Symphony of Fates: A Legends of Tivara Story (The Dragon Songs Saga Book 4)

by JC Kang

  She turned and hobbled away, ignoring whatever the former emperor babbled. From the threshold of the building, she caught sight of the Hall of Bountiful Harvests; where, four years before, a naïve, gangly princess’ journey started when she met a dragon in man’s clothing.

  She leaned into Tian, and he wrapped his free arm around her. It was comforting, just like when he consoled her as a child, just like his affection in the Wilds. With him providing a reminder of who she really was, despite the image of princess and regent she projected, she would rule fairly and justly.

  Jie climbed the steps to Black Lotus Temple, her first visit back in several years. The meeting with her adopted father, Master Yan, might prove interesting after what she’d learned a few months before.

  The day of the regent’s first audience, she’d accompanied Brehane to a meeting with Lord Xu in the Hall of Bountiful Harvests.

  “There is no reason why your arm shouldn’t work,” the elf had said. Even his powerful magic had no effect.

  She sighed. “It has moved on three occasions, when I wasn’t even trying.”

  Staring at her, he pressed a finger to the center of her chest. “You must resolve something in your heart.”

  Tian, perhaps? She’d already given up on that. What else could there be?

  “Jie!” a female voice called from the door. Princess Alaena stood there in a frilly Arkothi dress that didn’t suit her, cradling her baby. “They said we might find you here.”

  “Aye lass,” Prince Aelward said. He, too, looked handsome in his formal sailor’s uniform. “We ‘ad to say goodbye before we sailed home.”

  A handsome male elf peered around them. His eyes widened when he met her gaze. He looked at the royal couple. “This is the half-elf you were telling me about?” He turned back to her. He felt familiar.

  The elf from her dream.

  He had bowed, his focus never leaving her. “It seems our paths have come close, but never crossed until now. I am Thielas Starsong. And you are?”

  Hair prickled on the back of her neck. No words came out of her mouth for a few seconds, probably a first. When she finally spoke, it was a squeak. “Yan Jie.”

  “Yan,” he repeated, voice hollow. “Adopted daughter of Master Yan?”

  Jie’s mind had spun. Hardly anyone knew Master Yan even existed. “Who are you?”

  He moved closer, arms wide. “I think you know.”

  “No.” She had taken a step back. “You can’t just appear thirty-three years after you abandoned me and my twin.”

  “Abandoned? Twin?” He shook his head, so violently his ears might’ve caught the wind and made him take flight. “No, there was only you. I had to protect you…your mother…the prophecy.”

  Jie’s own elf ears twitched. “Prophecy?” And no twin?

  Thielas’ voice was almost a whisper. “A half-human girl of Aralas’ blood shall slay the Orc King.”

  Lord Xu had choked. “Such silly tales. The elf angel was something of a philanderer, with a fetish for human women. It wouldn’t surprise me if he made that up.”

  Everyone gawked at the blasphemy. It was hard to believe that Xu, no matter how powerful he might be, could so easily dismiss an elf angel.

  “That fetish,” Brehane had said, voice acerbic, “the nine loves of Aralas, helped win the War of Ancient Gods.”

  Xu scratched his chin. “Were there only nine?”

  Jie had ignored the elf lord, turning instead to the other one, her supposed father. “If anything sounds made up, it’s your pathetic excuse for giving me up.”

  Hands raised, Thielas had shaken his head. “I had to hide you, somewhere the Altivorc King would never find. Where better than your mother’s people? I begged Master Yan to give you your birthright.”

  Jie had frowned. “He said I was left abandoned at the temple gate with a note attached to my swaddling blanket.”

  “And how would I find the temple gates without your clan knowing? What did the note say?”

  “Master Yan lost it.” That’s what he’d always said.

  “Since when does one of your clan lose anything?”

  ***

  Which was how Jie now found herself outside the temple’s gravesite, behind her unknowing stepfather.

  “Father,” she said.

  He spun around with amazing speed for his age, the clan’s Black Lotus Blade in his hand. He lowered it when his gaze fell on her. “Jie. I don’t think anyone has ever succeeded in sneaking up on me.”

  Fitting her like a second skin, Kiri’s magic armor made her stealth even better, even hid her scent from the temple guard dogs. It kept her cool in the stifling summer heat, as well. Despite her frustration at his hiding the truth of her birth, his kindly eyes melted her heart. Her angry tone slipped. “Where is my birthright?”

  Master Yan sighed. “You met him, then. Your father.”

  She nodded.

  He pointed to two new grave markers. “Here lie the Architect and the Surgeon, their bodies recently returned to us. Their lives were indelibly tied to yours. Your mother was the Beauty, my daughter. You are my granddaughter by blood, though I could never tell you. Come with me.”

  She followed him in silence back to his study, where he opened a secret compartment built into the wall and withdrew an object bound in black cloth. He unwound it, revealing an arrow. Silver impurities veined in regular patterns through its transparent crystal point.

  “Here is your birthright.”

  She reached…with her bad arm…and took it.

  Thank you for reading the Dragon Songs Saga. More stories in this world are planned for 2017 and beyond. Please join the Mailing List for monthly updates.

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  Birthright:

  An Origins Short Story

  Thielas Starsong held the bowstring taut, the green fletching of the arrow prickling his pointed ear. One well-placed shot would be the latest momentum change in the six-thousand-year war between elves and orcs.

  Concealed behind a tree at the top of a wooded ridge, he watched as the column of two dozen tivorcs shambled along the path below. They were infamous for a lack of discipline, and their unsynchronized steps could hardly be considered marching. Their plated shoulder and chest guards clanged in nerve-wracking cacophony, scaring wildlife deeper into the forest. Sweat on their turquoise skin glistened in blinking patches through the dappled noon sun.

  A horse the size of a house, armored from head to tail-less rump, walked at the rear of the formation. It moved quietly compared to the Tivorcs. Astride it rode an altivorc, a more intelligent cousin of the Tivorcs. A prince, no less—a begotten son of the Altivorc King himself.

  Straight, meticulously groomed black locks cascaded out of his crowned helmet, contrasting with the tangled hair of his minions. While the T-slotted helm protected his head, he wore only a dark tunic—an inviting target for the misinformed.

  However, Thielas was well-informed: neither his magic nor his razor-sharp steel arrowhead would penetrate the cloth. Even though the orcs had lost their ability to channel magic after losing the War of Ancient Gods a millennium before, the King and his princes hoarded a handful of artifacts from before that time. Like this tunic.

  The prince snarled something which Thielas, despite his century of battling the brutes, barely understood: “By the Second Sun!”

  Thielas stifled a laugh, imagining the obsessive and stodgy altivorc to be appalled by his underlings’ poor excuse for marching.

  Don’t worry, he thought, I will end your frustration just as soon as you present me a good target.

  As if obeying a subliminal suggestion, the altivorc turned his head, exposing an eye in the helm’s slit. A near-impossible shot for a human, but routine for Thielas.

  Just as he was about to loose his arrow, a frail voice whispered on the winds. />
  It’s a girl...

  The urgency in the voice threw off his concentration. The arrow flew errant, jolting the Prince’s head back as it plinked off the side of his helmet.

  The tivorcs sank into defensive stances with growls, heads jerking this way and that to find the source of the attack. The prince himself looked straight in Thielas’ direction.

  He would not see Thielas.

  Thielas had uttered one guttural syllable worthy of a tivorc profanity and disappeared into the ethers.

  He rematerialized at the mouth of a cave, his limbs heavy and languid from the draining effect of his invocation of Shallow Magic.

  Disoriented, he looked around to find the area surrounded by the straight trunks of vaulting eldarwood trees. The low-lying sun cast the wispy clouds above in a swath of red hues. He scanned the sky for the iridescent moon, Riyalas, which never moved from its spot in the heavens. It was high and to the south-southwest, waning to half.

  Dawn. Somewhere in the mountains between Cathay and the Elven Kingdom of Aramysta.

  Thielas felt his energy increase by the second, and he patted the pouch that hung over his chest. It held a rare Starburst jewel, a relic from the First Orc-Elf Wars that helped offset the fatigue of Shallow Magic.

  His keen eyes were drawn to the fresh black and red blood smeared across the ground.

  His heart lurched into his throat. Just a step into the cave laid a dead altivorc, a flat metal pin lodged in his eye. A young elf woman lay sprawling beside him, gutted by a horrendous slash across her abdomen. A clear orange jewel—his own beacon—sparkled just out of the reach of her lifeless fingers. Sadness yanked his racing heart back into his constricted chest, even as he buried his emotions to stay focused.

  He slung his bow and drew his longsword, knowing that it would be difficult to shoot through the dense forest. Then he froze in place and listened.

  Not far down a rocky path, Thielas heard the distinct cries of a newborn, high-pitched and full of vitality, almost drowning out the rhythmic jingling of metal. Looking down, he saw a trail of fresh blood heading in that direction.

  As he raced through the trees, the sounds got louder. He jumped over the hacked-up body of an elf lady, lamenting that he could do nothing for her. He swerved around a pair of altivorcs, crumpled dead over a fallen tree trunk.

  And then he saw them, blurs of color dancing through the trees: four altivorcs in chainmail, wielding bloodied broadswords, and a silver-haired elf maiden in a gown of starlight. Despite being a head shorter than her attackers, she held them at bay with elegant thrusts of a thin longsword. Behind her, a human woman staggered, clutching a screaming bundle close to her chest. In the other hand, she gripped a curved, black-lacquered sword, which now served more as a crutch than a weapon.

  He needed to reach her side, to save her and the elf woman.

  The elf maid twisted out of the slash of one of her assailants, while simultaneously stabbing another in the neck through the narrow gap between his helmet and armor. A third altivorc met her as she finished her spin, plunging his sword into her belly.

  Enraged, Thielas grunted a throaty word and the altivorc exploded in a fiery blast. Ignoring the instant fatigue creeping into his limbs, he charged into the fray as one of the attackers turned to face him. Time automatically slowed in his perception as he engaged, his enemy seemingly moving through molasses. With this advantage, he sidestepped to his opponent’s blind side, just out of the sluggish downward arc of the broadsword, and slashed across his midsection. The altivorc’s armor held, and the elf had to raise his own weapon to block a slow horizontal hack. As his enemy cocked back to swing again, Thielas flipped his sword and cut through the eye slot of his helm. A black shower sprayed from the wound as time resumed its normal pace.

  Not waiting to see if the altivorc was dead, Thielas turned toward the human. She was on her knees, bent over. Beside her, her own foe lay motionless in a puddle of black, her sword lodged in its chest. The baby’s cries echoed through the valley.

  He looked back at the elf woman, torn between who to help first, then bounded over to the human and eased her into a sitting position. Black hair was matted against her pale, sweat-streaked face, and she afforded him a smile through wan lips. Fresh blood began to soak into the ground under her. Cooing through shallow breaths, she opened her dirty robe and brought the child to her breast.

  It was then that Thielas saw the baby for the first time, her face wrinkled and flushed red. A thick shock of black hair crowned her head. Her cries stopped as soon as she latched on to the breast and suckled. A girl…

  Behind them, the elf maid crawled forward, and Thielas tore himself away from mother and child to attend to her.

  “My Lord,” she whispered. “They fell upon us so fast—they came out of nowhere. We did our best to defend Meiyun. Her own male companion disappeared, probably killed first. There are still more out there.”

  Thielas brushed the hair out of her face and smiled kindly. He knew she would not last long, for he was far too depleted to use divine magic to heal such a horrendous wound. “Meiyun lives. You did well. I am sorry I did not get here earlier.”

  “It is my honor. I believe the prophecy.” The woman’s voice trailed off, and her eyes closed for the last time.

  Thielas fought back tears as he gently laid her head down. “May Ayara take you to her bosom.”

  Not far in the distance, armor jangled and heavy boots crunched through the fallen eldarwood needles. He turned back to Meiyun, gauging his own strength and weighing his options. Grief overwhelmed him when he realized a cruel fact: he lacked the energy reserves to heal her, and he did not have the dozen minutes needed to draw on the less-depleting, ritualistic Deep Magic to teleport mother and babe to safety.

  Meiyun looked into his eyes. Her voice was weak, no louder than a whisper. “I am dying, Thielas. Take her. Take her to safety. My sword remembers its home. Use it. My father will ensure that she stays safe.”

  “I will take her to my home in Aerilysta. My sister, the queen, will watch over her.”

  Meiyun scowled. “Now that the handmaidens are dead, the only ones who believe the prophecy are you and the altivorcs. The elves won’t protect her. My father will.”

  Before Thielas could rebut her, several altivorcs stormed toward them, broadswords drawn. Behind them, an altivorc who stood a head above the rest stepped forward. He was handsome, as beautiful as an elf. In his hand he held not a sword, but a wand. It was the Altivorc King himself, clothed in the dapper uniform of a military officer going to a banquet, his head covered only by a crown. None of it would protect him from Thielas’ deadly archery.

  Thielas unslung his bow, and in a blink of an eye nocked an arrow. The Arrow. Silvery impurities veined in regular patterns through its transparent crystal point. There were only a dozen such arrowheads, passed down through generations of royal elves from the Elf Angel Aralas—The Hero of the War of Ancient Gods. He had said that this arrowhead could kill the Altivorc King with a single shot.

  “Thielas, Thielas.” The King was almost laughing. He stretched out his arms, inviting the elf to shoot. “You may have killed many of my sons, but it is not you who will slay me. Not even your esteemed grandfather could do that. You know the prophecy.”

  The prophecy. It wasn’t worth risking such a rare relic. Thielas lowered the bow, and his eyes darted to the babe, wrapped in her mother’s arms.

  The Altivorc King followed his glance. A cruel smirk formed on his lips. He made a sharp motion with one hand and pointed the wand at Thielas with his other. “Kill the woman and bring the whelp to me. The elf is mine.”

  The King’s cohorts surged forward, broadswords raised. The Great Orc uttered a harsh snarl, and a bolt of red energy exploded from the wand.

  Time seemed to slow again, unbidden.

  Thielas spun back, out of the line of fire, dropping his bow and taking up Meiyun’s blade as he finished his turn. Another blast just barely missed him, as the horde of
altivorcs closed in on the new mother and her child.

  He had to get there first.

  In three bounding steps, he reached Meiyun’s side. He held her desperate gaze as she thrust forth the bawling babe in outstretched hands. In a decision that would haunt him forever, Thielas took the child into his free arm and uttered the single syllable that spirited them away through the corridors of magic, leaving Meiyun to face her fate alone. The vision of her last wistful smile burned in his mind’s eye.

  He popped back into existence in utter darkness that not even his night vision could penetrate. The cloying scent of incense assaulted him. Exhausted to the core by his repeated use of Shallow Magic, he did not have the power for the simplest of spells, a magical light. He collapsed to the ground, taking care not to harm the whimpering child in his arms.

  Tears burned his eyes as reality set in. Meiyun. Dead.

  As he tried to draw breath into his grief-tightened chest, his sensitive hearing picked up the almost inaudible shuffling of a dozen footsteps. He wobbled to his feet, rocking the child in one arm while drawing his sword in another.

  His blade had barely slid free of its sheath when someone twisted his wrist and knocked the weapon away. He found himself sprawled on the ground, cradling the now crying babe. Cold steel crossed his neck in two directions, while his leg was pinned, knee twisted at a painful angle. Completely helpless, he relaxed, using what little energy he had for patting the baby.

  Blinding light flooded the room, and he squinted as his eyes adjusted. Blurry, dark shapes coalesced into a dozen human male and female forms, all with black hair and honey-toned skin. They wore tight black clothes, and held weapons.

  A few cleared a path to allow a man of middling years to step forward. “Starsong.” He almost spat his name. “How did you find us?”

  Thielas made a slow, unthreatening gesture toward Meiyun’s sword.

  The man made a horizontal gesture, and all of the warriors backed away. “The Black Lotus Sword. Where is Meiyun? And Feiying?”