Their blood ran through the apparatus’s pipes and vessels. Their young cylls were macerated, then purified at each stage, until all that remained was a concentration of lifeforce. According to ancient tomes, those energies were held within tiny particles freed from those torn cylls, invisible motes that the ancients called mytokondrans. The recipe for this potent fuel came from those same texts. Still, it had taken centuries of Iflelen study to refine their methods, through adaptations and advancements—including the incorporation of living sacrifices.
Each child lasted five days before succumbing, giving all their life to the hungry copper-and-crystal web. Just a century ago, the same machine had once consumed a child each day, but the Iflelen had improved their methodology over the many years, such was their progress. They also learned how to use those same distilled elixirs to extend their own lives.
Wryth stepped past a small tow-headed girl, her head lolled back, a tube down her throat. He brushed fingers through her hair, silently thanking her for her gift and sacrifice.
He remembered when he had first knelt before the great machine, shortly after swearing fealty to the god ?reyk and joining the Iflelen. That had been sixty-three years ago—but it seemed far longer.
He could barely recall his youth as an acolyte to a Gjoan mystik. He and his mother had escaped the Dominion when he was six, just before he was to be blinded in preparation for his own training to be a mystik in their mountainous stronghold. He fought down the memories of that harrowing time, being chased by Gjoan hunters, the murder of his mother by slavers, his own years of misuse, until he finally ended up at the school of Teassl, on the Islands of Tau on the other side of the Crown.
He only gained entrance to the illustrious school because a hieromonk, one who had been abusing him at a whorehouse, had noted the tattoo on the inside of Wryth’s upper lip, marking him as a possession of the mystiks. Only rare children were afforded such training. Believing such a boy to be special—and maybe wanting Wryth to be closer for easy pleasuring over the next years—the monk had gained Wryth entrance to Teassl. There, he had excelled on his own, eventually gaining his first Highcryst, that of alchymy. Afterward, he had thanked the hieromonk, gutted the bastard with a dagger, and left for Kepenhill, where Wryth earned his second Highcryst, thus becoming first a Shrive, then an Iflelen.
Even now, after so long, after achieving so much, he could still awaken that old pain and humiliation of his younger years, when he was defenseless and at the mercy of so many others. It stoked the cold fire inside him, of ambition, of the drive to never again be under another’s thumb. To ensure that, he sought power found in ancient knowledge, intent to let nothing and no one stop him from becoming a formidable force, one more potent than any king.
With a silent growl, Wryth cast aside such dark musings and focused back on the shining wonder before him. He had dedicated the rest of his life to divining the mysteries buried here. He searched ahead, to where one of his brothers waited.
Shrive Skerren had summoned him down here with some urgency, but Wryth could not answer that call until the king was gone.
To reach his brother, Wryth bowed and ducked and twisted his way through the maddening copper web, aiming toward its center—where a hungry spider waited, imbedded at its heart, a talisman of great significance.
Ahead, Skerren bent near the holy artifact.
Wryth caught glimpses of it as he worked his way closer. The sculpted bronze bust had been wired and tubed into the great machine. The countenance of the sculpture was that of a curly-bearded man with a crown of the same plait. His bronze skin roiled with the energies suffusing through it. The finest of his curls and strands of hair waved, as if stirred by invisible winds. Glass eyes of a violet blue glowed dully, blind to all around it.
According to the talisman’s history, the bust had been discovered in Havensfayre two millennia ago. It had been found in a forgotten vault in Oldenmast, buried deep under the roots of that ancient tree. Since then, the bodiless head had passed through countless hands. No one truly knew what to make of it, but all appreciated the beauty of its design and workmanship. It traveled to the farthest reaches of the Southern Klashe and north to the sequestered Hegemony of Hapre. It had been studied, dismissed, and had come to adorn many kings’ halls, until it finally made its way to Azantiia.
Over time, the revelations from ancient tomes offered some hint of its true wonder, how it could be stirred back to life if fueled in a proper manner. Still, it had taken the Iflelen centuries to wake the talisman from its slumber and glean what little they could of it. The head had spoken only four times since stirring to life. Each utterance was cryptic, whispered in a language no one understood. Those four messages were inscribed in the Iflelen’s most sacred texts, waiting to be deciphered.
As centuries passed, their order had learned much. They discovered how the holy talisman produced a strange emanation, a vibration through the air. It felt like an itch on the skin when one drew near.
Even now, Wryth felt that wind blowing against him as he crossed closer.
With time, the Iflelen learned how to monitor its strength, using slivers of lodestone wrapped in copper wire. It did not take long to recognize how this strange emanation affected small animals: birds, lizards, snakes. The wild beasts would fall sway to its call, becoming docile, easily handled.
It was Vythaas who first related this to bridle-song and spent all his life trying to capture this sound and use it to control larger beasts. He eventually refined his method with copper needles inserted into key areas of the brain. After working for a time with animals, he found the dull-minded Gyn the easiest of men to manipulate, then moved onward from there.
Still, the talisman continued to radiate its strange silent song. To monitor its keening, the artifact was surrounded in concentric rings of bronze, a complicated skeletal sphere, like an orrery used to study the stars. The rings were lined by wired lodestones suspended in oil-filled crystal spheres, becoming a hundred tiny weathervanes. With those tools, the direction and strength of the talisman’s invisible winds had been mapped over centuries. And so it went for the longest time, with the talisman forever calling out to the world.
Until an answer finally came.
Sixty-two years ago—a year after Wryth had sworn his blood oath to the order, which he still deemed as providential—another wind blew the vanes straight back at the sculpture’s head. The wind came in from the east, and from its fierce strength, it was estimated to have risen somewhere near the coast of Guld’guhl. So, Wryth had overseen the establishment of an Iflelen outpost near the mines of Chalk and continued to watch for that sign again.
Thrice more over the past decades, those winds rose again, spinning the lodestones toward the bronze bust. This further convinced their order that something similar to their talisman must be buried out there. Then a moon ago, the mysterious winds appeared again, sporadic at first, then the gusts blew stronger. The rising storm drew Wryth and Skerren to the mines of Chalk—where the bronze woman was discovered, only to have it stolen by a shrewd thief in disguise.
Wryth reached Skerren, despairing at the full breadth of what they had lost, now likely sunk into the sea.
“About time you got here,” Skerren scolded.
“What is so urgent that it required me to be pulled from the king’s side?”