The rift hurled disarray through Arithon's aura. Wracked, he could not shed the shackling weight as the binding laid foul hold upon him.
Nor could his desperate tears be contained, as once again, he found himself reft from the use of his birth-gifted talent. To extend his awareness beyond the veil, he must first cross through the ring of a necromancer's sigils of binding. There, his striving blundered like a winged bird wrapped in felt. His bard's mastery of sound became warped into dissonance. His innate awareness of light did not sing. A prison conjured of cruelty and domination held him as captive inside of his flesh.
Now the streaked hands bore down on his right arm. The bone-blade bit again. Its virulent sting touched his nerves to dipped acid. Arithon writhed. Again, the flame of his beingness flickered, and again came the punch as the force of wrong conjury skewered his heart. But for his two hands, his torso went dead. A torrent of harsh words, and the wet knife was dipped. The swirl of stirred fluid unleashed its forced seal, and fell power lashed into his solar plexus.
The blow thrashed the breath from stunned lungs. Arithon's gasp was a moan of stark agony. 'Mercy,' he pleaded through hammering pain.
But the guttural voices over his head called only despair from the darkness. The whirlpool of grim force tugged him down, and down, while the fingers that tapped and prodded and stroked moved on and clamped his right ankle.
The next knife-cut came, and ripped frost through his groin, and hurled him further into imprisonment.
Light-headed, Arithon drifted. The pain that intruded in scintillant flashes leached his being into gapped fragments. Relentless, its current scoured through hollowed bone, and dissolved the firm ties to identity. Four-square, the seals with their haltering sigils bore into his suffering flesh. The inexorable drag of the filled bowl soaked him in, until he felt snuffed in silk batting. The suffocating numbness spread inward, leaving his hands and his feet as islands of truncated feeling. Unmoored, he could not track the self-aware life that drove his reflex for breathing. As an unravelled yarn from a knit, his spirit became drawn out of the gravid shell of his trunk.
Grace died, by dread increments. Awareness of light left his eyes. His hearing frayed into silence. The clay bowl on his stomach bore down like poured stone, absorbing his flickering consciousness.
Vertigo spun him as the vessel was raised. Cowled figures leaned over him, chanting. The print of spread hands that he could not feel froze the streaming sweat on his abdomen. Oblivion beckoned. The shrill warning of instinct whirled away.
Then the bone-knife nicked into Arithon's navel.
Pain entered him, new-born. Its drilling force reawakened nerve, bone, and sinew, a molten lava that flensed him, spirit from tormented flesh.
This was not the kindly crossing known to the bard. No natural death, where the life-conscious essence gathered itself and in gentle parting, cast away mortal ties and slipped free. Instead, Arithon experienced a forced separation, a tearing of continuity that despoiled right order and savaged all rhythmic relinquishment. His husked body shuddered. Wrenched by the throes of that merciless back-lash, the knotted ropes strained, while the incised bowl held above his splayed form wound in the peeled stream of his consciousness and plunged him, drowning in blood-murky broth.
Arithon fought the induction, to no avail. As though his life-cord was reeled onto a spool, the dominant imprint infused in the vessel dragged him headlong into bondage.
He could not burst free. The refined shift in resonance that would buy his clear passage across Fate's Wheel could not rise into completion. His essence stayed tethered. The nailing spells fixed by the wax seals locked him into etheric connection. The auric remnant anchored in his extremities pinned him yet to his brutalized flesh. Constrained as a bead upon a plucked thread, Arithon's imprint became seized into a liquid-filled bowl for a diabolical sacrifice.
A cult parasite of the Kralovir would drink him down.
No action might save him. The black grimoires told over the hideous fate of human prey taken by necromancy. Their lost spirits became a fused part of the creature who partook of the vile sacrament. Hung in crossing between death and life, the immutable aspect of Arithon's being would remain enslaved. Like the children before him, his bound shade would be tapped, tormented, and wrung as emotional fuel for a cult host's unnatural immortality.
A last invocation would frame the ritual. Arithon felt cased in harrowing cold. The spells in the bowl were as knives, fencing his signature presence. His still-quickened hands and feet would not let him tear loose, though the suspension that shackled him to his dying flesh lashed his psyche to untold distress.
Then came the horrible, sloshing tilt, as the clay bowl was given over to the warped creature who would absorb him. Stopped lungs could not scream. A stilled tongue raised no utterance. The cult master's hissed recitation reached full closure, unchallenged. Arithon felt his consciousness pour into dark, a bright current spilled out of a jar.
Agony milled him. He became a thousand hurled shards of remembrance, vivid as light through stained glass. Wrenched from trued flight by wrists and sealed ankles, he felt stretched. A wire filament cranked to the verge of release, he was unable to let go, or snap, but could only be drawn and pulled under.
The spirit granted existence within Ath's creation was of itself too immutably real to rend from the span of the infinite.
Far off, so far, the Warden of Althain heard the shrill cry of vibration struck off by Arithon's ordeal in Etarra. He listened, knowing the moment was nigh. Anxious, he awaited the word of appeal to enable his Fellowship to react. . . in Jaelot, drawn tense, Luhaine watched a smiling priest tuck into the banquet on Lysaer's table . . . while in Darkling, under the dark of the moon, Kharadmon fretted out the delay, tracking another priest who shuddered on his knees, eyes closed for the jolt that presaged an addictive ecstasy . . .
Falling . . . falling . . . falling . . . the crux of one instant extended beyond bearing as seizing forces spun their vortex about him. Arithon dwindled into the clutching embrace of the host who inducted him. Strung out of body, stripped of physical senses, only mage-sight recorded his transit as the filament of his essence streamed through the mazing sigils stamped into the bowl. He could not break their grasp. The higher octaves of his awareness had become torn beyond reach. Below him, the dark chains wrought of symbols and blood, that tethered him to his quivering husk: the naked form strapped to cold stone, now beyond help to release. He existed in terror, suspended, while the weave in spilled liquid winnowed him away, making him as a stranger unto himself.
Arithon fought to recall his beloved. Her features came to him faded, cheeks streaked with reproachful tears. 'Above any-one living, I trust you. . .'
Not real: her voice was no more than an echo from memory. His heart's flame stayed shackled. Even Elaira could not reach him, here. No tie to the living might rip him clear: not his grant of permission to Dakar, nor the blood bonding, enacted by oath, made to a Fellowship Sorcerer. All aspects were lashed into subjugation. The imperative seal of Davien's longevity imposed by the Five Centuries Fountain did little more than prolong the dragging torment of transition.
Regret raised still more cries in scalding protest. Most wrenching of these, the death-wish of Earl Jieret's deceased war captain: 'Say to Prince Arithon, when the Fellowship Sorcerers crown a s'Ffalenn descendant as Rathain's high king at Ithamon, on that hour, he will not have failed me . . .'
Caolle's accusation was hard-followed by Jieret's: 'Make me one promise, that after my death you honour my daughter with the same pact you gave me as a child in Strakewood. . .
Swallowed away with the ingested potion, Arithon still sensed the tug of that oathsworn commitment. His grant of protection to Jeynsa s'Valerient remained intact. Initiate master, he had set his intent in clean form. His binding cord to her must dissolve on the moment his mangled flesh perished. The incised wax ciphers holding him to the body would be broken once the collection of life-force was finished. The necr
omancer would go on to burn the left husk, or else call forfeit the robbed power he sought to exploit.
Though Jieret's young daughter would escape without taint, no kindly reprieve might erase the ripping trauma of dissolution. First link in a seeded chain of disasters, the fate of the Teir's'Ffalenn at Etarra brushed against her clanbred gift for true vision . . .
Asleep in the prow of a waterman's craft in swift passage across Daenfal Lake, Jeynsa shocked awake, screaming. The prophetic dream that had broken her rest continued to rake her with gooseflesh. As the boatman's son tried to ease her discomfort, she swiped back her ruffled hair, panting to the raced pound of her pulse.
'No, you can't help me.' Arms tucked to her breast, stunned to horrified fury, she shot a glance towards the northern horizon.
No shadow pursued her.
Only white needles of reflected starlight scribed the boat's foaming wake. Terror rode her, regardless. The scene exposed by her clanbred talent had been all too graphically damning: of her realm's crown prince, ringed by the rippling presence of ghosts. Girls, women, and boys, each had been entrapped by the black craft of necromancy. The kindly boatman importuned her to sleep.
Jeynsa refused. She feared to close her eyes. The crushing dread rode her, that the nightmare just glimpsed in the crypt at Etarra would return to harrow her further. 'Just row! Save us from evil, I must reach the shores of West Halla at speed.'
Her Sighted dream had laid bare the hideous concern, half-suspected since the clandestine conversation overheard in the camp lodge tent. Past all question, Prince Arithon of Rathain had become seduced by a practising cultist. Caithdein's successor, Jeynsa's office was plain: charter law forbade unclean works. The gravity of her errand now carried extreme stakes and a desperate urgency . . .
Lost, Arithon tumbled. Jerked under, then drowned, he thrashed, entangled within his captor's aura. He tasted despair, revolted by the corrupted taint of a life preserved from the grave. The future promised no hope, only desolate suffering to breed madness. Noosed tight, he howled alongside the innocents chained into bondage before him. Immersed in their agony, he could scarcely feel the ephemeral string of connection that linked him to his dying flesh. The actualized thread of selfhood that streamed from the infinite whole and rooted the seat of his being had been drawn too far beyond reach. The shackling hoop invoked by the bowl dismembered every harmonic alignment with the prime life chord. Ensnared by that garrote, he could not cross the gate through the veil, or access the higher mysteries.
Grace was absent. Dignity died. Light dimmed, and joy became a dumb figment. All that he was now existed for naught but to feed a blighting corruption.
Vile wretchedness claimed him: Arithon saw through the black cultist's eyes. He spoke with the creature's rough voice. In words that engendered no music, he recited more lines of ritual. He was the pale hand gripping the sacrificial knife to enact the final stroke over the heart. He slavered along with the diseased awareness that would shortly destroy the wax ciphers dribbled over the husk's bleeding limbs on the altar . . .
At Althain Tower, Sethvir masked his face, while a weeping adept braced his shoidder. Her steady question could not mask her dread, that no earthly recourse might salvage the balance of Athera's signature resonance. 'You fear that your crown prince has crossed into irrevocable jeopardy?'
In the mountains of Darkling, observing the enraptured priest, Kharadmon clamped a fierce grip on himself to contain his scalding distress. 'Teir's'Ffalenn! The time to remember your training is now!'
While at Jaelot, a pin-point vortex of cold nestled inside a candle sconce, even Luhaine's staid temperament cracked. 'Arithon's left his resistance too late! Show us all mercy! The drakes' charge is broken, and we're left four-square in the breach of a grievous disaster!'
Beyond thought, the shared dread, that the bright weave of the world stood at risk if the heart seed of the last s'Ffalenn prince became severed past reach of a Fellowship intervention . . .
The bone-blade touched the breast of the bard, then scribed the last of the dread ciphers. No whisper rose from stilled lips in protest. The incision seeped, nearly bloodless. By now, the victim's heart-beat had stopped. His nerves ceased to register feeling. Residual sensation had drained out of fingers and toes, though the wax seals still conserved the trapped trace of etheric connection.
Commingled as captive within the grey cultist's aura, Arithon sensed the corpse chill of his abandoned flesh as the creature whose foul practice had stripped him of will laid a splayed palm over the wound on his sternum. Forced symbiote, he shared the chant to unhook the heart spark of his being: the foundational core that guarded his earthly awareness.
Darkness beyond cognizance crushed his self-contained thought, as chant and cipher made contact. The necromancer's power closed in as a prisoning fist. Pinned at the crux, then dragged past the bleak threshold, Arithon melted into the array of knotted sigils that joined every Kralovir necromancer into energetic communion. His suborned shade would suckle the cult in an initiate order of hierarchy: from established master, to consecrate initiate, down to the least servant held under compulsion, and even unto the planted sigils that marked others, hooking them to an unconscious state of potential. The surge as his induction completed was going to recharge the whole web.
Arithon felt the pull of that sucking, dark hunger. Cultists whose practice spanned over millennia yearned towards that moment of sublime euphoria. They hungered to indulge in their forbidden fruit, as piercingly sweet as addiction.
The Kralovir master poised over his conquest with the heart's energy fluttering beneath his spread hand. 'Ready yourselves.' Anticipation thrilled through him. 'Tonight's feast is a rare talent. All my years, I've tasted none like him!'
While Luhaine despaired, and Kharadmon raged, the Warden of Althain braced to enact an outcome of tragic necessity. Yet Arithon's failure foreclosed every planned option. To forestall the corruption of Etarra's armed company, Sethvir would have no choice but to free all the bound shades, and thereby invoke a crown lineage's ending . . .
The Kralovir master capped his incantation. His claim opened up the linked channel that married him to his brethren, then breached the innermost seal defining his victim's identity. The pent reservoir of the essence streamed forth, the linkage of interlocked sigils blazing with the burgeoning influx of power. Across the continent, in their secretive enclaves, or kneeling alone before ceremonial candles by starlight, his colleagues gasped, caught up, then enveloped in collective surrender as the fresh charge of the induction wrung them dizzy. The flux lit their shared weave as a lyrical bolt, wrought of tuned sound and bright lightning. The sensation burned, a whirling explosion that crested towards climax.
And there, at the crux, struck in fire and light, one word unfurled from a calyx of wardings and invoked the appeal for release:
GRACE!
At Althain Tower, Sethvir cried out. The adept at his side caught his shoulder, then gasped, brought to her knees in winded astonishment. 'When did your s'Ffalenn prince touch Paravian presence? Ath's blessing on earth, how did we not notice?'
In Darkling, Kharadmon froze between seconds in time, while Luhaine, in Jaelot, all but ignited the palace on the levin-bolt force of struck shock . . .
For Arithon had not wrought the predicted defence, or drawn on his rights as a crown prince. Instead of the expected, straightforward plea for a Fellowship intercession, this Teir's'Ffalenn had leaned in trust on the victory snatched from his trial within Kewar's maze.
There, on the hour he claimed absolution from the weight of his mortal failings, he had owned his true self in the presence of a living centaur guardian. His cry pealed out now, affirming that heritage, rightfully his by Ath's law.
Aware presence responded. While his defeated will of itself could not cross, or burst through the closed ring of sigils, he was more than a spirit-tied mote of identity. Sourced in the infinite, his true Name spanned the arc of creation. The embedded knowing could not be revoke
d: or the memory, once lifted to knowledge through the gift of Earl Jieret's sacrifice. He was the land, and the land was his very self. The prime chord acknowledged no physical boundary: the same forces that knit Athera herself underwrote his unencumbered autonomy.
Rock and air, flame and water confirmed the free gift of an unconditional deliverance.
The clay bowl exploded. Spattered dregs splashed the symbols on defiled flesh, breaking gaps in their wrought continuity. The very air burned with sound and light, scalding with a purity to remake the sea-tides and the dense span of the firmament.
The master cultist shrieked and dropped his bone-knife. Stunned witless, he staggered and fell as the bursting influx reamed through him. Its clean force unravelled all chains of dark sigils. Harmonic resonance snapped the warped ties that forged his parasitic longevity. Unstoppable, the wave surged throughout the cult's web, reaping each far-off member of the Kralovir through the whirlwind of immolation.
Chained spirits winnowed free. Stone and mountain resounded. Water shimmered and rebounded to joy. Stars blazed in exaltation, while the night's breezes laughed in rebirth. Across the five kingdoms, sleepers smiled in dreams. Unicorns flung up their horned heads and tossed their floss manes in astonishment. Within Ath's hostels, stone rang like bronze chimes, as every white-robed adept stood their ground as sounding-board for the light.
No cranny or crypt might shelter the Kralovir from the reach of the prime vibration called down. No incursion survived. Across the continent of Paravia, the grey cult's coerced servants broke, weeping, cut free of unwilling bondage. The initiate masters' corrupted flesh crumpled, razed clear of surrogate domination.
While the strapped prince on the stone slab shuddered and breathed, the turning world chimed to the sound of his Name and drew him back into himself.