Fallen Star

by Steven Drake

  “It’s gone,” she gasped.

  “What?” Darien asked. “What’s gone?”

  “This is the table where I woke up, but there was something above me, the first thing I saw when my eyes opened, a light, like a star, just floating there above the table, shining over the garden.”

  Darien didn’t respond, but put his hand to his chin, and squinted his eyes, intensely focused. Miri looked up again. The absence triggered an intense sadness. Whatever it was, it was supposed to be there, but it wasn’t.

  “Do you remember anything else about it?” Darien asked, “Was there a barrier around it, something like glass? Did the light appear to move, almost as if it were alive?”

  “Um…” Miri searched her memory. It had not occurred to her before, but she remembered the swirling movements of the light in the sky, and the strange reflections that seemed to dance around it. They could have been created by glass. “I didn’t before, but now that you ask, yes, I think so.” Miri paused. “Do you know what it was?”

  “I think I do,” Darien said.

  “What was it?” Miri asked. “I feel like it should still be there. I don’t know why, but it bothers me that it’s gone.”

  “I’ll explain later. For now, I want to explore as far as possible. If I’m right, this is what the Order of the Shade came here to find.”

  “They took it?” Miri questioned, and Darien nodded soberly. He evidently didn’t like the idea of the Shades having it any more than she did.

  Darien moved closer to the table and ran his hands along it, examining it closely. “I see,” he finally said. “This table has a different enchantment than the rest of this place. This is almost exactly the same as what I encountered in Kadanar, though not quite as old as that. You were sleeping for a very long time.”

  “How long?” Miri asked, uncertain whether she wanted an answer.

  “Well over a thousand years, without doubt, probably between fifteen hundred and two thousand years actually. It becomes difficult to say on enchantments that old.” Miri’s breath hitched. She had expected something bad, but still, actually hearing it made it real. Everyone she had ever known in her former life, the father she knew from her dreams, whatever other family she had, brothers, sisters, her mother, and everyone else she had ever known, would have died centuries ago. She was a relic, an orphan from a land that no longer existed. Tears formed in her eyes, and she reached out like a hurt child to the nearest person, wrapped her arms around Darien and wept into his chest. He didn’t react at first, just standing stiffly, then slowly, he placed a hand on her shoulder, and wrapped an arm around her back. He softly patted her back as he actually held her. The gesture felt forced, awkward, and uncomfortable, but considering who it was coming from, it was more than she expected. That he cared enough to even make the attempt meant worlds to her, and she felt the tears receding. He allowed her to remain in his arms for several minutes, before he grasped her about the shoulders and gently rocked her away.

  “I want to explore as much as possible,” Darien said. “There might be more to learn. Take some time to rest.”

  Miri shook her head and turned away from the table. “It sounds like I’ve rested here enough.” She started walking away, back into the garden, and didn’t look back.

  They followed the stone path away from the table, back to the main path that ran through the garden, and then followed another branch to where it disappeared into a dark passageway.

  “Hmm. Interesting,” Darien said. “Zitane didn’t mention this.”

  “What is it?”

  “There’s a passage here,” Darien said. “Zitane gave a detailed account of what he remembered before we left. He was quite certain that the only other passage out of this garden was blocked.”

  “Then let’s go,” Miri said.

  Darien disappeared into the dark passage, and Miri followed. Darien lit the passage after a few yards, illuminating an unadorned stone hallway that sloped gradually downwards. Mirisa still felt the presence of magic all around her, but it was weaker here, more undefined. Several minutes passed without any change as they made their way steadily through the passage. Time drifted by, and Miri wondered how far this passage could possibly go. After walking for perhaps half an hour, the passage finally opened into a large spacious room with a ceiling high above.

  Darien went out first, brightening his light, and Miri added her own. They had emerged in an alcove on one side of a large rectangular space. It looked like some kind of throne room, or rather the remains of one. The throne that rose out of a pedestal at the back of the room had been broken in half, with pieces of stone lying scattered across the floor. The door that had concealed the passage where they entered was nowhere to be found. It had to have been shattered by whoever last came this way, its remains lost amongst the rest of the broken stone and loose gravel that littered the room.

  As Miri and Darien explored the room, they came to realize that some kind of battle had been fought here. The walls, otherwise seamless, without brick or mortar, bore huge gashes torn several feet wide and nearly as deep, some vertical, some horizontal, and at every possible angle between. What could cause such devastation? The perimeter of the room had once been lined with carved statues, figures of what might have been proud warriors and wise scholars, but now they were all broken, ripped into pieces by the same force that had rent the walls in so many places. Strangely enough, the sense of magic that she had felt earlier seemed to be gone here, and instead a feeling of emptiness pervaded the place, a disturbing feeling of profound loss. Mirisa shuddered. She didn’t like this room.

  “What happened here?” Mirisa asked aloud. Darien didn’t respond, save for a low grumble. He had an idea, and whatever it was, he didn’t like it, but he wasn’t willing to say exactly what yet. Miri decided not to press further. She wanted to leave the room, as quickly as possible.

  They left the throne room through the only apparent exit, a wide opening at the front of the room that might once have contained double doors, but now simply served to mark the end of one room and the beginning of another. They passed into a long, dark, hallway, wide, built to accommodate many people coming and going. A central channel was lowered a few steps from the raised edges. Strange, jet black arches rose out of the raised areas on either side, halfway from the outer walls to the central channel. Many of the arches had been broken in pieces. Huge chunks of black stone had riddled the floor with hundreds of cracks. Some of the strange gash marks were present here as well, but fewer, and smaller.

  Shortly after Miri passed into the long hall, the sense of dark emptiness that pervaded the throne room faded, and Mirisa felt the magic of the place return. This aura was different from either the cave, or the garden, and certainly the emptiness of the throne room. As they walked down the hall, Miri felt a certain level of familiarity, something like what she had felt in the garden, but not quite the same. The dream of her father had always seemed so far away, separated by a vast distance of time, and now she knew why. This felt more recent.

  Darien headed down the hallway towards a light in the distance, and Miri followed close behind. She scanned back and forth into the doors on either side of the hall. The strange arches looked important, and Miri wondered what purpose they might have served. Many had strange symbols carved into them, something similar to what she had seen on her stone table. Some of them had writing, in the old language. Miri found she could read most of it, but the words didn’t seem to make much sense. She suspected they were place names. The word river appeared a few times, as did the word for mountain. She didn’t recognize any of the names, if they were names. Behind the arches were dozens of black stone doors, most still intact but covered with centuries of dust. Other doors had fallen into the hall, or hung on their rusting hinges. Still others had been entirely destroyed, the passages blocked by rubble.

  The sense of familiarity grew steadily stronger, and more urgent, with each step Miri took. Finally, at roughly the halfway point in the long, w
ide hallway, she stopped, struck by the sudden urge to stand beside one of the arches. Without thinking, she did so, and suddenly gasped as she remembered. She had seen this room before, in the vision the faerie queen had shown her when she followed Darien to the spring. She had been standing in this exact spot when the blond-haired elf man and the faerie had stood opposing that black clad figure with Darien’s sword. Miri had all but forgotten the visions. She had trouble even remembering what they were about, but suddenly, in this room, in this spot, they returned to her mind with perfect clarity.

  “Miri, what’s wrong?” Darien asked as he walked back to where she was.

  “I’ve seen this room before.” Miri said. “When I followed you to the spring, the faerie queen, she looked at me, and then, I couldn’t look away, and it felt like I was falling, then I was somewhere else. She showed me something, like a vision, several visions actually. One of them was here. There were two people, over there.” Miri pointed towards the entrance to the throne room. “An elf stood hand in hand with a faerie, and they were about to fight a man clad in black. It wasn’t you, but the man had your sword, I’m certain.”

  “The Demon’s Blade?” Darien asked. “You’re certain?”

  Miri nodded vehemently. “Do you know what it means?”

  “No, and I don’t think you should dwell on it.” Darien added with more than a hint of displeasure. “The faeries are capable of magic similar to my shadow sight. They show visions of the future in order to manipulate others into doing what they want. I don’t trust them.”

  “This wasn’t the future, I’m certain of it now.” Miri said. “This was something that happened in the past. These arches were intact. There were lights above us. The room hadn’t been destroyed.”

  “That is possible. I wasn’t the first person to hold the Demon Sword. There were at least two others. Was this man human or elf?”

  “Human, I’m certain.”

  Darien shut his eyes and tensed. Miri felt something change in him. He seemed almost angry about something.

  “Do you know what happened?” Miri asked.

  “I have a guess who that man was, but I have no idea who they might have been fighting.” Darien spoke slowly, restraining the anger that seemed to have momentarily consumed him. “But I know someone who does.” Darien sighed, and his anger seemed to recede, or maybe he only set it aside. “I want to hear everything you saw in the faerie’s visions later, but for now, let’s see what else we can learn here.”

  They continued down the hallway, which grew progressively brighter as they went along. When they had gone about three quarters of the way down the hall, Darien extinguished his magical light, as it was no longer necessary. Light was streaming in through another set of large double doors at the opposite end of the hall. The black doors had been torn from their hinges, but they were, at least, still present, unlike those in the throne room.

  After passing through these doors, Miri looked up to see open sky above her, though the temperature still seemed unnaturally warm. The ceiling of this particular room seemed to be missing. Whatever it had been made of, it seemed to have disintegrated entirely, as no debris seemed to be visible in the room below. The room looked like a forum or perhaps a meeting hall. The room was basically circular. At the center of the circle, a podium rose from a platform set several feet above the surrounding room. At least a dozen rows of benches surrounded the central platform in expanding circles, broken by several aisles to provide access.

  “Just like the Ivory Hall in Kadanar,” Darien mumbled quietly.

  “What do you mean?” Miri asked.

  “There is a meeting hall like this in Kadanar as well, called the Ivory Hall. This was an elven sanctuary once.”

  Darien did not linger long. Instead he strode quickly across the room to a pair of black stone doors. They looked immensely heavy, but Darien pushed them open easily. The scene outside dropped Mirisa’s jaw. They stood at the top of a set of stone steps that led perhaps a hundred feet down, where an entire city of white stone buildings sprawled out, hundreds upon hundreds of ornate structures stacked next to and on top of one another, without seam, brick, or mortar, as if they had been carved whole out of the mountain itself. The city spread across a wide valley, far into the distance until the buildings disappeared into a fog that covered the lower portion of the valley. Most of the city appeared untouched, beautiful as if it had been inhabited yesterday, save for a few places that showed the same wide gashes seen in the throne room, but impossibly larger. Great gashes seemed to have torn through entire sections of the city and rent the mountain itself.

  “How has all this been hidden for so long?” Miri wondered aloud.

  “The entrance to this valley is blocked,” Darien said.

  “Your magic lets you see that far,” Miri asked, “even with the fog?”

  Darien nodded. “Someone caused an avalanche, larger than anything I’ve ever seen. Whoever did this…” He paused and looked down. “It doesn’t matter now, but the passage we found is probably the only way in now.”

  “Should we explore the city?”

  “No,” Darien said. “I doubt there’s much to find. I saw some signs of activity back in the hall, but nothing out here. I don’t think the Shades came this way.”

  “Could there be anyone else sleeping, like I was?” Miri voiced an irrational hope that someone else might have survived.

  Darien sighed. “I doubt it,” he said. “Everything we’ve seen so far suggests that you were important, probably connected to the royal family somehow. The magic that kept you asleep is both powerful and complicated. If they had put others to sleep, it’s likely they would have kept all the sleepers in the same place, so they could weave the enchantment just once.” Miri’s face fell as her frail hope shattered. “We can search if you want, just to be certain, but it could take days to go over the entire city. These ancient elven enchantments are hard to see until you’re almost on top of them.” Darien added. He was trying to be sympathetic, but he was right. They would just be wasting time.

  “No.” Miri shook her head. “You’re right. Let’s go back and see if we can find out what else they took.”

  Miri took a final look at the city, a view that seemed familiar and comforting, but also sad and empty. Then she sighed and followed Darien back into the large structure. Darien crossed the forum quickly again and passed back into the long hallway, turning right into a particular doorway. Miri focused her own mage sight to try to see what Darien might have seen to pick this particular door. She could see nothing, but when she opened her eyes she chanced to be looking at the floor, and saw many sets of overlapping tracks in the dust, a clear indication someone had passed that way.

  She jogged to catch up with Darien, who had gotten several yards ahead, light in hand, following the tracks down a hallway, through a door, up several flights of stairs, then out into a high-ceilinged room filled with row upon row of tall bookcases, a library. Miri gasped. This made the library at Catarina palace seem like the tiny library that she herself had founded in Exire shortly after she arrived.

  “It’s amazing,” Miri said, but Darien was already scurrying through the room, following the tracks. He stopped at a strange looking metal spiral that rose out of the ground. He cast his eyes around, and finally picked up a glass ball sitting on a shelf nearby. He placed the ball upon the top of the metal spiral and a light blossomed within, lighting the area for a dozen yards around.

  “If you see any more balls like this. Pick them up and put them in these spirals.”

  “What are they?”

  “Elven lights,” Darien answered. “They use similar devices in Kadanar. It will save us the trouble of using our magic constantly.” Miri nodded. She found a few more of the glass balls and a great many more of the spiral stands. Judging by the piles of broken glass on many of the shelves, many of the balls had been broken for some time. Still, between the two of them, after perhaps ten minutes of exploring, they had found enough to lig
ht the library sufficiently.

  After that, they followed the various sets of tracks to different spots in the library. Darien examined many of the books, taking several and thumbing through them. Some seemed to pique his interest, and he laid these aside, mentioning his intention to return for them later. Strangely, nothing seemed to be missing. Judging by the number of tracks, there had to have been several dozen people going through the library, but there appeared to be no books missing. Darien seemed concerned about this as well, and his regular grumbling increased as time passed.

  Finally, he stopped at a large blank gray stone wall where several sets of tracks seemed to come together. Unlike every other wall in the library, this wall was completely bare and unadorned. Darien ran his hands over the wall mumbling quietly to himself. Finally, he narrowed his eyes and stared at a single point on the stone wall.

  “Stand back,” he said. Miri backed away to several feet behind him. Darien then raised his hand, and a swirling ball of darkness formed in front of him. The still air of the library churned, papers rustled across the floor, books rattled on the shelves, and the void grew. This was much larger than the one he had shown her the night before. It grew to a foot wide, then two, then four. The wind rushed past her, and she herself felt the pull of the void, tugging at her. She braced herself against one of the metal spirals that seemed to grow out of the floor.

  Then Darien pushed the spell forward into the wall, and it groaned loudly, the sound reverberating above and below. Miri expected the wall to crumble, but it did not, instead it shook, vibrated, and groaned louder. The groaning and shaking continued to increase in volume until it sounded like a cacophony of shrieking and wailing destruction. Several books fell from nearby shelves while a steady rain of dust descended from the ceiling. Beads of sweat formed on Darien’s forehead, then streamed off, pulled into the swirling void of darkness. His face grew red, and Miri could feel the intense power of his exertion. The light within him burned white hot like a star, so bright that in her eyes, it drowned out everything else in the room. Finally, Miri felt a sudden snapping, like a taut rope suddenly cut, whipping violently. The shelf exploded, but the pieces only disappeared into the void. A pair of bookshelves toppled over, and something crashed somewhere on the other side of the wall. Darien withdrew the magic and the chaos subsided. He fell to a knee and took several long deep breaths. Miri rushed to his side.