Migyn

While the outer doors of the towers had been closed off, the rest of it was largely intact. It never got particularly bright inside without torches, but as long as it wasn’t completely dark outside it was easy enough to navigate.

Everything was thick with dust and age and lack of maintenance. Spiderwebs covered every corner and crevice and age had caused some of the stairs to be more unstable than Migyn would have liked—but the stone ones were still climbable.

Migyn made her way to the top of the tower where she stepped out onto the battlement. Even if she couldn’t leave, if she climbed high enough, she could find a world without walls.

The sky was just turning pale pink, and the winter wheat turned the horizon into an endless stretch of white gold. Summer was approaching, and all of Avheia was in a flurry preparing for the spring harvest and the Festival of the Night’s Fall.

Despite everything that had happened in her past and the reality her nightmares reminded her of, Migyn still loved her little village.

She loved the walls of the castle and the little keep her family lived in.

She loved the little houses, the market, and endless fields she never got to walk through in their prime.

She loved the mountains of the Crown and the way they wrapped around the verdant forest of the Brin like a mother cradling her babe.

She wanted to protect it and see it thrive.

If only I had a better answer than tangential suicide. Migyn sighed as she walked toward the sounds of the festival. For the past year she’d thought of all sorts of plans to get Avheia out from under the black cloud her existence put it in, but her options were limited by more than just her youth and lack of talent—it was largely because Migyn was an Aeshanian.

Removing her hood, Migyn pulled her long, iridescent white braid over her shoulder and stared at the strands as they shimmered different colors in the dying light.

Iridescent hair. Pearly skin with a soft shimmer. Crystalline eyes.

Most people from Easalan had dark hair, toned skin and eyes of green or brown—but not Migyn. As if being an Incarnate wasn’t enough of a torment, she was born with distinctly Aeshanian features—a people who the Easalans had conquered a hundred years before.

Her appearance made her a target in more than one way, but it was the only thing she had left of her biological father—a fact which often left Migyn of two minds.

There was a certain cognitive dissonance between the mind of “Migyn” and her memories of being “Astus.”

Astus’s childhood and Migyn’s were roughly identical until Migyn’s dreams began. Thanks to how much her appearance made her stand out, and the fact she was an illegitimate child, she was confined to Inner Avheia by her parents, bullied by her peers, ostracized by the town.

It was a difficult thing for a young girl to bear, especially when she didn’t understand why her situation was the way it was.

“The Aeshanians were monsters,” the cruel ones told her. “You are a monster, and when you leave these walls, the paladins will take you, turn your hair into thread and your blood into wine whilst taking your flesh and bones as laurels of victory!”

And they encouraged their children to be similarly horrible.

“Moongirl,” they called her. “Monster.” “Beast.”

An ugly creature not worthy of love, or even acceptance.

Even now it made Migyn sick, but for the Astus who knew nothing, such extreme external rejection led to vengeful inner resentment.

How fragile had she been, then? How much had she longed to hear the words of praise the Stag Mothers fed her, instead of the horrible stories of the people she’d grown up with? How she had relished in their attention and the love they showered upon her?

How Astus loved the way the faces of the Avheians who had mistreated her had turned pale when the Stag Mothers and their Herd bowed before her and exalted her as a god.

It was a beautiful revenge—and a beautiful lie.

The Stag Mothers aside, how can adults act so maliciously toward a child? Migyn wondered, thinking back on it. What did being so nasty do for any of them other than be a means to make themselves feel better in the moment? They often saw repercussions for it, too, since Baron Verdyn rarely stood to the side and let them be when he found out about it.

Nevertheless, Astus lived a life. Through losses and victories, she always trusted the wrong people and made a million mistakes.

But she learned, and she endured.

She always felt like she was grasping the edge of a cliff, desperately trying to hold on even as every moment of that life was spent in pain and living for the rare, joyful moments of her life.

Migyn of this life, still a largely child, witnessed Astus’s suffering from an early age. Her body was different, but in her mind, she felt Astus’s pain. It was so real, so close, so personal—yet, at the same time, it felt like it happened to an entirely different person.

Astus’s life also lent Migyn knowledge and skills Astus never had. Astus’s anger, though still raging somewhere in the back of Migyn’s mind, was quelled by nearly thirty years of temperance, and her more recent childhood left her floating between innocence and Incarnate, making her almost an entirely different person than who she could have been.

Though Astus had come to resent her father and his bloodline, Migyn held his memory sacred—and for all the cruelty Astus suffered under the people of Avheia, Migyn forgave them.

I cannot let the past or future define me or anyone else. I can borrow her allies, but Astus’s enemies need not be mine.

Which was how she came to Vaendael.

Saint Alessio Xenris. His name is as arrogant as the rest of him, she thought, annoyed.

Migyn’s hope was if she offered herself to him—whether allegiance or life—it would all end before it had a chance to begin.

The thought had occurred to her to use her knowledge to take push the Stag Mothers aside, take control of the Herd and their followers, and perhaps even go on to claim victory over Vaendael and rewrite the sad story of Astus into a triumphant warsong—but, like Astus at her death, Migyn had no desire for a crown.

She had no taste for war, nor did she truly believe the Stag Mothers would ever truly bow to her.

She could have gone directly to the Emperor and presented herself as an Incarnate, but no part of her wanted the Emperor involved in Avheia. As far as she was concerned, the Easarian Empire was no different than the Stag Mothers. They were interested in power and political gain, cost be damned.

There was at least a chance she could negotiate with Vaendael.

As the only other Incarnate she knew, there was the potential for a tacit understanding between them regardless of their future-past.

Yes, he was the enemy. Yes, his armies slaughtered her family while he burned Avheia. Yes, he had been the one who killed her.

On the other side of the coin, she was the enemy of his country, his religion. Her people started the war first, crossing the borders and raiding Easarian towns at every opportunity.

The Stag Mothers occupied Avheia shortly after finding her, using it as their base of operations to support their forces as they rose against the Empire. Astus was forced to follow the Herd as it swept across the countryside until she finally broke free of the Stag Mothers’ control and reclaimed her independence.

It was Astus who returned to Avheia near the end, drawing Vaendael’s eye back when it could have avoided his ire if she hadn’t been so desperate to run away from her position as Astus Incarnate.

Had she stayed and died on the front lines, the front lines would never have crossed Avheia’s threshold.

Avheia’s burning was more my fault than his, in the end. He was doing his job. I was the one who came back. I was the one Baron Verdyn chose to protect when, by right, he should have turned me over to them once they were no longer under the rule of the Stag Mothers and their Herd.

There was to be no mercy between enemy gods, and so everyone who chose the losing side burned.

Migyn swallowed as she tried to turn her focus back on to the bright, peaceful world around her now—but the vision at the edge of Migyn’s mind was dark. As sweet and clean as the air was now, in her memory ash and dust threatened to choke her with every breath, the scent of firewood mingling with that of burning flesh.

Such is the way when you fight against the Goddess and her Incarnate. Such is the way when you fight against Vaendael—and such is the way when you’re nothing but a puppet of the Stag Mothers.

Anything was better than the Stag Mothers.

Shivering, Migyn hugged herself and focused on the music of instruments and children laughing in the distance. The sounds of construction also bounced off the stone as the people of Avheia raised temporary buildings for the coming festivities.

She pressed herself against the parapet and peeked through one of the crenels of the battlement. Not quite tall enough to get the whole view, she used the holes in the merlons to push against the wall with her feet and pull herself higher to get a better view.

Foreigners had crowded the roads outside the castle since late the night before, and the extra hands they’d hired had been arriving since the new moon. They brought a delightful chaos into Avheia’s normally quiet existence, adding life and color the little town rarely saw.

Festival season around the Brin brought more than just workers looking for decent-paying jobs. Where people gathered, so did merchants of all kinds. Flags bearing unfamiliar crests flapped in the wind, and tents with colors Migyn rarely saw were being erected near the shores of the Diradyne river.

Thanks to all this, the usually quiet market was thriving. Lamplighters were lighting the braziers which lined the roads, and the hunters were setting up bonfires that would be lit for the festival’s opening ceremony.

Even from a distance, it was beautiful and made Migyn’s heartache.

So often had she imagined what it would be like to run wild through the market, eating food they couldn’t normally get in Avheia and listening to stories from far-off places.

But it was just a dream.

Resting her head on her arms, she watched the sun drift lower on the horizon.

“Hmmm?” Migyn frowned and lifted her head back up. Out of the corner of her eye, a dark figure moved along the wall. What is…? Is that a person?

She rubbed her eyes, hoping that she was just imagining things, or that buildings and ships present for the festival had cast a strange shadow.

But no.

Someone was scaling the wall. And they weren’t just scaling it—the only way that was possible was if he were using magic.

Gritting her teeth, Migyn pulled up her hood. From her hand, she grew a short wooden sword and ran to where the figure managed to hop over the parapet.

He wore a short cloak and also had a hood over his head, but she could tell it was probably a man. He must have seen or heard her approach as he twisted around to face her after he’d landed.

“Hey!” Migyn shouted, pointing her short sword at him. He had dark hair and dark eyes that glimmered in the lights of the town below. “Who the hells do you think you are?!”

The man didn’t respond with words. Instead, he summoned a flaming dagger from his fingertips and ran at her.

“Shit!” Migyn cursed. It just had to be fire, didn’t it? “Hey! Intrud—”

The man’s dagger sliced toward her head, forcing her to block. Her arms shuddered under the weight of the man’s force, and she watched her wooden sword warily.

Luckily, as Astus, her sword was made with living wood so it was a little more burn resistant. Fighting Vaendael had taught her some things—but she’d only be able to take a few hits.

Unfortunately, Migyn was not a frontline fighter, and this man quickly proved to be no simple thief. After pushing her back, the man managed to get up to her side and grab her arm, twisting her around against his chest.

“Let me go, or I’ll scream,” Migyn said, squirming. The man put his dagger near her throat. Licks of flame threatened to brush her skin.

“That’s enough, now. Be quiet,” the man said in a warm, honey-like voice. “I don’t want to hurt you, but scream, and you die.”