Soleil Asclepius
The sun rose and I woke.
This was my ritual now, the only calendar I kept in this ageless, silent place.
Not the turning of seasons—I had lost count of those centuries ago. Not the distant, muffled festivals of the new lessers who sometimes crept through the outer ruins, their voices strange and short-lived.
Just the sun. Just Mordain.
Not the Lord of my fallen Clan, but the star the Djinn had named, the god of their gentle, starlight religion. It rose and I opened my eyes. It set and I surrendered to the hollow embrace of dreams that were always, always memories.
I had been here so long. In this observatory, this laboratory, this temple—the Sun Theatre, they had called it, with their beautiful, hopeful voices. The Djinns.
The peaceseekers, as that name meant, as if the universe would honor such fragile self-definition.
Their words still echoed in these halls, faint impressions left on stones that no longer cared to remember. I kept their silence company. I kept their dust from settling too thickly. It was the only devotion left to me.
And I never, never stepped outside.
My body trembled, a reflex older than this mountain. The memory rose unbidden, as it always did in the quiet moments between waking and full consciousness: Taegrin Caelum wreathed in our righteous fire.
Lady Dawn, our matriarch, our gentle heart, who had walked into that black fortress under banner of diplomacy and never walked out.
Lord Mordain, his grief a furnace that consumed all caution, rallying the few of us who remained—those who dared—to rain divine fire upon the Vritra's throne in retribution.
We were fools. Beautiful, burning fools.
Agrona Vritra did not kill Lord Mordain. That was the cruelest mercy. My Lord, greatest of the Asclepius phoenixes, wielder of one of the ancestral Wills passed down through millennia of our bloodline, faced the High Sovereign in single combat.
Their battle shattered the sky above Taegrin Caelum, a war of gods witnessed only by the damned and Lord Mordain... He lost. Not killed—Agrona would not grant him so clean an end. He was defeated. He was broken.
His flames guttering, his Will sundered, his body dragged into that light-drinking fortress while I—I alone—fled into the cold, unforgiving dark.
I was the only survivor. The sole ember left of that pyre. And I had been smoldering here ever since, afraid to burn bright enough to be seen.
I pulled the blanket tighter around my shoulders. It was woven from the shed feathers of my kin of the Hearth. Their warmth was a memory of home, of a time before we followed Lord Mordain into exile, before Dicathen became our prison and Alacrya our grave.
The cold I felt now came from within—a hollow place where the fire of my people once blazed. No blanket could warm that void.
I rose from my nest. It occupied what was once the director's work study, a generous chamber whose original purpose I had long ago forgotten.
Bookshelves, emptied of their Djinn texts—lost to time or perhaps salvaged by the new lessers—lined the walls like silent mourners.
I had arranged my feathers, my few precious belongings, with obsessive precision. Order was the only bulwark against chaos. Keep the corridors clean. Keep the relics dusted. Keep the inner sanctum sealed. Do not think about what lies beyond.
Do not think about the new lessers—elves, dwarves, humans, they called themselves—who had begun to probe the outer ruins. Their curiosity was a knife. I did not begrudge them their exploration; these were Djinn legacies, after all, and the Djinn were gone.
But every torch they carried, every echo of their foreign voices, was a signal fire that might draw the Indraths' gaze. So I retreated deeper. The inner sanctum was my shell, my tomb, my sanctuary.
The Sun Theatre's heart, severed from its body by the cataclysm that buried the rest under mountain stone. Here, I was hidden. Here, I was safe.
Here, I was utterly alone.
I walked the familiar path to the glass corridor. My nails—my talons—clicking softly against the ancient floor, were the only sound. The corridor was a marvel of Djinn engineering—a transparent tube of crystallized aether that curved along the inner sanctum's outer wall, offering a panoramic view of what was once the grand courtyard.
Now, it was a cage of stone. The mountain that the Indraths had raised to bury the Sun Theatre's pressed against the glass, its weight a constant, silent accusation. Above, impossibly high, a jagged maw of collapsed rock let in slivers of sky.
The sun's rays, when they found that narrow opening, painted trembling ribbons of gold across the moss-covered flagstones below.
I pressed my palm against the cool glass. The mountains shouldn't exist. The Indraths had ripped them from the earth's bones, a geological lie to conceal their genocide. There was no Djinn civilization, the mountains declared. There was nothing here before us.
But I knew. The stones knew. And the sun, Lord Mordain's namesake, witnessed their deception and remained silent, as gods always do.
Movement drew my gaze. Three shapes, curled together in a patch of the strange, orange-hued grass that thrived in the courtyard's fire-rich soil. My Phoenix Wyrms.
They were my only companions. My children, in a way I had never anticipated being a mother. The first had come to me as an egg, abandoned or perhaps laid in this very courtyard before the cataclysm of Taegrin Caelum, its fire-dense shell cold and dormant.
I had held it against my chest for months, feeding it ambient mana, willing it to live. When it finally hatched, the creature that emerged gazed at me with eyes like newborn embers, and I wept for the first time since Lord Mordain fell.
I looked at the Phoenix Wyrms. Even curled against each other in rest, they stood ten meters tall, their bodies mountains of crimson scales that caught the filtered sunlight and threw it back in shattered rainbows.
Each scale was an armored plate, overlapping like the feathers of my true form, shimmering with internal heat that never quite reached the surface. Their wings—folded now, tucked against their spines like lovers embracing—were vast canopies of living fire.
The feathers, if one could call them that, blazed in perpetual, contained conflagration: molten gold at the leading edges, bleeding into searing orange, finally deepening to arterial red at the trailing tips.
The flames did not consume; they simply were, a constant, gentle flicker that cast dancing shadows across the ravine walls.
Their foreheads bore the single, jagged horn that marked their species—sulfur-yellow, gleaming with an oily, wicked light. Weapons and ornaments both.
The larger's horn was scarred from an ancient territorial dispute, a notch near the base that I had healed myself, whispering old phoenix prayers over the wound while it slept.
And then there was the third. Their chick, though "chick" was a laughable understatement for a creature already the size of a carriage. It huddled between its parents, its scales still the softer, burnished copper of youth, its horn barely a nub.
It chirped—a sound like cracking stone—and I felt my sternum ache with something I had long believed calcified beyond feeling.
I reached for the pouch at my belt. The seeds within were my quiet labor of centuries: fire-adapted plants I had cultivated from spores found in the deepest, hottest corners of the Sun Theatre. They grew nowhere else in Dicathen. They were, in their own small way, as unique as the Wyrms themselves.
I descended into the courtyard, my wings—my true wings, vast and feathered with the eternal flames of the Asclepius—unfolding to catch the thermal currents.
The flight was short, a soft landing on the springy, heat-blessed grass. The Wyrms stirred. The larger female raised her head, her eyes—deep magma-orange, vertically slit—finding mine. Recognition warmed her gaze. Affection, perhaps. Or simply the acknowledgment of a reliable food source. I did not care to parse the distinction. She was here. They were here. That was enough.
I scattered the seeds in a wide arc. The Wyrms moved with surprising grace, their massive bodies flowing like liquid fire as they lowered their heads to feed. The chick, bolder now, waddled toward me directly, its nub-horn bobbing.
I extended my hand, and it pressed its snout—hot, dry, scaled like cooling basalt—against my palm. Its breath was the scent of a forge, of metal accepting transformation.
"Aren't you beautiful," I murmured, and my voice, unused for so long, cracked on the words.
The chick chirped again, and the sound echoed off the mountain walls, up toward that distant, indifferent strip of sky. The sun continued its slow arc across the narrow aperture, indifferent to my small congregation of fire and scale and bone.
I looked at my Wyrms—my family, my flock, my reason for rising each morning—and for a moment, the cold within me receded.
For a moment, I was not the sole survivor of a slaughtered people. I was simply Soleil, of the Asclepius, feeding her children under a captive sun.
The moment passed, as all moments do. The cold returned, creeping back into the hollow spaces. But the Wyrms remained, their fires banked but steady, their presence a quiet, constant warmth in the endless, echoing silence of the Sun Theatre.
It was enough. It had to be enough.
Then it came.
The calm of my courtyard, that fragile, hard-won peace I had cultivated over centuries of solitude, shattered in an instant. The stone beneath my feet convulsed.
The mountain groaned, a sound so deep it was felt rather than heard, traveling up through my legs, my spine, and settling in the hollow of my chest like a cold, clenched fist.
Something old was waking.
The Phoenix Wyrms erupted into agitation. The female spread her vast wings in a protective canopy over their chick, her scales flaring bright with alarm. The fledgling pressed itself against its mother's heated breast, its nub-horn trembling.
The male—Cherry, my Cherry, my first and dearest—reared back, his sulfur horn catching the dim light, a warning shriek building in his throat.
"Calm down," I breathed, the words escaping before I could shape them, my voice a thread of forced serenity in the rising chaos. "There is nothing to be afraid of."
They did not believe me. How could they? I barely believed myself.
I drew forth a flame from the core of my being, coaxing it between my palms with the gentleness one might use to cup a fallen nestling. It bloomed there, small and steady—a yellow flame, pure and warm, the exact hue of a mordainflower at the peak of summer.
Those flowers had grown in the gardens of the Hearth, back when the Hearth was still a home and not a memory I was afraid to touch. Lord Mordain had loved them. He said their color was the color of hope that had learned patience.
I pressed my flame-wreathed hands to the female's beak, tracing slow, soothing circles along the heated keratin. The gesture was ancient, instinctive—a phoenix mother's lullaby translated into fire and touch. Her agitated shivers slowly, slowly subsided. The molten gold of her eyes, wild with panic, softened to something resembling trust.
"Take a little flight, won't you?" I murmured, and she tilted her great head, listening. "Just for a while. Until things calm down."
She understood. Or perhaps she simply trusted me enough to obey. With a rustle of feathered scales that scattered sparks across the courtyard grass, she gathered her chick beneath one wing and launched herself skyward.
Her mate followed, his massive body a streak of crimson and gold, and then they were gone—through the narrow maw of collapsed rock, into the sliver of captive sky, leaving me alone with the trembling earth and the terrible, awakening thing.
Now. Now I could focus on the far more existential problem.
My head snapped toward the inner sanctum. My wings unfurled, catching the thermal currents I had summoned in my agitation, and I launched myself across the courtyard.
The flight, usually so brief, felt interminable—each wingbeat matched to another shudder of the mountain, another groan of protesting stone. I landed hard at the threshold of the glass corridor, my talons skidding on the ancient floor.
The inner sanctum was in revolt.
Everything trembled. The walls, the floors, the delicate aether-webs that still, after all these millennia, connected the Sun Theatre's disparate systems.
My small apartment—my nest, my refuge, the only space I had dared to claim as my own now—was literally vibrating, its stones humming with a frequency that set my teeth on edge. Books I had arranged with such care had tumbled from their shelves. A ceramic vessel, holding dried mordainflower petals I had preserved for reasons I could no longer remember, lay shattered on the floor.
How? The question ricocheted through my skull. How is this possible? Nothing has happened here for centuries.
But something was happening now. The aether—the vivum, that precious, life-giving force that made the Sun Theatre a sanctuary for mana beasts, that final, breathtaking achievement of Djinn that had made them superior even to us Asuras—was trembling.
The Asclepius were the only non-dragon Asuras who could touch aether as the dragons did. But where the Indraths enslaved it, forcing it to bend to their will, we had learned a different way. Our Djinn friends had taught us. They had shown us that aether was not a tool to be broken, but a conversation to be entered.
I listened now. And what I heard made my blood run cold.
The Sun Theatre was activating.
After millennia of silence, of slow decay, of being buried under Indrath-forged mountains and lesser-forged mines, the great machine was stirring. I could feel it in the vivum's pulse, in the way the aether gathered and swirled, coalescing into patterns I had not witnessed since... since the Djinn themselves walked these halls.
Mana beasts. The vivum was making them. Recalling them, recreating them, pulling their essence from the aether itself.
When I first claimed this sanctuary, I had painstakingly, guiltily eliminated every mana beast within its bounds. I had done it for my flock, my gentle Phoenix Wyrms, so they could live in peace without competition or threat. It had felt like a necessary cruelty, a small sin committed for love.
Now the vivum was undoing my work. Reversing my choices. The Sun Theatre was remembering what it was supposed to be.
The glass of the corridor flared to life.
I staggered back, a cry caught in my throat. The Djinn's Manatech—their greatest craft fusing mana and technology with their understanding of aether—was awakening.
Screens of pure mana crystallized in the air around me, materializing from the ancient conduits embedded in the walls. They flickered once, twice, and then resolved into perfect, luminous clarity.
Every screen showed the same thing.
A child. A lesser child, a dwarf boy, his small body rigid with terror and desperate determination. And beside him, a human girl—barely more than a woman, her red eyes sharp with barely-contained panic.
They were trapped in one of the ruined chambers of the outer theatre, a space that had been claimed by lesser miners, its Djinn architecture crudely fused with the mountain's natural stone and the rough timber of human industry.
You are trying to show me something? I demanded of the Sun Theatre, of the long-dead Djinn, of the aether itself. But I was a fool. The Djinn were gone. This was simply mechanism reacting to a stimulus I could not perceive. It was not trying to show me anything. It was simply showing, and I was simply watching.
Another tremor shook the Sun Theatre. Stronger this time. I felt it in my marrow.
"Why are you showing me a lesser?" I whispered, and my voice was the voice of someone begging. My hand moved of its own accord, fingers threading through my ashen blonde hair, tugging at the roots. The pain was grounding, a small anchor in a sea of rising dread.
If it is the Indraths...
The thought was a razor. If Lord Indrath's hunters had found me—if this disturbance was their doing, their method of flushing me from my burrow—then I was already dead. They would follow the trails of my presence, my scent, my essence, back to the Hearth.
Back to the few remaining phoenixes who still sheltered there, in our hidden Dicathian haven. Back to the kin I had abandoned centuries ago and still, still loved with a ferocity that made my chest ache.
If it is the Vritra...
I did not finish the thought. Some fears are too large to give shape.
The aether in Dicathen had always felt wrong to me. Since the Djinn's extermination—since Lord Indrath's genocide, since his dragons scoured the continent of its brightest lights and left only ash and silence—every trace of aether in the Old World had been stained. Polluted. Corrupted.
It was that poisoned aether that birthed the ferocious mana beasts of the Beast Glades, creatures of such rage and hunger that even the Hearth's sanctuaries were not entirely safe from their encroachment.
I thought of the Hearth now, watching the screens. Watching the dwarf child dodge and weave, watching the human girl cut down snarler after snarler with blades of compressed wind.
How young they were. How desperately, impossibly young. I did not know that lessers began their wars so early. I did not know they forged their children into weapons before those children had even learned to carry the weight of their own names.
But there was something else. Something the screens revealed that the naked eye could not perceive.
The aether. The purple, shimmering specks of vivum that danced across the Manatech displays—they were gathering around the dwarf boy. Not randomly, not chaotically, but with intention. Like moths to a flame. Like iron filings to a lodestone. He moved, and the aether followed. He breathed, and it responded.
What are you? I breathed, and the screens offered no answer.
Then the earthquake came again—not a tremor this time, not a shudder, but a full-throated convulsion. The mountain screamed. The glass of the corridor spiderwebbed with cracks. And beneath it all, rising from the depths of the Sun Theatre's ancient bones, came a roar.
My blood froze solid in my veins.
Cherry.
I knew that cry. I had heard it first when he was no larger than my forearm, a hatchling with scales still soft and eyes like liquid amber. I had heard it when he took his first flight, crashing into a wall and tumbling to the ground in a heap of ungainly wings.
I had heard it when he found his mate, when his first chick hatched, when he drove off a rival male who threatened his territory and returned to me with a notch scarred into his horn, seeking comfort I had no right to give.
Cherry. My first. My dearest. The keeper of that primal Beast Will that bound my entire flock together, the accumulated wisdom and power of every Phoenix Wyrm who had nested in the Sun Theatre since I first claimed it as my refuge.
What are you doing?
The screens, obedient to whatever ancient programming governed them, shifted. The image reformed, resolving from chaos into terrible, crystalline clarity.
Cherry had found the dwarf boy.
He had unmade the section of the Sun Theatre where the child and his guardian were trapped. Not destroyed—unmade. The Djinn stone, the human timber, the mountain rock—he had reduced them to their constituent elements, blasted them apart with the sheer, annihilating force of his presence.
Through the smoke and dust, I saw him: my Cherry, my gentle giant, his scales blazing white-hot, his wings spread wide, his sulfur horn lowered like a spear.
He was going to devour the child.
And the child—that strange, aether-touched, impossible child—stood frozen before him, too small, too fragile, too young to face what was coming.
The human girl was already moving, her wind blades screaming toward Cherry's face, but they would do nothing. They would achieve nothing. Cherry was ancient beyond lesser reckoning, his scales tempered by centuries of volcanic heat.
Stop, I tried to scream, but the word caught in my throat, trapped behind centuries of silence and fear and the terrible, corroding habit of inaction.
Stop, I begged, of the screens, of the aether, of the long-dead Djinn who had built this place and then abandoned it to monsters and cowards like me.
Stop, I thought, and Cherry's jaws opened wide, revealing the furnace of his throat, the gathering inferno that would reduce that small, brave, foolish child to ash and memory.
And I realized, with the clarity that comes only in moments of absolute crisis, that I had spent four hundred years hiding from choices exactly like this one.
I could hide no longer.
A/N:
Another divergence from canon: we know Mordain led a punitive expedition against Agrona after Dawn was captured. In this timeline it ended in the worst way possible.