Elva Rackthorn and the Tears of Azrael

Greenpeak, Part 1

The first day of their journey was oddly cold for a mid-summer morning, enough that when Elva snuck out to check on the rune-powered carriage (and avoid her father's pre-travel melancholy), a snake had curled up on the warmth of the hood.

A common forest viper, Elva thought, approaching it with soft footfalls. Quick to strike if you stepped on them— she had learned the hard way that they blended in neatly amidst the dead leaves and detritus of the forest floor. But their venom was useful for all sorts of necromantic crafts, and the occasional paralytic bite was easily treated with a salve made of river piksie slime. Elva had kept a few in the old quarry a while back, fattening them up with piksies and frogs until they were docile enough to milk.

Perhaps this was one Elva used to feed, because when she drew nearer, it just slowly tilted its head and tasted the air with its tongue.

"Git, git," Elva hissed, flapping her hands, and in response the viper just curled into a snugger dozing position. With a sigh, she yanked down the sleeve of her traveling cloak and grabbed the viper right behind its head. It twisted a bit in her grip, before going limp and staring at Elva with vague reptilian disdain. Elva raised an unimpressed eyebrow in response.

"Go snack on a rabbit," she muttered, before tossing it into a bush she remembered seeing bunnies near.

None of her books mentioned what wyrms ate. Technically, familiars didn't really need to eat if their hosts could provide enough energy, though Reggie loved munching on any sort of citrus fruit, rind and all. It would be deadly useful, Elva mused, if her wyrms would eat up all the scraps from her material prep, like flower stems and piksie limbs and the bits of owl pellets without any bones. She could see it now: her at a work desk, flicking scraps over her shoulder for her wyrms to snatch in their jaws as they looped through the air in agile spirals or maybe curled about her limbs like friendly vines.

Elva drummed her fingers on the carriage hood. A tangle of wyrms— the idea was growing on her. It made sense for all the right reasons, of course: the prestige, the power, the utility. But it might make sense for other reasons too. Familiars were supposed to feel, well, familiar. To feel like a missing puzzle piece, or a favorite cloak pulled out of the closet as summer wears out to autumn. To fill gaps you didn't know were missing, to make you complete.

To close your circuit.

Elva glanced at at the manor windows. Father was out of sight. Lucy would be grabbing some hot sider around back before the drive to stay awake at the wheel, and so Elva was free to peek under the hood. She slipped her fingers under the crack of the hood, found the two release switches, and pulled up the metal plating.

It was beautiful underneath. When she was too young to really appreciate it all, Elva's mother had held her up on her hip and pointed out all the various mechanisms. She had talked about the looping wires and rumbling gears as being part of a conversation with the runes. Like a song, where the runes were the words and materials the instruments, their shapes and arrangements directing the melody so that the wheels would turn and the brakes would work and the speed of the carriage could change like the loudness of a voice.

But none of that song could work, sustain itself, without the runeplate as a power source. And that was Mother's contribution. Other sigilmancers had worked out the looping sigils that organized the forces and chose the materials that could channel them best throughout the carriage, but necromancers excelled at the messy stuff. And runeplates were messy, made of plants and blood and bone dust, fur and feather and flower. Runes drew energy from the Betwixt, the realm between worlds, but you couldn't just draw that energy forever. That energy, called vix, corroded the material it came through, and if the material itself didn't decay first, the runes themselves could warp into something dangerous. It used to be people just matched runes up with materials they corroded the least, or otherwise had people constantly feed their will into them.