Discordant Note | TBATE

Chapter 111: The Last Djinn

Toren Daen

"The beasts of the Indrath clan failed millennia ago," the djinn said with iron. His long, graying hair was pushed away from his face, highlighting his sharp, aged features. 'You came here for insight? You'll get none from me. The asura have tried and tried to wrench our powers from our minds, but they've all failed."

I scoffed. "I don't need your insight into aether," I said angrily. I'd gone to such lengths to heal this djinn, and the only response I'd received was hostility. It boiled my insides. "But I do need answers. About the Relictombs and their–"

"Speak, phoenix," the djinn said, ignoring me and cutting off my reply. "I know how your kind views 'lessers.' These pawns of yours can spout the lies you've told them, but you will speak to me yourself. Put away the mask."

Lady Dawn's lip curled with distaste. "You think them my pawns? Your people have always been insightful, djinn. Yet now you spout the same small-minded rhetoric of the dragons you hate so much. Toren Daen is no more my pawn than a chick is a mother hen's puppet."

The djinn smiled nastily. "You assert you don't use mortals as pawns? Then how come you've created this phoenix-djinn hybrid to traverse our Tombs?" His face fell into something dark. "And you took the body of my friend to do so. I know the abilities of your kind, phoenix. How you build yourselves up from the ashes. And Andravhor's touch is entrenched in this man before us. You dare to enter here after using his body to your own ends? And preaching of being a mother."

Aurora blurred. One second her glowing, translucent form was behind me, the next it held the side of the djinn's head in a five-fingered grip. I smelt the sizzling of burnt flesh as her hand clenched around the djinn's skull. "I have been lenient toward your disrespect, djinn, for those I've long held dear," she said quietly, a quiet pulsing of intent flattening the grass around us. I remembered the first time I'd pushed the phoenix and the full weight of her King's Force pressing me into the floor. "But I will not tolerate such blatant contempt any longer. Not even for all those I've loved."

The ancient mage looked up at her without flinching under her King's Force. Sevren stumbled nearby, and I had to hold onto my First Phase to stand tall. And still, I knew she was holding back.

The djinn stared into Aurora's burning pits. Over our bond, I felt that same discomfort of being peeled apart. The djinn's eyes bored into Lady Dawn's inscrutable suns, peeling back layer upon layer of mana and aether.

Then he barked a short, amused laugh, his head still held by Aurora's grip. "By Entropy, he loved you! Andravhor, that fool!"

Aurora's phantasmal body went rigid.

"What a bleeding heart he had," the djinn said, staring at Lady Dawn's chest. If there were not already a gaping void there, I was certain his stare would burrow straight through her incorporeal flesh. "To give away his body to you in your mutual death. And then for you to pass it on further to the Twinsoul among us? The absurdity..."

The phoenix's grip slackened, a wave of restrained emotion roiling under the surface. "He was my husband," she said quietly, matching the djinn's intrusive stare with her own. "My star in the night. The light in the cosmos. And as he reached the end of his mortal life, he gave up his own body to me, so that I would carry a piece of him with me forever. And I will not allow you to insult his legacy."

My bond released the djinn, pushing him back. I didn't understand how her normally incorporeal form could interact with this ancient aether-wielding mage, but there was a clear handprint burned into his wrinkled face. Aurora swept around imperiously. Her face was carefully blank, but those burning pits she called eyes flared with the restrained force of a supernova.