TWOLAS - 06 - Peril's Gate

  But Sethvir's stilled face showed no flicker of hope in the kindly spill of the candleflame. He held to his wish, unrelenting.

  The Sorcerer had begged the service of a witness of Ath's Brotherhood to help seal a record in crystal. As Warden of Althain Tower appointed by the Paravians, Sethvir was insistent. The integrity of his post lay at risk. His last act before he engaged threatened faculties must catalog the cascade of events that might soon write the last lines of Athera's closing chapter. Should Asandir return from his labor to find ruin, he must know in detail what had passed. The great drakes had entrusted the Fellowship of Seven to ensure Paravian survival. An integrity outlasting three ages would not founder; not without leaving clear word of the struggle that could stand as the Sorcerers' epitaph.

  At length, a soft tap at the chamber door; the adept called in for his specialized skills had arrived to enact Sethvir's dispensation.

  The bursting glitter of silver-and-gold threadwork emerged like a cry from the gloom of the outer landing. The slim figure stepped in and closed the oak panel. Such was his care, the latch fell without sound. Then he pushed back the hood, with its crowning cartouche, the interleaved ciphers of safekeeping and trust framing the seal of the bonded witness. If the man was still young in years, with the beautiful thin hands of an artist, his talent had powerfully marked him. The solemn brown eyes in his beardless face reflected an ancient's deep wisdom, paired with an astuteness that had gazed into world upon world past the veil.

  He nodded to the lady on watch at the bedside. His poise could have been a dancer's, a warrior's, or the mold for a sculptor's masterpiece as he knelt at the Sorcerer's shoulder.

  I am here by request to stand witness,' he greeted Althain's Warden, then laid his hand overtop of the lady adept's, still clasped to Sethvir's slack fingers. 'Though I wish that the sorrow of this hour had not come, and that I was not the one called to assay the burden, know you are beloved. As ever, our Brotherhood bides in your shadow. Mine, the honor, to serve your request with integrity.'

  The Sorcerer's fingers fractionally tightened within the adepts' linking grasp. A tormented interval elapsed before Sethvir opened his eyes. His speech came with effort. 'In the aumbry under the arrow slit you'll find five wrapped crystal spheres.' His voice sounded stiff as the rust on old hinges as he labored to impart his instructions. 'I ask, leave the amethyst and the citrine. The clear quartz preferred to work with Ciladis, and should stay undisturbed. Of the two smoky quartz, bring the pale one.' His breath exhausted, the Warden explained by sent thought that for joyless tasks that particular sphere was most likely to grant its expansive permission.

  'I understand.' As the witness gathered his robe to arise, the lady adept touched his arm in restraint. 'Stay with Sethvir.' She disengaged from the Sorceror's slack clasp and offered her vacated footstool. 'I'll fetch the crystal the Warden suggested.'

  Resettled at the Sorcerer's side, the witness bent his head, eyes closed as he readied his faculties. A mind as complex and broad-ranging as Sethvir's would require far more than a long reach. His earth-sense could impose complication and hardship. The scope of the electromagnetic current he channeled, minute to unthinking minute, was vast enough to burn the unshielded mind to a cinder.

  Ill equipped to engage such a burden without help, the adept calmed his breathing, then opened the gateways in mind and heart to tap the prime source itself. Power flowed in, gentle and sure, of a force to spin mountains from one grain of sand, or clasp a butterfly without one particle of dust disturbed from fragile wing tips. The chord that first made, then sustained all creation charged the adept's presence with a shimmering corona that washed through the thin glow from the candle. Shining, in his robes of pure white, the thread pattern on his hood and cuffs scintillant as sparks splashed off heated steel by a forge hammer, the adept set barriers of protection to encapsulate his inner self. The rest of his being became as blank slate, empty and clear of all imprint.

  'Sethvir, I am here,' he pronounced in soft assurance. 'When you're ready, I'm prepared.'

  The cool hand he cradled between his warm palms returned no response. But deep in his mind, a sure, controlled touch claimed the channel the adept offered up to the Sorcerer. That tacit, first contact was not overwhelming, a ripple of light imagery drawn from the surface current of Sethvir's entrained gift of earth-sense ... in the ruins of Penstair, a snowy owl furled silent wings over a killed hare. Southward, in Orvandir, three unsettled crows pecked at glaze ice by a streamside that by now should be swelling with thaw.

  The witness sighed through parted lips, amazed by the masterful, flowing thread of the Sorcerer's shared awareness. He understood resonance. Like a perfect, sustained note pared out of a chord that described every facet, of reality, from harmony to cacophony, he sensed the fierce will that embraced the mammoth torrent of Athera's moment-to-moment existence, and, even pressed to extremity, stepped its vast torrent down to a delicate trickle.

  The ongoing effort such a feat must demand stunned even the adept's illumined cognizance. While over the Storlains, a new blizzard raged; a field mouse in a burrow in Havistock husked a dry seed, a small wrongness: by this time of year, had the frosts been less deep, the shell should have softened and cracked as the pale shoot inside strained to sprout. . .

  No witness in the dwindled ranks of Athera's hostels could keep pace with a presence refined to such infinite precision as this. First raised to awe, and then abjectly humbled, the adept let the tears seep shamelessly through his closed lids. 'You are needed beyond measure,' he dispatched through the link. 'Truly, is tonight's course the choice of absolute necessity?'

  Sethvir's answer emerged as a wound skein of imagery, clear-cut as sorrow itself. The sequence opened with sight of the Paravian continent, and its massive, crossed fault lines, whose major array intersected beneath the thermal pools of Silvermarsh. If the Fellowship's effort to isolate Rockfell Peak failed to channel the deranged branch of the lane flux into safe realignment through the Skyshiels, the fragile balance of Athera's crust would be set under stress. Disturbance in one fault was certain to rattle the more active rift through the Thaldeins, disrupting a cycle of quiescence that had lasted the span of an epoch.

  'The continent would survive the shaking,' Sethvir sent. A string of images fleeted past, of town buildings crumbled, and sorrowful loss of life. Yet grief and death did not shape the core of the Warden's immediate concern. 'Just one massive quake would shift links of anchoring spellcraft set in place since Paravian times.'

  The visions that unreeled after that caused the witness an unpleasant shudder: of wardings released, that kept vile creatures and malevolent sprites under gate and guard, and which human language had no name for. The Fellowship Sorcerers maintained deep protections in steadfast dedication until such time as the Paravian races should reclaim their abandoned place on the continent. Yet the aberrant creatures given form by the impetuous dreams of old drakes paled unto insignificance as Sethvir delivered the shattering gist, of spelled anchors tied into the earth's molten iron core, that would spin out of alignment with an unnatural shift of Athera's crust. A sharp change in the flow of the planet's magnetics would destroy fine-tuned calibrations and unravel three more grimwards wholesale.

  'Should those grounding seals be disrupted, I have no more resource,' Sethvir confessed in bald helplessness. The Paravians were gone, who had sung those mighty constructs into existence. Lacking the strength of his Fellowship colleagues, one Sorcerer would not be enough to instill any patch of remedial spellcraft: the grimwards would break, disgorging rank chaos, and cascading ruin would unleash a cataclysm beyond all imagining.

  'I cannot stand idle and watch as all life on this world is destroyed.' The Warden of Althain served up his conclusion in stark rage, that refused the bittermost ash of defeat. 'While I recognize truth, I hold power to act. Ath Creator allows us our lives, to spend or redeem by willful expression. In passing the Wheel, I might, perhaps, constrain those lost dragon haunts for just l
ong enough to bear them across the veil with me.'

  The adept paled, appalled. 'You would fail in that sacrifice. Even risk unraveling the pattern of your spirit from the infinite span of existence!'

  'I would merely be first to suffer that fate,' Sethvir corrected in gentle sadness. 'If the Fellowship falters, you and your white brotherhood, and everything extant would follow. By the end, unless Asandir returned in time to attempt the recall of a dragon, random chaos would devour the whole world, and then the bright, teeming consciousness of all that claims space and order within it.'

  Never mind that the mists of Desh-thiere would escape, and effect damning congress with the questing free wraiths that Kharadmon's mazes had temporarily forestalled. Their unchecked arrival must inevitably open the floodgates, drawing the invasive hordes out of Marak. Those perils would wreak their assault over time. Even a late intervention might curb their worst damage and permit a slow road to recovery; whereas the effect of just one unleashed grimward could unbind the stability of the planet. Such wholesale ruin would find no surcease. Without living dragons to placate the ghosts of their dead, and lacking Ath's gift of the Paravian guardians, one maddened haunt's dream held the power to unbind the spun thread of creation.

  'Their ghosts can spin form and create without love,' the adept saw, aghast.

  Sethvir stirred, the weak trace of a nod his frightening affirmation. 'You do understand.' Words taxed him sorely. Shadowed by looming, explosive disaster, Althain's Warden dispatched his beleaguered conclusion by thought. 'My spirit is bound. Any one breaking crisis might doom the Paravians. The charge the great drakes laid on our Fellowship leaves no recourse. If the warding of Rockfell fails over equinox, I will have no choice but to try for an intervention.'

  A doomed attempt, the adept perceived beyond question, lent knowing insight by a linkage that unmasked the Sorcerer's secret doubts. The glistening tracks of the tears on his cheeks became a gesture of travesty. No word could console such service as this. The young witness in his stainless white robes, wrapped and crowned in the empowered glory of his golden aura, set his face in spread hands and wept anyway.

  For tortured moments, Sethvir gave back nothing more than his tacit reassurance, that the world loom his Fellowship endeavored to guard was a force that did not subscribe to the human onus of worry ... In the mountains of Vastmark, a kestrel pair mated; a frog in the Salt Fens stirred from hibernation; on the Ippash plain, a pair of cranes danced, while the locust grubs dreamed of their hatching in spring, burrowed beneath teeming grasses . . .

  Too soon, the lady adept returned, her careful hands clasping a gleaming quartz sphere, crisscrossed with fissures like mirrors. Its core seemed to burn, a living, bright play of captive veils and reflected rainbows.

  'Warden?' The lady knelt in tender respect. When the Sorcerer's shut lashes flickered in recognition of her whispered warning, she brought the fiery weight of the crystal to rest on the coverlet above Sethvir's heart.

  The fine wrinkles surrounding his eyes tightened in stressed response to even that expected influx of sensation. His other hand lifted, frail as a storm-tossed leaf. He fumbled once, then settled the limb back to rest with his crabbed, scholar's fingers spanned over the curve of the sphere. 'Forgive me. I'll also need help with the wakening.'

  'Let me.' The witness lifted the slackened limb in his clasp, leaned across, and guided their combined grasp to steady the crystal. Through the Sorcerer's contact, the young man received the stone's Name, followed by the phrase of toned sound that would key its rise into tuned resonance. Joined in grim purpose, he and the Fellowship Sorcerer stroked the stone's gleaming surface. They addressed its smoky heart, teased and warmed it with touch to a state of roused energy that soon quickened, singing, into a presence of heightened sensitivity.

  'I'an, i'anient,' Sethvir whispered greeting, the Paravian words meaning, 'thou, thyself'.

  Recognition flowed back, then an intimate testing as the consciousness imbued within crystalline form surveyed both witness and Sorcerer. Sethvir responded by laying flat his formidable array of defenses. With childlike clarity, he yielded himself to inspection, his courage a breathtaking display of absolute trust.

  The sphere responded, unveiling its core self, in turn. Quickened, its watered tea coloring brightened, until the inclusions flared and sparkled, alive with a brilliance too vibrant to arise from the gold-madder glare of the candleflame. The adept's refined vision sensed the stone's opening, as the rock crystal's aliveness responded. Its calming presence emanated a gift of balancing energies, precisely attuned to steady and lift the Warden's exhausted spirits.

  The exchange seemed the handshake of two ancient friends, keeper and jewel conjoined in free partnership. This crystal had resided at Althain Tower since Paravian times. Throughout Sethvir's guardianship, its nature had been tendered in flawless respect. Gratitude resounded through the shared moment of greeting. Even to an adept's schooled perception, the upwelling exuberance of the sphere's energies rang meticulously clear and unburdened.

  The crystal embraced its service, joyful despite the troubles that prompted its calling. Its sweet chime of permission rang down from the exalted, high frequencies, where the seeded, first concept of form meshed to the template of thought and flowered into existence. Whatever Sethvir wished the quartz matrix to hold, it would imprint within its consciousness.

  The adept appointed as Sethvir's witness was well trained to detect that shimmering moment of alignment. He removed his grasp, leaving only the Sorcerer's hands clasped to the wakened sphere. Then he settled at the end of the pallet, his touch tender as he gathered the silken flood of white hair and cradled the Sorcerer's head. 'As you wish, I am ready to proceed.' The adept closed his eyes, settled into a trance state, now poised to engage the trained gifts of his office.

  The wisp of a thought framed Sethvir's reply: 'I must fully immerse in the stream of my earth-gift. You'll sense the pulse, though the signal is faint.' Already engaged holding three distressed grimwards, Althain's Warden lacked the strength to focus his awareness with the requisite clarity. 'You must stand as bridge. I ask that you receive the events I select. Act as a lens. Sharpen them to the intensity needed to inscribe them into the crystal.'

  The adept caught his breath, his head bent to contain his stunned flood of emotion. The sorrow became punishing, that a Sorcerer of Sethvir's stature should ever require such assistance as this, a service most often performed for the dying, too foredone to speak their last wishes.

  'Grimwards,' came the flicker of Sethvir's fierce irony, the concept tagged by sharp concern for Asandir's health and safety. 'Too taxing a burden for any flesh-and-blood consciousness to grapple without paying a murderous penalty. Small resource or grace is left over.'

  The adept shared the echo: of a roiling force, inexhaustibly powerful, clothed over in alien patterns that sank a ranging, dull ache through his bones. That such energies could exist in the flower of Ath's creation, and not burn through restraint and scorch out teeming life, posed a dichotomy past all understanding. The wisdom of Ath's Brotherhood lacked the terrible scope of a Fellowship Sorcerer, whose first initiation to the mysteries had been ordained by the fire-born minds of the dragons.

  'Dakar will not fail you at Rockfell,' the adept stated, as desperate himself for reassurance. 'Let your wish be done, but as a precaution this world will never require.'

  Sethvir returned no empty platitudes. Dignified by an austere, tactful courage, he aligned to the deep rhythm of the earth's pulse. One by one, he selected the key images to be preserved as an inviolate record of events.

  The adept standing vigil could do no less than attend his office as witness. Steadied at last by the discipline of Ath's peace, he received the sequential stream of visions from Sethvir, and recorded them with faithful clarity. He became the clear conduit for the Sorcerer's intent, to lay down his last testament into crystal.

  The transcript contained an unnerving complexity, much of it patterned in coded geom
etry, curves, lines, and angles framing a language derived from proportional mathematics. What streamed past, too fast for the adept to interpret, another Fellowship Sorcerer could grasp at a glance. At times, Sethvir's sending broke into pictures: fleeted images of snowbound forests, or fallow fields gray-rimed in hoarfrost. The iced tumble of streamlets locked fast to cracked rocks interspersed with impressions of small, starving birds seeking forage. At intervals, the ghost imprint of the future flowed through as an overlay set on the present: the thaw that would come, disastrously late. The adept was shown rivers swelled to thundering flood as pounding rains swept the mountains and lowlands. Deluged by an intricate catalog of detail, he caught only the urgent gist: that the unnatural, prolonged winter was going to breed famine across the four northern kingdoms. Warning must reach King Eldir in Havish. The harvests in Lithmere alone would not fail, and the crown must be charged to make disposition in advance of the inevitable shortfall.

  More geometries: red flares in cold ward rings; in Tysan, Khadrim flew and slaughtered at will across Camris and Westwood. A farmstead burned; a wolf den was savaged. Two necromancers met in warded conspiracy in a cottar's shed outside Erdane. Four dragon skulls smoldered in sealed iron coffers in a brick-walled tower in Avenor. There, also, Cerebeld schooled his coterie of young acolytes to old, unclean practices, forgotten lore garnered from a musty cache of grimoires confiscated from a condemned talent. In Lysaer's absence, the High Priest wielded the reins of Tysan's state policy with hot ambition and iron hands. Cerebeld still found his dearest wish frustrated: patrols in Avenor's crown livery completed their sweep of the roads and the countryside, and returned to the city unsuccessful; while a princess disguised in fustian rags stayed hidden, transferred southward into safe hands.

  Scenes shifted, to a dark cave where things chittered and cried, their voices like tormented fox kits. Something bloody and torn struggled in a snowbank, snagged in the coils of its own spilled entrails. South and west, a drought threatened; farther east, new stands of fencing disrupted the game trails in Radmoore Downs. Sethvir left word for a raven by Name, asking a boon, and in prescient consequence, Traithe would come to leave Methisle fortress after spring spawning, to set seals of rot on the oak posts and boards. Another generation of ambitious farmsteaders who thought to found a new village east of Firstmark would return, beset by ruin, bearing new tales of Paravian ghosts, and lamenting the soil was accursed.