I woke first and when I did, it was early. Light had only just begun to press against the shutters.
The room was grey -colored solely by a dimness that only existed between night and morning. Ash lay on the floor against the far wall, curled on her side, one of her arms tucked beneath the pillow she had claimed. Her breathing was slow and steady.
I raised my arms above me and stared at them. Two Sparks, one on each forearm. The Requiem sat on my right, a point of black so deep it seemed to drink the light. The Cradle rested on my left, almost glowing against my skin. They were small and insignificant to look upon. A child's marks had looked no different.
I could feel them, though -that was what mattered. Beneath each Spark, something had taken root. New pathways, thin as spider silk, threading outward from each mark toward my mana core. They were fragile and incomplete, but I could certainly feel them. I would make them more. The man had spoken of stages, had he not? There was no point in wasting time.
I started with the Requiem as it was the obvious choice. The room had a tiny hearth -a piece of firewood lay beside it. I reached over from the bed and took it, held it in my right hand, and pushed mana toward the black dot. Nothing happened.
I tried again with more force. The mana swirled against the mark and slid past it. The third time, I tried to be slower, feeding the mana in a thin, steady stream. There was the faintest response -an itch from somewhere in my right arm. The wood beneath my fingers felt different. Dryer? I held it longer and a crack formed along the grain, thin and barely visible. It was progress. Small, miserable progress but still progress.
I closed my eyes and concentrated. By the time I stopped, Ash was gone.
The pillow sat neatly against the wall and the blanket she had been using was folded. I had not heard her leave, and that bothered me more than I cared to admit. Even diminished, my senses should have caught the sound of footsteps. I glanced through the window and found her immediately.
She was across the village, hauling stones and setting them aside. She had changed into Martha's clothes already. The garish pink was visible even at this distance. Her sleeves were rolled past her elbows, and she was sweating through the fabric despite the morning chill. She had been at it for some time, judging by the pile in front of her. I turned away and returned my attention to the mark.
There were more important things.
I moved outside to my usual spot by the low wall. The morning air was cool and I sat cross-legged in the grass. I used a branch first -one that was dry, and stripped of leaves. I wrapped my right hand around it and pushed mana into the Requiem.
The response came faster now. Perhaps the pathway needed use to widen? It certainly felt like something about it was changing. The bark beneath my fingers aged, peeling back in thin strips to reveal wood that had gone grey. I held it for a count of ten, and the branch crumbled where my fingers pressed.
This power was so painfully slow. I did not expect it to match even the tiniest portion of my original power, but I had expected it to be useful at the very least.
I picked up another. This time, I tried to control the rate of decay, feeding it less power. The branch aged but did not crumble. Its color shifted from brown to grey, the wood drying until it was light as kindling.
I tried cloth next -a strip I tore from the hem of the ruined dress Martha had given me. Briefly I hesitated, but then I recalled that she had already replaced it with another. Dirt aside, the thing had stretched too far, especially around the chest. The cloth strip frayed beneath my fingers within seconds. The fibers separated, and then simply fell apart. It seemed the power worked faster on material like this.
Stone was different still. I pressed my palm against the low wall itself and pushed mana into it. I held the flow for thirty seconds before something happened. A crack appeared, emanating outward from my palm in three directions. The crack spread, and something pressed back against my palm. An echo of something so faint I did not catch it. An impression, so faint it impressed little upon me. If this was some key to advancing my power, I did not understand it.
I catalogued the differences and tried to find some pattern between them. Hard materials resisted and softer materials yielded. The rate of decay could be controlled through the volume of mana supplied. The range was limited to direct, sustained contact through the hands.
These were the parameters of my new cage. A cage so small a child would have found it confining. Each time I pushed mana through the Requiem, the Spark seemed to strain. It didn't feel like it was growing, exactly. I did not know what the damned thing was doing. Surely, if it needed power, then I had that to spare.
It wasn't all dissatisfaction though. At least I still had magic. I found myself idly decaying branches, even though I knew the result. Yes, perhaps there was a joy to power for power's sake alone. Each time I did, the Requiem hummed. That feeling of straining came again. It didn't matter for now. Even diminished, I could still unmake things. Destruction I understood well.
I paused to flex my hand. The mana expenditure was slight, and my reserves were quite large, and most of them were still the thicker mana. It was odd -I could pick which one to use -which one to push into the Spark. The older mana was far, far more efficient, and yet I had no way to replenish it.
I looked up. Ash was somewhere else now, not at the wall that had apparently needed repairing. She had moved on to helping Tom with something near his cart, lifting a crate that Tom was visibly struggling with, carrying it as though it were empty. Her feet moved quickly and she set the crate down and then she was already turning, no doubt off to someone else.
She hadn't stopped moving since dawn. Strange, that. Something about it pricked at me.
I stared at my left arm. The white dot stared back.
I had not been avoiding it. This was prioritization. The Requiem was more immediately useful. In a confrontation, the ability to decay was a weapon. The Cradle was what, exactly? The ability to grow things? Base healing? Useful after the fighting was done or decided.
I knew that was not the full truth. I had known it since the Inking -since the warmth had settled into my arm. I pushed mana into the Cradle.
The warmth came fast. It spread through the pathway and into my palm like sunlight through a half-shuttered window. It was steady and gentle. I held a dead branch -the same one I had rotted with the Requiem moments ago. One that was long past any hope of life. There was nothing for five seconds. Nothing for seven. I nearly pulled away. Then, I saw a bud.
It was tiny and green, pressing out from a joint in the branch where a leaf might once have grown. It was small enough that I might have missed it, had I not been watching so closely. I stared at it.
The bud did not retract when I pulled my hand away. It stayed, growing on a branch that had been dead in my grip. I held another dead branch and did it again, until another bud bloomed to life, this one near the tip.
I tried the cracked stone of the wall as I pressed my left palm to the same spot I had decayed with my right. The warmth flowed -slowly, so slowly I might have imagined it, the hairline cracks began to fill. It would take minutes to seal even this small wound.
This was not healing. This was something far more. I had known it, of course. That was why I recoiled so. Still, the power was weak -pathetically weak. Far slower than the Requiem by a wide margin. The Cradle did not sit well in me. Not because it was unpleasant…perhaps that was precisely the problem.
Ash was with the children now.
I noticed because they were loud. She was running with three of them near the center of the village, weaving between huts. She was laughing and the sound carried. I had not heard such a sound from her before.
She was also favoring her left shoulder. There was a slight hitch in her stride when she turned. Her hands, when she paused to catch her breath, were raw. I could see the redness even from here. Nobody else would have noticed, nobody else was me.
I watched for longer than I intended -something in her movement tugged at me. Ash had been everywhere. The well. Tom's cart. The section of the wall being repaired. The woodpile, and now the children. A dozen more places I hadn't seen but had no doubt she'd visited. She had been everywhere, except one place. One hut, and the now quiet mother inside it.
Perhaps I had been watching her too closely after all.
An old man had been struggling with a fence post near me.
He had been at it the entire time I had been training, perhaps thirty paces from my spot by the wall. The post had rotted through at its base, and the grey haired man had been trying to shore it up with mud and twine. Neither had worked so far. It seemed he had no mark for this.
I had been ignoring him. I was currently testing the Cradle on a larger piece of dead wood, curious about whether scale affected the response. The pathway ached, but I could still push mana through it. As it happened, the power worked slower and consumed more mana the greater the scale.
The fence post was right there.
I rose and walked over. The man looked up at me with a startled expression, one many had shown me. My gaze had made many at least uncomfortable, even my most loyal of subjects. I did not speak. I wrapped my left hand around the rotted base of the post and pushed mana through the Cradle.
The warmth flowed. Under my fingers, the grey wood began to firm and colour returned to it in slow degrees. The rot did not vanish entirely, but it receded. It took thirty seconds. Perhaps less. I let go and walked back to my spot before sitting down. I did not look at the man.
The Cradle pulsed unsteadily in my arm. A part of me had hoped that this might be enough to push it further. It was not. The mark was faintly straining now, but that was not nearly enough. This had been a test of scale. The post was larger than the branches I had been using.
"Thank you," he called out.
I did not meet his gaze. The results were informative, that was all. I returned to my tests.
My hand caught on rough bark during a Requiem test. I’d gotten a scrape along the edge of my palm and now the wound was bleeding. I hissed through my teeth. These small wounds had not been a consideration before. I would not have noticed them at all.
My left hand reached for the cut before I had made the decision to move it.
The Cradle responded and warmth pressed into the broken skin. I watched the edges of the wound draw toward each other, slowly. The flesh knit. It was not clean and it was not entirely painless. The skin that sealed over the cut was slightly raised and pink, and it itched in a way that made me want to tear it open again.
Still, the wound closed. I stared at my palm. My instinct had been to mend.
Once, I had taken wounds a thousand times worse and simply waited for someone else to heal me. My powers had let me destroy the world, but they had never so much as let me heal a chipped fingernail. That had been a small part of my chain, one I had never thought to care about. I turned the observation over and set it aside. I did not know what to make of it. I moved on.
It was late afternoon by the time I had exhausted a fourth of my mana. I had ended up using more of my original power than I would have liked.
The pathways throbbed and even the marks themselves now ached with a soreness that sat deep beneath the skin. I sat with my back against the wall and watched the village. I did not know why. There was power and time to spare. The fastest way to grow these new powers was to keep using them, surely, but I watched anyway.
Ash was still going. She was helping a woman hang laundry now. Her movements were slower than they had been at dawn, but she had not stopped. She had not eaten, as far as I could tell -had not rested either.
My gaze drifted. I found that quiet hut again -the only one that did not glow with light from within. Marin, that had been the boy's name. When had I committed it to memory?
The boy's mother sat outside, on a low stool in the last of the afternoon light. Marin was in her arms, wrapped in a blanket, though the day was not cold. His head rested against her shoulder and his eyes were open. I knew they saw nothing.
Ash was nowhere near them -had been nowhere near them all day. Every task she had thrown herself into had orbited around this hut without ever touching it. I recognized the shape of it now. It felt familiar.
Ash returned to our shared room at dusk. She sat down against the far wall, in the same spot she always chose. Her knees drew up as she rested her arms across them. I did not see at first, the movement was so subtle, but she was shaking. It was not cold.
"Are you injured?"
Ash looked at me. Her blue eyes were flat. "I'm fine," she said. "I'm just tired."
A lie, and an obvious one. It was not the kind of terrified lie people had given me so often, and yet I saw through it just as cleanly. I did not push. I did not know how.
The question I had asked was wrong. I knew it was wrong even as it left my mouth. She was not injured -that was obvious. What she was, was something else. A word only a Hero would know. One a Demon Queen never would, or could.
Ash closed her eyes. Her head tilted back against the wall. Within minutes, her breathing slowed. Within minutes more, she was asleep. Or pretending to be. I could not tell which. I went out.
Restlessness was the reason. The room was small, and my body still hummed with the residual ache of the day's training, and I simply needed air. The village was quiet and lanterns flickered along the muddy paths.
I passed the fence from earlier. It was holding -the post stood straight, the wood firm where I had pressed the rot from it. The man had even tied new cord around the upper section. It looked sturdy, as sturdy as anything in Hamel did. I looked at it for one second too long and kept walking.
It was some time before I returned. The Hero had not moved. She really was asleep then.
I lay on the bed and raised both arms above me, staring at them in the lantern's dying light. The Requiem, on my right. It was no more than a small black point, though it looked larger than it had before. It had felt like coming home. Destruction was mine, had always been mine.
The Cradle, on my left. A white point, almost as big as its cousin. It had felt like something I had not earned. It was a beginning, in the hands of someone who had only ever brought endings.
I closed my right hand over the Cradle. The warmth pulsed, faint and steady. I held it until I fell asleep.