A transformation took place, when night folded its shroud
over Aranh Breckenridge’s daughter.
The common room was cleared out and set for bed. All of the
children, save two, were asleep. The twins, Godric and Fuller, stood sentinel
outside their matron’s private chambers, with eyes and ears as sharp as any
seasoned thief’s. Which was just as well, considering they had both been well
on their way to becoming thieves,
before they’d wound up under Miss Sithe’s roof.
Outside the good matron’s sanctum, the night was quiet.
Serene, even. Moonguard slept easy, as always it did. The twins looked two
shakes away from bored at their posts. But past the threshold, inside Sithe’s study, something ...
unsavory was happening.
Something that would have set Sythius Sil’nathin into a
frothing rage.
An intricate, circular rune was drawn on the hardwood floor.
Drawn in the language of God the Father, with a hand as steady as any
calligrapher, Sithe had managed to invoke something unspeakable.
Most runes written in this language stayed stationary after
being drawn, but these were somehow different. They seemed to dance in the
night air, restless and harsh, pulsing, fluctuating. Like veins leading
straight into the heartbeat of the earth.
This was not the sort of thing one learned at a university,
or as a thaumaturgist’s apprentice.
Standing in one corner of the dark, candle-flickering room, swathed
in a robe that looked like a tailor reached up and grabbed midnight out of the
sky for fabric, was the matron. She held a thick book in her hands, opened to a
page far in the back. Her quicksilver eyes roved across the text, lips moving
silently.
A full five minutes, an age in miniature, passed before
Sithe finally shut the book, with a declamatory thump that would have made a lesser being jump straight out of its
skin. She reached into a pocket of her dark robe and drew out a knife. She held
out the other arm, pulled back the cloth, revealing her pale flesh.
The blood in her veins seemed to glow, and pulse—not with
her heartbeat, but with something else’s—and snake-like strips of light began
to lift off of them. Whirling, undulating, inside the confines of a cage that
eyes were not meant to see.
Sithe took a firm grip on her blade, and belted out a string
of words in a language that could not be transcribed; ugly, guttural sounds
that slithered out of her mouth and dripped thickly in the air.
She ripped the blade across her arm, and bright red blood
splashed into the center of the circle, where it solidified, and promptly
shattered like crystal. Light exploded out of it in a volcanic geyser of white.
Sithe shut her eyes against the glare and waited a number of
seconds—heartbeats—before opening them again.
In the interim, the white had coalesced into a concentrated,
deliberately inhuman shape.
* * *
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