“Veydann,” my father called, picking his way across the meadow.

Tchunk! The ax bit into the wood with a thoroughly satisfying shudder, splitting the log completely.

I looked up, pausing to wipe the sweat from my brow and rest my axe, which I had been wielding with purely mundane strength as a matter of exercise.

“Odinar,” I acknowledged coolly.

Swing! Tchunk!

“I'm getting really tired of coming up here personally just to drag you down to war councils, boy,” he growled at me.

For an absurd moment, I wondered how long it would be before he stopped calling me boy like I was still some untrained stripling, but ignored the urge to ask.

Swing. Tchunk!

Oh, but I loved watching my father’s teeth grind. He couldn't really say anything (it was according to his own edict that his children were subject to the same titles and etiquette rules as the rest of the world), but we both knew my refusal to call him anything but Odinar ate at the old man's composure almost as much as being essentially ignored.

"This little whim of yours is getting old, boy," he snarled as I swung the wood-ax again.

Tchunk!

Really. I'd've thought he'd stop calling my refusal to be sent for a whim after I'd stuck to it for a hundred years. I had originally hoped I would manage to get left alone a bit more from that gambit, but I should have known better with Jarrock Odinar. Now, it was mostly just one more way to fence aggravations with the old man.

What I said, though, was, "Then you should stop coming up after me." Nobody was going to accuse me of being out-stubborned by my own father.

Swing! Tchunk!

He wouldn't, of course, stop; little as my father liked my tactics and the way I handled his heralds and other sons, they really did need me if war were breaking out again. It was my expertise behind most of the major magic workings my nation had created, and it was not the only gift my unconventional habits and erratic temper had given my country.

Swing! Tchunk!

I was also, though few would admit it, among the small handful of generals that had won most of Noldur's wars for them. Of course, nobody really admitted that out loud since I fought against them in the civil war.

"You're as stubborn and surly as ever," he growled. "Don't you think it's time you gave up this little hidey-hole and came down and lived in the Valley with the rest of us?"

Stubborn? Surly? Look who's talking. "I like my hidey-hole," I said, never missing a beat with the axe. "Besides, if I came down there I'd have to live with the rest of you."

Swing! Tchunk!

My father knew better than to engage with me on that one. "Veydann, I--never mind. You'll still have to come down for this one. We're in the fight of our lives this time, and no mistake."

From what I had seen in my death-vision of Jamal Himdalli, that was probably true, but admitting that to my father would be giving him leave to order me around for the whole war. I swung the axe again. "As opposed to the fifteen other 'fights of our lives' we've been engaged in over the last three hundred years?"

Swing! Tchunk!

So perhaps it was forgivable when his next words came out with a bit more of a bite. “Do you think you could spare a moment from the woodsman’s chores for an emerging crisis of historic proportions?” he nearly snarled at me.

I smiled--I couldn’t quite help it, he looked so mad--and swung my ax again. “Sure. What is it?”

Tchunk!

I’m pretty sure I heard him counting to ten that time, but for what remained of our relationship, I decided not to tell him so.

Tchunk!

“Boy,” he huffed out at last, “the Drinorae, the Waesir, and the Mithgarians just carried off a nearly successful sortie against the Baifrost, apparently working together. Jamal Himdalli is dead just from that opening volley, and we’re still not sure what damage, exactly, was done to the Bridge in the battle.”

Tchunk!

“I’m sorry to hear about Jamal,” I said quietly, swinging my axe again. He wasn’t the greatest of the Himdalli, but he had been a good friend, and a solid warrior in the Alsir ranks. It would take time to heal his loss, especially among the Himdalli brotherhood.

Not to mention, it was getting harder and harder to watch everyone die.

Tchunk!

My father growled in frustration. "Just what does it take to get you to do your duty, Odinari?"

"An actual request," I said mildly, swinging the ax once more. "Which, by the way, you have not yet given. I haven't answered to your orders in a hundred years, Odinar."

Tchunk!

My father hated it when I called him by his formal title almost as much as he hated asking for anything. I could practically hear his teeth gnashing as I brought the axe back around. "Fine. Veydann, would you kindly come down and--"

“Nope,” I said cheerfully, swinging the ax again. “Can't think of a reason to.”

Tchunk!

Hey, nobody ever called me diplomatic.

“Demons come and drag you to the bitterest depths of Chaos, Veydann! Do you have any idea what you could do if you would only—?”

But what I could have done, I suppose I will never learn, for as my father spoke, the frigid air of the valley gave an abrupt and sickening lurch, a terrible and disorienting sensation such as I had never felt before, and fervently hope I will never feel again.

Now, up until this point, the interview had been going according to a well-established routine. I pretended not to know why he was here and goaded my father into as close to a frenzy as Jarrock Odinar ever came, and eventually (usually after a great deal of threats and bluster and a little bit of pseudo-diplomatic maneuvering), my father would officially ask for my help as a Noldurian vassal and a successful Alsir general. We’d wrangle over the terms of my command for a while until we were both satisfied and then get into an argument over one of my brothers or the peculiar limbo of the current succession or some details of the rudimentary war plan, the conclusion of which would be my father storming out on his great grey stallion (who had quite the flair for the dramatic for a pseudo-horse) or very occasionally me losing my own temper and throwing my father bodily out of Trideil (okay, so maybe that happened about as often as him storming out. At least I came by the temper honestly, right?).

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It was a known dance, if one both of us quite disliked, and I had already been laying strategies to get what I wanted out of the conference this time.

But right in the middle of my father’s impassioned appeal to my thoroughly withered patriotism and nonexistent dreams of glory, the entire valley shivered.

I know no other way to describe it, though it’s likely a moot point because that particular calamity cannot actually ever happen again. I threw up my hand in a vain effort to hold off the uncomfortable sensation of the greatest working I had ever performed--or rather, four of the greatest workings I had ever participated in--unraveling and collapsing upon me like the shrill screaming of a thousand shrouds.

The Great Seals of Slumber, Hunger, Darkness, and Pain, the mightiest magical engineering feats of an entire age, were...gone.

Just gone.

"What in all nine worlds was that?" my father asked, sounding more shaken than I had ever heard him.

"That," I said, feeling my stomach curl into a knot and sink into the depths of my abdomen as I spoke, "is the only thing I can think of that could induce me to come down to the Valley without asking concessions."

My father had spent a lot of time rehashing those arguments with me, and in spite of his preoccupations with matters of state, he had a memory like a steel trap, frequently even better than mine. "The Seals--" he started, but couldn't finish.

"All four Great Seals," I said quietly, my eyes trying vainly to pierce the distances even I could not see through here, "have been shattered like those cheap dinner plates you keep making Freya for throwing at you."

My father hissed a long, indrawn breath. The Great Seals were my greatest triumph, and one of the most powerful pieces of magical engineering ever created, designed to endure every attack and hope of our enemies until the world ends. Created from the dark side of the four elements--Slumber for Water, Hunger for Air, Pain for Fire, and Darkness for Earth--to bind and control the creatures imprisoned within their confines, they had been intended to cage those of our enemies that lay beyond our power to destroy, and two of them had even been used for that.

The most dangerous of the creatures now loosed upon the world was a demon-beast called Garmondir, king of the southern land of Shrendak and a creature so formidable that only a scant handful of refugees and fools had ever survived seeing it, and (so far as I know), I alone had ever survived it seeing me. The beast had once embarked on a campaign to "clean out the rodents" by eliminating mankind and all our works from the world, and only sheer desperation and extremely good timing had allowed us to activate the Great Seal of Slumbering Water upon its lair before it may well have succeeded. Even then, I had been forced to flee through the dark underworld of the Chaos Nethergates to avoid being trapped with it, and still no one really believed what I had found there.

The beast-king would be…less formidable… since we had spent the better part of thirty years hunting down most of its lackeys and knights and pulverizing its country into unusable rubble after the war, but anyone who underestimated the peril that Garmondir itself could still pose was truly an unmitigated fool.

There was a very good chance, however, that we would not survive long enough for the irate beast, now some five thousand miles to the south, to wreak dark vengeance for its long sleep. The Great Seal of Hungering Air had been used to its fullest effect upon the great legions of undead in the mountains of the Helvaran Mithgarians, binding each and every undead revenant servant to within a small handful of miles of the place where it was raised and thereby effectively neutralizing the clannish mountain folks' ability to pose a threat of any sort to our continent-wide sovereignty--something they had been seriously contesting us for before the seal was cast. The undead were difficult and costly to kill, and were bound by terrible geas to obey the commands of their masters unflinchingly. Now that they could finally assemble their dead and necromancers in force, they would waste little time marching on their long-hated enemies here, and we would not have bound them so if we had been certain of our ability to defeat the gathered hordes. They were also a great deal closer than Garmondir.

Still closer, however, were the Fenrar. Once, they had been the prized pets of the Noldurian aristocracy, and our own private corps of shapeshifter assassins had set up their castle on an island in the center of a caldera lake no more than twenty miles from Aesaguard and not a great deal farther even from here. I still thought the use of the Great Seal of Dark Earth had been serious overkill, but my father had insisted that, since they were technically within the boundaries of Old Noldur Valley, we were legally forbidden from killing them, and by then they hadn't needed my help to lay down the workings. They had even convinced the arrogant shapeshifters to hold still for the binding, which was a rather ugly piece of pseudo-deceit that had never sat well with me, even if my brother Fallon had paid for it with the loss of his hand.

Still, I had been angry enough at the murder in which they had taken part--the loss of Baldan, the only one of my brothers who had ever had enough of a gift for diplomacy to keep us out of a major war, instead of getting us into it, still cut deep--that I had balked only slightly. Assassins had never been a form of warrior I valued, anyway.

The Great Seal of Fiery Pain, however, left a bad taste in my mouth as I remembered what had been done with that one. This had been the reason I stopped taking orders from my father, and the memory still hurt.

Lokigan Faeron had once been our staunchest ally, in the beginning days when neither our military nor our arrogance were up to the standards of our intense code of honor (also in the days when we all practiced it as it was written). He had ruled the neighboring state of Waesir, the land where men walked and talked with fire elementals every day and bent them to their will. He had been my first teacher in the art of magic after I left my father's court to find my own way, and he was a fire-master and a shape-shifter without peer. He had gotten us out of nearly as many scrapes as he had gotten us into, and he had a fierce and funny heart and a quick wit I could still smile to remember.

But something had gone deeply wrong in Lokigan's heart as our nation and our power grew, and he could never really acknowledge the fact that we had seriously eclipsed him, and that even his own pet project (the Fenrar assassins) had grown beyond anything in his own realm in power. Something had curdled deep in his soul as time went forward, and by the time Baldan died, he was a bitter, hollow wreck of a man with power as great as any I have ever known. It was he who was the mastermind behind Baldan's death; he had tricked our blind brother Hondir into striking the fatal blow in an apparent game, positioned and ordered the Fenrar to allow for the fashioning of the deceptively powerful weapon, and it was largely due to his interference that our formidable skills and power were unable to save Baldan after the blow was struck or even successfully reanimate him afterward (my father tried).

We would fear Garmondir; we would certainly respect the threat of the loosed Mithgarian revenants. We hated and despised the Fenrar, and no one was going to take their position so close to our castles lightly.

But the deepest wounds would likely come just from hearing Lokigan Faeron's name. My father was the one who had bound him with the Great Seal of Fiery Pain, condemning him to suffer so deeply that it would be a wonder if he still knew who he was, but I had not had the means to object. Part of the power that Lokigan Faeron commanded made him almost impossible to kill with blade or blow, and others made him immune to flame and capable of existing in pieces or deprived of water and air. Even I was not honestly certain how we might have killed him, though the problem had long seemed academic, since the Great Seal with which he was bound was supposed to last until long after all of us were dead.

Lokigan Faeron had betrayed us over and over again even before that fateful day. His name was still a byword of ugliness and deceit, a specter of fear, loathing, and evil on the collective consciousness of our country. For those of us who had known him personally--myself, my father, Fallon, Ulmer--the cut would be deeper, but the shock would be felt nationwide. The Great Seals were an article of faith. I couldn't even imagine what kind of tidal force must have been mustered to smash them--and to do so thoroughly enough that it had ricocheted through all four was chilling.

“Then you are right,” my father said, his voice as dark and cold as the winter snows. “It is time to go back to Volhollan.” He paused. “Stalnir!”

The great gray stallion appeared as I whistled a summons for Vastar, and both of us took to the air at nearly the same time.