But Mazille’s face told Winter all she needed to know. Her features fell as she shook her head. “Psimantic ability in tiellans is rare. Far more rare than in humans. The only surviving tiellan psimancers I’ve encountered are here, at this campfire.”
“And did the power manifest itself in tiellans only recently, as it has in humans?”
“That, my dear, is a long story. And it is why we have sought you out.” Mazille’s gaze flickered to Urstadt.
Winter said nothing. She would not dignify Mazille’s implied question with an answer. Winter had already given hers. Instead she met Mazille’s eyes, unblinking.
Mazille sighed deeply. “Very well. I must first go back, far, far into the ages…”
* * *
In the Beginning, there was Light and Dark. Light had no end, and thus had no beginning, and likewise Dark had no beginning, and thus no end. And Light was stronger than Dark. And yet Light understood that, without Dark, she had no beauty; without Dark, she had no definition, and no purpose. Without Dark there was nothing to illuminate; without Dark there was nothing to change. And likewise Dark, the weaker of the two, acknowledged that without Light, what use was he? For Dark meant nothing without Light to define him; Dark had no purpose with no source of conflict.
And so the two existed together, Light and Dark, in harmony, and both were happy. Thus they played for countless millennia, moving their forms around and through one another, until one day they lay in such a way that both experienced the greatest pleasure that has ever been known. The two moved together in a moment of such ecstasy, that suddenly they could not discern what was Dark and what was Light. The two became one, for a moment of hazed pleasure, and then both collapsed in content exhaustion. As the breath of Light and the breath of Dark merged together, the stars in the sky were born.
Light and Dark looked on what they had created, and smiled. The stars were beautiful to behold, and countless. But soon they saw that the stars were lonely. They were countless, yes, but they were all so far apart; they had no way to communicate with one another, no way to love one another the way Light loved Dark. Light shared her worries with Dark, and the two agreed to create a place for the stars to live, a place they could be born and exist and die, and meet. Thus, Light and Dark formed the Sfaera, with great waters to house fish and whales of the deep, and high mountains to reach the sky, and rolling forests to beautify and sustain the land. Light and Dark looked on the Sfaera with pride, and began to send the stars down to the Sfaera, to live, to die, and then to live again.
Light created the form for the first stars, and that form was created after the likeness in her own mind. She created the form, and the stars inhabited the form, and thus the tiellans were born.
Dark, too, created a form for yet other stars, and that form was created after the likeness in his own mind. He created the form, and the stars inhabited the form, and thus the humans were born.
And the humans and tiellans lived together in harmony, with love and affection toward one another. And thus the stars, the countless children of Light and Dark, found happiness, life, and love on the Sfaera.
Light and Dark looked on the Sfaera with happiness, and were content.
* * *
“My father told me that story,” Winter interrupted. “He said my mother used to tell it to him. I thought she had made it up.”
“She did not make it up,” Mazille said, quietly.
“Then it is real? Dark and Light were real, and we… we are their children?”
“It is as real as any other creation story you have heard. As real as Canta’s,” Mazille said. “But this story is only the beginning. I have more to tell you. We do not know what happened to Light and Dark…”
* * *
Perhaps they grew bored of their creations and left for new horizons. Perhaps they have finally grown old and passed away into Oblivion, as all things must. Perhaps they are still there, waiting, watching.
But what matters is that, other than in their most basic forms, they no longer show themselves. We no longer interact with the great Beings that formed this world, and formed us.
And then came the First Age. By all accounts, that First Age was a paradise. Tiellans and humans lived in harmony, if you can believe such a thing. We hunted the beasts of the Sfaera, we gathered plants and other forms of food, and soon began to grow crops. There was only one monarch, and she ruled with a loving, benevolent hand.
* * *
“The Chaos Queen,” Winter said.
Mazille glared at her, annoyance plain on her face.
“Some call her by that name,” she said. “We called her the Great Matriarch. She loved her people, both human and tiellan, and she treated them fairly.”
“The monarchs of the First Age ruled benevolently,” Winter said, “until the last one went mad, and broke her kingdom. Bedtime tales. A human once told me there was only one monarch,” she added, thinking of Galce. “But she did go mad. She did as Chaos directed.”
“Your human friend was only partly right,” Mazille said. “There was only one monarch, throughout the entire First Age. She was endowed with long life, somehow, but at the end of her life, her mind failed her. She destroyed society as people knew it then, and we fell into the Starless Age…”
* * *
In the Starless Age the Sfaera fell into a terrible cycle.
The Mad Queen continued to degenerate, until she was finally overthrown by another being of great power. But that being, in order to keep the Sfaera together, to keep the Outsiders from invading, and because of Soren’s Folly, had to take over the Mad Queen’s role, and became the Mad Queen herself.
This cycle became known as the Annulus.
The Starless Age lasted longer than all of the other ages combined. Over ten thousand years, and the Sfaera existed as if in stasis, going through the same motions, the same cycle, every thousand years. Until finally, a new queen, the woman Khale, after whom this nation was named, sacrificed herself, and sealed the opening into the Outside, and saved us all from destruction.
This ushered in the Age of Marvels, and this is the age where psimancy truly began. You may have been told that it was a recent thing, and for humans that may be so. But not for tiellans.
Psimancy was a new art, then, though it was not the same as it is now. There was no such thing as faltira in those days; all psimancers were actuals, and they were all tiellans. The histories teach that tiellans were one with nature, could control the elements. Tiellans were psimantic masters, and the greatest warriors of the Age of Marvels—Rana Dalther, Kels Erie, Kuote, and Merle of the Lin clan—were all psimancers.
Tiellans rose to power through psimancy. They were respected, honored for their ability not only to fight but to engineer great machines and use their arts to help those around them. There were psimancer Druids, and psimancer Rangers.
But, as all ages must, the Age of Marvels came to an end. The Great War between the humans and tiellans began when the humans became jealous of tiellan psimantic power. Tiellans prevailed at first, because humans could not compete with the very power they coveted. The children of Light fought the children of Dark, and beat them back.
Then, a new weapon was introduced.
No one knows where the ability came from. But one day, the human king brought with him a dagger, and his dagger broke the world.
The dagger, imbued with the blood of a Scorned God, had the power to quell a psimancer’s power in an instant. Any psimancer near the dagger lost all power. And as the psimancers fell powerless around him, the king slew them with the dagger, drenching it in their blood, and the more psimancers he killed, the greater the dagger’s power became, until he all but wiped out the most powerful warriors.
When the dust cleared, and the blood ceased to flow, the humans found themselves victorious. They enslaved the surviving tiellans for thousands of years.
But the tiellans, while defeated, did not lose hope. They created rihnemin, the great monuments of our people,
to stand as witness to their fallen brothers and sisters, and to house the power that they would one day reclaim. Psimancy was passed down through tiellan bloodlines, but only a precious few were chosen each generation. Often their power was latent, or simply weak, just a shadow of what was once possible. Tiellans bore their psimantic ability with sacred pride, and soon not even other tiellans knew of this birthright, save for the families who carried the blood themselves.
* * *
Mazille said, motioning around the fire, “We few are the inheritors of the true power of the tiellans. Our powers are much stronger than those who came before us. Together, we could move mountains, and crumble nations.”
Winter stared, blinking, into the fire. So many questions rushed through her mind, but one above all.
“My mother must have been a psimancer,” Winter said softly.
“I saw the resemblance the moment you came to my shop,” Mazille said. “You have her hair, and her eyes. You two are very much alike.”
“You knew my mother?” Winter asked. Her mother had died when she was too young to remember her. Beyond the stories her father had told her, all she had were the horrifying visions she had seen of her in Azael’s presence. Visions Winter could only hope were not real.
“Effara was one of us, for a time. Opal, Phares, and I all knew her.”
Winter shivered. She had not heard her mother’s name since before her father was killed.
“What happened to her?” she asked.
“She left us,” Mazille said. “We did not know why at the time. But I suppose now it is clear. She lost interest in our order. She intended to start a family.”
Emotions tumbled within her, fighting for breath. She desperately wanted to know more, but another part of her was cautious, distrusting of anything Mazille had to say. Still another part of her fostered the tiniest grain of hope. Perhaps, after all of this time, this was why she had never felt she belonged.
Perhaps, more than the tiellans, more than the Druids and the Rangers, more than even her father and her kin in Pranna, this was where she belonged.
“We thought she had gone south,” Mazille said. “We searched for her for a time, but in the end it seemed a lost cause.”
“She made her intentions clear,” Phares said. His voice was deep and quiet, and Winter realized it was the first time she had heard him speak. “She wanted nothing more to do with us. We could not force her to stay, as much as we tried. As much as we wanted to.”
“Why did she not want anything to do with you?” Winter asked. She could not imagine leaving the group of people that were more like her than any other in the Sfaera, for any reason.
“She lost her belief in our cause,” Mazille said. “She no longer believed our story, everything I just told you. She thought it was something our ancestors had made up, to make us feel special.”
“But she could use psimancy?” Winter asked. “She saw the evidence.”
“She could,” Phares said slowly, “but psimancy alone was not evidence enough. Especially when the humans began to manifest the power as well.”
Winter shook her head. “If you knew I was Effara’s daughter, why didn’t you tell me all of this in Navone, before I left? Why did you come after me, try to kill me?”
“I had not been ordered to kill you,” Astasios said. “Just to reclaim the faltira you had bought from us, and bring you back. We were going to tell you everything that very night.”
“But you were too strong, too quick, even for us,” Mazille said. “With each generation we get stronger, but… but you seem far stronger than any of us. How many tendra can you wield?”
Winter hesitated. Sharing such a detail seemed dangerous, somehow. She did not want Mazille to use it against her.
And yet, the truth did not seem all that harmful.
“I don’t know,” Winter said.
“You don’t know?” Mazille asked, frowning. “Have you not tried to access your full power?”
“I… I can use more than a dozen,” Winter said after a moment. “I think I might be able to wield a few more, if I really tried.” That was technically not a lie, but she wasn’t disclosing how many more than a dozen she could wield. Typically, maybe two score, and that was without testing her limits. She could not remember clearly, but under the dome in Izet, and in the Circle Square in Navone, she thought it was possible she used even more than that.
The other tiellans around the fire stared at her in stunned silence.
“More than a dozen?” Vlak was the first to speak, his eyes wide.
“Are… are you sure?” Mazille asked after a moment.
Winter shrugged. “Not exactly, but I do think I’ve used at least a dozen.” She met Mazille’s eyes. “Why? How many can you access?”
Mazille blinked, then her eyes shifted to the fire. “Six,” she said. “On a good day, with the purest faltira. Vlak can match that, and we are the most powerful tiellan psimancers to exist in memory.”
Vlak? So a voyant uses tendra? It made sense, if acumens and telenics both used them as well.
That, however, was the least of her questions. “I want to know more. About the rihnemin, and this blood dagger.” The strange tale had reminded her of the monks she had faced in Roden—and Daval himself—who had been able to block her telenic ability. “And more about my mother,” she added, unable to stop herself.
“Of course,” Mazille said, nodding. “We will be happy to share with you all we know.”
Winter nodded. “Good,” she said. She had other duties, of course—her Rangers, the campaign against the Khalic Legion, and her training sessions with Urstadt—but this was important. She needed to make time for it.
She might, after all, have finally found a home.
31
Odenite camp, outside Kirlan
CINZIA WAITED FOR ASTRID at the edge of the Odenite camp as the last rays of the sun began to vanish. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. She could hardly contain her nervousness. It had been four months since Knot had been taken—four months, and Jane’s promised advance to Triah seemed as far away as ever—but Astrid’s last check-in had been hopeful. One week ago, the girl said she would soon find Knot, and to look for her by sunset at the end of the week. That was today, the sun was setting, and Cinzia waited.
Soon, Cinzia heard rustling in the forest ahead, and her heart began to thump rapidly in her chest. She could not believe how much she had taken her relationship with Knot for granted—and even her relationship with Astrid. Without Knot, and with Astrid only here on occasion, the Odenite camp had been driving Cinzia mad. She had not realized how much she had been relying on them both to retain her sanity. Once the three of them were together again, Cinzia would never let them go.
Sure enough, Astrid walked out of the forest, her eyes just beginning to glow a soft green.
The girl was alone.
Cinzia looked behind Astrid for any signs of another person, listened for any other sounds. She neither saw nor heard anything. Her heart continued to pound in her chest, so loud she could hear each beat.
“He could not keep up with you, is that it?” Cinzia called, laughing nervously. Knot had to be with her. Astrid insisted she had all but found him.
But as Astrid approached, Cinzia saw the look on the girl’s face. It told her all she needed to know.
Cinzia fell to her knees, unable to stop the cry that escaped her lips.
Astrid said nothing, instead moving directly to Cinzia and wrapping her in an embrace.
“Is he—”
“I don’t think so,” Astrid said quickly. “I didn’t… I didn’t find anyone, Cinzia. No Knot. No one from the Cult. Nothing.”
Cinzia stayed in Astrid’s arms, grateful for the girl’s embrace. When she pulled away, she saw Astrid had fully transformed, her eyes glowing bright green, teeth and claws elongated and sharp. A fleeting thought struck Cinzia that it was peculiar she didn’t mind the qualities that once horrified and terrified her in
equal measure. It was impossible not to see the differences the girl manifested at night, but Cinzia realized she loved Astrid not just in spite of those differences, but because of them.
But Knot was still gone. Cinzia choked back the lump in her throat, refusing to shed the hot tears that formed in her eyes. “You said you were close.”
“I thought I was,” Astrid said, her voice unusually earnest. “The trail I was following was a Goddess-damned wild goose chase. The Black Matron planted every informant I’ve found. In the Ministry, in the City Watch, in the Sons—every single one of them. She led me on an idiotic pursuit through the city, and then out into the forest to a cabin. An empty, stupid cabin. Knot wasn’t there, and there was no sign of him, or anyone from the Cult.”
“You must have found something. Anything. You mentioned a cabin. What was in it, Astrid?”
“A message,” Astrid said. “A single chair in the middle of an empty cabin in the woods. A place only I would recognize.”
A chair in an empty cabin. “No,” Cinzia said, shaking her head. “The past four months cannot have been for nothing. You had to have found something.”
“I’m sorry, Cinzia,” Astrid said, and even through the green glow Cinzia saw the pain in the girl’s eyes. “I thought I could find him, but I was wrong. I’m so sorry.”
Inside Cinzia, something broke. She did not know what it was, or what it meant, but she felt a visceral snap inside of her.
“This is not your fault,” Cinzia said, looking Astrid in the eyes. She meant it, and she hoped the girl understood that, but she did not have time to convince her. Cinzia embraced her again, then stood up and walked towards the forest, ignoring Astrid’s calls.
* * *
Anger boiled inside of Cinzia as she stalked through the forest. Anger at the Black Matron for doing this to her, to Knot, and to Astrid. Anger at her sister for doing nothing to help Knot, when he had done so much for the Odenites. Most of all, anger at herself. Her sense of helplessness the past four months had nearly driven her mad; the only thing that had kept her sane was knowing that Astrid was out there, looking for Knot.
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