The temple stood tall and sinister in the distance, a big steepled monolith of stone punching its way out of the snow with twisted spires that hung hazily within the swirling chaff of a relentless blizzard. Like a great cruel crown, the Wizard’s Guild had sprung from the snowbanks like a shipwreck upon the tundra, beached on an endless white horizon. His journey had been gruesome and long, but he afforded himself a prideful smile; he had made it.
The Messenger heard the frosted fabric of his cloak cracking as he dismounted his grey striker and hitched the horse to the starved remains of a pine tree beside the river. As he fastened the knot the reins cut into the limb like wet mulch. How many years had passed since this thing had last been kissed by sunlight, he wondered? Everything is dead.
His mount whickered uneasily, padding the snowdrift with worried hooves, when there came a sudden hiss up above as a streak of light zipped through the flurry of flakes to thump into the plains further north. A boom rolled across the deserted wasteland, echoing time and time again, each time more distant than the last. They don’t only come at night anymore.
“Be still,” he shushed her gently, stroking her black mane with a stiff hand. “This won’t take long.”
He patted the crook of his waist and let his numb fingers fumble at the cold steel buckle of his satchel just as absent mindedly as he had day after day for so long now. Still there. He gave a quick scan of the wild plains of white surrounding him and pressed forward breathing heavily with every laborious stride. He slowed as a strong gust of icy wind whistled between the semi-buried rubble of semi-standing walls. The empty brass lanterns squeaked in the sudden gale lolling beneath the branches of bony trees, lifeless, even in the depths of a vibrant summer.
Yes, this was an empty place, barren of life and faded of hope. The grounds held many vast meandering trenches, now a distant relic of a world around the temple where, once upon a time, this place had possessed manicured gardens and wildlife living beneath a blue sunlit sky, basking instead of freezing; but no more.
He continued through the cold, wet slush, winding his way ever closer towards the loneliest place he had ever seen. Would they be expecting him, he wondered? Would they know why he was here?
The stained-glass windows were faded, and all their ledges held perfectly crisp bars of white. They lacked the vibrance that this once beautiful work of masonry had, long ago, possessed. Now, it looked like the shell of an order, once prominent across civilisation, on its last legs dying in the snow at the edge of the world.
The Messenger approached the doors, the oak was damp and rotting, swollen and gnarled from years of snow beyond counting. The stone steps, too, beneath their glossing of ice, had an ancient weariness about them. The Messenger pushed the doors open, hearing the screech of old hinges resonating on older walls, and he stepped inside.
Warmth washed over him like an embrace of dragon breath. How long had it been since he had last felt so cosy, he wondered? Within, there was a contained emptiness, large as it was closing. The hall was vast and lambently lit, and swathes of the great marble floor glistened as if polished by the torches that hung from the stone columns, ever burning with the power of magic. There was no oil-soaked rag, pig fat, or sulphur at the heart of the flame; just a form of sorcery granted to few and gifted to less. The Messenger’s eyes were drawn to the walls, the only feature in a featureless place, an enormous mosaic of lavish and intricate artwork that spanned the circumference of the cavernous space, save for one gloomy black wall. Like ink in water, it coiled and bubbled, swirled and rippled, it smoked like fire trapped beneath the surface of the sea. For all of the strange and wonderous things that magic could be, this was a phenomenon so alien that he dare not be inquisitive about it, and so he kept his distance.
There was the hum of a voice reverberating throughout the temple, a deep and echoing mumble of words that rolled off the stone around him. The messenger walked towards it trailing droplets of icy water scattering from the frayed ribbons of his cloak with every step.
Ahead, a grand staircase spiralled down into a great yawning black hole within the marble floor. He skirted the balustrade with a damp gloved hand upon it, peering down into the depths of the temple, its sconces of light fading away into the inky darkness below. The voice was louder now, but it was not coming from beneath him, he was sure.
Beyond the staircase the sound became steadily clearer. The voice came floating through a wide archway and now, here and there, he could pick out words within the rumbling hums. His boots clacked against the marble and the rings of his chainmail jingled as he made his way inside the chamber, a blush of unease pulsing with his every step. His hand found the satchel once more, fingering the pin of the buckle, still firmly in place. Still there.
The Messenger halted patiently at the back of the large domed room, a scattering of wizards silently occupied the rows of pews before him. All of them were cloaked and hooded, and all of them rested their faces into the palm of their left hand, hands entombed within magical gauntlets. The source of their power was bound to them like women and childbirth, like men and stubbornness, like rocks and gravity. He could feel the intense energy fizzing through the room like molten metal warming him to his core.
“These stars mark the coming of change!” said the Great Wizard, standing from his throne.
The wizard paused and gestured for their new arrival to approach. He was a stern old man, even within the shadow of his cowl his aged skin could not hide the lines of a lifetime worn grimace cutting through silver stubble. Long strings of dirty grey hair hung with a damp weight upon his shoulders, their tips frosted in the light neath a chandelier of blue flames that hovered ominously above his grand seat.
The Messenger stepped forward and unfastened the satchel with a tinny click, a feeling of nakedness suddenly washed over him as he reached inside for the first time since he had threaded the prong through the ring last waning red moon. He produced a letter, the ink pertaining the addressee was blotched where the parchment had gotten wet during his travels, but it remained legible enough; Uristan, of The Wizard’s Guild, Western Order.
The Wizard took it and assessed the wax seal, an imprint of a crown that lay unbroken, save for some minor cracking; his journey had been rather long. He brushed his cloak aside revealing his gauntlet, a heavy and ugly lobstered steel casing that housed his left arm from fingers to bicep. He broke the seal with a smooth brush of a clawed forefinger as the metal joints quietly squeaked and groaned.
Uristan’s eyes could not betray the euphoric relief of penmanship he had long been waiting for, finally his to devour. The other wizards remained still and silent in their pews, the only sound the crisp crunch of parchment as this old master of the ancient order read with enthusiasm. The slightest hint of a smile betrayed his lips, and with a gratified sigh he raised his arm, and his clawed hand snapped shut with a squeaking metallic thunk.
“The time has come!” he barked, and the walls resonated with his words. “Go beneath the temple and bring them to me at once.”
Several wizards stood and swiftly filed out of the room in a quiet shuffle without merely a word, only the ruffling of their cloaks and the tip tapping of their footsteps.
Uristan laid his gauntleted hand upon The Messengers’ shoulder with a heavy pat. “Walk with me,” he said. “I have something I must show you,” his voice rasped like a saw on wood. Wise, old, pained.
The Messenger scanned the pews to find the remaining wizards still with their faces buried into their left hand. Is this prayer? Are they lost of hope?
Master Uristan led the way into the great marble hall, his gait so smooth beneath the cloak that he might well have been floating. The Messenger tailed the frayed train of Uristan’s robes through the archway as the last of a couple dozen wizards disappeared down the stairs into the darkness; the cacophony of footsteps dying away the deeper they ventured.
He guided the messenger towards the wall of murals, “do you know when this temple was built?” he asked.
“No, Master,” he shook his head. “I’m not sure that I do.”
“Several thousand years have passed my young friend,” he sighed. “All temples contain these same pictures, did you know?” He eyed the messenger hungrily, “all of them exactly the same, from here to the furthest reaches of civilised man. And its story is a fascinating one.
“There was a time for us when mountains would wake from their slumber to walk our world, a time when our ancestors could do nothing but burrow underground in fear.” Master Uristan walked a few steps forward, and the messenger followed.
“For a very long time these monstrous things, these Titans, roamed our planet crushing everything in their path like a plague. Under the command of the legendary elemental knights, the titans exacted the planets penance; a truly unstoppable force. But then there was one man,” he tapped the claw of his gauntlet against the stone. “Galadriad the Brave, they called him.”
“I know of the stories, Master,” the messenger nodded. “My mother would often read me fairy tales as a boy.”
“It is more than a mere fairy-tale,” he countered. “With no more than sword and shield Galadriad sought out the titans and he battled against their size and strength until the mountains were still again. This, I promise you. It is written.”
The Messenger was no stranger to fanciful writings of myths and legends. He had read countless tomes of colossi dwelling within scripture that had captured his wonderment from boyhood to somewhat recent days. Yes, he reminisced, there had been much less time for reading since the war had started, and time was so very short, he knew.
“Not quite,” the messenger wagged a smug forefinger. “Galadriad failed to defeat the titans, and so he sought their master’s and challenged them for peace.”
The wizard shared a proud smile, “Yes, Galadriad defeated the Titan’s masters in a great duel that lasted many days. And the knights, true to their word, sealed them away. They honoured him by rearranging the stars in his likeness so that the world might always remember his bravery and enduring strength.”
The wizard gave an approving nod to the wall, sauntering along its breadth. “Such is the power of the wall of destiny, a monument that can capture the events of something so formative thousands of years before its inception. We can read the future by following these pictures around this hall. As accurate as the charted stars by night all the way back to the day the first gods walked upon the shores of this land.”
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“Riveting read, I’m sure.” The Messenger gave a tired roll of his shoulders.
“Oh, it is,” the wizard smiled. “It is our story. Your story and mine, and every man who draws breath in this world, we can all find our destiny right here.”
He sighed with heavy despair, his face a picture of stoic pain as he pointed to the opposite wall where the murals lay buried beneath the thick tar of smoking black fog.
“It used to be a bright and wonderful work of art. It showed a future that promised peace and longevity for civilised man.” He pursed his lips, “but no longer.”
Uristan turned to The Messenger, his eyes a watery glaze and his throat red and vascular, a proud man who forbid a display of weakness within his halls furious at his own shortcomings in this moment.
“Defiers of destiny have undone our promised future.” He looked furious enough to spit, “just look at our sacred wall now. It seeks to deliver a most untimely fate.”
“Darkness?” The Messenger asked.
“Nothingness,” Master Uristan corrected him.
They both stood for a short moment admiring the art in the deep quiet that had fallen over the hall. He noted that it was not all painted, some parts were chiselled and carved to give depth and definition to the scales of beasts and dragons, fire and blood, corn and sea. Like the disruptive silence of the night returning, the hall held only the whisper of roaring torches once more. This wizard, this lonely old man of great power and knowledge regarded the wall of destiny with such passion that one could easily mistake him for looking upon it with virgin eyes. No, the messenger knew that Master Uristan had squandered a collective sum of years studying the intricacies of every pitted stone and was far from finished.
The Messenger remained silent as the master wizard laid his clawed hand upon the stone. His metal fingers were splayed over a colourful impression of five magical gauntlets set upon pedestals within a great temple, this temple. And in the foreground, five silhouettes stood foreboding, their hands outstretched, reaching. The Messenger knew of these five daring shadows, every man from every village from sea to sea had heard the tale. But perhaps more importantly, he also knew that one of these ominous painted apparitions was still very much alive.
“Right here,” he said. “This is when they came. Apprentice wizards, squires of the arcane arts, plucky fools, nothing more. That squalid group of thieves who dared to forge a new path has left the guild in disarray ever since. Now, this black smoking omen swallows more of our wall every passing day. We fear that this great end of days may be approaching much sooner than we had hoped.”
The great wizard growled as he slashed his claws across the wall leaving deep jagged strikes through the stone upon their sacred monument. And then, by some divine work, the crumbs of mortar and paint found their way back from whence they were torn. The Messenger could scarce believe his eyes, and Uristan merely snickered.
“We cannot erase the past,” he held his gauntlet up to the torchlight as the chalky dust of stone glowed upon his gauntlet and drifted back towards the wall. “But we can set it right again. That is why you are here.”
The Messenger silently regarded him. His smug smile jutted from the hood of his cloak, the whites of his eyes clinging to the blade of darkness beneath his cowl. Yes, this was a man who had been waiting for high tide to come again, and the waves were finally tickling his boots on the beach of destiny.
“Forgive me, Master Uristan,” said the Messenger. “Night is gathering, and I am long overdue south. The letter I gave you, it is important. The Emperor will be expecting a response, if you’d be so kind.”
Master Uristan nodded, “your Emperor, he begs need of our order, demands we send our stewards of the planet to the frontlines to let magic gauntlets do his bidding. He requests we defeat his enemies, that we conquer.” The wizard shook his head, “this is not our way, as he well knows. I am certain he must be desperate, but we follow the wall, only what is written, only what destiny has ordained.”
“Then the wall is wrong,” the messenger stepped forward. “A wizard stands at the helm of the enemy army burning our men alive with a gauntlet, and you propose to tell me that it is irrelevant to your precious wall?”
“This wizard is no steward of the planet,” Uristan growled, “merely one of the five heretics that sacked this great temple almost a hundred years ago.”
“Am I to assume that you refuse to bring this rogue to heel? This monster that brandishes the power of your order upon our lands is to burn the world while you cower here in the snows and do nothing?”
The wizard thrust his gauntlet forward and, with a roll of his metal knuckles, he dragged the messenger towards him like gravity plucking an apple from its branch. He froze, and had never felt such power like it, every fibre paralysed with the wave of a gauntlet. He could do nothing but hold his gaze, the master wizard so close that he could smell the rancid breath of a hunger on him.
“Not nothing,” he whispered. “We all have our part to play in destiny’s vision. Please, do observe.” The Messenger felt the freedom return to his muscles, as the wizard turned away, his cloak billowing to cover the gauntlet once more.
“You have seen stars falling from the skies, yes? They look much like this picture; would you not agree?”
The messenger nodded. Night after night, thousands he had seen since he had left the frontlines a world away. Most were the striking sweep of light as he had laid down beside his campfire of a night, but every few days there would be fizzing missiles of white-hot power burning towards the planet, booming like rolling thunder as they struck the ground.
“And what do you make of this?” Uristan pointed to a small figure at the bottom of the wall, though the paint had faded and was chipped and cracked in places, overall, it was still easily observable. A wizard in grey and a man in black looking upon the wall of murals; this wall of murals.
“Is that…” the messenger peered closer, “us?” the messenger knelt closer.
“It is not for me to presume,” he shrugged. “Perceive what you will, the outcome will be the same. Destiny is destiny.”
The messenger took a step back and searched further ahead for answers, but where should he begin, he wondered? Somewhere amidst the mania of drawings his destiny, his fate lay hidden in plain sight. It would take years to make sense of just this small section of stone, he knew, but time was short, so very short.
“We have been waiting a lifetime for this moment,” said the Master wizard. “Waiting for you.”
The stairs came alive with the clamour of footsteps again. The wizards were returning from beneath the temple, grunting and wheezing.
Master Uristan gestured back towards the chamber. “Please,” he smiled, “you have travelled a long way, it would be a shame that you should miss such a moment in history.”
“What is stopping me from leaving right now?”
Uristan laughed. “Destiny, of course.”
“You are saying that I could walk out those doors, and you wouldn’t try to stop me?”
The Messenger looked across the hall at the brown square in the wall, envisioning the swirling snows beyond it. His horse waiting by the river, frost gathering upon her.
“You could,” Uristan continued walking towards the chamber. “But you won’t.”
The wizard disappeared through the archway and The Messenger felt the creak of his knees begin to move. What am I doing?
He heard the satisfied grunt of vindication as he approached the throne where Uristan sat, the wooden arm of his fine seat a nobbled and scratched reminder of just how long his gauntlet had rested upon it.
The wizards entered through the archway six at a time, perched upon their shoulders were coffins of heavy ancient stone. They placed all four of them upright against the walls, each of them accompanied by the sound of disturbed loose mortar crumbling onto the marble floor.
Each coffin held a unique insignia, bearing carvings of the elements, fire, wind, water, and earth. The Messenger doubted himself, surely, he would not be made to believe that the corpses of such legendary knights truly existed, and here of all places?
Master Uristan rolled his eyes over the letter once more with a smirk and stood from his throne. In his clawed steel fist, the paper began to smoke in coiled streams of toxic black.
“The time is upon us where we fulfil our destiny. Harlequin of the underworld!” He called out in a powerful voice, “grant us their swords so that they might down our foes. Grant us their unfailing trust and obedience so that they might carry out the tasks that living men cannot. And grant us their unwavering endurance in the face of those who would seek to banish them!”
The parchment flared into a puff of flame, and Uristan blew the smouldering ashes across the chamber. The embers danced through the air towards the caskets settling upon the stone glowing like fireflies upon the dead’s tombs. There came a dull thump from within the caskets and the insignias pulsed in crimson light, the flash of runic scripture bleeding through the stone and dripping down the sarcophagi. His heartbeat throbbed in his neck.
“The titans must wake!” he bellowed. “And they must obey their master’s command! We must rule as the winds must blow, we must rule as the fires must burn, we must rule as the water must run, and we must rule as the earth must be still.”
“For these stars mark the coming of change!” he boomed.
“For these stars mark the coming of change!” the wizards repeated in force, lifting their gauntlets towards the heavens.
The room suddenly came alive with a flash of magic, and an icy breath of air fogged from beneath the stone to send a shiver through the room. There was the crack of fracturing stone and crumbling rock as the coffin lids fell away from their counterparts in a puff of dust. The four caskets stood open through the haze accompanied by the stench of death and decay on a scale the messenger had never known. He retched at the choking smell and drew his scarf about his mouth and nose, and though he wanted to look away, wanted to leave the room, wanted to run; he found himself drawn to the insides of these four tombs.
“It cannot be,” he uttered. “My eyes betray my mind.”
He approached slowly as the dust cleared and shook his head in disbelief as he craned his neck inspecting the first skeleton. Wrapped within layers of rotten black robes it held its sword, a rippling icy blue blade, point down. The hollows of its eyes wept an endless stream of tears that trickled over the lip of the coffin and out across the marble floor. The Water Knight.
He crept further towards the next, another fleshless man with yellowing, pitted bones clasped around the hilt of a longsword, its fine edge shimmering in a heat haze. Its empty eye sockets steamed as if he were burning within, undoubtedly the furious knight of fire.
Beside him, in the casket bearing the sign of wind, the skeleton stood motionless grasping a rapier, its point so fine it could pierce steel like a needle through a hessian sack. Its robes wafted with an unfelt breeze, the ribbons of black fluttering against the casket loosening more crumbling stone to the floor as the knight of air levitated in ominous silence.
The final coffin was, perhaps, the most eery of them all, he thought. The knight of Earth looked much as he must have in life all those thousands of years ago. The largest of the four with a sword like a meat cleaver big enough to shield his head to his knees. Behind this grotesque blade of mammoth proportions, the knight was not rotten flesh and bones at all, but petrified, a stone man of immense size squeezed into the shell of this casket, finally tasting fresh air for the first time in many a millennia.
“How is this possible?” the messenger could see there were other doubters within the chamber. Men of this ancient order who, despite their magic gauntlets, had unlikely ever truly believed in something such as this.
“This is necromancy,” he stepped away from the dead men. “It is black magic, or something darker.”
“This is the beginning of our true legacy,” Uristan replied. “To wake the titans, one must free the titans, and it is only these men that know where to find them.” The master wizard smiled contentedly.
The messenger swallowed over the lump in his throat, “you believe that the titans can win us the war?”
Uristan scoffed with a smile, “we are only doing what is written. The wall does not lie.” He placed a comforting hand on the messenger’s shoulder. “Let us say that the titans have unfinished business, and there is no Galadriad anymore.”
The messenger made to draw his sword but before he had even gripped the hilt, the four knights of the dead took a sudden heavy step out of their tombs raising their swords in unison protectively. A smattering of grit fell from their bones as they stood in their combat stance staring down this lowly courier.
“Go on,” Uristan urged him. “Defy destiny just as he did, this man who bears a stolen gauntlet and sets the empires borders ablaze. Make your stand and prove our sacred wall wrong.”
The Messenger felt the hot prickle of adrenaline spotting beneath his leather, the rash of sweat spreading down his spine and the burning blush of surrender as he took his hand away from the hilt of his blade. The dead knights fell at ease watching him from the black lifeless holes within their skulls.
“Your presence here today brings great joy to the guild,” Uristan sighed happily. “I’m going to repay you with a priceless gift, a treasure that very few men without arcane tutelage could ever dream to possess. Tell me, would you like a gauntlet of your own?”
The Messenger looked about the chamber, at the clan of cloaked wizards like powerful wraiths, at the undead legends of old stood before him with their ancient swords of God-smithed sky stone, and at Uristan, the fabled master of the Western Order. I should go. Back to the war. Back to the screaming. The killing. The burning. So much burning. But I am afraid. Could I live like this? Peaceful and safe at the edge of the world? A coward… But who would know?
The Messenger held his gaze, “yes, I... I think I would.”