The Prodigal Sunsinger [Imogen]

[Aurin]

The High City of Zaichaer
34th of Searing, Year 122 Steel

Aurin's blade flashed in the unholy light, flipping end over end to embed itself in the neck of something that had once been a horse. Now its hooves split into talons, its teeth become horrible fangs, and the rest of its body unutterably altered by the Dread Mists. The old man shot a glance behind him, the focused gaze of a man of battle in the midst of a melee. He began to smile in appreciation, and that brief lapse in attention gave another monster enough of an opening to attack.

"Behind!" he shouted, and the man reacted immediately. His weapon burned with a much more comforting light, though Aurin couldn't tell in the moment whether it was a physical light or just something he could see with his trick turned on and his senses feeding him more than they could without runic enhancement.

Aurin cast about for a blade. His own had been thrown, but he needed something in case anything got close enough to him to engage. He needed something to help the old man, who was stabbing and stabbing even as the thing gored him. The redhead fashioned a dozen facsimiles of himself, all running in different directions as he ducked, tucked his shoulder under him, and rolled under an overturned cart to pull a blade from a corpse.

Too slow.

"Ansel!" someone shrieked.

The blast had been bad enough, killing so many. Now the distortions of the Mists were hunting them down, too. He had to make good on his promise to the coven leaders now that they had met his terms and taken him in. They were his people now.


The Golden Peacock
74th of Searing, Year 122 Steel

Decorum be damned, the sun was going down and Aurin was in his shirtsleeves on the balcony that let out of his office. From up high, Kalzasi looked much like the neighborhood was called, glittering jewels strewn out into the dark. He took a sip from his tumbler. His grimace was not for the burn it afforded him, but rather at the memories that haunted him still.

He had made good on his promises. Many more witches had survived the attack on Zaichaer than would have without him. He never claimed to be a hero. Still, it felt like a failure all told.

Aurin wasn't a sentimental man, but when they had made him one of them, they had done so in earnest, and he had bled beside them. That counted for something in some primal way that his rakish unconcern couldn't quite dismiss.

[Imogen]

Imogen was well aware that Aurin Kavafis was the manager at the Golden Peacock, and there was absolutely nothing whatsoever which stopped her from simply walking in the front door and asking the staff for a meeting with him. Some of them might even remember her from the trip last Frost; even if they didn't, nothing precluded writing a letter and asking it be passed up the chain.

She didn't do any of that. Something about the entire endeavor felt like it still needed some element of secrecy. She had a note in the Pfenning's logbooks placing Aurin in Zaichaer shortly before the devastation had occurred, but the fact that he had apparently been there with Mr. Wardell troubled her. She had wondered, belatedly, on her way north, whether the Grymalka's city below the city had suffered the same devastation as the one above. Even if she'd thought of that while still in the High City, she supposed there was no good way to investigate.

Instead of taking any sensible approach, she folded a change of clothes neatly into a tiny sack, opened her bedroom window, and assumed the shape of the albatross. Getting the seabird's seven-foot wings out of the window was tricky, especially while trying to hold on to the sack, but she eventually flopped on to the little tiled veranda and got her bird-shape righted. With a few powerful strokes, the albagin took flight, drawing only a few curious glances from the street below.

Moments later, when Imogen found an appropriate perch atop the Golden Peacock, shielded from the view of the street below and flat enough for her purposes, she returned to her own shape and hurriedly re-garbed, throwing on trousers and a light shift. It was very lucky that Frost was no longer in the air; she doubted the seabird could have carried the heavy coat she'd worn all those months back. She hadn't had room for shoes, either, but that was just as well- it was easier to sneak about on rooftops while barefoot.

She had located the window to Aurin's office earlier that day, so it was only a matter of shifting carefully across the roof to the awning above. The process was made considerably easier by the bound lemur totem; though she did not wish to shift her form, she had found that invoking the power of the small monkeys still allowed her to conduct her (relatively huge and bulky) body across high passages with surprising grace and dexterity. So it was that she arrived above the Theater manager's office to find the inhabitant below, drinking.

Well, that was typical. She couldn't recall a time seeing Aurin without some kind of alcohol in his hand.

"Mr. Kavafis!" Imogen called down, voice a little raspy from the multiple sudden transformations of her voicebox and the cool evening air, "Sorry, it's Imogen Ward, can I come down? I just need a moment."

[Aurin]

From his office balcony, Aurin was more cantankerous gargoyle with a habit for voyeurism than some nouveau riche would-be king surveying his throne. He was paranoid, though, and his Semblance trick had grown quite powerful. And so he knew a bird that wasn't a bird had landed nearby, and he recognized the pattern of Imogen Ward. What he didn't sense was impending danger, so he just continued to sip his drink and marvel at this strange city that had become home despite his best efforts to isolate himself.

He had, of course, had his suspicions about Imogen and Carina. He was suspicious by nature. He hadn't seen either of them in Zaichaer, not in the Market, nor the Grove, nor even in the Pfenning Theater, which had been his only solid connection to lead him to the covens—that and his deathwish audacity. His deals had been struck, and he had made good on them as best he could. He still didn't know the ladies were were or weren't of the covens, but this sudden and strange appearance was certainly suspicious—and amusing.

Lazily, the man turned around so his elbows caught the balustrade and he could peer up toward the roof.

"O Imogen, Imogen! wherefore art thou Imogen?
Deny thy father and refuse thy name;
Or, if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love,
And I'll no longer be a Kavafis."

He smirked. Imogen scanned, but Kavafis did not. In any case, Arry wasn't here to needle him about poetry.

"You know, you could just invite me out for a drink..." He chuckled. "Come on down. Don't break your neck, please. I don't want to have to explain away a corpse." Then again, perhaps he had risen high enough in society that corpses wouldn't tarnish his reputation or hinder his freedom, especially if he wasn't the one doing the killing.

[Imogen]

Well, it was definitely unnerving that the man was so deeply unconcerned about random women on his rooftop. Was he that drunk? Or was this a common occurrence in Kalzasi? Maybe the avialae did that, sometimes; who could say?

No matter. She was the witch mysteriously visiting Aurin, not the other way around, so she adamantly refused to let her puzzlement show on her face. Instead, Imogen called to mind the totem of the domestic cat, letting the spirit well up within her aether without changing her physical form, and stepped smartly down from the roof. She landed lightly (much too lightly for an Ork of her size) on the balustrade and then, because she didn't really wish to fall to her death tonight, slid onto the balcony proper.

"What exactly was that supposed to be?" Imogen demanded, "A pick-up line? Poetry recital? I hope it's not for a play- it sounds like doggerel, nobody's going to want to listen to that."

Only seconds into her reunion with the theater manager and she was already offering her truly enlightened commentary on productions. Still, perhaps one weird turn deserved another.

"Listen, I just got in from Zaichaer. I saw your name in the Pfenning records, or what was left of them. I heard that you were there with Urs Wardell, which means you could only have been on business with the Covens, yeah? And someone mentioned you had been trying to bring evacuees north."

It was a continuous shame--low level, to be sure, Imogen did not make a habit of beating herself up over things she could not have foreseen, but still there--that she had not been present to assist with the evacuation. It was funny, how quickly one's perspective could shift. Three months ago, she'd been setting out from the outskirts of Drathera, with nothing in her mind but tracking down some Ecithian girl and getting back a smuggled knick-knack. Now, with the High City cast under the reddish light of the rift above and no real signs of devastation's abatement, she wasn't certain anything she'd done for the past seven years mattered at all.

She did not really believe what she'd heard on the roads, that Kalzasi was responsible for the explosion. Intellectually, she knew that the sheer volume of aether involved in an act of destruction so vast would have drained a thousand mages dry. Nobody understood how potent Zaichaer's abjurinium technology was better than the Sunsingers- she doubted even the city's godling could have punched a hole right through the Presidium itself.

"I need to know what happened in Zaichaer that morning, and where the evacuees went." She almost withheld her last, most pressing question out of misplaced loyalty to some habit, but ultimately; "Have you heard any news of Carina since then?"

[Aurin]

Aurin watched her descend, her aura overlaid with something familiar—a cat. That was odd; some Orkhan magic to be sure. At her retort, he smirked.

"Everyone's a critic." But she was also, apparently a member of the covens, so he was obliged to help her. That didn't mean he wouldn't be his normal, "charming" self about it. "I had business at the theater, and both Dr Wardell and I had business with the covens. Mine was conducted to mutual satisfaction, I think..."

His bravado crumbled a bit; he was weary from not sleeping. He knocked back some of his drink and rubbed his hand over his face. Fucking memories.

"The Sunsingers did a lot of protecting. The Railrunners did a lot of moving. The others did what they could. I did what I could. We got many out. Some went to ground. As for what happened... some sort of explosion, I think in the Knob. Then shit flew up into the air and opened the first rift. Something opened another rift and they merged into a bigger fucking rift. Mists pouring out. The ZADC did what they could... used the same chemical weapon they used on the prince's wedding reception, but it wasn't enough. If you've been there, you've seen the destruction. Probably worse since we got out. Killed a bunch of the corrupted things, but there were plenty more where they came from."

Aurin frowned. He didn't like mysteries he couldn't get to the bottom of.

"It wasn't Kalzasi. At least, it wasn't the Queen-Regent. Can't figure out who it was... Heard plenty of rumors. Some even blamed the covens." He shrugged.

The man finished his drink. It roughened his voice. He wasn't a soft man, but he figured she wouldn't be here unless there was a someone she was looking for and he didn't think it was Carina.

"Haven't seen hide nor hair of Carina. Was there anyone else you were looking for? Some stopped here for a while and moved on. Others are still in the city."

[Imogen]

Imogen watched Aurin Kavafis carefully as he relayed his tale, watching the man's mood swing like a pendulum in the night.

Some of what he said matched with what she'd seen in Zaichaer, or heard out of Anton and Vanessa after they'd cleared the Pfenning. It was good to have confirmation that the ZADC had tried to suppress the blasts; not because it filled her heart with sudden patriotism, but because it confirmed that whatever had torn the hole in the sky had also ripped through the concentrated powers of the Order of Reconciliation and the aether-suppressant machines sourced out of Gel'Grandal. Only one detail startled her into speech: "Started at the Knob? I wonder how the Gobbler was untouched, then." She'd thought the Knob must have been a casualty of... shrapnel, perhaps, or some other fallout from the central eruption.

As Aurin finished his tale, Imogen rubbed her hand thoughtfully along the balcony railing, taking in the twilight amidst the rooftops of Kalzasi. There was a long moment of silence as she organized her thoughts, and decided which secrets no longer had any value in the keeping, whether or not Aurin was telling the whole of the truth.

"I believe you, about Kalzasi. And it wasn't the Covens. The government in Zaichaer were, to a one, incompetent twats, but I've run into enough reconciliators to know that they had their Negation honed to a fine art- not to mention a stockpile of magebane so big it could give you a stomachache from six blocks out. Frankly, I can't think of any likely suspects whose names don't appear among the pages of a hymnal."

She had thought about it, when she'd first gotten back to Zaichaer and seen the smoking ruin where the Presidium previously presided. Unfortunately, her conclusions were convincing- there was not a single kingdom on the face of Karnor which she could suspect of being able to wreck that sort of havoc. Either the gods had finally seen enough of injustice (unlikely), or someone on the world stage was hiding a secret big enough to threaten every empire at once.

All of that was well above her pay grade, especially now that she wasn't getting paid.

"I was away at the time, in Ecith. You'd like Ecith, I think; the people there all drop trou so quickly that some don't bother to put them back on. I found invitations to three different communal beds in three weeks, and all I was doing was asking people where the pawn shops were." One could not tell, from Imogen's voice, whether she was disgusted, intrigued or jealous of the rampant promiscuity. Perhaps that particular view of sex was the most fundamentally Zaichaeri trait of all?

"Anyway, whatever blew that rift open caused storms all the way out there, and they weren't random, either. The Dreadmists hunted through the villages, twisting magic and beast alike to make specific inversions of the order they'd established. Never seen the like. And if there's something out there which can control the mists, I have to let my bosses know."

Imogen reached down to her bosom with one hand and pulled down the shift over her right breast, revealing the classic sigil of the Cardinal Rune of Reaving seared into her ivy-green flesh, apparently with a literal brand. Entwined with and surrounding the brand was a stylized sunburst, glimmering fitfully with silver fire to Aurin's magical sight.

"If you met the Sunsingers, you ought to recognize this. Do you know where I can find them?"

[Aurin]

"That's what I heard..." He sighed again and shrugged. "But I heard a lot of things and who knows how much of it was true? I still get the odd intelligence out of Zaichaer, but it's all piecemeal and doesn't add up to anything as far as I can tell. There were also people claiming the Gods came down to help fight for a time, but that could just be minds playing tricks..."

An eyebrow rose at her tales of Ecith. He had considered fleeing there when Solunarium didn't work out, but decided it was too hot on that continent and he didn't know how he would fare among the Orkhan. Aurin was a man who made calculated risks—most of the time. He wouldn't have kicked her out of his bed, but he didn't get the sense that she was interested. In any case, sentient mists put a damper on his libido.

"I heard the mists were acting strangely, but... well, they're the fucking mists, so... Some of the witches were blaming Lysanrin, said when they get powerful enough, they can summon the mists. I don't know if that's true or just... you know, an easy scapegoat. Even if it's true as far as it goes... calling them isn't the same as sending them hunting. Some were blaming the Order, as well, but I don't know that those are grounded in anything other than years of enmity. The wards on the Windworks never fell, though... at least they were still up when I left. And airships were circling the affluent areas, whether looting or... I heard a White Knight Hall also maintained its wards against the mists and the monsters and all the other fallout. Supposedly the home of a Seeker?"

He grimaced. Aurin didn't like suppositions and conjectures, but all he had was a mess of puzzle pieces and it didn't feel like he had time to fit them all together before something else dire happened. Hazel eyes lit up a bit as he perused her identification; he merely nodded, however.

"Aye, all right. The most senior Sunsinger in the city is at hospital. I'll take you." He set the glass by the door, climbed up onto the balustrade, and looked back at her. "Coming?"

With that, he leaned back and fell into the darkness. It was only a couple of stories, and a magic word broke his fall. Then he was walking toward the Tranquil Gardens in the Commons, figuring she would catch up if she wanted to.

[Imogen]

Imogen had heard the same stories about Lysanrin summoning the dread mists, but it didn't seem all that relevant to her- even if one of the poor bastards could call forth a few clouds, there was no chance in hell that there were enough Lysanrin in Zaichaer to have created the murderous tempest everyone had said formed on the 34th. She shook her head silently, clearing it forever of that ridiculous notion.

As Aurin spoke about the "senior" Sunsinger, Imogen felt hope rise in her heart. If one of the Captains was here, they might have some idea of how best to proceed. Anything to free her from this nasty burden of self-determination.

"At the hospital, you say? Do you mean the Tranqu- hang on then, Aurin, what are you... hey, get down from-!"

Too late. Mr. Kavafis leapt off the balcony and descended into the dark garden below, leaving only her silhouette against the outline of his office.

"Well damn." Imogen muttered, "Never had someone run away when I get my tits out before."

Well, there was nothing for it but to follow him. She was tempted to simply assume bird-form and fly after him, but a full-body transformation right now would only leave her naked in the middle of the hospital later. Leave it to the mages of Ecith to develop a power which actively resisted all civilized attempts at wearing clothing.

In theory she could try to manifest wings in a more humanoid form, but she didn't fancy the idea here and now. Her brief experiments with large-scale therianthropy on her journey from Zaichaer had reminded her that animals were cunningly designed to perform their natural functions; if you just stuck albatross wings on an Ork, you did not create a flying orkhan, just a winged one. The advanced art of catabolism, meanwhile, could certainly have infused her with the superior jumping prowess of a lemur or a cat's power to land upright, but it would do relatively little to cut down on the damage which landing from such a height was certain to cause.

Thankfully, Imogen had more magic than that at her disposal. She filled her aura with the lemur totem's image, allowing its powers to suffuse her muscles, and then flicked a hand over the railing. There was a burst of argent fire from her palm, which resolved itself in a matter of seconds into the huge, stately partisan she kept tucked away inside her soul. She gripped the ten-foot spear firmly with one hand, then swung out over the balcony.

Though the Orkhan witch's weight immediately tugged the spear downward, her countervailing will infused the mystical weapon. It descended, but slowly, and when she released it and allowed herself to safely fall the final floor's height she hit the ground lightly enough that it made almost no sound at all. The huge spear spun in the air, as though celebrating victory, then rapidly dissolved back into aether, its astral form plunging back into Imogen with enough force to make her stop and brace herself.

Then she was done, on the ground, and still clothed, so she set off after Aurin... who was already leaving the grounds.

"Hey! What the fuck!" Imogen groused as she pursued the theater manager towards the Tranquil Gardens.

[Aurin]

Aurin flashed a smile at her when she caught up. It might have been directed first at her chest, but then, she was taller than him. He found her eyes eventually.

"Oh, good, you brought them..." He linked arms with her as if they were on a date or something and headed toward the Commons. They might have moved faster, but it was already late enough he was going to have to do some smooth talking to get them in to see the man.

"Ansel is a tough old bastard, but he's supposed to make a... well, he's going to recover. At his age, they don't know if it will be a full recovery, but they are doing what they can, and they can do a lot. It was just that the best we could do was triage on the journey back to Kalzasi." He didn't mention footing the bill; he wasn't looking for repayment. The fox-faced trickster took his obligations seriously if he deigned to consider something an actual obligation. But he was a witch now too, if a smart-assed one, and he was looking after the old Sunsinger well, even if the man complained that he needed to be up and back on the road to Zaichaer.

The nurses at the Tranquil Gardens could be more terrifying than mistborn monsters, it seemed. The man hadn't made an escape yet. Perhaps he understood that if he didn't cooperate fully, he wouldn't have the wherewithal to help whenever he got back to the ruins of Zaichaer.

"Do you know him?" he asked, glancing sidelong at her. Witch he might be, but he didn't know all their secrets, nor did he know all the connections between the various others of the population. They survived on a fair amount of secrecy, which he could appreciate. He just also enjoyed knowing secrets.

[Imogen]

Imogen didn't mind Aurin play-acting the strolling lovers; it was the sort of act she'd put on many times in Zaichaer to deflect suspicion, and Mr. Kavafis was at least as paranoid a bastard as she'd ever been. Probably more so. Carina had always said she didn't have the temperament for serious subterfuge.

So she walked alongside him, paying closer attention to figures out of the corner of her eyes than Aurin, until a sudden and familiar name hit her like a sack of potatoes.

"Ansel? Did you say Ansel? Gerhard?"

She could hardly believe her ears. The Sunsingers weren't a vast organization; she had expected to at least recognize whomever it was Aurin had dragged back to Kalzasi for treatment. But to find her immediate commander here, separated from Zaichaer by total coincidence?

If she died in the next few months--and that possibility did not seem remote--she steeled her will to demand that Vicis explain what the fucking joke was meant to have been.

"You could say I know the old bastard. Branded me with the Rune, for one, taught me half of what I know of the sword, and basically all of the spear. He's the wanker who sent me to Ecith on a month's warning and made me miss all the... all the fun times around here."

Imogen's words were biting, but her tone evinced nothing but concern. At least if Ansel was here, she could make her report and debrief him about the failure in Koidhouo’uv. Not a subject on which she could give an enthusiastic presentation, but the prospect of admitting defeat no longer turned her bowels to water. Given the magnitude of disaster which had befallen Karnor (and the wider world) in the space of a few months, she enjoyed a somewhat more comprehensive perspective on the severity of her own mistakes.

"I can't believe you got him to stay put. Man never turned up to officer meetings, couldn't be bothered to introduce himself to recruits, and would leave the city on walkabout for weeks unannounced. Talk around the garrison is that he once got badly injured in a fight, seared his own wound shut and slept for a week in a hole in the ground outside Zaichaer to heal. In Frost. Just so the Kindred wouldn't tie him down!"

Imogen shook her head. "Guess age really does a number on the best of us."