“You claim he has wielded the primordial flux?” The seductive prospect raised covetous awe, an empowerment with an unparalleled edge to contest the Seven’s omnipotence.
Eyes narrowed, Selidie embraced the risk of that priceless prize. “He stays living until I’ve extracted the methods by which he commanded the interface.”
The sister fitting the tripod leaned forward. “He’s coming around. Is letting him hear our intentions entirely wise?”
“No matter,” snapped Selidie. “Forcing the mind scars and cripples the spirit. If he doesn’t succumb to violent madness, he’ll survive as a biddable idiot. In which case, Vivet can harvest the s’Ffalenn lineage without his temperamental objection.”
Shock caught Arithon’s breath. Speech failed him, as his muddled reason grasped just how brutally he had been played. Hindsight indeed raised bitter questions regarding his oath to sponsor a child at Ettinmere, the unmalleable ethic of royal compassion engaged through cold machination. Vivet’s alleged assailant had died, consumed by a struggle to speak. Her knife-thrust in plaintive self-defence passed unquestioned, with no living witness to testify. The grotesque revelation overturned decency, that her violation had been brutally staged, with the rapist her enthralled victim.
As damning, the drugged aphrodisiac concocted during the aftermath. Gullible male sympathy almost had compromised Rathain’s crown lineage. Arithon shuddered, galled incandescent. A criminal murder, appended to the birth of a child predisposed to be used as a game-piece ignited his accusation. “Here’s another innocent’s destiny maligned, if not cashiered for death under reckless endangerment! You’ve a heart better suited to a stone ornament, and not a drop of warm blood in your veins.”
“You refer to Fionn Areth and Valien? What are they but dust motes in the storm?” The Prime shed culpability with venomless logic. “Two backwater yokels of average endowment, weighed against stakes where the measure of any one life does not signify.”
“For what greater good?” Seared wild by outrage, Arithon pressed, “What kind of principle stands on the high-handed sacrifice of autonomy? I shudder to picture the society moulded by your sisterhood’s creed. After all, you Koriathain have no sense of humour, no quaint vulnerability, and ah, yes, let’s not omit unassailable frigidity. How many young girls have been forged into passionless tools, suborned of their intellect and denied any standing to question?”
“You cannot possibly envision the scope of our order’s commitment.” Selidie’s fixated regard never flickered. “Broad-scale issues lie in the balance that reduce this world to a cipher.”
Wrists welled scarlet, Arithon strained against the glass fetters. “Pardon the sand grain crushed under your heel for protesting the insignificance!”
Selidie’s cameo smile showed amusement. “You can’t gall me into a stickling debate over points of philosophy. The option is mine to break you at will and silence your gad-fly insolence.”
The threat was not empty. A lifetime’s adept mastery slipped Arithon’s grasp like water poured out of a jar. He fought restraint anyway, extended trained reflexes until agonized back-lash punished him senseless.
His vision went patchy, crossed by shadowed movement as another silent assistant placed a massive amethyst sphere in the tripod over his head. Arctic cold sliced through him, skin and bone. Terror melted his viscera. The jewel’s rank presence weighted his chest as though he were drowning. His skull rang like a tapped bell. Out of time, lost to resource, he sank into a purple mist that flayed flesh and spirit like the cut of a thousand scalpels.
He battled the onslaught, beyond tears to weep, his pounding heartbeat pummelled towards the nadir of primal oblivion. The cascade of disasters unleashed if he failed threatened ruin beyond contemplation. Yet his desperation wrestled no reprieve from the onslaught.
Pain pulverized all resistance and fed the Waystone’s vortex of power. Lashed by the animal need to cry out, Arithon arched against the restraints, tendons rigid beneath bloodied skin. Primal struggle gained nothing. Selidie up-stepped the force set against him, until the relentless torrent demolished his deepest defences. The last bastion guarding his mind breached and crumpled, stranding him beyond redress.
Caged in isolation, Arithon did not feel the distant thunder of Sethvir’s step, pacing the library at Althain Tower. He knew nothing of the empathic despair that brought Elaira to her knees in the Mathorn heights.
Love endured with tied hands as the insufferable happened. A sanctioned crown prince fell to deadly enemies, cut adrift and flayed under the focal vortex of the Prime’s most powerful crystal. Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn reeled, alone and stripped naked, while the brutal probe levelled to ransack his being rendered his adept mastery as vulnerable as air-bubbles shaken to the surface of a tapped glass.
While the avalanche of upset probabilities rocked the world on its axis, rain like spun glass swept in sheets across the cragged downs of Atainia. Run-off glossed the grim stone of Althain Tower and varnished the slate shingles lapped over the eaves. Droplets clung, trembling, to the tread of the Sorcerer who circled the library floor, then unravelled under the side-swiping gusts that shivered the leaded casements.
Althain’s Warden did not bear his vigil alone. The glare that iced the barren table-top also stamped Asandir’s seated form in granite and ebony. Eyes of sheared steel watched Sethvir pace. Hair still clubbed to ease yesterday’s heat wore a tarnish of dust from the road, and anxiety chafed his lean flesh to bleak bone. As ruthlessly scored were the leathers abused from rushed travel on foot to bear witness. Speech failed in defeat, with the brutal course of two Ages of hope fast sliding towards ruin.
Naught could be done. Braced nerves must withstand the agonized wait, while Sethvir’s earth-sense sifted the stream of event from moment to moment. Always, he stifled bad news behind silence, dread buried while the cresting wave of disaster built into a nexus of certainty. Asandir curbed his impatience until his tense colleague saw fit to declare himself.
The iron restraint that stemmed premature speech was no frivolous affectation. Even a single word carried weight amid the unfolding, charged course of destiny: all the more where ancient stone rang like a tuning-fork to the tidal surge of the Third Lane. Althain Tower’s foundation straddled a grand convergence of ley lines. Here, mage-tuned senses already quivered and leaped to the pulse of concurrent activity. The whisper of Sethvir’s restless tread echoed the marched tramp of armies: True Sect dedicates in Tysan hounding the clan fugitives under Saroic s’Gannley; counterpoint to The Hatchet’s crack companies in Rathain besieging Halwythwood’s warded ground. The heart bound to Athera’s weal ached for the insufferable consequence. Esfand, as freshly invested caithdein, faced harsh choices fit to snuff the last embers of youth.
As dreadful to contemplate Elaira’s plight, alone in the peaks of the Mathorns, a raw toll of anguish that paled, given the day’s unravelling spiral might unseat the mysteries preserved through millennia.
Sethvir reached the west casement and stopped, a forlorn silhouette rimlit by the storm. Clenched knuckles planted on the sill, he seemed frail enough to snap under the grief piled upon his bowed shoulders.
Asandir shoved erect. Fast for his angular frame, he closed in a stride and latched a supportive grip on his colleague. The flesh under his hold was fever hot, the muscles beneath cranked as wire. “Should you drive yourself mad? If my oath did naught but defer Arithon’s doom, your bravado won’t even signify.”
Sethvir shivered, drawn white. “His Grace hasn’t lost his identity. Not yet.” Steered to a chair, he sank into a heap, gaze averted. “Life’s not lost, though Arithon’s current state of awareness cannot be counted a mercy.”
Asandir dropped the notion of pausing to brew tea. “Show me.”
The pause hung, then stretched far too long. Asandir kicked aside the adjacent chair and drilled a stare at his colleague, full-face. Aquamarine eyes lifted, blank, the mighty awareness of the world’s weave subsumed: not in sweet reverie, int
oxicated by the liquid melody of a thrush’s song, or the sonorous splendour of whales in the deep. Instead, the vast torrent encompassed by Sethvir’s awareness lay shadowed into eclipse. Black pupils dilated by terror, the incarnate being entrusted to bear the span of Athera’s earth-sense was flogged senseless on adrenaline fear.
Few things in creation could sap a Fellowship Sorcerer’s courage. That Sethvir’s grasp on the reins of broad-scale vision should flag dropped Asandir to his knees. “Cal, come back! Prince Arithon’s anguish is not yours!” Powerful fingers urgently chafed the Warden’s unresponsive wrist. “Our ranks cannot surmount this crisis without you.”
A fierce, controlled shake raised a laboured breath. Sethvir blinked and stirred. His eyes refocused, welled up with tears.
Asandir spoke gently across fallen gloom. “Is his Grace lost entirely?”
Sethvir shuddered. “The mind is associative.” Further detail emerged at a whisper. “Trauma has him reliving the moment he fell into prior captivity.”
The field Sorcerer recalled that lamentable history: when, taken in duress to Whitehold over two centuries before, Arithon had languished in enchanted fetters at the mercy of the same adversary. Then, he had laughed into Prime Selidie’s teeth, in combative charge of his faculties.
“What is my life worth? Do you imagine I’m cowed enough to forsake my integrity just to stay breathing?”
The withering thrust of Selidie’s response, recorded by Sethvir’s precise script in the Tower’s archive: “The Fellowship holds your blood pledge to survive, no matter the cost or the consequence.”
“Madam, you’ll have nothing taken by force.” Eyes shut as the blue fire of the Skyron aquamarine blazed into his shielding, Arithon wielded a master’s command over mind and spirit. His defence had bent his agony into song. Beauty and decency had clothed his torment, no matter how vicious the pressure against him.
Selidie remarked she had heard wittier satire before up-stepping the power.
The duel had raged day and night, until the bard’s sustained melody cracked and broke. Tenacious, Arithon had laboured onwards in verse, and for longer, the strict bulwark of cadence and metre upheld him.
The Prime reviled her victim’s doomed triumph. Impatient, while a voice rasped ragged by stress continued in determined resistance, she snapped, “I will see you howl like a dog in despair …”
Even chained down under the flaying attack, Arithon still had noted the presence brought forward against him. Denied sight, reft of senses, the cry of his heart recognized his beloved’s singular essence above all others. If his fury had towered before, today’s vivid recall of his explosive rage smashed all boundaries—and then rushed away, without warning lost into a void impenetrably dark and deep …
Asandir expelled in a sharp breath, devastated by the pitfall unveiled behind Sethvir’s distress. “Ath wept!” For Arithon lacked any context to realize that the sudden, blank pall of oblivion was not caused by Selidie’s working against him.
“He’s mired under the misguided assumption his beloved betrayed him,” Althain’s Warden confirmed.
Asandir swore again, beyond helpless to exonerate Elaira’s innocence.
For the past threat of abuse to his cherished lady, turned as leverage, had been the crowning stroke that demolished Prince Arithon’s adamant resistance, before. Disaster had forced his choice to embrace the only possible counter-move. His defiant riposte, spoken then, yet rolled a charged echo into the present: “This extortionate act I can stop, and I will …”
Beyond sorrow, the courageous rebuff the initiate master once shaped to salvage grace from the jaws of defeat: Arithon had truncated his cherished recollections of Elaira, a severance forged by self-mutilation. He had gathered the sum of her living memory, along with other, more dangerous knowledge his vital strength chose to keep sacrosanct. Every secret he guarded beyond life itself had been thrust intact beyond Selidie’s reach, into the emerald signet of Rathain. The ring held as his pledge of royal troth, bestowed on Elaira, and safe as a vault since the kingdom’s crown jewels were defended by Fellowship mandate.
Asandir locked anguished eyes with Sethvir, both Sorcerers wracked by relief that the desperate measure yet escaped Arithon’s recall. “At least,” he said, fraught, “we won’t face the resurgence of Kralovir necromancy.”
Thanks to Arithon’s stringent foresight, the horrific rites from the Black Grimoires yet remained sealed beyond access.
But at such terrible cost: reduced, that past hour, to a gutted shell, Arithon’s shattered cry in the aftermath still harrowed the fast silence of Althain Tower.
“Have done! Do your worst and be quick. I have nothing to lose, any more than a husk stripped of name and identity.”
For mercy, then, the plunge into oblivion had ended his crippling anguish …
But not on this day. The on-going trial in Daon Ramon allowed no such forgetful reprieve. World-spanning stakes rode the compact’s suppression of the sisterhood’s archival heritage. To secure a successor with the raw talent to preserve that irreplaceable store of proscribed record, the Prime Matriarch harrowed up Arithon’s massacred dead to pulverize his identity. The tactic assaulted an integrity already made vulnerable by the falsified evidence of Elaira’s betrayal.
Sethvir sprang erect. He circled the library’s confines again, a huddled stick puppet wadding the moth-eaten sleeves of his velvet robe.
Asandir looked on, hands ruthlessly laced. “Our crown prince is more than well-tempered to withstand even this vicious onslaught.” Whoever meddled with Arithon’s spirit provoked more than a scion of Torbrand’s volatile lineage: the hardened survivor of Davien’s maze commanded the tenacity to disarm the trap of futility. “Are you in fact certain his Grace has stopped fighting?”
“No,” Sethvir snapped, ashen. Such relentless suffering, in Arithon’s hands, indeed might lend him a perverse, adversarial advantage: the brute tactic could be strategically turned to unseat the Prime’s fixed objective.
Asandir refigured the premise. “The mind is associative.” Memories, bunched in graphic, hysterical storms might subvert the concerted assault through the Waystone. “The Matriarch’s not emotionally equipped to withstand that grisly tactic of misdirection.”
Sethvir turned, aghast himself under the barrage of Arithon’s flashback relivings. “But methodical torment cannot buy time. Selidie has forsaken patience. Worse than hounding our crown prince to madness, she’s seeking access, through triggers, to key his remembrance of a specific event. She’s driving to access his mystical encounter with the Ilitharis guardian’s spirit in Caithwood last winter.”
Asandir stared, appalled. “Not the rarified vision that restored his self-awareness of absolution!”
“The same.” Sethvir flinched from the price, that the innate expansion endowed by that contact had bestowed the intuitive access to flux imprints across two Ages of history. The intimate knowledge prised out of that moment would unlock a fearful array of specialized mastery: Arithon had aligned the templates of three disciplines, then wakened the lines of ancient magic which tapped the well-spring of Athera’s mysteries. Those harnessed forces had sealed the forest verge against the Prime’s spell-cast invasion.
“Tea,” Asandir insisted, his gall hobbled to the gesture of a palliative. Draughts stirred by his movement reeked of ozone, the white flicker of near-to-limitless might chained in ruthless abeyance. He fetched kindling, tipped out the ash-pan, and sparked the brazier on the table-top. Moved ahead to the cupboard for restorative herbs, he sensed the break in the Warden’s clipped strides. Warning spun him volte-face.
Sethvir buckled, wrists seized in collapse by the field Sorcerer’s timely strength.
“Ath above, we are finished!” Asandir cried in anguish. “The murderous witch has broken through?”
“Not Selidie. Teylia,” Sethvir gasped, then channelled the earth-sensed insight directly …
Across the bloody mire of relivings that damned soul and spir
it, a fragment of recall resurfaced, branded in fire against urgent need. Arithon knew the old woman only as the nameless ally whose fierce intervention had freed him from his prior ordeal of imprisonment.
“You are not all they say! Truth has many facets. Where you have suffered all manner of grief, your inner heart cannot lie to you. But emotions can be manipulated to inflict an undue toll of cruelty …”
At Althain Tower, the field Sorcerer shook off his stark surprise, too canny to bank on the moment’s fragile intervention. “Koriathain will never retire the contest.” Though Teylia’s foresighted seed of assurance might steady Arithon’s besieged identity, Selidie’s stolen youth only had deferred the untenable straits strangling her succession. No forthcoming talent met her pervasive need to secure her high office. The stake hanging on the outcome today would not relent anytime soon. Asandir chased down Sethvir’s chipped pot, scrounged the crock of spring honey, then set about brewing peppermint tea, while the assault engaged in Daon Ramon continued apace, beyond let-up.
Selidie directed her will through the Waystone, the channelled power of seven ranked Seniors honed to a needle’s point. Strike after strike, she pierced the veils of frayed memory guarding her victim’s integrity. Time and pressure shredded Arithon’s resistance. With his self-contained arrogance already crushed, the last bastion weakened, with the genius trove of his unequalled talent close as shredding the lock off a tattered book.
“I suggest we’re in danger of killing him, first,” interrupted the healer detailed to watch Arithon’s life signs. Lips pursed, she measured the toll on taxed flesh: the sped pulse and sawed breathing; the fingers whose technique on the lyranthe were legend, clenched involuntarily rigid; the sweat-streaked skin drained to translucent pallor, and the green eyes dulled under slack lids. Gone, every vestige of dignity from the subject’s wracked frame.