[Fourth Era – Year 1036 of the Divinity War; Sirithae (formerly known as Hopron), Valley of the Innumenary]

  As one memory ended, we fell into another, continuing where we’d left off before.

  “Now open up.” Fane’s words echoed off the glass walls. Jestil looked down at the disassembled trunk and shared a panicked look with Irinai.

  “Quick, the trunk,” Irinai whispered.

  Jestil tucked the journal into his document pocket, then rushed to line up the hinges, replace the rod, and quietly slide the trunk home.

  As he nudged it into position, he noticed a strange shadow of movement under the bed. He bent to peek under. An unearthly hole in the stone floor, dilated as if breathing, rhythmically yawning open, then contracting. All the hairs on his body prickled with horror as he crept closer to peek down the living hole in the third-story floor. A strange breathing sound emanated from below, not in time with the movement of the hole. A much quicker, shallower breath.

  “What’s taking so long.” Fane’s voice made him jump.

  With a desperate fear, Jestil turned away from the nightmare hole under the bed. “I’ve got to make sure this contract is in order. That you haven’t swapped it or anything.”

  He gathered the contract from the edge of the thick carpet. A brief examination showed it was the correct contract. The seal was bound, and the entanglement activated. The contract had been made.

  “Alright. I’m letting you in.” Reluctantly, he released the entanglement on the door before he lost his courage.

  Fane burst through the door and Fraela followed.

  “Block the door,” Fane called back to Fraela. She pushed one of the trunks in front of it.

  “You, you made the contract,” Jestil stammered. “You can’t intimidate us now.” Jestil looked back to see Irinai climbing out of the window.

  “Funny thing about contracts. You must have written hundreds just like this. But to bring them to market they’ve got to be so generic they could work for anyone, if used correctly. But you’ve never used them, have you? Perhaps, if you read through it again, you will spot your error.”

  “I made no error. You’re bound to the contract.”

  “Am I?” He picked Jestil up by the collar of his kajin and slammed him against the wall.

  Jestil’s head rebounded, his ears started ringing, his breath rushed from his lungs. He struggled for air but could only grasp shallow breaths before the pain cut each breath short. How could he have been so foolish? If he hadn’t been in such a rush to hide what he had been doing, he wouldn’t have been so careless checking. But what had he missed?

  Fraela laughed. “He actually thought he’d beaten us. Did you see the look on his face?”

  “It was rather amusing.” Fane dropped him without warning.

  Fraela skipped around her brother. “Oh, Jestil, you imbecile.”

  “That’s good, Fraela. Jestil the Imbecile.” Fane looked down at him. “You’ve earned a new name.”

  “You have no idea what a fool you are,” Fraela mocked. “We just had a couple of the twenty-second generation make your contract for us.”

  Fane laughed. “You never named us. What kind of nit-brained plan was this anyway?”

  “So now that those fools of the twenty-second can’t harm you,” Fraela cackled, “you must feel awfully safe. Especially after this.” She gestured to the door and leaned in to examine the runic key. “Is this your blood?”

  Fane loomed over Jestil at nearly twice his height and girth, a stern tower dominating the bedroom, and he pressed in a single footstep closer. His weight tottered overhead like a mountain tensed for a landslide. “So you like to paint the walls with your blood, do you?”

  Jestil backed away until a cold breeze stirred through the window at his back.

  “Leave before you get uglier than you already are,” Fane said.

  “You’re blocking the door.”

  “Can’t take a little justice?” Fraela mocked.

  “Out,” Fane shouted. A slight chin thrust toward the window accompanied the lonely word.

  Fane’s sister, Fraela, stood behind him smirking.

  Tyranny may prod Jestil into defiance, but he wasn’t fool enough to prod back.

  Fraela waved him along with mock impatience.

  Jestil frowned before turning to poke his head from the third-story window. Kornut and missop woods clothed the valley and the foothills until they gave way to scrub, bare rock, and snow-peaked mountains, which rimmed the horizon. Darkening clouds overspread the sky to the west. “It looks like a storm.”

  “A storm? How dreadful. Hand me his cloak,” Fane told his sister.

  She obliged.

  “Here.” Fane tossed it past him, out the window.

  Jestil watched it fall to the ground, a three-story drop, unreachable.

  “It’ll be you next.”

  He climbed out after Irinai and reached for the roof. “Next time, Fane.”

  “If you weren’t so weak, your words might scare me.” Fane drew in the shutters.

  Irinai reached down from the rooftop, to help him up.

  “Jestil?” Irinai nodded out at the gathering storm.

  He turned to stare into the wind. “With luck, it may pass to the north.”

  “Not with our luck.”

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  The roof held two options. It was either half burning, half freezing by one of the chimneys, or take the only shelter this rooftop provided, beneath the petrified morthel. He hesitated to even look at those monstrosities, certain they were watching him in return. Some visceral and nameless fear from his forgotten past stole over him. Who would even consider shelter in the same thought as morthel? The petrified morthel stood atop the roof as trophies, displaying the power of the Innumenary who had defeated them.

  Jestil and Irinai held hands to steady each other across the slate tiles, out to the row of chimneys that ran across the ridge line of the roof.

  As Irinai had predicted, they had no luck. The storm did not pass either north or south. It blew in directly toward them, its shrill wind carrying a bitter chill.

  Since the edges of winter had been approaching for days now, Jestil had dressed for the cold of the night. Yet even he hadn’t been prepared for this. Irinai, less so.

  “Irinai? Are you well?”

  She nodded, but he knew it was a lie. Her robes were thin house robes. Nothing meant for this. Yet she ought to have any number of coats in her revenescent. Why didn’t she fetch one for herself, and one for him while she was at it?

  “In my experience, women rarely need pockets, they just seem to pull things out of the air.” It was as close to the edge of propriety as he dared risk, merely hinting at her revenescent. “Don’t you have a coat you can pull out? Perhaps that red one.”

  Irinai frowned in guilty silence.

  “Did I break propriety? You referenced entanglement. I thought it would be … Forgive me. My sense blew away with the wind.”

  Irinai shook her head. “No, I lost it.”

  “Your coat?”

  She shook her head “My … my …” She looked away and said a word he’d never expected to hear her, or anyone, speak aloud “My revenescent.”

  Most men had lost entanglement. He should have considered that a woman could lose their revenescent, but it had never occurred to him. “So you can’t …” he cut himself off before he said the words ‘have children?’

  Jestil had begun sculpting a child once. He had made so many life entanglements that he’d occasionally longed for a family of his own, though he was too young, too unmarried. So his sculpture, however perfect, was useless. He couldn’t make a child on his own. They could only be quickened, mysteriously transmuted into flesh and bone, inside the sacred home, the pocket dimension known as a revenescent. And only women had those, while only men could make the entanglements that would bring them to life, binding body and soul together.

  Jestil leaned up against his chimney, thoughts spiraling over a dismal abyss. Irinai’s plight pained him beyond anything he’d ever felt before. What if he’d lost the power of entanglement? It was a desolate thought. That must be exactly what she felt every moment. What could be done to recover a lost revenescent? Was it even possible?

  Frustration led him to dark thoughts, which left him trying to shake off the horrors he’d seen in Fane and Fraela’s room. That broken spirit trap, and …

  Perhaps that strange living hole beneath the bed was one of the reasons they worked so hard to drive them from the room. Where could it lead? Who or what had been hiding in that darkness? And then there was the journal.

  As the wind intensified, Jestil pressed himself against the chimney, where the sacred flame ever burned. He coaxed the sacred flame up the chimney until it peaked out over the top, offering an extra helping of warmth and light.

  Then he pulled out the journal he’d found in Fane’s trunk. Whose was it? This writing was familiar, but it couldn’t be his own lost journal, could it? Absently, he felt a mystic grin growing. He was desperate to find that journal. He must have come here for a reason. If only he could remember.

  He thought of that strange stone Lilari had found. Why did it call to him so? He looked up to the stormy skies. If only there was someone out there who could help.

  Father, he thought of his father’s lifeless body in the ice cave. It had been so empty, so where had his soul gone? Father, if you’re out there, help us.

  He pulled open the journal and flipped through the pages, skimming past hints of betrayals and tricks. Had it really said what he’d imagined? He would have to come back and decipher those in context.

  He stopped randomly and read the first words that caught his eye.

  It was Iffrael’s idea, really. And a more devious idea I’d never seen. For as long as these drackmoor clung to their mates they kept making children, and they continued to gain strength against us.

  We could not make them forget their bonds, not of a single pair of them. No amount or intensity of attacks against their emotions could shake their devotion to one another. They were soul bonded, each man entangled to his maiden’s revenescent, and children kept coming. But the Amnesia Storm continued. And so the way remained open. What could not be severed could be twisted.

  We tricked them each into believing they were brother and sister. Can you believe it? Brother and sister. The children ceased, and they accepted it. Accepted that their devotion to each other was born by blood. We broke them apart and they never even …

  Suddenly, a great drop of rain fell on the page, he dabbed it with his robe to keep the ink from smearing. Another struck the bridge of his nose. Jestil closed the journal, and sheltered it with his body as the rain began coming in a torrent.

  The sacred flame retreated into the safety of the furnace, leaving them in near darkness.

  He looked to Irinai. His sister. Was she really his sister? Who were these couples that had been tricked? He and Irinai, Fane and Fraela, Wurn and Surai, brothers and sisters, everywhere he looked, it was all brothers and sisters. Who had been tricked? To imagine such love being so cruelly broken, tricked into believing they were brother and sister, still family, but halted family, neither growing nor multiplying. Bonds twisted into termination.

  Already populations were dwindling because of the loss of entanglement, and likely revenescent too. If people lost all their powers to create life, the world would die out, empty. He could see the disaster coming, but what could he do about it?

  The rain became hail, and the hail grew thicker and stronger, heavy stones pelting them painfully. Leaving welts. Lightning flashed across the sky.

  "Over here," Irinai called, her voice so familiar. Of course it is. She’s your sister. She’d taken shelter under the petrified morthel, the cursed morthel.

  A hailstone clobbered him over the head so hard his ears started ringing.

  He fled with Irinai under the cursed morthel and looked up at the terrifying forms of the monsters sheltering them. Only vaguely did they have any sense of anatomy. They were more like clay forms given life without structure, without muscle or bone. Rather they moved through the bubbling and writhing of their substance and those trapped within.

  He’d never seen a living morthel in this life, though he’d heard many tales. But a vague memory surfaced as if he really had seen them once, moving toward him like sauce bubbling in a pan, the hands and paws of trapped souls reaching out and clawing at the ground for escape, but only propelling the creature toward its next meal. Still, they tried, eternally clawing for an escape that would never come. That was the great horror of the morthel. For they were creeping, unbreakable prisons.

  These morthel had been petrified leaning over, cresting, curled above them like waves ready to break. He’d only seen ocean waves in illusions, but that was the only likeness he could summon.

  “We’re going to be cursed.”

  “What do you mean,” Irinai’s voice came between chattering teeth, “we’re already cursed. How much worse could it get?”

  Cold wind gusted across the rooftop. Irinai pressed in beside him wet and shivering, cuddling against him.

  She was his sister, he told himself. His twin sister. She had to be. But what if they truly had been something else? And now they were only living as a shadow of their former selves, their former lives. Their former bond?

  But what if she really was his sister? He felt sick. She was his twin sister. How could he ever think of her as anything else? Even if it was true?

  It was a trick, it had to be. But what kind of trick? Were these words meant to be read? Were they tricks sent by the Severed to confuse them? Like those children’s stories Irinai had mentioned? And yet they had been hidden in a locked trunk. Like a secret. They were clearly written by someone closely acquainted with the Severed. Fane and Fraela would have read them. Must have. Did they believe them? Were they …?

  He shook himself, miserable and confused. The cold wind froze their wet clothing upon their backs. Irinai's shivering turned violent as she huddled close for warmth. They could not endure such cold all night. They would freeze solid. He wrapped an arm around her, but he had little heat to impart.

  Irinai … He loved her like no one else. The image of Elizzin intruded into his thoughts with that ever-present scent of winterblossoms. He felt a mystic grin pulling at the corners of his lips.

  He scoffed at the thought. Of course, he loved Irinai, as he should love his twin sister. And yet he had failed her. She had trusted him more than he had trusted himself, and he’d failed her. And now his sister—yes, his sister—was suffering, freezing … Don’t think it. No, don’t think the word … Dying.