Ashes Unwritten: Oblivion's Heir [Volume 1 Complete!]

Kess sat on one of Maude's couches in front of the fireplace, sandwiched between Eamon and Rowan. Eamon had practically lifted her feet off the ground with his embrace when he saw her up and about again, and had been fussing over her ever since—he'd even brought out food, though Kess wasn't quite up to a full meal yet. Arlette had awkwardly patted her shoulder, and Claire simply looked her over like a piece of meat, but it was caring for both of them in their own way.

Kess found it odd, really, to be welcomed back in such a way. It made her think of Oliver, though not in a good way. He'd always tolerated her, but he spent more time trying to change her. That, combined with his reaction as she'd awaited her own execution, made her wonder if she really knew her brother at all, or if he really cared about her. She pushed those thoughts from her mind as Arlette limped back into the room, her face drawn and pale.

None of them looked very good, actually. Claire sported dark circles under her eyes, Rowan was still limping, Arlette looked, if possible, worse than Kess—her wounds had apparently been deep. Eamon and Rae both sported bandages, Rae's occupying her entire torso. It occurred to Kess that maybe they weren't in a position to try what she wanted to do, but she wasn't sure how much choice they had.

Arlette sat carefully, with none of the grace or poise she normally possessed. She dragged her bad leg up with her arms, flopping it onto the table with a grimace. Maude scowled at Arlette's boot on the table as she closed the door to the sitting room.

"That table ain't cheap, you know."

"I'll buy you a new one when this is all over," Arlette said. "What's the status, Eamon? Anything new?"

"Same as always. Only on top of everything else, they've got patrols out looking for the lass and everyone from the manor. We'll have to lie low." Arlette shook her head.

"Not with the storm out there. I got word that most of the outer city is gone. It'll hit here next, unless Kess thinks she can do something about it." The room turned to stare at her, and Kess was suddenly grateful for Eamon and Rowan's sturdy frames on either side of her.

"I don't know," she said. "I still want to try talking to it. I think I can control it, maybe." She hesitated, folding her arms with a wince. "Or at least I think it's trying to help."

Arlette put her head in her hands, sighing. "Well, it's not like we have any other ideas. Did no one take a clouding history class in school?"

"It wouldn't have done any good," Rowan said. "They rewrote most of it after the Council was formed and—"

"And the girls destroyed the rest," Arlette snapped, glaring at Kess and Rae. Rae just shrugged, looking satisfied.

"In any case," Arlette said, "I don't see a problem with it. There should be no guards near the Archives. The storm is strongest there, so the biggest issue will be getting through it at all."

"I want to try something else too," Kess said, pulling out her locket. "When I had that vision at the Archives, the woman told me to release Fulminancy. The storm says the same thing, and it seemed to want me to do something with the lockets—or my locket, anyway."

To their credit, no one laughed, though Claire coughed a little in the corner. Rae simply looked on quietly, her sharp eyes focused. Kess continued.

"That, and when I was at the palace, the Seats seemed hellbent on getting back the lockets I'd taken. They wanted them for safekeeping, and when I said I'd destroyed them already, they mentioned that they would have felt Fulminancy scatter and release—that I couldn't have destroyed them yet. They might be connected somehow."

"They don't contain power, and the Seats already took Rae's powers back—why would they need the lockets at all?" Claire asked, frowning as she leaned over the back of the couch. "And why would they have any connection to the storm?" Kess shook her head, turning her locket in her hand.

"When Fulminancy was created, they had to have a way to bring those different types of magic together. What if these lockets were used for exactly that? Then they pass them down from Seat to Seat, using them mostly for transferring powers between old Seats and new Seats when people aren't born into them."

Rowan leaned back into the couch thoughtfully. "Early on in that journal written in Tamresh, the author mentioned that repackaging the powers involved a conduit," he said. "Though he was hearing about a lot of it secondhand. I always assumed that they were only required for that initial transfer, but it's possible they're like tumblers in a lock—that maybe the mixture of powers in them encourages Fulminancy to grow and develop here instead of more traditional elemental powers."

Eamon frowned, looking thoughtful. "You two could have a point. Our mountains were known for lockets and goldsmiths for thousands of years—maybe they just took whatever object was convenient and used it to lock away the powers. What do you want to do with them, though?"

Kess looked a little sadly at the locket that had been around her neck since her parents had died. "Destroy them," she said. "Or see if we can, at least."

"Wait," Claire interrupted, looking skeptical from the foot of the couch. "How do you know the Seats didn't want your locket just to take your powers—or worse, to do exactly what you're suggesting?"

"Well, they seemed focused on keeping them safe," Kess replied. She blushed, avoiding Claire's glare. "And, well, the storm seems to want them gone, but..."

She trailed off, not quite able to defend her position. It felt faulty even to her ears. It was true that the storm wanted them gone, but how did she even know that the storm was on their side? It had rescued the manor and helped Kess escape, sure, but could she be certain that the little cloud in her room was connected at all? She sighed. I miss the days when my biggest problem was what type of punch to throw, she thought wistfully.

Claire threw up her hands and stormed away from the couch, looking exasperated.

Kess looked at Rowan, who was frowning at her locket. "I do remember a passage that discussed the difficulty they had keeping Fulminancy together initially," he said, taking the locket from Kess to study it. "It kept wanting to unravel into its respective elements. They needed a seal of sorts. That tome was missing quite a few pages, but later the lockets showed up, and they began to have a lot more success with Fulminancy." He handed her locket back. "What Kess is suggesting isn't out of the question, but I can't confirm it either."

Kess coughed as she stared at the locket, her lungs still not quite back to normal from that night in the garrison. Eamon handed her a glass of water, and she nodded her thanks absently. As she went to take a sip, however, the water sloshed away from her locket to run down the sides of the glass. At first Kess thought she'd simply been clumsy—but then she pressed the locket to the side of the glass and stared.

The water fled.

And suddenly Kess remembered rivulets of blood and water streaming away from the lockets. She remembered leaning over the fireplace to heat her knife on that night she'd first given Rowan her powers—the fire had shied away, making it difficult to heat the knife at all. She remembered the way the wind quieted in a Drystorm around the locket—how the fog and clouds alike would stream around the locket, like it was a stone caught in a bubbling river.

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Kess shot to her feet, nearly spilling the water as she set it on the table to run towards the fireplace. Fighting dizziness, she dropped to her knees and simply held the locket towards the flames.

"Kess what—"

The flames shied away. Shocked, Kess pulled back before searing her arm, though even several feet away, the flames seemed to avoid where she sat with the locket.

"It was here all along," she whispered, staring at the glinting metal. Then, louder, she spoke so the entire room could hear, though she knew Claire was probably doubting her sanity again. "Classical elements shy away from the lockets," she continued. "Water, fire, the wind in a storm. Blood," she added, mouth going dry. "Hillcrest kept them around even though they didn't store power, and even though most Fulminancy is passed down genetically. They needed them for big transfers when Seats were born Duds, but why not keep them in a drawer somewhere? And with Uphill politics, why not just transfer the Seat to someone with power?" She shook her head, still watching the way the flames danced away from her locket. "No, they kept them close for good reason—and it had nothing to do with transferring at all. They wouldn't have this effect on classical elements unless—"

"Unless they're blocking the elements somehow," Rowan said behind her. His voice was excited, and the couch creaked as he came over to crouch by Kess. He took the locket from her hands and tried it himself, grinning in awe. "It's repressing them," he said. "Just like when Fulminancy was formed. Fulminancy tried to revert back to the classical elements because of an identity problem, or at least, that's what scholars called it. Power that saw itself attuned to fire for thousands of years simply couldn't see itself as Fulminancy—so they used the lockets as a sort of translator, it seems."

"And you want to…destroy the translator," Claire said, tone flat. "After your much more intelligent predecessors failed to solve anything after years of careful research. This was the best they could come up with, and you want to unravel all that work."

"It doesn't seem to be working all that well as it is, lass," Eamon said quietly. "Maybe its time is up—and that storm did save the lot of us. It can't be all bad."

"Do we have a choice?" Arlette asked.

Silence settled over the room. It seemed a stretch, Kess knew, but what else could she try? We might very well make things worse, she thought. But the city will be gone anyway if we do nothing. They could huddle underground and start over, but Hillcrest was isolated and hard to feed. A winter of supplies would be gone long before help arrived.

Rae finally broke the silence. "Well, we might as well figure out if we can do it before we make a plan out of it. So, an experiment then," she said, face lighting up. She tossed her locket onto the table, where seven pairs of eyes watched as the puddle of water from Kess's glass shied away from the metal. "Do mine first."

"But—"

"It's not actually mine. Your brother has that one." Kess paused, then looped her own locket back around her neck, fishing one of Rowan's daggers from his belt. The metal on the lockets was relatively pliable. Kess gathered up her Fulminancy into the dagger, plunged it into the locket, and flew back into the couch, swearing as her cracked ribs protested the treatment.

Rae grinned, and was immediately on her feet as Kess stumbled back towards the table. Kess scowled at her. "What is so entertaining?"

Rae cracked her knuckles, offering Kess her hand. "I've been so bored. Give me some."

"Some what?"

"Fulminancy."

"But you don't—"

"We don't need a locket after what we did at the Archives," Rae said. She cocked her head at Kess, studying her. "Did you never hear how they founded our Seats in the first place?" Kess shook her head. "Mariel and Faleas took a blood pact together. They hated each other, but still chose to cooperate to save people. They were able to share powers afterward."

"And you were going to mention this when exactly?" Rae shrugged.

"Whenever was relevant." Kess and Rowan shared a look. When are hidden magical powers not relevant? Kess rolled her eyes, but she took the dagger, sliced open her hand and Rae's, and emptied half of the bit she had into Rae. Rae grinned, something wild in her expression.

"Now," she said, "We try it together." Kess and Rae gripped the dagger, Fulminancy wrapped around it, and plunged it into the locket. It flung the two of them back into Eamon and Rowan so hard that the men both grunted, and the couch they braced against slid back a few feet.

"This is going well," Arlette noted, watching as if bored. Maude was muttering about the state of her table. Rae scowled as Rowan put her back on her feet.

"I thought for sure that would work," she said, using a handkerchief to stifle the bleeding. Kess stared at the locket, and a few disparate pieces clicked together. Real Fulminancy, or whatever it had been before being packaged up, had been about balance. Rae and Kess occupied opposing Seats, sure, but what of Rowan's strange powers? She turned to look at him.

"What if Rowan holds it too?" Rae shrugged, and Rowan moved between them, gripping the dagger with Kess and Rae's hands on top. This time, as they plunged the dagger into the locket, it cracked.

Kess was bathed in a flood of light—Fulminancy searing through her veins, filling every vein in her body, an unwieldy and too-powerful presence in her veins. Even with some of it leaking to Rae, she was having problems stifling it as it tried to eat her alive. Slowly, wisps of storm clouds erupted from her like the Shadows she'd seen around the city, and the room began to fade.

Rowan gripped her around the shoulders, and a soft warmth entered that swirling vortex, steadying her and bringing her back to the room. The shadows faded, and she stood there, breathing heavily in the silence of the room. Dimly, she noticed that Arlette was halfway to her sword, and Eamon already had a dagger in hand.

"Well, that explains the Shadows," Rae said, retreating to her corner. "Too much Fulminancy and you lose control."

"You gave me some of yours?" Kess asked. Rowan nodded, touching her cheek as if making sure she was really there.

"So we have the people to crack them open, and, provided Rowan is reliable, a way to keep you from turning into a monster as you do it," Arlette said. "How do you propose we steal these things to begin with?"

"Well, we have four already," Claire said, fishing a bag out from her pocket. "I filched these from under Kess's bed before we left the manor. Took me months to figure out where she was hiding all the good stuff."

She tossed Kess's bag and the two lockets towards her with a clink. Kess stared at the heavy bag, nearly forgetting the room as she was brought back to that arena so long ago. She pulled open the strings and, true to Claire's word, the two lockets she'd taken from the dead Seats sat on top of the gold.

"So that leaves Dad, Brother, and Niall," Rae said.

"Can we not call him—"

"Don't call him—"

Rae just grinned, her impish nature back with her temporary Fulminancy. "Kess convinces the storm not to kill us all, we deal with your family problems and Niall, destroy the lockets, and go home." She shrugged. "Seems good enough to me."

"I can offer advice about the palace layout, at least," Arlette said. "And run a distraction with the rest of Forgebrand, if Kess will let me borrow them." Maude walked forward from the back of the room, still scowling at the bloodied table.

"I have more up-to-date information on where the Seats are sleeping these days, if you need that. I was looking into it for the lass, but from what I hear, she found what she was looking for, anyway."

Kess chased away thoughts of Oliver from her head. She'd found him, yes, but in what state? Was he even the same man he'd been before? Had he ever been that man? She tried to focus on Arlette's words instead of the doubt tumbling around in her mind.

"We'll run a distraction with the troops—attack a nearby garrison while the two of you—" She nodded at Kess and Rowan "—do whatever you need to do with the storm, and after that, the lockets."

"I'll go after Niall's," Rae volunteered. Kess frowned at her, knowing that her Fulminancy was already slipping away. Temporarily transfers never lasted long, at least with the volatile, active type of Fulminancy that she and Rae wielded. Rae caught her eyes then, some of that confidence back in her gaze. "A knife kills a Fulminant Seat just as good as any other man," she said.

They sat there in silence for a few more moments, as if waiting for words of encouragement, or someone's final say on the matter. Finally, Rae slammed her knife into Maude's table, on top of the broken locket where their blood met, and smiled.

"Good hunting, all."