by T. A. Miles
Perhaps this affliction was what motivated the Morennish people to fight as aggressively as they did. It may have been that they believed they would find a safer home by taking it from their neighbors. Perhaps the Morennish people were fleeing a curse, though he couldn’t see how it benefited them to flee one curse in the company of another.
“This way!” someone whispered harshly.
Korsten looked in the direction of the voice—it sounded like a very young person—but when he emerged from the shade of the building and out from around Onyx’s head, the individual nearly choked on their next breath and promptly dashed from view before he could discern any details of face or form.
Korsten let go Onyx’s reins and followed. The figure had jumped over the rubble at the base of the broken wall, into a wrongly exposed trio of floors, cluttered with toppled furniture and strewn articles of whatever the previous residents might have owned otherwise. He caught sight of them—a slight figure in a gray cloak—running up the stairs that were still clutching to the wall they had once lined. A door at the top appeared to be the individual’s goal, and Korsten followed swiftly.
The chase led him through the door, which he caught before the stranger could close, then down a partially exposed corridor lining the outside wall, and around a corner at the end, which led into the better protected interior.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” Korsten called after them.
That only inspired the individual to move faster. How they could be as afraid of him as they must have been of that beast in the streets, Korsten had no idea. They were evidently not afraid of the very notion of a stranger, else they would not have tried to direct him to what he assumed was meant to be a safer hiding place than the shaded side of a toppled wall. He nearly felt like a villain chasing them toward that safety, but he had to know what this was…all of this.
It was in the midst of pursuing the stranger around another corner and into a narrower hall, that they shouted something incomprehensible in the moment. Promptly following, a door opened up onto Korsten’s path. He turned quickly to one side and slipped around it, ending his pursuit long enough to turn and see who might have been on the other side. It was that action which prevented him receiving a bolt to the back. A Barrier, quickly cast, deflected the man’s shot. That took the stranger aback quite severely. He stood gaping before he found the presence of mind to lurch back into the room from whence he’d come. Presumably his actions had been to protect whomever Korsten had been chasing originally.
Unfortunately, for their emotional peace at this hour, it would do them no good. Korsten detected their presence permeating the spaces within the building. There were several. Rather than chase after anyone, he followed the sensation of their blood driving rapidly through their veins. They were all quite terrified, though he wouldn’t take credit for the majority of the fear within these walls, since only two people had seen him thus far.
“Korsten,” came a brusque voice that startled him to turning about. He was beginning to think that his mother’s spirit was quite real, and quite aggravated with him. “Ignore these piteous fools. It’s me you’re here to see.”
In the moments the words were given, Korsten perceived the spirit of his mother, but he recognized quickly that it was not hers. There was something different about it, beyond the manner in which it was speaking.
“Different, yet related,” the new spirit said telepathically, it’s resonance shifted from what he’d believed to be Zerxa’s voice, to one masculine.
Korsten looked behind him and then back at the door, in the moment an overly tall, slender form was leaning into view in the doorway. An antlered head and eyes that for a moment appeared animal adorned a face that was more human than beast, and that rested gracefully atop a man’s robed body.
Long fingers reached into the room and drew back in invitation. “Come home,” the individual said.
As quickly as the words had finished forming, the peculiar individual was gone. A terrible knot of dread tied itself in Korsten’s stomach. His immediate thought was that he had been misled by this person, communicating with him behind a mask of his mother’s memory. But how could he have known Zerxa? How could he have known her child?
Korsten stepped carefully back out into the corridor, looking down either side of it. There was nothing present beyond the gloom of abandonment. That abandonment felt absolute for only a short time. It only required Korsten to return to the outer passage to be brought back to the din of the creature rampaging through the streets, and of determined men combatting it. He felt a strong pull to helping them, though they might well have been his enemies. Surely, the threat of such a beast eliminated the importance of political boundaries.
“They would still be your enemies.”
Korsten looked to the speaker, the horned figure. He was exceedingly tall—his rack of pale antlers nearly touched the ceiling. In fact, he was bent slightly forward to allow space for his height. His skin was quite pale, his eyes large and many dark tones blended together…and his hair was red. As red as Zerxa’s, and as red as Korsten’s.
“As red as any of ours,” the stranger said. He extended a long-fingered hand again. “Welcome home, Korsten.”
Korsten had debated whether or not to accept the invitation from the peculiar horned man, but he could not have truly ignored it. There were answers here.
Belief in that had him moving quickly down the corridor, in the direction the stranger had been. As if to snuff that belief before it could truly take him anywhere of worth, the corridor ended on a broken floor, overlooking a broken street two long stories down. He stood facing another ruin and the remains of the city. Wherever the creature had gone to, it was silent now. Searching for it, led him to a centrally located building with a domed roof and many spires surrounding it. There was a golden-green cast to it, as if it sat beneath sunlight that very simply was not in the sky. The many carefully wound layers of white-gold that decorated the dome reminded him of what he held in his pocket.
With a sensation of relief and of revelation, Korsten quickly took Zerxa’s pendant from his pocket. He was not surprised to find that it was lit, the tone of its glow matching that of the domed structure.
Pocketing the item again, Korsten looked for a safe way to the ground. Finding none, he gave another scan for the towering beast before determining it far enough away to perform a Reach to the dome. He arrived on a wide stair that was cracked in several places, leading up to what might have been formerly a manor or a palace.
It occurred to him that he may have been stood at the threshold of his mother’s childhood home. The thought inspired him to hesitate, and it was in that hesitation that he detected a sudden surge of presence behind him.
Turning from the dome, he noticed several figures aligning themselves on the wall of a building across from the stairs. They were men, armed with bows. Without delivering any warning, they made truth of the stranger’s comment, and fired upon him.
Barrier shielded him from the onslaught. He watched their arrows skitter off the spell, or bounced back toward the building, all of them too low to return to their sources. The men paused for only a moment, as if unsurprised and given what Korsten had already seen, he was also not surprised.
In their mutual lack of response, the heavy footfall of the creature returned. Korsten had only a moment to look in the direction it was coming from before it was there, sweeping long arms over the buildings, knocking away portions of the roof and men who were not quick enough to leave. Stone and a pair of bodies struck the frozen street in front of Korsten. One of the bodies was further crushed beneath the beast’s foot.
The remainder of the men on the roof scrambled away, seeking refuge within the buildings. The creature resumed its chase, soon moving out of immediate view.
Korsten lowered his Barrier and went to the bodies. He avoided the one who could not have survived and made quick steps to the other, that he might drag the man out of the way of further harm.
&n
bsp; “Stay away!” the man shouted at once, struggling with a leg that was surely broken to get to his feet. In the process he tried warding Korsten away with his hands, then began searching for the weapon he had plainly lost during the fall.
“I’m not—”
“Get back!” he cried out, as if Korsten were the beast responsible for his current state. It reminded Korsten unhappily of the soldier from Indhovan.
“What are you afraid of?” Korsten demanded, but it did no good to speak; the man was shouting over him, shouting obscenities now. He seemed certain that he was going to die.
Korsten silenced him with a Sleep spell. And then he stood in the relative silence, unsure what to do.
The man was not terribly heavy, so Korsten had decided to drag him toward and ultimately into the domed building. The front doors had been crashed open at some point during whatever had gone on here—if the creature hadn’t done it—so he met little trouble besides that which dragging a limp body provided.
Within the space he found an elaborate, though aged, foyer. In the hall beyond there was equally dilapidated grandeur, and he elected a bench for his would be enemy to rest upon. The cushion was dusted with some snow and collected grime, but Korsten still deemed it better than the floor. He left the man to recover, exploring the area with Analee fluttering at his shoulder. She must have felt unsettled with their environment, and for good reason. Hopefully, Onyx was taking care of himself by staying out of view of trading beasts or the ill-aimed arrows of the local people.
Korsten’s wandering brought him quickly to an open pair of doors to the side of the front hall. He ventured in and was faced with no less than three circular stories of bookshelves. Unfortunately, most of the books lay upon the floor in a heap of scattered pages and broken binding. Korsten looked about the remains anyway. He found pages penned in a peculiar hand; he presumed it was the Morennish use of letters. He also found illustrations, many of them to do with deer, or people with deer antlers.
He couldn’t help that he thought back to the hart that had been in contention with one of the Vadryn in the village behind him. He wondered what the relation was…to Morenne and these creatures. Were the antlered stranger and the hart from the village related in any way? Or were those simply two separate, if strange, circumstances?
Different, but related. He replayed the words of the horned stranger in his mind.
His browsing eventually led him to a space on the second level that he might have been able to access with a ladder. One was in the room to be found, but when he tried to move it along the shelves, it became evident that its wheels were beyond repair. He kicked at them lightly anyway, and eventually let them be. Yes, a Reach could get him nearly anywhere, but especially in to trouble, and he had no desire to transport himself to a weak floorboard, and ultimately a new hole in the floor. It was better to save his energy besides.
It was in that moment when the man he’d left asleep in the front hall burst through the doorway at an awkward gait in a clumsy attempt to bring Korsten down. Korsten avoided him easily, and he careened into one of the lower shelves, which sent sheets of debris from their decaying contents down on top of him. Korsten summoned his sword and waited for the man to right himself from the mess. He let him get as far as trying to stand again before stopping him.
“Just rest,” he said to the man. “I’m not here to harm you, though you seem bent on taking injury.”
The man held his breath in an extended moment of pause, as if waiting for his end. When it didn’t come, he released the breath suddenly and his body sagged in a confused heap. “Why?” he eventually asked.
“Why not?” Korsten replied, presuming the man was asking why he’d been spared.
He looked at Korsten as if he felt mocked, but he was also scared. Korsten could feel that if he couldn’t see it plainly in his expression.
“Is it because I’m from Edrinor?”
The question startled the man, almost to smiling, as if Korsten had said something absurd. “I’m not a fool. Kill me, don’t toy with me.”
“So, it’s because you believe I’m Morennish, then,” Korsten could only deduce. “Aren’t you as well?”
The man glared at him. And very quickly his expression transmogrified to one of terror.
Korsten watched him, confused, until he noticed that he wasn’t looking directly at Korsten, but behind him. Following his mortified stare, led Korsten’s view to the antlered figure from the passage. He stood with room for his full mantle in the height of the doorway, his presence quite menacing and quite surreal.
“It’s because you’re one of the Wyrr,” the stranger said, looking upon the man on the floor, who was beginning to panic.
Korsten could feel it without hearing him trying to scramble through the book litter he had tumbled into earlier. He wanted to console the man somehow, but his attention was fixed on the newcomer, and what he had said. “Who are the Wyrr?”
The antlered man with lengths of crimson dark hair looked at Korsten now, though that comforted the injured man little. While he was breathing overly fast, running himself out of breath, the peculiar figure in the doorway said, “We are, Korsten. You and me. Now, come with me.”
Korsten found himself at a loss. In his unsureness, the antlered man raised one arm, extending it unnaturally into the room, where it took hold of the injured man’s head. A sickening sound of bone breaking followed a small whimper, the last sound the man would make.
Still unwilling, or unable to respond, Korsten simply stood in the center of the desiccated library while the elongated arm shrunk back to its bearer, who turned to leave. Something about that action, the lack of concern after such cruelty triggered motion in Korsten’s legs. He followed after the man, stopping in the doorway and calling after him. “Why did you do that?”
The man—or creature—stopped, turning to face Korsten across the floor of the front hall. “He would have tried to kill you.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Korsten said, though he felt somewhat foolish doing so, recalling the arm and its strength, enough to crush a man’s skull.
“It is,” came the other’s reply. “I did that because he would have tried to kill you. You need not worry about defending yourself here. I or the others will do so against this despicable rabble.”
It was too much for Korsten to fully comprehend, so he moved away from that topic for the moment. “Who are you?”
“I am Xelonwyr,” he said. “And you are my child’s child.”
Korsten was beyond response. He felt ready to leave.
“You would go because you don’t agree with the answers you found,” Xelonwyr said, his brow lifting toward his peaked hairline. “Your blood is wiser than that. In spite of the other half of your making, the blood of the Wyrr doesn’t taint. That’s why I summoned you here.”
Korsten didn’t understand. “What’s happening outside of this place?” he decided to ask.
“Our defense,” Xelonwyr said. “Against the remains of the population that rose against us. If allowed, they would enter this place and attack us.”
“The creature protects you.”
“Yes, and it would not have attacked you. It recognizes the blood of its creators.”
“I’m not one of its creators,” Korsten said, because he felt the need to. And then, he said, “Those people ran from me.”
“Because they fear us,” Xelonwyr said. “They recognized you, as one of us, and they ran. They ran you directly into a trap.”
Korsten thought about the individual he had chased after earlier, and the man who had come out of hiding and attempted to shoot him in the passage. He didn’t know if Xelonwyr’s scenario was right, but admittedly, he couldn’t say that it was wrong.
“It’s right,” Xelonwyr assured him. “Had they taken you, they would have done what they could to break and humiliate you, all to bolster their courage, to embolden their spirits so that they might continue their siege against us. It’s destroyed this city
. It’s destroyed this country, and them.”
“The war was already ongoing when the revolution occurred,” Korsten stated, recalling what Sethaniel had accounted.
The look he received from Xelonwyr seemed disinterested. The sensational individual—neither creature nor man—turned to leave once more.
Korsten followed.
“There are few of us left,” Xelonwyr said while guiding Korsten through the ruined passages of what must have once been his home. “The war with Edrinor had already begun, yes, but this was a war between the gods first.”
Korsten suspected the conversation might lead in this direction, aligning with his dreams—perhaps his conversations with the spirits of the sea.
“It spilled over, onto men” Xelonwyr continued. “They had to be empowered in order to protect themselves. In the process they were led to believe this war was theirs, that they were victims. They were, but not of random assault. The Vadryn were unleashed, as a weapon—a means for us to defend ourselves against annihilation. Priests were the answer…the counterstrike…a deep error on the part of the Welkyn.”
Korsten was at a loss to hear the account so casually…to hear that…
He wondered if he had heard correctly. Perhaps he was dreaming again. This might all have been another hallucination while he lay unconscious somewhere. He tried to make sense of it anyway. “The Welkyn tried to annihilate the Wyrr, and now the Wyrr would use the Vadryn to annihilate men?”
Xelonwyr looked back at him over his shoulder. “It is that simple, Korsten.”
Korsten stopped walking, noticing after the fact that they had come to the base of a lengthy staircase. At the top lay a set of doors marked by two smoldering sconces. The smell of the smoke presented an argument in favor of consciousness, but it was still difficult to accept. That an ancient being, or group of beings, had hidden themselves away in the remains of a city they had once tried to rule from…that they had somehow created or led to the creation of the Vadryn and now hid in loathing, doing nothing…