It's him again!

Baz looked over Ilia’s shoulder as his young devotee worked. The books. Again.

Ilia said something under his breath as he carefully wielded needle and cord to sew the signatures together. He wouldn’t recopy any of the old texts into this new one until he had the new tome assembled fully. 

“You’ll ruin your eyes more if you don’t watch the sun or the light levels in here.”

“Go away,” Ilia muttered. “I’m busy.”

“Some people are polite to their gods.”

“Other people didn’t expect a task to take so long or they would’ve done their offerings before starting it.”

So he was paying attention. Baz sank back into the shadows that had started collecting in the room as the sun sank closer to the horizon. He could wait a little longer then. But only a little. Ilia had been slacking as of late, and while much of that might have to do with the Wildling he was engaged to being in the palace, it still didn’t excuse him from following through on his end of their deal.

Using the shadows, Baz slipped out of the room through the window and slid along the wall to the garden below. The Wildling hadn’t been here for very long, but already the garden showed improvement. The trees had thrown out more leaf buds and the flowers were putting out new leaves and flower heads. He often heard the gardeners talking and even as recently as the afternoon they hadn’t figured out if they wanted to curse or praise the seemingly sudden change in fortunes that made the plants more lively.

Once he had assured himself no human was around, or the Wildling, he took his proper form. He didn’t need to breathe, but still he took a deep breath of the orange flower perfumed air. Harboured by the trees he could walk here on his own two feet without one of the other palace dwellers seeing him and screeching before running out to find one of the Chidorian Order to try and eradicate one spot of darkness from a place ruled by light. Or so they thought. He was always gone by then, sequestering himself in Ilia’s study to watch what played out afterwards.

It would be amusing to have that replay again. Especially when no one knew that they would be ruled by child of light soon enough. Not that anyone knew thats what she was. He’d heard most people remark that the Wildlings golden eyes were unusual, but gave few thoughts on why they were like that. Baz thought most people were simply relieved that Ilia was marrying anyone at all.

As amusing as it would be though, he didn’t feel like going through it again. It got a little tiring being himself. It’s why he’d disappeared so long ago until a much younger Ilia had shown up in the temple of the dead god he’d been resting in for the last century or so. The boy, now man, needed him more than Baz desired peace and quiet. Besides. Azaia would rip him apart if he let any of her people come to harm if he could thwart it at all. And he really didn’t want to deal with his sister yet. Especially when she was angry.

The scent of burning herbs interrupted his musing and Baz looked up to see smoke threading its why out into the night air from the study window. By the time he was up at the windowsill to drink in the smoke, he had shifted into a nebulous thing. 

Ilia lit the last of the dishes of herbs and used the long match to light the oil lamps arranged artfully on the offering table with the dishes. “You must have been close by.”

“In the garden,” Baz answered while eyeing the singular peacock feather in the vase that never left the centre of the table. That was more for Ilia and anyone who entered the study. Ilia liked pretty things to look at, and it often soothed others to think that an unknown god who had pretty things among their offerings couldn’t be much harm despite what the teachings of the Chidorian Order said.

“Have you noticed the gardens are doing better?”

“I have. Give it a year and you’ll see the damage from the blight being reversed.”

“And how long until its been eradicated?”

Baz moved to the next dish to drink in its smoke. “Hard to say. The blight has been here for years. It might take that long to get rid of it. Could be longer considering the extent and severity of the damage. But it could also be shorter. The Wildling is young and strong

With a nod of resigned understanding, Ilia looked out the window. “When are you going to call Pippa by her name?”

“When you’ve married her and I’ve met her properly.”

“Lets hope she doesn’t react badly to you then.”

Baz didn’t think she would. In fact, he’d be surprised if she hadn’t figured out that something was hanging around the palace, if not the man she was betrothed to. But he didn’t say anything. Let Ilia figure out how perceptive the Wildling was. It would at the very least provide more amusement than usual for himself.

Maybe after Ilia died he’d attach himself to another human. Or even stay with the family.

It may have been years since Sultana Jahana had disappeared years ago. Yara knew of it of course. Had allowed it to happen, as well as her mother. But by this point she thought everyone had forgotten that the Sultana, and the ones before her, had always guards. Nothing flashy like the ones that protected the sultan or their sons. Still, in the disappearance of the previous sultana and now, Yara had taken over the family and their business going several generations back and kept up the work of making sure that her daughters and eventual granddaughters would be prepared to take on guarding the next sultana.

Forgotten. Till now.

Chanri Harrowhawk sat uncomfortably on the lounging chair in the back garden. Yara’s husband, faithful Cheo, had passed years ago so she felt no shame in looking over Chanri. She suspected underneath his uniform he would be pleasing to look at. She wasn’t wrong. Good heavy muscle went well with the solid features of his face.

“Seeing as you are from Iqba, I’m curious about how you managed to find out about my family and find us,” she said before sipping at her cooled mint tea. Chanri looked up, where her daughters were surely peering from the upper windows, before meeting her eyes again. Yara smiled slightly. 

“Looking into things,” he replied carefully. Good man. He’d learned the most important part of guarding then.

“And?”

“And it seems that not all of the ladies that surrounded the Sultana were of the upper nobility, or even the lower nobility. Internal records gave me a consistent name.” He looked up again. “Despite not being noble, your family has homes quite close to the palaces.”

Chanri refused every promotion Ilia tried to give him. Most of the proposals at this point where all that serious anymore. It was a game now. A yearly proposal, and its subsequent denial. And Chanri knew when each attempt was coming. It was in the way that Ilia wrote when he sent out the missive for Chanri to meet with him, usually the early afternoon when Ilia took one of his actual breaks from work. And he always made sure to do it on Chanri’s days off. Mostly because he gave him shit more than once for not taking breaks, and the ones he did take were not nearly long enough.

Which is how Chanri ended up looking over Ilia as the young emir laid on the floor with an open book over his face. He nudged Ilia’s knee with a foot. “Don’t tell me someone succeeded in killing you.”

“Does it look like I’m laying in a pool of my own blood?”

“Poison in your coffee wouldn’t leave blood.”

Ilia was silent for a moment before reaching up and removing his book from his face, revealing a rather disgruntled Ilia. “I check for poisons.”

Chanri knelt down. “You aren’t wearing your glasses. Far as I’m concerned, you would mistake an execution order for a report from the front lines.”

Now Ilia sat up, rubbing at his face after putting down his book. “I didn’t ask for a meeting so you could make fun of me, Chanri.”

“If I was making fun of you, I’d ask how courting the young Lady Roy was going.”

Ilia grimaced and Chanri couldn’t help but chuckle. He’d been watching Ilia’s awkward attempts to try and court Pippa. Evidently he and the others had been lacking on the aspect of the education they’d been giving Ilia since becoming the first part of his ragtag army ten years ago. The poor man had barely a clue on flirting, let alone seduction. It didn’t help that Pippa didn’t seem overly fond of Ilia either.

“She’ll come around eventually,” Chanri assured Ilia as he sat down across from her. “You have time before the wedding.”

 “Maybe.” Ilia rubbed at his eyes. “But you aren’t here so we can discuss Pippa.”

“No? You don’t want details on how she seems to be trying to shake off her guards?”

“The ones I assigned or her ladies?”

Chanri’s brows rose in amusement. “You think Basere doesn’t have Pippa in her sight at all times?”

“I’m surprised anyone is able to keep up with her. But we still aren’t discussing Pippa.” Chanri settled back and waited for the inevitable proposal. Ilia didn’t disappoint. “I asked you to come here for a reason. I have the papers made out should you accept a promotion to general–”

“No.”

Ilia cocked his head to the side in exasperation. “You didn’t even let me finish.”

“Would it have mattered?”

“No. But you could have heard me out. There’s a pay increase and everything.”

Grinning, Chanri shook his head. “Still not interested. You know this.”

“Worth a try,” Ilia replied with a shrug. “I’m not getting rid of you ever, am I?”

“You’re stuck with me until I die.”

“Or I die.”

“Only one of those things is happening in my lifetime and that will never be your death.”

Ilia sighed and fell backwards again. “You’re the worst mercenary in existence. You’re supposed to be able to be paid off.”

I have too many things going on inside my head. It all started in checks notes early 2021. It all started with the very beginnings for Defenders of Alcadia and then spun out of control from there. Now I have twelve works I'm playing with all in various stages so I'll be updating this the more things happens.

The last of the afternoons light streamed through the crumbling ruins of the temple, creating a tapestry of gold that played through the leaves and flowers of thick vegetation to create pools the pools of shadows that Baz prowled through. Dust played in the beams of light, drifting with the cooling breeze that sighed its way through the leaves. Normally Baz would stop to watch the dance, but not this time. This time he had much different intentions that he had every day for the last century or so. He didn’t even pause to admire the work of his counterpart with how spiders feasted on the insects count in their webs. Death always tied with life in a delirious dance spanning from the beginning of everything, just like how light and shadow couldn’t exist without the other. Much of humanity seemed to have forgotten that as they took on newer and newer gods, abandoning the older ones to die slow deaths until there was none left to mourn them. None except the gods of now and before.

This temple was for a dead god. 

As Baz grew closer to the centre of the temple, he heard the crying and pleading before he saw the boy. The boy hadn’t figured out that this god wasn’t here. They hadn’t been here for a long time. They had done their time slowly dying and fading further into obscurity over the course of centuries until they finally allowed Death to welcome them into their arms as an old friend. Such deaths were bittersweet. Baz no longer tended them. Instead he stalked the shadows of the world and listened in on humans who didn’t remember that he existed as a god. They turned him into a monsters in which to scare their children with instead to warn them away from the far edges of field and wood. It wasn’t reverence though, and so he wasn’t called on to act as god. This was something he’d wanted after all.

But then he’d heard and found the boy.

He didn’t make a sound as he crossed mossy flagstones. The boy kept on pleading with his head down. If Baz had a true heart he’d have felt it being tugged upon by the pitiful sight before him. But he didn’t, but that didn’t mean the boys wailing for help hadn’t awakened his curiosity and sympathy. The boy knelt in place before the crumbling altar, dirty and tear-stained. Baz wasn’t sure he had left this spot, let alone this temple. He watched for a moment longer. Hearing the hoarseness in the boys voice. He couldn’t be any older than the early teen years if Baz remembered anything of human aging from his travels and time as a proper god.

“Boy.”

The boy threw his head up and started looking around. “Is that you?”

Baz weighed his possible responses. He knew who this boy was expecting, but he wasn’t this lesser god. But the god wasn’t coming and Baz had a creeping feeling this boy was going to die here if no one or nothing responded.

“Yes. What are you here for, boy?”

“I…” The boy finally turned around, gasping as he caught sight of Baz. That wasn’t uncommon. Most people were horn off by Baz’s appearance, and it did inspire most tales of monsters. His lower legs being similar to that of a large shaggy wolf, with the upper body of a man. Wide antlers crowned his head, and if one looked long enough they found his fingernails to have more in common with claws. More than enough fodder to inspire fear for many. “I didn’t think that is what you would look like.”

“No?”

The boy shook his head. Wide brown eyes showed more curiosity than fear. The boy rubbed at his eyes before blowing a mess of curls from his tear streaked face. “I need help, please.”

Baz got as close as the shadows let him. “What do you need help with?”

Chanri leaned against the inside of the doorway to the study, feeling the carved relief of twining vines pressing into his shoulder as he watched Ilia move around his study, wiggling his fingers as he looked over the towering bookshelves. Many of the books he appeared to be looking at were ones that he’d restored. Chanri remembered most of them as fragile and crumbling texts that Ilia had guarded fiercely after pulling them out of long forgotten places. Now they weren’t so fragile with new covers of dyed leathers and recopied pages.

“Are you certain of these plans of yours,” Chanri asked as Ilia muttered a few words and one of the books from a higher shelf floated down to him. 

“I’m certain of nothing,” Ilia replied as he carried the book, more of a thick tome than a normal sized book, to his desk. He waved his hand at the window while muttering another sentence to himself and the curtains opened to allow sunlight to flood in. “That way I can’t be surprised by anything that falls outside of certainty.”

“Don’t repeat my lessons back to me, whelp. I’ll toss you around a ring the same way I did when you were just a boy.”

“And I’ll just have to reintroduce you to dangling over my head again.”

Chanri snorted and Ilia looked up with a slight grin. All composure broke and Chanri had an answering grin of his own before he shook his head to regain it all back again. Damn was it hard to be stoic when he wanted to keep Ilia here in Yorica where he could keep an eye on him. The tall collar necklace of gold and mother of pearl Ilia wore rankled at Chanri. He hadn’t been there to protect Ilia from the wound he’d received that had caused him to start wearing such jewellery. Instead he’d been in here making sure any and all coup attempts were foiled before they got too much support from even the more passive of this pit of vipers Ilia called a court.

“I still don’t like you going off without me.”

“I’m long past my twentieth summer, Chanri.”

Right. He had been an adult according to Yorican customs for a few years now. But Chanri still saw the boy he had been when they’d met. All wide eyes, messy hair, and gangling limbs that only seemed to coordinate on accident instead of through any purposeful will. The boy was still there, locked behind numerous scars and shadowed eyes, only to come out on rare moments. This wasn’t one of those moments. As proud as Chanri was of Ilia, he still held bitterness for the world that had forced him into the serious young man he was now.

“Here.” Ilia spun the book so Chanri could read where he’d flipped the pages to. He tapped the left page. “This is the answer to a lot of my problems right now, I’m sure of it.”

Reading over the page quickly, Chanri frowned. This was the sort of thing Ilia was crawling through ruins for? Tales of the Fae Folk?

“I don’t think I understand.”

Ilia sighed as he sat back down in his chair. “Wildlings, Chanri. One human parent and one Fae parent. They’re supposed to be as connected to the land as their Fae parent, but not so bound by the rules that govern Fae behaviour.”

“You think there’s one of these Wildlings in Elsienfal,” Chanri asked, more than a little skeptical.

“I know there’s one there.” Ilia stood up abruptly and stalked to the window. “Everyone wants me to marry, then fine. I’ll marry.” He turned his head to Chanri. “King Hasryn oldest unmarried daughter happens to be illegitimate with an unknown mother. So I’ll be going to Elsienfal to end this war between our two countries and see if I can’t manage a betrothal while I’m over there.”

Chanri knew that spark in Ilia’s eyes. He wouldn’t be dissuaded from his plans now. 

“If she’s half as troublesome as you, I’m quitting.”

We are pretending I did this on time

Ilia found solutions to his problems.

After their father died, his brothers locked him in a small isolated castle so they could keep him out of the way as they waged a civil war against each other over who got to be Sultan next. 

In that castle he prayed to Chiador for help while roaming the halls and rooms. There he found a small forgotten library, and within were hidden texts of a heretical, pagan nature. They were written in a language he understood though, and so he did. Within the aging pages that would’ve crumbled in a less careful hand than his, he learned of a nearby temple to an old god. One that was known to help all and sundry. After three days of thinking over what he’d learned over, mulling over acting on this knowledge and the consequences that would result, he started pilfering sheets and scarves from any and all linen closets and chests. The final step was cutting curtains down. He escaped the castle and disappeared into the countryside with a group of attendants loyal to him, and him alone. 

Weeks later he swore an oath to Baz, the old god of the temple, and Baz promised to share his power.

Mercenaries tried to attack Ilia and his small group as he set out to gain supporters and take on his brothers. In a show of what he could manage at the time, he had them hanging by their ankles from the trees and made them swear to serve and support him. Chanri Harrowhawk had been at Ilia’s side since.

As the third son, Ilia had spent his childhood preparing to enter a monastery at the age of fourteen and eventually become a priest to Chiador. He hadn’t learned the skills his older brothers had as the “heir and spare”. So he’d approached Chanri to teach him how to fight. Others had joined in on giving him lessons. He was now an accomplished swordsman, had a decent grasp on other weapons, and could fight from horseback.

When he finally quashed the civil war his brothers had caused, Ilia had considered simply making them high-ranking court officials. That was until those loyal to his brothers had tried to start an uprising against him. Once stamped out, he had to consider his next move. He simply couldn’t have them killed, they were his brothers and even if they had caused him nothing but misery for three years, he just couldn’t do it. He still felt a sort of love for them. So he banished them. It was the kindest solution he could come up with. And one he still stood by to this very day. The petitions to reconsider the banishment made for excellent bedding in the aviary of his beloved birds once the papers piled up enough to annoy him and he shredded them.

The Chiadoran Order refused to name him as Sultan when he took the throne at sixteen. No matter how much he argued with the three Enlightened Priests, they staunchly refused to crown him as his forefathers had been crowned. They wanted to renounce Baz and return to the light, as they put it. Something Ilia had refused to do, still refused to do. So he turned to history and from the pages of his forefathers he chose an appropriate title and crowned his own damn self. 

Emir Ilia Endric, a fitting title for a warrior monarch.

And a warrior monarch he had been and still was. It seemed as if every country saw Yorica as nothing more than a plump partridge they could poach to add to their own kingdoms, weakened by civil war and with a boy on the throne. In time they all learned their mistake. He may have been raised for monastery life, but he’d cut his teeth on war and had been living on the edge of a blade since the beginning of his teenage years. 

He took the gryphon, an ancient symbol of ferocity, vigilance, and valour, as his emblem and laid into those who thought they could claim his country as theirs. Thus, the Witch King of Yorica was born, as his confidence in the power he wielded grew and he used it more and more in battle.

The coups and uprisings supplied plenty of men who needed to be dealt with once Ilia squashed them. He sent them to the front lines. 

The first assassin that was ever sent to kill him tried to cut his throat. So did a few of the next ones. Ilia commissioned his jewellers and metalworkers to work together to create collar like gorgets that were functional as armour, but ornamental enough to be seen as nothing more than a piece of jewellery meant to show off. An assassin that tried to cut his throat in his sleep had Ilia wearing silk and leather gorgets in his sleep.

Those who he won against were allowed to keep their countries. Ilia wasn’t interested in expanding his borders or creating an empire. Instead he forced them to supply him with men to replenish his troops, as well as replenish his supplies, negotiated trade agreements, and nosed around before wrangling a “special favour” out of each country.

His magic relied on him having knowledge of an ancient language, and Baz refused to teach it to him. Instead Baz instructed Ilia to seek out places that would hold texts containing the language, and the spells that the people who’d once commanded the language used them for. So he searched the conquered countries for the knowledge he needed.

Each defeated country. Each new bit of language and consequent mastery over his magic. Each time another country declared war on him. Each coup was defeated. Each uprising quashed. Each assassination foiled. Each and every fucking decision he made.

The Witch King of Yorica was no longer a weak boy king to the wider world. He became a warmongering, ruthless, and bloodthirsty tyrant.

Ilia spent hours looking over his dying country as crops shrivelled during times of good rain and sun. Trees that had spent decades producing abundant fruit instead produced shrivelled and blackened attempts at fruit while their leaves became mottled with a sickly brown and the bark of their trunks and branches grew grey and lifeless. Livestock grew thin and quiet. Streams and creeks that had once teemed with fish and mussels simply became nothing more than channels of running water.

This problem had been a problem since before his father died. But it was his problem now.

Looking out across the sea to a shore he pretended he could see through the haze that dispersed as the sun burned it off as he leaned against the mast, he gently patted the head of an injured cliff swallow he’d found on his way down and wrapped in a bit of muslin.