Chapter Text
Death was an eventuality hardly unfamiliar to Flins. Even if said death was happening upon himself. It should be easy—close your eyes, unmoor your senses toward the silent fog that shrouds all lost souls of the night, leave the fading embers of old flames to their deep, dreamless rest.
It should be easy.
Yet this time, it was not. There was no rest to be found amidst this crimson hell scorched by madness. His senses refused to let go, despite the clutches wrapped around him crushing his bones to the point that every breath became a futile effort. Trapped in his lungs was the acrid burn of decay, corrupting even the soil beneath him to charred shards and crumbled splinters. Etched into his ears were the choked screams of his companions, marked by their final moments of agony writhing in vain against their own bounds. Staining his eyes blood red was the fateful sight of the Moon Maiden collapsed over the sludge-sullied tundra, holding out her hand so helplessly, so hopefully, of a spear impaling the Traveler’s heart a split second before their fingertips could touch.
So this was how it ended.
With every weakening pulse of his lamplight, Flins knew he was one step closer to following the fate of his comrades. The clue was in the sound of something breaking within his ribcage, a brittle crack accompanied by the muffled noise of something else being pierced. But the pain didn’t take any clarity away from his mind. Flames of fury only roared higher, and as he stared at the neverending scarlet hands oozing through the miasma, ripping all that crossed their paths asunder, he wished with every last shred of his being that he could resummon the strength to cleanse such foul abomination.
If only he had any strength left … Had he once likened death to drowning, for the emptiness and sorrow that swept over one’s final existence in dark tides? Only this time, it was the world itself drowning, and he was the lone lifeguard kneeling over the shore, fully aware yet unable to change the slightest about what had become of his failed duty.
If only he had more time for another chance …
“Mr. Flins?”
“You seem awake. Can you open your eyes for me, Mr. Flins?”
An odd voice, too unperturbed and emotionless to befit the mayhem that was this world, echoed through the bloodsoaked clouds like some eerie advent oracle. The cold timber sliced across the desolate cries of the dead, and suddenly, the carnaged scene took an unexplainable shift. Voices hushed. Colors faded. As if it were merely a shattering dream, the very fabric of the universe spiderwebbed, fractured, and then—
The pressure around his chest was no more. Flins gasped, coughing violently from the foreign sensation of air rushing into his lungs. The bounds are gone? His hand shot for the lantern at his hip before he had time to catch his breath. I’m still alive. I can still kill him.
“I wouldn’t bother with that,” said the same voice from before. It sounded slightly amused, and Flins understood why after only a moment. His lantern wasn’t there. In fact, neither was the familiar presence of his gloves or his Ratnik uniform, the rough texture of leather replaced by soft cloth against bare hands.
“Your mental state seems stable and normal,” the voice announced. “Now, open your eyes and sit up please, so I can verify your physical recovery.”
Flins didn’t realize till then that his eyes were squeezed shut. He blinked, waited for his hazy vision to focus, and quickly became confused by what he saw.
This was no longer the forsaken wasteland he was mourning moments ago. There was no more battlefield, no more monstrous swaths of tendons and claws, no more lightless black sky. Instead, he was inside a dimly lit small room, and across from him sat a white-robed woman regarding him with equal parts interest and alarm.
“Eyesight is functional,” the woman pronounced. “Can you tell where you are, Mr. Flins?”
Flins blinked again. What was all this? And if he was truly still alive, was the purgatory he had just witnessed simply a nightmare he woke up from?
With an elusive sense of presence, he glanced around. The room looked gray, its walls completely covered in unpainted stone, bearing no windows. A narrow doorway the size of a rectangular pillar led to a corridor beyond, seemingly lined by equally gray stone arches and pavement. The woman in front of him, expectantly waiting for his answer, was perched atop a stone stool, elbow leaning against a stone table. Even the bed he was inclining on, with its unnaturally hard surface …
A terrible omen rose in him, for he recognized such architectural style from long-ago memories, and if this wasn’t a dream, there was only one thing it could imply.
“Khaenri’ah?” His throat felt dry, his own whisper hoarse and distant. “But it can’t be … How did I get here? And who are you … if I may ask?”
It was surprisingly difficult to converse in a civilized manner, considering all the violent images deeply branded into his mind.
“I’m the doctor in charge of your care.” The woman jotted down a few words in a notebook. “As to how you got here, it’s a longer story. Let’s just say, you are one of the most distinguished guests invited personally by High Lord Rerir.”
As if on cue, a figure emerged from the doorway behind her. Ragged crimson cape, black bandage wraps, messy white hair falling over a pale face.
Blood froze in Flins’s veins. The Rächer of Solnari is here? And then, when his bloodflow seemed to resume, it was with a raw surge that bled through his vision, desperate to erase the sinister figure he could never forget in a thousand deaths. Before his mind could fully process all the confusion and shock, his body was already acting, launching itself forward in pure reflex.
I can still fight. Lightning gathered at his fists. Flames sizzled and crackled with regained strength. I can still kill him.
Flins leaped, aiming true. Yet he had barely made it halfway across the room when something abruptly changed. As if life had been drained from him once again, a wave of weakness crashed over his limbs, and the power within was gone as quickly as it had returned. His knees buckled, sending him tumbling to the ground. A cold grip caught him just before he hit the floor, and the next moment, he was yanked up and thrusted against the wall like a weightless rag doll.
“Nice try.” A shadowed face loomed before him. “You haven’t forgotten that the Moonhunter loves to play with his prey.”
Flins bit down the searing abhorrence lodged in his throat, willing his body to keep moving. To his dismay, slippery scarlet arms wasted no time wedging over his chest, caging him tight against the stone at his back. What remained of his strength was pathetic under their ironclad constraint.
“My congratulations on another success of your experiments, doctor. I couldn’t have asked for a more lively welcome the moment I walked in.” The Rächer of Solnari spoke without turning to look at the other person in the room.
The woman beamed. “It is an honor, my lord. I’ll have to check back on Mr. Flins in a few days, of course, but I can almost guarantee that the hibernation left no negative impact whatsoever. For now, he is in prime condition for what you need.”
She proceeded to packing up her supplies, then made a swift exit. Flins tried to follow her path outside the room with his gaze, though his captor didn’t give him the opportunity. One clawed finger tilted his chin, forcing him to stare into a pair of red-violet eyes cleft by slit pupils.
It was in this humiliating position of surrender that he finally managed to make sense of everything that had transpired.
The ruination on the tundra wasn’t a mere nightmare, for there was no mistake in what he found behind those savage eyes staring back. They glinted with a ferocious power just as he remembered, the kind that rended the sky, the kind that brought eras to their knees time and time over. The bloodshed, the ashes and dust, the moonfall … It had all been real, and if the doctor’s words were anything to go by, he and his comrades had fought and lost before a long slumber preserved his life alone, not unlike what happened five hundred years ago.
History was repeating itself, leaving him as the sole survivor adrift in another ocean of death and grief. But if the reaper had already swung the scythe, why a mocking return from this slumber?
“It would seem that our legendary manslayer has taken a newfound interest in Fae traditions.” Flins summoned a most disingenuous smile. He needed to probe. “And to such an extent that he deigned to learn a thing or two about the workings of our hibernation. Pray tell, to what do I owe this privileged treatment? Not pure nostalgia for old-time enemies?”
Those slit pupils narrowed. “Sleep hasn’t smoothed out that cursed tongue of yours, Lightkeeper. It’s been decades since anyone dared to speak to me like this. You might even call it nostalgia indeed—after all, others of your sort have long been dead before they get a chance to stand before the High Lord.”
Decades … Others of his sort …
Flins felt his heart sink. The dreadful omen that hit him upon first glances of the room came rushing back. Had the world truly been bending once again to a sinner’s will for so long? The Lightkeepers, the Fae, the Frostmoon Scions who would surely seek their revenge … Had all of them perished while a singular spared one slept, oblivious to people and nations alike being obliterated and resurrected anew?
“Now, no need to act so surprised.” The Rächer of Solnari—or the monstrous tyrant now known as High Lord Rerir—regarded Flins’s changing expression with apparent satisfaction. “One should have foreseen the inevitable day when all would kneel before my throne.”
“Throne?” Flins couldn’t help the bitterness dripping from his voice. “How tragically dull and lonely to sit upon such a lofty perch, based on your own account. By all means, allow me to make things interesting again. I am not the least opposed to offering more ‘lively welcomes’ you so appreciate.”
Surreptitiously, his hands tested the limits of his bondage, searching for a way out of his current plight. But the Rächer of Solnari actually laughed.
“Is that a threat or a joke? Misfortuned soul, your struggles were meaningless back then, and will continue to be all the more so today.” Flagrant arrogance gave those words a vicious stink, even if one couldn’t deny the matter-of-fact attitude with which it was spoken, a confidence that could only come from absolute control. “That said, some truths can only be grasped when you see them with your own eyes. So let’s behold, what shall become of a Lightkeeper when he no longer has any light to keep?”
Without warning, the bondage freed themselves, slippery sinews loosening their clutches and retreating into crimson miasma.
This ought to be the moment, the part in theaters where the villain made a foolish taunt out of blind conceit and handed his nemesis a chance to turn the tide. Or at least, so Flins hoped as he snatched the opening, calling upon the ancient blue flames within him to strike once and for all. And yet … When he reached into the deepest recess of his power, he found nothing there.
Nothing. The blaze that once vowed to end all evils didn’t come soaring forth. None except a flicker answered his calling, like the faint stirring of a distant memory too vague to take shape. The weakness he was overtaken by moments ago only grew, and the more he fought against it, the more it seemed to drain what was left of him, until even that tiny flicker dissolved into the dark, forcing him to catch the side of a table to so much as remain standing.
For the first time, true horror overcame his mind. “What have you done?” Flins gritted the words through clenched teeth, though he already guessed the answer.
No amount of bandages could hide the vicious smile stretching across Rerir’s face. “Just a small trick on that lantern of yours. The one you must’ve found missing by now.”
“You … sealed it?”
“Oh, better. I purified it, exactly like what your friend had done to my heart.”
With a wave of his hand, Rerir summoned a lantern to his side. It bore no striking dissemblance to the standard-issue lightkeeper version, but Flins wouldn’t fail to recognize it with his eyes closed. It was his, the tether to his true Fae form, the one that radiated the source of his flames. Or rather, the one that used to—a sight of the past with its crystal blue now replaced by ashen gray.
“And here is the best part,” Rerir continued. “Did you know this was an arcane ritual used centuries ago by Fae nobles to rule their slaves? Brilliant and effective. With their source power gone, all those savages could draw up against their masters would no longer be Fae magic, but their pitiful life force. Fighting back would do no good except for overexerting their bodies to hollow shells.” A mocking glance swept over Flins’s slumped form to emphasize the point.
If not for the reality lying bare in front of him, Flins would not have believed it. His lantern couldn’t have possibly been reduced to this. Surely, his feebleness was a mere aftereffect of long slumber, which would soon pass without a trace. But it was hard to ignore the empty presence inside his soul telling the truth, with dim wisps of dusk light barely a shadow of what it once was.
Why would fate bring him back, only to forsake him so?
Then the implications settled in, landing with a sense of absurdity nearly eclipsing the cruelty of the revelation. “So this is the parade of triumph you wanted me back for? All the lengths you went to, just for fabricating a perfect prisoner to make yourself somehow feel superior?” The idea was so morbid, Flins thought he could almost laugh. “Your hypocrisy remains lamentably disgusting, no matter how many years pass.”
It was obviously unwise to go so far to provoke his captor, knowing the objectively vast power difference now standing between them. Thus, he wasn’t the least surprised when the Rächer of Solnari suddenly launched forward, and the next moment, an iron fist punched him so hard that he flew backward, smashing into the wall. As he doubled over from the bone-shattering blast, tasting the hint of blood rising in his throat, a hand closed around his neck and lifted him off his feet like an animal to be butchered.
“Calling me names doesn’t make you any less of a sorry sight,” Rerir hissed. “Your knowledge of my power is extremely lacking, if you believe I ever needed to do more than lift a finger to squash you like an insect.”
“Like … what you are doing now?” Despite the choked airway turning his voice into broken rasps, Flins wasn’t going to end this exchange of pleasantries. “Strangling … is getting a bit old. Or is that all you know? Even more lamentable … for some high lord, to have so little craft.”
He expected the hand around his neck to tighten more. But this time, he was wrong. Rerir simply looked down, loftily as if indeed appraising the mere life of an insect.
“You think too highly of yourself, Lightkeeper. There are much better things worthy of my attention than killing you again with my own hands. For the time being, consider yourself lucky that your life happens to interest me a little more than your death.”
A shroud of miasma returned as Rerir spoke. The scarlet hand emerging from it stressed the word “interest” with a menacing air of purpose, circling its prey as if thoughtfully orchestrating. When it lifted its index finger to trace over its target’s cheekbones, the despondence that had driven Flins to recklessness moments ago gave way to both shock and disgust. Then the finger paused over his jaw, and its sharp claw cut into his cheek.
For a few passing seconds, Flins didn’t quite follow what was happening. With a foggy lightheadedness from the lack of air and blood flow, it took him some time to register the sting and the scent of his own blood. It took him even longer to realize what that hand was trying to do. The sharp tip of its claw worked through his skin like a carving knife, slicing slowly and precisely through his flesh, drawing up some sort of a pattern with the bloodied path it cut through. A curvy horizontal line at first, then down, before twisting to the side and up like a hook.
His whole body went cold when realization struck. No, not this. With all the strength he could muster, he tried to push back at the hand, tried to stop that pattern from completing itself. But it was no use. The carving knife continued, a meticulous calligraphy without the slightest pause, and he couldn’t so much as turn his face away, not with his throat still choked tight.
“No need to take it as a personal privilege—I make it a habit to brand all my possessions,” Rerir drawled as he took his time embellishing his handiwork. “There is no better way to make an object’s ownership plainly obvious than to label it with its master’s initial.”
Flins had lost his voice by now, his blocked windpipe threatening to send him into unconsciousness any moment. But the physical affliction was nothing compared to the marring of his soul. Every cut tore at the last remaining shreds of his dignity, etching darkness like a curse into the very core of his existence.
Eons seemed to have passed before the last stroke landed in place. “One has to admit, this design suits you flawlessly,” Rerir announced. “Oh, and a word of advice. Don’t even think about mauling your own face to cover it up. No attempt of yours will be remotely sufficient to leave a dent on a marking of mine.”
With that, the clawed hand retreated, and the choking grip was released theatrically, fingers splaying sudden and wide. Rerir laughed as he watched his prisoner drop to the ground in a limp heap.
Once again, Flins found himself slumping against the wall, trying not to cough too violently as he caught his breath. His body was shaking, though this time, it wasn’t from pain or shock. Even with the rush of blood returning to his head, making his temples throb and his ears ring, he could feel a small trickle of warmth sliding down his cheek like tears, before dripping onto the ground and staining the cracks dark between stone slates.
“This serves as a reminder, Lightkeeper. Time to learn your place in this new world, and accept it.”
The toe of a boot was all Flins could see, kicking up a puff of dust into his face. His vision swam. You will … never … The reply was a failed attempt, a garble of unintelligible syllables lost between coughs. It was likely unheard by any audience anyway—apparently finished with what he came here for, Rerir turned on his heels, sweeping out the door with a flutter of cape and another satisfied laughter.
Flins closed his eyes. He hesitated a little, deciding against touching his cheek. He curled his trembling fingertips into the center of a fist, trying to focus on calming his battered mind and turning his attention to the rhythm of his heartbeat, the warm temperature of his blood, the sound of the cold draft sighing through the doorway, instead of the burning symbol that branded him like livestock.
It was a long while before his heartbeat steadied. His blood cooled, crusted into a messy web of crisscrosses stiffening his skin. The draft from the doorway died down. All was quiet, and when he managed to get back to his feet, holding on to the edge of the table, his thoughts were his own again.
He couldn’t deny that for a moment, the same question from hundreds of years ago crept back into his mind. What was left for him? With all his people no more and his lantern forever extinguished, with nothing remaining in his world except a vast ocean of deathly silence, equally meaningless in every direction, would it not be better to simply sink, returning to the soundless depths where no more hope would be lost?
But he couldn’t indulge himself with that thought. There were still too many questions left unanswered, too many truths left unchecked. If shame and despair were his enemy’s weapon of choice …
Flins looked up at the gray expanse of stone blocking out the sky. No light came through the ceiling, and he had no flame to illuminate the dark. This space felt foreign to him, cold and black and far away.
Even so, he wouldn’t hand anyone the satisfaction of subduing him so easily.
If life gave him a second chance to fight, then he would fight. Even if he didn’t know how.