Will Wight - Of Dawn and Darkness

“You told them the truth?” Calder asked, astonished. “You told your mother that you intended to run off with me, after I was booted out of the Blackwatch and destroyed an Imperial prison?”

“That wouldn’t bother my mother,” she said dryly. “She doesn’t have the brightest view of the Empire. To her, that made you sound roguish.”

Calder resolved to meet Jerri’s mother.

“Besides,” Jerri continued, “I didn’t say that I’d ‘run off’ with you. That would have a different implication altogether, wouldn’t it?”

She smiled at him and rested a hand on his arm, and his pulse picked up.

At that moment, Andel cleared his throat from the half-open door.

Calder spun to face him. The Imperial officer was standing with his hat in one hand and the door in the other. Sweat rolled down his face, and he fanned himself with the wide brim of his hat. His suit, usually pristine white, was damp with patches of sweat.

Still, he showed no expression. “We have a situation on deck, Marten. You should come take a look.”

The more decisions Andel made for Calder, the tighter his authority would stick. Calder had to put a stop to that now. “I’ll come when I’ve finished here, Andel.”

“Suit yourself,” Andel said. “You’ve got about ten minutes before the ship burns down around you. Spend it however you’d like.”

He bowed his way out, pulling the door shut behind him.

Calder shared a look with Jerri. It was muggy and warm in the cabin, but not oppressively hot. Certainly nothing that suggested a fire.

Andel had been sweating.

In its cage, Shuffles began to laugh. It was covered up by a blanket, under which it slept most of the day, but it woke whenever danger was imminent. Its chuckles were deep and rich, the laughter of a cruel giant.

Together, Jerri and Calder rushed up onto the deck.

More than a month into the Aion, Calder had seen things he would never have imagined back at home. A finned monstrosity just beneath the waves, weaving its careful way around the Lyathatan, raising its spiky mouth above the water for long enough to hiss spitefully. A storm during which water rained up from the ocean and into thirsty clouds. An island that slid away, shy, whenever their ship got too close.

So when he opened the door to a faceful of oven-hot sunlight as bright as an alchemical flare, Calder felt a fresh round of familiar panic. Maybe this time, the Aion was revealing its full fury, and they would finally confront the wrath of something ancient and inhuman.

Jerri gasped next to him, clutching his arm with a hand edged in spidery tattoos. At her touch, he turned his gaze to the sky.

A constellation of flames danced over the ship, just out of reach of the mast, too bright and white to look like ordinary fire. They weren’t traditional tongues of flame, either. Pyramids of fire drifted in stately laps overhead, spinning around cubes, spheres, twisted nests, and undulating snakes. This fire could take on any shape, it seemed, except the natural.

Calder stared for a few seconds before he noticed the pattern. The bright, geometric clouds of fire were not moving randomly, but cycling in some complex formation that kept them orbiting the ship. As The Testament moved, the flames followed effortlessly.

Calder extended his senses, Reading. He caught a whiff of Intent from the fire—alien, distant, curious, and almost joyful—but most of his attention was focused on the ship.

A ship did not experience emotions like a human being, not even an Awakened ship. Its understanding was slow and limited, more a sense of purpose than any actual thought.

But as far as it could, The Testament panicked. It did not like fire. Taut lines suddenly felt as though they quivered with tension, the seamless deck frozen in panic instead of calm and placid.

The ship wanted, more than anything, for Calder to make the fire go away.

In the cage, the prisoner—Urzaia—lay on his back with his arms folded under his head, apparently asleep. Eight, the grim man with the shield strapped to his back, alternated his gaze between Urzaia and the lights overhead. One-eyed Nine had stripped to the waist, his scarred back glistening with sweat, and he stood with his head tilted up to face the sky.

“Is this usual for the Aion, Navigator?” Nine called back, only seconds after Calder stepped out of the door.

Over the past few weeks, the Champions had learned the precise extent of Calder’s inexperience. Namely, that he knew next to nothing about the Aion Sea. Eight seemed to trust that they would get where they were going, or else he didn’t care where they ended up so long as Urzaia never escaped. But Nine blatantly pretended that Calder was an expert Navigator, asking his opinion on weather patterns or the mysterious behavior of the haunted sea.

The man may have been mocking him, but Calder got the impression that Nine was trying to extend him a measure of respect. To treat him as the man he would someday become, perhaps. It still made situations like this uncomfortable.

“The sea is full of surprises,” Calder responded. He shot a glance over at Andel, but the man wasn’t laughing; he was staring straight at the deadly fires.

Nine grunted, raising a hand to shade his eyes as one of the shapes dipped close to his face. He didn’t flinch back from the heat, as Calder would have done. Perhaps Champions couldn’t be burned.

Nine’s braids swayed as he shook his head. “What do you think, Eight?”

“I’m watching the prisoner,” Eight responded shortly.

“Fine,” Nine said, “I’ll take a turn, but we run into some sort of Elder-spawned sea serpent later, it’s yours.”

Eight said nothing. He continued standing with his arms folded, shield on his back, looking between Urzaia and the fire in the sky as though he thought his prisoner had engineered this somehow, as part of an escape attempt.

For his part, Urzaia began to snore.

Nine lowered one hand to pull the hammer from his belt, raising the other hand. He closed his eye for a moment, smiling a little.

And the hammer changed.

After only an instant, the Champion held more than just a tiny claw hammer. The steel seemed to stretch and swell, forming a blunt head of steel, its hilt becoming a shaft of solid shadow. In half a second, it was the size of a sledgehammer. He didn’t raise the weapon, but left its head leaning against the deck.

That was impossible. No one fully understood Awakening or the powers of a Soulbound, but there were a few rules. For one thing, an Awakened object changed shape only once: during the Awakening process. Most Readers believed that the phenomenon had to do with the physical structure changing to align more closely with the invested Intent, but regardless, the Awakened object could not be reshaped afterwards. A claw hammer couldn’t become a giant weapon of war any more than any hammer could spontaneously grow in a carpenter’s hands. It was ridiculous, the kind of mysterious ‘magic’ that came from folk tales.

Yet if anyone could do the impossible, it ought to be the Champions.

Jerri’s grip tightened on his arm, urging him to explain. “He shouldn’t be able to do that,” Calder said.

She shook her head. “Not that. Look.” She nodded up at the geometric flames above the ship.

The grand orbital procession had practically frozen, each shape simply spinning in place instead of dancing and weaving around one another. The lights sat anchored, as though waiting.

The Intent in the air sharpened, like one giant, invisible eye had turned all of its scrutiny onto the Champion called Nine.

“He’s drawn its attention,” Calder said, fear bleeding into his voice.

Jerri managed to frown at him in confusion without taking her eyes from the spectacle in front of her. “Attention? Attention of what?”