In the Time Before Time, there was chaos on the earth. Windstorms raged without end and all the lands were frozen and burned to ash without rain. Eloei and the Deceiver were born of the primordial tempest and struggled for control of the world. The Deceiver said, “Why do you struggle? Let the earth remain barren.” Eloei said unto the Deceiver, “It should not be this way. The earth should teem with life in all its forms, and man should walk the earth, and man should rule over it.” And Eloei made it so.
-The Testament of Kahlo Hadrizeen, First Prophet of Eloei, Chapter 2, Verses 18-23
Rayyaq Raleed, Qarda
It was a towering giant of a paladin, at least a head taller than his comrades, who finally split the front door open with his gold-plated axe.
Lanor stood in the corridor with the ornamental murals depicting Kahlo Hadrizeen’s life. Kahlo Teaches Himself to Read. Kahlo Destroys the Altar. Ascent of Mount Tulaylal. The Deceiver Tests Kahlo. The sixteen murals went on and on down the hall to the atrium of Hasjal’s manse, all the way to Kahlo Departs into the Hereafter, to the ornately carved cherrywood doors that were now cracking under the press of intruders.
“Hierophant!” a man screamed pleadingly. “Get back! The door—get back!” She was aware of another throng at her back, one pouring into the same corridor behind her while the big golden brute outside broke the doors down, smashed them off their golden hinges. She’d been witness to moments like this before. Monumental ones. The ones that decided everything.
Her mother’s death. Qarda’s declaration of war against Myrenthos for violating the Third Precept. Her father’s murder in Dhasherah. The Synod’s congregation. Her arrest. Her vindication—the archelder decapitated in the Temple. Pivotal moments steered the course of her life like a rider’s reins steered a horse, but they also changed the road itself, the course of all history.
“Hierophant Lanor!” someone shouted. Time was an ever-shifting beast, often a snake striking at prey, a straight line hurtling forward with all its might and speed. Now it was a worm. A small, lethargic worm, slowly creeping along the path of fate with no hurry to arrive at destiny. Voices were distorted. Actions that happened in an instant—another axe chop cleared away a full chunk of the door, which fell to the tiled floor—stretched out over many moments, as if everyone were reenacting the scene slowly for an audience.
A great stillness filled her in that moment. It was light; air; calm; peace. She breathed in a soothing breath that dulled the edge of her nerves, newfound energy surging from the base of her spine and up into her skull. The world thrummed around her. Or was it her that was thrumming?
Lanor blinked.
***
“Throw yourself down from the mountain,” said a voice. There was an ineffably alien quality to it, like its sound was made of hollow bells ringing in unison, or perhaps someone speaking into a bucket made of metal. When Lanor opened her eyes, the world was cold, colored a light gray. Wind whistled over Mount Tulaylal. A storm encroached from the west. “If your faith is strong, He will lift you up on wings. If your faith is weak, you will perish on the rocks below.”
Lanor looked down at her hands, but they were not her own. They were larger, thicker—wisps of hair sprouted from the backs of them. She looked up and her stomach dropped inside her. There came a giant face protruding from a nearby thundercloud, blackness roiling around it, crackling with bolts of lightning. Waves of heat rippled off its surface like sunbaked sand on a hot day.
The face was like brass. It had a bright edge even in the ambient dark, a metal sheen that gave it an uncanny solidness despite its illusory shape. It reminded her of embalmed corpses she’d seen once in the ancestral tombs of Khaad; the face was gaunt, its eyes sunken and closed, but the difference was that she could see its eyes moving fervently under the sealed lids, like a long dead man dreaming.
It was familiar, yet not quite—and all the more unnerving for it.
“Give yourself over to your captors. If your faith is strong, surely Eloei will spare your life.”
“Depart from me,” she answered it. “Eloei gave me feet, that I might walk. But the journey is mine to take.”
“It is not too late to choose,” said the spirit in the storm.
“My choice is made,” she replied. “Leave me. Now. I am not what you thought I was.”
“You all are... in the end. When I peel back your layers, I find the same thing every time. I always have...” It laughed, and its laughter rolled like peals of thunder across the firmament. “Your choice means nothing when time itself has forsaken you.”
“I SAID BE GONE!” Lanor boomed. Now hers was the crashing thunder and the lightning arcing from one horizon to the next. She stretched out her hand, and now it belonged to her, smaller and softer.
The face in the storm recoiled, contorting into monstrous shapes, a man one instant, a sharp-toothed beast the next, changing form like a lizard of the jungle might change its colors. She saw it for what it was—the Deceiver, all its inner ugliness laid bare. She saw its fear. Somehow, it made her afraid at first, too. But in the next breath, there was hope.
Lanor blinked again.
***
When she opened her eyes, the world fell clumsily into place, every sight and sound piling atop one another in one big discordant mess. She heard Hasjal’s voice in the din—he pleaded with her to retreat to safety. She saw Ghamal’s loyalists pouring into the manse like water through a broken dam, heard the clanking of her loyalist paladins’ armor as they charged forward on either side of her.
Her hand was outstretched just as she’d seen in her mind’s eye. The power from the Mount—it still pulsed in her blood, lighting her from within. All the speed and fury of a thunderbolt just beneath her skin. My choice is made. All gods but Eloei are deceivers.
It was then that the tallest of Ghamal’s loyalists, the broad-shouldered paladin with a black beard as big as his head, pointed straight at her from the end of the hall. She could see the whites of his crazed eyes. He hefted the golden axe behind his head, raised it high. “Long live Hierophant Ghamal!” he cried out from his belly with pure conviction.
“In the name of Eloei the Merciful,” she said, holding out her hand vertically, making the four-fingered Eloheed benediction. “...if it please Him...” In that same moment, he put all his bodyweight into the throw, hurling the axe down the corridor straight at her. “...so be it.”
Clang!
The axe collided with a wall and rebounded, shaking violently with the impact, the metal quivering in midair. It fell squarely on the floor, its blade cracking a tile. Except there was no wall in its way—not one made of stone, at least. Lanor’s hand burned and crackled with power. Before her, and between them, was a wall of what looked like solid light, translucent but hard to the touch. The ghostly barrier of light absorbed the attack. Not a drop of Sanzeen blood was spilled.
A volley of spears met a similar fate; they all clanged and crashed against the wall of light, wobbling on impact and clattering to the floor. Lanor knew it was her doing, felt the curious energy in her own fingertips, yet her mind had trouble accepting what her eyes could plainly see. At times, she’d watched the practiced hands of a cleric pour consecrated water from a pitcher into a ritual bowl so smoothly that the stream of water seemed suspended in time, totally frozen and motionless, like a finger of glass. It mesmerized her every time. This was how she began to make sense of what she saw now—it looked like a wall of water that flowed so smoothly, it was almost invisible. Yet this phenomenon also had a faint golden glow to it.
The wall was so solid that neither side could penetrate it. Her loyalists charged ahead and tackled it with their shoulders, swung with their swords—nothing left so much as a dent or scratch. So long as she held her arm steady, neither side could attack the other. She forced them into a stalemate.
“Eloei has spared my people,” she told the intruders. The wall was strong enough that metal rebounded off its surface, yet thin enough that sound passed freely through it. “He has also spared you. Leave this place while there can still be peace.” For the first time in her short life, she spoke with the authority she was always meant to wield, the confidence that had eluded her until this moment. She felt weightless then; the soles of her sandals softly brushed the tile beneath, a whisper. She felt weightless enough that her feet might leave the floor.
It was a miracle.
And as men who were inclined to take miracles to heart, everyone on both sides was still for a moment. For Lanor, it called to mind a scene that unfolded one day just outside the Temple grounds, when two stray cats were locked in a hissing, yowling fight. When a stray dog charged them, barking, they separated, and the dog immediately lost interest, sniffing the ground where they’d been and wagging his tail slightly before padding off down the street. The cats stood bewildered in the aftermath, blinking and avoiding one another. It imposed a shocking sort of peace between them.
Her loyalists, as well as the traitors who fought for Ghamal, stood on either side of the scintillating barrier, unsure of how to proceed. Swords and spears drooped to their sides. For a moment, she wondered if she had solved the entire civil war in one fell swoop. Praise be to Eloei.
Then her feet found the floor. Weight settled into her calves, her ankles, and pressed the soles of her feet firmly against her sandals. It felt like emerging from a bath or wading out of the ocean. She was heavy again with mortal weight—and no mortal could do what she’d done.
“Hasjal?” she asked, and when she opened her mouth, something hot and wet trickled down her nose and past her lips. The world blurred. She lost her footing—someone caught her before she hit the floor.
The wall was gone.
Then came the roar of charging men, the clanging of armor, like distant peals of thunder and hollow bells. Sharp ringing pierced her ears. A dark shroud fell over her vision, and then she slipped out of consciousness.
***
What is this place?
She awoke in a dark corridor. There were no torches to be seen; rather, there was no ceiling, and pale moonlight lit the way instead. The tiles beneath her bare feet were cold to the touch, like Castle Muadazim, but this was not that place. The air was still. The hall stretched on for centuries to two doors at the very end, one of them cracked, spilling golden light from its fractures like the mythical blood of a god. The other door was open and led only to darkness.
The hall was lined on either side with important events from the life of Qarda—no, not that. Not quite. They were statues. It was lined with statues of all the hierophants who had come before her, from first to last, beginning with Kahlo and ending with Drakhman.
Where have I seen this before? Or... have I?
It was familiar, yet not quite—and all the more unnerving for it.
Under the faint glow of the night sky, all the statues were dark blue, carved from marble or some other monochrome rock, and they were all unpainted. It cast the dead hierophants in a ghostly light—where painted statues tried to capture the essence of the subject as they were in life, these were lifeless effigies, the shapes of them and nothing more.
Lanor made her way down the hall in the dark, studying the faces of each prophet she passed. The first statue on the left was the First Prophet, Kahlo Hadrizeen, Eloei grace him—his name and title were always bundled like that in her mind for reasons of religious propriety. He was the one who first bridged the gap between man and Eloei, transforming Ralaheed into Rayyaq Raleed and planting the seed of Qarda’s eventual unification. “I showed them the way, Lanor,” said a voice. It was not a voice she’d ever heard before—when it spoke, the eyes of the statue flickered with pale golden light like a candle dancing in a breeze. “The way was long, and it has led to you. Now you must see it finished.” Her heart leaped into her throat at first, but it was a reflex. Something about this unfamiliar voice brought her reassurance rather than fear. She kept moving.
Next, on the right of her, was Kahlo’s firstborn son Rahseem. He finished codifying the role of the Synod as a way to interpret the sayings of the hierophants and ensure that hieratic canon remained intact. Later, the Synod would prove to be a valuable check on the hierophant’s otherwise boundless authority, preserving trust among the people. “I saw to it that the Deceiver did not sully the word of our Lord Above Lords in this land. My heart breaks to see his influence in your time. This is not your fault.”
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“I remember you,” said Lanor. “I remember all of you. My amgahtrya...” The fullness of Eloheed faith required formal schooling in the teachings of the Testament, and that went quadruple for a crown priestess of Qarda. Her amgahtrya under the scholastic clerics of Rayyaq Raleed was relentless. She learned the lives and deaths of all the hierophants until she could match each of their names to a single line from their biographies, and now this vision began to plumb her knowledge.
“The people warred like this in my time, too,” said a different statue. It was of Ibram Hadrizeen, Kahlo’s great-great-grandson, the hierophant who sired no children with his wives but did conceive with a courtesan, sparking the Sixty-Year Schism. “It was my indiscretion that cost so many their lives. Eloei never meant succession to pass through the bloodline—you must understand. The Lord Above Lords never intended for any of this. But you see how man can be set in his ways, even after all this time.”
“I helped put Qarda back together,” said Aghmah Iresh, Ibram’s illegitimate son. “In time, they came to accept me. Man can be more forgiving and reasonable than you might think. We can all be so much more than we imagine.”
Down the line she went past seventy more prophets, their faces blank and peaceful in death, and Lanor reflected on what a struggle it was to be alive—not only in her time and circumstances, but for a thing to be alive at all. Ever. It was formed of its parents’ bodies, fed from its mother and then from the world, so many inert substances, all of them dead, that combined to form a living thing. What a hallucination it was to be alive at all.
Life was a dream that death had. What a wondrous and terrible dream it could be.
Lanor was getting closer to the end of the corridor, the end of the procession of Qarda’s rulers from the annals of history. Alabrim Azain. Aghmah Azain. Muhad Sanzeen. The Sanzeen line that led to her proud, stone-faced grandfather, a man she’d never met but who survived for a time in the stories of her father. And there he was again. Drakhman. Though he was a statue, he seemed more real here than in her dream in the Temple, when he was flesh and blood and talking to her. Maybe it was his absence that was more real for her now, the void he left behind filled with solid stone.
“I never knew what the throne would mean for you,” said Drakhman. “None of us did. Now the weight of all our lives, all our good deeds and our transgressions, rests on you. Now the time we knew is coming to an end.”
“Lanor,” said another voice. This one was unlike the others, deep, resounding, gentle but stern. “You weighed the sight of your eyes and the sound of your ears. With you I am most pleased.”
“Lord Above Lords,” she gasped, and her voice caught in her throat. She fell at once to her knees like all the life had gone out of her legs. She collapsed and prostrated herself.
“Lanor,” said Eloei. “Why do you throw yourself down in this way?”
“I’m not worthy.” Her voice trembled as she spoke. All of a sudden, she felt divine eyes scrutinizing her, picking apart her life and all the blasphemous doubts that she never told anyone. All of her disbelief melted away like a Dhasheran snowflake in the warm palm of her hand. It was a sobering, naked feeling.
“But you are what I love most about the whole world. You and all the people in it.”
“I don’t deserve it. Who am I, that You would favor me? The others...” She thought of Ghamal, of the paladin beheading Rhadiz Tal in the Temple. Her stomach twisted with secondhand shame on their behalf. “Surely others deserve it more than me, but there are many who deserve it even less than I do. We are not so great, even when we try to be.”
“But 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. You created divinity and perfection as ideals to strive toward eternally. This is what makes you so special...” A cryptic pause. “...and this is why I cannot allow the Deceiver to erase all that you have made.”
Now Lanor’s skin prickled and her fine hairs stood on end. She rose to her feet. “The Deceiver?”
“Here we are away from the Deceiver’s influence, but now time is of the essence. I am limited in what I can say to you.”
She furrowed her brow, suppressed the urge to scoff at even Eloei’s words. “Limited? Who could limit You, oh Lord Above—”
“There is no time. Listen carefully. I am bound by my word, and I am permitted only to answer certain questions you ask of me. I will speak to you now in the way a human speaks plainly to another, but my answers are carefully guarded. If I am cryptic, I convey as much meaning as my constraints allow. If I am silent, then I am forbidden to answer, but I implore you to infer meaning even from my silence. Hurry, Lanor.”
Her heart thumped in her chest. “Why is there no time?”
“Soon the influence of the Deceiver will reach us here. The influence is ever-expanding.”
“Who could possibly limit You?”
“Another.”
“Surely not the Deceiver...”
“No. There is another.”
“Who is it?”
“The Third.”
“Who is the Third?” This question Eloei answered only with silence. The Third, Lanor thought. Eloei. The Deceiver... She recalled a verse from the Testament that spoke of a third, one of Kahlo’s visions from the distant past. ‘I saw the Deceiver tear down Eloei from His rightful place in the firmament. I saw a third, and the third was given dominion over the unknown world.’ Even separated by millennia, the words of the First Prophet called out to her. “What do the doors mean at the end of the hallway?”
“The Time After Time.”
“What is the Time After Time?”
“As the head and tail are two sides of the same akkah, so are the Time Before Time and the Time After Time. The time you know is the thin edge of that coin, where there is much before and after.”
“What will happen in the Time After Time?”
“It is yet to be decided.”
“Who will decide it?”
“You who walk the earth. You and the Third.”
You who walk the earth. “‘You who walk the earth’—do You mean me?” Silence. “Do You mean Qarda?” Silence. “Or... what about all people? All people who walk the earth—is that what You mean?”
“Yes.”
“How? How will we decide it?” Silence. The floor quaked, and the stone statues trembled and rocked noisily back and forth. A fissure split the floor down the middle, snaking up the wall between the two doors at the end of the corridor. The whole structure threatened to collapse. “When will the Time After Time come? How soon?”
“Ten years,” said Eloei. “Only ten years remain. Our time is at an end, Lanor. Call out to me again and I will always hear your prayer. I will answer you when my word allows. Truly I say to you, Lanor, that you are deserving of my favor—you who walk the earth.”
“A flower sprouting from dung,” said another voice. She recognized it right away, and ice water flooded her stomach. “That is all your best have ever been or ever will be. Even you are tainted like the rest. You are a stubborn stain on the universe, and so you must be cleansed from the face of the earth.”
“Lanor has my favor. She made her choice, even when you were sure she would falter. This is why humanity retains my favor.”
The Deceiver laughed a laugh that dripped with malice. It was vicious, speaking with teeth like it hated the mere sight and sound of her. “You love them because you never understood them. Not like I did. NOT LIKE I DO!”
***
The reverberations of it followed her into the waking world. She hit her head. “Ow,” she whimpered, but the pain was short-lived.
“Praise be to Eloei!” several men said all at once. “Praise Eloei the Merciful. Praise be to Eloei...” Their scattered exclamations and sighs of relief dissipated, and Lanor felt some of them leave her presence while others stayed.
She sat up to find herself in a bare bed on the floor of an all-wooden room. There was a tiny slit of a window in the wall behind her, plain, glassless, unadorned. It let in a small pane of sunlight that hit the floor near the open doorway. Suddenly, the room tilted, and Lanor rolled off the bed.
“Hierophant Lanor!” said Hasjal. He brushed past paladins and a couple of clerics to reach her, offering a helping hand. “You’re awake. Are you all right?”
“No,” she breathed. “I... My bearings... It feels like the whole room is—”
“Listing?” He smiled and nodded once. “We’re at sea, Lanor. It’s all right. You’re safe.” He pulled her gently to her feet. “Easy, now...”
“At sea?” She stood, the stiff muscles of her legs stretching to accommodate her stance, and with a clumsy wave of her free hand, she found her balance. Lanor stood on the tips of her toes and peeked out the window. She saw where the bright blue sky met the dark blue ocean, heard water lapping against the hull. She smelled brine. It was a far cry from the holy city of Rayyaq Raleed and the rain-kissed jungles of Qarda. “How long have I been away?”
“You fell ill in my home,” said Hasjal. “Do you remember? It’s been days since then. Two days now.”
“Three, if you count the hour,” Zumhir corrected him.
“Three. Yes, three. We took my personal ship docked on the River Shureh, and the melt of snow from Mount Tulaylal has ferried us out to sea. Even still, Eloei guides us. And our prayers have been answered again—you’re awake!” Hasjal wiped sweat from his brow, his eyes bloodshot and sagging. The events of these last days seemed to have aged him even more. His eyes had not lost their kindness, but their last drop of youth was already gone. “You need water. One of you—”
“At once,” said another cleric, and two of them disappeared to retrieve her refreshments.
“You said you were away.” Hasjal took a step closer to her, but there was a caution in his movements now that she was on her feet. He approached her like her father used to approach the trained tigers of wealthy merchants in their agrarian estates, when he was eager to stroke the beast’s striped fur just once. There was excitement, intrigue, but it papered over primal fear. “Where did you go?”
“I went looking for something,” she answered dreamily. The dregs of her vision were still fresh in her mind; she feared losing them. “Something I’ve never had before.”
“Did you find it?” She smiled. Nodded. “What was it?”
There came the whistling, squeaking call of a seagull circling the boat. “Certainty.”
Lanor found herself thinking of Sashani. She hoped the timid girl was safe, wherever she was now, and that she was far beyond the ugliness and bloodshed in the capital. She said a silent prayer to Eloei to safeguard her former handmaiden, the only friend she’d ever known, and for the first time she could remember, she felt certain that there was someone to receive it. Let us meet again someday when this is all over, she thought. Eloei willing.
Lanor joined Hasjal on the main deck of his ship. It was a goghla, a long, boxy ship with benevolent mahjeen carved into its corners for good luck and safe passage, and it even had glass windows in some cabins. A goghla was ordinarily a merchant’s vessel, but Synod clerics were wealthy enough to afford their own for leisure travel. They often loaded it with plenty of servants and enough food, water, tea, and luxuries to last a long voyage.
Now it carried Lanor away from the only home she’d ever known. It carried them all out to sea. What was once built for pleasure was now their only bastion of survival, adrift and exiled from the land they knew and loved. A land that was now burning.
“We are bound for Dridon,” Hasjal told her quietly. They stood near the bow, looked out at the blinding sunlight playing off the water, sharp shards of white scattered on blue like finely broken glass. “I could think of nowhere else to go but a Land of Tithe—the only one not sacked by Grackenwell. Our closest ally... and the best place to retreat and rebuild for now.” There was silence, save for the waves and the distant screech of a gull. “I know this must be a lot to hear all at once, exalted Prophetess. I promise that we can rebuild our forces there. We can make contact with the veracidins we’ve scattered across the Stone Continent, those still loyal to you. We can send word back to Qarda for our loyalists who still survive, let them know we’ve not forgotten them. We can...” His voice trailed off, and in its faltering, she could hear his desperation for her approval.
Finally, she just shook her head. “It’s all right, Hasjal. You did well. I will always be grateful to you all for saving my life.”
“Saving your life?” Now he broke out into a weary grin, his sleep-ringed eyes a little wider now. “You saved ours long enough that we made a retreat! Did you know there was not even one more death after what you did? We took some grave injuries, but we all survived thanks to you.” There was a pause, and Lanor felt like a trained tiger once more. “Just what was that back there?”
“What else?” She smiled knowingly. “A miracle.”
She could see him nodding reverently in the corner of her vision. “Of course. A miracle from Eloei.”
“How long has it been since Qarda has seen one of those?”
Hasjal chuckled. “Well, that’s a complicated question, to be sure... Still, there must be a reason that Eloei worked this miracle through you for all to see.”
She nodded, her smile fading, her face going solemn again. She opened and closed the fingers of her right hand, studying the wrinkles of her palm. “There is.” Another pause—this one was much longer. The sun had already passed its zenith for the day and was bound for its slow descent behind the horizon. It was hot out on the deck of the goghla. “Dridon. This will be good. I can feel it—this will be the fresh start that we all need to regroup.”
Hasjal breathed a sigh of relief. “I was so wracked with guilt over the decision we made without you. Dridon... That strange, drab land, so barren compared to the jungle, with its winters even colder than Dhasherah... Truly, you’re looking forward to seeing Dridon for the first time?”
“I am.” Lanor turned to face him then, and a look passed between them that she’d never felt, a look of deference, as if she were the elder one and he were the one in his mid-teens waiting on her wisdom. “Actually, I believe I’ve already seen it. Once. Eloei showed me.”