The unlearned fool says, “There is meaning, and I know it.” The learned fool says, “There is no meaning, and there never can be.” The humble one says, “If there is meaning, I know it not, but I wish to find it.” The wise one says, “There is no meaning, so I will create it, that there might be goodness where there was none.” Goodness is the horizon we can never touch but we must never stop seeking. In the name of Eloei, so be it. Yea, in the name of Eloei, so be it. Take heart, everyone. Take heart.
-The Testament of Kahlo Hadrizeen, First Prophet of Eloei, Chapter 100, Verses 120-End
Southern Frost, Dridon
Lanor had been to Castle Muadazim a handful of times in her life. Somehow, the trip to Dhasherah, whether for the Circle of Kings or some such other political assembly, always seemed to fall in the colder moons. It was a temperate land with four seasons and warm, sunny summers. In her mind, though, the place was always associated with the cold, be it rain, snow, or some sleety mixture that made travel even by palanquin miserable.
Dhasherah had never been as cold as the south of Dridon was. The farther south they ventured, the colder it got.
Lanor and her loyalists camped in caves where they were available; otherwise, they were forced to erect every moshel they had, thin tents with breathable mesh fabric designed for the hot, humid climate of Qarda. They huddled together for warmth. The campfires helped, but not enough.
They spent their last akkahs in a remote village outpost comprising two rectangular buildings with daub walls packed between frames of timber. The traders there spoke the Dridic dialect of Stonish, but it was so far removed from the northern Tern style of speech that even Hasjal had trouble communicating with them. They bought all they could afford and traded for what they couldn’t—coats, furs, supplementary animal skins for their moshels, hard brown breads, salt.
This outpost was the last sign of civilization they saw for one whole moon.
It had been nearly two moons since the Grackenwelsh attack on Pitloch, where they’d lost their home away from home and most of their belongings, when they saw the next sign. Hasjal approached Lanor with a stone in his hand. “My Hierophant,” he said gravely, “I bring mixed news.”
“Just a moment, Hasjal,” she answered him, and he waited his turn.
They’d gathered in a snowy clearing in the woods, built several fires for warmth and a central cooking fire. Their moshels were set up and half the group ventured out into the woods to hunt. There were no trappings of royalty or luxury left among them; now they were only survivors.
Lanor tended to the deckhand who’d lost his leg to a cannon shot. She changed the bandages around what was left of his wound; she’d watched a cleric do it enough times that she was competent enough to do it herself now. While she worked, she read him a passage from the Testament by memory.
“‘And so I say to you, people of Ralaheed,’” she recited softly, redressing his scabbed-over stump, “‘that man is endowed to surpass the beast and the mahjeen; for you are capable of killing one another as they are, but they are incapable of caring for one another as you can. The beast breaks his leg and is left for dead by his kin. But what beast, what mahjeen, knows to craft a splint for such a break? And what beast, what mahjeen, could care for it? The love of Eloei is reflected in our love for one another, that the tragedies and horrors of nature might be mitigated as we are able in our time.’”
The deckhand smiled up at her, then bowed his head. He’d been in the throes of a deep depression after the initial shock of his injury; now it seemed that time, community, and Lanor’s hieratic presence were all lifting his spirits day by day. “Thank you, exalted Prophetess.”
She returned his smile. “I should be thanking you for all you’ve done for us.”
“I can still be of use. I will be!” He nodded as he said this, as if to convince himself as much as her.
She put a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “I know you will. We need you.”
Lanor made her way back to Hasjal, who waited at the periphery of camp with anxious eyes that couldn’t sit still in his head. The matter was so urgent that he didn’t even wait for her greeting. He simply held out his hand and presented the stone to her.
“One of the hunters found this nearby,” he told her in a low voice. “I think it best not to alarm the others just yet. They need rest.”
“A stone?” Lanor asked, cocking her head. She turned it over in her hands. “A... sharp stone?”
“A spearhead.”
Lanor held it closer to her face, studied it more intently. She could see now that the stone did indeed have an unnatural shape, its edges chiseled sharp with flat indentations. She’d overlooked these signs at first because the thing was so unlike the Qardish spearheads she knew. “Was this made recently? Or is it an artifact?”
“The edges are still quite sharp. What’s more...” Hasjal accepted the spearhead back, swallowing hard. “I found it resting in the snow. Atop the snow. Which means...”
Lanor nodded, understanding. “Someone was here.”
“Veracidins have not ventured this far south since the war that made Dridon a Land of Tithe. Little is known about the Southern Frost. But we know there are Tomeless here in this frozen wasteland—some estimate thousands, others thousands of thousands.”
She scanned the trees beyond the clearing, seeing nothing but bald black trees and snow-laden conifers receding into the white abyss. Someone was out there. Were they watching even now? “You’re right. Let’s not alarm the others yet.”
“When should we tell them, do you think?”
She considered it for a moment. “After we eat. Once we’re fed and rested, they should know at once. We need to prepare to make contact with them.”
Hasjal arched an eyebrow. “The Tomeless? Here?” He stuffed the spearhead into his leather bag like contraband he wanted to hide.
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“Dridon has its own war now. The veracidins will need time to survey the land to see when it’ll be safe again—if ever. Their missive relays don’t reach this far south, do they?” Lanor knew the outlandishness of what she was about to say, but she saw no other way around it. “What if we allied with the Tomeless?”
The mere idea of it stunned him. “But we have nothing left to give them. Nothing to trade. How will we curry their favor?”
“Will we have anything soon?” The cleric absorbed her question, shook his head. “Then Dridon is already a lost cause, even without their war. Retrieving riches from Qarda will be costlier than ever now that it belongs to Ghamal. We’ll have to find another way to gain allies anyway.”
He swallowed hard again. “I see. You’re right, Hierophant Lanor.” He buried his hands in the furred sleeves of his Stonish coat, shivered against the cold, whipping wind. “Well... shall we eat?”
Lanor was particularly hungry that day as they made their way back to camp. Hasjal helped her feed gray wood to the fires, keeping them stoked against the blustery conditions. Her belly growled. She missed the luxury of choosing what to eat on a given day, having a kitchen full of cooks and full of diverse ingredients and flavors. Now they ate only what they could hunt and harvest. She said zahuahr that day over a meal of tiny berries and roasted squirrel.
Would she ever taste forty-layer bread again? Or even tea? River water and melted snow were less palatable by the day, and food had become a chore that needed doing, all the joy sapped out of it.
In her own darkest moments, which she endeavored to keep secret from her loyalists, she called to mind the words of Eloei spoken in her last vision. “You are what I love most about the whole world. You and all the people in it.”
“You always try. From the moment you began, you tried. Some of you fail. Some of you succeed. But you as a creature continue to try.”
“Call out to me again and I will always hear your prayer. I will answer you when my word allows.”
Here I am, Lord Above Lords, she said in the privacy of her own mind. This is me calling out to You. I need Your help. Am I making the right decision? Should I ask the Tomeless for help—or should we stay in hiding and count on Dridon’s help instead? Her only answer was the whistling wind of early winter. Please, Eloei. I need Your help. Eloei repeated His silence.
And so Lanor did as she’d learned to do when she called out for help with no answer: she did it herself. When the hunters returned from their midday outing and accepted their meal, she addressed all her loyalists at once. Told them about the Tomeless living in the Southern Frost. The spearhead. The likelihood of securing Dridon’s aid, and the possibility of finding aid elsewhere here in the frozen south. The people listened and deferred to her; she had command of an audience like never before.
Like an infant learning to walk after her parents shunned her cries to be carried, Lanor found her own way. It was a skill that circumstance compelled her to hone over the past year. And hone it she did.
It was a sobering reminder not to let herself be swept away in her fervor and lose all sense of self. Eloei might arm me against my enemies, she thought, looking down at her flexing hand, but the fight is mine alone.
***
That night, the wind died down. The Southern Frost was quiet as death. Quiet enough that Lanor could even hear the sound of her own breathing beneath the spitting and sputtering of the fires.
It was settled. They would seek out the Tomeless in the coming days, first sending veracidins to gather information and then to arrange for a meeting. The hunters, on their excursion that day, so happened to see evidence of Tomeless fires in the distance, thin fingers of gray haze rising above the wintry woods. The veracidins would be able to track them down in a day or two.
Lanor sat by her own personal fire, holding out her palms to soak up the warmth. She wondered at things to come. As she sat there, the sizzling of coals and the soft rush of her breathing filling her ears, a familiar voice returned to her.
“You called out to me again and I heard your prayer,” it said. “Just as I promised. Here I am to answer you, as my word allows.”
Where have You gone? Lanor thought. I need Your help. Why would You reveal Yourself to me, only to hide away from me again, just as you did for fifteen years of my life before?
“Truly I say to you, were it my choice, I would commune with you who walk the earth each day,” said Eloei. “I am bound by my word and the influence of another. The Third. This is one of the last times I am able to commune with you, Lanor.”
Ever?
“This is the first of four times I am permitted to speak to you in this land for the next ten years. You may call upon me three more times and I will answer you at once. Take heed, Lanor: once we convene for the fourth time, I will be cut off from you until the Time After Time, and your prayers will reach me no longer. These are the terms of my word I set from before even the mahjeen ruled over Ralaheed. The end draws near, Lanor. The end ordained by the Deceiver with the blessing of the Third.”
She nodded. And You want me to stop it?
There was a long pause. “No, Lanor. Not even I can stop it.” This response inspired that familiar fear tingling up from the base of her spine. When the object of her worship all her life admitted to being second in power to another, it was cause for existential dread. “I want you to stand tall through the end. I want you to see what becomes of the world and make it new. Let not your hard work, and the hard work of those who went before you, be for naught.” Another pause. “You are my final hope for your kind.”
The fire extinguished itself at once.
Lanor’s composure finally broke—she gasped, jumped off her seat on the log. No one seemed to notice. The others had retired to their moshels, save for the paladins’ night watch that encircled the camp, and Hasjal huddled around another fire with his fellow Synod clerics discussing the Tomeless.
She meditated alone in the cold darkness. There was a certain resentment brewing toward Eloei now, an attitude wholly different from her childlike reverence, her agnostic indifference, and her more recent confirmation of faith. How dare Eloei let any power stand between Him and His believers? How dare Eloei accept worship as an omnipotent being for millennia and still be second to another? The paradigm shift was maddening; she felt like she’d just been told of the existence of a light in the sky brighter than the sun that had always been there.
She wondered what her father would think of these developments. Drakhman. He was a mere statue now in the promenade of her memory.
This must be the only way. You wouldn’t lead me here to die. Would You? She waved a dismissive hand. Never mind that. Don’t answer. That doesn’t count. The hot coals still burned passively in the pit, slowly reigniting the firewood in slow-creeping tongues of flame. She never got an answer.
Good. She would wait until she had something more substantial to ask of Eloei.
In the meantime, she would have to make do with His word, the Testament of Kahlo Hadrizeen, the life and times of a man some two thousand years her senior who walked a path not unlike her own. How many times had Kahlo sat at the edge of a fire staring into it for answers? At least she had the written record of a man who’d matched wits with the Deceiver and kept the truth alive.
Lanor saw now how her destiny was inexplicably, inextricably entangled with that of the book. The hopes and fears of all the Eloheed now rested on its spine. Hers, too.
Even if Lanor could no longer call upon Eloei at will, and even if her prayers would need to be sparing, carefully doled out over the years ahead, she would survive. She had her reason and her goodness. Eloei did not love those that walked the earth for no reason.
In that moment, and for the days allotted to her, she resolved to live as one deserving of a just god’s love. Nothing could sever her ties to the truth of the tome by which she lived, truth that had survived the crucible of her reason. Such bonds were not easily broken.
Not for the Tomebound.