Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Twenty-One

Sephara

Empyria, the Imperium

20th of Tournus

The Grand Imperial Library wasn't quite as grand as its name suggested, given the surrounding architecture. Of modern design, it had been sculpted of duller stone than the typical Empyrian white. It described a stunted cylinder, its rounded exterior dominated by wide, open balconies and embellished with the same stone likenesses of Imperial myths and heroes that seemed to grace every notable building in the city. The figures had been carved to give the impression of vaulting from balcony to balcony, an eternal procession of warriors leaping laps around a building sixteen storeys tall.

Inside, its centre was hollow, a square at its core in the main hall dedicated to an exotic tangle of forestry and plants fuelled by the blaze of refracted sunlight spilling in through the transparent ceiling far overhead. An expansive desk ten times the size of Dexion's perched in front of the makeshift garden, manned by a squadron of harried librarians. Around the edges of the yawning interior loomed the bookshelves themselves, arranged in rings climbing the building's full extent, reached by a wide staircase that snaked up through every level in one unbroken curl. Small alcoves jutted outwards over the centre, their sides made of hardy spirewood for privacy and protection.

"You've never been here?" Lexia asked as they padded towards the front desk.

Sephara realised she'd been staring with her neck bent back and her mouth agape. "No."

Her companion huffed. "Figures," she said. "Uncultured street dog."

She'd been strong-armed into bringing Lexia along, by the girl herself, no less. After Lexia had named herself Sephara's partner that night in the Praevin compound, she'd insisted on being present for every undertaking Sephara made in her investigation. She claimed her father's brush with death made the matter personal, though Sephara was well aware how distant Endarion was to all his children, Lexia included.

And so here she was nine days after seducing Dexion, about to delve into the dustiest of Empyria's hand-scribed tomes in search of a vague mention of immortals or strange symbols, with only an entitled nineteen-year-old at her side and two mysterious daggers in the satchel at her waist.

Before Lexia could approach the desk and begin throwing her father's name around, Sephara snared her by one elbow and dragged her around the side of the miniature forest, aiming for the base of the staircase.

Once they'd moved out of sight of the librarians posted at the desk, Lexia tore her arm free. "What the fuck? I was going to ask what floor to go to."

"And risk anyone knowing what we're looking for?" Sephara said. "It only takes one librarian to be in the enemy's employ to ruin us."

Lexia canted her head. "You really think the Caetoran paid off librarians to let him know if anyone came asking about symbols on daggers?"

Aware of how ridiculous her paranoia now seemed, Sephara shrugged. "The Caetoran, or 'the immortals' who actually killed Novissa."

A beat of odd silence passed, and then Lexia made a clucking noise with her tongue. "That's actually a fair point. Maybe this is why you Boratorrens have such a persecution complex."

You Boratorrens, Sephara noted. Despite her supposed loyalty to her absent father, the girl didn't count herself among his family. The notion made Sephara wonder at the valuable resource her father was ignoring in his disdain for Endarion's illegitimate children.

Then again, hadn't she begrudged Lexia's presence here today? That made her hardly any better than Valerian.

They mounted the stairs and started the long climb. Lexia chose the eighth floor, halfway up, for convenience. The alcove they claimed was comfortable; a squat desk perched in the middle, plush cushions positioned around it.

When they'd settled and ensured no one nearby could see into their nook, Sephara produced the two daggers—Novissa's and the one used to kill her—and set them on the table. As she studied them again, Lexia departed to seek out the first in what promised to be an unending cycle of books. They'd already agreed to begin their searches with the various immortals who populated the world's history. Though she didn't expect a culprit to blatantly announce themselves, Sephara hoped to find some clue of who Novissa had referred to when she'd carved the ominous message onto her blade.

Because they'd shunned the assistance of a librarian, Lexia didn't return until half an hour later; she balanced a tower of thick-spined doorstoppers across both arms. She dropped them with a dusty bang onto the table and took her place beside Sephara.

"Please tell me you can read," she said.

"No," Sephara shot back. "I suggested coming to the largest library in the Imperium because I'm illiterate."

"Just checking," Lexia said.

Sephara plucked the first book from the pile. "I'm actually impressed you can read," she said. "The stigma with illegitimate children is that their parents never bother to teach them." Only when she'd finished speaking did she realise how the comment, a sarcastic rebuttal to Lexia's own, might sound.

The girl grimaced, flexed her hand as if preparing to lash out, then calmed herself with a deep breath. "That's what I am, is it? An uneducated, forgotten bastard?"

"I never said that," Sephara said.

Lexia raised a halting hand. "It's what you think though, right? I was born on the 'wrong' side of the sheets, so I must be your inferior."

"I couldn't actually care where or in what manner you were born," Sephara replied uneasily. "My father's the one who holds those opinions, and we both know it."

"Yeah, good old Uncle Val," Lexia replied with a grimace. She prodded her thumb into her chest, then gestured at Sephara with an accusing forefinger. "We're not even that different. My father's acknowledged me, even if he'd never be able to get permission to give me his name. Might not mean much in the long run, with him not ever being around, but I'm not just some throwaway by-blow."

She remembered the argument between her father and uncle, back when Endarion had first asked Sephara to uncover Novissa's true assassin, and how Valerian claimed his brother sullied their name with his bed-hopping antics. She knew her father held her uncle's four bastard children in low regard for the simple illegitimacy of their birth; Valerian believed instead in the power of a pure legacy.

Sitting across from Lexia now, a girl who looked more like a Boratorren than Sephara did, who'd managed to infiltrate the Praevin compound just as easily as she, who'd insisted on joining this investigation to help the family who shunned her, Sephara knew her father was wrong.

"I'm sorry," she said, sincerely. "It was a stupid comment."

Lexia waved her away. "It was Valerian speaking, not you."

The young woman turned her focus to the books before Sephara could formulate a reply, so she fixed her eyes on the first page and scanned the title. A History of the Archaic Novhar, by a man with far too many syllables in his name. From his prose, Sephara assumed him as dusty and long-winded as his text.

To her disappointment, the book only summarised what she'd already been taught, though in much more detail and with unnecessarily grandiose wording. The author even offered up a heavily annotated timeline of events, though she didn't understand how anyone could possibly write with any certainty about eras long lost to the passage of millennia.

The Novhar were the very first sentient, intelligent life to inhabit the planet Eld, forged by the hands of the oft-overlooked Architects. Given sentience a theorised two hundred thousand years ago, they did not flourish organically from the aasiur that comprises all life and are therefore composed of something entirely alien. This is what grants them their unchallenged aasiurmantic prowess, and what certainly contributes to their immortal life spans. That they are not tied to the Esoteric Dawn—the centre and origin of all life, the wheel from which the tapestry of the universe is woven—is intriguing indeed.

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A dense chapter followed, concerning the physical make-up and very early history of the Novhar. Sephara scanned it, but found her eyelids growing heavy and allowed herself the mercy of moving on to a later chapter:

The Empire of the Novhar—the so-called Immortal Empire—was a planet-spanning affair, with every single known sphere in the Vast Infinite a vassal within their dominion. They had colonised and conquered all the mapped worlds, and some beyond our mortal knowledge besides. In order to tether these disparate worlds together, they refined the Atlas Gates, those mystical cosmological phenomena that formed when the Vast Infinite was pulled together at the dawn of time and planes of existence bled into one another. With this network of Gates perfected, total colonisation and domination of the known universe proved a devastatingly simple matter.

After deciding the history of a long-extinct superhuman race would reveal no clues, she found a chapter towards the end that caught her interest:

Though their empire had been sundered some twenty thousand years ago and most of their population driven into distant exile, the saga of the Novhar did not reach its undeniable conclusion until the Cataclysm, ten millennia ago. When the Abyss was opened and its destructive denizens, the Ravessi, permitted access to the Vast Infinite by the traitorous Novhar, Erdohan, the entire known universe suffered. Humanity, and most of the other humanoid, sentient races known to populate the world of Eld, were driven back to the dark days of their primitive beginnings, their civilizations torn apart and their way of life irredeemably ruined.

Salvaged histories from the post-Cataclysm era, written by humans who had once served as unwilling slaves during the Novhar Empire, claimed that the Novhar completely disappeared following this apocalyptic event. It was theorised they had come into direct conflict with the Ravessi unleashed by Erdohan and met their end there, but there were no survivors to validate such a theory, and the truth of their fate has always been, and will likely always remain, a mystery.

Sephara had never been interested in the world's ancient history, not even when one of her more studious tutors had attempted to map out the proposed Vast Infinite—the known universe—in a futile attempt to capture her attention. Terms like Atlas Gate, Novhar Empire, and even Ravessi, the legendary demons of the Abyss itself, had been redundant for ten thousand years. The Novhar were remembered now only for their role as the creators and enslavers of mankind, and she doubted they'd had a hand in Novissa's murder.

The author's uncertainty regarding the fate of the Novhar interested her most. Of course, she only read about the Novhar to dismiss them as Novissa's 'immortals', but the complete lack of evidence about their fate seemed ominous. Could it be possible some of the Novhar had survived and been in hiding for ten millennia, waiting until only recently to organise the death of the old Boratorren matriarch with the hope of destabilising the Imperium?

The idea was so fanciful she had to chuckle.

"I suppose the words do look funny when you can't read them," Lexia said.

Sephara slammed the book shut, showering herself with dust particles.

Lexia looked up and asked, "You know of the Cataclysm, I presume?"

"Of course," she replied, then tapped her book. "Just reading about it."

"This Erdohan character, he came to personify ultimate evil and chaos. There are speculations here that the hellish gods of old religions are based on him."

"You're suggesting a religious cult?" Sephara asked. "You think this Erdohan killed our fathers' aunt?"

Lexia snorted. "Don't be ridiculous," she said. "I'm suggesting a cult might worship Erdohan and be acting in his name. Like how the old religions acted in the names of their gods."

"Sounds far-fetched."

"You have any other suggestions?"

She shrugged. The Novhar were, after all, ten thousand years extinct. Even if a handful had survived, what use was the death of an aging Imperial politician to a race that had once enjoyed absolute power?

"Let's assume the immortals aren't Novhar," Sephara concluded. "Where does that leave us?"

The younger girl snapped her fingers. "The Architects," she said, naming the so-called creators of both the Novhar and the Vast Infinite itself.

"Pure myth."

"The Arisen?"

That gave Sephara pause. The Arisen were humans who'd achieved immortality through mastery of every known branch of aasiurmancy, much like the Drasken Empire's current rulers. At one point in early modern history, they'd ruled over their Theocracies as autocratic emperors. Their two-millennia reign had ended with Godking Skiron four thousand years ago.

"I was reading about Skiron," Lexia continued, as if tracking Sephara's train of thought. "Call it a conspiracy theory if you want, but wouldn't a toppled immortal king have a motive to mess with Imperial politics? Everything I've read of him so far suggests he was an evil bastard."

"Firstly," Sephara said, "the Arisen are all dead. Secondly, they'd have no cause to work with the Caetoran. If they wanted to regain their empire, they're more than powerful enough to just take it from the Caetoran without all this political bullshit and warmongering and killing from the shadows."

Lexia's face dropped with momentary hopelessness. Sephara hoped the girl would give up and leave her in peace, but instead she grabbed the two daggers.

"It has to be the symbols," she decided.

"But we don't know what they are."

Lexia huffed with impatience. "This might come as a surprise, so brace yourself: we're in a library, the ultimate provider of information and answerer of questions."

"Yes," Sephara grated. "A big fucking library. If you want to find out about those symbols, you're probably looking for a single book. How many books are there here? A hundred thousand? More? Feel free to read each and every one. I'll be busy making myself useful and catching an assassin or two."

Lexia rolled her eyes, her mouth twitching into a long-suffering smile. "I saw a section on symbology during my search earlier. That narrows it down somewhat."

―

They spent the better part of the day scanning shelves in the symbology section. What Lexia obviously hoped would be a hint from a single, all-revealing tome turned into an infuriating puzzle. It seemed no single book held the answers, but a selection of them, quoted together, did. More interestingly, the books were all penned by the same man, a renegade mage named Rexan Sudarium. What daylight remained they used to map out snippets of information in their alcove, painting a disorganised picture with the scattered clues Sudarium left throughout his work. As they read, she couldn't help but wonder if Sudarium authored a deliberate breadcrumb trail, if he too was involved in this absurd plot.

Novissa's dagger, it turned out, bore the symbol of an order of mages known as the Fensidium. The symbol itself was depicted in one tome, named in another, and explained in a third. Apparently, the Fensidium was a mercenary order of mages operating in and around the Karhes, and loosely allied to the ruling council of the Drasken Empire. To complicate matters, Sudarium himself led them.

"So Novissa was part of an illegal magic club?" Lexia said with a cocked head.

"Or she just has their dagger?" Sephara suggested, reluctant to accept another empire had anything to do with this mess. She'd set out to prove Drasken uninvolved in the assassination, not further entangle them. Besides, Novissa hadn't been an aasiurmancer. "Or maybe she trained with them, or knows someone who trained with them?"

Lexia shrugged. "I never knew the woman. My father knew her best, but he never mentioned anything."

"So that's a dead end as far as I'm concerned."

The symbols engraved into the assassin's dagger were of more interest, however. The precise pattern of interlocking circles, Sephara learned from Sudarium, were actually distorted versions of the aasiurmantic icon for shadowmancy.

Sudarium wrote that the image belonged to the Caesidi, an order of assassins dedicated to the Arisen in the last years of their reign.

The Caesidi were created by Godking Skiron not long after an attempt on his life almost succeeded. According to popular legend, Skiron had been born with a birthmark on his back, just left of his spine. The assassin who attacked him tried to stab him in the back with a dagger, though their aim was inaccurate and the wound not fatal. The blade had, oddly enough, struck just below the birthmark, leaving a distinctive scar, and it was suggested by the surgeon who treated Skiron that, had the dagger struck him on the birthmark itself, he would have perished.

In a move designed to mock the failed attempt on his life, Skiron equipped his newly minted Caesidi with the same type of dagger that had been used on him, with a characteristic curved blade. In addition, he made it a requirement that all Caesidi be adept shadowmancers, as his own almost-assassin was rumoured to be.

After they had both read that passage, Lexia shot Sephara a look of such childish smugness it was a challenge not to punch her in the face.

"I told you it was the Arisen," she said.

"No, you only suggested them," Sephara countered. "Besides, the Arisen are gone, the Caesidi too, I suppose." She chewed the inside of her cheek as she considered. "I think it's more likely the Caetoran has a small cabal of assassins he named Caesidi. He gave them the curved daggers to make them seem authentic. If anyone ever unveiled their identity, as we've done, it would make them think the old order has returned."

"That doesn't explain why Novissa wrote 'the immortals killed me' on her dagger," Lexia argued. "And why she did it decades ago."

Sephara shrugged. "Maybe she knew about the Caesidi's creation."

"Then why not write 'the Caesidi killed me'"?

"Because if anyone but your father had found that mark, it would've been hidden," she said. "Whereas 'the immortals' is vague enough to be harmless to most. But it put us on the trail to the answer, and maybe that was her intention."

Lexia rolled her eyes. "I still like the theory of it being an Arisen. I think Skiron's our man."

"Why?"

The younger girl scoffed. "It makes for a much more interesting adventure if our foe's an immortal godking, don't you think?"

"Skiron and the Arisen are gone," Sephara said. "Let's just accept the simpler and far less dangerous answer of it being the Caetoran and his devious nephew." She had, of course, been forced to share her discoveries regarding Khian and the Heaven's Paramours with her cousin, who'd initially shaken her head and declared the new Warmaster too obvious a suspect. Khian was at the very least privy to the plot, though, something even Lexia, in her childish stubbornness, couldn't deny.

Lexia rested her head against the alcove wall. "So, it's simple enough, then," she said. "To get my father the proof he needs, we need to bring down an order of assassin shadowmancers, link them solidly to the Caetoran, and get the entire Imperium to see what a relentless arsehole he is. All this as we try to go undiscovered, my father tries to win a war, I try to keep my family safe, and you happily continue fucking the Captain-General of the Praevin. Who is probably involved in this, by the way."

Sephara smiled a cynical smile. "Of course, he's involved," she said. "It sounds like half the entire bloody world is involved."