Arc F1.10 | Chapter 16: Bones Against My Chest, Under My Hands

{Constant Force} pushed against Xavier’s tiny body, moving him where Emilia wanted as she surged forward, intent to strike Prex before the man could fully acclimate himself to the situation.

The boy was in the way—was a constant drag against her attention—and Emilia needed to keep him safe, needed to know exactly where he was at every given moment without active thought. Already, the aethermark that was splattered over his chest allowed her to easily see where he was, but Emilia wanted to feel it throughout her entire being—wanted to be able to tug him about as needed.

It wasn’t a nice skill, nor did she have the wherewithal to be nice or gentle in her moving of the boy at the moment. That was fine—Emilia knew what it was like to have bruises of love over her body, one person or another gripping tight around her wrist or waist to pull her this way or that.

Once, during her early teens, she had joked about having Malcolm’s handprints tattooed around her wrists. At the time, she’d been far too young to get a tattoo, but now that she was older, Emilia thought there something sweet and loving about having Malcolm’s bruises permanently etched onto her skin, and had she not constantly had to field questions from people about who had done it and was she okay, Emilia might have plastered his love permanently over her skin. Unfortunately, the questions had always been tedious—also, eventually, people had stopped asking, her answers so consistently Malcolm or one of the clones, and followed by some story about her being crazy and them having to yank her out of danger or forcibly drag her away from some chaos or another, that people simply came to accept that the bruises were a part of her existence.

It was part of why the few people who had seen the bruises Warren left on her had never asked follow-up questions, why the marks of play Rafe and now the triplets left over her skin were barely given more than a cursory glance.

The only person who always looked, always questioned, was her father.

“Even if you always give me the same answers as to how it happened, I will always ask. I want to make sure no one is ever hurting you, my little starlight,” he had said, long ago, back when most of the bruises had been the result of Malcolm filling the role of protective older brother, her father constantly having sweets that Malcolm liked sent over to the Laprise household in thanks for his continued efforts in keeping her from accidentally killing herself.

Hopefully, when this situation was done and Xavier was safe in her arms, the little boy would look at the marks her skill was inevitably going to leave behind in the same light: as the gift of someone seeking to keep him safe, even if the execution had to be a little rough.

Prex’s first parry against her assault was sloppy, but the man was as skilled as Vtraní had told her he would be. A slight slip of his blade against her willbrand, and had he not been so fast, her blade might have slit through his forearm.

He was fast enough to not only shift his arm in time to avoid the blow but to also move further away when his dagger shattered—unless they were created by an artificer with an irregular deviation, like a rumai’se, a normal blade could never hold up to a willbrand, and despite the fact that her preferred willbrand had been one of her first successful creations and should have been a flawed thing, Master Shaw had made sure it was perfect, powerful, and more importantly, upgradeable.

Only later would Emilia learn how to make willbrands upgradeable herself, and to say it was a nuisance to both make them that way or actually upgrade them was an understatement. As a result, unless it was for a friend who knew, absolutely, that they preferred a specific type of weapon, neither she nor Simeon ever bothered making them upgradeable—and really, considering how long upgrading took, it was generally easier to completely replace the willbrand in question anyways. Emilia was rather attached to her original willbrand, so she kept it upgraded; she also carried extra willbrands with her—not that she was about to reveal that to this man, unless necessary.

Around them, Prex’s energy swirled, attempting to push her own Awareness and aether out of the space—he wouldn’t succeed. Not only was she a non-dev, one of the few people even a lavender code would struggle to expel from aetherspace she was already occupying, but she had trained with some of the continent’s most powerful people. Perhaps more importantly, she was used to needing to manoeuvre around her brother’s own overwhelming spread of power, and as previously stated, at the moment, Prex’s power was nothing compared to Atticus’.

Still, the Blood Rain General had beaten it into each of his students to always expect the worst, and in this case, that meant hitting the man with everything she had—at least, it should have meant that. Unfortunately—

Behind her, Xavier shuddered, her Censor locking on to the strange energy writhing around him—something from Prex? It was difficult to tell, the one thing about the man’s abilities that she wasn’t used to the fact that his energy felt off—like it didn’t belong to anyone in particular, she supposed.

Presumably, the fucker’s energy was doing something odd to Xavier. In reality, for all she knew, it could be someone else—Vtraní had made it clear that, while many of the most powerful people in the city actually had low Expansion Levels, several had huge Expansion Zones and Perfect or Near-Perfect Awareness Levels. At the time, Emilia had thought it odd just how many people were on Vtraní’s list; there were certainly some places with high occurrences of irregular deviations, but usually that was due to a culture of cultivating and encouraging valuable irregular deviations to continue to exist.

Lüshan had no such culture—if anything, their culture was closer to Baalphoria’s. Most irregular deviations weren’t illegal or villainized—although several certainly were, and Lüshan did something with all of their black knots that likely either involved turning them into secret agents or killing them—but neither were they particularly cared for or coveted. This was probably why so many Drinarna could be encouraged to ignore what was happening with all the kidnappings in the city: they didn’t hate people with irregular deviations, but they often wouldn’t risk their lives for them either.

The result was that many people with irregular deviations in both of their nations ended up some mixture of refusing to reproduce—tons of people didn’t want their children to experience the same disregard or outright hatred they themself did—or marrying another person with an irregular deviation. The thing was, from what Emilia knew about a lot of the people her friends were picking up, most of them were first-gens, and according to Vtraní, this was the case for most of the people Fräthk picked up. According to Levi’s questioning of Gëon, the same went for those who worked for him: most were first-gens; people who had experienced a genetic spasm in utero, rather than inherited some irregular deviation from a parent.

Even stranger, when asked whether people who were the children of people with irregular deviations simply had better support systems that were able to protect them from people like Fräthk or winding up on the street and seeking shelter from Gëon, neither Vtraní nor Gëon had thought this happened that much. In other words, it wasn’t like those people were tucked away, safe, somewhere in the city; rather, they were rare.

Considering the population of Falmíer and the usual statistics on how many people would have irregular deviations in similar cultures… there were so many in Falmíer who were first-gens while the number of people who had inherited their irregular deviation was low, presumably because Fräthk had been swiping most people born with an irregular deviation up for several generations. Possibly, someone had been picking those people up before Fräthk came along as well—after all, unless Fräthk was about to keel over from old age, there was no way they had been responsible for kidnapping that one man, Cordk, three hundred years ago.

Combined with the reality that, while Fräthk sometimes allowed their people to have children, it was a rare thing—something that Emilia could both understand and not, children being both a bargaining chip and the sort of thing to finally inspire a revolt—the number of people with irregular deviations in the city should have been lower than it was. It wasn’t, and while there was no way that all of those first-gens were as powerful as some of the people their group had gathered, there was a strange abundance of rare and powerful abilities in the city. Sure, some irregular deviations were powerful the first time around, but the majority took a few generations to fully settle—it was part of why, in a handful of nations, there were families who had gained their power through their generations of breeding their irregular deviations into finely honed weapons.

Of the people Emilia knew who fell into that category of person, most of them were monsters—Knivarish was one of the most powerful people she knew, his irregular deviation the sort of thing that she would love to have working for them at the moment. Unfortunately, the situation with Knivarish being what it was, the two of them weren’t even able to publicize their friendship—if they had, she would have messaged him about potential olthagri cures and maybe even had someone go back to the Grey Sands to get him, once she realized how quickly her friends were moving through Dion.

The problem was, in order to keep Knivarish safe, they would never be anything to one another—officially, she wasn’t even someone who knew about him in more than passing whispers, while to him, she was nothing but the bratty child of the Secretary General, poking her nose into Grey Sander business when she shouldn’t be. Worse, to him, she was someone too influential to kill unless it would never get back to anyone who had killed her. Thankfully, Knivarish liked her and wouldn’t kill her, but it was sad—the two of them had actually been friends since they were teenagers and he had pickpocketed her!

This was all Emilia’s roundabout way of distracting herself from the reality that while she couldn’t feel anyone else around, that meant little when this city was filled with monsters. It could be Prex’s energy affecting Xavier, either through the little boy feeling an overwhelm that she herself was unable to feel or through an attack, his tiny body shuddering as his eyes clamped closed.

Either way, one moment she was surging towards Prex, intent to slam her blade into him before he could activate his own willbrand; the next, she was shooting backwards. {Constant Force} dragged Xavier across the room and into her arms, his body so light and tiny against her that it broke her heart.

Was this how small and frail she and her siblings had felt the first time their parents had held them? What in the world had a teenager Malcolm thought, that first time he’d seen her playing with his much bigger brothers? The first time he’d helped her strip out of mud-coating clothes to get clean? Had her childhood friends seen nothing but another child, or had they seen her bones protruding against her skin? Her eyes caged by bone and deep circles that wouldn’t fade for months because she had always been prone to nightmares? Her skin some sallow colour that wasn’t quite right?

The little boy’s limbs wrapped around her, and while he had cried out in some sort of fear in the moments she was moving him, here against her chest, he simply curled into her, trusting that she would keep him safe. Around them, her aether solidified into a cage of power that even the lavender codes she’d fought had struggled to get through—not the most powerful one, his power a rupture through the world that even she could never perfectly deflect, but the less powerful ones had never been able to take over the space she already occupied, as long as her aether was condensed enough. It was a defence that was nothing if not draining; Emilia would rather drain herself and die with this child in her arms than risk him being struck down because she’d left him alone when something might be targeting him.

“Gonna fight with the kid in your arms?” Prex asked, his willbrand now out and spinning through his fingers. The blade was moderately small, sliding in and out of its two-part casing as it moved, the entire thing some mixture of silver and red and brown—the sort of colouring that could be purposeful or the result of the willbrand never being properly clean, and instead, being left to moulder with blood.

“I don’t see why not,” she replied. “Better to keep the boy safe in my arms than to leave him open for more attacks out of them.”

The man’s head tilted. Mulling her words over? Wondering when she noticed he was attacking the boy? On the other hand, if he hadn’t attacked the boy, had he not noticed someone else pressing their energy around him? If so, that said a lot for his abilities being overblown—or for the possibility that someone with another irregular deviation that could avoid his detection was actually behind whatever had been reaching for Xavier.

“Perhaps…” Prex replied, those dark eyes of his blinking slow at her, as though she were nothing to be concerned about. “But now, the boy is right there for me to skewer. I wonder, will you choose the boy or yourself, when my blade comes for you?”