Dar Shara touched it, as if scratching a pet on the head, “Remarkable that someone so young could do this… “She turned to Malcor and eyed him more closely. Behind her, Dread Lord Armageddon swirled from his titanic dragon form through a whirlwind of fire and dark energy into his human form. He walked up behind her.
“The statue is in the likeness of the rebel king Cor’tanos, the shadow dragon patriarch who refused to pledge to Takhissis or the Consort. We also call him and the shadow dragons, ‘the heretics’. The human mind, especially at such a young age, struggles with placing a color or type on the shadows. Black is suitable. The black iron wrought with gold and ruby eyes is a flawless likeness.”
Dar Shara took the statue and walked back to her chair. As she walked, she suggested, “Shall we continue with the Ceremony? There are some here who will remember this with fascination, but the villagers need their rest. Dar Rojo, may we?” She sat down and placed the statue on the throne arm looking out over the courtyard. “I believe we have the matter of Calvin and the others to review.”
“Yes, we shall proceed. Malcor, return to your place with the others. All other youth step forth and let the Ceremony continue.” The mayor stepped out into the courtyard as did Calvin and the other teens. “Keep in mind that, the way the Emperor designed this Ceremony, it was originally three days of combat demonstrations, worship, and sermons while fasting.” He laughed. "And, well long before that, back when we worshiped the dragon totem, Alerius hunted us looking for any who could resist the dragonterror. We've gotten so much better at letting families and communities self-determine this. However, we must see for ourselves if wise decisions have been made here in Klenna."
The Ceremony resumed its normal course. There were no surprises or exceptions. Each stated their desire and their acceptance, by blood through marriage or by apprenticeship, and were blessed by the priestess Dar Shara. At last, Calvin stood forward and declared what he had been prepared and trained for his entire life, “I seek entrance into the knighthood.” He summarized his training and exploits. His father, the mayor, came to stand beside him as he wrapped up his qualifications. Lacking the show Malcor had put on, the customary endorsement or rejection by the shrine’s prefect would take just moments.
This ceremony did not follow customary. The prefect stepped forward but Shara waved the old man back. Armageddon helped her step down from her throne and she slowly circled Calvin. “Strong back. Fair complexion. Well-rehearsed summary my dear Calvin. Tell me,” she stepped closer to him with each word, “is knighthood what you really wish? Serving the Queen means long days soldiering, studying, seeking the mightiest foes, protecting the weakest of the Queen’s vassals. Maybe you don't have what it takes to be a knight, let alone one of the most elite paladins, blessed with holy powers? Unless a priestess chooses you for love, you are bound to chastity and death. As a paladin.” Her eyes scanned the crowd of villagers and noted some of the girls. “Do you have what it takes Calvin?” her lips brushed over his and he flinched. "To be a paladin, or a knight? Both would be glorious. Which path would you take?"
To Calvin’s credit, he tried to answer but words failed him until he at last nodded his head affirmative. Shara looked him in his eyes and then to Malcor’s. “Neither of you
She leaned into Calvin to rest her cheek against his and made eye contact with Malcor, “Choose wisely.”
In the silence of the moment following, Calvin’s father could be heard saying, “You will pass. I know it. This is what we have been training for.” No one counselled or encouraged Malcor.
Malcor remembered the many stories where the two terms "paladin" and "knight" seemed interchangeable. Listening to the high priestess though, he realized the difference as one of faith and servitude. He stepped forward and stated his choice, “I choose the path of sacrifice. I have much to learn. The more difficult path is my destiny. I would be a paladin.”
“I choose to be…”, Calvin said as Dar Shara turned from Malcor back to Calvin. “The same as Malcor.”
Shara embraced Calvin and declared loudly, “Welcome to the knighthood young squires!” More quietly so that only Calvin could hear “You do not hear the Queen in this regard. This path will bring you pain Calvin. Your destiny is not the knighthood. You are too easily distracted by beautiful things.” He winced as he caught her gaze pass over the girls waving at him.
Applause erupted throughout the courtyard and at long last, the breakfast feast that would have happened with a usual ceremony became the evening feast. Several of the paladins and their temple counterparts had musical talent and music soon filled the courtyard. The dragons, not comfortable with so many normal humans, flew off to hunt leaving only Armageddon behind. He endured the curious stares and questions from Klenna’s children with grumpy dignity.
Eventually, he felt a small hand tug on his fist. He looked down to see a small girl. She had a touch of prophecy about her and uncanny blue eyes similar to Malcor's. When her eyes met his, the eldar chuckled and knelt down. He held out his hand asked, "What is your name?"
She put her tiny hand in his giant armored one and said, "I'm Klara. I saw you dance with Mal. He is leaving with you and the red lady?"
Armageddon regarded her from the River for a just a moment and saw her small aura pulsing there with concern for Malcor, whom she viewed as a brother and protector. "Malcor, you love him."
She nodded, her eyes threatening to burst into tears. "He saved me. It was so cold and I was so lonely. He brought me to the warm place, his forge. They got me a job. He is always here. With him gone – "
Armageddon touched her forehead, gently for how strong his hand could be, and interrupted her, "Malcor goes to serve the Mother. You know the Goddess?" Klara nodded, her eyes wide. "By doing so, he'll be better able to look out for you and those like you. He'll always be here in your heart and dreams. Now, hurry, go give him a hug and tell him these things so that you never regret missing a good-bye."
The little girl smiled, sniffled, and then turned to run and find Malcor. The dread lord watched her run as the crowd seemed to magically part for her. She looked back over her shoulder at one point and mouthed a thank-you. Shara walked up on her guardian as he watched the small child hug Malcor in fiercely tight grip that almost knocked Mal over. "It's not every day you see a child make friends with an eldar dragon," she commented. "I may have to commission a piece of art for this moment."
Armageddon continued to watch not answering his mistress. "We must keep an eye on that one Shara. She is different. Special."
Shara turned her eyes to gaze at Klara from the river and nodded. “Do you think –“
Armageddon said nothing. Some children have a sense of potential and destiny about them but only when older does it show. Generation upon generation, Alerius’ records had shown that this sense in the dread lords would offer Klara as a genius prodigy or an omen. “She is too young to tell,” was all he said.
Chapter Six – Initiates to the Temple at Morbatten
The applause, the congratulations, the well-wishes, all had faded. Klenna sat as it ever had, three days behind them on the road to the capitol. Dar Shara had been most explicit that they travel quickly and unseen to Morbatten. In seven days, they must report to the Temple at Morbatten or forfeit their acceptance as knights, and thereby paladins too. Normally, the trip took seven days on the main roads crisscrossing the empire. Moving quickly but quietly proved difficult in the mountainous region aroun
d Klenna. Though the terrain would level out, the straight roads built over centuries would not serve their need for stealth. They needed to go faster to make up for any inevitable delays along a main highway.
Mal rather enjoyed this test of their resolve. His conditioning made the travel and the pack load easy. More than once, he carried Calvin’s load. The difference between hard manual labor and the attention to detail required from hours in the forge gave Malcor clear advantage over Calvin’s privileged lifestyle, even with Calvin’s tutoring; nothing beat the kind of constitution developed by years of hard manual labor. Malcor crouched down behind a thicket from where he watched the main road. Calvin struggled off the road into hiding several hundred feet back.
Around the road’s wide bend and a gentle rise, Malcor thought he had seen signs of travelers. Be unseen, she had said. Sure enough, dark shapes crested the rise and a column of infantry led by a knight came into view. Jogging in double-time, Malcor counted and realized it would take this regiment hours to pass. The knight drew parallel to Malcor’s hiding place. Not just a knight of noble birth, the man bore the markings of a paladin. Malcor felt the weightiness of destiny and a tug from the River’s current. Not just a paladin, a powerful paladin. The knight reached into one of his saddle bags and drew out a small glass vial. He held it up and Malcor saw the man’s lips move as if whispering to the vial. He kissed it and then pushed it towards Malcor’s location. The vial quivered in the air as if about to drop and then the push sent the vial hurtling to Malcor. He held up his hand to block it from hitting him and instead it landed in his hand.
As he caught it, he heard a whispered voice say, “You are safely unseen initiate. This potion will heal even dire wounds. Tonight you will be challenged. Beware. Only wisdom will save you.”
An hour later, with the regiment still double-stepping past them, Calvin finally caught up to Malcor. He too had received a potion. Late in the afternoon, they finally dropped onto the main road and began running to make up lost time. Luck held them and no other travelers interrupted until hunger finally forced them to stop. Though late at night and exhausted from their travel so far, they both felt antsy with the knight’s warning.
Not daring to make a fire, they ate dried fruit, bread, meat, and cheese and quietly discussed whether they should wait the night out and at least face this encounter as fresh as possible, or continue their travel. Though they prayerfully sought guidance, with no answer forthcoming, they readied themselves for a confrontation and waited. It felt awful, just waiting for something dangerous to happen. Malcor finally stood up and began pacing.
“I wonder if all paladins do this?” Calvin asked. “I’ve heard of initiation rituals but sneaking around for days and days to The Temple feels not like a paladin.” It had grown cold and his breath's fog hung in the air around his words.
Malcor shrugged, “There was a knight at the forge once, a young one, just out of training. We talked. He had to do a trip to The Temple too. In his case, he was given a cup of water. He had to get it there from one of the western provinces – so, nine days on the roads? – without spilling and there had to be water left. It was summer.” Malcor stared into the darkness around them. “I think it is a test to see if we can follow difficult if somewhat pointless instructions. It’s how they weed out initiates who lack focus I guess.”
“Well, at least he made it. Are we supposed to reach The Temple and not be seen? Morbatten is a crazy busy city and The Temple is continuously watched and very busy. Have you been there?” Malcor shook his head no. “It is on the eastern mountain overlooking where the river enters the harbor. We have to go through the city, or around the Emperor’s Mountain," Calvin explained.
"Calvin, that knight with the water? I saw him at the forge later. He was an officer. He didn't make it into the paladin ranks."
"Do you know why?"
He shrugged. "Ishan said it is orders of magnitude more difficult to become a paladin than a knight. Harder still to be a knight than an officer. There are tests and things they look for."
Morbatten as a country lay along the eastern side of the huge land called Forsaken Islands. Where the island’s center contained large forests and its own mountains, the eastern coast grew increasingly mountainous until dropping into a roiling and stormy ocean. The capitol itself, also named Morbatten but pronounced slightly different from the empire, meant “children of the father” and honored the dragon emperor’s guardianship of the barbarian tribes that then grew into the people of Morbatten. The capitol nestled in a large valley with three mountain peaks straddling its northern edge. The tallest mountain served as the throne of the dragon emperor Alerius. It sat dead north of Morbatten’s center. Fortified by artisans over millennia, its lower southern sections stretched out into the nicer estates of Morbatten’s wealthy and nobility. The other faces and upper sections had been left in their natural state. The emperor had long ago transformed the interior into everything needed to rule and watch over the empire.
To the north and west, lay a smaller mountain capped by a fortress. The fortress served to overwatch the main road in and out of the capitol. The paladins, though based in the Temple itself, used it alongside the knights and military officers as their base of operations and training. As the military grew and the knights turned into the main command structure of the army, the fortress had taken turns as an administrative, then training, and eventually the guard purpose it now filled since the Bloodstone Wars began centuries ago.
Opposite the fortress and facing more east than north, stood a mountain divided from the emperor’s by Tania’s Great East-West road and a series of plaza fountains feeding the Cordabad River. Called simply the Temple At Morbatten, the largest and mightiest of the Queen’s three temples looked out over the ocean, down to the capitol, and eye level with the emperor’s throne. These three mountains secured the northern edge of Morbatten as surely as a wall from Taysor. Off and on fighting between the two empires had yet to breach that mountain wall even as the winter war waged along it away from the nuances treaties and agreements.
“The mountain is not an option,” Malcor said thinking about it. “We have to trust that our objective is to not be seen as we go through the City. If this is an obedience test, getting there is half of it. If we go around, we probably get caught by a patrol right? We cannot be late.”
Calvin yawned and took a drink from his water skin. “You know, if “unseen” means unrecognized maybe all we need do is get there without being recognized or stopped.”
Malcor sat down on a fallen tree and continued to scan the darkness. He shrugged. “Unseen. Maybe we just show up in the dark of night. Or without light… isn’t there a scripture about dragon fire and other breath weapons in their relationship to darkness and light?” He reached into his backpack for his scriptures.
Calvin nodded, “Yeah, there was that story of the dragon patriarchs claiming their breath weapons, fire, acid, lightning, and so on. He tried to recount the scriptures “beneath the canopy of Heaven but cloaked in throneplanes of hell” or something. I never understood that story.”
Malcor flipped through to the Book of Sparks, the first book and found a reference. He read, “The Queen reached up touching Heaven and proclaimed This Fire is mine and mine children’s fire to light the dark of this new realm. This Fire shall never dim and my children shall wield its Light, each of their own destiny and shape, to create and guard a paradise for the fallen. This Light, this new realm, this sword against the dark is for the Fallen Unseen.”
A gentle breeze swept towards them, heard in the leaves of the trees, and then rustled the scripture’s pages. In the wind, Malcor heard a voice add, “…dragon’s breath is an illusion. Dragons breathe Light. The Fallen and the Innocent of this world choking in the River, see it as fire or steam or lightning. To be Unseen is to cloak yourself in the Queen’s power so that Innocents do not recognize you as different.”
A quick glance at Calvin showed that he did not hear the whisper and Malcor p
ondered that too. Sometime later, Malcor startled awake where his head had nodded too far aside. Early dawn had begun but it was still very dark. Calvin had rolled up in his cloak. The road lay clear and empty. Mal woke his friend.
Making their way to the road, they did not notice the short figure standing right in the middle facing eastward to the City, until they almost ran into him. The figure did not move or give sign they were there. Mal and Calvin stepped back quietly and noticed the garishly bright clothing all mismatched. An odd assortment of different sized pouches strung along a bandolier. He, it, appeared to be a Halfling from the southern province of Home. They had emigrated to Tania with the promise of autonomy and their choice of fertile farm fields in the era of the first priestess Dar Tania almost two thousand years ago.
“I know you’re there. Hi. I’m Kaia. I’m here to test you. I’m looking east so I don’t see you. Malcor and Calvin right? I hope. This will be so awkward if you’re not… well, are you?”
The Halfling had a high-pitched and excitable voice. Hearing it made the boys feel happy. Happy? No, wrong word. Interested? Excited? Calm but ready? Malcor could not quite place the feeling. Calvin said, “So what if we are? We already have a test…”
“At the Temple! I can get you there!” Kaia exclaimed. “I can get you to the Temple right now in fact, UNSEEN…” he opened his arms wide as he said the last part for emphasis. “I am the test. Well, sort of. What do you want?”
Mal and Calvin exchanged glances, “What do I want?” Calvin repeated. “I want to be a knight. What do you want and why are you here?”
“C’mon Calvin, let’s go. No point wasting time here. We have a place to be soon.” Malcor started to walk around the halfling.
Kaia added, “Sure, sure. Ignore the Halfling who wants to help with your test. Like I said, I can get you there now. If you try to go past me, you won’t get past me.”
Malcor's Story Page 6