The Valley of Death

By Hyrum W. Hawks

A deposed princess, expert in magical glyphs, must join forces with a charismatic ambassador and battle through the Valley of Death to reclaim her war-torn kingdom in a post-atomic world.

Since before recorded history, the Valley of Death has stood by its name. Not a drop of rain has fallen or a living soul returned from its borders. But t

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sparkling Draconic Unicorn Publishing
• Release date: Feb 15, 2024
• ISBN: 9781961105058

Hyrum W. Hawks

Hyrum W. Hawks is a lot of things, but first and foremost identifies as a child of God, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and a child of the covenant. He is a devoted husband and father of seven children. He began his career by getting master's degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, and recently earned one in outer space resource engineering. He spent his career in heavy industry, especially mining, oil \& gas, and outer space resource mining and processing. He is also a patent agent and has written hundreds of patents for clients, and is an inventor on over forty granted patents himself. He is beginning the process of moving to being a full-time novelist since he began to learn about creative writing in early 2022 when a few of his children expressed interest in writing but didn't take the initiative to learn. He decided to learn how to be an author and teach them. Instead, he's found the first hobby of his life that has lasted longer than a month. His goal is to go full time within five years.Check out ReamStories.com/HyrumHawks, where you can read short stories and the beginning of his works in progress as a subscription. His books include hard sci-fi, sci-fantasy, and whatever pops into his head.Hyrum W. Hawks is a lot of things, but first and foremost identifies as a child of God, a disciple of Jesus Christ, and a child of the covenant. He is a devoted husband and father of seven children. He began his career by getting master's degrees in chemistry and chemical engineering, and recently earned one in outer space resource engineering. He spent his career in heavy industry, especially mining, oil \& gas, and outer space resource mining and processing. He is also a patent agent and has written hundreds of patents for clients, and is an inventor on over forty granted patents himself. He is beginning the process of moving to being a full-time novelist since he began to learn about creative writing in early 2022 when a few of his children expressed interest in writing but didn't take the initiative to learn. He decided to learn how to be an author and teach them. Instead, he's found the first hobby of his life that has lasted longer than a month. His goal is to go full time within five years.Check out ReamStories.com/HyrumHawks, where you can read short stories and the beginning of his works in progress as a subscription. His books include hard sci-fi, sci-fantasy, and whatever pops into his head.

Book preview

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This is Radio Chungrim, bringing you breaking news. In our top story, the Lost Princess is reported to be, at this very moment, dining with the boorish ambassador from Tevrim. What possible motive could Her Highness have for condescending to spend time with such an odious…

High Form Café, Chungpash, Capitol of Chungrim

Jeanne took a sip of her tea and schooled her face. Was it possible that the ambassador was even more of a boor than Jeanne had anticipated? A man about whom polite society had no polite words. Was his physiognomy truly an accurate match to his personality? She waited with her face neutral to give no sign of stray emotion to the disguised press scattered about the restaurant. They waited on her every facial whim to snap a mundane photo for the tabloids.

Would you like to join me for a nightcap at my embassy? The ambassador had the gall to wink as he tamped ground barsh root into his pipe. The press would have a shot of that wink, for sure. Imbecile. He compounded his awkwardness as he tried to form a simple glyph for fire with his soft, manicured fingers, but fumbled the weaving and the glyph failed to coalesce. A waiter weaved the correct glyph, breathed a touch of power into it, and lit the pipe for the ambassador as Jeanne struggled not to roll her eyes.

Jeanne Adrenash, Lost Princess of Tavargin, was a tall, athletic woman of typical Dashandan ethnic heritage, meaning she had nearly black skin and long hair of such a dark blue-brown as to appear black on all but the brightest of days. Her ears tapered to a point at the top, and her face formed an elegant oval. Barely two and a half-dozen years old, she was covered in intricate glyphs glowing a soft blue. She was considered by newspapers, tabloids, radio announcers, and movie studios alike as the most beautiful and eligible woman on Drachmar. They all described her as ‘lost,’ despite how cruel that moniker was. Her nation’s capital lost to the bomb. Her family trapped in the rubble by conspiring, power-grubbing monsters. Her nation’s identity lost to more than a hundred years of Dashandan Coalition rule. Her nation now lost to roving warlords.

She did not care about her fame or prestige except in how she could use it for her war-torn homeland. In the present, the ambassador’s advance still forced her to repress her gag instinct. He had a daughter only half a dozen years younger than her! But dinner had been excellent, after the Cavadocian coastal style of the far east, with creamed tubers and heavy curries with some excellent baked vegetables, and she intended to keep it down despite his flirtations.

She reached over the table and touched the imbecile’s pale blue, unadorned hand with her dark, heavily glyph tattooed hand. The glyphs ignited slightly, sending a high frequency magical vibration through his hand that would excite him even more while also giving him a sense of comfort, trust, and wellbeing. One of her specialties. If he’d been even slightly intelligent, he would have had tattoo mages embedding glyph-sets to protect him from emotional manipulation since he first entered the diplomatic corps. No, his tattoos were all flashy and useless. The laziness of the rich and magic-deaf. Of course, he was not the type to adventure, as indicated by the paleness of his hands, his blue-copper blood obvious through his untanned and uncalloused skin. He was pale even for an ethnic Rimian, with the bright red hair of his people.

Good sir, while a nightcap would be pleasant, you know I cannot join you without a chaperone, and where would we find one of those at this time of evening? She gestured at the dining hall, draped in coarsely woven tapestries that gave the feel of the nomadic styles of far Cavadocia, the land of the destroyers. Too bad your daughter is not in town. We could invite her. That would confuse him. Besides, are you not as tired as I after a full evening of delightful conversation and merry banter?

Playing dumb and old-fashioned had the desired result. The ambassador was a true Rimian, not just by ethnicity but by culture, and none of the Rimian elites that ruled the central region of the Dashrimtak supercontinent were so uncouth as to be overly blunt about their intentions with the fairer sex, as they still called women. It went against their deepest cultural taboos. He took his defeat with all the grace of a man used to rejection from the elite women of the eshtan race, and especially from a royal of the most famous royal family on planet Drachmar.

A royal family in name only. The world thought her the only member of her family remaining. The rest lay dead in the ruins of the palace in Trebtav.

Only she and her blackmailers knew the truth. Her family were captives and her good behavior kept them alive from day to day these last four years.

I suppose you are right. The ambassador heaved a sigh. It does seem to be getting a bit late.

And your wife will be worried for your soul, Jeanne thought with hidden bitterness towards the hypocrisy of the elite, especially an outwardly devoted man of the Pashite faith like this man, who preached monogamy without practicing fidelity, while judging the faithful polygamy of the ‘barbaric’ Takians and Bartans of the south. Her own Trebite beliefs were far more egalitarian and practical.

The stern face of her senior guard, Marcel, slipped unbidden into her mind, reminding her to not judge other cultures so harshly, or she’d be guilty of the same cultural bigotry the ambassador was. Marcel just wouldn’t let her despise every other culture on Drachmar in peace.

But my dear ambassador, Jeanne said as she sipped her cup of strong Dashandan black tea, before we part you still need to tell me more about this fascinating proposal rumors say is coming out of Tevrim.

His resultant smirk made Jeanne want to slap him with a glyph-enhanced hand.

I cannot say much, but I can tell you I anticipate my homeland of Tevrim will make moves into the Valley of Death within the year. The ambassador positively preened, his jowls vibrating. It will double our holdings.

Jeanne faked breathless wonder. She had to fake it, as the other two ambassadors had stated their own countries were to do the same thing. But it’s a desert that has never known rain or had a survivor return. No Rimian nation has dared enter it in thousands of years. Jeanne wanted more. She hid a hand under the tablecloth and made a series of glyphs into a glyph-set. She couldn’t breathe any power into it, as was proper, but the trace of power all glyphs had when formed by a mage or sorcerer would be enough to tip this weak-minded man into saying more.

Even as she made the glyph-set, she pondered on his words and put the pieces together from the hints she had gleaned from the other Rimian ambassadors she’d flirted nauseatingly with these last few nights. The other small Rimian nations north of the valley had the same vested interest in the valley and similar small holdings compared to their larger Rimian cousins. Maintaining a still and emotionally neutral face and hoping her azure eyes were not gleaming too brightly with her repressed emotion or magic use, she smiled as demurely as she could. I suppose you must have a brilliant plan on how to enter the valley?

She flipped the glyph-set towards the ambassador’s lap with a flick of her wrist.

His eyes flashed with a hint of a blue glow for a heartbeat and subsided. Yes, that is not a large secret, I suppose. Well… He leaned in with a conspiratorial gesture of his hand so she repressed a sigh and leaned in to match. We intend to take the largest expedition into the valley in history. But with modern weapons and armor to complement our magic users, we expect far better results. The Sentrimi and Kantrimi ambassadors will have to eat their scarves from jealousy. And we’ll finally have somewhere to ship our goods besides the Dashandan tyrants to the north or our Rimian brothers.

Jeanne thought about her own secret expedition, repressing her instinct to worry about them. They should be partway into the valley in question even now, but were overdue in reporting in. If those conniving Cavadocians from across the seas hadn’t been interfering in the Dashrimtak supercontinent’s politics, there would be no competition from any of the Rimian nations. Cursed atomic reactors seducing the world. Not that her Dashandan cousins were any better with their imperialistic ways, including occupying her own nation and leaving her family as figureheads. She would reclaim her homeland from the tyrants, busybodies, and warlords, and her last hope was finding some mythical weapon at the center of the Valley of Death.

But now was not the time to think about that. Lingering bitterness was deadly to sorcerers in a most literal way, and thinking of tyrants like the emperor of the Dashandan Coalition was the surest path to that most dangerous of emotions and the death of the heart that followed.

Jeanne leaned in and parted her lips in the way a movie star had taught her just after the war and spoke so softly the ambassador had to strain to hear. What would it take for me to join that expedition?

The ambassador appeared to forget how to breathe. That was far too effective, considering no magic was involved.

While she waited for his brain to restart, she thought of the scrap of ancient paper that had started all of this just months earlier, as her hopes had faded. She had obtained that bit of hope from a rather dodgy source via a crumbling monastery in the Rimian highlands, dozens of hundreds of years old, maybe dozens of thousands, and reportedly hidden by failing glyphs. Very little survived except a few sentences in the dragon tongue, which she had translated. At the heart of the Valley of Death is the greatest danger the world has or will ever know. A weapon of unbelievable destruction. A weapon impossible to control except by one of greatest self-control and acumen, magical and moral. Death itself trembles.

Interrupting her thoughts, the waiter approached their table. An ethnic Rimian with blazing red hair hidden under a wig of brown braids, he wore the traditional robes of ancient Cavadocia across the sea, fitting the theme of the restaurant. Rimians did love to play dress up. He handed her a note.

She activated the glyph cipher and read the message embedded in the paper, her eyes flashing blue as the magic showed her the message directly in her vision. She barely repressed a curse, then incinerated the paper with a flick of her fingers, the glyph for fire coming to her without thought.

I’m sure we can accommodate you on the expedition, the ambassador stammered.

Thank you, I will take you up on that, ambassador. Now, I do apologize. This is rather urgent business requiring at least an immediate phone call and probably a visit. She rose and bowed, unconsciously using her royal training to put her elegant red dress to her advantage, sinking the ambassador further into her thrall and possibly giving him an aneurysm. His paleness was alarming. As a Trebite faithful, she would do nothing immoral like these heretical Pashites, but she would do anything else to reclaim her homeland. Especially if it meant manipulating a boor like this man.

The ambassador survived to be lecherous another day. He struggled to his feet and bowed obsequiously. Jeanne touched his hand in farewell, using her tattoo glyphs once more to add to his trust of her, and departed.

Turning, she felt half a dozen weak glyphs bounce off of her. Glyph mages hiding among the guests were trying their magical three-dimensional photography again. Magic could no longer do two-dimensional photography, as mundane technology had become widespread enough to nullify its magical predecessor. No mundane tech had yet made a three-dimensional photograph. Her own glyph tattoos deflected the pitiful attempts and dissipated them. Their curses as she walked by were sweet as candy to her ears.

Jeanne left the café and her shadows, Marcel and Hansa joined her. Marcel, a large Tavargin man with a moderate glyph talent, had been her guard for almost two dozen years before the war and returned after fighting in the war. Hansa, an average height, average build Tavargin woman, had fought in the underground with Marcel during the war and was about two dozen years old with a bit more talent than Marcel, but less training. Both had short, dark blue hair.

What did the ambassador say that triggered that flash of bitterness? Marcel whispered. He had a glyph-set in his arm that gave him a jolt if Jeanne felt bitterness. The stronger the jolt, the more bitter the feelings and the more likely he’d have to act to protect her from herself.

I thought of the emperor, may he die a dozen times. Jeanne patted him on the arm. Just a momentary slip. No danger. We’re leaving to deal with a crisis with the expedition.

Jeanne had a car take her back to the Intercontinental Hotel, as she couldn’t be seen walking the three blocks as herself. Not the Lost Princess. Not that she’d have been left to walk in peace. The undisguised press stood outside and snapped mundane photos of Jeanne both as she exited the restaurant and as she arrived at the hotel. More three-dimensional attempts bounced off her shields, and this time she engaged her minor defenses, sending a shock glyph back to the photographers, causing at least a dozen to exclaim in pain. Without her guards, she could not have made it through the mass of people without throwing elbows or revealing the extent of her magical talent. A well-hidden talent, despite being a third child of a famous king. She had outfitted both Marcel and Hansa with sufficient crowd control glyph tattoos to push back as unruly a group as the press. Possibly even a fairly sizable mob, if they weren’t too violent.

Your Highness, one reporter called. A Cavadocian, by the looks of him. How do you find Ambassador Avtarish?

Jeanne kept her fingers from making a glyph that would slap the smug smile off his face and answered. This was a good question for her public persona, though not for her digestion. And a good reminder of the pronunciation of the ambassador’s name. She did struggle with Rimian proper names, as her language glyph-sets only translated meaning, not people’s names.

I cannot, of course, gossip about any of my friends and associates, she said, eliciting a tittering laugh from the crowd of gossips. She tilted her head, fluttered her eyelashes, and continued her performance. I seek to always expand the circle of friendship of the Tavargin people among all the tribes of eshtan-kind. To gain for our people the friends we need to put an end to lawlessness and rebuild after the tragic end to the last Dashandan Coalition war of aggression. May peace reign in Tavargin, and on Drachmar. And, as always, death to the emperor, may Treb curse his soul forever.

Several of them shouted back, ‘Death to the emperor.’ The anti-Dashandan sentiment after the war was pervasive in Rimian and Cavadocian circles, but nowhere more than the Tavargin diaspora, who were driven from their homeland for over a hundred years by imperial repression. She had joined that diaspora, and that hatred, during the war. The current emperor was nearly the entire focus of all of their hatred. The rest of their hatred was for the Cavadocian war chieftains who had dropped the bomb on Trebtav to end the last war.

She waved and allowed her eyes and defensive tattoos to flash blue, producing an audible gasp of excitement and an unconscious step backwards from the press as she entered the hotel. She had re-popularized having extensive tattoos among the rich, though most thought she had them made by famous glyph mages and sorcerers. She made nearly all of them herself. And while she couldn’t drop her persona, she could at least not be smothered by the fools in the press. Use any advantage, her father had taught. Especially her magical abilities.

They thought her a spoiled princess, with glyph mages and sorcerers at her beck and call. She was quite content for them to underestimate her.

Jeanne sped across the lobby and took the elevator to the top floor. She sent a pulse of magic to check her room, finding nothing. She waited as Hansa swept the room, her pistol drawn and defense glyphs active, in case anyone lingered outside the range of Jeanne’s detection. After an incident with a building climber a few months earlier that ended with the climber in the hospital and one room of the suite filled with ice, Hansa and Marcel took no chances. Jeanne had told her she could defend herself, but Hansa had pointed out that it would have hurt Jeanne’s persona if the press found out she could punch a hole through an unarmored eshtan with a single glyph. And had.

With the room clear, Hansa took up post on the balcony while Marcel stayed outside the door to the suite to run interference. There would be flowers arriving soon, and not just from the Tevrimi ambassador. There always were.

Jeanne immediately headed to the bedroom and ignored the four-poster bed’s beckoning calls to sleep. She got out of the ridiculously confining dress and tossed it into the pile of clothes growing on the wingback chair in her room. She rummaged through the oversized wardrobe, then scattered the pile on the wingback, finally finding her disguise on the side of the bed. She swore she’d clean the room the moment she had time to breathe. She could hire a lady’s maid, but who could she possibly trust? A Tavargin could be in the pay of the warlords, and a local wouldn’t have the loyalty to the princess she needed. Best to do it herself.

As she could not pass for a Rimian, Cavadocian, Takian, or Bartan, she dressed as a Dashandan traveling laborer. A broad-brimmed hat, bulky stuffed overalls, and a worker’s coat, she had mostly disguised her body. She stuffed her cheeks with cloth, covered her face in a thin layer of subtly lighter makeup, added some contour to change the shape of her jaw, and then used a glyph-set to disguise her eye color. Last, her fingers flashed with practiced ease as she wove a complex glyph-set, miniaturized it, and breathed power into it. Inspecting her work, she pressed it into her chest. The glyph-set would linger above her skin and somehow cause anyone who wasn’t protected by their own glyph tattoos or wasn’t unusually paranoid to simply ignore her.

The glyph-set did not work without the costume, though. As technology advanced, magic retreated. Gasoline powered combustion engines ran automobiles today, whereas four dozen years earlier, automobiles ran on glyphs. Magic faded as mundane efforts took their place and filled the minds of the public. But magic always ran on the cutting edge in society, a step ahead of the mundane.

Jeanne knelt, touched her forehead, mouth, and ear with her left hand, and pressed her other to her heart. Great Treb, hear my prayer. Mind be clear, words be righteous, hearing be true, heart be full. Guide my path this night as I seek the truth. Thy will be done, oh Treb.

Devotion to the divine mother paid, she rose and slipped out the main door, giving her destination to Marcel as she left. She headed to the end of the hall and down the servant’s stair. Her guards were not worried about her. After an incident in Cavadocia with the emperor’s assassins at a dinner party, Jeanne had a higher kill count than Hansa, formerly of the underground. She hoped to never catch up to Marcel, who had fought in multiple wars, first for Dashanda and then against them. The real challenge that night in Cavadocia had been dealing with the incident without breaking anything. The Head Commerce Chieftain did not have a sense of humor.

Chungrim was a safe country, almost as safe as Cavadocia, so she walked without concern across Chungpash, its capital. Two dozen minutes later, Jeanne stole a tool bag from a locker outside Chungpash University Hospital and slipped unnoticed into the building, despite the late hour. People carrying tools were barely noticeable, anyway. The desk attendant on call’s head lolled closer to sleep than awake. Jeanne’s disguise might have been unnecessary. She made a quick sleep glyph, breathed a bit of power into it, and tossed it at the attendant, sending her completely into sleep. Jeanne stepped behind the desk, looked through the room number book, and found her destination.

A few minutes later, she found the room, verified the man’s identity, and knelt outside, pretending to work on an electrical outlet on the wall in the near silence of the ward.

Twelve minutes later, her knees ached. No one had noticed her yet. No one but a few nurses had even gone in and out of the room. She also was no longer just pretending to work on the outlet, as she had found the hot and neutral were swapped and was now fixing it. Her father had seen that she and her siblings were trained in the fundamentals of not only academics but all the trades, from electrical and welding to plumbing and bricklaying. In all of them, slipshod work was inexcusable. She did love electrical systems. So much potential for violence.

Voices sounded in the room. One was a local nurse speaking Rimian with a Chungrimi accent. The other was the panicked voice of the patient. It was not in Rimian. Not in any language she had ever heard. Yet it felt vaguely familiar.

The nurse telephoned a healer in and they attempted to communicate with the patient. The patient replied to them with building panic, as evident by his rising pitch and increasingly rapid speech. Jeanne had glyph-set tattoos for every major language on Drachmar, and a few of the more obscure ones. This was not a standard language.

When she heard the healers make a phone call for a linguist, Jeanne waited, enduring the aching knees and the boring white paint. She poked idly at the repaired outlet, wondering how hard it would be to overload the system and start a fire. Not that she needed to start a fire, but Marcel had taught her to be ready to create a distraction at the drop of a hat.

She hoped that, as the largest hospital in any Rimian nation, the hospital had a good linguist on call, with tattoos of every language on Drachmar. When the linguist arrived an hour later, she listened for less than a minute and declared she had no idea what he was speaking. Jeanne swore under her breath and packed up the tool bag. The room emptied and Jeanne slipped in to try a few tricks of her own.

The man attempted to speak to Jeanne, but she just held her fist to her mouth, asking him for silence, and gave a sign from the expedition. He quieted. She studied the man. He looked like an ethnic Takian, with skin barely lighter than her own but with the classic Takian red hair of his Rimian cousins. Takians in their homelands were insular and notoriously closed to outsiders. Those who traveled were social and gregarious. All of them were highly superstitious by an outsider’s standards.

Taking a few deep breaths, Jeanne began producing a glyph-set of language in the shape of the old Takian Empire’s borders, before it split into the nations today, but still the boundaries of the common language of Takia. It took her several minutes, as it was one of the more complex glyph-sets known to eshtan-kind. Finally, it hung pale in the air in front of her, waiting for true power to do anything. She breathed enough power into it that it should sink into the man’s skin. Finally, she compressed it down until it was the size of her palm. She approached and showed it to the man, then pantomimed talking and pointed at him again. He nodded his head and breathed some of his own power into the glyph-set, enabling it for his own body.

She moved the white cotton blanket enough to expose his leg and looked closely at the man’s existing tattoos. Scars said he was a veteran of more than one battle, and simple defensive glyph-tattoos covered his skin, likely made by expensive glyph mages during the recent wars. Expected for one of the mercenaries she had hired.

She looked closer and saw something she had never seen before. His glyphs were vibrating. While subtle, it was a distinct effect she could see because of her sorcerous training.

Jeanne looked to the calf, where most people had at least one or two language glyph-sets if they traveled at all. He already had Cavadocian, Dashandan, Takian, and a few other major languages. No Rimian dialects, meaning he was likely a native to a Rimian nation, even if his ancestry was from further south. They all looked disjointed, the glyphs not in their usual compact state. She pressed the glyph-set to a blank spot on his leg and swore as it would not pass into his skin.

The man’s eyes matched the shock she felt. She had never felt so much resistance to a glyph. She held the glyph to her lips and breathed further power into it for nearly a minute. Enough power to negate the recipient of the tattoo from needing to provide any of the power from their own body for at least a few days.

The glyph-set vibrated as she pushed it into his leg. Adding a push from her other hand, the glyph-set sank into his skin, but she had to hold it in place to keep it from leaking back out.

Can you understand me now? she asked, hands vibrating.

Princess Jeanne? Is that you? he replied. Have I been cursed by Pash? Or Treb? Or a demon? Or all the demons?

There are no demons. Now, focus. What language were you speaking?

I have no idea, Highness. Everyone was speaking strangely when I was picked up by the spy balloon.

Jeanne needed a report from that balloon. It would probably arrive by the time she returned to the hotel.

What happened?

They destroyed us, he said. We had no chance. Highness, my skin burns where you’re pressing.

Then speak faster, she said, her own hand burning from holding the glyph-set in place.

Highness, I do not know. We lost our ships the first night when the water we rode on vanished. We fell from the sky! Then we camped and flaming arrows appeared all around us. Our machine guns were no use, and our sorcerers fell before the battle started. I ran but must have been knocked out. When I woke in a crack in the ground, I tried to escape. I found a glowing staff…

He groaned audibly and Jeanne felt the glyphs unraveling. She removed her hand and allowed the glyph-set to dissipate safely, a bright flash of light filling the air.

The man spoke in relief, but not in Chungrimi or any language Jeanne knew. Jeanne leaned close and saw hundreds of tiny glyphs swarming about the spot she’d been pushing. She tapped her eyebrow and activated a microscope glyph-set which appeared in a burst of glowing lenses in front of her eye.

Those were dragon language glyphs. She could read them, even if she had never learned to speak the dead language.

The sounds of the nurse returning precluded any further study.

I’m sorry. She deactivated the microscope glyphs, then turned and attempted to leave.

What are you doing? the nurse said, entering the room as Jeanne approached the doorway.

Jeanne ducked her head, held up the tool bag and said in her best bass voice, Traced the electrical issue into here. Fixed it.

The nurse looked at Jeanne with narrowed eyes. What was the issue?

Hot and neutral were swapped, Jeanne replied. She glanced at the nurse’s face. A lot of glyphs. This woman might see past the magical elements of her disguise. Would she also see past the mundane parts?

Is that bad? I can’t believe it took this long to get someone from maintenance to fix it. And in the middle of the night! The nurse continued to rant, but walked past Jeanne into the room and began puttering about the patient.

Jeanne mumbled her agreement and then headed out the door, not looking back.

She returned the tool bag and crossed town, slipping unnoticed back into her hotel room. Only her guard Marcel acknowledged her, and that only because of his glyph tattoos. He’d made a few simple ones himself, but glyph mages over his dodecades supplied most of them, with notable additions by Jeanne herself. She excelled at dangerous glyphs.

Jeanne, Lost Princess of Tavargin, felt the bitter taste of failure and fought to keep her emotions neutral. Bitterness still swelled, and she repressed it by letting her anger and frustration flare. Better angry than dead.

She stared at the Dashandan-style decorations of the room. The Intercontinental had been built in the Dashandan style during the war, with right angles and simple geometric patterns everywhere. She loathed each wall panel and chandelier. She cursed the emperor, wishing his death. She cursed the Cavadocians for dropping an atomic bomb on Trebtav. She cursed her decision to not go on the expedition herself. That expedition had been armed to the teeth with three hundred of the most dangerous mercenaries money could buy and a pair of sorcerers that claimed to rival the ancients in power. Clearly that was false.

And now? One common soldier had returned and was babbling like a lunatic in the ancient language of dragons.

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This is Radio Chungrim, bringing you an hour of enlightenment. Tonight, we will play a recording of a tribute concert from two months ago by the Chungpash City Orchestra in honor of the ongoing conflict in Tavargin. The concert was a resounding success, raising nearly four hundred thousand kontar for the orphans and widows’ funds overseen by the Lost Princess of Tavargin herself. And stay tuned next hour for a Cavadocian drum performance recorded three months ago in Tartash.

Tartash, Capitol of Cavadocia

Xavier Ikantis listened to the arbiter with little interest. Was he even present, or was this a dream? Arbiters were normally at least interesting to him, if only for the interesting languages. Xavier was a linguist, polyglot, and senior peace chieftain. He had negotiated nearly three dozen international business mergers, about a dozen and a half cease fires, a dozen peace treaties, and even helped resolve a hostage situation he had found himself in on the inaugural commercial flight from Cavadocia to Barabarta.

Why hadn’t he been able to negotiate a successful continuance for his marriage?

Sitting in his fine but rumpled Tavarkian robes in the justice chamber tent, he listened as Arbiter Sinta agreed to activate the divorce decree. Divorce had been an option for women in the greatest and most enlightened nation on Drachmar, his homeland of Cavadocia, since his own ancestor overthrew the empire and established the republic. It was their protection against domineering husbands. But only in recent years had they been allowed to divorce for no cause. And the only cause here was that his now former wife was going to marry a famous actor and refugee from Tavargin.

You’re just plain too boring, she had said to him. You’d rather stay home than go to the parties we’re invited to.

Besides, she had said she didn’t love Xavier, anyway. Why would she stay with someone she didn’t respect and was a laughingstock in her world when she could have someone with real ambition to move up in fame?

His life was a sham. He had too much hurt from his past to exert himself to join her set. It was enough to dim the glow of his pale purple eyes.

Arbiter Sinta stood and held his hands in front of him, displaying a glyph-set he had likely prepared before the hearing. This complex of a glyph-set took time. In fact, he’d probably had a glyph clerk make it, as Arbiter Sinta had about as much talent with glyphs as Xavier did with singing. None.

Arise and breathe into the decree. Arbiter Sinta looked from him to his soon to be former wife, giving Xavier a look of pity, further demoralizing Xavier. He did not want pity from his co-workers, even if the co-worker was a local arbiter and not an international hotshot peace chieftain.

They stood and approached. As was the law, each inspected the glyph-set to verify there were no mistakes. They then breathed their power. This was a significant undertaking to match the significance of the bond breaking, so they each had to breathe into it for nearly a minute. Lung control sufficient for contracts was taught from an early age to everyone, but only those with magical talents had to learn to endure for multiple minutes. His soon to be former wife had no magical gifts, but all eshtan had enough magical ability for a contract.

They looked at each other one last time as the glyph-set flashed. He felt the marriage tattoo glyphs on his hands and fingers flash in return and dissolve, as well as the older bracelet of glyphs around his wrist binding their friendship.

For a fraction of a heartbeat, he saw through her eyes as the breaking of the magical bonds rebounded. He saw himself, but so much worse. His rumpled robes became somehow tattered. His dark blue skin became pale and sickly. His tapered ears somehow sagged. His braids greyed. His face aged thirty years. He wondered what she saw in his eyes.

Her presence via the friendship bond snapped out of his awareness. A minor sensation even in a strong friendship, it had still been present during their separation and had been noticeable if he was still. The disgust and annoyance the bond had