The tide of unmaking, p.23
The Tide of Unmaking, page 23
part #3 of Berinfell Prophesies Series
“Haven’t we all at times?” Tommy asked.
“Look,” Jimmy said. “Joost look at the timing of all this. We’ve been without Jett for seven years now. And yet, joost when the Tide of Unmaking is unleashed, joost when the new prophecy is discovered and we need a Seventh, Taeva shows oop. Isn’t that joost like Ellos?”
“Ellos’ timing is perfect,” Grimwarden said. “Have you all prayed?”
“I have,” Tommy said. “A lot.”
The rest nodded.
“Well?” Grimwarden asked. “What did you learn?”
“Learn?” Kat asked.
“From Ellos,” Grimwarden replied. “Did you learn His will in this?”
Kat shook her head. “No definite answer,” she said. “I had a hard time focusing my mind. This seems so important, but my prayers felt like they were bouncing off the ceiling.”
“Mine too,” Tommy said. “A lot of my prayers have felt that way lately.”
“As have mine,” Grimwarden said reluctantly.
“Just because we ask,” Goldarrow said, “does not obligate Ellos to speak to us. Much that we need to know, we can discover in His written word. Much we cannot tell until the right time has come.”
Grimwarden nodded with gusto. “That is wisdom if I have ever heard it,” he said.
“I call a vote,” Tommy said. “But we do it the old way, the way my great grandsire did it in Berinfell’s first age thousands of years ago. You have all worn your medallions, I see. We will douse all candles. In the darkness, pray and think and ultimately decide. If you wish Taeva to join our ranks, to become a Lord of Berinfell, then place your medallion on the silver tree on the candle stand in front of you. If you do not believe she should become one of us, then keep your medallion around your neck.”
“I am impressed, Tommy,” Grimwarden said. “That is an old tradition. Very old.”
“I did some reading,” he said. “The wisdom of our past. I thought it might help.”
“It might indeed.”
“Now,” Tommy said. “Blow out your candles.”
They did, and the throne hall was plunged into darkness.
“Once you’ve cast your vote,” Tommy explained, “Say your own name. Attendants, when you’ve heard each of the Six Lords, ignite the dremask braziers.”
The hall plunged into a silence as impenetrable as the darkness. There were no murmurs, no whispers, no creaks of chairs or squeak of boots on the floor. This was a solemn time.
“Felheart Silvertree,” Tommy said, his voice echoing faintly.
And, after broad spans of silence, punctuated by Lordly names, the final name was spoken.
“Alreenia Hiddenblade,” Kat said.
And the Throne Hall attendants restored the light.
23: Misguided Vengeance
“MY LIEGE, IF I MAY be so bold,” bowed Priest Dhrex.
“You were bold once already,” Vault Minister Ghrell spat. “And that is one too many times, I fear.”
“I was only asking that you consider—”
“And in front of the Conclave, too,” Ghrell continued. “I tell you, Priest, if you were not under the protection of the Sacred Sanctuary, I’d have your wings torn off and your body piked atop the Central Spire.”
Dhrex swallowed. The image of his wingless body run through with a Nemic polearm forced bile up his throat.
The pair talked on the third balcony of the Vault Minister’s palatial home high atop one of thousands of red-rock spires in the Nemic mountain-desert of Tere Solium. The sedimentary towers were perfect protection from ground invaders. Meanwhile the arid climate forced any assailing army to double their food rations, making any prolonged siege nearly impossible.
The easterly setting sun flared red against the spires and sent long tendrils of shadow across the barren, undulating ground hundreds of feet below.
“Recognizing your restraint,” Dhrex continued, feeling only slightly more bold at the Vault Minister’s adherence to the Spirit Laws, “and trusting in your continued veneration of the Sacred Priests, I must insist that your judgement may be misplaced in this matter, and it’s my job to present you unbiased wisdom.”
Ghrell’s eyes burned with fury, and every thorny plate on his abdomen bristled. “Unbiased wisdom…” the Vault Minister repeated, turning his eyes away from the impertinent fool before him. “Wisdom is such a temperamental thing.”
The Priest followed the Vault Minister’s gaze to the horizon. “Temperamental, my liege?”
“Wisdom says this, wisdom says that. And then it changes based on the mind of the speaker. It shifts with the wind, shifts with the passing of ages.”
“I can see your point, but I—”
“Yet the wisdom of our ancestors is of inestimable worth.” Ghrell turned to Dhrex and drilled him with a glare. “Such wisdom is far beyond what we can manage in this day. Wouldn’t you agree, Priest?” he spat out the word Priest.
Dhrex rustled his wings awkwardly. “Well, yes, the wisdom of those who’ve gone before us is certainly one of the pinnacles of our—”
“So I wonder. I wonder what wisdom motivated our ancestors to defend themselves against the woodland parasites.”
“Woodland parasites?” Dhrex frowned. “I…I don’t follow. If you could…”
“And when our people rose up to fight, were they not cast down from the sky and dashed upon the forest floor of the infidels? Tell me, Priest.” Ghrell’s eyes had an eerie light behind them. “I said, tell me. Is it not the Sacred Texts themselves which designate us as the First Born of Allyra? Are we not those who were called to reign and rule upon the holy grounds without and within?”
“Vault Minister Ghrell, perhaps you are misinterpreting—”
Ghrell’s hand shot up and encased the Priest’s throat, choking his airway.
“Perhaps it is you, young Priest, who needs reminding of precisely what the Elves have done to our people.”
Ghrell lifted the pitiful Servant of Allyra off the floor by his neck. Dhrex’s eyes bulged as he struggled to squirm free, but Ghrell held him close and spat as he spoke, “Study the ancient words, imp! Then you would see what the heretical Elves are hiding from the faithful Nemic…from all of Allyra. And—”
A blinding white light exploded in the city somewhere below, the intensity so strong that Ghrell shrank back and dropped Dhrex to the floor.
Suddenly the light changed to blue followed by the ear-shattering sound of splitting stone. Dhrex crawled to the balcony’s edge while Ghrell took flight, both of them with mouths and eyes gaping wide. Spreading out over the ground was a massive, azure blanket of shimmering water. But rather than fill in the barren wasteland, it hovered in a horizontal plane, suspended in mid air.
Then, the Vault Minister and the Priest heard the screams.
Stone at the bases of no less than fifty spires cracked and splintered, and slowly the towers began to fall. But they did not shift and topple. They dropped straight down into the shimmering, surreal plane. Some sort of sucking gravity drew them down at increasing speed such that few Nemic citizens had time to fly out from their dwellings. Spires, homes of thousands, slid away into nothingness.
Dhrex suddenly realized just which spires these were. “Mother Allyra, save us,” he whispered. “The hatcheries.”
“NO!” Ghrell yelled, his voice instantly hoarse. He clambered toward the balcony’s edge, leaped, and shot down toward the aberration.
The sound hit him like the ringing of hammers. Stone cracking, concussive waves like thunder, but something more as well. There was a kind of thin, high wail that seared through armor and flesh to rattle his skeleton. It was grief and agony on a scale Ghrell never thought possible. It was the sound of hundreds of Nemic children and their attendants shrieking in horror.
Ghrell beat his wings with the pull of gravity, diving toward the descending spires with complete disregard for his own life. But there was nothing he could do. Not even halfway to the cataclysmic event, the towers disappeared completely, the cries of the children vanishing as one.
Ghrell roared, diving faster and faster. From Dhrex’s angle he was sure the Vault Minister would follow them into the mystical blue sea. But before Ghrell could reach it the plane snapped shut with a thunderous boom that knocked the Vault Minister out of the air.
Dhrex had forgotten about the searing pain around his neck and flew down toward the Vault Minister. The whole thing had happened so fast; the Priest was still trying to make sense of it all. As he flew, Dhrex noticed Nemic taking to the evening sky, surely searching for the cause of so much chaos.
“Vault Minister!” Dhrex called. “Vault Minister!”
Ghrell lay on his back amongst some large red stones. Dhrex descended upon him. “Can you hear me, my liege?”
The Vault Minister moaned, struggling to open his eyes.
“It’s me, Dhrex!”
Ghrell hissed at the sound of the Priest’s name, then coughed up blood. “Are they gone, fool?”
The Priest looked up at the circular vacancy, appearing like a field full of freshly hewn tree stumps. Dhrex nodded. “Yes, sire. All gone.”
The Vault Minister swore in Nemic, struggling to prop himself up on his elbows. “Don’t touch me,” he said when Dhrex tried to assist. Ghrell wanted to see it for himself. He squinted, forcing his eyes to focus on the absence of so many spires in his beloved city.
The sight was more painful than anything he could imagine. Absolute grief. He could barely think, fighting back the insignificance of the injuries that threatened to take his life in favor of the pain of losing so many innocent lives. It was incredulous too; beyond the depth of his imagination to comprehend. How could this happen? How could such a thing be possible? Nothing on Allyra’s shining face had such destructive power.
Ghrell coughed again, using his wing to wipe blood out of the corner of his mouth. It was then, from the very corner of his eye, he spotted something in the sky. A distant blur at first, even with his exceptional Nemic farsight, but then gradually coming into focus. When it did, his heart nearly stopped.
“LOOK!” the Vault Minister cried.
Dhrex turned to follow Ghrell’s outstretched finger. “I don’t see, my liege. Your people have taken flight. They’ve come to—”
“LOOK, YOU FOOL! IN THE DISTANCE!”
Dhrex looked again, past the crimson spires, past the swarming Nemic and further back over the northern mountain range. A tiny speck hovered above the border of their lands. Dhrex blinked through three sets of corneas, magnifying the speck to 25 times its size.
It was an Elven Scout on a Scarlet Raptor.
“No,” Dhrex thought. “It cannot be.”
“YET, IT IS!” Ghrell snarled, climbing to his feet and shoving the Priest aside. “As I have told you!” He flapped his wings, struggling to take flight. Sand sprayed Dhrex as the Vault Minister ambled up to join his onlooking masses above. “LOOK UPON OUR FOES, MY PEOPLE!” he pointed to the horizon. “SEE HOW THE ELVES BESET US FROM AFAR AND MURDER OUR CHILDREN! COWARDICE!”
The host of Nemic fliers turned to discover exactly what their leader pointed at. Thousands of sets of eyes cycled through their lenses and focused in on the Elven Scout far in the distance.
Ghrell sat at his empty dining hall table gnawing off the heads of rock beetles. Normally he enjoyed the bowl of his favorite delicacy. But today he was absent from the pleasure of it. His thoughts were elsewhere.
“Vault Minister Ghrell?” came an attendant at the far end of the room.
Ghrell didn’t even register the summons, his articulated jaw grinding away on a recently deceased beetle. He was preparing for war. But something bothered him, something he cared not to admit. And if he was going to lead his people to annihilate the Elven race, he couldn’t afford to be bothered by doubts.
Still, the thought scratched the back of his skull like a disgruntled sand flea. The strange blue apparition that stole so many innocent lives…was it really the Elves’ doing? Was Dhrex correct in his caution?
Ghrell swallowed. Perhaps he’d been too hasty to accuse the Elves of this bloodshed. Perhaps Dhrex’s ideas needed hearing out.
“No,” Ghrell spat the remains of a rock beetle carcass onto the floor. “No, he isn’t right.” He still came to the same conclusion he’d all but voiced down below: war would be the only response.
The attendant tried a little louder. “Vault Minister Ghrell?”
“WHAT?!” Ghrell roared.
“S-s-sir, your scouts bring word.”
“Send them in.” Ghrell reached for another rock beetle trying to escape from the bowl.
Two Nemic scouts covered in dust and bleached from long hours in the sun strode into the dining hall and saluted their Vault Minister.
“What news do you bring?” Ghrell said, his eyes focused on the the beetle he was slowly squeezing to death.
“Vault Minister, we bring word of…” the lead scout hesitated, then looked to the other. They’d rehearsed this before they landed, but now the words were hard to find. “…Word of—”
“SPIT IT OUT,” roared Ghrell. “Or get out of my hall before I bite your heads off too.”
“Well, your Vaultship, it’s just that…”
“We honestly don’t know what to call what we’ve seen,” said the second scout.
Ghrell mocked them. “You honestly don’t know what to call—what in Allyra are you babbling about? OUT! GET OUT!” Then Ghrell stuffed the beetle in his mouth.
The attendant started to usher them out when the first scout yelled over his shoulder, “It’s a Curtain of Doom.”
For the first time since they entered, Ghrell looked toward the scouts who were now almost out the door. He let the chewed-up flesh of the beetle slide out of his mouth and pile onto the table. “You said what?”
The attendant and the two scouts stopped, then turned back around.
“In the East, Mother Allyra bends from a plague of unmentionable description,” said the second scout.
“Well, try,” answered Ghrell.
The first scout stepped forward. “It’s a wall of light,” he said. “Like a rippling curtain stretching from horizon to horizon. It moves ever so slowly. Quite impressive, glimmering, colorful. But wherever the wall meets the ground, the terrain is utterly consumed.”
“Consumed,” Ghrell repeated.
“It is simply no more,” said the second scout. “We fired bolts into the apparition to see what would happen.”
“And?” asked Ghrell, growing weary of coaxing information from his scouts.
“Well, sir, it vanished,” said the second scout. “Consumed in a flash. No more.”
“No more…” Ghrell reached for another beetle and tore off the head with his teeth. Whatever doubts he’d suffered a moment ago, they were put to flight. Dhrex was just as pitiful with his assumptions as Ghrell suspected. Wait until the Priest hears this, Ghrell thought. Then he’ll see. Ghrell cursed himself for wanting the Priest’s approval so much. If only he weren’t the—he stopped the thought from going any further.
“It’s the Elves,” Ghrell finally said. “Bent on wiping us from the face of Allyra.” The Vault Minister stood up and pushed his chair aside. Blood was filling his face, his hands balling up into tight fists. “I want to purge Allyra of these misbegotten, pointed-eared usurpers! WAR, I SAY!” roared Ghrell. “LET US AVENGE MURDER WITH WAR!!”
Dhrex paced the balcony of his quarters, situated alongside the temple. “This is not good,” he muttered to himself. “Not good at all.”
Wringing his hands, Dhrex took a few deep breaths trying to calm himself down, trying to get clear on the situation.
“Think, think, think,” Dhrex ordered himself.
He knew Ghrell was about to explode. If he hadn’t ordered war against the Elves yet, he thought, he’s about to. As much as he respected Ghrell, even honored him, he did not agree with him…couldn’t agree with him, was more like it. There was too much proof to the contrary…wasn’t there?
But the more Dhrex thought about it, the more he realized he couldn’t prove the strange, blue blaze of destruction wasn’t from the Elves. “Using the power of the Lords, it’s possible,” he said to the air. “But not plausible. Why would they?”
His pace along the balcony quickened. He had to think fast. Ghrell was beyond reasoning, but he wasn’t. “I will make up my own mind,” Dhrex said. “I will do what logic demands. What justice demands.”
He looked to the northern horizon to a point caught between the setting sun and the encroaching darkness. “I have served you faithfully, Mother Allyra.” He swallowed against what he was about to say next. “But I sense their is a call greater than your preservation. The preservation of life. Of the souls created by Ellos Himself. For too long I have bowed to inferior truths, though merit they may have. There are superior pursuits, and of such, I chose.”
But how could he betray his people? How could he willingly inform the Elves of Ghrell’s plot knowing he’d doom his own race?
That’s when Dhrex realized he had no reason to not suspect the Elves were bent on annihilating his people. But he had no reason to suspect them either. For all his reasonings as a Priest, he was finally making a decision based on faith.
And it was the best decision he knew to make.
24: Coronation
FOUR MEDALLIONS HUNG FROM THE silver tree candle stand. Tommy, Jimmy, Johnny and…Kat had all voted for Taeva to become a Lord of Berinfell.
“Kat!” Kiri Lee said, “How? You…you changed your mind?”
“No,” Grimwarden said. “Each Lord’s reason is his own or her own. The vote stands…unless Taeva is not of Elven blood or unless she does not wish this for herself. As Lords of Berinfell, you must speak with one voice. Go to Taeva. Go now.”
