Side A – Yasgrid
For a single heartbeat Yasgrid hung in silence. The Darkwood didn’t understand what she was saying, and Endings knew her meaning all too well.
The silence and stillness couldn’t last forever though and with the next thunderous beat of her heart, as she started to speak once more, the silence and the blade in her hand shattered.
You trespass beyond the gods’ design, the fragments of the blade spoke the words and they rang from the firmament. Constraint Level One released.
The kaleidoscope of a night sky above her paled in comparison to the colors which bathed the dream world she stood in as Endings became a rainbow cyclone tearing around Yasgrid and spiraling throughout the Darkwood.
What have you done? the Darkwood asked in the leaves torn free by the whirlwind.
“Not as much as I need to,” Yasgrid said, her attention turning sharp and inward.
In the distance, but impossibly close too, she heard the beating of mighty drums. She smiled at that. It wasn’t what she’d planned for. In truth she hadn’t planned for most of what she was doing. That wasn’t how the magic she’d become a part of worked.
In her heart, sleeping flames began to rouse, the shelter they’d enjoyed being battered by the Storm of Endings as much as the Darkwood was.
Termination of bond to Bearer invoked, the storm screamed and Yasgrid felt the last threads of the light that she still held slipping from her grasp.
What is it doing? The Darkwood had no heart to flutter and no pulse to beat wildly, so instead its roots quivered and the winds that were its breath swirled in the waking world as the light of the Storm spun in the dream.
“The gods…” Yasgrid started to say but the Storm drowned her out.
The scream of the light twisted the Darkwood’s harmony into a new song. A song of absolute order, and absolute annihilation.
In her heart, the sleeping flames felt the assault on their host and rose to full wakefulness.
The peace they’d been wrapped in was shredding.
Pain and misery loomed once more.
Which sparked rage unlike any of them had ever felt before.
They would not return to the suffering they’d been trapped within.
And they would not allow their host to suffer even an instant of the torment, or be harmed at all.
Alone, they had been weak. Overcome by the blade designed to undo their very essence. Freed of their divinely imposed constraints and together for the first time however they were mighty. Within them lay the power to redefine the world.
Even a servant of the divine, or the most puissant tool a god could craft could not strike them down again!
“Everything is okay,” Yasgrid said speaking in the dream to the flames in her heart but audible to all who might hear her, waking or within the dream. “I know this is scary, I feel your fear. But this will not be our end.”
“That’s not possible. You are mortal!” The flames were united in their belief but the wave of reassurance she sent washing over them gave each one pause.
“And that is why I can do this,” she said.
Side B – Nia
Nia felt an impending storm, and knew that she was far beyond where she was supposed to be.
But someone had threatened her mother.
With a beat loud enough to shake the mountain her body rested on, Nia crashed her song through the shadows, burning them away and manifested almost the entirety of her being in the Darkwood.
But she didn’t wear the form of the Stoneling woman she had become.
Or the form of the Elven woman she had been.
When Nia arrived in Elshira’s hidden lair, she arrived as fire.
And she did not arrive alone.
“This form suits you,” King said, hopping up to one of the roots which formed the cage Naosha, Marianne, and Kyra’s prison.
Nia, burning with the radiance of earthbound star, stood outside the cage and around her every childhood terror she’d ever imagine was arrayed, with a dead woman at their center.
“Fool,” Elshira said, “This is my center of power.”
The vines which rose from the floor of the hidden cavern were not grown from any natural thing. In an instant Nia was buried under a swell of interlocked arms of the unclaimed dead and pulled down into the chthonic depths were no fire can burn and no light can shine.
“Fascinating,” King said, sharpening his claws on the steel hard roots of the cage.
“The young idiot has made her last mistake,” Elshira said, her dead features twisting with victorious glee. “I believe she has handed me the last key I needed. With her power absorbed, I am freed of so many constraints. Even the air has become charged with the anticipation of my dominion!”
“No,” King said.
Elshira blinked and shook her head, aware that a cat formed of living night was addressing her.
“What do you mean no?” she asked, her tone wary as she observed an intruder she hadn’t sensed enter her lair, even after he had begun speaking to her.
In the cage, Naosha and Marianne shared a glance and a small smile, while Kyra looked on in absolute bewilderment.
“You are incorrect,” King said, ceasing to clean his foreclaws on the cage and turning instead to groom himself.
“I am not. I am supreme here,” Elshira said.
King tilted his head, sizing Elshira up.
“Do you think so?” he asked with the suggestion that he was asking a mouse if it thought it was safe when it was within the reach of his paws.
“There are none in the Darkwood who can oppose me. Not even this one’s daughters,” Elshira said, gesturing to Naosha who wasn’t quite about to keep the smile she was holding in from crinkling the corner of her eyes.
“And what of those who are not within the Darkwood?” King asked.
Light in every color flared through the room as the charge which had been building suddenly burst and from the ground, fire rose.
Around Nia’s blazing form, the ashes of the unclaimed dead were caught by the swirling lights and cast down to their final rest.