Ji-hyeon’s first year on the far side of the First Dark was actually worse than the second. Not because the dangers were initially greater; on the contrary, the harshness of the terrain and the frequency and ferocity of the monsters she encountered only increased the longer she wandered, and the closer she came to the black sun that hung low in the dull heavens, forever brooding over the far horizon. Or what she called the black sun, anyway; the shiny ebon disc was the only definite celestial object in the vast emptiness of the sky, and it seemed to emit both a prickling warmth and the constant purplish glare that lit this realm.
So it wasn’t anything external that made the first year of Ji-hyeon’s banishment to the sort of hell she had never really believed in so much harder than the second. What made the first year so exhaustingly terrible was simply that it was her first year.
A year. And a brutal one, even if she had been born to this world of perpetual twilight and snowy ash where the worst horrors walked on two legs but there was also plenty of badness stalking her on four or five or six or more. She ate some of what she killed but could only keep down a fraction of that. The rest of her diet consisted of the grey grubs and grub-shaped roots and grub-tasting lichens she excavated from the too-soft earth or pulled from the crumbling rock formations. She had no way of knowing what kept making her sick, the food she foraged or the opaque water she drank from streams and springs and lakes, which sometimes tasted of copper and other times of vinegar and still others of nothing but the ash that coated everything everything everything in this desolate place, from the low mountains she initially crossed to the ravine-fractured plains beyond to the cloud-spearing range of peaks on their far side.
Over it all presided the black sun. It never rose or set from its position, fixed in the cloud-webbed sky like a hole burned through a map. Most curious of all, instead of remaining the size of a coin it had slowly grown as big as a dinner plate over the course of Ji-hyeon’s journey to the west.
Or what she called west, anyway. She had to apply some shape to this place and some direction to her quest, otherwise she would have gone mad. For all she knew the distant beacon wasn’t stationary at all, and every time she awoke or it came back into sight after being obscured by the landscape it had actually moved to what would be a different point on a compass or star chart or map, in a world with compasses and star charts and maps, and people to agree on what they meant. She had asked Fellwing to lead them in the right direction, and the little owlbat always flew toward the black sun, but perhaps the devil was just as disoriented as her mistress.
Fellwing. Every day Ji-hyeon awoke with the thought that she should release the devil in exchange for passage home, and every day she balked anew. Part of her trepidation was the sad fact that the little fiend was all that Ji-hyeon had left—the empress had taken her family, her army, everything, and if she were to have any hope of revenge she couldn’t trade away the one advantage she still retained. She would need far more than just a bound devil to take on the full might of the Immaculate Isles, obviously, but keeping Fellwing was at least a start. Returning to the Star now, without even her devil, would mean abandoning any chance of making good on her oath to destroy Empress Ryuki. Buying her miserable life in such a fashion would mean sacrificing not just her own honor but that of the entire murdered Bong family.
Try as Ji-hyeon did to convince herself this was the only reason she hesitated to wish herself home, there was another, deeper, darker motive. Even more than the shame of loosing her devil at the expense of her revenge was the fear that Fellwing wasn’t actually powerful enough to transport her back to the Star, that she would finally commit herself only to have the owlbat sadly shrug her wings in defeat. Ji-hyeon had survived much, but wasn’t sure if she could survive the heartbreaking confirmation that she truly had no hope of escaping this place. It made her sick to even think about it.
Sick. As if she were ever anything but sick. Even when her stomach wasn’t punishing her for trying to stay alive against all odds she was ill, had been since her first week here. Too hot on the high mountain passes where the dirty snow was actually that instead of more drifts of ash, and too cold on the shores of the ivory ocean that lay on its far side, despite how warm the black sun’s rays felt reflected off the creamy waves that rose and fell with nauseating slowness, the tides that lapped the shore coming and going as slowly as rice syrup being rolled from one side of a jar to the other. A year of sickness, marching sick, fighting sick, until like so much else she ceased to notice it, her rattling cough and perpetual fatigue as mundane a part of her existence as the thinning white hair that had grown out enough to keep getting in her right eye.
A year of keeping her left eye hidden behind an iron patch. Or her left eyes, to be strictly accurate. She had known something had changed during her final trip through the First Dark, but it wasn’t until she lay panting beside the steaming corpse of a wyrm and saw her sweaty face reflected in a puddle of its silvery blood that she discovered just what had happened. Tentatively pulling aside the crude blindfold she kept over the left side of her face to block out the distracting assault of indescribable colors and phantasmal impressions, she winced and blinked the neglected orb awake … and in the mirror of metallic blood saw that a grey second iris now crowded the white of her left eye, the pupil of this new addition a horizontal black dash like the eye of a goat, or an octopus. She had blinked at her reflection, a reflection that began to take on terrible alterations as her devilish eye was again able to focus after its long banishment behind the blindfold, and then she had rushed to tie the raggedy patch back in place.
Yet as if seeing itself reflected in the lifeblood of its demonic kin had given it strength, the eye began to see through the stained cloth of the blindfold, and more disconcerting still, through her very skin when Ji-hyeon scrunched her left eyelid shut. It was as if the new eye wanted to see more, refusing to be shut out—and while at times it felt like it wished to warn her of things she might otherwise miss, like the spectral parasites swarming through the meat of a fresh kill, at others Ji-hyeon had the unsettling impression that it wasn’t her eye at all, but that it belonged to something else, something that was using her to look out into this world after eons of blind darkness … But after many disconcerting days of being unable to shut out the unearthly images, she discovered that the eye’s vision couldn’t penetrate the rusted armor of a roving mutant. After murdering the squealing beast she wrapped a small scrap of its platemail in a rawhide pouch, and this makeshift eye patch finally darkened the devil-eye again.
It was far easier to adjust to only using one eye than it had been to try to adapt to having three, and she especially hated the way her Gate-shifted vision made her devil look like something far less cute than an owlbat. Despite all this she still found herself compelled to lift the rim of the patch when even Fellwing seemed uncertain of the path before them, or when the water source was especially questionable, or because she was so crippled by depression that without a fleeting ripple of color in the monochromatic wastes she couldn’t muster the strength to get up and start moving again. The eye tempted her, encouraged her to interpret its sights, but if she looked for too long she felt her thoughts begin to quiet, her ambitions sapping away, her feet thoughtlessly carrying her off course until Fellwing ferociously flapped in front of her face enough to snap Ji-hyeon back to the moment and realize she had wandered perilously close to the bone-strewn entrance of an immense lair. Then the eye would be punished with another exile behind the iron patch.
A year of this shit! A year of keeping careful track of the days despite her exile in a land without night. She had brought very little with her through the Othean Gate, having not exactly thrown an overnight bag over her shoulder when she went to meet the empress, but many of the inhuman things she killed carried equipment, and over time she acquired an incomplete set of crude and decaying gear. Each time she awoke from fitful rest she scratched another mark in the haft of a spear she had taken from a monster she had killed within her first ten minutes of arriving here, and while the head of the weapon had long since broken off in the carapace of a dire centipede, she kept the pole as a walking stick, and more importantly, a calendar.
A year of slowly confirming that while there had once been great civilizations here, now there was little left but desecrated tombs, every city a cemetery long picked clean by the scavengers who seemed as mad as they were monstrous. The bizarrely shaped buildings were worn smooth as beach glass from the dusty wind, hollow caves with no remaining trace of door or casement, only their bleached stone sockets. She could not even find a skeleton that wasn’t twisted into something bestial and wrong, Ji-hyeon the last human shape left in this forlorn world. Or the first; who could say, who could say …
A year of singing to Fellwing until her voice was hoarse. Of counting her steps and the solemn pillars of the petrified forests and the few standing columns of the ancient ruins, just to prove to herself that there was order here, even if its only name was Ji-hyeon Bong. She marked her passing by scratching a simple message in High Immaculate into whatever rock or ruin seemed most prominent when she made camp, those times when she could find something that wouldn’t crumble under her writ. It read: Ji-hyeon Was Here. She Walks To The Black Sun.
A year of knowing that even if her first father and her sisters and the rest of their house had indeed come to this hostile land their odds of survival were far longer than even her own. Of knowing that the only eyes that would ever see her messages were not human, and if she were lucky, could not read High Immaculate.
A week of walking a blasted shore where the bones of dead things washed in by the stagnant sea crunched under her every step, and where she almost collapsed from thirst before finding a brackish stream that flowed into the ocean and following it far enough inland that she was able to drink, and every day of that week knowing her family was probably dead, that the Empress Ryuki’s judgment had been far crueler than simple execution. Because the not knowing was worse, and the hope Ji-hyeon clung to was so cruel it turned Fellwing fat as a tiny pumpkin and black as a mamba before they’d even come down from the first mountain range.
A year of wondering every day where Sullen and Keun-ju were. If they were, anymore. Of hating herself for not cherishing every moment with them, and securing countless more by keeping them close, to hell with letting them leave to find Maroto, to hell with trying to save the world. Of hating herself for not forgiving Keun-ju, and of hating him all over again for forcing her to push him away … and then finally forgiving him completely, and hating herself for not doing so when it had mattered. Compared to what the Empress Ryuki had done to those who trusted her, Keun-ju’s betrayal of Ji-hyeon’s plan to run away from home was laughably mild. Or would have been, if Ji-hyeon ever laughed.
A year of wondering every day about the Cobalt Company, captured by a petty, vengeful empress, of Choi and Fennec and even Hoartrap. Of wondering if Chevaleresse Singh and her children were now back home in the Raniputri Dominions, their desertion on the eve of the Company’s passage through the Lark’s Tongue Gate the sagest military decision anyone had made all campaign. She wondered about Colonel Hjortt, though not for long. And one day, deep into her journey, she wondered about Zosia, waiting nervously in the middle of Diadem for reinforcements that would never come, and at long last Ji-hyeon laughed, laughed until muddy tears ran down her ash-dusted cheeks, kept laughing until she was sick. But really, she was going to throw up anyway.
A year of that, and she could survive anything. It helped that she had given up all hope for her family, for her house. No one could survive here who didn’t have a devil, Ji-hyeon realized, to protect them from the toxicity of the very food and water and perhaps even the air; only Fellwing knew how much she truly shielded her mistress from. That was why no matter how debilitated Ji-hyeon might be when the horrors came for her she always found her strength in time, her fever breaking just long enough to stagger up and draw her thirsty black sword and strike down her foes … but not even her devil could fully insulate her from the poison of this realm.
Here at last, though, their relationship was completely symbiotic, for while the owlbat spent her every moment preserving her mistress, so, too, did Ji-hyeon spend her every moment feeding her devil with a never-ending torrent of the darkest emotions to ever bubble up from a mortal heart. They fed off each other, a vampiric circuit, like the clasp on one of her first father’s scrolls made in the likeness of two serpents eating each other’s tails. A symbol for eternity, he had told her, but if this was eternity, then all the hell scrolls she had ever scoffed at had only hinted at the true horror of existence.
Hope did not fail her completely, though, and in her second year it grew and grew, because by pulling her eye patch aside and squinting her devil-eye she had finally been able to see the black sun for what it truly was. A Gate, letting in a little feeble light and warmth from the world of mortals. From the Star. And as it slowly but surely grew on the horizon she knew that while it might take many more years to actually reach it, once she did she would crawl back up from hell and avenge herself not just on Empress Ryuki herself but on all of Othean.
Twenty thousand Immaculate soldiers had stood by and done nothing as her second father was executed for one of the few crimes he had not actually committed in a lifetime of roguery. A dozen dozen archers carrying out the murder without hesitation. And how many more evil mortals had carried her sisters and her first father and every single other member of their household up the steps of the Temple of Pentacles and cast them into this nightmare? How many more had labored to destroy her home, desecrating Hwabun just as the Black Pope’s war bishops had destroyed pagan shrines in the hinterlands of the Crimson Empire, a practice all civilized people condemned?
Some members of the Immaculate court must have objected to the empress’s harsh judgment, most quietly but a few loudly, but now that Ji-hyeon knew the truth of Empress Ryuki’s black heart, she had no doubt that dissenters would have been silenced in just as absolute a fashion. Which meant anyone who remained on Othean when the last living Bong finally returned would be complicit, or close enough as made no difference—even if Ji-hyeon had killed Prince Byeong-gu, there was never any doubt the rest of her family was completely innocent, and anyone who would continue to serve an empress capable of such savagery deserved exactly what Ji-hyeon would bring them.
Dark thoughts, but they went well with the setting, and kept her going even when the memories of Sullen and Keun-ju brought frustrated tears to her eyes, and when the fantasy of being reunited with both of them felt as thin as she’d worn her boots … but without the means to steal a new pair off a dead adversary who resembled a woman covered in a diamond pattern of scaly knobs. The fallen monster’s head looked like something banished from the seafloor even before Ji-hyeon hacked it apart with the black blade that howled right along with her, the rest of the creature’s pack fleeing at the sound of her sainted steel. Word must be spreading among the tribes of a lone swordswoman with an enchanted blade, an all-seeing eye, and a bound devil, but while that might have discouraged some, it clearly emboldened others. The first year Ji-hyeon only defended herself, but in the second she became a ruthless huntress, ambushing anything she could take unawares, showing no mercy to her enemies … and everything that walked or crawled or slithered or flew in this place was her enemy.
For two relentless years Ji-hyeon stayed one shaky sword thrust ahead of an anonymous death, and at the end of that second year she chopped her notch-striped walking stick in two. Not because keeping the crude calendar had become too depressing, but so she could use the two ends as a brace for the arm she broke fighting a tusked monstrosity. Under Fellwing’s ministrations the arm eventually healed but she didn’t bother marking the days anymore. Why had she bothered in the first place? She was here until she escaped or she died, end of song.
Then, traversing the buckled ruins of a once-mighty wall that ran along the tops of the fjords that formed the northern coast of the pearlescent sea, Ji-hyeon stumbled into the very sort of trap she favored most.
She was weak and shaky from climbing up to the headland, and Fellwing was sleeping in her sling on Ji-hyeon’s chest, exhausted from keeping her mistress strong and alert during the perilous ascent. Stern gusts blew in from the ocean and whistled up through sea caves in almost musical bursts. The winds kept the stone underfoot free of the slippery ash that would have made this treacherous route impassable, but they also deafened her with their near-constant trilling. She had considered moving farther inland before resuming her westward march, but beyond the sea cliffs stretched another ruined city, this wall but one edge of what must have once been a wonder to dwarf any metropolis on the Star.
To Ji-hyeon’s jaded right eye it looked like nothing so much as a maze that stretched to the far horizon—if she walked into that expanse of blasted stone and teetering ruins the black sun would be obscured by uncounted miles of rubble and wreckage. Many times in her journey she had lost sight of her quarry, sometimes for weeks at a time, and there was nothing worse than cresting a ridge and finding she had been wandering off course, the black sun in a completely different direction than she had anticipated.
Flipping up her eye patch to let her devilish left eye have a gander, she saw that the dead city teemed with gossamer activity. Pastel currents swirled up out of the streets, sentient black shadows peeling themselves off the walls and roofs to swim up into the variegated air. Nothing new here, then. For the umpteenth time Ji-hyeon wondered if this realm was truly as bleak and hopeless as it seemed or if these lands actually thrived with warmth and happiness and normal life, life that she could only catch hints of with the aid of her altered eye. What if this place that appeared to be an ancient ruined city in some alien land was in fact a bustling city on the Star, and she was but a doomed ghost who could see nothing but the shadows cast by the living world?
Yes, well, as long as she was asking herself stupid questions she’d already pondered a thousand times, what if she went ahead and carved her haunted left eye out of her skull? Dropping the patch back into place, she turned away from the vastness of the city and followed the wall that ran along the coastline. Long stretches of its ancient allure still stood strong, but where the buckled wall-walk had collapsed she climbed down to wend her way through the labyrinth of scattered masonry.
It was here that the trap was sprung. A portion of the wall had pitched over the edge of the sheer cliffs into the sea, leaving a gap of mostly open ground to cross from the lonely, freestanding arch Ji-hyeon leaned against, catching her breath, to the resumption of the ruins. The wall had pulled up and away from the city here, riding a crest of land nearly as sheer on the city side as it was on that of the sea, but the ridgeline ahead wasn’t too narrow and she hadn’t seen sign nor spoor of anything larger than a rock squid since gaining the headland. Still, she hadn’t lived this long by taking her safety for granted.
As if sensing her uncertainty her left eye itched to be let back out into the light, and she obliged it. She only let it have a quick peek, though, having learned that the longer she stared with her devilish eye the more it affected her equilibrium, her feet struggling to find purchase on illusory planes that lingered even after she put her metal patch back into place. Squinting to focus past the predictable waterfall of blushing pigments that swirled over the narrow ridge between her and the ruins on the far side, she didn’t see any of the oily black smears she was looking for. She had learned that such dark smudges oftentimes limned hostile creatures lying in ambush, their cover worthless against the acuity of Ji-hyeon’s witch-eye … but while the ruins ahead fluttered with countless hues and shades and ephemeral activity, none of the angry black blobs revealed themselves.
Ji-hyeon snapped her eye patch back in place, and once her feet felt steady enough to make the crossing she plowed ahead along the exposed ridge. The whistling wind rose near to a scream out here, away from the buffering ruins, and she scowled at the empty sky—a coast without birds seemed as unnatural as an ocean without water … which it might well be, since she hadn’t had any interest in further investigating the slushy white tide that broke on the dismal beach.
From the corner of her eye she saw a shadow dart around the wreckage of the wall ahead of her. The only shadows in this gloomy land were made of twisted flesh and fetid blood, the black sun too weak or too weird to cast actual shade. She was already most of the way across the open path, and broke into as fast a charge as she dared. A misstep here on the rocky, uneven turf would send her either tumbling off the cliffs into the sea or bouncing all the way down the sheer slope to the ruined city far below. Her breath was short and hot and painful, her legs stumbling and twisting as the wind hit hard enough to trip her up, a crude javelin in one hand and the other keeping Fellwing from bouncing too hard on her chest even as she rubbed the devil awake.
Another shape bobbed briefly into view behind the curtain of boulder-strewn rubble. This wasn’t the first time she had trusted her cursed eye to warn her of danger only to be let down, and as always the question remained if this was due to her failure to understand its bizarre visions or because the organ itself intended to deceive her into peril. A question to be revisited after she killed everything that stood in her way—there might be an army of mutants waiting beyond those first few blocks of the fallen wall, true, but if so they would immediately be on her trail and she was far too tired to lead them on a protracted chase back the way she had come. Better to press forward and push through, however many there were, until they ran screaming from her black sword. Ji-hyeon would have planned an ambush for this exact spot had their roles been reversed, but then holding a narrow path or bridge is most effective if you’re trying to bottleneck a larger force, as opposed to a lone agent—as always, she had the advantage of her wits over the four armored figures who now stepped out from the cover of the stones to challenge her.
Fellwing finally woke with a frantic chirp Ji-hyeon could barely hear above the shrieking wind, the exhausted owlbat bursting out of the sling to flap around Ji-hyeon’s face. While she appreciated her devil’s warning she could see perfectly well what a bad idea this was as she crossed the last dozen meters of narrow trail to where it opened up at the base of the wall. None of these warriors had charged yet, waiting for her to come to them, and they had spread out enough to trap her among them. They must be smarter than most of their monstrous ilk, which meant they were more dangerous, and while they didn’t wear helms and their armor wasn’t as brutish as most, their blades looked every bit as keen. One of them brandished an enormous crossbow.
With Ji-hyeon’s eye streaming from the wind, their faces looked almost human, their features flatter than most of the monsters here, their open mouths not displaying tusks or fangs. Ji-hyeon focused on the most intimidating, a tall female with a glaive … a glaive she thrust into the earth at her feet, raising gauntleted palms in the air just as Ji-hyeon drew back her javelin, preparing to spit this woman through her barking mouth and then draw her swords. Whatever trick this was, Ji-hyeon wasn’t falling for it, what she had taken to be a deafening wind actually the howling of her black blade warning her to strike fast and now and kill kill kill these things, and just as she tried to hurl her javelin at its naked, confused face Ji-hyeon tripped.
One of the others had kicked her legs out from under her, Fellwing failing to protect her mistress, and then they fell upon her. There were four of them and Ji-hyeon felt so weak, but they were all old, she saw, old and weak, too, and she thrashed and kicked and howled, trying to headbutt a leather-skinned man in the teeth when he got too close, and snapping at a crone’s hand when she tried to press something over Ji-hyeon’s mouth. No, not her mouth, something wet and cold against her forehead, and the howling faded as they chanted some spell, some trick, Fellwing circling far above her attackers, again a single beacon in the empty sky above the empty sea.
“Ji-hyeon,” they were saying. “General Ji-hyeon.”
She was too surprised to speak, but she stopped fighting, her fevered brain finally acknowledging that these were real people, not more monsters, and they were addressing her. Her own name sounded alien on the lips of these four old-timers, three women and a man, the concern on their lined faces shifting to relief. To joy. The old man was weeping, the hands that had seized her and held her down now softly helping her sit up. It was a dream, and one Ji-hyeon had not let herself indulge in so long she had no idea where it even went from here …
“You know me,” she managed, looking at the happy faces of the heavily armed and armored geriatrics. They were familiar, but in the way of dreams, where all mortals are cousins and known to one another. “I … I’m sorry, I don’t …”
They looked taken aback for a moment but then exchanged nervous laughs. The oldest of them, the woman with the glaive whom Ji-hyeon had almost murdered, executed the unmistakably ostentatious bow of a Raniputri knight despite looking more like a Flintlander, and said, “Chevaleresse Sasamaso of the Crowned Eagle People, Captain of General Ji-hyeon Bong’s Bodyguards, reporting for duty.”
Ji-hyeon couldn’t speak, gawping at the grinning old knight as her weathered features synchronized with the fading image of her beloved bodyguard who had died at the First Battle of the Lark’s Tongue. No, not died … been consumed by the Gate that had opened up beneath the battlefield, along with so many others, like—
“Count Hassan, of the Cobalt Company, reporting for duty,” said the Usban man, his voice steadier than his knocking knees as he gave as deep a bow as his old back would allow.
“Duchess Din, of the Cobalt Company, reporting as well,” said the least haggard of the four, though Ji-hyeon could see that her face was just as wrinkled as the rest beneath her makeup. Looping her arm through that of the third woman, the only one Ji-hyeon didn’t recognize at all, Din said, “And may I introduce Captain Meloy Shea, late of the Fifteenth Imperial Regiment, now of the Cobalt Company.”
“Very, very late of that outfit,” the fine-haired Azgarothian woman hastened to add, giving Ji-hyeon the Cobalt salute. “Honored to meet you, General, and serve a better cause.”
“I … I don’t understand,” said Ji-hyeon, her head spinning as she looked around at her saviors. She was too shocked to feel anything but confusion. “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what happened, to you, to me, I don’t—”
“The one luxury we have here is time to discuss it all, but we can do that back at camp,” said Sasamaso, easily hoisting Ji-hyeon back to her feet despite her advanced years. “And that can wait until you’re rested and fed.”
“Though you could tell us a little, while we walk?” said Shea nervously.
“No, she can’t,” said Sasamaso, smiling up at Fellwing as the devil swam laps around them here in this pocket of calm air amid the ruins, outside the raging wind. “We’ve waited this long, we can wait a little longer.”
“You’ve been waiting for me?” Ji-hyeon managed, the ground seeming to float under her feet as Din and Hassan gathered up her rotting pack, rusting javelin, and everything else she’d dropped in the tussle.
“Oh, yes—this may surprise you, General, but we’ve been waiting a very, very long time,” said the wizened chevaleresse, and together the small party limped off into the shell of a city that was ancient when the Star was young.