Role

Chapter 25

Tamazin was glad he would not meet his end alone.

A strange thing, really. He didn't want to end at all, but he knew the
chance was slim, and time had finally run out.

But he was glad she had come. He supposed it had never been in doubt.

But still.

The elixir burned on the way down. Liquid fire which abruptly transitioned
to terrible, all-pervasive cold. Colder than the ancient dragon's breath.
Colder than the touch of invocation. A chill so profound that heat simply
was gone.

Then darkness.

A moment of nothingness. A singular emptiness as death reached out with its
claws to snatch what was rightfully its due. Perhaps a second, perhaps an
eternity, where an existence sat upon scales anathema. A bottomless abyss
on one side. And on the other...
The scales tipped ever so slightly away from the abyss, and Tamazin died.
Dead eyes opened.

Who was he?

Sight returned first.
Stars. Who were the stars?

Joihe. The Cadre.

Memories slotted into place. A lifes worth of faces, names, trials.
Some were hazy. Indistinct. The Outer Circle, a familiar voice whispered to
him. Some burned bright. The trusted. The family. The friends. He clung to
these, letting other vaguer faces slip away. That was fine. Those could be
regained, perhaps. They didn't matter.

Then came strength. Power filling dead flesh with unholy vitality. Limbs
weighed down with the chill of death energised in a way indescribable. Bone
wings flexed, feathers tumbling away, and a profound sense of loss.

Then a moment of exultation. The realisation that all those that who had
scoffed and claimed it impossible would even now be realising how wrong
they had been. Those who had doubted the Cadre. Those who had said it would
never be enough. That it was a lost magic.

His limbs were stiff. Unpracticed. The perfect avian grace gone, and still
weighed down by the hand of death scrabbling futilely to drag him back to
that abyss.

An embrace. Words. Triumph. Potions crackling on a fire as the trappings of
mortality burned.

Then heat. A single point in a world of ice. A blazing constellation as the
stars lit the back of his hand. Her mark.

It was a place the ice could not go, an island aflame in a dark, frozen sea.

A permanent reminder scribed into bone remade by magic and myth:

Never alone.