I. The Prisoner
In the depths of the Prison of Elders, Eramis is the Kell of No House.
Outside, she is the firebrand of House Devils, the archfiend of Twilight Gap, the Shipstealer.
But here, she has no house. Here, she reigns all on her own.
In the arena, where Eliksni runts and leaderless Cabal challenge her, she rules with a broken Arc spear for a scepter. It's the strongest weapon they'll give her, and she bends it to her will.
No matter how many times the Ether-fat guards try to send her to her death in that arena, she triumphs. She kills their champions; watches the Ether hiss from their masks. Watches the gel leak out of their suits. She begins to cherish the smell of a good fight. Blood. Sweat. Ether. Fear.
She imagines that one day, a banner will be emblazoned with a broken spear and an inverted crown.
House of Anarchy. House of Riot. House of Eramis.
House of Nothing.
When there is only one Kell, there is no need for houses.
Today, she fights a Centurion of the broken Red Legion. Money changes hands. His pauldrons are scuffed with the memory of battle, and he's been given a War Hammer. He raises it to cheers and peacocks for the crowd.
Eramis tosses her broken spear between her hands, waiting. Two glowing, pinpoint eyes focus on her as the Centurion turns.
He swings the hammer at her, and she rolls out of the way. He swings it again, but she's behind him now and out of his sight line. Like a creature searching for a fly on its back, he struggles to find her. She jams the sparking head of her Arc spear into a notch in his armor and uses the leverage to vault herself onto his shoulder.
He rages like a niirsai beast, all fury and stupidity, and nearly throws her from his shoulders. She tries to pull her spear free, but his giant hand knocks her senseless for a moment. The spear releases at the last minute; she grabs the top. Arc energy bites her palm as she jams the tip of the blade under the edge of his helmet and into his neck.
He screams.
Before he falls, she leaps off and lands on her feet. The crowd never cheers for her. Instead, they whisper.
No prison will hold Eramiskel, they say. Eramiskel is a devil greater than the Devils themselves.
Eramiskel does not know how to lose.
II. The Wolf
The neighboring cell holds a Wolf.
She ignores him at first. He's too greedy for her acknowledgement. Sometimes, he reminds her of the needy Dregs that followed her old Kell like carrion birds, squawking for attention and squabbling over his kills.
What the Eliksni have lost, more than anything else, is dignity.
Eventually, the Wolf learns to intrigue her. He calls himself Praksis, and he has ideas. But he's young. He thinks every idea he conceives of is the first and best of its kind. She suspects he's never had to report directly to a Kell.
He likes to talk about machines—building them and bending them to his will. He has a mad idea about recapturing the Great Machine, binding it in Arc wire, and making it give them its power. He's been listening to the stories about Ghaul.
She lets him talk, and she asks him questions. Every question is a whetstone. Every conversation is a test, and it will only take one failure to lose her interest.
"The Great Machine made the Eliksni great," she says. "Until it left us. When it did, we were weaker than when it arrived. Why do you seek its touch again?"
"To return us to that strength," he says. His voice is muffled through the wall between them, but the arrogance comes through clear.
"How can you build strength on a foundation of weakness?" she asks. Each word is a needle. Each word should sting him with revelation.
He remains silent.
"Did the Great Machine make the Eliksni strong, or did it draw out the strength within us?" she asks.
Again, silence.
She tilts her head back, looking at the dark ceiling of her cell. "Reliance is the greatest weakness. Remember that. You are playing with a child's stacking spheres."
He's silent so long that she begins to wonder if he was worth her time. Then, he says, "I will create new spheres."
She closes her eyes and smiles.
III. The Traitor
On the day of the prison break, Eramis is nursing a gut wound.
It's not fatal, or at least she doesn't think so. She won the match in the arena, but not before an arrogant Captain drove a Sword into her side. It cut through her Devil robes and left a bloom of blood that reminds her of the water flowers on Riis. Athrys loved water flowers.
She's dozing when Variks arrives at her cell.
"Eramis."
She opens her eyes and then narrows them immediately. Despite the wound, she stands—too quick, she gets dizzy—and steps toward the cell door.
"Traitor," she says in greeting.
Variks flinches. He shakes his head, lowers his eyes. Even with the door between them, she can see his fear. It buoys her.
"There is change to come," he says quietly in Eliksni and then looks over his shoulder. His eyes dart back and forth, fearful, suspicious. He switches suddenly to the clumsy common language of the Guardians.
"Change Variks will make, yes? Change Variks will lead. But Variks, too, will need a leader…"
Eramis laughs. "You wish to make me your prisoner-Kell?"
"No," Variks cringes. "Variks wishes—"
"I do not care what you wish, Variks the 'loyal'," she says. There are Eliksni who change in the shadow of prison bars. They fall. They shrink. But Eramis has grown. She must show Variks that even with this steel between them, he is smaller. He is still a Dreg pretending to be a vandal. "If there is justice in this world, one day, I will dock your last two arms and leave you for dead."
Something in Variks's eyes hardens. They share a tense silence. Finally, he says, in a voice as cold as Ether, "Do not say that Variks did not try to help."
He leaves, and Eramis settles herself again on the floor of her cell.
Later that day, an alarm sounds. The warden projects a message in Variks's voice. The doors of her cell open, unprompted, as frenzied Eliksni and Cabal charge through the prison, thirsting for freedom.
IV. The Visionary
In the first several months of her freedom, Eramis curses Misraaks the Forsaken.
He is a wish-to-be Kell, a captured traitor, a four-armed Dreg cringing before a false queen, playing pretend among the enemies of the Eliksni.
And worst of all, the most humiliating: he has beaten Eramis.
She has failed to acquire the SIVA weapon, failed to shame the Guardians, failed to reignite the fires of the House of Devils. Her failure haunts her.
Now she sits in the bridge of her stolen Ketch, straight-spined, staring. Staring at some distant point that she has long passed, one she can never return to.
Atraks, youngest of her council, watches her from across the room. She closes the gap between them.
"My Kell," she says. She has a voice like a child.
Eramis is quiet for a beat longer than she needs to be. Finally, she says, "You are too young to remember the old house. What the Devils were before."
Atraks bows her head out of respect.
"This failure has no sting for you," Eramis bites, bitter.
Atraks keeps her head bowed. Then, slowly, she raises it. Her eyes dart over Eramis's face, searching. "I am too young to remember," she agrees. "But my eyes are clear. I can see what the Devils will be."
Eramis opens her mouth to remind Atraks of her place, and then pauses.
Something in her mind has unlocked.
She stands to her full, towering height, stretches her second set of arms.
"No," she says. Clarity has descended on her like a Riis rain shower. "The Devils are nothing."
She begins to walk out of the room, purpose in her step, fire reignited in her belly. "The Devils are dead."
House of Anarchy. House of Ruin.
House of Eramis.
"We must become something new."
V. The Nightmare
As she dissolves the old bonds of House of Devils, Eramis is haunted by shadowed dreams. In one, she relives Twilight Gap.
She lunges, driving a sword into the belly of a Guardian-soldier, grunting as they yell and crumple forward. Another Guardian rushes at her head-on before she has time to yank the Sword free. But she hears the sound of a Shock Rifle firing behind her… and leans abruptly to the right as the shot flies by and hits the Guardian before her with full force.
She looks back to see Kridis, shimmering with the purple glow of the Void as her Servitor shields her. Kridis tips her head in acknowledgement of Eramis and turns to fire the rifle into another cluster of Guardians.
Eramis rips her Sword free and forges ahead. They are closing in on the city now. Guardians are falling all around her.
They are so close.
Fast, heavy footfalls come up behind her—Phylaks, ferocious and bloodthirsty, shouts to Eramis as she attacks a towering, broad-shouldered Guardian. Eramis ducks and slides out of the way. As Phylaks makes contact with the Guardian's head, Eramis slashes the beast across his side with her Sword. He loses his balance, and she kicks his hip, tipping him toward Phylaks.
In these days, Phylaks almost always fights with her bare hands. She breaks his neck.
Eramis pushes forward.
They are so close…
A ferocious laugh erupts to her right, and then the thundering blast of a Scorch Cannon. Taniks, a blur of whirring machinery, creates explosions of earth and flesh and blood all around them. He keeps laughing.
So close.
But then… before her, a blinding flash of gold. She sees Eliksni burst into flame and ash around her as a gun fires one shot after another. Pools of shining light are the only trace of the victims. The Guardian wielding the gun is like a tiny sun.
Another shot. Kridis's Servitor. Another—Kridis herself. Eramis remembers losing, but she does not remember this. Doesn't remember seeing Phylaks evaporate into blowing ash. Doesn't remember the shot that hits her in the chest, or the burning fire that explodes through her limbs, or her own scream…
She wakes with a jolt, breathless.