The stifling heat of the Bellows clung to the drafty upstairs room, thick with the scent of jasmine and the lingering musk of the tavern below. O'nor lay back against the tangled linen, the roar of the people below muffled. Beside him, Jo'val shifted while tracing a slow, deliberate circle over his lips.
"Did you tell the Val'dora council to relent for the night? Did you finally put down your sword to be with me?" The question came distorted as if vibrating the air.
"I—I pick up the sword to protect you. You know our families make our union impossible?"
Jo'val let out a scoff of pure rejection at the mere mention of their families. "O, you have stared down armies, battled the champions of the Anai and killed a fire breathing dragon. What is so hard about fighting for me?"
The question caused the vibration in the air to ripple as if the room was on the surface of water.
"I...I fight—"
Jo'val cut him off.
"You fight for yourself. You choose war. You choose bloodline. You would rather die on the field with a blade in your stomach than in bed with me?"
The world cracked like ice that hit the stone too hard and then shattered.
O'nor's eyes snapped open to the pitch-black ceiling of his own quarters in the 'nor estate.
He lunged upward, gasping for air as if he had been held underwater. His heart hammered a frantic rhythm against his ribs. The stifling heat of the summer night clung to him, his entire body slick with sweat. A stinging drop ran down his brow and into his eye.
"It was just a dream." O'nor recited to himself as he wiped sweat from his eyes and cheeks with the palm of both his hands.
He swung his legs over the edge of the cot, resting his elbows on his knees, staring at the stone floor. The ghost of Jo'val's touch still lingered on his lips.
O'nor pressed his hands forcibly to his eyes as if pushing the dream back into the crevices of his mind.
I must forge fifty men into a vanguard. I can't be distracted by a—. O'nor couldn't even finish the thought*.* By her*.*
Throwing on a loose tunic, he abandoned the stifling bedroom, marching down the hall to find the only other person in the estate awake at this hour.
Dak'nor sat slumped in his high-backed chair, his ink-stained fingers trembling as they hovered over the darkly glowing dragon crystal resting on his desk. He looked up to see his younger brother walk in with sweat on his forehead, but Dak'nor's face was gaunt, the skin around his eyes bruised with exhaustion.
Dak'nor merely gestured to him to enter ignoring the disheveled state O'nor appeared in.
"The Void is not a place you walk into, O," Dak'nor whispered, his voice raspy. "It is a frequency. When I hold the stone, I slip beneath the waking world. My skin goes numb—like plunging into a frozen lake—but my bones... boiled. It feels as though I have run for three days straight, yet my body hasn't moved an inch."
O'nor stood on the other side of the wooden table, his shoulders casting a long shadow in the candlelight. He weighed the crystal as a general evaluates a weapon, holding none of the reverence of his brother.
"A parlor trick," O'nor said flatly, crossing his arms. "If this 'Void' makes a man frictionless, if it binds him to an eternal force, then it is the ultimate weapon. But an army cannot pass around a single glowing rock on a battlefield, Dak. If they need the crystal to find the door, the weapon is useless."
"The crystal is the door," Dak'nor insisted, defensive of his discovery.
"No," O'nor countered, leaning forward and resting his calloused hands on the table. "If the dragon brought this dark with him, it didn't stay in the stone. It leaked. I can feel the temperature in this room, brother. The Void isn't locked in that crystal. The stone is just a lantern guiding you in. We need to learn to see in the dark without it."
O'nor walked around the desk, ignoring the crystal entirely. He gripped his older brother by the shoulders, pulling him up from the chair. "Show me. Don't use the stone. Use your mind."
Dak'nor swallowed hard, nodded, and closed his eyes. His breathing slowed to a shallow cadence. O'nor mirrored him, emptying his mind of the castle, the war, and the flickering desire of her. He focused entirely on the empty spaces between the air.
The rejection was immediate and violent.
The Void pushed back against him. A pressure clamped around O'nor's skull, as if he had been plunged into a freezing lake. Frosty mist plumed with each breath O'nor took and his blood pressed up against his veins radiating a heat that contrasted the encroaching cold—just as Dak'nor had warned.
O'nor's instinct was to open his eyes and break the connection, but he clamped down on his will. Hold the line, he commanded himself. He fought the pressure forcing his mind forward through stubborn desire.
They shifted in and out of reality, struggling like a drowning man breaking the surface only to be dragged back beneath the waves. As they stuttered between the Void and Dak'nor's laboratory, the warmth, light, and scent of wax sputtered out, replaced by a collapse into a monochromatic wash of gray-scale ink. The temperature fell and the pressurized silence of the Void slammed against their eardrums.
They were standing in the laboratory, but the walls felt distant, immaterial.
"This isn't deep enough," Dak'nor explained, his voice echoing strangely. "Focus your mind to go deeper."
O'nor followed the command, and the gray-scale of the space they occupied smoked away into a dark, empty wall of nothing.
"Look," Dak'nor directed, his hand pointing into the abyss.
O'nor's physical eyes remained closed, yet his mind opened to the Void. It was a disorienting, elevated perspective—like watching his own actions from ten feet above, a spectator to his own soul. He struggled to maintain his focus, the vision stuttering as the colors and textures of Dak'nor's laboratory flickered in and out of existence.
Dak'nor, sensing his younger brother's aggressive attempts to anchor himself, leaned into the stillness. "Let go, O'nor," he coached, his voice steadying the chaos. "Don't try to make sense of it. Just allow it. Your will is the stillness, and the stillness is the Void."
O'nor took a ragged breath, releasing the desperate grip he had on his own identity. The stuttering slowed to a small vibration and then ceased. The fractured perspective crawled into place, the vantage point becoming his own. He was no longer looking down at himself; he was looking through the dark.
And deep within the endless black, far beneath the surface of the shadows, was a pulse. A brilliant speck of pure energy. It was the antithesis of the surrounding dark—a remnant of something old.
Dak'nor, entranced by its beauty, felt himself pulled in its direction, his obsession overriding his caution. As he drew closer, however, his movements slowed, his limbs becoming leaden as if he were wading through thick mud, struggling to drag himself toward the light.
Progressively, the ink-black void curdled. The shadows thickened, turning viscous as they lashed out, wrapping around Dak'nor's forearms like oily chains. They dragged him back into the depths, the cold of the Void biting into his very bones.
"Hold!" O'nor roared. He anchored his feet against the gravity of the Void and hauled Dak'nor forward, fighting the drag of the shadows. Together, their outstretched fingers brushed the edge of the fracture of light.
The sensation was an overwhelming wave of pure feeling, like being held in a warm embrace. It was the certainty of peace, a radiant warmth that chased the freezing dark from their veins for a fraction of a second.
Then, the strain of holding that frequency shattered their focus.
The Void crumbled around them as their minds faltered.
Both brothers hit the stone floor of the laboratory, gasping for air as if they had been drowning. The warm candlelight flooded back into their vision. Dak'nor scrambled backward against a bookshelf, weeping openly from the loss of the light, his body shaking with fatigue.
"Did you feel it?" Dak'nor choked out, wiping tears from his face. "The power. The light! It is the divine. If we can harness that—"
"We will die trying," O'nor interrupted.
O'nor slowly pushed himself up from the floor.
"The light fought us, Dak," O'nor said, his voice hard. "The shadows pulled at you, and the strain of touching that warmth nearly stopped our hearts. A soldier cannot struggle for his weapon in battle. "
"But the dark takes as well as gives!" Dak'nor pleaded, realizing with mounting concern what his brother was thinking.
"The dark is compliant," O'nor corrected. "It didn't fight me when I anchored us. It only fought you because you reached for the light. What happens, big brother, if we stop reaching? What happens if we simply skim the surface and siphon the power from the shadows?"
Before Dak'nor could stop him, O'nor closed his eyes.
The younger 'nor had felt the tactical key to reaching the Stillness. Instead of stepping fully into it, he threw a tether around the darkness and pulled it into the mortal world. As he drew the abyss into his own veins, the laboratory frost bloomed across the desk, turning the candle flames into sputtering blue sparks.
Dak'nor scrambled to his feet, his heart hammering against his ribs.
O'nor opened his eyes.
Dak'nor froze in shock. O'nor's warm, brown eyes were gone. In their place were two pools of oily, lightless obsidian. The black ichor of the Void saturated his gaze.
When O'nor spoke, the voice was low and deep, like a sound carried on the winter winds.
"Your fears are the whimpers of a child, Dak'nor," the general said. The warmth of the younger brother was surgically absent. He spoke with the unfeeling precision of a commander at war. "You look at the dark and see a prison. Can it not also be more?
Power to force freedom from this endless bloodshed?"
O'nor turned away from his stupefied brother. He held the freezing, frictionless power of the Void within his own veins, his boots making no sound against the stone floor.
He walked out of the laboratory and into the streets of Beh-REET, a man who had successfully weaponized the shadows of a walled-off world. He was the first of the Dragon-Oath.
The harbinger of a new age.
Eyes of Black and Blue
O'nor stood before the council. He laid out Dak'nor's discovery as a general would command a squadron of spearmen.
"Every campaign we have fought against the Anai has been measured in lives lost," O'nor's voice echoed off the stone walls. He locked eyes with the elder councilmen, holding their gaze one by one. "A mortal man tires. His lungs burn. We lose borders not because the Anai are superior warriors, but because mortal flesh has its limits."
"Dak'nor and I have discovered a way for any man to tap into the Void." O'nor continued, his voice dropping into a deadly cadence. "I have touched it. Imagine a vanguard that can march for three days in the freezing or sweltering mud without rest. A soldier who can heal from most wounds in the heat of battle."
An elder councilman slowly nodded, his eyes narrowing in calculation. Beside him, a minor councilman stroked his chin, echoing the slow, rhythmic nod of agreement.
"An untouchable army," the elder man murmured, the hungry anticipation thick on his lips.
"Exactly," O'nor confirmed. He stood tall, the candlelight casting long shadows across his face. "Give me the commission. The authority to break them and rebuild them with the Void."
Tor'val leaned forward from his seat. His gaze hard with distrust.
"Are we to hand this boy a legion of men in the hope he can turn them to these unstoppable warriors?" Tor'val sneered, his fingers tapping a frantic rhythm on the stone dais. "Giving O'nor command of a vanguard wielding this... this Void would make his house more politically powerful than the Val'dora itself. I vote no."
"Tor'val's reasoning is pathetic. My son and our family care not for power for the sake of power." Kal'nor's voice cut through the room like an arrow. The head of the Val'dora council sat still, but as he looked at his son, his eyes were filled with a deep dread. "However, his conclusion is correct. I stand with Tor'val."
A murmur of shock rippled down the long table. It was unheard of for Kal'nor to side with his political rival.
"Father?" O'nor asked, his brow furrowing.
"I fear what this magic will do to your mind," Kal'nor answered coldly. "This power is dark and unknown, O'nor. To touch the dark is to invite it in. A man who wields a hammer looks for a nail. A man who wields a blade looks for a war. I will not sanction the corruption of our own men."
The rest of the Val'dora councilmen exchanged confused calculating glances.
"We are bleeding on the borders," one of the councilmen argued, leaning forward. "The Anai do not yield easily. If this power can break their lines and secure our future campaigns, we would be fools to ignore it. A vanguard of untouchable soldiers led by the slayer of the dragon? It would inspire our men and our people."
The murmurs grew into a chorus of agreement. For the first time in years, the council actively moved to veto their head. Victory outweighed caution.
Sensing the shift, O'nor stepped closer to the dais, addressing only his father. "For years, you berated me for swinging a sword in the dirt instead of commanding these men," O'nor said, his voice tightening. "You demanded I step out of the sands. You demanded I become a leader. I am stepping forward, Father. I am offering you the victory you have bled for."
"I asked you to lead men, O'nor," Kal'nor said, his voice quiet yet resolute. "I did not ask you to forge monsters. You have my vote of no."
The council outvoted Kal'nor and Tor'val, granting O'nor the authority and the men he required.