Midnight Wardens Chapter 1 (WIP) (Patreon)

** I've wanted to write a magic school story for a while, and Godking was going to be that but it was too difficult to write. This is attempt number 2. Hope it is interesting and you enjoy it, I'll release chapter 2 soonish and yeah. We'll see? Let me know what you think :D. Note, this isn't a trans story, jsut gay. Always gay. **

So cold, I was so cold. Snow had made its way into every fold and crevice of my once expensive cloak, making it good for nothing more than a wind break.

I tried to shake some of it loose, but it may as well have been a part of the garment now, the dust from the road up to the mountains combining with the ice to form a filthy carapace of rime around my shoulders.

The books I had meticulously read and the rumours I had memorised told of the snows up here. Historians mused that the Wardens had timed their induction ceremony for the winter solstice on purpose, dusty passages positing that it was to keep any common child from running away to join them. Wizened old men whispered in taverns of the folk that had died trying to make it into the valley of the Godsreach Academy. A few more drinks and they’d spin tales of the folly of those like me. Children on the cusp of adulthood, succumbing to the everfrost of these lands, their souls doomed to haunt the pass until the end of time.

Taking another step, my heart lurched into my throat as something beneath the snow caught my foot and I toppled face first into the snow. Any other day, with a fire just a few yards away inside my parents’ expansive estate manor, falling into the soft freshly fallen snow would have been a pleasant experience. Out here, though? It was a potential death sentence.

A fall like this would sap away more of my precious body heat. If I found myself too weary to get up? Well, my corpse would probably never be found. The snow in this pass was unending, too high to ever really melt.

My arms shook like saplings in a storm as I pushed myself to my feet, brushing snow off myself as I went.

Was I going to die in this blizzard? It was only just rolling in and already I could feel my strength waning, each step harder than the last, sapping more warmth from my bones as fresh snow pressed against my leather breeches.

Still, I was stronger than this! If I could sit through my mother’s pointless lectures about the web of deals and bargains between the merchant families, I could get through a depths-cursed blizzard.

No sooner had my determination surged than a sharp gust of wind tore my feet out from under me, leaving me sprawled on my back in the snow. My breath hissed through my teeth as helpless frustration dipped alarmingly towards despair. The gods didn't want me, that's what this had to be.

At least the fall had been soft. I’d be comfortable while I died. Not really though, because I was bloody freezing.

“Come on Elyda,” I whimpered, failing miserably to motivate myself. If anything, my high, expertly shaped voice just sounded pitiful against the howling wind.

Just like the rest of me, that voice had been made to order, shaped and created to be the perfect voice for the wife of some influential man. That is no metaphor either, my mother was barren, and after countless attempts, my father had paid to have me made instead.

A Saphilim, that’s what I was. An artificial human. I’d researched the process thoroughly, sneaking out in secret to visit the grand library of Dawnbridge with its expansive shelves of dusty, ancient tomes.

A tiny sliver of soul from each of my parents, so fine that neither felt its loss, combined with spellwork and a hundred different powders, metals, and the heartwood of a depthsthorn tree. All of it had created a child, designed to the specifications of my parents then left in their care. Medicinals were fed to my mother in order to have her produce milk, and after that it were as though she had birthed me herself.

Except, that was actually far from the truth. Although I was only fifteen years old, I would never be able to gain much more visible muscle than was already on my thin frame, along with a myriad other small details of physiology that would haunt me for the rest of my life. I would always appear as the perfect little wife, beautiful and sweet of figure. Gods, I hated it.

My dislike was not because of those aspects in and of themselves, but rather the way others treated me for it. I was viewed more as an object than a living thing, stuffed into expensive dresses, handed wine, and told to shut up.

But I wasn’t just some decoration! I wasn’t damn it, I was me, I was Elyda!

I pushed fiercely at the snow beneath me until my numbed hands made contact with the ground and thrust myself up and wobbled back onto my feet.

Something glittered through the snow, an orange glow that had hope sparking to life within me. Was someone out there? I’d even take death by bandits over dying by cold.

“Hello?” I called, wincing at the croak that came out from between my lips. My second call was more successful, but the wind tore it away regardless. I’d have to get there myself.

No response came from the mysterious glow, but I made for it anyway, pushing through the snow even as it piled up around me. If I didn’t make it through the pass soon I’d be snowed in, heart still beating or no.

The blizzard being as dense as it was, I was stumbling into shelter before I understood that I’d reached safety. I blinked and turned to stare around at the old rock walls, rough at the top where an ancient landslide had severed a mighty slab of stone from the mountainside. At the base though, it was smooth, the backs of generations of Warden hopefuls having pressed against it seeking shelter just as I was.

The orange glow had been that of a campfire as it swayed and flickered in the anemic gusts that made it in. Six people sat around it, peering up at me with various states of wariness. Two were grizzled fighters, old but still with strength in their limbs, one man and one woman. The other four were children, of the same age as me. I pulled my cowl tighter about my face as their stares caused a different sort of ice to form in my gut.

“What do you want?” the woman growled, hand on the hilt of her sword.

I gulped, trying to work up enough saliva to speak. “Warmth,” I murmured, shuddering under the weight of the chill that had seeped into my bones.

At the sound of my high voice and apparent helplessness, she eased back against the rock and ushered me in with a wave. “Where is your escort, girl?”

Right. Children given over to the Wardens willingly by their parents were usually assigned an escort to get them through the pass.

“Got none,” I mumbled, huddling in close to the fire beside one of the other kids, a girl I think. I wasn’t paying too much attention to anything but that sweet sweet fire.

Guess I should stop calling myself and others my age children though, there was a reason it was this age group that found their way into the Warden’s care. Old enough to be married off for political gain, old enough to die for political gain, old enough to join the Wardens. I’d be a woman soon, by that metric at least, as would the girl next to me and the others about the fire.

Except I was crafted, and not just crafted, but an exceedingly aberrant one at that. My hand twitched up to my hood, making sure my distinctly inhuman ears were safely hidden. It’s not like being crafted was a bad thing, but we were so new, normal humans didn’t know what to make of us. Best to keep my abnormalities to myself for now.

That is, if my damned hair didn’t float free and give me away! My fiddling with the hood had caused a strand of auburn hair to float free. Urgently, I shoved it back into my hood before my new companions realised that it had no respect for the laws of up and down. Of all the things I’d forgotten back at my parent’s manor, it had to be my weighted hairties.

“Ah, a stray,” the grizzled old veteran said, giving me a knowing smile. “Not the first of your type I’ve seen in this pass. Glad you’re still warm, unlike some of the others. Let’s make sure you stay that way, eh?”

“You ran away to join the Wardens? Why?” the girl next to me asked. “Being a Warden is pretty dangerous and uh… well, you are very small. I’d have stayed with my ma if she… you know...”

I turned to get a look at her now that I was warm enough to think and found my neck craning upwards. She was definitely my age, but even sitting she was taller than me by half a head. I found myself experiencing a touch of jealousy over her build. She looked like she could run and fight alongside any boy our age, possibly even come out ahead.

Meeting her eyes warily, I sized up what I found behind them. There was sadness there, and a gentle kindness, along with a street rat’s cunning. I probably wasn’t far off with that guess either, it was usually the poorest of the empire who sent their children off to the Wardens, unable to feed the increasing appetite of adolescence.

Abruptly, my focus shifted and I found myself not looking at the person behind the eyes, but rather at their colour, warm and brown like milk chocolate. Her pupils were blown wide as she searched my face with a cautious smile.

“You’re pretty,” she said with a gentle grin. “That cloak is real nice too, except the mud of course.”

I whipped my gaze back to the fire and tugged my hood closer about my face. Everyone always said that. Beautiful, pretty, gorgeous… that’s all I was to them, a painting to be admired. Fuck that. I scowled down at the embers and vowed to ignore the girl on principle, no matter how kind the look in her eyes had been. I was done being pretty.

“I’m joining because my da reckons it’ll be a better life than going down into the mines with the rest of the boys from Anor,” one of the others spoke up, a boy this time. “He reckons the mines’ll dry up afore long.”

“That’s just a rumour,” the older man grunted, breaking his silence. “There’s still plenty of iron in the kraetchers boy, and it’s best you not be spreadin’ dangerous talk like that.”

The chatter continued on after that, but I stopped paying any attention. The boy was right though. Anor was one of many mining villages in the kraetcher mountains, an offshoot of the same range we were in now, and like all settlements of its type, it lived or died by the amount of ore it could produce.

My family owned a mine in another village further along the range and part of the reason I was being married off was to secure a future source of iron for our ironworkers when the supply ran out.

Not that any of that mattered anymore, not my family, not the rapidly approaching death of their old home. We’d all be Wardens in training soon, each of us honed into a weapon to keep the surface safe from the demons that dwelled below. The crazy thing was that… I was excited for it, for the relative freedom that my new life would bring.

A smile tugged at my lips for the first time in a long time. Freedom.

Well… relatively speaking.