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Fantasy
The Blue Crystal
Prologue
THE westering sky had gone from turquoise to violet with soft trailings of vermilion clouds set like serpentine jewels in the dark purple velvet. The low hills, shrouded in trees, huddled beneath the cooling sky, becoming hushed. In the darkening gray directly overhead, the Blood Star glowed, its light pulsing brighter, brighter, as if an inhuman heart pumped blood to the cold fire of its form. Shimmering, it hung suspended over the forested hills, the cottages and the children who played out the last minutes of their day.
The children cared nothing for the Blood Star.
As the last streaks of sun color faded to darkness, the children ran playfully for the largest cottage, jostling at the door and moving quickly from play to excited anticipation. Soon would come the Remembering.
Inside the earthen cottage in the softening glow of firelight, several women cleared the last vestiges of a feast from a long, crude table. Murmuring softly among themselves, they covered wooden bowls with whitecloth and corked skins still half full with wine. Their men carried rough wooden stools to the hearth and set them around the perimeter of the fire’s glow, close to but not pressing upon the chair and its occupant already at hearth¬side. With eyes reverently hooded, they assembled the stools, motioned the children to take places on the warm stones beneath the hearth, and produced a few yellow crystals to cast light into the darker corners of the cottage. The children settled restlessly at the foot of the old one and the women took places on the stools. The men then closed the circle and stood behind their women.
All eyes waited, glittering.
The old one looked around her at the expectant, watchful faces and smiled. Her thin face was creased with age, her skin darkened by years of working in the sun, but her milky blue eyes were still quick and keen. Dressed in a simple, dark shift that wrapped her thin form, she pulled a favorite yellowed shawl about her shoulders and nodded. It was time to begin.
“We have all been gathered together like this before for the Remembering, and we have all heard the story. Every home hears it on this date each year. This year, though, I want you all to pay particular attention.” Although she smiled, her intense eyes flared meaningfully at each face. Wraiths of firelight danced across her face.
“There are not many of us left who can Remember, and each year more of us are gone. It will not be long before I will go as well, and someone else will have to do the Telling. It will not be Remembering then; it will be legending, and legends are stories lost in their retelling. When that time comes, I want you all to remember that the story is true and that the lessons are worth learning, for if the stories are lost in myth the teachings are lost also. It would be a terrible sad¬ness for me to think that my children or any who come after would have to learn again by the trials of the Blood Star. There has never been a more terrible time.”
She paused, her thin voice echoing away in the silent cottage. No one moved. Impaled by this message of relentless death and crouching doom, they all waited for her to go on.
“You have all heard the name of Heth Zor, the great king who ruled many, many years ago, before even I was born. He was a good ruler, strong and wise and humane. With the might of the Blue Crystal and Shalabourne, the saber of the One, he governed our land with compassion and humility, and our people were at peace. He ruled his kingship with the family of his one true son, Mal, and his second wife who had her own son, Bren. Separated by half a dozen years and different bloodlines, the boys were constant rivals for their father’s affections, and antago-nism grew between them. Heth Zor knew, as by his own kingship, that the magic and regency of the Zor―the One―is carried not by the blood but in the heart. He also knew that while his true son had the first quality, his adopted son had the second. When it became clear that Heth Zor would pass his kingship to Bren the younger, Mal became inflamed with hatred and jealousy. It was not long afterward that Heth Zor became stricken with illness, and by the time healers were summoned he was too far down the dark road to bring back. At his death, the healers whispered that he had been poisoned.
“Taking immediate possession of his father’s kingship, Mal proclaimed himself Mal Zor, the One, and ordered his step brother imprisoned for the crime of murder. The innocent Bren fled Healite and melted into the muted fabric of the common people, disappearing from the sight of the throne forever. Mal Zor assumed his stolen kingship without so much as a dagger raised in challenge and set about to become the richest and most power¬ful ruler ever known.
“Then he discovered that the Blue Crystal was gone.
“Enraged by the theft and with his power diminished, he first ordered legions to search everywhere, to ransack every house and inspect every corner, but no Blue Crystal was recovered. Finally Mal Zor had to concede that it was gone and he devised a new scheme. He enslaved the common people by scores and reopened the mines that had flourished before the Blood Star, searching for a new Blue Crystal, and sent thousands to their deaths in his quest for power. It was a terrible time, a time of fear and death and hopelessness.”
Her voice trembled with remembered emotion.
“It lasted far too long.”
Regaining her composure, the old woman stared carefully at the faces around her, looking for and finding complete absorption. She nodded once with satisfaction.
“Then one day, Mal Zor’s machine of greed progressed too far. His legions had enslaved all the useful people of Healite and the surrounding country so that they had to scour further and further for fresh slaves. Town by town, they attacked and fought and kidnapped, leaving despair and desolation behind them. Finally their campaign of destruction brought them to the tiny village of Cairgn.”
In the firelight, the little children’s eyes grew wide. As they watched, the form before them seemed to shimmer and blur, the old woman’s face misting in the hearthglow, the skin seeming to smooth and soften. The firelight flickered across the woman’s features, reshaping them with gentle fingers into that of a woman much, much younger.
“I lived there with my parents,” she went on in a hollow voice, “when the soldiers arrived. They began by shouting, demanding that everyone come to the center yard for inspection, and herding slow ones with jabs of their lances. Their horrible drogues, those armored war-beasts, frightened us with their snarling and stamping. We huddled terrified in the village clearing, awaiting our fate. I was never so afraid in my life.”
Still the fire did its magic, and its sculpting of the woman smoothed the wrinkles from her forehead and firmed her sagging skin. Memories brought her color up high, and her nostrils flared.
“Then they burned,” she said in a hard voice. “Burned our cottages to rout the sick and hiding. Anyone who at¬tempted to resist was impaled on a red crystal sword or crushed beneath the heavy claws of a drogue. Women screamed and cried. We little ones whimpered. Cottages burned and fell in on themselves, the straw curling to cinders and the blocks crumbling away.”
Her breathing quickened with purpose. The hands that clutched the arms of her chair were taut with emotion, yet looked rounded and smooth where before had been only bones clad in wrinkled skin.
“I was there when it all started,” she breathed. “I saw … the beginning.”
And in her eyes, the children thought they could see the magic image of a riotous burning cottage.
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