by Steven Drake
“I must tend to other business. You may return to training, or consider what you have seen.” Galen bowed slightly and took his leave.
“Well, what do you think of all that?” Jerris asked, as Galen left them standing in the first-floor hallway.
“It’s astounding,” Darien commented, shaking his head. “I never imagined that our ancestors possessed such power.”
“I know, and now, it’s going to be my responsibility. All those people…”
“Try not to think of that Jerris. They’ve been sleeping for thousands of years, and will sleep for thousands more, if needed.”
“I know, but they’re alive. They went to sleep expecting to wake up some day, not just sleep in those caves forever.”
Darien sighed deeply. “I know, Jerris. I know. You’ve had the responsibility for an entire race laid on your shoulders. It isn’t fair. I almost wish we’d never come here.”
“No Darien.” Jerris’ voice stiffened and he spoke with surety. “If this is my fate, I will accept it. If I don’t accept it, then it will just fall on someone else, or maybe no one. Maybe if I don’t wake them, they will sleep forever. I have to do what I can, so our people don’t have to live the way my mother did, the way your mother did. Besides, now we have a hope to defeat the Demon King.”
Darien’s eyes opened wide and he shook his head and smiled. “Jerris, you continue to amaze me. You possess a spirit worthier of kingship than most who bear the title. I would not feel any shame to bow my knee to you.”
“Please don’t,” Jerris quickly corrected. “It’s bad enough the way everyone else acts around me. I can’t have you bowing and curtsying like they do. They don’t even talk to me really, they’re always afraid, like they’ll be flogged for bumping into me in the hallway.”
“I know Jerris, I know.” Darien laughed. “You’ll always be Jerris to me, a frightened boy covered in mud standing in the doorway of an inn.”
“Ugh. Thanks for reminding me of that,” Jerris said. The two half-elves shared a chuckle and stood quietly for a few moments, content to gather their thoughts for the moment. Jerris started fidgeting, drumming his fingers along his arm, a telltale sign of anxiety that his teacher recognized immediately.
“You should go and relax somewhere,” the teacher consoled his pupil. “We can resume training tomorrow. I don’t think either of us will be able to concentrate on training after seeing that.”
“I suppose you’re right. Good day then.”
Darien returned to his room, and studied some of his books on elven magic. Most of them were fairly basic, as far as Darien could tell, at least they were basic for the elves of millennia ago. The books described many abilities that no modern mage could reproduce, but they contained nothing remotely like what he had seen beneath the Ivory Hall. Some of the texts made mention of more powerful magics, and many referred to other titles that covered advanced techniques. However, despite many hours of perusing the library, Darien had found none of these other titles, nor any more advanced tomes of magic. Given how well other books on more mundane topics like history and geography were preserved, Darien thought it odd for these to be absent, and suspected they were secreted away elsewhere. The only other possibility was that they’d been omitted on purpose, but that seemed unlikely.
After spending the afternoon studying and quietly thinking, Darien ate his usual meal of bread and water, then headed out of the Ivory Hall to walk in the evening twilight, his favorite time to do so. Somewhere above the concealing canopy of the Feralen trees, the sun was sinking behind the lip of the hidden valley. The intervening canopy of the trees obscured the shadows from the mountains, and left the valley painted in a blurred collage of shadows ranging from green half-light to almost total darkness.
“You’ve certainly had an interesting day.” Darien barely reacted to the unexpected address from a voice he had come to know well. The half-elf looked to his left to see Ezra, the inscrutable old man who observed Darien from some unknown location, striding along beside him, gnarled staff in hand. He first encountered the strange old hermit over six years ago just after he had stolen the Demon’s Blade, during his escape, on an island in the middle of Lake Kalena, far to the south. Darien had been exhausted, desperate, and on the verge of madness, having nearly succumbed to the demonic forces of his stolen weapon. Ezra had appeared just in time to cast an enchantment that blocked the madness of the Demon Sword. The enchantment also allowed the old man to observe his movements, speak to him, and even appear before him, a truth he had realized after several further encounters. Ezra called himself a guardian of the Demon’s Blade, but the old man gave no further clue as to the source of his knowledge of, and power over, the sword.
“Ezra, I was hoping you would show up. Did you know about the Star Sword?” Darien inquired, speaking quietly, just above a whisper, just in case anyone was around.
“I knew of its existence, but not its connection to the Demon Sword,” the old man replied in his thin wispy voice. “The mistrust between elves and men is deep. The elves never revealed to their human allies how the swords worked.”
“Well, that’s believable enough, since it took a year for them to decide to tell me. More importantly, does the Demon King know?”
“I have never seen any indication that he does. If he knew its function, he would have searched for it, for it would have represented a possible danger. Since he did not search for it, it seems likely he did not realize the significance.”
“What do you think? Am I correct in believing that the Star Sword will be able to kill him?”
“I believe so, but there is a danger,” the old man warned. “The Demon King’s power is even now slowly ebbing away into the Demon Sword. If all that power were released at once, however, it would certainly overwhelm the spell that allows you to resist the sword’s corruption.”
“So, then he and I would have to kill each other, almost at the same time,” the executioner observed. “No easy task.”
“Be careful, Darien,” Ezra cautioned. “You may well have found a possible way to defeat your enemy, but it may not be wise to pursue this path.”
“If there is a chance to defeat him, to finish what I started, to finally and completely bring justice to those who killed my mother, I must take it. All my life has been a quest to bring justice upon those who destroyed my life before it even truly began. I have no other purpose.” Darien stopped, turned, and looked directly into Ezra’s stoney eyes.
Ezra returned his gaze with a look of deep worry, then suddenly sighed and shook his head. “Calling it justice instead of vengeance changes nothing. This is a dangerous course for you, and there is certainly violence and death along it. If you choose that course, I fear for you.”
“Is there any more danger than sitting here waiting for the Demon’s Blade to destroy me just as surely over more years? Does my life matter when weighed against the death of my enemy? If I fail, we will be little worse off than when we began, and if I succeed, then the circle is closed, and the Demon’s Blade can be buried and hidden, hopefully for a long time.” Darien crossed his arms and turned away. “I will pursue this with or without your help.”
“Your chances of success and so the chance of victory over the Demon King, will be better with my help, regardless of your choice, so I will help you.” The old man’s voice seemed to carry a tinge of bitter resignation, but he had at least agreed to help.
“You know much about the Demon’s Blade, but do you have any idea where to look for the Star Sword?”
Ezra nodded grimly and blinked slowly before speaking. “After the War of Vengeance, the elves all but disappeared from history, while mankind established the Kingdom of Sarenna. As you were told, the royal family of Sarenna kept the sword. While Sarenna was destroyed, much of its knowledge was preserved by their highest order of mages. The Royal Magi kept a library there. When their great city fell, the survivors saved what they could, and fled to the city of Trinium to the northwest, where they even
tually became the Order of the Golden Shield.”
“I… see,” the executioner grumbled. “It will be nearly impossible for me to get in there undetected, and without knowing the city, or what I’m looking for, it’s a desperate gamble.”
“It is fortunate, then, is it not, that you already know someone who does know the city, and the Order?”
The executioner’s eyes flew wide open. “Rana! Of course.” He turned to thank Ezra, but the insubstantial apparition of the old man had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared. Still, Darien had gotten the clue he needed.
There was, of course, the possibility that Rana would not help him, but he hoped that she would. Her hostility had decreased steadily since their arrival in Kadanar. What had once been unequivocal hatred had softened to a grudging respect. At first, Darien had been surprised that she stayed in Kadanar to begin with, and wondered why she didn’t go back to her old life, but as time passed, he became so used to her presence, that he almost forgot that she had an old life at all.
When he wasn’t training young Jerris, he often sparred with Rana. She proved a worthy opponent. Their intense practice sessions had pushed him enough to sharpen his skills back to their previous level of precision. Her mind was quick and sharp as his own, and she even seemed to think much like him, assessing his tactics with cold, calculating precision, predicting his attacks before he made them, and forcing him to think far ahead to beat her. She fought with a tenacity and a rare instinct for battle that he had come to respect. She hadn’t yet managed to best him, but she had come nearer than most.
Moreover, he discovered that he and Rana were more alike than he had ever expected, and more than he yet wanted to admit. He never confided to her that he, like her, had watched a family member killed before his eyes. He had inflicted upon her the same pain that he himself had felt, and that filled him with a relentless guilt that gnawed deeply at him. No matter how often he reminded himself that it did not matter now, that the past could not be altered, that guilt was irrational and useless, he could not shake the feeling. Her presence continually forced him to face a past he wanted desperately to forget.
He passed the rest of the evening silently stalking the narrow mountain paths at the perimeter of the valley, alone and out of sight, a ghostly wraith passing amongst the stones. He wandered long into the night, and when he finally felt the fatigue of the day catch up to him, he returned to his room and laid down with sense of purpose he had not felt since he’d arrived in Kadanar. For the first time, there was a light at the end of the long darkness, a hope, however slim, that his enemy might be defeated. He stared at the ceiling for a long time before sleep found him, his mind still busily running through the many things he needed to do before he undertook this quest.
Chapter 2: Rana’s Dilemma
What could Darien be planning, Rana thought to herself as she laid in her bed staring up at the polished white stone ceiling of her room in the Ivory Hall. What exactly does he intend to reveal at this meeting tomorrow? He came to my room himself to ask me, which is strange enough, but the look on his face was different than I’ve ever seen it. Something has changed. I don’t know what, but something is different, something important.
There was something in his eyes, a sense of purpose that I haven’t seen before. He wouldn’t say why, but I know he needs my help somehow, and I actually want to help him. By the holy Seven, I know I shouldn’t want to help him. I should want him punished, want him dead, want him to suffer as my family suffered. But I don’t, may the Gods forgive me, I can’t hate him anymore.
All the anger Rana had once felt for Darien the Executioner had been slowly sapped away, replaced with that sense of familiarity that invariably comes from spending a great deal of time with one person, and when she wasn’t alone, she was usually with Darien. Jerris treated her kindly, and tried to be a friend, but he was usually busy with something, learning history or etiquette or one of the dozens of other things that a future king had to know.
Once, she would have confided in Maya, the faerie who rescued her from certain death, but things had changed. She had learned that the faeries had manipulated her into hating Darien the Executioner, made sure she watched him as he killed her family under orders from the Demon King, and all of it just so she would chase Darien halfway across the world, a bitter potion for the young woman. The faeries had used her to get to him, and why? Why had the faeries done it? With their magic and their ability to communicate through the water, there must have been some other way. Why had they put her through it? The reason they had given her, that they had seen evil in her destiny, seemed nothing more than an excuse, a poor excuse.
Rana still did not hate Maya. She could not hate the one person who had known her so much of her life, who had guided her through a troubled childhood, and who genuinely cared for her. Rana had made peace with Maya before the faerie departed for her home waters in the south, apologized for heated words spoken in anger, and forgiven the faerie for her cruel but well-intentioned manipulations, but their relationship would never again be as it was. The childlike trust she had placed in the faerie was gone, shattered like a pane of glass into so many innumerable shards, never to be whole again.
The elves of Kadanar were polite, but cold. The way they regarded her was akin to how she had been viewed before she joined the Golden Shield, when she had wandered the streets fighting to survive. To these elves, she was an outsider, someone out of place, an unnecessary intrusion, an object of fear, scorn, prejudice, or pity, but not an equal. When she realized that this was how Darien and Jerris must feel in the cities and towns of man, it only made her feel worse, more awkward and unwanted.
That left only Darien, who had sought her out as a sparring partner, someone to help him sharpen his skills. Though it was probably only out of expediency, they had spent many hours together. At first, it was all awkward silence and barely disguised anger. She had been filled with anger at that time, at the faeries, at herself, at the cruel whims of fate, but mostly at Darien, whom she still saw as the source of all her problems.
He had quietly accepted her unspoken accusations, her wrath, and the sum of the misery that she threw continuously at him during their early sparring sessions. He accepted it all, without speaking up for himself, without complaint, without so much as a reaction. More than that, he had tried to comfort her in his own inept and awkward way. That had only made it worse, because she didn’t understand it. Nothing made any sense. How could this stoic, unpretentious, quiet man be the same one who haunted her nightmares for so many years? Why did he soften towards her?
That confusion had kept her up many nights, until her frustration grew so great that she could no longer stand the sight of the man. It was Jerris, in the end, who had finally given her the answer she sought. The elf lad had come to her in her room, concerned because Darien had mentioned that she had not been sparring for a while, and so she had confessed her confusion to him.
Jerris had not intended to reveal Darien’s secret. He had offered only kind sympathies, and tried to explain Darien’s guilt without revealing too much, but Jerris, as he was apt to do, said too much, letting slip a statement that made very little sense. “Well the two of you are kind of the same, in a way,” Jerris had said. Then the young elf prince had stopped short, and become evasive. After perhaps twenty minutes of badgering the young prince to explain what he meant, the young half-elf finally relented, and explained everything. He had told Rana the story of how the Order of the Shade had orchestrated the brutal execution of a young Darien’s mother, forced Darien to watch, and then used his fresh anger and rage to trick him into joining their Order.
Then it all became clear, like a blurry reflection in murky water suddenly coming into focus when the sun shines at just the right angle. Darien’s past was not so different from her own. His guilt, his awkward sympathies, his willingness to absorb all her hatred, suddenly made perfect sense. He really did have feelings underneath the cold and bitter exterior, but all his lif
e had been a violent struggle that hardened him just as her own violent years had hardened her. Rana and Jerris had then had a rather long and meaningful talk about their mutual friend, during which Rana promised the nervous half-elf at least a half dozen times that she would not reveal her knowledge of Darien’s secret.
From that point, her feelings towards her former hated enemy began to change. Each day, she noticed something new that reminded her of herself. She understood his drive to become stronger, for she’d felt it too. She saw the relentless cold in his eyes in an entirely new way, knowing that she’d seen the same in the mirror many times before. It seemed strange to think, but he no longer seemed to be the same man that had haunted her nightmares. No matter how she tried, she could no longer quite see Darien as the monster she had long imagined him to be.
Their sparring sessions had changed as well. No longer filled with anger, Rana asked questions of the former Shade, and he answered them, helping her improve her technique, helping her adjust to his own. Now that she had the opportunity to compare Darien’s teaching style with Geoffray’s, she realized that she much preferred the simple questions and answers of the Shade to the memorized stances and forms of the knight. Often Darien would ask a question, and leave it for her to ponder, and she found that she learned more from considering her answer than from all the training she’d done under Geoffray’s tutelage. She began to understand why Jerris admired his teacher so, and she began to share that admiration.