Falling Aflame Read online

  Falling Aflame

  Kairis Viola

  Copyright © 2019 by Kairis Viola, Kushka Press and D Kai Wilson-Viola

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Created with Vellum

  Dedication

  With love to my family, my friends, my beta readers and those that have stood by me through thick and thin.

  Final copy will list ARC and Betas here

  Contents

  1. This is an ARC copy of the book

  2. Preface

  Part I

  1. Chapter 1

  2. Chapter 2

  3. Chapter 3

  4. Chapter 4

  5. Chapter 5

  6. Chapter 7

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  About the Author

  Also by Kairis Viola

  This is an ARC copy of the book

  If you receive this, it may have formatting errors or editing that is being corrected at final proof. If you receive this after the launch date of 15th October, you have received this in error.

  Please get in touch with [email protected] and we’lll investigate!

  Preface

  Shula

  Legend in my family tells of how we were created. Legend about Eishalla, or Halla, Queen of the Hags. Daughter to Danesh and Aula, my descendants. Who took their baby, who exhibited powers that should have seen her raised by the Curias of the Light, and begged a boon from the one that her father quested for. He who’d posed as a kindly wizard, retired and dreaming in the back village they inhabited. He, who everyone agrees, was playing a long game, knowing that the only way to beat the light and the Curais was to corrupt it, and that corruption could only come about with a girl.

  That girl was Halla. Dark dreamer of the village, she could read and write, and, sadly, was touched by magics other than fire already, making her the perfect candidate for Eowmer’s plans. Eowmer, the Necromancer or Harat Fall, Reaver and Grand Viseer of the city of Tarvanaa, who had been thought lost to the ages long before encountering my family.

  It’s true that it was she who created the changelings with Phoenix, Fire and Dragon. She who irrevocably changed the balance of magic in our world. And that this balance change heralded a new age of magic, where magi and witches, ice magics, healing magics and more could flow into the world through mutation. But, before that, there was a conflagration - one that split magic and made it wild. The books I have tell a different tale as to why.

  In the scholarly regions of our bigger cities, the books say different - how she was consort to the Necromancer, and that, in burning him, nothing could be undone, that in bewitching Phoenix, Fire and Dragon, the best that the church of Light had to offer, she extinguished some hope from the world, preventing anything from healing. That those three had the power to stop her. It’s all couched in terrible mystery and lies.

  This is a lie. This tome, passed down through my family via my father, tells of how his mother was one of the children of Halla, that were rescued when the temples finally fell. That she was blind, but carried different magics, and, ignoring the summons to return to Halla when called, survived in the wilds with what became my father’s family. But she bore with her, this book. A telling, a record. Told by all four of them. A precious book, to match my incredible cards, a gift from the past, one that will save our future.

  I humbly offer this account as a narrative for consideration, to explain the inaccuracies and contradictions of the formal texts, and why there are no surviving texts from the city of, nor the temples owned by Curais to explain how this came to be. And to submit for consideration, another text to explain the wild magics, so they may aid us all, and so those of my kind need not heed the call or be put to death as dangerous, as the book evidences there is another way, and there was always planned to be another way.

  I offer this to recieve a pardon for my family - on both sides, to bring them out of exile, and in return, offer my own services to the Curais, as both Fadeling and changeling pyromancer. Because there’s one final truth hidden in this book, that no books talk of in the Citadel. Eowmer lives.

  In loving memory of my great great Grandmother, Eishalla,

  Shula Brenton, Changeling Pyrowitch, AC 91

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Halla

  “…and if there is no light?” the Priest Penitent droned on. I was doodling in my little sand desk, the slates too valuable for times like this. Chalk had become hard to come by and the alchemical ingredients that allowed the creation of chalk were off-limits while the blight was encroaching at that part of the forest. I didn’t really understand why blight was a problem, other than that we lived in the borderlands. In the borderlands, blight was bad, and there we were lucky to see a Priest of Curais with enough power to cleanse the area once every nine choosings or so. So, once a decade basically. If the blight moved any faster than a crawl, we would - like many villages around us - have to abandon it.

  Choosing day was coming again, soon. More of us would leave, to train with Curais, and more priests and priestesses or penitents, or tradespeople made, and the village would become a quiet place. For a while. It was good, and bad.

  For a start, it was easier to hide what I could do with less people around me.

  Etal, the old wizard monitoring the blight was ‘away’ right now. As was father and a few others of our kin. My father, a warrior of modest repute, owed Etal my life, and, as Etal asked very little, only that they occasionally quest when an interesting tomb or area opened to his sight, father was more than willing to oblige. Neither father nor mother would tell me what that ‘owing’ was. Just that it was. And that I would always owe him, and that as long as it was proper for an older man to ask of a child of the village, I was to do it without question. As I was unsure what ‘improper’ actually implied, I did as I was instructed as often as I could.

  In all fairness, between school and scrying to protect the village in the ashes of fires, and my care duties when I disobeyed Penitent Oban, who taught those of us with a modicum of intellect to read and write, to better serve our village, Etal rarely had time to ask me for anything. And when he did, it was simple things like ‘light that candle.’. Always with a strange look in his eyes, always a touch of disappointment when I unerringly found the poorly hidden tinder implements and lit the candle.

  So…at the beginning of this term, chalkboards had been ruled impractical, and paper and ink was…impossible. One of our children living with us currently was Dryara. Anything made of plant material not also touched by the temple of Curais and purified to flame, sprouted around him. He was going to train, I suspected, with the blight fighters, somewhere out past the borders of Eithal. Dryara were children born on a certain day, at a certain time, in certain conditions. They were so nature attuned that nature corrected and reached for them. They made excellent farmers, though conversely, couldn’t wo
rk with or be around food preparation of any sort. Sprouting bread didn’t taste nice.

  Oddly, fire cured everything and stopped all other magics. Which was why, I guessed, Curais funded our schools, ran our governments and basically, had their hands in everything. And technically, as a fire weaver, I should be one of them.

  But, every choosing, my powers fail. And my parents show relief that it’s only wild magic that is springing to my hands. So, unless I have no other choice, I don’t even try to summon fire now. And I’ve got no affinity to the others, just the ability to see things in the aftermath of each. Ice melted to water lets me see the past, but is very rare, because the past for most ice is the sky - it doesn’t work with snow, and all we see in the lake are the executions and drownings of those that didn’t want to leave the village. In the fire’s ashes, I see… odd futures, twisting and turning, but I did once see the blight creeping up one edge of the village, up a cliff that is difficult to examine, and saved us from losing…well…the school. That may have been a mistake, but the Dryara react badly to blight, and losing Rawal to blight sickness was worth protecting our stupid, and far less powerful (than he believed himself to be), priest Penitent. I was not punished that day for smacking the rod out of his hand, before he lit the fire, but, now…he watches me with narrowed eyes. Were he to work out that I used to boost his lighting flames to test my own powers, and quite honestly, I think I’d be burned at the stake, figuratively.

  That’s what we call it, being sent to Curais, as we have to be completely purified before we go. It’s not real fire - instead, a cleansing, healing fire that removes anything ‘impure’ about you. I suspect it’s all fairy lights and wisps, and there’s no real elemental fire involved, because no one, even a girl who once wove her witchling beads into her hair, has ever been hurt. When we quizzed Oban about that after, he said that she would remove them herself, and that totems were not evil, just misleading.

  Chalk and slate though… we thought for a while that we’d be allowed, because there was no way we could practice our symbols, to leave the class, and instead do practical training with our families - I had been hoping to learn to shoot a bow given to me by my parents on my last name day, but instead, father was back questing, and mother refused to teach me. Instead, she refused to let me train with a bow and loaned me instead to the Blacksmith. Every night, as the forge fired down, I was asked to guard the village by reading the ashes.

  Before we got there though, there was a chalk and slate issue… one which originally was going to be solved with a very expensive trade of f with another village, one which we couldn’t afford. After thinking about it, father’s solution had been a small tray, packed with sand from the quarry where the blight had been two summers before. Inert now, as blight ate all magic, it was an elegant solution, at first. Now though, as the sand was rarely packed well, and dribbled out onto the dusty floor. What had been a hard, packable surface that could be scratched with fine lines in the beginning was slowly becoming a sludgy soft edged blur of letters that rarely held shape or form. And they were tracking that sand everywhere - after a slight accident one day in the doorway of the temple where too much sand had accumulated, the Penitent ruled, after three days of no school while the mess was cleaned up, that no magics could be engraved in the sand until a way was found to stop it from leaving the building.

  An elegant solution, ruined by a trick that Japek played. I knew it wasn’t because the sand was slowly trickling out or being spilled on the floor as it was used, it was because Japek threw a handful of his workings at Eber, and Eber had temporarily been blinded.

  For correcting the Penitent, for those three days, until a priest of Curais could be found, I had cared for Eber, an annoying little snot nosed brat who happened to be the son of the town’s mayor, and undertook devotionals. Around my fingers, the sand was heating up, and I realised with horror that there was a small piece of molten glass under my forefinger. Without thinking, I scooped it up, and dropped it into my lap, onto the leather apron I wore on the days I was to help in the blacksmith’s storage rooms after school. I didn’t see Oban looking over at me. He might even have addressed me, I was so wrapped up in what I was doing.

  “HALLA!” the priest bellowed, and I looked up, doe eyed, and dazed.

  “If there is no light…” he repeated, tapping his wand, which doubled as a pointer, stick, light and anything else he could think of, though mostly he used it for lighting the fire in the morning so he could skip arriving an hour before the children.

  “If there is no light, then we’ll be in the dark, blind, unable to lead one another,” I repeated dutifully. In my head though, I couldn’t help the next thought. Just as sure as we’d be blind and in the dark with too much light. But there is no moderation in this discussion, is there?

  “Stay and sweep the floor Halla,” the priest, Obam, said, before turning away from me again to point at the board. “We don’t want a repeat of the last time, and we haven’t found a way to neutralise the sand to make it safe,” Snickers filled the class as my cheeks reddened.

  Yes, father had come up with the idea. He’d even asked Eber, and Eber hadn’t seen a problem. But now Eber and Danesh, my father, was away, and we couldn’t work out how to prevent the crackle that happened every time some of us crossed in or out of the threshold. And we couldn’t continue to learn magics in those states - crackles like that were either blight or wild magic related. It couldn’t be blight, we were very carefully checking the back cliff now, and wild magic was…well, wild. How do you predict an untamed force that shouldn’t exist anywhere else bar the Fenns? So, all our magics based learning was postponed, and the Choosers summoned a few days early. And unluckily for us, perhaps, the Choosers selected were from the temple of

  The answer to that probably lay in one of Eber’s books, or with the priest sent to do this year’s choosing. Until then, we were on religious studies till we could recite the books of light and night verbatim. Those of us that already could - myself included - were becoming bored stiff. All because my father hadn’t foreseen the consequences, and had no clue how to prevent the leak of magics now that the sand was magically attuned to each child.

  It was obvious that it was attuned to each child because, three weeks ago, a week before the choosing, the sand started to glow. We thought it could be the sunlight - choosing is held at Midsummer after all, so more sun, maybe the sand was charging. Sometimes blight touched stone held some bioluminescence, so, maybe the quarry had been imbued with the same effect?

  The problem was, everyone had a different shade of sand. And the hues seemed to tie to their sympathetic magics. So, there were three older boys in trouble, as their trails led to Ainya’s window… and she in her turn had skipped off into the woods with a fourth colour. As the daughter of any family of standing, this would be a problem but Ainya built a bigger problem, simply because of her coveted standing. She and her family, after all, were the most important in the village, living closer to the town square than even the inn.

  Her mother awoke that second morning to riotous colour under her windows, and as she slept late, too late to stop everyone from seeing and gossiping as her house was the closest on the main road to town. The Mayor’s daughter… that afternoon, as we travelled home, passed her door, we saw her sweeping frantically, stirring up motes, an emblazoned red mark on her milk and blossom skin.

  Two of the Taiberday pranks were also ruined this way - lines showed where things had been switched, and unsurprisingly, the little pranksters were caught. It was at that point that Japek threw the sand, and the crackling not only began, but other…weirder things began to happen and those weirder things made them stop letting us play with magic. Or learn, as the rest of us called it. Except me of course, because all I knew was theory. And stories, played out in ash and burning.

  The only one without a line was me. And in the rush, few people noticed. But I did.

  The Dragon

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  Chapter 2

  Curais- The Phoenix

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  Chapter 3

  Halla

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  Chapter 4

  Curais -

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  Chapter 5

  Halla

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  Chapter 7

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  Chapter 7

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  Chapter 8

  Halla and The Dragon

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