----------

Aaron's room, much like his sister's, had become a laboratory. However, instead of it being a laboratory of books and politics, it was a laboratory of alchemy and shadows.

Tonight, he wouldn't be doing the final step in production for his work. That required his mother or brothers to be there, controlling the flow of shadows. Instead, he was unpacking yesterday's work.

He moved mechanically, the dawn light flickering through, as he washed out the equipment. Yesterday he had made gold, but now he rinsed out beakers and reset the apparatus. It was drudgery and would have been done by servants if his mother didn't want the secrets of alchemy stolen, but Aaron didn't mind. It cleared his thoughts, and the familiar routine calmed him down. Cleaning up and resetting was just as important as the act of gold-forging or brewing immortality. He had never been arrogant, anyway. Not like his siblings-sister included.

It was then, in the quiet dawn, that the deadliest and greatest idea of alchemy presented itself to Aaron.

He began by opening one of the old texts, written by alchemists that had come long before him. He liked to flick through them, hoping for inspiration in the muddled writings of foolish men. None of them had gotten anywhere, though he supposed it was hardly their fault. They didn't have access to the essential element of alchemy-Witchairian magic.

He opened the new book that Lysandra had bought him whilst slightly drunk-an old, weathered tome that bore the familiar smell of parchment. Usually books like these went through ageing processes, when cunning booksellers would make them look very old because that would attract alchemists looking for hidden volumes from long-burnt ruins of yada yada.

But you never knew. He examined one of the alchemical poems-yes, this one was truly nonsense-and would have laughed. Except for the fact that whoever wrote this guessed far too much for his own good.

In the sun, in starlight, in fire,

The gold shalt turn to lead,

In the shadows, in the night,

The lead shall grow to shine.

(The editor had forgotten to switch to old language for this line.)

Bind the shadows! Bind the shadows!

Into gold, into forever.

Into breath and bone.

It wasn't actually shadows that made the alchemy function. It was simply their origin-Witchairian Magic. But he had heard the witches been called 'Shadows of the North' or 'Ladies of Shadow' too many times to count. Sun had no effect on alchemy, of course, but light was commonly theorised as the origin or death of alchemy.

He would go to his mother tomorrow and get her to order the copies burnt, devoured by the flame they loved so dearly. They came too close to the truth.

But first, he repeated the last two lines in his head.

Into gold, into forever

Into breath and bone.

The first two made plenty of sense. Turning lead into gold and making the immortality elixir had always been the aim of alchemy, and Aaron had achieved them both. But...the last line was strange. Into breath and bone. Alchemy could not create the living. Well, he had never heard of any theories about it. There were ideas about a cure-all that would heal any disease and a universal solvent-the legendary alkahest-but he had discounted them as fantasy and the line didn't refer to those anyway. It suggested that alchemy could be used to create new life, not heal it or dissolve it.

It could be idiocy. It could be hogwash. It probably was. But...

It could be true.

Aaron turned to the next page of the book.

Aaron sat in his laboratory for hours upon hours, reading a thousand tomes on alchemy.

Nowhere was there a mention on the creation of life. When research failed him, as it had almost always failed him when it came to alchemy, he started to brainstorm himself. Often his mother had shaped shadows into people, but without her control, they simply dissolved. If what the poem said was possible, they would have to find a spark of life, that flickering flame of soul, somewhere else. But where?

He looked at the abandoned heap of minerals in the corner of the lab, which he'd stopped working with since he discovered that he only needed lead and one of his brothers or his mother. Iron, salt, mercury, gold...a thousand elements that everyone had thought would lead to the immortality elixir or the lead to gold transferral.

Bind the shadows! Bind the shadows!

In all of his work, he had never found anything that created life. Even elfin Animation could only ever mimic it.

Without a better idea, Aaron went to the Crimson training ring to watch his brothers fight.  

------------------

If you've never seen a fight between two powerful magic-wielders, then imagine the sky breaking in two. Then imagine lava emerging from the earth, the ground splitting into a thousand spider-webbed pieces and lightning cracking down as a tsunami swallows the world.

Good. Got that in your head? Right. Now imagine that there are two thunder-breathing gods in the centre of it, and it is black lava emerging from cracks made by whips of darkning (lightning, in shadow form) and that tsunami is a black wave of shadow. Oh, and these two shadow-born titans are wielding flaming swords and there are five of them, all fighting each other.

Right. Multiply that by ten please.

The arena was vast, filled with rocky terrain and hidden spots where brother fought against brother, their flaming swords the only light in the black ring. It was riveting, and Aaron watched with bated breath as the brothers allied and betrayed in a great arena of war. He could scarcely imagine what it must have been like in elfin wars, where although the wielders weren't nearly as powerful as his brothers there were many, many more. Theseus had surrendered early on because he had the least magic of all of them, but the rest were still going.

The fight seemed to shake the world, and Aaron felt simultaneously awed and jealous as his brothers displayed their godlike power. He knew that they were all mostly idiots without their magic: unable to truly lead. He knew that what he had done-rise a poverty-struck nation to unimaginable wealth, allow his family to live forever-had changed far more than these gods in the shape of brothers ever could.

This was a taste of how those without noble blood, those without alchemy, felt. Like nothing at all, their voices barely whispers. They could do nothing, change nothing, be nothing as they watched gods and goddesses walk the earth.

Valkyries, swift as plague, unbeatable warriors capable of defeating even the elves. And the elves themselves, wielders of terrifying magics. Crimsons, heir to great powers over shadow. Witches, weavers of the laws of magic, painters of the natural rules of the world. Dead, yes, but glorious.

And everybody else, just trying to scrape a living off a continent of gods.

He refocused on his task, watching the patterns as his brothers wielded shadow and flame.

When Perseus and Markus joined Theseus, the clamour stopped. A shadow-ridden world disappeared just like that. Erik and Tyton stared at each other from opposite ends of the field.

This what Aaron had been waiting for. The slivers.

There were solid shadows, mist shadows, shadows that seeped into people's lungs and choked them. All little tricks that the Crimsons were still learning how to wield. Then there were slivers.

A sliver in your brain, home of the mind, would make you obey your attacker. A sliver in your heart would make you forget all you loved. A sliver in your lungs and you would choke in solid darkness.

The slivers were hard to summon, and nearly impossible to control. At most, his brothers could make two before their magic ran out. His mother could make seven. Slivers were paper-thin, but as long as an arrow. They couldn't be thrown by the mind, but instead had to be moved by hand. Knocked to a bow and shot like an arrow or used as daggers in combat.

He watched as his two brothers knocked fake slivers into real bows and shot.Tyton missed. Erik struck true with his blunted sliver. He raised his hands in victory. The sliver would have gone through to Tyton's brain.

Aaron scanned those watching for his mother's face. Usually she was here-to congratulate the victor, or to jump in the arena herself and fight it out with the best of her sons. When the servant delivered his mother's summons, though, he realised that the Empress had other things on her mind.

Medea sat, her throne now obsidian and ruby, as she watched the crowd below her. Aaron took his place beside his mother, shifting uncomfortably as usual on the hard onyx throne.

Lysandra's absence stood out like a sore thumb in the room, at least to him. She should have been here for this meeting: here, to control the politics of the room, to discuss economics during whatever was to come.

"Thousands of years ago, the first Witches were made in the fire of the Volcano of Wrath." Aaron shivered at even the mention of the Witches. They were legend, they were power, they were death. Every Kallian lived in terror of just one having survived their Empress' wrath.

"They were born from the molten rock and crawled on to the surface continent. They could alter the fabric of the world, reweave the laws of nature, of magic." A chill settled into the room. Everybody knew what came next.

"Far away lived the Goddess, the Mother." Murmurs filled the silence. The fabled Goddess was hated and feared by all humankind almost as much as the witches were, even with both of those races long dead. "She had three daughters: Elena the Eldest and then Sarai and Belle, the Twins.

"Elena fashioned elves from the sky and gave them God-Born magic. Sarai and Belle created valkyries from the ocean and gave them the God-Born war-gift. Lyra, the Mother, despaired at their short lifespans and made them live for centuries.

"The witches wanted no part in the creation of life forms, but in their frosty mountains they required soldiers if they were to fight the goddesses. So, they fashioned the human race out of fire. Humanity was not as strong as the gods, and possessed no magic, Witcharian or God-born. Leaderless and enslaved, they could not rise up against the Witches and suffered for decades under their rule.

"Soon the Witches set their sights on the newly founded nations of Miras and Asriel, one home to the valkyries and the other, to the elves. The Goddesses loved the first valkyries and the first elves and so fought beside them in a war that lasted a hundred and one years. When the war ended, humans escaped the weakened witches and fled to the South sub-continent.

"The Witches, still wary of the God-Born Lands of Miras and Asriel and able to travel across huge distances, preyed upon humanity, who the valkyries and elves left to rot.

"One man, in his anger at the the treatment of his people, sided with the Witchkind and tricked the Gods. The Witches managed to kill their ancient enemies, and the valkyries and elves marched to the human lands and turned them to nothing but a boiling desert."

"They tossed us aside as though we were nothing, and when one man killed their gods, they destroyed the homes of millions." A silence fell over the chamber, the history well-known.

"They expected us to die. To go extinct amongst the ruined country. We did not. We fought and survived for thousands of years, crippled and weak and barely scraping a living in a desert.

"Thousands of years after the Gods and the God-born scorned us, a warrior decided to fight for her country. She journeyed through the isthmus, a broken land like her home, in the Western Marshes, a part of Miras where no valkyrie went, until she found the Northernmost Land, now the Witch Kingdom. The warrior was me. I bartered with the witches for a magic to unite us. To protect us. I tricked the witches and then felled them all.

"I have taken our people's vengeance for the witches that enslaved us millennia ago. That was my destiny." Silence fell over the room.

"Now, it is not my destiny anymore. It is our destiny, the story we will write together. Now it is time for the second vengeance. I have avenged our ancestors for their crimes of the Witches. Now we will avenge the God-Born's scorn!"

The cheer came. All at once from the generals, from the people gathered below. It sounded like the clash of steel and the din of war.

"We may not have magic, or warrior blood. But it does not mean we are not great. Just because we did not earn the favour of the gods does not mean we are not worthy of a home. Just because we are not blessed as they are doesn't mean our lives mean nothing. We have a right to a home, to freedom, to happiness. We have a right to live in a world where we do not fear!"

He knew that in her eyes, it was true. No one knew much about his mother's childhood-including him-but she had been no Warlord. She had gone to the witches to help her people-but somewhere along the line, she had lost that purpose.

When he heard the words of his mother's speech, it didn't rally his fighting spirit. For even if his mother painted herself as a liberator, he knew she was simply another warlord from the pre-Crimson era, just far, far more powerful. Half the country worshipped her as their saviour, the other half hated her as another enslaver, like the Witches, like the Gods, like the valkyries, the elves and the warlords.

Aaron was in between, he supposed. That was, he knew that his mother was not a liberator, but he still loved her even though she was who she was.