Striking Chains
Page 36
The Lord was quiet for a while. "Yes. It's inevitable, with the gradual rise of magic and the Baccatans' knowledge of what I did to them. Hence, we need to make many friends. If you want to go traveling again, I'll support you."
"What? Outside the forest? But Lord --" Rose stopped herself, shaking her head, and reconsidered. She'd felt a pang of fear about going outside the magical tree's range again, but she'd risked herself the same way before. Shouldn't she be willing to go outside again if the Lord called for it?
She took a deep breath and said, "I would rather not, Lord. My family needs me, and my people can use my help here."
"Understandable." The Lord approached her and took her clawed hand in His own wrinkled, furless one. "You've done well with this life so far, but a complete life includes making time for those bound to your own heart. Go and be merry with My blessing." Then He laughed, a sound like a thousand leafy branches shaking, loud in the throne room of oak. "And with a heap of medals and support from the Council, I assume. Which might be good if you'd like to take it over someday."
* * *
On Temple Island, Prince Dominic donned a crown marked with the western sun.
He'd deliberately flouted the traditions of his people to hold a Mithraic-style wedding, immediately after his coronation. Julia, once the slave of an innkeeper, blushed beside him in a dress brilliantly designed as a merger of cultural styles. His own clothing, too, made him look like the mix of former Servant and western Duke that he now was, as an independent Prince.
He took Julia's hands and kissed them. "I'm glad to have you at my side."
She said, "The people... our people, still need someone watching over them."
"Then we'll need to live up to that, Princess."
After the wedding and two days of celebration, Dominic took Julia on a trip up the hill to the High Temple. He'd waited deliberately to avoid giving the appearance that this was a traditional Servant wedding, but she did want to see the place -- and there was work to do here. Guards walked to either side of them.
The conquest of Temple Island had been complicated. Even with the Servant class' surrender, his advisers had told him firmly that walking into the Nether would get him brutally murdered. He would miss the place. There'd been a power struggle among Jasper's friends who tried to reorganize and continue acting as the Boundless One, continuing the charade that the big crystal was an infallible and eternal ruler. Again, Dominic's inner circle had refused to let him put down their last stand in person. "The Unbound Realm needs you alive," Jakob had said in between trips to his own island. "At least until you have an heir."
That was where Dominic had arrived, then; he was still the servant of his nation. A leader who had limited ability to act both officially and in his personal life, because he was needed to make a system of laws function. He shook his head, refusing to feel sorry for himself. He walked with his new wife up the slope of Temple Hill, skipping the traditional prayer at its base.
Under guard, the royal couple entered the High Temple and its courtyard. Dominic wanted to kneel, by habit, but forced himself to stand. The massive crystal floated in the air before them. All its glimmering messages were gone, all its facets blank.
"It's funny," Julia said. "Among us Bound, we were never really clear on who or what the Boundless One was. And I've been hearing people talk about the western King like he's some actual bearded man waving an axe around. And the Velesians call their King a god, so the rumor is that he's not physically there at all."
"Maybe the form doesn't matter," Dominic said. "How about replacing me with an empty chair?"
"It's a little late for that," she said, and poked his crown.
"You don't seem awed by the One."
"It's a rock. It's only smarter than half the Citizens I know."
Dominic laughed. A few of the guards chuckled, as though the spell of the One's mystique had been broken.
He hoped that the people would accept the transition from the caste system to a Mithraian-style government. Temple Island had begun to rebuild, the flags of merchant ships stood out on the horizon, and the people at least tolerated his rule. That was all he could ask for, for now. Everything was in flux.
He looked into the suite of rooms where Jasper's friends, the "secretaries" of the inanimate Boundless One, had lived. Like Jasper himself, they'd shown no sign of living in luxury.
Julia said, "They were that poor?"
"Not poor, but humble. The problem with the Holy State wasn't that it was run by evil men. That was Jasper's mistake; he thought it'd work, if only he and his friends got to run it."
"You miss him, don't you?"
"I wish he were alive to help rebuild."
He returned to the hovering crystal and had someone bring him a chair, so that he could sit and have a detailed look at it without seeming to grovel. He sat for a long time examining the Weave. The One was far more complex than it appeared to the untrained eye; its threads stretched everywhere. Yet after seeing the Seaflower, and the griffins' power, and the Velesians, and other examples of advanced magic, he got the sense that the crystal's pattern was somehow wrong. Twisted, knotted. There'd been talk of having the northern forest god send him advice about unsealing this magic node, but he wasn't sure the puzzle of its intense and tangled magic could ever be solved. What was a node, really, other than a lucky spot where the Weave converged and made a natural resource like an iron deposit or a patch of good farmland?
It was a gift, an opportunity, a chance to defy reality and define the heart of a whole culture.
Julia had been exploring the High Temple under guard, but now sat nearby with a glass of wine. "What do you want to do with this thing, anyway? Maybe it'd be better to just break it."
"What?! Even if I could, do you have any idea how big an explosion that'd make?"
Julia said, "So stand a safe distance away. Maybe we could do something with the crystal shards."
Dominic pictured riding out the blast -- he'd want to be on a ship miles from the island! -- and then distributing shards with some kind of enchantment. "There might be a thousand pieces, but not enough for everyone. They'd become just another thing to fight over."
No, the gem would need to remain intact. He was doing enough already to make magic available to everyone, and maybe the nation even needed to have its own shiny object to focus on. What he could do was to get out of the way as his people lived in peace, running their own lives. The stone's power was best used, if he could, to support others and not to dominate and control them.
He chuckled. Maybe he was thinking of this node backwards. Its many threads were normally part of a system of control. Seen that way, its subtly mutilated threads were probably unfixable. But if he thought of it in reverse... Well, nobody had ever done that, had they? They'd always pondered it in terms of arcane theory, of how to gain and keep power. Never in terms of liberty, or of love.
Dominic stood up and pressed one hand against the crystal's smooth surface. He probed at the Weave with his free hand, channeling and studying its power.
Something snapped inside it like a taut bowstring. The light all around the High Temple flickered gold and green.
The guards murmured and Julia stood up suddenly, knocking over her chair. "What did you just do?"
Dominic stepped back, pulling her behind him. "What better way was there to seal this place's power away, than to design a knot that'd pull tighter if its users only tugged and grasped for more and more power? Nobody ever tried loosening it. What that actually did, I'm not sure."
A wave of golden light exploded through the High Temple, knocking Dominic and Julia down and making everyone else fall or stagger. The temple walls cracked. The whole world rumbled. Dominic felt astonishingly heavy for a moment as the roar of shattering stone went on and finally ebbed.
His guards hurried to help him and Julia up. "Sir, that earthquake! What happened?"
"I don't know!" Dominic examined the crystal again and saw a new tinge of golden li
ght within it, matching the solar glow around his own body. He let his aura fade again, but the crystal still shined. There was a pattern, a rearrangement of threads here, and he could barely comprehend what it might do.
Shouts came from the land below Temple Hill. Dominic said, "Let's go investigate," and led the way down toward the capital city. The coastline looked somehow off.
They soon discovered why. Nearly the entire island had just sheared itself free from the seabed, and now hovered over the ocean. The water all around shore rippled strangely as it tried to find a new balance. Ships struggled to stay afloat. The now-flying island was high enough that a sailor atop a ship's mast would be able to climb ashore.
Julia was one of the first to recover from being stunned. "You did say you wanted to set people loose and help them rise."
Dominic ran through all his knowledge of magic theory, but the closest thing he could think of was the floating rocks said to be far west, near the root of all magic in the world. He'd just unleashed something truly powerful, and doubted that this reborn magical fountain could ever be fully controlled again.
A lot of frightened people had gathered nearby as though Dominic personally could keep them safe. "Sir, what do we do?"
The Prince of the Unbound Realm fixed his crown firmly on his brow again, and said, "Let's go fix the damage and then figure out what we can learn from this. First I need information. Can I get some volunteers to scout out the island?"
A few frightened young ex-Bound stepped forward from the crowd, ready to serve the new nation. Prince Dominic smiled. "Good men."
Author's Note
Thanks for reading! Please consider leaving ratings and reviews on Amazon, Goodreads, or other sites like Reddit. Independent authors don't get noticed without fans helping to get the word out!
This book is in the same world as my second novel, "Striking the Root", which takes place a few decades later. I first wrote "Chains" for National Novel Writing Month 2013 but was unhappy with that draft, partly because Dominic went too quickly from loyal Servant to rebel. After much revision and expansion, I think it turned out well in the end!
About the Author
Kris Schnee has been a parrot trainer, an MIT graduate, a zoo intern, a lawyer, a game designer, and most recently a software developer. He lives in Florida.
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