INTERLUDE 6D: OLD WYRM’S WRATH
“Only at a sufficient remove can meaning be rarefied. Proximity to truth does not entail a complete view of its various aspects. You cannot judge the road until you reach your destination – and many fail to do so, falling by the wayside, tripped by their own caution. There is always a destination, though you know it not until you come upon it. That is the meaning of destiny. That is why Yune is Destiny’s Door. That is why you have opened this page tonight. You are following the road. But beware: you approach too quickly. Do not be tripped by incaution. Many of those who so fall never again rise.”
– from ‘The Syth Codex’, 39:115-122
I am the ghost. I am the hourglass and I am the sand. I am the walker of the ways. There are many paths. Most are hidden. Only one takes me into my future. I will find the path. And I will walk it.
Phanar crept along the dark corridor of roughly-hewn stone, night-vision spell active, armaments making minimal noise.
I swallowed my ghost. I crossed the sand. I smashed the hourglass and remade it in starlight. I walked every way. I took every path. I found my future. And I became it.
The mantras of the ancient days flowed strongest when he was in danger, when he knew that everything dangled over the precipice of combat. His father’s voice came back to him, echoing down from those barely-recalled first expeditions. Aged five or six, Father took him out to hunt the whiteclaws, and he carried Father’s bow… He remembered being confused about why it was kept unstringed, remembered waiting, longing, for the day he’d be permitted to carry the spear or the quiver…
A day that never came.
And the words of the other man of N’Lem whose face he remembered, the old man whose name time had stolen – that old man was constantly in Phanar’s thoughts these days. When he realised the danger into which he’d placed Anathta with his hiring of the Mundian archmage – realised how their hopes of slaying Ord Ylon now hung in the balance – the warrior had fallen back on his old training more and more, burying his thoughts, stamping down his fears.
The future flowed and he was a ship’s keel piercing its tide, choosing his own course.
This is nothing. Nothing, compared to what came before.
He knew hardship as no other.
The memories had been locked away, and no enchantment he’d ever undergone had plucked them from his head. He’d even had Ibbalat try, once, disguising his curiosity in the form of a game. The mage had discerned nothing more than a single glimpse, and that alone had mystified him. Phanar was unsure whether their sanctity was something to do with the memories themselves, their awfulness – or whether it could simply be that so long had passed…
Seven hundred years? Eight?
He had no idea exactly how long ago he’d been born – nor Anathta – but it had been many centuries, of this he was certain. Even now, he could remember the old man’s confusion. The last child of N’Lem was destined to make the journey. But Anathta could not be sent off on her own: she was too young – even fate surely could not bring a baby barely capable of taking a few steps out of that timeless void, the unmoving, windless desert? Was not Phanar the one whom prophecy decreed must cross the ashen lands? And was it not Phanar in whose mind the ancient liturgies of their people were stored, brought forward from the jaws of death into the light of the present?
The old man had used the end of his stick to draw the winged shape in the lifeless soil. Phanar had borne that shape with him in his dreams until the night of the attack. Until Ord Ylon came to the gates of Miserdell and spoke with his terrible voice.
But no. He’d never felt it. No hand of destiny. No guidance from fate. He spoke the mantras to himself as Father taught him, and he’d tried teaching them to his sister, many times – Kultemeren as his witness. She refused him each time, shirking her responsibilities at every opportunity, and made a point of paying him no attention whenever he spoke to her about where they came from and why.
Yet the doom, he was certain, remained hers.
Her voice, her desire for revenge – that was what had set him, set all of them, on this course.
And she was no less a child of N’Lem than him. Even without the training he’d undergone at a young age – training he’d thought responsible for his skills, his aptitudes – she excelled at what she did. What they both did.
Even now he saw her returning, darting back up the tunnel towards him, her graceful movements completely silent in her form-fitting fabrics, her oiled leather accoutrements.
Stolen content alert: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.
The Potions of Unbound Speech and Visible Sympathy they’d all imbibed might’ve made them look and sound different to their enemies, but to Phanar his sister looked like she always did – a living shadow, slinking rapidly in his direction.
She first gave a thumbs-up, then held up eight fingers, and finally made the stabbing, two-fingered motion that meant armed kobolds.
He nodded to her; as she paused, crouching and regaining her breath, he made his way back to the others.
“Eight guards,” he reported quietly. “The gate is ahead. Well done, Kani.”
Ibbalat had tried to scry their path and failed every time; but where spells had failed, faith had succeeded. The night-vision let him see the way she blushed at his compliment, and he swiftly looked away, lest he spend too long regarding her and get distracted by the curly, flaming hair he longed to touch, the milk-white curvaceous body he longed to know.
It must be done, he reminded himself, moving his eyes to Redgate.
“Do you wish to take the lead in this?” he asked, forcing the words out with difficulty that he hoped wasn’t audible. “Or either of you, Kani, Ibbalat?”
Kani shook her head, as though she were embarrassed. Ibbalat just looked towards the ‘champion’, an expression of intrigue and curiosity on his face.
“No, I will conserve my strength,” Redgate demurred from behind his mask. “I have properly exercised my power in preparation; now I will rest, until the time arrives. Or you call upon me, in need, of course.”
The Mundian bowed his head gravely.
Phanar turned away so that the sorcerer wouldn’t see the scowl on his face, and he led them on into the darkness, towards Anathta.
You exercised your power by slaughtering hundreds, he wanted to say. Not just warriors, but likely the children too.
The archmage’s destructiveness was so obvious, so obscene, that Phanar partially blamed Ibbalat for the taunt that had sent Redgate pursuing the orcs. But there was nothing to be done for it; he knew it was only his anger at Redgate that was influencing him. The young mage hadn’t cast the stones; he had no way to know the sorcerer was really going to react the way he did. It was regrettable, but not unforgivable.
When Phanar reached his sister she looked around at the others, nodded, then fell in at the front alongside him.
“Halt!” squeaked one of the kobolds, a female, as they came into view around the tunnel bend. She was staring at the centre of Phanar’s chest, as though his head were twelve or more inches lower than it was in reality. “Red-Of-The-Fur didn’t say anything about this! Who’re you?”
Red-Of-The-Fur?
It took Phanar a moment to realise that the potion’s magic was somehow translating a kobold’s name, there.
He regarded the kobolds, standing there in front of the doors in their mismatched armour, rusty weapons leaning against the walls. None of them looked in good health. Upon those mostly covered in fur, their scales appeared like dry, mangy patches. Those with brilliant, glistening plates for skin had thick tufts of hair protruding from their flesh at random intervals.
Many claimed they were formed from an unholy union of rat-man with lizard-man – and Phanar had heard a few people espouse the notion they were originally demonic dog-men crossed with naga, fish-men. He personally fancied that they were just a mongrel race, a people of hybrids of all different kinds. Whatever the truth, each one was similar to its fellows in certain respects: they were both furry and scaly on different sections of their body, and four-fingered, long-tailed. Four feet to five-and-a-half feet in height. Humanoid, heavy-bellied.
But from there, none of them looked quite the same: their natural colouration ran the full gamut, white and green, blue and red, brown and black. Some had a long snout for a face, rodent or canine teeth glinting in their smiles; others had stubby faces, with forked, serpentine tongues lolling from their lipless maws.
The fact they carried weapons meant little. Kobolds were cunning, but only to a point. They could use what others had created, knew how to scavenge, make the most of scraps – but they had no artifice of their own. No true intellect. They were cannibals, and prone to in-fighting. They didn’t ever speak Mundic, and their natural voices were piping and growling noises; he’d picked up the meaning of a few phrases here and there, but getting a full sentence out of a kobold was a new experience.
“Red-Of-The-Fur didn’t say anything about us?” Ibbalat replied. Curiously, whilst Phanar could understand his friend perfectly-well, he could hear the faint shrill squeakiness of the mage’s voice, as though it were echoing back off the cave walls. “Is Red-Of-The-Fur a Spellborn? We’re from the Stair-Shadow. He wouldn’t know we were on the way.”
Stair-Shadow? That has to be Ikamax, the last place we came across kobolds.
The name was fitting, really. The structure of black stone in the centre of the Hintamar Bogs was a pyramid, twenty or more huge steps up each side leading to the apex.
He had no idea where Ibbalat got ‘Spellborn’ from though. Was that the translation of ‘magic-user’?
“The Stair-Shadow?” another of the kobolds replied in awe, glancing around at its mates in apparent perplexity. “No wonder you look so weird! I mean – so nice… And you – you’re a Spellborn?”
Ibbalat nodded. Clearly the magical masking effect allowed some portion of their true identities to shine through – his robe and mage-hat must’ve had some kind of analogue in the kobold’s eyes.
That dark, beady gaze had turned to Redgate, the kobold again staring with the low-down eye-level. “And you?” he squeaked.
The archmage nodded too, staying silent. A few of the kobolds actually bowed.
“We ask that you let us in,” Anathta said. Phanar knew his sister well enough to know that she was seeking to test the potion’s magic, trying a short, simple phrase.
“Of course, of course… I love your armour. Where’d you find it? Here, Shrunken-Tail, get the other handle…”
A small retinue of kobolds preceded them into the tunnel beyond the low, wood-and-metal gateway. They were jabbering on with each other, picking up others of their kind from different tunnels at intersections, informing them all of their sudden guests, these pilgrims from a far-off territory.
Phanar felt a smile spreading across his face.
This is the future I have chosen. I chose not to kill them. I chose to enter in peace.
Now, word spreads throughout the city. Now, the dragon will find out that we are here.
Ibbalat – I hope you are ready.
* * *