Prologue: The Dying Dark

In a time now forgotten, I once almost killed us all. These bloody hands gave the Dark complete power to consume the world.

The end was no evil man, not the harbinger of ruin-- not some god or inhuman consciousness. It was the very same darkness that you can look up and see now in some unlit corner, some crack in the bedrock, your shadow as you walk on a sunny day. Just. . . incarnate.

Initially, the sun didn’t shine as bright, the nights lasted longer; you get the idea. But all things have momentum. Take twenty seconds off the average day, that doesn’t matter much. But how about an hour? Two hours? The world chilled and crops faded in the dwindling twilight. Entire swathes of the population died gnashing their teeth, trapped in a perpetual, decaying winter. The world a pestle, the dark expanse of heaven our mortar.

And we arrived at a crux—the last-ditch effort of those sad humans to fight the Dark. Beggars and thieves pretending to be heroes. I handed my pick of the litter—a sop named Walthier-- a weapon that might save us.

And then I did nothing.

Sitting on an empty throne in a disheveled fortress, I studied the hefts of stone thrown about at odd angles like some ancient astronomical calendar. Second guessed myself as light through the ceiling breaks faded, darkness covering the paint that gilt the walls and frescoed the ceilings. This had been a house of kings, but there was only me.

“Sirrah? You’re muttering to yourself, should I be concerned?” Another voice sounded.

Despite my canvas of description of the decrepit and sepulchral, Walthier did leave me a squire to attend me. An abomination, barely human. The sickness that ran through his veins is why this calamity occurred.

“The light is fading,” I said. “We’re going to die a slow death in utter dark. It will be contemplative, you will feel it creep into your bones.”

The boy looked at his feet.

At last he got the nerve to reply, “The King will—”

“The King!” I finally ceased my vigil, watching the last embers of the sun fade from the sky. “Walthier is a man. Whatever providence I bestowed on him, it was the desperate who worshiped him.” I plunged my next words in slowly, perhaps one final pleasure at the end. “And I thought you people, you Psychics, were better than my race.” Walthier was, after all, born as talentless as myself.

“As far as I see it,” the boy left off his customary ‘sirrah,’ “with or without that Book, he is every bit my equal.” The last strands of light snapped. If he had looked back, he could not have seen my face.

I heard him dig into that word: ‘he.’

“You’re better than me, even now? Are you better than me, boy?” It would have been pleasing to hear him answer back yes, to end my life with a thousandth justification for my hatred, but I think he was gone then, retreated to some dark corner of the fortress, or perhaps of the world.

In the dark, my ears buzzed with static and my eyes conjured grey splotches. I laughed, the creeping haze of fear welling up inside. The cold was compounding.

Later. I could go mad later.

I followed the walls, letting the granular feel of brick guide my death march. After some turn, in some hallway, my hand brushed past a large rod. I imagined a gaudy cylinder of gold framing the right side of a mirror as my fingers traced over a cold, smooth plane. And within that space, I imagined a thousand faces that could have been mine.

The face of my youth is the only one I can recall.

And then–

Ah yes, I spent my time idling about some fine tapestries, feeling their frayed threads with the back of my hand. Reciting the argument back to find the weak points in the squire’s psyche I had failed to attack.

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So lost in thought, I must have sounded like an absolute madman when I noticed a faint dazzle of light illuminating the corridor. I frantically searched for a window, but it was that boy again. His palm out before him, a lively flamed danced on its surface, no self-immolation—no fuel.

As I said before: Psychic.

“You’re back.”

“I—” The boy hesitated. “I was charged and shall do that duty. We were to go meet the King once the battle was over. As the stars have returned in the sky I gauge that it is so.”

“Stars you say? So we’re still in the dark.”

“I expect they will still call it night. It has been hours since the last light disappeared. I would not have interrupted, but you have been wandering the halls, speaking to yourself for quite some time.”

I began muttering to myself again, questioning the veracity of the boy's claims. It was possible; I could not deny that. Easy to lose myself to the rolls of time the more my mind aged. My eyes rolled over to that heart-thumping flame. Could I believe a Psychic prone to evil? Prone to all sort of unnatural. . . . I tensed at the sight of his conjured light yet again. I once again longed to hurt the boy-physically now-- but the muscles in my neck hung tight in restraint, ready to be plucked like the string of a harp.

"Lead on, boy." Back to my old work: a world free from Psychics.

Before that, it was time to reclaim my gifts from Walthier. Even if he lived through the fight, even if he personally slew the Dark, the Pyschics would cannibalize him in time. His title of messiah would confer a happy life for five, maybe ten years, but the toll would come due. It always does when you don’t have power.

The front gates of Fort Benehedren hung broken- one giant stone slab gone, its twin slumping in mourning from the loss. Thick clouds obscured the night sky save for sparse pockets of starlight that poked through the cover. The two brother moons hung faraway and obscured, soon to retreat below the cover of the distant mountains. The world slept in shadow, but shadow requires light.

I won.

“You were lucky to find your way out here in that utter abyss,” I said.

“I’m sorry milord? I only came inside when the light returned. I obeyed your orders and did not abandon my post, even as I believed we would die in that. . .” He cleared his throat. “Abyss.”

I paused and cocked my head to examine the freckles holding hands around his nose. The way the starlight illuminated that particular shade of red hair.

He was right. The boy in the throne room was someone else long gone. They looked similar though; it was hard not to think of that old memory. My eyes shifted to that pulsing fire in his hand and my fingers twitched towards the dagger at my waste. So similar.

“The horses?” he asked, eyeing my hand. I could feel the trepidation there.

“Of course,” I smiled. “Lead on.”

As we walked across the dusty courtyard to the rib-bare geldings tied to a withered stump, I saw the red stripes stitched into the shoulder my squire’s linen (what passed for a military uniform now). It denoted his affinity with a power just as great, just as terrible as the one that had died today. A power in this world that would be the next to die with any grace given to me by all that was born at the beginning.

The horse’s back felt like it would snap under my weight. In a world with so little food, the horses were the first to go. Starved, eaten. What we rode would be worth the weight of a kingdom in coal once the sun rose again.

"I’ll do my best at tracking. It’s impossible to say where the final battle concluded."

"I know the way." I said it with a whisper.

It was so long ago, but I don't think I did it intentionally. But when the boy leaned in, straining to hear my words, my arm acted on its own accord. My knife sheared through his neck only halting at the stringy tendon, at which point I pushed through the resistance and finished the cut in a sawing grunt.

His eyes darkened in understanding without a trace of shock. More like he had been warned about such an eventuality.

The boy fell from his saddle and his shoulder hit the ground with a crisp snap like a branch in winter. If the pagans welcome the new year with a blood sacrifice, then so much the better to welcome in the rebirth of our world with one of my own.

And yet I was, and always have been, an overconfident fool.

His blood milling about with the dirt, one hand cupping his severed artery, the boy's face clenched and true hatred spewed from those eyes. His other arm, stuck under him and broken, pulled free in fury and I saw too late the spasms of orange energy that ran along his fingers. He slammed his fist into the ground.

I watched my blunder with bleak understanding. As energy flowed beneath my horse and I, it expanded. A cataclysm of fire and heat rose like a bloom and engulfed me, the squire releasing every last spark of energy he could. And then fire and brimstone. The world turned to a horrific slew of oranges and reds.

After the salvation of humanity, after the death of the Dark, that is how one of the most portentous days in human history began– with myself smeared into a red stain.

-My story, from a time long forgotten