Unsleeping Patron - Return of the Ascendant

The timber was still wet with sap, but the notch was square. Gideon drove the wooden peg through the mortise with three heavy strikes of his mallet, the dull thud-thud-thud echoing across the terrace. Sweat ran down the groove behind his ear, stinging a fresh scratch from a hawthorn branch he’d cleared that morning.He stepped back, wiping his brow with the greasy cuff of his wool sleeve, and checked the line of the fence.Six months. One hundred and eighty turnings of the sky, though without a sun to mark the hours, they measured time by the rhythm of their own calluses and the yield of the stone-pits. Brierhold wasn’t a camp anymore. It was eight rectangular timber cabins with low, turf-covered roofs, a ditch lined with sharpened pine stakes, and a fenced paddock where three of the long-legged, featherless fowls picked mindlessly at dried lichen.Near the central well, Hester was grinding dried roots against a flat slab of slate. Her broken spectacles were gone, replaced by a pair of wire frames Gold had fashioned from a length of copper wire scavenged from an engine casing. She didn’t look up when the mallet hit, her shoulders moving in a tight, rhythmic rhythm as she reduced the grey tuber to flour.”Gideon!”The call came from the northern perimeter. Samuel Wu was standing on top of the stone earthwork, his arm raised, pointing a long ash pole toward the edge of the golden dome.Gideon dropped his mallet into the wood-shavings. His hand moved by habit to the heavy iron knife strapped to his thigh as he cleared the three-foot ditch in a single, heavy stride. His left knee gave its usual dry click, but the pain was manageable now.”What is it?” Gideon shouted, scrambling up the loose shale embankment. “Coven scouts again?””No,” Wu said, his voice dropping an octave, his throat working as he swallowed hard. “Look at the light. Someone’s walking through the wall.”Gideon squinted through the grey twilight.Where the amber dome of the Relic met the choking wall of Miasma, the fog was bulging inward. A figure stepped out of the ash-colored soup, moving with a calm, unhurried stride that didn’t belong to a lost man.He wasn’t carrying a torch. He didn’t have the Blood-Lantern swinging from his grip, nor was he leaning on a shale crutch. He walked upright, his bare feet sinking barely an inch into the loose gravel.Gideon stopped five paces from the edge of the stone work. Hester had run up behind him, her linen apron stained with root-juice, her breath coming in short, rattling gasps.The man stopping at the perimeter was completely bald. His head was smooth as a polished river stone, free of eyebrows, eyelashes, or stubble. The torn, grease-stained flannel coat he had left in was gone, replaced by a simple tunic cut from thick, unbleached canvas, tied at the waist with a strip of raw hide.Poised under the grey sky, he didn’t smell of rotting meat.The stench of decay that had followed Silas Blackwood six months ago the thick, sickly sweet odor of sloughing internal organs was entirely absent. Instead, a clean, sharp scent of ozone and crushed pine needles drifted off his shoulders.Beneath his skin, a soft, amber light radiated outward. It wasn’t a flame; it was a deep, liquid gold that throbbed gently beneath his jaw, his collarbones, and the backs of his wrists, as if his veins had been flushed with melted sun. His skin was pale, smooth, and utterly free of the purple bruises and sores that had mapped his neck when he walked into the mist to die.”Silas?” Hester’s voice was barely a whisper. She reached out, her fingers catching the rough bark of the perimeter stake to steady herself. “Is that… Silas?”The bald man lifted his head. His eyes, once bloodshot and ringed with black bruises, were brilliant. The sclera was clear as spring water, the pupils tiny amber pinpricks centered in irises that glowed with an inner, steady light.He looked at Gideon, then at Hester, his gaze moving over the timber cabins, the smoke rising from the turf chimneys, and the fenced fowl pen.”The wind breaks held,” Silas said.His voice didn’t sound like two stones scraping together anymore. It was clear, resonant, and carried an odd, metallic ring that made the air around Gideon’s ears vibrate slightly.Silas stepped across the boundary line, entering the golden dome. The amber light beneath his skin didn’t clash with the Relic’s aegis; it seemed to slide into it, a drop of warm oil merging with a larger pool.”You’re bald,” Wu muttered from the top of the embankment, his ash pole lowering an inch. “And… you’re glowing, man. Your wrists.”Silas looked down at his right hand. He turned his palm up, closing his fingers into a tight fist. A faint, golden thread of light sprouted from his knuckles, held its shape for a fraction of a second like a needle of hardened glass, and then dissolved back beneath his skin.”The rot is gone,” Silas said simply. He looked at Hester. “The potion worked. Distilled water, Purpur-Blossom, Thread-Fish ash, and Asharto horn.”Hester took two steps down the embankment, her copper-framed spectacles slipping slightly. She reached out a hand, hovering her fingers an inch from his forearm, checking the radiant warmth coming off his skin. “Your pulse… I can see it in your neck. It’s slow. Maybe forty beats a minute.””Thirty-six,” Silas corrected. “My heart doesn’t bleed anymore. It’s solid.”Gideon stepped forward, his eyes narrowed as he inspected the man standing before him. He had seen men survive gangrene, seen men come back from trench fever with half their weight stripped away and their minds ruined. But Silas didn’t look like a survivor. He looked like something that had been taken apart, cleaned in a tub of lye, and put back together with tighter screws.”You were gone six months,” Gideon said, his voice hard, testing the weight of the words. “We buried three people from the second Earth wave while you were out there. We built eight houses.””I know,” Silas said. He turned his head toward the central stone vault where the Slate of Names floated. “I could feel the anchor expanding. Every time a new name showed up on the slate, the pressure in the woods shifted.”He reached into the canvas tunic and pulled out two small, cloth-wrapped bundles, dropping them into Gideon’s calloused palm.”That’s sixty grams of Thread-Fish ash and ninety grams of iron-horn powder,” Silas said, his voice flat, businesslike. “There’s enough left for seven more potions. You, Hester, Wu, and four others.”Gideon looked down at the heavy cloth packages in his hand, then up at Silas’s glowing, featureless face. “Why seven?””Because the Fel-Cats are coming back tonight,” Silas said, his amber eyes fixing on the northern trail. “And this time, they aren’t bringing dried fruit.”