Gifts of Vorallon: 01 - The Final Warden

by Thomas Cardin

  The Final

  Warden

  Gifts of Vorallon I

  Thomas Cardin

  Cover Art and Map by Thomas Cardin

  Copyright © 2013 Thomas Cardin

  All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the author.

  ISBN: 1481196839

  ISBN-13: 978-1481196833

  DEDICATION

  For my father, who read to me when I was a child

  Introduction

  This story is forbidden. It was forbidden for us to write, and it is certainly forbidden to read. We who worked long into the night under the illumination of magic and with the aid of the very gods who had forbidden its writing, send it to a new, young universe where it may be read.

  We wrote this in a language unknown to us, which none of us could speak. The gods taught us the ways of writing this and assured us whoever held this tale would understand. Only there, within this other universe, may this story be read without harm to the balance.

  Magic crafted this story and magic will carry it away to the new universe. A young world, but it is alive and it will surely be the first of many if it can survive. That world will have a name, and its living spirit will be the essence of magic.

  There, the dreadful events herein may even now be unfolding again.

  The name of our living world is Vorallon, and I am his Voice, but this story is told through the voices of all of us who lived it: the gifted among us. These events took place five hundred years after Vorallon became aware. It is a story of the first age of his life and the first age of men, before we had a true written language among our race, before the horror of undeath existed in this universe.

  It is the story of the best man ever to live among us, perhaps the best man ever to live in any world of any universe.

  chapter 1

  the silver thread

  Twenty-First day of the Moon of the Hunter

  -in Blackdrake Castle – Ousenar

  Hethal was certain of a being far greater than himself. Those who did not know, who did not have that certainty, might still say they believed or had faith, but they were wrong. It was not for them to believe in their god; rather it was for them to earn the belief and faith of their god.

  He was certain of his god, the Great Leveler, the Lord Lorn. With all his heart and soul, and with his gift, he would earn his god’s faith in him. But here he knelt, the only priest of Lorn, quaked and wracked by horrors, unable to steady his thoughts. His breath came in shallow gasps, and his eyes could not focus past the nightmare of the future.

  His gift had shown him another being to be certain of, something far more wretched and foul. A beast of obsidian scales, the hint of a serpent writhing in darkness. Two enormous, baleful eyes watching hungrily as his shuffling corpse fell toward them.

  Gulping for a deeper breath, he steadied himself by tracing the fine weave of his prayer rug with a trembling fingertip. He repeated this exercise until he found the calm to reach his inner voice and call out to his god.

  Lorn’s heavy spirit flooded into the austere black chamber. “I am already here.”

  “My Lord Lorn,” Hethal exhaled. His lanky frame fell lower, pressing his thin nose to the red and gold threads of his rug before the weight eased. “It was the same nightmare.”

  Without looking up, he knew that Lorn now stood before him; he could feel the impact of his god’s eyes in the prickling sensation down his bare back.

  “It is a nightmare for us all,” Lorn said. “For it is our doom. Your vision foretells what will become of the world if we cannot restore the balance. It is the reason my brothers and I were born.”

  Where Lorn had only soothed before, or given simple direction, he now shared mysteries. Hethal’s head snapped up, pale blue eyes wide open, to see compassion on the face of his god. Was this it? Had he earned what his heart cried for? Lorn stood before him tall and severe, yet smiling, adorned in shimmering brown robes trimmed in gray.

  “I can ease your pain, but only you can turn this nightmare away,” Lorn said, acknowledging the play of Hethal’s emotions with a broadening grin. “The strength of your spirit has granted you the unique gift of prescience. The future is forbidden and yet you unravel it with a thought. This has always made you very special to us.”

  Lorn opened his arms wide, inviting. The touch of those arms would remove his lingering dread of seeing men he knew to be alive stumbling among a horde of the dead into the halls of Blackdrake Castle. It would ease the pain of seeing forests he knew to be lush, reduced to a few bone-like trees. In those arms, the agony of skies turned to black and seas turned to blood would fade away.

  Hethal launched into Lorn’s embrace like a man leaping from a pit of serpents. Relief washed over him, more intoxicating than the perfume of a lover, and certainly more comforting than the crushing squeeze of his brother Moyan after a Zuxran victory on the battlefield.

  Before Hethal’s pulse had mounted to more than an ecstatic pace, Lorn released him. “The gods have been working for many years, since before I was a mortal child, to prepare the way for you.”

  Lorn had been a mortal child! Hethal swallowed hard and let the thought sink in. Much the same as when his gift first unfolded an entire day’s future before him, but even that paled to knowing he had earned his god’s faith.

  “I burdened you with tasks that have darkened your spirit. In my name, you guided your brother and his army to conquer the width and breadth of Ousenar. Much now lies in death so that the living cannot be warped and twisted by what we have named the Undying One.”

  Hethal nodded, remembering one recent bloody massacre that had been precipitated by his merest push to his brother. Urging Moyan to position his elite Black Hands on the right flank instead of the left allowed them to spot the ambush early. No enemy had survived that day that had not been drug back to Blackdrake in heavy chains.

  “The grand cycle of souls is out of balance,” Lorn continued, his voice growing bitter. “Demons rampage over Erenar, dragging souls to Nefryt. The light of life grows dim.”

  The few Zuxran raiders who returned from the land across the Vestral Sea brought word of cities razed to rubble and ripped bodies left for carrion eaters. The halls of Blackdrake had grown ever more silent as people listened for word from long overdue ships, all fearing the rage of their mad Queen should they report any more mysterious losses.

  “My brother Lord Aran has done what he can to strengthen those of the light who still remain, but up until now it has been a losing struggle.” Lorn’s bottomless green eyes hardening to steel. “Everything is at last in place for a final effort to destroy the Undying One and cast out the Dreadful Other he heralds. Only then will the balance be restored. This is a task only the Old Gods can achieve, the reason they sleep to gather strength. Your nightmare will come to pass only if that effort fails.”

  The renewed color drained from Hethal’s face. “I have seen how Vorallon dies, nothing has changed. If this event succeeds, I would have seen it,” he slumped low. “I am sorry, my Lord.”

  Lorn raised Hethal’s weak chin with a light touch. The god smiled again and let more of his uplifting strength flow. “My priest, your nightmare this morning was just that, merely a nightmare of your first prophecy of the end of days. For many years now your fear has prevented you from using your gift to look more than a few days ahead.”

  Hethal’s mouth opened to deny Lorn’s words, but he hung his head at his burst of pride—the price of being uplifted into the dealings of gods. It was true; seeing his own death wr
enched at his gut, but the vision of himself rising to stumble hungrily among the dead made his veins run with ice.

  “Look just one moon ahead, to the falling Moon of the Thief, when Voradin shines blue again. You will see your path and your purification,” Lorn extended his hands once more. “Use my strength to break past your fear and look.”

  Hethal took hold of those powerful hands and breathed deep. Lorn’s spirit battered like a ram. His barrier against the vision of his own death and the ensuing agony of hunger stood firm. His gift waited for those walls to fall, whipped into frenzy by the war cries of his god, eager for the pillaging of the future to begin. They cracked, but not easily. The mortar and bricks of that wall were monumental, having grown thick and daunting during their years in place. Finally, they fell and the future spilled out from the breach.

  Hethal hunted at the tangle of events that lay ahead. There were many possible futures, each with its slender variations of success and huge gulfs of failure. Even in the best of them, many more had to die, and so few would live to stand against the end of days. One man’s destiny, a man he had never seen, was a dull silver thread weaving through any hope that remained. Hethal saw where to push and where to pull to save as many as possible, but this stranger defied all manipulation.

  Still focused on his vision, he pulled his extremities in from the edges of his rug, as far away as possible from the glassy black stone surrounding him on all sides. The world around him was different now; the future revealed ancient terrors hidden less than a finger’s width away.

  He consumed Lorn’s strength at an alarming rate to push his gift along destiny after destiny, while his god smiled on. When Hethal saw the full extent of the future, Lorn’s smile faded. With the identity and destiny of this stranger fully unfolded, Hethal shook his head in amazement and withdrew from the flood of vision. Thousands of questions struggled to burst from his lips as he looked up into his god’s eyes.

  Lorn forestalled them all with a slow shake of his head. “Please, Hethal, I beg you, be careful what you reveal to Him. Even your vision can be changed by the choices He must make.”

  The dull silver thread of this destined man twined through every viable destiny. Hethal shook his head. The future was so much clearer upon the battlefield, where a single push invariably won the day. If he pushed this unique man too hard, the world would crumble.

  “I will try, Lord Lorn. On my life, I will try,” Hethal swore while steeling his mind against towering doubt.

  “I leave you to your work now. This is the last of my strength I can give you until the end has been averted. Go with my love and my confidence in all things you do, Hethal.”

  Lorn’s presence faded away, leaving Hethal alone with his doubts and painfully aware of the black stone surrounding him. A moment before, the stone had been just glassy black stone, like obsidian. Now he knew the secret brooding deep within the solid piece that shaped Blackdrake Castle, a secret that existed to break the living. Setting foot off his small rug meant touching the bare floor. Moyan had given him the rug, a prized treasure, and now his only shield from what lurked within the blackness. It still sleeps, he thought, bolstering himself. It is not ready to awaken yet. He slid a bare foot onto the seamless stone.

  He slid his other foot off the carpet and cringed, his mind turning the touch of perfect smoothness into numbing cold, a memory of a possible future. Another step and he stood before his basin of beaten copper to plunge his hands into the water and shatter the reflection of his haggard face. Barely blinking, he washed himself raw with a rough rag, but the stench of many future deaths still lingered.

  Leery of the light devouring stone, he yanked his threadbare brown cassock on over his head while his toes hunted for his sandals on their own. He rolled up his small rug and tucked it through his rope belt. When he turned his back on his austere chamber, leaving his morning candle to burn itself out, it was with welcome relief. It was time to rouse Moyan from his silken sheets and take the first steps that would lead them both out and away from the horror that brooded within the stone.

  His brother’s adjoining suite of rooms was a palace. Rugs, tapestries, and paintings covered every hands-breadth of wall and floor. The tightness in Hethal’s throat eased a fraction. He had laughed at Moyan’s desire to hide as much of the black stone from himself as possible, now he knew what it was that had so unnerved his brother. He wove his way between silk pillows, miss-matched chairs, and gilt statues to the bedchamber while ducking down from each patch of bare, black ceiling.

  He roused the two naked women entwined with his brother, dark haired beauties both, and shooed them from the bedchamber. They obeyed him in wide-eyed silence, gathering their silks and finery, then tripping over themselves in their haste to retreat to an adjoining chamber. They believed him to be every bit as mad as the Queen, a rumor he had done nothing to counter as it fluttered throughout the castle.

  Once he was alone with his slumbering brother, he slapped him awake and hauled him out of bed. When the bleariness cleared from Moyan’s dark, heavy-lidded eyes, Hethal spoke only of what they needed to do next—a battlefield push. “I have a vision to share with the Queen.”

  Moyan’s sleepy eyes opened wide and his beard jutted out. “Absolutely not! The Queen is-” He interrupted himself and scanned the chamber before continuing in a much lower voice. “We risk far too much if we reveal your gift to her in any way. She could take all this away,” his flailing arm took in the entire suite, “along with both our heads.”

  Hethal lowered his gaze from his brother’s rising temper. “There is no other way, brother. Our heads will be safe from her furies, but we must act. We cannot wait for the Queen to send us into the field at her whim. Not this time.” He distracted Moyan from the look of cunning that crossed his face by reaching out to clasp his brother’s brawny arms. “There is also Lady Scythe to consider.”

  “What of Scythe?” Moyan asked, shrugging his clinging hands away. Hethal concealed his satisfied smile with a submissive bow.

  “She will be happy,” Hethal replied. “In the future I see, she is saved from the Queen’s foul rages, but you must help this come to pass.”

  Moyan turned toward the exterior doorway of his suite and bellowed for the Black Hand guardsman stationed beyond. “Send a page to request an audience with the Queen, Demeht,” Moyan commanded the elite veteran who entered. “For me and my brother.”

  Hethal watched the concerns play out on his brother’s face while he assisted him into his armor of blackened chainmail and tooled leather.

  “You have not told me everything of your vision, brother,” Moyan said, thrusting his head through his dark red surcoat. “This is no simple battlefield maneuver you suggest.”

  “No, brother,” Hethal said, kneeling to the buckles of Moyan’s boots. “I cannot share everything with you yet, but I will. You must give me reign to tell the Queen what I must, in the manner I must. We need her blessing if we are to gain her ships.”

  “Her ships?” Moyan mused with a grunt then went to his standing silver mirror to begin the intricate waxing and styling of his beard. Throughout the process of braiding twisting it into a protruding, fist-like shape, Moyan’s eyes strayed to Hethal. “Stand up straight, brother.”

  When word of the Queen’s acceptance came, they departed into the vast, echoing halls of Blackdrake Castle. Hethal clung close to the false protection his brother’s presence offered, keeping his breathing regular and his widened eyes level. They descended the great spiraling concourse leading down to the throne room in the deepest core of the castle. He would have to go to the heart of the beast before he could escape.

  Hethal kept his mind busy with the legend of the enormous castle, matching it against the true past revealed by his vision of the future. Raised by the magic of the great black dragon, Kamunki, its high walls, towers, and buttresses gave its exterior the semblance of a castle. However, other than the great hall that had allowed the dragon egress, the sprawling interior was a r
iot of rooms and purposeless chambers; a chaotic mass of what the creature believed a castle to be. Without the abundance of magically glowing sconces all along the walls, the darkness of the stone would have been complete and maddening blindness.

  Great doors barred the throne room. Constructed long after the dragon’s death for the first Zuxran king, they towered fully ten men high. They had stood for over a hundred years, and like the black stone of the main body of the castle, they showed no sign of age or decay.

  Legend said the wizard Losqua created the doors, the only man to discover a way of cutting into the stone of the castle. Hethal shuddered at what the wizard must have found within the stone.

  A pair of the Queen’s royal guards stood at attention, dressed much as his brother, in the livery Zuxra. At their approach, one guard turned and pulled one massive door open enough to enter and announce them to the Queen. A moment later, he emerged and both guards pulled the doors open wide, waving Moyan and Hethal into the throne room.

  They entered the enormous circular throne room. The high arching vault of its ceiling, unsupported by pillars or columns, extended beyond the reach of the unwavering lights that encircled the walls. He ducked his gaze down from the suffocating darkness overhead. It was here that Queen Ivrane and her ancestors had made their throne room, and it still bore the marks and scars of Kamunki’s death throes. Elena the hunter slew Kamunki when her godstone spear pierced his heart. Where the dragon’s blood had spewed forth, it had melted the rippled floor into deep pits. Where the dragon fell was the largest pit of all, so deep that none had ever assailed to find its bottom. All believed the creature’s bones to remain in its depths. Clutched tight to them were the bones of Elena, who met her own end in Kamunki’s grip.

  Queen Ivrane, a thin, dark haired woman of middle years, sat upon a raised throne added to the room by the hands of men. An ornate, gold-flaked chair upon a gray stone slab, heaped all around with a disarray of loot captured by Zuxran raiders: embroidered pillows, silks, and rugs. She wore a dingy white gown stained purple with dribbles of wine. Beside her stood the slight form of Lady Scythe, lost within voluminous gray hooded robes that hid all but a finely shaped chin from sight. No others were within the great room, even the guards had departed and pushed the doors shut.