Heir of the Fog

CHAPTER ONE HUNDRED

Weightless Blade

Once both Miran and Ciren were satisfied, I let them work without me and drifted outward, walking the corridors of my mist with a quiet pride in what we had wrought.

Our place of craft could have made even Lucious, Artisan Genius of District 97, bite his tongue. Once I had only scraps and the blunt patience of repetition; but ice, in the right hands, is a powerful building tool.

We raised complex constructs from it: forges that hummed like glaciers breathing, galleries walled in blue glass, workshops cavernous enough to house giants, all layered over years until the place felt like a cathedral carved from winter. I passed buttresses made for beings several times my size and spoke into the hush, more to test the echo than to seek reply. "Did you enjoy my tale?"

Many Frostkin stayed near the mist's core, but none lingered so close to the craft halls that vibration might spoil a delicate cut. The corridor looked empty. It was not. Atop a supporting pillar, something I could not see watched me.

An Isari.

Miran and Ciren had not noticed her arrival. She had come while Rogara bled and decided to wait until our hands quieted. I had felt her long before I placed her shape. Even for me, fixing on one of them while they held still demanded effort; their armor drank light and returned a lie. They could hide their aura until even my senses slid past them.

Only Hazeveil's shadow nature could easily notice them, giving me a gentle tug at the wrists and signaling when one of them was nearby.

Glancing up into one of the great pillars, I caught it at last—hidden, barely an outline, visible only when I forced my eyes to fix on that point and convince my mind there was something there. Even though the Isari gave no sign of having been seen, I went on, amused. "See? That is why I told you all to practice speech more."

Silence answered. She had reasons to keep her tongue stilled. An Isari does not announce itself until it must. She was mapping the chamber, measuring distances, watching my posture, marking every opening I offered out of habit. Then the air shivered, and the outline on the pillar became a body, coalescing into edges and plates where a heartbeat earlier there had been only mist.

I triggered the Kinect barrier through the bracers and let it settle invisible around me.

While the figure on the pillar still held its pose, steel hit force from my blind right. I had not seen the movement. The image on the pillar lingered a heartbeat longer, then unstitched into mist as the true body resolved in front of me—blade's tip a finger from my sternum, pressure singing along the barrier like rain across glass.

"Did you spend so long outside that this is the only language you speak now?" I asked, not surprised. This wasn't the only time the Isari attacked me.

She blurred. Semi-reflective plates bent the corridor into a false mirror; movement became a shiver where an eye expects a line. Digitigrade legs, jointed like a stag's, settled into a low, balanced crouch that could launch her three lengths in a blink. Mist-filament antennae along shoulders and spine quivered in tiny arcs, tasting currents I could not feel. A second blade hissed free of its hip groove, magnetics releasing with a soft click. Looking straight at her for more than a breath tugged at the back of my skull, the familiar nausea of trying to reconcile an outline that breathed out of rhythm with the world.

Between those flickers I caught her eyes. Ella. Recognition threaded the moment even as she split into afterimages, striking from three angles at once. Steel came at me from the right, then low left, then high again, each motion so economical there was no sound wasted on flourish.

"Master," she said at last, her voice resonating through the frost of her vessel rather than throat or mouth. "You have stayed inside too long. You are losing your edge. There are… too many openings."

"Perhaps," I allowed, meeting her next flurry with minimal turns of wrist. "What news do you bring me of the land beyond the mist?"

Her reply was more attacks. She ghosted left, and a sword traced a hairline across the ice barrier I had summoned where my ribs would have been. She vanished into the seam of two shadows and reappeared behind me, point probing the hinge of my shoulder. Every change of angle brought a fresh twinge of vertigo. I held my gaze to the space just beside her and let the periphery catch her shimmer. Direct attention was a tax the Isari knew how to collect.

Within reach she smelled faintly of cold iron and the ozone static that gathers before lightning. The semi-reflective plates were patterned in chaotic, mist-like fractals; each time she stilled, she simply ceased to exist until motion returned her to the world.

A cut hummed at hip height and would have parted me had the ice barrier not still been holding. When it dropped, I caught the next strike on a wall of ice raised from the floor, her blade sliding against its edge with a sound like frost cracking. She adapted without pause, pivoting on the stag legs to angle for another opening.

The Isari had a habit that unsettled other Frostkin: they attacked us. They hunted openings in our guard the way they hunted paths through the Abyss, and if a brother or sister left a weakness open long enough, an Isari's sword did not hesitate. Friends back in the human districts would call it cruelty. I had once thought the same—before I understood the mercy within it.

They tested edges. They made sure we kept looking outward even while wrapped in the safety of the mist. They cared for Frostkin in the way a whetstone cares for a blade—without softness, without apology. And they would not halt their cut if the opening remained. Some had fallen to them, lives ended cleanly that the Abyss would have savored.

Despite the weight of their legend, they were scouts, not duelists built for battle. If one of them managed to kill a warrior made for battle, the verdict was simple: that warrior would soon die to the Deep Abyss itself and, dying, might drag brothers with it. Better to end the risk cleanly.

An Isari blade was quick. The horrors outside were not. The Abyss savored suffering when it had time to feed. A neat death here was not cruelty; it was reprieve, a way to show mercy the horrors beyond would never grant. They fought alongside the Frostkin when the moment demanded, but in quieter times, it was the Isari who kept the others vigilant and ready.

The only ones they didn't touch were Miran and Ciren. Even I, their maker, had been tested by Isari blades more times than I bothered to count. None of them knew I did not truly die; to their minds, if I proved unfit for the Abyss, ending me would be an act of mercy, the greatest gift they believed they could offer their creator.

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Our dance slowed. Steel whispers thinned. Ella let the last cut fade into stillness and spoke at last. "Many openings," she said. "But I can't strike you. It's bad—also good. You are bad and good, master." The words came clipped, the judgment clean, as if she were reciting measurements.

"You know," I said, letting the tension leave my arms, "where I come from we receive someone with tea, not blades."

Her head angled, the semi-reflective plates shimmering in and out of the corridor's light. She flickered without trying; stillness made her vanish, movement returned her to the world. That was one reason the other Frostkin avoided long conversations with Isari—well, that and the chance a greeting could become a cut. "What is tea, master?" she asked, genuine.

I searched for the simplest concept, steam, leaves, and warmth cupped between palms, but found none that would carry for someone who had lived their whole life within the Abyss. "It doesn't matter," I said instead, not unkindly. "Why are you here? You would not come unless it mattered. Were Haldrin and the others occupied?

"I went to Haldrin first." She shifted, the reeds of her antennae along shoulder and spine twitching as if tasting a distant ripple. "He knows of the next batch of intruders who will test our borders. He is already preparing." A heartbeat's pause. "But I have other news for you, master."

A soft clack answered before I did. One of the reinforced compartments along her back cycled open; runic pressure locks breathed a pale sigh. Panels unfurled to reveal a nested spine-cradle, magnet grooves still humming from the strain. Ella reached back and drew out a blade taller than a man, thick as siege iron.

She raised a great sword I knew by weight before sight. "We found it, as you requested, master."

Doomcarver.

The colossal weapon I had lost the day I fell into the Abyss. Its surface showed the same deep obsidian-gray, the runes along the flats catching a silver-blue spark at the angle of light.

Ella held it with both arms braced, not for fear but because the thing was stubborn matter made obedient only by resolve. She stepped close enough for me to take it, plates along her back showing hairline stress where the spine-cradle had carried too much weight for too long. The compartments were built for supplies, objects, even ore, not for a sword that felt like it carried the weight of a battlefield.

"We finally found it," she repeated, voice steady though her frame shivered with invisible fatigue. "As you asked."

I took Doomcarver. The mass met my hands like an old argument. The runes answered the contact with a faint, living gleam; conviction threaded up my arms and set the blade's edges singing in silence.

"Great work," I told her. "But stop by Miran and Ciren before you head back. You'll need repairs."

"Yes, master."

As I touched Doomcarver again, its long grip fitting my hands, I half expected the ancient weight to descend and moor me to the floor. For a long time, that was the first truth of this blade: the massive weight. Instead, it felt light. The sword I had once barely levered from the earth, a mass that mocked muscle and technique alike, now rose as if a breath might lift it.

Ella noticed before I finished the thought. Her head tipped, mist-fractal plates breathing in and out of sight. "Master—small, but strong. As it should be. Good… very good… but also bad."

I let a dry smile crease the words. "It isn't only strength. It weighs far less for me than it does for you." I angled the flats so the runes caught the corridor's pale light. "See these? The Engraving of Dominion. It converts willpower into strength."

Her attention flicked over the script with less awe than I expected. Dominion's character was precise and austere, the cuts shallow as if the alloy hated to be marked, yet the stroke order carried that old severity I could never quite replicate. Ella merely logged the fact and moved on, antennae tasting the air for other currents.

I had spent too long with Miran and Ciren. I thought, too used to their bright fascination or their brazen critique. The Isari filed miracles into ledgers labeled useful or noise.

She voiced the ledger line anyway. "So… master not strong?" A brief pause as she weighed the social edge of the phrase. "Bad. Bad, only bad. Should go outside more."

I wasn't sure what response I expected, praise perhaps, or a simple nod acknowledging an old milestone reached at last. Instead I felt the small, absurd disappointment of finding a door effortless only after you no longer needed what lay beyond it.

Doomcarver had taught me the cost of will. It was never meant to be easy to carry. I remembered prying it from the ruin where Captain Sethis Vauren had slept his last sleep, the metal refusing my grip until will foamed in the lungs. Back then I studied the runes and dreamed of wielding this weapon. Now that I could, I realized the blade's truest task had not been to serve me, but to make me. It was a forge, and the ore was the bearer.

I set my stance and let the blade move. Even my slowest swing woke the second rune, the Sigil of Severance, and the corridor answered with violence. A line of silver-blue energy tore from the edge, not fading but racing forward, a beam that split the mist and struck the far wall with a thunderclap. Frost-clad pillars along its path sheared apart with surgical precision, leaving slabs the size of carts to topple and explode across the floor. The impact rippled outward, shaking the air until it felt heavy in my lungs.

Mist along the beam's path had been burned away, leaving a raw corridor of exposed ice that steamed faintly in the cold. Cracks spidered through the walls, still groaning as they settled. The scent of frost and stone dust lingered.

The third mark, the Inscription of Conviction, held the edge in impossible poise. Doomcarver looked newly born, no burr, no abrasion, the kind of sharp that did not shine so much as refuse to be anything but itself. Its power was unquestioned. The problem, if it could be called that, was elsewhere: the lack of weight where weight should live.

The blade did not test me anymore. It did not argue. It simply obeyed, and in that obedience, a certain hunger went unfed. I felt an echo of the younger self who had wanted this so fiercely, the ache of wanting itself, not of having, and the ache cooled. My hands no longer needed the sermon the sword was built to preach.

Ella watched, and this time fascination finally touched her voice. The antennae stilled, as if the environment itself quieted to listen. Then her head inclined a fraction.

"Master, there are also… more news."

"What is it?" I kept my eyes on the blade a heartbeat longer, reading what the runes were willing to say and what they would not.

"It is about Winged Death."

That name turned the world a degree colder. Winged Death—the crimson that had broken my climb, a warlock in Sjakthar's fold and, aside from the God himself, the one creature whose attention I had plotted routes to avoid. From the first day we expanded our borders I had drawn a blank on the map where its territory lay and told my people: do not expand in this direction. And yet I kept eyes there anyway, Isari eyes, two at all times.

"Speak," I said.

"We believe he is ascending," Ella answered, every syllable delivered like a measured step. "He has been… receiving offerings." She searched for a human word and found none she trusted. "Other crimson go to him and give themselves without a fight. We judge this means he stands near the brink of change."

"Offerings?" I was surprised. His core should have already reached its peak; such gifts meant nothing—unless they were his way of proving mastery of the rule, or forcing himself to its edge. Which meant my greatest enemy in the Abyss stood on the brink of becoming something far stronger than he was now.

My grip tightened around Doomcarver's hilt. The blade did not grow heavier. That, somehow, was the clearest omen of all.

"Ella," I said, the decision already hardening in my mouth. "Leave repairs for later. You should not have delayed this news. Lead me there now."