The first thing Remus understood, coming back to himself on a narrow cot with sunlight moving in slow gold ripples across a stone ceiling, was that the ceiling itself was underwater, or close enough to it that the distinction barely mattered: a wavering, dappled light that meant a lake sat directly above wherever he'd been laid to rest, and a temple had been built to live beneath it on purpose rather than by accident.
The second thing he understood was that he was not alone, and that pretending to still be asleep was buying him nothing at all.
"I felt it, Master," a woman's voice was saying, close enough that he could place her a few feet to his left without opening his eyes. "Many lives crying out as they died in the crash. It came all at once and then it was just gone."
"That's because every one of them carried a strong affinity for magic," a man's voice answered, older, unhurried, the settled calm of someone used to being listened to without needing to raise his voice to earn it. "Including the one lying in front of us now. The ship itself came down inside the Rift proper. We'll never retrieve enough of it to learn where it launched from, let alone whether it came alone or as the leading edge of something larger."
"Do you think it was scouting us for an invasion?"
"I don't know yet. I don't like not knowing it."
Remus lay very still, cataloguing the ache in every joint the way he'd once have logged a diagnostic readout, and found himself entirely unsurprised, weary in the way a man only gets after enough repetition, that his second life had apparently decided to open its next chapter with him strapped to a device that drained people the way a battery gets drained, dumped into open water, and fished out by strangers arguing about him in the third person as though he weren't lying four feet away with two working ears.
"Are there other survivors?" the woman asked.
"Only one, and he fought us the whole way up from the rocks," the man said. "We told him we meant no harm. He didn't believe a word of it."
"You sound like something else is bothering you besides the ship."
"We've had this island entirely to ourselves for over five hundred years," the man said, and for the first time something genuinely unsettled moved under the calm. "Then, in the span of one night, we have an airship crashing into our own coastline. I don't believe in omens as a rule. I believe in this one."
"It's rude to eavesdrop on a conversation you're clearly awake enough to follow," the woman said, without any real heat in it, and Remus opened his eyes to find her looking directly at him, already smiling in a way that told him he hadn't fooled her for one second of the last two minutes. Her skin held the deep, cool blue of something that had spent its whole life somewhere the sun rarely reached, her hair a long fall of silver-white over one shoulder, and Remus placed her, with a small jolt of relief that surprised him, as the second of the three faces he half remembered from the wreckage: the one who'd argued, over the objections of a red-skinned man ready to end things quickly, that their own customs said to feed the hungry and heal the wounded before deciding what a stranger actually was.
"You're the one who spoke up for me on the beach," he said, voice rough from disuse. "I owe you for that, whoever you are."
"Akira," she said. "And I remember exactly what I said, so don't waste breath thanking me for good manners. I'd like to know what you are instead. Starting with your name, and moving straight on to what that ship was doing in our sky."
"Detect Thoughts," she added, almost as an afterthought, and Remus felt something settle over the inside of his own skull that he could only describe, later, as the exact discomfort of a house guest realizing every door in the building had just been left unlocked at once.
Skill Activated: Detect Thoughts!
"You should know I can hear whatever you're actually thinking while you answer me," Akira said, not unkindly, the tone of someone stating a house rule rather than issuing a threat. "It saves us both a great deal of time. I'd apologize for the intrusion, except I've found that men tend to lie less when they know lying is pointless."
The tall, lean man who'd been standing near the doorway laughed under his breath at that and made his own quiet exit, offering nothing beyond a warm, "I'll leave Akira to her interrogation, then. Go easy on him," and Remus decided, on no evidence at all beyond the man's carefully composed face on the way out, that this particular attendant had learned the hard way exactly how thorough Akira's gift could be and had no intention of testing it twice in the same morning.
"My name is Remus Draymoor," he said, sitting up slowly against the ache in his ribs. "Second son of Duke Ferron of the Southlands, a human kingdom I doubt you've ever heard the name of. I was taken from my own bed in the middle of the night and used as some kind of fuel source for that ship. I woke up here."
Akira studied him a long moment, head tilted, and whatever she found underneath the words seemed to satisfy something in her, because the careful, professional distance in her face eased by a fraction.
"I believe you," she said. "What's left of the ship and the bodies of whoever kidnapped you are being kept up at the Forge. Come with me. Between the two of us, we might fill in some of what's missing."
She led him out through a low archway into a small paddle boat, the Temple of Healing's own foundations sitting submerged in a lake so still and blue it looked poured rather than filled, and Remus understood, once they'd crossed to shore and the island unfolded in front of him properly for the first time, that Master Corvin's forge waiting at the top of a black volcanic mountain was going to be the least strange thing he saw before this particular day was over.
The climb up carved stone steps left his legs shaking by the time they reached the summit, and the sight waiting there did nothing to help: a structure built less like a castle than like a castle's ghost, floating on a broad stone dome above a slow, churning sea of open lava, heat rolling off it in visible waves even from the outer causeway.
Inside, a man built like a landslide waiting to happen stood over a long worktable, and beside him, laid out with the careful, deliberate respect of a museum curator handling something irreplaceable, sat the broken pieces of a curved, single-edged blade.
"Master Corvin," Akira said. "This is Remus. The last survivor of the wreck."
"Was there another?" Remus asked, before Corvin had said a word.
"There was," Corvin said, his voice a deep, unhurried baritone that seemed to come from somewhere below his own chest. "This is what he left behind." He gestured at the broken blade. "Holy Steel. Nothing on this island is supposed to be able to break it. He managed it anyway."
"Can it be repaired?"
"No living smith on Kethara can reforge Holy Steel once it's shattered," Corvin said. "This piece is finished. I was about to have it moved to the training hall for the acolytes to study, as a warning about exactly how outmatched we might currently be."
"May I try?" Remus asked, already reaching for the charcoal stub tucked behind his ear, the small motion as automatic to him now as breathing.
Corvin's eyebrows rose a fraction, the first real crack in his composure since Remus had walked in. "If you believe you can," he said, "I've no objection to watching you fail somewhere I can catch the pieces."
Remus laid his palm flat across the broken length of steel.
"Identify."
Item Identified: Holy Steel Sword.
Design Acquired: Holy Steel Sword.
"Repair Item."
The three pieces drew together under his hand with a low, singing hum, seams closing without seam, the blade whole again in less time than it took Corvin to fully exhale the breath he'd apparently been holding.
"That is not a small thing you just did," Corvin said, turning the restored blade over slowly under the forge's own orange light. "What about this, then?" He set down the sword and lifted, in its place, the bare hilt of a two-handed weapon with no blade at all attached to it. "The one who broke the Holy Steel wielded this. He conjured a blade out of it somehow, and none of my own people have ever managed to work out the trick."
Remus took the hilt, felt a cold, patient weight settle into his palm that had nothing to do with the metal itself.
"Identify."
Item Identified: Dark Soul Sword.
Unable to Acquire Design.
Missing Prerequisite: Dark Soul Magic.
"It's a Dark Soul Sword," Remus said, reading the refusal a second time with the same careful attention he gave every door the System had ever shut in his face, filing the shape of the lock away even without a key that fit it yet. "I can't take the design. I don't know the magic it's built from."
"That magic is forbidden on this island," Akira said, quiet.
"Then we may have to un-forbid it," Corvin said, "if the alternative is standing here disarmed against whoever sent that thing to break my sword in the first place." He crossed to a shelf and lifted down a third object with both hands, oddly shaped, heavier than its size suggested. "One more. Tell me what you make of this."
Remus took the skull in both palms, felt the same distinctive cold settle through his fingers that the sword's hilt had given him a moment before.
"Identify."
Item Identified: Skull, Adult Male. Species: the Nightforged.
"The Nightforged," Remus said aloud, tasting the unfamiliar shape of the word.
"I've never once heard that name," Akira said.
"Neither had I, until just now," Corvin said, and something crossed his broad, weathered face that Remus recognized instantly, because he'd worn the same expression himself more than once: a man reaching, in real time, for a private theory he badly did not want to say out loud. "Both of you should leave me a moment."
"Is something wrong?" Akira asked.
Skill Activated: Detect Thoughts.
Corvin waved off the question with a hand that didn't quite hold steady, and it was only because Akira's own gift was already turned on him, half by habit, that Remus caught the shape of the thought moving underneath the old smith's composed face before he could bury it properly: just as Daegon's prophecy said. Shadow people with souls forged into their swords, coming to end us all.
Neither Remus nor Akira said anything about what she'd caught, but the look she gave Remus on the way out of the forge told him she'd heard it too, and that whoever Daegon was, they were both about to find out considerably sooner than either of them had planned on.
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