Azure Storm: Prologue

“Papa?” Aldric whispered nervously out into the chilly, darkened hallway, unintelligible echoes of his voice peppering across the mostly bare cobblestone around him.

The moon, only a sliver from full, bathed the path ahead in diffuse, dim light. He missed home. The only place he considered home, anyway. The Highwatch Citadel was sterile and bare inside and out, no great tapestries hanging from every wall, no nearby meadows and forests in which to carelessly lose the summer days.

Louder this time, “Papa?”

Confident at last that he was alone, he crept down the hall and swung open the oak door into his father’s study. Slowly and carefully, as not to knock anything over and stir someone to intrude, he lurched through the dark towards the thick woolen drapes that entirely snuffed out the dregs of moonlight. His father’s golden-headed battleaxe — the symbolic instrument of his seat of power — shined back, a larger crescent cut from each end to form the axe’s two blades.

Aldric ran his fingertips over the silhouettes of the furniture, sanded and polished smooth and free from the splinters on the ancient furniture in his ancestral home. He sat atop the grand chair with carved filigrees and Windmere Yellow velvet. The drawers to his father’s desk creaked open, and Aldric said a silent prayer to the Eleven that no one would hear. It took a few tries before the objects of his search glinted in the lunar luminescence. They were not in the drawer that he expected, but surely if his father was onto him, old Agvar would’ve hidden them somewhere else altogether.

The small orb of carnelian felt familiar in his hands, though the grooves chiseled and smoothed into it to offer an easy grip were too big for his diminutive fingers. A familiar warmth immediately tingled in his finger tips, lingering just there for a moments before radiating out across his frail frame. But mere moments later, his bones felt like they were forged of the finest steel, folded carefully in the furnaces of the great masters. Though the allure began as a desire to be strong, it was the euphoric surge of bravery that kept him returning. Aldric could only imagine how it must be for a proper warrior like his father who already always was so brave and strong.

After he had channeled enough of the empowering, intoxicating magical energy, he tucked the orb back into the desk where he found it. Next to it was a jagged, uneven shard of azurite, its dark blue the color of the halo around the moon. In a normal state of mind, Aldric was terrified of what azurite held, but the bravery of one magic helped him turn and face the other.

He felt the now familiar pull out of his body and into the aether between possible worlds. At first, the visions were terrifying — even with the bolstered bravery of carnelian. Unpredictable. Uncontrollable. But, over time, he got better at staying in each moment longer. The calmer he was, the easier it became.

“Papa!” he shouted excitedly, seeing his father in glisteningly polished armor, standing proud in a verdant rainforest. But he did not respond. Instead, he grabbed the orb of carnelian from a pouch attached to his hip, the swirls of muddy brown among the orange-reds immediately recognizable. And his father began to kill. They were unarmed and fled upon his approach, but others in the armor of the Crimson Hand spread out and surrounded them, herding the back towards the legendary General Agvar Windmere, who slashed and smashed with only the sort of fury carnelian could provide — even the strongest of soldiers without the aid of magic could never compare.

“You shouldn’t be here,” a spiteful, growling voice said from the back of Aldric’s mind. For a split second, it was as if he felt an earthquake, though the soldiers around him were unaffected, and then he was ripped backwards into the aether and, mere moments later, back into his body. But something came back.

“Aldric!” a soothing, feminine voice said. “Get back to bed!” Alys, the maid!

He wanted to run over and hug her, both out of genuine fear and knowing that a taste of sweetness always helped smooth over his antics and misbehavior. But Aldric’s body had other urges, springing backwards out of the chair, somersaulting to land on his feet next to the battleaxe, which he ripped from its wall mount before immediately accelerating faster than he ever had towards Alys, whose head soon thumped with a squish and rolled across the hallway behind her.

Aldric’s body lurched forward, stepping in the rapidly growing puddle outside the office door, tracking crimson footprints as he went. He fought every step, trying to drag himself and whatever possessed him back to the stone. But it was no use. His legs only carried him further into the core of the Citadel, axe swinging two and fro in front of him with every step.

“Master Aldric! Are you okay?” shouted a guard as he entered the main hall. Another guard joined him, running up the stairs. Large oil lanterns hung at intervals around the balcony that encircled the round room that burned through the night. It was capped with a stained glass dome that flickered with the dance of the flames below, breathing a sense of movement into the tiny armies fashioned from shards of colorful, carefully cut glass. Aldric always found it gruesome, but his father would lecture him about how those bloody battles united the entire continent under one banner, preventing further death — and that it was his responsibility to maintain that order at all costs.

The guard’s helmets extended down around the neck, but Aldric impaled one straight through the face with the blood-soaked blade of his axe. He then promptly kicked him back down the stony steps, chopping off the other’s leg at the calf, leaving him for dead at the top of the stairs, writhing and screaming in pain. Aldric just wanted it all to stop and hoped his cries would at least summon those who could.

He lurched down the stairs into the main foyer of the citadel, patterned with black and white checkerboard tiles. After father taught him chess to “hone his strategic mind,” he played a life-size chess game with the guards and the servants. However, this time, the blood flowed, as he mowed down his father’s pawns with frenzied whirls of his weapon. Even if he could not control it, Aldric felt every muscle in his arms and legs surge with inhuman intensity not even carnelian ever provided.

“What’s going on?” a familiar, lightly raspy voice asked. Aldric’s stomach sank — did he still retain some control over his body yet? Against his will, he spun around to face Old Merrie, the woman who had practically raised him after he was cut out of his mother’s belly during birth to save his life. His father, of course, was always off busy with military affairs, and when he was around, he was most interested in turning the meek boy into a soldier and a strategian.

As she met her final moments, Aldric tried as hard as he could will to shut his eyes, to spare himself to grisly sight, but the most he was able to muster were a few rapid blinks. At least whatever possessed him turned back towards the front door of the citadel before he could take in too much, smashing his way through the thick oak doors like they were made of parchment.

Though much of Crimson Peak lie silent under the shadows, lamps along the streets shimmered, reminding Aldric of the fireflies he used to catch back in the fields behind home. He would only hold them in his hands for a few minutes, enjoying their pulsating glow, before unleashing them back into the night sky, where they could waltz with the stars. Their lives were short — he dare not siphon too much of that away.

Outside, he bounded down a flight of concrete steps towards a square lined with phoenix blossoms, cherry trees tricked with malachite and moss to bloom their pale pink blossoms year-round. New ones budded as the ones that burst forth a fortnight before fell below to line the perimeter. In the center stood a marble fountain depicting a phoenix bursting forth into new life, a symbol of the union of the many dominions that came together to forge a more peaceful future in this grand continental capital above the clouds.

The phoenix was supposedly summoned with a keystone, a particularly potent shard of carnelian. The Church preached that they were manifestations of the Eleven, but Aldric was always confused why there were not eleven schools of magic. His father and the priest both told him to not ask too many questions.

“No, I am not one of your pitiful made up gods,” the voice cackled in his head.

The boy tried to imagine the surge of carnelian, how it reminded him so much of the cruel creature that had overtaken him, except he had power, control. Like the power now surging through his muscles was his.

“Wh-what?” the voice murmured in his head.

It was as if he was walking upstream in a knee-deep river with a strong current as he pushed himself over to the railing at one of the edges of the square. The muscles in his legs flinched and flexed erratically as he fought to keep control over his body. As soon as he was within reach of the sheer cliff that looked down into the Tyne — his homeland — below, he flung the axe into the black.

“Aldric?” a gruff but concerned voice inquired behind him.

“Papa?” he asked, spinning around, the reassurance of his father’s voice granting him more of a sense of control. His eyes welled with tears, and he saw one rolling down his father’s own cheek.

“I’m so sorry,” Alvar replied, raising his crossbow. And it was the last thing the boy saw before taking a bolt to the brain.