The Lure of Fools

by Jason James King

  “I wasn’t caught, except by my own shame. I was overcome with remorse, and self-loathing, and retreated to the garden where the Spirit lily grew. There I knelt in prayer for hours, begging the Divine Mother for forgiveness, and pleading with her to cure my wicked inclination. A cure I repeated over and over again, all I desire is a cure, I sobbed.

  “Finally, when the aching of my knees and the sheer emotional exhaustion became too much, I stood to leave. That’s when I heard the voice.”

  “The Spirit lily?” Graelle scrutinized the white petals of the flower.

  “It came to me in the voice of a little girl.”

  “What did she say?”

  Irvis hesitated. “Now this is the part you are sure to find difficult to accept.”

  She scoffed. “We are sitting in a garden of a tower in the legendary lost city of the Allosians discussing a talking flower while the world outside is supposedly ending. I am very much beyond difficult to accept.”

  Irvis gently took her shoulders, sat her up, and turned her so that the two were facing each other. “The little girl voice said to me this is your cure, and then…”

  Irvis glanced away, his chubby face flushing red.

  Graelle furrowed her brow. “What?”

  “The flower showed me a vision.”

  “What did you see?” She lovingly rubbed his arm. This was obviously difficult, and she was trying to be encouraging.

  Irvis met her eyes. “I saw you.”

  Graelle hadn’t expected him to say that.

  She pulled her hand back. “What do you mean you saw me?”

  “I saw you, but it was more than just seeing. I felt your soul, and knew you. I saw your life. I saw your struggles, I saw when your only remaining family, a sister, turned her back on you. I saw you degrading yourself to survive, I saw you kill―”

  “Stop it!” Graelle shook her head. “That’s impossible.”

  Irvis flashed a sad smile. “But most of all, I felt something I’d never felt before. It was strong, and invincible. It swept away my petty lusts and I knew what it was–love.”

  Tears rolled down Graelle’s cheeks. She stared at the Spirit lily, ashamed that Irvis was seeing her cry. “H-how long ago was that?”

  “Years ago.”

  Graelle sniffed. “Then why didn’t you come to me sooner?”

  “I didn’t know who you were. I mean, I knew that you were a Rikujo guild boss, but I didn’t know what you looked like and so I couldn’t make the connection. Besides, I was supposed to be celibate. Finding you meant leaving the brotherhood, and I wasn’t ready for that.” He cupped her chin and gently turned her face back to look at him. “But when I saw you in Imaris, I remembered the vision.”

  Could it really be true? It wasn’t the supernatural powers at play that warred with Graelle’s acceptance of the story, but her own sense of self-loathing and worthlessness. Why would any god or goddess recommend her to a man like Irvis? Someone who, despite his flaws, was earnestly trying to follow a path to the divine?

  “I…” Graelle began.

  Shouting.

  They both turned toward the direction of the garden’s entrance–which was mostly concealed by greenery–and jumped when Lord Gymal rushed in. And he wasn’t alone. A young woman with tan skin and black hair worn in a ponytail, ran in after him followed by…

  “Mulladin!” Irvis shouted. He scrambled to his feet and then helped her to stand, keeping an arm around her waist. “Where have…”

  Graelle felt Irvis stiffen. “Divine Mother!”

  Graelle didn’t know what had stunned Irvis, but her gaze settled on a finely crafted weapon Mulladin held in his hand. It had a large amethyst jewel in the center of its cross guard and a sleek blade peppered with tiny emeralds. Graelle knew that weapon. She’d seen it hanging at the waist of Argentus himself. It was the sword of the Invincible Shadow.

  Kairah’s spell-casting was growing weaker. To her mounting horror, it’d become impossible for her to cast from the Third Discipline–Space, and the Fourth Discipline–the collection of spells that made up the Sensory discipline. That was likely the reason she could no longer communicate with Aeva when out of the Spirit lily’s immediate presence. Of course, that didn’t account for her not being able to speak with Aeva when she briefly visited her after taking Jekaran and the others to her apartments. Was that three days ago, or four? She was losing track of time. Another symptom of my deteriorating state? Or was it just that Shivara was working her relentlessly?

  The eccentric Allosian oracle had Kairah sitting in the silver chair–a talis Shivara named the Zikkurat–for hours at a time, after which she would demand detailed accounts of what Kairah saw. Apparently, only one with the ability to see the weaves of fate could use this particular talis. Kairah didn’t know why Shivara never sat in the chair herself, but assumed it to be part of the oracle’s training.

  While all of Kairah’s other spell-casting powers were diminishing–even her prodigious talent in the First Discipline, Creation, was suffering–her sense of fate and ability to see into time remained strong. Perhaps that was the purpose of Shivara making her use the Zikkurat so much? Could constant use of Apeiron to cast certain spells slow Moriora’s creeping corruption? Like a muscle being exercised to avoid atrophy?

  Her latest excursion of seer-ship ended, and Kairah leaned forward in the chair. She was growing physically tired, something that shouldn’t be happening in the presence of the Mother Shard. She wiped her forehead with the back of her hand.

  Shivara immediately began her interrogation. “Did you see him?”

  Why can she not give me a moment’s rest?

  Kairah shook her head. “I saw a swarm of locusts descending on a bountiful field of wheat. A white eagle followed, intent on devouring them. An army of little reptiles awaited the swarm, but the locusts had stingers with venom strong enough to kill both the lizards and the eagle, and…”

  “No, child,” Shivara snapped. “The future is protected by a strata of symbolism designed to veil its true meaning. An oracle has to push through that imagery to see the true vision. You have to cast your mind forth and not let distraction slow your momentum. Otherwise you will not punch through the stream of time.”

  “I apologize, mistress. I am fatigued. Perhaps that is making it difficult for me to reach the highest state of seeing.”

  Shivara stared at her for a long moment. “It’s the corruption.” She turned away and idly spun a metal spiral resting on one of the room’s many tables. “It’s making your body less able to absorb Apeiron, and so you will start wanting to sleep, and”―she hesitated―“eat. I will have Etele fetch you some fruit.”

  The willowy girl entered the room immediately as though she’d been waiting just outside the door for Shivara’s telepathic call. But perhaps that wasn’t the case. The woman stepped up to Shivara and stared her in the eyes. As always, Etele did not utter a single word and so their communication must’ve been psychic.

  “At the College of Disciplines?” Shivara answered back aloud, like Kairah did with Aeva whenever possible. Contrary to what Kairah originally thought, it was as if Shivara was weak in the Fourth Discipline, like Kairah herself. For she always addressed Etele audibly.

  I am entirely powerless in that Discipline now. The thought was bitter and stoked the quick fires of Kairah’s increasingly chaotic anger. She reined it in.

  Most Allosian spell-casters when in the presence of an Aeose would spell-cast for even the most trivial of reasons. In fact, they were encouraged by their teachers to do so whenever they could and for whatever reason. It helped train them, and develop their abilities. Shivara wasn’t like that. She employed a lot of talises, none of which she used directly.

  Well, she is almost a thousand years old. Perhaps her conservative nature is a holdover from a different time.

  Shivara’s age still astonished Kairah. She’d been told all her life that Allosians rarely reached more than four centuries in age. Yet this woman had
existed for over twice that, still looking as young as Kairah herself.

  “That doesn’t concern me. Go.” Shivara waved a hand at Etele. “Fetch Kairah some of those blue bulbs from the Levanta tree you’ve been cultivating.”

  Etele nodded obediently and then disappeared through the doorway.

  “Thank you, mistress.”

  Shivara smiled. “Tell me again of the man you saw in your initial vision.”

  That irritated Kairah. Shivara was obsessed over the being with metallic-gold hair, the one who’d appeared to a clandestine circle of human worshippers and given them something. “He was tall, perfectly proportioned, had shoulder-length glowing hair the color of burnished gold. He wore a sleeveless robe of white that also appeared to glow, and―”

  “And he said nothing to you?”

  Kairah hesitated. The oracle hadn’t asked that question before. “No, mistress. I was but an invisible observer of all the events in that vision–as always.”

  Shivara glared at Kairah. It was a look of such sharp anger and accusation that Kairah actually sat back in the chair, as though too close to a burning flame.

  Why is she angry with me? If Kairah didn’t know better, Shivara looked as though she were reacting to someone lying to her.

  The expression passed as fast as it had come, and Shivara replaced it with another one of her smiles. “It will take Etele several minutes to return with the fruit. Why don’t we invoke one more vision and then we can rest for a while.”

  That sounded very appealing. Kairah nodded, trying to ignore her increasingly demanding hunger pangs and sat back in the Zikkurat. She closed her eyes and let the talis’s disconcerting sensation of detachment wash over her. It swept away her sense of physical self, which did make her hunger and fatigue fade into background noise.

  “Try again to direct the vision,” Shivara said from somewhere far away. “Channel them as they come, ignoring irrelevant details and focusing on what it is you need to see.”

  The prospect of controlling her oracular experiences was new to Kairah. It made sense though. An oracle wouldn’t be as valuable if she couldn’t find answers to specific questions. She regretted more and more procrastinating her training with Shivara.

  “Think on the man with the gold hair.” Shivara’s voice was no more than an echo now.

  Kairah tried to do as Shivara wanted, but each time she entered the Zikkurat’s trance, the golden-haired man seemed unimportant. Other matters drew her clairvoyant attention. Clouds of thickening blackness unfurled up and down the continent’s western coast, emerald lightning striking down upon the land accompanied by a translucent green wind that destroyed everything it touched.

  Past or future?

  She often grappled with the difficulty of placing the chronology of what she was seeing. Sometimes a vision would start in the past and then suddenly shift to the future. Kairah wasn’t certain how she could tell, but found that scrutinizing the images eventually yielded the answer as to whether she was seeing history or prophecy.

  A nagging fear rose in her mind. What she was seeing was neither past nor future, but the present. This was happening now. Moriora’s vessel, Karak’s Eater, was sucking the life from the world on a massive scale.

  Karak was right; he did not die in Taris. He has become far more powerful, his reach exponentially wider. I have to stop this!

  Kairah wrestled with the stream of information deluging her, focusing not on Shivara’s question, but on her own need. Where was the Eater? How was he doing this? How could she destroy him before he destroyed them all?

  Kairah felt the vision contorting, shifting, changing shape. It was as if she were bending a bar of metal, difficult but with the right amount of pressure… Again, ancient Allose appeared before her, but it was populated not by Allosians, but humans.

  Thousands gathered around the base of three mountainous staircases leading up to a circular platform at the top. Kairah had seen this structure in her first vision, though now hundreds did gather on the platform, all bowing reverently. A column of white light descended from above, touching the center of the platform. When it faded, the silver-haired woman stood in the center of the kneeling humans. She smiled at them, as a parent smiles lovingly at their playing children.

  The blonde woman with the familiar face Kairah had seen in her first vision, the one who secretly communed with the apparition of the golden-haired man, rose before the goddess. Her hands were locked together as if in pleading. The goddess smiled indulgently, glanced around the crowd, and then nodded. She raised an open hand and white light coalesced into a pulsating orb, like a miniature sun. The sphere of perfect white energy faded, leaving behind a small object in the goddess’s hand–a ring.

  Kairah scrutinized the ring and immediately could make out the etchings of lilies running along its silver band. She knew that talis. It was the ring the human Irvis had found, the talis that produced an energy stronger and purer than Apeiron.

  The silver-haired goddess slumped her shoulders as if weary. The blonde woman nodded at a man to her right who reached out and collected the ring from the goddess. She gave the man a tired smile and then met the eyes of the blonde woman standing directly in front of her. Something seemed to pass between them, and then the blonde woman’s blue eyes hardened. She whipped up her right hand and manifested a ball of emerald energy in the shape of a flickering flame. The goddess’s eyes widened, and she leapt back, throwing both of her arms out in the process, palms turned out as if to push back an attacker.

  A heartbeat later the green flame exploded into a beam of energy that struck for the silver-haired woman’s heart. It smashed against an invisible wall just inches from the goddess’s palms. The beam of emerald light split into five crackling bolts of electricity arcing wildly in the air. The five lines of green lightning encircled a translucent sphere that had formed around the goddess. The glass-like sphere expanded outward, and the green electricity wove together around it.

  The blonde woman’s eyes widened, and she retreated, pushing through the crowd of on-looking humans and flying down the stairs. A few others followed–members of the woman’s cabal to be sure. Waves of power erupted from the cage of green lightning surrounding the goddess and her protective barrier, and the ground shook.

  The crowd of humans standing on the platform fled, joining the throng of thousands watching from below into a wild mob of chaotic flight. The stairs supporting the platform swayed, shook, cracked, and then collapsed. The circular platform fell away, leaving the goddess, her barrier, and its cage of electricity hanging in the empty air.

  Pulses of white light pushed through the green electricity, but dimmed upon contact, and changed to a purple Kairah knew all too well–Apeiron. The blasts of white, then purple energy increased until they shot out from the goddess in every direction. The cage of emerald lightning, however, did not dissipate. It expanded with each wave of the goddess’s repelling spell, and amethyst crystal formed like frost and started encasing the green power that attempted to crush her.

  The ball of warring colors fell from the air and smashed into the pavement below with an explosion that rocked the entire city. Fissures snaked out from the point of impact, breaking up manicured stone and causing buildings to sway and collapse. The light from the explosion faded, although Allose continued to shake with increasingly violent quakes. At the point of impact there was a hole in the ground opening into a bottomless shaft. Apeiron, like a geyser of purple lava, shot thousands of feet into the air. It slowly crystalized and hardened into a towering amethyst obelisk; the Mother Shard.

  Smaller towers of purple crystal erupted from the ground all over Shaelar, many of them exploding up through cities in seismic catastrophes that killed thousands.

  The vision shifted.

  The blonde woman with her group of conspirators stood at the base of the Mother Shard. Their eyes were closed and they were chanting something Kairah couldn’t hear. When they finished their spell, a blast of Apeiron exploded from
the Mother Shard, expanding outward across the continent.

  As the wave of power passed through the blonde woman, her hair and eyes changed. No longer did she have curly yellow tresses, but instead long, straight strands of jewel-colored hair fell to her shoulders. Her eyes changed to purple, and the peach color of her skin paled to an alabaster white. As the wave of power passed over the land, it wrought like changes in all the humans it touched. But the pulse of Apeiron weakened the farther from the Mother Shard it traveled only to dissipate entirely before it could reach all the cities in Shaelar.

  The millions of humans that remained unchanged were located mostly on the western half of Shaelar’s ancient super continent. Kairah saw them band together over the years, joining thousands of Allosians to oppose what had been done to their goddess. They made talises of all varieties for the humans, talises to aid in everyday life and travel. But mostly, they created weapons.

  Kairah saw the humans, aided by their comparatively few Allosian allies, marching against others of their kind in battles and fighting with displays of incredible power. The war lasted for decades, with the human rebels gaining little ground. Emissaries from Allose were sent to the west to broker peace with the humans. Included among the envoy were some of the original conspirators who had aided the blonde woman in her treachery against the goddess. They lived among the humans, preaching to them in an effort to sway them to their side. More years passed, and while open war had ceased, the battle raged on in argument and politics.

  The scene shifted again to the nightmare Kairah had already beheld. Moriora vessels attacking Allosians and humans, an emerald-colored Apeira well cracked and broken. A massive quake collapsing thousands of miles and replacing them with what was now the west sea. It continued longer than it had the first time, showing Kairah the humans, now separated by an ocean, hastily building a fleet of wooden ships. No more Allosians could be found among them, but Kairah did see that some of the humans now had green eyes. They abandoned their ruined cities and homes, launching into an unfamiliar sea under a sky churning with black clouds and illuminated by flashes of green lightning.