Ashes of the Fallen

Chapter 10 - Pick Your Poison

A Storm Traited. Aidari Rainheart was a Storm Traited.

Everything she knew about Aidari was turned on its head. She had been telling the truth. In her mind, with her recollection of events she had killed the High Casters. 

Leaning over the bar, she set each page of Aidari’s grimoire spread out like a deck of cards, her Pulse providing a perfect copy with every new memory that came into her mind. But their differing thoughts were a mess of fragmented memories and crisscrossing details that refused to connect together in a coherent way. 

Nemera couldn’t help but pore over every hazy detail she had uncovered so far. 

Siara’s outright refusal to show her the crime scene. The Forewarn Cliffs underground laboratory. The alleged Stormspell apprentice slaves. The sigil Comet found. The claw marks against the walls of the Pressurehold. The Ashgrave’s daughter: Robin Whiteheart. All of it created more questions and the more Nemera delved into Aidari’s memories the less she understood. 

Why had Basra sent her here without telling Neridia of their Master’s passing or was Siara not told? Why had Aidari’s storm struck so much of Floodbound but she could not harness the Brink? Why had they sent Siara during a storm when they knew Sunspell elves were afraid of rain? Why couldn’t she visit the Forewarn Cliffs when they were the answer to everything?

A crater could give Nemera something to work with. Hell’s teeth, charred bodies or ashes would’ve at least confirmed their deaths but Neridia barely had a mortuary or mausoleum from what she’d heard. All she had was the incomplete memories of an uncertain murderer, a confirmed blackballing of visiting crime scenes and several elves that wanted Aidari dead. But despite all of that, the name Ashgrave would not leave her mind and how they died…was unmistakable.

Elliot Ashgrave and Kalia Goldheart had died from the Ashes of the Fallen. 

A winter chill blew through the Spirit Bar, sending the pages scattering to the winds and sending Nemera to her knees. Clutching her chest, the numbing cold left her breathless, a feeling she knew all too well but with every attempt to use her training, her Pulse faltered and her grip on the Spirit Bar flickered into nothingness.

Nemera couldn’t move.

The familiar warm lull of sleep became stiflingly hot as the overwhelming ache of her limbs forced Nemera to remain still despite the beating heart that surged to life. She had felt the weight of the Pulse plenty of times before but this…this felt like exhaustion that would never end.

“It seems like you’re finally awake, Deathkeeper.”

Nemera blinked, simply because that was all she could do. Glancing around, the cold, cramped, prison walls of the Pressurehold had been replaced with a warm hearth, the room now plushly decorated in cold colours of blues and silvers. She had been rescued. Somehow.

“Hypothermia, I ask you. Are you quite dense in the head?”

Nemera let out a wheezy laugh that was more of a cough than anything else, the bile that rose in her throat forcing her to double over, the fiery vengeance of a migraine threatening to knock her from consciousness. But the moment her soot-covered Inferno Trollian dove into her arms Nemera felt…complete. Her Agar, ever dutiful in his watch despite everything that had happened. Too sick to offer an apology to Comet, all Nemera could do was avoid throwing up on him.

“Ah, my apologies. The medicine we gave you might’ve been a tad strong. We’re not used to…Neridian plants.”

Her ears buzzed from the Pulse, muffling the strange twined voice as tears burned at the corner of her eyes but Comet’s natural positivity chased them away. Nuzzling furiously into her chest, she was soaked not with sweat from lack of sleep but the chilling, gnawing feeling of malnourishment. She had overdone it again.