old Kanimaw.”
Indeed. “Zulfaqar has enough cities to be considered a nation from before the tempest.”
Fazl sighed. “And we're barely two city-states.” Hope was somewhat far from that. It was a town, really. An army of twenty thousand would easily be able to take any city. That did not count for very powerful mages. Although, at twenty thousand, Zulfaqar probably had more than his fair share of mages, and some of those more powerful ones among them.
Despite that overwhelming army, Zulfaqar had said his chances were barely five percent, or something like that. Just who would destroy his army? Was Sanya really that powerful?
It was not like Calderae and Hope would get any help from other cities.
“New Kanimaw and everyone else will not support us in any way. Not the underground cities either. The word about Sanya and Esmat was spread. The cities agreed that they should die. In fact, they've cut off trade and forced the local Guild to close down.” Barely two city-states indeed. What in reality would they all be able to do? . . . Maybe that five percent was becoming a more possible chance.
“Hey, there's Sanya now,” Fazl nodded in a direction outside Aisha's vision.
She turned to look. Sanya and Mai stepped towards the ceremonial area from the gateway to the city. It was just an open space to the northwest side of the city. To the east, the caldera rose up towards the sky. To the south, buildings stood behind a short wall and a surrounding ditch.
The ceremony itself included Zahira's body on a pyre of wood, built atop a stone carved in the shell of a nautilus—some sea creature from oceans, cut off contact by the tempest, a mortal cousin to Heliux.
Wood, because Zahira would be given the ritual of royalty. While sunset symbolized Heliux paying respects to the dead, the pyre symbolized Heliux turning all of its attention back onto the thing that mattered most. As well as the dead being taken by Heliux—being a god of light and the ocean, among other concepts. Change and transformation. Fate. It was kind of in a weird spot—a piece of an old pantheon, now often just monotheistic. So, the one and only god ruled some concepts—many—but not all. Well, that depended on the particular flavor of the religion. There were a lot, especially after the tempest.
Aisha liked the particular branch of the priestess conducting the ritual, because she had been born a guy, just like Sanya. Something about how the transformation between genders showed a most high devotion to Heliux, god of change. This also meant they were not so stuffy and mean around people who were not of normal genders, sexual orientations, or minds.
A pile of wood sat off to the side. Each individual would take a piece and help add to the pyre. Then an Elemental mage attuned to Thermal would ignite it.
That Thermal mage would be Aisha instead of someone from the church. She would bear this piece of the ritual for herself. She would light the fire that would burn Zahira.
Her death was Aisha's fault, somewhere. She should not have sent them, not after an exhausting day. Three people was too few, she should have sent more.
Something. Anything.
Zahira's death should have been entirely preventable.
As the guildmaster, as acting leader of Calderae and Hope, as a guardian to Zahira and the rest of that group of orphans from the academy, and then the strays she has caught, there should have been something she could have done . . .
Alas, it was worthless to dwell on this now. Sanya was here, Aisha could distract herself with a question.
Aisha wanted to ask Sanya about their whole logistic issue and teleporting an army. Aisha waved to Sanya, then beckoned her over with another gesture.
Sanya nodded, said something to Mai, and then they headed over to Aisha together.
“Sanya,” Aisha greeted. “Mai.”
“Did you need us for something?” Sanya asked, blunt, and sparing the greeting. It was not that she was annoyed or anything, she just . . . did not care for small things like that, it seemed. Good, Aisha liked bluntness.
She wore her typical dark purple mage robes of a Spatial mage. Would this girl get more unique clothes? Ah, she had, she just needed to go back to Speleothem when they were ready . . . whenever that would be. Also, she was the only one with an Anchor to it, so she'd have to teleport there . . .
The two of them looked and smelled much better than they had that morning. It seemed they had . . . done the thing. Good for them, she guessed?
“Do you think you could teleport a whole army to Hope?” Aisha asked.
Mai blinked. “A whole army? And she shouldn't teleport, anyw—”
“Probably, but not to overtax my channeling afterward? Probably not,” Sanya said.
Aisha and Fazl exchanged a glance. So it was either Sanya or the army, or some gradient in between that would need to be figured out.
“Thank you,” Aisha said. “That is all.”
Sanya nodded and turned away, walking with Mai towards the pyre. Esmat was there, sitting on the grass and staring up at it.
“So now we should find a middle ground between her teleporting people and saving enough channeling for herself,” Fazl noted.
“Can we even let Sanya loose? Do we let an eighteen year old girl level an entire attacking force of twenty-thousand? Does our entire sovereignty depend on one girl?”
“This ‘one girl’ could mean the difference between the world's destruction or not. But perhaps you're right. We should not burden her with everything.”
They had asked her to survive. Now, they would ask her to carry the entire burden that it came with. That was just . . . wrong. Aisha and everyone else would have to do their fair share too. If not, then maybe they deserved to wall into their demise.
“With Zahira dead, Sanya is the only Anchor there . . .” Aisha thought out loud. Yeah, this was getting worse with each thought of battle plans and logistics.
“Temporal mages could still get us there,” Fazl pointed out.
It was not the best choice. Yet maybe suboptimal choices were all that they had. “It's half a day's ride via camel. Our troops would get to Hope tired.” The same could be said for Zulfaqar's troops too, maybe. The march to Hope could leave them winded, too.
“Could the other Spatial mages chain [Organic Displacement]?” Fazl asked, moving on to the next idea.
Aisha shook her head. “The maximum number of people they can move at once is twenty-four.”
Fazl did the math in his head. “We are in a bind.”
“Certainly.”
Aisha groaned, and then rubbed her head. She was dead, she could not get things like headaches and other mortal problems. Yet this whole planning thing was giving her more than her reasonable allotment of mortal headaches. She wasn't built for this—to be a leader, not when the fate of tens of thousands rested upon it.
She was just . . . some stupid essayist who spent to much time in a tower thinking. Thinking because the alternative was sitting there for hours holding up a time bubble to give the more important Aeolian and Thermal mages less tragic working hours. By slowing them down in a time bubble, the outside world sped up in comparison, letting their however many hours of boredom or holding up a spell actually count for much more.
Then she had gone on a caravan ride and nearly gotten assassinated. All of that tumbled into “oops now the entire royal family is dead” and then the rest was history!
Why had she founded a city? Why had she made the guild? . . . To help people, but, like, she did not sign up for politics and inter-human conflict.
“. . . How much damage do you think you can do to Zulfaqar's army?” Fazl looked like he had an idea, good for him. That idea was probably getting Aisha to directly get her hands dirty and fight the army.
Aisha had thought of that too.
Aisha shrugged. “Can the two of us destroy them?”
“I seem to recall that a couple of mages almost killed you back on your first caravan trip.” So, no. Fazl thought that he and Aisha would not be able to single-handedly—well, two-handedly—eradicate Zulfaqar's soldiers.
Aisha winced. “I killed the First Prince. And the assassin.”
“I found you nearly dead that time too—amendment, I found you undead.”
“I'm stronger,” Aisha said with a flat expression. A hint of dread in her voice.
“I know. But by how much?”
“I . . . I have no defenses. I can single-target kill anyone. But after that it becomes rough.” Maybe that would work, though. Time bubble in, kill Zulfaqar with a [Necrosis] and then leave. Bam! Suddenly his army has no leader and their ruler is no more!
Fazl nodded. “I'll teach you the Aeolian spells I know for defense. We can even practice the big area spells.”
Aisha flashed Fazl a morbid smile. “Thanks. Gotta protect our kids, yeah? Our future. It'll only take a little massacre.”
“An argument can be made that we're doing the exact opposite of protecting our future.”
“. . . Shush. Now come on, we have a ceremony to attend.”
“Funeral, Aisha. It's a funeral. One of your ‘kids’ died,” Fazl said, any light or joy or anything positive in his expression and voice completely gone.
Aisha frowned and headed closer to the pyre.