This is the Wytchforest. My home.
A dim voice warned him that this could not be true—then that voice fell away. He had forgotten his own name. Then, he remembered. El’rash’lin. His name was El’rash’lin. He winced. The name meant “cursed one.”
Why am I cursed? What have I done? Why do they hate me?
In the forest again, alone, he ran as quickly as his young legs could take him. The trees alone understood him. Not safe even among his own family, at least he might be safe among the trees.
Twilight darkened the boughs, spreading a thick web of shadows through the undergrowth. He could not see the stars anymore. He lost his way. Then he found it. He ran harder… then slowed to a stop.
In the clearing ahead of him lay a pool—deep blue water, so unstirred that it might have been made of glass. Nervously, he drew closer. He saw reflections in the pool. The constellations, the moon, the foggy white swirl of Armahg’s Eye.
Then he saw himself: just a boy, slim faced, pale haired. What was so different about him? Then he saw his eyes—not azure like the others but purple, like the last moment of twilight before nightfall. Purple, like a bruise.
There’s something else...
He stirred. His heart leapt in his throat. Was this a trick of the water, the stars reflecting of its surface? The pupils of his eyes were white! He frowned.
Is that all? Is that really so terrible?
He must be missing something. He needed a better look. Instinctively, he raised one hand. A tingling heat kindled within him, starting at his chest, surging to his fingertips. Violet flames flared to life.
He screamed in panic. But the flames did not burn him. He stared—first horrified, then awed. The harmless tendrils coursed the length of his tiny arm, like serpents of purple light. He realized they must not be dangerous after all. He reached for the nearest tree and touched it.
Flames gushed from his fingertips as though something had been undammed within him. The fire wreathed the tree’s great trunk and spread higher and higher, swallowing the limbs. He screamed. He pulled his hand away—too late. His fire climbed as high as the heavens now. The tree shook and groaned, as though it were calling for help. El’rash’lin ran.
Years passed. He sensed that; sensed, too, that he’d been wounded. They were driving him away. Their thoughts conveyed the same raw hate as their yells. They hated him as much as they feared him. He told them they had no reason to be afraid. He would not hurt them, would not summon the magic they feared so much.
The Sylvs did not listen. They drove him out of the thick, ancient darkness of tree-shade, into the harsh strangeness of the world beyond. Nothing covered him but awful, empty sky. He wandered, half starved, alone and afraid. He came upon strangers—people with burly bodies and rounder faces, who spoke with words he sensed were not his own language though he understood them nonetheless.
He asked them for help. Most ran. Others hefted axes and tried to split him like a block of wood. He wanted to die, but something snapped. Something within him would not let them take his life. It roiled until he could no longer deny it. Finally, in despair, he fought back. He tried not to kill them, tried to soften the magic so that it would only scare them off, but the flames roared beyond his control. Screams echoed in his ears, driving him mad.
I will not fight... I will not kill...
He ran. They followed. In their naked, bestial thoughts, they blamed him for everything: failed crops, abrupt sickness, babies born cold as dead fish. He wanted to tell them their suffering was not his fault, that he did not hate them, that he was only different—not their enemy—but he knew they would not listen. Just as his own family had refused to listen. Finally, exhausted, he collapsed on the banks of a river. He waited to die.
But then he appeared: a giant of a man, big as an Olg but with almond eyes, angular Sylvan eyebrows, and a sharp jawline, fire flying from his hands. Tattoos covered him, head to foot. Before him, attackers scattered like so many cinders. Then, face lined with concern, the big man knelt to help him.
“Do not be afraid. You are safe now. I am like you. My name is Fadarah.”
He blinked in shock. “I am El’rash’lin...” His voice broke. Fadarah’s eyes were violet, like his own, the pupils white as starlight. “Are... are we demons?”
Fadarah smiled. “No, my friend. We are gods.”
So many saved now. So many more than they’d ever dreamed.
El’rash’lin watched them gather on the sun-washed plains, eyes filled with tears. Kith’el. Silwren. Iventine. Aerios. All of them—his new family. And Fadarah, their leader. So many. Surely they were safe now. No mob could harm them. They could go somewhere… live in peace.
They settled on the northernmost shore of Ruun, far from anyone. They built a village. They lived there for years before the Sylvs came. It was not enough that the Shel’ai had been driven from the Wytchforest. Sylvs now claimed that all the evils of the world could be traced back to them.
Horsemen, swords, great clouds of arrows.
The Shel’ai fended off wave after wave, violet flames burning the shadows of the dead into the scorched grass, but they just kept coming. Hundreds, then thousands. Finally, in despair, Fadarah ordered them to flee.
For weeks they ran, living like wild animals. They’d wisely targeted the Sylvan cavalry first, decimating them early in the fighting, hoping the footmen would give up. But the remainder of the Sylvan host pursued, only hours behind. Then, at last, the Sylvs grew weary of their own losses and gave up, returning to their own homeland. For them, it could not be called a victory because a handful of Shel’ai remained alive.
The Shel’ai did not celebrate. They wept. Some cried out for revenge. But Fadarah refused. He led them south instead. He told them to have hope. Perhaps Dwarrs were different. Reclusive, taciturn dwellers of hills and caverns, what did the Dwarrs care if the Shel’ai raised a new village in the unused fields? So the Shel’ai headed south, avoiding contact with Humans. They sought refuge in the snowy shadow of the Stillhammer Mountains, a safe distance from the city-fortress of Tarator.
But the Dwarrs answered with threats, and legions of armored men massed on the border. So the Shel’ai went north again. They decided to take their chances with the Humans—but their arrival in Ivairia coincided with the onset of famine and plague. Though the Shel’ai protested their innocence, even their attempts to use magic to ease the Humans’ suffering were rebuffed.
Some suggested they seek solace on the Lotus Isles. Others questioned the wisdom of this, doubting that the Humans there would be any different than the Humans in Ivairia.
“We will have no peace until all our enemies are crushed.” El’rash’lin heard himself speaking the words.
The others agreed—even Fadarah, the great man sitting alone by the fire, wearing in his expression the awful loneliness of the wilderness.
“Then we will crush them,” Fadarah said at last. “But to do this, we must become more than Shel’ai.” He rose to full height. “We must become what the Sylvs fear even more than they fear us. We must become the stuff of nightmares. We must become Dragonkin.”
El’rash’lin made the discovery. He read of the place in the famous Scrollhouse of Atheion, slipping unseen into the ancient, floating library in the dead of night. There, he scanned yellowed tomes written long before the Shattering War, until he found the legend: Namundvar, the Dragonkin.
On pages over a thousand years old, preserved by magic, the great, dying sorcerer had written how his kind defied the gods, leeching power from the gods’ favored creations: dragons. But the dragons had disappeared—dead or vanished, Namundvar would not say—and the Dragonkins’ power was waning. Some had even begun to mate with barbaric Humans and Dwarrs, spawning the first Sylvs.
The Sylvs multiplied. They had no magic of their own, but they overran half the Wytchforest through sheer numbers. Then, the Shel’ai—those Sylvs born with sorcery in their blood—began to appear at random. Nobody wanted them. The Sylvs
did not trust magic, and the Dragonkin were disgusted that their power had been so diluted. Thus, they all fought each other.
Namundvar knew it was a war none could survive. So he called upon the last of his dying power to carve a breach through the heart of the world, through all that was, to tap directly into the Light.
Let all behold the spring from whence we came; let them know, at last, what unites us.
Namundvar’s Well. El’rash’lin pondered the legend. He dared to hope. Might Namundvar’s dream still be realized? Could the endless wars that racked all the races be stopped somehow if people could be shown reason? He shared the legend with Fadarah. The great man’s eyes filled with hope of a different sort. He embraced El’rash’lin like a brother. “You have done it,” he said. “We will draw fire and light from this Well. We will save our people!”
They gathered in the deepest secret sanctum of Cadavash—young and old, all the Shel’ai who remained. Four had volunteered: Silwren, Aerios, Cierrath, and Iventine. They stood fearfully in a circle near the Well, Fadarah just a few paces beyond them. In a moment, it would begin. It took only a little magic to unseal the Well, but it would take the combined might of all those assembled to steal from it.
El’rash’lin knew their plan. He knew every detail of Fadarah’s strategy. He knew because he had drafted much of it himself, long before. He wept. He had argued against this. But no one would listen.
So instead, without a word, he stepped toward the edge of the Well and joined the others. Fadarah’s eyes widened, wet with tears. But El’rash’lin was not doing this for Fadarah. The words of Namundvar’s legend echoed in his mind: Let all behold the spring from whence we came...
All the Shel’ai ignited and combined the full sum of their powers. Violet light flooded the chamber, playing off ancient paintings. El’rash’lin’s eyes had been closed in concentration, but he opened them. He gazed into the Well. He expected to see peace, tranquility, even power. Instead, he saw the weight of his own mistake, surging up from the depths, so great that it crushed the breath from his lungs.
CHAPTER TWENTY
ROWEN’S PLEA
Rowen gasped for air. He looked around, speechless, and saw that he was standing once more in the basement of the jailhouse in Lyos. Silwren stood in her cell, her face taut with worry—but not for him.
El’rash’lin was lying on the cold stone floor, body shaking, his eyes blank and staring. Rowen knelt beside the fallen sorcerer, filled now with pity for the man whose memories he now shared. He felt for a pulse.
“Silwren, help him.” Rowen reached for the keys to her cell and realized they were still upstairs. It did not matter. Silwren touched the locked door of her cell, and it swung open. Rowen blinked. Why didn’t she escape earlier?
Silwren moved forward and sank to one knee beside her friend. She took his hand in hers. Her eyes closed. A violet glow enveloped her body. Moments later, El’rash’lin coughed and opened his eyes. He glanced up at Silwren, almost without comprehension. Then El’rash’lin faced Rowen.
“Forgive me,” he gasped. “I wanted... to show you more, but my strength faltered.” His violet eyes rolled back.
Rowen looked urgently at Silwren, but she said, “There’s nothing more I can do. He needs rest. Help me hide him.”
Rowen grabbed the fallen sorcerer’s arms and dragged him as gently as he could into Silwren’s cell. She followed.
“It’s the magic, isn’t it?” Rowen asked. “It’s killing him.”
Silwren nodded slightly.
“Will it destroy you, too?”
She did not have to answer.
El’rash’lin did not look so hideous anymore. Only tired. The memories of the sorcerer’s life still filled Rowen’s mind as though they were his own: trees, blood, laughter. Fire. He still had many questions, but he was finally beginning to understand.
“He tried to use his own magic to heal you,” Rowen said. “You and the others. That’s what left him... like this.”
Silwren was quiet for a moment. “Iventine—the Nightmare—woke first. He had delved deeper into the Well than any of us. It warped him. Going so deep into the Light, then being ripped away...”
Rowen thought of his own experience at Namundvar’s Well, of that sense of wholeness and tranquility—woven into him, then torn out—and shuddered.
“When El’rash’lin woke, he could have saved himself, but he didn’t. He tried to use his own magic to heal Iventine, to save all of us from madness. He thought if he gave us time to heal...” Silwren’s voice lowered to a shameful whisper. “I went mad, too. When I woke... I lashed out. Aerios, Cierrath... I killed them.”
Rowen saw now why she so frequently bore no expression. Each moment for her was a battle against the same madness that had left El’rash’lin deformed and had turned Iventine into a demon. He wanted to soothe her but could think of nothing to say. He looked down at El’rash’lin instead. “The Light did this to him.”
“Not the Light. The subversion of it.” Tears clouded Silwren’s eyes now. “He spoke the truth when he said he wants to die. So does Iventine, I think. To go back...” Her voice broke. “When Iventine comes, I can’t fight him. Do you understand? If I do, it’ll be worse than death! I’ll go mad. I’ll lose control of myself. I could kill everyone...”
She broke off, trembling. Rowen took her in his arms. He tried to soothe her, but so deep were her fear and despair that he wondered if she even realized he was still there.
Rowen thought his careful retelling of all he had learned from Silwren and El’rash’lin would leave his audience impressed, perhaps even spur them to action. He’d gone first to Captain Ferocles and Sergeant Epheus, meeting with them in the barracks office of the captain, but neither of them wanted anything to do with it.
“Now we have not just one sorcerer to contend with, but two!” Sergeant Epheus spat.
Captain Ferocles eyed Rowen with disgust. “You’re proving to be more of a nuisance than you’re worth,” he said. “Locke, I do not care about sorcerers’ fairytales. I care about Lyos. If these two won’t help us, they’re a liability. We should kill them now and be done with it.” He tapped his sword’s hilt meaningfully.
Rowen felt his face go hot. Before he knew what he was doing, he drew Knightswrath and leveled the blade at the captain’s throat. Sergeant Epheus leapt to his feet, drawing his own sword, but Ferocles held up a hand to stop him.
“You will not harm them.” Rowen prodded the captain with his sword tip, hard enough to draw a tiny rose of blood through the man’s tunic. “They will help us. You have my word. But threaten them again, you bastard, and I’ll have your head!”
Ferocles blinked in surprise. A faint smile formed. He nodded slightly. “Have it your way, Locke.”
Fuming, Rowen withdrew his blade and sheathed it. He left without another word.
Epheus made to follow, sword drawn.
However, Ferocles stopped him. “Don’t bother,” he said with a chuckle. He dabbed blood off his tunic and rubbed it between his thumb and forefinger. “Odds are the good corporal will be dead in a couple days, anyway.”
Epheus did not smile. “And the wytches?”
Ferocles answered with a heavy sigh. “They’re locked away. They haven’t hurt anyone yet. And I suppose it’s a bad idea, on the eve of a siege, to waste the number of men it’d take to kill them. Let them live—for now. But when the siege comes, they’ll either help us, or we’ll kill them, regardless of what Locke thinks about it.”
Rowen cursed his temper. He kept looking over his shoulder as he made his way along the cobblestone streets, half expecting to see a squad of soldiers coming to arrest him—or simply to kill him on the spot. But he was alone. In fact, the streets of Lyos were eerily calm.
If the arrival of the Isle Knights had done nothing else, it had at least helped quell some of the people’s unease. Crovis had even reassigned the squires—several hundred in number—to assist the Red Watch. These squires, while not yet kni
ghted, boasted the superb training and discipline of the Lotus Isles. Rowen knew this all too well, since many of the squires were familiar to him—though he’d done all he could to avoid them.
Thanks to the presence of the Knights and squires, the riots had finally ceased. Rumors of Cassica’s fall and the approaching Throng had spread, but by word of Crovis Ammerhel, the people of Lyos suffered a strict curfew. This made Lyos appear almost deserted, save for the taverns. Rowen thought of his first day back in the city, seeing children playing while mothers tended the small gardens in front of their homes. He wished suddenly for a bit of noise to break the awful stillness: a flute, an angry shout, a child’s laughter, anything.
He wondered what had become of Hráthbam. Was the merchant back in Sorocco by then? Rowen missed him, but at least his friend was far from harm. He thought of Jalist too, wondering if the Dwarrish sellsword had indeed joined the Throng. If so, doesn’t that make him my enemy now?
He sighed and thought of Ferocles. He could not blame the captain for doubting him. He had to admit his story sounded absurd. Epheus had even suggested that this was all some kind of elaborate ruse. But what did the Shel’ai have to gain? Surely, they could free themselves from their prison whenever they wished—just as Silwren had opened her jail cell with a touch. And if they planned to use a Human to help them gain the city’s trust, they might have chosen someone more influential than Rowen!
He went to find the Isle Knights. He loathed the thought of speaking with Aeko again after their last meeting, but perhaps she could make better sense of the renegade sorcerers’ strange tale. Or maybe she had further news of the Throng.
He found Crovis Ammerhel, Aeko Shingawa, and Paltrick Vossmore—representatives of the three orders of Isle Knights—positioned on the battlements overlooking the gates of Lyos, ringed by other Knights and squires, halfheartedly discussing the city’s defenses in the unlikely event that the Throng attacked after all.
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