Witness

::: subchapter Adwyn knew it was mistaken, but sense was sense. The schizon-clad drake lighted down on the granite hall like the pupil of Gwymr/Frina. One glance was spared to the male assistant barring the door. Then the adviser scanned the four guards watching. He smirked, and strode right up to the assistant. "I must speak with Mlaen." The words came piercing like light, and his studied glare shone upon the assistant. The other drake could have flinched. He swallowed and said, "She went out looking for you." He didn't mean Mlaen. "A shame. Yet not my concern." He took a step. "She's at the Berwem gate⁠ ⁠---⁠ thought you might fly that way." Adwyn glanced at a guard. "They have mirrors. Tell her to come back." He took another step. "Or don't. Wait until I leave." The assistant still stood in front of the door, albeit with a coiled tail and dew that could have been spicier. He asked, "Where have you been?" "Can I not fly out to talk to a friend?" "You⁠ ⁠---" He stopped to collect himself. "You were summoned by an Inquirer, and you refused to let us accompany you!" The smaller orange drake glanced away. "Something is up." "Precisely why I must see Mlaen. Surely you aren't holding that up?" "She'd going to bite you when she gets back." But he stepped aside. Adwyn slinked his way down the twisting ramp, and paused frowning in the lobby. He could have kept straight, gone down to the sleepless red wiver. He went right, down the same corridor from earlier. Past the threshold of the Dyfnderi's room, he was pulling down a pycnofiber curtain, and covering the doorway. It would stop no one; yet his assistants were not (to his surprise) foreign to politeness. When Adwyn lay down, one lamp shone in this dim room, the one sitting on his desk. He stared into it, and reflected. The scarlet drake had always been a chimerical hope. Adwyn'd always known he was somewhat older and foreign, and that was if he'd even been interested at all, at all. But they had complimented each other finely. And for Adwyn there had always been one more matter, on other thing to address, which kept him from seeing how bright it could shine. Kept him from ever asking. Would it have been better to lose hope earlier, or later? Or never? Adwyn sighed. There were clearer ways to deal with this⁠ ⁠---⁠ that old king had convinced him into at least some time in a monastery. But to just accept it, to acknowledge what couldn't be denied, to move past? Adwyn couldn't tell you it wouldn't work. Couldn't tell you some half of him didn't want it. Logic, rationality, philosophy, the disciplines of order and sundry, they all had come as easy to him as everything else. And yet. Still there lingered some succulent complexity, some verity that dwelt in his feeling that he wouldn't release so simply. He liked the scarlet drake, fancied him. But Adwyn didn't know what he would do about the feeling⁠ ⁠---⁠ but mere acceptance, stoic forgetfulness, seemed too abject. And just as it had been with expressing his feelings beforex, right now there were still other tasks to be completed. Then, Adwyn could deal with matters of the fangs. The high alchemist, his wife, and the high guard. None of them could be trusted. The wife and the high guard at least gleamed sympathetic about it, but the alchemist⁠ ⁠--- It was a threat. And an alchemist was the last dragon you wanted against you. Adwyn could cede. Go to sleep now, and in the morning find something less... dangerous to occupy his attention. What, truly, was at stake? Mlaen said it herself⁠ ⁠---⁠ concern for the law was rich, coming from him. Adwyn knew laws were just finely engraved stones. Treason, conspiracy, trespassing, theft of what truly wasn't theirs⁠ ⁠---⁠ it was all pale, victimless and abstract. Truly, Adwyn was guilty of worse. But even if it weren't about the law, Adwyn had to solve this mystery and he'd known it since the puzzling existence of the Dychwelfa revealed itself, even more with the baffling appearance of the humans, and most with the perplexing actions of the thieves. It was what the adviser had hoped to find (and disappointed not to find) in the sky-dweller exile; a sight for answers and a sight for knowledge. Adwyn had to know. So perhaps morals didn't shine, here. Adwyn decided he wouldn't rest even if the thieves were actually heroes. It was a puzzle, to see their true face, to scry their true motive. The Return of Dwylla? The human demonhunters? The old pillars of Gwymr/Frina? It all piqued, and if nothing else, Adwyn would sate his curiosity. Adwyn rose and advanced once more to the threshold. Still, one more choice prickled: should he tell Mlaen? The alchemist's threat lingered. Do not inform the faer. Would the black ascendant stand opposed to an ancient alchemist? As the scarlet drake would say, there's confidence and that's too much of it. But⁠ ⁠---⁠ Ushra was old and withering. What had he done to hold onto that kind of respect? Gwymr/Frina had been haunted by its past long enough. Adwyn would care about its future. "You look brightly smug," came some growl of a voice. "I'd tell you it's not a good look, but you don't care and I don't think that mug of yours has a better look." Adwyn cleared his eyes, leaving the realm of thought to discover he remained at the threshold, standing to block a scowling orange wiver. He said, "I'd tell you rudeness isn't a good flavor for you, but I don't mind." Adwyn stepped aside and the wiver did not step into the room. "What you should tell me," she started, "is what possessed you to fly away against your assistants? Shall I report this?" "Do what you will. I think capitol will care more that I stand at the cusp of uncovering the secrets at the heart of Gwymr/Frina." "And you'll have all that honor to yourself, won't you?" She looked sour. Adwyn regarded the wiver. He smirked a certain schemely smirk. "Well, I wouldn't say you two are uninvolved. Why, you could certainly stand to make my life easier, less complicated. That should not go unnoticed." The wiver was like a bug. But that entailed a certain simplicity, an a lack of loyalty. She wasn't on his side, not yet and perhaps not ever. But he had a sway, for now. The female assistant followed after him, as he walked off. He didn't mind, but didn't allow her to step into the room with him and Mlaen. Adwyn would unravel the secrets of Gwymr/Frina. Adwyn would descend the pits. (And if the town needed a hero... the black ascendant could redeem his name.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Adwyn paused a moment to see the paintings. Cynfe's work. They smelt oddly of ink, and had the glow of the finest oils. Forms seemed to struggle to life, shadows sinking away and highlights popping. One painting stared out over the red distance of the land of glass and secrets, as it was known from its highest peaks. A land crossed and riveled deep with serpent-like gullies and ravines and gorges, with blooms of green or black life scattered all around. The suns neared colorfully the horizon, and thunderous storm-clouds weighed high above. That painting was largest, the centerpiece. Others hung meekly beside it. One of a cracked fire-clay mug and its twin shadows, rendered to exact extremes for inscrutable reasons. One of a land snail eating a tidbit chicken, ponderously. Adwyn saw fish, scenes of bamboo, and the night's sky. What shined out most though, was that there were no dragons. He had to sift the walls to find it, tucked away in a corner. The one painting, with a dragon, was of Mlaen. A portrait. It could have⁠ ⁠---⁠ should have⁠ ⁠---⁠ been one of the centerpieces, but Adwyn knew why it wasn't. The Mlaen dwelling in this painting regarded kindly, softness in her cheeks, a smile. As Adwyn looked longer into her painting, he felt a voyeur's shame ride up on him, the sense that in this painting was a moment, someone's moment, and it wasn't his. Adwyn had never seen this Mlaen. He frowned as the lights blent together in his head: the paintings had no dragon save one, because no dragon would model for her save that one. "I never did expect pieces like these in the land of glass and secrets." It was the male assistant, sidling up to him. He let him with a nod and no response. They waited for the female adviser to get ready. Among them settled the silence of the town hall very late into the night, like the rich soil to nurture fruits of thought. It would help, if Adwyn hadn't already found enough resolution to sate that hungry thinking part of his brain. Everything was decided; he would solve the town's mystery, he would descend the pits. Properly, the pits were just another sifting hazard (it was as if the lake collected them.) Plummeting chasms of dustone and glass out in the lake's center, they were like stabwounds in its battle against the sky. The librarian had wondered if they were accidents of the flow of the glass, or sites of doomed meteors, or something odder still. They reached down to the caves that were like the arteries of the cliffs, and natives called those caves the pits too, in defiance of sense. Dragons said they didn't want to talk about the pits, but you couldn't shut them up if you attempted to. The superstitious prattle was entertaining to hear, in the least, but Adwyn knew they were deeply hyperbolic: supposedly, the pits had humans, spiders, fungal oddities, slightly animated cadavers, things too monstrous and strange for the lake above, things which tried to be dead and failed, and things no dragons had dared yet to name. If you believed their talk, one would think the unholy pits the place of some god's lingering curse⁠ ⁠---⁠ if what the natives called unholy had, in their godless spirituality, some meaning greater than 'it gives me the creeps.' Adwyn breathed in and out, in and out. The posture of meditation came easily to him, and he found patience in the peace of the moment. The drake beside him