Samiel eagerly opens the parcel, expecting mail. The statue he pulls out gives him pause. He doesn’t say anything as he examines the carving of Buttons. He couldn’t read Shalassian but that other fat Whelps would Astrelline have met on her travels?
Samiel’s room was the smallest bedroom in Tyleril’s apartment. A corner was set aside for his and Razail’s tent-bed. Books sat crammed onto the space of a handmade desk and stolen notes from other apprentices were carefully hidden beneath it. A mage light kept the room bright even as the sun outside the window began to lower in the sky. Silence reigned in the apartment now with Pop and the other residents of the apartment busy and away.
And in his room Samiel stared at the carving. His mind mulled over the last few times he’d seen Absolain and Astrelline.
‘Dangerous’, was what Pop had said Abs had called her. Abs had called Pop a holy imbecile. Tyleril had tried to hide that from him but Samiel had overheard his father as Tyleril had anxiously paced. Unaware of the meeting between Tyleril, Aestus, and Thanelor Samiel was left to wonder what else had happened. What else had made Pop’s anxiety spike so high again? What else was unsaid that he wasn’t hearing? Irritation made his lips tug into a scowl. To much was missing he didn’t know. To many pieces he wasn’t aware of. “It’s complicated.” He mocks Absolain’s words, doing his best to imitate the same tone the words had been delivered to him. The words echoed in the room long after they left his lips.His fingers tapped against the statue. Stop, Pop had said. But didn’t Pop take a vow to protect everyone? On the battlefield and off. He said to leave Absolain alone. Abs was angry, Pop said.
Samiel resisted the childishly angry impulse to burn the wood, though he felt his fingers warm up.
“I ‘spose…"
He begins slowly. He couldn’t go beyond the safe places Pop had limited him to. Thane and Mother wouldn’t help him find Astrelline either. Absolain was angry. Pop was anxious and the way his hands shook made Samiel suspect something was very wrong. "Not dead then. ” Astrelline was alive.
But what was he supposed to do? To young to leave home without an adult but not old enough to be treated like and adult. Gears turned and he ran his mind over spells, homework, lectures, and stories. There was a answer to be found, a way to do something. Anything.
Left to his own devices Samiel set the carving on his desk and grabbed a sheet of paper. He grasped at books to browse through them as he began to sketch. He was silent. But anger stirred in his chest, encouraging Samiel as the child began to focus.
“I’ll find something. I’m a kid or I’m an adult. But I’m always a kid when it’s convenient.” The last word held the stirrings of anger. “I’ll show everyone.” Somehow.
Though he refused to leave the statue alone for long. It would have a new traveling home on Samiel’s bag.
Blood was potent, Mother had told him once. To often, she had said, people discarded pieces of themselves. You could locate someone with their hair, blood droplets, or personal items. Mother said she was a monster and shouldn’t a monster be able to hunt it’s quarry? He hadn’t questioned her words. Like many things his mother had said and done it just…fit. Mother was a puzzle with missing pieces Samiel could not figure out. But she was a puzzle he knew. Mother was the monster under the bed, the thing in the closest, the who when you called out “Who’s there?”, and other things better left alone in the dark.
So Samiel let the missing pieces of Mother’s puzzle stay missing. She was brutally honest to him and it was a brutal honesty he appreciated best after much thought and silence.
Pop had dropped him off at Celtrois’s one story mansion home. His hand had trembled less today and when Samiel asked him what was wrong Pop had smiled and promised everything was fine.
But he lied.
Samiel could see the lie on Pop’s face before it was spoken aloud. Ghosts of leftover emotion lingering in his fathers fel-tinted golden eyes. Fine. If Pop was going to lie then Samiel was going to figure out his own answers to problems. “To young to be an adult. But an adult when it’s convenient.”
Celtrois’s home was richly furnished and kept meticulously clean through magic. It didn’t scream decadence but the furnishings oozed nobility in a way that only the oldest and most dignified noble houses seemed to manage. Everything looked costly. Samiel had apprenticed under Celtrois for a year now and knew the secret was not that the items were expensive- it was that they were old. Age was, in its own way, something that gave the items more. He might have been wrong but Samiel was certain that seemed right. Outside of Celtrois’s home there were grounds that Samiel considered large. Large enough to keep him hidden from his Uncle’s sharp eyes as he kneeled down on the ground.
There were few spells Samiel had been taught that he was allowed to use without asking for permission. After the dragonfire incident with Reynllin Celtrois and Pop and limited what Samiel was allowed to practice outside of Celtrois’s watchful eye. “Technically, I’m following the letter of the law and not the spirit.” He said aloud, reassuring himself.
A map of Quel’thalas lay on the ground, held down by one hand. “A bit of hair, a memory, and a droplet of blood.” Mother could do her spells with no regents, he registered and this knowledge brought annoyance with it. He pricked his finger with the tip of his knife and waited for a small droplet of blood to well up and fall onto the map. “One blood drop.” A few scales, painfully stolen from a dragonhawk, set atop the mirror. “And for the memory…” He remembered what Astrelline smelled like, the feeling of her hands when she touched him and how it felt for his magic to be made null. Seeing her smile and say Buttons name wrong. _Button._
He didn’t need to _find_ Astrelline exactly. Just the disturbance she made. He began to whisper aloud his memories of Astrelline, focusing his magic on the map. The scales seem to burn away with the blood droplet and the paper beneath them was gone. He should have used a proper scrying mirror.
Find the disturbance. Charm a monster. Send a letter. It seemed so simple. But as the map under his hands began to grow warm he had a moment of doubt that it would work at all.
Tyleril Silversword 