HAYVALA

Two centuries we live. Two centuries to see the world change in a single night. In the grand scheme of things... I am young. I have so much to learn still, but you, little brother, have less than I. You were twelve when you took the crown. Heavy were the pearls embedded in the metal, and at sixteen, I wondered if this was a cruel fate for you. I wondered if it would break your spine with how you try to lift our kingdom on your shoulders, wanting to prove that you walking up the crystalline steps was not a fluke, as the Lords and Ladies would whisper. Hayvala sat at her vanity. Kazmira excused herself to grab some brushes from the cupboards. Opal necklaces hung off her jewellery box, assorted with moonstone clips for her feathers. White against white, she tickled the longest one, where no downy feathers remained as the last one fell at her twenty-fifth turn.

It feels so long since I lost you, Yokonei. Laucan can barely remember you. You were there before he came into the world. I think Mother sometimes wondered about you — pure of heart, sometimes I wished you had been our father instead. But you were a Traye, and to Father, there was no greater crime than that name. Her fingers wound around the hilt of Yokonei's dagger. His last gift before a king's apathy stole him from her. Grey ribbons wrapped around the hilt, a promise of stability and strength, with the gentle touch of silk and a knight's hand on the dance floor. To a firm defiance to a young squire in a tourney ring, refusing her part as a doll to be wed.

There are people like you, Yokonei, out there in the snow.

Violet-tinted eyes carried the love of the tundra, seeing past the flurry and into the flowering fields, full of wisdom and hope, never left wanting in happiness. An aura of soft moonlight, her grief created a shield of stone around her heart in the fallout, and formed a lance of hatred to touch a crystal for justice. Hayvala held the dagger at its balanced tip, as he showed her. It acted like a pendulum of war and peace on the tip of her finger, but she placed it back in front of the mirror when Kazmira's shape bustled to her side. "You find what you're looking for, Mira?" she mused when Kazmira set a parchment down in front of her. "Is that the day's proceedings?" Hair cupped in the hands of her talented handmaiden, she rolled it open to let the paper hang on her lap.

"Yes, m'lady." Kazmira brushed white tangles out into Navee loops around her ears. "Lunch will be served in your quarters at the listed time — you also have some... outstanding requests His Winged Grace sent your way with his profound apologies at his inability to handle them in a timely manner. Shall I prepare a quill and inkwell for you?"

"If I spent my days answering the same requests I'd get nothing important done," Hayvala said and rolled the parchment. "I know what bothers His Winged Grace about these requests. Turns go on, I am unwed, and at my age it would be expected of a lady of my standing to give my hand to a well-endowed, proper noble. But Laucan is yet a boy. I will not make that choice for him like it was near made for me. Those recipients can wait for a proper answer at the proper time. We live two centuries, they can wait." Hayvala waited for Kazmira to finish brushing her hair before standing from the chair when Kazmira bowed her head. "I think I shall head into the city for lunch. I have something I need to pick up from the florist."

"Of course, my lady. I will accompany you."

"I would be glad to have your assistance and knowledge," Hayvala said with a smile at her handmaiden. "I need only the seed of a snowrose to plant in my garden. I sent a missive to have a bundle prepared."

"Oh, you're planting one, Your Grace? For whom?"

Hayvala touched the dagger and brushed her fingers into the neat ribbon. "Someone whose memory I do not want to fade, so I will make it bloom in the safety of the garden." A sense of anxious pressure slipped through the air and folded it into several pieces to shatter the mingling auras. "You may come in," she called when it stopped in front of her door and trembled. It swung open to reveal one of the young squires turned knights, shivering in their scaled white plate. "Yes, Ser? Is something the matter?" Up to him, she frowned when he lowered his head to her, keeping his gaze locked on her boots.

"Keeper Blackwall asked for you, m'lady," they said, and their dark gold feathers shivered in the slits of their helmet, and still refused to look upon her as a fellow Avaerilian. "He is within the palace library studying the world crystal."

Hayvala smiled and raised her hand, but the knight straightened out his back but never lifted his head. "I shall see to our guest then," she said with a nod at Kazmira. "I should not be too long. If you would be so kind as to escort Kazmira to wait for me at the carriages, Ser? I am going out today."

"Would you like me to apprise Knight-Valiant Myloz of your wish? We can set up a patrol—"

"If it suits you, Ser, but I do not want an entire contingent of knights taking up the streets and causing inconvenience to those in the midquarter trying to go about their daily lives. I do not want the world to stop for me," she said with a grin when his eyes flicked upwards, thin beads of alarm. "You may tell him as such."

"I understand, Your Highness. Mistress Kazmira." He swung out his arm, and the two left arm in arm, but at a respectful distance from each other's sides.

Let us see what Blackwall wants. The Keeper spent unseen days and knights within the confines of yellowing parchment and old, abandoned stories no one deigned to read for their own sake. Stories with lessons to teach from their forgotten, buried past. Thousands of words measured and penned with a sense of finality and permanence, for their was no undoing ink on a page. Blue flames hung in the snow-flecked chandeliers when she made her way deeper into the confines of the palace, farther from windows, a shell of protection not all could fit inside. It brought a sense of stale dark deep in the worn cracks of stone slabs and marble pillars woven with opalescent trimmings. At the end of the long corridor, the massive circular doors into the library. It carried the scent of knowledge, and her pain. Her heartbeat fluttered against her ribcage, but she stilled her historic fury and willful petulance, for neither served her to save Yokonei Traye — it only served to trap her in a cage of gilded silks. Tongue on the edge of her lip, she pushed through the doors with a whisper of magick wind.

Keeper Blackwall sat at one of the chairs at the circular table around the crystal, shimmering blue with hidden truths behind the icy cloud in the room, attaching itself to the books in the wall of bookcases around it, imprinting on its stories. "Ah, Your Highness." He bowed his head, but not in full as he got out of it, tucking his hands into his black fur cuffs. "You received my message, then?"

"Yes." Words measured, never to be put down in ink. "What do you require of me?"

Her question went unanswered when Blackwall turned back to the crystal with a sense of interest and curiosity bleeding out into the stone foundations made of the bones of her people. "It is incredible, truly," he stated. "From here, I feel the pulse of the world's aura — an organ fed by a heart. Beautiful, but fogged, even with my expanded sense into the flow. It's a shame the history beneath it is marred." His head tipped to the side when he swung his attention to her, and looked upon her straight in the eye. "His Winged Grace could not give me more than I already knew, and to handle your condition I need to know a few things of this world crystal. Information it pertains, the way it was accessed." His hands left his cuffs to tangle in his own fingers. "Lady Hayvala... what question did you ask it?"

Hayvala frowned. "I asked for the true history of Naveera, to find a way out of the blizzard."

His aura of pitch black tar shifted and molded with the aura of the world crystal. "Just as is?" he questioned.

"I had no need to know anything else."

Blackwall nodded in frozen motion. "It is true that trying to merge your aura with a crystal causes entanglement in Aurus, and rabid obsession in non Aurus as you get with obscura text. The more those without our sight read said texts, the more they hunger for the truth on the edge of their mind, forgotten to the past — burned out of their life as if it had never existed," he explained. "We, as Keepers, try to keep the Obscura Texts from falling into the wrong, untrained hands. We look upon history with a biased perspective, having not lived it, but it is like a direct connection to that history often found in our blood, that is the power of Obscura Texts. It can drive even sensible, clear-headed folk into the borders of madness."

"Yes, I've heard the dangers of the Obscura Texts. There is none here in the palace of written form." Hayvala studied him. "I asked the question, and the entanglement was my price, Keeper Blackwall. It is not of the ordinary. It's our penance as Aurus. Always toeing the line between the light, and the dark."

Blackwall pinched his chin. "The burden of knowledge."

It sounded like an agreement, but the way his aura shivered in intent gave her no sense of relief and security. "You do not think I asked the right question? Does something about my condition bother you?"

"On the contrary, my lady." His smile deepened. "I think you were not honest with yourself when you merged your aura with it."

Hayvala pressed her shoulders into her neck, but refused to bend to the harsh wind. "May you clarify, Keeper Blackwall?"

Blackwall nodded and stepped through the darkness and into the light of the lamps. "I apologise, I suppose it was I who asked the wrong question," he corrected. "Knowledge for knowledge's sake causes a rift in the mind, to fill in the gaps we cannot carry. You do not hold this rift in your mind and aura. Rage. Agony. Spite." The last word came out cold and sharp in his familiar but strange Navei song. "This is what fills the gaps of yours. My lady, I do not doubt you asked, but I suspect you did much more than ask an innocent question, you gave it a fervent wish and made it manifest."

Hayvala dug her fingernails into her palm, but breathed out her wyvern mist. "I wished for an end to the cycle."

"A noble wish, but not the one layered in your aura." Blackwall tipped forward. "To approach this, I need all the facts to heal your entanglement. It is a connection to history, remember? To correct it, to redress the balance, we need that connection," he pointed out. "Hence why I ask for your wish, for what you summoned and changed the course of history." In the tar, a snake's eye flitted open its third eyelid, but disappeared into the murk. "In the moment, we do not think of how much our actions can flutter the aura of the world."

Words broke on her tongue.

"Apologies if I've caused you unease, Your Grace. I often forget my words while researching the crystals, spend enough time around Keepers, we have a certain way of approaching our knowledge," Blackwall said. "I have one other question, though. You did not give your blood to the crystal?"

"No." Hayvala closed her eyes. "That would be exceptionally foolish, even for me."

Her answer appeared to satisfy him from the polite nod, melted from the cold ice. "I wouldn't call you foolish, Lady Hayvala. Malcontent, maybe, but someone of your caliber... I wouldn't blame you. Thank you for indulging me." He left the crystal to walk through the stacks, to her, but stopped at her side. "Regret shatters the perception one leaves behind, my lady. Loss is a powerful motivator, and makes it worth the risk of temptation." He left her side to head for the door without another measured word.

Her voice screamed behind cell bars, but never left her throat.

Her strength, ignored in the arm of the knights when they pushed Yokonei to the floor and his blood added to the foundation of bones. He needed her, but he sat up without falter and gave her a smile though everyone cursed his name, his precious name, full of power.

A brother's rage and realisation, storming her home to demand justice.

Over and over, the vicious cycle of Naveeran blood to bury them instead of pure snow.

It's not the blizzard that's killing us. Hayvala released the painful tension in her shoulders and hands at the sound of closed doors. It pulsed in her mind, the constant reminder of the flow, the light and the dark, and the game Aurus played with every waking moment.

Burden of knowledge, or the burden of our own emotions let alone others?

Hayvala lifted her gaze to the crystal which gave her a clear, but bloody answer.

You believed better of me, Yokonei, I wish your gentle spirit could've soothed the draconic rage inside me, digging into my soul... but I have betrayed you in a worse way than those who killed you. Hayvala turned her back on her regret. But still, Keeper Blackwall, the power of your name is what confounds me the most. Tar in your aura, too many colours... I am starting to wonder if Laucan truly bothered to ask for your name.