NEVEN

Xe'tena. Zet'alna. Navei'al.

Three creeds. Three philosophies. The Wyvern Dogma. Hear with the soul. Dance with the body. Sing with the voice. Easily he forgot their meaning, lost in the waves of the blizzard's mist. Easily he found himself unable to keep his promises. Stones scraped the bottom of his leather soles as the Sentinel kept his arms locked behind his back, hunched over from the constant push through the cell blocks. His chains tangled around his arms and legs. Windows thickened with frost, but he spotted the sprawling streets of Volaris, the crowds of Avaerilians who shouted against their entrapment. Tall towers along the outside walls glowed with magick, a barrier to protect the exposed city. "Where are you taking me?" He flinched when the Sentinel sent a knee into his shin, but he released his own magick through his nose to glare at the Loyalist's back. "You haven't killed me yet, just enough to keep me alive." Suspicion dragged him forward through the guardhouse between the edges of the lower quarter.

"We are giving you one last chance to remember where your loyalties lie, Lotayrin," the Traye Loyalist said when they stopped at a pair of wrought-iron doors with no opening to reveal the room within. "You need not suffer this if you would simply acknowledge your shameful conduct and accept judgment for what you've done to Naveera with your actions." He opened both doors with a wave of his hands, and an icy wind dragged them into the crevices in the side. Darkness flowed through the room when he was tugged inside, and he found his bones lacked the strength to struggle when they dragged him underneath the one, diamond-tipped light on the roof. Iceshards held up blue lamps to reveal pockets of the dome, and he tried to twist around when another pair slammed the doors shut with a metallic clang. Runic locks glowed and tightened together, blocking out all sound from the outside.

"My conduct? What I've done to Naveera?" Neven choked. "Are you so frozen?"

"We have been for thousands of turns, and you've stolen away the one chance our people have for freedom from the tyrant on the throne. You believe the son is different from the father?" He spat at his feet, and Neven dragged his fangs over his lips. "We have lived in squalor, treated with disdain, or at worst, outright murdered for having real loyalty to the true heirs of the throne. Ikarun Traye was murdered, his oath breaking traitor of a knight brother chose his side and suffered the consequences for it. He abandoned his family and name. Much like you did." Another spit, and Neven curled his fingers together. "All that is left is the young Traye the Storm Wardens and yourself stole away and put in his head that the fight of the Wardens is his to fight instead of the doomed crusade it truly is."

Neven went to drive his fingers into his throat, but he grunted when the Sentinel kneed him closer to the center of the room. "Is that the story you tell yourselves?" he mumbled, and flinched when the Sentinel pushed him onto the ground with a quick magick snap to keep his hands locked against the floor, forced to kneel to the loyalist who believed his cause righteous and just. He found a burst of laughter rising in his lungs. "You know what? Maybe we are truly helpless, and any actions I take don't matter, do they?" He scowled when the Traye Loyalist made his own lunge for his throat, but grabbed the collar of his buttoned shirt instead.

"Say that to the blizzard, Lotayrin," he hissed, nose flared with hazel beaded pupils. He shoved him down again. "Answer our questions, and we may be merciful enough to release the half-giant woman."

"And give her no means to go home, I suspect."

"That does depend on how you act here." The Traye Loyalist went to the edge of the light, standing off to the side with other Iceshards and Sentinels both. "The Traye Loyalists are ready to act, and if we need to make an example to show the tyrant what's waiting for him, then so be it. It is not as if he hasn't murdered an entire bloodline, men, women, and children all." He sent a whisk of ice to create a circle of runes, and Neven frowned when it closed and a faint mist rippled from the mountain peaks. "You have chosen to ignore the song of Naveera, chosen to take upon yourself a worthless fight. You shall not do the same to the true prince of Naveera."

"Oh, Great Evyriaz... Ignorance travels as fast as the truth." Neven broke into another laugh. "Ready with so little information, buried underneath the snows of wilful ignorance." He straightened himself out. "You want information? I have some for you. Did the Loyalists know about the secret tunnels underneath Irimount? Did they know the ghastly things which took place down there to the very prince they claim to hold the pedestal for? Or was that wilful ignorance as well?" He curled his fingers in his manacles. "Oh... who am I kidding, that would take too much foresight, though I don't doubt it was the Loyalists who made that entire situation possible from the start." He rolled his neck, then let out steam through his nose. "You don't want your crown prince. You want what he stands for. You want his blood. You don't care about what he wants or what he stands for."

"And you know?"

Neven breathed out his love of family. "Yuven Traye."

In the darkness, he faced the little, pale-haired boy who hid behind the obsidian carved names of ancient Wardens. Hand outstretched, the little boy crossed the sweeping grasses and the beds of snow roses. Each step created the passage of time as Yuven went from the pale-haired boy to the immovable young man before he reached the tips of his fingers. Underneath the burning sun, Neven raised his head upwards to catch the violets, brought to life by the light. His gaze lacked the fear of before, a standing ovation to the strength of the Wardens as he looked down at him.

"Come on, Miesero," Yuven whispered out a familiar complaint. "You would really let something like this bring you to your knees? You are a Storm Warden. You bend to nothing."

Neven cried through the childhood gone so fast. "You didn't even know his name, did you? Just that it was connected with mine. I'm sure you got your information somehow, but that doesn't matter, does it?" He choked on the bloody history underneath the fields of ice. "His name isn't what matters to you. What he's been through in this cursed place doesn't matter. The Traye Loyalists don't care about the last Traye... they care about vengeance... and I won't be party to it. I won't be complicit in another child's murder. If I must be the example, then fine. Provide it." He dragged his strength upwards. "Provide it... because I am not going to give you anything else about him. He is free to make his own choices, and he has chosen the Storm Wardens."

"Because you and yours fed him the drivel the Wardens have spouted for hundreds of turns to justify the murder of Avaerilian Anima. We live much longer than the sunlanders drowning in muck. We do not forget so easily."

"Yet so easily we have forgotten where we came from," Neven said through a choked chuckle. "You think I convinced him to take this path? That I told him to take up this 'doomed crusade' as you put it?"

"Yes."

Both pride and heartbreak ripped his chest asunder when he stood in the great hall, with the Trainees stepping into the light, shedding their blood against the darkness. Fenrer and Yuven, no matter the words he shared, the tales he told, were not deterred, were not convinced, were not swayed from the path. Neven chewed on his lip at the memory of Kayal, a curious Trainee full of questions to match his Trainer. Taken away in an instant by the forces in the dark before his time.

"They knew what they were getting into," Kemal said, full of grief but acceptance of their life.

It does not make it any easier.

"I didn't."

The Traye Loyalist raised an eyebrow. "Excuse me, Lotayrin?"

"I didn't convince him," he repeated. "I tried to convince him otherwise. You need not believe my words, it's like you said... let the blizzard judge me for the worth of my soul." He stretched out his shoulders and held onto the shards of his dignity. "Are we done? Are you going to take me back to the cell so I can await my execution? And please don't call it anything else... I know exactly what's about to happen to me. I have given you a name, much more than your people deserve, that is all the information I have that I am willing to give to feed your ignorance and hatred."

"Is that the dwindling patch of ice you're willing to die on, Lotayrin?"

"In every lifetime — from this one, to the next."

"You leave us no choice then," the Traye Loyalist said, and then nodded to the two Iceshards by the door. "We're not finished here, I still think you can be convinced onto the right path of Naveera, even if you cannot recover from the stain you've left upon your name." Neven drew himself up, but then gasped when the Iceshards latched onto his arms. Tugged down to the floor, he swung his head around when stone manacles slammed onto his wrists from the runes beneath him. Mountains of mist grew closer together from the circuit, to create a well of flames. Runes filled to the brim with molten energy, and he scowled when he found his legs trapped within the stone.

"What else can I give you that'll satisfy your need for revenge against some perceived slight?" Neven snapped, shuddering when the runes lit up in a giant circle, inching closer to him at its focal center of power. The Traye Loyalist stayed on the boundary of white-hot pain. Neven tried to tug himself out of the stone locks, and drove his fangs into his lips when the runes sizzled by his ear. Its radiance burnt into his pupils as he tried to pull himself away from it with no routes of escape. "You don't have to do this. You don't have to let the curse of our people swallow you!" he tasted his own blood when the runes quickened. "How much of our lives must we shed and leave in the blizzard to freeze?"

One rune hissed underneath his arm, and he drove his fangs deeper at the scalding sensation of the coldest ice when it forced his magick to meet it, glued underneath his skin and dragged through his veins. Pinpricks swept into needles, into daggers through his body. Bubbles popped in his lungs when it completed the second to last circumference around him, and he gave one last half-hearted tug for his own life. "I am not your enemy," he rasped out his pleas. "I am not your enemy. Naveera was my home."

I wouldn't be making it better by being another performer. I wouldn't be making it better by sacrificing someone else.

Time ticked into space when the final circuit started with a burning rune against his back. It pushed his gasp out of his lungs when he tried to breathe for his family. "This won't fix anything," he pleaded to those who refused to hear, to dance and sing. "You must see that—" White-hot pain burnt his words off his tongue as he drove his fangs into it to try and stem the screams of Irimount. "We will never be free!"

"Not as long as people like you break their promises and oaths," the Traye Loyalist said with a scoff. "If you won't talk, Lotayrin, then remember our pain. Even you should be capable of that much." His fingers snapped and created a ripple effect of ice through the lamps the Iceshards held. Its caustic flow completed the rest of the rune, and Neven swung his head back to the loyalist when the light seared his brow.

No!

It pulsed through his magick and pulled ice along his skin to create flayed embers.

I made a promise! I made a promise to him, I can't break it! I'll break all the rest before I break that one!

In a single, metallic note, the light overflowed into his life and showed its sharper teeth of a single coin of the world.