And there, rising from the center of the courtyard stood the tower. Well, part of it. The stone steps spiraling upwards remained intact up to the fourth landing, but the outside wall and the topmost floor had tumbled to the ground, exposing barren stone rooms. Keeper Ishkar’s office, the place Dnara had spent most her life, had become nothing more than a pile of weathered rubble that had crushed Keeper Ishkar’s beloved apple orchard. Not a single apple tree remained, nor piece of furniture or book or cloth or...
There were no bodies, Dnara realized with a gasp. She had prepared herself to see the charred remains of her keeper and the friendly cow, but she never expected a lack of remains. Of the twenty-three who had lived there with her, people whose faces she could still see in her mind, there existed not a single bone nor marker to tell the world they had ever existed at all.
“Could a fire have done all this?” Dnara asked aloud. “Even a magical one?”
The wind whistled through the ruins and Treven stopped to gaze up at the tower along with Dnara. Treven could not answer and Athan remained silent in the saddle. But, he’d known. Athan had known the whole time the impossibility of her story. When she said she’d lived in the tower, his shock had been apparent, and now she knew why. No one had truly lived in this tower for untold years well beyond her age.
“I don’t understand,” she whispered and felt the wind tugging at her cloak.
With careful movements, she slid from the saddle then helped Athan down. He slumped to his knees but then managed to shuffle with her to the tower stairs before collapsing fully. She brushed his bangs aside and he lifted his eyes to look on her with sad regret. Words formed on his lips, but no sound came. Agony filled his expression, his hand clutching the shirt over his chest. All thoughts of the knoll and the lies he’d told fell away as her heart filled with sadness.
She held him for a quiet moment then eased him onto his back against the steps. “You were wrong,” she said, her fingers tracing lines along his cheek. “This is my fault.”
“No,” he began to argue but couldn’t finish.
Dnara placed a finger atop his lips. “Melakatezra, whoever she is, tricked you and your brother all those years ago, because she knew this day would come. It is because of me. The why of it, I don’t yet understand, but... But there is something connected between all of us. A soul-thread, Keeper Ishkar would call it, tying our lives together for better or worse.”
“Mela-,” he sucked in a tight breath. “She’s not- ...her name... it’s-” but he could say no more, by a magical pact Dnara assumed, and the frustration in his expression overshadowed the pain. “Dammit. Dammit it all to blight and back,” he spit out along with a wheezing cough.
Dnara wished it could be so simple, to damn it all and blame the blight, but she’d come to understand a more complex answer existed, somewhere. She glanced around the ruins, hope dwindling that the answer could be there, under a pile of stones. When Athan grunted in another wave of pain, she returned to Treven.
After unbuckling a saddlebag filled with herbs and food, she rubbed Treven’s nose while trying to see past the glassy black eyes of the mule. “Your brother is in great pain, and I don’t know what I can do to help.” To her words he nodded and lipped her sleeve. “The second day will dawn soon, the day Garrett said he’d meet us. Can you find your way back to the northern edge of the grove and wait for him, show him how to get to us?”
Treven hesitated, turning his long face to Athan. With a sweat beaded brow and eyes darkened by exhaustion, Athan nodded his agreement to Dnara’s plan. Giving a resigned heavy snort, Treven nodded as well and set off back through the broken gate.
Kneeling beside Athan, she offered him a drink from a waterskin. “How young were you, when you struck a deal with the raven?”
Athan drank deeply before answering. “I’d just turned nine. Treven, six.”
Hearing him say it made the whole story feel much more real. “So young to have lost everything.”
“No younger than you had been,” he argued then sputtered through another sip before handing back the skin. “You are too kind, Dnara. You should have left me alone to face my choices.”
“Then I would be no better than the raven,” she replied while searching through the saddlebag.
Her words ended his arguments and he lay propped halfway up on the first stair in silence while she worked. Pulling out two cloth-wrapped packages from the bag, she mixed a few herbs and bound them within wild onion sprigs plucked from a patch growing out of the floor. She paused a moment, trying to see the mosaic pattern the floor had been decorated with, but grass and dirt had completely covered the tiles.
“It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve only been gone a few weeks,” she muttered and handed the bundle to Athan. ”Here, for the pain.”
Athan popped the bundle into his mouth without question and chewed, grimacing at its less than pleasant flavor. After masticating the bundle to release the herbal oils, he stuffed it into the top of his cheek next to his molar then spoke. “There’s a door down there, still intact.” He indicated the dark crevice in the corner where a stairwell led downward.
“The vault,” Dnara said. “Keeper Ishkar keeps- kept his most prized books there.”
“I couldn’t get into it, but didn’t spend much time with it, either. I wanted-” Shame refilled his eyes and he looked away. “To be there when you woke up,” he finished quietly.
“I’m glad you were,” she said honestly and placed her hand on top of his.
He didn’t look back at her and closed his eyes instead. “There might be answers in the vault.”
She knew he was right, but she hesitated to leave him alone with the guilt he carried. “Will you be all right alone for a while?”
To this, he nodded and settled back against the stair with a wince and unsteady exhale, scarcely able to move an inch farther. “I won’t run off, I promise.”
His jest made her smile, reminding her of all the pleasant moments shared between them. Even based on a lie, the happiness he’d placed within her heart could not be so simply erased, nor could her fondness for him. It would be easy to stand in judgment of his crime and abandon him to his choice. In the end, he’d tried to do the right thing. How could she do any less?
Leaning over his upturned face, she brushed aside his bangs and dabbed the sweat from his brow before kissing it. “I won’t be long.”
His eyes opened to stare up into hers and his hand swept through her hair before falling to his chest in fatigue. He did his best to smile, but in his gaze remained a great untouchable sadness. Taking the everbright lantern off the floor, she headed for the stairs with the wind following in her wake, leaving Athan alone in darkness save for the pale moonlight reaching down through ruin and shadow to embrace him.
30
The stone steps carved into the bedrock circled downward and ended at a small puddle of water that had gathered from the surface. Dnara held out the lantern, illuminating a carved granite room whose ceiling had begun to bulge and crack with tree roots now hanging downward like living stalactites. It smelled of damp and fungi, and a patch of white mushrooms crawled up the wall. Across from the stairs stood part of the once ornate outer wooden door, its painted carvings long deformed by mold and moisture. Only a third of the door closest to the hinges remained, looking as if someone had taken an axe to the rest of it.
“Keeper Ishkar would not approve,” Dnara muttered.
Pushing past the rotten wood, which flaked off with the gentlest touch, she came upon the intact inner door made of metal and centered with a large circular locking mechanism. Unlike the rest of the tower and the wooden door now at her back, the metal door gleamed under the lantern light without a speck of rust. Placing her palm to the door, she was surprised to find it warm despite the frigid chill filling the underground space. It also hummed with a vibration that buzzed through her fingertips, making the hair on her arms stand up and her scalp tingle.
Pulling her hand away, she mom
entarily wrestled with the urge to leave whatever ghosts existed beyond the door to their cloistered secrets. Holding the lantern up, she wasn’t even sure she could open such a large, heavy door on her own. And then there was the lock...
Inhaling deep, she shoved her doubts aside. She’d come too far and at too great a cost to give up now. She placed her palm back against the warm metal, closed her eyes and focused on remembering how Keeper Ishkar opened the door. It felt like an entire lifetime ago, the last time she’d been down in this place, trailing meekly behind Keeper Ishkar’s robes with a cold, buzzing collar around her neck.
Yes. That’s what the sensation from the door reminded her of: the low hum of a starstone. It was that same unceasing buzz, that same relentless vibration, ever present and uninterrupted; a constant in her life from one day to the next until the great wind had come and released her. That same wind curled around her ankles, billowing her skirts and winding its way up her body. No longer afraid, she welcomed its presence, smiled at its caress, and guided it through her hand to the door.
She could feel it flowing through the carved runes and lined patterns on the door, and in her mind she could see it. The runes and patterns illuminated with the soft glow of magic, all roads leading to the central lock. Whispered words called to her, asking to be spoken louder than the wind could express on its own. With another deep inhale, she opened her mouth and gave voice to the wind.
“Ilashn’i’nahsli.” Her voice resonated deep, speaking the word forwards as another voice spoke it backwards, ending at the other’s beginning and forming an infinite loop.
The door grew hotter, the illuminated runes brightened enough to blind her closed eyes, and the lock clicked as it turned counter-clockwise three-hundred and sixty degrees until it ended where it had begun. The buzzing stopped and the room dimmed until the everbright lantern regained its dominance over the darkening runes. The wind withdrew with one last playful tug on her hair, and she opened her eyes to an understanding of the words she had spoken.
“Welcome home, dearest child,” she whispered aloud, the words translated forwards, then she backtracked and read the words backwards to give them an entirely new meaning. “Answers await within.”
Dearest child? Surly that couldn’t be her. And what a strange language, to form such complex messages. She wondered at the work that must go into crafting those words, forming their exact letters, syllables and emphasis like the ingredients in a spell. And then, with a touch of shock, she wondered how she had come to know such a language.
The wind, Dnara assured herself. It was the only thing that made sense as she stood before the unlocked door. Or, a book she’d read on some night secreted away from Keeper Ishkar. A book she hadn’t been allowed to read, making her speaking the password feel like a lie. She was no one’s dearest child. The answers waiting beyond the door had not been intended for her.
“Probably Henrick,” she muttered the name of the redheaded apprentice who seemed to have been Keeper Ishkar’s favorite. “He always has to tattle when he finds me with a book, and he always has that arrogant grin that-”
Had. He had that grin, she reminded herself. Henrick, for all his annoying tendencies, was most likely dead. Judging from the ruins upstairs and the pieces to this puzzle she’d begun to put together, Henrick had been dead a very long time, if he’d ever truly existed at all. Unexpectedly, a knot formed in her chest, and she wouldn’t have minded in that moment to have seen the flash of his copper hair in the sunlight or even his stupid arrogant grin.
Pieces of a world that once made sense to her. Parts of puzzle she struggled to see the whole of. Memories of home.
She stared at the door and its familiar, intricate engravings. She couldn’t deny it, the way she felt in this place. Prison or not, this tower had been her home. “Welcome home, Dnara,” she said quietly to herself. A loud click echoed and the door swung silently inward.
The darkness waiting beyond lasted only a few seconds before a series of soft pale lights began glowing around the perimeter, filling the room with over a dozen small stars. Different than the everbright lamp in her hand, but done with similar magic, she guessed. She’d never been allowed beyond the first wood door, always told to wait while Keeper Ishkar retrieved one book or a dozen, setting them into her arms before expecting her to carry their weight up five flights of winding stairs out of the basement and up to his office. She could feel the weight of those thick leather bound tomes in her arms now, and she could smell their musty ancient paper.
She expected that same scent to assault her now, but the lights illuminated an alarming sight. Not a single tome nor scroll awaited her. There were no full bookshelves from which Keeper Ishkar would have plucked his books of knowledge. There weren’t even any shelves! Stepping into the barren stone room, Dnara stood in abject silence, wondering where all the answers she’d hoped to find had gone.
As her eyes adjusted, a small singular object set on the stone floor’s center caught her attention, its light, off-white color juxtaposed against dark grey. With slow footsteps, she made her way across the smooth undecorated stone, and found a square piece of parchment with slightly curled corners, no bigger than her palm. On it, in handwriting she could mistake for no one else’s but Keeper Ishkar’s, read a riddle.
‘I am what is waiting at the end of all things.’
And much like the state of the tower ruins over her head, the untouched metal door and the barren room waiting beyond it, she was surprised to already know the answer to this riddle written by her keeper’s hand. It was an answer she’d only recently learned for herself while floating on the dark sea of shadows and staring out to a distant barren shore where one life had been sacrificed to save another. At the end of all things awaits, “A beginning.”
The parchment caught fire in her palm but did not burn her hand, and from its flames arose an undulating blue smoke. The wind pushed the smoke from her palm, leaving a tiny mound of ash behind. She fisted the ash and watched as the windblown smoke drew a line from the center of the room to the far wall. She followed the trail to its end, to the place on the wall at chest height where the blue smoke had painted the stone with a singular rune outlined by a tilted square. An unexplored place within her mind immediately deciphered the rune’s meaning: the end. Opening her hand, she found another rune painted onto her palm by the ash: the beginning.
Could this room, its riddle and these runes have been meant for her after all? Could she have been someone’s dearest child? Before the shadows of doubt could creep in to curl her fingers closed around the rune in her palm, she took in a breath and pressed her palm to the rune within the diamond. Meant for her or not, she’d come too far to fall back into shadow.
From where her flesh met stone came a glittering light. It warmed her hand, but she kept it intently pressed to the stone, even as the heat became uncomfortable and the stone began to glow a molten reddish orange. She had endured more than this heat, faced more than the fear of being burned. She had come so far for answers, helped by so many kind souls and fought through the unknown world of blight and shadow, all for this. This moment was meant for her! Without fear, she would seek the answer to who she could become at the beginning of this new journey, even if it meant the end of all she had once been.
The light outlined her hand then radiated outwards like sunbeams, forming a square no wider than her shoulders. The brilliant light etched itself around the sides of the square, became blinding for a split second then went dark, abruptly casting the room into the void as the perimeter lights extinguished with it. Almost forgotten, the everbright lantern in her other hand renewed its glow, filling the space with not a dozen stars but a soft and gentle moon.
Holding the moon up, she couldn’t help but gasp at what she saw. The square of stone carved out by the light had disappeared, and in its place existed a hidden alcove. Within this alcove waited a single, plainly bound book. She reached for it but stopped as the lantern light illuminated her other hand. Her palm,
still warm, bore a new white scar forming a perfect circle with a dot to show where the line had begun and where it had ended. Not the end nor the beginning, this rune combined the two.
“The infinite,” she said aloud, her whisper echoing within the room. But, the word felt incorrect. Closing her eyes, she focused on the rune, trying to recall how she knew its name. A page turned within her mind, a gentle voice spoke, a lullaby could be heard carried on the wind and a smile welcomed her home. “Iru.”
A warmth filled her heart and she shared a smile with the wind. This rune had been the symbol of a people, her people, the Iru. She had a people, a place she belonged. She had a home. She had been, somewhere at some place in time, someone’s dearest child.
When next she looked at the book, its plain cover had been branded with the same rune. Beneath the rune, in Keeper Ishkar’s handwriting, the cover had been embossed with one thing more. A name. Her name.
Dnara Ankari.
A last name. Her heartbeat pounded. She had a last name. With a shaking hand, she took the book from its resting place and turned to the first page to find what other answers may await her.
‘My dearest child,’ it began in Keeper Ishkar’s handwriting. She stopped reading, tempted to shut the cover and toss the book across the room. Dearest child? Keeper Ishkar’s dearest child? In what convoluted reality could that be true?
‘I am certain you have many questions, least of which being how I dare to call you my dearest child after all I have put you through,’ the writing continued, stopping Dnara as she began closing the cover. ‘I hope you will one day understand how never being able to utter those words to you in person has become my greatest regret in life, second only to my failure of protecting my brother, your father, from a fate worse than death.’
When the Wind Speaks (Starstone Prophecies Book 1) Page 26
