The Riven God

by F. T. McKinstry

  Lorth took his Raven’s cloak from her hands and slung it over his shoulders. “Get some help and bring this beast to Nolan, ay?”

  Her expression turned sly. “Aye, Master. If you let me take Leaf to my lesson.” She raised her chin and arched her brows in challenge.

  “Forget it,” he growled. Leaving the deer where it lay, he continued up the wide path towards the Oculus, which towered high above the wooded halls and paths of Eyrie like a jewel shining in the sun.

  Banyae danced up to his side. “Please? You promised.”

  “I lied.” He pointed behind him. “Don’t leave that there.”

  “I’ll tell the Council you were ignoring them,” she threatened.

  Lorth rolled his eyes. The Aenlisarfon knew damned well he was ignoring them. While they had given him the Ninth Seat on his own merit, he had accomplished this with characteristic disregard for propriety and protocol. He would never have gained the stature of Initiate to the Aenlisarfon without the recommendation of Ealiron himself, who had decided his Council of Ravens needed a high wizard with some darker sense.

  Lorth stopped, leaned down and pulled a knife from his boot. He took it by the blade and held it up, flashing a silver hilt in the shape of a naked, curvy girl. He had acquired the blade years ago from a man he had murdered for the sake of a prostitute named Leaf. But Banyae knew nothing of that. “If anything happens to her, I’ll carve you up like a hare and feed you to the ravens on the cliffs of the Western Quadrant. Clear?”

  She nodded in all seriousness and then held up her hands in glee as he lowered the hilt into it. “I’ll be careful, Master. On my word.”

  As the hunter continued on his way, he cast one last glance over his shoulder. Banyae had lifted the sled and was gasping and staggering towards the kitchens with it. Shaking his head, Lorth pulled his hood over his face and continued on.

  An enormous raven lifted from an oak tree on the edge of the way and soared over his head towards the center of the citadel, where it disappeared into the trees.

  Spring had come to the valleys, but on the mountain she dallied, bringing cold nights, frosts, and only the hardiest growing things to bear. The forests thickened with swelling buds, and perennials thrived in the many gardens tended by the wizards of Eyrie. The day promised warmth as the sun cast golden rays through the trees that sheltered the lower levels of the citadel. As Lorth climbed higher, the vegetation thinned, as did the appearance of folk and apprentices. He passed observatories of glass, statues of Formation gods, and courtyards containing crystal mosaics and beautiful carvings of geometric patterns. Amid the airy structures, outlooks provided breathtaking views of the realm of Sourcesee.

  He rounded a corner and stepped upon a narrow stair that led to the entrance of Onesee. Something dark moved over the edge of a wall that formed the alcove for the door: the bird he had seen in the oak tree. Not just any raven, however.

  Lorth stopped with a smile as a man appeared before him. Tall and fair, with the ivory skin, crow-black hair and the gray-green eyes of Ealiron, his immortal father, he wore the worn clothes and gear of a traveler beneath his Raven’s habit.

  “You bastard,” Lorth said. They clasped arms, and then embraced. It had been nearly a year since he had seen Eaglin, the Raven of Eusiron, in the halls of Eyrie. “I never could spot you shapeshifted.”

  The two men withdrew. Eaglin’s smile, though warm and genuine, cast a shadow. “You’re late,” the black-haired Raven said. “Giving knives to girls, at that.”

  Lorth lowered the bow and quiver from his back. “Did they send you to fetch me?”

  “If they had sent me, I’d have tracked your wolf ass down hours ago. I just arrived from Caerroth.”

  “What are you doing here?” Though Eaglin didn’t sit on the Aenlisarfon—he didn’t need to—he occasionally projected here to speak to the Council for whatever reason. He rarely came in person.

  Eaglin glanced at the wooden door to the hall, a tall, unassuming portal tucked into a stone arch. “I’ll make that clear shortly.” He stepped aside and held out his arm. “After you, Raven of Ostarin, First Raptor, Ninth Seat on the Aenlisarfon and Siomothct of the First Regard.”

  Lorth scowled. Eaglin enjoyed teasing him about the seriousness of his titles, mostly because they made Lorth uncomfortable.

  Lorth opened the door, inhaling the chill of a large space. He entered the top of an expansive circular hall with a strip of windows around the ceiling. Stone benches rose up in tiers on all sides. At the bottom, an intricate mosaic of the Eye surrounded by an interlocking pentacle spanned the edges of the floor. The colorful stones glittered in the light beaming quietly from the window ring. The Source glowed from the center of the pentacle. Called an iomor, an energy well deep within the earth, the Source fed and connected all the iomors on the planet in a web of sentient light. An eight-rayed star made of amethyst, rose, clear, and smoky gray crystal spanned the diameter of the ceiling. Aligned with the Waeltower above, the stars and the Source focused a single point in the interplanetary web of entities known as Formation.

  Evenly-spaced around the Source awaited the Aenlisarfon, a council of Ravens who focused on and kept balance in the energy patterns of Ealiron. All eight of them were projected, as they lived in other parts of the world. A serious lot, to Lorth’s mind. Tetchy and arrogant, at times. But they had a great task on their minds, and Lorth had friends among them. They rose from their seats. Knowing their deference was meant for Eaglin, Lorth skirted around a high row to the northern side of the ring, where a space had been left for him. Fortunately, Eaglin’s presence and the fact that he and Lorth were close would discourage any protests about Lorth’s lack of punctuality.

  Lorth hated politics. But sometimes it could be useful.

  Eaglin stayed close, one row down. Lorth quietly said, “How’s your mother?”

  “Still blushing from your last visit,” the dark Raven replied.

  Lorth smiled. Leda. The Mistress of Eusiron, High Priestess of Maern and the love of his life. He didn’t journey to Eusiron often enough, but he projected there occasionally to talk to Leda and leave her sated with his love. The tender arrangement had never sat comfortably with her son. But he had made a kind of peace with it over the years.

  As Lorth and Eaglin reached the bottom row, Eaglin hopped into the ring and strode to the Source. Lorth removed his cloak, straddled the bench, and swung his feet over. He looked up to find the wizards staring at him in astonishment.

  “Is that blood on your clothes?” asked Tela, voicing their thoughts. The Raven of Set Falor, she had graying blond hair and eyes of blue.

  Lorth glanced down at himself. “I was hunting.” As their shocked silence filled the hall, he looked up and added, “Deer.”

  Rattled by his unwitting and yet cavalier reference to a darker deed, the council members sat down, some of them in relief, others in a huff. Gwion, the Raven of Utan, a broad-set man with dark skin and wiry white hair, regarded Lorth with twinkling brown eyes and a badly hidden smile. Gwion had a sense of humor.

  In his homeland of Ostarin, they called Lorth a hunter, a folk term for an assassin. In Eyrie, he held the title of siomothct, an assassin in service to the Eye. This was known to very few outside the Aenlisarfon, who requested his skills on occasion. They had begrudgingly given him the highest rank of First Regard for being not only accomplished but also able to discern the Old One’s hidden paths, a rare and inborn ability referred to as Web.

  Eaglin stood near the Source with his head bowed and his hands folded before him. When silence fell, he began. “Silearin,” he greeted the Council in Aenspeak, the wizard’s tongue. The Ravens pressed their hands on their hearts and bowed their heads. Lorth did the same, again sensing shadows in Eaglin’s mood.

  The dark-haired Raven looked up and around. “The patterns of consciousness that comprise the time-space matrix of my father’s world have changed.”

  No one said anything; their expressions ranged from blank to puzzled.
Lorth recalled what he had learned about the nature of a world. What appeared as mortal experience was the physical manifestation of an entity’s mind, the equation of every living thing, including the minds of entities within him, the hierarchy of divine awareness on the fabric of creation. This structure was pentagrammatic; Ealiron held five entities within him: Bancor, Math, Aeorin, Farus and Maelin. Each of those held five more, and so on, depending on the size of the Aenmos, or creator. While this conscious living network was in a constant state of change, the gods who gave it form didn’t change. Until now, apparently.

  Directly across from Lorth, a Raven named Arin with pale hair and a dark beard voiced all of their thoughts. “Why would that change? And how do you know?”

  “The hierarchy of Formation cannot change,” Eaglin said. “However, entities from other systems can influence a world for their own purposes.” He glanced at Lorth. “Eusiron is such a one. But sometimes this happens without the knowledge of the world’s Aenmos. Thus are the wars of gods born, and being mortal, I couldn’t begin to describe the manner or complexity of it. I’ve heard tell that Eusiron keeps a presence here to watch and ward.”

  Lorth raised his brow. Eusiron had created the hall by that name in the heart of Ostarin, Lorth’s homeland. There, folk called him the Dark Warrior; a fitting name, for he appeared, albeit rarely, in the finest trappings of a warrior, dark in both expression and manner. Lorth had first encountered the god many years ago during an occupation of his homeland by a Faerin warlord. Lorth had thereby learned that he was an aspect, a creation of the entity himself. But he had never known that Eusiron focused on this world in matters of cosmic war.

  Eaglin turned to Arin. “As to how I know, I’ve been tracking it for two seasons. There is a scrying pool deep beneath the Waeltower of Eusiron. It is more ancient than even the hall; I don’t think Eusiron himself knows how long it’s been down there. My mother uses the pool for many things. As have I. Last autumn, shortly before I planned to return to Eyrie, she brought me there and asked me to look into the water. For over half a moon’s cycle, she had been seeing the same vision every time she gazed.”

  The Council stirred, exchanging glances. “This pool,” said Tela. “It is a portal to the Old One?”

  “Aye,” Lorth said. They turned to him. “It’s formless, like a blank place in the grid, a bottomless hole. Not even the gods can discern its depths. Like all paths to Maern, it’s tricky and very difficult to interpret. Only the Old One knows the connections between the vision, the intentions of gods and the heart of the perceiver.”

  “You have looked into this pool?” Tela asked.

  “Aye,” the hunter replied quietly, feeling Eaglin’s gaze on him. “The Mistress of Eusiron trained me in its use before I came to Eyrie to take on the mantle of Raven.”

  Eaglin said, “The vision my mother saw in the pool was terrible. I will not speak of it. When I looked, I saw something different. A woman of the north, a princess. She was dressed in hunting garb.”

  “How did you know she was a princess?” Tela asked.

  “It seemed clear to me,” Eaglin replied.

  “Who is she?” asked a dark-haired, older wizard with pale eyes.

  “I don’t know.” Eaglin stepped away from the Source and began to pace slowly. “She had red hair. Gray eyes. I returned there every day at twilight to search the image for a change. She was always in the sunlight. I think she stood on a shore; there was water around her. But then, one day, she was in the dark. I could hardly see her, but I knew she was there.”

  At Lorth’s side, Gwion said, “How did you know this to be a change in Ealiron’s pentacle?”

  “You saw a fold in the time-space matrix,” Lorth intuited suddenly. “In one of those visions, the woman is latent. Unfocused.”

  “Just so,” Eaglin affirmed. “Which means an entity has altered the Pentacle of Ealiron by changing a timeline, for some reason.”

  “Is your vision related to the one your mother saw?” asked Galeant, a woman sitting on Lorth’s other side. Very old, her voice wavered, but her eyes were bright with power.

  “She thinks it is,” Eaglin said. “The day my vision changed, hers went dark completely. She didn’t see it again.”

  Lorth leaned back and rubbed his face. Leda. What did you see? For Eaglin not to tell the Council it had to be something sensitive, to her particularly.

  Arin said, “The Aenlisarfon cannot see patterns above the time-space matrix. Any change in a timeline is seamless to us; that is the nature of mortal experience. The woman you saw may never have existed here. And the entity who has influenced our world could be anywhere. Anything.”

  Eaglin nodded. “Unfortunately, this entity has hidden himself and not even my father can see him. He asked me to work with you to search the patterns of the grid for clues. In his usual way, he would not reveal them to me.”

  Galeant wheezed a laugh. “Never that easy, eh? A god knows himself by the actions of his creations.”

  Eaglin smiled at her. “Indeed, Wise One.” He stopped pacing and drew something from his cloak. “Here is a clue, perhaps.” He handed a piece of paper to her. She perused it with raised brows, and then passed it on.

  Lorth received it last. His heart skipped a beat as he gazed upon a rubbing of a serpent with sharp, ragged fins and rows of teeth. He stretched his neck to release the tension there. In the southlands of Tarth as a younger man, he had been bitten by a deadly spider. After nearly taking his life, it had left him with not only a large red scar on his neck in the shape of a five-rayed star, but also a deep sense for movement in the darkness of the Old One’s domain. The scar had a useful but annoying habit of alerting him to trouble.

  “Is that a loerfalos?” Arin asked, leaning forward.

  “Looks like it,” said another. The Council murmured together at the possibility. Many of them looked at Lorth, but he ignored them, studying the image in his hand. The Mistress of the Sea. He had encountered one of the enormous immortal sea serpents nearly two years past in the Gray Isles, on a mission from the Aenlisarfon in which he had, with the help of a renegade Raven they had sent him to find, discovered the existence of an eamoire, the immortal progeny of a loerfalos and a star. Lorth had gained the Ninth Seat by preventing the annihilation of the realm at the hands of the newborn immortal. He had also lost Cimri, a good friend, and nearly his own life as well.

  Lorth held the image of the loerfalos in his hand. He looked up. “Eaglin, where did you get this and why is it a clue?”

  The Raven released a breath. “It’s a reach,” he admitted. “After I left the pool that day, I went to the refectory. One of Cael’s apprentices was sitting at a table with a crowd around him. Just a lad, fifteen summers or so. Good with a knife. He’d never drawn or carved anything, and he didn’t have the sight. But he sat there in trance and carved this into the table with his dagger. Afterwards, he didn’t remember doing it.”

  Of course, Lorth thought. “Red hair? Blue eyes? Cim—something?”

  “Cimar. You know him?”

  “When he was a child. That’s Cimri’s son.”

  “Who is that?” asked Arin.

  “Cimri of Waleis,” Lorth answered. “Order of Albatross, First Mate of the Oak Leaf.” He waved the paper. “I lost him to the loerfalos on my mission to the Gray Isles two years ago.”

  The Council murmured and shifted about; some of them nodded in recollection. Galeant said, “A lad who lost his father at such an age might very well imagine the creature who took him.”

  Eaglin nodded. “True, grief could have driven it.”

  “Or acted as the medium,” Lorth added. “The Otherworld knows its own. It doesn’t reveal itself at random. The timing of this alarms me. The loerfalos exists above the time-space matrix. She would know if it changed.”

  “But she’d no more be able to see a hidden god than would Ealiron,” said another, an older man with an aquiline nose.

  “That doesn’t mean she wouldn’t know what happ
ened,” Lorth countered. “The trouble is, she may not have a reason to bother herself with it. To my knowledge, the Mistress of the Sea has little to do with mortals aside from devouring them occasionally.”

  “This still brings up a point,” Eaglin said. “We’re dealing with a fold in time-space, a distortion in Ealiron’s Pentacle. We can’t see this with our minds, but our hearts see other dimensions. A lad in grief would do this instinctively. We can do it by focusing our intentions on the Otherworld and seeing what emerges.” He moved his gaze around the circle. “See what you can see. We will meet here again at twilight, three days hence.”

  The Ravens bowed their heads, spoke farewells, and vanished.

  *

  When the Aenlisarfon had gone, Eaglin came to Lorth and sat down next to him. “This disturbs you.”

  Lorth handed him Cimar’s carving. Gently, he asked, “What did your mother see in the pool?”

  The shadows returned to Eaglin’s eyes. “She saw a god raping a young woman.”

  After a pause, Lorth said, “It’s my understanding that an entity would be destroyed for doing such a thing.”

  “It’s not that simple. Not every god is integrated and aware of the Old One in his heart. Some are balanced but unaware, and can do things that we would consider evil. Others are imbalanced, created in imbalance and they are truly evil in every sense of the word. These are destroyed eventually, but in our terms this can take the life of a cosmos to occur. The deeds of entities have vast repercussions and we couldn’t begin to perceive all the connections. But unless the one in whose dominion the violation is committed knows the identity of the perpetrator, he can do nothing. As Galeant said, he must, in those cases, learn it through the deeds of men.”

  “Do you think the one who created the distortion in the Pentacle is the one your mother saw in her vision?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know. She saw that in formlessness. She doesn’t know who it was, when it happened, or if it even has happened. Neither does my father. It’s in the Old One’s domain.”