Whatever befell, Sethvir could not fathom the course of Arithon’s plight. Once the piercing chord of Alithiel faded, the impenetrable warding that curtained the isle severed his earth-sensed access. Nor was he immune to the desolate wrench that followed the sharp separation. Fingers knotted, jaw clenched, the Warden did not cry out. While the agony lingered, he breathed in the fusty scent of his books, acrid with oak gall and varnish and ink. What felt like the desperate absence of hope plunged him into the abyss. He endured, as he must, bereft as the Paravian presence faded past reach.
Misery weighted the unflinching summary owed to the field Sorcerer directly afflicted. “Worry more that our crown prince might recover, only to become detained.” Concern suggested the Paravians might keep the Teir’s’Ffalenn in exile to protect their seclusion. “Fate has dealt us a hand without recourse, except to bide on the outcome.”
If his Grace survived the shock of confrontation, he would bear a responsibility beyond any invested High King of old. The Fellowship’s case rested on his voice as liaison to salvage the compact. Unknowing, alone, he shouldered the burden as Mankind’s sole advocate.
Late Winter 5925
Variables
Arithon Teir’s’Ffalenn never feels the delicate touch of the Sunchild who arrives to tend him in collapse; senseless, he breathes, a hairbreadth from death, while the strength of a centaur guardian lifts his slackened frame and bears him to shelter, where the battle for his recovery rests on the resiliency of his own merits …
News of the surprise contact with the Paravians finds Traithe at Telmandir, placed as advisor to High Queen Ceftwinn’s court; and dismay prompts his warning, sent to Sethvir: “Better that the Koriathain should have murdered Rathain’s prince, than to face the ruin if he falters. Has somebody else with hale faculties gone to stiffen my stop-gap protections and safeguard Seshkrozchiel’s hibernation …?”
Blind to the perilous judgement shadowing Mankind’s grant of leave to inhabit Athera, dedicate officers harden their troops at Etarra, while The Hatchet broods over his tactical maps, and fumes with impatience for the coming spring to resume his campaign to crush Rathain’s displaced clans …
Late Winter–Spring 5925
X. Riddle
Returned from the nadir of black-out after shocked perception collapsed, the glimmer of restored awareness cascaded into disorientation. The shear came too fast for the mind to assimilate, the grand chord of the infinite and the rarified octaves of singing joy smashed into fragmentation. Senses stretched too far past the veil stumbled, too abruptly crammed back into the range of animate, mortal experience.
Mage experience equipped Arithon s’Ffalenn to surmount the chaos of extreme derangement. Mauled in the storm, he curbed the first spike of terrorized panic. He endured, while flared nerves wracked his body to seizures. The hot sweats and chills of back-lash fever accompanied the shuddering onslaught of grief: loss of a depth to wring spirit from flesh always followed exposure to a Paravian. The punishing gamut had threshed him before: where the flash-point bursts of gifted Sight deluged intellect, and the cyclonic delirium of vivid dreams ebbed into ghastly depression. Adept mastery braced Arithon for the brutal course: an arduous passage survived by endurance, until forgetfulness blunted the explosive, first agony of separation.
But this re-emergence surpassed his experience. The recoil cut deeper. Untamed, unknowable, the glory evoked by a living Riathan stripped the soul naked and shattered integrity. As far as Arithon had plumbed the crystalline matrix of minerals, and as widely as an unbounded immersion had plunged him into the abstract surge of the planetary flux, the enthralment spun by the unicorn’s challenge left him dazzled blind, pierced with longing, and mortally wounded. Earthly magnificence paled, a ghost shadow after the jewel-toned radiance that shimmered beyond reach of human identity. The ecstatic glamour inflamed him with a tormented desire that eclipsed every bodily need.
Arithon drifted, stupefied in the throes of withdrawal. Days might have passed, or unremarked minutes. Time’s span was irrelevant. The unshielded blaze of the infinite seared the heart beyond care for all worldly reward. Crowned High Kings before had abandoned the intolerable burden of earthly penury. They had passed, clothed in glory, uplifted to bliss and fulfilment that never looked back. Selfless service by right bestowed the freedom of their unfettered passage. Arithon yearned towards the path of his ancestry, a golden ribbon that arched past the veil, and a cry in the blood that foretasted the pristine dawn of ultimate reunion. The clarion call thrummed through his pulse, too powerful to deny.
Yet the flight towards transcendent triumph jerked short, his unfolding awareness yanked backward as though collared and leashed. Recoil dissolved the resonant harmonics. Struck by the very mallet of discord, Arithon screamed.
Ripped from immersive ecstasy, he fought, though no effort availed him. Trapped as the caged bird, he battered bruised wings, flensed as the promise of radiance tarnished, then extinguished like a winnowed flame.
Arithon crashed, helpless under the visceral sting of defeat. Cold fury recognized he had been bound, tethered by an inviolate stay of self-sacrifice, granted in free will. Likely the working stemmed from his blood oath, when a knife’s cut at Athir had sealed his intent to embrace unconditional survival.
Except that the unclean hold on him bore no mark of the Fellowship’s immaculate conjury. In fact, Ettinmere’s shamans had crafted this noose, a furtive knot slipped through his given consent to sponsor a fatherless child. Valien’s life forged the shackle that strapped his fate to outside interests. An infant’s survival posed the perfect bait, given his line-bred s’Ffalenn compassion could not stomach an innocent’s death by exposure. Who else but Koriathain orchestrated the trap behind his self-blinded mistake? They had hidden their pitfall with murder, then blindsided him through distraction, as Vivet’s irksome charms sought to snag his affection.
The bloodless effrontery abrogated every concept of mercy. Anchored to life, the mind schooled to mastery confronted a prolonged ordeal, fit to strand the spirit in the crucible of raving madness. Perhaps, at the end, a coil to deny a clean passage across Daelion’s Wheel.
Blood scion of Torbrand’s ancestry, Arithon committed to action instead. He would live to serve Ettinmere’s shamans their reckoning, not just for the cruelty of their claim but for whatever twisted agenda had allied them with the Koriathain. He would strip their purpose bare in defeat. If, after Selidie’s utter destruction, the sisterhood crossed him further, he would rout their meddling atrocities and crush their order to oblivion.
Arithon bent his ferocious will to the course of incarnate recovery.
Resolve grappled the agony that lacerated his focus. Self-command demanded the stabilization of his deranged faculties. Iron discipline must surmount the torment of body and mind. Eyes filmed, lips crusted by fever, Arithon battled muscles jellied with weakness. Vertigo shattered his effort to sit upright. Spun wretched with nausea, he barely stemmed the spiral back into unconsciousness.
Arithon panted for air, entangled in clammy sheets, and without recollection of his unknown benefactor. Determined not to befoul himself, he rolled off the mattress and crashed on the floor. There, the crisp scents of pine resin and bees-wax brutalized his unmoored senses. The assault smashed the last of his dignity. He retched, dry heaves that brought up only bile, until he lay limp with exhaustion.
His dry-cotton mouth warned of dehydration. He forced himself, reeling, and crawled to the nearby washstand for relief. Beaten weariness defeated his struggle to stand. By necessity, he upset the basin and lapped up the spill.
Sleep ambushed him there, and smothered him in a febrile unconsciousness trackless as the face of the deep.
Arithon knew nothing until scalding pain smashed through his insensate oblivion, waking him into the chaos of overextension. Drifted awareness delivered a welter of sensory stimulus. Experienced wisdom sought stillness, while patience breasted the battering influx. He breathed and waited, until scramble
d perception encountered the pulse of his heart-beat. Arithon fixed on that rhythm. Inhale to exhale, he held on until bewilderment settled into a semblance of orientation.
Burning discomfort quieted to warmth on bare skin. The dazzle that tormented his eyes mellowed into a slant patch of sunlight, streamed through an unshuttered window. The deafening din in his ears resolved last, to the trickle of running water and bird-song. Errant breezes wafted the pungent fragrance of pitch pine. A borrowed shirt clung to his frame, crusted with unwashed sweat. Sleeve cuffs adorned with exquisite embroidery were rucked back from his skeletal wrists. He surveyed those details in supine detachment, ground to prostrate indifference under the trauma of sensory overload.
The oblate flare of sunlight narrowed and moved, glinting on chased enamel where the basin lay overturned. Softer highlights brushed the grape-vine motif carved into the toppled washstand, civilized refinements as abused as the wracked towels dumped over by his incapacity.
Desecration of someone’s charitable hospitality pricked him to embarrassment. Galled from leaden apathy, Arithon groaned. He turned over. The effort narrowed the edges of vision. He lay heaving, skin clammy, his swimming sight fixed on the legs of the bedstead. The cap fittings were beautiful: verdigris bronze wrought into a lattice of intertwined dragon-flies.
Pervasive hush reigned. No footstep came to right the crumpled coverlet dragged off the mattress, its ivory linen patterned by a jacquard loom. The same elegant taste pillowed his cheek on a floor that required no carpet. The exposed grain of the wood suggested a preference that valued nuance above creature comfort. The glass panes in the latched-back sash had been bevelled, and snug, half-planked walls wore the egg-shell patina of whitewash.
Arithon shifted his head. The changed vantage revealed book-shelves. Cupboards with plate racks flanked the slate chimney above a clean-swept, cold hearth. Polished copper utensils and nested iron pots suggested a pantry kept plentifully stocked.
Thirst eclipsed the overdue need for food, with the gurgle of the streamlet outside his likeliest water source within reach. Apparently left to his own devices, Arithon dragged himself belly down towards the door. More than the chance to wet his dry throat, the creek offered him means to ease his condition. Immersion into a tumbling current would discharge his aura and stem the onslaught of sensory overload.
Since the resident owner never appeared, Arithon fielded the whiplash set-backs incurred by his severance from the Paravian presence alone. He knew what to expect. Each day’s hard-won progress drowned in deep sleep, unravelled repeatedly in the transition back into waking consciousness. Weakness and recurrent fever brought relapses into oblivion. He muddled through the eerie, stretched moments when physical senses forsook him: stumbled into furniture his deranged eyesight failed to discern, and winced as though fractured, when sensitized hearing spiked amplified sound through raw nerves. The least wafted scent pummelled into the over-stressed tissue of consciousness. Step by visceral step, he surmounted the necessities: tidied his person and laundered his soiled bedding and clothes. He fetched wood for the grate, and rifled the jars of jerked meat and picked fruit in the pantry to rebuild his strength.
Nights passed the hardest, when the risen flux tides razed through his fissured awareness. The further he strayed into dreams, the worse the disorientation faced by morning, each onerous fight to quench rogue bursts of mage-sight wearing him down. Unlike a stress recoil incited by over-extended faculties, these after-shock surges of ephemeral perception were followed by corrosive grief. Recurrent flashbacks reopened the wound of heart-sore separation, until sorrow sapped his resilience and numbed his morale like cobweb soaked in camphor.
Few survived the duration. Dulled after the dazzling brilliance of the infinite, worldly passion dissolved into apathy. Brooding loss, and bouts of untenable longing evoked hallucinations, while reason lapsed into lassitude as fatal as narcotic poison. The morass opened the pitfall to suicide for the unwary. Arithon stared down the crippling odds. This pass, no liegeman as steadfast as Kyrialt guarded his unsteady steps. No brazen clan healer’s remedies buffered his terrible anguish. By his own devices, Arithon walked the abyss under the cold-struck threat: that failure consigned his roped spirit to who knew what ill usage by Ettinmere’s shamans.
Fury bolstered his drive to stay wakeful. Harrowed by disorientation, he latched back the casements and stood naked in the brisk spring air until shivering chill lashed him sober. He fussed over light meals, then paced on bare feet to escape the languor of repletion. Into the wee hours, he sang ballads until his voice cracked, then recited epic lays in rasped verse until concentration forsook him.
When the candleflame’s flicker mesmerized reason, he snuffed the wick and quartered the darkened cottage night-long, the focus required to drive each step turned to harness the aimless drift into mage-sight.
At length, when he tired, the shelves lent relief. The small library included rare volumes in ancient Paravian, some dangerously scribed with the prepotent phrasing of actualized language. He read without light: original books penned in common characters, with no matching copies amid Davien’s proscribed collection at Kewar. Select subjects here surpassed parts of the greater archive stored at Althain Tower. Arithon surveyed treatises on herbals and healing, and folk recipes compiled in scrap-books bound with tooled leather and yarn. Crisp labels identified boxed sheaves of field notes, catalogues of pressed flowers, ink drawings of fish, painted beetles, and wing feathers, annotated in elegant, familiar script.
Wonder stilled his finger-tip on the page at the prickle of recognition: the elegant hand belonged to Ciladis!
Giddy, Arithon leaned on a pine desk that quite likely belonged to the missing Sorcerer. When he steadied enough to pursue curiosity, he ran his palm over the silk finish of the cupboards and gently fingered the clam-shell drawer pulls, artfully pierced into filigree. The horn stand of quills, the ink flasks and river-stone paper-weights stood sentinel over the cushioned rattan chair, well-worn by use.
Dust coated nothing. Any intimate clutter and scrap-paper notes had been tidied away, as though the meticulous master had planned to vacate his personal quarters. Perhaps to succour a needy castaway, or not: the alternative sparked an unpleasant analysis.
If someone else tended the empty cottage, Ciladis’s departure might not be recent, or prompted by the inclination for privacy preferred by an initiate power. The house wore silence like a shrine, the cherished craftsmanship of the carvings, the waxed floors, and the priceless books preserved through millennia.
Arithon paused, embarrassed. He dared not, any longer, shy from the predicament of his degraded condition. His stalwart passage brought too little progress. Doubt threatened to drown him in ice-water fear: that likely the Paravian refuge packed a resonant charge too potent for mortal recovery.
Arithon clenched his teeth. “I will not succumb. Not here and not now!” He pitched himself, reeling, into the chair, determined to combat the mire of insanity through the knowledge in Ciladis’s books. If no other palliative existed, the greater reach of Fellowship wisdom might purge the bleak thickets of apathy.
He plunged into days of fixated study. From treatises on herbals, he perused the notations on which local plants brewed tisanes to stay wakeful. What listed poisons repressed mage-sight proved useless: anything potent enough to ground a beguiled awareness also damaged gifted talent. The volumes on refined healing offered no better solution. Arithon turned in stark desperation to Ciladis’s surveys. He pored over sea-charts. Analysed the cycles of the local tides, and searched the intricate, silver-point maps that detailed the regional electromagnetics, adjusted for season and phase of the moon. But no haven existed where the bore of the flux current was less reactive.
The high resonance on the warded isle that guarded the Paravians in seclusion matched, or exceeded, the frequency of the proscribed free-wilds ground, where even the time-tested blood of the clans feared to tread.
Arithon fought despair. Concentration an
d mage-gifted Sight became his last weapons against the long nights. Furtive sleep ambushed his vigilance. When breaking dawn caught him unaware, he lost himself to the intoxicant flood of the natural world past the casements. The influence of the Paravians’ proximity fevered his dreams, drugging him under the fecund fire that unfurled every quickening bud. The song of the elder races charged the earth and the air, until each breath heightened his undying desire to search for their hidden glens until he collapsed, faculties abandoned to the volatile bliss that graced their eternal existence.
Arithon resisted the honeyed temptation. Scourged by the siren call of the flux, he defused the dreams that plagued him to exhaustion by sprinting down forest game trails until he gasped, soaked in sweat. Once, he swam in an icy inlet until his pink skin turned white, and he panted through blue lips and chattering teeth.
Indifferent to hunger, he foraged by rote, hunting with the informed respect that took small game by ritual permission. He found viable seeds preserved in the pantry. But if the Sorcerer had kept a kitchen garden, his herbs had gone wild long since.
The unwelcome impression of abandonment nagged.
Arithon swerved from that painful thought. Lest pilfering reason should beggar hope, he fled until he ran out of land. At the isle’s west shore-line, while afternoon waned, he waded and fished, lulled by the lucent turquoise shallows and the white thunder of surf on the reef.
Whipcord fitness returned. Innate balance steadied. In due course, the morning arrived when Arithon’s venture outside to draw water did not upset his adamant discipline. Tiny leaves gilded the willows arched over the brook: the passage of days had slipped into the turn of the season. Anxiety ruffled his fragile calm. For last year’s peril resurged with the spring. Dry roads on the mainland would wake True Sect fervour and unleash The Hatchet’s campaign of conquest.