He held up the last of the medallions—Gorev, Agion of Honesty—to catch the fall of sunlight.‘Our purpose is only to strengthen mortalkind.We have no interest in rule.No interest in removing the lords of this world from their thrones.Nor in enthralling their subjects.Our purpose, our holy mission, is to strengthen mortalkind.To free it from the crippling shackles of ancient power.From the nefarious influence of the First Folk, so often disguised as gifts.And from the more blatant horrors the First Folk left behind in their negligence.We envision an ordered world, freed from the chaos and confusion of the past and rebuilt, strong and stable, upon a foundation of mortal virtue.We would help to make you, and all who live in this world, better, Your Majesty, as we strive to make ourselves.Our interest is in a fulfilment of potential.’
‘So you say,’ Forgard ventured.‘Tarebach may be far from here, but stories travel far, and we have heard stories.’
‘For order to be built, chaos must be burned away,’ Torin said simply.‘In some places—as in Alberon, your neighbour—that process can be gradual enough not to upset the balance.But Alberon was already well on its way towards order when we arrived.Tarebach…’ He shook his head and smiled sadly.‘Now, it is a beacon of civilisation.But it was a long, hard road from there to here.Ours is a brutal, violent history—one marked not only by internal strife, but war with neighbours, among them the City from which the sorceress Fola hails.But that depth of chaos and depravity demonstrated the necessity of the Mortal Church, and forged it.I would see Parwys spared such a traumatic rebirth—’
‘Do I hear a threat?’the queen cut in.
‘No, Your Majesty.You hear a wish, for your sake.Dark powers threaten your kingdom.The haunting, of course, and the rimewolves that have long plagued your northern territory.And now this strange… woman… who bends a rimewolf to her will and shatters your gates with a gesture.The sorceress Fola, too, and the City she serves.It is ancient, and terrible.A contortion of the natural order by the First Folk, meant to shackle and weaken mortalkind.These forces converge on your kingdom, and more will come.It is a comfort to the wretched to have companions in the chaos they wreak, for it assuages their shame.So it was in Tarebach.Violence begets violence—horror begets horror.Chaos entangles all, corrupting even those powers we would wield for good.But decisiveness, true courage, begets a willingness to sacrifice the corrupted good.’
He placed Gorev’s medallion, completing the circle around the staff.It clicked against the wood of the table, a quiet sound that rang in the silence of the room.He shut his eyes, felt a quiet thrumming in the air.A holy sign of the ritual’s readiness.As a Knight of Mediation, he was called only to the cultivation of three virtues—fidelity, justice and compassion.Yet, as an anakriarch, tasked with the defence of the Mortal Church from threats both within and without, he had devoted himself to all nine, insofar as he was able.Both to ensure his own stolidity as a bulwark against corruption, and to enable work such as this.
‘By the Agion,’ he intoned, feeling his blood surge with righteousness and potency.The gentle thrum became a pulse through him like a drumbeat.‘The Exemplary Nine, whose light of virtue is our guide-star through the dark fog of this corrupted world, I assert the primacy of Truth, of Mortality, of the Mundane against the contorted wickedness of Glamour, of Undeath, of Magic.’
Torin opened his eyes.Nine points of fire, as white as the heart of a forge, burned in the air above the medallions.The prince watched, astonished.His mother’s face was a shadowed mask of outrage.Jon Kenn clasped his medallion with both hands and whispered prayers, his eyes bright with rapture and wet with tears.Uli, the housecarl, seemed ready to throw his body between the fires and the prince.The three counts present were more subtle in their reactions, though Torin noted the slight smile that creased Afondir’s cheek.
‘Let what the Agion surround be sundered,’ Torin said, beginning the final verse of the litany.‘Let enchantment burn away.Let the world be as it truly is, and not as our viciousness would wish it.’
The sacred flames roared.A thin smoke began to pour from the staff in their midst, and then to thicken, carrying with it a sharp, acrid scent.Black blisters formed on the staff and expanded outwards, unfurling, their shape like twisted serpents emerging from their burrows.At last, with a sound like cracking ice, the enchantment upon the staff gave way.The staff snapped out to nearly twice its length; Forgard leapt away from one darting end of it with a yelp.
The fires faded, leaving no mark at all on the iron medallions.The staff lay upon its cloth, contorted and disfigured by black, curling growths.Silence held in the room save the soft crumbling of those charred protrusions to a greasy dust.Torin watched with a deep, almost transcendent satisfaction.The wickedness woven into the weapon by the First Folk, drawn out and burned away.
Today, this hateful staff.Someday, all the world.
‘This is the fate that awaits your kingdom if you allow these dark forces to fester,’ Torin said, his voice still holding the weight of his invocation.‘If you act now, decisively, you might carve the corruption out before it infects everything.We have no wish to purge Parwys entire—a cure nearly as painful as the plague.Only to lance the boils, drain the infection, and burn away the disease.Let us do our work, Your Highness.’Again, here, the ambiguity as he let his gaze wander from Prince Owyn to the queen and back: not a challenge to her role, but a recognition of its temporary, symbolic nature.‘Let us save what we can of your kingdom.’
‘And you think our own people incapable of that task?’Medrith pressed, her face a storm cloud and her voice like rolling thunder.
‘Not incapable,’ Torin said.‘But inexperienced compared to those of us who have long waged war against such wicked powers.Experience that can make all the difference when stakes are so high and time so short.’
The queen opened her mouth, but Owyn spoke before her.
‘Very well,’ he said, his affect flat, his eyes hard and cold as raw iron.‘Tell me what you need.’
The First Folk Road
YC 1189
A ghost is little more than an impression left upon the world of some strong, unfulfilled desire.Often, but not always, for revenge.What desire is more potent, and more terrible when unfulfilled, than the need for justice?
Archivist Jagh Hud,Death and Undeath,YC948
Fola sagged in her saddle, letting Harwick guide their horse, listening to the swish of hooves through the marsh.They made slow progress following the submerged silhouette of the First Folk Road, a shadow beneath silty, ankle-deep water.The road itself was sound, as were all the First Folk roads.Dirtied, perhaps, or buried beneath landslides or rising waters—as this one was—but sound.There were First Folk roads that had become bridges over chasms after quakes rent the earth.Though to the eye little more than well-built roads of fine material, their magic preserved them through eons of time and the contortions of the world they bound as it shook itself apart.
Sleepily, Fola wondered what the point of them had been—partly to keep her mind from wandering to Colm and other, more painful questions.The First Folk were capable of far more direct means of transportation.There were doors in the City that opened into other lands, some beyond the horizon of the sea—some into other worlds, the librarians who studied them speculated.There were moving platforms, too, such as those that bore one up to the observatory high atop the Starlit Tower, so near the sky that it turned dark even in daylight and the world below bent as though distorted by an ill-made lens.
Yet the First Folk had made roads which had to be traversed by foot, or by horse, or by wagon.Were these some earlier expression of their capability, after they had attained certain skill with magic but not yet risen to the heights that would forge the City?A step along the way to true mastery of the world and its powers?
There were volumes upon volumes of texts in the depths of the Labyrinthine Library, at the very heart of—and spiralling deep, deep below—the City.Volumes that surely revealed the history she now wondered at absently, in a half-dream, all but carried off to sleep by the warmth of the horse beneath her and rocked by its steady gait.
Volumes written in the language of the First Folk, all but inscrutable even after a thousand years of study.Thus, her project: to conjure the minds of the First Folk from wherever they had vanished, to put these and countless other questions to them directly.
She must have dozed, for one moment they still travelled through the silty mire of the Windmarsh and the next the road lay plain beneath them, bricks of white stone sloping upwards through the air, high over jagged hills.A startling transition that filled her with vertigo as she gazed down at the distant ground below.
She blinked against the light of afternoon, trending towards evening.Frog, still bundled against her chest, breathed gently.The last leagues of the Windmarsh stretched to the east.The road disappeared again beneath their waters, only to reappear at the banks of a broad river—the Afoneang.The road arched into a brilliant, gleaming bridge over the river, which flowed down from the mountains to the north towards the southern sea.At the foot of those mountains, strangely isolated from the flow of the river, a lake glittered in the late afternoon light.
‘Abal’s Scar,’ Damon said, bringing his and Siwan’s mount up beside Fola and Harwick.‘The wound in the world by which the kingdom was forged.Awe-inspiring, every time I see it.’
‘Oh?’Fola said, curiosity burning away her drowsiness.‘I don’t recall it from that play you lot put on.’
