The Dark Season Saga- the Final Harvest

by Yehya H Safwat

  I watched from the shadows, searching for another place to observe. My powers weren’t unbounded and the greatest limitation of my traveling to and from Veil was that it was not undetectable. Even just staying at the borders of shadows could be discovered by travelers of various sorts. The Folds weren’t mine only to use.

  The streets were clean and the event’s staff, from the Neligan guards to servants and organizers, were totally ready; everyone had memorized their role to the smallest detail. With the thousands of visitors expected, there was no room for mistakes and the beginning of the contest was only several hours away. Baneca had surely set up an event worthy of Lorken’s name.

  A few hours into the day, I stumbled across a familiar face: it was Maloch again. In scruffy clothing, he was walking across the busy streets like a lifeless zombie. I followed him to an alley and I was about to warn him not to walk through –I still hadn’t satisfied my curiosity towards him. He was not protected by guards like the majority of people back then. But it seemed he didn’t care, and that somehow protected him.

  In the alley, he paused for a moment, gazing at a dark corner. I tried to see who was there but wasn’t face enough. Maloch stepped toward the shadows and took a palm-size bag from the shadowy figure putting it in his pocket.

  I followed him when he left the alley. He didn’t pay any attention to the cheerful atmosphere and ignored any attempt to lure him into a shop or even look at anything offered to him. Then we reached the inn where he stayed.

  The inn was close enough to the main square. I climbed to the balcony, examining my surroundings and judged that it would make a nice vantage point. When Maloch entered the one-room apartment, he put the bag in a closet and collapsed on the bed. From the tiny dimly lit balcony I noticed his steady breath and realized that he fell asleep so I left my spot and walked towards the preparations.

  As hours went by, shrouded in my hood, I walked among the workers sitting in the shade of the buildings around the main square. Cautiously, I walked to the open area at the end of a street connecting the square to the far northeastern end of the city. There, by the bed of the Arcatur Mountain, the majority of the wealthy guests held their tents. A searched for the wooden sign with the same label I read in the Radimortum. Deep inside me, I wished never to find Anarca’s tent, but there it was, an ordinary looking tent without even a single guard.

  That is weird, I thought. He usually has security. Yet I knew I should wait till I was certain of Anarca’s whereabouts before I venture into his tent.

  Late that afternoon, I found myself jumping back into Maloch’s balcony and hid behind its wall as I watched him. He greatly puzzled me, and my curiosity drew me to his tail. Something in the ghostly white eyes of Sarin hooked me to him.

  Maloch was silent and distant, sitting in his chair in the dark and drinking. He often gazed out the window. An hour or so later, I subtly followed him when he ventured out. Skulking amidst the hundreds striding the streets, I watched him purchasing some stuff I couldn’t identify from shady tradesmen. I noticed that those tradesmen appear and vanish randomly in the obscure parts of Borg. When he was done with his purchases, he went to a spot in the slums where the silver marshes slithered between the houses and collected some of its water.

  I didn’t forget about the contest. When the parade preceding the contest started an hour or so before sunset, I saw how grand the event was. The guests were of the highest class. Adorning expensive clothes and eye-catching jewelry, they came from all races, riding their best mounts and accompanied by their most exotic slaves. From the eastern gate, they led their way to their chambers in the Governor’s Hall or the luxury inns.

  I was standing among the crowd when I noticed the people shuddering when they felt the earth shaking under the heavy steps of the Mimlak, the Cartanian black-furred, horned, giant bear. I turned to see three Mimlaks carrying their Minotaur masters.

  Spectators shivered at the sight of the Kracash, the half-crocodile, half-hippo mount bred in Setlock. Riding them were individuals of a human sub-race who lived in the Insane Marshes of Setlock.

  On heavily armored war horses, the narrow-eyed, proud Nelsians walked the streets of Borg. After them, the brown-skinned Zenian humans arrived in marvelous caravans.

  Hoofbeats echoed as the graceful Heralds carried their Dargos riders as they led the parade. Valadas the Grand Dargos walked among several high-ranking knights on his rare shadowy-gray Herald. One of the knights carried the banner of Robyn Day Bringer herself –that of a radiant shield. No one knew which one she was behind those fearsome helmets. It was a statement that the Eredians still rule their cities, not Baneca. People stood in awe as they gazed upon the march of the Dargos.

  Word had already spread that both the slave list and performers list were outstanding, so the diverse audience was little surprise. Other words spoke of a historic summit by the wrapping of the event. Everyone was curious, and I couldn’t blame them –nothing was more unlikely to happen than a slave exhibition in Eredia.

  Yet it was clear; Talor had come to Borg. And what came next was the solid proof.

  A few people aimed their attention towards the sky, their faces filled with fear and wonder. When I looked up, I saw a couple of Aerothian Pegasi carrying their Golden Maidens, soaring high in the gray sky of the city. What could possibly interest them in such a distasteful event ? I asked myself. Perhaps it is the meeting.

  The Pegasi landed atop the tallest building overlooking the square. The majority of those watching had heard the tales of those magnificent beings, but only an unlucky few ever met them, and this was in battle. The Aerothian Pegasus Riders were one of the terrifying forces among the Doster Rising Company. They were responsible for thousands of fatalities in the armies of the Chain of Cas. The governor’s Neligans watched them nervously. The Pegasi lingered for a brief moment and then flew away.

  The visitors who lingered on the outskirts hurried towards the main square as the sunset. They took seats beneath an enormous half-pavilion facing the stage. As the sun went down, the show began.

  Before I turned to leave for my spot in Maloch’s balcony, I heard a resonating, blood-chilling growl. At the tail of the line of visitors arriving at Borg, I saw the mobs making way for few riders.

  Then I saw the elves. Striding in breathtaking grace were a few elven Pishante, the tree-woven wolves, with their elf masters. I saw a banner bearing an oak tree surrounded by hues of the four elements in the shape of an erupting spring. Silence befell upon the street as people gazed upon the elven parade.

  “It is the banner of the Oaken Ring,” I heard one the visitors whispering to his companion, and I turned to see the solemn face of the one riding the first tree-woven wolf. Leading the elf parade was an elf in his late six hundreds. He resembled a man in his thirties, riding a burnt-brown Pishante, fire dimly blazed in his eyes

  “Aeron Windburn,” I heard someone say in awe. When I looked back at the elf, I saw him fit the description given by A’rak. Indeed what was in front of me was the last living son of Agathorn the Tempest and the last elven general

  The Neligan guards surrounded the elf parade nervously until the elves reached their destination; a big tree close to the event. Their color gradually changed from human-light brown to midnight green. In a matter of seconds, the elves had dissolved in the foliage of the small garden, leaving the Neligans who surrounded the garden confused and on their toes.

  As if the unrest that coincided with my arrival to Eredia hadn’t enough strange parts, another wind from the east hailed on its lands.

  ***

  The Talorians loved poems. From my spot in the balcony, I listened to the words of long-dead poets as the flowed across the city. Skillful enslaved artists hailing from different corners of Talor shaped some of the poems into beautiful songs. They echoed from the stage, reminding people of a time when words moved them.

  For others, things were not that amusing. For those not part of the event, for those in the slums or at the docks,
in the slave pens or the farms, atop the mountain or deep in the sea, the whole painting was mute. A cruel scene that had all the elements of life, but they kept fading one by one. The less fortunate felt themselves disappearing. As they did, they reached with their arms, trying to grab anything just to remain where they were … to merely exist. They screamed to be heard and if they couldn’t be, they would just hope that the spot where they used to exist would be noticed. Maybe they could be missed.

  It was a brutal world with no room for compassion and there was none expected.

  Knowing that the event was Baneca’s ‘gift’ to Eredia, I saw the first brushstroke of a hazy picture.

  The night of the first day of the event had almost passed, but nothing extraordinary occurred. I returned to Veil and decided to use the Realm of Shadow sparingly during my stay in Borg to minimize the risk of being exposed. So for that night, I put my Twin Daggers in my locker and conjured Cresh the Soothing, accepting her numbing tendrils caressing my doubts.

  At that moment, lying in bed and gazing to the swirling vortex above me, I heard something. It took me a moment to detect its source: the closet. I cautiously approached and opened it to find Yoppa and Yarpus, the twin daggers, lying quietly.

  A silence hung in the air, as though they had been talking to one another. I didn’t know why it felt like they had a guilty aura as if they were talking to each other but had stopped the moment I opened the closet. They seemed odd that moment, their dark and light contrast seemed more distinctive. When I held them in my hands, they just felt different.

  When I put them back in their spot and headed to my bed in the unlit room, they spoke again. That time I heard them clearly. After a century of silence, Yoppa and Yarpus spoke. All they said was “Salitar.”

  Brown Eyes

  I woke up with a word resonating in my subconscious; Salitar. Though it sounded like Eran-tongue, I had no idea what it meant.

  I took a swim in the cold silent lake, basking atop the faint glimmer of my treasure in the bleak morning of Veil. I gazed upon it, more than fifty feet below.

  Sherako’s grunt interrupted my thoughts, and I turned to see him in his tiger form on the hill nearby staring up into the sky. I looked up there and saw a falling star. It was dying, a comet that dived beyond the ether. I swam on my back with my eyes fixed on the fading star. Whose star is that? Judging by the length of its tail it must have been falling for a few weeks by now. Who or what faded in Talor? Who has fallen?

  As I swam, I decided that what was happening in Borg shouldn’t be ignored. I was a taker and a watcher. If Sherako was directing me to a legacy worth collecting, I must find it. There was anger as well; I was the knower of secrets, and I was gazing at a picture I couldn’t see.

  I finished my swim and returned to my room to prepare for the day. When I stepped outside again, I saw Sherako’s enormous shadowy figure lurking a couple of feet from the lake. He glanced every now and then to that falling star, growling faintly. I watched the star vanish behind the gloom covering Borg. Sherako turned to me with those black and secretive eyes.

  “What is happening in that city, my friend? What does Anarca have that you want me to find?”

  He ran to the hill where he faded away, phasing back to Borg. Despite knowing that I could be making a mistake, I followed Sherako back to Talor, onto Maloch’s balcony.

  Maloch wasn’t there when I arrived, but I had other concerns.

  The conflict between the Dargos and the Chain of Cas was a dangerous song to dance to. I had to monitor the primary mark Sherako picked for me. Anarca was no ordinary mark; the Chain of Cas’s Grand Evocke was a dangerous target. I didn’t even know what Sherako was after, and that made my mission even more dangerous. When I ventured into Anarca’s tent, I must be sure that he wouldn’t find me there.

  I sneaked to his tent in stealth and watched it carefully as I planned my next step.

  Few hours had passed, when all of a sudden I heard something.

  From blocks away below the deafening sound of the grand event and the riotous streets of Borg, there was an undetectable susurration, too low to be heard by non-Genn ears. It would take an ear like mine, trained to hear a spider’s conscience grumble, blaming it for the fly it just ate, to hear that faint sound. It was not a physical sound, but more of a calling which I heard with my soul.

  Everything else fell into silence when I saw her. A golden-haired girl was walking head-down, broken body and soul in that long, unnoticed parade. A parade of zombie-like, chained humans and humanoids of various races, herded like cattle across the streets.

  Slave merchants surrounded the parade like a pack of hyenas. One of them got close to the girl and grabbed her hair, violently examining her face and build as he pulled her head to one side and the other. She screamed in pain and anger, but the guards ran in her direction, hastily silencing her. The half a dozen Neligan guards looked around nervously. When nothing happened, they backed away and continued prodding the slaves onward.

  When they got near the square, one of the guards ran ahead. I didn’t think that there was anything remotely illegal in what they were doing, so what could cause such caution in Edwin’s men?

  The Neligan guard who had gone ahead rushed back and talked to the leader of the parade. The leader looked concerned and then galloped towards the large square ahead.

  From my spot, in Maloch’s balcony, where I lurked shrouded behind the branches of the tall trees, I saw a group of five Dargos in the main square, where the parade was heading.

  The Dargos stood in their silver, full plate armor in front of a smithy examining some armors. I could see A’tor and Agat with them.

  I could see the cart Maloch had brought to Borg in that slave parade. The cage housing that being was still in it.

  I looked back toward the unnoticed girl, with her delicate, bruised body. While other slaves moaned with pain and fatigue, she was merely whispering. With a great effort, I managed to read her lips. “Hope is never far,” she was repeating over and over, like a mantra.

  “Yarpus,” came a whisper from my daggers. I looked at them, wondering why all of a sudden they had become loquacious.

  My attention snapped back outside when Agat grabbed A’tor’s arms, waving for him to follow him towards another shop. As the Dargos moved away, I saw A’tor pause. He stood in deep focus, listening to something. The young knight then caught up with Agat, but not without one last glance in the direction of the slave parade.

  In the streets of the city, a voice bellowed from an undetectable location, the same voice of the crazed monk,

  “THE HERALDS OF THE DARGOS WALK PROUDLY AND NEIGH.

  BUT AGAINST THE ROAR OF OUR DARK AGE IT IS JUST A SIGH”

  Chapter Four

  Into the Light

  Point of No Return

  I noticed something happening at the governor’s hall, not more than a hundred feet from the balcony I lurked in. The Neligan guards posted outside shot to their feet when a man passed them, pushing the doors aside and entering the hall. The man wore an exquisite flowing red robe and dark green cloak marked with the black sigil of the Chain of Cas, the Fist of Levust. That sigil resembled a fist tightly holding a chain.

  He wielded a staff of dark metal, and I easily recognized him: Anarca.

  I would not have another window of opportunity like that one, where I was certain of Anarca’s whereabouts. I was ready to venture into his tent. I moved to the far northwestern corner of the city, but not without one last look at the golden-haired slave girl. I watched as she entered the slave pens below the governor’s mansion.

  I appeared behind the back of the tent, listening.

  Nothing. No guards, no chains blocking the entrance, no alarms... nothing seemed to stand between me and the interior of the tent.

  An invitation? Is there nothing valuable in there? Yet the most logical explanation was that no one dared to bother the Chain of Cas or its Evocke.

  Raising the back flap of the tent and peekin
g inside, I saw carelessly piled stuff in the corner of the faintly lit, twenty-foot wide space. A white sheet covered the pile concealing its content. In the center of the room, I saw a pedestal atop which a glass box was placed. Inside it, emerging from the pedestal, an ash-gray sculpted hand held a scroll case. The case was made of a strange dark material, and its blackness seemed to absorb the light. I had to hold it in my hands to identify it, though I had the feeling I knew that metal. From that distance, I saw that the end of the case had some strange silver markings on one side. The other end had another silvery marking that resembled a human hand clawing through something. The workmanship was unknown to me, but it was beautiful and irresistible. Still, I wasn’t there to indulge my desires.

  What is in that scroll case? What are you dragging me into, Sherako ? I wondered.

  I stepped inside the tent, scanning my surroundings and focusing on each sound intently. Even a fly flapping wouldn’t escape my senses.

  With thorough examination, I saw that no spell protected the sculpted hand or the scroll case. There was no trap or alarm trigger that might alert a hidden guardian or even Anarca. From that close proximity, the material of the scroll case was clearer and it seemed more familiar to me.

  Eternus? I wondered with bewilderment.

  That was it. I could never resist an item made of Eternus. So, trusting the result of my examination, I mustered my courage. I stretched my hands toward the priceless scroll case.

  A second later, I was holding the tip of the scroll case, motionless, as if petrified. I stared at its other end, where there was someone else holding it too.

  I was not mistaken; there was no alarm trigger calling some guardian. The hand was the guardian. The animated, huge gray hand was holding the other end of the case with a firm grip.

  How have my skills failed me?

  "Genn," a crude whispering voice called from under the ground. "Focus now, for you are in one of the turning points of your life.”