image [https://i.imgur.com/9JnFmXw.jpg]
Gusts of loose ice crystals danced over the white waste of the northern ice sheet, chasing Bilberry Rattlestaff as she rode forth on a sled pulled by four giant tundra hounds.
Short and stocky, like most of the Vermili caste, Bilberry was wrapped in heavy woollen hides and wore a pair of thick goggles to shield her eyes from the hostile chill. Her exposed cheeks flushed red as she urged the team of hounds forward, racing under the uncanny half light of a total solar eclipse.
She’d departed the village of Last, northern refuge of the giants, in the dying days of autumn, when breaths of coming winter froze the ocean and allowed passage to the great ice sheet. The crossing was difficult, and it was followed by weeks of scouting as winter arrived in full force. Throughout it all, the eclipse hung ominously in the sky, blinding Vandrin’s gaze.
For nearly five weeks, Manrith, Splinterra's dark moon, strayed from its natural course in the heavens to purposefully block the sun’s light, causing widespread panic as it cast the world into constant shadow.
Nostros herself, the Face of Night, wielded power over the moon, using it to blind her brother and provide cover for Bilberry to perform this prison break.
What little illumination did gleam around the edges of the moon revealed a landscape that looked entirely alien when compared to the forests and valleys of Bilberry's childhood home in the Dynasty Heartland. It could have been another planet.
In the distance, the dark slopes of the nearby Chillspine mountain range rose to a jagged crest, and the smokey plume of an active volcano billowed across a brilliant aurora that danced overhead.
The tundra hounds drove a dizzying pace, swerving around ridges and spires of ice that sheared from the ground. Bilberry clung on as they found their way; the animals were excellently trained to navigate the ice sheet, working together as a loyal pack. They were worth every penny she'd paid for them, and each one was good deal smarter than the lazy lapdogs she'd owned when she lived in Loverlock, writing plays and jokes, years before any of this.
But that time was long gone now. She was half a world away, and the heart of a lost god's prison was closer than ever.
To either side of the sled, sharp towers of ominous black stone jutted from the ice to loom hundreds of feet tall. They stood across the horizon, spaced at miles distant points that ringed a vast perimeter.
Those towers were powerful magic of the Aspects themselves, serving an etherial function so dark it had been wiped from history; secondarily, they were a tall warning to keep the northern tribes far from this place.
It was a warning Bilberry had ignored; she'd worked her way through the outer defenses and now she saw the towers up close, as perhaps no other interloper had for three hundred years.
They had no entrances, no battlements for guards, nothing but that awful black stone that seemed to be formed of a single piece, despite their vast size, with no cracks or seams where blocks might fit together.
They exuded an aura of dread and despair. To look upon them was to feel yourself despised, as if the very structures themselves wished you harm. It was a potent deterrent that had worked for a long time.
In Bilberry's case, ironically, the towers were the very beacon that had guided her to her goal.
She'd spent weeks on the ice, approaching the prison under cover of the eclipse, then days more, brute forcing her way through layer upon layer of ancient etherial wards. It was a frustrating and gruelling process that forced her to stop and dismount every few hundred meters so she could work on breaking through the potent magical defenses.
At last she'd cracked the final barrier before the cage itself, mounted up her sledge, and raced for the centre.
If there had ever been guardians stationed here within the perimiter of the towers, there was no sign of them now. Her progress went unhindered. This was it. She was really here, after all the time preparing, and every hardship. What truly waited for her beneath the ice?
Her time was short; Vandrin would almost certainly sense that something was wrong and redouble his efforts to counteract Nostros' obstruction. He could only be blinded for so long before the full force of his gaze returned to the prison.
Bilberry had all manner of magical protections to conceal her etherial presence and reduce the ripples she left in the veil; those precautions had kept her alive and one step ahead of the Rays since she started this journey, but all would be useless if she got caught here in full focused view of Vandrin, the Face of Day.
Her sled finally swerved to a halt on the flat frozen plain which marked the rough centre of this vast ring of dark towers.
Bilberry jumped down as the hounds huddled and whined. The ice beneath her boots was so clear she could see down into the far depths where all turned to darkness. This place was deeply wrong; the realm was warped and ruptured, the veil scarred, and the animals could feel it. They were trespassing upon the prison of a lost god.
Ice stretched away in all directions. There was no hint of an entrance or doorway, but she’d come prepared to make her own.
From the laden packs of provisions and tools she tenderly pulled a large, well wrapped item. With a flourish she loosed the ties which kept it bound, and unveiled her magnum opus. She was still working on a worthy name for the instrument: for now, its working title was the Etherial Amplifier.
Unlawfully taken from Royal Road, this story should be reported if seen on Amazon.
It was taller than her, formed of strips of enchanted metal, bound and twisted around a wooden hollow. Tightly wound strings stretched from base to tip, forged from a secret alloy by master metallurgists in Brod.
Wires connected dials and switches on its neck to a cluster of ether crystals that glowed rose pink in the cavity of its wooden core. It was a prototype, clunky and awkward to hold, but utterly beautiful to her. This was the instrument Bilberry had worked a half-lifetime to build.
She tore off her gloves, heedless of the cold, and strummed her fingers across the strings. As each string intoned at her touch, the pink ether crystal cluster thrummed with resonated power, transforming the vibrations to a sonic roar amplified to such a degree that it drove back the wind and cleared frozen debris from a section of the icy ground around her.
In response, a golden glow bloomed and lit the ice from deep below the frozen surface. It shone beneath her feet lighting up her face as Bilberry grinned.
Hello there.
She began to play, starting with a low and pulsing tone before launching into an ascending solo. The ether crystals took her melodies and formed them into kinetic force that arced out before her, slashing at the ice, sending showers of frozen shards flying.
The instrument rewarded a very different style to a traditional lute. As Bilberry played, she bore into the strings aggressively; her fingers slid up and down the neck, causing it to shriek through scales and modulate pitch violently, which in turn accelerated the slashing excavation taking place before her.
The lashes of magical energy did more than simply slice through the ice, they severed etherial bindings tied into the very fabric of the veil, wards woven into the tundra that had stood for centuries. She shattered them in minutes, cackling with raucous laughter as she played, shaking her head with her furs whipping about in the frozen wind.
The sounds of her unbridled music echoed out across the miles of northern waste. Ice crystals began to reverberate into modal patterns turning the ice sheet into an intricate shifting canvas of trembling frozen shards.
Bilberry Rattlestaff stood above all contenders as the greatest bard of this age, and, as far as she was concerned, the Etherial Amplifier was the finest instrument ever created. Together, they played a song fit to raise a lost god from its prison. Nothing like it had ever been heard on Splinterra before.
As her magical solo roared to a close, at last an excavated channel descended down through the layers of ice into the darkness below.
Stowing her treasured Etherial Amplifier, Bilberry lowered enchanted ropes that lashed onto the contents of the hole. She hitched up the tundra hounds and together they pulled, slowly and painfully dragging a heavy block of ice up from the depths.
It was the size of a coffin, and it glowed from within with golden light. At first it was almost blinding, but gradually the glow began to fade. Bilberry settled the icy coffin on the edge of the hole. After a minute of squinting into the fading radiance she could finally see inside.
A single naked body lay encased in the ice.
It was a frozen boy, a teenager perhaps, depending on his caste. He looked skinny, even emaciated, perhaps a result of the centuries long internment in this icy coffin. He seemed unremarkable apart from the strange form of imprisonment. Bilberry hadn’t know exactly what to expect, but none of her speculations had looked quite like this. She knelt and peered in.
The prisoner beneath the ice didn’t stir but from what she'd already learned on her journey she was sure he was alive. Nevertheless, his eyes remained closed and Bilberry couldn’t help but be reminded of the way her daughter looked when she was sleeping.
Light flashed and Bilberry was startled back to her feet. The ice sheet was a shade brighter around her. She looking to the sky and saw that Nostros' power had finally faltered. Manrith was beginning to slide away from the sun, bringing the eclipse to a gradual end.
How long did she have left, a few hours? More if she was lucky. She looked down at the frozen body before her.
If her suspicions were correct, luck might just be on her side.
“Right then boy, you’re coming with me,” she barked as she gathered her tools to leave.
She grabbed the enchanted ropes again and adjusted them so the ice coffin would be dragged behind the sled, then she roused the tundra hounds to action.
Together they raced away from the prison as the world grew brighter by degrees. Bilberry made a beeline for the nearby mountains. There was a refuge there, somewhere she could hide from Vandrin and his agents; a place to crack the coffin open and search for more answers.
By the time daylight once again swept unhindered across the ice sheet, she and the prisoner were gone; hidden away in the foothills of the Chillspines.
A ray of sunlight glared down upon the coffin shaped hole in the ice. It flitted across the tundra, searching for tracks, but they had already been lost to the wind. The sun focused back on the broken prison and it began to burn with rage. The ice melted under its gaze, and then it began to boil.
For hours the searching sun blazed red upon Splinterra; tidal cities flooded as the ice-caps flowed into the seas, the oceans steamed causing hurricanes across the realm, and people cowered in the shade lest their skin blister in minutes under Vandrin's inexplicable wrath. The joy felt across the world at the end of the eclipse turned to terror at what must surely be the annihilation of Splinterra itself.
Then, as suddenly as it had begun the onslaught was over. Vandrin relented, or was was restrained.
The fifteen Aspects of Orot, the splintered God, set the world to rights together. Over the following days they rolled back the oceans and the ice-caps, fixed the heavens in their proper places, and healed those wounded by Vandrin's outburst.
Orot promised that such wanton destruction by the Aspects would never happen again. Zaffir and Dynas together sent a wave of plenty and flourishing life across the world in apology and recompense, and all appeared subdued. In secret the Aspects were in disarray; they argued, accused, and began to panic while Fate's design continued unhindered.
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In a room deep beneath the Chillspines, the prisoner lay thawing under Bilberry’s watchful eyes and the glow of a large crackling fireplace.
Hours passed while the coffin melted away and colour returned to the boy's frozen flesh.
At long last he opened his eyes, startled and disoriented, and immediately began to cough. He gasped and heaved with wordless convulsions, flapping his weak limbs and curling into a naked ball on the floor as he drew his first breaths in nearly three hundred years.
Bilberry rose and wrapped the prisoner in a thick blanket. She dried his hair as he clung to her in a daze, shuddering with shock and chills. If this was a god it seemed as vulnerable as a newborn.
Slowly the boy began to warm up. His body stopped shaking with the chill of frozen centuries, and Bilberry began to sing soothingly to him. It was a tune from long ago, from her old hometown of Ablerise, nestled in the heartland of The Radiant Dynasty, a place to which she might never return. She sang, as she had sung her daughter, Olive, to sleep a thousand times over a thousand nights, and tears rolled down her cheeks. The young god lay in her arms, too weak to rise, until finally her voice lulled him into a deep and exhausted sleep.
[End of Prologue]