Kingdom of Bones

by Philip C. Quaintrell

  Looking through the matted strands of his hair, Alijah found Asher on the edge of the shadows, where Malliath lay. The ranger’s hand moved and his fingers slowly wiggled, despite his statue-like form. For the first time he wasn’t watching the rogue. His eyes focused on the floor and his brow furrowed into concern.

  “Your bond strengthens,” came The Crow’s startling voice. The wizard wandered into Alijah’s eye line. How long had he been in the chamber?

  The rogue turned back to Asher, who had returned to his normal demeanour. The ranger showed no signs of distress and his blue eyes settled on Alijah once more.

  “Are you ready for today’s lesson?” The Crow asked, snatching his full attention.

  Before Alijah could answer, the wizard waved his wand over the manacles around the half-elf’s wrists, unlocking them.

  Coming down on his full weight was always hard on Alijah’s legs and he stumbled a step in a bid to regain his centre of gravity. He looked around nervously, waiting for the Reavers to appear with fresh prisoners or worse.

  “Today’s lesson is going to be a little different,” The Crow explained, seeing his mounting paranoia. “Follow me,” he instructed.

  Alijah watched the necromancer turn on his heel and leave through the only door. He didn’t know what to do. His instinct said run, never follow The Crow anywhere. He suspected, however, that pain would find him whatever he decided.

  “Come along!” The Crow called from the hall.

  Asher stepped out of the shadows, coming up behind Alijah. The rogue quickly put one foot in front of the other and worked to catch up with the wizard.

  It was a strange sensation to walk out of the cell rather than be dragged out. Any hesitation on his part was met with Asher’s imposing shadow. Stuck between the two, Alijah followed diligently. The occasional dark mage would pass them on their route and look at Alijah with curiosity, but none questioned their master.

  Travelling to the other side of The Bastion, Alijah soon realised where he was being led. The Crow entered his private study without looking back to see if he was still accompanied by the half-elf. Asher stood to the side of the door, in the hall, and closed it after the rogue passed through, leaving the two of them alone.

  “Before we move on,” The Crow said, gathering up sundries from his desk, “if you wish to attack me, now is your opportunity. We have much to do and there won’t be time for it later.”

  Alijah knew exactly what he wanted to do in that moment. He would grab the Leviathan’s tooth off the mantle and bring it down as hard as he could on The Crow’s head, cracking it like an egg.

  But, he didn’t.

  The rogue stood rooted to the spot, kept there by the pain that still lingered from his previous lessons. The necromancer knew many ways to make him suffer and he wouldn’t invite violence if he didn’t know he couldn’t come to harm.

  “Very good,” The Crow commented, glancing over his shoulder. “A wise king knows the power of inaction. To do nothing sometimes can be just as important as acting.”

  Alijah’s eyes darted from one side of the study to the other. “Is that today’s lesson?”

  The Crow ignored him and continued to busy himself by the table on the far side of the study. It was covered in alchemy equipment, jars of ingredients, and luminous liquids. Resting on a stand was a thick black book, its ancient pages opened to the middle.

  After making him wait a while longer, The Crow returned to the centre of the study with a wooden bowl in one hand and his wand in the other. The bowl was filled with green liquid, thick as any broth.

  “Drink this,” he commanded, holding the bowl out.

  Alijah looked at the disgusting liquid and his hands refused to take the bowl.

  Surprisingly, the wizard lifted the bowl to his own lips and took a mouthful. “It’s the foulest thing you’ll ever taste,” he promised, “but it won’t kill you.”

  Alijah still wasn’t convinced this wasn’t a trick. Would he swallow the liquid and discover it to be poison The Crow was immune to? Would he be in agony for hours, days even?

  Seeing no alternatives, the half-elf took the bowl in two hands and drank a mouthful. The wizard wasn’t wrong: it was the foulest thing he had ever tasted. It very quickly threatened to return on him.

  “Keep it down,” The Crow warned.

  Alijah made a concerted effort to breathe through his nose and ignore the acrid taste that burned his tongue. When the nausea passed, he sighed in relief and handed the bowl back to the necromancer.

  “Stay very still,” The Crow ordered.

  He brought up his wand and touched it to Alijah’s forehead, then to his own. He repeated the movement over and over, always connecting the tip of the wand with their heads. A quiet chant escaped his lips, but to Alijah’s ears his voice grew exponentially, a thundering boom inside his mind. He felt himself being drawn into The Crow and then expelled with every back and forth of the wand.

  The hypnotic effect continued for another moment until the wizard’s chanting became unbearable and Alijah had to shut his eyes.

  Then it stopped.

  The foul taste was gone from his mouth. The chanting had disappeared. The wand ceased its insistent tapping. Then, he heard the sound of feet passing by, followed by the general din of a city. His senses were filled with sounds and smells, and his skin could feel the warm breeze.

  The rogue opened his eyes to a world he didn’t recognise.

  He was standing in the middle of a busy street, surrounded by tall adjoining buildings and overlooked by a glorious blue sky. People were going about their lives, oblivious to the shabby and haggard young man staring at them all.

  Something was inexplicable about the people, the buildings too. Alijah knew the architecture was different to any in Illian and the clothes had a style he had never seen before.

  “You can’t put your finger on it, can you?” The Crow walked out of an alley attired in his usual dark robes and feathers. “You feel as if you should know where you are, but something isn’t right. The people perhaps? The buildings?”

  Alijah weaved between the oblivious people and made his way towards the wizard. “Where are we?” he asked urgently. “What is this?” he added, sure that what he saw was an illusion.

  “Where we are is quite significant,” The Crow replied cryptically. “Or at least it was, once upon a time. You’re standing in the middle of Ak-tor, the capital city of the world!”

  Alijah couldn’t believe what he was hearing but, then again, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing or smelling either. “Have we…” He could barely say the words. “Have we travelled through—”

  “Time?” The Crow finished in an amused tone. “Of course not. Magic is powerful but it doesn’t make one a god. Some things cannot be done. This has all been built from my memory. You’re inside my mind, Alijah.”

  The rogue couldn’t think of anywhere worse to be…

  “This is… ten thousand years ago?” the rogue clarified, his eyes moving over everything.

  “In my mind,” The Crow reiterated, striding out into the flow of people. “We’re just ghosts here.” Proving his point, a man and his young son walked straight through the wizard as if he wasn’t really there.

  Alijah held his arm out and allowed his hand to pass through a woman walking by. “It all feels so…”

  “Real?” The Crow inferred. “That’s because the memory is so fresh in my mind. Ten thousand years might have gone by but, from the moment that dagger stopped my heart to the moment The Black Hand brought me back, it felt like only a second.”

  Alijah’s eyes were drawn to the wizard’s chest, where his robe concealed the old scar. “You killed yourself,” he stated bluntly. “You left all of this behind so that you could, what? Change the world?”

  The Crow fell in behind the father and son, motioning for the rogue to follow them as well. “I didn’t meet death to change the world, Alijah. I did it to meet you, to instruct you, to forge you into somethin
g that will outshine all of this.” The wizard turned his head to the half-elf. “You are the one who is going to change the world…”

  Alijah still had no response to statements such as that. He continued to walk through the streets of Ak-tor in silence beside The Crow. They followed the man and his son diligently and the wizard gave no indication as to why. The question, however, was far from his mind, occupied as he was observing the people of The First Kingdom.

  One such person, an old man, stood behind a market stall outside a shop that apparently sold toys. What caught Alijah’s eye was the blatant display of magic. The old man waved his hands over the toys on the stall and they sprang to life; little toy soldiers marching up and down, a wooden dragon flying above.

  After noting the old man, the rogue soon discovered that almost everyone around them was using magic. A woman stepped out of her house and assessed the white walls with a critical eye. Deciding she wasn’t happy, the woman placed her hand to the brick and it instantly changed to blue.

  Turning a corner, a pair of brooms moved by themselves down the street, collecting all the debris. Alijah was so focused on the flying brooms that he nearly missed the carriage coming towards them. The father and son stood to the side and the rogue instinctively did the same. It took him a moment longer than it should have to realise the carriage wasn’t being pulled by any horses, or any animal for that matter.

  Turning on the spot, Alijah saw some use of magic everywhere he looked. And no one was using a wand or a staff.

  “This is impossible,” he pointed out. “They’re humans. They can’t use magic like this.”

  The Crow continued to trace the steps of the father and son, his wand in hand. “Yes, I imagine this all looks like something of a fantasy. In the only world you’ve known, humans require wands or staffs with a core of Demetrium as a conduit to control magic. The same laws of magic applied here as well, only they had a more elegant solution to carrying around a piece of wood.”

  “What do they use?” Alijah asked, his hunger for knowledge finally awakening.

  “Some of them actually did use wands,” The Crow replied casually. “Though, it was more of a fashion statement back then, mostly for the priests and high-borns; something they could brandish in front of others, I suppose.” Regarding the Ak-torians around them, he continued, “These people didn’t use anything. The finest fibres of Demetrium are sewn into their clothing.”

  Alijah began to pay extra attention to everyone’s attire. He could see nothing exceptional about their materials, but he did notice that the father and son were wearing rags in comparison.

  “Incredible…” the rogue let slip, witnessing an ordinary man levitating a heavy barrel through a doorway.

  “Incredible for some,” the necromancer said with some emotion. “Demetrium is far rarer in Illian compared to Erador. King Atilan had it mined and exported from there to here: an expensive process. Only those that lived inside the walls could afford it and, as you can see, it changed their lives.”

  “What about those who couldn’t afford it?” Alijah asked.

  The Crow gestured to the father and son. “They did what they had to to survive in a kingdom that didn’t care for them.”

  With The Crow’s final word, they followed the father and son around the corner and out of the shadow of the tall buildings. The city opened up into a courtyard of gardens that surrounded a looming white tower.

  Alijah craned his neck to sight the very top. “Does King Atilan live in there?” He had only dreamed of the palace Atilan had called home, though in no dream had he imagined it to be a simple white tower.

  “No,” The Crow answered. “This is The Citadel, home of The Echoes and their priests.”

  Following the father and son a little farther, they joined a queue that saw them met by a priest of the Echoes. Alijah couldn’t believe his ears when the man sold his son for coin. He wanted to reach out and stop the fool, urging him to keep his child safe. But this had already happened. He was ten thousand years too late to be of any help.

  The young boy cried as his father walked away, never once looking back. A lump formed in Alijah’s throat as he watched the boy being dragged towards The Citadel.

  “That was you, wasn’t it?”

  The Crow stared at the boy, his expression unreadable. “That was Sarkas, son of a drunk. That little boy soon forgot who his parents were. The Echoes broke him. Out of his pain and suffering I arose. I did the monstrous things he could never do, just as I will for you.”

  The necromancer clawed at the air with one hand and ripped their surroundings away, reducing the courtyard and the tower to mist. It was disorientating, but Alijah soon found his bearings again, only now he was high above the ground, standing on a balcony. Looking over the edge, he deduced the tower was that of The Citadel.

  “Quite the view from up here, isn’t it?” The Crow stepped to his side and joined him in gazing at the vista.

  Ak-tor was sprawled beneath them in a pattern of interlocking circles, each section walled off with archways between. Beyond the edge of the city was a different city altogether. A shambles of roughly erected huts and shabby buildings spread across the fields.

  Rising up, in the west, was a fortress-like palace that glistened in the sun. Its walls were patterned with gold and the spires sparkled like diamonds.

  “That was where King Atilan lived,” The Crow confirmed. He turned to the shanty town outside the city walls. “That’s where I grew up, beyond the touch of magic.”

  Alijah couldn’t help but see the irony in The First Kingdom’s only living survivor being a person who grew up without magic. Considering the very tower he was now standing in, the rogue didn’t like to think what had been done to Sarkas to make him so twisted, let alone powerful.

  “Where is this?” Alijah asked, searching the mountain line in the distance.

  “We’re on the northern edge of what is now The Evermoore forest. Some of this is The White Vale, south of Namdhor.”

  Alijah thought back on his geography. “I’ve crossed The White Vale before,” he said. “I’ve been around The Evermoore too. I didn’t see anything like this…”

  “Ten thousand years is a long time,” The Crow replied. “The First War, between Atilan and the Dragon Riders, ended with Ak-tor being razed to the ground. Over the years, it was swallowed up by the earth, grown over by a wild forest, and forgotten by all.”

  Ragged breathing and the sound of scratching pulled at Alijah’s attention, turning him away from the vista of Ak-tor. The room behind them was dark, a stark comparison to the sunshine and white walls of The Citadel.

  In the middle of the room, a gruesome scene had played out. A woman lay dead on the floor, her bare stomach covered in blood. Alijah stepped into the room and felt the cold liquid seep between his toes. There was little he could do about it; the blood was everywhere. Crouched beside the dead woman was a young man, his attention wholly on the parchment laid out in front of him. He was scribing furiously.

  “This particular incident required a few spells to clean up,” The Crow remarked. “I didn’t have long before my master was said to return. This was his room.”

  Alijah looked from the necromancer to the scribing young man. “That’s you?”

  “Oh, yes. This moment shaped more lives than you know.” The Crow eyed the parchment and left Alijah to examine it over young Sarkas’s shoulder.

  Reading anything in the ancient language was hard, but the rogue knew well what words were being scribed. In fact, he recognised the entire parchment.

  “This… This is the Echoes of Fate. This is the prophecy…”

  The Crow nodded along. “This is the prophecy that drove The War for the Realm. King Elym, your grandfather, wanted to invade Illian over these words. Even the mighty Valanis took its words seriously.”

  Alijah crouched by the young man. “You really did scribe the Echoes of Fate.” He looked over the dead woman and the frantic Sarkas before turning to The Crow.
“Why? Why do any of this?”

  “Had those words never been written, had I not left them where Nalana, your great aunt, would find them, your grandfather would never have schemed to invade Illian. He openly disregarded the prophecy but, in his heart, he believed it to be true.”

  Alijah shook his head. “You scribed the Echoes of Fate so the elves would go to war with man? That didn’t happen. My mother brokered peace and my grandmother took control of Elandril. This just caused a lot of needless deaths!” he insisted.

  The Crow looked back at the half-elf with eyes that spoke of great sorrow. “Yes, many died because of what happened here. But it had to be done, they had to die, and everything had to happen exactly as I saw it.”

  Alijah stood up. “Why?” he demanded.

  “If King Elym had not planned to invade Illian, your mother would never have been sent to scout the kingdoms of men. She would never have met Nathaniel Galfrey. You would never have been born…”

  Alijah stumbled backwards as a crushing weight descended on his conscience, a revelation he simply couldn’t fathom. “You… You did this…” He turned away, convinced he was going to be sick.

  “Yes,” The Crow said proudly. “I created the Echoes of Fate to ensure one thing and one thing only.” He held his arms out to the rogue. “And here you are.”

  “No,” Alijah said firmly, refusing to hear it. “You couldn’t have… You didn’t do this for…” He couldn’t say the words. “It’s not possible!”

  The Crow looked down at the parchment. “I know, it’s a lot to take in. With only a few words on a scroll I brought you into being ten thousand years later. Whoever said the small things don’t matter has never seen a flame spark a wildfire.”

  Alijah froze, his sight fixed on the dead woman and the blood. How much had been spilled over the centuries to ensure his birth? How many deaths? He couldn’t be that significant, he just couldn’t. There wasn’t any one person whose life warranted the death of so many.