If there is one thing, I’d like to manifest into the awake world from the land of Oneiro, it is the lack fatigue from climbing two thousand and seven hundred steps. No burning of the body, no thirst for air, no sweet sweat to cool the body either, although that is a trade I would willingly make of course. Maybe I’ll be capable of that once I decipher the black book further, but for now I better hurry as time of dreams is nearing its end.
I wonder if Sigi himself sauntered through these halls or simply his imagination filled this place with the onyx tiles stretching far and wide, the strange columns of weeping, joyous and multifarious folk melded together, reaching high into the dimness while constantly changing shapes emanating the warm light of the day.
As I neared the wall after I knowingly decided to keep going forward on the branching center of the ornated path, this seemingly minor question answered itself when the walls appeared, decorated by carvings of events including a city sacked most definitely the one we both dreamed about. There was even a one that strangely picked my interest, depicting a small village where the structures clearly followed the southern colonial style amidst crimson hewn trees growing high towards the sky.
The one directly on its right showed a sleeping aevhen maiden hewn from pallid stone, resting on the bank of some river while an orkish figure wept over her body. And another beside it showing three youth, one mostly human except for the sharp curvature of his ears, an aevhen girl maybe the same age as me, though still in the form of a child with voluminous dark hair flowing across her feeble form and down to the devoid ground beneath their feet. The last one, clearly Sigi one of its eyes were missing and hewn meticulously to reflect the often misty darkness which occupies the empty hole.
The three siblings inherited various levels of our kindreds’ blood stood in the center, their backs to each other’s as the atrophic undead crept in from the corners of the etching. Is it his message that danger is closing in on them? Before I could seek the answer, my attention was drawn to the last piece drawing me to itself, the most detailed on the far right.
A large ornated room was carved with all its details, one I recognized as the only vacant room in the Radiant Keep with a large bed in the center. In front of it a regal figure – is it father? – stood holding a newborn. My heart began to beat quicker and stronger as I noticed the dagger raised above the head, the pallid tip pointing at the small infant in his hand.
Before them, a lady wept and wailed on the floor, while two figures carved clad in the chromatic armor of the Impirith Praetoriir holding her down firmly. Was it father? It can’t be. It has to be grandfather whose fourth wife said to be came from the family of niuvhei whom they exiled to the north eons ago. This has to be the moment he purged the taint from our family. Yes, it has to be.
“Aurelithae?” I turned and stared down at little Sigi, one tear tainting my left cheek I quickly wept away. “Ah excuse me Sigi. Don’t know what took me over while staring at these…” As I turned back, the etchings were no more, in their place the black marble or limestone gleamed back at me.
When I finally, properly looked him in the face, I noticed his usual bright expression devoid, instead he looked tires, dark circles around both his eyes with the one remaining still red. “Is everything alright?” When I asked his soft face contorted whilst he tried to turn his back against me.
I walked up to him and kneeled while gently touching his shoulder. “You can tell me everything you know?” He looked back at me, snorting and clearly using all his mental strength not to cry in front of me, to appear strong. I am unsure if it is the right thing, but I smiled at him the best as I could and it seems to work as his lips curved reassuringly.
Though they still trembled as he tried to force the words out from himself. “Papa… Father died.” At last he softly bellowed those words out and I am once more not sure what came me over, but I wrapped my hands around his neck and hold him tightly as uncle did the day when Brother Tullian died when I was as small as him.
After a few moments passed I let go and we sat against the wall and remained in silence. Was it the time to tell him or should I try to console him? I scraped through my memories, recalled the day when Uncle Augermil relayed and talked with Brother Albron after our loss. Like him I asked Sigi about his father, to talk about the best moments they had together as I recalled uncle mentioning that evoking these memories aid in the healing of the heart and mind.
I listened sharply as he regaled of the day, they first left their settlements’ walls and headed out for a hunting trip in the forest south westward to them. I felt a bit envious as he retold a bit hastily the moment his father wrestled with a large black bear and hurled its enormous form across the river, then told him and his older brother Eadwald on the importance of life.
After a few more stories he went silent and I once more raked my mind to ease his heart and mind. and remembered uncle telling Brother Albron that do not worry for the dead as they were now in the care of the Solemn Shepherd and the Gray King who shall grant the valiant souls a blissful rest, then one day sow them back into the world. I told him, one day he and his father shall meet again, though he may not recognize him immediately, but he shall know when the time comes.
I let out a hushed sigh as the brightness on his visage slowly returned. “Do not fear Sigi. Soon the entourage shall bring you...” I halted for a moment and he gazed at me with an innocuous pensiveness. “Here in the capital, you shall all be safe I promise you.”
His face changed once more, became strangely concerned. “I am not sure about that.” I felt an ominous tingle brewing in my body and soul. “He was right.” As I opened my mouth to question whom he spoke to, I stared not at him but at the ceiling of my room with shadows dancing and swirling in its center, retreating from the light of dawn.
**
“I know you may be tired of my reiteration, but are you truly fine going through with it?” Albron escorted Augermil along the narrow and high corridor deep beneath the cathedral’s north eastern tower housing the Circle of Daemeiorvoth, The Prodigious Sculptor and Father of Chaos. Canvas like banners hung from the sides of chaotic mosaiced walls, bearing his sign, a collection of chaotically fused geometrical shapes bleeding rainbow paint.
The two halted at the large basalt, limestone and marble hewn ornated gate carved with masks of diverse expressions, a sorrowful smiling at Augermil, a wickedly joyous one exhaling in relief at Albron. “I am. But are you willing to accept my decision? If not, just please wait in the main chamber.”
Albron stared at the gate, his draconic eyes following the hewn out masks adorning its rought, muddled together shell. “You were there for me when I was accepted into the Order, now I must do the same even if it brings me no joy.”
Augermil raised his right, prominent eyebrow. “You know that and this is not the same?”
He chuckled awkwardly while furling his hands into fists. “I know. I could not make this choice like you, I am too much of a coward. But I want to be here, see it through is the least I can do as the events of that night are as much of my fault as it is yours uncle.”
Tears welled up in his eyes, and Augermil firmly grasped his exposed left shoulder, though before he could reassure him, lift the weight from his conscience, the moaning of the gate echoed through the corridor, signaling that the mad clergy was prepared to begin the ritual of alteration, augmentation. In the end he only uttered two words. “Thank you!” And the two walked in.
For a moment Augermil halted with a sorrowful gaze aimed at his eldest companion staring vacantly back while his enormous winged form of chromatic scales and stag like horns laid motionless, from his throat his iridescent blood streamed windingly into the pool. “Goodbye old friend. We shall meet again in the Golden Pastures!” On either side of its massive head, two figures stood scantily dressed in muted blue and green velvet garments scantily kissing their slender forms.
“The Pool of Change has been prepared. If you are ready, we shall commence the ritual.” Then a fellow aevhe of the far eastern kin walked on the right, the Arch-Mystriar of the Daemiorost Circle of the Order. His pallid form statuesque, chiseled with the finest proportions of their kindred, hair luxuriant and reaching almost to the ground while a dim stone gray crown from which long veils of rosy tint followed the lines of his even locks. His exposed chest ornated with the chaotic lines of a painter, the disordered symbols carved into his gleaming epidermis.
“See you soon Nephew.” Augermil turned and smiled at Albron and two locked their arms firmly, then Augerim walked stiffly towards the pool as the humming of the vicari and the magistrariir surrounding it in their flamboyant, mismatched attires began.
At the sign of the Arch-Mystriar he halted before the pool and watched as he held out his hands, fingers stretching upwards and a tray with a peculiar flower blooming only after the House of Disorder’s dragons’ blanket stretching vistas of foliage in their rainbow flames. He watched as the niuvhe snapped his fingers and the flower with roots intertwining into themselves set aflame emanating a musky smoke that slowly pervaded the spacious chamber.
“Prodigious Sculptor, I beseech thou to once again to guide this soul through the Path of Self-Alteration.” His voice laced with madness thundered through the chanting and as he began, Augermil and Albron both felt a presence grow and spread across the chamber, their thoughts like the roots intertwining with themselves, bearing chaotic ideas while also filling them with dizziness.
“Let the flesh of the Heavenly Monarchs’ child merge impeccably with the flesh of our Magnificent Mother’s child.” As he stood at the edge of the pool, his knees gave out and he collapsed onto them, trembling the room. In the pool of blood whilst having thoughts of fully retiring and becoming a wandering bard or painter to retell his myriad tales to people of the Empire, he glanced a vaguely anthropoid shape made out of polished stone with cracks bleeding multifariously tinted paint with the head on his neck upside down, vertically oriented eyes where the mouth, mouths where the bereft ears should be, unevenly distributed limbs protruding all over the body and clapping, creating and reaching for him.
“Grant him your Gift of Symbiosis, so that he may carry out his task within the Almodo’s Design better than he could have in his current crude form.” The figure’s form disturbed in the pool of blood as the two vicari who began to slice the lustrous cadaver apart, hurled large pieces into the chromatic pond.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
Then as the last piece submerged, an orange ethereal orb appeared, greedily consuming the smoke into itself before dropping into the pool without sound or disturbing the once more smooth surface. Augermil head cleared at the same time, and rose back onto his feet and at the sign of the Arch-Mystriir walked into the pond and was pulled into it by invisible hands holding his massive, wiry body. “Let him be reborn as His instrument!” The Arch-Mystriir whispered.
Augermil weightlessly floated in an eerie storm of chaotic matter, slowly descending further into a blindingly shimmering aperture of golden. Beyond it he found himself laying on caressing sand and as he looked slowly up, he found himself on a meadow glowing in the warm. soothing hues of dawn. A pleasant warm air swept through his being and he let out a sigh of relief as all the pain of centuries, all the grief from thousands lost seemed to fade from him for the first time in thousands of years.
When he opened his eyes, he stood once more, clad in his old gilded armor he wore while cleaving through legions of undead, nekrossus, orkhin, the fallen kin of his and many others. The moment his gaze wandered off from his old armor, he noticed the two stunning figures before him and he collapsed onto his knees, head bowed down.
Before him stood the patron, chief Deos of the Empire, Iuanorh the Dawn Father, The Amber Lord, Bringer of the First Light in all his searing golden and crimson glory while assuming the striking appearance of an aevhe. Beside him, with hands locked were his radiantly beautiful wife and the Magnificent Mother of Aevhen kindred, Maerhya whose voluminous, divinely silken hair with locks of all vibrant shades stood still even as the ethereal gust blew through them.
No words were uttered, yet Augermil knew of their intentions of appearing before him. He rose his head and met their gazes, each reflecting sorrow and clemency for his failure of letting their favored child be taken by the Shadow and at his resolution of altering his being, his form conceived by the two eons before his birth.
As soon as he wanted to utter his promise to the two – to find and defeat this eluding evil – he was hurled through realities and for a moment he glimpsed into the Aether Between Realms, gazed upon the mighty form of the Titans holding, guarding the balance of the planes, watched the Great Serpent swimming across the dim vista of strangeness swallow a sphere and looked at the threshold with the unknown beyond before he arrived before the Prodigious Sculptor whose form glimpsed in the pool.
Before he could even take a look to satiate his old childhood curiosity which set him upon his long path, a pain beyond any and all other and indescribable coursed through his whole body and soul. He felt as the hands which contours followed the stroke of an overzealous painter grabbed onto him and tore him apart shorn of care and gentleness.
Augermil wanted to scream as his form shred to its miniscule atoms were clapped together with his old companions which extended the unbearable pain. Minutes felt like hours, hours felt like days, days felt like centuries as he was slowly reassembled into his new form while not allowed to fall into the Land of Oneiron devoid of the pain.
Though at last, he burst back into reality as the others watched the pool shrink and flock into the center where it first took the shape of the sphere pressured, molded, sliced by crafty, unseen hands until it took the anthropoid silhouette of Augermil’s augmented, new form. Then the fluid turned into hardened, scaled epidermis, soft and gleaming sunken eyes in the elongated and wide head with a beaked curvature with slit noses and mouth, even jaw beset with alabaster angular spikes, the antler like intertwining horns, bestial feet with shimmering claws and a long feathered tail.
His deep and bestial roar echoed through the chamber, through corridor as he felt the flames of dawn and Promethean burn ever stronger not just in his soul, but even within his body.
**
The mingling lights of white, gray and amber spread over the vast golden meadow stretching far across before the mountain, and a soft sigh traversed far as Augermil stared anxiously down from the threshold of the hexagonal platform. On his right, Jaculus his new winged companion stretched his legs while spewing forth chromatic embers from his vivid throat capable of swallowing even the hulking Augermil.
Days passed since the ritual, yet his body, his soul still tinged from the reconstruction, and still not used to the heavier weight of the scaled body which muscles proved denser as he felt even without the aid of maghia, he could easily lift a boulder with one hand. Overall, Augermil found it both strange and exciting as he once more thirsted to test the limits of his new form, though it had to wait.
Footsteps made him turn around and his tail breezed against the clawed frontal foot and hand of Jaculus who growled a little whilst Augermil apologized as besides his heavier weight, he still wasn’t used to his spiked tail protruding from his back, leading to half his few garments to be thrown out as they lacked the bottom aperture through which it could slip out.
“Uncle, I know you wanted to set off without notice, but I could not stop them, and well her.” Albron approached him with Nawfal at his sides, and three of his underlings behind them who were chosen to accompany him in the retrieval of the Chosen. “Her?” He asked, his voice deeper and melodious, yet still not lacking in the serenity it once possessed.
“Sister Aurelithae. When she heard you went through the change, she was quite curious to see your new form.” Albron answered scraping his bearded visage with an apologetic expression. “Which then led to Father also wishing to bid you farewell, besides I believe he also wants to be spectacular about it.” Augermil heaved a sigh while stroking his wide forehead from which his majestic antler like horns protruded, now adorned with metallic beads inscribed with soothing runes that lessened the adjustment to his altered body.
Though before he could prepare to welcome his little brother, his Elhyrissiar and Aurelithae whom he hadn’t seen for years before the attack on the Cathedral, the space before the large gate beneath the slanted ridge tore open revealing the grand ceremonial hall of the Radiant Keep, Terrianis and Aurelithae standing front with a small legion of attendants and the Impirith Praetoriir in the chromatic plate armor behind them, waiting for the two apexes of draevhen kin to march through.
Everyone on the bridge connecting to the platform lined to the edges, saluting and bowing on their knees including Augermil’s entourage who stood beside their own draconic companions, mounts. “Just to be clear, she said for you to forego with decorousness.” Albron whispered as their fists glued to their ceremonial breast plates of amber and plum trims.
When Terrianis and Aurelithae reached near them, the two kneeled like the others, but rose immediately upon his command. “We know brother that you are no fond of such traditions, ceremonies so we shall keep it short.” Augermil remained silent, but nodded in understanding and acknowledgement. “You have once more proved your boundless humility, your courage unwavering like roaring rivers, and most importantly your loyalty to our cause, to our purpose in the world. Both father and grandfather recognized and gifted you for your greatest sacrifices, yet we failed to do so in the thousand year since our ascension.” Terrianis stopped for a moment, his expression calm, his gaze piercing veiling his own gratitude and relief at the tainted form of his older brother.
“But on this day, we shall rectify this mistake.” A strong gust of wind made the dragons snarl as they felt waves of mana washing over the platform, flowing like the greatest of rivers towards Augermil whose newly crafted armor turned into a glowing mass of translucent matter, its silhouette changing.
When it returned to its metallic state, its shades of dawned turned fully chromatic, with each shade drifting on the smooth, gleaming surface. The embossed breastplate extended down to his hip in many symmetrically contoured, angular segments bearing the draconic symbol of the empire on front and back. The shoulder plates reformed and joined into the vambrace engraved with legions of runes on each overlapping segment, the greaves similarly welted together with his footwear, whilst the tunic and breeches hugging his sinewy, scaled form gained the luster and smoothness of fluid alloys while its ruby shade turned deeper and vibrant.
“I am undeserving of such gifts and kindness! You have my unwavering loyalty my Elhyrissiar!” Albron felt a slight anger slipping through his calm façade, trembling his body he masked by straining his body, his muscles. When Aurelithae stepped forward after looking for confirmation, he soothed a little and felt a little joyous when she smiled at Augermil who himself felt conflicted of her seeing him in his new form, afraid what words would pour out from her soft, gleaming lips. “I know that even you may look different from now, you are still the same Uncle who spent his precious time with me when mother passed, that you showed me the grace and strength of our forefathers, to me you did not taint your form, but instead ascended to be closer to them. To me you are the same paragon, hero of the Empire and I may still lack in power, but please accept my gift.” Tears welled in Augermil’s eyes as he kneeled before the young niece of her reaching only up to her waist even as she stepped onto the threshold of aevhen adulthood.
“Thank you!” He said with a tremulous voice as he wrestled with his feelings bursting through the dam he built up through the long years of his life. “One more thing uncle! It may take sometime to convince them to leave, as they just have lost their father. So be gentle with them like you were and are with us!” Augermil nodded whilst Aurelithae knotted the slim thread of the amulet resembling the Heavenly Monarch which she hewn after the painting in the grand hall of the Radiant Keep.
After Aurelithae walked back besides Terrianis, Augermil hailed the Empire and him once more before giving out his orders, and at once, the four Draennith Praetoriir took off to the skies, heading towards the dim peeks of Dhaugruz.
**
Albron stood silently in the small, dim space permeated by the cold, cleansed air facing the statue of the Solemn Shepherd rising forth the white marble wall. Surrounding him were three beds of stone designed with perfect edges, their lower sides ornamented with gold shaped like vines spreading upwards. On each three bodies laid in eternal silence, their bodies pale frozen in time till the end of times. The one on his right a draevhen of the same age with alabaster long hair spread under his back, flowing with impeccable straightness. In front a beautiful maiden with hair as black as the fine feathers of ravens. And on the left a young child of their kindred lost way before his time.
“We need to speak.” Albron got down onto his knees, clutching a pendant with onyx in its center. His hot breath enveloped the onyx as he whispered with a shaking voice while his face remained devoid of most emotions except for anxiety, the fear of everything he done be in vain. “He set off to the north this morning.” He added.
Seconds passed by, then his breath turned visible, his flesh crawled as an unsettling, yet also welcomed coldness filled the dimly lit crypt. Soft shadows started to bite into the white light sprawled by the lone crystal embedded into the ceiling, as the little child’s corpse slowly risen halfway. His lids slid up revealing eyes inhibited by an uncaring, vicious darkness.
“Than that is a relief, isn’t it my friend?” A myriad whispering voices, young, old, deep and soft, gravelly and serene, melodious and bland decanted from the gaping maw of the child’s pale corpse while its small head twitched towards the left shoulder. “Have you taken care of the Chosen?” It shook the head once in answer. “Then it is not. If he gets there before the Host, the plan shall fail.”
“Do you trust me Albron?” For a moment he remained silent, ruminating his answer. “I do. But we have to hurry up, otherwise he gets there before the Host.”
The corpse rose into the air and carefully landed on the tiled floor, walking towards Albron with small, careful steps. “He will that is certain. But fear not, he and Terrianis are both already late. The seeds have been planted in the heart of the youngest.”
Albron furled his thin brow as he stared into the vacant eyes. “What about the other two?”
“Whether they live or die, whether they are brought here into the heart of the Empire, whether your uncle decides to mentor them, whether they cut down the Beautiful One or not, whether they discover the cult and jeopardize their efforts, they are inconsequential in the grand design. So do not fret over it, be glad things worked out.”
“What about Aurelithae? Did she read the black book?” Then he asked feeling relaxed suddenly. “She did, though I am not sure yet if she will be prepared for her task. So when her time comes, stay by her side and if necessary, bring her here.”
“It shall be done so.” Albron bowed down. “For now, try to beckon her back to the city my friend.” As his head rose up, the corpse once more laid on the funeral bed, motionless, the shadows retreated back to the corners, away from the white light of the crystal in the ceiling.