Yethyr ran down hallway after hallway, desperate to pinpoint the one spirit that called him. He conducted the choir of endless dead to sing his song more softly so he could even hear that single desperate voice clearly.
It was more a noise than words, more a whimper than a wail, but Yethyr clung to it like a beacon in the dark.
And so did I.
A Datrean had called out. A Datrean with steel in their voice had called out and, loathed as I was to help Yethyr take a blacksmith for his own, I would never abandon one of my makers to the torture of Hell.
So when Yethyr began to stumble with the quieting of his deathsong, I started singing it willingly. He startled at my voice but didn’t slow. I would not let him. For once, we were united.
“You waste your strength, frail prince,” Z’krel said from the walls.
Yethyr ignored him.
“I mean my words. This is not a sound you wish to follow. You’ve tasted my hospitality; you do not want to taste this.”
“You said I could take any with me that answered my call,” Yethyr gritted out. He took another corridor. “Do not renege on our agreement just because someone actually did.”
“I said ‘Any spirit that answers you may follow and nothing will prevent them.’”
Yethyr removed me from his belt, expecting an attack, but what came instead was music.
Z’krel was singing.
His voice was as deep as the earth, as clear as water, and it tore through Yethyr’s symphony like a hammer through a skull.
I stuttered mid-note, all of Hell did. With the song puppeting him interrupted, Yethyr ’s body gave out and he crumbled to the floor.
Z’krel’s voice vibrated the ground; it was suddenly in perfect command of everything and everyone. The choir of Hell switched to his melody as did the choir that clothed the Prince.
Yethyr lurched to his feet, his armor no longer under his own power. He hissed out words with effort.
“You swore you would not touch me.”
“I am not touching you,” Z’krel purred. “I am touching the bones that surround you. There is a distinct difference is it not? It’s not my fault you need such things to move.”
Yethyr descended into blind panic. He could not move, trapped in a prison of bone. He spun out dozens of compositions, each more intricate and desperate than the last, attempting to reclaim dominion over the bones that he used to move.
Z’krel’s melody was immovable, barely affected by Yethyr’s every attempt to alter it.
“You are gifted, frail prince, but you cannot yet outsing me.” Z’krel, in all his fiery skull glory, was suddenly hovering right over the Prince’s shoulder
“What will you do?” Yethyr gritted out. “You still cannot touch me. Am I to become an amusing statue until you grow bored?”
“Why would I do something so wasteful, when I know Spryne would offer me much for Felnae’s heir?”
Yethyr’s stomach flipped. “Spryne already has what he wants from me. He would gain nothing from my death.”
“I imagine you are right, which is why he will pay extra for the privilege of having you in the flesh, alive.” Z’krel chuckled. “You have a better idea of what that fate entails than I do.”
Yethyr did. I was suddenly consumed by his unmitigated horror. Whatever he was envisioning was a dread that eclipsed anything else.
He swallowed back what I suspected would have been a plea for mercy.
Z’krel focused his song onto Yethyr’s right glove, where he clutched my hilt.
I understood the music’s purpose at once.
Z’krel wanted Yethyr to let go of me.
How dare he. How dare he! He eats my people, he tortures my makers, rewards the treacherous council for doing the same, has the audacity to think himself good enough for my father, and now tries to rob me of my path to revenge?
I resisted; I sang with the force of all the steelsingers within me. As strong as they had been, however, they had not been able to hear deathsong in life.
They did not know how to puppet bone. I could only parrot Yethyr’s song and hope it was enough to keep his hand closed. I was no demon or some deathsinging prodigy, but I could put up a fight for control of a couple of fingers.
To my startlement, Z’krel immediately let go. The skull jerked back as if I had burned him.
Yethyr crumbled into the wall, panting in the eerie silence.
For the first time, the choirs of Hell had fallen quiet.
“Are you offended, Son of Daened?” Z’krel sounded surprised. “My apologies. I did not realize you wanted him for yourself.”
I wanted to sneer. I wanted to shout. I guess you're not as close to my father as you think if you don’t know why I was made. I only barely held back the words.
Yethyr was listening.
“Forgive the insolence. It is so very rude to take another’s things without permission. And we are all trying to be polite. Aren’t we, sweet prince?”
“Very polite,” Yethyr managed to squeak out, several octaves higher than his regular timbre.
“We should all stop trying to impose music where it isn't wanted, don’t you think?”
It was a leading question and even in his frazzled state, Yethyr had the presence of mind to recognize it.
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“I won’t dominate your things if you don’t dominate mine.”
It was the most meek I had ever heard him sound.
“Good boy.”
And just like that, the giant skull disappeared.
Yethyr took a breath and then another. He looked around at the hall. The shine of green cat eyes gleamed further down the corridor.
Watching him.
Yethyr rested his head against the cold stone wall and sighed. Slowly, he restarted his song with the voices in his pendant, careful not to draw in the choir of Hell as well.
When he finally stood, the cat was gone.
Yethyr was reduced once more to the choppy unnatural movement that characterized his steps outside of Hell—trapped in his own body again in a painfully familiar way. He resented how his hand clutching my hilt could barely hold me up by himself.
I helped him return me to his belt
“Thank you,” he whispered hoarsely. “For…that.”
I had half a mind to call Z’krel back and take him to this Spryne character after all. I didn’t want his gratitude.
Or perhaps I did. I needed him to trust me; I needed him to rely on me. I needed to wrest back some control, but to do that, I had to get him to bloody my blade instead of efficiently kill with deathsong.
That was a waiting game. So perhaps I could suffer his gratitude for the moment.
Yethyr sped through halls empty of all but the brainless. Only I was there to judge him running in his undignified inhuman way, but I didn’t.
The voice crying out for salvation was getting loud. So was the sound of screams disturbingly. The chambers were also getting warmer. The eerie blue flames in the skull lanterns that lit the way turned orange and began radiating proper heat. The dark stone walls became flecked with veins of gold.
A corridor later Yethyr entered a massive hellish forge.
Lava dripped from the ceiling and dozens of brainless banged away at strange screaming anvils. To my intense relief, I did not recognize any of my makers among them.
Yethyr glanced at their work to find them mindlessly banging away at humans, not steel.
This wasn’t craftsmanship, I realized with horror, this was torture. There was a screaming body upon each anvil, being hammered away beyond recognition.
Unrecognizable, but those were Datrean voices.
Yethyr grabbed the nearest hammer and found his grip so much tighter because I was helping him with all my will.
The brainless man who held the hammer didn’t seem to notice the interruption. It just froze mid-swing, waiting patiently to be released.
The body he had been banging noticed though. The smashed mouth stopped screaming, catching breath it no longer needed.
It was not the voice that had called him there, but Yethyr still pleaded. “Let me take you away from here.”
The spirit on the anvil spat. “Better this than to be a slave to you. At least here I’ll be made into something glorious.”
Yethyr recoiled at the vitriol, letting go of the hammer and it fell once again into its rhythm as if it had never been interrupted at all.
Yethyr huffed in annoyance. “You Datreans make no sense.”
I was starting to agree.
He turned away and searched for the voice that actually asked for him.
In the midst of this forge of screams, it was no longer easy to pinpoint.
“Spirit, do you hear me?” Yethyr called to it
“Yes.”
The voice came from a furnace. Trapped in a flaming cage, the spirit was being burned for fuel.
“You wish to be risen from Hell,” Yethyr asked it.
“...I do.” There was a strange defeated tone in the admission.
Yethyr reached out to the furnace and the flames turned dark red. He released a deathsong of calling and the spirit came willingly. Streams of blood left the fires and coalesced as a mote of crimson light in his palm.
“Where can I find your body?”
“The Forge of Daened,” the mote of light said.
“Are you a steelsinger?” I was surprised by Yethyr’s surprise. As far as I was concerned, the steel in the voice was unmistakable. Then I remembered Yethyr was a deathsinger. He could hear the voice itself because it was dead, but he could not hear how the veins of gold in the walls resonated with every ragged word.
How I resonated with every word
“I was,” that voice said.
Yethyr, the bastard, was delighted. “You will be again. Your spirit here in Hell is still connected to your body in the living world. We can use that connection to find a path out.”
Yethyr unleashed a new composition upon the spirit mote, one of sympathy and connection. The light in his palm stretched until a crimson string extended out from it and disappeared down a corridor.
Presumably, the spirit’s body would be on the other end
“The Lord Z’krel will not let you take me so easily.”
“He has sworn to allow you to leave.”
“I know. I would not have spoken out if I thought that you didn’t have a chance.”
“We must be quick then.”
“Indeed.”
Yethyr scrambled to follow the stream of red light, urged on by the power of the mote and myself.
We all could hear strange creaking noises trailing us that grew louder by the moment.
“You said you would let us leave,” Yethyr reminded the ever-watching walls.
“That is true. I did.” Z’krels cheerful voice seemed to come from the every skull lantern that we passed. “But I welcome guests to my halls other than you, and I can hardly control their actions.”
Whatever “other guests” Z’krel had apparently invited were approaching and approaching fast.
Perhaps even faster than we thought.
Yethyr suddenly heard something skittering on the ceiling. He looked up to see the shadow of a black spindly shape launch itself at him.
“Die,” he commanded, but his deathsong passed through the descending shape unaffected.
It was dead. It could not die.
Panicked, Yethyr grabbed my hilt. He didn’t think he would be able to draw in time, so he was utterly unprepared for how ready I was.
I seized his desire to draw the moment he felt it, guiding his killing intent into instinctual action. I was slicing through the air, the bandages covering me, and the creature in one swing. It was done before Yethyr had even processed what had happened.
The dead thing, whatever it was, lay in two pieces at his feet. Red tendrils leaped into my blade and I tasted an eternity of hellish torment, too grand and consuming for me to comprehend. Who could say what the dead thing in life had been? Clearly, it had forgotten itself, so I tuned out its confusing painful memories to focus on my triumph.
Yethyr had killed with me.
Finally. Finally.
With visceral satisfaction, I felt our bond be sealed in blood and too late did Yethyr realize what he had done, and he did realize it.
Every other wielder hadn’t noticed the pact they made with me at the moment of their first kill, but Yethyr had always been sensitive to my power.
Since our meeting, he had kept my presence at arm's length and safely out of his inner mind.
But no more. The blood dripping from my edge forged a chain that skewered his thoughts and bound him irrevocably to me. He immediately tried to sever it and found it beyond his power to break. The damage was done, never to be undone.
I was in.
Thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate all the support I have gotten during the transition to move this story to Royal Road. Do tell me what you think! I love comments and often respond to them
I will be posting a chapter every day until July 30, 2025. Make sure to follow the story and come back to read more!
What would you say is the bigger danger to Yethyr?
