Rhoden spun around, the ties of his robe in his hand. Instinctively, he reached for the knife in his sleeve, but realized that a pocket had never been made in this garment. Sitting in a shadowed chair by the fireplace was a figure who stirred. Light from the window glinted off spectacles as he turned his head.

“I apologize,” said Rapidian. “It was not my intention to frighten you.”

“What are you doing in here?” Rhoden demanded, his heart racing.

Rapidian motioned to the chair opposite him. “I’ve been waiting for you. We have things we need to discuss.”

“This is a private chamber, Aras Rapidian. I understand that you have the trust of my uncle, but that does not give you leave to come to me so furtively and in secret.”

“Horst led me to believe that you were a young man of the utmost courtesy,” said Rapidian, tilting his head. “I would have thought you would welcome the chance of a private conversation.”

Rhoden closed his eyes momentarily, doing his best to ignore the rush of annoyance he felt. Yes, he knew this man had things to tell him, and he knew that his uncle trusted him, but he was beyond the point of exhaustion, and his manners began to fail him.

“I’ve had a very long day,” he said, fighting to keep his voice calm. “I would like it very much if we could have this conversation another time.”

“Of that I have no doubt,” said Rapidian, “but this cannot wait, Rhoden.”

Rhoden felt irritation and anger rise in him. “My uncle said that you stayed behind from the hunt for the Seranach so you could help me,” he said. “Yet you abandon me on the day I needed the most support, and then have the audacity to ask for my patience?” He strode to the doorway. “I would like you to leave. Now. My guards will escort you out.”

He turned the doorknob, but the door would not open. He threw his shoulder against it, but to no avail. It was as though the door was made of the stone that surrounded it. Half-snarling, he turned to Rapidian.

“What did you do?”

Rapidian sat calmly in the chair, his face completely unruffled. “I know you are upset, Rhoden. In your position, there is no one who would not be. I am sorry it must be this way, but there are things I must tell you, and it must be tonight. The door will remained closed until I have said what I need to say. Do not worry about your guards. They will not disturb us.”

Rhoden stalked to his bed, watching Rapidian warily. “Who are you?” he asked.

“You already know who I am: Aras Rapidian, High Master of the Brethren of the Dawn and Elder of the Arnyr.”

“Why won’t the door open?”

“Because I do not want it to. We require absolute privacy for this conversation.”

Rhoden perched on the end of his bed. He scrutinized Rapidian, trying to read his face, but his tired mind could not detect anything, ill-meaning, or otherwise.

“Fine,” he snapped. The sooner this conversation was over, the sooner he could sleep. “What are we to talk about?”

“I will excuse your poor behavior, simply because I know the circumstances you find yourself in,” said Rapidian with a frown. “To begin, though Horst promised you I would stay, I have realized that will no longer be possible. I do not know how much longer I can remain in the palace, but it will not be for more than a few days. I am doing everything I can to find the Dryr fugitive I spoke about last night, but I have realized that I need assistance, and so I must go, and soon.” He looked sternly at Rhoden. “I do not know when I will have to leave, and that is why we must speak tonight about the Dryr.”

Rhoden frowned. “I already know about him,” he said. “Last night, you explained to the Council.”

Rapidian shook his head. “You know about the one, but I speak of the many,” he said. “Dryr is the name the Shadows had when they lived on the earth in the days of the Sun King. It was a name they held with pride and meant the People of the Darkness.”

“Forgive me,” said Rhoden, holding up his hand. “But I still do not understand. What is so important about the Dryr and their history that cannot wait until morning?” Under the haze of tiredness, his irritation boiled like liquid in a cauldron.

Rapidian considered Rhoden for a long moment. “Several years ago, your uncle contacted me,” he said at length, and his glasses flashed as he moved his gaze. “He said that you had become obsessed with learning anything and everything you could about the Shadows. What interested us, however, was your intense desire to know the answer to a more important question: what happened to you in your childhood? What had caused your skin to change, to so resemble the Dryr of old?

“Horst led you to certain answers that you were ready to hear. Slowly, you began to learn, although you were not wholly satisfied by the answers you found.”

Rhoden clenched his fists. “I know my uncle kept things from me, but are you saying that he deliberately led me away from finding the truth?”

“Your question—to know what happened to you in your childhood, and what caused the change to your skin—was ours as well,” said Rapidian. “It has been ever since the first black began to appear. When you began to search, you were not ready for the answers we could give, so we fed you more palatable information.”

“Horst never told me that he and I had the same goals,” said Rhoden. “Why didn’t he tell me about the Dryr or any of this?”

“It was not his place to say,” said Rapidian.

“Whose was it, then, if not his?”

Rapidian paused, then said, “It was your father’s.”

Rhoden stared at the man. He wet his lips, which had gone suddenly dry. “He—told me he knew nothing about my condition. And he rarely even mentioned the Shadows.”

“And that never gave you suspicion?” Rapidian asked grimly. “You never questioned that he might be hiding more than he would say?”

“I never felt I could ask him,” said Rhoden, feeling heat rise to his face. “What did he know? Did he know how it happened? Why my skin changed?”

Rapidian sighed. “Unfortunately, we will never know what Garazor knew,” he said. “I was not close to him and was not privy to his private thoughts. So, in his absence, I will tell you what I know, and what I suspect happened to you. I will not have every answer you seek, but I hope to be able to provide some knowledge to you, knowledge you have long sought for.”

“Thank you,” said Rhoden breathlessly. His anger, and even some of his exhaustion disappeared in the promise of new revelations.

Rapidian looked sternly at Rhoden over the rim of his glasses. “I trust from your newly found politeness that you are finally willing to hear me,” he said, and his voice held a hint of reproach. “To give you the explanation you seek, I will need to explain some of the history of the Dryr. I trust I will not need to explain again why this is necessary, nor why we must discuss this in private.”

“No,” Rhoden said humbly.

“Good,” said Rapidian. “Then we should have a little more light, I think. The night is coming fast.”

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

Once Rhoden had lit a fire in the grate—being accustomed to doing this on his own, rather than having servants do it for him—he joined Rapidian in a chair before it. For a moment, the other man merely stared at the flames, seemingly lost in thought. At a prompting from Rhoden, he began once again to speak.

“As I said to you before, the black-skinned people from Aleria’s past were known as the Dryr,” said Rapidian. “They were not as numerous as the people of the Sun King, by any means, but they were very powerful and mysterious and sought-after. Did you know that, at that time, black skin was often envied by those who did not have it?”

Rhoden looked down at his own hands, black and gray in the fading light from the window. “That is difficult to imagine,” he said softly.

“And yet it is true,” said Rapidian. “The Dryr were once the chosen people of Ennis, beloved above all his creations. He gave them the potential for special gifts—gifts which gave them power, and which he did not offer to anyone else.”

“How do you mean?”

“In your studies of the old children’s tales, I’m certain you came across accounts of men and women using magic to help themselves out of tough situations?” Rapidian asked. When Rhoden nodded, he continued. “You have perhaps wondered whether those tales were true; and, if they were, what happened to that power?”

Rhoden nodded his head. He had indeed wondered these things.

This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

“What has been forgotten in time,” said Rapidian, “is that all of these stories stem from a single truth: the Dryr once held those abilities. Magic, if you wish to call it. These gifts from Ennis are what enabled them to become so strong and so feared. And they were lost with the Dryr.”

“What kind of abilities?” Rhoden asked.

“You’ve heard of one already,” said Rapidian. “The Dryr I am seeking after has Illusion on his side. The power of Illusion was one of the more common gift of Ennis to the Dryr. They once used it in the arts, to all kinds of amazing purposes and the entertainment of the Sun King in his palace. There were men who could act an entire play on their own, changing their appearances so that they could be every character in it. There were beautiful displays of sound and music and song.”

He looked wistfully into the flames, as though he wished he had been alive during the time of the Sun King, and had experienced such beauty in his court.

“What other gifts were there?” Rhoden prompted.

Rapidian seemed to come out of a trance. He blinked a few times before continuing. “There were gifts of Sight, of Hearing, and Connection. Men and women who became excellent healers, or crafty spies. Others could travel long distances through shadows. It was also said that one of the rarest gifts was that of foresight, though it was never confirmed. If there ever was a Seer, he or she was never documented.”

“How do you know so much about this?” Rhoden asked, amazed. “I’ve never been able to find even a hint of what you’ve told me about the Dryr. Is this what is recorded in the Chronicles?” The hunger to know what was written in them, though recently quashed, rose forcefully in him again.

A hint of a smile touched Rapidian’s face. “The Chronicles,” he mused. “Dorican’s, correct? No, there is no mention of these gifts in his works. I’m afraid by the time he wrote them down the histories were already corrupted, as much as he tried to avoid it. It is important to remember that nearly a millennia had passed between the days of the Sun King and the days of Dorican the Scribe. Try as he might, his history was doomed to be incorrect.”

“Then, how do you know?” Rhoden asked, searching the man’s face once more. He yearned more than anything to understand him, to know what he knew.

Rapidian pushed his glasses up his sharp nose. “I’ll explain in a moment,” he said. “First, however, I must ask you a question. I know you have studied, or attempted to study, the history of the Dryr. How much do you know about the downfall of the Shadow King?”

Rhoden was a little surprised that such a question was directed at him, and his tired mind pulled together the details.

“The Shadow King was contemporary to the Sun King,” he said. “He turned to evil, plotted against the Sun King, and attempted to overthrow his rule. But the Sun King was able to gather an army and they marched to war. He defeated the Shadow King and all his subjects were killed. No Shadow has ever been seen since that time.”

“Until you,” Rapidian mused, looking keenly at him.

Rhoden tried to ignore this. “But—” he said, continuing his thought, “you said last night in the Council that the Dryr were not gone.”

“They are not,” said Rapidian. “At its very core, your history is true, but it lacks all of the important details—details which the Ennist Church tried desperately to hide during the Great Schism. You see, Rhoden, the Dryr were defeated, yes, but they were not destroyed, as all your histories and stories say. They were imprisoned.”

Rhoden’s breath caught in his chest. “Imprisoned?” he repeated. “Why?”

“The Sun King found, as he battled the Dryr King and his armies, that they were too powerful. Because of their gifts, they could not easily be killed. And their king, the Shadow King, was the most powerful of them all. Solanus, he was called. Tall and proud and as bitter as winter, he fought like a demon against the Sun King, with dozens of Seranach and hordes of Dryr at his side. But eventually even he was overcome.”

Rhoden sat in the heat of the fire and shivered. One Seranach had caused endless chaos for them in the Citadel. He could hardly imagine what two or three or even a dozen of them would have been capable of.

Rapidian continued. “The Sun King could not overcome them completely and so was forced to find another way. He imprisoned the Dryr and their king deep beneath the earth, in a place that repressed their gifts and made it impossible for them to escape. He gave it the name Falingrast, and sealed it with the Heartstone.”

Rhoden felt as though someone had punched him in the stomach. His eyes grew wide as he realized. “The beast—the Seranach. It took the Heartstone last night. If—if the Dryr are still imprisoned, perhaps they sent the beast to fetch it for them.” He looked at Rapidian in distress. “What will happen if the Dryr have the Heartstone?”

“We do not want to imagine the terror of what would happen if Solanus were once again to get his hands on it,” Rapidian said, his voice hard. “But that day will never come. And, no, Rhoden. The Seranach did not take the Heartstone. It only thought it had. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. It will make more sense with a little more explanation, I promise.”

Rhoden nodded and sat back, though he was thoroughly confused. How could the beast have thought it had the Heartstone? Unless…

“It was a fake,” he said, and Rapidian smiled.

“Horst always said you were the brightest mind in the College,” he said. “Yes, it was a fake. Once the Seranach, or its master, realized they had been duped, they discarded it straightaway. It was a little difficult, but after following their trail, I did find it.”

From a bag at his feet, Rapidian withdrew a crystal the size of two fists, which shone faintly in the light of the fire. Rhoden stared at it.

“Does the Church know?” he asked. “That the Heartstone is a fake?”

“No,” said Rapidian, placing the crystal stone on his knee. “The true Heartstone was removed from the Church, oh, centuries ago. This was a good enough copy, though it lacks every virtue the original had. Any Dryr with a gift could tell, which is why it was thrown aside as soon as it was gained. But this copy, despite its flaws, has served the Church for many years.”

“Even though it wasn’t the true Heartstone?”

“Of course. After all, it is not necessarily the object itself, but the reverence and honor it is given that gives the object power.”

“And where is the real Heartstone, if not here?”

“Safe, I can assure you. Safe and hidden away, where it can never be used to free or influence the Dryr.”

Rhoden nodded, staring at the crystal. A hot spike of anger rose in him, though it was not directed at Rapidian.

“If the Seranach was after the Heartstone, and the Heartstone was false,” he said, his voice shaking, “then the attack on the Citadel is meaningless. That thing killed the High Priest, my father, all those people—for nothing.”

“No, not nothing,” said Rapidian hurriedly. “Never nothing, Rhoden. Through such great loss, there is something to gain here. We now know that the Dryr who initiated the attack on the Citadel, whether working as an individual or commanded by someone more powerful than himself, was after the Heartstone. That is very important for us to know! It gives us a glimpse into their plan, to see what it is they hope to accomplish. It gives us an advantage.”

Rhoden’s anger, as quickly as it had risen, subsided. “Us?” he queried. “You and my uncle?”

“Ah, I see there is still quite a bit to explain,” said Rapidian. “No, not just us, and not even just the Brethren. We work together with the Arnyr, and have for centuries.”

“Who or what are the Arnyr?” Rhoden asked. “You’ve mentioned them before, but have given no explanation.”

“They are a very private folk,” Rapidian said. “And for good reason, as I will soon explain. You remember how Solanus and his followers were imprisoned within Falingrast?”

Rhoden nodded.

“The Sun King placed guards over the prison when it was made. The men he trusted to do this were Dryr themselves. I am sure I do not need to explain to you that not all Dryr were imprisoned with their king. Good and bad exist in all peoples. The Dryr who would not follow Solanus fought fiercely against him, and helped the Sun King in the imprisoning of their king. Because of their valor and bravery, the Sun King gave the remaining Dryr this important task: to guard Falingrast until Ithelinum once again joins the earth and Ennis judges those within the prison’s walls. It was not a task given lightly or even wholly willingly, but the remaining Dryr felt it their duty to repay the world for what their king had done.

“The descendants of the first wardens guard the prison to this day, in secret. They quickly cast off the name they had held, and called themselves Arnyr: the Children of the Watch. They live now, high in the mountains, keeping their unenviable and necessary task.”

“There is a community of Shadows, hidden in the mountains?” Rhoden asked, his tired mind sprinting to keep up with his thoughts. A sudden desire rose up in him. “Where? Where do they live? Can I meet them? Why does no one know about them?”

Rapidian gave a tight smile. “They have their ways of keeping out of sight,” he said. “As for where they live, I believe I am not at liberty to tell you, yet. I am a part of their community, and so may come and go as I wish, but they are wary of outsiders.”

Rhoden suddenly straightened, looking at Rapidian with new eyes. “You’re one of them,” he said slowly. “You’re Arnyr.”

“No,” Rapidian said, with a small chuckle. “I am a man, and always have been.”

“But—the door,” said Rhoden, twisting around to look at it. “How did you—?”

“I have my own secrets,” said Rapidian. “Ones I will not even tell princes or kings, no matter if they ask kindly. But do not trouble yourself. I mean no harm.”

Rhoden relaxed a little. “My uncle?” he asked. “What does he know of all this?”

“All of what I have told you, Horst knows,” said Rapidian. “He and all the Brethren. I have led their ranks for many a long year, and we have continued a close correspondence with the Arnyr. I am privileged enough to be counted among their Elders; a kind of honorary member, if you will.” He looked at Rhoden with a clear, honest expression. “I suppose that is why I know what I do, Rhoden. I have spent many years—indeed, my whole lifetime—studying the Dryr and the Arnyr, the prison and the Sun King. Through the grace of God, the Arnyr escaped the Great Purge, and so their histories remain accurate and clear. We use the truth to help us stop threats before they happen. We have kept many Dryr from escaping their prison, though it should have been impossible for them even to try. But our watch has become lax through the years, as it never should have been. Because of our pride and folly, we failed, to the detriment of your life and so many others. The Dryr man who escaped should not have made it to the capital, let alone have brought a Seranach into the midst of the people.” He turned his head, and Rhoden saw tears behind the spectacles. “I will never forgive myself for that blunder,” he said softly.

“Surely, you cannot be wholly to blame,” said Rhoden. “From what you have said, it seems the Dryr will ever try to leave their prison.”

Rapidian’s mouth curved in a small smile. “You are kind,” he said, “but I cannot accept it, even though your kindness is given in ignorance. It is our duty, Rhoden, to keep threats such as these from becoming reality. We have failed our duty, and the consequences lie on our heads.”

For a moment, the two of them were silent, staring into the fire. Rhoden thought on Rapidian’s words, and images from the night before came to his mind: the terrible staring eyes of the Seranach, Cael’s choking breaths, the scream of his father. That they could have been avoided was what he longed for above anything. But he found he could not be angry with Rapidian. Whatever shame and anger the other man felt, Rhoden knew that there was now no changing what had happened.

It was incredible to have his mind expanded thus, to learn of the Arnyr and their never ending task. To know that Shadows still existed, and to know that they were within reach, was amazing to consider. Once again, he felt a deep desire awaken within him—to see the Arnyr, to meet others who were like him. He wanted to know where they were, what their culture was like, and what other secrets and truths they knew.