Page 1 of Bound and Tide

Chapter 1

HOW TO EULOGIZE YOUR MOTHER

Xander Sephiran Shadowhart was vexed. That wasn’t an unusual state in which to find the blood mage, but the length of that vexation was indeed peculiar. To Xander, mood was a fleeting, malleable thing, but this vexation insisted on persisting, and it was wearing him thinner than an old piece of parchment that had spent years pressed beneath a cobblestone.

The failing of the Chthonic Tower began, like most catastrophes, as mere inconvenience. Xander had been pacing his study, listening to the hollowness that his footsteps barely filled and failing to purge his then-mild aggravation. He ran a hand along the smooth length of the ironwood table and over the backs of its many vacant seats, languid gaze on the vast emptiness of the Accursed Wastes through chamber-spanning windows. He was surrounded by books he had no interest in reading and artifacts he didn’t care to dismantle and unriddle. Not even the sight of a winged beast snatching its writhing dinner from amongst the dunes amused him.

Deepest darkness, was there nothing in the realm that would pluck him from the depths of mild discontent?

The shadow imps were especially quiet that night. Their feeble attempts at pleasing him had fallen woefully short since his return from Aszath Koth. They’d taken to toiling undetected, which only proved to annoy Xander more—at the very least his despondency deserved an audience.

Movement from the corner of his eye and a crash spoiled the silence of the chamber. Vexation flaring, Xander spun only to see a sconce had detached itself from the stone wall and toppled to the floor. There it lay, dwarven craftsmanship and vustrium metal cracked right in two as if to say, And now what will you do? It shouldn’t have been possible, something so solid and well-built popping off the wall and breaking in half, but even that minor mystery failed to engage him. He simply snuffed what was left of the arcane flame out with an errant shadow, and that should have been that.

But of course it fucking wasn’t.

The plumbing went next, his bath refusing to run as hot as he preferred—just on the verge of scalding—and then not warming at all. The missing heat had apparently relocated itself to the larder, spoiling the meats and cheeses and turning his stomach with the stench. And finally, the walls began to go—a rather big if uncanny deal.

Not even stuffing the shadow imps into the cracks kept the blustery winter winds from driving over the dunes and through the tower’s fissures. If he’d been keeping count, he would have noticed a third of them had vanished, but his exasperation made him worse at arithmetic than usual, not to mention that he was never very good at discerning when someone else was overwrought.

Instead of questioning the appearance of silvery tears through the plane around him, he only swore that it was impossible to find good help, minions just didn’t want to work anymore, and he promised the emptiness that he would strangle the next infernal wisp he saw. After that, there were no more imps to be seen at all.

Surrounded by crumbling stone, failing flames, and a constant drip he could not for the fucking life of him find, Xander’s vexation inched ever closer to its limit. Despite his adeptness with arcana, he was falling behind the tower’s deterioration, not to mention falling anemic. Each repair was answered with double the destruction elsewhere, walls were smeared with blood that was not quite as potent as expected, and he had to concede that soon the Chthonic Tower would be naught but a crumbling ruin if drastic measures were not taken. And if the tower went, Xander Shadowhart would be homeless, and basest, bloodiest beasts, wasn’t being motherless bad enough?

Xander flopped about in what was meant to be his most comfortable seat—at some point over the last moon it had lost over half of its plushness in an arcane accident he could neither identify nor mend—and he teetered dangerously into brooding territory.

It was important to note that Xander did not brood—brooding was for melancholic blood mages with black hair and blacker perspectives. He did scheme for revenge, of course, and he reveled in his triumphs, occasionally wallowed when he was unfairly bested, and there were bouts of pouting too, but brooding was not Xander’s style. Increasingly, however, the dread that all of this was a bit too familiar crept into his mind.

Xander might not have been ready to embrace just how much worse things were presently than they’d been the last time his arcana went awry, but evidence didn’t care about any kind of mage’s denial, and as he lifted the vial of blood that hung from around his neck, the truth eventually sank in: Xander’s mother really was gone.

She wasn’t dead, of course—there was probably no killing her—but she was no longer on the same plane of existence as the Chthonic Tower, and that was why the gods-forsaken place was falling apart. When her essence had been trapped in an occlusion crystal in the palace of Eirengaard’s trophy room, a similar problem presented itself, but a younger Xander eventually overcame the block to his magical patron after some embarrassing displays out in the desert when his arcana went amok. It had never quite been the same, perhaps, but close enough.

This, though, was not that. Bloodthorne’s human mother banished Birzuma back to the infernal plane, there was an entire veil betwixt them, and things were swiftly headed to the Abyss in a handbasket.

Xander should have been working on a summons—that was what blood mages were for, after all: to serve and salvage their demonic sires when they were banished or otherwise indisposed. If he spent too long staring at his vial, he could practically hear her voice niggling at him: You’ve got one job, one purpose—make yourself useful and fulfill it.

But summoning a demon was nothing like summoning an imp, an ubi, or any other kind of infernal. He would first have to gather a number of rare ingredients, calculate and wait for just the right celestial setting, and conduct moons of preparatory arcana—arcana Xander was discovering he might not exactly have in reserve at the moment, especially not so soon after the events of Eirengaard. He couldn’t even patch a bloody wall, for darkness’s sake, how the fuck was he supposed to open up a rift to another plane large enough to let a demon through?

And even if he was capable?

He touched his cheek where the claw marks had been—deep but now healed. Well, he wasn’t entirely sure if he…if he wanted to…to take the risk of summoning his mother again until he had somewhere else to live that wasn’t reducing itself to rubble. Birzuma was particular enough, and if the first thing she saw when she came home was the mess he’d let happen, her displeasure would be paramount.

Aszath Koth, however, was not a mess, and though foolish, it was the first place he thought to go. He’d spent a few days recovering in Bloodthorne Keep after the unpleasantness in Eirengaard when his mother was forcibly returned southward, but the inevitable discomfort that came with being housed by the family he’d been on the brink of wrecking was…a lot.

Bloodthorne’s utter infatuation with a woman who Xander had killed was also problematic, and no matter how many times he repeated that he also resurrected her, Bloodthorne was insistent on being prickly about the whole stabbing-Kitten-in-the-back-and-letting-her-bleed-out-in-his-arms thing.

Conversely, Kitten wasn’t at all as angry as she should have been about being murdered, which was downright confusing. Instead she was…well, she was nice, and that made him want to vomit. Paired with Diana’s suffocating affection, and Zagadoth’s acrimonious glares, Xander quickly decided he had enough, so after only a few days and a half-true announcement that he could no longer stand their company, the blood mage sliced into the plane and popped back to the Accursed Wastes. Returning to Bloodthorne Keep after all that just couldn’t be an option—it had only been a moon since he’d left, and going back now would make him seem…lonely.

And Xander was not lonely, because to be lonely was to be pathetic. He only found himself in a frustrating predicament, and the bustling halls in Aszath Koth were filled to bursting with lamia and draekins to complain to. The Chthonic Tower had never been like that, even before it started to fall apart.

A small uninvited shudder made its way up Xander’s back at the memory of the minions his mother once employed, decidedly not for communication. Xander had thought himself improved as the tower’s lord by only retaining leagues of shadow imps and the occasional captive instead.

He sighed heavily—he might have even accepted the company of that tremulous priestess and her stuttered suggestions to be good over the monotony of what he was enduring now, alone. But after he’d taught her so much and everything they’d been through in Eirengaard, Pips had chosen not to return to the tower with him. As if rebuilding the temple to whatever goddess she followed in that hamlet south of the capital was somehow more fulfilling than being in service to an actual blood mage. Preposterous!

She was lucky her company was so unsatisfying, otherwise she would be beside him regardless, probably crying about being abducted and wanting to go home and…well, no, actually that didn’t sound very good to him either. Though it was the exact kind of thing he ought to enjoy, to revel in, to really get his villainous blood pumping, he suddenly loathed the idea of taking a prisoner. He could clearly recall enjoying his last abduction, but now just the thought of some distressed detainee offering him baked goods for a whiff of freedom made his guts all doughy. It wasn’t meant to be a confusing feeling, but blood mages were notoriously shit at identifying guilt, and so he just assumed his last meal wasn’t sitting right.

Xander huffed and wiggled about, trying and failing once more to find comfort in the lumpiness of his seat. It protested beneath him with a creak, and in response he threw himself back with a vengeance. This was, apparently, the final straw, and the bottom of the chair fell right out, dumping Xander to the floor.

“Can you not hold it to-bloody-gether long enough for me to have just a little sulk?” he snapped at the tower.

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