Imperial Year 768
The Heptagram
Scholars have long debated where the true center of Creation lies. To the spiritually-inclined it seems obvious that the Imperial Mountain, which they identify with the Elemental Pole of Earth, should be the center. Figuratively, of course, princes and officials insist it must be the Imperial City, the Seat of Splendor, the grandest city in all of Creation and the center around which all civilization revolves. Others chart the geographic center of the Blessed Isle, or the course of winds and waves, or other, more esoteric methods to place the center wherever is convenient for them.
To Taryn din Ilya it seemed obvious that the answer should be the Heptagram. The basest description would call the Heptagram a school, the finest in all the Realm where the children of the great and powerful came to study all variety of subjects and where the battle-sorcerers of the Realm's Legions were trained, but no acolyte of the Heptagram would describe it as merely a school. It was in a very real sense the future, both for the Realm as the cradle of its next generation of rulers, and for its students whose careers and prospects for advancement often rested on their performance on that bleak island just off the northern coast of the Blessed Isle. It was the cradle of knowledge, the font of power, a chrysalis within which ignorant caterpillars blossomed and took wing as colorful sages.
Taryn herself was a daughter of a family of middling importance in the southern city of Chiaroscuro. In those days the Heptagram admitted a small number of students from the Realm's subject states, chosen by performance on the Imperial Examination and then by lottery, in addition to those nominated by the great Houses of the Blessed Isle. From a young age Taryn clung to stories of heroism and resolved that this honor should be her route to fame and fortune. While her peers daydreamed and played as children do she threw herself into study. She cajoled and bartered access to every library she could and devoured every book and scroll, badgered lessons from teachers in a range of the martial arts, both with weapons and without, and sought out apprenticeships in the Realm's administrative offices to build connections and knowledge of the systems in place.
At seventeen she sat the Examinations, sponsored by a clerk she had worked under for a year and a half, placed top in the entire Southern Direction in that year, and requested the Heptagram as her placement. Shortly thereafter she said farewell to her family for the last time and walked to the harbor to take ship for the Imperial City, and from there on to the Heptagram.
The Heptagram was situated on an island off the northern coast of the Blessed Isle, once a fortress and still protected by some of the most powerful sorcerous wards ever devised. Breaching it uninvited was "theoretically possible," students were told, but the strait was said to be littered with the bones of would-be interlopers. The main structure of the place was composed of fourteen towers, vast structures beyond almost anything one might see in that day, pulled by sorcery from the black rock of the island. To many observers those storm-lashed sea-walls and their spiky black towers might seem ominous. When she first saw them the towers reminded Taryn of nothing so much as a crown.
The students there were strange to her, she had of course studied the culture and tongues of the Realm, but to work with foreigners while going home to speak her own language at night and being fully immersed amidst the children of the powerful was quite different. She was mocked in the careless way of children absorbing lessons from their elders for her appearance, her accent, her humble origin. Where at home she had been the shining star of all things academic here she was among students who had been given access to the finest tutors and to libraries she could only dream of. She set to with her characteristic grim determination, but never seemed, to herself at least, to be any more than treading water, always behind those who had read more and knew more.
Three years into her studies, on the night our story begins, Taryn was called into the offices of the Prefect, who congratulated her on the swift completion of her studies and presented her with the silver ring that marked graduates of the Heptagram. Taryn stared at the ring, sitting there on a worn velvet presentation cushion on the desk in front of her. She would not later remember much of this conversation. Through her lightheadedness she managed to inquire in a steady voice whether the school had considered her for admission to the school of sorcery. The Prefect seemed to understand, and told her that graduation from the academic program alone was a tremendous achievement and would open many doors for her in the Realm, listing a few potential prestigious posts, all outside of the Blessed Isle, of course. The school of sorcery, he said, was a terrible, dangerous thing, that would bind her to a lifetime of service; not that he doubted Taryn's ability or her commitment, of course, but it would be a great loss to the Realm to send her down a road the school believed was ill-suited to her skills.
Taryn thought, later, that she must have thanked him. All those years of toil and sweat, putting up with the casual bullying of the children of the Blessed Isle, the sleepless nights studying, the correctional beatings when she got things wrong, all that to be judged a...a...a mediocrity. To be shuffled off into the army or the civil service, to a post more suited to one of her station, while one of those Mnemon brats with a guaranteed seat took the seat and coasted through without doing an honest day's work for it.. She wandered, away from the office, ring clenched in one fist, steadying her breathing as she'd been taught, not paying attention to where she was going. The sound of waves grew louder. She looked up to find herself at the sea-wall, a smooth expanse of obsidian shaped into the rough semblance of a wall. In the darkness she could barely make out the waves crashing into it, fifty or sixty feet below, and then she stopped, realizing how close she had stepped to the edge, stepped back down. She stood below the barrier watching the waves for a time. Then she looked down at the ring in her hand, still in her palm, not on a finger. She did not speak, but bubbling up from inside came a silent fury, and with it a resolve to be more. If she could not be more than a mediocrity here she would leave, find a master who would teach her. And then she hurled the ring out into the sea with all her strength.
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The Silver River Valley
Middle North
Far from the Blessed Isle, the Heptagram, and Taryn, though on the same night, two people walked through a wood. His name was Rorik, son of Rorik, and hers was Kaya, daughter of Lea, and they were betrothed. They had only met twice before but that was the life children of smallholders lived in the North in those days, and neither of them found the match to be an odious prospect. Theirs was a harsh land, poor in soil, clinging to the edge of the White Sea and sustaining itself on hunting and trade as much as farming. So far from the center, as well, the fabric of Creation wore thin in places, and sometimes things slipped through from outside, far from the light of the Sun that fixes all things into their shape. They resemble people or animals, usually, but warped and changed by unreality, usually merely physical but sometimes more horrible still.
The one Rorik told Kaya of on that night looked like a wolf. It was the custom of the people of that place to hunt such creatures where they appeared, for the potential for destruction was great, and the threat to individuals working in a coordinated group was typically small; Rorik and his hunters had ridden out days earlier in search of the beast after hearing of it preying on livestock in the region, and they had found it. Or rather, it had found them. Beasts of the Wyld were often dumb, robbed by the warping of even their basic animal cunning and left predictable and aggressive, but this one had snuck up on them and taken three silently before the rest of the hunt realized they were in danger, then barreled into the middle of the group, scattering them.
Rorik, he told Kaya, had found himself on the ground next to his pony, which had been hamstrung and was struggling to get up, off to the side of a deer track in the woods, hearing the screams of dying men and animals from all sides. He had his bow, and stared around him for a glimpse of the thing, which stalked out ahead of him without a care in the world a moment later, black-furred, looking ten feet tall, dripping saliva which hissed and smoked when it hit the leaves below. He steadied himself and drew his arrow, and in that moment a sense of absolute calm came upon him and he saw the creature pause, a sudden golden glow reflected in its eyes, and then as it bounded forward his arrow went clean through its skull and out the other side in a sudden flare of light. Golden fire caught in its fur and it burned to a skeleton in an instant. Rorik dispatched his crippled pony, gathered what he could carry, and set off for the long trek back home on foot.
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He was terrified, Rorik admitted, knowing both of ancient tales of golden heroes who protected people from the terrors beyond Creation and the grim southern priests who insisted such stories were nonsense and the golden light portended ancient demons that once enslaved humanity. He told Kaya he did not wish to enter into marriage with such a secret and he wished to give her a fair chance to withdraw.
She took his hand then, firmly, and said that she was not afraid and they would deal with whatever it was and the consequences of it together as they should. Rorik looked at his intended, almost of a height with him and powerfully-built, eyes slightly averted after that bold declaration, and decided that tomorrow's marriage sounded like a very good idea to him, now, and the two kissed briefly in the evening light before heading back to the house, where they were surrounded again by excited relations and ushered to the center of the long table in the great hall for a pre-celebratory feast.
Halfway through the feast, where the mead and ale flowed free and much singing was done, the door at the end of the hall was blasted inwards by a tremendous force and three strangers in colorful armor marched in and demanded the Anathema. In the silence Kaya's father stood and demanded the names of the strangers, who dared to invade his daughter's feast, and he was promptly shot through the head by the stranger to the left, a woman in crystalline red armor with an ornate short bow. The rest of the feast scrambled to their feet, seeking weapons or seeking to flee. Rorik found a bow, and despite the confusion when the golden light flared again and an arrow found the throat of the stranger in black armor in the center the source was plainly obvious. The woman in red said something loud in a foreign tongue and stepped forward through the press, shoving aside men twice her size who tried to stop her, the third stranger in white armor striding behind her and killing any in reach with swift strikes from his spear. She dodged Rorik's next shot and caught the third out of the air before grabbing him by the throat, lifting him from the floor; he heard her say found you before he knew no more.
Kaya woke to find herself pinned under wooden rubble, the roof partially collapsed, doors barred, smoke filling the room, surrounded by the dead and dying, and a woman in a silvery robe untarnished by the hororrs around her on a stool that had somehow remained upright. She asked the woman who she was, and the woman told her, and asked if she would choose to live, given the chance. Kaya glanced to the side, where her eyes fell on Rorik, sightless eyes staring from a head bent at an unnatural angle, and the sneering face of the red woman burned itself into her memory. She told Luna that was no choice at all and that she would always choose to live.
The soldiers of the Realm stationed around the perimeter of the burning house to ensure that nobody escaped did not notice the crow slip out of the smashed roof in the smoke. The man in white armor, whose name was Talin and whose house was Cathak, did, and unlike the rest of his company he grasped the full significance of it. The two made eye contact for a brief moment, then Talin bent back to undoing the greaves of his warplate in preparation for the long ride home.
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The Scavenger Lands
The Middle of Nowhere
While the Realm claimed sovereignty and peace over the whole of Creation there were, in reality, many wars. On the Blessed Isle these were almost more gangs brawling than actual wars, but as you passed further from the Empress the bloodier they got. On this particular occasion the city of Sand and the city of Quills were at war, as they often were, over a bit of ground nobody quite remembered who should own or why, but happened to have a commanding position over a bend in the Grey River and would be quite a coup for either to get ahold of, and so they fought.
As foes engaged in protracted conflict often did both sides had long since decided against contributing a large portion of their own citizenry to their armies, and both cities were sufficiently prosperous to keep a steady stream of young mercenaries hungry for glory flowing into the land between them, among them a man who called himself Tarvash. He knew, on an intellectual level at least, that this sort of constant low-intensity border fight was not a great path to advancement, no matter how well it paid, He knew his destiny was to end up a footnote of a footnote, but Tarvash of the Grey River was not the kind of man to put much stock in destiny. He was young, but held the rank of Lieutenant in a brash up-and-coming mercenary band. He knew the game of chicken between mercenary companies well; without access to ready recruits they were forced to preserve their forces first and fight second, and Tarvash had an uncanny knack for making sure that it was the opposing mercenaries who first decided they were in an untenable position and should preserve their forces. Swelled by victories won and bonuses paid his company was one of the largest and best-equipped in the entire war, fighting on the side of the city of Quills.
They had held the bend in the river for almost a year, and rumor had it that Sand had sent negotiators to Quills, the night Tarvash's throat was slit while he slept in his tent. He had his suspicions, later, who had done it, of course, but in the end as he lay there pumping his lifeblood out over his hands onto his bedding the identity of the shadowy figure he saw from behind leaving his tent was the furthest thing from his mind. A small voice he couldn't quite identify in the back of his mind asked if he'd like a chance to try again, to do things better. He knew, somehow, that this wasn't a hallucination, that something had reached into his mind and put the words there, and as best he could he answered yes.
Tarvash was not the name he was born with, but his new masters demanded he leave even that aside as they reshaped him and bound him to them. Names are dangerous, they warned him, and bid him give himself a title; he thought he might call himself the Iron Revenant, and they approved. They approved again as the Iron Revenant stepped from his tent armed with a dizzying array of blades and began to kill. Sixty-three mercenaries died in that camp before anyone was alerted to the problem. NIneteen more died afterwards. Six, none of whom had known the Revenant's assumed name, let alone his birth name, managed to flee before the horror and spread the tale before them in hushed whispers of the man with the slashed throat who came back to take his vengeance on the living.
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Heaven
The Forbidding Manse of Ivy
Heaven is a self-contained realm, its walls supporting the physical dome that is its sky, but it is also entirely city and the same size and shape as the Blessed Isle, and it is home to the many millions of greater and smaller gods that make sure Creation is working, as well as some others. One of those others sat at a desk in the Forbidding Manse of Ivy, the headquarters of the Bureau of Destiny, staring at a piece of paper on her desk as though it might bite her.
She was tall, slim, dressed in a faded blue wrapped robe that had been fashionable in Meru when she was young. She signed her documents "Glass," and while she supposed someone must exist who remembers her birth name she wouldn't bet money on it, even with her Heavenly Salary. She looked to be in her mid-thirties, and was, in fact, closer to seventeen hundred years old. She looked like a functionary, and was, but her function was in the Celestial Bureau of Destiny and was rather more important than many.
On this particular occasion, the same night that Taryn rejected mediocrity, that Kaya lived, and that the Revenant died, she was looking over data produced by the Loom of Fate in search of patterns, and she had found a pattern. The pattern was one of the most astonishing things she had ever seen, and represented the complete failure of one of the most complicated plans ever devised and executed. It foretold upheaval, destruction, pain, death, and the total loss of control of her Department. It also foretold a chance, perhaps, to undo one of the most catastrophic mistakes of Glass' life, and perhaps a glimmer of hope.
Early intervention could stop this short. If the Bureau could lean on its levers in the Realm, take a more direct hand in the Hunts, find the Empress and take her into their confidence...Glass shook her head. She had spent too long in this office. With a trembling hand she reached out to pick up the paper and touched it to a candle flame on her desk. When the ashes had cooled on her hearth she was outside, on a balcony overlooking one of the Manse's many internal courtyards, still considering the implications.
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Author's Note: The large number of viewpoints and the summary dialogue are here to get background out of the way quickly, the story after this will take on a more focused format.