Chapter 15: The Forsaken

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> “I remember the day of creation clearly, and I tell you I saw twelve Heralds arrayed behind the Crowns at the moment of waking. Behind Lady Haust I saw a tall, dark man with his hair worn in a high knot. And behind Queen Talvi, I saw a pale man with white wings, a slender golden-haired woman whose eyes shone like the sun, and a quiet, darkly clad woman who wore blue flame like a shawl. What has become of them, it seems, nobody knows…” —Amisten Henrutcof Llenava, Memories of the Deep Past.

THE FIRSTMOTE

somewhere in the endless sky 01.01.01.01.01.01

“And there they go…” King Eärrach exhaled heavily, tipped his head back and sighed as though a heavy weight had finally been taken from his shoulders just as it was becoming unbearable. Around them, the vast stone bowl of this amphitheatre, which just moments ago had been packed shoulder-to-shoulder with two million blinking, naked, newly woven mortals, now echoed with silence. They were out in the world, now. Their world, to explore and do with as they pleased.

“That’s…it?” Chathamurgah asked.

“They have everything they need,” his Crown told him. Chathamurgah wasn’t sure what to make of his creator and patron. She was so…small. So light, and so frail. He wanted to protect her, despite knowing her power eclipsed his by an inexpressable degree.

“I’m worried for them,” Chathamurgah insisted. “It’s a big and dangerous world you’ve made for them, and they have no tools, no clothes, no—”

She smiled, and took his hand reassuringly. “They have knowledge, and they have each other,” she said. “I promise you, they’ll thrive.”

“Except for the ones who die.”

Haust nodded slowly. Her thin lips pursed in an expression of…what? It was so hard to tell with her eyes hidden thus. There may have been sympathy there…but not much, as her next words revealed.

“Some of them will, yes,” she said.

“You could have given them more.”

She looked directly at him at last, insofar as he could tell. She must be using senses other than sight to look past that opaque veil. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you?”

“Death is not so terrible as you think,” Haust told him. “They will have full and worthwhile lives.”

“Then why did you make us eternal?” Chathamurgah asked, indicating himself and his fellow Heralds. Most of the others had sidled closer to listen to this conversation, though Maicoh, Maingain, Faun and Satyr had wandered off to go play in the waterfalls. “It doesn’t seem fair, somehow. That we should have immortality and all this power, and they should be sent naked out into a world that can so easily kill them…”

“Is fairness the only moral concern?” Haust asked.

Chathamurgah paused and glanced around at the others. Dragon was shaking her head as though the answer was an obvious no. Yngmir, towering over the rest of them, was stroking his beard thoughtfully as he weighed the question. Rheannach seemed to have lost interest and was staring at King Eärrach. And the Shishah was grinning like a lunatic, utterly unreadable.

Vedaun and Nimico glanced at each other, shrugged, and walked away. Only Iaka met Chathamurgah’s eye, then looked up at the sky with an expression of deep sorrow.

“It does seem…even if death is not so terrible, they’re going to suffer,” she ventured. “Must they?”

“I’m afraid they must,” Haust replied solemnly.

“Why?”

“To avoid worse,” Queen Talvi told her. “You will understand, in time.”

Iaka and Chathamurgah looked at each other. Chathamurgah could tell what was going through his cousin Herald’s thoughts, because it was the same one passing through his own: why can’t it be made obvious right now?

Nothing had, so far. The world didn’t make sense. In the few days he’d existed, these Crowns who’d made them had been kind, tender, clearly fond of them, but also aloof. And much of what they did didn’t quite seem perfectly just to him, somehow. Take Rheannach, for instance, who was still gazing at Eärrach with fathomless adoration in her eyes. Had he created her just to receive her unconditional love? That seemed…

Well, it made him uncomfortable, for reasons he couldn’t quite put into words yet.

Haust touched his arm gently. “Come on. The world is waiting. You won’t figure it all out by staying here.”

Chathamurgah shook off his melancholy feeling and nodded, looking up at the sky. All those floating lands out there, and right now there were humans and elves exploring them and figuring out how they were going to last through the first day, the first night, and the day beyond.

He wanted to help them. But for now, all he could do was wish them good luck.

They were going to need it, he felt.

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INTERLUDE: YNGMIR’S STUDY

The Thundering Hall 09.06.03.10.03

“I see a pattern,” Jerl said.

“In what?” Haust asked, pausing.

“In the kinds of Heralds you made. You each had a…I guess you’d call it a theme.”

She sighed, then nodded with a tiny, self-effacing smile. “Yes we did. King Eärrach wanted companions, a loving wife and two faithful hounds. Prince Sayf wanted teachers who would educate mortals through the medium of baffling, entertaining, thought-provoking riddles.”

“And you meanwhile created the Herald of Lore—” Jerl motioned to Yngmir, who was still deep in his meditative trance above them, “Dragon, the Herald of Secrets…and Chathamurgah. The Herald of…?”

She sighed. “Critique.”

There was a long silence. Somewhere outside, Jerl could hear the sounds of activity. People tending the wounded and making repairs, he supposed. But here in Yngmir’s study, the only sounds were the ticking of his gigantic clock, the rumble of his slow, immense breath, and the soft creak of his tree.

And, faintly, the rustle of fabric as Haust smoothed her skirts. “You’re right,” she said. “To Yngmir I gave a tremendous memory and the wisdom to make sense of all he learned. To Dragon I gave the shrewd intellect to both uncover and keep the world’s secrets. But to him, I gave what I considered the greatest gift of the three: the courage and cleverness to question everything.”

“Why?”

“Because critique, doubt, skepticism and rational deconstruction are powerful tools, Jerl. And they are necessary tools. You can’t take absolutely everything on faith, and you can’t make sense of the world only by gathering data. You have to do some thinking, eventually.”

She sighed again, and bowed her head. “Unfortunately…that way there lie some deadly traps.”

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> “What is there to say of Vathelan? Oh, the City of Arts! The human city of Auldenheigh grew from its ruin like a tree planted in a corpse, and is splendid enough in its way, but Vathelan’s central purpose was to showcase the artistic brilliance of elves. It was a testament to everything we fey loved about ourselves. Which of course means that among the wonderful arts we celebrated in Vathelan was the art of slaughter. I prefer Auldenheigh.” —Amisten Henrutcof Llenava, Memories of the Deep Past.

THE SLAVE MARKETS

Vathelan, Garanhir Earthmote Hundred and ninety-eighth year of the Ordfey

Officially, to the elves, the great city of Vathelan consisted in its entirety of the gleaming walled city perched on its rocky outcropping by the river Ardha: the sprawling, undefended human quarters outside the walls were the Kinelai, literally the Place For Slaves, and if those quarters had any other name at all it was in Wightidh and the elves did not deign to know it.

To Chathamurgah, such proud inequity made no sense at all.

The Kinelai were, of course, less beautiful than the City of Arts, but no less expertly made. After all, the stonemasons, carpenters and other workers who had erected those gleaming walls were all human, and they took their skill to making their own dwellings. They were forbidden from making their quarter as grand as the Feylai, and they of course had to work in whatever spare time the masters granted them…but it was theirs. And thus, in its way, quainter and nicer.

The Feylai was a gleaming monument to elvish sensibilities about aesthetic beauty and their own glory, and that made it cold and aloof to Chathamurgah’s eyes: the Kinelai on the other hand was a place where people lived and wished to fill their lives with as much relief from their hardship as they could. There were the planters and window boxes, for instance. No flowers, as those were the exclusive preserve of the Fey, so instead the Kinelai was a riot of cooking herbs, great tumbling sprays and bushes of them that made the air smell and taste alive. There were murals, painted carefully inside the lines of permitted artistic expression. There was song, each one flirting with censorship in a daring game with death as the reward for those who misjudged a step.

There was freedom, even though every single human here had a leather collar tight around their neck to remind them they were slaves.

Chathamurgah was incognito, having taken the guise of a green-skinned Gûlfey, though the disguise was marred by the absence of the usual entourage of slaves. Even the lowest, meanest elf had at least one trotting along at their heels at all times with their eyes dutifully downcast. Still, the humans hurried out of his way as he strode through the streets, bowing and shutting up so that Chathamurgah was the center of a moving circle of silence. It bothered him terribly. He’d have preferred to hear the laughter, chatter and music that filled these streets when the Masters weren’t about. But this was the middle of the market day, and he was not the only elf on the streets.

He was also spoiling his disguise by going on foot rather than being borne on a palanquin. To the eyes of other elves, this Gûlfey must be completely destitute, without even a personal slave to scurry in his shadow.

He didn’t care.

Rather than pass through the gates into the slave market itself, he trotted up some steps to the encircling gallery where the Fey buyers could recline and socialize while their slaves attended to the actual work and business of buying new kine at the various auctions below. From this vantage, the market was divided into square stockades of varying fullness, with sellers proclaiming the kind and fitness of their “wares.” The largest stockades were in the middle, dealing with laborers and workers whose lives would be spent working hard where the Masters couldn’t see them. The ring outside them were house slaves, servants, cooks, cleaners, and all the others whom the elves might have to actually have to see from time to time.

Outermost and closest to the galleries were the valuable slaves: entertainers, personal attendants, pleasure slaves and gladiators. And, lounging against the railings and considering them, was the woman he’d come to see.

She was a Taranfey to look at, her skin as blue as distant stormclouds, her hair dark as eclipse, her eyes the blue of burning rum. She had an entourage of three slaves standing meekly alongside, two girls of perhaps thirteen, and one strapping, broad-shouldered man in his twenties who stepped forward to intercept Chathamurgah’s approach.

“Your pardon, lord. My mistress’ wish is solitude…” he began.

It’s me.

His ‘mistress’ looked up, then waved a languid hand. “Thank you, Berdel. Let him pass.”

Chathamurgah nodded at the man, then slumped down on the couch opposite his cousin.

“You know you may as well be trying to empty the Blue Sea with a thimble,” he pointed out as he sat.

“It’s good to see you too, cousin,” she said.

“Iaka—”

She flashed him a disapproving look. “Where’s your subtlety? Here and now, I am Emrys.”

“We shouldn’t have to be subtle,” He retorted.

The disapproving look became a cold stare for a second, then she turned and indicated a slave with a lift of her chin. “See that one?”

Chathamurgah looked. There was a boy waiting to go up on one of the auction blocks. He was maybe seven or eight years old, with a curly mop of blond hair and wide, innocent, worried blue eyes.

“What about him?”

“Pretty, isn’t he? Very…tempting.”

They both frowned at each other in mutual distaste at her mockery of how an elfish noble would describe the child.

“…Your point?”

“If you out me, I won’t be able to buy him. If I don’t buy him, someone else will. And then, if he’s lucky, his future involves—”

“I don’t need to hear what his future involves, I know quite well enough,” Chathamurgah stopped her.

“Then you understand why we have to be subtle,” she said.

It was Chathamurgah’s turn to give her a cold look, which he turned out and indicated a slave at random, a woman in her forties somewhere in the middle ring. “What about her?”

“What about her?”

“What’s her fate? Working in the kitchens until her joints fail? Or him: the mines. Him: the arena. Her: the stables. Don’t they deserve your care?”

“They do, yes.”

“But the boy deserves it more?”

“If I can’t save everyone, I shouldn’t save anyone. Is that what you’re saying?” she challenged.

“You have the right to decide, as the Fey do, who gets to live and who gets to die. Is that what you’re saying?” he retorted.

“Better to save one than none,” she shot back. “And you know the fine line we are both already walking. So shut up before someone overhears us.”

“You’re forgetting what we are, Herald Iaka. Nobody overhears us unless we allow them to,” Chathamurgah said. He looked around to illustrate his point: the most interest either of them had drawn was a nearby Gûlfey woman who looked him up and down with the calculating air of a rich bitch deciding whether she liked his physique and handsome face enough to overcome his obvious financial and social inadequacies, and whether the minor frisson of scandalously ‘roughing it’ with the poor was sufficiently enticing…and decided that it wasn’t. She turned her attention back to the slave market, and thereby rather perfectly proved him right.

Iaka sighed. “Fine. What do you want, Murgah?”

“I need your help.”

“You?”

“I need to talk with Vedaun and Nimico. It would be…ideal…if you could be there as well.”

She sipped her wine, then gestured at her buyer out on the market floor as the boy was ushered up onto the block for sale.

“…Talk to them about what?” she asked.

“About uniting. About going to our Crowns and putting our case to them. They’re your siblings, if all three of you made a united case to Talvi—”

She scoffed, but said nothing.

“You don’t think it’ll work.”

Iaka’s lack of reply was reply enough. She sipped her wine again, and watched as her buyer’s opposition backed down defeated in the face of an exorbitantly high bid. The trembling boy was led from the block and handed over, little suspecting that he was about to enter a life of comfort, safety and warmth. It was no wonder Iaka’s other ‘slaves’ all adored her so much: she was unfailingly kind to them, and the very first gift they had received from her was their freedom.

A meaningless gesture, Chathamurgah thought. What could they do with it? Where could they go? It was an illusion of freedom, the gesture without the substance. But, to one dying of starvation, even table scraps were magnanimity.

“You said it yourself,” he pressed, softly. “One is better than none. It’s just one drip of water, maybe, and your mother may be made of granite. But with enough time, with enough drops…”

Iaka sighed heavily. “Shut up.”

He did so. She watched as the boy was led to her wagon, there to join whichever few others she’d decided were worthy of being saved over all the rest today. Once he was aboard and the door locked, she drained the last of her wine and set down the empty goblet with angry firmness.

“Fine. I’m in.”

Chathamurgah almost asked if she was sure. He blinked at her, wondering whether something else or somebody else’s words had also touched and influenced her.

“Thank you,” he said, aloud.

“Where and when?” She asked, still watching the slaves as if hunting for one more who caught her whim.

“Vedaun’s longhouse, tomorrow.”

“I’ll be there.”

“Thank you, Iaka.” He stood.

“Nimico, though?” She asked, as he turned to leave. “My sister is not exactly known for her charitable moods. She would be a strange ally in this cause.”

“I’ve thought of that.”

“And the idea of you and Vedaun seeing eye-to-eye is—”

“I’ve thought of that too. Please, cousin…”

“Have some faith?” she asked, gently mocking him.

“Precisely the opposite.” He walked away. His step was brisk and angry, but inside he was almost smiling. Almost.

The first and most difficult hurdle had been crossed.

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In defiance of the cold (not that it could harm him anyway) Vedaun was stripped to the waist when they arrived. When Chathamurgah and Iaka emerged from the conifer forest around his longhouse, he glanced briefly at them, then returned to the business of splitting firewood with the axe that had become his symbol.

It was an affectation, of course. He was a Herald, any fire in his presence could burn indefinitely without fuel. But that would have been dishonest in Vedaun’s particular definition of the word, and Vedaun had very much to say on the subject of honesty. Hence why his longhouse was built entirely by hand, from timber he’d felled himself, on ground he’d leveled by hand and with tools he’d forged himself on the anvil he’d cast himself from iron he’d mined himself…

It had been the labor of generations. The work of dozens, even hundreds of men, all done by one man. Or at least, one Herald limiting himself to mortal strength and capability.

And once it was built, he’d continued to improve and maintain it. Vedaun had invented his own new techniques as he mastered carpentry, stoneworking, ironworking, weaving and more, and the product of his long work was breathtaking in its austere subtlety….just like Vedaun himself, who was twice as tall as a mortal man but proportioned so naturally that one would only know it on standing beside him.

He tossed the split fuel onto the stack next to him, and started trimming down some kindling as they approached. From behind, his entirely hairless snow-pale skin showed off the landscape of his back muscles as they worked and moved, steaming in the cold air.

“What do you two want?” he asked.

“Your help,” Chathamurgah replied.

“With?”

“The Ordfey.”

“Hah!” Vedaun pulled a rag out of his belt and wiped the axe blade clean before hanging the tool safely under the eaves. “No.”

“You haven’t heard us out yet,” Iaka replied.

“What is there to hear?” Vedaun started gathering fuel into his arms. “You want to, what? Change the Ordfey? Destroy it? Re-educate the elves?”

“We want the Crowns to.”

Vedaun’s scathing bark of a laugh echoed off the mountains. He pulled himself together quickly and looked her in the eye. “…You’re serious?”

“We are,” Chathamurgah replied.

“Hah! Oh, you poor idealistic fools…come in.” He tucked the bundle of firewood under his arm and led the way inside. He stacked the wood next to the stone trough that was his hearth and shrugged into a comfortable green woollen tunic with his own distinctive, elegant, geometric patterning around the hem and sleeves. “Bretha!” he called. “We have company.”

A figure napping on a wide fur-strewn bed in the corner stirred and sat up, drawing one of the furs up to her breast for modesty. She was human, in her fifties or so, with dark brown hair long since shot through with strands of grey. She blinked at Murgah and Iaka with sleepy confusion, and started casting around for something to dress herself. “…oh!”

Vedaun gestured and a screen folded at the bed’s end unfolded itself, giving her the privacy to dress. “Lazy,” he chided, fondly. She just scoffed and said something mildly disrespectful.

Iaka sat on the bench Vedaun indicated for her and smiled. “You’re right, you know.”

“About what?”

“Oh, something you said about two hundred years ago. ‘A man can build the grandest hall in the worlds, but it will remain incomplete until a woman lives there.”

“I said that? Well, I was right.” Vedaun cast a fond look at the divider as he sat down, and Bretha stuck her head out long enough to smile at him before vanishing again.

“How did you meet?” Iaka asked. “You would never take a slave wife.”

“Indeed not. Bretha is a free tribeswoman, her people have never been collared.” Vedaun looked smug on his mortal wife’s behalf. “In fact, I met her after she slew an elfish slave-taker who’d been tracking her. She reversed their roles, to his brief surprise.”

Bretha emerged from behind her screen, tying her belt to cinch her dress in at her waist. “The trick to fighting an elf: attack them first,” she said with a smirk, then poked Vedaun’s bald scalp. “Husband, your manners. Fetching the ale and meat is your task while I lay the board for guests.”

Vedaun chuckled and rose. “Right you are,” he agreed.

Iaka and Murgah exchanged a look, and knew right away there was no point in protesting or trying to skip this step. They were in Vedaun’s house, and would follow his rules or get nowhere. So, they sat and drank tea while the board and meat were fetched, the board laid, and Bretha played a bowed lyre for them while they enjoyed the hospitality of the house.

Vedaun seemed to be enjoying himself. Whether he enjoyed making them do things at his pace, or was simply glad to have the company, Murgah couldn’t decide. Either way, impatience would win nothing and potentially cost everything, so he restrained himself and partook.

After the music, Vedaun escorted them into a shuttered verandah where Bretha had lit another fire pit in the midst of a quartet of reclining couches with a stunning view of the glaciers running down on the other side of the valley. The balance of flame and frozen breeze was oddly pleasant, and Vedaun handed around long-stemmed smoking pipes to relax with. Murgah had no idea what he’d packed them with, but it had a heady scent and a pleasant taste.

Either way, it seemed this was the moment when Vedaun was finally willing to discuss their business again.

“I don’t understand what you think you will gain,” he said, tipping his head back to loose a smoke ring at the ceiling. “The Ordfey is all part of the plan, can’t you see that? It is exactly how the Crowns wish it to be.”

“They say otherwise.”

“Their deeds speak louder than their mouths,” Vedaun replied.

“Are you saying the Crowns are liars, brother?” Iaka asked.

“Why shouldn’t I? According to themselves they are not God, or gods.” He sipped his pipe again. “They are, in Mother’s own words, just four jumped-up mortals with grand ideas, and all of a mortal’s flaws. Even if they are not lying to us, they can still lie to themselves.”

“Hardly a loyal sentiment,” Chathamurgah noted.

“Mother did not create us to be loyal.” Vedaun shrugged. “Sometimes, I think she only created us because the other three had Heralds, so she was damn well going to have some too.”

“If only I could disagree…” Iaka commented sourly.

“Anyway. The way to find the truth of a person, even a Crown, if you cannot trust their word, is in watching what they do and what they permit to be done around them. It doesn’t matter that our creators verbally lament the Ordfey and its cruelties, if they sit back and allow it to go ahead. That’s a tacit approval.”

Murgah glanced at Iaka, who was fidgeting with the stem of her pipe and brushing imaginary flecks from it rather than smoking. Her expression was blank and guarded, but that in itself was a sign she was deeply troubled by her brother’s words.

For his own part, Chathamurgah was hearing what he had already believed for a long, long time.

Vedaun saw it. “So, cousin. If you think they’re content with this, if you think they consider all that—” he aimed a lazy hand skwards to wave it in the general direction of all elfkind and the entire Ordfey, “—is part of the plan, or exactly how the world they made should be…why even bother? Do you really thing we can combine our voices and change their course? You know how old they are, and how young we are next to them. Why should Mother listen to her children?”

“Perhaps she’s testing us,” Chathamurgah replied. “Perhaps the ‘plan’ is to see how long it takes for us Heralds to actually stand up and tell them it’s wrong and has gone on long enough.”

“Perhaps. And if you’re wrong?”

“Then we’ll still have done the right thing.”

Vedaun snorted a twin stream of smoke from his nose. “The right thing,” he echoed, dully. “Who are you to say what the right thing is?”

“Is he wrong?” Iaka asked.

Vedaun just chuckled grimly. “Rightness springs from power, and nothing more. Whether it’s the power of Ordfey swords to cut down rebellious slaves, the power of Crowns to put us their creations back in our place, or the ineffable power higher even than King Eärrach…even he’s just following orders. That’s what rightness is, my dear kin. It’s whatever the powerful decree. And any one of the Crowns is more powerful than the twelve Heralds combined.”

He puffed up the pipe more to keep its bowl lit than to smoke it. “No, your ‘perhaps they’re testing us’ was the more persuasive argument.”

“And if nothing else, perhaps we can get them to admit you are right,” Iaka added.

“Heh! Dear sister, you know my mind almost too well.”

“So you’ll join us?” Murgah asked.

“Cousin, I have been waiting for you to begin this thing for a long time. I will join you gladly.” Vedaun offered a rare smile.

“That leaves only Nimico, then,” Chathamurgah said.

“Oh, don’t worry. She and I are of a mind: she’ll need no persuading.”

“…If that’s so, then we can begin planning the next step,” Murgah said.

“Which is?” Iaka asked.

Chathamurgah sipped smoke, blew a ring, and explained the plan. And in the event, he was proven right.

They didn’t need much persuading at all.

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INTERLUDE: YNGMIR’S STUDY

The Thundering Hall 09.06.03.10.03

“You must understand, I didn’t overhear these conversations at the time. They are…reconstructions. Pieced together by the subtle marks left in the world by weighty events, like a tracker might reconstruct his quarry’s stride by their bootprints.”

Haust sighed, leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees, and looked down at the floor between her feet. “We…make so many mistakes. This isn’t even the hugest we’ve made in our long spans, though…it’s up there.”

“You believe creating him was a mistake?”

“No, of course not. What mother would say that of her best and brightest son?” Haust shook her head, and a complex expression that was both smile and bitter self-recrimination twisted across her face. “My mistake was, I trusted that Murgah would reason his way to understanding and faith. I’d forgotten about the trap.”

Jerl frowned at her. “…Trap?”

“Oh yes. An easy, easy trap. One I fell into myself, and slipped back into several times, and probably shall again, given enough time.” She rose to her feet and paced, describing the circumference of the circular rug that surrounded Yngmir’s tree. “There are many such traps, but the one I speak of lies in wait for the talented and clever. Indeed…it’s part of the gift, in a sense. Or at least an inevitable, necessary consequence.”

Jerl said nothing. He was becoming acutely aware that very, very few mortals reported having ever even knowingly spoken to Lady Haust, and the longest such conversation on record had lasted but a few minutes.

In all the time the Worlds had stood, she had never shared so much of her thought with anyone, that he knew of. He was going to have to write this down, he knew it. In fact, he wished that he already had been.

Haust either didn’t hear his thought, or ignored it. She completed her circuit of the carpet and forced herself to sit again.

“The world is hideously complex, wouldn’t you agree?”

“It…certainly seems to be,” Jerl ventured.

She nodded. “Everything, without limit, is complex and complicated beyong the scope of mortal knowledge. I mean that literally, it’s impossible for a human brain to contain enough information. But when you first learn a thing, when you first start to get the hang of it…it doesn’t feel so difficult, does it?”

Jerl thought back on the various skills he’d learned in his life. Knots, he remembered. After his father first purchased the Cavalier Queen, he’d spent a week or so constantly practicing them with the help of the then rigging chief, and by the end of the week he’d mastered the bowline, stopper, clove hitch, sheet bend, double half-hitch, rolling hitch and cleat hitch knots.

Then, just as he’d been feeling cocky and smart, he’d been introduced to the other twenty-five.

“At first, yes,” he agreed.

Some shadowy relative of a smile flitted across her lips. “The very clever and astute suffer this problem quite intensely. Everything comes easily. The cleverer they are, the more they can learn without effort. For the sufficiently clever…by the time they are approaching the point of challenge, they may feel they have learned enough to be able to reason out the rest, so that their best move is to start studying something else, for a bigger picture. So their attention flutters away like a moth, and they’re never humbled by the realization of how little they actually know. What happens to them then, do you think?”

Jerl considered it. “They…would go through life learning that the world is a simple place. Obvious. Easily understood.”

“Is it that?” Haust challenged him. “Or is it something subtler?”

Jerl blinked, frowned, then shook his head and shrugged.

“It’s not that they think the world is simple, Jerl. It’s that they think the truth is simple. Simple and obvious. To somebody in the trap, the truth becomes something that jumps out like a brilliant light in the dark, and you’ll know it’s true because it will immediately make perfect, effortless sense. The truth is a level paved road, easy to walk on. If you are confused, if you find your thoughts are difficult and uncomfortable, that’s a sign you have plunged off the road of truth and into the thorny undergrowth of falsehood and misunderstanding.”

She inhaled slowly, glanced up at Yngmir, then back down to Jerl. “Do you think that’s right?”

Jerl thought about it for a moment. “No…no. I think it’s the other way around,” he ventured.

“I agree,” she said, softly. “That’s the trap. And the cleverer the one who’s caught in it is, and the longer they remain in it, the tighter it closes.”

“…And Chathamurgah is very clever,” Jerl said.

She nodded, though there was no pride in her expression. “The cleverest. And he has been stuck in the trap since the First Day.” She rose to her feet again, as though sitting still was becoming painful. “…And I didn’t notice.”

Slowly, she resumed her slow circle around the edge of the rug. This time, Jerl stood and walked with her.

The story continued.

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> “The thing to remember is, our depravity was infectious. Humans of modern times like to imagine that our human population were perpetually cringing, traumatized things kept in line by terror the way one might bully a captive into submission. The truth is, the same darkness lurks in the human soul as in the elfish one. Gladiatorial bouts were enormously popular among the slaves. That began to change not long after Ekve’s two hundredth jubilee celebrations…” —Amisten Henrutcof Llenava, Memories of the Deep Past.

THE CITY OF CHOIRS

Vathcanarthen, Prathardesh Earthmote Two hundredth year of the Ordfey

Prince Sayf had once told the Heralds the story of a trickster who caused havoc at a wedding of gods by sending the gift of a divine golden apple, addressed vaguely to ‘the most beautiful.’ The result, according to the story, had been a vanity-fuelled dispute between three goddesses, culminating in a war whose legend had survived even through the death of the World Before and the birth of this one.

The fable came to Chathamurgah’s mind now because, for the first time since the First Day, he had the pleasure of seeing Rheannach and Nimico standing side-by-side, and the legend had resurfaced in his brain. Which of them was more beautiful?

It ought to have been obvious. Rheannach was unquestionably a rare beauty by any mortal standard, but Nimico was a divine beauty, imbued with a grace and perfection of proportion and features far beyond what mortal flesh and blood could ever achieve or maintain. Her hair was golden, her lips full, her voice melodic, her figure so perfect that to glance at it felt like a crime…

But there was a listlessness in her face and posture that abdicated it all. Her eyes, for instance, were red-rimmed with tired indifference and seemed half-realized, as though she’d got as far as deciding she wanted intriguing irises the hue of rose gold, then got bored and never bothered with the pupils. The result was like being given a bored look by two unminted coins.

And then there were her wings.

All the Heralds had their wings, of course. It was one of the few things about their own bodies that remained stubbornly immutable and unchangeable. Rheannach had her beautiful iridescent magpie wings, Vedaun a pair of brilliant white pinions like a vast swan’s, the Shishah’s were blue and cream like a peackock’s, and even Yngmir could unfurl a vast array of sky-blotting grey owl feathers.

But Nimico’s were the only ones that looked unkempt. They ought to have been elegant, being glossy black at the patagium shading to shimmering gold at the primaries. But instead, they were perpetually scruffy, and she was the only one of them who shed feathers, at a rate of one or two every few minutes. Her palace, a sullen spike on a peak within view of the Glacier Keep, was as adrift in them as a rookery.

No, as unquestionably more lovely as Nimico should have been, she projected an air of terrible ennui that would always lose to Rheannach’s serene good humor.

Though, here and now, Rheannach’s mood was not quite so sparkling.

“I really don’t know about this…” she fretted.

“It’s important, Rhee,” Iaka told her, encouragingly. “You need to see this.”

“But I—”

“You’ve heard the stories and the rumors, we know. But you need to see it,” Iaka pressed. “Please.”

This was a pivotal moment in Murgah’s plan. Nimico had joined them at once, with a shrug as though it was the first interesting idea she’d heard in far too long. He’d rejected the idea of bringing Maicoh and Maingan on board as impossible, they were utterly loyal to King Eärrach. Faun and Satyr were too shallow, they’d consider the whole affair boring and beneath them, and the Shishah, so far as he could tell, was a true believer. As were Yngmir and Dragon.

But Rheannach was much too innocent. Even if she turned around and told her lord husband everything that transpired today, she was still about to have her eyes opened in a way that was long overdue. Whatever happened, they were doing her a kindness today.

“Disguises,” Vedaun grunted. As one, the gathered Heralds nodded and changed. Between one stride and the next, their customary forms rippled, shifted, and the room now contained five wealthy elven merchants.

“…That’s not a fey hair color, Nim,” Iaka pointed out. Her sister made an exasperated sound, and her golden blonde tresses twisted sideways to a shade of sun-on-the-grass green unusual but not impossible for a Gûlfey.

“Better?” She demanded.

“Thank you.”

Iaka’s “slaves” were waiting for them with a collection of palanquins. Their use rankled for Chathamurgah, but he consoled himself with the knowledge that these were free humans who had volunteered to help Iaka keep up her charade of elfish nobility. Still, he reduced his own mass as he boarded the chair so as to make the journey easier for them, and watched through the gossamer curtains as they trotted out into the flow of people heading toward the arena.

This whole cycle of thirty-two days was a festival marking the two hundredth year of Ekve’s various reigns. The imperial coffers had been generously tapped to fill the city with every sign of celebration, from musicians and bunting to stalls offering enormous supplies of food, free to the consumer at the throne’s expense. Even slaves were permitted to partake, in a rare gesture of magnanimity.

But today was the climax, and the jewel of the celebration was a spectacle in the arena. It had been going on for the entire day, exploring through the full roster of entertainments. Early in the morning had been plays and performances, displays of exotic animals and talented acrobatics. There would have been poetry readings, reenactments of great battles, concerts and duels between talented and notorious gladiators, interspersed with a few choice executions.

There was no shame in missing these aperitifs to savor the main course only. The Queen-Consort herself was taking to the sand—not in itself unusual, as Bekhil was an infamously enthusiastic gladiator—but the rumor almost certainly started by the palace itself was that this particular bout would be something particularly rare and special.

So, a river of palanquins flowed into the arena, each a statement of its owner’s social position, wealth, artistic taste and more. Murgah entertained himself with crowd-watching as the incognito Heralds were kept waiting in the long line, though he saw none who stood out to him. The humans were made uniform by the rules on how they were permitted to dress and present themselves: their short, tough, close-fitting tunics made concealing a weapon almost impossible, and could only be dyed according to the wearer’s occupation and patterned according to the Set of their owner. Those tunics were as much a symbol of slavery as the leather collars.

The elves were made uniform by their lavish attempts to stand out from one another. Each one was so decorated, so jeweled and powdered and festooned that they became a kind of moving blot. Simplicity was not in their thoughts: simplicity was a slave’s condition. And so each one was so much a riot of silks, stones and extravagant hair that their silhouette became broken and unclear and their clothes dazzled until the eye skipped over them.

Either way, Murgah could find nobody in the crowd who particularly caught his attention. It was a relief when their chairs were waved through and carried all the way through the arena’s wide halls to the private box Iaka had arranged for them.

The interior was noticeably cooler than the heat outside, thanks to cunning architecture and the large wetted drapes hanging from the high ceiling. The light was pleasantly dim too, in part due to an ornately intricate screen of woven reeds. From the outside, it would be impossible to see in: from the inside, the view of the action was mostly unimpeded. And if one bored of the spectacle the walls were sumptuously painted, and the room was decorated with potted plants, thick soft cushions, sweet incense burners and flower arrangements, not to mention the exquisite food on equally exquisite lacquerware.

Rheannach looked around in vague surprise. “It’s so private!”

“That was the idea, cousin,” Vedaun told her.

“But…won’t that be suspicious? Won’t people wonder why we’re hiding away in here out of view?”

Nimico laughed. “Why would they? Look, there are dozens of these boxes out there. See?” She pointed them out, and Rheannach relaxed.

“Oh. Yes. Okay. Good,” she nodded.

Nimico’s smile turned mischievous. “Besides, they’ll just assume we’re having an orgy.”

“…Oh.”

And that’s exactly what they’ll see if they spy on us, too, Murgah thought, privately. There was a tight crawlspace behind the back wall, into which a slim body could wriggle to peep and eavesdrop through the gaps. It was presently empty, but that might well change. Ekve’s court survived, he knew, because the emperor had eyes and ears everywhere, always alert for plotting would-be usurpers. But a spy who eavesdropped on the heralds would witness only five Fey revelling in, by the empire’s standards, quite a tame fashion.

He let Nimico continue to tease and embarrass Rheannach and took his seat near the screen window. Right now, the spectacle out on the sand was a military parade, regiments of human janissaries marching stoically behind their resplendent fey commanders. The parade was so long that it snaked out the main gate, looped completely around the arena’s edge, and then back out the gate again. The marching feet and music were impressively synchronized considering the time it took sound to carry from one side of the amphitheatre to the other.

Even as he watched, the last of the marching units entered and began its circuit of the sand. They had arrived at just the right time. Excellent.

The others settled in on their lounging couches as the procession completed its orbit and exeunt. There was a brief, expectant lull, in which a sense of energy mounted. Even the food servers in the cheap seats paused in hawking their wares to turn expectantly toward the grand central gate.

They didn’t have to wait long. As the last of the soldiers exited, trumpeters emerged to the sound of wild cheering, raised their instruments, and blew a stirring fanfare. The central gate opened, and a new procession began.

The figure at its head was met with a deafening roar of approval, which condensed into song, taken up by twenty thousand throats.

Ayé! Sii ol Bekhil, ayé! Ayé! Bomirdd! Bomirdd! Bomirdd! Ayé! Canarthakun kuuha olfey! Caernvirdh! Caernvirdh! Bomirdd!

The simple chant repeated over and over as Bekhil raised her weapons high above her head and saluted the crowd. She was Taranfey in this life, her skin as grey as wood ash and her hair as dark as the bottom of a thundercloud, but even from this far away they could see the excited opalescent flash of her eyes, wild and manic.

The crowd’s energy was equally manic, their song loud enough to shake the stones. Bekhil strode confidently to the very middle of the arena and turned, her arms spread high and wide to acknowledge their adoration and let them see her.

Then she strode forward across the sands, and a two columns of other gladiators trailed after her. All were resplendent in the finest, shiniest gear, but none were a match for Bomirdd, who was clad in an iridescent armor of the style known to the elves as *Carchaid—”*Crabshell.” Its intricately cut and layered plates fitted her form like a second skin, sliding over one another where she was flexible, rigidly protecting her where she was not. Its pearlescent surface shimmered in the sun as the procession reached the center and formed a circle. At first, the gladiators turned outwards and raised their weapons toward the crowd in salute. Then they turned inwards and saluted the Consort.

And, finally, they faced the royal box above the entrance, and saluted the distant figure of Ekve.

Murgah watched the emperor give Bekhil an imperious nod, and felt rather than saw the swell of excitement in the blood-crazed consort’s heart.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

She turned, and tapped a tiny portion of an elf’s innate magic to raise her voice to a thunderous volume that rang as clearly around the arena as the trumpets had a moment ago.

“Beloved fey! Honored guests! You who have come to celebrate our beloved liege lord! Welcome!” she cried.

The cheering went on for a minute more. She soaked it up, then raised a hand for quiet.

“As a token of his love for you, my love the Emperor has decreed a special spectacle for today! Today, by his most generous command, for the first time I will perform for you the Blood Spiral!”

Rheannach leaned over as the crowd sighed then burst into ecstatic cheering and singing. “The…Blood Spiral?” she asked. “What’s that?”

“Suicide,” Chathamurgah grunted.

“…What?”

“It’s a gauntlet,” Nimico explained. “Basically, she’s just told the crowd that she won’t leave this arena alive. She’s going to fight, and fight, and fight until somebody finally kills her.”

Rheannach’s eyes widened, and she stared out at Bekhil again. The others traded a knowing look. This was what this whole visit was for, today: Rheannach needed an object lesson in just how utterly depraved the elves had become. And there were none, frankly, as thoroughly depraved as Bekhil.

“But she’s…she’s…” Rheannach stammered.

“Excited?” Vedaun offered tactfully, before Nimico could offer a more colorfully accurate word. Rheannach nodded mutely. She looked like she was about to throw up even though Heralds, being granted superhuman control over their bodies, did not vomit involuntarily.

“They all are. The elves have seen too much, done too much, tested every boundary and broken every taboo. Death is the only one left to them that still has some real impact,” Vedaun opined, and rose from his seat to retrieve a cup of wine. “And even then, to them it’s like…hmm…like selling the estate they presently live on and buying another. Doing this is no great hardship to Bekhil, and lets them indulge their fetish for slaughter…and their exhibitionism.”

Outside, another fanfare began. The other gladiators who had accompanied Bekhil into the arena—two ranks of sixty-four, a hundred and twenty-eight total—backed off to form a ring around the outside.

“It’s all scripted, of course,” Vedaun continued. “If they wanted to they could rush her, and not even the Laughing Death could prevail against so many attacking at once. So they’ll begin with a grand melee where most of them ignore her and with strictly memorized rules of who is allowed to kill whom, until they are down to, oh, a dozen or so. The ones left by that point will have had some dramatic successes to make them seem especially skilled and worthy…and to make Bekhil look even better when she kills them.”

Rheannach shot the waiting duellists a profoundly disturbed look. “It’s so…wasteful…” she ventured.

“To us, yes. But the point is to make Ekve seem especially glorious, and anything which makes the consort seem powerful and deadly improves him by association. That’s worth spending a couple hundred elvish chal on.”

“But…life is a gift! It’s—!”

Nimico sighed. “Rhee…you knew this was happening. It’s been happening for hundreds of years. You can’t pretend you didn’t know about it.”

“Well…I mean…” Rheannach flinched as the trumpets blew outside and the crowd’s roar turned into a frenzied clamor for blood.

Sure enough, it was flying through the air in seconds, along with assorted severed body parts. Some portion of the fights out there were genuine clashes between two combatants doing their level best to kill one another, and those were over quickly. Indeed, most of these were Bekhil, flashing hither and yon through the melee while her sword flashed and sparked in the sunlight, lopping off a head here, opening an artery there…

The ones she didn’t touch were choreographed and lasted longer, allowing the participants to showcase their dazzling gymnastic proficiency. And as much as he despised this entire affair, Murgah had to give them credit: the skill on display was truly exceptional. How long had they rehearsed for this? Knowing they were all carefully practicing the moment of their chal’s end…

He joined Vedaun in grabbing a cup of wine and left Rheannach to watch and fidget in mounting dismay and distress.

Iaka came up behind him as he poured. “This is cruel,” she whispered, so conspiratorially that even if Rhee hadn’t been so distracted, she couldn’t have listened in.

“We agreed to it,” Chathamurgah pointed out.

“We voted on it, and the three of you outvoted me,” Iaka replied, and plucked the decanter from his hands. “I still don’t see why we have to destroy her innocence like this.”

“There are times, dear cousin, when your sense of compassion goes too far.”

“I would say the same about your sense of equity.” She poured her wine and gave Rheannach a terribly sorry look. “Innocence is a beautiful thing, Murgah. It’s rare enough among mortals, the fact she’s remained so wide-eyed and pure these thousands of years is…it’s a miracle. Something terrible will come from doing this to her, I’m sure of it.”

“I must disagree. There’s nothing beautiful about letting her enjoy the luxury of ignorance while the slaves suffer.”

Iaka sighed and moved away. She took the wine with her, he noted. When he glanced at Vedaun, the snow-skinned herald shrugged as if he didn’t particularly have strong feelings either way, and popped a honey meringue topped with salmon roe into his mouth.

As for Nimico…well, she was busy driving the point home to Rhee with what seemed almost like wicked relish.

“Oh, this looks like it’s going to be good. See? Bekhil and Darada there have been sort of circling together and…there we go!”

Rheannach’s knuckles were white on her chair. Indeed, she’d crushed the wood down to a handful of compacted splinters. And the look she gave Nimico was thoroughly appalled…but she watched. Chathamurgah wandered closer to see what the fuss was about.

Sure enough, Bekhil and another gladiator, an Ithfey man with a flowing mane of silver hair, had clashed and were trading sword-strokes with a rapidity and precision that beggared belief. Even to Murgah’s eyes, the rehearsed narrative of their duel was so carefully planned as to be invisible: it truly did look for all the world as though Bekhil survived his onslaught by the very narrowest of margins, taking a scratch on her throat as she twirled around a savage thrust.

She buried a needle-thin stabbing dagger in his eye in retaliation, and was then immediately on the defensive as a second gladiator swept in to very nearly run her through from behind.

So it went. There were enough combatants still on the sand that the piecemeal, one-by-one attacks on Bekhil could be justified as the others not wanting to let their guards down. But no sooner had the Laughing Death dispatched one foe than another emerged from the melee to challenge her.

The crowd loved it. Their song was in full voice now, loud enough to rattle the furniture and screen windows, and yet somehow above the din he could hear the joyous laughter for which Bomirdd was named.

The rehearsed carnage continued for ten non-stop minutes, until at last there were only two left standing on the field: Bekhil and another equally infamous gladiator called Anoris, who had enjoyed a number of glorious moments and stunning battles herself in the long battle to this duel. Now, there was a well-judged lull in the action as the two circled each other, trading amplified compliments, with just a hint of lighthearted taunting. The moment waited, stretched, grew tense until the crowd was utterly silent and alert—

Their clash was like two thunderstorms meeting out in the cloud sea, as abrupt as lightning and just as impressive. Their wychwethels wailed and sang, shrieked as they met and bounced back, rang and glimmered. Bekhil’s armor stopped a stroke across the breast, Anori rolled under a slash that neatly snipped the high ponytail from her crown and left her fighting from under a shaggy, loose bob.

They seemed evenly matched. Indeed, even Chathamurgah started to wonder if this was not, in fact, actually a real battle between them and they were just that good…

Until the moment that Bekhil’s sword was torn from her grasp. It spun and bowled away across the sand, Anoris darted in and slashed, and Bekhil twirled away in one direction, away from the killing stroke.

Her armor, its straps severed by Anoris’ sword, twirled away in the other direction and fell off her body entirely, leaving her completely naked before the delighted crowd.

Nimico actually laughed. “Oh, that was excellent!” She declared, earning four looks of deep disapproval from the other Heralds. “Oh, come on! Armor doesn’t fail like that. They must have practiced that for years to get it looking so good!”

Chathamurgah did have to concede that point. Carchaid was held in place by dozens of straps, many of them doubled up. For the entire suit to just fall off like that from one or even six of its straps being cut was pure costume armory…and the dexterity to cut the straps so precisely was pure stunt choreography.

All to titillate the crowd and indulge Ekve’s exhibitionist lusts. Grotesque. How much good could they have done if they devoted such obsessive focus to better ends?

He did not guard that thought. Instead, he turned it on Rheannach and twisted it like a knife in the gut.

It had the desired effect. Rheannach rose so abruptly that she unconsciously obliterated her chair by knocking it hard into the wall. Gone was her wide open naiveté. Instead, she shot the four conspirators a terrible glare with red-rimmed eyes, wrenched a panel of the screen window out of its frame, transformed into a magpie and was gone in a frantic flapping of wings. No elf in the arena noted her departure: they were all too busy howling with delight as Bekhil wrapped her legs around Anoris’ neck and crushed the life out of her foe with her thighs.

Now the real gauntlet began, and the first wave of hapless human slaves was thrust into the arena with spears and hatchets in hand, to fight desperately against a far superior foe until sheer numbers brought her down. Chathamurgah didn’t care to watch such senseless butchery: he turned to the others and spoke softly.

“Well, it’s done.”

“We’re committed,” Vedaun agreed.

“King Eärrach won’t be happy we broke his wife,” Nimico commented with, once again, a discomforting degree of satisfaction as though this was the most entertaining thing she’d seen in years.

“Good.” Chathamurgah replied. “He made this world. It’s time for him to either step in and fix it, or acknowledge that it is exactly how he wants it.”

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INTERLUDE: YNGMIR’S STUDY

The Thundering Hall 09.06.03.10.03

“I’ve met Rheannach. It’s hard to picture her being so…childlike.”

“Everyone is, at first. Even Crowns.” Haust smiled and gestured. A vision shimmered into view behind her, like looking through a slightly frosted window that had opened suddenly in the air itself. Jerl blinked at what he saw: a white room, all rounded corners and bright lights, its huge window overlooking what could only be a city…though unlike any he had seen before. Its spires were immense, thousands of times taller than the highest steeples and ziggurats ever built in the Nested Worlds. Beyond them, a glass wall stretched high overhead in a vast dome…and beyond that was only darkness, and a terrible sea of red fire.

But the focus of this vision was a tiny ginger-haired girl, kneeling on the cushioned windowsill and looking out over the conflagration with her father’s arm around her shoulder, listening as he explained the facts about their world.

“I was, in most respects, a very normal little girl. I had a favorite doll, a favorite character in my favorite story, and I used to love riding my bicycle in the park.”

Jerl chuckled, struck by the sight even if there were features of it he couldn’t make sense of. “…You were a cute child.”

“I was the last child.”

When Jerl frowned at her, she elaborated. “When I was born, it was quite a scandal. You see, this new world we live in now has but one sun, and it’s sort of a miracle: an eternal fire that makes its own fuel from nothing. The World Before had hundreds of billions of trillions of them, but they were more like campfires, burning fuel that had long since been felled and there would never be more: once it was gone, it was gone. So one by one, they burned out and went dark.”

She tilted her head at the vision of herself, and the view pulled back sharply, as though Jerl had been grabbed by the scruff of his neck and pulled away with inhuman strength. The walls slid past, they shot through the solid dome, and then Jerl was looking down on this strange floating city, basking in the energies of a dim, baleful red sea of flame.

“The smallest, coolest and dimmest lasted an incredibly long time, ten trillion years or more,” Haust continued. “But even they would fade…and then it all would be dark and cold, forever afterwards. No more fire, no more warmth, no more life. That was how the World Before died, and it was how I lived: in this flying city, huddled close to one of the last few sparks of light in a dark universe, with only a few million years left to go.”

She chuckled softly at his astonished blink. “A million years was no time at all next to such immensely long-lived suns, nor next to how long most people had lived. As far as everyone else was concerned, my parents had been terribly cruel to bring me into the world so soon before it faded away. No child had been born for hundreds of millions of years before me. And none would be born after. I was the very last, and the very youngest.”

She sighed and dismissed the vision. “Compared to Eärrach and Talvi, I still am a baby. Next even to me, our Heralds are still very young and naive. And Rheannach’s innocence in particular was long-lived by her own choice. She was very happy with King Eärrach, you see. Completely in love with him, and the thought never crossed her mind that there was anything to criticize in him. She never went looking. So she never found.”

“Until Chathamurgah and the others finally showed her.”

“Yes.”

“So what did she do afterwards?” Jerl asked.

“What else? She flew back home and demanded her husband give her a satisfactory answer for what she’d seen and what the others had said.”

“…And what did he do?” Jerl asked.

Haust chuckled softly, and looked up at the ceiling and off into infinity.

“He gave her a satisfactory answer,” she said.

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> “The jubilee celebrations were one of the bloodiest days in the empire’s history, of course. I was one of…oh…I daresay thousands of gladiators whose job was to die on the great feast day. I remember, not long after Bekhil cut me down, as I was lying there bleeding out and watching the exquisite show she put on slaughtering the slaves, it started to rain heavily. Ekve was furious, of course. He’d been assured of a hot, dry, clear day for this spectacle of spectacles. I gather he put all his weather forecasters to death in inventive ways, afterwards. For my part, I thought the storm made the rest of the fighting particularly dramatic.” —Amisten Henrutcof Llenava, Memories of the Deep Past.

KING EÄRRACH’S CABIN

A hidden earthmote Two hundredth year of the Ordfey

Turmoil. It followed her as she flew home, racing along behind her and leaving the sky to crackle and surge. It raged inside her head and left no room for coherent thought. she just was, for the moment, lost in her pain and sickness and confusion and anger and disgust…

So many emotions she’d felt only the lightest brush of before, and now they whirled in her mind like a hurricane. And somewhere in the eye of the storm, a terrible fear was crystallizing.

Home came up to meet her before she was ready. She angled in to the lake shore, not ready to see him just yet, not until she’d thought, figured her head out, done…done something. Instead, she slammed into the beach with a thunderous impact that left a crater as wide as her wingspan.

That was cathartic at least. A little. The blow seemed to let some of the turmoil out, so fuck it. She stooped, tore a rock from the ground and pitched it into the lake with all the force she could muster. It shattered in her hand, and supersonic fragments slammed into the water with a cracking boom that launched a brief localized rain shower into the air.

Good. She stooped to grab another one…then stopped. In an instant, all her feelings froze solid.

Fish were bobbing to the surface, dead or stunned from the explosion. One of them was familiar, a monster of a trout she must have seen a hundred times when it flung itself into the air to snatch at insects, or her husband’s fishing flies. She’d sometimes thought about giving it a name.

And now, she’d killed it, unthinkingly.

She dropped the rock, and waded out to it, hoping perhaps it was just stunned and would flash under again after a few seconds but…no. No, there was an aura to living creatures, a sense of there being something more to them than just meat and bone, and it was absent around this one.

She scooped it up and held it.

“…I’m sorry.”

The fish, of course, just lay in her hands completely glassy-eyed and still. Around her, one or two of the stunned ones did revive and submerge again, but all told there were half a dozen her thoughtlessness had just…ended.

A vision shot through her of the elves in the arena howling with lust and joy, and she shivered. She’d been rapt with horror at their thoughts, the way eroticism and slaughter mingled grotesquely in them as they watched death being dealt. The gladiators in particular had been crazed with it, so utterly enraptured by the thought of it that they welcomed both killing and being killed as though it was beautiful.

And none more so than Bekhil. The feeling shining brightly from that one had been that for the first time in far too long, she felt alive. As if every other day of her chal and many chal before it had been dreary and suffocating except for those few bright moments when she got to flirt with the threshold of limbo…or, as today, dive gleefully through into the temporary oblivion beyond.

It was sick. Life was a gift. Existence was a gift. And yet, the Ordfey seemed to worship its opposite, as though nothing in all the worlds was more desirable than to not be. Many of those elves had been watching the condemned human slaves with a sensation of…of envy.

And now, here she was, dealing out death and destruction in a fit of pique. It didn’t matter that she’d not intended it, this blameless creature was dead by her hand.

She waded back toward shore until the water was only calf-deep, then sat down and waited. Around her, the rain continued pummelling down from a leaden sky of her own making, so hard that it thrashed the water opaque.

Sure enough, Eärrach joined her before long. He’d been in the potting shed, she could tell. His hands were stained black, and he smelled of compost and sap.

Just then, though, his hands may as well have been crimson, and the scent might have been the tang of blood and sweat that she still fancied she could taste, bitter in the back of her throat.

He sat down next to her, and waited for her to speak first.

“…What am I, to you?” she asked, eventually.

“You’re the one I love,” he replied.

She still didn’t look at him. “…What does that mean?” she asked. “You made me. You made me to love me. And you made me to love you.”

“Yes.”

“What does that mean?” she repeated.

It was his turn to remain silent for a while, until he scooted over an inch and put his hand on her back, gently.

“…What happened?” he asked.

“You don’t know?”

“I don’t spy on you, beloved.”

“Do you spy on any of us?”

He frowned. “No.”

“You should have been. You’d have seen this coming.”

Eärrach watched her solemnly for a moment, then looked down at the fish. “Where were you?”

“Vathcanarthen. Chathamurgah, Iaka, Vedaun and Nimico took me to the jubilee celebrations in…in the arena.”

“Oh.”

“Pan…it was evil.”

He sighed. “Yes.”

“And you’re just letting it happen!”

“Yes.”

She stared at him, wondering now if she’d ever actually looked at him before. Suddenly, without changing in any way, his face seemed to have become much less pleasing to her eye. Was his expression calm and wise, or indifferent and callous? The pelting rain running off his face made it seem graven from stone.

“…How can you?” she asked.

He was silent for so long that she began to wonder if he was going to answer at all. Finally, he spoke in a soft rumble, quiet and terribly sad.

“I can give an answer. I can promise it will be true, but I can’t promise it will be complete, or to your liking.”

Had he used any other tone of voice, those words would have been too cold for her. Too calm, too restrained, too dispassionate. Part of her still thought so and wanted to be angry at him, but there was a deep sorrow in his voice that stopped her anger with a gentle touch.

She sighed. “…Just say it.”

“What am I, Rhee? Answer carefully, this is more important than you think.”

She groaned, and lightning struck the mountaintop with a boom. She didn’t care, she didn’t want to rein in her emotions right now. “Oh, Pan… Not another damned set of questions, please. Can’t you just tell me what you think? Why does it always have to be like this, with the leading questions and the gentle, teacherly approach? Why do you always have to treat me like a disciple, instead of your wife? Just once, just for fucking once, treat me like we’re even a little bit equal!”

He paused, then looked down at his knees and chuckled softly. “God, I love you. You’re right. I’m sorry. I’ve grown so used to being careful and indirect…and that’s the root of this, of course.”

He turned his face upwards and stared unblinking into the rain. “I am not God, merely His instrument. I am among His mightiest instruments anywhere in any reality, but merely an instrument nonetheless. What power I have to create is entrusted to me. As is the care of his children. And that means—“

“This is caring for them, is it?” Rheannach interjected, bitterly. “Letting them do whatever they like, with no consequences? No guidance? You’ve never even told them that what they’re doing is wrong!”

He looked at her, intense now. “They know what they’re doing is wrong. They know it in their souls. Indeed, that’s exactly why they’re doing it, because there’s an intoxicating thrill to wickedness. And there is a consequence for them, beloved. They’re miserable, self-hating, nihilistic. The reason they’re so obsessed with death is because they haven’t figured out how to live yet.”

“But that just makes your inaction worse! You could show them the way out! You could—”

“No. I can’t. That’s the problem.” With a sigh, he reached over and took the fish out of her hands. “I can’t show them anything. The moment I do, it’s over. The seed would be scorched.”

“The seed of what, though?”

“That’s where the answer is incomplete.”

“How do you know it’s anything at all?”

“Because I’ve seen it before. The World Before was just this cruel, once. Crueller, even. There were dark times through its long history, far darker than the Ordfey is capable of. Indeed, there will be dark ages throughout the future of this creation, the likes of which will make this current tragedy seem quaint and petty. But out of all that suffering comes something otherwise impossible—free, good beings. Beings free to be good instead of enslaved to the will of a greater power. Out of that came us,” he said, thumping his chest. “Even as incomplete and imperfect as we are. The freedom to be magnificent and good and even holy is too precious to endanger.”

Rheannach didn’t answer. she looked back out into the lake again, trying to picture that, and felt oddly glad that she couldn’t.

“Vedaun thinks this is all part of the plan,” she said, after a moment. “That you’re entirely okay with what’s happening. That you approve.”

“A man has chronic pain in his ankle. A surgeon tells him ‘I can have that foot off in less than a minute, and most of my patients survive!’ The man refuses the amputation. Does that mean he loves the pain?” He shrugged. “No. No, I don’t approve. And I do wish the plan didn’t require me to stand aside. I’d free all those slaves and bring all the elves to their senses in an instant, if doing so wouldn’t harm everyone even more in the long run.”

“Pan…the slaves are dead. They suffer and they die. There’s no better future waiting for them.’”

“Do not be so certain,” he warned. “There are a great many things yet to be discovered in this world. Do you think I restrain myself out of some twisted dark pleasure? No. I suffer all their deaths, my love. Every one of them. It is only…” high touched his thick fingers to his breast and sighed. “it is faith that keeps me strong.”

“Faith in what?!”

“A great many things, some too great to talk about right now…but among them is faith in you, my dear children. I know what greatness lies within you all, because I was privileged to help put it there. I know too, how much it will cost for you to find it. I can only ask you believe me when I say it will be worth it, and that the cost of my direct intervention would be far too dear to pay.”

He paused, then sighed at himself. “…But look at me. I slipped back into teacher mode.”

The rain wasn’t so heavy now. Rheannach mopped her sodden hair out of her eyes. “You did with the amputation thing, but…go on.”

He made a self-effacing grunt. “A herald stands on a mountaintop, and sees a mudslide has just started and is sweeping down the hillside. She has the power to adjust its course, and sees that if she sends it one way it will flatten a town of thousands, and if she sends it the other way it will wipe out a small family farm. Which way should she send it?”

“Well…if she can’t stop it entirely…the farm.”

“Does it make any difference that the small farm is close and the town is far?”

“No.”

“No. It’s an easy one to think about in the abstract, isn’t it?” Eärrach sighed. “But now let’s talk about the real conundrum. If I were to descend in power and majesty to fix all these problems of mortal origin, what then? Would they be free to be?”

Rheannach sighed and stood up. “I know you believe they wouldn’t.”

“I’ve seen it, Rhee. I’ve seen it so many times. When parents prevent their children from ever making mistakes, when the old shelter the young, when the Sufficiently Advanced take over from the Undeveloped…at every level, the impulse to prevent the lesser evil causes a much greater one. In this case…If you aren’t free to do the wrong thing, then you aren’t free.”

Rheannach frowned at the ripples in the water. “The other four think freedom is just an excuse to justify inequity and harm.”

“They do?”

“Well…Chathamurgah and Iaka do, anyway. Vedaun and Nimico I think believe it means anything goes.”

Eärrach sighed. “…Come on. Let’s eat this fish.”

“You could breathe life back into it,” Rheannach pointed out, hopefully.

“Or we could have a nice fish dinner. I was planning on eating this guy sometime soon anyway.”

There were several layers of subtext that he didn’t speak aloud but which rang as loud as bells in the psychic layer of their conversation. Death was a normal part of life; pretending as though her mistake had never happened wouldn’t help anything; they needed to do something mundane together.

She sighed, and stood up. “…No. No, I’m sorry. I love you, Pan, but this whole thing…it’s shaken me, and I need to think and make up my own mind. You’re so…you’re too perfect at times like these.”

He paused for a long time, and there was a tremor in the ground that never quite made it onto his face. Finally, though, he closed his eyes and nodded slowly.

“Alright.” He said softly, almost as though he was afraid of something. “I love you too.”

She managed a tiny, tight smile, then spread her wings and took flight again. She wasn’t sure where she was going, beyond that she definitely wasn’t going back to Chathamurgah and the others. She wanted to do something, something good, something…something that shone a little light into the darkness she’d been shown.

The turmoil slowed, and ceased. In its place was a sudden sense of purpose, and a plan. There was something she could do. Something that would harm nobody, take away nobody’s freedom to choose or make mistakes, but still show that she, at least, disapproved of the Ordfey and its ways.

The skies became blue, and she flew on with a head full of clearer thoughts.

It was time to help the slaves help themselves.

----------------------------------------

INTERLUDE: YNGMIR’S STUDY

The Thundering Hall 09.06.03.10.03

Jerl nodded. “And that’s when she became Raksuul.”

Lady Haust shrugged. “Well, that was a longer process than just one conversation. It took her nearly a hundred years to really establish the underground slave movements, sixty more before she could reveal what she was to the slaves she helped liberate and taught them the secret ways to her havens, and another hundred more after that before she finally forged Scorn and revealed her open support for their emancipation. The Ordfey still clung on for another eight hundred years after that point, but…” she smiled up at Yngmir, then lowered her voice.

“Truth be told, she impressed us. She took a day that could have ruined her, and let it transform her instead. She went from King Eärrach’s beautiful, doting, naive, innocent wife to being…”

“More complex than that,” Jerl suggested.

“She travelled the world, Jerl. You know what that does to a person. Seeing how people live, encountering different ways of being, having your mind expanded. Rheannach was the first Herald to explore the Worlds in the spirit of really experiencing it. She was the one who inspired Yngmir to build this hall, and Dragon to take her first husband. She forged a legend that was all her own…though it cost her. I don’t think she’ll ever be so innocently in love ever again.”

“That’s no bad thing,” Jerl opined.

“Exactly right. I think what they have is healthier, now. So in the end, Chathamurgah’s plans for her backfired completely. When we took a closer look at them, we found what he was planning…it was terrible.”

“Terrible how?”

“Their intent was a world fully in line with their personal values. You’ve heard enough about them now to know what those are.”

“Is a world without inequality so bad?” Jerl asked.

“Hmm. Eärrach would say something about how we’re all ultimately equal before God, in the grand scheme of things.”

“And what would you say?”

“That Inequality is the shadow without which the light is meaningless. It’s the down that defines up. A world without inequality would be a world where love cannot exist, because how could you ever love everyone fairly and equally? Love is devotion, a focused giving of your energies to a few in preference over the many.”

“Huh.”

“But mostly? Inequality is necessary. Not in the sense that we have to put up with it because it’s not going away, but in the sense that how could you ever cook a meal if the hearth wasn’t hotter than the room? Chathamurgah, though…he maybe wasn’t so far gone in the time I just told you about, but now…”

“What happened to him?”

“We confronted him, and the other three. And for the sake of our creation, we had to act.” Haust sighed, and fidgeted with an invisible speck on the end of her thumbnail. “…That was a bad day.”

Jerl frowned at her. “What did you do? They’re still around, aren’t they?”

There was a long silence, so utterly quiet that Jerl could hear the soft rush and drum of rain on the gabled roof far above him.

Finally, she spoke again.

“Yes…and no.”

----------------------------------------

> “I would like to see the Firstmote again. It was a beautiful place to awaken, though I did not know it at the time. But my first experience was a lightly scented breeze, and the soft rustle of it through vine leaves and tree branches, and the tinkle of water on stone. I awoke to the feeling of sun-warmed marble under my bare feet, perfectly laid. There were columns and colonnades, fountains and standing stones. And in the center, a sculpture of something I have never made sense of. Yes, I should dearly like to go back and study that sculpture. I feel that if I understood what it depicted, I would know much more of the world.” —Amisten Henrutcof Llenava, Memories of the Deep Past.

THE FIRSTMOTE

Somewhere in the endless sky Two hundredth year of the Ordfey

There were no chains. Not even metaphorical ones. Somehow, it would have seemed more honest to Chathamurgah if there had been. Was he not a condemned man on his way to his sentence?

Perhaps. But that wasn’t how the Crowns saw it. Rather more insultingly, they saw themselves as kindly but deeply disappointed parents correcting, not a wayward child, but an adult son who had strayed from the path. And so they had made no show of force, used no shackles either material or magical. They called **and the four conspirators came, because there was simply no point in refusing.

They met on the Firstmote. Its stone amphitheatre had changed in the thousands of years since that first day. No longer was it a beautiful, meticulously laid vision of expert masonry and clean white lines. lichen, weeds and ivy had found their way in, and now there was nary a crack without something green thrusting up through it. The terraces in particular were now a purple riot of hardy weeds whose flowers filled the air with the scent of mint.

The Crowns were waiting for them. Chathamurgah glanced at the three siblings, then sighed and they advanced down together, side-by-side, until they stood facing each other, the creation pretending at being equal to their creators.

Talvi in particular looked sad, and old. Normally, her appearance of age was just the cosmetic veneer—a few dignified wrinkles, white hair, a couple of cosmetic blemishes. Now, though, the weight of long time and many regrets filled her eyes as she swept her gaze across Vedaun, Iaka and Nimico.

Sayf looked grim. His arms were folded, his mouth downturned, his head bowed slightly as though deep in thought. It didn’t suit him at all.

Haust, of course, was unreadable. Her veil remained in place and she stood with her face turned straight forward so that Chathamurgah couldn’t tell what she was looking at. It made her seem…unreal, somehow.

Eärrach had the opposite problem. He was the most immensely real thing in existence, and his scrutiny was a crushing pressure. And it was to him that they were to answer, primarily. The other three would follow where he led.

Murgah spoke first. “So.”

Eärrach had been looking at Vedaun. Now his gaze flicked to look Murgah in the eyes. “Yes.”

“Are we on trial?”

“You’re being given a chance to explain yourselves.”

Chathamurgah returned King Eärrach’s gaze levelly. “Explain what, exactly? What have we done?”

“You tell me.”

“Nothing. We’ve done nothing. We spoke to each other about the ways in which this world of your making leaves us dissatisfied. That’s all.”

“True.” Eärrach nodded. “And you have the perfect right to be dissatisfied. We aren’t satisfied. This isn’t about what you have done. It’s about what you intend.”

“And how do you know what we intend?” Iaka asked. “Unless you have gone digging around in our minds?”

“We don’t need to,” Talvi said, softly. “Deep experience makes it easy for ones such as us to read intent from behavior. But if that does not satisfy, then consider: the Words are more intricate and powerful than you think. Time especially.”

Chathamurgah’s sense of certainty shifted and put him off balance, like he’d been standing on dry sand all this time. “What about Time?” he asked, carefully.

“Its future use can be said to resonate backwards through the ages, Chathamurgah,” Haust told him. “We know it will be spoken by one, and maybe by others, and some of those potential future speakers would be catastrophic. And among the might-have-beens is you.”

“…So what?”

“So we looked at the future you would make with that power,” Eärrach said. “We saw what you would do, the world you wish to make. You are…terribly, terribly wrong. About everything.”

“Please,” Haust stepped forward. “Let us show you.”

Chathamurgah glanced at his friends, wondered, and wavered. She sounded so…convinced. So sure of herself. And she was his Crown, after all. His mother, or as close as Heralds could have. Maybe…

Nimico took a step forward. Her eyes, dark and sullen, locked on Haust’s blank, faceless veil “You could show us whatever you like,” she said. “And that means you can’t show us anything.”

“There can be no trust here,” Vedaun agreed. “Whatever vision you show us, whatever argument you make…we can never trust it to be the truth. You have the power to be perfect liars.”

“You can have faith,” Eärrach replied, his tone almost pleading, like a man reaching out to a friend dangling from a cliff.

“No. Faith is just the word for trust without reason.”

“Existence itself is a form of faith!” Talvi objected. “Do you not believe each other to be real, independent, and outside of self?! How else could you get on otherwise? Faith is to believe what your reason and spirit beg you to know.”

“And in any case, what could our motives possibly be, here?” Eärrach pleaded in a ground-shaking rumble. “As you will no doubt point out, I am the greatest power in this universe. I need not justify myself to you for any reason, and the only thing I hold myself accountable to is beyond all ken. Do you not see? You are less than the tiniest mote of dust next to me…and I love you.”

“Just like you love all those other motes of dust,” Iaka’s tone was accusatory.

“Yes! And I know things you do not yet know, are not ready to know. To know them now would destroy the one hope you all have of crawling out of the animal mud up into the planes where we reside. We want you to succeed! We want future equals! But the path to that point is very, very long. It is fraught with danger. Dangers you cannot yet begin to comprehend.”

“And sacrifice.” Talvi spread her hands. “Not without reward…not even for the most wretched. There is more to this world than you see or sense.”

“We’ve seen the reward for faith in you,” Iaka shot back, acidly. “Death, despair, torture and servitude. And we want none of it.”

“You see what is before your eyes,” Sayf added cryptically. “Are you so sure you have seen it all?”

“Consider our natures,” Haust pleaded. “There is far more to us than the mechanics of our bodies. You’ve seen this. Think through the implications. Please.”

“The implications? Look at yourselves!” Chathamurgah’s answer seethed up suddenly. “You, who hide your face out of affectation! Or you, who made a pretty pet wife for yourself! You, with your endless orgy of women and entertainment, or you brooding alone in your library as if you can’t bear to look out on what you made! You think you can stand there and claim infinite deep wisdom? You’re not gods! You’re just humans who lived a long time, with all the same flaws, all the same selfishness! And here you are, begging us to stay because I don’t think you have the courage to face your real nature!”

Without any perceptible movement, without any interlude of time, without the tiniest premonition of action—

King Eärrach was there alongside them, now. A shimmering bubble had formed at some distance, and the world began to…grow heavier. Power began to manifest, unfathomable power, and with every word he spoke, the King became more of his true self. His ultimate, beautiful, terrible, primal self, a being so far beyond anyone on any front, physically or spiritually, it beggared belief even standing in front of him in the act of self-revelation.

His utter majesty was this time tinged with both a hint of anger—a terrifying thing, against such an extreme being—and a whole heap of sorrow.

Which was honestly far worse to bear.

“You speak out of deep ignorance, child. Ignorance for which you are not to blame. But your audacity demands an answer, and I fear the only answer I can give may cause you great harm. You leave me little choice, Chathamurgah. I will you to know.”

A great and terrible power unfolded, somehow, in the depths of Chathamurgah’s mind. Somehow he understood the King had just spoken a Word, and spoken it solely for Chathamurgah’s benefit.

It wasn’t pleasant. King Eärrach conveyed knowledge of what he was. It was a playback of immense history, from a log cabin in an ancient wood…

…On a planet. Planets!

Stars! Countless stars! Galaxies! More than the sands on all the beaches! So much—!

He was young. So young, so much more human. Simple work, exulting in his body, in the company of others. Terrible pain, too. Something unspeakable done to him in his youth. Faster, now. Brief glimpses of lovers, children, friends, service…

Wars. Terrible wars. Unfathomable sacrifice. On and on and on and on—

Amalgamation. The act of Ascension. The gathering of life-energies, farewell to souls…

Farewell to planets.

Farewell to galaxies.

Farewell to all the stars.

Farewell even to the corpses of stars. To matter. All matter, in every meaning of the concept, aside from themselves.

Darkness. The eternal darkness of maximum entropy, while they plotted, visited friends in other realities.

A gathering. The Act of Creation. The WORD was Spoken. And it wasn’t enough—

More sacrifice. Sacrifice of all but the King himself, and yet him too, in a strange way—terrible realization.

He was the world before. All of it. All of it! Everyone and everything that had ever been had flowed into this one tiny stream of a man and he had grown, and grown, and grown near-infinitely until the end, and the tipping over, and the will to create anew.

…And yet, he was not all. There were others apart from him. Many others, countless others! Dear beyond all conception and reckoning, closer than kin. All were lesser beings, though one was stupefyingly more, and vastly more animal in nature to go with it. All bound into a communion of love, yet **in and among and through all these incomprehensible beings was a thing that was—

Chathamurgah’s agony blasted his throat raw as he shrieked, and the moment was over.

Mercifully, the memories that had poured through him were gone. Only their impression remained.

“…There.” Eärrach offered him a hand up, and Murgah realized he was on his hands and knees. “I am so very, very sorry, my child. You are correct in an important thing. We—I—should never have allowed things to go this far. You have not failed us. We failed you.”

“You should have…let it…end,” Chathamurgah rasped, drawing back from the offered hand in revulsion. “It was…*meant…*to end…”

The King sat his…his parody of a body down on the ground, crossing his legs and sighing a deep, unquenchable sorrow. “It did end. I am that end. And the revelation at that end is precisely the thing I have spared you. That I must spare everyone. It is too much.”

Chathamurgah could only laugh. He staggered to his feet and gave the King of Crowns a terrible red-eyed glare that tried to speak his every feeling without words. “I was wrong. You are a god. A terrible, omnipotent, impossible, and foolish god. You should have moved on! You tell us there is more than death? Then why are you here? Do you even believe yourselves?! No.” He decided. “No, you do not, or you are too afraid. I do not know which is worse! Instead of moving on, you play at things like you were truly still a creature of meat and marrow. Like you were still animal! More, you make yourself into this preposterous animal-god! You have within you the sublime power of creation, and instead you choose to strut and reek among these little beings like a stag in the throes of rut! You are not worthy of worship. You—whatever you fancy yourself to be—are a thing which should not be. This world should not be.”

“Why?” Haust asked.

“That you can even ask such a thing in the face of—!” He gestured angrily at the King. “Because none of you you are godly enough to manage such a burden! You are too human! You’re…you’re both at once! You’re a god pantomiming mortality! Or a mortal playing at godhood like a child dressing in adult clothes! Either way—! Both ways—!”

He trailed off, unable to properly voice his contempt. The silence that followed was long and bitter.

The King offered a nod toward reconciliation. “There is…much truth in what you say. And I respect you for saying it. You have made an important leap of understanding just now…but too soon for it to help. Instead it fills you with contempt, with blindness to what comes after what Is. To the very idea of something Beyond. I would offer you more, but—”

“Spare me.” Chathamurgah staggered away from him, resisting the hitherto alien urge to retch. The whole of creation felt sullied to him now. This toy they’d made was nothing, absolutely nothing at all next to the glory he’d witnessed. They were like apes setting down a handful of dung in front of that marble masterpiece in Sayf’s house and calling it the same thing. They’d made a pathetic shadow of the Before, riddled with suffering, all for the hubris of four who’d never learned the lesson of letting go. His flesh crawled with renewed hatred.

Behind him, he heard Talvi sigh, then address her three Heralds. “…I think your cousin has made his choice,” she lamented. “You need not choose the same. You—”

“Do as you please,” Nimico scoffed. He heard her footsteps, and she joined him at the edge of the flagstones, looking out over to the cliff to stare out at the clouds. Her hand found his, and squeezed.

“I…must warn you,” the King added, perhaps in a final gesture of hopefulness. “The decision you are proposing to make is eternal. This new creation has only just begun. It will, over time, grow into the fullness of a new universe. Is that…is that not worth some patience?”

Despite himself, despite the simmering anger and disgust in his soul, Chathamurgah did hesitate. But it was not a decision, really. He could not just decide to change himself into what Eärrach wanted him to be. He could not just decide what seemed true to him, or to ignore what was happening here and now.

“Do you ask every soul that question?” he croaked. “Each human out there will never see this new universe you speak of. They will suffer and be snuffed out here and now.”

“I understand how hopeless it must seem, having just started on a long and difficult journey,” Sayf warned. “And so your defiance is brave, and in its own way deeply noble. I respect it. I think we all do. But we will also respect the consequences of what comes next.”

“You’ve all spoken enough,” Chathamurgah rasped. He spread his hands and started gathering his energies, turning his awareness outwards. So many little minds….and yet, so few as well. Far fewer than there had been stars in even the least galaxy, Before. So few, that if he concentrated hard enough, he could reach out and touch them all. And now, he knew exactly what to share with them. “You speak of lofty futures and all this. Perhaps. I am not a god, but I am here, and their suffering is now. And they will all die, forgotten, not knowing a thing about anything else. I want no part of it. I will either free them, now, or—”

His power came up short, as though he’d abruptly reached the end of an infinitely strong chain. Then it snapped back so hard he staggered.

“No, my child.”

A power far stronger than his body or his will dragged him and spun him around, not cruelly but irresistibly.

“Would that you all had said all these things sooner, perhaps things might be different…but I think not. I saved you just now from a terrible fate but I will not do so again. Our choices resonate in all eternity, child. Your free will is your predestiny. Choose well,” he warned, “while you still can.”

Chathamurgah said nothing. There were no words. Only a…a longing, of sorts. To have never come to this place, to have never faced this moment. To have never seen and felt, to have never had this cursed knowledge thrust into his mind. To have never been at all.

He looked his creators in the eye, and knew they thought they were giving him a gift.

He rejected it.

A wave of terrible sadness turned the amphitheatre grey and lightless. “…Since that is your answer…” Eärrach sighed, and drew himself up. “…I am sorry we have failed you.”

There was a shattering, rumbling boom that had nothing to do with the physical world. It didn’t stir a mote of dust, blew not a zephyr, didn’t so much as set the vines to swinging. But it tore right through Chathamurgah and took something enormous with it. Something that fizzled away like a whisp of steam on a hot day and left him feeling somehow both empty and confined.

The force holding his limbs released, and he dropped to his knees. The impact…hurt. When he fell forward and stopped himself with his hands, the sandy stones scraped his palms raw. When he raised them to stare at them in shock, he saw his own blood for the first time.

“Born into angelic destiny were you, greatest of our children and greatest of my creation. You had a magnificent future before you, Chathamurgah. All that was asked of you was faith.” Eärrach shook his head. “But that is no longer your fate. Today you have surrendered your angelic glory, a glory which is not mine to restore. In the ages to come, I charge you to ponder these things. I now commend you wholly to the world, that you might suffer—or revel—in the physical you so wrongly despised. Your doom is mortality.”

He turned to Iaka, Vedaun and Nimico. “And what about you? Has anything we said today stirred you? Can you turn from the path he has led you down? Please…if you have any doubts—”

There was a still moment. Then Vedaun stepped forward.

“You are asking me,” he said, and stooped to help Chathamurgah stand, “to abandon my brother.”

“I am asking you to—”

“Save it.” Nimico pressed her hand to Murgah’s, and healed his graze. “I’d rather be a loyal mortal than a hypocrite Herald.”

Talvi turned to her last Herald. “Iaka, please—”

Iaka stood in silence for a long time, still wreathed in the gentle blue flames that were her own unique affectation. She didn’t look any of them in the eye, not Talvi, not Eärrach, not Chathamurgah. Her gaze was turned downwards at the flagstones.

“…I understand what you are saying,” she said, eventually, and finally looked up at the Crowns. “Truly, I do. Have faith, and things will be better in time…I think I understand why you cannot interfere.”

Talvi exhaled, and took a step forward to embrace her, but Iaka held up a hand. “But they are suffering now,” she said. “I…I can’t ignore it. If I can help them more by being mortal…if it will grant me that freedom…”

She looked to Eärrach. The King of Crowns bowed his head and sighed.

“…It is a doom,” he said, “but in that doom, there is freedom. You have choices now you would never have had. You can now choose to be more magnificent than even I had dared to dream for you…”

He glanced at Chathamurgah. “Or become a greater evil than we have ever imagined. You are right. It’s true freedom, including the freedom to help your fellow mortals however you see fit. In its way, it is a gift…if you are willing to suffer for it.”

“I am.”

“There is no turning back. You understand that.”

“I do.”

He turned to Vedaun and Nimico. “Do you?”

Vedaun’s reply was a simple, stoic nod. Nimico’s, however, was an indifferent shrug.

“Freedom sounds better,” she said.

The Crowns looked at each other, and Eärrach sighed.

“…So be it,” he said, and stretched forth his hand.

Chathamurgah watched the transformation with a bitter mix of profound gratitude and sadness. They were giving up *so much…*But mingled in it was a stirring of faith after all. That perhaps, truly, this could be a gift, if only they reached out and grasped it. So he watched as Vedaun shrunk from his towering height to the scale of a merely very large man. He watched Iaka’s flames gutter out and leave her pale and small and pretty.

Nimico laughed as her wings burst apart in a shower of scruffy feathers. She caught a handful of them, felt them, then blew them away with a puff of her cheeks. It was the first time he could remember seeing her look lively in a long, long while.

“I feel…lighter!” she said.

“I…” Eärrach seemed taken aback. Clearly, the last thing he’d expected was glee*.* It seemed to disturb him greatly. And, Murgah thought, it ought to. His own reduction was a punishment. Vedaun’s, loyalty. Iaka’s, the necessary step to do what mattered to her. But Nimico had just thrown away infinity out of…what? Boredom? Whim?

He felt quite disturbed by it himself. But what was done…was done. There was no going back.

He pulled himself to his feet, and felt the weight of his body press upon the soles of his feet for the first time. He felt the silken texture of the wind. He realized, with a jolt, that his belly was empty and that for the first time in his existence, he would need to fill it to sustain himself rather than for pleasure. No more was there a furnace in his core, drawing off some of the Crowns’ energies to fuel him.

He was mortal. His time, now, was measured in…what? Decades? Fifty or sixty years, perhaps?

The thought lit a driving fire in him. He had so little time, now. Hardly any.

But, perhaps…time enough.

“So be it,” he echoed Eärrach’s words.

“Where would you like to go?” Eärrach asked him.

“We will need shelter and food. Send us back to my cabin,” Vedaun answered. “And after that…Leave us alone.”

“As you wish.” Eärrach sighed again, but nodded and raised his hand one last time. “Farewell. I hope…I hope you find peace.”

There was a rushing feeling, a dizzying swirl, and the Firstmote was gone. In its place was Vedaun’s hall, and its mountains.

They glanced at each other, and for the first time, Chathamurgah did not really know what they were thinking. The connection between them was gone, never to return.

He shivered as the cold bit his bare skin and froze his toes. he was going to need a cloak, and shoes. And food! Water! Firewood and shelter! He was going to need…

He exhaled and watched the unfamiliar sight of his breath clouding. He was going to need to work for every day of life from now on. And he was going to age. To die. They’d condemned him to a long and miserable decline at best. Him and the three others. Bastards. It was in their power to grant immortality, and instead they chose for all but a chosen few to suffer death. Well fuck that. Fallen he may be, but Chathamurgah had not lost his knowledge of some of the worlds’ deep and most intricate magics. He would need resources, effort, experimentation and a few failures, but he could do it. They could do it. After all, the Crowns had, once upon a time.

Yes. He could walk their path. He could become a Crown in his own right, in the fullness of time. It was what they wanted, wasn’t it? That a mortal would rise to join them? Why not him? He at least had a glimpse of the path…

He smiled, and was resolved.

“Come on,” he told the others, and led the way into Vedaun’s house. “We have work to do.”

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YNGMIR’S STUDY

The Thundering Hall 09.06.03.10.03

“But…Civorage said he has a Herald on his side.”

“He has Iaka.”

Jerl frowned. “But…you made her mortal. Thousands of years ago! How chould she still be alive?”

“The Heralds, even fallen ones, know things about magic and the nature of the world that no mortal has yet discovered or will discover for a very long time. Combining that with a mortal’s freedom to choose, to act, and to adapt, they…found a way to endure.”

Haust sighed and rose to stroll around the room. “Time has not softened and taught them as we had hoped. To the contrary, it seems to have made them even more deeply entrenched in the beliefs and mindsets that led them to that moment. But they are as vulnerable as any man or woman, so they have built up deep layers of protection, working through carefully chosen proxies and agents.”

Jerl glanced toward the door. “…The Nornfey.”

“They are Iaka’s, specifically.”

“There are others?” Jerl cast a disturbed look toward the door and wondered what other twisted creations might be roaming the worlds.

“Not like the Nornfey, but yes. Spies and feyset, human cultists, mercenaries…even an airship guild. You can guess which one.”

Jerl nodded.

“Most don’t know who their true masters are, of course. But it was Iaka who set Nils Civorage on the path to acquire Mind. She cast a great work of magic to make the vault more accessible, found a way to manipulate and whisper secrets via the Shades…She’s the one responsible for the particular mess you’re embroiled in.”

“And the others?”

“Chathamurgah and Vedaun haven’t made their moves yet. Nimico…may have. It’s unclear.”

Jerl sat back, and tried to fit all this into his mental image of the world and how it worked. It was all true, he knew. He’d seen it, in that first speaking of Time, then set it aside as something he needed to learn in due course.

“…Are there likely to be more of these revelations?” he asked.

“Inevitably, I’m afraid.” Haust shrugged slightly. “Would you have preferred to get it all in a single huge chunk? I suspect you would have found it difficult to take in.”

“True,” Jerl agreed. Somehow, he had the sense that this too was all part of the plan, all part of the course he’d set himself on at the first speaking. “The more I learn the less I feel like I know what to do about it.”

Haust smiled. “I feel exactly the same way.” She smiled even wider when Jerl blinked at her. “I’m immortal and inconceivably powerful, Jerl, but I’m not God. I’m not omniscient. I’m…if life is stumbling through a dark canyon network, then I’m just lucky enough to be carrying a decent map, and a bright torch. I’m still, at my roots, a human.”

Jerl thought of the little red-haired girl he’d seen in her floating city over the sea of fire. And what had she said? That she was the very last to be born in the World Before? Well…that made her human, perhaps, but far from normal. But he didn’t say so. Instead, he rose from his chair.

“Well…I guess I’ll stick to the plan, then. Research the Words here, then go searching for some of them.”

She rested her hands lightly on the back of the chair she’d previously been sitting in and gave him a level look. “I’ll tell you the only thing you need to know, Jerl: that you won’t find any hints here, because we hid those vaults well. They were not supposed to be found until far in the future, when people were ready and capable for them. There is nothing in any library or archive, not even here, that will lead you to them or tell you more about them than you already know.”

“Not even speculation? A list of their names? How many there are?”

“I could tell you. But I advise against it. Let things unfold as they will. The Words have an agency of their own, and may not match your ideas for who should get what, or what powers would be the best match for which of your friends. Perhaps the ‘wrong’ word may turn out to be exactly what its speaker truly needs.”

“That’s a lot of ‘perhaps.’”

She smiled. “Uncertainty really bothers you, doesn’t it?”

“Uncertainty gets people killed.”

“Reality gets people killed. One should not suppose they can be certain of all ends. After all, you are not the only one making decisions in this world. Your opponents and neighbors get a say in events as well. As do natural forces beyond your vision. Uncertainty is the reality we all must live in, because certainty is a lie.”

“That seems a bleak outlook,” Jerl commented, frowning.

“Is it?”

“Well of course it is! If you can’t be certain, how can you plan? You need a solid foundation to build things on.”

“Certainty is not the same as probability. This is still a rational world we find ourselves in. The point, however….the point is that you are out of balance. You depend too much on an illusory sense of certainty. As a merchant captain, you stuck to the same well-proven routes and steady profits your whole career. You’re…” she paused, and laughed suddenly. “You’re a lot like me!”

When he quirked his head interrogatively at her, she explained. “I used to long for the universe to be a rigidly orderly place. I wanted to believe that all of life was like…like dominos. If one had the right perspective and knowledge, they might be able to see how the last domino would fall without ever even needing to tip the first.”

“I can see that,” he nodded. “You described your childhood as at the tail of a very predictable end, didn’t you?”

“Yes! And King Eärrach, he grew up in the universe’s vibrant spring. I came around in its fall, if you will. But really, this is a problem everyone faces—that life is an inherently messy business and our efforts at controlling it can only amount to so much. Even the smartest navigator and most skilled helmsman are still at the whim of the wind.”

“We can still prepare for it!”

“Prepare, yes. But never control. And we can never prepare for everything. That would require sight beyond a Crown’s. You must learn what that boundary is. It’s like learning to move on a storm-tossed deck, Jerl. Even the most seasoned airman will never know exactly how each step will be.”

Jerl frowned. “Seasoned airmen know when to tie themselves fast in the face of a storm.”

“Exactly! It’s a reasonable precaution, but it doesn’t take the storm away. The only way to ensure you never fly in stormy weather, is to never fly at all.” She leaned forward and stared him in the eye. “You’re not that sort of a coward, Jerl. You’re more able to handle uncertainty than you like to believe. You just need to be prepared, and accept the consequences. That, ultimately, is the warning I came to give you.”

”…Be prepared?” He asked.

“Be prepared for consequences. You have been…fortunate, so far. Indeed, your being here completely neutralized and thwarted Civorage’s plan tonight. Whatever he intended, he could not do because of you. He knew that given enough cycles and do-overs, Time would let you win over Mind. That’s good fortune. But…I think it will only work once. Because there is a counter to your power. One he has the wit to identify, and the ruthless cunning to realize.”

“What?”

“The next time, he will put you in a no-win situation. He will arrange matters so that no matter what you do, you must lose something. Or someone. You need to be ready for that.”

“I already knew that, Lady Haust. I already warned my crew not to get cocky and trust that I’ll see them through this alive.”

“Good. But do you really believe it? Would you really be able to accept a victory if it meant losing Mouse, or Derghan, or Amir?”

Jerl hesitated, and she nodded. Her tone, when she continued, was warm rather than critical. “You love your friends. I wouldn’t dream of blaming you for that. But you must be prepared to accept consequence, for consequence is coming for you. The measure of a mortal man is not in his accomplishments, or his deeds, or his wealth, or any of that. You can’t take it with you over the Threshold, can you? All you can take is yourself. So what kind of man would you be? Are you a man who turns in on himself…”

She reached up, flipped her hood back into place, and seemed to fade somehow, as if she had suddenly become less real, or shifted slightly orthogonal to what was real. Jerl blinked, and realized he couldn’t picture the face he’d just spent the last few hours looking at.

Below her veil, her mouth set in a grim, challenging line.

“…Or do you accept your finite ability, and live at peace with it all?” she asked.

Jerl frowned as he considered her question.

“I suppose—” he said, then shut his mouth. In the time he’d been distracted with his thoughts, she had faded from view completely and was gone.

Well…that fit what he had heard of her. It was a rare mortal who got to knowingly speak with her at all, and he’d never heard of anyone seeing her face before…even though now, he couldn’t bring a single detail of it into focus in his memory. Jerl shook his head and turned for the door.

“One last thing,” she said, touching his elbow.

Jerl nearly died of a heart attack. “Fuck!”

She flashed a smile and a girlish giggle. “One last thing. A gift, of sorts. Something to make you a bit more comfortable when you stand in Eärrach’s presence. If you’ll accept it?”

“Um…sure?”

She smiled, took his hand, and again managed to give that impression of looking him in the eye despite the layers of opaque cloth shielding her face. And Jerl felt something…change in him. Something enormous, and yet nothing at all. For a moment he felt as though the entire world was made of dry crepe paper and he’d need barely stamp his foot to smash the whole earthmote—

—the moment passed. He gasped, shook his head, shivered, and looked Haust in the veil.

“What—?”

“An…innoculation of sorts.”

“A what?”

She laughed. “Never mind. Just remember when you meet him, Eärrach has a great deal of certainty. If you thought Talvi, Sayf and I were overwhelming…he’s more so in every way. And he has some strong beliefs. When the time comes, push back a little. He’ll be grateful for it.”

Jerl nodded. “Thank you.”

She smiled, then darted in and kissed his cheek. “Until next time. If there is one,” she said, then stepped nimbly past him to his right. When he turned to follow her, he saw nothing but Yngmir still in his meditative trance. Somehow, he knew she had actually gone this time.

“Quite a thing…” he muttered.

He headed for the door, pushed it open, and left the study. Outside, the cleanup and repair work was underway, and all seemed quiet. He couldn’t hear any weeping, but the air was heavy with grief and loss. Some of the people working around him had the numb, staggering faces of the traumatized.

And in front of him, in the middle of the floor, were the dead. Row after row and column upon column of them, each carefully shrouded and placed. Jerl ran his eyes up and down, left and right, performing a quick count and multiplication.

…Fuck.

His eyes caught on Mouse, who was moving among the mourners unnoticed, doing his best to soothe and support with his power. Wherever he went, the berieved seemed to find some fortitude, but it wasn’t enough to salve Jerl’s sense of rightness. Not when he had the option to undo it all.

He could step back, he thought. He could warn everyone. It would save lives…

And he couldn’t think of a good reason why he should not. He still didn’t know exactly why Civorage had come here, after all. Perhaps he couldn’t save everyone…

But he could save some.

He made up his mind, straightened his back, focused on a moment in time, closed his eyes…

And spoke the word of Time once again.

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