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HZD: Winter’s Bargain Chapter 1 

Read here on AO3. Rescued by Aloy and now under the watchful eye of the Carja court's many spies, Sylens reluctantly helps put Meridian back together after the attack on the Spire. Someone seems to want to keep the Carja nervous, and Sylens needs to find out whether they're an enemy or an ally. The one with Marad’s spy shenanigans. Aloy/Sylens, 2300 words. 

He must have been thrown onto the ice.

That would explain the hard surface underneath him, the concussed confusion as his eyesight blurred. Shamans stood over him, songs distorted behind heavy wire-and-cloth headsets. Their voices cracked and reverberated. Sylens had done something terribly wrong. Of that he was certain. The tribe had decreed this cold vengeance for what he had done.

Aloy said, “If I had known you were the person who needed rescuing, I wouldn’t have come.”

Sylens opened his eyes.

Red desert dust caked his hands, the orange blankets in front of him, and Aloy’s jacket. Heat washed off her. It felt like the desert sun, but something metallic too, like the HADES unit. She looked more muscular than he remembered, heavier, as if she had been given gravitas by her conquests.

The red-and-gold battlement walls around him looked Carja. Not ice at all; heat and heavy blankets covered him. There were more people in the room than he had seen in months, more than he cared to see. Three masked guards were arranged behind Aloy like nervous Watchers. They were extraneous, a sign of a nervous sovereign. Aloy could have attacked him while he was asleep if she had wanted. The guards did serve to partially hide a man dressed in the lighter finery of a Carja noble, who waited patiently beside the closed wooden door.

Until now, Sylens had imagined that he could have walked through Meridian at almost any time unobserved; although his markings might be memorable, most people who knew his face were dead. In the course of their business he and Bahavas had met once at a shrine near the edge of the city and once in the holy circle near the apex. On other days, he had gone to the markets on the outskirts with his arms and head covered, to forestall questions from Carja who found Banuk memorable.

He had certainly never been here before.

“Why did you bring me to the palace?”

Aloy ignored the guards as surely as Sylens had done. “You were hurt. Do you remember the Vantage near the prison?”

The prison? Ah, she meant the one in the Sundom. Sylens still had a feeling that exile should be cold. Maybe that was why the avalanche-prone cliffs of the Alpha site had sometimes been a comfort. Now, though, the palette of his life was not blue and white but shades of green.

He had had months wandering in deserts to disprove his fear of the cold, not to mention the time spent here, in the humid forest. The idea had never departed, though. When he had been a child he had seen an exile taken onto the ice, the shamans singing in praise to the justice of the rime. The man had been half-mad with poison, but he had been alive enough to weakly struggle.

That wasn’t what Aloy was talking about, though. “Yes, of course I remember. The Vantages are made to be difficult, and this one was no different.” The cache up in the mountains would have been a good place for a relay signal. Not an essential part of the plan, but something in him had wanted to take a journey that long. He needed to stretch his legs, to ride without needing to go anywhere. Maybe, he needed to look at the mesa and wonder whether Aloy was in Meridian.

“Someone yelled. It turned out to be you. Avad’s people wrapped your arm, but it will take a long time for the bruises to heal.”

“You brought me to Meridian?” He lowered his voice, both for their secrets and because he was angry. Afraid, too; he doubted that Carja justice was any kinder than Ban-Ur’s.  

Aloy nodded, her lips pressed tightly together. She knew it was a weighted decision.

“Foolish. I suppose I should thank you for saving my life, but I didn’t think you had any particular love for this city.” Sylens sighed. She might have saved his life. It had been a careless fall, and now that the tattered dreams were clearing, his left arm ached fiercely.

Instead of asking anything further, Aloy turned away fast, the beads in her hair jangling against the metal sewn into her clothing. “Let me talk to him alone,” she said, talking through the guards to the nobleman still half out of sight behind them.

“A minute, no longer.” The man had a clipped voice full of confidence. It sounded familiar, but Sylens had intentionally stayed out of bloody Carja court politics when he was luring Bahavas and the other members of the gang that would become the Eclipse. The king had only mattered as much as Helis’ revenge demanded he did.

Aloy nodded. Sylens sat up as the guards walked out, leaving him with a better view of the single door in the little tower room and the bench on which they had placed him. Aloy folded her arms, looked like she considered sitting down and then decided against it.

“There were bandits near the Vantage,” Sylens said. “Some of them caught me on the cliff and must have fled when you came. I did not just fall off the ledge.”

Aloy smirked, did not directly reply. “I haven’t told Avad and Marad who you are,” she said.

“And why not?”

“You gave me the tools I needed to defeat HADES. And out last conversation was … unusually civil. Now we’re even.”

Sylens chuckled. She didn’t know that the spear had included the virus a virus that was meant to send a version of HADES, caged again, back to his new hideout. There was something appealingly reasonable about the exchange of debt, though. Hadn’t they all been paying the debts of the Old Ones, all this time? Hadn’t humanity deserved what it got, for Faro’s sin of erasing APOLLO? Sylens wasn’t sure. Aloy, though, was the only other person likely to understand any of that at all.

“In fact, that’s why I was in the forest in the first place, setting up relays. If we could use Eclipse equipment to speak to HADES, we could learn so much more,” he said.

Aloy was taken aback. “You’re just … telling me that? You trust me with that? Did it not occur to you what HADES did last time? Did you want to do that again?”

“I was in the desert. I thought that if the Faro robots rose up out of the ground it would be a terrible loss but at least I wouldn’t be around to see civilizations destroyed again.” He shifted, found that his arm ached only slightly less if he tucked it against his side. “We make scant few pieces of information now. For them to be consumed again …”

“But now you’re telling me you want to do that exact same thing again.”

“No. Not to unleash it. To control it. To talk to it, as you talked to GAIA. With the spear, with the Alpha Override, I think we could do it.”

“I was here.”

“What?”

“I was here, in Meridian, when the world almost ended. You know that. I would have had to watch innocent people die, not just myself. I will not face that again if I can prevent it with my own hands.”

“Exactly! Exactly.” Sylens sat up, swinging his feet to the floor. It didn’t hurt to move that far. How had she carried him here? Drugged with hintergold, on the back of a Strider? “Aloy, if we learn what HADES has to tell us we can find out more about the kind of technology that created GAIA in the first place.”

“I can still work with GAIA, in the Nora lands.” She uncrossed her arms, sat heavily down on the side of the couch where his legs had been.

“Then you understand the knowledge they both could give us.”

“I heard the recordings. Quantum processing, was that the one? That’s what you would have destroyed us all for.”

“That is what I trust you with now. We could remake the Earth, Aloy.”

“I won’t allow it. The Kestrels won’t allow it.”

“I know. So I’ll help you. Whatever you’re working on here … I don’t doubt my knowledge of the city will help you.”

“Locked together by a bargain again. I’m beginning not to regret rescuing you, if this sort of fight results. Too few people …”

“Even though the world is at stake?”

“It won’t be. Because you won’t leave my sight.” She stood up. “This is good timing. Marad has me working on some things in the city. We can both stay out of trouble.”

“Good. You deserve a place as Avad’s investigator. You deserve Marad’s place as advisor, really.” It was a guess, based on the name she had used, but it was also honest. Sylens did not doubt that Aloy was more intelligent than any of the Carja courtiers.

Aloy pushed a sigh out in a loud burst. “I won’t tell them who you are. I’m saving that one for when I might need it.”

“To use against me? A good decision for both of us, I think.”

Aloy rapped on the inside of the door.

The guards hadn’t gone far. Almost immediately, the door opened and the man in the robes, the one Aloy had called Marad, walked in. Sylens carefully stood.

Aloy looked between them. “Sylens, this is Blameless Marad. Sylens helped me … prepare for the attack on the city.”

“Greetings. You come highly recommended, and Aloy … I’m sure you know how much she did for the city.”

Was he probing, wanting to know where Sylens was during the attack? Aloy had seemed to think everything would go smoothly. “Blameless. That’s a … notable name.”

“Is it? Some people certainly say so.”

“…Do they.”

“Right now, my advice is that Aloy consider her work,” Marad said. “After the attack, some people are rebuilding and others are taking advantage of the chaos. The Hunter’s Lodge has been taking in scared farmers. There’s plenty to do, if you want to help us while your friend recovers.”

Aloy did not hesitate. “Yes. I already know a few places where we could help out with supplies. The Nora have already left, but … like you said. Lots of refugees.”

“You know where to find me,” Marad spoke with clipped authority, like a teacher telling a child how far they were allowed to stray. When he went out, leaving the door open behind him, he conspicuously gestured for the guards to move out onto the next lower balcony, far enough that they could see the doorway but not so far that they were obviously watching the tower. Sylens watched him go. He had a feeling that Marad was more than an advisor; someone so effortlessly practiced at giving out no information at all was more likely a spymaster. Sylens could admit when he was outclassed — to himself, at least. Unfamiliar with the city as he was, Marad would be able to track him easily.

Aloy nodded at the door. She always looked ahead, didn’t she? Always forward.

“You’ll be able to stay here in the palace,” Aloy said, and led him out. “But I have work to do. Machines are all out of their usual territories after the attack.”

Years ago, Sylens would have thought that he might never walk the streets of Meridian again. He had little use for the city itself as long as he could lure people like Bahavas out of it. The chaos in the court had worked to his advantage. Now, Sun priests did not walk in bloody-minded procession but hunched their shoulders on their way to shamed and profaned alters. Sylens almost laughed at how unlikely it was that someone would recognize him. As soon as they crossed the bridge from the palace, people crowded them. Farmers from lands shelled and shredded during the attack, hunters who had made their way to the Spire to seek their fortune, and thrill-seekers now seeking no more than hot food and passage north thronged the streets.

People recognized Aloy, though.

Vendors called out to her, not to sell but to thank. She greeted some people with clasped hands and a nod toward the Hunter’s Lodge. “Tell Talanah I say hello.” Soon enough, though, Aloy found her own apartment door and opened it onto a large, cool room. Sylens shut the door behind him. The trap door on the left side of the room had recently been broken, and sharp pieces still stuck out from the edges of the stone passageway. Otherwise, the room was decorated in Carja finery.

“They gave me this place,” Aloy said bluntly, setting her bow and arrows down beside the door. She followed them with the spear Sylens had given her, and met his eyes. “The last owner is gone.”

“How convenient for you.”

“He was a complicated man.” She let the spear go, moved to sit on a cushioned bench beside it. “But now we have a chance to do more. Let me explain what we’re working on here.”

“Wait.You kept my secret, for now. The thing that could put me in greater danger than any other person in this city. You trust yourself with it. Why?” Sylens did not hesitate to be blunt.

She looked down. “Because we’re the only ones who know.” She stood, faced him furious. “If I told Avad that you had helped call HADES down on this city, they could kill you. I don’t know if Avad would, or if Marad would sway him. And then our last piece of information is gone, a lifetime worth of research. You’re wrong about so many things, Sylens, so very many. But you did the work. And I won’t see the only other person who understands that work destroyed.”

So fierce. So … he watched the line of her jaw as she tilted her face up toward him. The thin, white scar was barely visible from one side of her neck to the other, like a terrible smile.

He nodded. “And what is our work?”

“First, we’re going hunting.”