The Shattered Shards

by Stephen J Wolf

  She had come to him in his dreams during his incarceration in the Prisoner’s Tower. She had guided him on a path of escape through the tower, saving Dariak along the way.

  But it wasn’t Mira, he finally admitted to himself in earnest. It had been the glass jade that guided him to Dariak. It had tapped into his mind and he only thought he saw his dearest love leading him safely through. No, it hadn’t been Mira at all.

  Yet he had convinced himself that some part of her was still with him. Still guiding him. Still loving him with the same careless freedom his heart shared with her. It made more sense that her soul was part of him. They had grown up together. They had spent so much time together. They were so rarely ever apart.

  But now he felt torn asunder. Mira was truly gone.

  Quereth and Morrish walked through the garden and only glanced occasionally in Gabrion’s direction. They didn’t try speaking to him as he rocked back and forth, trying to make sense of his loss. Though Gabrion didn’t know it, Quereth understood his pain keenly. And he knew the young man would need some time.

  Time, they received. It took over two hours before any word returned to them from King Prethos. The page, Berral, finally joined them in the garden and called to the three visitors to rejoin his majesty in the throne room. Pale and empty, Gabrion needed Quereth’s gentle guidance to comply.

  The page led them back to the throne and there the king sat upright. It was as if he had been lashed during his absence and now it hurt too much to rest back on his opulent chair. Yet also, a searing anger burned in his eyes.

  “Visitors from Kallisor,” he spat. “Have you the courtesy to cease your lies at present? Will you now speak with clarity and avoid misconstruing your intent here?”

  Gabrion furrowed his brows and responded half-heartedly, “What are you talking about?”

  The king’s voice lowered and it was hard for the three of them to hear him. “You say you came not to engage in war, but to seek other knowledge. Knowledge of an unknown prisoner and the piece of jade that was already lost to me. Knowledge only.”

  “It is as we said,” Gabrion acknowledged, tensing with the increased suspicion creeping into the king’s voice.

  “And you proclaim your peaceful intent, though you arrive with a small army of your own, garbed in magically protected armor, which you clearly pillaged from one of my own settlements.”

  Gabrion’s face twitched in annoyance. “We did not pillage any of your towns. These garments were given freely by the people who believed in us and our quest.”

  “And what, may I ask, is your quest?” the king sneered.

  Gabrion stepped forward clenched his hands into fists. “I came here to reclaim my beloved. I came also to find a way to end the warring between our countries. Securing your piece of jade is the means to that end. I did not come here to start a battle with you. My forces outside are merely to lend credence to my claim. I have already explained all of this.”

  The king barked a laugh. “And you claim not to be here under the command of your king. That this quest is your own.”

  “It is so.”

  The king laughed again. “The evidence is to the contrary. As your army awaits in my courtyard, you have reinforcements arriving from the east. Clearly you are a diversion here, set to disable us until support arrives.”

  “Reinforcements?” Gabrion looked confused.

  The king’s eyes squinted in anger. “Take your subterfuge elsewhere, warrior child. There was no logic to your claim but scouts have shown us your true purpose here. You will leave my courtyard immediately or else my archers will shoot down your forces where they stand.”

  “You’re mad! If you did so, you would slay your own merchants and citizens in the process.”

  “It is worthwhile if it prevents you from scoring an early assault. No, young fool, you will all leave these grounds at haste and you will—”

  A clattering sound echoed from the western wall of the room. “I demand you let me through!” shrieked an exasperated woman.

  “But! You can’t!”

  “Nonsense!” The woman stormed across the floor toward the throne. She ignored the three visitors tending the king and spoke to her husband, whose face flushed in a mix of anger and bewilderment. “Is this true?” she demanded.

  The king composed himself and addressed his queen with utmost patience, though not even he knew where he found it. “My lady, clearly you can see that this is not the time for an interruption. I am nearly finished here. Wait outside a moment longer.”

  “I will not be blindly escorted to some hidden location for fear of attack. I will remain where I can best assist!”

  “Let me finish with my guests,” the king insisted. He gestured to Gabrion and stopped when he saw a bizarre look scrawled on the young man’s face.

  For Gabrion, it was as if he had fallen asleep and entered a dream. No, a strange nightmare. He watched the woman stare down the king, her hair enwrapped with a misty white veil. He couldn’t breathe as he registered her face. Her delicate cheeks. Her soft brown hair. He hadn’t recognized her voice for she had never spoken in such tones around him. But he knew her. And he knew he wasn’t awake any more, or perhaps he had died without knowing it at all.

  It took all his strength to pull in the air he needed to utter a single word. “Mira?”

  But it couldn’t be. It was impossible. The king himself had said there were no prisoners from Savvron here. This woman was merely close in resemblance to his beloved Mira. And she was foremost on his thoughts, so of course he mangled her features in his mind so that this woman resembled Mira. That made more sense to him than the momentary thought that she was standing mere yards away from him.

  The woman turned to him and her brows furrowed. “Do I—?” Then she gasped. “Gabrion?” She hesitated for only a moment before she floated those few steps that separated her from the warrior, after which she threw her arms around him and laughed merrily. “Gabe! It is you!”

  He didn’t know what to do. Who else would know his name? It had to be her, not some charlatan that only looked like her. As she laughed, the sound echoed through him and reminded him of his childhood and all their joyous times together. But he was dreaming. This wasn’t real. It was some form of mage trickery or some foul magic that had never existed before. He then glanced around to see if maybe Kitalla was nearby causing strange illusions just to play with him.

  Mira disengaged and she looked at him, gazing deep into his eyes. “You’ve—you’ve really grown a lot, haven’t you?” she asked. “Oh, Gabe, I can’t believe this! How are you here? What brings you here?”

  While he tried to find even a single word, the king asked, “My lady, you know this miscreant?”

  “Miscreant?” she retorted with a laugh. “Hardly! Gabrion is harmless, my lord. We grew up together, he and I.”

  The king connected the pieces easily. He turned to Gabrion with a questioning gaze. “This is the prisoner of whom you spoke?”

  “Prisoner?” Mira asked.

  Gabrion could only nod.

  Mira laughed. “I’m no prisoner, Gabe.”

  “She is my queen.”

  Chills raced up and down Gabrion’s body. He shook with a cold fright. He couldn’t explain it. Something was terribly wrong here. “But you… You were kidnapped. From Savvron.”

  “No, Gabe, you don’t understand.” Mira chuckled. “I met Prethos,” she said, gesturing toward the king, “on one of the sojourns I took with my parents. We’ve known each other for some time now. The attack on Savvron was…” She paused, trying to find the best way to explain it, but she wasn’t sure.

  The king finished for her. “I had told her that I wanted her as my queen and that I love her deeply. She knew it would entail relocating here. Thus I sent for her.”

  “Oh, it was quite a rush, Gabe!” she said. “His scouts rode in to the forest in Savvron and found me and we rode off that very moment! It was beautiful. I knew he would be waiting for me here.”


  “You… you what?” Gabrion asked, perplexed. “Don’t you remember all the fighting?”

  “It was all staged,” she dismissed. “They were all trained to make it look like a skirmish. That’s all, to make it more exciting. You ran off in a panic but you saw, didn’t you?”

  “No,” he said in disbelief. “It was no false battle, Mira. Don’t you know how many people died that day?”

  Her expression flickered for a moment. “What?” she asked, pausing in her glee for the first time.

  “I barely survived, myself,” he said, exasperated. “All this time, you really thought it was a fake battle? Mira?”

  The king looked at his queen and shook his head. “Kallisorian nonsense,” he pronounced. “My fighters were well trained and would not have harmed a single man, woman, or child in a defenseless town like that. He is lying.”

  Mira looked torn. “Gabe isn’t known for lying.” She turned to her lifelong friend, as if reevaluating him suddenly.

  “I have quested since that day to find you and to bring you home,” Gabrion stammered. “You’ve been here all this time?”

  “Yes, Gabe. Of course. My parents are here as well.”

  The warrior paused for a moment, recalling what he had learned from his father. Mira’s parents had been on sojourn when the attack occurred and they hadn’t returned. Only letters had come back to Savvron, and only briefly until they had stopped altogether.

  “Your parents knew.”

  “Of course they did,” she smiled. “They accepted the king’s proposal for marriage before he came for me. He wouldn’t have sent for me otherwise.”

  “But you were kidnapped,” Gabrion muttered. This made less sense to him than her being dead. He needed it to make sense somehow. “You were stolen away. I had to find you.”

  “Gabe, that’s very sweet, but I wasn’t kidnapped. Not really.” She turned and smiled at her husband. “He simply had me brought here to my new home. With him.”

  Fire welled inside of Gabrion and as he swallowed, he felt as if knives cut through him as well. He had yearned for her so lovingly and for so long, yet her heart had not been his. She hadn’t yearned for him. She hadn’t expected him to find her and rescue her. She had barely given him any thought, it seemed, for she hadn’t even written to him over the past year.

  She seemed oblivious to Gabrion’s plight. Instead, she clapped her hands and laughed. “It’s so good of you to come. We should celebrate our reunion.”

  Gabrion was dumbstruck. Clearly, Mira had been brainwashed by this tyrant king. But as he looked at the two of them, he realized that he was an utter fool.

  That very day she was taken, Mira had kept asking Gabrion whether he thought the armies would come. She had kept looking around as if she expected them to arrive at any moment. Perhaps she had an inkling that her king would come for her while her parents were away. Perhaps she had agreed to go but wasn’t certain of when her escort would appear. The more he thought of it, the more he remembered her pensive moments, her odd sighs that hadn’t made any sense back then. She clearly had struggled to tell him about her love interest, for she had not once hinted about him. She had avoided Gabrion’s own advances, but he thought she was merely being shy or playful.

  It started making sense now. All along this journey, his companions had teased him time and again about chasing a ghost. Though when they saw the comments hurt him, they had withdrawn. But here he realized that he had indeed been chasing a ghost all along. The Mira in his mind hadn’t been real after all.

  “Gabe, what is it?” Mira asked, fear making her voice quaver.

  He reached deep into his pocket and withdrew the one object he had carried with him all this time. He kept it clenched tightly in his hand as his eyes darted back and forth from the king to the queen. “I die this day,” he declared.

  “Gabrion?”

  “The world around me is a false one. Your troops invaded Savvron and slew many of our people, just so you could steal away the one person I truly loved with all my heart.”

  “Gab—”

  “I die this day, now that I see that you are blind, Mira. That you could believe in any way that an assault on our hometown would bring no casualties. That young Kaz found us on our way to our picnic covered in blood, and you would dismiss it. You are blind that the king sent Andron to train us to defend ourselves, so that when the Hathrens attacked, we did rise up to defend ourselves. And many of us died that day.”

  “Gabe, stop!” Mira demanded, clutching her head with her free hand and turning away.

  “Our homes burned and that one skirmish led to the increased fighting of today. It also brought me out of Savvron to travel the world, in search of enough strength that I could come to rescue you. You, who cared nothing for me.”

  “That isn’t true, Gabe!” she cried. “You were my closest friend!”

  “So close, you could never tell me of this man? So close you never wrote to me once over the past year to tell me what was happening or that you were all right?”

  “I—I did!” she retorted. “And you did not return my letters. I told you of Prethos and our wedding and that I became queen—”

  “Nothing ever came to Savvron!” Gabrion interrupted. His gaze slid to the king. “How is it that none of these supposed letters reached Savvron?”

  The king merely shrugged. “Messages between our kingdoms do not pass easily, especially if you incited your king against us. But I assure you, I left no orders to interrupt any letters my beloved Mira would send.”

  Gabrion shook with the man’s use of ‘beloved Mira.’ His soul trembled as he looked at them, calm and in disbelief, doubting his own story. The distrust in her eyes made her seem unnatural to him. There was something wrong and he couldn’t discern its source. He glanced again to see if there were signs of mages casting charms over her, remembering fleetingly that such magic did not exist among the mages anyway.

  “My lady,” the king said. “This friend of yours seems utterly confused. He is a lovesick child who went on some mad quest to pursue you.”

  “I don’t know what to believe,” she said. “But I don’t know why Gabe would lie.”

  “I wouldn’t,” the warrior said. “Visit Savvron and see the destruction for yourself.”

  “There’s no way of proving when any such destruction occurred,” the king dismissed. “It could have been from a recent battle or a bad storm.”

  “The people will tell her,” Gabrion insisted through gritted teeth.

  “My lady,” the king sighed. “You came running in here because of the dreadful news that has befallen us, did you not?”

  Mira shook herself alert for a moment. “Yes, the Kallisorians broke through the eastern defenses and march upon the castle.”

  “Indeed, and this young ‘friend’ of yours also brought a small army of his own.”

  Mira turned her wide eyes on Gabrion. “Is that true?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “And he came demanding the fire jade from my possession, on top of that.”

  “Gabe?”

  “I did, Mira, but—”

  “Isn’t it clear,” the king said in a loud tone, “that this boy has used your presence here to seek audience with me so that his forces can weaken us before the main army arrives? He seeks to destroy us, Mira.”

  “No!” Mira gasped with tears in her eyes.

  “No,” Gabrion echoed. But he could see that she believed her husband’s version of the events. The burning within him faded to an icy coldness and he felt a sensation he had never truly experienced before. Loathing.

  Mira backed away as the look in Gabrion’s eyes changed to a feral sort of rage. He lost all sense of humanity as he stood there fully accepting that his whole quest had been based on a lie and, worse than that, that Mira’s new life was also based on a series of lies that she clearly chose to believe without trying to listen to him at all.

  “Mira, come home with me,” he said in a strange voice that
wasn’t his at all. He sounded as if he had risen from death and his throat was barely working.

  She stepped further away. “No. You monster. Leave this place!” Distraught, Mira spun on her heels and bolted from the room, tears streaming from her eyes.

  The king rose to his feet and four guards approached from the wings. “Your stay has ended,” he declared. “I should slay you outright for the pain you have inflicted upon my queen. Take your forces from these walls and pray I do not order the guards to eradicate you once you are in the desert.”

  “What have you done to her?” Gabrion snarled. “How can she have forgotten the battle in Savvron?”

  “Her Highness is of no concern to you, commoner. Be gone from this place before I slay you here and now.” In response, the guards drew closer still, swords at the ready.

  “This isn’t over.”

  “Oh, yes,” the king returned sternly. “It is certainly and undeniably over.” With that, the guards rushed Gabrion, Quereth, and Morrish out of the throne room, where heavy doors slammed decisively shut.

  Chapter 32

  Deeper into Magehaven

  Their bodies were riddled with minor injuries, but Randler and Frast sprinted away and raced toward their goal. Randler hated leaving Kitalla behind to fend off the beasts and mages by herself, but he also knew that she would be up to the challenge. He was elated that she had suddenly shown up and he understood full well that she wouldn’t do so just to die now.

  Randler hadn’t known Kitalla until after her torture in Grenthar’s domain, but his bardic talents had kept him informed even then. Rumors had swept through Pindington of the happenings in the thief’s lair and after he came to know her, Randler easily connected the tales. Seeing her in combat, he had also determined that the whispered stories hadn’t quite lived up what she must have really endured.