by Warren Fahy
CRIMSON
By Warren Fahy
A Mystique Press Epic Fantasy
Mystique Press is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2015 Warren Fahy
Map by Michael Limber
LICENSE NOTES
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Meet the Author
New York Times best selling author Warren Fahy was a bookseller, movie database designer (thousands of his movie descriptions are all over the Internet at different sites like Rotten Tomatoes), helped get a new definition of the word “mullet” into the Oxford English Dictionary and was lead writer for Rock Star Games’ Red Dead Revolver. His science thriller FRAGMENT was nominated for a BSFA and an International Thriller Award and is published in 19 languages. The sequel, PANDEMONIUM, is now available along with his epic fantasy, CRIMSON.
Book List
Biosphere
Crimson
Escaping America
Fragment
Henders
Pandemonium
The Haunting of Sherlock Holmes and Other Adventures
The Kor
The Flea Series
They Call Me the Flea – Episode #1
They Call Me the Flea – Episode #2
They Call Me the Flea – Episode #3
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CRIMSON
Contents
Book One: The Dimrok
Chapter 1: Home Again
Chapter 2: The Burning World
Chapter 3: Artimeer’s Reason
Chapter 4: Love
Chapter 5: Party!
Chapter 6: Knot
Chapter 7: The New King
Chapter 8: The New Queen
Chapter 9: The First Defense
Chapter 10: There
Chapter 11: Escape
Chapter 12: The Second Defense
Book Two: Ameulis
Chapter 13: Ameulis
Chapter 14: Here and There
Chapter 15: Pigg
Chapter 16: Checkmate
Chapter 17: A Message Heard
Chapter 18: The Congress of Ameulis
Chapter 19: Revolution
Book Three: The Seven Isles
Chapter 20: Under Way
Chapter 21: Fogbound
Chapter 22: The Race Is On
Chapter 23: Caught!
Chapter 24: Healing Wounds
Chapter 25: Damsel in Distress
Chapter 26: Nightmares
Chapter 27: The Living Isle
Chapter 28: Drewgor
Chapter 29: Reunion
Chapter 30: The Fate of the World
Map of Ameulis
“To know your own soul
imagine the world if you were king.”
– Elwyn Gheldron
Book One
THE DIMROK
Chapter 1
Home Again
The trident sail clawed the darkness as he entered the Serrid Strait, where a demon was calling his name.
Trevin Gheldron held his breath as he plunged into the freezing gloom between the giant cliffs, and as he glided deeper the demon’s taunts splintered around him. A mile in, he clutched his cloak at his throat, searching the jet-black walls that soared a thousand feet to a winding river of stars above. Then he peered into the gloom ahead and saw a massive wave rising.
Trevin held onto Stargazer’s mast as she was lifted half-way up the cliffs on the black wave, and there, waiting for him inside petrified bones, the demon burst out of the cliff. The skeleton of the ancient Winteg king spread crumbling arms and a diamond crown fell from its thorny skull as it screamed, “Gheldron!”
Trevin lunged for the sparkling crown as it splashed in the water barely out of his reach, and the wave pushed his skiff all the way out of the Serrid Strait, spilling her onto the open sea.
“What defies me so?” he cried, bitterly.
Stargazer wheeled and hurtled north, against his will; and a dark wind filled her sail.
“All is against me!”
The blue North Star, Niveron, bounced on Stargazer’s bowsprit.
Trevin crouched on the midthwart, his umber cloak blowing open around his laced-up leather tunic. He wore gamey purple eel-skin pants tucked into tall black boots. He had not thought of clothing when he had left.
For three days and nights, Stargazer ignored him as she raced north over an ocean as smooth as glass. And all the while rage banked inside the seventeen-year-old’s prideful heart, until, on the third night, it erupted in hot defiance.
With a ferocious yell, Trevin hauled the sheets of Stargazer’s sail and pulled her tiller with all his might. She came about and he fixed her eye on Arcturus, the ruby South Star, determined to retrieve the Winteg’s crown. The placid sea boiled around him, seething all the way to the horizons, and the tiller broke his grip with brutal force.
The skiff swung like a compass needle, casting him onto his back. And as he crawled forward he saw sapphire Niveron bouncing on the bowsprit as Stargazer sliced the mirror-like sea.
“Almighty Gairanor!” he cursed, invoking his immortal ancestors. But their eyes blinked implacably in the sky, reflecting on the still waters around him.
Trevin slumped at the tiller again as wind twisted the black spirals of his hair around his beardless face. After eleven years in prison he had stolen six days of freedom. He wept, unmoving, in rage.
He gradually noticed tiny blue, green, and yellow stars twinkling beneath Stargazer, and he pulled his numb fingers from the rushing sea. He realized that he was already crossing over the southern reefs of Ameulis.
It was hard to say how fast he was moving, so lightly did Stargazer skim the glassen sea, yet in three days she had crossed what would have taken three weeks in a great ship with many sails. But why?
The answer appeared beneath Niveron: the Dimrok. The black slab of stone mounting the horizon chilled Trevin like a shadow on his heart.
The island had been named the “Dimrok” so long ago nobody remembered why. Some conjectured that it had been a prison in ancient times. Yet Trevin’s grandfather, Elwyn Gheldron, had moved the Throne of Ameulis to this square rock four centur
ies ago.
Trevin was born there and spent his first six years there. And now, apparently, he would spend the rest of his life there, as well: a prison fit for a king.
For there was only one reason Stargazer would disobey him. His father—the King of Ameulis—must be dying.
The glowing reefs over which Trevin passed rendered the isolated isle inaccessible to large ships approaching from the south. Two hundred miles south of Ameulis’s capital, the Dimrok was like a jigsaw puzzle piece ten miles long and seven wide with a square bay carved into its southwestern shore like a whale’s mouth. Atop 400-foot cliffs of dark slate, Trevin saw the emerald fields shining blue in the starlight.
Thrusting 380 feet up from the palisade, the Lightstone Tower stabbed the sky like a tusk of moonlight. Sullenly, Trevin marveled at the shining spire, which seemed to lean over him in the night sky as he drew closer, so high was its apex. There were stones that the sorcery of his Cirilen ancestors could not craft, such as diamonds. But Elwyn’s tower was made of a stone nature could not produce, which the Cirilen called lightstone. And after the last eleven years of training on the Isle of Damay, Trevin’s eyes now appreciated the incredible power and mastery of its maker. Conjuring lightstone from sand, roses, seawater and gold, most Cirilen working their whole lives could never produce the quantity his grandfather had raised four centuries ago in a single afternoon to build his tower.
On the ground floor, Trevin knew, sat the Throne of the King of Ameulis, now occupied by his father, the beloved King Selwyn, whose law was simple. For Selwyn ruled that no one may be another’s king. Since his father had decided virtue must be chosen, he let his people choose. And his kingdom blossomed as a tyrant’s never had. Despite his father’s guiding principle, however, there was and always would be one slave in his kingdom. That person was his own son, who must be King.
The ocean awoke from its amnesia suddenly and wild breakers smashed against the Dimrok’s gasping shore. Stargazer rode the waves and, sensing her urgency, Trevin moved to the stern thwart, his hand on her tiller, which stubbornly guided itself. As she rounded the southwestern point, Trevin spied several large ships anchored in the Dimrok’s bay, and he recognized their gigantic Ameulintian mainsails furled to broad yardarms.
A big swell rolled the heavy vessels and his eyes followed it to the beach, where it crashed and receded in pearly foam around a shining figure.
Stargazer crested the next wave and rode it in.
The silver figure moved like a statue coming to life. The man pulled greaves out of deep sucking holes in the sand, and Trevin wondered how long the knight must have stood there as he lent a weak yet steady hand to pull his skiff onto the beach.
Trevin noticed the man’s armor was open at the wrists and neck, his flowing hair silver in the moonlight. The man turned to look at him and his face was livid as a skull, stretched so tight the skin had cracked over the bones of his face. Trevin gasped, and yet, somehow, living eyes with black irises flecked silver reassured him in that ruined face as the man’s silver hair shone round his head like a crown. “My son!” the man said.
“Father!” Trevin knelt under an avalanche of dread. For Selwyn had already died and had lingered for his return.
Selwyn clenched bony fingers on his son’s arm: “Late!”
“Father…”
Selwyn’s armor turned and marched up the beach, the joints screeching as they worked out grains of sand, and Trevin ran after him as his father’s armor moved under its own power.
Selwyn looked back at Trevin with eyes still bright. “Never mind!” he hissed. “My flesh carried me. I carry it this last mile.”
The Second Moon illuminated the rocky ramp rising from the beach to the forest on the cliff. As Trevin helped Selwyn onto the path, he heard a sound like a thousand knives being sharpened behind them. He turned and saw a battalion of the silver crabs Selwyn had created to guard the Dimrok scrabbling out of the sea and over the sand in a silver wave. They must have protected their creator as he stood vigil for Trevin’s return for unknown days and nights. Trevin sensed their anxiety.
“Remember me!” Selwyn whispered to them. And they turned and scurried down the beach, flinging themselves into the foam.
The silver king paused and gathered his breath in unraveling lungs as he faced his son below him on the path. He pointed at the trees on the cliff above. “Elms twice my age live in that forest,” he said, and somehow his voice was soothing and familiar now, conjuring warm memories. “Golden instruments were placed by your grandfather in the woods to make the sky sing. Do you remember?”
“Yes,” Trevin answered. “I remember, Father!”
Selwyn turned and trudged forward, motioning Trevin to follow, and Trevin hastened after him. But halfway up the path, Selwyn paused again and raised a silver arm: “Wait!” The ancient Cirilen’s eyes were keen in his ravaged face as he peered over the bay.
Trevin noticed a cloud snake like smoke in the air. “What is it, Father?”
“Everything is so clear now, at the end.”
The curling shadow crossed the bay and plunged like a fist into the trees, which shrieked and flailed. “It came with you! Like a wind in your sail… Even now it pretends to be a Winteg’s ghost to trick the Gairanor.”
“Who, Father?”
“Listen. Listen to the wind.”
Trevin cringed as the tempest blasted pipes and bashed chimes with unbridled abandon in the trees. Even the bronze bell deep inside the forest, which only tolled when storms were too dangerous for mariners, clanged a sonorous warning.
“What does it sound like?” Selwyn cried over the din.
“It seems most reckless, Father.”
“It is hatred driven mad by a single dream just out of reach, Trevin.”
“What has slain you, Father?”
“It comes for you now…”
Trevin scoffed: “But why?”
“To ruin you or to be you, or both.” Selwyn drew him closer to be heard: “Old things waiting in twilight love your youth and power even more than you do, my son!” Selwyn coughed black blood over his chin. “You are evil’s beginning or its ending…” He took his son’s hand. “We must go.”
The king’s enchanted armor pulled them both forward briskly now. The pipes, bells and chimes screamed and jangled in a ghoulish bedlam as they reached the top of the ramp and took the path into the churning trees.
“Father,” Trevin shouted. “Let me dash away this wickedness!”
Selwyn stumbled and his fingers snagged on Trevin’s robe. “Alas, it’s not so easy. Even with the Scepter…”
“Rest, Father,” Trevin said. A cursed wind sent against a Cirilen? Trevin flung a finger in the air and met the shadow with white-hot wrath: “Be gone!”
The wind gasped and held its breath: the forest froze around them as leaves spiraled to the ground. They heard the sea whispering on the coast. And Trevin turned to his father and smiled. “You see?” he said.
“Do not drink this flattery, boy.” Selwyn frowned. “This sugar it sprinkles on you is not meant for your tongue.”
“Father, it is gone now. I will protect you. Don’t worry.”
A distant scream scratched the sky like a needle, and Selwyn rolled his eyes heavenward. The pipes in the treetops squealed as an icy gust smashed through the roof of the woods and swallowed them both. It lifted them up and hurled them through the tunnel of trees.
Trevin saw his father somersaulting in the air beside him as they were sucked around a corner and carried down a long avenue. A crashing scale of bells and pipes descended an octave around them as they accelerated toward the widening patch of moonlight at the forest’s edge.
Then the freezing wind spilled Trevin on the great lawn outside the woods. And as he rolled and climbed to his feet he saw his father borne up into the starry sky toward the pinnacle of the Lightstone Tower by a dark talon of wind.
The shadowy fist carried him toward his bed at the tower’s peak. But then it dissi
pated like a winter breath half way up and let Selwyn fall.
Trevin ran, sobbing, across the greensward. He vaulted up the marble staircase at the gate of the tower’s stoneworks. Halfway up the stairs he spied his father’s body crumpled on a small terrace to the right and ran to him.
He pressed his hand on the breastplate of Selwyn’s armor, and it cracked open and fell in pieces, revealing his wasted body. He lifted him into his arms and carried him over the last stretch of the stairway, dashing over the veranda through the great doors of the Lightstone Tower that had never been closed.
Turning right from memory, Trevin shivered off the chill of the darkened throne room and shouldered open a door to a curving, torch-lit corridor. He soon reached the landing of the stairs that spiraled the tower to its peak, and he vaulted over them three steps at a time.
A thousand steps later, he staggered up a ladder into the uppermost room, a chamber only 30 feet wide, where a solitary candle pointed its flame at his father’s bed.
Trevin laid Selwyn down, waiting by him with frozen tears, squeezing his hands and feeling their fragile bones cracking in his angry grip. “What a treachery this is!” he cried. “What a murder!” He shook a fist at the stars in the window as tears streaked his cheeks. “I shall repay this violence one-hundred-measures-to-one!”
His father’s eyes fluttered, impossibly, and then they opened in the candle’s guttering light. “Trevin,” Selwyn whispered as black blood drew a hideous frown on his pale face. “I have much to tell and no time to retell it…”
“Speak, Father!” Trevin bowed his head between his arms.
Selwyn whispered: “Nothing gains easier passage to the heart than that which is closest.”
Trevin wept. “Nothing is close to my heart!”
“Listen! The events I foresee nearly always come true. And I have seen a most terrible destiny on the path before you. That which is nearest to your heart, my son, shall be your doom. The thing you love most of all… will be your curse!” The old Cirilen stiffened as death gripped his throat. “Beware the crimson…”