by J. M. Martin
Tiana hadn't said it, and in ways, she hadn't needed to. Starting a war was exactly what she wanted. Perhaps it was the true purpose of their presence here this night. Who was he to deny her that? Married to her, he would become a prince, but for now, he was still a mortal man. Even if he didn't go along with it, there would still be war. This way, though, he would get to live. He knew which side would win the upcoming battles, and by the seven moons, he would stick to the winning one.
Striding purposefully, with his back straight and his head held high, he was never stopped. Not by guards, not the emperor-consort, not by any of the other assortment of individuals he passed. While he may not have had the fae's ability to bend light and disappear, he had something that worked just as well: rank. The best way to get anywhere was to blend in, and in a palace, the best way to do that was to strut about like you owned the place. He ignored salutes, bows, and curtseys. The first few times he passed the palace guards in their leather armour, he had fingered the pouches in his pockets. One for pain, one for death, and one to forget. None of which would help him now. All he could do was continue moving.
He passed rich tapestries and paintings, ornate statues and fixtures, pocketing a few small trinkets that caught his eye. Any other time, he would have stopped, ran his hands along the art, and admired the craftsmanship required to make them. Now, though, he had a place to be. The railing along the curved staircase was like polished vines, intertwined, and smooth. They seemed alive to the touch. It seemed magical, true magic, not the glamors that the fae surrounded themselves in.
He approached the great doors that lead to the throne room. They were parted, slightly, and though he could not see beyond them, he knew the empress would be there. He felt at the pouches one last time. His plan had been to simply send her into a dreamless sleep, find where she hid the Moonstone, and leave. That option was gone now.
If he truly wanted to start a war, pain and death would be his friend. To kill in cold blood would be to embrace the sentiment Tiana had shared, that to cut short a life by a breath was no great travesty. It was not a choice he would willingly embrace. A war would leave this palace, this temple of life, in much the same state as the dead men on the roof. Bloody, decaying, and fly-ridden.
What of forgetting, though? How much would she lose? The evening? The War? Her very identity? Her love and her family? Would it be a mercy to sentence her to a life without memory, or to cut it short, allowing her to have the solace of memories in her last moments? A third, darker option flitted across his mind: betrayal. He ignored it, dismissing the thought. Instead, he forced a smile, straightened his posture and pushed through the door, entering the throne room.
It was a room of life. The room seemed to have been forged by the forest itself. The throne, on a raised platform seemed to be made of living trees, roots and vines intertwined to form a chair. Tiny white flowers sprouted upon it.
Dispersed throughout the room, noblemen and women stood clustered, chatting, in small groups. Surrounding it all was a melody that seemed to dance from the harpists’ fingers. It expanded out from the center of the room where a woman stood. She was tall, her figure accentuated by a blue and green floor-length gown that wrapped around her. Even in the grand chamber, which seemed to contain the essence of life itself, she stood out like a rose in a field of snow.
There was no room for doubt in his mind that this woman, with her almond hair and dark skin, was Empress Anyada, ruler of the so-called Civilized Lands, the most powerful human in the world. He took a step into the room, straightening his jacket. He gave his name to the portly doorman and waited. The man cleared his throat and, at once, the assembly of dark-haired nobility turned to inspect the newcomer.
“Sir Willem Jael Al'Caryth of the Third Honor, future prince and envoy of the Island Fae seeks private audience with her Lady Anyada, Empress of the Civilized World,” the doorman said, in a booming voice which seemed to echo back upon them.
A wave of whispers went through the large chamber room, the words inaudible to Willem, but the shock and curiosity was not.
The empress eyed him, her large brown eyes locked onto his, seeming to scrutinize his very existence. Eventually, she raised her hand and the whispers died down, all looking to their ruler. Even the harpists in the far corner cut short their song.
“You all may leave me now. I will be available for public audiences with the rising of Laya in the morning.” Lowering her hand, she nodded to him. “You may approach.” At once, in a flurry of movement, noblemen and women in a variety of hues of green, blue, and gold exited the room. The men with their short hair, and the women with silver brocades in their woven hair, all watched Willem with obvious interest. He ignored them. They were his issue no longer, provided they stayed out of his way.
He stepped further into the room and gave a sweeping bow to the empress. Just because he was here to steal from her, and potentially assassinate her, wasn't any excuse to be disrespectful. He took a moment, with the last of the nobles leaving, to scan the shadows. No sign of Tiana. Was she really just waiting for him upon the rooftop? Images of her murdering the resident nobility flashed through his mind, followed by ones of her doing the same to the empress. He would be glad for her absence. It would give him time. He would think about her later.
“Greetings, Lord Willem of the Third Honor. To what do I owe the pleasure?” The empress looked to be about thirty. She was pretty, not yet with the mature mask to her features that time would bring. Still, there was an undeniable air of authority to her. Her eyes, though warm, were sharp and calculating.
“I was informed that I should come to meet you. It is only in this past day that I've risen to my rank and honor.” She examined him, much as he had her.
“You are mortal, are you not? To be a fae prince and not of them is unheard of.”
“I am, yes, though mortal for not much longer, and I'm not yet a prince either.”
“I see. Answer me this, if you have only just come to your rank and betrothal this past day, why are you here? Where is your beloved? Do her people not celebrate?”
He smiled in what he hoped would pass for a sheepish grin. “The fae are ever partying, and as you stated, I am mortal still. They won't miss me this night. I thought it best to get to the official duties and delegations.”
She nodded, her eyes narrowed and thoughtful. “You will give up your mortality, the very thing that makes one human?”
“Who hasn't dreamt of living forever? Divorcing ones ties with death, to see the coming and going of ages?” he spoke nonchalantly, shrugging, and looking around the room. This place would burn when war came. With no magic to save these people, they would be destroyed.
“It is an evil thing, immortality. At least, in the hands of once-mortal men.” Her words rang through the halls, and he remained silent, sensing she had more to say. “If one lives through the ages, what happens to the value of a life? When the rise and fall of empires, peoples, and species happen in a day?” Her voice was not harsh, instead, it was questioning. “What is war then, but the snuffing of candles?”
Tiana's words echoed in his mind, 'You will learn, their lives end in a blink of an eye, to cut it short by a breath is hardly a tragedy.'
What if he didn't want to learn?
“I carry with me the weight of immortality every day. The power would consume my mind. It would change me, rewrite my existence to make me what it sees as perfect. It would deny me the mother's embrace, it would deny me the last trip through the veil and to the lands of our forefathers, if I allowed it.” She looked at him, pulling a chain from beneath the neckline of her dress. From it, coiled in gold wire, was the Moon. It was a white sphere, milky, and it seemed to glow. It seemed a perfect replica of Theia, the smallest but eldest of the Sisters. It called to him, whispering, yearning to be used. To burn.
“This is your purpose, is it not? I feel it calling for you.” He tore his eyes away from pearl and looked back up at her. “The woman you are to marry, how many
millennia has she lived? She cannot possibly love you.”
He stepped forward, feeling the pouches in his pockets as he moved.
One for pain,
One for death,
And one to forget.
“Immortality is my right, Anyada. It will be mine.”
“You fool.”
#
Tiana waited for him upon the rooftop. She sat upon the parapet, legs dangling over the side of castle. She didn't look up as he approached, didn't acknowledge his presence, though she knew he was there.
He sat, swinging his legs over the edge and clasping her hand. After minutes of looking over the forest haven she turned to him, wide eyes pensive.
"You have changed."
"Starting a war does that to a man," he said in a low voice. His words felt hollow in his own ears. He didn't turn to meet her gaze, nor tighten his grip upon her hand as she did his.
"Is she dead?"
"No." She took in a sharp breath at that, but he continued. "If their lives are nothing but the blink of an eye, allowing them to live but a breath longer should be no issue." He could feel her eyes, questioning, curious, boring into the side of his head. Still, he did not turn to her.
"You have my Moon?"
"No." Why was his heart not racing? Not pounding with fear, adrenaline? His stomach not turning with dread? Instead, only a cold, icy power washed over him as he sat next to Tiana, Princess of Fae.
"You failed." Her voice was cold, harsh, and…childish?
"No. There will be war, as you wished, and the Moon is no longer in their possession, but neither is it yours." Bringing his feet under him, he stood. Standing on that ledge, there were three options to him. To fall forward; death. To deal with the raging tempest beside him; pain, and quite likely, also death. To leave, to step down, walk away, and forget? No, that wasn't an option.
"You have it. Give me the Moon, Willem. I made you into who you are. I can undo all of that," she said, her teeth becoming fangs, her eyes into slits.
"You can't, though. She has spoken to me, and has accepted me as her own. In exchange, she grants me her power."
She sniffed. "Very well. I will allow you to hold it for me. Come, we will go home. There is likely a feast we are missing."
"No."
This time he did look at her and caught her arm as she moved to strike him. "Never again. I am a mortal man."
"You are weak," she spat, her voice venom and her eyes fire. |
“I am mortal, that is far from being weak. It is stronger, in fact, than any power an immortal might have.” He stepped down, onto the flat surface on the castle's roof, and moved toward her. She twisted and rose to meet him. Like this, the fire in her eyes, the petulance in her voice, he began to question why he had sought out her hand from the king and queen of the court. For all that she was ageless and beautiful, she was a child.
Tiana stepped off the wall to stand at eye-level with him.
“You would betray me, now? After all that my kin have done for you?”
“I did say there would be war.” She looked at him, eyes searching, exploring, and uncertain. He memorized that image, when both fury and curiosity were at battle with one another across her features. He used that moment, when she seemed entranced in discovering the dark recesses of his mind, to reach behind his back. He looked over her features, soft and delicate, with silver hair that reached down to her shoulders, her plump lips which parted delicately, and then in shock as his dagger pierced her flesh.
It would not kill her. Killing an immortal was much more difficult than that. It would accomplish what he needed, though. Pain. Pain and forgetting, as the powders upon his blade penetrated her flesh. Sliding his blade free, and wiping the blood on his trousers, he picked her up, her frail body convulsing with pain and terrors beyond his imagining.
Light of the Moon, grant me admittance to the other realm.
The world seemed to peel away from him as he stepped through the veil. Ghosts, imprints of the living, and a haunting melody played through there, the dark and twisting realm. Too long here, and he would slip away, the physical realms forever lost to him.
He stepped through to the other side.
Tiana's screams pierced the cacophony of the fae court. Revellers and musicians stopped mid-twirl and mid-track, all to look at him, their prince-to-be, and their bloodied princess. Dropping her to the ground, he squatted and retrieved a couple of items off her body.
“I'm afraid I'm going to have to decline the betrothal. The princess and I had a bit of a spat,” he said as he stood, pocketing a few jewels. “I'm sure she won't mind me taking these. You know, for the trouble.” He winked at his audience, ignoring the stunned fae folk in front of him.
“Well, can't exactly say it's been a pleasure, so, how about this: the Moon belongs to humans. Keep to what is yours, and we will to ours. Any actions will be seen as an act of war. It will not go well for you.”
Once more, Willem Jael Al'Caryth let the veil of worlds part, and felt himself slip into the ethereal darkness. All that was left to him was death, stolen jewels, and the powers of immortal divinity.
The Muttwhelp
Edward M. Erdelac
Born on the Indiana border and reared in the wind swept kingdom of Chicagoland under the spiritual tutelage of Tolkien, Robert E. Howard, D&D, and 80’s fantasy movies, Edward M. Erdelac is the author of the acclaimed Judeocentric/Lovecraftian weird western series MERKABAH RIDER, BUFF TEA, COYOTE'S TRAIL, and the Van Helsing in Texas novel TEROVOLAS. His weird Civil War novel ANDERSONVILLE is due out from Random House in 2015. His stories have appeared most recently in STAR WARS INSIDER MAGAZINE, KAIJU RISING, the Stoker-winning AFTER DEATH, and WORLD WAR CTHULHU. He resides in the Far West with his wife and a gaggle of kids and cats. News of his work can be read on his Delirium Tremens blog at http://emerdelac.worpress.com.
~
Dark days in Wayphar.
The Fey Folk of Oldwood had been left pinned to their trees like butterflies by the spears of the goblin hordes. Spars of the White Armada lay shattered at the bottom of the Billow Ocean, and Rentellevaire, the shining city-state of the August King, was threatened by the Witch Queen herself.
Behind the Black Army of Odius Khan, the Plains of Daroosh were furnished in fire. Thick curtains of smoke marked the pyres of the famous Thunder Riders, every man and horse slaughtered, their bones gnawed clean by crag trolls and other fell folk with a penchant for such meat. Below the Black Army’s grimy encampment, down in the Valley of The Golden Lap, the plump little village of Glean huddled amid its waving wheat fields. To the east, its elder sister town, Crossbow Hollow, was ablaze. The orks scurried among the burning buildings like angry ants, and the tall shapes of trolls pulled down the tower keep with a resounding crash. The last true bastion of mankind between the orks and the Heartbreak Sea had fallen. The tall, red sailed warships of Admiral Athkabode waited at the coast to carry their forces north, to join the Witch Queen’s dread host on the field of Bantilloy. Only Glean remained.
Mogarth Muttwhelp considered the stone bowl of mushy field gruel with a flare of his porcine nostrils, and decided to tip the sour smelling slop into the spluttering fire. He would almost rather eat raw man flesh than the stuff the ork cooks concocted.
The black little crow-nosed goblin squatting across from him, chewing at a raw dog’s leg, looked at him aghast with his beady agate eyes.
“Boss, the next time you ain’t going to eat your stew, give it to poor hungry Redshat,” he squeaked, shaking the flopping, sandy-furred joint at him.
Redshat was the last of the old Bellygasher Gang. Picknose had been killed on forage detail by a farmer with a pitchfork while coming out of some henhouse with a chicken in his arms and a mouthful full of eggs. A clutch of peeping chicks had hatched in his dead, grinning maw moments after they’d pried him from the wall of the coop. Hangnail had tripped over his flapping feet on the march across Daroosh and been mashed flat by one of their own lumbering trolls, and Coc
kblood and Footwart had been spitted on the same blue lance in the last charge of the Silver Lancers at Corbin Keep.
Their brigand days in and around Crossbow Hollow had never been so deadly. They had made a decent living, the five of them, cutting throats in the alleys at night and unhorsing lonely riders on the back roads with a length of cord strung across the lane. As their boss, the lion’s share of the gold had gone to Mogarth. The gobbos had been content to work for fresh meat.
Mogarth had fallen into the leadership of the Bellygashers by happenstance.
As a muttwhelp, the son of some nameless ork raider who had ravaged his human mother and left her hanging half-dead and bleeding from an oak tree on his grandfather’s farm outside Glean, he had never quite fit in anywhere. Most muttwhelps never made it to the birthing, or were hacked to death in their cradles or drowned. His tenderhearted mother had suckled him, even though his tusk nubs had scarred her nipples. She had raised him, even though it had isolated her from her own family and neighbors, and educated him by the hearth light when the scowling master at the Glean schoolhouse had turned him away, an ugly, green skinned babe snuffling snot and bitter tears into her apron.
He had worked down in those golden fields till one winter when his mother had caught a deep chill in her chest and sickened past caring, wasting to death when the robins returned. He had tried to keep the old farm going after that, but none of the merchants in Glean would buy his yield, or sell him seed, and he couldn’t afford any intermediary agent.
He had burned the farm to the ground and salted the fields to ensure none of the hateful pinkskins could use it in his wake.
He rubbed his rough hand over his stubbled head. He could still see the bare patch of land down in the valley where his home had once stood.
Mogarth had departed for Crossbow Hollow, the eastern gateway to the Golden Lap Valley and its most populous city, taking only the old blue shirt his mother had woven for him and the silver handled whip his father had left tied around her scarred throat.