Fate’s Pawn

There was an awkward moment after he was gone where no one seemed to know what to do next. So Raziel spoke up.

"Alright. I'm gonna go have a look around," Raziel said.

"Is... that a good idea?" Miles asked.

"Is it a bad one?"

"Are you going to do it anyway?"

"Yeah."

"Ugh. You go ahead. I'm gonna wait here for Hoeru to get back."

"Alright. Keira? Roland?"

Keira sighed and gave a 'I don't have anything better to do' shrug. Roland just nodded and Raziel started walking towards the nearest building. Now that he was looking around, it was hard not to notice just how vibrant and green the grass inside the fort was. It felt like if he looked closely he'd be able to see the vines crawling further up the buildings as they grew. All of the plants seemed not just to be living but thriving.

There was a sound as well, just at the edge of perception even once he noticed it. It was a gentle hum, something that set Raziel at ease. It grew stronger as they moved towards the center of the fort.

"Do you guys hear that?" he asked.

"The hum?" Keira asked.

"Yeah. What is that?"

"I think it's some kind of magic. Those marks on the building probably have something to do with it."

"Marks?" Raziel asked and looked closer at the outer wall of the building they'd come to. He hadn't noticed because of the vines covering the walls, but there were patterns cut into the stone walls of the building. Some of them were faded, but the vines seemed to have grown into the indentions, perhaps protecting them from wear somehow. The marks were swooping patterns that made Raziel think of clouds and rain. The grooves seemed to be directed downward, growing thinner and sharper near the ground.

"Weird," Raziel said, reaching for his father's book and flipping it open. He was fairly sure he'd seen these marks drawn somewhere and, after a moment's searching, he confirmed it. There was a small drawing, not terribly detailed and crammed into a page with a lot of notes that Raziel was sure were about another place much further north. Squeezed down into the very bottom corner were a couple words that did seem related though.

Battery? Power source? Ask Donovan.

Raziel wondered who Donovan was. There were a lot of names like that in his father's book. Names of people he'd known, worked with. Raziel wished he knew more of them. His grandfather was the only one that might know, but talking to him about Azariel was always difficult at best. Talking about his father's book, even more so.

Raziel shook his head to clear it. Now wasn't the time to think about Duriel. He noticed the other two were looking at him. It was always hard to decipher Roland's looks, but Raziel thought he saw sadness in his friend's eyes. Keira, on the other hand, looked somewhere between confused and interested by the sight of the book. That made Raziel uncomfortable. She was yet another person who knew about the book now. Yet another person who might ask questions about it.

He put the book back into his pocket and tried to look nonchalant about it. They'd come to a spot near the door to the building. Well, the doorway. There was no door. Just an empty section of stone the right size and shape for a door. Raziel wondered if there had been one once or if it had been made that way intentionally. It was dark inside. He could still feel Keira's eyes on him.

"Well, I'm gonna go in," Raziel said suddenly, stepping towards the door.

"Wait! You don't know what could—" Keira started, but Raziel was already past the doorway. The moment he stepped on the first stone of the floor, he felt something seem to connect to him. It was a little like stepping from the shade into the sun, energy tingling all up and down Raziel's skin.

Lights bloomed in the darkness all along the walls of the suddenly revealed entry room and hall beyond. The light came from glass orbs set into the walls at regular intervals. Each lamp contained a steady blue flame.

"See?" Raziel said. "Nothing bad."

"That could have been a trap."

"But it wasn't, so it's fine."

Keira made a frustrated growling sound, but Raziel saw a slight smile appear on Roland's face. Raziel headed towards the hall and only a moment or two later heard Keira and Roland's footsteps behind him. The first thing he noticed once his eyes adjusted to the dimmer light inside was that the walls were also covered in patterns. These were engraved, but the lines were even finer, and the pattern was different from outside. Rather than the whorls of the outside, this pattern was one of boxes, and boxes within boxes. The smallest that Raziel could make out would have fit inside a dewdrop, but together they formed shapes that covered the whole wall at once.

The second thing that he noticed was that the light was changing. The color of the torches shifted from a darker blue to a lighter blue, nearly white. But something else dragged his attention away from the light.

"Do you guys hear that?" Raziel asked, once he noticed the humming sound that had subtly grown as he'd entered the building.

"I feel that," Roland said, and Raziel realized that he felt it too, a deep vibration in his chest.

Raziel turned to give Roland an acknowledging nod and saw that Keira was heading into the hall. He started to follow her, but noticed that as she moved further away the quality of the torchlight was beginning to change again. The color of the torches near her were changing to something darker. Blue like the color of the sky at dusk. Further, Raziel noticed that the color in the main room where he and Roland stood had changed as well, becoming something closer to indigo.

"What's going on?" Raziel said pointing to the torches. Roland paused momentarily before his eyebrows raised as he understood.

"It's connecting to our auras to light the lamps," Keira said from further in the hall. "It's not taking much energy from us. Not nearly enough to light all these lamps at once or you'd definitely feel it. Just enough to complete the circuit."

"Our auras?"

"Your internal magic," Roland supplied.

"Oh. Well, where's the rest of the energy coming from then?"

Roland shrugged.

"Don't know," Keira answered. "Could be a battery somewhere in here or it might be pulling it from the outside. I think the only reason it's taking any from us is so there's only light where we are. Sort of a power saving thing. It's very efficient. I bet Miles will want to look at it as soon as we tell him about it."

"You can do that?" Raziel asked, flabbergasted.

"You can do just about anything with the right symbols, if you have the correct calculations and geometry. And enough power. Something like this would be really expensive and a pain to build. Everything has to be just right. I'm surprised you didn't know. Isn't that book you've got about this place or something?"

"Or something," Raziel said, reticent. He moved to follow her though. "Dad was sort of an archeologist."

"How is someone 'sort of' an archeologist?" Keira asked. They had walked through most of the hall without stepping into any of the rooms, though they checked each as they went. They seemed to be dormitory rooms with old beds and a few pieces of dust-covered furniture. Raziel had caught up to walk beside Keira as they went. The doorways on either side of them had a filmy, almost translucent fabric covering the opening. Raziel pushed through one at random. It was so light that it felt like someone had woven spider webs into cloth.

Her question had been more rhetorical, but he still felt a need to answer it. That feeling warred with his normal secretive attitude towards his father's work. But he also found that he wanted to talk about his father. He'd kept his father's thoughts to himself for so long that they were begging to be let free. Besides he didn't have to tell her everything.

"People in the universities didn't like him. They thought he was crazy because of some of the things he believed. He had to sell a lot of the artifacts he found and give others away to patrons to finance his trips. A lot of the scholars he dealt with believed those things should have been put in a museum instead, so that didn't earn him any more friends."

The room looked like it was a dining room of some kind with a long wooden table surrounded by chairs and rows of cabinets that, on inspection, held wooden cups and bowls. Raziel absently brushed the dust from one such bowl with his good hand as he talked.

"You," Keira started, hesitating just a little, "you keep saying 'was'?"

Raziel didn't answer at first. The wood of the bowl felt solid and smooth beneath his hand. When he finally did answer, he tried to keep the old pain out of his voice.

"He disappeared a long time ago. Him and Mom. It's why I live with my grandfather at the mansion."

"Oh."

Raziel risked a quick glance at her. She was looking at him differently, more intently than she ever had before. He smiled awkwardly and looked away.

"It was a long time ago," Raziel said, proud that his voice stayed steady as he set the bowl down and walked towards the door.

Roland had stayed outside the room. When Raziel came out to stand near him, he put a hand on Raziel's shoulder. There was no pity on his face, but there was a little shared sadness. Raziel gave him a smile and a grateful nod and continued down the hall.

At the far end he found a staircase. At the top of the stairs was a room with rows of pews and a podium at the far end. Once they were all in the room, the torchlight turned from Keira's dusky blue to something that almost approximated normal daylight. The entire room—floor, walls, and ceiling—had been painted so that it looked like they were standing out in an open field. Some optical or maybe magical trick made it appear as though the ground was covered in grass and Raziel had trouble telling exactly where the walls were. The illusion the painting created made it seem like the room extended out to the far horizon.

Roland walked down the aisle while Raziel gawked. Roland stood looking at the far wall beyond the podium, his head cocked just slightly. Raziel moved to join him.

"What is it?"

"The clouds. Do you see anything in them?"

Raziel looked for a long moment, shapes in the clouds momentarily resolving here and there into the different objects, but he didn't think that Roland was talking about the turtle or the bear that he saw. After a minute or two of looking, during which he heard Keira walking about the room but not coming to join them, Raziel was about to shake his head and tell Roland no. Then he saw the eyes.

Ever so subtly the artist had woven a pair of dragons in amongst the clouds. The lines were so faint that their forms were mostly suggested by the intermittent clouds that gathered about their bodies and wings. They were massive and intertwined, spreading out. Once Raziel knew what to look for, he saw that their bodies were on every wall as well as the ceiling. It was difficult to pick out where one began and the other ended. Only their eyes were clear. They were also blue, and so they were easy to miss at first. But once Raziel caught the slightly different shade that marked them, it was difficult to pull his eyes away. The creatures were looking at one another, and subtle lightning sparked between them. They didn't look malevolent, but they were terrible creatures.

In church they said everything in the physical universe had been created by twelve dragons, six mated pairs that each held authority over a portion of reality. Sun, Moon, and Stars, Land, Sea, and Sky; there was a King and Queen for each. Their children had control over smaller portions of their dominion, lords and ladies of this mountain or that river. Raziel didn't think that this could be anything other than the King and Queen of the Sky themselves.

"Is this place some kind of dragon cult?" Keira asked having come over to see what they were looking at. Roland shrugged, gave the place one more look around, and began to head back towards the stairs.

"Where are you going?"

"To ask Miles what he thinks."

"Do you want us to come with you?"

"Up to you."

Raziel looked at Keira, and she seemed to think it over for a moment before going as well. Raziel walked with them out of the building, pulling his father's book from a pocket as he went. The light was too dim to read in the building, but once they were outside Raziel began to flip through pages. Keira saw what he was doing and lingered with him while Roland moved on. He found the small diagram of the fort his father had drawn. The four buildings had lines attached to them that led to labels. Raziel guessed that the one labeled "Sky" was the one they stood next to. The one directly across from them was labeled "Birth" while the other two were labeled "Union" and "Capture." The tower was labeled "Prison."

Raziel flipped to the next page which held the picture of the human-like creature with grass in place of hair. Azariel had managed to capture a look of curiosity on it. The drawing took up most of the page, though it shared some space with a picture of an egg on a stand. The rest of the page had a long note scrawled around it that read,

The fort is certainly home to something. Nearly everyone has had some kind of encounter, but I think that I am the only one who's spoken to the little creature which, as far as I can tell, lives in the tower. It has neatly and completely avoided the rest of us, and given the grace with which it moves I doubt it has been particularly difficult. I believe that the strange room we found at the top of the tower is where it makes its home. I am not sure why it allowed me to speak with it but not the others. It seems very fond of books and showed interest in my journal. It is a kind creature, if skittish. If I can befriend it, perhaps it can tell me more about this place.

As he poured over the words, reading them again twice over to make sure he didn't miss anything, an echo of old pain came back to him. But at the same time, he hadn't felt this close to his father since the earliest times he'd found the courage to open the book after his disappearance.

Raziel didn't say anything, but he looked up at the tower and was struck with the sudden need to see the "strange room" his father had referred to. He was curious about the labels given to the other three buildings but that could wait. He had to know if the spirit his father had referred to still lived there. He didn't say a word. He just strode forward, drawn like iron to a magnet.

"Raziel?" Keira asked behind him. She'd been looking over his shoulder and was only a foot or so away, but Raziel almost didn't hear her. He even thought he answered, but no words actually left his mouth. After a moment, he was running.

The tower was very tall, but it had a different look to it than the rest of the buildings. Even as it reached up into the sky, it seemed somehow oriented downward like an arrow sticking out of a man's chest. Once again, Raziel saw engravings on the stone of the tower. These too seemed to run downward, to pour into the earth or whatever else might be beneath. These buildings weren't constructed the way that Raziel thought of buildings being put together. They weren't put together like pieces of a puzzle to craft something. They had been wrought out of single pieces of stone.

Like the buildings, the tower had no door, just a doorway. Raziel stepped in expecting lights to appear as they had in the other building. They didn't. It was dark inside, dark as night.

"Raziel! Where are you going?" Keira said, grabbing his shoulder and turning him to face her. It suddenly came to him that she had been talking to him. He hadn't been intentionally ignoring her. It had just sort of happened.

"Up, I think," he said, finally.

"Up? This.... This is a bad idea. We should wait for Roland or Miles. Or better yet, not go in at all."

"Okay. You wait here then," Raziel said, completely misunderstanding her. He stepped in further as his eyes began to adjust to the dim light. To one side, he saw a set of stairs, leading up further into the dark. He moved towards them. Keira let out a frustrated growl and followed him.

The darkness swallowed them. They walked with careful steps, testing each stair before continuing. The staircase spiraled upward, and as they left the last traces of light, Raziel's good hand quested out searching for the wall to steady himself and found Keira's hand instead. She tensed when he first touched her, but she held onto him. They traveled upward for what seemed like hours, the only sounds in the dark their breathing and their footfalls. After a while, Raziel began to wonder if they'd ever see the top of the stairs. It seemed the darkness had taken them and would be unwilling to give them back.

Tension built slowly as they blindly felt their way forward. He wanted to cut it by saying something, but he couldn't think of anything to say. And worse, he couldn't say anything because he was beginning to think that he was hearing more than just their two sets of feet in the darkness. That something else was there with them. The spirit? Was it following them? Could it see them? He wondered what Keira was thinking, if she'd read that part. Her hand felt surprisingly soft in his. He hoped his palm wasn't sweaty.

At last, up ahead he saw a bit of sunlight seeming to peek in from under what looked like a doorway. Raziel and Keira both sped up a little, wanting to escape the dark. At the top of the stairs there was a door, an actual wooden door with a knob and a keyhole. Raziel had to let go of Keira's hand to try it, though he felt reluctant to do so. For a moment he felt sure that the door would be locked and something would come rushing up at them from behind, pinning them against the door before tearing into them.

But the door opened, and Raziel's light-starved eyes were blinded by light coming in through windows. He blinked and stepped forward while Keira did the same, both of them eager to be out of the dark. They found themselves in what might have been a museum to the odds and ends drawer that seemed to exist in every house. There were shelves with rows of forks, knives, and spoons. Bits of string sat in carefully ordered bundles, sorted by color. There were wine corks, rags, a deck of cards, bowls, needles, a dozen shirts with pairs of pants, thirteen shoes in a corner, rings and necklaces hanging from lines strung across the ceiling. Three pairs of glasses, one missing the lenses, the lenses of a second cracked and the frame badly bent, the third on a tiny pillow in pristine condition. A set of yellowed dentures sat near a toothbrush. Knick-knacks of every kind were sorted and placed with extreme care throughout the room.

And the books. The walls were covered in books. They were not haphazardly or carelessly placed. Each seemed settled in a spot where it would be comfortable, where it was meant to be from the moment it had been created. Only one book seemed out of place. It sat open on the table at the center of the room as though someone had been reading it just a moment before.

The room was lit by several large windows that Raziel was surprised he hadn't seen from below as well as a skylight that took up most of the ceiling. The windows gave the room an amber tint. After the total darkness of the stairwell, it was both beautiful and confusing.

Raziel and Keira cautiously stepped in. He moved to the table to look at the book while she moved around the room, examining the vast array of personal debris. The book was old, the pages yellowed, the illustrations faded. It seemed to be a primer on etiquette. There were illustrations that took up about a third of each page. One side had step-by-step instructions for how to properly bow. The other was the same but for curtsying.

"Alright, this definitely qualifies for strange," Keira said. Raziel looked to where she stood. Over in a corner of the room there was a pile of rags with what looked like a tapestry draped over them.

"Is that a bed?"

"I think so."

The nook also had a ladder that led up to an open trapdoor. Sunlight streamed down from the opening, but something else had drawn Raziel's eye. He had to squint to realize what it was. Someone was looking in at him from beneath a brown cloak.

Raziel jumped in shock, and the face slipped out of sight. He thought he saw a flash of green in its hair. Raziel jumped for the ladder.

"Raz?" Keira said. He didn't answer, afraid of spooking the spirit or whatever it was. A moment later he heard her following him up. As soon as his head was above the lip, he looked around.

There was no one to be seen. Raziel climbed the rest of the way out and looked around. There was nothing but a bare stone roof and the parapet. Raziel expected to hear wind, if anything but something else filled the air.

"Is there something up there?" Keira asked, still coming up the ladder.

"I guess not. Do you hear that?"

The noise here was different from down near the buildings. Where that had been a gentle hum, this was almost a low sigh. It reminded Raziel of water going down a drain. He wondered if it had anything to do with the markings on the roof of the tower. They were almost the same as the ones on the outside of the other buildings, but they were inlaid with a silvery metal.

As weird as the sound was, he had to admit that the view from the top of the tower was stunning. The trees rolled away from him in every direction, the way he imagined waves did with a boat in the middle of the ocean. Far off he could see the cliff side where Peritura stood, the sky ships flying to the dock like birds coming to roost. The sky spread out all around them. The sun shone down bright and clear, and Raziel saw two moons. The deep red moon was like an ember hanging in the sky, and the gold moon in its crescent phase looked like an eye beginning to open.

Raziel opened his father's book again and began to leaf through it, wondering if there would be anything else about the fort. He searched through the pages near the one with the picture of the face, but nothing seemed to correspond to anything he'd seen.

"Find anything?" Keira asked when Raziel returned the book to his pocket. She had been looking out at the scenery, enjoying the view. Raziel shook his head and looked out as well. He heard a noise that sounded like a voice on the wind and looked down to see Miles and Roland staring up at them. They were waving for them to come back down. Raziel thought there was urgency to the way Miles was waving.

"Well, I guess there's not much reason to stay up here besides the view," Keira said, though she sounded a bit regretful about leaving. She cast one more look out at the forest with a wistful smile on her face Raziel had never seen there before.

"No, I guess not," he said, wishing he could think of an excuse to stay. They climbed down and walked into the dark. Raziel wanted to take her hand again, but they were on opposite sides and he'd have to do it with his hurt hand. It wasn't as painful as he thought it should be, but it still seemed like a bad idea.

When he finally began to see light again, he knew they were close to the end of the stairs, but Keira's pensive silence still had Raziel on edge. At the bottom he saw Miles looking into the tower but pointedly keeping himself from going over the threshold of the door.

"Oh thank God. What were you two thinking going into the building? I told you there could be traps when we got here, Keira. I can see Raz just walking in, but I would've thought you had more sense," he said. Raziel winced. Keira glared and Miles shut his mouth.

"Why'd you call us down, Miles?" she said, irritation clear in her voice.

"Hoeru says we should get moving. He's waiting at the gate."

Raziel tried to think of some excuse to stay but came up empty. There was no way they'd be getting back without Hoeru, and it was entirely possible that, after the eggbeast incident, they wouldn't be able to even get out of the city much less here, again. And he hadn't even found the spirit. He walked slowly in the direction of the door, looking down as he tried desperately to think of something to keep them there, when he noticed something he'd missed before.

The light from the door only let him see a little, but there was a pattern on the floor. Where everything else he'd seen had been engraved, this seemed to be some kind of enamel on the stone. What caught his eye was a part of a circle with complex geometric patterns inside. Raziel reached into his pocket once again, pulling out his father's book and looking for a certain page.

"Raz? What are you doing?" Miles asked, but Raziel was too entranced by what he was seeing to answer.

His father had recreated the pattern as best he could. There was something written on the page, but in the dim light, Raziel couldn't quite make it out. He walked forward, squinting into the dark, alternating between looking at the circle on the ground and the one in the book. Distantly he heard a sharp intake of breath from behind him as he stepped closer to the circle and suddenly a lot of things happened all at once.

There was a pounding of feet behind him. He felt something in the ground buzz, making the foot he'd just put down feel like it was going to sleep. There was a sharp, clean smell suddenly in the air, and he felt the hair stand up on his arms. Something caught the back of his shirt and dragged him off his feet with a jerk. His father's book slipped out of his hand.

There was a ringing crack in the air and a horrible blue-white flash. Raziel hit the ground and screamed as his hurt hand smacked the stone. He was blind and deaf, but he strained trying to get back up, trying to see the book. Whatever had grabbed him was still pulling him back, and after a moment he realized it was Miles and that he was shouting.

"Raz! Stop it!"

Raziel finally stopped his frenzied struggle, but still he strained to see into the dark, to see what had happened to the book.

"Miles? Raziel? What happened?" Keira's voice asked.

"The book! Where's the book!?" Raziel shouted frantically.

"It's fine, Raz, it's right—" Keira started to say, but then the circle began to glow with the same blazing blue-white light that had flashed a moment ago. Raziel caught sight of the book lying in the circle a foot or so from the center. As he watched, there was a humming sound and the book began to come apart, slices of it drifting up like leaves caught in a miniature cyclone. Raziel's eyes went wide. He didn't scream again. He couldn't make a sound as the shreds of paper and binding spun faster, taking on the blue-white light, and disappeared.