Chapter Seven
Arkady kept having dreams.
Of people he'd failed, those whose souls he'd been forced to commit to eternal destruction, unable to release their souls in any other way beyond the cruelest of form, the only one available to him, all other options exhausted and his path chosen, inescapable, like gravity exerting itself upon his very life force, the only direction forward.
He couldn't remember which came first - the voices, the pain or the unrelenting eyes, looking upon him in judgment, saying 'why couldn't you save us?' or 'why didn't you try?' or 'are you really so helpless that you always take the easiest path?'
When he awoke awash in sweat, it felt like he hadn't slept at all, no more rested than he had been when he'd closed his eyes hours earlier. The weight of those souls lost to the æther would remain with him for quite some time, but it had been decades since last he'd needed to endure this, and he had blissfully forgotten how much the pain and pressure was at the onset.
Except now he was back in the thick of it, and he couldn't remember what his pathway had been through to the other side last time.
The dwarf knew all of this would eventually pass. It had passed before; it would pass again. But that didn't make it any easier when he was in the thick of it, the unbearable cost of war rubbed like salt into his eyes once more.
There were no other avenues to deal with blueflame weapons. Mages had been looking for centuries for a way to release the souls contained within without destroying them, and those far wiser than him had been driven to the brink of madness, contemplating any possible path to let those souls go gracefully, but it was not to be.
When he'd been given his training by his mentor regarding blueflame weaponry, his teacher had told the dwarf that, with any luck, all the blueflame weapons would be destroyed before he would ever be asked to deal with any of them, but alas, the arsenal had been tenacious in its determination not to be destroyed, hiding in nooks, crannies and caves, just waiting for time to pass and a new, naïve generation to discover them and put them back to use for their horrible causes.
Over his lifetime, he'd dismantled close to a dozen of them.
"You're awake," Moonweave said. She'd braided his beard while he slept and it hung in a neat red triple braid, bound with a heavy silver skull clasp at the bottom of it. He'd normally tended to his beard himself, but the last few months, they'd been so busy and overtasked that he'd let it fall into disarray, not having the time nor energy to keep it prim and proper, so he was delighted to see that the pixie had restored it to its normal glory, if not better than he usually kept it.
"That must have been quite the challenge," Arkady said to her, inspecting her work. "I... Thank you, for your kindness and attention."
"I need to earn my place here as much as anyone, Master Threadbinder, and if my small hands can bring some lightness while you sleep, then I am happy to have provided them." She looked a little demure, but there was also a sense of pride about her. She knew how much import dwarves placed on their beards, and how much must have been on his mind for his to have fallen into such a state of disrepair. She was a good-looking woman, but there was something about her that made him think she'd been mostly sheltered in the palace for much of her life, and now that she was out of that gilded cage, she was going to try and learn as much as she could as quickly as she could. "I want to do all that I can to establish my sense of worth to the group."
The dwarf chuckled softly. "I know better than most, dear pixie, that you're only that small because you choose to be. I have spent time with your kind and have seen them tower over me when the need was present. You need not hide your abilities around us."
"I'm not hiding them, Master Threadbinder," she said with a shy giggle. "I simply haven't had a call for them as of yet, but should they be needed, you can expect me to display them."
"You can also simply call me Arkady," he sighed. "You're going to be with us for quite some time, and I have no qualms about someone in our entourage referring to me by my first name and not my title."
"Do... do you dislike me, Arkady?" Moonweave said, sitting upon his chest atop his beard, straddling the woven hair, folding her arms at the wrist in front of her, almost to make her bosom press up more towards his eyes.
He smiled a touch sourly, mostly at himself. "I apologize if I have given you that impression, m'lady. I'm actually quite fond of your kind, and you seem quite a sweet girl. I just..." He inhaled a let out a breath. "I know how ridiculous it sounds, but you remind me so much of soldiers I served with, back in the war, and all my memories of them are tied up in how they died. I'm... I'm trying to get past that, but when you're around, it's as though all their faces come springing to mind again and I'm trapped by their memories."
"Perhaps we could set some other memory as my default?" she said with a soft smile. "What if I wanted to engage your services, to find where my thread connects?"
"Normally there's sizable vitae transfer involved, but I suppose since you've already been effectively banished from your family, I could make the attempt for a pittance, although I know pixies have caused trouble for other Threadbinders in the past," he said.
"Oh?" she said, leaning her elbow on a tuft of his beard, her hand in her palm. "How so?"
"Some pixies live complicated and highly changing lives, so while in the process of following a thread to its completion, that thread has been known to break and be replaced by another," he said. "I'm not saying that
will
happen to you, but merely pointing out that it
has
happened and not only the one time, but multiple times. Pixie hearts are... complicated things. There is precedence for it happening, so I feel obligated to remind you that this is a possible path."
"Do you need me to get your partners?"
He nodded. Arkady always preferred that his wife participated in the rituals whenever possible, although from time to time a client would ask that she not be in the room, and he generally respected the client's wishes. "I can begin to prep my materials, but my wife at the very least should know that I'm going to be engaging in magics on Quiesh's back, or if she can find a place where we can put down and stretch our legs a bit more."
The pixie began to flit her wings and lifted up into the air, turning to fly out of the room, but making a point to show the underside of her skirt to the dwarf, revealing her bare ass to his eyes. A few moments later, he could feel the griffon started to descend. He wasn't at all sure where they were right now, having been in the carriage since their departure from the blueflame weapon yesterday, but as they started to sink down towards the earth, he could hear gulls circling around the griffon.
"If nothing else, husband, you certainly
look
better than you did before," Yasha said as she entered the carriage. "But I suspect that's more to do with our pixie tending to your grooming than you doing it yourself."
"You can tell she did it?" the dwarf asked as he rose out of bed, not bothering to put clothes on, making his way over to his toolkit. "What gave it away?"
"Beneath the skullclasp at the very bottom of the braid, there's a small purple ribbon that I think our new companion has used as a belt from time to time," Yasha laughed. "I doubt anyone else would notice, but I'm your wife, and I notice every little change that ever happens to you. Has your mood improved since you went to bed?"
"A little. Perhaps time is the only real curative for this pain, but we will do what we can to see if distraction can provide a little solace as well," he replied. "Moonweave would like to find her partner, so I'm going to bind her thread and we'll take a look and see what she's got lined up in her future."
"You told her about the Pixie Problem, I hope?"
"I did, but she's still game for it."
"Then I suppose we should get to it."
Arkady moved to the door of the carriage and looked out, seeing they were on the coast, rather,
a
coast of some kind. He suspected they were about to cross over the Habiby Sea, on the other side of which laid Gom Weydan. They were going to visit the pocket city. It wasn't a thing they had ever particularly wanted to do, but in following Sophia's path, they would, in fact, be traveling towards an eternally elusive opportunity.
"We are only a day's flight from Gom Weydan, I see," Arkady said, looking back over his shoulder at his wife. "Do we know how much longer the window will remain open?"
"Until the first day of spring, so a month or so," Yasha said. "So as long as we don't spend too much time lingering there, we shouldn't be too concerned about being trapped there. I've always been a little keen to see the Shimmering City during its brief forays into our realm. The tales they tell of it are remarkable, if perhaps a little too far-fetched to be completely believable."
