All of six years old in his latest incarnation, Royen the Eternal was enjoying this nocturnal adventure so much, it was all he could do not to cry out in exhilaration. And it was high time he had some fun, for lately he had suffered an abundance of grief.
For one thing, aside from a few instances of usefulness, ever since they’d arrived in this aptly named forgotten place, Yonfi had on many occasions felt like a helpless boy instead of an immortal hero, and he loathed this feeling with all his heart. Because while they were still in Feerien (which seemed a world of utter bliss compared to this gloomy realm), he’d seen his powers thrive, and bring great happiness to himself and to others, with feats such as scaring off those filthy Scavengers and raising all those dead people – his own beloved brother first and foremost. However, just as life and warmth had been drained from it, Erat Rin seemed to have had a similarly harmful effect on his abilities, condemning him to enormous depths of self-doubt and misery, and affecting others like a curse: first he’d been unable to save the nameless girl from the storm, and then to the guilt of her death had been added his lamentable failure to live up to the legends written about him by being unable to illuminate the Stone and letting down so many people.
But the moment he first attacked the sandy soil, burying his fingers in it with all the pent-up fury he’d been feeling, and seen the ground crumble and sink at his touch as though afraid of him, he had laughed triumphantly and fell upon the task with double the self-confidence and vigour, digging and digging and digging in such a state of wild abandon, that when he next heard Raddia’s alarmed voice he looked around and realized he stood in a pit so deep, her and Gallan’s faces seemed as small as waning moons.
So with a few quick leaps he climbed to the surface, and when he asked Gallan if he thought the hole was deep enough, he was so shocked by how fast this yawning crater had opened up before his startled eyes, he could only nod wordlessly in reply.
“Can I kick the Stone inside, then?” Yonfi said, not even panting from the effort.
Raddia beamed at him. “Of course you can, my sweet. Have at it.”
So down went the stupid stubborn Stone, its great heaviness making it sink even deeper into the soft exposed ground, so that after a few of moments it had vanished into the unfathomable darkness. And then, his gleeful furor renewed by seeing Gallan nod at him encouragingly while a rare smile broke on his pallid face, Yonfi begun to fill up the pit – an even easier thing, for all he had to do was push at the seemingly weightless piles of dirt his excavation had produced; and as soon as this was achieved, he was joined by Gallan and Raddia, and they all stomped on the earth till it was smooth and even.
But now came the hardest part, and the one for which Yonfi, caught up in all the heady enjoyment of his restored amazing powers, had least prepared himself for: sitting and waiting to see whether the buried Blinding Stone would draw out the Sun.
And as the three of them had turned their gaze up at the overcast sky like the villagers had the night before, each passing moment seemed longer, and harder to bear, and Yonfi, besides his rising impatience, had to fight the irksome voice of doubt as well. So when Raddia came up from behind and wrapped her hands around his chest, laid her head softly upon his shoulder and gave his ear a tiny, tender kiss, Yonfi not only let her, but relished in her unfailing ability to make him feel loved, precious and strong.
And then Raddia’s hope in him entered him sublty, as if by her breath which he felt become one with his own, and so without lowering his head Yonfi shut his eyes tight and willed the Sun to appear like Feerien’s first moon did at the break of dawn.
“The air...” he whispered. “Is it just me, or does it feel a bit warmer?”
So it does, my love, Raddia said softly, and then the balm of her words was all of a sudden combined with a faint but growing warmth which set the skin on his face atingle, and Yonfi’s eyes opened slowly and then wide to the first unmistakable ray of the Sun.
It was but a single ray at first, a taut string of light extending between the earth and the clouds as if the sky was an immense kite of rosy grey – but then this up till that moment seemingly unbreakable fabric began to slowly tear, and thin out like windswept smoke, so that the ray thickened into a beam and then into a column and finally, as the initial break in the firmament’s mantle grew into a gaping, still-widening hole, into a tall luminous pillar that shed a blissful warmth to the air and the ground it lit up.
And as Yonfi, Raddia and Gallan squinted at the Sun-made hole that with every passing moment destroyed the clouds as fire does darkness, too stunned to even think, the range and intensity of the warmth grew bigger and wider, until it finally reached the village, seeping into rooms that had long been dark and cold and making their dwellers stir from their sleep, warming up gardens and orchards and beasts in pens which had all but forgotten what it felt like to be awakened by sunlight, and giving the appearance of life even to things lifeless, to barren ponds and sparks of shiny mineral in the soil.
Thus the three who now deserved to be called People of the Blinding Stone were soon joined by a sleepy crowd of men, women and children, so astonished they’d almost dismiss this wonder as a dream if it weren’t for its blessed warmth and the brightness of the light, of the Onf-Rah who, as they barely recalled from long ago, one had to be a god to be able to look at without averting one’s gaze at once. The Sun had finally returned.
Then Yodren pushed his way through the motionless people, knealt before his brother and embraced him, whispering words of love and admiration; and after Raddia had explained how Gallan’s brilliant plan and Yonfi’s heroic execution of it had brought about this miracle, Yodren stood before the crowd and, aglow with pride and happiness, shared the glad tidings with them – whereupon the villagers, first the children and after a moment every single one of them, burst out in wild cries and sobs of triumph, dancing and prancing and hoisting up the Khum-Rah, their beloved, blessed saviours.
So loud and frenzied had the celebrations become, that the thud of his enormous body hitting the ground went unheard, but when Wixelor began to groan and then howl as he writhed on the dirt, the people stepped quickly aside while his distraught friends rushed to his aid. But despite their eagerness to help him, even Yonfi had trouble trying to keep him still, while Raddia stroked his wrinkled, sweaty brow and Yodren, stooped above Wixelor’s rapidly moving lips, struggled to make sense of his ramblings.
“Something about a monster... and legions of people arriving here...”
“Could it be the Sun?” Raddia said, remembering the darkness of Ienar Lin as he had described it to them. “Should we take him inside, away from the light?”
“But he was fine in Feerien,” Yonfi said. “Even at full second moon he was.”
However, after a while Wixelor’s wild shudders began to abate, and he lowered the hands he’d been keeping pressed against his temples, and finally he was able to sit up and accept the flask of water Iabi had hastened to bring, draining it in a single gulp.
“I’m sorry for alarming you, dear friends...” he wheezed. “It was just that this – this thing hasn’t happened to me in a very long time, and I’d forgotten how awful it is.”
And then he explained to them how, when he was still a young Dreamer learning to cope with the countless dreams of beings from all over and beyond Norien, he would sometimes be assaulted by swarms of images and feelings stemming from a single place in time and space – a battlefield, or the site of some great disaster, which the defensive faculties of his poor brain were insufficient to protect him against. And just now, when he walked up to the sunlight, he’d been overwhelmed by such a massive swarm.
“Do you think this means something horrible will happen here?” Yodren asked, seeing the question written on Iabi’s worried face. “A war, perhaps?”
“And what about the monster?” Yonfi asked. “Was it killing people?”
“That’s the strangest thing,” Wixelor said, getting to his f
eet and smiling at the crowd to show them there was no need for alarm. “It wasn’t an actual monster; it looked more like the statue of one, for though it towered over me, it stood perfectly still.”
“And the people – what were they doing?” Gallan asked. “Fighting?”
Wixelor shook his head. “It seemed as though they simply gazed at it.”
“Do you remember what the monster looked like?” Raddia said.
“It had the face of a man, but its body was one of some reclining beast.”
Iabi was speaking urgently to Yodren. “He asks if the statue was built here.”
“It must have, for the swarm attacked as I was looking at that place over there,” he said, indicating the approximate area where Yonfi had buried the Stone.
And now Yonfi broke his thoughtful silence. “What if the dream is a warning? Maybe it means that this statue has to be built to make sure nothing bad happens.”
They all stared at him – all but Raddia, whose face lit up by their amazement at the boy’s simple wisdom; for what better way to ensure that no one would ever unearth the Blinding Stone and cause it to lose its power than to cover it with a huge statue?
“Iabi says his people shall erect the statue if that’s what the prophet decrees.”
“Tell them I’m no prophet,” Wixelor said with a dismissive laugh.
“But it makes sense even aside from the dream – doesn’t it?”
“Well, then by all means let them build one; just not on my account alone.”
Iabi was already in deliberations with a group of elderly tribesmen, explaining Wixelor’s fit and what it might suggest, and they all turned and nodded at the Dreamer, unshaken in their belief that his vision was prophetic and should be carried out.
“Can I help them?” Yonfi said, lifting a boulder to display his strength.
“But what shall it look like, this reclining man-beast?” Raddia asked.
However, Wixelor couldn’t recall any more details; the onrush of dream images had been too overpowering; he only knew the beast part rested on four great legs.
“But there are a million four-legged beasts!” Yonfi complained.
At that very moment, a booming sound erupted, silencing everyone and making them turn towards its source – and as they did, the villagers broke into a panicked run, for where the Sun had first shone upon, on the flat soil that had begun to crack from the heat of the light, there now stood a big, strange animal, the likes of which most of them had never seen before. It was a little shorter than a bull, with a muscular body covered in sand-coloured fur, four powerful legs whose paws were armed with huge sharp claws, and a beautiful imposing head, framed by a nest of long, dense, golden hair.
Yet despite its formidable appearance and obvious strength, there was nothing in the beast’s demeanour to suggest that it was even contemplating an attack. It merely uttered another ground-shaking growl, and then lay down to bask in the sun.
And meanwhile, one of the villagers, a stooped old woman as dark and wizened as a raisin, was talking heatedly to Yodren, her toothless mouth working over the words while at the same time she cast fearful, astonished glances at the reclining beast.
“She says it’s an omen,” Yodren told them after a while, “because everyone in the tribe believed that the last of these animals had perished during the Ashen Curse, when there was almost nothing left for them to feed on. But before the Stone of Death struck, she says this was the strongest, most-feared beast in all of Dwanar. And she also insists that its apperance cannot be a coincidence, but is a sure omen affirming your vision.”
Wixelor was staring at it too. “It’s extraordinary...” he muttered.
“What? What?” Yonfi shouted, jumping up and down. “You know what it is?”
“Sure, I’ve seen its kind before, but what’s amazing is that – the monster? The statue... What I saw... it looked exactly like it, only on a much larger scale, of course.”
Yodren was still nodding at the old woman’s words; then he came back to them.
“It’s called a lion. Apparently, it’s considered sacred – the king of all beasts.”
And as if in deference to a king, the sun was showering the lion with gold.