In the many sols after the passing of Octavus and the reign of his son Valerus Prodius Marcellus, the sons of his house ruled from marble courts that rose in Tolanii splendor, while the Kapii kings still held their own thrones along the western coasts. Between their realms, rivers bore fleets heavy with tribute; markets swelled with the fruits of distant harvests; the speech of the Marcellii carried weight in every hall where treaties were sealed.
Yet beneath the banners of both crowns, unrest stirred in the deep places of men’s hearts.
Across the sea, upon the continent of Norrem and in the halls of the Kingdom of Larian’s treasury, there served a young noble of fine bearing and dangerous mind, Aldomhir Ormentus Van Daggerlad. He was a man of sharp proportion and of eyes that measured every soul as one might weigh coin or blade. His ascent had been swifter than most men could reckon, for he wove alliances with precision, binding merchants, ministers, and even foreign envoys into the cloth of his will. Whence he spoke, gold shifted hands; whence he lingered, secrets were unearthed.
Though his name was still spoken with formality, there was a gathering sense that the pulse of the treasury beat to his hand alone. He weighed each petition with the same careful poise he gave to coin and steel, as if searching for the hidden weakness that would yield the greater gain.
This habit, some said, had been with him since boyhood.
On an Orrim’s Day long past, when Aldomhir had seen only seven summers, his father Dunahmir was helping to raise the stage for the yearly play. A box of rusted fittings split, and a jagged edge scored his arm the length of a hand. The wound was shallow, yet the blood ran freely. Aldomhir had never before seen his father bleed. Until that day, he had thought Dunahmir a pillar beyond harm. The sight planted in him a lesson he would carry into every bargain and stratagem: that every fortress has a seam, and every man will yield when cut in the right place. And that the deadliest monsters are those who smile as they slide in the knife.
Far from this court, other powers moved.
Along the riverwards and in the harbors of the east, rumors rose of a wasting sickness among the Elves—those who drew closest to the Godstone in their craft and sustenance. Their hands, once steady over the runes of the Tongue, now trembled as their eyes bled crimson. In some cities, the afflicted were carried to the forests and left among the roots; in others, great fires rose as storehouses of grain were consumed to halt the unseen curse.
Through those stricken lands moved two bound in a higher purpose: the young Elf Îthaeviël, whose beauty bore the solemn light of the moon’s last watch, and Velunor, her Medjaib, a being of the Mother’s own breath. Together they stood in market squares where the dying lay, spoke words in the Tongue that stilled the raving of fevered minds, and struck down the plague’s servants who crept through the night to spread its reach. In the memory of those who beheld them, their passing was as the brief stilling of a tempest, though the storm ever gathered again beyond the hills.
In the courts of Tolanii and Kapii, the heralds yet proclaimed strength. Victories were counted abroad, and great houses vied for glory through festival. Yet in the private councils of Aldomhir’s closest agents, the Elves’ sickness was spoken of in another tongue—less as a calamity to be feared, and more as a lever that might tilt the crowns of kings.
And the kings of Kapitolus became his heart’s greatest desire.
Aldomhir’s Web
In those days, the crown of Larian shone upon the brow of Aldomhir, whose hand had once turned the ledgers of kings. He had entered the court as treasurer, a keeper of the realm’s tallies, where his voice seldom rose above the scratch of the clerk’s reed. His father’s farm lay in dust, its furrows unwatered by fortune, and his mother’s dowry had long sailed east with the creditors’ fleet. He had chosen a different inheritance and gathered it coin by coin: a debt erased for a whispered favor, a ship spared by a quiet warning, a forgotten bond drawn from the shadows of a guild vault.
Each kindness answered itself in time, each whisper shaped a key, each key opened a door that the proud believed closed.
His ascent from treasury to throne moved in silence. The old King of Larian leaned heavily upon his counsel, and Aldomhir lingered often in the royal chambers. Rumor swelled in the halls that the treasurer warmed more than the King’s confidence, and that a cup poured at the feast of midsummer bore the taste of bitter myrrh. By autumn’s turn, the banners of mourning hung above the sea walls, and Aldomhir sat on the throne. His first edicts flowed as wine upon the lips of merchants, yet beneath the scent of cedar ink, he began weaving a net of alliances and debts that would reach far beyond the Norrem coast.
Across the Byring Sea, in the kingdom of Tolanii, a soldier named Sallamacius was rising. He was Tolanii by birth, son to a cooper and a seamstress in the bustling streets of New Tyrus, a city built upon the ruins of the old Cypherian harbor. He had grown up on the tales of Octavus, the Paladin King, whose sword and spirit had bound shore to shore in the days of his fathers’ youth. Sallamacius had never seen that King, yet in the telling, he found his measure of honor. He entered the levies as a common spearman, endured the frost of frontier winters, and learned the art of patience in the long silences between alarms. Step by step, he earned command until his word carried the weight of the banners that followed him.
Rumor reached Aldomhir first as dry leaves across a threshold.
A caravan-master from the eastern marches spoke of Elven healers who once kept fever at bay, now falling beside their patients. A river factor swore that barges bearing Godstone filings arrived half-empty, their crews fearful of the dust that glimmered in their pay. A Visian buyer offered triple the price for common salt, pleading a city’s need to cleanse tainted stores. Aldomhir summoned scribes, and columns rose upon his tables that traced the shadow of sickness through the arteries of trade.
He sought councils where he might shape the greater tide. The Marcellian princes of Tolanii convened beneath a ceiling carved with the triumphs of Cypheria. Aldomhir stood apart, yet his voice carried. He spoke of markets trembling, of caravans altering course toward safer havens, of Elven trains that had ceased entirely. He offered a remedy robed in prudence: emergency tallies for grain, guarded roads under royal seal, and friendly tariffs to draw Kapii ships toward Tolanii quays.
From the marble hall, he went by night to a lesser fire. There, Sallamacius sat with captains of the frontier, weighing new commissions against the hunger of his levies. Aldomhir promised stipends for garrisons along the spine-roads and leave to choose his own lieutenants. He spoke of caravans needing watch and of Kapii merchants who would sail boldly if they spied Tolanii banners inland. Sallamacius accepted without flourish, for he favored deed over speech, and his assent held the force of iron.
Far away, Îthaeviël walked with Velunor through Valenekan cities, clinging to the forest’s edge and river mouths grown sour. In halls of mourning, she sang the measured lines of the Tongue, and the fevered drew steadier breath. In markets, she named the pride that drew trembling hands to Godstone in their fear, and she warned of the toll each rune demanded from the heart that traced it.
Letters rode from these places, some bearing gratitude, some bearing pleas, and a few carrying ashes, for their writers had gone to the grave before the ink grew dry. These passed Aldomhir’s desk among the ledgers, and his pen paused only to set them in the order of their use.
Weeks pressed toward high summer.
Prices rose as heat over stone. Temples poured lustrations at every gate. Physicians spoke of many certainties and yielded many beds. The Kapii kings looked both seaward for mastery and landward for tribute, their envoys crossing paths with tidings from Tolanii. Aldomhir’s maps, drawn with harbors widened in the mind and quays multiplied by promise, reached them beneath seals of silver. They received them with pageantry, for pageantry binds pride to purpose.
Meanwhile, Aldomhir’s household moved with quiet precision. He supped with guildmasters who counted fleets by memory and with widows who bore the signatures of men lost at sea. He sent oil to sanctuaries and epitaphs to certain houses. He praised rivals in the open hall and weighed them in private, each name placed upon a shelf for later taking.
Through all, Sallamacius marched. He raised palisades where roads converged, repaired stone where bridges sagged, and drilled farmers whose sons had learned the soldier’s stride. Rumor outpaced his banners: of raiders broken in the marches, of salt-hoarders scattered at the river’s mouth. The telling grew in the passing, yet all ended with the same truth—Sallamacius kept faith with those who kept the road.
Thus, the web drew tight.
The Elvish sickness bled along the old channels of trade. The Kapii courts smiled over their cups and sent scribes to their tallies. The Tolanii princes debated levy and boon, while Aldomhir prepared both. Îthaeviël gathered the faint to prayer, bearing light into houses shadowed by incense and grief. In every tally, coin gathered to the hand that guided the traffic. In every rumor, a soldier’s name grew heavier upon the tongue. The realm moved toward a single hour, and each servant of fate readied his chosen tool.
When the first granaries barred their gates before the harvest, the hall of princes called for counsel. The summons bore Aldomhir’s seal. He entered as a servant, as ever, yet the measure of the room had changed. Voices that once swelled with festival now bent themselves to the price of grain and the worth of a levy. His ledgers lay ready. His mirrors faced one another.
His web held.
The First Breach
The sickness crossed the Byring Sea in the hulls of merchantmen whose sails once gleamed white in the sun. They came from the eastern ports of Norrem bearing spices, iron, and silks, yet in the shadows of their holds lay cargo unmarked upon any manifest. Men staggered down the gangways with fever in their breath; some fell before they reached the quay. The dockward priests of Tyrus rang their handbells in warning, and incense thick as sea-mist billowed over the harbor stones.
In New Tyrus, Sallamacius walked the piers at dawn, measuring the fever’s path. He saw the faces of fishermen who dared not cast their nets, of stevedores whose hands trembled upon the rope, of widows who waited by the water for coffers of the dead. He gave orders to seal the outer wharves and to raise a cordon along the grain markets, though such orders drew curses from merchants who saw profit fleeing with the tide. Yet he bore their anger, for the roadward mind weighs peril above price.
Across the sea in Larian, Aldomhir sat in the high seat, receiving reports inked by trembling scribes. The fever’s toll in the outer provinces filled one scroll each dawn; by dusk, a second scroll joined the first. He read each by the light of a single lamp, his face composed as though the parchment carried merely the sum of a harvest. To his council, he spoke of fortifying the trade routes, yet his private messengers bore other words—quiet instructions to press advantage where the plague’s shadow fell heaviest.
By his design, ships bearing Larian colors sailed with guarded cargo into ports where the sickness had emptied the markets. They came as rescuers, offering grain at half the common levy, their hulls guarded by Larian marines. Yet each dock they claimed became a chain-link in a greater tether, binding harbors across Norrem to the Larian crown.
In the Kapii courts, kings debated in long chambers open to the sea-wind. Younger lords spoke of closing the coast entirely, lest the fever take root. Elders counseled alliance, arguing that a united fleet could turn back the shadow.
Messengers from Tolanii entered at the height of these debates, bearing letters penned in Aldomhir’s hand. The letters praised unity in the tongue of honor, yet within their folds, they named certain harbors already pledged to Larian oversight. Those who read with care saw the shape of a net, yet the net was cast in silk, and many let it close.
By midsummer, Îthaeviël and Velunor reached Kapitol itself, where the fever had begun to climb the marble steps of the old Cypherian palaces. They moved among the afflicted with the steadiness of those who walk by faith rather than sight, tending both body and soul. In the palace square, she sang the Song of the Returning Breath, and some who had lain still for days stirred and opened their eyes. The people hailed her as a vessel of mercy, yet she looked toward the horizon where sails thickened like storm clouds, knowing that mercy alone could not guard what was coming.
In the weeks that followed, Sallamacius fought more battles with ink than with steel. He petitioned for broader quarantines, for guarded granaries, for levies to reinforce the roads between Tyrus and the inland valleys. Some measures passed; others died beneath the tongues of those who still counted coin above life. Yet with each denial, he turned to his captains and secured what could be taken—watchtowers on the hills, patrols along the bridges, caches of salted grain buried where only his trusted men would find them.
The first breach came in the eastern district of Tyrus when a grain-ship from Norrem slipped past the quarantine under the banner of a friendly guild. Its crew died within a week; the sickness bloomed in the market like fire in dry grass. Bells tolled without pause, and the air hung heavy with the scent of ash from the pyres. Sallamacius stood upon the walls at dusk, watching the smoke rise in black pillars over the harbor. In that hour, he swore before the memory of Octavus that Tyrus would stand, though the cost be weighed in his own blood.
In Larian, Aldomhir received word of the breach and smiled faintly in the shadow of the throne. The plague was no longer a whisper from across the sea; it was a fire in the granary, a wind in the sails. And in the turning of that wind, he saw the shape of his dominion take fuller form.
The fever that once crept now strode through the streets of Kapitol’s twin kingdoms, filling their courts with the sound of disputation. In Tolanii, the Marcellian princes gathered beneath their carved ceiling of Cypherian triumphs, yet the triumphs seemed like fading light against the shadow upon their gates. In Kapii, kings stood upon wind-swept balconies, looking down into harbors where ships lay idle, their crews bound in fever’s grip.
Scribes carried tallies between the courts—numbers inked in neat columns, each digit a measure of hunger, of loss, of walls that would not hold. In the east, Larian’s ports swelled with trade, for Aldomhir’s fleets now moved grain and salt with guarded regularity. Each vessel bore the seal of Larian’s crown, and in every port where its anchors bit the silt, a new steward took up watch in the King’s name. These stewards spoke of relief, yet they also counted the ships of others and recorded the worth of their stores.
From his high seat, Aldomhir received their reports with measured grace. In the council hall, he called his gains “the strengthening of bonds,” yet in his private chambers, he marked them upon a great map, driving iron pins into the harbors of Norrem and Kapitol alike. Around these pins, he looped thin cords of silk until the map resembled a spider’s wheel, each thread drawn taut toward Larian’s heart.
In New Tyrus, Sallamacius stood at the head of a narrow table strewn with wax-sealed orders. The faces before him were lean from long marches, yet their eyes held the steadiness of those who knew their duty. He spoke of the plague’s course as a general speaks of a siege—naming the districts fallen, the strongholds yet to be taken, the places where resistance must be doubled. His captains departed with the swiftness of men bearing a torch through the wind.
Îthaeviël and Velunor moved now to the highest places of danger. They passed beneath the shadow of Kapii’s citadel, where fever had reached the servants of the royal household. In the upper halls, they prayed over lords whose hands had once signed decrees of war, now trembling upon the edge of life. In the lower streets, they stood among the merchants’ stalls, turning away those who sought Godstone cures in their fear, for she knew that each fragment taken in haste would draw the soul into a debt deeper than the sickness itself.
As the harvest waned, the plague’s hunger outpaced the earth’s.
Fields lay uncut where the reapers had fallen, and the wind carried the sound of empty mills. In the courts, envoys came with pleas for relief, some offering coin, others their fealty, if only grain would flow. Aldomhir’s messengers rode to meet them with contracts sealed in silver, binding kingdoms together under terms that favored Larian’s hand.
Each oath spoken added weight to the cords upon his map. He thought often of his father’s arm on Orrim’s Day, of how quickly strength could be unstitched once you found the seam. Kapitol’s walls, like any man, would bleed when cut in the right place.
By season’s turn, the Byring Sea was no longer a passage between continents—it had become a channel of power, its tides driven by the sails Aldomhir commanded. In Tolanii and Kapii, princes and kings spoke still of sovereignty, yet the grain in their storehouses bore another’s seal, and the ships in their harbors answered to another’s voice.
It was then that the first murmur rose of a thing greater than the plague, a shadow that moved within its shadow. Some said it walked in the footsteps of kings. Others swore it sat already upon a throne.
The Siege of New Tyrus
When the cords upon Aldomhir’s map grew taut as a wheel, his stewards loosed the outer spokes. Larian hulls pressed westward beneath sober pennants, their decks ranked with marines and their holds arranged with casks of grain. Among honest cargo lay sealed jars packed in straw, each jar restless with a red whisper of life. Couriers rode ahead bearing offers of relief to harbor-masters who measured hunger by the hour. Harbor chains lowered, and the fleets of Norrem entered as guests.
New Tyrus received them in a season of thin harvest.
The wharfward bells had rung each morning for the sick, and the mills turned on scant measure. Aldomhir’s ships anchored in gracious order outside the chain, and envoys crossed the bright water in lacquered skiffs to speak of mercy priced as friendship. By their word, the grain would follow once the inner quays made room, once the pest-houses drew their bounds, once the roadward gates opened to Larian wagons.
Each concession sounded slight beside the promise of bread. Each seal set upon the parchment aligned the lock for the hand that held the key.
Upon the eastern headland, Sallamacius assembled his captains in a stone hall open to the sea air.
New Tyrus lay below them in tiers of marble and red tile; beyond the chain, Larian masts made a grove upon the water. He named the harbor a battlefield and the wharves a breach. He assigned cohorts to the chainhouse, the grain markets, the bridgeward towers, and to the cisterns that fed the upper wards. He ordered the watch to search each cask that crossed the chain and to burn what carried vermin or foul grain.
A few merchants cried out that such fires consumed profit; he answered by placing their kin among the wardens of the flames so that their care would draw its own wage. The captains took their charges and departed as men who bear a city upon their shoulders.
Night followed with a wind from seaward.
Lanterns moved across the Larian decks, and the sound of oars rose like a slow chant. Under color of treaty, tenders crossed with “purifiers” for the pest-houses—tight-lidded jars sealed in wax and prayer-strip. They passed the chainhouse with papers in perfect order.
In the lower market, a jar slipped, and its lid struck stone. From the mouth of clay poured a living scarlet, quick as water, eager as sparks in dry grass. It surged along the gutters and climbed the stacked sacks as if each stitch were a rung. From alley to alley the red ran, and from cellar to cellar the red sang.
At dawn, bells pealed from every ward.
The harbor smelled of pitch and incense. Sallamacius stood upon the chainhouse roof, his cloak struck flat by the wind, and issued orders that ran faster than the tide—cisterns sealed, granaries isolated, gutters dammed with earth, kitchens armed with salt and lime. Cohorts formed cordons between districts and carried lit braziers to scorch and cleanse. He set boys to beating sheets and shutters so that vermin fled toward the fires rather than into houses. His mind weighed each street as a redoubt, each courtyard as a killing ground for the plague that moved as an army moves. In that ordering, the city drew breath.
Toward midday, a cry rose from the old Cypherian square. A river of red spilled from a culvert beneath the palace wall, and the square filled with a churning tide of rat and flea, a single body with a thousand thousand eyes. Panic swelled, for the tide climbed the steps where kings had received ambassadors and moved toward the upper courts.
From the western arch came Îthaeviël and Velunor, their cloaks marked with the soot of ward-fires. At her throat hung the Bludh Godstone, its deep hue glimmering with the weight of souls once held. She drew a long breath—a Wyl—pulling the heat of her own soul into the stone until it pulsed with crimson light. Wisps of her being streamed outward, coiling in the air like molten script. With her free hand, she wrote in the Tongue of Songs, each blazing syllable forming the name of the vermin tide. The letters hung, bright as iron from the forge, and the swarm’s will bent beneath the weight of its true name.
On the Wae, she exhaled.
Flame leapt from the letters as from oil to torch, running the length of the red river. Rats shrieked and writhed as fire seized them—not the fire of pitch, but a burning that bit the soul, stripping life from vessel until nothing remained but char. The square roared with it, a purging blaze that neither wind nor water could master, for its root lay in the name itself. Velunor set his palm upon the marble, steadying stone so the heat would pass through the culvert and not into the palace foundations.
When the last ember curled to ash, the Bludh stone dulled, cooling like steel quenched after the strike. Îthaeviël stood in the sudden stillness, her breath raw, the streets clear. Men wept upon the steps and praised her in voices hoarse with awe.
Sallamacius descended from the chainhouse and came to her. In his hands, he bore a case of oiled cedar, drawn from the wreckage of an old Cypherian barque kept in the city’s reliquary. Within lay a Godstone flute, pale as moonlit bone, once belonging to Octavus’ wife, and he spoke to her saying,
“This sang before you were born, and will sing again if your breath wills it.”
He placed it in her hands without ceremony, the gift of a soldier to one who had fought beside him.
She bowed—not in courtly thanks, but in quiet recognition of the trust given—and then asked for maps of the cisterns, culverts, and markets, and a tally of jars received. Sallamacius gave all with speed, for he favored truth over ceremony, and she favored labor over praise.
Word of the square reached Aldomhir before the sun crossed the western eaves. He sat in the shadowed hall of Larian and heard the account twice—once as panic from a harbor factor, once as calm recitation from a steward on the King’s pay. He dismissed the first and rewarded the second. Then he sent new orders in a cipher that his captains read as benediction. The siege would take two hands now: one to starve, one to sow.
That evening, New Tyrus lit watchfires upon every terrace.
Priests walked the streets with bowls of salt. Children slept with sprigs of rosemary tied at their wrists. Îthaeviël and Velunor moved like lampbearers from ward to ward, sealing gutters with song, quenching nests as a smith quenches iron, and lifting the courage of those who labored beside them. Sallamacius took the night upon his shoulders and walked the walls step by step until dawn, measuring the rhythm of guards and the answer of the city to each order given.
By morning’s light, the harbor lay still beneath a sky polished by wind.
The chain held.
The fires burned with a clean flame. Bread reached the upper streets in measured loaves. The city lived through a night that would have slain it. Yet upon the water, the Larian masts remained as a grove unshaken by storm, and in the holds of their ships rested many jars that had not yet tasted air. The siege endured, patient as a tide that learns the curve of shore.
In the days that followed, Aldomhir’s fleet kept its courtesy unbroken. Skiffs still ferried envoys with measured words, and the chainhouse still heard petitions couched in friendship. Yet behind the smiles, the other hand of the siege closed.
A dozen Larian sloops fanned northward along the coast, dropping anchor at inlets where the fishermen of Tyrus took their catch. Each landing brought the same gift—casks of salt at a bargain price—and the same request, that their catch be sold to Larian buyers. Slowly, the fish markets of New Tyrus grew empty even while the sea was thick with shoal.
Southward, Larian caravels touched at the river mouths, taking grain from the uplands before the wagons of the city could reach them.
That night, in the quiet of his tent, Aldomhir bent over a narrow desk, the lantern’s glow catching the ink upon his hand. He wrote not for his captains, but for the eyes of his blood—those yet unborn who might one day inherit both his throne and his wars.
Only, in the centuries to come, it would be discovered by the Privian archaeologist Jo Melbrook in 882 DE, becoming widely read by famous monarchs like Gulmund Mordrake and even Judux et Cadullum for how it shed light on negotiations of trade deals, alliances, war strategies, clandestine espionage, and even manipulation and deceit of one’s enemies as well as their friends.
In that private book, The King, he set down a line that pleased him as much for its truth as for its subtle cruelty:
“It is good to let your rivals think they know your mind. Let them fight the image of enmity they think you to be, and should they fear you more than you deserve, do not correct them.”
Closing the cover, he placed the book beneath the maps at his elbow, and turned again to the movements of his fleets.
Carters returning to New Tyrus came home with dust in their sacks and curses on their lips. The hills remained green, but the granaries of the city began to hollow like gourds left too long in the sun.
Then the plague showed its scales in Kapitol’s flesh.
The lands around Tyrus carried seams of Godstone like veins beneath the skin, and the people ate from fields brightened by its strength. Bread rose quickly in the ovens, fruits swelled richly on the bough, and milk thickened with a golden sheen. The same blessing opened a door to judgment. Those who feasted on Godstone-touched harvests marked first the thin streaks of red upon the arm and throat, lines like paint drawn by an unseen hand. The streaks spread until the skin shone crimson; minds once steady faltered beneath visions of the Tongue that had served them in former days; cries burst from gentle mouths as terror saw letters blazing in the air. Blood welled from the eyes in a bitter rain, and beds filled with the sound of breath that labored toward silence.
Many among common folk perished by flea-bite and spattered breath; more still rose from fever and returned to labor. Yet those who kept Godstone close, or ate deeply from its fields, yielded wholly. Their limbs stiffened, their voices stilled, their bodies locked in shapes of anguish—twisted flesh and bared bone—statues of living torment that endured until hunger finished what the sickness began.
The Elves who dwelt among men suffered fiercest wounds, for their craft leaned upon the Tongue and their bread drew from bright earth. In their halls, the red shone earliest and the stillness came swiftest.
In the harbor, the Larian masts shifted with the tide, always keeping the chainhouse in their shadow. Sallamacius knew the posture of a predator when it lowered its head to drink. He walked the walls each dawn, studying the patterns—how a galley would drift against the current without anchor, how a skiff would vanish behind a grain barge and remain unseen.
By the third week, word reached him that certain merchants had begun meeting Larian factors in their own cellars, trading gold for jars of untainted flour brought secretly over the chain. Those merchants’ names were entered into the watch ledgers beside the names of men who had died of the red plague. In the council of captains, Sallamacius spoke only a warning: that hunger breached where armies failed, and that the wall between them and ruin stood as thin as a man’s loyalty when his belly ruled him.
Îthaeviël, her Godstone flute at her side, turned her work to the city’s water with Velunor bound ever to her soul, his Medjaib spirit woven into her breath and blood. Through him, she moved as no mortal could—phasing through stone, vaulting from roof to roof, and striking with a speed that made battle a thing already decided. Together they passed from cistern to cistern, sealing each mouth with Bludh-script so that only her hand or Sallamacius’ could open it.
In the nights, her music wound through the alleys in the Tongue’s commanding mode, a measured force that bent vermin from their lairs and steadied hearts grown faint. She moved often between this world and the half-shadow where fleas could not cling and blood could not touch, spared from the plague’s grasp by that divine bond. She spoke in low courts of the harvest’s hidden price, naming the bond between Godstone and the red, and she set her seal upon storerooms that surrendered their bright grain for darker loaves.
The people began to speak of her in the same breath as the watchfires, a presence tireless, a song that lingered over the wards like breath upon a winter window.
By the month’s turn, the Red Death was no longer a rumor from distant coasts but a constant toll in the wards of Kapitol. The city’s air grew rank with incense and boiled vinegar; priests burned laurel in the squares, and the gutters ran with lime and salt. Yet for all the cleansing fires, the plague found the seams. It clung to grain sacks, hid in the folds of a market cloak, rode in on a fishmonger’s cart from the wharves.
The markets thinned.
Entire streets fell silent save for the cough of the dying. Velunor kept close at Îthaeviël’s side, phasing her through walls to bypass crowds where the red ran hottest, and together they struck down vermin nests before they could birth another wave. But for every nest quenched, another flared in some far quarter of the city, and the tide of death crept higher with each dusk.
By the seventh week, Kapitol’s walls no longer held back the sickness.
What had begun as scattered vermin fires in the wharf wards now burned through every district, a red river flowing in the gutters. The air above the market quarters shimmered with heat and incense; every courtyard carried the reek of pitch and lime. Men were buried with such haste that their names passed into the dirt unspoken.
Elves, though few in number, fell in the most harrowing ways—their flesh mottled with crimson streaks, their eyes bleeding as if the Tongue itself had turned against them, until their bodies twisted into grotesque, bone-pierced statues that stood in doorways like silent accusers.
In the great hall of the Kapitolian council, Sallamacius stood over a map spread upon black oak, the stones that marked the Larian fleet moving no less surely than the disease. Around him, the nobles argued, some crying for the gates to be thrown open to beg mercy from Aldomhir, others pleading that the plague be cleansed before a sword was drawn. Sallamacius’ voice cut through both:
“You fear the sickness more than the spear—yet the spear you see, and the sickness you carry in your own breath. Yield, and you give him both.”
His words bound the chamber in silence, though the fear in their eyes remained unbroken.
That night, the vermin came in their thousands, pouring from a breach in the aqueduct that fed the upper wards. Sallamacius raced to the archway with his guard, but the square beyond was already a living tide of red.
There, from the smoke, strode Îthaeviël with Velunor at her side, their steps as one. His Medjaib spirit bound within her made her a thing unassailable—vaulting from roof to wall, phasing through stone to fall upon the plague’s heart, moving too swiftly for tooth or claw to find her. The Godstone at her throat burned in Bludh state, its wisps curling about her like living script.
She drew breath, and Velunor’s presence flowed into her, the Wyl gathering in her chest. With a leap, she landed at the aqueduct mouth, her hand tracing the word for fire in the Tongue upon the very air. Wisps flared from the stone into the vermin, seizing their names; the Bludh-script bound them, and in the same breath she Waed a flame that was more command than heat. The horde ignited without smoke, each rat burning from the soul outward, their bodies collapsing into ash before they touched the ground.
When the last ember died, the square stood ringed with men too awed to cheer. Sallamacius came forward and clasped her arm, his voice low:
“Kapitol stands another day.”
She gave no answer but turned toward the next cistern, Velunor’s strength already carrying her on.
By dawn, Aldomhir’s masts were gone from the harbor. He had not broken the walls, but his other hand had done its work—the plague’s roots lay deep, the granaries were hollow, and the city’s veins ran thin. The siege was over, yet the land beyond the gates lay stricken, fields left to rot under the red curse. Kapitol had survived the storm at its walls only to find the flood within.
The Hunt Begins
The gates of Kapitol stood open to a land turned strange. Where wheat had grown, there was only rust-red stubble; where orchards had cast their shade, the boughs hung barren, and in the wind one heard the thin chime of branches stripped of bark. The air carried no birdsong, only the drone of flies drawn to bodies that the earth had not yet claimed. Those who could still walk went with eyes hollowed by fever; those who could not were left in doorways, their skin a map of crimson streaks that spread and deepened until they shone like wet paint.
Sallamacius gave the order to bury the dead in the river’s flood meadow, where the current would scour the soil. Yet the burials could not keep pace.
In the Elven quarter—a warren of carved lintels and balconies draped with ivy now withered to thread—the toll was absolute. They had been the first to fall, the plague seizing the Godstone within them and turning it against their own flesh. Those who had studied the Tongue all their lives died with their eyes fixed upon visions none else could see, crying out in syllables that once healed but now devoured.
Îthaeviël and Velunor moved through it as shades untouched. Her bound Medjaib spirit let her pass between worlds, phasing through walls and leaping the pestilent ground so that no flea nor drop of blood could find her. Yet she slowed for none; every moment wasted was another moment the plague spread. She had already traced the pattern in the ruin: Aldomhir’s hand had guided it. The jars, the vermin, the timing of the siege, all bore the precision of a mind that dealt in plagues as other men dealt in coin.
When she brought the name to Sallamacius, his jaw hardened.
“He is beyond the walls now. In the east.”
Her reply was curt,
“In the east, but not beyond reach.”
So began the hunt.
Velunor’s will braided with hers, lending her sight that cut through forest and fog, letting her taste the faint trail of Bludh-scent that marked Aldomhir’s passing. They followed it to the burned husks of waystations, to villages where only vermin lived, to the mouths of mines that reeked of Godstone dust and rot. In each, they found signs of his purpose—pits where vermin had been bred, vaults lined with jars sealed in wax, and prayer-strips that bore the marks of the cult.
The last vault lay beneath a chapel whose walls still bore the faded mural of the Mother’s hands. They came upon it at nightfall, the door barred, the altar empty. In the darkness below, Aldomhir’s voice rose in a chant that was not prayer but calculation, each syllable a command to the vermin, each breath feeding the plague.
Îthaeviël did not descend by steps. She tore the ground asunder with the Tongue of Creation, landing in the center of the vault, Velunor’s light burning in her eyes. The chant faltered, and Aldomhir turned—not with fear, but with recognition.
He turned toward her, lips parting as if to shape a final creed.
She was already moving.
The vault narrowed to her breath and his heartbeat. Her hand passed through flesh as through water, and within she felt the coiled rot that had fed the plague. Velunor’s spirit closed with hers, and together they crushed it to silence. His body bowed as the light fled, the seam-cutter undone by the hand that bound.
When his death, only the vault remained, its shelves heavy with the cult’s plague jars.
She smashed them all. The air thickened with a red mist that hissed in the Godstone at her throat but could not enter her. When the last jar was broken and the last pit collapsed, she came back to the chapel floor where Sallamacius waited, saying,
“It is done.”
But he looked east, saying,
“No. This was but one hand of the cult. The other still holds its crown.”
Even as the vault’s embers cooled, the other hand of the cult was already in motion.
In the ruined hills north of Kapitol, where the plague had left nothing living but the crows, a small company picked its way between the carcasses of oxen and the splintered frames of wagons. At their center rode a woman cloaked in black, her face hidden beneath a visor polished to mirror-light.
The woman in black was the keeper of what Aldomhir had most prized. Across her lap lay a coffer of blackened oak bound with bands of Godstone. No lock was needed, for the thing within could not be opened by mortal hand. Yet the weight of it seemed to bend her spine as though she bore a second life—or a second death—upon her.
Inside, nested in silk, lay a Nox, broken crown, its age far surpassing even the Elves. Pure, unbridled malice whispered from the obsidian ridges of that crown, the mind within twisted beyond comprehension. It was the sigil of the cult’s remnant, a rallying point for all who still served the shadow in secret.
They moved under moonlight, avoiding roads, drinking from streams too shallow to hold reflection. The woman in black did not speak to her escort, and they did not speak to her. Only once did she halt—upon a ridge from which she could see Kapitol’s walls far off, the watchfires a crown of their own upon the hill.
Though her master’s plan was halted, she did not falter. For she believed he would find another way to save Creation.
Then she turned east, toward the passes where no army marched and no plague had yet touched. Behind her, the coffer shifted, as if the crown within had heard and approved.
The Song of the Rivers
In the weeks after Aldomhir’s death, the siege lifted, yet the land did not breathe free. The red plague still walked the streets of Kapitol and drifted along the wind to Valeneka’s green heart.
Îthaeviël did not rest.
Bound to Velunor’s spirit, she moved like a shadow between cities, crossing walls and battlements as if they were reed-thin. She entered sickhouses without door or gate, phasing past wards and guards to kneel beside the dying—Elf, Man, and Dwarf alike—her Godstone flute close in hand, her fingers writing desperate Bludh-script upon their brows and cups.
She tried every pattern she knew.
She traced the names of the rivers in the Tongue and washed them in the sufferers’ blood; she wrote the word for life upon bread and fed it to those who could still swallow. Some rose for a day before the fever claimed them again; others simply bled out in her arms. Velunor’s voice in her mind urged her on, steady as a forge-hammer, but the failures carved hollows into her that no song could fill.
By the third month, the Elf knew there was no cure in all the names she could grasp.
The plague was not a sickness alone—it was a curse braided into the Godstone itself, feeding on those who touched its power. For Elves, whose lives were woven deep with the Tongue, it was death certain and swift. Valeneka’s glades were falling silent, the harps unstrung, the halls emptied.
On the eve of her breaking, the Mother came. Not in light, nor vision, but in the quiet between heartbeats, when even Velunor’s spirit stilled. She showed Îthaeviël a word she had never seen, yet had always known—a name vast enough to bind whole hosts within it. With this word, she could draw the red from the Elves, and from others who still bore the curse, into herself. It would kill her, but all she purified would be immune thereafter.
When she told Velunor, he tried to forbid it, but they could not be parted, saying,
“If you take it, I take it.”
She knew his meaning—that her death would be his death, for his spirit was her shadow, her stride, her very breath in battle.
They went to the river confluence of Valeneka, where three great waters met beneath the Heartland’s sky. Word spread faster than banners; thousands came, limping or borne on litters, carried in arms or leaning on staffs. The Elders stood in a half-circle, and from among them stepped one who held a small coffer. He opened it and gave her the flute of Octavus’ wife—the Bludh Godstone she had borne since the siege—now washed in the river’s light.
Îthaeviël placed it to her lips and began the Wyl. Her breath drew the pestilence as the tide draws the weed from the deep; her fingers moved in patterns no mortal had ever written, the word the Mother had given her spilling in fire through the air. The vermin fled the banks, the wind held its breath. Those in the water felt the heat leave their veins, the pain ease from their bones.
Velunor stood with her until the last note, his form a halo of light where their bond strained against the dying. The red came into her like molten iron into a mold—filling, shaping, burning. Her skin flushed crimson, her eyes bled, but still she played.
When the final breath left her, the Bludh stone of the flute shone with a clear white light. It had become Klyr, purified by her sacrifice, and the rivers bore its song downstream to every shore of Valeneka.
She fell into Velunor’s arms, her body already fading to the light she had given. He did not weep; he held the note she had left him, carrying it in his spirit until it was swallowed by the sound of the waters.
That day, the Elves of Valeneka and all others touched by the red awoke free from the plague. But the riverbanks kept her absence, and the song she had sung was never heard again.
Stability by Strength
The rivers of Valeneka shimmered with the memory of her song. In the Heartland, where she had drawn the pestilence into herself, Îthaeviël’s body lay beneath the newly risen Klyr-flute, its stone still warm with the last heat of her breath. The waters carried her melody to every shore, and the plague, finding no flesh it could claim, drowned in its own silence.
Sallamacius stood on the quay as the last rites ended, the wind bending his cloak like a banner. He had seen her walk through walls, leap the breach, and scatter hosts that mortal arms could not break. She had saved them with a sacrifice that bound her name to the city’s salvation. The weight of that gift settled on him like a stone upon the chest.
He rode the floodplains and crossed the high passes, gathering to his banner those who had held their ground against the sickness and those who had bent the knee to it. In the hills of Gathrune, he stood before the remnant kings, his spear planted in the earth between them, and swore that no crown would rise above another while he drew breath. At the gates of Valira, he broke the siege of her starving quarter, giving bread before he took allegiance.
City by city, shore by shore, the League bent into the circle he drew, and in that circle the Republic was born.
Îthaeviël’s death had purchased Kapitol’s survival and granted the republic a breath to shape its destiny. Sallamacius saw the fields beyond the straits and the broken crowns that lay across Lakmana and Valeneka. He saw the remnants of plague, the grasping hands of warlords, and the vaults where dangerous knowledge could fester. He chose a single course: to gather the weakened lands under one rule and set a seal upon the world that no rival power could break.
The fleets of Kapitol sailed again, their bronze beaks cutting through the narrow straits to Lakmana, the old homeland, where famine and fever had hollowed its kings, and to Valeneka, still bending beneath the weight of the red scourge. Sallamacius came with grain for markets, law for streets, and iron for gates that barred the way. Cities that opened their harbors joined the republic’s embrace; those that resisted yielded before the press of triremes and the measured tread of cohorts.
In his lifetime, the banner of the Trentus Adatii rose in harbors from the northern fjords of Lakmana to the southern deltas of Valeneka, each conquest a stroke in the great circle that future generations would seal. The fleets brought grain to empty markets, law to fractured streets, and iron to gates long left unguarded. Cities bowed to the republic’s order, and those who resisted felt the steady press of bronze and discipline until their banners joined the Kapitolian fold.
As the red plague withdrew from the earth and the rivers ran clear once more, the world felt the stillness that comes before a new song.
To the Kapitolians, this was not only the passing of a calamity but the turning of the divine wheel. Born of Cypherian faith, they kept the Mother as the heart of all worship, yet their devotion flowed also to the lesser gods—Holmnuh, Valen, Lakman, Thade, and the others—as bright hands who had shaped the firmament and seeded the soil of creation. Around Scissalan, their shrines stood, where merchants, farmers, and rulers alike set offerings for the favor of these elder powers.
It was in their honor that the new count of days was named, each month recalling the craft or blessing of a god, so that time itself became a litany.
And so chroniclers fixed this moment as the Dawning Era, Sol One, for the measure of all days to come. The old reckoning of the Ancient Era was closed, its last line drawn in the shadow of Îthaeviël’s sacrifice. Across Scissalan, merchants, scribes, and rulers turned their calendars to the Kapitolian count, marking time not by the age of kings, but by the peace purchased at so dear a cost.
In the hush that followed, the seas too bore their own laments, carrying whispers of loss from shore to shore.
One tale was spoken often in the smoke of ruined hearths, the fate of the Vi’Ivekian vessel. Laden with scrolls and crystal-glyphs of the Tongue, it had set forth from the eastern isles, bound for the high libraries of the west. But amid the Byring Sea a tempest rose, black and sudden, and the waves did not break as other waves. Hidden hands moved beneath them—spies of Thadius, weaving the very Tongue against its keepers—until the masts were torn, the decks split, and the sea closed over the cargo of ages.
The loss struck like a second plague. In the silence that followed, a handful of their bravest turned from the shore, choosing a fate unbound from the land. They sought the fish of the deep and wove themselves into new flesh, becoming Averitic—neither wholly Elf nor wholly of the sea—so that they might dive into the storm’s graveyard and gather what the deep had swallowed. Long did they labor in darkness and pressure, bringing again to light fragments of the lost hoard.
Yet when they returned, the halls of the shore would not grant them kinship. The high Elves, fearful and proud, demanded all that had been recovered, giving no right of it to those who had paid with their own form and freedom. Words became blows, and blood was spilled upon the quays. The Averites, hearts pierced by both steel and betrayal, turned their backs upon the land.
They descended into the unlit realms, taking with them what they had salvaged and binding it to the stone and coral of the abyss. There they founded a realm no tide could touch, and in time, some would be known as the Thallasiuns, dwelling in shadowed palaces beneath the weight of the world. There, another world would be born by their kind, kept apart from those who dwelt above.
In the centuries that followed, Kapitol’s reach would swell like the tide, its seal pressed upon every shore. Chroniclers would speak of this beginning as the quiet after the song, when the lion stepped over the hart, taking the field not for the feast, but to guard it for the ages to come.
And still, in the songs of river and sea, the world kept the memory of the Elf who gave her light to cleanse its waters.