Veig Treth was a man forever haunted by ambition. When he was an orphan of five, following his father – a travelling Spirit Servant – across the Farmlands and the Minelands, where Treth the Elder provided his humble, low-earning services (that mostly consisted of invoking the Spirits to help cure misery and affliction too great to be dispelled by mere hope), he constantly dreamt of one day having a house of his own instead of sleeping in barns and chicken coops or, when not even those were available, out in the open like a vagrant, in the mercy of the elements; then the sufferers would come to him, and thus he could demand heftier payment than a basket of eggs or a head of cheese to undo hexes, protect from ill will and pray for prompt marriage or greater cattle fecundity.
And when his wish came true, by his marrying into a family of relatively wealthy Miners, he couldn’t stop dreaming of someday making the leap that divided ordinary Feeres from those privileged or fortunate enough to be living on the inside of the Castle’s walls, where one could procure the finest goods, drink the best wine and ale, and most importantly, if he were a Spirit Servant employed by the Spirit Home, earn heaps of gold, avail himself of first-rate whores and even – if sufficiently determined – make his services indispensable to the nobility residing in the Palace.
So, when his mousy, unsmiling wife grew fat with child – a child that Veig saw as a chain that would hold him a lifelong captive of the gloomy Minelands and their dull-witted, coal-dust-retching dwellers – he gathered (that is, stole) what coin was at hand and fled to the Castle, where, after eagerly (if not enthusiastically) pleasuring a rich, well-connected widow for an entire month, he was granted rights of residence.
Any other man in his place would be content and wish no further betterment – but Veig Treth, unlike most men, was plagued by ambition as one is by an incurable ailment: the mere thought of waiting for the childless widow to croak and then spending the rest of his days merely enjoying the benefits of her bequest made him physically ill, robbed him of sleep and left him yearning for the life he truly desired: being not merely one of the Spirit Home’s Servants but High Servant of the Castle and of all Feerien.
And this he pursued most deviously, aided by the inheritance of the widow, whose passing he had hastened with arduous lovemaking combined with goose-like fattening; first he found an elderly Scribe drowning in debt from a life of dissolution, and paid him to forge a document by which the King appointed him successor to the High Servant; then, after King Fazen had unknowingly placed him in this eminent post, provoking the low-ranking Servants’ justified wrath, Veig unleashed a pest of discord, suspicion and outright hatred in the Spirit Home, by slandering, bribing and threatening various Servants, all the while making himself the High Servant’s pet with shows of gratitude and servility – such as personally preparing the old man’s elaborate meals and mulling his wine with strong spices, whose flavour covered the acrid taste of the powdered mushrooms with which he was slowly but steadily poisoning him (at least his humble past on his father’s side had taught him a thing or two).
Then the blessed day finally arrived, and Veig Treth found himself living in the High Servant’s palatial quarters, visited by the noble folk, bowed to at the Castle’s market, and having exclusive and liberal use of the Spirit Home’s considerable purse. For the first time in his life he felt as though he could breathe freely, while trying to convince his giddy, greedy self that there were no more steps in Feerien’s ladder to climb, no grander life to crave. And when Queen Firalda herself summoned him to her regal chambers and asked him to say a benediction for her long-banished son, his bliss was so immense it felt like peaceful death – at last, he could lay his ambition to rest.
However, for all his intelligence and ruthless determination, there was one thing Veig Treth had neglected to nurture, deeming it irrelevant to his ravenous aspirations – he had never quite decided whether the Spirits to whom he owed his good fortune were real to him or not; belief in them had always seemed secondary to believing in himself; and by the time he was resting on his laurels, the essence of his vocation had become so unimportant to him that he inwardly scorned Servants like his father, who sat around chanting nonsense and burning herbs and waiting for a response that never really came instead of using their craft to make their own lives – and not some ignorant Farmer’s – better. So, while he was cunning enough to give regular performances of faith for the Spirit Home’s congregation, in his heart he doubted that the Spirits existed at all.
And then, like massive and horrific retribution for his life of unbelief, the Shy Death had struck, forcing him to grapple with an outbreak of terror, anger and grief he was far too jaded and self-absorbed to know how to efficiently address.
It had begun with throngs of women suddenly flooding the Spirit Home night and day, wailing and gnashing their teeth and tearing off their hair because of the dead infants they carried like so many bundles of bloody meat. Naturally, they were all convinced that the Spirits were punishing them for some grave transgression, and so Veig was not only obliged to officiate the dozens of burials and spend hours on end kneeling in front of the altar and pretending to beg the thin air for mercy, but also to offer consolation and assurances – none of them genuine – that this evil would stop.
But then people started noticing that the supply of meat from the Farmlands was steadily decreasing, and also that corpses discovered by chance, human or not, weren’t putrefying as they should, as if the death that had claimed them was indeed too shy to bring its duties to fulfillment. And so Veig, by then equally helpless and panicked as the stricken worshippers, had to attend the unearthings of the babies, some of whom were burned as a gesture of atonement for sins unknown, while others were taken back to their homes, where a gruesome practice had begun to surge – for since the dead neither stank nor wasted away, many grieving parents, spouses and siblings kept the deceased in their homes as if they were still alive, clothing and bathing them, carrying them from room to room, putting them to sleep and sitting them at the table, and some even bringing them to the Spirit Home to be blessed and prayed over.
And as if the madness of the simple-minded people wasn’t bad enough, King Fazen, till then as firmly indifferent to the doings of the Spirits as Veig himself, after fathering a score of stillborn babes, decided that as ruler of Feerien he should make himself wise in the ways of their celestial punishers – overnight making the High Servant his sole and constant counsellor, confidant and consoler.
There was only one way for Veig to maintain both his position and his sanity – and that was, once again, to give into fantasies of a life better than the one he was living, without furious crowds beleaguering him with questions he had no answer to, and where the royalty would be dignified and grateful and not unconfident fools blabbing about sacrifices to the Spirits and spells of protection against the Seventh Moon.
In other words, he was determined to defeat the Shy Death on his own, even if he hadn’t the faintest idea as to how he would achieve such a feat, or even if it were feasible at all. But what the High Servant lacked in faith, he made up for in shrewdness – for Veig Treth hadn’t been born with a silver spoon in his mouth like these blue-blooded dimwits who were unable to solve the tiniest problem unless it could be bought off, nor had he been granted the gift of literacy like those pompous Scribes who thought that the solution to everything lay in the pages of their ancient, useless books. He had begun his life sleeping in haystacks and hollowed-out trees like a dog without a master, and look at him now, advising the King of Feerien like the wisest of the wise.
No, he wasn’t going to allow this dire misfortune, nor the frenzy it had brought on, to taint the fruits of his ambition – whose new goal was to restore order to the realm, even if it meant producing bloody Royen the Eternal out of the nothingness of his profound disbelief.
As happens with legendary figures whose powers transcend the human nature, there was no consensus as to whether Royen the Eternal had ever actually existed.
>
However, there were references of this unique hero and his astonishing deeds in the writings of Scribe Historians dating dozens of centuries back, and the story of Royen had been part of the oral tradition since time immemorial, growing in elaboration and popularity when Fate showed Feerien and Feeres her hard, cruel face.
According to the earliest documents, Royen had been born in the aftermath of the Disaster, while the world struggled to recover some shred of its former glory. Depending on the teller of the tale, he was the youngest son of an extremely poor family of Farmers or Miners, and he had shown the first signs of his preternatural abilities when, as a lad no taller than a goat, he could wield a spade or a pickax with twice the strength of a burly labourer, provoke terror in the most aggressive sheepdogs, and beat older, bigger children black and blue – for belligerence seemed to run in little Royen’s blood; what was more, the boy was invulnerable to illness and pain that would have a grown man writhing and moaning in his sickbed.
And as he grew, so did his powers, until they had surpassed those of normal men so greatly, people started to fear him, thinking he was some evil Spirit that had lingered after the Disaster to do even more harm. So they tried to kill him, many times and in many ways, but Royen couldn’t be killed: he would tear down the sturdy bricks behind which they had walled him in with his bare fists; hold his breath under the water they’d cast him in till he could brake the chains he was tied up with; uproot and bring down a great oak on whose branch they had hung him – and then he would slaughter those who had tried to murder him, rip them from limb to limb till their own mothers couldn’t tell them from the carcass of a cow devoured by wolves. Not even Nature could overpower Royen: fire couldn’t burn him, he could go about naked in the most brutal cold, or get struck by lightning and carry on as if he’d merely been bitten by a gnat.
And then one day he disappeared and was seen or heard of no more. Some said that Time, that relentless destroyer, had finally caught up with him, and he had died of old age as all men did. Others believed that he continued to rove across Feerien righting wrongs and bringing life where only death reigned, his immortality making the barren soil blossom with flowers and the dry rock bleed water and even, some said, raising the dead as though from sleep. And still others claimed – and this was the version of the tale that had gathered the most believers over the ages – that Royen was born time and again, once in every generation, even if most of the time, being ignorant of his true origin and the powers it bestowed upon him, he lived the simple life of a Farmer or a Miner, marrying and having children and being distinguished only by his great strength, his imperviousness to sickness, and the way that things, both living and inanimate, seemed to bend to his will.
He was a force of nature, Royen the Eternal; a man who stood between life and death without quite belonging to either – for he who cannot die cannot be said to live as well, at least not as humans do.
And as the Shy Death spread its evil fingers across the realm, the storytelling thickened like smoke rising to the heavens in the hope that someone – man or Spirit –will see it, and come to the people’s help. “Royen walks amongst us,” they said, willing their words to be true. “He’ll awaken the dead and save us from a Second Disaster.”