by Travis Peck
He felt Shiya squirm behind him. Her arms were still wrapped tightly around him as she slept against his back. He knew that the overpowering joy he was awash in would eventually fade away, but that knowledge did not prevent him from appreciating the moment.
As old campaigners, he and Crallick knew that small moments like this were the ones that helped them persevere through the bad ones, and the old captain in him knew that the bad was just getting started. He just wanted to get his family to the safety of the capital before it was too late. Then he would do whatever he needed to in order to ensure their safety in the tumultuous times ahead. The Fourth Ravinor War had begun, if unofficially, and he would make sure that it was the last one, with Styr victorious and the ravinor threat dealt with once and for all.
***
Far within the mountain stronghold, Martel, his master, and the Rhyllian, contemplated their future, and more important, the future of their world. Mon Lyzink was at his desk. The scratching of quill on parchment was the only sound in their spacious quarters.
Martel and Yurlo exchanged a look but did not break the silence. He had noticed that his mentor seemed untroubled by their situation and was taking the opportunity, while he had it, of gleaning every bit of information from the ravinors within the stronghold. Martel found himself with moments of immersion into his chosen field of study, but the fact that they were prisoners here, albeit well-treated ones, had intruded upon his work assisting Mon Lyzink in writing his masterwork.
Yurlo, not a trained scholar, had spent most of his time reading through the extensive library that the queen had given them complete access to. When the short islander wasn’t reading, he was performing rigorous training exercises that would keep his body ready should they find any means of escape. Martel doubted the likelihood of that prospect. Two giant ravinors—he had learned they were called colossi—guarded the gate at all times, though it would not matter if it was left undefended. No single human, certainly not even three humans, could budge those enormous gates, much less open them. They would have to find another way out if they had any chance of warning the empire what was coming.
Mon Lyzink had contributed little to the idea of escape as he was so deeply involved in his studies, but Martel knew that his mentor, as obsessed as he was about this wellspring of ravinor knowledge, would leave with them if they found an opportunity. Whatever information they could learn here could potentially save the empire, but they could not wait too long or else that knowledge would be too late to do any good. That fear was what kept Martel and Yurlo up at night, that and being in the midst of what must serve as the capital of the secret empire of the ravinors.
The queen had been forthright in admitting that she had several such strongholds scattered throughout the empire, though she had said that none were so large as this one. It was still quite troubling. Even more troubling was the mission that her three daughters were undertaking. This one stuck in Yurlo’s craw, and well it should. His homeland was under threat of a widespread infection, if the queen could be believed, at this very moment.
Despite candles spent searching, Martel and Yurlo had found no possibility of escape from the mountain stronghold other than the main entrance. They were given unlimited access to the fortress and had wandered around many leagues of underground caverns and connecting tunnels, and still they had found nothing. Martel wondered if the queen had barred off any area that could provide them such means of escape, but if she had, they had not been denied access anywhere thus far. They had to keep looking. And praying to the Giver that they would find a way out and warn their fellow humans of the coming ravinor plague, if it wasn’t already too late.
***
Ifo saw Styr in the distance. The bright, white styricite buildings in the city proper reflected the sun, so brilliantly incandescent and pure it gleamed, as if the Giver himself resided there. From a distance, at least. Ifo was still haunted by what he had done there. Not the fact he had taken a life, though he knew that there would be an accounting for that with the Taker upon his death.
His last contract had been fulfilled, but the strange requirements he had followed would not let him rest. He had killed a legate of the empire, an incorruptible symbol of justice and righteousness. Ifo had dumped the body down a specific culvert and had promptly vacated the city as he had been instructed. And he had been paid lavishly to do so. He had more than enough money to retire now, so why could he not let this go?
Now that the time-limit clause in his contract had expired, he was venturing back to his adopted home city. But, though he was retired, he would still be cautious. Ifo had no plans to set foot back in his old quarters as they had been compromised. He would go into the city and seek out his old employer, though he feared that he was dead. Then he would see his friend, Arin Trevan, and find out what had happened since he had left. Perhaps then he would find the answers he needed to put this life of death behind him for good. Ifo prayed to the Giver that such would be the case.
Ifo crossed under the archway of the southern gate of Styr and into the capital. No guards remarked on his passage, and no suspicions were raised as the retired assassin returned home.
***
Moira no longer attempted to keep track of her time spent in the ravinor dream. Tallying the sunrises and moonrises—and reapings—that were her only visible marker for there being any passage of time here, had proven to be fruitless. At times, the moon or sun would stay up for ages, but then the two orbs would swap back and forth several times every few breaths. Moira had given up trying to understand the bizarre chronology of night and day in this place.
Instead, she focused on her dealings with her erstwhile tutor. Moira and the Shadowman had engaged in some worthwhile conversations, and then some decidedly bizarre ones. The mad apparition, who was her only company in this place, was a challenging character to be around. If she had not been ostracized from birth amongst her peers, Moira did not think that they would have understood each other at all. Nor would the Shadowman have offered her his tutelage, such as it was, without this kinship—however deeply buried.
She began to paint a picture of the specter before her. Not as he appeared here, which was an impossibility of the laws of nature, but as Moira imagined him. Not as she imagined him physically, but rather she imagined his journey that had led him to this place. She had received no details from him about his early life, yet still from his flashes of sanity, and the glimpses of the obviously tortured soul that resided beneath the inky tendrils of darkness that shrouded him, Moira knew that his was a journey of great pain and terrible suffering. But through all of what she suspected, she never lost sight that he was the Shadowman, and as such, was the harvester of reaped souls, ones who he forcibly enlisted in the ravinor cause against their will. She could never forget that, nor forgive.
The hurt of her loved ones’ demise had yet to fade—it did not hurt any less—but now she could take her mind, for a short time, from those she had lost. Moira still questioned the motives the Shadowman had for keeping her alive in the waking world and for allowing her continued presence in his closely held sanctuary that was the ravinor dream. Was he just lonely? Or did he have more sinister motives for teaching her how to interact with the dream?
She had been afforded a great deal of idle time to ponder these questions here in this place. Despite her many forays of witnessing the reapings for most of her life, she was beginning to understand just how little she had known, and even now, Moira struggled with the Shadowman’s cryptic and often confounding lessons. But she would not give up. Nor had she forgotten her own plan, but she knew that in order to carry it out with any chance of success, she would have to not only convince the Shadowman to continue to teach her, but she also must gain the mad creature’s trust.
Moira knew that what she might learn here could well be the difference in the battle between ravinors and humans. And she would be up to the task or her betrayal of those she had known in the waking world would have been for naught—her s
oul damned to the Taker for nothing. Perhaps she was already as damned as the Shadowman was.
The End of Book One
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