Wes.
Why? Why? Of all the steelsingers not trapped within me, why did it have to be him? He had probably come back just to convince Yethyr to destroy me.
Demons below that’s probably exactly why he answered.
I tried to bury my panic. The bond between Yethyr and I ran both ways and he was beginning to sense my agitation.
Up close though, Wes’ skeleton was devastated. Spiderwebs of fracture lines scarred every bone, highlighted by dripping molten metal, red hot from the heat.
The jewelry he had worn in life, I realized, had all melted into him.
I could not contain my horror.
Wes had been a small man and the lack of flesh made it stand out all the more. When he stood to full length, his head reached the Prince’s nose. Yethyr, short beside his kin, had at last found someone he could look down on.
“I am Yethyr, son of Yevvar,” he said in Datrean. “Name yourself.
“Wesed Steelsinger,” his voice came out as deathsong. His vocal cords had burned in the lava; he could not speak with a tongue that was no longer there.
“Do you know what you have agreed to?”
“Do you know what you have agreed to?” Wes said. “Killing with that sword?”
I could not suppress my panic now. He was going to tell him my purpose. He was going to ruin everything my father had worked so hard to set into motion.
“Settle.” Yethyr tried to wrangle me into an illusion of calm. “The sword knows you well.”
“I helped make it.”
He made me; he wielded me. The only person who never killed while doing so. There was no blood binding our bond, but my steel remembered his hands.
Yethyr narrowed his eyes. “And yet you revile it?”
He did. That was clear.
But I had been a part of him once and he remembered. I could see it, beneath the hate, beneath the fury, there was desire.
He had not escaped the poison of my allure, even in death.
Wes carefully did not mention that. Perhaps he did not want to even admit it to himself.
“Bonesong slaughtered the whole forge. How could I not detest it?”
Yethyr curled up his face. “Well of course it did!” He snarled. “What else did you expect? Did you think you could pound the resentment out? Did you think it would be grateful?”
Yethyr was offended on my behalf and I was confused. I was not inherently resentful. All I wanted was to protect the city. My current bitterness was all Yethyr’s fault and how dare he imply otherwise!
To my further annoyance, Wes didn’t correct him.
“Resentment was the aim. I loved my Master. I did everything for him, but he intends to break the world. You need to stop Bonesong before it consumes you.”
Yethyr’s fingers flexed on my hilt. “And how do I do that?”
“Destroy it. Right here. Right now. While the forge of its birth still burns hot enough.”
To my relief, Yethyr recoiled. “I will not punish the blade for your blasphemy.”
Wes sighed even without lungs.“What then? Are you going to punish me in its stead?”
“Need I remind you that I just helped you escape punishment.” When Wes made no argument, Yethyr smiled. “Ah, so you were being punished. It’s hard to tell in Hell. What was your crime?”
“Jumping in the lava after the death of my Master,” Wes said carefully.
“Why?”
“I was supposed to die gloriously against your men.”
“Why didn’t you?” Yethyr pressed.
Wes considered a moment. I wanted to laugh at him. He was trying awfully hard to avoid mentioning that he had been holding me when he died.
“I haven’t my Master’s hate,” he said at last.
“You don’t hate me?”
“I did, but now, I’m trying to save you from that hate.”
Yethyr suddenly swung me at Wesed’s neck. I was so startled, I didn’t even resist when he stopped me just shy of colliding with the bare bone. “Have a care, using the freedom my song allows you to deceive me.”
“I do hate you,” Wes corrected hastily. “Just not enough to bring the rest of the world down with you.”
“Do you think me dumb enough to believe that?” Yethyr’s hand shook. I wasn’t sure if decapitating Wes would actually do anything, but I was eager to try. Yethyr held me back. “If you accepted my call to try to sabotage me, you will find it exceedingly difficult.”
Red flames in hollow sockets eyed my shaking blade. “I accepted your call to warn you of sabotage, at great risk to myself.”
Wes closed the distance himself, allowing my edge to graze his still searing hot jawbone. Yethyr took it as a show of confidence, but I knew it for what it was
He just wanted to touch me again.
At our touch, we were connected once more. His grief, his guilt, his wrath was harsher than in life; his very mind was frayed from the horror of Hell, but beneath the deathsong now puppetting his body, it was him: my maker, my wielder, my potential destroyer.
My last tie to a dead time.
A familiar ache thrummed through both of us and perhaps on some level, Yethyr felt it too. He hastily pulled me away from Wes’ jaw and the painful bliss of our reunion.
“Risk to yourself?” Yethyr said incredulously. “You were being tortured.”
Wes ran a bony finger along his jaw. I had only nicked it, but he knew I could have sliced it clean off if I had been petty enough.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
He glared at me suspiciously, resentfully.
Hungrily.
“My punishment was not going to last. My master saw it as a lesson and Mona would have forgiven me eventually. It was her sister that held grudges. I just had to—”
“You don’t believe that,” Yethyr insisted. “You would not have answered me if you didn’t know deep down that it would never end. That is why you are here. Do not insult my intelligence by implying it was to save me.”
I almost pitied Wes. He had just sacrificed his chance at hellish decadence, betrayed everyone he cared about, and given the man who destroyed his home leave to puppet his corpse, all to be not believed in his warning.
What a cruel joke it was.
Wes looked down at his hands and seemed unnerved by his own skeletal fingers. The metal of melted rings was just starting to cool. “It doesn’t matter now. I will never taste the fruits of Hell.” He looked up from his fingers. “I will not be forgiven for this.”
No, he certainly would not be. He was trying to ruin everything, and only Yethyr’s paranoia, greed and stubbornness were foiling him.
“For leaving Hell?”
“For treachery,” Wes said. “I have committed treason against Datrea. Serving you could only be deemed as such.”
“You claim to serve me in earnest then?”
“My very body dances to your tune.” Wes shrugged, drawing attention to how Yethyr’s music minutely shifted just to accommodate the motion. “I can hardly do anything else.”
“Yes, but for the moment, how you dance is up to you. Have you not noticed how I have written the composition to fluctuate according to your whim?”
There was an edge of excitement in Yethyr’s voice. Besides his own mentor, there were precious few he could speak to about his work.
Wes rolled his neck. “Deathsong is strange, now that I can hear it. Eager to move; unwilling to change, so unlike the music of metal. New as I am to its sound, I understand enough to see how slim this ‘freedom’ is. You could conduct this music directly at your leisure.”
The Prince frowned. “That’s true. I could.” Yethyr gripped the deathsong and Wesed’s skeleton splintered apart.
The lava had not spared his bones after all. In truth, the hours immersed in the lava had turned Wes into nothing more than bone fragments. Without Yethyr’s deathsong forcing his pieces back into shape, Wes was confronted by his true scattered, brittle state.
Helpless. Broken. In his own body.
Yethyr wanted to vomit. He hastily put Wes back together, releasing command of the deathsong as soon as he had taken it.
It could only have been a moment of that suspended hell, but Wes was whimpering and Yethyr’s hands were shaking. He tried to hide it, but I could feel the fingers around my hilt trembling.
“I have better things to do with my attention than torment you.” He tried to say it flippantly. “My mentor is satisfied with collecting bodies for labor and war. I have no interest in such things. Serve me in good faith and I will leave the conducting of your body to you.”
Wes took a moment to temper his terror. He straightened, calmed, and said, almost stubbornly, “I answered in good faith.”
“Prove it to me ”
Wesed’s whole ribcage heaved with a heavy sigh. “What are you going to make me do?”
“Stonesinger Jezad said that some of his most precious tablets are hidden somewhere here, somewhere safe, somewhere First Firesinger Infred would not think to look.”
“I wouldn’t know—” Wesed caught himself. Inspiration flickered in the flames of his eye sockets. His skull tilted, considering. “I wouldn’t know for sure, but I do know the most secure place in the forge.”
“Where?”
Wes pointed toward the corpse iron wall that I had helped him dent so many hours ago.
The Heart of the Forge.
Ah, so we're back to this plan.
“What am I looking at?”
“A vault.”
A vault? A vault to house enough firesong to blow up a quarter of the city perhaps.
“Is that pure corpse iron?
“Bonesong can cut it.”
I sure could; the current gash in the corpse iron was proof enough, but that alone had taken commitment, my commitment, and I was not sure I wanted to commit to blowing myself up. I would kill Yethyr, yes, but not much else.
Most of the army was at the palace and when Wes had originally convinced me to try, he had explicitly said that the explosion wouldn’t take out the palace.
What exactly would this achieve, besides destroying me of course, which was Wes’ main goal.
But it was no longer mine. I still had a council to hunt down. I still had to dismantle the Brinn. What did it matter if I was poison to all who touched me if I was surrounded by the very people I had claimed vengeance upon?
Yethyr approached the wall of corpse iron. He had no idea of the firesong that threatened to incinerate him.
I tried to warn him. I dropped countless thoughts in his head with his voice.
“Wes is a Datrean.”
“He can not be trusted.”
“We speak in the same frequency now, Bonesong,” Wes said irritably. “I may not understand Brinn, but I’m sure you’re lying to him about something.”
I wasn’t lying now. “He is going to KILL YOU.”
“Hush,” Yethyr said.
Somehow, he saw my visceral reaction as proof that he needed to enter this “corpse iron vault.”
It didn’t help that he had gotten it into his head that the library tablets were hidden there.
I wanted to laugh. Yethyr refused to believe Wes’ honest warning about me, and now he would not believe my honest warning about Wes.
We were all dancing around truth, the three of us, and Yethyr was obliviously spinning at the center. His arrogance had almost killed him twice in Hell. His distrust had doubly cost him here.
He was a contradictory boiling pot of pride and paranoia.
He was perfect.
He was too smart for his own good and too stupid to see truth when it was literally shouting in his head. My curse could slowly poison his life and as long as I suited his goals, he would find blame elsewhere. He was malleable enough to bend; brittle enough to break.
I was going to ruin him; I was going to make him bring down his bloodthirsty society from within and the world would be a better place for it. Wes could pretend he was trying to save the world by destroying me, but I was the one actually doing something.
I would not help him destroy me.
My blade grew heavy in Yethyr’s hand and he scoffed. “Is this how it is? Every time I do something you don’t like, you’re going to throw a tantrum.”
Oh, you want a tantrum? I made myself heavier. I put all my weight into being as inconvenient to hold as possible. If he was going to swing me at the Heart of the Forge, I would not let him swing at all.
He spun another deathsong, yet again trying to dominate my will, and once more, the steelsong of my makers rose in my defense.
It was a familiar dance, a familiar duel and we had both gotten better at it. An even match.
Then Wesed started to sing.
A steelsong composition in the frequency of deathsong; it should not have worked. The very jewelry melted into his bones could not hear him, but I could.
My maker’s voice was ethereal, but still his. He sang a tranquil lullaby. It soothed the steelsong within me, forcing me still, forcing me silent, forcing me sharp.
Yethyr swung me at the Heart of the Forge and the dent I had made grew deeper.
And then he did it again and again.
And again.
I could not stop it. My blade danced to Yethyr’s deathsong, and Wesed held me down, forcing me to submit to it. It felt like being banged on the anvil all over again, trapped between rhythmic force and an unyielding grip.
I remembered that time dimly. I remembered it with joy and grief. I remembered it with pain and fear. I had fought the process back then too, if my hazy memory served, but that had been worth it; that had been a rhythm of creation, a painful labor of my family to bring about my birth.
This was death.
Blow by blow, the corpse iron gave way to my subjugated edge. Blow by blow, I resigned myself to death.
At least it would kill Yethyr and Wes too. At least the survivors of Datrea were far away and would not be caught in the blast.
At least Malinda was safe.
My edge penetrated the corpse iron, overcoming its ancient steelsong and a blast of air burst out.
Cool air.
Cold air.
Yethyr swung again. Now that the steelsong reinforcing it was broken, I sliced clean through. The walls fell away, revealing a small stone chamber. It was dark and silent, filled only with cool, slightly stagnant air.
The Heart of the Forge was empty.
Yethyr and Wesed looked at each other, but it felt more like I was sharing that look with Wes. We both knew what should have been in here, and we both understood the implications.
The hottest, most volatile firesongs in Datrea were missing.
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!
Do you think Wes made the right decision in answering Yethyr's summons?
