Time, mused Azuri. It was different for the short-lived giants. While elves took longevity for granted, as an entitlement of their species, Otoka no doubt fought time tooth and claw for every year; To elves, time was a pestilence of which there was an irritating surplus, but to giants, time was something to cherish, steal, and treasure. As Frellyx had whiled away idle decades filling unending doldrums, Otoka had somehow scrimped together centuries, and lived as if he was jealous of every passing second.
It was a lot to take in. Based on what he had overheard, Frellyx was not only the elder wizard, but had mentored this great giant patriarch of magic, despite Frellyx having little renown in magic now.
"Why do you brood, Azuri?" Having fallen back by shortening her steps, they now walked side by side. She even walked like Cyhari, who had teetered like an infant, as if she had preferred to refine the art of toddling over learning to walk.
"Why do you ask, creature?" He slouched as he strolled ahead, feeling centuries younger than his five hundred years. As the shadows lengthened, he felt himself shrink further, and, anxious that his gigantification was wearing off, he measured himself against her by looking in her eyes. Seeing it was only an effect of the swarming shadows, he breathed a sigh of relief, and quickened his pace.
As they brushed through the titanic foliage, leaves shivered like heavy sheets of tin, towering grass flicked their legs like whip tails, and if they were slow to stoop under the boughs, bark as broad as a ship's keel scraped at their scalps, or worse, the beams knocked full on, a hard, blinding pain.
When clouds crunched into a black knot, lightning rained down in crinkled tangles,
sparking smoky streamers from dry patches, then jagging again and again, from a few hundred feet back to a mile off, as if threading needles to draw a seam tight. As thundercracks roared, the quickened wind spread the scent of burned leaves and smoldering air until every sense was brimful of lightning, even his elven high senses, which traced the manifold, crackling flash of the bolts through time, and the lines bordering where the crude dimensions bordered both past and future.
Rain smacked down huge, watery grapeshot, thumb-sized spatters showering them, then streaming, then gusting sheets of rain, as if a mountain had aimed its waterfall in their general direction.
While the creature had caught up, her answer was drowned out by the downpour. They leaned into drenching gusts so thick with water, the wind turned gray, than silver.
Having never experienced rain like this, Azuri began to wonder. Were cloudbursts fatal on Nymerea?
Ten minutes of incessant rain soon smothered Azuri's worries, for his neck and back ached with the contstant effort of resisting the pounding rain. The roots, the soil, and Otoka's branch-strewn path were now awash with mud and water, oozing underfoot and churning through their legs.
When the rain let up to a drizzle, Azuri turned to speak his mind, but his words were still stopped by the rain streaming from his water-logged hair, and only when that had slowed to a trickle wetting his lips, did he wipe his mouth and speak his piece: "where is your maker, creature?"
She rubbed her face dry with her sleeve. "That's an interesting question." A smile sagged under sad eyes.
He sighed. "I'm not in the mood for a philosophical exercise."
"Then you picked the wrong question. Besides, we--I mean, you two--used to have those philosophical exericises."
"Used to. Past tense, like my daughter. But if you must, I will completely explicate the possible interpretations. You could have taken it literally at least two ways, as I, your father, sired your... ingredients..." Azuri could not suppress a dark titter and a wheezy sigh. "And Otoka, also your literal maker, welded you from the past bits of my daugthter. Or perhaps you meant a deeper maker, like Lyspera, the Spider-God, whose threads weave through this dark world, and the Abyss which gloves it."
"Is a thief a maker, though?" The creature's voice was low and thoughtful.
"A what?"
"A thief...the myths of Lyspera only say she stole the worlds in the Abyss. They're not her eggs."
"Thank the gods, or they would hatch, netting not only new eight-eyed gods, but millions of new dark webs in filaments of unbreakable will, weaving together countless Abysses, one inside the other."
"You," said the creature.
"Excuse me?"
"You're my maker. I concede the honor to you, Azuri. Even if you don't accept me for who I am, it's clear that you know me, unlike Otoka, who engineered me without understanding."
Azuri rolled his eyes--and realized he now stood a head shorter. "It's wearing off."
"I can teach you the spell if you'd like. It's not hard."
"If you have the power."
"Our art is less power than gift. A trick passed on as a master wills."
"But I'm not conscious of any magic in me," protested Azuri.
"You're five centuries old, and don't even know that magic surrounds us?"
"When I haven't been a soldier, I've been a functionary, and both are consuming careers.
Whether you give yourself to war or policy, the state assumes your sacrifice day to day, Cyhari."
As if to heighten this misstep, the drizzle slowed to a patter. When Cyhari stopped, the silence grew to fill the overshadowing grove. Thumb-sized raindrops slid in dark brown trails down the bark.
"You've never called me that."
"Yes I have. In my mind. You'd think, as your--as her father, I could keep you both clear and distinct in my mind, but instead I think of you as a version of her, or a variation on her, and think of you as--I know it's not very flattering--Cyhari-thing."
"Cyhari-thing?" Her pasty eyelids fluttered as she breathed a faint sigh, parting her lips into an indeterminate grin that was as much pout as smile. "Call me that if you wish. At least I'd get to hear you say my name."
"I'd rather not," said Azuri, "but it will do for now, when my cares are focused on finding your wizard."
"As you wish." She waved him up to giant height with an upsweep of her hand. "I will shelve teaching you until later, as well."
"You aren't teaching me anything. I've lived this long without learning magic."
"Strange. You're so much like him, but also so very different."
"Like who?"
"Like Azuri." At his bemused glance, she continued. "The Azuri of my memories was a little aloof, but kind and understanding. In my eyes, he was wiser than Otoka the Wise. He was everything to me. I was afraid to disappoint my father."
Azuri snickered. "You never had a father..." At her pained expression, he relented. "...Cyhari-thing."
"Having grown to full flesh in mere days in Otoka's lab, I know my memories and feelings are illogical. Enchantment is mighty, but not a proper upbringing, however much I have the memory of one. And while I remember how to be good and bad--she was not all good, you know--I inherited no tendency to lean toward either face of that coin, and it could be luck or fate as to which side comes up."
"Don't be an idiot, Cyhari-thing. While your personhood may be in doubt, you're a magical construct, not a dumb machine. Smack the coin down any way you want. Good and evil are willed."
"What will, father?" At his glare, she stared back until his eyes burned and watered. "I'm geased. For that matter, you're geased too. You gave up your capacity for good and evil."
"You mean taken from me. If any of us ever had it, given the webs drawn here and there by the Spider-God."
"You're a contrary creature, father. Having just said good and evil are willed, now a spider's pulling your strings?"
"Yes, and his name's not Lyspera, but Otoka. And those strings are pulling at me now."
"I feel them too, father."
When the shadow slid over them, it blocked the breeze, steadying the boughs and trees.
As the shadow dragged longer and longer, it was like time had stopped, sweeping up the anxious moment into its dark folds. Azuri felt like a toadstool that had mushroomed in the unlooked-for silence.
Azuri stooped behind the tree. The back of his neck tingled.
"What is it?" she asked.
While the black mass rolling over the gray sky menaced the woods with oppressive shadows, what made Azuri shudder was the unmistakable stench, a vile aroma that had plagued him before.
While he had been unable to shake Eurilda's foul stench since she shook him in her grip. it was not the giantess, but a tangent scent he had last smelled in her presence.
Where were they? "Do you see anything?"
"You mean other than that!"
"No, not that. Something near. So near, its smell oppresses me."
The Cyhari-thing checked left, then right, then over her shoulder. Seeing nothing around them, she then checked under her shoulder.
"It's not you," scowled Azuri.
"I thought you might not be done disparaging me."
"Whether I am or not," winced Azuri, "don't take it personally. I'm the only person here. You're a creature. At best, you're a creation."
Her eyes flashed and one fist tightened. "If you would deny me personhood, I'm at least a thinking being."
"And at base, a wizard's dark thought. Not that I can judge, as no sooner had my daughter become a dead thing, than I used her to justify every wicked impulse. The dead world is destined to be exploited by the living."
"The dead world?"
"The world of things."
She shivered, then forced a smile. "Perhaps because I see the world with these newborn eyes..."
"Being so recently harvested, call them ripe." He returned her warm smile with a cold one.
"...but it seems to me that everything is living. At least to us. For what can we see that is not our living eyesight? What can we hear that is not a living sound? We do not see or hear the world as it is, but only our living perceptions of those things."
"You are one step away from saying all this is an illusion." He crossed his arms and shrugged. "It is a conversation that we had before. Well, not us." He scowled. "Soon after started the train of events that ended with her death. A little dogmatism in meaning and object reality would have helped her. I recommend it to you as well."
As the voluminous shadow slid further and further into the Abyss, the vermillion sky lengthened in its trail, illuminating not only the deep cut of her resentful scowl, flinching from the heavy repugnance creasing his brow, but Nymerea's tangled jungle, Uenarak's obscured skyline, and the obscured shapes of things above, whose shapes gradually resolved, tracing the outlines of warships.
"That can't be right," she said. "I have no memory of such a thing, neither here on my birth world, nor on Alfyria, the place of my recollections."
"You see it too?"
"Unless we're seeing things."
"What do you see?"
"Painted warships. Dozens, if not hundreds. Enough to carpet the sky with their dark underbellies, as if we were worms crawling under so many stones."
"I see them too."
"Is that what you smelled? Some kind of varnish on their keels, or the freshly painted hulls?"
"Definitely not. While I'm at a loss to describe what I see, I have placed the smell. We must find your master."
The cool air bore the crisp tang of rusted iron. As the grasses crunched underfoot, Azuri accustomed himself to his colossal form, his crushing weight now the comforting self-knowledge
that nearly anything would deflect from such a massive being. Only giants, monsters, magic, and his own poor judgment--having now accepted the geas of two wizards back to back--could impact his life now.
Where a river gurgled and birds trilled, they nearly stepped on clutches of eggs shadowed by the towering sheaves. The path meandered back to the tree line, where gigantic larva, each as long as Azuri's gigantified forearm, clumped under a low branch--green globules pulsing with the urge to grow,
to surpass the oozing spheres that confined them, one of which had split, revealing a brightly colored wing, a wet, tissuey gauze that now forced its way out a gash in the blobby shell.
"Stop," Azuri said.
"What is it? Otoka is surely over the next rise."
"If he saw the ships, would he not have returned to his manor?"
"Would we not have seen him? Would it not be more natural to follow the ships in their wake, as we are doing?"
"To what purpose? Is your master not known as the wise? Is he not opposed to this war? Seeing ships headed for another world, and Uenarak poised on the outbreak of hostilities, would he not collect his apprentices and depart?"
"Your mistake is thinking I know my maker. If you or I instinctively do as he wills, it is only the geas. While you must follow his word as law, you do not also feel as he does. Or are you also known as The Wise?"
"We should have caught up to him before now."
"Are you suggesting he left us behind? Was captured or slaughtered?" When she ruffled her hair pensively, the creature made a striking contrast to his daughter, who was anything but self-conscious. "What is this strange sense of urgency, Azuri?"
"The quivers of your corpse heart matter not at all. Worry will never kill the freshly dead, newborm monsters, or virgin loyalties."
"I could care less what happens to Otoka."
"Perhaps it's only the geas, pricking you over and over."
"It's more than that, Azuri. It drives me ever onward, not only through the day, but into Cyhari's maddest memories. It would have been better had he made me forget, for Cyhari's frustration and resentment live on in me, and balk at his enchanted influence. While I should be grateful for my life and happy to obey my maker, the memory of her stubbornness and pride bucks in me, like a krydayn shying from its reins. Knowing I follow not my own thoughts and feelings, but a stricter script, imposed by Otoka's distant eye, is torture, and it's better not to exist, Azuri."
"Then Cyhari's memories are reins as well." Despite himself, Azuri smiled. "Take it from one who knows, foolish half-thing. While I've lived over 500 years, you've not yet lived 500 hours. It is better to exist than not to exist. when there is always some new diversion, like the stupidity of enmagicked monsters."
In a cavernous, tangled grove, the gangly trees meshed a shadowy canopy where translucent spiders glimmered, perched on vast cobwebs strung from roots to leaves, and bulbous dewdrops slid like snails down ash-white bark.
There crouched six giants garbed in violet and blue robes, their hands webbed with flashing, crackling sparks, aside from one whose hand slashed towards the Abyss, then dragged down a blue-green stream of lightning. While Azuri rolled left, the creature stood numb under the onslaught, her hair swooped up into a fraying cloud as a hole smoldered through her smoking shirt. Her stunned face scrunched in pain, then those creases doubled and whitened with fright, and tripled and reddened with rage, until she seemed masked by warpaint, at which point she lowered her head and barreled toward the assassins.
As she barged forward, lightning splintered around her, pricking her front and back with jagged electricity, until she slammed the sky-channeling sorcerer flat, then trampled over him, kicking back at his squashing head for good measure, before seizing another giant in each hand. Her muscular power seemed less supernatural than supernal, as if she had been dragged down alongside the cleaving lightning bolt, a celestial child spawned from the Abyss's web of dark gods.
As two reached for Azuri, their hands enveloped in bright blue nimbuses crackling gold and silver, he sneered, drew his sword, and speared one through the chest. When his blade flashed so bright and true that he felt no drag at all, he thought his might increased past the power of flesh and bone,
until the impaled robes flopped to the ground, revealing neither a wound nor even a giant, but a bloodless slit cut by his sword.
Bemused, Azuri backpedaled from the other giant. Sorcery. His inward groan was not one of dismay but contempt, for he despised the dark arts, even though he could not help admitting a modicum of sorcery might have come in handy in his twilight years. Still, he had not lived so long by not being clever.If they could, by spell, sidestep those mortal blows they saw coming, Azuri must trick them into a dying they couldn't see coming.
He fell back yard by yard before the spark-fisted sorcerer, even allowing a second, then a third, to mob him, making a growing throng of lightning-clutching giants. As they swung sparking hamhands here and there, hoping by brute force and luck to put an end to him, he slipped back with stuttering half-steps, allowed his toe to drag back a moment too slow, then dipped his sword low in a feigned exhaustion. As one doubled his sparking fists and brought them down in an overhead smash, he twirled the sword up in a flash, skewering violet robes, giant ribs, and the very dying breath still struggling to croak a spell. When he vanished, blood and a darker gore clumped to the blade, but some yards away, the giant's last syllable trailed off in a groan, and a crash in the foliage.
When another giant stomped up behind him, Azuri pretended not to notice, judged the weapon's path by its whistle, and slouched both under its arc and into the sorcerer, his elbow sledging nose, cheek, lips, and teeth. When the yelping wizard drew his sparking hand to his wounded mouth,
his face smoldered and sizzled, and he yawled like a cat, ran blind through the shadowy grove, and collided with a trunk concealed in the darkened gap of two larger trees.
When Azuri faced the third, this one turned tail and fled through the groves, rushing past the Cyhari-thing, whose hands had choked the life out of the two she grasped, and whose eyes stared dully ahead, as if she had forgotten they yet dangled from her hands. When her eyes refused Azuri's and locked on something faraway, he turned his head, but saw only trees. Were her thoughts elsewhere, he wondered, or no place at all, but in another time. Just as he could not help thinking of Cyhari when he looked at it, so might he remind her of a better time. Even an abomination could think of a better world,
a world it would never be suited for, if it awoke remembering one.
While her eyes were no longer on the present, but fixed in a far off memory, she was there as skin and bones, a bundle of reflexes tangible to the sorcerer who skulked from behind a tree and grasped her forearm to his own undoing, for the twofold jolt diffused through her stiffened arm, which lashed out, slamming him into the dark trees.
She turned to Azuri with a shaking step, as if awakening from a dream. "We go to the manor, if only to shield you from these assassins."
He winced. "Think not of my safety."
"I do not." Her voice was hollow. "What I love of you cannot be killed, and what lives of you will never love me. You think me a fool, but I know this."
"I think little of you at all." He knew not why saying this brought tiny tears to his eyes, but blinked them back and turned his face by feigning to look the way they came.
"I cannot help thinking much of you, Azuri. It is the way I am made. While it is not what Otoka willed for me, I am taking the shape of my raw material." As she started down a beaten path hidden in the dark groves, her brow clenched. After a few minutes, her eyes met his. "While I know my fondest memories are fiction, stories please when their lies come to life. Even if I have no father in truth, my thought of you are the only good I know. I will care for that untruth as if it was the heart of my being.
Even if I never feel any warmth from his living image."
"While you may think of your memories as imaginative literature, in truth they are a misreading." It was cruel to belabor when she was determined to persist, but he could not help himself, for a loathsome love had entwined with his hatred for the creature, an agonizing thread he could not help yanking on, hoping to unravel his confused feelings for this monster so like his daughter. "You know the truth. You know you are not her, and can lay claim neither to the events of her life, nor the memories comprising the cornerstone of your identity. Certainly not her father, who did not sire you,
regardless of how you rationalize it otherwise. I did not make you, monster. Life did not make you. Magic was your mother, and death your father."
While neither his daughter, nor truly alive, neither was she a stone, but a living image that
held a mirror not only to life but to the still living memory of his daughter, and when she cried like a thing alive--like a person, like his daughter--his heart betrayed him and went out to her, until his hands shook from the effort of suppressing their instinctual reach to her cries, when he scowled, forced a cruel smile, and twisted the knife: "this hurts me more than you, monster."
"Well, thank the gods for that." Sarcasm cut through tears to wrinkle her snuffling nose. "I was beginning to think nothing could hurt you, father."
Although he willed a chuckle and a malicious grin, his face only sagged around a long sigh. "I'll admit no one has hurt me worse than you, creature, not even your egotistical maker. I can tolerate his vanity, and overlook his mistakes, but I can not ignore your sincerity."
They walked in silence for another hour.
The manor's cold, gray shadows were resonant with silent emptiness, despite still smoldering candles, and the haunting sense someone yet lingered. Too baroque to be exquisite, and too delicate to be ominous, Otoka's white sandstone walls glittered with embedded crystals, and housed not only wizards, but an array of worlds in miniature. By following the shadowy halls, you toured a grand, pompous mansion, while a golden path inlaid in the dark paneling concealed, in plain sight, a magnificent orrery: gold leaf, hammered into rays, engraved a bleak cosmology, with Nymerean runes doubling for drifting oases, and five golden gaslamp chandeliers turned down to a dim illumination in this wizard's abyss.
"Otoka has already departed."
"I feel him here."
"That's regrettable," sighed Azuri.
"What do you mean by that?"
"While feeling this palpable connection to your maker makes matters of faith easier, it also snares free will. When I feel the webs of fate stick to me, I tear free. Better to live free than to live forever."
"That's easy for you to see. You've lived tens of thousands of days compared to my handful."
"One day I will die, however much I struggle against that coming to pass. Death is as final as birth, and as inevitable as breathing."
"Finality is the mirror of causality."
"Tzupontila. You did read that book."
Searing flashes speared through the open doorways, their bright splash leaving a scorching white afterimage that seared not only the walls, but the back of Azuri's mind, a sparking flare that signaled something urgent from the ancient elf's forgotten days, some vital fact resurfacing from oblivion. While the windows showed neither storm clouds nor raindrops, nor any sign of a storm, the hazy skies, mingling with misty, monstrous trees, seemed gorged and agitated, as if barely holding back sheets of rain.
"Truth to tell, I--she--only skimmed it, but in the crystal clarity of my revived memory, I have been scanning the recollected pages as we roamed." Inching near a crossway, she breasted very near to peer around the corner.
"What?" Azuri hissed.
"I heard something. Not footsteps. A crackling."
Then Azuri heard it, an innocuous pop trailing a sizzle, like a fresh torch flaking smoky embers, but also so eerily unlike anything else, that, as the old elf placed the sound in his memory,
he also recalled his consuming fear, for he had never been able to forget his harrowing rush through the Abyss. For all their peril, the Alfyrian Ladders had at least been civilized.
When the sputter multiplied like fireworks, Azuri turned to the window, where scarlet streamers of smoke streaked the Abyss. With every passing moment, this handful of smoky trails multiplied,
until their redness blotted out the black sky, becoming the dark violet hue of elf blood.
"It's the Fire." Azuri gripped the sill and leaned through the window. "That fool used it."
"I have no memory of this."
"It's the Alfyrian Fire."
"But what does that mean?"
"It means elves. Hundreds, thousands. I have no idea how many."
A confused look pinched her face, before falling back into its placid reserve. While this reflex filled a splintered moment at best, Azuri's breath froze and his heart skipped a beat, for the creature had copied Cyhari's most distinctive expression, reserved for the most perplexed moments of her life. It last flickered in her brow when she drew in her final breath.
"But why?"
"Turnabout is fair play."
"No, I mean why now?"
"Spies? Who knows. If Otoka's here, we should find him now."
Even as they pretended to a choice in the matter, the geas jerked their legs toward the door, ungainly, arrhythmic steps subverted only by some effort into a graceful, resigned submission to the spell-flow, which now thrust them, sprinting, down halls, past more open doors, which now projected towering flashes and sparking shadows in the corridor. Only the sweat swarming from his brow to his flushed cheeks told of his silent struggles against his enchanted slavery; on the inside, his own thoughts and feelings were obscured by a crushing music, even as his limbs were reeled forward, snared by the wizard's will.
As one room, both its windows flung high, filled with orangish-red vapors, Azuri's scorn melted in the icy grip of a cold and clammy realization. "Run."
While he detested the creature, his mind would be brittle to the sight of Cyhari's death, no matter how distant he felt--he willed--himself from this sorcerous amalgamate. To see her stilled face--even knowing it a shoddy simulacra, distorted by Otoka's biases--would break him, though he knew her death was a reenactment. Despite his prepossession that she was only a performance, animated by magic, the theatrics of her redoubled death would overcome Azuri. Well might the creature desire to be real; for now, Azuri only cared that she lived.
The next comet of red vapor spiraled through the window, sprawled open like a smoky hand, and disgorged a score of armored elves, brandishing swords radiant from the mirrored glow of the Alfyrian Fire. Even at three times their size, Azuri knew better than to melee with so many elves, who might overturn an uneven battle by Alfyrian magic, especially with no giant wizards yet at hand. Even as he hesitated, the geas chopped through his wavering, and yanked them at a breathless sprint down the hall.
While Azuri had not done so much running in all his centuries, he was somewhat faster than the creature, who was even less practiced at this means of locomotion, and it took a willful exertion to hold himself back, or rather, hold back the geas, whose impulses raced faster then thought and demanded more than will or desire. As he fell back behind the creature, his face snapped taut in a rictus of pain, and he spat through gritted teeth, "run! Run like your fake life depends on it!"
As he faced the elven unit, Azuri knew he had not overcome the geas by will or strength. Perhaps in weathering many enchantments, his spine had become wooden, or perhaps the spell was cutting its losses, and intended his fatal resistance. As the geas tore at him now, every muscle bulged to the point of a grotesque cleavage, as if the warring wills might literally tear every part of him in two.
He clumped forward, as if the corridor was not only hazy, but gelatinous.
When the elves flung themselves upon him with rage, Azuri feared the High Tzhurarkh had dispatched these thousands not to silence Otoka, but to ensure Azuri's murder. Then spells streamed in the corridor, breathing fire and lightning at both of them until their clothes and boots charred, chipped and peeled, and scorching the forearm he raised to ward his eyes. While the miniature spells were more nuisance than threat, when four elves expanded to giant height, it not only leveled the playing field, but threatened to upend the board.
Then Azuri recognized the dark, dire eyes of their captain, whose brightly enameled armor still bore the marks of his sword.
"The mighty Azuri." While Kejuro's once-handsome face was scarred where falling shelves had bludgeoned him, he was even more disfigured by the hateful sneer which flashed alongside the long blade darting toward Azuri.
Azuri not only whisked it aside with a backhand parry, but with a dexterous twist of the hilt,
so deft that it was more like penning a verse than swordplay, slit the throat of the giant elf by Kejuro's shoulder.
When Cyhari fell into step with Azuri, her blade twinned with his, and their slashing, clashing, meshing blades bit and stung Kejuro, who pressed forward against the stings, swatting them left and right as he slid the point through their weaving steel as if their hard-flung parries and strikes were as tenuous and diaphanous as gossamer, and the blade raked Cyhari's cheek, scratched Cyhari's knee, and dragged down the back of Azuri's hand, gashing a welling wound that sent his sword clattering to the ground.
Azuri was stunned--in a hundred years, he had not been bested at swords. Even the famed Frellyx had proved more diversion than danger, but now, even with the image of dead Cyhari by his side, Kejuro was not only proving his better, but pressing his advantage like one who had long trained for this day. Indeed, knowing he would lead the High Tzhurarh's Cerund knights on this raid, no doubt he had trained long and hard, coiling violence in his pent-up muscles and passions.
"Run!" yelled Azuri. "Get Otoka!"
"Yes, go get your master, ugly thing." At Kejuro's sneer, Azuri was remorseful for thinking of her likewise.
"Cyhari-thing" reflected poorly not only on the monster, but his daughter, and made his thoughts easily caricatured by the High Tzhurarkh's goon, who had, with "ugly thing," one-upped Azuri's moronic nickname for her, whose only crime was being an unwilling knockoff, and whose only ambition was living up to copied memories. "I've come such a long way. Save me the effort of tracking him down, and bring him to his death. Then, abomination, I would very much appreciate you baring your neck for my blade." As he strutted in a half-circle around them, he wagged his blade to underscore his spite. "What are you, anyway, you motley, piebald thing? Giant, elf, or cow? While I see the family resemblance"--his eyes flashed darkly to Azuri--"what did he have, that mothered such a mongrel. doomed to die in ignorance and darkness, for if you don't know what you are, how can you know anything..."
When his sword swept wide not in sarcastic emphasis, but from the heavy book flung at the blade, his mouth kept running until the overlong, brutally unfunny joke was broken off, or rather, shattered, as Azuri's heavy hand, nearly the size of Kejuro's head, slammed so hard into his face, that it must have shattered and rattled his swordmastery along with his mangled teeth and jumbled words, for he so labored to raise his sword that it was easily turned by Azuri's thrust, which pinned him to the library wall.
As the elves recovered from their shock, they advanced on Azuri and Cyhari with swords presented.
"Run, you idiot!" Clasping Cyhari's wrist in his quivering, numb, blood-wet grip, Azuri dragged her down the corridor. "If you won't listen to me, heed the geas!" The same geas which now pulled them sprinting down the hall.
As they jogged, his anxieties were swamped by resentment for this creature that supplanted his daughter. Compared to the panting, labored breathing of his gigantified lungs, her cool, calm loping was so fluid that she seemed poured from a jug. Her limbs flexed not like skin, but a supple fabric, and when her sweat wafted over him, his gorge rose, for it was cloyingly sweet.
As they bolted down the corridor, the elves whistled up sparking darts of eldritch fire which jangled like bells, puffed into musical bursts when they grazed the wall, and, where one scored a spiral arc along Azuri's forearm, tinkled melodiously as his charred skin peeled.
Even as he groaned, he grit his teeth, pinched the next flaming missile in his fingertips, and whipped it back to cleave the ribs of the lead elf, who sprawled, rolled, and knocked down three more.
Only afterward did he wonder. While he had never handled magical flame, it felt not only right, but fitting, as if the fire knew his hands like a hound or falcon, and changed its loyalties to Azuri in the heat of the moment. Then all thoughts of magical aptitude, as well as every other speculation, dwindled to a fine mist, pounded through by his belabored breathing and jogging step.
When the elves did not resume their chase, Cyhari and Azuri raced up a spiral stair, climbed to the next floor, and dropped to a fast walk. As the tempo of his breath fell from raging wind to mellow breeze, and as his pulse cooled, he began to also question, what of the geas? What had cracked the whip on their sprint, then goaded them into battle, but his own will?
Not only were his limbs once more his own, but the taut geas-strings--which not only snapped his attention from one inane thing to another, reordering his priorities to match Otoka's, but reined in any negative thought of that master sorcerer--had gone from tense to supple in their flight, only to go slack as they caught their breath.
"Did you feel that?"
"Yes," she said. "What does he mean by freeing us?"
"Why free an asset as Five Worlds go to war? Fleeing from Nymerea would bode well for us, but not so much for the sorcerer."
"You think Otoka dead."
"I wish my thoughts were so mighty, given how he abused the corpse of my daughter. No offense." Cyhari's scowl crumpled as she mirrored Azuri's wry but sad smile. Having practiced that smile long and hard, then brandished it in negotiations with failed friends and disheartened enemies, the old diplomat knew its effectiveness in bringing discouraged opponents to his side. "But even being able to entertain such malice toward Otoka signifies that he is no longer the Wise, but the dead."
"Then why do I feel even more responsible for Otoka now?"
Seeing the worry writ into her face, Azuri looked away. "You're either a better facsimile than I credited him for, or more alive than I care to admit, creature."
"What do you mean?"
"While much in life is inevitable, nothing's urgent but our instincts and our moral sense. The former makes you a living being, an animal, while the latter makes you a person."
"Either of which you are loath to admit where I am concerned," she said cooly. "I understand your dilemma, father."
"Don't--" When Azuri scowled, reached for the sanctum door, and shoved it wide, jetting lights of Alfyrian Fire, still flaring in the windows, flashed in the dark room. "If you must call me father, choose a more ironic tone. That's how she would have said it."
"I begin to see your point of view."
"You do?"
"Even sarcasm is a judgment, and exercises the moral sense. Devoid of this moral coloration, few of Cyhari's rememberances make sense. My memories are clear and without judgment, toneless events and images that I struggle to comprehend. If you are right, I am not yet a person, but a patchwork animal."
"Perhaps it only takes practice." Even as he denied it to himself, it pained him to admit this to the creature. If she had a soul, where was his daughter? Was she alive and perplexed by by the puzzle made of her corpse, or was she dead, but submerged in this abhorrent new life? In any case, Cyhari could not be resting.
Otoka's sanctum was a temple to his personality, strewn with the trophies of victories won by wisdom. "Look around us, creature. All these effects, strewn in unironic self-worship. Your maker was not only too powerful to develop a moral sense. but too wise to know judgment. Even your creator is only a kind of animal, who fattens his power by feeding his mighty instincts."
Along the far wall ran a dark tapesty, so thin that the breeze kicking through the door stirred ripples in the weave, puffing dark, moldy dust in the chamber.
"He's not here."
"He's only just left." When Azuri gave the tapestry a harsh tug, it spilled into a heap, filling the room with the reek of moldy fabric and shining dust. The effulgent grey dust cloud peaked to silver on the ceiling, but surged a bright blue nimbus around the Doorway.
"Is it safe?"
Cyhari had never passed through a Doorway. While this ignorance was not her, it was definitely her echo, and a lump in his throat stopped his answer. Even an echo of his daughter asking him to keep her safe could reach his heart, and stop him in his tracks. While his guilt was a light burden to bear, as a rein, it bit harder than the geas. "No."
"No?" She glanced toward the Doorway, furrowed her brow, then turned back toward Azuri. "How then is he wise?"
"He is clever, which to most seems the same thing. With death coming, it is also clever to risk the Doorway."
"While the wise trust nothing, the clever gamble on everything."
Now she quoted Tzupontila. "An apt quotation. If only we had the opportunity to discuss it."
"You still do." Her voice faltered. "If only with her shadow."
"As my heartache becomes tender, and my nostalgia becomes fond, I may be more interested. For now, our future follows the Doorway."
"I will brave it first."
"Not on your life." Azuri steeled himself. "Your gigantification may vanish on stepping through, you know."
"I could renew it now."
"It would be in vain, for The Doorway banishes all enchantments, so its passengers arrive on the other side in truth."
The gray gleam rippled, cloven by a grayer hand, so gray the nearly translucent flesh shone with ice blue veins.
Azuri laid his hand on Cyhari's shoulder, then stepped back, folding her to his chest.
The stranger's teetering step seemed to splinter the moment. After his whisper dimmed the Doorway, he toppled to the floor and curled to a shriveling husk, which raveled until as brittle and papery as a wasp's nest. While this could no longer be called a person, but only the remains of one, somehow a breath rattled in this cadaverous figure.
Deep in shadows, Azuri's eyes went first to Otoka's white, ashen face, not the long, midnight blue cloak that muted who crouched over the still wizard. When the terror rippled through him, his bones shook like jelly, and his blood gelled like ice. Having backed up against Cyhari, Azuri raised his sword.
When Eurilda half-turned, her right eye raked Azuri. While her cloak flowed over her hands,
Azuri guessed they held weapons either sharp in the mortal sense, or pointing toward her dark purpose.