Inspired by Chris S/Ren’s own bit of 5G Silverfire fanfiction… of course, Ianthe has a slightly different memory of how it went down 😉
It had made Ianthe proud to see the two war banners flanking the entrance to the tavern — the Wing and the Talon on painted silk, glinting silver on blue in the torchlight. Now I am one of them, she had thought, as she had wanted since her earliest memories. She had stood up straighter to see them, thought herself a paladin, a champion for good–
Is war everything you hoped for?
Hush. She closed those thoughts out, watching Ren bundle his throwing blades in his silver and blue tabard. As if it were any other rag.
Last night, she had stood before the Veiled — under the banners, in that same torchlight — and Ren had regarded her, strange, appraising. “You are so much like your mother Eirene,” he had said, with a rasping sigh. He looked as if he had more memories than if he were a thousand years old.
Maybe he did. Maybe he was. Ianthe felt nearly that old, now.
Ren had followed her into the woods last night, too, after they had been attacked at the crossroads by the Bloodred Moon. When she thought she had heard someone cry out, saw the shape of a human form in the shadow of a rock, she had leapt into action, and Ren had stepped after her.
“Do you always run straight into danger?” he had asked her, with a gentle curiosity.
“All I know is that if I were out there, I’d want someone to come find me,” she replied. He’d had no response to that.
Later, in the tavern, Ianthe had asked him, “May I ask you an impertinent question?”
“I don’t see how I could possibly stop you,” he had replied, with something approaching mirth.
“Why does your Order wear the Veil?” She knew it was wrong to ask, even before Rolant set a hand to her arm in a gesture of warning. But she abhorred questions without answers, and took a perverse pleasure in being the sort of person to speak the unspeakable.
He had not answered then, either.
And then… what had happened, had happened. They had stood in front of Baron Kalaris, who spoke the word of the Silverfire King; arrayed at his back was the King’s might. An honor guard, merely, they had thought at the time.
Ianthe had been daydreaming — thinking of the counter-equations she had worked with the Arcane Circle last night, or pondering the ominous words of Selaine of the Ivory Gate, or perhaps just admiring the finely-turned calves of Kein Vyland. The tired platitudes about the great service the Champions had rendered didn’t apply to her; she hadn’t fought in the War, after all. She was yet half a Champion.
When Kalaris said the Orders and warbands were no longer needed, she had thought she’d misheard. When he talked of turning their Power over to the Silverfire King, who would be its final arbiter, she had drawn in a sharp breath. Wasn’t this — wasn’t this the same thing the Ebon Order had wanted?
Kalaris had strode down the first rank of Champions, calling on each of them to renounce their Orders. Each refused, in turn. Ianthe was glad she was in the back rank, as a late arrival; had Kalaris turned that immense presence towards her, she was unsure what she would have said. Others in the back ranks called out that the Ebon Order was still a threat, that they were still needed. Kalaris refused to listen.
Ianthe remembered the moment when he had proclaimed them all outlaws. When the killing had begun. She remembered it most vividly because Rolant had stepped in front of her, wrenched her behind his well-armored back and shield.
The ranks fell apart around her, and Ianthe couldn’t think, didn’t know what to do. These were the knights she had looked up to all her life, and they were slicing through her warband and her newly-made friends. These were the knights whose retreat her mother had died to defend, and now they gave no quarter to the fallen, mercilessly running them through.
In the end, she didn’t have to think. A warrior with a two-handed sword charged her, and instinctively she called on her talent, summoning tines of force. One, two, three, the arrows of air landed in rapid succession, and the man fell senseless. Later, she’d learn that the Silverfire Forge would call him back to life, but in the moment, she might as well have killed the man.
She remembered little of the battle after that. She stayed behind the lines, healing where healing was called for. Wise Nacera Umber, another Arcane Circle healer, gave her guidance on where to go and what to do. But neither could do anything for the fiery death that rained from the sky, or the silver-chased swords that struck killing blows.
Swords, perhaps, forged by the King himself.
The next thing Ianthe remembered, she was running for Rolant, seeking comfort from him, as if she were a girl awakened from a bad dream. But there was no comfort to be found there — he grieved, too, as his friend Nu, a Disciple of the Tempest and another member of the Talon, had been struck dead by the fiery rain. She wasn’t the only one of the Eyrie, either — Jayna of the Wing, a Golden Temple archer, had also died, and only lived again thanks to the Baron Sunderwynd’s own Power.
Nu would live again, too. That was the blessing and the curse of Champions — those whose bodies could be recovered, at least. Not Mother, buried forever under ice and poison of the Ebon Order. Not those who could not pay the toll of the Arbiter of Death.
The battlefield was a ruin of the only life Ianthe had ever wanted. When Tezac, the grizzled Golden Temple warrior from the Wing, found her resting beside the Gate, he had asked, “Is war everything you had hoped for?” She wanted to scream, to fly at him with nails bared. He was older, and wiser, sure, but he didn’t have to be smug.
That was hours past, and a world ago. In the present, Ren said, “I suppose it is time to put this away.” He gestured at the sad bundle of silver and blue and gleaming steel.
“You can always put it back on when this is settled,” Rolant offered.
Will there ever be a time when this is settled? Ianthe hardly believed it — any more than, sixteen hours ago, she could have believed the Silverfire King could betray them.
But…
Magic is an unending circle — Ianthe’s link to Power had taught her that. No, more than that — magic was a moebius strip, a circle turned in on itself to make a single surface.
And magic is life. Preserve me, she added mentally, recalling the words Rolant used when he called to healing.
“We can wear it to reclaim it,” Ianthe said at last, with an optimism she didn’t entirely feel, yet. “They are our colors, too.”
