by P D Ceanneir
‘I will try to remember that. Does this mean he is mine?’
His father nodded and smiled, ‘he was programmed to find you on your thirteenth birthday just in case I…well… I was not around.’
Telmar bowed his head for a second. It seemed strange talking to this image of his father, and he felt tears well up in his eyes; he sniffed hard and wiped them away, trying to act like a man in front of his father.
‘I know son,’ said Efron with a sad look on his face. ‘I wish I could be with you in life, but in truth I was counting the days I had left after you were born, and those days were a bonus. I watched you grow to become a young man and that was my reward after the sickness left me.’
‘Sickness Father?’
‘Yes, I had an ailment that left after you were born,’ he held up his hands. ‘Do not ask me what it was, because even I do not know. It did, however, come in stages and the energy it created made it possible for me to charge Harlequin with energy and give him life.’ He looked sombrely into his sons eyes, ‘now I think it is inside you, son.’
‘Me?’
Efron nodded. ‘I believe it will not affect you as it did me. It may not affect you at all, I hope it doesn’t, but I have given you Harlequin to watch over you, and another gift.’
Telmar raised his eyebrows at his father.
Efron nodded his head to an area behind him and Harlequin floated over to it to illuminate the dark corner of the room. Sitting on a stone block was a sword.
‘It is traditional for a father to give his son a “Manly Gift” on his thirteenth birthday,’ said Efron. ‘This sword was made by the Master Smith Lord Borran.’
Telmar gasped. Lord Borran was by far the greatest maker of Rawn swords in the land, each were made of the finest quality steel and were very individual in design. This one had a long thin blade that had a tint of green within it. There was no hilt basket, which was not uncommon with Rawn swords, but the hilt was a hand and a half grip with a jade and gold spiral design of a snake, the snake’s back ridges were formed into a hand grip. The blade itself seemed to grow out of the large fanged mouth of the snake and the eyes were made of small rubies. There was no pommel, just an emerald held on by the entwined tail of the snake. The emerald had its top section carved out to form a cup.
‘The sword is called Basilisk,’ said Efron.
‘The Nalobeandan snake goddess of retribution,’ said Telmar, and his father nodded. Telmar picked up the weapon and gave a few cuts through the air. Even as young as he was, the sword was well balanced and easy to wield. He gave the emerald cup a quizzical look.
‘That is the recess for Harlequin,’ his father said when he saw the boy s expression. ‘He will only answer to your voice, ask him to return to the sword.’
Telmar did so and the ball of white light seemed to hesitate for a few seconds, then started to dim. He watched it come towards the emerald cup and land neatly inside it. Once its generated glow subsided completely he could truly see it was a small round sphere about two inches in diameter with many, very tiny, Skrol etching over its surface. Telmar was at a surprisingly advanced level of training when it came to the language of the Old Gods, but these symbols were unfamiliar to him. They did not seem to appear in the usual eighty-four characters of the Skrol alphabet, these were more like a numeric sequence, rather like a complex mathematical formula. He was about to ask his father about it when he realised that the ball was white.
‘I thought Glemmarstone was brown, father?’ he said
‘It is. The energy I put into it after each bout of my sickness caused it to turn white,’ sighed Efron. Glemmarstone, or God Metal, was a substance created by the Old Gods, the My’thos. It was a fusion of all earthly material and it became indestructible, though it also had more, unknown properties. The other weapon of power, the legendary White Spear of Haplann, also forged from Glemmarstone is known to have a mind of its own as well.
Telmar looked along the full length of the sword. ‘Thank you father this is most generous.’
‘I only wish I could give it to you in person, son.’
Telmar nodded and looked away towards the shifting landscape within the archway in a bid to hide the brimming tears in his eyes.
The images within the arch jumped quickly. He could see, briefly, a stunning landscape of rolling green hills, and then it changed to a vast sprawling city of tall metallic structures where cylindrical shapes with fixed wings glided through them. Then it turned to a burning plain, black smoke hung in the air over charred carcasses that looked human. Then it shifted to the Isle of Carras, where an unfamiliar shrine sat in the circle of its stone rings, before it quickly changed to a blackened dead forest of gnarled trees. He then briefly caught a glimpse of the Door sitting in a large room next to a high-backed throne with many tiered pews encircling it, but he did not connect the sighting of the Door to his dreams. Then it disappeared to reveal another scene.
‘Father, what is this contraption?’ he said pointing to the arch.
‘Ah,’ said Efron. ‘A very good question, and a difficult one to answer. I have been studying it since my engineers stumbled across the tunnel you came along. After reading the Grymward, I knew it was here, but had no clue as to how badly damaged it was. This, my boy, is the Elder Styx’s greatest secret. He called it the Mastirton Maelstrom. In fact, it is a doorway into a particular energy stream of the Dragon Lanes, the Earth Mothers Lifespan Conduit to be exact. Through it he could travel anywhere at any point of the planets life.’
‘You mean, Time Travel?’ gasped Telmar.
Efron nodded and pointed towards the set of standing stones. ‘The conflagration of stones, coupled with the shifting rings above, form into a sixteen sided dimensional cubical shape with mathematical precision. This charges the archway and helps to keep it open. In fact, what the Elder Styx stumbled upon was the actual shape of dimensional space-time and the energy it creates comes from time itself. He called the energy particles Tachyons and the space-time shape a Tachyhexadecagon.’
Telmar gave his father a quizzical look, ‘Tachyhexadecagon?’
Efron laughed, ‘Styx was a genius, but he was a bit lax with names.’
Telmar turned back to the arch with its flashing images of landscapes through time, ‘so what is wrong with it?’
At this point the Glemmarstone orb of Harlequin spun inside the emerald cup of his sword.
‘It has a Depolarised Inversion Event trapped within its modular matrix,’ it said.
‘Put simply,’ added Efron when he noticed Telmar’s confused frown, ‘it’s stuck; causing it to stutter though Timescapes and I don’t know enough about it to fix it. Harlequin has some of the personality traits of Styx embedded into the Skrol that cover his surface, but he is not as smart as the real thing, even he is at a loss.’
‘At the moment the whole thing is stable. Yet it is teetering on the edge of a huge cataclysmic Time Inversion that can turn this whole planet inside out. So I suggest you don’t go near it.’
‘I’ll try to remember that,’ said Telmar smiling, but he felt frightened at what he had heard.
‘When you leave, Harlequin will close the opening behind you. In the morning go to the hearth in my study, prise open the right corner stone, inside you will find the Grymward. It is yours to study at your leisure. I have left some notes inside it to aid you in continuing to decipher the Elders complex code. Maybe there will be a passage in there to explain a possible solution to stabilising the Mastirton Maelstrom. Until then it is too dangerous for you to be here.’
‘I understand, father,’ said Telmar obediently.
‘May the My’thos watch over you son,’ said Efron beginning to fade. ‘I will always love you.’
Telmar never got a chance to say goodbye, his father faded into nothingness, leaving him alone inside the strange room. He walked back to Tuen House in a daze, carrying Basilisk without actually remembering the journey. Too much information was swimming around his head. He was so exhausted that
he didn’t even disrobe. In the morning he woke from a refreshingly sound sleep. He put the events of the previous night down to an over-active imagination. That is until he noticed his boots covered in dirt, and the sword Basilisk propped on a seat at the foot of his bed. As soon as he saw it, he remembered the conversation with his father and rushed down to his study to retrieve the Grymward from its hiding place.
The Elder’s journal was there, dusty and buckled, but otherwise unmarked. He resisted the urge to open it and start reading his father’s notes. Instead, he hid it in his room and set about the duty of morning chores with his mother before breakfast.
The Academy
OF
RAWN ARTS
“May your path to knowledge be forever marred by experimental endeavours”
Earl Colinas of Landrum: Archmaster of the Academy of Rawn Arts
1
Seventeen years before the death of Efron, his sister Anna married Selwin the High Steward of the Vallkyte king. Three years later they were to have a daughter, Namwi. Anna was old by then and the Phage had struck soon after Namwi was born and so she was not able to see her daughter’s first birthday. Selwin, a kind and honourable man, much respected by his peers for his gentle nature, was heartbroken. He struggled through life in court while raising Namwi, who became a beautiful child, though quiet like her father. Then, at the age of seven, he fostered her to her aunt and uncle in Tuen House. She was to stay with them, and Telmar, for four years and they would be the happiest years of her life.
Namwi was a very quiet and introverted child; her father had not spoilt her and she found the pressures of court life extreme for herself as much as her father. Moving to Tuen House was at first frightening and alien to her. She had only met her aunt and uncle on two occasions when they visited parliament, and she had never met her cousin, Telmar.
Life at Dorit Lorne was going to be very different from back home. Yet her foster parents treated her as family, in so much as any member of the Tressel household became family, which meant she helped with the chores and the running of the ranch. Her days started before first light and finished just before evening supper, after which she would retire early and fall into an exhausted sleep.
Nothing was ever repetitive at Tuen House. She would learn to ride and help Telmar and the cattle hands collect stray livestock from the mountains. She would aid Aunt Catlyn in the barns as she cured sick animals, something Catlyn was very good at, or help the old smith in the smithy. Most days she would be covered in muck, have bloody scratches and blisters on her hands, but she enjoyed every minute of it. There was something organic, calming and unpredictable about life at Dorit Lorne.
Efron took time to educate her along with Telmar in the years before his death. Namwi had a marvellous memory and became Efron’s star pupil when it came to learning about history and politics, although her father had instilled this in her from an early age already. She and Telmar were very fond of each other; they were like brother and sister and she followed him everywhere he went, though she recognised very early that he was a child with an independent nature. Namwi grew into a confidant young woman at Tuen House. Still quiet and shy with strangers, she nevertheless became a woman of substance in later life and the first female lawyer of Dulan-Tiss. She was short and slim with a full round face and rosy cheeks, long dark brown curly hair and soft hazel eyes, this led to her having many suitors when she reached her late teens who wished to court such a beauty, but she would kindly turn them away.
Secretly, many believed, her fondness for Telmar never left her and she always looked back at Tuen House as her home.
2
After her first four years with the Tressel family, Namwi always tried to return there in the summer months to help on the ranch. In the first year of Telmar’s apprenticeship into the Academy of Rawn Arts, she offered to ride with him to the Pander Pass.
They took provisions for the ten-day trip and three of the smith’s sons and four of Count Talien’s household guards accompanied them. Catlyn bid them farewell, hugged them both and tried to hold back emotional tears of sadness, she would not see her son again for a year until next summer term.
They travelled around the foothills of Dorit Morn and made for Little Dorit, staying the night in the old tavern at the centre of town. Then they travelled north, taking the east road that fringed Lake Furran into Haplann, from where they linked up with the Old Drove Road that led to the Pander Pass.
The Pass in those days was a small township that had sprung up from the original garrison, which guarded the opening to the pass, a long, deep tunnel through the mountains’ heart built by human hands over three thousand years before. Much of the town lay to the north, away from the garrison and the outer walls. The Tressel party stayed in the Pig and Trough Inn on Parlance Street for the night. In the morning Namwi and Telmar would part company; Namwi’s father had already sent a planned escort to the Pass to take her back to Dulan-Tiss.
‘I will miss you, cousin’, she said to him as she watched him tighten his harness onto his horse. Her face etched with worry.
‘I will miss you too, Namwi,’ said Telmar, trying hard not to look away from her face. In a few short months, the fourteen-year-old Namwi had grown into womanhood with such surprising changes that the adolescent Telmar found it difficult not to notice the new bumps and curves. He himself had grown into a handsome young man and towered over his shorter cousin.
‘I will see you next summer,’ he continued. ‘Of course you could always accompany your father to Aln-Tiss when he comes for the king’s birthday ball. I would see you then.’
‘Yes I would like that,’ she said, without much conviction. She still looked worried.
‘What’s wrong?’
She was doing that annoying habit of entwining her long locks of hair around finger and thumb, Telmar knew she did this when she was nervous.
‘I feel that things are...changing. You know. Life will never be the same.’
Telmar nodded urging her to go on.
‘My father wishes me to marry,’ she blurted out.
Telmar was speechless for a few seconds, his stomach fluttered. ‘Ah, right. Who is his choice?’
She shrugged, ‘he has not made up his mind, I have told him I’m too young and I wish to go to Law College.’
‘What did he say to that?’
She shrugged, ‘not much.’
Telmar sighed. The thoughts of his uncle, and whomever he wished his daughter to marry, were none of his business, but he could not get rid of the feelings of apprehension he felt at the news.
He forced a smile. ‘This is not the way I planned our farewell,’ he said to her.
She began to sob then; she flung her arms around his neck, and cried on his shoulder. He was very aware of the nubs of her teenage breasts against his chest. He had to crouch a bit so she could reach.
‘Take care, Telmar,’ she said into his ear.
‘I will.’
‘Write to me every day,’ she demanded.
‘Of course I will.’
He left to go into the tunnel of the pass; before he entered, he turned on his saddle to see the forlorn Namwi watching him depart at the doors of the stable and felt a sense of loss when she gave him a little wave. He waved back and trotted into the darkness.
Little did he know at the time that the girl he left behind on that day at the Pass would be the cause of a war that would take the lives of thousands, and throw Telmar’s world into turmoil.
3
My father once told me of the first time he saw Telmar.
He and his two friends had walked into the great assembly hall of the academy’s west wing. The Rawn Academy building was a strange looking structure for such an acclaimed institute. It was a three-storied square limestone building with row upon row of gothic style windows and statues of famous Rawn Masters from throughout the ages crowning the very edge of its glass-domed roof. The whole building sat on tall columned arches and the first time I set eyes up
on it I was amazed at how it ever stayed up. So precarious a design it was, that when I entered the main cloisters archway I often did it at a run thinking that it would collapse on top of me. Such faith I have in ancient buildings. I still do it to this day.
Though the academy is a large building, it is actually part of the royal palace of Aln-Tiss. The palace grounds harbour such buildings as the parliament halls and library enclosed inside its own walls. Most of the main areas of the city sit southward of the palace and hug the coast where the town of Old Port slopes towards the sea.
That year’s intake of Rawn Apprentices had all arrived throughout the week to enrol at the administration building, which was a small red-bricked house that annexed the library. Once the clerks had registered them, they then left the grounds to find lodgings in the city until the first day of training where they would then live in communal bunkrooms in the Academy Dormitory Annex. As my father informed me, the first day usually involved a long boring speech by the Archmaster, an ancient title for the Academy’s leader, to everyone in the assembly hall and the apprentices were then shown to his or her dormitories.
Two young lords accompanied my father - Yovin, Master of Arthoni the Earl of Arthoni’s son, and his cousin, Squire Hinton of Trin, a small fishing village on the Arthoni coast. Most of the time my father had no patience for fawning sycophants and flatterers who befriend him because of his station. Being the De Proteous, and heir to the Rogun throne, made it difficult for him to make true friends. Yovin’s father was the king’s chancellor and this meant the Master of Arthoni spent many days at the palace, and so he and Vanduke became friends purely out of necessity. Vanduke found him humorous though a little snobbish and his cousin, Hinton, heir to a minor lordship, was at times pretentious.
Father often took these two along purely because they had an amazing intuitiveness for court protocol; they also possessed a vast knowledge of local nobles. Most of the court gossip and everyday news came from the lips of the Arthoni cousins. Father would always be the first to admit that he had terrible memory for names and faces, something that always seemed to bother him in later life because it led to embarrassing situations at court functions when nobles from distant lands introduced themselves to him, and his face would remain comically blank. Thankfully, my father had a wit and charm that would endear him to many people and his laid-back nature made up for his shortfalls in memory. However, I do remember my grandfather (whose policy of court protocols were strict) often became furious with his only son for his lack of enthusiasm.