The Runes of Norien
Page 20
Time hardens a story as it does a tree; a few centuries, and it may grow to be a towering thing of solid, unyielding belief in its truth. And amongst the numerous myths that warmed the nights of generation upon generation of Feeres, feeding – and feeding on – their sweetly tingling dread as they huddled by the fireplace, grateful for having been spared of its hair-raising horrors, the story of the Disaster had become such a powerful presence.
For long before it became Feerien, the Sphere of Toil, the world of the six moons was a world of great fertility, prosperity and beauty: great peaceful seas of bright blue and sprawling forests in a thousand shades of green, purple mountains, golden fields and silver rushing falls and lakes, the lot of them a splendour to behold, and, scattered among them in a seemingly inexhaustible abundancy, fruits of the earth and beasts whose flesh brought bliss to the palate.
Three kingdoms ruled this marvel of a world, each of them strong and affluent enough to never seek more; and yet it’s in the nature of man to always seek more, to steal what lies within another’s grasp if only for the pleasure of the theft. Weak minds, urged by ill and devious counsel, started to prevail, till the three Kings, founding their acts on irrational fears, and dreaming of conquest idly as though digesting too rich food, they declared war on one another’s kingdoms.
And while this senseless war raged, nature was ravaged first of its magnificence and then of its very life; luscious woods were obliterated for the making of arrows and spears, glorious, timeless mountains were gutted out for the forging of swords and shields, and rivers that once ran fresh and clear as crystal were darkened by the blood of slain warriors whose bloated corpses infested the land.
Until, seeing no end to the erect beasts’ stupidity and fearing that their eternal home would end in lifelessness and filth, the Spirits of Life and Death summoned Their celestial destroyer, the Seventh Moon. A year it burned, next to its six pale siblings, and beneath the fire of its gaze all living things withered and died; onetime thriving plains were turned into deserts, oceans dried up and massive waves of scorching heat swept across the kingdoms, leaving nothing but dust in their wake.
And when the Seventh Moon finally, mercifully set, all that had survived its devastation was a shadow, a vague dream of that former paradise: some patches of earth that, over the centuries, would grow into the Farmlands and the Minelands, a seaside castle all but broken into pieces, and all around them desolation as far as the eye could see: Waste Valley, the Drowning Isles and the Dead Lands.
Thus went the story of the Disaster, handed down along the ages like a legacy of caution: Be prudent and frugal and try to do as little harm as possible, it seemed to say, for no one can imagine the horrors a second Disaster might bring.
But as the Shy Death crept across Feerien – and in a six-moon year at that –, many were those whose existence had been obscured by apprehension, and who, while waiting for a fitful sleep to claim them, or just as they emerged from it, frail and despondent, would look up fearfully at the sky, to make certain that no vast eye of red and black had risen to lay waste to the tatters of their lives.