by Jacob Cooper
“It is a gift to those who share a womb,” his mother had always said. Gift or not, playing hide and seek as a child was an utter waste.
He was weary from the long sprint. He guessed he had run at full speed for roughly fourteen hours, stopping only once for a brief few deep swallows of water from a stream. His legs ached from the marathon and his chest burned from heaving fast, deep breaths.
Soldiers of the Arlethian armies were present and organized into detachments. Hedron spied Lord Therrium and his family flanked by soldiers on all sides. A command was shouted, a drum sounded a cadence, and the soldiers began to march. Within only a few minutes, the hold was abandoned. Dozens of pyres sent smoke spiraling scores of feet into the evening air. The smell of death filled every breath he took, making him queasy. It was then he saw the fuel for the giant blazes consisted of dead men.
Thousands!
His concern for his sister heightened and he wondered if she—no, she was alive. He felt it. And she was here, in the hold. Two figures emerged from a southern entrance of the hold and walked toward him. The canopy that was so typical in the surrounding areas of Calyn was thinner over Hold Therrium, and the orange pigment of the evening sky shone through. He saw Reign’s silhouette, knowing her walk and shape instantly. But beside her was another, a man much taller. Tension gathered in him, not knowing what to expect, but it faded to disbelief as recognition finally came to him. The man’s hair came to his shoulders in back and was long enough to cover his face in front. He was wounded with several Triarch leaf bandages over various parts of his body. And a sword, as recognizable as the sun itself, was at his side.
“Aiden!” he cried.
TWENTY-FIVE
Honleir
Day 29 of 4th High 412 A.U.
IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS since the last surviving member of Honleir’s village had perished. The Great Basin of the Schadar was cruel and unforgiving. Thirty souls of Honleir’s village had ventured out attempting the journey across the basin to reach the closest known spring and the Schadar had claimed them all—except for Honleir. Timney, his ten-year-old cousin, was the first that had died.
Any water the group had was long since consumed. They carried no provisions save for a tent or covering that could be fashioned to provide shade of even the most meager quality during the day. Any other provisions were unnecessary and burdensome to bear and therefore left behind. It was a one-way journey, successful or not. Honleir had not urinated in nearly two days and, while a vile thought to him before this journey, he would have eagerly recycled the urine, counting it as a blessing. He supposed his body had no moisture left to expel.
It was nearing midday. Honleir had stopped his night walk over four hours ago, when the sun began to rise in the east sky. He lay still in his tent, trying to sleep and expend no energy. Though he had lost his sense of direction the night before as a bout of delirium set in long enough to disorient him, he still felt he traveled in the right direction; but that was little comfort against the chapped and cracked red flesh upon his face, neck and hands. He tried to keep his hands from being fully extended as skin would tear and scabs reopen on his palms. Besides setting up his dismal looking day-tent every dawn, his hands had very little to do. It was his feet and legs that bore the most grievous impairments, both externally and internally. The waning moons would give little light tonight, being the second to last night of the cycle.
And the second to last night of High Season, but little difference that makes in the Schadar. The climate was always harsh no matter the season.
During a full first moon, the endless desert hills would shimmer as if silver glass. If he could freeze a picture in his mind to hold forever, that would be it. However, another picture remained in his mind—one he had not seen but was sure had come to pass.
Those who had stayed behind in the village were certainly no more than dust mixed with sand now. They had given all the stored water supply to Honleir’s party, knowing what they sacrificed. At seventeen, he was nearly a man but remained as yet unprepared to leave his family, especially in such a manner. Though his mother, Almena, was probably strong enough to attempt the crossing, she elected to stay behind with her husband and brother, both too weak physically. But aren’t we all too weak? he thought darkly. It seemed now it did not matter the choice he and the others would have made. Death was intent on finding them, but the suffering of crossing the Great Basin the past ten days could have been avoided. I should have perished beside my family, my dust mixing with theirs and the sand. Again it angered him that an entire village could be erased without any seeming consequence. This is what it was to be Kearon. To exist but not live, to breathe but not be.
And the Poems! Where is their wisdom now? Where is the great Orator Rishz’nah to save us?
Mind rendering had proven futile in his attempts while traveling. His group believed he would miraculously save them with his as of yet undeveloped gift. He would somehow find water and restore the village. I swore I would! But he knew the chance to keep his promise was gone forever. He had failed and they were all dead because of it.
A tiny shadow scurried quickly across the sand to a small covering of tumbleweed and rock. Honleir barely caught sight of it from the corner of his eye as he peered out the opening of his tent. Haphazardly making his way to the tumbleweed, he risked the journey of a few paces across the sweltering desert floor with his shoes and large head covering and slowly peered over the ball of twigs to spy a lizard of some create lying on a small rock, belly up. Honleir guessed the creature was trying to take in the day’s heat before nightfall cast its ever so slightly cooler temperature. He felt the heat of the sun starting to burn his skin in these moments he had exposed himself. Without thinking, the Kearon boy snatched the lizard with both hands, his left grabbing its head, clamping its jaws closed, and his right securing the tail. He raised the lizard’s abdomen to his mouth and bit down hard, ignoring the pain of the cracked flesh on his face and releasing a small flood of bodily juices into his mouth. It empowered him as he sucked harder and harder, draining the lizard’s life into his own. The small creature squirmed and thrashed for half a minute before relenting and giving up its all. Finding that he had gained all possible liquid succor from the deceased creature, he consumed whatever parts he could bring himself to swallow and discarded the wasted carcass.
The heat was taking its toll as he stood in the full gaze of the midday sun. Raising his head slightly, Honleir stared at the burning torch in the sky and, for a split second, he thought to strip himself naked in defiance of the Schadar’s wrath and allow the merciless desert to consume him as it had all his kin. He wasn’t sure which was producing more heat, the sun or the radiating waves he felt rising from the sand beneath him, causing the air to ripple before him. Eventually, he turned his gaze downward and away from the intense light of the sun, not wishing to blind himself. For several minutes, he could not focus on anything due to the large distorted sunspot masquerading as a black hole that dominated his vision. The eyes would take some time to purge themselves of the punishment Honleir had just bestowed upon them.
He felt stronger though, he thought. The meal had provided at least some sustenance, paltry though it may have been. He returned to his tent to wait for the sun to turn a deep red as the last slivers of direct light vanished below the horizon, making the sky glow violet, orange and red from its indirect light. Only then would the temperature drop to a level that was barely tolerable for physical exertion and he would begin another long night of tedious walking.
Only anger drove Honleir; it was all he had left. His family and village were extinct, leaving him without any real reason to press forward, but the anger swelled and filled him more every night as he trudged his way in whatever direction he moved. He allowed it to tarry with him, nurturing it in his solemnity. How he yearned to find those responsible for his plight! For murdering his family and friends! It was too easy to blame his situation on a natural occurrence, too convenient. In fact, the boy di
dn’t care if it was natural.
Someone is to blame!
His people lived a cruel life. All the Kearon. Or perhaps life was simply cruel.
Why not rise and meet death, then? It cannot be more cruel than life!
He came to the opening of his tent, throat parched and skin cracked. He hesitated, but only for a moment.
Blackened Heavens, come take me! Honleir shot forth from his tent, tore his clothes from his body and defied the sun, screaming at it with his dry voice.
“I will not hide from you! I will meet you face to face! Take me now, as I am! Scorch my skin and burn my eyes from their sockets! You can do nothing to me that has not already been done inside me!”
As Honleir’s anger swelled to righteous indignation, his mind stretched to find the source of his circumstances. But not just his current circumstance of being without family or friends and aimlessly wandering across a basin of the Schadar, hovering slightly above death; more, he saw that his circumstances of life were born to him because of his lineage. All his troubles and hardships could be traced to this fact, the fact that he was born Kearon—something he did not choose. The dried-up water spring was not the real reason he was nothing and less to the world. Something was happening to him now and Honleir saw much more clearly the more he focused on the avalanche of fury crashing down inside him that the real cause, the actual root of all the misery and pain, slight and injustice, sat with House Wellyn. He knew the history, the poems lamenting the fall of House Kearon and her allies to Oliver Wellyn over four hundred years ago. Until now it had never been more than simply something he knew but did not seem to have any meaning to him. Now, he knew it in a different way—a way that was not only something one understands with the mind but also feels in the flesh and knows in the core of sentience; the way a man knows something only by experience. The history he had been taught as a youngling began to be woven through him, becoming part of him, and he part of it. Details hidden in prose and poem sprang to his mind that were so subtle previously but now seemed so vivid and pronounced that a wielding of understanding permeated through him of events centuries old. He saw the beauty of the poems and how they cycled through the centuries, unfolding to him in ways that he never had considered—well beyond mere history. Every word, every line, every stanza, every verse he now owned as his memory, his experience. He could see them as a single collective work, one continuous and epic story…
No, more than a story. A path.
So great was the onslaught of revelation, Honleir had not realized until now that he was mind rendering. It had been a futile exercise to force this little known ability as he traveled with his now dead kith and kin in attempts to find water and shelter. He seemed to have no control or command of when it manifested and what it showed him, but the knowledge that poured through him now brought new understanding of his lineage and family, of his…House.
I am of a noble house, Honleir thought and recognized for the first time what that could mean.
His physicality changed. Bones and muscles no longer ached, cracked skin no longer stung. Honleir stood up straighter and took in the sights around him, seeing almost an unobstructed view of an ocean of sand and stone. His mind now clear and focused, still in the middle of a mind render, Honleir became aware of where he stood. Not the general area or direction, but exactly where he stood. He had never been in this spot before, but it would have made no difference to his cognizance if he had been. He knew in his mind where he had been, the exact distance and course traveled, where each fallen villager had perished as well as the exact moment in the moons’ or sun’s cycle it had happened. This did not come with surprise as his elevated state of mind simply accepted the knowledge and processed it as if little more consequence than particles of sand blown by a breeze.
As Honleir’s mind rendering came to a climax, he fixated on one stanza from the Returning Renditions of Rishz’nah:
Consciously fleeing above the wind
Returning from deep within
Escape presently without malice
Where I am no more callous
Honleir internalized the words, making them part of him. As he did so, he felt the verse course through his veins as if his blood were boiling. His mind spun with images of places he realized he knew but had never before seen, a dizzying collage of deserts and dunes, rivers and seas, mountains and forests, fields and glaciers. After a moment, he caught hold of one of the images and held it before him. Rushing wind and sprays of water amid great clouds.
“There,” he said.
Then he vanished, leaving nothing but shallow impressions in the desert sand of his thick-soled shoes as the only evidence that he had just a moment ago been present.
Vash’ah screamed as he fell through the air. He prayed every cloud he pierced would catch him and somehow let him softly fall to the water below, but his prayers were going unanswered. It was oddly silent, other than his screams, as he plummeted through the skies. His clothes, torn and tattered, were dry only moments after being expelled from the river into the wide-open void. Far below, he could see the Sea of Albery that would be his watery grave. Farther east, he thought he could just make out the single peak of the Runic Islands. And, something else. Something edged into his sight; something that looked like—and then it was gone.
I didn’t know hallucinating was part of—
The form reappeared. A man, not much older than himself, looked to be sprinting through the air toward him. Bronzed skin and hair the color of obsidian, the aberration caused Vash’ah’s fear to cease its hold as disbelief emerged within him. And then it disappeared once again. Snapping back to the realization of imminent death, Vash’ah heard the rushing water grow louder in his ears. The spray of the massive waterfalls started to fleck his skin, and he knew the ocean surface was only a few span of feet below him. He closed his eyes.
A sudden whoosh sounded around him. He expected to feel his body slam into the water that would be as hard as the mountains themselves before all went dark forever, but this did not happen. Instead, he felt something grab him—arms? Sandy arms. The clasp was tight. It reached from behind and around to his chest where he thought he felt hands clutched together. The smell of sand filled his nose. He dared not open his eyes. The whoosh sound came again followed by utter silence. Vash’ah opened his eyes and saw nothing. He screamed.
“I have you,” said the voice behind his right ear. “Do not fear.”
TWENTY-SIX
High Duke Emeron Wellyn
Day 3 of 1st Dimming 412 A.U.
A GOBLET SHATTERED INTO HUNDREDS OF SHARDS as it collided with the wall of stone inside Wellyn’s personal chamber. Tyjil was unmoved by the High Duke’s physical reaction to the news he had just delivered.
“How can they all be dead?” Wellyn demanded. “Josi’ah must have been wrong. Mithi’ah was confused, clearly. His report had to be wrong!” Mawldra, Wellyn’s faithful hound, looked as agitated as her master.
“A miscalculation somehow, your Grace,” Tyjil offered simply.
“Miscalculation? I think you have a talent you’ve neglected to share before, Tyjil. You are quite gifted in understatement!” Wellyn paced as he stammered, nervously picking at the stubble on his chin. The miscalculation was his own, if there was one. “I sent three thousand men. Swords, axes, short-archers. All trained for dealing with wood-dwellers. Three thousand!” he screamed. “And Therrium yet lives!” Wellyn ceased pacing when he came to his desk. He reached out and leaned against the desk with his head slightly bowed. “Therrium lives,” he repeated. The consequences could be ominous if this were not corrected immediately. Perhaps it was already too late.
“My Duke, we must prepare,” Tyjil said.
“Maynard,” Wellyn said, ignoring Tyjil’s comment. “Maynard truly was defeated?” Wellyn could not think of a time when he had known of a chase-giver to fall. Was there any record in Jarwyn of a chase-giver’s defeat?
There are no records of any create there anymore, Wellyn r
eminded himself.
“All indications are that he did fall, my Liege. This is an additional area of concern. Therrium will have no reason to keep his vow of silence and will undoubtedly reveal the existence of Maynard’s kind to his army. They will not be caught unaware again. We must prepare.” Tyjil’s words seemed to have no effect upon Emeron Wellyn. The High Duke of the Realm continued to lean against his desk, looking down.
“Therrium is not a warrior, but he is not spineless. How will he react?” Wellyn asked.
“It is hard to say for certain, my Duke,” Tyjil answered, “but there will be no doubt to whom those soldiers belonged. They will know they were soldiers of the Realm. And,” Tyjil continued, “they have also inevitably discovered my work by now in the forest though they are certain not to know what to make of it. The implications of this failed action are far reaching. In short, I believe Therrium will do what any leader will do when attacked by another, yes?”
“And what is that, Tyjil? Speak plainly,” Wellyn demanded.
“He will respond in kind, your Grace. He is not a warrior, true, but he is cautious and clever. Our situation would have been many fold improved had he not survived, yes? His people will surely gather around him.”
Mawldra’s ears perked up before the two men heard the approaching footsteps echoing down the corridor. A few seconds later, a knock came at the chamber doors. “Enter,” Wellyn snapped.
The Minister of State entered the chambers accompanied by two Khans and an aide who carried a small wooden box. The Minister was sweating and slightly out of breath wearing a shade of pale that besets all weak men in leadership. A knot formed in Wellyn’s stomach but he continued staring down at nothing in particular, unmoved.
“My…Duke,” the Minister gasped. “I have just received a most disturbing and urgent message.” He looked up at Tyjil and then back to Wellyn. “Perhaps privacy would be the prudent choice for this message.”