Soulwoven

Chapter Fifty-One

~51~

Tsu’min Nar’oth had not set foot in the city of Soulth’il for nearly a hundred years.

For once, it felt like a long time.

The bones of the city had changed little. Still intact were the leaf-carpeted streets; the shining, crystalline buildings of pearlescent soulth’sha; the seven bridges; the eight parks; the ten-fold palace—all the landmarks of his childhood thousands of years before.

Gone was the last remaining shred of subdued vitality that had once made Soulth’il the only home of the Sh’ma.

Tsu’min exhaled and bowed his head and led his band of outlanders from the edges of the capital toward its heart. He had not been to Soulth’il in a century because Lomin Miuri’ma, the Sh’ma Ith’a and the cancer that sat at the heart of the city, had not called for him. Lomin had lost interest in the reports on the outside world for which he had long relied upon Tsu’min and the na’oth’na. He had lost interest, according to most, in almost everything.

But Tsu’min had not.

He and his compatriots had kept their ears open for word of the heart dragons, as they had sworn to do. They had ensured that the barrier that kept the Duennin penned in the wastes remained intact. They had lived in exile, with none to trust but each other, and they had watched over a world that did not know they existed and a people who had grown to loathe and fear them.

Tsu’min squeezed a jade bead that hung from his right wrist. He remembered the dragon. He saw his people burning, broken, shattered—the grasslands in flames, the banners broken.

Promise me, Mi’ame had said as she’d died.

And he had made a promise to her to watch over the world.

And for three thousand years, he had not broken it.

Tsu’min moved slowly along the shining waters of the Soulth’nth. His people stared at him from curtained windows and shadowed archways and distant balconies. When they saw the outlanders at his back, they frowned and whispered. Several left their homes and ran ahead of him toward the heart of the city.

The red-tinged crystal homes of the First Ward rose on Tsu’min’s right and lost themselves in the orange and yellow and brown of the Second. The tones of the Eighth and Seventh Wards on his left swept from navy blue to violet to aquamarine to glittering, translucent rainbow.

In the Wards lived the majority of Tsu’min’s people. In the Wards, they studied and read and wrote and built and lived slow, quiet lives.

In the Wards, they believed that they were safe.

Tsu’min crossed the Soulth’nth on the Bridge of Rainbows over long, streaming beds of the kelp-like plant that produced the soulth’sha. Ahead of him at the end of an arrow-straight boulevard lay Soulth’il’s one great hill, a marble of dark forest surrounded by glittering buildings and crowned by the ten towers and seven minarets of the Sh’ma Ith’a’s crystal palace.

The wind stirred the leaves on the bridge.

Aysh’a, they whispered. Aysh’a.

Change.

Tsu’min brought change behind him in the form of three humans, a Wilderleng, an Aleani, a half-breed who did not know what she was, and a Duennin.

Lomin had brought change across the Bridge of Rainbows in the past. With it had come blood and fire and pain and death.

Tsu’min felt the eyes of his people upon his back. He heard their whispers. They were wondering if he brought them the same kind of change that Lomin had.