The Bone Rattlers (Heat #1)

[Vin]

Saoirse the Unbound
Rattlesnake
Slightly above adolescent.

[spoiler]There was a time in her youth where the bite of the northern Whitelands wouldn't have bothered Lady Katalina Feron, but ages scouring the world beyond her home as Chief Inquisitor of the Knights of the Claw gave her a silent regard for all things warm. Castle Blackspear was one such place. Built on the coastline near the mountains bordering the Wastes, the ancient castle was like a flame to those wandering the cold dark. Those within, however, knew a different truth. 

"Take me to her," Katalina told the castle knights on her arrival. "I've a message from Kastor."

The vixen was led beneath the castle catacombs where crackling braziers hung from every ceiling and the hot, dry air grew trapped within narrow caverns. Along each wall, mewling wretches pulled against shackles, begging not to be taken. Katalina selected one, a stoat who abandoned his post, and proceeded with the coward in tow.

The knights halted as a heavy stone gate marked the end of their descent- a name carved above the threshold: Saoirse. One passed Katalina a manifest and she flipped through the pages.

"She's not eating?"

"She heard you were coming."

"Typical. Let me in."

The gate rose and Katalina shoved her prisoner forward. The stoat quivered against the wall, muttering hopeless prayers as he gaped at the rattlesnake in the center of the cell. His fear turned to confusion as he realized that it was laid on its back- completely dead.

Katalina's eyes rolled.

"Really, Saoirse? Is this how you behave? Starving yourself? Playing dead? These childish games won't rid you of me. Get up. You look ridiculous."

When she didn't stir, Katalina's paw rested on her sword. "And look at your nest!" Tubes of snakeskin littered the floor. "I swear, you don't even try."

Nothing.

A different tact then.

"Fine. Continue your games. But, listen well," Katalina growled. "We are at war, Saoirse. The Whitelands crumbles under an impossible weight and we move to claim new land. Warm land. But we are not alone. The fools in the South are set to march too. No doubt we will meet. It's time. Time to prove yourself to Kastor, and do what you were born-"

"Born? That'sss what you sssay?" Life flourished in Saoirse's coils as her body twisted upright, her hiss like burning fire as she dwarfed the vixen with her full height. "You who sssstole me assss an egg?"

Saoirse's fangs dripped venom but she didn't dare strike. A jagged scar tracing up her snout and a week without warmth had been enough to keep her from trying again.

Frustrated, she sank within her scales. "You bore me with information I already know. I'm aware the Whitelandsss fallsss. I've heard it in the Sssong and, well... I don't care. I'm not your weapon to wield. Ssso go away."

"Bloody child. You would ignore your duty!"

"Your duty."

"Do as you're told!"

"Make me." Saoirse's tail twitched. "You may control me here, but you realize if you pull me from thisss freezing hell that there'sss nothing keeping me bound to the Whitelandsss. Nor to you."

"You must."

"I will not."

"If you don't help us, we WILL fail!"

A smile crept up Saoirse's maw. "Finally. Honesssty!"

Defeated, Katalina scowled. "I've spoken with three diviners now and they hear the same song. I don't know why, but without you, we will fail. Such is cruel fate."

"Cruel indeed." Saoirse's tongue flickered from her mouth as she noticed finally, the third creature in the room. "But, I sssuppossse. Sssince you ssseem ssso desssperate."

"You suppose?"

"Yesss, I'll lend you my power, my venom, my giftsss, and be sssteered in the direction I'm pointed. But, when I'm done crushing these creaturesss, when their leadersss are dead and they cower in terror- you will take me back to the land you pilfered me from and return the life you ssstole."

Katalina stepped aside as Saoirse slithered past, a flick of the serpent's tail removing the stoat from the wall behind her. "Please. The life I took you from is no different than this."

"Perhapsss, but at leassst it would have been mine."

With a single shake of her tail, the snake's symphony began. She enveloped the stoat completely, coils rippling as she stole music from his lungs. An arm broke first, the beast's cry cut short as Saoirse pulled closer to listen. Next went a femur. It gave a hallowed ring as her scales gave it purchase. Limb by limb, Saoirse summoned the Song from the poor creature's body, her shaking tail carrying them to each new crack, each new movement, until finally, one last breath brought crescendo.

Saoirse devoured the beast and laughed.

"What's so funny? What did you hear?"

"It'sss ironic isss all," Saoirse answered. "The enemy. They call him Chainbreaker."[/spoiler]

Augur Wren
Mink
43 seasons

[spoiler]The great slate fang of Chandler's Razor tore the dark grey sky in two. Nestled deep in the shadow at its base, the fortress of Chandler's Light stood silent.

Ahead of the rest of the scout group, Augur Wren picked her way over the three bodies in front of the open gate. Her apprentice, and his most impressionable scout friends. She breathed, first shallow then deep, then spoke.

"It's safe now. Strip them of their gear, then prepare them for their last rites."

Camp had been a rushed, horrified affair. Beasts had whispered and told ghost stories, made all the more unnerving by the knowledge that three dead lay not a hundred paces away. Even so, all had agreed that Ralkan, the apprentice Rattler, had been far more trouble than he was worth. After the others had fallen asleep, Remien had asked very carefully and very quietly if she had known that he would die opening the gate, and Augur Wren had not answered.

But now her scouts tindered lanterns awake as they bore in, and they brought illumination back to Chandler's Light. Beneath the inner canopies of the city, clusters of otherwise young and healthy beasts seemed to be making shelter everywhere they could, in empty market stalls and ransacked scout equipment lockers and empty ice-walker gear bays, all desperately huddling round long-guttered candle stumps in clumsy heaps of burned-down tallow.

All frozen in place.

"Poor souls must have been terrified. Look, sir. They even tried their own bone-rattling in the end."

One of her scouts pointed to a few knucklebones, where they had fallen in tallow.

Augur Wren grunted. She hadn't read from bone in fifteen seasons. They were unwieldy, ominous things that yielded all fear and no subtlety.

The longhouse squatted in the far corner of the town square. The great door hung open, cracked apart by some twined pressure of cold and wood and metal. A message was daubed in near-black on the wall, smeared at some point but still legible.

A lantern casts its light only when a candle burns within.

She squeezed her way through the ruptures in the door and took in the contents of the longhouse. Two dozen beasts sat at the Duke's table, all frozen where they sat. Every single one of them was clad in thick white pelt, the first pick of ice-walker bounties across the seasons. The table itself was a mess of tallow and candle stumps, dirty plates scattered wherever they would fit.

Off to one side of the room, two great vats beneath chimney structures designed to lead through a small maze of canopies and wooden slats to the outside. Chimney structures that, judging by the stink being kicked up by whatever tiny parts of the scene were being thawed by her scouts' meager lanterns, had been blocked for some time.

"I wouldn't do that if I were you," she said. One of her scouts recoiled from the stirring stick he had been about to touch.

From the Duke's throne, a thick-furred stark white hare stared at her with sharded eyes.

"Sir, this one's wearing a different uniform. Looks like a Staid Hearth sentry." Another scout, hunkered over a frozen stoat.

"Hmm." She stared the Duke's corpse down. "Came to you for help, did they?"

"Evidence of a fight, sir." Another scout, by a floored mink in a puddle of frozen blood. "This one's Staid Hearth as well, I'd guess. Never heard of any minks in Chandler's. Oh, sorry sir."

"Not to worry. So, why strike them down?" She placed a clawtip on the Duke's forehead, tipped him gently from side to side as she thought. "I wonder. The ice-walker pens are empty, but there's not a beast here who's died of starvation - and you've an awful lot of tallow to paw for a place that hasn't seen a harvest in two seasons. Did Staid Hearth get angry, hmm? When they found out what you had done to the elderly, and the infirm?"

"I've found the recordkeeper." Remien called from a dark corner. "We'll not get any answers from them. Chained to their chair, sir. Doused in tallow and-"

"Burned." She finished his sentence. "Did they object, Your Eminence? Did you make an example of them? Fur and fat do wick so much better than you'd think, don't they?"

She pushed the Duke over and turned away. There was a loud crack as he hit the ground.

"Take whatever you like from the noblebeasts - they have nice warm coats, if any of you are lacking - and everything we can make use of on the march home. Bring the Staid Hearth beasts outside for their last rites. The rest of this place is no longer of Kastor. We leave it to the white."[/spoiler]

Gauta Firstflame
Fisher
Late Thirties

[spoiler]"Do you see this, dearest?" asked Gauta as her fluffy tail twitched, her sleek body grounded to a halt and the bones rattled one last time, dancing with the smoke filtering through holes from the bowl. "A different song!"

"I have my doubts, mother." Bonn shook his head. "Using fires for divining? I do not see the point in this."

Gauta turned to the beast she had raised for fifteen seasons. With the firelight below the bowl, the cave was illuminated with the faces of the many Bone Rattlers who had walked so she could run. Some of the drawings were lifelike - the fisher could feel her son's humorous gaze atop the wall - while others have been whittled away by the ravages of time, or, like Gauta's, had been poorly drawn. Rellan remarked that her pitch-black face looked like some sort of ex-edible.

Thankfully, having to create self-portraits was the worst portion of her duties, being the only part her mate had failed to teach her. She knew which bones were to go into the bowls first, how quickly her limbs needed to sway, and when to end the long dance. When to stop all motions and listen to the voice that blended past, present and future into a single melody - The Song Of All That Lives. One world, one song, one fate.

Or so Gauta thought before the flame called to her.

"Do you not hear, son?" The older fisher's tail began to swing madly. "Shaking the bones oneself is not reliable in the slightest. Every group of Rattlers has a different way of doing so, but there is only one true future! There must be some constant holding all the different strands of destiny together, I am sure of it!"

"And you think that constant is fire?" asked Bonn. "The same fire that consumed our woods just days ago?"

"There is no need to remind me. I was there!" Gauta threw up her paws in exasperation. "Fire has taken trees and grass and converted them into dead earth and deader ashes, but it is from these where new life grows! I heard the flames, its shouts, its shrieks, its screams! Never before have I felt so alive!"

A flash of alarm surged onto Bonn's eyes. "Mother, are you well?"

"Look around you, Bonn!" Immersed in her ecstasy, the senior Rattler let go of the bowl, sending the bones spinning around the cave-floor. "It is no to the flame this world shall meet its end! It's something else! It rises and consumes all that is in its way! Earth, plants, beasts-"

"Gauta!" Rough paws shook the fisher away from her trance. "Stop this at once!"

The fisher's eyes snapped shut, and a few seconds passed before they opened again, gazing upon another fisher. Unlike Bonn and his mother, his father's fur was nut-brown, and his stern grey eyes stared right through her.

"Rellan," Gauta muttered. "You're back."

"I heard all about you, Gauta," said the beast she called her mate. "You and your ramblings about destructive, chaotic fire. Chaos is something that's to be extinguished, not kindled!"

"You can't kill chaos. Just because you're a decade older than I-"

"I taught you everything you needed to know, Gauta!" shouted the old fisher as he bent down, gathering bone after bone from the ground. Bonn rushed to help his father, but he was quickly waved away.

"I know."

"And you taught me all you knew as well." Rellan took a deep breath. "We've been together forever, through hot and cold. Together we laughed when our kits were born and together we cried when the plague took them. Why abandon us? Why chase a phantom flame?"

"You will never understand the summons. The calling's more than just a hope or dream, more than any hunger or thirst." Gauta's fearful eyes turned to her mate and kit. "I have heard tales from the citybeasts who visit us. Whispers of ruination, of a slowly encroaching tide, of a mass of water that nobeast alive can stop. Only the flame can lead us away from it, and it calls me away from home. It calls me towards the south."

Bonn's jaw hung away from the rest of his head as his mind struggled to form a response, but a paw on his head put that process to a halt.

"And then what?" Rellan asked, his brows furrowing. "You can struggle as hard as you like, but you can't fight against the Song. Forget about your fires, we provide guidance! Stay here, and do your duty while we do ours."

"Mother!" Bonn finally cried out. "Please don't leave us..."

"No," spoke Gauta Firstflame as she turned away and took the first of many steps away from home. "Worry about yourself, dearest. My fate lies elsewhere."[/spoiler]