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rainbowfic2023-09-18 10:18 pm
zero_pixel_count) wrote in rainbowfic2023-09-18 10:18 pm
Chrome 01
Name: "When will the banners and the victory parades celebrate the day a better world was won?"
Story: waking the dawn
Colors: chrome 01
Supplies and Styles: Chiaroscuro, Portrait
Word Count: approx 9k
Rating: 15
Warnings: It's a rescue-and-aftermath story and not particularly graphic - but not entirely euphemistic either, and it's dealing with the aftermath of torture. (Also the aftermath of a pre-industrial-plus-magic battle.) Body horror, mercy-killing, the implication of disordered eating. Delfi worries about how consensual her brother's relationship is, but it's a groundless worry; she doesn't have all the facts.
I love a good fix-it but I'm almost entirely an original writer; this story is an experiment in whether 'an original fix-it' is a workable thing. Specifically, it's a time-travel / time-loop fix-it, this is the fourth time around as far as Hanno's concerned; he started it, or at least started the fixing-part, mostly by yelling at the powers-that-be until any will to stop him they might have had gave out. (It's probable they didn't even want to stop him anyway. He didn't actually stop to check.) Also featuring: absolutely nobody human, a surprising amount of gen-x nuclear-winter-anxiety for a fantasy story, gleefully gutteral consonant mutation. (I think all the words are obvious from context, but speak up if they aren't. Also, please let me know if I've done anything wrong with the labelling/tagging etc, I worry about these things.)
It's a victory. It's a victory. It is.
The gates of fallen midnight are broken open. All that beautiful craftsmanship, carved oak and grey hornbeam bound in forged steel and crowned in bright gold, as rent and shattered as their maker's mutilated corpse, rotting over the arch.
There's a voice in the back of Hanno's mind muttering that the first lord of midnight would have been more offended by the damage to his gates than by the desecration of his own body. It sounds a little like Guae, who, after all, would know.
(It isn't.)
Hanno stands amid the frozen rubble that was once homes and workshops, markets and taverns, where people lived their lives in the long dark, and fled or died when the hell-white came. This close to the source, there is no mistaking the cold for any natural phenomenon; no ordinary winter, no matter how prolonged, would have ripped roofs open and tumbled walls like this, not in anything less than a hundred years abandoned.
He knew the city well, once. Or Guae did, which almost amounts to the same thing; another of midnight's beloved creations, from the grain-docks on the iced-over river to the foundry-docks on the dry canal. The building behind him was nominally a watchmaker's shop, specialising in intricate automata. If there's so much as a stray cog remaining, it's buried under hard-packed ice and snow; the only machine that moves in the city now is the machinery of an army's logistics.
Across the broad paved road that led to the great gates, there's a guard placed, some cautious distance from the walls and only just ahead of where the onager crews are starting the slow process of withdrawing the engines, though there's no sign of any resistance within. Moravin faced mother on the field and fled bleeding; Ethevis, if the pattern holds true from the last three times Hanno has fought this battle, was never here at all. Leaderless, the reschtört lack... coordination at scale. That kind of insight and initiative are among the things that were stripped from them in the twisting; the majority of them have either fled the field or died on it.
Or will die, shortly; their people are sweeping the city, retrieving their own wounded, making sure of the enemy. It's the nearest thing to mercy. Perhaps some of those who fled will have wit enough to find a way to live; there is no going back.
If all is going to plan, somewhere behind him, on the open ground where herbs and vegetables once stood, a camp is going up under his brother's supervision, centred for now around the field hospital. His sister is here, perched on the edge of a frozen fountain with her war-hound at her feet and her team-captains gathered around her; the fortress was mapped, once, but that feels like a lifetime ago, and who knows - mother said, planning this - what the first lord of light has done in that time?
Hanno has a fair idea. Not that he can explain that, though he did give Delfi as many hints as he thought he could get away with passing off as secondhand knowledge down the bond from Guae.
The gates are open. Moravin has fled. They hold the field. It is a victory.
There is nothing left stopping him from going to Guae. He's done it before.
Yet he stands frozen, staring, sword naked in his hand. Black blood on the blade, obscuring the bright pattern, the fine graven lines that spell love in a language only the two of them speak. Guae's sword; the arms-masters of the house of dawn have long since given up telling Hanno it's too long for his arm; he has learnt to make it effective.
He should clean the blade. He can hear them, in memory, telling him so.
He will not. Not until he can place it again in the hand where it belongs.
(Grant only that he still can; that he is not alone in this broken world. The silence in the back of his mind makes sense, rationally, but -)
He should have gone in the moment the gates were open. Instead, he stopped to think, and now his thoughts are consuming him. This is why he doesn't stop.
Ilvhan Attaviané spots him; breaks away from Delfi's little huddle.
"Hannothferan." His voice is softer than usual, and even then, he draws close before he says more. Sets one gauntleted hand on Hanno's pauldron. "I think my brother would say, go to him."
Ilvhan's brother probably would. He would probably have said that in any lifetime, even the first.
Hanno stares down the road, past the siege engines and the beginnings of a guard-posting, past his beloved's dead father and into the gloom beyond the broken gates.
"We have your back," Ilvhan claps his shoulder again.
He doesn't shout, or make any signal Hanno sees, and probably most of the house of dusk are back with his brother, or scattered across the battlefield in twos and threes as field medics, dusk doing what dusk does best, but one of the small units waiting across the square starts toward them. In a moment they'll all be looking at him, and he'll have to remember how to be the person who doesn't hesitate -
- and then everyone hesitates, because Hanno's mother is here, striding across the field towards them with standard-bearer and honour-guard trailing behind, and the lord of dawn's presence has a weight that even most of those who followed her to victory find heavy to bear.
The second scion of dusk holds his ground until Hanno murmurs, "it's alright."
"We'll be waiting for you," Ilvhan says, and steps back.
Mother's sword is sheathed, her glaive shining clean on her shoulder for all her armour isn't, and she moves like she has never been weary a moment in her life; her scions are probably the only ones unconvinced.
"Hanno -" she reaches for him, but it's an offer, not a demand, and she wouldn't push the point, but he steps up anyway; lets himself be held. He can bear it. She's his mother, she held him as a tiny fragile infant and did him no harm, and she's one of the first lords; the power in that is ice down his spine, these days.
Delfi settles easily under her other arm. Good, that'll take the sting out of having Hanno trying not to flinch from her.
"Makna has the encampment. Ourschen reports the perimeter quiet. Delfi," she sets her daughter aside - "Carry on; I've come to fetch my brother down. Hanno -"
Her attention doesn't actually burn. It takes him a couple of breaths to get that through his head. Delfi, bless her, buys him time; bows and excuses herself back to her waiting captains.
"Hannothferan," mother says, soft, putting him away from her. "I don't think you ought to go in there."
Hanno makes himself loosen his grip on Guae's sword. Plants the tip in the dirt and leans on it. Mother's trying. She knows more than she knew the first time around. She doesn't know everything.
"I have to."
"Oh, child." This time, she doesn't reach out. "You loved him so much."
"Love." Hanno chokes on the word. Watches her misunderstand. Watches, in the corner of his eye, Delfi and Ilvhan talking together.
"Present tense, mother," he manages. "I love him. I would love him through worse than this."
I have, he doesn't say. He can't. Veron says Attavia knew at once that her children had changed, but mother - she never seemed to notice, and he's never been able to bring himself to tell her.
"Oh, my child," she says again. This is hurting her; everyone in a hundred yard radius can probably feel it. She, who was not made to know fear, is afraid for him. She, who was not made to know despair, grieves for him, and what she thinks he will find within these walls.
And he cannot tell her she is wrong. Not with certainty; Guae shut him out when the tide began to turn.
(«I am coming for you, beloved,» Hanno told him, in a dream of merciful darkness, heavy under the weight of the irons and the pain, hope held out in both hands. «We are coming.»
«If you are coming,» Guae's reply came slow, «don't tell me. I can't keep anything from him, not now.»
«Beloved -»
«Hanno. I love you. You have made this infinitely more bearable, and I can't let you do this any more.»)
Ilvhan is drifting back over. Delfi probably sent him. Probably for moral support. Hanno refuses to need it.
Straightens his shoulders; looks the lord of dawn in the eye. "I told my beloved would come for him, and I mean to keep my word."
Galadhé's emotions are more visible on the faces of those around her than on her own, but she nods.
"Ilvhan Attaviané," she says, very formally. "Second Scion of Dusk. Nephew. Will you look after my son in there? Please?"
"First Lord of Dawn," he makes a sweeping bow. "We intend to."
There's a frozen moment, when Hanno still can't make himself move, before Delfi's calling - "mother? A moment -"
Bless her.
With mother's attention away from him, Hanno can turn.
With Ilvhan at his side and dusk's best close-work team around him, he can walk, at last, through the broken gates of midnight.
Breathe out fear and horror and doubt. Breathe in rage. And love, always love.
*
Hanno knows this fortress better than almost anyone. Not because he has been sharing his mind with one who was there when it was built, and has been there, captive, through this campaign; not because he has been carrying as much of the pain as his beloved will allow, but because he has done this all before. Moravin is consistent, predictable, in ways Hanno would prefer not to think about. Ways that make him want to falter, want to stop, make him wonder if all they're achieving is more suffering, but -
- for this, for Guae, he would think any thought. Most of all the ones which tell him where he will find his lover. Or at least, where to look.
Ilvhan's team take his direction without argument. Hanno doesn't pay half as much attention to his surroundings as he should; he knows it. They adjust around him, compensating, and besides, he was made for this. His reflexes are very good, even for what he is. When they're attacked, he guts the only reschtört to get near him without really surfacing from his thoughts, from the place where he's calling endlessly into darkness, hoping for an answer.
Banner-light on shimmering mosaic tiles. An intricate pattern. A familiar one.
This way.
The door at the end of the corridor has been fitted with lock and bar, crude workmanship over fine. The enchantment laid over is not at all crude. That is the work of the first lord of light, and it's new. He didn't do that the last time Hanno did this.
Hanno stares, starts to reach - the enchantment starts to react, reaching back -
- Ilvhan doesn't register as a threat until too late, getting in front of him; the shoulder-check carries him off his feet -
- that's a trap as well as a bar, a trap meant for him, because Moravin knew, he knew Hanno would come -
- because Hanno promised and Guae believed him and Moravin ripped that out of him - Moravin knew he was there, in Guae's head -
(«I'm sorry, I'm here, I will come for you -»
«Oh, sweet Galadhené.» Under the shock of being addressed directly, he can feel Guae struggling, trying to push him away, block him out. Trying to protect him. «I really hope you do. Or… perhaps I should call you Hanno, too, we are so close now. We've been through so much together. But you say it and say it and you haven't found your nerve yet, have you? Come to me.»
And then a stab of pain, a warding backlash that took the memory with it. Until now.)
"Back with us?" Ilvhan lets him up. Cautiously. Keeping a hand on his shoulder. "Sing with me, cousin."
Ilvhan's team are a perfect, practised chorus, the song-spell is new to him but it's Anaie's crafting, unmistakable, and there's a space in the harmony that feels like it's meant for him.
The enchantment reaches for him again, as he lifts his voice, but half of the harmony is protection. The other is attack, as it exposes itself in reaching. The enchantment crumbles, leaving nothing but iron, and Ilvhan's people have tools.
The lock and chain give way to cold-chisel and hammer-blow. The bar is lifted. Ilvhan, throwing-axe at the ready, sword swapped to his off-hand, grants him the honour of stepping through first, but follows close behind. His people -
- Hanno doesn't care any more what Ilvhan's people are doing, because Guae is here, hanging limp in his chains, still and unresponsive as he was in death -
- not that, not here, not now, not again -
"Hanno," Ilvhan says. Utterly calm, though it's sinking in that he's been talking for a while. "Hanno. Hold him. We are going to cut him down; he will be hurt, if he falls. He needs you to hold him, now."
There is no particularly gentle way to hold someone who is half a head taller than you and naked as they day they were made, when you are in full armour and carrying a bloodied sword you can't quite bring yourself to put down. Guae stirs, makes a weak noise of protest, and it might be the best sound Hanno has ever heard.
"I'm here, beloved," he whispers into ragged hair. "I'm here."
"Support his arm, Hanno." Ilvhan's voice is coming from a long way away. The whine of metal giving way is startlingly close. Hanno probably should care more than he does about someone swinging a sledgehammer that close to his head.
Even if Guae were more than half-conscious, there's no strength in him to hold himself; Hanno lowers them to the floor, as carefully as he can, wincing at how the rolled edges of pauldron and vambrace dig in to blistered and scabbed skin. It's a drop in the ocean, he knew that the first time he did this, knows it viscerally now, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
It's the only thing that matters.
He takes Guae's nerveless hand in his; wraps it around the hilt of his sword. He's half-expecting Ilvhan to speak up, to remind him that giving Guae a weapon when he's half-mad from suffering and probably doesn't even recognise them as friends yet is surely not a good idea, but he doesn't.
That's good; Hanno wasn't planning on listening anyway.
Ilvhan's people have stopped - whatever they were doing, that had them moving around the room - by the time Guae's eyes come properly open, the moment he sees and hears and understands.
"My heart," he whispers, and the walls come down between them, and everything is agony for a while.
*
Ilvhan and his team are very well prepared.
Partly in ways that are entirely normal: armed for close work, not the open field, for moving fast in hostile darkness.
Partly in ways that were entirely predictable: equipped for the breaking of doors and locks, barricades and chains, carrying water, green-cordial, simple food and the means to make soft light and fireless heat. Silk spell-embroidered to the warmth of felted wool, loose robes and blankets both.
And partly in ways that have Ilvhan's team casting him the feeling of strange glances, for their specificity. The fact that it is the feeling, and not the glances themselves, the loose web woven between them which is stranger than any of them know, for how lightly it sits. That highly specific enchantment-breaking, which Vero taught them but Ilvhan knows damned well is his baby sister's working as much as the woven web. That they've brought honey-cake and mountain cheese, nuts and dried apple, but not the sausage that would round out a herder's cold supper.
And, of course, how precisely Vero briefed them for almost this exact scenario.
They cut Guaeth down; leave him and Hanno tangled up together while they sweep the room for traps and surprises and... things which might be better not left in eye-line.
Set out food and drink. A loose silk gown with fastenings at the shoulder. Heat source, though only a very little light. The blanket Ilvhan drapes very carefully over them both.
And then Ilvhan's people file out, and he sinks down in the open doorway, weapons ready. Three of them go to make contact with Delfi's teams; the rest start clearing the nearest rooms.
Empty, all of them. At least of the living.
("There are three ways this could go," Veron told him, privately, the night before he rode out to meet the gathering army. "If Guaeth's alive, they're both going to drop, once you get them together. Don't try and move them unless you absolutely have to; set a guard, and wait. Hanno's going to come back up spitting feathers; he'll want to find something to kill. Make him get food and water into Guaeth first; get Guaeth out of there if he'll go; he probably won't. You'll need to keep a guard on both of them. Sic Delfi on Hanno if you can, or one of her teams. You're going to need to stay with Guaeth at least until you can get him out."
Ilvhan tipped his head, a silent why.
"Because I can't be, and they'll trust you enough. They'll both be very strange. Guaeth in particular might be… alarming. I promise you, you have nothing to fear from either of them. No matter what -" Veron winced, drained his little wooden cup of birch-geischt, and reached for the bottle to fill it again. "So long as Hanno wakes up, that's how it'll go. If he stays down for more than a couple of hours - you're going to have to carry them both out, and you will want to set a watch on them. Just in case it's... gone too far. You'll need Laina to open the workshop doors; there are things down there that need to be destroyed. She'll know what needs to be done."
Ilvhan didn't ask his brother how he knew.
"And if -"
"If he's gone?" Veron's voice was utterly flat, swirling the spirit in his cup as though it held all the hope he was named for. "Hanno will follow him. If you can get him out of there alive, you'll have done remarkably well. Grant it doesn't come to that.")
*
Their world is a spinning roil of senseless agony, glass shards and fire, failure and defeat and loss; the closest thing to solid ground is the gut-churning knowledge that there really isn't much they wouldn't do to make it stop.
That there's even less they wouldn't do to protect each other -
- that there is an each other at all -
- that the part of them that is grimly, methodically, imposing order on the chaos is called Guae and the part that is stumbling, reeling from the visceral reality is called my heart -
- no, that part is called Hanno, and he knew this was going to hurt, of course he did, but - he hasn't done this before, not like this, the first time he didn't know until too late to be here, the second they weren't even lovers, and last time Guae ducked out of Moravin's trap and his siblings paid the price for it, and he can't -
- that-which-is-Guae wraps that-which-is-Hanno up, very carefully; holds him away from the yawning depths, builds doors in their mind and closes them on the worst -
- «no,» the part called Hanno tries to protest; he's not the one whose blood is staining the mosaic grout, he's not the one with irons still at wrist and ankle and neck, he's not the one Moravin the world-shaper has been poking and prodding and prying at and - surely the least he can do is to look without flinching. «This isn't -»
«- fair? Did we ever think it would be?» Gentle. Dry. A wash of relief. Hope, a flickering ember.
«I think I always hoped.»
Amusement. Love. «You probably did.»
The grim determination creeps back in around the edges. Guae is implacable, picking thoughts and feelings and memories out of the chaos of common experience. Closing things away where Hanno can't see them -
«Please -» Hanno's falling to pieces, and he has no right to be.
«Please,» echoes back - «for the sake of what little dignity I have left, my heart. Besides, this -» the sensation - muffled, blunted still sickeningly unmistakable - of their right thumb-nail being torn out at the root - «sorry. The pain wasn't the point. Even the - twisting wasn't really the point.»
«Information.» It's more a thought than a deliberate sending, but they're tangled so close.
«No. He had everything that mattered out of me a long time ago. He was… Playing a longer game than that, my heart.» Detached observation. Alarmingly detached.
For a moment, Hanno touches something like the same detachment as the pieces fall together.
«Proving his power. Proving he could use me to get to you, and I couldn't stop him. Or… couldn't bear to. Until the end.» Very gentle. «I'm sorry, my heart.»
«I asked you not to.» Honestly, he feels like there were times when he was outright pleading with Guae not to shut him out this time, no matter -
- he's pretty sure he remembers that? But it's -
- the door in their mind looks an awful lot like the one on the room they're in. The one with the trap that was meant for him. He probably shouldn't be reaching out to open it, that's almost certainly a bad idea -
The ghost of a hand on his arm. It is a bad idea, and he doesn't need to do this now. «Please,» Guae murmurs. «They're yours, I kept them for you, but -»
Dread coiling like mist around their ankles. He was in Hanno's head, too. And until that trap touched him, Hanno didn't remember.
«He wouldn't allow it. He thought if you did, you might stop reaching out to me.»
«I wouldn't have. And - that doesn't make sense.» It was helping, tangled in like this he knows, having him there was helping Guae.
«He didn't need to make sense, my heart. Only to hurt. He knows.»
The long game. The only way Moravin can win this is by making them give up. Making them do this again, making Guae go through this again, and again, until they can't bear it any more. Until all that's left, all there ever was, all they ever were, is Guae broken and broken again under Moravin's hand, because no amount of grit and stubbornness, no amount of grim resilience, can ever hold against a world-shaper's power, and Hanno reckless in his anger, burning hope so fierce that when the fire dies everything he tries to save is ash -
«Beloved -»
«No, my heart. We can do this. If we have to try again» - for the hope of a future that doesn't end with Anaie putting Moravin's dagger into Guae's guts and a swan-dive into death for them both -
«I don't want him to touch you again.» Even to himself, Hanno sounds like a petulant child. A child whose tantrum has dragged everyone he loves through hell more times than he cares to think about.
«Neither do I, my heart. Neither do I.» Guae's voice in their head is a thin, broken thing. Guilt and grief come up like a drowning tide -
- and then Guae is catching him again, and the unfairness of that burns, when he's the one who's suffering and it's all Hanno's fault -
«No,» Guae's voice grows stronger. Reaching out. Drawing them together again. «That is Moravin's poison talking; this ground we do not yield. Give me your anger, my heart. Give me your hope.»
Still he hesitates -
It feels as if Guae draws a breath. Then another. Steady. «Hannothferan Galadhené. My heart. Get the fuck up and fight.»
This time, the anger, the damned unfairness of it all, is a breaking wave, sweeping them up together, back into the world, to quiet darkness and the sense of Ilvhan's watchful presence.
Something else, too, someone else; familiar. Family.
*
Delfi loves both her brothers very dearly, of course, but she and Hanno are alike in ways that Makna is not. It was Hanno she toddled after as a girl, and Hanno she got into trouble with, when they were both young; she knows her oldest brother very, very well. So she has known for some time that Hanno is not... That something isn't right. That some part of him is deeply, deeply hurt.
No-one would disagree with her on that point now, of course; when it became clear that the house of midnight had fallen, when Atelaina came shepherding her youngest siblings to safety - everyone knew, then. She knows it goes back before that; right into the long dark which everyone else seems to think of as a golden age. And it was, in the beginning; one day everything was fine, but then the next -
She knew something was wrong at breakfast. Makna outright said she was being silly; mother told her, very kindly, that her brother was at a difficult age, and that there was nothing to worry about. Delfi decided neither of them knew what they were talking about, and when Hanno set out at evening, she crept out after him.
He left the road as soon as he was out of sight of the walls; cut through the woodland to meet Thaleviné. Went to him straight as an arrow through the dusk. To this day, she'd swear there'd been nothing between them before that day, or at least nothing more than potential, attraction, interest. And there was nothing then - not even a word of greeting - before Thaleviné had her brother backed up against a tree and was working on peeling him out of his clothes.
Delfi crept away, face burning, and has wondered ever after if she should have interrupted.
If she could have.
And from that day on there was something brittle and hurt in her brother; and if people still called them both reckless in the same breath, she could see the difference. She might do something for the thrill of the risk, or because she didn't stop to think it through; Hanno, though - Hanno she sometimes felt just didn't care if he got hurt. Maybe reached for the danger to feel alive. And if he and Thaleviné weren't entirely inseparable, it was less than a year before they vanished together and returned presenting themselves as newlyweds, which even among sfità, who might live a century but probably not two, would be called recklessly fast. That they claimed to have carried out the rite by Nennian tradition, without witness or officiant, only added more fuel to the fire of Delfi's doubts.
She doesn't doubt the bond, which is horrifyingly strong and sometimes embarrassingly obvious; she just doesn't think it was new. She thinks perhaps they just stopped hiding it.
She's wondered down the years if she should blame Thaleviné, or if he's just as much a victim of - whatever it was - as Hanno. And now... She doesn't know what to think.
Hanno's been a mess this whole campaign, and only mostly in the ways that make sense - the hell-white has been hard on everyone, and having his beloved in enemy hands for so long can only have made that worse, and yet. And yet. Something's been off, again. She was expecting to have to recruit Makna to sit on him, but he hasn't hardly been reckless at all. Resigned, almost. Lost, sometimes, in a way that she associates with refugees and rescuees.
Whatever it is, Delfi doesn't like it.
So she holds her second back with the reserve, and when Ilvhan's message runners come to tell her they've found Thaleviné, she leaves them in command and takes her own hand-picked team in with her, to see for herself.
She doesn't remember the Fortress of Night well enough to know what these rooms were, before; elegant, once, though. Ilvhan's people have cleared the corridor, and are standing guard in the moderately grand hall it branches from; after the challenge-and-response she leaves her own augmenting them, and passes through alone.
Ilvhan is sitting on his haunches by an open doorway. The corridor's lit; the room beyond isn't. She didn't say she'd come herself, when he told her his plan, but he doesn't look surprised. Rises to his feet with all dusk's wonted grace, and comes a little way down the corridor to meet her.
Dusk's grace in the way he manages not to sound reproving, either, murmuring, "I thought they deserved some privacy."
"I have to know," she says, and then, even more quietly, "there's something strange going on there. Has been for some time."
"There's - yes." He's frowning, a little. "Whatever it is- we might do better to ask my brother, when all of this is settled. I'm almost sure he knows. He's been… Odd. For a while. But - by all means." He waves an invitation. "I'll warn you, it's bad."
Delfi moves like the hunter she is, soft-footed, her presence masked. Pauses in the doorway, blinks until her eyes adjust to the gloom. Between the enchanted blanket and the way her brother's curled around him like an octopus, about all she can see of Thaleviné is one bruised and bloody forearm, broken chain dangling from his wrist, hand wrapped tighter than unconsciousness should allow around the the hilt of that damn sword of his that Hanno's carried so long.
She can read more from Hanno than she can from him, and more from the room than from either of them, tracks of the past as clear as those of a deer over snow. She doesn't like any of it, but - she can read it. And it says her brother isn't the only one here who's been suffering.
It's not as much of a relief as she thought it might be.
"They're stirring more," Ilvhan says quietly, when she returns to the corridor. "I think it won't be long, now."
Back to the opposite wall, Delfi settles in to wait.
It's not quite another half-hour before she feels her brother's awareness come back to the world.
"Delfi? Is that you?" He calls, out of the dim room, and if his voice isn't quite right, it's as close as it's been in years. He's not moving quite right, either, coming through the doorway, shaking out his hands as though they hurt. As though everything hurts. "We could use your help. We need to destroy some things."
He almost sounds convincingly calm, but Delfi knows what poorly-suppressed anger looks like on her oldest brother. Well enough to recognise it even when it isn't - or isn't entirely - the wild-fire temper she and her brothers share, when there's something slow-burning and implacable beneath it.
Hanno's attention snaps to Ilvhan as he unfolds from his crouch.
"Do you think you could drink something first, Guaeth?" He asks, very gently.
She's not expecting the doubled laugh - bitter amusement from Hanno's throat and a soft cracked sound coming out of the dark from Thaleviné.
"Hah." Hanno's voice, still, but Thaleviné's accent. "Vero's been giving you instructions, hasn't he."
"He had a disturbingly precise idea of what we were going to find in here." Ilvhan says it very lightly, and shrugs, but he's not any less troubled by the unanswered questions than Delfi is.
"Of course he did." Soft snort. "Sweet Vero sees everyone else so clearly and still can't look in a mirror. Go on then, -" the shift's abrupt, it's Hanno talking now - "get in here. Delf', you may as well. Maybe it'll finally stop you fretting about us."
"I'm not fretting -" she, well - honestly, she lies, but she follows Ilvhan nonetheless.
"No, but -" it comes grating and broken from Thaleviné's throat, it obviously hurts - Hanno drops like a stone at Thaleviné's side, reaching for him, hands clutched together as they have what is, equally obviously, an internal argument.
Which Hanno loses, hard enough - and obviously enough - that Delfi has to sit on the urge to hiss.
"No," Thaleviné says again, but this time he uses Hanno's voice to do it. "But you do think I forced him."
That is a damned sight more blunt than she'd ever expected out of Thaleviné, who as far as she can tell has never said anything without thinking it through thoroughly and who always has at least three reasons for anything he does.
She can work with blunt and worry about the implications later. "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered the possibility."
The horrified, half-voiced - "why?" is entirely and only her brother. Thaleviné's response is the slight inclination of his own head, wince carefully suppressed, that says, go on.
"I don't believe your bond was new at the midsummer banquet that year. And I know something both terrible and intangible happened to my brother right before the pair of you suddenly became inseparable."
The expressions passing over her brother's face are… complicated. Partly because whatever he's feeling is complicated, but also partly because half of them aren't even his emotions. If she thought they were tangled in terrifyingly close before -
- the offended prickle and the rueful affection it's warring with are probably his own, though.
"I love you, little sister," he says, at last, and sounds almost like himself. Comes to hug her, awkward in armour - he has helm and gauntlets off, but is still wearing the rest, which she's honestly a little surprised by. "We have been keeping secrets. We didn't expect you to see us clearly enough to worry." That's both of them, accents mingled oddly, and she has no idea what to say in response.
Ilvhan evidently does; he comes close enough to set a pair of wooden cups in easy reach. "You should both drink this," he says, very calm. "It will soothe your throat, Guaeth, but more importantly, it's energy you don't have to scavenge."
It takes Hanno's steady hand over Thaleviné's shaky one to get the first cup down his throat; Hanno looks rebellious for a moment and then knocks the second back himself.
"Water, green-cordial, honey-water, broth." The last two bottles Ilvhan sets down have keep-warm spells acid-etched into the glass. "Give it a few minutes, and then try a little water. Guaeth - one of the alarmingly specific things my brother said was that food was going to be difficult. Take it slow; if you feel like you can eat for yourself, that would be best, but don't push it. Hanno - you need to be very careful about your energy levels. Vero said, 'this may be more of a drain-off than you're used to handling.' That's a direct quote."
"Your brother," Hanno says, and she's not even sure which of them is talking any more, "is an appalling mother-hen."
He does, at least, start chewing on a honey-cake.
"As far as I'm concerned," Ilvhan says, after a moment, "the three of you are an appalling conspiracy. I do believe you meant to protect us - but don't think we haven't noticed you're up to something. I'll admit I'm a little concerned about why the youngest of us all appears to be right in the middle of it along with you, but I'll grant that might just be Anaie being a very strange child."
"You have no -" Thaleviné starts; croaks into nothing.
Finishes the thought from Hanno's throat. "- no idea what potential that strange child will grow into."
"Will?" That's not a slip, not even this worn-down, and Ilvhan doesn't miss it any more than Delfi does.
Their grins don't quite match; Thaleviné's is more of a grimace. "How could we possibly know that? It hasn't happened yet… Has it?"
Delfi grits her teeth.
Ilvhan folds his arms. "How can you possibly be this coherent, this soon?" It's a solid parry. "And don't try and tell me it's that horrifyingly close bond of yours, even if you weren't still two people at all it wouldn't make all this -" he waves a vague gesture at the room - "not have happened."
"We've had a lot of practice," Hanno says, pouring water. "We are very good at compartmentalising. And this," Thaleviné's accent creeping in, as Hanno puts the cup into his hands, not quite letting go, "this is only pain. It's clean."
Ilvhan clearly understands something she doesn't, from that; he winces. Stays silent while Hanno helps Thaleviné drink.
"As far as secrets go -" that muddled halfway-house voice again, Hanno reaching for a piece of cheese and a handful of dried apple slices - "ask again, when we are… More settled. Going into it now would… cut. This has been - rougher than we thought it would be." It's an awkward admission. Uncomfortable to sit with. "I told Vero once -" and this is all Thaleviné - "knowing what you're getting yourself into doesn't make it any easier."
He's the oldest of them, of course, but he's not older enough for the weight of old pain behind the words.
Ilvhan hears it too. "When did you -" He catches himself. "No, later, you're right." He shakes his head. Shakes the thought off. "Are you going to let us get you out of here before…"
"No." Thaleviné croaks, from his own lips.
Ilvhan - still kneeling on the tiled floor, just out of their reach - nods. Shuffles back a little and reaches for another satchel. Medical supplies.
"Alright. Up to you which one of us does this," he says quietly.
There's a moment of silent debate between them, before Hanno says, a little reluctantly, "you do it."
Delfi doesn't know Ilvhan well enough to be sure, but she thinks that has surprised him.
Hanno untangles himself from Thaleviné, takes up helm and gauntlets - and Thaleviné's sword, with even more obvious reluctance - and gets to his feet.
"Well, Delf? Wanna go smash some shit up?"
Delfi would absolutely rather smash things than sit here in this dim small room that reeks of fear and pain for even a moment longer; she rises and follows her brother out.
One of Ilvhan's inexplicably-well-briefed team hands him a sledgehammer on a leather baldric as they pass. Hers fall in around them at her signal.
*
In one body, in one room, they endure the patient work of healing, the cleaning of wounds, the cataloguing of what needs further care, the gentle encouragement to drink.
In the other, anger boiling at last into action, they stalk through the sometimes-still lovely halls of the fortress of night, heading down, down. They do not encounter any living enemy, not yet; Delfi and her team handle the call-and-response, passing other teams, engaged in the systematic work of clearing and mapping.
They have a different goal; they know where they are going.
The sealed doors are beautiful still, laid with onyx and obsidian and agate like fire, and Delfi's people have a guard set before them, because they can neither open the doors nor damage them. This is Thalevin's own workmanship, at the height of his power; the way opens to Guaethguin Thaleviné's hand.
That it's Hannothferan Galadhené's actual hand matters not one jot.
Time was, the workshops and forges of the house of midnight were spoken of in awe, among those with even passing interest in such matters. There is space for awe, still, in the dreadful majesty of the uses to which the house of light twisted those arts, first subtly and then openly.
There are reschtört alive down here, still, the clever ones biding their time, and all that cleverness buys them nothing because they are destruction walking, wrath personified, nothing and no one can touch them. Delfi has their back, her people have the perimeter. They carve a bloody swathe, and it is almost incidental.
They know what is down here. Guaeth saw it at it's height, and saw it at it's fall. They know what can be cleansed, what can be restored, and what they need to destroy.
The schtörtfessk, first; the pit, and the tools of the shaping. It is - better, if as few people as possible see the outline of what is possible, in the shape of what has been done. Moravin is a world-shaper; Ethevis is a world-shaper's scion, mortal imitations of the process would not achieve quite the same results, but they could be more than horrific enough. Best that the only ones who see this before they take the hammer to it are scions and followers of the house of dawn, not given to the kind of contemplation that could reverse-engineer the process. And Guaeth, who already knows how it works.
(Guaeth, who holds Hanno's arm a moment; reaches out through him; change is creation is creation is change; poison enough to fell a small town denatures at his will, to grey dust and light, against which everyone in this place is already well-warded. Even the prisoners, because Moravin needed them to live. Even the reschtört. Even those in the process of becoming - of being made into reschtört, because the application has to be very precise and controlled. Elsewhere in the fortress, the other teams are probably starting to find them. Realising the choice they need to offer, to those whose minds are still broadly their own; some will find the changes have gone too far to live with.
Moravin was always very careful with that, with him. The changes are subtle. He's not even sure if it's entirely the same process, if it's in some way fundamentally different for born-people, whether talith or sfità, or if it's simply a matter of playing a longer game with him. There's never been a scion made reschtört. Not unless Ethevis counts, which... isn't a thought they want to think, right now.)
As they climb the steps to the workshop proper, movement catches their eye, down in the pit -
- not a reschtört, not yet, but too far gone to survive - Hanno vaults the rail, sword in hand.
(Leaving Guaeth standing by the rail, Moravin's hand on his shoulder, Moravin's voice in his ear "There comes a point in the transformation, my dear, when it has gone too far to be stopped. This one -" looking down to the pit - "approaches that crux; too much changed to live as what they were. They will come to me, and be made complete, or they will die broken.")
Hanno doesn't hesitate even a moment, delivering the mercy blow to one changed further than Guaeth has ever been, though their desperate, pleading eyes are still their own. Makes sure of the other two bodies in the pit, utterly businesslike.
("You must wonder what this means for yourself. These little things -" Moravin's touch is so, so gentle, tracing the slowly-healing incisions on Guaeth's fingers - "are no great matter. Preliminaries. Subtle things. The flesh will become accustomed to change, whether you will it or no. Make no mistake, my dear, I will bring you to that point… but not until you want it. You and I will last as long as the world lasts; there's no hurry.")
(Somewhere else, Ilvhan's hands are gentle, too, as gentle as they can be cleaning burst and infected burn-blisters on Guaeth's right hand. Moravin's subtle things are by no means subtle enough to escape his notice. That hand has claws more than nails, now, but his only comment is, "tell me if you need me to stop for a moment, Guaeth."
And he does stop, sets the twisted hand down very gently when Guaeth can't make himself reply.)
Hanno stands in the pit, a small figure beside the hulking bodies of the unfinished reschtört, surrounded by sheer walls that were made to contain them, hedged about by mechanisms meant to sap hope and will and strength, mechanisms that are still running, mechanisms that were made to be impossible to break from the inside -
- understanding settles on him like a grey cloud, as he looks around. There is no way out.
"Alright," he says softly. Breathes in despair. Backs up, step by careful step, until he comes up against the far wall. Leans heavily; lets his shoulders drop; lets his head fall back to rest against smooth stone.
Guaeth looks up through Hanno's eyes to where Delfi is standing outside the control room, leaning on the rail, looking down, more amused than concerned, one eyebrow lifted, as if to ask how he intends to get himself out of this one. Her lips move, but the words don't come through.
(Guaeth doesn't lean on the rail, it's not permitted him. But he looks down, and can't look away, not with Moravin's hand in his hair, turning his head; not when it's Hanno down there, this time. He can hear the growling. Schtörtgán, Moravin's blood-hungry war-hounds. They're no real part of the process; they're here for the fear they induce, for Moravin's amusement, and because they need to be fed.
"What do you think, my dear?" Moravin asks, commanding his attention. "Should we leave him down there a little longer, wear down that irritating peppiness a little more? Or are you eager to make a start?")
(Guaeth presses his good hand to his chest, as if that will help, and tries not to be sick.
Ilvhan's talking, low, gentle. It won't make words.
There's no way out. There never was. All their high hopes were just pretending otherwise, closing their eyes -)
«Close your eyes a moment, beloved?» Hanno's tone is calm. Measured. As if defeat isn't tearing at his soul, as if it's not taking all he has to keep his feet. «This is making my head spin.»
Hanno closes his own eyes a moment. Breathes in pit-air, an immaterial poison of dread and despair.
Breathes the despair back out again.
"Yeah." Aloud, but quiet. Not really talking to anyone at all, even Guaeth.
Wipes Guaeth's sword on his already-filthy surcoat; sheathes it. Pats himself down, checking over his gear.
"Yeah, no. Fuck this."
Breathes in again, and the engines of despair don't stand a chance. Hope unfurls like a banner, shining golden. Unshakeable, unstoppable, the full tally of the strength of the first scion of dawn set against what may be a very clever mechanism, but which is, absent its makers, dead or fled in defeat, only a mechanism.
Hanno kicks off the wall, takes four long strides and springs, almost straight up, to where his sister is already reaching to catch him and haul him over the rail.
Delfi's laughing, saying something teasing about recklessness; Hanno's teasing back, sheer force of habit, even he's not really paying attention -
- that was a terrible idea. That was a brilliant idea. Hanno running on hope is a hundred times more solid than Hanno running on rage. His presence in Guaeth's head is fierce, driven, utterly implacable. «The only person I am ever going to surrender to is you, beloved. Trust me. I've got this. All you need to do is come along for the ride.»
He does destroy the pit-mechanisms first, though; pacing the perimeter and taking personal offence and the borrowed sledgehammer to delicate constructions of crystal and wire. Then the control room; then the workshop proper, staying his hand only long enough to let Guaeth reach through him and check for traps and poisons.
Even Delfi stands back to let him work. She's got his back, even if she's never trusted Guaeth in this life, and she's starting to understand why they need to do this for themselves.
*
Hanno gives himself a moment, after, to slump amidst the wreckage of broken glass, twisted metal and shattered gemstones. Drinks the green-cordial and water one of Delfi's people produces; eats a handful of nuts and chews on a strip of fruit leather. Long-running jokes to the contrary, he's not fool enough not to realise that if Vero made a point of telling Ilvhan to warn him about this, then he needs to listen. Besides, if he pays attention, it's obvious Vero was right; he's feeding more power down the bond to Guae than he can reasonably sustain.
Fortunately, he doesn't need to sustain it, just keep up for long enough.
Guae's clean and warm and bandaged, somewhere in the back of his mind; not in no pain but certainly less, and more comfortable in himself for being dressed, as well. It helps. Not eating, and Ilvhan's not pushing the point, but he's keeping broth and green-cordial and honey-water down.
One last thing to take care of and they can get out of here.
«The diarnmaschengna.» Guae sounds - feels - exhausted.
Even Hanno's not exactly looking forward to climbing all those stairs. He reaches for another piece of fruit leather; starts chewing mechanically. «I still don't understand how it works.»
«I don't think you need to, my heart. You have a hammer; it worked last time.»
It worked the time before, too, but Hanno isn't going to mention that. His memories of quite how badly he got hurt doing it have faded, a failed loop; Guae's memories of learning about it haven't.
Then, quieter: «show your sister this.»
No way he can run it himself, Hanno can see that immediately. He doesn't have enough left in him. He doesn't really have enough capacity for magical theory to understand it himself, either, but that, at least, he can borrow from Guae.
"He designed this," Delfi says, frowning at the schematic sketched in salvaged chalk on a section of workbench swept clean of debris. Almost visibly wrestling her misgivings. "Well. Alright. But I'm holding you to the promise of answers, you hear me." Catches Hanno's arm; looks into his eyes as though she can see through them - "he can hear me?"
Hanno nods before Guae can prevaricate over what the right answer would be.
"I'm holding you to that promise, Thaleviné."
"I hear you, Galadhené," Guae borrows Hanno's voice. "I'd expect nothing less."
The twisting of the reschtört may have been shrouded in secrecy, but the source of the hell-white is nothing that Moravin even attempted to conceal. It's just reaching it that was the problem, and from this side of Thalevin's seal-locked doors, that is only a matter of climbing.
The great spiral stair isn't some narrow defensive thing; it's Thalevin's making, steep and wide and elegant, and none of Delfi's team like it much. They like Hanno's suggestion of having them wait at the base of the tower even less; he's quite certain that in the unlikely event there's anything alive up there at all, it won't be half a match for him and Delfi, but he concedes that argument.
Delfi does stop them at the point when their cold-wardings are really starting to work hard; sends them back to mount a guard a full spiral below. It does no-one any good to have them getting silly with cold up here.
Besides, it's not much further to the tower's open roof, and the warded glass dome where the diarnmaschengna waits.
It still doesn't look anything like a machine, and it still hurts to look directly at some of the parts. Light refracts strangely through a set of prisms and spheres, unhindered by the ice that rimes everything.
Delfi stands beneath the sheltering arch of the doorway, close enough to run the warding; prudently out of line of sight. It's killing-cold up here where the diarnmaschengna spins warmth relentlessly into light, and Guae's new warding is against cold-burn and frost-bite, not against the cold itself.
No time to hesitate. Hanno knows better now than to just rip the autsen-stone out of the heart; there's an order to this. He sets his feet, hefts the hammer, and renders the diarnmaschengna into shards and dust, piece by methodical piece in a screaming of shattered glass and torn enchantment.
He leaves the pendulum, swinging in its lead frame; the dome needs to come down first. Hanno takes three steady breaths that burn like fire in his chest, and sings shattering as he swings the hammer; Delfi's clear voice comes in above him, and the dome falls in a shower of sparks and shards.
Helm or no, he's going to be fishing glass shards out of his hair for a damned long time.
The air's cold, still, but not driven cold. «One last thing, beloved. Then we can rest.»
Guae reaches through him; Guae catches the pendulum by the chain.
"Enough." All the strength they don't really have left in their voice. "Be still. Be unbound. Be undone."
What flares isn't entirely light. It's blinding anyway, but with the dome down, most of it goes up. It still batters hard against his already-stretched wards; he doubles over, heaving, and just about manages not to be sick.
What remains, when he straightens up, is only dust and rust, a breath of warm air and power, and more tears than they have strength between them to cry.
In the doorway arch, Delfi is on her feet, looking both shaken and shrewd.
(Far below, Ilvhan has a very gentle arm around Guae's shoulders. The portion of his father's power that settles onto him strengthens more than it scours, but only just.)
(Somewhere in memory, Guae looks grim. "I don't think there was ever anything to be done about my father.")
(Somewhere else in memory, Hanno asks, "will it be enough?")
(Somewhere else, now, the other scions of midnight - Thalevin's younger children - waver between hope and grief.)
Here and now, Delfi hauls Hanno up to his feet; slings his arm over her shoulder and starts helping him down the stairs, and Guae finally condescends to be carried from the room of his imprisonment, and from the fortress which is, inarguably, now his.
Story: waking the dawn
Colors: chrome 01
Supplies and Styles: Chiaroscuro, Portrait
Word Count: approx 9k
Rating: 15
Warnings: It's a rescue-and-aftermath story and not particularly graphic - but not entirely euphemistic either, and it's dealing with the aftermath of torture. (Also the aftermath of a pre-industrial-plus-magic battle.) Body horror, mercy-killing, the implication of disordered eating. Delfi worries about how consensual her brother's relationship is, but it's a groundless worry; she doesn't have all the facts.
I love a good fix-it but I'm almost entirely an original writer; this story is an experiment in whether 'an original fix-it' is a workable thing. Specifically, it's a time-travel / time-loop fix-it, this is the fourth time around as far as Hanno's concerned; he started it, or at least started the fixing-part, mostly by yelling at the powers-that-be until any will to stop him they might have had gave out. (It's probable they didn't even want to stop him anyway. He didn't actually stop to check.) Also featuring: absolutely nobody human, a surprising amount of gen-x nuclear-winter-anxiety for a fantasy story, gleefully gutteral consonant mutation. (I think all the words are obvious from context, but speak up if they aren't. Also, please let me know if I've done anything wrong with the labelling/tagging etc, I worry about these things.)
It's a victory. It's a victory. It is.
The gates of fallen midnight are broken open. All that beautiful craftsmanship, carved oak and grey hornbeam bound in forged steel and crowned in bright gold, as rent and shattered as their maker's mutilated corpse, rotting over the arch.
There's a voice in the back of Hanno's mind muttering that the first lord of midnight would have been more offended by the damage to his gates than by the desecration of his own body. It sounds a little like Guae, who, after all, would know.
(It isn't.)
Hanno stands amid the frozen rubble that was once homes and workshops, markets and taverns, where people lived their lives in the long dark, and fled or died when the hell-white came. This close to the source, there is no mistaking the cold for any natural phenomenon; no ordinary winter, no matter how prolonged, would have ripped roofs open and tumbled walls like this, not in anything less than a hundred years abandoned.
He knew the city well, once. Or Guae did, which almost amounts to the same thing; another of midnight's beloved creations, from the grain-docks on the iced-over river to the foundry-docks on the dry canal. The building behind him was nominally a watchmaker's shop, specialising in intricate automata. If there's so much as a stray cog remaining, it's buried under hard-packed ice and snow; the only machine that moves in the city now is the machinery of an army's logistics.
Across the broad paved road that led to the great gates, there's a guard placed, some cautious distance from the walls and only just ahead of where the onager crews are starting the slow process of withdrawing the engines, though there's no sign of any resistance within. Moravin faced mother on the field and fled bleeding; Ethevis, if the pattern holds true from the last three times Hanno has fought this battle, was never here at all. Leaderless, the reschtört lack... coordination at scale. That kind of insight and initiative are among the things that were stripped from them in the twisting; the majority of them have either fled the field or died on it.
Or will die, shortly; their people are sweeping the city, retrieving their own wounded, making sure of the enemy. It's the nearest thing to mercy. Perhaps some of those who fled will have wit enough to find a way to live; there is no going back.
If all is going to plan, somewhere behind him, on the open ground where herbs and vegetables once stood, a camp is going up under his brother's supervision, centred for now around the field hospital. His sister is here, perched on the edge of a frozen fountain with her war-hound at her feet and her team-captains gathered around her; the fortress was mapped, once, but that feels like a lifetime ago, and who knows - mother said, planning this - what the first lord of light has done in that time?
Hanno has a fair idea. Not that he can explain that, though he did give Delfi as many hints as he thought he could get away with passing off as secondhand knowledge down the bond from Guae.
The gates are open. Moravin has fled. They hold the field. It is a victory.
There is nothing left stopping him from going to Guae. He's done it before.
Yet he stands frozen, staring, sword naked in his hand. Black blood on the blade, obscuring the bright pattern, the fine graven lines that spell love in a language only the two of them speak. Guae's sword; the arms-masters of the house of dawn have long since given up telling Hanno it's too long for his arm; he has learnt to make it effective.
He should clean the blade. He can hear them, in memory, telling him so.
He will not. Not until he can place it again in the hand where it belongs.
(Grant only that he still can; that he is not alone in this broken world. The silence in the back of his mind makes sense, rationally, but -)
He should have gone in the moment the gates were open. Instead, he stopped to think, and now his thoughts are consuming him. This is why he doesn't stop.
Ilvhan Attaviané spots him; breaks away from Delfi's little huddle.
"Hannothferan." His voice is softer than usual, and even then, he draws close before he says more. Sets one gauntleted hand on Hanno's pauldron. "I think my brother would say, go to him."
Ilvhan's brother probably would. He would probably have said that in any lifetime, even the first.
Hanno stares down the road, past the siege engines and the beginnings of a guard-posting, past his beloved's dead father and into the gloom beyond the broken gates.
"We have your back," Ilvhan claps his shoulder again.
He doesn't shout, or make any signal Hanno sees, and probably most of the house of dusk are back with his brother, or scattered across the battlefield in twos and threes as field medics, dusk doing what dusk does best, but one of the small units waiting across the square starts toward them. In a moment they'll all be looking at him, and he'll have to remember how to be the person who doesn't hesitate -
- and then everyone hesitates, because Hanno's mother is here, striding across the field towards them with standard-bearer and honour-guard trailing behind, and the lord of dawn's presence has a weight that even most of those who followed her to victory find heavy to bear.
The second scion of dusk holds his ground until Hanno murmurs, "it's alright."
"We'll be waiting for you," Ilvhan says, and steps back.
Mother's sword is sheathed, her glaive shining clean on her shoulder for all her armour isn't, and she moves like she has never been weary a moment in her life; her scions are probably the only ones unconvinced.
"Hanno -" she reaches for him, but it's an offer, not a demand, and she wouldn't push the point, but he steps up anyway; lets himself be held. He can bear it. She's his mother, she held him as a tiny fragile infant and did him no harm, and she's one of the first lords; the power in that is ice down his spine, these days.
Delfi settles easily under her other arm. Good, that'll take the sting out of having Hanno trying not to flinch from her.
"Makna has the encampment. Ourschen reports the perimeter quiet. Delfi," she sets her daughter aside - "Carry on; I've come to fetch my brother down. Hanno -"
Her attention doesn't actually burn. It takes him a couple of breaths to get that through his head. Delfi, bless her, buys him time; bows and excuses herself back to her waiting captains.
"Hannothferan," mother says, soft, putting him away from her. "I don't think you ought to go in there."
Hanno makes himself loosen his grip on Guae's sword. Plants the tip in the dirt and leans on it. Mother's trying. She knows more than she knew the first time around. She doesn't know everything.
"I have to."
"Oh, child." This time, she doesn't reach out. "You loved him so much."
"Love." Hanno chokes on the word. Watches her misunderstand. Watches, in the corner of his eye, Delfi and Ilvhan talking together.
"Present tense, mother," he manages. "I love him. I would love him through worse than this."
I have, he doesn't say. He can't. Veron says Attavia knew at once that her children had changed, but mother - she never seemed to notice, and he's never been able to bring himself to tell her.
"Oh, my child," she says again. This is hurting her; everyone in a hundred yard radius can probably feel it. She, who was not made to know fear, is afraid for him. She, who was not made to know despair, grieves for him, and what she thinks he will find within these walls.
And he cannot tell her she is wrong. Not with certainty; Guae shut him out when the tide began to turn.
(«I am coming for you, beloved,» Hanno told him, in a dream of merciful darkness, heavy under the weight of the irons and the pain, hope held out in both hands. «We are coming.»
«If you are coming,» Guae's reply came slow, «don't tell me. I can't keep anything from him, not now.»
«Beloved -»
«Hanno. I love you. You have made this infinitely more bearable, and I can't let you do this any more.»)
Ilvhan is drifting back over. Delfi probably sent him. Probably for moral support. Hanno refuses to need it.
Straightens his shoulders; looks the lord of dawn in the eye. "I told my beloved would come for him, and I mean to keep my word."
Galadhé's emotions are more visible on the faces of those around her than on her own, but she nods.
"Ilvhan Attaviané," she says, very formally. "Second Scion of Dusk. Nephew. Will you look after my son in there? Please?"
"First Lord of Dawn," he makes a sweeping bow. "We intend to."
There's a frozen moment, when Hanno still can't make himself move, before Delfi's calling - "mother? A moment -"
Bless her.
With mother's attention away from him, Hanno can turn.
With Ilvhan at his side and dusk's best close-work team around him, he can walk, at last, through the broken gates of midnight.
Breathe out fear and horror and doubt. Breathe in rage. And love, always love.
*
Hanno knows this fortress better than almost anyone. Not because he has been sharing his mind with one who was there when it was built, and has been there, captive, through this campaign; not because he has been carrying as much of the pain as his beloved will allow, but because he has done this all before. Moravin is consistent, predictable, in ways Hanno would prefer not to think about. Ways that make him want to falter, want to stop, make him wonder if all they're achieving is more suffering, but -
- for this, for Guae, he would think any thought. Most of all the ones which tell him where he will find his lover. Or at least, where to look.
Ilvhan's team take his direction without argument. Hanno doesn't pay half as much attention to his surroundings as he should; he knows it. They adjust around him, compensating, and besides, he was made for this. His reflexes are very good, even for what he is. When they're attacked, he guts the only reschtört to get near him without really surfacing from his thoughts, from the place where he's calling endlessly into darkness, hoping for an answer.
Banner-light on shimmering mosaic tiles. An intricate pattern. A familiar one.
This way.
The door at the end of the corridor has been fitted with lock and bar, crude workmanship over fine. The enchantment laid over is not at all crude. That is the work of the first lord of light, and it's new. He didn't do that the last time Hanno did this.
Hanno stares, starts to reach - the enchantment starts to react, reaching back -
- Ilvhan doesn't register as a threat until too late, getting in front of him; the shoulder-check carries him off his feet -
- that's a trap as well as a bar, a trap meant for him, because Moravin knew, he knew Hanno would come -
- because Hanno promised and Guae believed him and Moravin ripped that out of him - Moravin knew he was there, in Guae's head -
(«I'm sorry, I'm here, I will come for you -»
«Oh, sweet Galadhené.» Under the shock of being addressed directly, he can feel Guae struggling, trying to push him away, block him out. Trying to protect him. «I really hope you do. Or… perhaps I should call you Hanno, too, we are so close now. We've been through so much together. But you say it and say it and you haven't found your nerve yet, have you? Come to me.»
And then a stab of pain, a warding backlash that took the memory with it. Until now.)
"Back with us?" Ilvhan lets him up. Cautiously. Keeping a hand on his shoulder. "Sing with me, cousin."
Ilvhan's team are a perfect, practised chorus, the song-spell is new to him but it's Anaie's crafting, unmistakable, and there's a space in the harmony that feels like it's meant for him.
The enchantment reaches for him again, as he lifts his voice, but half of the harmony is protection. The other is attack, as it exposes itself in reaching. The enchantment crumbles, leaving nothing but iron, and Ilvhan's people have tools.
The lock and chain give way to cold-chisel and hammer-blow. The bar is lifted. Ilvhan, throwing-axe at the ready, sword swapped to his off-hand, grants him the honour of stepping through first, but follows close behind. His people -
- Hanno doesn't care any more what Ilvhan's people are doing, because Guae is here, hanging limp in his chains, still and unresponsive as he was in death -
- not that, not here, not now, not again -
"Hanno," Ilvhan says. Utterly calm, though it's sinking in that he's been talking for a while. "Hanno. Hold him. We are going to cut him down; he will be hurt, if he falls. He needs you to hold him, now."
There is no particularly gentle way to hold someone who is half a head taller than you and naked as they day they were made, when you are in full armour and carrying a bloodied sword you can't quite bring yourself to put down. Guae stirs, makes a weak noise of protest, and it might be the best sound Hanno has ever heard.
"I'm here, beloved," he whispers into ragged hair. "I'm here."
"Support his arm, Hanno." Ilvhan's voice is coming from a long way away. The whine of metal giving way is startlingly close. Hanno probably should care more than he does about someone swinging a sledgehammer that close to his head.
Even if Guae were more than half-conscious, there's no strength in him to hold himself; Hanno lowers them to the floor, as carefully as he can, wincing at how the rolled edges of pauldron and vambrace dig in to blistered and scabbed skin. It's a drop in the ocean, he knew that the first time he did this, knows it viscerally now, but that doesn't mean it doesn't matter.
It's the only thing that matters.
He takes Guae's nerveless hand in his; wraps it around the hilt of his sword. He's half-expecting Ilvhan to speak up, to remind him that giving Guae a weapon when he's half-mad from suffering and probably doesn't even recognise them as friends yet is surely not a good idea, but he doesn't.
That's good; Hanno wasn't planning on listening anyway.
Ilvhan's people have stopped - whatever they were doing, that had them moving around the room - by the time Guae's eyes come properly open, the moment he sees and hears and understands.
"My heart," he whispers, and the walls come down between them, and everything is agony for a while.
*
Ilvhan and his team are very well prepared.
Partly in ways that are entirely normal: armed for close work, not the open field, for moving fast in hostile darkness.
Partly in ways that were entirely predictable: equipped for the breaking of doors and locks, barricades and chains, carrying water, green-cordial, simple food and the means to make soft light and fireless heat. Silk spell-embroidered to the warmth of felted wool, loose robes and blankets both.
And partly in ways that have Ilvhan's team casting him the feeling of strange glances, for their specificity. The fact that it is the feeling, and not the glances themselves, the loose web woven between them which is stranger than any of them know, for how lightly it sits. That highly specific enchantment-breaking, which Vero taught them but Ilvhan knows damned well is his baby sister's working as much as the woven web. That they've brought honey-cake and mountain cheese, nuts and dried apple, but not the sausage that would round out a herder's cold supper.
And, of course, how precisely Vero briefed them for almost this exact scenario.
They cut Guaeth down; leave him and Hanno tangled up together while they sweep the room for traps and surprises and... things which might be better not left in eye-line.
Set out food and drink. A loose silk gown with fastenings at the shoulder. Heat source, though only a very little light. The blanket Ilvhan drapes very carefully over them both.
And then Ilvhan's people file out, and he sinks down in the open doorway, weapons ready. Three of them go to make contact with Delfi's teams; the rest start clearing the nearest rooms.
Empty, all of them. At least of the living.
("There are three ways this could go," Veron told him, privately, the night before he rode out to meet the gathering army. "If Guaeth's alive, they're both going to drop, once you get them together. Don't try and move them unless you absolutely have to; set a guard, and wait. Hanno's going to come back up spitting feathers; he'll want to find something to kill. Make him get food and water into Guaeth first; get Guaeth out of there if he'll go; he probably won't. You'll need to keep a guard on both of them. Sic Delfi on Hanno if you can, or one of her teams. You're going to need to stay with Guaeth at least until you can get him out."
Ilvhan tipped his head, a silent why.
"Because I can't be, and they'll trust you enough. They'll both be very strange. Guaeth in particular might be… alarming. I promise you, you have nothing to fear from either of them. No matter what -" Veron winced, drained his little wooden cup of birch-geischt, and reached for the bottle to fill it again. "So long as Hanno wakes up, that's how it'll go. If he stays down for more than a couple of hours - you're going to have to carry them both out, and you will want to set a watch on them. Just in case it's... gone too far. You'll need Laina to open the workshop doors; there are things down there that need to be destroyed. She'll know what needs to be done."
Ilvhan didn't ask his brother how he knew.
"And if -"
"If he's gone?" Veron's voice was utterly flat, swirling the spirit in his cup as though it held all the hope he was named for. "Hanno will follow him. If you can get him out of there alive, you'll have done remarkably well. Grant it doesn't come to that.")
*
Their world is a spinning roil of senseless agony, glass shards and fire, failure and defeat and loss; the closest thing to solid ground is the gut-churning knowledge that there really isn't much they wouldn't do to make it stop.
That there's even less they wouldn't do to protect each other -
- that there is an each other at all -
- that the part of them that is grimly, methodically, imposing order on the chaos is called Guae and the part that is stumbling, reeling from the visceral reality is called my heart -
- no, that part is called Hanno, and he knew this was going to hurt, of course he did, but - he hasn't done this before, not like this, the first time he didn't know until too late to be here, the second they weren't even lovers, and last time Guae ducked out of Moravin's trap and his siblings paid the price for it, and he can't -
- that-which-is-Guae wraps that-which-is-Hanno up, very carefully; holds him away from the yawning depths, builds doors in their mind and closes them on the worst -
- «no,» the part called Hanno tries to protest; he's not the one whose blood is staining the mosaic grout, he's not the one with irons still at wrist and ankle and neck, he's not the one Moravin the world-shaper has been poking and prodding and prying at and - surely the least he can do is to look without flinching. «This isn't -»
«- fair? Did we ever think it would be?» Gentle. Dry. A wash of relief. Hope, a flickering ember.
«I think I always hoped.»
Amusement. Love. «You probably did.»
The grim determination creeps back in around the edges. Guae is implacable, picking thoughts and feelings and memories out of the chaos of common experience. Closing things away where Hanno can't see them -
«Please -» Hanno's falling to pieces, and he has no right to be.
«Please,» echoes back - «for the sake of what little dignity I have left, my heart. Besides, this -» the sensation - muffled, blunted still sickeningly unmistakable - of their right thumb-nail being torn out at the root - «sorry. The pain wasn't the point. Even the - twisting wasn't really the point.»
«Information.» It's more a thought than a deliberate sending, but they're tangled so close.
«No. He had everything that mattered out of me a long time ago. He was… Playing a longer game than that, my heart.» Detached observation. Alarmingly detached.
For a moment, Hanno touches something like the same detachment as the pieces fall together.
«Proving his power. Proving he could use me to get to you, and I couldn't stop him. Or… couldn't bear to. Until the end.» Very gentle. «I'm sorry, my heart.»
«I asked you not to.» Honestly, he feels like there were times when he was outright pleading with Guae not to shut him out this time, no matter -
- he's pretty sure he remembers that? But it's -
- the door in their mind looks an awful lot like the one on the room they're in. The one with the trap that was meant for him. He probably shouldn't be reaching out to open it, that's almost certainly a bad idea -
The ghost of a hand on his arm. It is a bad idea, and he doesn't need to do this now. «Please,» Guae murmurs. «They're yours, I kept them for you, but -»
Dread coiling like mist around their ankles. He was in Hanno's head, too. And until that trap touched him, Hanno didn't remember.
«He wouldn't allow it. He thought if you did, you might stop reaching out to me.»
«I wouldn't have. And - that doesn't make sense.» It was helping, tangled in like this he knows, having him there was helping Guae.
«He didn't need to make sense, my heart. Only to hurt. He knows.»
The long game. The only way Moravin can win this is by making them give up. Making them do this again, making Guae go through this again, and again, until they can't bear it any more. Until all that's left, all there ever was, all they ever were, is Guae broken and broken again under Moravin's hand, because no amount of grit and stubbornness, no amount of grim resilience, can ever hold against a world-shaper's power, and Hanno reckless in his anger, burning hope so fierce that when the fire dies everything he tries to save is ash -
«Beloved -»
«No, my heart. We can do this. If we have to try again» - for the hope of a future that doesn't end with Anaie putting Moravin's dagger into Guae's guts and a swan-dive into death for them both -
«I don't want him to touch you again.» Even to himself, Hanno sounds like a petulant child. A child whose tantrum has dragged everyone he loves through hell more times than he cares to think about.
«Neither do I, my heart. Neither do I.» Guae's voice in their head is a thin, broken thing. Guilt and grief come up like a drowning tide -
- and then Guae is catching him again, and the unfairness of that burns, when he's the one who's suffering and it's all Hanno's fault -
«No,» Guae's voice grows stronger. Reaching out. Drawing them together again. «That is Moravin's poison talking; this ground we do not yield. Give me your anger, my heart. Give me your hope.»
Still he hesitates -
It feels as if Guae draws a breath. Then another. Steady. «Hannothferan Galadhené. My heart. Get the fuck up and fight.»
This time, the anger, the damned unfairness of it all, is a breaking wave, sweeping them up together, back into the world, to quiet darkness and the sense of Ilvhan's watchful presence.
Something else, too, someone else; familiar. Family.
*
Delfi loves both her brothers very dearly, of course, but she and Hanno are alike in ways that Makna is not. It was Hanno she toddled after as a girl, and Hanno she got into trouble with, when they were both young; she knows her oldest brother very, very well. So she has known for some time that Hanno is not... That something isn't right. That some part of him is deeply, deeply hurt.
No-one would disagree with her on that point now, of course; when it became clear that the house of midnight had fallen, when Atelaina came shepherding her youngest siblings to safety - everyone knew, then. She knows it goes back before that; right into the long dark which everyone else seems to think of as a golden age. And it was, in the beginning; one day everything was fine, but then the next -
She knew something was wrong at breakfast. Makna outright said she was being silly; mother told her, very kindly, that her brother was at a difficult age, and that there was nothing to worry about. Delfi decided neither of them knew what they were talking about, and when Hanno set out at evening, she crept out after him.
He left the road as soon as he was out of sight of the walls; cut through the woodland to meet Thaleviné. Went to him straight as an arrow through the dusk. To this day, she'd swear there'd been nothing between them before that day, or at least nothing more than potential, attraction, interest. And there was nothing then - not even a word of greeting - before Thaleviné had her brother backed up against a tree and was working on peeling him out of his clothes.
Delfi crept away, face burning, and has wondered ever after if she should have interrupted.
If she could have.
And from that day on there was something brittle and hurt in her brother; and if people still called them both reckless in the same breath, she could see the difference. She might do something for the thrill of the risk, or because she didn't stop to think it through; Hanno, though - Hanno she sometimes felt just didn't care if he got hurt. Maybe reached for the danger to feel alive. And if he and Thaleviné weren't entirely inseparable, it was less than a year before they vanished together and returned presenting themselves as newlyweds, which even among sfità, who might live a century but probably not two, would be called recklessly fast. That they claimed to have carried out the rite by Nennian tradition, without witness or officiant, only added more fuel to the fire of Delfi's doubts.
She doesn't doubt the bond, which is horrifyingly strong and sometimes embarrassingly obvious; she just doesn't think it was new. She thinks perhaps they just stopped hiding it.
She's wondered down the years if she should blame Thaleviné, or if he's just as much a victim of - whatever it was - as Hanno. And now... She doesn't know what to think.
Hanno's been a mess this whole campaign, and only mostly in the ways that make sense - the hell-white has been hard on everyone, and having his beloved in enemy hands for so long can only have made that worse, and yet. And yet. Something's been off, again. She was expecting to have to recruit Makna to sit on him, but he hasn't hardly been reckless at all. Resigned, almost. Lost, sometimes, in a way that she associates with refugees and rescuees.
Whatever it is, Delfi doesn't like it.
So she holds her second back with the reserve, and when Ilvhan's message runners come to tell her they've found Thaleviné, she leaves them in command and takes her own hand-picked team in with her, to see for herself.
She doesn't remember the Fortress of Night well enough to know what these rooms were, before; elegant, once, though. Ilvhan's people have cleared the corridor, and are standing guard in the moderately grand hall it branches from; after the challenge-and-response she leaves her own augmenting them, and passes through alone.
Ilvhan is sitting on his haunches by an open doorway. The corridor's lit; the room beyond isn't. She didn't say she'd come herself, when he told her his plan, but he doesn't look surprised. Rises to his feet with all dusk's wonted grace, and comes a little way down the corridor to meet her.
Dusk's grace in the way he manages not to sound reproving, either, murmuring, "I thought they deserved some privacy."
"I have to know," she says, and then, even more quietly, "there's something strange going on there. Has been for some time."
"There's - yes." He's frowning, a little. "Whatever it is- we might do better to ask my brother, when all of this is settled. I'm almost sure he knows. He's been… Odd. For a while. But - by all means." He waves an invitation. "I'll warn you, it's bad."
Delfi moves like the hunter she is, soft-footed, her presence masked. Pauses in the doorway, blinks until her eyes adjust to the gloom. Between the enchanted blanket and the way her brother's curled around him like an octopus, about all she can see of Thaleviné is one bruised and bloody forearm, broken chain dangling from his wrist, hand wrapped tighter than unconsciousness should allow around the the hilt of that damn sword of his that Hanno's carried so long.
She can read more from Hanno than she can from him, and more from the room than from either of them, tracks of the past as clear as those of a deer over snow. She doesn't like any of it, but - she can read it. And it says her brother isn't the only one here who's been suffering.
It's not as much of a relief as she thought it might be.
"They're stirring more," Ilvhan says quietly, when she returns to the corridor. "I think it won't be long, now."
Back to the opposite wall, Delfi settles in to wait.
It's not quite another half-hour before she feels her brother's awareness come back to the world.
"Delfi? Is that you?" He calls, out of the dim room, and if his voice isn't quite right, it's as close as it's been in years. He's not moving quite right, either, coming through the doorway, shaking out his hands as though they hurt. As though everything hurts. "We could use your help. We need to destroy some things."
He almost sounds convincingly calm, but Delfi knows what poorly-suppressed anger looks like on her oldest brother. Well enough to recognise it even when it isn't - or isn't entirely - the wild-fire temper she and her brothers share, when there's something slow-burning and implacable beneath it.
Hanno's attention snaps to Ilvhan as he unfolds from his crouch.
"Do you think you could drink something first, Guaeth?" He asks, very gently.
She's not expecting the doubled laugh - bitter amusement from Hanno's throat and a soft cracked sound coming out of the dark from Thaleviné.
"Hah." Hanno's voice, still, but Thaleviné's accent. "Vero's been giving you instructions, hasn't he."
"He had a disturbingly precise idea of what we were going to find in here." Ilvhan says it very lightly, and shrugs, but he's not any less troubled by the unanswered questions than Delfi is.
"Of course he did." Soft snort. "Sweet Vero sees everyone else so clearly and still can't look in a mirror. Go on then, -" the shift's abrupt, it's Hanno talking now - "get in here. Delf', you may as well. Maybe it'll finally stop you fretting about us."
"I'm not fretting -" she, well - honestly, she lies, but she follows Ilvhan nonetheless.
"No, but -" it comes grating and broken from Thaleviné's throat, it obviously hurts - Hanno drops like a stone at Thaleviné's side, reaching for him, hands clutched together as they have what is, equally obviously, an internal argument.
Which Hanno loses, hard enough - and obviously enough - that Delfi has to sit on the urge to hiss.
"No," Thaleviné says again, but this time he uses Hanno's voice to do it. "But you do think I forced him."
That is a damned sight more blunt than she'd ever expected out of Thaleviné, who as far as she can tell has never said anything without thinking it through thoroughly and who always has at least three reasons for anything he does.
She can work with blunt and worry about the implications later. "I'd be lying if I said I hadn't considered the possibility."
The horrified, half-voiced - "why?" is entirely and only her brother. Thaleviné's response is the slight inclination of his own head, wince carefully suppressed, that says, go on.
"I don't believe your bond was new at the midsummer banquet that year. And I know something both terrible and intangible happened to my brother right before the pair of you suddenly became inseparable."
The expressions passing over her brother's face are… complicated. Partly because whatever he's feeling is complicated, but also partly because half of them aren't even his emotions. If she thought they were tangled in terrifyingly close before -
- the offended prickle and the rueful affection it's warring with are probably his own, though.
"I love you, little sister," he says, at last, and sounds almost like himself. Comes to hug her, awkward in armour - he has helm and gauntlets off, but is still wearing the rest, which she's honestly a little surprised by. "We have been keeping secrets. We didn't expect you to see us clearly enough to worry." That's both of them, accents mingled oddly, and she has no idea what to say in response.
Ilvhan evidently does; he comes close enough to set a pair of wooden cups in easy reach. "You should both drink this," he says, very calm. "It will soothe your throat, Guaeth, but more importantly, it's energy you don't have to scavenge."
It takes Hanno's steady hand over Thaleviné's shaky one to get the first cup down his throat; Hanno looks rebellious for a moment and then knocks the second back himself.
"Water, green-cordial, honey-water, broth." The last two bottles Ilvhan sets down have keep-warm spells acid-etched into the glass. "Give it a few minutes, and then try a little water. Guaeth - one of the alarmingly specific things my brother said was that food was going to be difficult. Take it slow; if you feel like you can eat for yourself, that would be best, but don't push it. Hanno - you need to be very careful about your energy levels. Vero said, 'this may be more of a drain-off than you're used to handling.' That's a direct quote."
"Your brother," Hanno says, and she's not even sure which of them is talking any more, "is an appalling mother-hen."
He does, at least, start chewing on a honey-cake.
"As far as I'm concerned," Ilvhan says, after a moment, "the three of you are an appalling conspiracy. I do believe you meant to protect us - but don't think we haven't noticed you're up to something. I'll admit I'm a little concerned about why the youngest of us all appears to be right in the middle of it along with you, but I'll grant that might just be Anaie being a very strange child."
"You have no -" Thaleviné starts; croaks into nothing.
Finishes the thought from Hanno's throat. "- no idea what potential that strange child will grow into."
"Will?" That's not a slip, not even this worn-down, and Ilvhan doesn't miss it any more than Delfi does.
Their grins don't quite match; Thaleviné's is more of a grimace. "How could we possibly know that? It hasn't happened yet… Has it?"
Delfi grits her teeth.
Ilvhan folds his arms. "How can you possibly be this coherent, this soon?" It's a solid parry. "And don't try and tell me it's that horrifyingly close bond of yours, even if you weren't still two people at all it wouldn't make all this -" he waves a vague gesture at the room - "not have happened."
"We've had a lot of practice," Hanno says, pouring water. "We are very good at compartmentalising. And this," Thaleviné's accent creeping in, as Hanno puts the cup into his hands, not quite letting go, "this is only pain. It's clean."
Ilvhan clearly understands something she doesn't, from that; he winces. Stays silent while Hanno helps Thaleviné drink.
"As far as secrets go -" that muddled halfway-house voice again, Hanno reaching for a piece of cheese and a handful of dried apple slices - "ask again, when we are… More settled. Going into it now would… cut. This has been - rougher than we thought it would be." It's an awkward admission. Uncomfortable to sit with. "I told Vero once -" and this is all Thaleviné - "knowing what you're getting yourself into doesn't make it any easier."
He's the oldest of them, of course, but he's not older enough for the weight of old pain behind the words.
Ilvhan hears it too. "When did you -" He catches himself. "No, later, you're right." He shakes his head. Shakes the thought off. "Are you going to let us get you out of here before…"
"No." Thaleviné croaks, from his own lips.
Ilvhan - still kneeling on the tiled floor, just out of their reach - nods. Shuffles back a little and reaches for another satchel. Medical supplies.
"Alright. Up to you which one of us does this," he says quietly.
There's a moment of silent debate between them, before Hanno says, a little reluctantly, "you do it."
Delfi doesn't know Ilvhan well enough to be sure, but she thinks that has surprised him.
Hanno untangles himself from Thaleviné, takes up helm and gauntlets - and Thaleviné's sword, with even more obvious reluctance - and gets to his feet.
"Well, Delf? Wanna go smash some shit up?"
Delfi would absolutely rather smash things than sit here in this dim small room that reeks of fear and pain for even a moment longer; she rises and follows her brother out.
One of Ilvhan's inexplicably-well-briefed team hands him a sledgehammer on a leather baldric as they pass. Hers fall in around them at her signal.
*
In one body, in one room, they endure the patient work of healing, the cleaning of wounds, the cataloguing of what needs further care, the gentle encouragement to drink.
In the other, anger boiling at last into action, they stalk through the sometimes-still lovely halls of the fortress of night, heading down, down. They do not encounter any living enemy, not yet; Delfi and her team handle the call-and-response, passing other teams, engaged in the systematic work of clearing and mapping.
They have a different goal; they know where they are going.
The sealed doors are beautiful still, laid with onyx and obsidian and agate like fire, and Delfi's people have a guard set before them, because they can neither open the doors nor damage them. This is Thalevin's own workmanship, at the height of his power; the way opens to Guaethguin Thaleviné's hand.
That it's Hannothferan Galadhené's actual hand matters not one jot.
Time was, the workshops and forges of the house of midnight were spoken of in awe, among those with even passing interest in such matters. There is space for awe, still, in the dreadful majesty of the uses to which the house of light twisted those arts, first subtly and then openly.
There are reschtört alive down here, still, the clever ones biding their time, and all that cleverness buys them nothing because they are destruction walking, wrath personified, nothing and no one can touch them. Delfi has their back, her people have the perimeter. They carve a bloody swathe, and it is almost incidental.
They know what is down here. Guaeth saw it at it's height, and saw it at it's fall. They know what can be cleansed, what can be restored, and what they need to destroy.
The schtörtfessk, first; the pit, and the tools of the shaping. It is - better, if as few people as possible see the outline of what is possible, in the shape of what has been done. Moravin is a world-shaper; Ethevis is a world-shaper's scion, mortal imitations of the process would not achieve quite the same results, but they could be more than horrific enough. Best that the only ones who see this before they take the hammer to it are scions and followers of the house of dawn, not given to the kind of contemplation that could reverse-engineer the process. And Guaeth, who already knows how it works.
(Guaeth, who holds Hanno's arm a moment; reaches out through him; change is creation is creation is change; poison enough to fell a small town denatures at his will, to grey dust and light, against which everyone in this place is already well-warded. Even the prisoners, because Moravin needed them to live. Even the reschtört. Even those in the process of becoming - of being made into reschtört, because the application has to be very precise and controlled. Elsewhere in the fortress, the other teams are probably starting to find them. Realising the choice they need to offer, to those whose minds are still broadly their own; some will find the changes have gone too far to live with.
Moravin was always very careful with that, with him. The changes are subtle. He's not even sure if it's entirely the same process, if it's in some way fundamentally different for born-people, whether talith or sfità, or if it's simply a matter of playing a longer game with him. There's never been a scion made reschtört. Not unless Ethevis counts, which... isn't a thought they want to think, right now.)
As they climb the steps to the workshop proper, movement catches their eye, down in the pit -
- not a reschtört, not yet, but too far gone to survive - Hanno vaults the rail, sword in hand.
(Leaving Guaeth standing by the rail, Moravin's hand on his shoulder, Moravin's voice in his ear "There comes a point in the transformation, my dear, when it has gone too far to be stopped. This one -" looking down to the pit - "approaches that crux; too much changed to live as what they were. They will come to me, and be made complete, or they will die broken.")
Hanno doesn't hesitate even a moment, delivering the mercy blow to one changed further than Guaeth has ever been, though their desperate, pleading eyes are still their own. Makes sure of the other two bodies in the pit, utterly businesslike.
("You must wonder what this means for yourself. These little things -" Moravin's touch is so, so gentle, tracing the slowly-healing incisions on Guaeth's fingers - "are no great matter. Preliminaries. Subtle things. The flesh will become accustomed to change, whether you will it or no. Make no mistake, my dear, I will bring you to that point… but not until you want it. You and I will last as long as the world lasts; there's no hurry.")
(Somewhere else, Ilvhan's hands are gentle, too, as gentle as they can be cleaning burst and infected burn-blisters on Guaeth's right hand. Moravin's subtle things are by no means subtle enough to escape his notice. That hand has claws more than nails, now, but his only comment is, "tell me if you need me to stop for a moment, Guaeth."
And he does stop, sets the twisted hand down very gently when Guaeth can't make himself reply.)
Hanno stands in the pit, a small figure beside the hulking bodies of the unfinished reschtört, surrounded by sheer walls that were made to contain them, hedged about by mechanisms meant to sap hope and will and strength, mechanisms that are still running, mechanisms that were made to be impossible to break from the inside -
- understanding settles on him like a grey cloud, as he looks around. There is no way out.
"Alright," he says softly. Breathes in despair. Backs up, step by careful step, until he comes up against the far wall. Leans heavily; lets his shoulders drop; lets his head fall back to rest against smooth stone.
Guaeth looks up through Hanno's eyes to where Delfi is standing outside the control room, leaning on the rail, looking down, more amused than concerned, one eyebrow lifted, as if to ask how he intends to get himself out of this one. Her lips move, but the words don't come through.
(Guaeth doesn't lean on the rail, it's not permitted him. But he looks down, and can't look away, not with Moravin's hand in his hair, turning his head; not when it's Hanno down there, this time. He can hear the growling. Schtörtgán, Moravin's blood-hungry war-hounds. They're no real part of the process; they're here for the fear they induce, for Moravin's amusement, and because they need to be fed.
"What do you think, my dear?" Moravin asks, commanding his attention. "Should we leave him down there a little longer, wear down that irritating peppiness a little more? Or are you eager to make a start?")
(Guaeth presses his good hand to his chest, as if that will help, and tries not to be sick.
Ilvhan's talking, low, gentle. It won't make words.
There's no way out. There never was. All their high hopes were just pretending otherwise, closing their eyes -)
«Close your eyes a moment, beloved?» Hanno's tone is calm. Measured. As if defeat isn't tearing at his soul, as if it's not taking all he has to keep his feet. «This is making my head spin.»
Hanno closes his own eyes a moment. Breathes in pit-air, an immaterial poison of dread and despair.
Breathes the despair back out again.
"Yeah." Aloud, but quiet. Not really talking to anyone at all, even Guaeth.
Wipes Guaeth's sword on his already-filthy surcoat; sheathes it. Pats himself down, checking over his gear.
"Yeah, no. Fuck this."
Breathes in again, and the engines of despair don't stand a chance. Hope unfurls like a banner, shining golden. Unshakeable, unstoppable, the full tally of the strength of the first scion of dawn set against what may be a very clever mechanism, but which is, absent its makers, dead or fled in defeat, only a mechanism.
Hanno kicks off the wall, takes four long strides and springs, almost straight up, to where his sister is already reaching to catch him and haul him over the rail.
Delfi's laughing, saying something teasing about recklessness; Hanno's teasing back, sheer force of habit, even he's not really paying attention -
- that was a terrible idea. That was a brilliant idea. Hanno running on hope is a hundred times more solid than Hanno running on rage. His presence in Guaeth's head is fierce, driven, utterly implacable. «The only person I am ever going to surrender to is you, beloved. Trust me. I've got this. All you need to do is come along for the ride.»
He does destroy the pit-mechanisms first, though; pacing the perimeter and taking personal offence and the borrowed sledgehammer to delicate constructions of crystal and wire. Then the control room; then the workshop proper, staying his hand only long enough to let Guaeth reach through him and check for traps and poisons.
Even Delfi stands back to let him work. She's got his back, even if she's never trusted Guaeth in this life, and she's starting to understand why they need to do this for themselves.
*
Hanno gives himself a moment, after, to slump amidst the wreckage of broken glass, twisted metal and shattered gemstones. Drinks the green-cordial and water one of Delfi's people produces; eats a handful of nuts and chews on a strip of fruit leather. Long-running jokes to the contrary, he's not fool enough not to realise that if Vero made a point of telling Ilvhan to warn him about this, then he needs to listen. Besides, if he pays attention, it's obvious Vero was right; he's feeding more power down the bond to Guae than he can reasonably sustain.
Fortunately, he doesn't need to sustain it, just keep up for long enough.
Guae's clean and warm and bandaged, somewhere in the back of his mind; not in no pain but certainly less, and more comfortable in himself for being dressed, as well. It helps. Not eating, and Ilvhan's not pushing the point, but he's keeping broth and green-cordial and honey-water down.
One last thing to take care of and they can get out of here.
«The diarnmaschengna.» Guae sounds - feels - exhausted.
Even Hanno's not exactly looking forward to climbing all those stairs. He reaches for another piece of fruit leather; starts chewing mechanically. «I still don't understand how it works.»
«I don't think you need to, my heart. You have a hammer; it worked last time.»
It worked the time before, too, but Hanno isn't going to mention that. His memories of quite how badly he got hurt doing it have faded, a failed loop; Guae's memories of learning about it haven't.
Then, quieter: «show your sister this.»
No way he can run it himself, Hanno can see that immediately. He doesn't have enough left in him. He doesn't really have enough capacity for magical theory to understand it himself, either, but that, at least, he can borrow from Guae.
"He designed this," Delfi says, frowning at the schematic sketched in salvaged chalk on a section of workbench swept clean of debris. Almost visibly wrestling her misgivings. "Well. Alright. But I'm holding you to the promise of answers, you hear me." Catches Hanno's arm; looks into his eyes as though she can see through them - "he can hear me?"
Hanno nods before Guae can prevaricate over what the right answer would be.
"I'm holding you to that promise, Thaleviné."
"I hear you, Galadhené," Guae borrows Hanno's voice. "I'd expect nothing less."
The twisting of the reschtört may have been shrouded in secrecy, but the source of the hell-white is nothing that Moravin even attempted to conceal. It's just reaching it that was the problem, and from this side of Thalevin's seal-locked doors, that is only a matter of climbing.
The great spiral stair isn't some narrow defensive thing; it's Thalevin's making, steep and wide and elegant, and none of Delfi's team like it much. They like Hanno's suggestion of having them wait at the base of the tower even less; he's quite certain that in the unlikely event there's anything alive up there at all, it won't be half a match for him and Delfi, but he concedes that argument.
Delfi does stop them at the point when their cold-wardings are really starting to work hard; sends them back to mount a guard a full spiral below. It does no-one any good to have them getting silly with cold up here.
Besides, it's not much further to the tower's open roof, and the warded glass dome where the diarnmaschengna waits.
It still doesn't look anything like a machine, and it still hurts to look directly at some of the parts. Light refracts strangely through a set of prisms and spheres, unhindered by the ice that rimes everything.
Delfi stands beneath the sheltering arch of the doorway, close enough to run the warding; prudently out of line of sight. It's killing-cold up here where the diarnmaschengna spins warmth relentlessly into light, and Guae's new warding is against cold-burn and frost-bite, not against the cold itself.
No time to hesitate. Hanno knows better now than to just rip the autsen-stone out of the heart; there's an order to this. He sets his feet, hefts the hammer, and renders the diarnmaschengna into shards and dust, piece by methodical piece in a screaming of shattered glass and torn enchantment.
He leaves the pendulum, swinging in its lead frame; the dome needs to come down first. Hanno takes three steady breaths that burn like fire in his chest, and sings shattering as he swings the hammer; Delfi's clear voice comes in above him, and the dome falls in a shower of sparks and shards.
Helm or no, he's going to be fishing glass shards out of his hair for a damned long time.
The air's cold, still, but not driven cold. «One last thing, beloved. Then we can rest.»
Guae reaches through him; Guae catches the pendulum by the chain.
"Enough." All the strength they don't really have left in their voice. "Be still. Be unbound. Be undone."
What flares isn't entirely light. It's blinding anyway, but with the dome down, most of it goes up. It still batters hard against his already-stretched wards; he doubles over, heaving, and just about manages not to be sick.
What remains, when he straightens up, is only dust and rust, a breath of warm air and power, and more tears than they have strength between them to cry.
In the doorway arch, Delfi is on her feet, looking both shaken and shrewd.
(Far below, Ilvhan has a very gentle arm around Guae's shoulders. The portion of his father's power that settles onto him strengthens more than it scours, but only just.)
(Somewhere in memory, Guae looks grim. "I don't think there was ever anything to be done about my father.")
(Somewhere else in memory, Hanno asks, "will it be enough?")
(Somewhere else, now, the other scions of midnight - Thalevin's younger children - waver between hope and grief.)
Here and now, Delfi hauls Hanno up to his feet; slings his arm over her shoulder and starts helping him down the stairs, and Guae finally condescends to be carried from the room of his imprisonment, and from the fortress which is, inarguably, now his.
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XD
Btw, talking of which, and since you said you weren't sure what you were doing with tags yet, you could definitely add in Supplies/Styles on this one (if you wanted) for Chiaroscuro (horror/dark themes) and Portrait (5k-9.999k words)! (You want, when using them, to have a line for Supplies/Styles in your text header details in the post as well. Disclaimer: not a mod!!)
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Of course now you've suggested those it suddenly makes sense - and I'll look at adding them later, thank you.
(On reflection, I suspect my problem was actually 'brain refusing to parse the lists for ADHD / layout reasons', lol.)
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Aw, glad to be of use! And they are confusing, just looking at them all like that. BUt, yes, they are very much optional extras, so that was definitely sensible. I find it quite fun, though, being able to say, "Oh, wait, I've done that one." Or using them to inspire you to experiment a bit in style, if you like that kind of thing. (Achievement unlocked! And sometimes you get pretty banners for it if you want them.)
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And the characterisation in particular was something I was really quite anxious about, as this is the first new project I've had in at least 15 years, and I'm still very much feeling my way through who they are & how they fit together.
To some extent the same with worldbuilding, but then again - it's at the stage where a lot of the worldbuilding is only getting done as-required after a first draft, coming back to fill in the placeholders ([some kind of drink], [landscape] etc) - which does make it difficult to infodump without realising... :D
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