Some connecting scenes for Illiam and Helis, back during their time at the castle. This follows on from here and here. The next piece chronologically is this one.
Masterpost is Here.
Helis woke up slowly. Their wings and shoulders ached, and the floor was uncomfortably hard against their hip underneath a thin layer of padding, but the blanket lying over them was warm. They could almost have closed their eyes and drifted back to sleep again if they hadn’t… remembered.
They forced their eyes open, to a blurry view of a stone wall and a few folds of woollen blanket.
What in Heaven am I going to do now? they wondered drearily.
They took a deep breath, and might have let themself cry again, if they hadn’t heard a noise from behind them, from somewhere else in the room.
They rolled over immediately, blinking sleep from their eyes. The room snapped into focus; disorientingly, they were in a corner, on the floor. The room was all stone and heavy-framed wooden furniture, including a bed hung about with red curtains, bookshelves to rival those in the workroom, and a desk underneath a glass-panelled window.
Seated at that desk, so that Helis could mostly only see the spare casual angles of his legs and his hunched shoulders, sat Illiam. He hadn’t noticed them; he was pulling a book across the desk towards himself, flicking through the pages, setting it aside. The scritch-scritch of pen on paper filled the room. Morning light streamed in through the window.
Helis slowly sat up, drawing their knees up against their chest and pressing their wings back against the wall. The blanket slid down to the floor; after a moment they pulled it back up.
Silver flashed as they did so; they blinked down at their wrist.
It was hard to tell, they hadn’t been paying attention, but Helis didn’t think this was the same cuff they’d been wearing yesterday in the workroom. It was smaller, lighter; more tightly fitted to their wrist as if designed for them specifically.
The cuff had what looked like a fine hinge on one side. There was no chain attached. It could almost have been mistaken for a crude piece of jewellery, except that there was no way it would fit over the bones of their hand to be taken off. Helis pulled their other hand out from under the blanket and found a matching cuff on that.
There were lines of engraving along the outer and inner surfaces of both cuffs. Bits of spell phrases jumped out at Helis; instinctively they reached for it, and were surprised all over again when nothing happened. They bit their lip, then lifted their left hand and craned their neck to try and find the beginning of the spell with their eyes.
“It’s not a design you’ll be familiar with.”
Helis looked up; Illiam had turned in the chair, one arm hooked over its back, and was watching them dispassionately.
“Did you make this?” Helis asked. Their voice rasped in their throat, and they coughed.
“Yes,” Illiam said. He looked more composed than the last time they had seen him; no longer bright-eyed with fury, not even tousle-haired or unshaven and drawn with tiredness. Helis distrusted the evenness of his voice. “Not something I do often, so I doubt the craftsmanship is up to your standards. But it will suffice for its purpose.”
Helis licked their lips nervously. They got the impression he was waiting for the question, watching Helis and predicting what they would say, and they hated it, but they had to ask. “What purpose?”
“It ties you to me,” he explained, still calm. “There is now a magical link between us. I will always be able to find you, and if you get too far away from me, the cuffs will heat up as a warning.”
“What?” Helis stared at the cuffs, sickened. This really was something like a bad play. “Is this what you took my blood for?”
“And my own,” he agreed. He tapped the bandage at the crook of his elbow. “It’s not taboo here, although it comes with certain risks. I decided it was worth the inconvenience of making the cuffs - I needed to ensure you don’t escape, but are still free to move about the castle, and this is the most practical way of doing that.”
“You have a really…” Helis took a deep breath. “Warped idea of practical, Illiam!”
He shrugged. “Would you prefer a cell? Or chains? Or something a little more permanent? Strictly speaking, I didn’t have to make it a device. Attaching the spell to the cuffs made things a little tricky. Have you ever worked on silver? Challenging. But you need to wear the cuffs anyway, and it seemed preferable to permanently inscribing the spell-lines on you.”
They flinched back. “That’s barbaric,” they hissed. “You’re barbaric.”
He rolled his eyes. “I said I was avoiding it. Pay attention.”
Helis hated being seated on the ground looking up at him. They pushed themselves up, wings spread for balance, letting the blanket fall. “This is the most sick and gross use of magic I have ever seen,” they said. “You -”
Illiam’s eyebrows lifted in cool, sardonic disbelief. “Really? This is the sickest thing? Tsk. Have you seen the kinds of spells that get thrown around on a battlefield?” He stood up, rolled his shoulders. “Compared to that, this is perfectly gentle. It won’t even burn you straight away, you’ll have plenty of notice to come back before the heat gets to injurious levels.”
“You didn’t learn this at the Academy,” Helis said.
Illiam shook his head. “No,” he said, with half of a smile. It wasn’t a pleasant expression at all. “This, I learned here, in the North. Surprised to find that there is more to the world than the Academy’s curriculum? Time to grow up, Helis. There’s no ethics classes out here. I’m nobody’s student or apprentice anymore, and your only value lies in how useful you are. I could do far worse to you and nobody would even blink.”
He stepped forward, across the room towards them. Helis rocked back on their feet, resisting the urge to cringe against the wall, wanting to leave but finding nowhere to go. They couldn’t quite manage to tip their chin up to meet his eyes, instead fixing their gaze somewhere near one of his shirt buttons. Still black, they noted nervously.
He stopped short of touching them, apparently content to loom. “So if I were you,” he said, “I would be resigning myself to the cuffs, thanking my lucky stars that I’m not dead in a ditch, and trying my best to be useful.”
He stood there, for a long impassive silence, until Helis took a deep breath and looked up. He was regarding them with an expectant look, as if waiting for them to say something in return. Still calm, still composed.
“Do I make myself clear?” he asked, when nothing was forthcoming.
“Yes,” Helis said, reluctantly. “But -”
He raised a finger. “Do I make myself clear. Yes, or no.”
“Yes,” Helis whispered, their gaze blurring as it slid off him, to the side.
He nodded. “Good,” he said briskly, and stepped away. He collected his coat from where it lay folded over a table that they hadn’t noticed, over by the door. There was a stack of fabric beside it, and he indicated that with a faintly contemptuous wave. “Get rid of the uniform; put those on. I’m going downstairs, and you had better not keep me waiting there.”
The door opened smoothly, with barely a whisper; Illiam left, pulling his coat on over his shoulders as he went.
Helis took a deep breath and let it out, shakily. They scrubbed their eyes determinedly, and went to get dressed.
The clothing by the door was thick fabric, shapeless, rough and drab in colour. Somebody had attempted amateurishly to make the tunic wing-compatible. Helis struggled into it with stiff joints, wishing for proper ties. At least, they supposed, it was both warm and obscured their figure into featurelessness.
There was a basin and jug of water, but Helis didn’t dare use it for anything. They opened the door, let it close behind them, and crept with trepidation down the narrow, boxy set of stairs they found themself in. Their nails went click-click on the cold stone floor.
At the foot of the stairs, where it opened out into a wider passageway, they found Illiam. He was not, to their relief, waiting for them impatiently - he was in what looked like a heated conversation with somebody in muted dark grey clothing.
“… don’t care who’s here. I told my father that I wasn’t going to be available for this.”
“I understand, my lord, but somebody -”
“Go and bother Brant with it.” Illiam turned to leave, dismissing the grey-clad man with an impatient gesture. “This is his element, surely. Heaven knows the man must contribute something of worth. You’ll get me tomorrow afternoon and not before; my work is more important.”
He strode down the hallway and past Helis, barely acknowledging them, as the man in grey bowed and murmured something respectful towards his back.
For lack of anything else to do, Helis followed Illiam. The man gave Helis a look of confusion and distaste as they passed.
They caught up as he turned a corner.
“How far away?” they asked, resentfully. “The cuffs. How far away from you am I allowed to go?”
“Far enough,” Illiam said. His suspicious air of calm was starting to fray; Helis caught sight of one of his hands fiddling with a fastening of his coat. “I’m not going to send you out of range. I would advise against experimenting. And that’s all you need to know.”
“And what am I going to be doing?” Helis kept having to lengthen their stride to keep up with him. Their legs protested. “I mean, what is my job? I don’t know why you want me here if -”
“Well, that makes two of us,” he snapped.
The hallways Illiam followed got smaller and colder, with fewer rugs. Another human in dark grey clothing, her arms full of wicker and cloth, put her head down as Illiam passed and gave them a wide berth.
After a couple of corners and another flight of stairs, Helis realised that they were hopelessly lost and would have no idea how to get back to Illiam’s rooms. Or outside, for that matter; this area of the castle had no windows.
Eventually, Illiam came to a door that looked a little familiar. Passing his hand over the doorknob, he unlocked it with a brief flare of magic, then threw it open unceremoniously.
The windowless room full of magic paraphernalia. Helis lingered uneasily on the threshold, hugging their wings around their shoulders. The glittering fragments of conduit stone had been swept up and disposed of, and any trace of Helis’ blood had been cleaned away. The top surface of the table was scarred with little pockmarks and burns.
“My workroom,” Illiam announced, needlessly. “I’ve wasted too much time on Father’s jaunts across the border and dealing with you; it’s time to get back to work.” He glanced at Helis, an irritable line appearing between his brows. “I suppose you can start by fetching me Halliday’s list of energetic constants. Third volume. And then get a fire started.”
Helis inched inside, letting the door close behind them reluctantly. “What exactly are you working on?”
“I’m composing a spell,” he said. “The most ambitious spell, I think, that anybody has ever attempted this side of the Greater Eastern Ocean.” He clicked his fingers and pointed to the bookshelf - and even despite everything, the careless disrespect in the gesture made Helis’ hackles rise under their ugly, uncomfortable clothing. “Halliday. Third volume. Useful.”
Your only value lies in how useful you are. Helis set their teeth, and went to comb through Illiam’s library.
A little late, but for FebruarOC days 8 and 9 I have a Hermes monkey and Illiam, one of the main protagonists of Ciperion.
Hermes monkeys live around and within Aion Chasm, which is basically a huge canyon that cuts the continent in half. Most everyone that lives on the continent avoids that area, and because of that stigma, most people are also wary of Hermes monkeys. Many people believe that they trick people into jumping into the chasm, but who knows if that’s really true ;) In the West they’re called Hermes monkeys, but people in the East know them as Mercuries.
Next up is Illiam, who is from the town of Anthem, which lies in the Emerald Territories in the southwest. The people of the Emerald Territories are known for their... strange cultural practices, which have caused Illiam great personal suffering. I can’t wait to introduce him into the story, which I should hopefully get to this year (I think I have his introduction planned for either chapter 11 or 12, but I’d have to double-check my outline).
I’m still behind on FebruarOC, but I should be able to catch up tomorrow to post J and K.
