Shatter (The Children of Man)

by Elizabeth C. Mock

  Faela flexed her fingers and nodded with a choked laugh as she walked back to her chair and sank into it. "I don't understand. How can we be colorless?"

  "For one thing, you aren't colorless," he amended. "The analogy young Sheridan used was a good one. When lightning strikes sand it melts the sand, but the individual grains aren't gone. They're still there, just in a new form. You've noticed that your power is diminished since the turning, correct?"

  Faela nodded in affirmation. "I thought that meant I had lost the right to wield my magic."

  "No, girl, that's not it at all. The process of turning is painful and it leaves scar tissue. During the healing process, your capabilities lessen, but you'll find your strength will return with time and practice."

  "Tobias?" Faela asked looking at the blood still staining her hand.

  He inclined his head to her.

  "How old are you?"

  "And now we come to it." Tobias checked over his shoulder and Mireya now stood next to Dathien whose arm encircled her shoulders. "As winter fades and the first crocuses of spring poke through the snow, I will reach my three hundred and seventy-first year."

  *****

  Chapter Eighteen

  "That simply isn’t possible," Eve said with a definitive shake of her head. “You don’t look older than thirty-five.”

  "So, you’re going to tell me what is and is not possible about my life, young lady?" Tobias asked her with an amused smile. "I learned long ago not to restrict the world into what I believe to be possible, because that is precisely when the world surprises me."

  Sheridan’s eyes sparkled as she leaned forward eager. "Your name is Tobias?"

  He nodded.

  "But then your surname isn't really Gresham," Sheridan concluded. "That was her name, wasn't it?"

  Tobias' eyes clouded visibly this time and lines of pain marked his face. "My, you do know your stories for someone who didn't spend any time at the Lusican temples.”

  "Whose name?" Jair asked then turned to Sheridan demanding, "How do you know all this?"

  "What?" she asked defensive. "I like to read."

  "The name she was known by was Gresham," Tobias began as a look of loss passed over his face. "It was the name she chose for herself to protect her nearest kin when she started the resistance, but her true name was Valaria Sagewind. Not many of the stories mention her real name any more. She was merely Gresham, one of the most feared of all the Deoraghan freedom fighters during the Cleansing. And she was my wife."

  A look of horror spread across Faela’s face. "You're that Tobias? The Deoraghan Tereskan who discovered how to remove a person's ability to wield magic? By the Light," Faela whispered through the screen of her fingers, "you started the Cleansings."

  "To my eternal shame, yes," Tobias replied. "I started the Cleansings."

  "So, that's why you turned?" Sheridan asked propping one of her knees against the table and she leaned into it. “It’s why you became a Gray?”

  "Let me start at the beginning," he offered. "It’ll make more sense if I start there."

  Eve laced her arms across her chest watching the proceedings, but she remained an observer, not a participant in the conversation. The direction this discussion had taken set her nerves on edge. The disregard and apparent disrespect that this man, Tobias, showed for the Orders irritated her. Neither his attitude toward the Orders, nor the fact that this man was once a Gray engendered her trust.

  Now he claimed to be responsible for one of the most notorious events in history. Eve was fairly sure he was mad, but looking around the table, she saw each person listening as though they considered his claims to be true, everyone except for Lucian, who while looking intent kept picking at the skin around his thumbnail. Eve hid her smile at his nervous habit. He didn’t trust this Tobias either.

  "Do you know why there aren't that many Deoraghan in the Orders?" he asked.

  "Their potential is typically weak," Sheridan answered automatically as though being quizzed. "They don't have a lot of talent for handling magic."

  "That is what the Orders have taught since the Treaty at Twinning Pass,” he acknowledged. “It was their compromise.”

  "Their compromise with who?" Sheridan asked her voice holding a hint of a challenge.

  "Talise," Faela interrupted with a smirk, "she uses magic in ways I've never seen. My brother's wife," she explained to the others, "she's a Deoraghan. She uses yellow magic combatively when she fights."

  This stirred Eve drawing her into active participation in the conversation. "But yellow isn't a combative magic. It's artistic expression."

  "Trust me," Kade answered. "If you've ever seen Talise fight, it's an art. You should be able to relate, Eve. It reminds me of your dancing."

  Opening then shutting her mouth, Eve bit back the reflexive response that he knew that she didn't dance anymore, because it was no longer true. With Lucien's return to her life, when she felt the rhythm it no longer ached like an open wound.

  "That's what I mean," Tobias said seizing on Faela’s tangent. "The Deoraghan don't use magic in the ways you're taught in the temples. It's more instinctive, organic even. Whereas normally only one in ten people can handle magic, the majority of the Deoraghan can. Because of that, the magic is more a part of every day life in smaller ways, so it's easy to convince outsiders that the Deoraghan have little talent for it. Dathien can attest to the falseness of that claim as much as I can."

  "But without temple training by the Orders anyone with the gift to effect the flow of color magic is a danger to themselves and everyone around them," Sheridan argued. "The untrained don't know how to use the magic without possibly causing irreversible damage. I mean I hate to say it, but look at what Jair did."

  Jair shrank back as if physically struck by Sheridan’s words.

  "Sorry," she said with a shrug, "but it's true. So, how can it be that the Deoraghan have so many more gifted than everyone suspects."

  "It was part of the treaty," Tobias explained. "The Deoraghan were free to train their own without interference from the Orders. They are no more untrained than you, young lady. They've just undergone a very different kind of training. But to understand the Cleansings and my story, we must go back to the founding of the Orders of the Light."

  "That was more than three hundred years ago." Jair felt compelled to point out. "You're not that old."

  "Not yet, boy," Tobias acknowledged. "Thousands of years ago before the Shattering, the center of the civilized world was Gialdanis, the white city. It was a place of beauty and learning. It was the home of the light mages. Through their work the city advanced and prospered. Eventually the mages decided that their abilities allowed them to see more of life, to understand more, so it was their duty to rule the city, instead of serve it. It was for the greater good for the mages to take care of the people. But that much power over the lives of the people, in the hands of so few, is never good for the people. Shortly after the mages began ruling the city, an earth tremor tore open the western half of the city.

  “No one at the time knew what had caused it, but it was the mages. They had tried to subdue light magic to their own wills. The eruption of the earth was a result of the Shattering. Half of that great city fell into the northern sea that night and the light magic was split into its separate colors. They were denied the ability to ever wield the unified light again. Only a handful of light mages survived the explosion. Of those remaining few came the first color mages. They wanted to ensure that no one else dared use magic as they had.

  “The first mage with red magic was a woman named Tereska, orange a man named Daniyel, yellow a woman named Lusi, green a woman named Phaidra, blue a woman named Nikela, and finally purple, a man named Amser. Together they founded the separate Orders. They wanted to ensure no one experimented with black magic ever again. They feared the independent use of magic, because from that freedom came the potential for the misuse of magic, like they themselves had done."

  "But the Orders were fou
nded to serve the people of this world," Sheridan objected, “not to maintain control.”

  "That is true," Tobias admitted. "The best way to ensure a selfless use of magic was to make sure that any who wield magic are taught to view their purpose as service, not rank or privilege. It suited their ends. But at the core, the Orders do teach control. Would anyone here disagree?"

  "I don’t see what’s so wrong with that,” Eve protested. “An uncontrolled gift is a menace. It's deadly."

  "Self-control is important," Tobias answered, "but coerced control is not. Control based on deception is not. Trust me. I speak as one who believed the teachings of the Orders unreservedly and without question at one time. You must understand, I thought that anyone trying to live outside the Orders prescribed guidelines for magic was a threat. So much so that I sought a way to remove the gift from those who refused training in the temples. It's a horrifying process, but the process itself is nothing compared to my intentions for its use.

  “I am Deoraghan, a son of the Tribes. I knew how strongly magic ran in the Tribes. I wanted to give the Orders a way to help them. I thought I was helping them.” Tobias shook his head with an abiding sadness. “I was removing the danger they posed to themselves. I was ensuring that black magic could never destroy my people, the way it had destroyed Gialdanis. That's what I kept telling myself."

  Tobias ran his hand along his jaw and through his beard breathing deeply as he recalled these painful memories. Despite the centuries that separated him from the events, he still remembered the faces of those women and children. The pain stabbed at him as sharp as if the events had just happened.

  "Cleansing I called it,” he snorted, "cleansing. It was a violation plain and simple. I raped the minds and souls of every person I 'cleansed' of the gift. I knew I was ripping away something that was essential to them, but it didn't matter. What mattered was protecting the world, protecting the Deoraghan from their own backwards ways.

  “After a person is cleansed, they are never the same. Trying to remove a person's gift is like trying to remove a person's mind. Except with cleansing, they live. They can walk and eat and talk, but that spark of the individual, their likes and dislikes, passions and hatreds, they were wiped clean, just gone."

  Chuckling without any amusement, Tobias continued. "The perverse thing is that cleansing can only be done by using black magic."

  The shocked faces around the table confirmed that his companions were unaware of this fact.

  "That's a little tidbit the Orders don't advertise about that particular punishment. In my arrogance of trying to cleanse my people of the taint of black magic, I began to wield it myself. One day, I was brought in to cleanse a group of Deoraghan that had been rounded up. They were only children. Why I balked at this, when there was so much blood on my hands already, I do not know, but I did. I refused.

  “Another Tereskan stepped in to do the job, but I stopped him. I protected the children and in the process it killed my comrade. When I threw the shield around the children, I felt as though my insides were on fire. Just as you experienced," he said gesturing to Faela and Jair, "when you each turned."

  "What did you do?" Faela asked. "Where could you go? You had betrayed your people, your family."

  "For a while, I just wandered. Using my abilities to help the people I came across. Until one night I was traveling in the foothills north of Wistholt and I came across a group of refugees who were being hunted by the Daniyelans. A band of fighters from the resistance protected them. Their leader was a woman from the Tribes, a Deoraghan like me."

  The smile that spread across Tobias' face was warm as he remembered that meeting. "It was the first time I met Valaria. I offered her my services. Many were hurt or sick. Valaria kept leading me to one person who needed my help after another. I could tell she was exhausted, but she stayed with me as I worked. It was nearly dawn when I finally noticed that she too had been hurt."

  He shook his head with a grin. "She was such a stubborn woman. I insisted on healing her and she demanded I see to the next child and would brook no opposition or argument from me. We worked through the night and when morning finally came, she saw my face.”

  "She recognized you?" Faela asked.

  He nodded. "My people knew who I was and what I had done." Tobias drew in a slow breath. "Valaria had lost her brothers when her Tribe was captured for cleansing. They resisted and were killed by the Daniyelans sent to bring them in. They were one of the first Tribes targeted. I had known that my life was forfeit for a long time and it seemed fair and right to me that Valaria would be the one to take it. I didn't beg for my life. I merely told her I could never make it right, even if I lived a hundred lifetimes.”

  He paused at this with a bittersweet smile on his lips. “I told her that I had no right to ask it, but if I were to die, I wanted to at least ask for her forgiveness. I should have died that night, but as you can see I did not."

  "What stopped her?" Faela asked in a quiet voice. As they waited for his answer, the only sound drifted in from the raucous common room in an indistinguishable mass of noise.

  "When she had imagined avenging her brothers' deaths, she thought she'd have to force the person to admit what they had done before they died," Tobias explained. "She never imagined that the person would confess what they had done and ask her for forgiveness, but not mercy. I deserved to die; I knew that. It was my question that stayed her hand, but it was my eyes that stopped her. You see, the Deoraghan have their own stories about Grays."

  "They do?" Faela asked startled by this revelation.

  "We do indeed, Rafaela. They've fallen out of fashion in the Tribes in recent years, but in my day they were quite popular. Grays are not the abominations that the Orders paint them to be. In the Tribes, there are stories of Grays throughout history since the Shattering who were chosen by Lior, raised up as the defenders of the people, the hands of Tallior.

  “Valaria knew these stories and when she saw me, she believed that I would save our people. But I was so ashamed of what I had done that I wanted no part in the resistance. I only wanted to help the people Lior put in my path, nothing more. After traveling with the refugees and the resistance for a few weeks, we were discovered."

  "Oh no, who found you?" Mireya asked worried, caught up in the story.

  "You know them quite well, Mireya," Tobias said with a knowing smile. "It was Rivka and Vaughn."

  "The Nikelan Scion?" Kade asked dumbfounded. "She's as old as you?"

  "Older actually," Tobias answered. "But she wasn't Scion yet. Rivka showed up and did the whole choir-of-one performance and told me that I was a part of her prophecy. To make a long story short, I wasn’t the only one who was a part of the prophecy, so was Valaria. Though she had not yet turned, Valaria was also Gray.

  Our purpose was to stop the cleansings and gain the Deoraghan their status as a sovereign nation to keep them safe from being enslaved again. Of course, we didn't know that at the beginning. It would have been nice to know that, but prophecy is a slippery thing as I'm sure you're learning. We did succeed.” He paused. “But everything comes with a cost. Do you know why the Treaty of Twinning Pass was signed?"

  Sheridan answered her voice subdued. "The son of the Daniyelan Scion was saved by Gresham...” Sheridan broke off unable to finish the sentence.

  "We were there to negotiate terms, but someone on the side of the Orders tried to provoke the resistance into fighting. Whoever it was fired an arrow into the resistance's ranks; it killed a very dear friend of mine, Liev. He was one of our commanders. Someone decided they wanted blood for blood, so they fired at the son of the Daniyelan Scion who was the Orders’ emissary. Like many Deoraghan, Valaria had traces of blue. She didn’t see it in time to stop the soldier, but she did see it in time to knock the son out of the way. The shot killed her instantly."

  The room waited for Tobias to continue. He cleared his throat. Though the event had occurred hundreds of years ago, recalling it always reignited the pain.
>
  “With her death, the treaty was guaranteed. Her valor and sacrifice convinced the Scion of the Daniyelans that the Deoraghan were no agents of the darkness and deserved equal standing amongst the other nations. That is what Gray means, children.”

  Tobias held the gaze of each Gray in turn as he spoke. “It means pain. It means sacrifice. And it means loss. It is not an easy road Lior asks you to walk. But those who have not faced adversity already, would not be called to this life."

  Faela and Jair could not look away from Tobias, but Lucien still sat hooded from the cold despite the warmth of the cramped room. He watched Tobias from under it. The Orders had given Lucien a home, a purpose, a family when he had nothing, when everything had been taken from him by the war. The way this man talked about them infuriated him. It took all his self-control to remain seated. Like Faela had said, Grays were an abomination. No sentimental tale would convince him otherwise.

  "I cannot speak for your story, Jair, but, Faela, you asked what I meant by another prophecy."

  Faela nodded shifting her weight. Now that the tale had finished, she noticed the twinges in her lower back and twisted to relieve the pressure.

  "The night you were born a prophecy came upon Rivka about a little girl with the gifts of a mind healer who had the power within her to either heal or destroy the world. Rivka sent for me and I spent the next three years looking for that little girl. I found you just after your fourth birthday."

  Bringing her legs up into her chest, she lowered her chin behind her knees and just stared at Tobias without speaking.

  "Your parents were already worried that there was something wrong with you. You couldn't speak and would fly into rages without any reason they could discover. The only thing that would calm you was Caleb singing to you. He taught me your lullaby, before I took you to Kilrood. Though I have to say my singing didn't calm you immediately like Caleb’s could. But it did work."