THE FIRST HISS (~ 2024) – PART III
Lady DeathBreeze had been waiting in the narrow mouth of the alley for what felt, even to an immortal, like far too long. The night had only just begun to unfurl across the city, draping the streets in velvet shadow, yet impatience had already begun to crawl in her mind. She stood against the cold wall of the building with a stillness that would have looked statuesque to mortal eyes, though there was nothing restful in it. Her pale frame leaned lightly into the brick as though she were merely indulging the posture, while her senses stretched far beyond the alley itself, listening to every distant sounds. Normally, patience was one of her finer virtues as time had carved that into her long ago. Tonight, it was different. She was waiting for a particular item, another book. The cost of obtaining these books had been intolerably steep. For more than a century, this volume had remained little more than a rumor at the edge of scholarship, an echo buried beneath false trails and dead collectors. Tonight, at last, she stood on the edge of touching it. That alone was enough to sour the serenity she so carefully wore.
The most tiresome part of such pursuits had always been the same: humans. They were necessary, useful, occasionally even clever, but they were cursed by brevity. So often she had shaped one into usefulness, taught them to read signs they did not understand, sent them into places where she herself could not tread openly, only to watch the years claim them before their education had fully ripened. Then the process began again. It was a cycle she despised.
Yet, Archer had proven different. He had never asked the wrong questions. He had never trembled too much at her pallor, nor lingered too long on the unnatural cold of her presence, nor pressed to know the source of the wealth she placed in his hands when she required something found, stolen, bought, or unearthed. Whenever she summoned him, he came. Whenever she needed a mortal hand to move where hers should not be seen, Archer answered. In that, he had earned something rare from her: respect. It was not affection in the soft human sense, nor trust in its fullest form, but it was close enough to be dangerous.
Still, respect did little to soothe annoyance, and as the minutes dragged on her gaze sharpened with every movement in the distance. Archer had always possessed that infuriating blend of loyalty and lunacy that made him both dependable and impossible. He could arrive exactly when needed or vanish into some feverish tangent of his own making and forget the world expected anything of him. Tonight had begun to feel like one of those nights. Their last exchange had been promising, and she wanted the book in her own hands the moment it appeared. She wanted to feel its weight, to know the hunt for this particular tome had ended.
At last, footsteps entered the alley. Lady DeathBreeze pushed herself away from the wall in one smooth motion, dark elegance made animate, and her eyes fixed upon the figure approaching through the dim light. A tall man, dark-haired, broad-shouldered, his outline briefly caught beneath the weak halo of a streetlamp. She stepped toward him, composed despite the irritation simmering beneath her skin. “Archer?” she asked, her voice polite, low, and precise. The man did not stop. He passed as though she were nothing more than another shadow tucked between buildings.
Under other circumstances, she might have approved of that instinct. Tonight, it drew the edge from her restraint. Her lips parted slightly and the tips of her fangs brushed her lower lip. Then, from behind her, came the voice she knew well.
“Hey, Death. I have it… or maybe I don’t.”
The tension left her shoulders at once, though not without a trace of irritation lingering in the look she cast over them as she turned. There he was. Archer, very much alive, very much late, and very much amused with himself. He stood only a few paces behind her, half-lost in the alley’s darkness, wearing that familiar expression that suggested he found his own jokes far funnier than anyone else had a right to. Still, there was a reckless charm to it, one that had on rare occasion drawn a chuckle even from beings who had forgotten how to laugh without cruelty. DeathBreeze withdrew her fangs and regarded him with the cold dignity of a queen forced to tolerate a jester she had not yet called in.
Archer moved beside her and crouched slightly to search through the satchel slung at his side, muttering beneath his breath as he displaced papers, wrappings, and lesser finds. Then, with a carelessness movement that made her dead heart tighten, he drew forth a massive book and lifted it toward her. It was old, really old, and substantial enough to require both hands. Its cover was dark and worn by age, yet the shape engraved upon it remained unmistakable: a serpent, coiled with the elegance of deliberate symbolism rather than ornament.
“The Deathwardens,” Archer said at last, glancing up at her with the look of a man still faintly bewildered by the madness he had agreed to participate in. “I don’t know how you manage to track these books into the strangest holes in the world… but you were right. It exists.”
“Thank you,” she answered, and the words were quieter than before, because her attention had already been claimed by the artifact now resting in her hands. The title struck a light confusion. It was not a term she had encountered in her prior research, nor one attached to the lines she had been following. The serpent on the cover, the old aura of secrecy, the weight of hidden lineage… They forced her curiosity to show presence. She traced the edge of the cover with one pale thumb before allowing herself to glance back at Archer. “I will call for you again,” she said. “You have done something precious for me. Had I been able to go there myself, I would have.” There was even the ghost of a smile at the corner of her mouth, brief but genuine. She did not often befriend mortals. Their lives were too brief, their endings too inevitable, and she had no fondness for witnessing the slow theft of age take those she had made useful. Archer, against her better judgment, had become an exception.
He answered with a nod, easy and untroubled, as if handing ancient occult volumes to a pale predator in an alley were no stranger than any other errand. Then he stepped backward into the living pulse of the city and was gone, swallowed by headlights, noise, and mortal distraction.
Left alone once more, Lady DeathBreeze lowered her gaze to the book. Her fingers passed over the serpent engraved into its cover. There in the alley, beneath the low hum of the city and the watch of the rising night, she opened the volume.
This was not what she had expected.
She had prepared herself to find Set. To find fragments of scripture tied to the Setites, half-lost doctrine, forbidden liturgy, some fork of the serpent’s path that might illuminate the roots of beliefs she had already begun to suspect ran deeper than rumor. Instead, the first pages gave her something stranger, older in feeling, and somehow more intimate in its darkness. The text spoke of a city in collapse, broken by war and plague. It told of a group of individuals, those called the Deathwardens, who refused to flee when ruin came. They remained not out of heroism, but out of devotion to a mystery they had spent their lives circling without naming. They revered death, but not merely as ending. They studied it as principle, threshold, architecture. Most were immortals themselves, or beings so far removed from ordinary mortality that death had become less a fear than an unanswered question. They wanted to understand the nature that governed their own unnatural continuance. They wanted to look upon the force behind endings and recognize it not as enemy, but as truth.
Then came the passage that seized her.
Through the fog of war, through alley made slick with blood and ash, the Deathwardens beheld among the corpses a figure unlike the others. She was described not as monstrous, but as beautiful in the terrible way that storms and funerals could be beautiful. She was elegant, composed, feminine, dark-eyed. She walked among the dead not in grief, but in recognition, counting the fallen as though each belonged to a design only she could understand. Her gaze followed death as one might follow a beloved’s hand. And in that instant, the Deathwardens knew. It was she. The one they had been seeking without understanding that their seeking had always been for her; Nexyra. Her name came upon them as a revelation, a reward to their unwavering devotion. A whisper in the mind sharp enough to mark the soul. Lady DeathBreeze read that passage twice, then a third time, as though the words themselves were opening some hidden chamber in her.
The text continued. The Deathwardens knelt before the divine figure, not because they had been commanded, but because recognition had stripped pride from them. And then another silhouette emerged. A tall, armored, blood-stained, manly figure. This one they named Tharos. He was not described as death itself, but as the warrior that would withstand lost cause until death would come claim it’s due. Where Nexyra seemed to perceive the sacred shape of endings, Tharos embodied the strength required to bear them. And the Deathwardens, the text said, were not chosen as favorites, nor seduced into service, but acknowledged.
That night, according to the book, Nexyra spoke her first recorded words to them: These ones understand. And Tharos answered: Then let them stand.
Lady DeathBreeze went still, the alley disappearing around her for a moment beneath the weight of the revelation. The serpent remained… that symbol was there, undeniably. It tied the work to pathways she had started to walk in thoughts, to shadows she had suspected led toward Setite origins. The gods named here were not Set and not the familiar forms she had expected. They were something adjacent or perhaps splintered from the same ancient root and grown in a darker direction. Her pale fingers slowly closed around the edges of the book as if protecting it from a clumsy fall.
At last, she shut the volume with measured care and held it tightly against herself. The city still breathed around her. Her mind had already gone elsewhere, drawn inward and downward into the implications of what she had read. This was no simple recovery of a rare text. With the serpent on its cover and the names of Nexyra and Tharos now stirring like fresh venom in her thoughts, Lady DeathBreeze turned from the alley and vanished back into the night, carrying with her not certainty, but the far more dangerous gift of obsession.
