Nargazor

[Nora Saint-Clair]

Sylvena

The earth beneath her hands thrummed with a low, bitter song.

Sylvena stood atop the half-raised parapet of Nargazor, her shadow stretching long in the blood-tinged dusk of the Blight. The walls below her curved in vast concentric rings, smooth and black as obsidian, growing outward like ripples of sanity in a sea of rot. The city would be a jewel corrupted, yes, but ordered, her will pressed into every stone and rune-bound line. Here, when the Great Lord’s storm came to sweep the land clean, his chosen would not merely survive. They would rule.

Her mouth curled in the ghost of a smile.

"I said deepen the root-folds, not widen them," she snapped without turning, her voice sharp as a chisel. "If the second wall is to hold, it must drink from the stone beneath like a child from the mother’s breast."

The two Dreadlords behind her Adevar and Lumein bowed low. They wore black, of course. Always black, as if it granted them mystery. Adevar had once been a High Seat in Andor, before he slit his mother’s throat and joined the Shadow. Lumein claimed he’d been a philosopher in Arad Doman, though he quoted only death now.

"Yes, Great Lady," they murmured as one, and began channeling, carefully, reverently, as if even the weaves feared to displease her.

She watched as bands of Earth and Fire laced together and plunged into the unfinished wall, the stone shuddering, groaning, then accepting the weave. The blight crept at the far edge of vision, a wall of oozing trees and grasping thorn, and it hated what she was doing. That pleased her.

Not so far now. Already the first three rings of Nargazor stood whole; solid circles of reality in a land that devoured reality like a starving hound. Each ring bore sigils bound with Earth Singing, her talent twisted now into something grander. Something necessary. Where once she coaxed minerals from soil and healed broken stone pillars, she now commanded stone to rise and seal out the madness. Green Ajah no longer. She was Chosen.

Sylvena turned, her armored hips whispering like a death chant. Her gown was black leather, cut into sharp lines and cruel symmetries, adorned with blood-rubies that drank light and gave none back. Her crown, dark as obsidian and veined with crimson, jutted like broken thorns from her copper-red hair. Even her gauntlet, spined and silvered, could cut a throat as easily as channeling could.

The Dreadlords would not meet her gaze.

But he didn’t even look up.

Amogorath hunched over a rust-stained table in the plaza below, his robes streaked with filth, his gnarled fingers stroking a bulbous vine that writhed in the iron box before him. The thing hissed. Something inside the box hissed back. He muttered to himself, words half-heard, like pieces of the Dark One’s own dreams made flesh.

Sylvena stepped down, her boots clicking against stone. The wards beneath her feet pulsed once, as if acknowledging her presence.

"You might at least pretend to notice the city being born around you," she said, folding her arms beneath her breastplate.

Amogorath did not stop working. “The walls keep the Blight out. That is your purpose. Mine is to ensure there is something left to inhabit them when it comes.”

"You mean to say you're breeding monstrosities."

He chuckled, soft and hollow. “We all are, dear Sylvena.”

She felt the draw of the Power at the edge of her skin, a familiar itch. The Dreadlords still labored behind her, sculpting the fourth wall from living earth, but she considered turning it inward. Just a touch. Enough to remind him what it meant to mock one of the Chosen.

But that was emotion. And emotion was the root of foolishness.

Instead, she walked past his table and down the long avenue that would one day be the Spine of the city. Already, sharp-angled towers rose in the inner rings, shaped by the Power, etched with wards and sigils of control. They were designed to endure the Blight’s fury and more than endure. Each held reservoirs of the One Power, siphoned from carefully hidden caches and held in silence until the Great Day. And the Blight would expand. It would. When the Dark One’s hand swept across the world, Nargazor and its sister cities would be the bastions that stood unbroken, where Forsaken would reign like dread kings over islands of order amid a sea of ruin.

"Let the Light rot," she whispered.

As she walked, the wards along the walls shimmered with faint green light, her own signature. The Weaves of Singing Earth, now blended with Fire and Spirit, bent the natural laws of decay. Within the walls, things could grow again of a kind. Crops bent to the night but nourishing. Trees that whispered in tongues but bore strange, sustaining fruit. No children played here, yet. No laughter. But there would be. There must be.

The Blight could not be erased. But it could be tamed. That was her dream. Her blasphemy.

And one day, even Beldragos would come to see its use.

Sylvena looked out over her city, dark and hard as her own heart, and smiled.

Amogorath

The worm cracked open beneath his scalpel with a wet sound like rotted fruit splitting. Its insides steamed against the chill of the Blightwind, though he’d cut the heat runes days ago. Still warm. Curious.

Amogorath blinked once. Then twice, slowly.

He tilted his head to listen not to Sylvena’s voice, which carried like a crow’s caw over the walls of her precious Nargazor but to the twitch of tendons in the thing’s broken flesh. That sound. Yes. That sound had been wrong before. Too wet. But now, now it was almost right. Almost.

"You're nearly singing, little one," he whispered, patting the twitching carcass. "Next batch will hum, I think."

His long fingers moved with the precision of a maestro. White gloves, stained now in browns and blacks, peeled the creature’s organs out in layers, coiling them into numbered jars. Some still pulsed. He let them. Movement was truth. Stasis was death. And Amogorath did not study death. He created life.

A true Chosen did.

Behind him, the city sprawled like a spider’s web order forced onto chaos. Sylvena's walls gleamed in their smug symmetry, each ring a monument to her ego. A girl crowned in thorns, strutting about in armor as if war were art. She had once been Aes Sedai, yes. They always liked playing soldier, those ones. Battle Ajah. How quaint.

He sniffed.

"You build, girl," he muttered, not looking up. "But I breed. And when the Blight swallows the world, it won’t be your walls that walk the earth. It’ll be my children."

The idea made him smile.

He straightened, slowly, his spine cracking audibly beneath the high black collar of his coat. The flesh beneath it was smooth as paper, his skin pulled tight over bone, but his eyes were bright, sharp, pale things that had watched cities burn and screamed instructions through ten thousand throats of a hundred thousand creatures.

Amogorath turned to face the heart of his garden.

The Blight rippled beyond the walls, dense with monstrous trees and glistening vines that pulsed like veins. His children writhed within it some hunting, some mating, some dying. All part of the song. He had bred the first Trollocs in the dark of his fortress, sewn from flesh of man and beast, with enough cruelty added to ensure obedience. Myrddraal were carved from shadow’s afterbirth, blind-eyed and soulless, and they had thrived.

But those were old songs. Ancient. Now, he was composing something new.

A four legged-thing skittered from the pit behind him, all ribs and twitching spines, its tongue too long for its mouth. It looked up at him and barked three syllables, barely formed. The middle one sounded like his name. Good.

He kicked it aside absently and moved on, toward the shade-shrubs. They grew in neat rows, each leaf the color of bruised iron. When crushed, they released a fog that ate bone. The Dreadlords feared them. Sylvena had insisted on keeping them outside the first ring. Foolish. They belonged in the city. What is safety, if not enforced?

Another cage: inside, a humanoid creature paced. It had no skin, only glassy, living muscle that flexed and twitched, constantly weeping black ichor. It had no mouth, but it screamed. Constantly. It didn’t need lungs.

"You'll be perfect for the border raids," he said, scribbling notes in a book bound in what had once been Aes Sedai flesh. "So easy to fear what you can’t understand. And the keenest mind will be befuddled by you, my darling."

He licked the end of his stylus.

Sylvena’s boots clicked behind him, each one a punctuation mark in her overdone soliloquy of authority.

"You might at least pretend to notice the city being born around you," she said.

Amogorath didn't bother to face her. He was already watching her, in the reflection of the iron cage, the way her dark armor moved like ink, the way the rubies in her crown pulsed as if feeding on her thoughts. She was so predictable.

So many of the Chosen had looked like that once. Grand. Beautiful. Poised for glory. Before madness. Before decay. Before they realized that immortality was boring unless you filled it with new toys.

"You do so love your walls, child," he said. "But I think in ecosystems. Yours is a prison. Mine is a paradise. Do you know how many species I’ve created since breakfast?"

He didn’t wait for an answer.

"I forget," he muttered. "But they’re hungry."

Sylvena’s silence behind him was heavy, like judgment. But he’d been judged before. By the Light, by the Hall of Servants, by Lews Therin himself. All of them had called his work monstrous.

And then they died, and he lived, and his creations still walked the world.

“You build your circles,” he said softly, “and let me work."