The Great Darkening (Epic of Haven Trilogy)

by R. G. Triplett

  “I know who you are, Calarmindon, and I know why it really is that you are here!” Her face contorted and twisted as she spat her words of hate. “You have come to seek the light.”

  Cal held on to his wits, determined not to be thrown by the beguiling efforts of this loathsome creature.

  Her voice changed to a sing-song taunt as she looked up from her hair-filled fingers, her yellow, sallow eyes begging him to come closer. “This light that you seek … do you not know that such a light, if found, would ruin all that I have sacrificed to build? And all the souls of those who serve me here on this isle would be lost forever in the wake of your curiosity! You wouldn’t waste life, would you? You wouldn’t forfeit the lives of all my servants, counting your cause to be nobler than their helpless existence, would you? You wouldn’t leave half-dead men unburied and unblessed, would you? What would your Poet parents say about such waste, Bright Fame? What would the great Father think about treating his creations with such … inhumane disregard?” She spat the last words in disgust.

  Cal’s mind went foggy, and as his bearing on the moment was lost in her twisted reasoning, he began to question the truth he knew. In the presence of evil things, even the truth can be wrought into a weapon of lies, and Cal’s doubt began to overwhelm his thoughts like a swiftly moving storm.

  Suddenly, out from inside his cloak, the blue-winged Sprite emerged like a bolt of sure-fired lightning. “I know who you are, Morana!” Deryn said with righteous anger. “I know who you once were, and of your great betrayal against your people and your great Father! No twisted words from your lying tongue will find their purchase here tonight!”

  Yasen’s eyes went wide with wonder at the small creature that addressed the monster with such fortitude. He could hardly believe what he was witnessing here in the mirrored hall on the Isle Dušana.

  “For I was there when you betrayed the violet trees in exchange for your humanity and your beauty. I was there the day you sentenced our people to death just to satisfy your lust and appease your jealousy.” Deryn, unafraid and unrelenting, pointed a small finger in the monstrous face of the vile woman. “And I am here now, on the day your beauty fails you for a second and final time!”

  Morana glared at the small warrior, but kept a safe distance as she spewed her anger at him. “You should feel what this skin feels like, brother, for I would burn all the violet trees of beauty and forsake my fruited birth a hundred times over to have the full desire and full attention of every breathing man!” Morana’s voice swelled in scorned anger as she deflected the doom that Deryn had spoken over her.

  Cal’s mind cleared enough, and he began to grasp hold of the truth that the dark magic had tried to obscure. “I will seek the light, and I will find it!” Cal shouted to the monster, his words uttered with more bravery and confidence than he felt at the moment. “And evil, all evil … your kind of evil will indeed perish when the new light comes.”

  “Cal, come on brother, get out of here while you still can!” Yasen yelled from the entrance to the hall, his wonder at the strange sights he beheld overpowered by the knowledge that they were still in imminent danger.

  “Look into your mirrored glass, Morana; no man will ever desire you again! This price you have paid has robbed you of your honor and your family, and has now left you bereft of any semblance of beauty. For as the tree of His power is put to sleep, so follows the beauty you sold your soul and murdered your people to keep!” Deryn shouted with vehement disgust, his faint blue glow growing brighter and brighter as he continued his tirade.

  Morana turned and looked towards the mirrored walls of her great hall, but where once she beheld the reflection of perfect beauty, she now saw only the decayed visage of her rotting destiny.

  “No!!!” she shouted in a high-pitched fury. The whole hall began to shake underneath the outrage of the witch. In a swift and angered motion, Morana turned to face her accusers, her eyes burning with enraged pain. She held high her clawed fingers as she bared her rotten fangs and shouted in the most nightmarish tone Cal had ever heard. “I will eat your souls, you cursed progeny of Ádhamh! For my demise is but at the hand of your fickle lust!” she screamed at them.

  The hall started to shake and the mirrored walls began to crack and splinter in response.

  “Come on, brother, run now!” Yasen yelled to his friend.

  “Deryn! We must leave this cursed place!” Cal begged the Sprite.

  “Beidh mé a fheiceáil chun é go bhfaigheann sé an solas, ach más rud é nach chun a chinntiú do Seirbigh!” Deryn whispered in the tongue of the Sprites as he shot towards the main entrance. Cal followed and soon all three of them were within a few paces from the doorway.

  Suddenly, in an explosion of shattered glass, the mirrored walls burst into a million shards of razor-sharp splinters. The vile witch flung her raised hands in one deliberate motion towards the runaway men, sending the broken glass hurling at them. With not a moment to spare, Yasen slammed the right side door of the large entrance closed, barely shielding them from the ruinous rain of tiny edges. A torrent of deadly fragments shot out the left side of the doorway and sliced through a dozen of her shirtless servant men who waited in readiness for her yellow-eyed command just outside the walls of the mirrored hall.

  “We must hurry!” Yasen said. “And what in the damnable dark is that?” he asked, pointing to Deryn.

  “Follow the shelled pathway, it will lead us back to the docks!” Cal said as he pointed south. “And this … this is Deryn—but there is no time now for explanations!” Cal whispered in hurried words, for even as he began to speak, the columns of Morana’s servants came to life with mirrored edges in hand and unrelenting hatred in their eyes.

  “Here they come, brother!” Cal shouted in warning to Yasen.

  One at a time, the shirtless men charged the three of them, and one at a time Cal, Yasen and the blue-winged Sprite buried their blades in their soulless bodies. They cut and hewed their way through the gauntlet of shattered glass and drone-like warriors as they ran with all the haste of desperate men to their docked ship. For every servant of Morana’s that they cut down, another would take his place, and soon the pathway was littered with a bloodied mess of broken glass and broken men.

  The horns of the woodcutters sounded from the deck of the Determination as Cal, Deryn, and Yasen made their way closer to safety. Yasen raised his horn to his lips to answer the call, signaling their distressed arrival. The moment the sound of his horn reached the rest of the men who were safely aboard the ship, the signal was given and a great whoosh of air announced that help had taken flight as the sky lit up with the sight of a score of flaming arrows. Soon the chests of the shirtless men exploded in a storm of blood and fire as one after the other was cut down before they could even wake to their yellow-eyed life.

  A second volley of arrows flew through the sky, and with it came a break in the line of the servants of Morana. Yasen and Cal leapt over the fallen men and slashed their way through the glass and bone of her slain forces until they heard the sound of their own boots upon the wooden planks of the ship’s dock. The mirrored looking glasses began to crash and splinter against the hull of the great ship as the shirtless men began to hurl their mirrored weapons of Morana’s vain fury with deadly accuracy. Woodcutter and guardsmen alike began to grunt and wail, and some fell dead, crashing into the cold dark waters as the razor sharp edges of glass cut and pierced and found their purchase in the men’s exposed flesh.

  Goran appeared at the side of the ship, braving the flying glass daggers in order to lower a rescue line over the side of the vessel. He called out to them, hoping to haul his brothers up to safety, but the onslaught of terror robbed the moment of any guarantee.

  Seig shouted orders to the captain of the ship. “Lower the sails, and hoist the anchor! We must leave now!”

  Arrows still rained their accurate fire, and Yasen and Cal were finally hauled up and helped to relative safety aboard the deck of the grey ship.

&n
bsp; In the midst of all the carnage and chaos of the escape, not many noticed the blue-winged warrior who darted in and out of the throngs of Morana’s servants with his thirsty blade and swift, azure speed. Great were the numbers of felled enemies by the hands of Deryn, the sentinel of the house of Iolanthe, and it was by his acts of bravery and vengeance that Calarmindon, Bright Fame, and his friend Yasen escaped the evils that had made their home on the Isle Dušana.

  Aboard the Determination, the crewmen cut the tether lines and the grey ship made its departure from the deadly shores. Most of the men, bloodied and out of breath, stared in grave silence as they watched the isle that could have been their place of death disappear, swallowed up in the darkness behind them. Seig ordered the ship to make a western course, and as they rounded the horn of Dušana’s southernmost point, what they beheld made their blood run as cold as the black waters they sailed.

  There, just beyond the rocky shores, hidden out of sight from where they had docked, was a graveyard of rotting ships. Vast and ancient warships, merchant vessels, fishing boats, and clippers made for racing, all in various states of abandonment, marked the death of so many men here at the hands of Morana.

  Cal took in the array of broken and submerged ships as he tended to the myriad of cuts and slices that riddled his body. He shuddered at the haunting sight that was sinking in the waters before him. “I wonder if the ship Wilderness is among them,” Cal said to Yasen. “Do you think Illium would have succumbed to her devilry like we almost did?”

  “I cannot say, my friend,” Yasen replied in an exhausted and disappointed tone of voice. “Many a good-hearted man fell today, some of them comrades of mine. I do not believe that just because one man is King, or just because one may be pure and noble of heart, that the enticements made by the evils in this darkening world would be wholly unheard by him.”

  “Perhaps you are right, Yasen,” Cal said with sorrow in his eyes. “For that was almost my end as well. I nearly abandoned all that the Oweles and the Sprites have entrusted me with, all for a momentary kiss with a red-lipped demon.”

  Yasen tore his gaze away from the expansive wreckage of sea vessels and looked Cal in the eyes.

  “But by the grace of the THREE who is SEVEN, those who charged you and called you out did not abandon you.” Yasen’s face lit with the light of a hope that he had not known before. “For even if the ship Wilderness is there, rotting off the coast of that damned place, and even if one of Morana’s shirtless servants was the lost King himself … you must know that you are not there, you did not taste her offer of betrayal, and that you, my brother, are not one of them.”

  “But I nearly … I almost …” Cal could barely find the words to deflect Yasen’s reasoning and continue on in his self-incrimination.

  Just then the small, blue-winged Sprite flew up to the railing of the deck, out from the vast darkness of the retreating isle behind him.

  “But they did not have what you have, brother,” Yasen said with a tired smile. “For the strongest of all lusts cannot compare to the truest of real beauty, and what Illium and his men never had—you carry around hidden in the pocket of your cloak.”

  Cal’s sadness broke a bit there in the presence of his brave and true Sprite friend. “I am sorry, Deryn, I am so sorry I didn’t listen when you tried to warn me. I am ashamed for the cruel things I said to you.” Tears began to fall from Cal’s weary eyes.

  Deryn wiped the blood from the tiny blade of his tiny sword before returning it back into its leaf-shaped scabbard. “It is not my role to hold failure and shame over you, Calarmindon Bright Fame; but it is my duty and my honor to remind you of your coming glory and your present calling.” Deryn flew up to the face of his friend before he spoke his next words. “Neither myself, nor the holy messengers, nor our great Father is caught by surprise at the trappings of this darkening world, or those hearts of men who find themselves trapped. And yet … He chooses to call to you anyway, Cal.”

  Cal’s mind flooded with the memory of the conversation he had had not a handful of days ago with the Owele, here, in almost this precise spot on this same ship, and his recollection began to change his mood from one of shame to one of deep and undeserved gratitude.

  “Take heart, my friend, for we have still a light to seek, and our great Father has chosen you to find it,” Deryn said in a fatherly voice. “And may I remind you … He did not send you to do it alone.”

  “I must say, Cal, that this Sprite friend of yours has wisdom in complete disproportion to his size … and bravery,” Yasen said as he shook his head in humble homage. “Bravery bigger than the whole lot of ours combined, I think. Thank you, Deryn. Though I did not even know you or your kind existed in this dark and joyless world, I will name you friend, and I will hail you as a mighty warrior.”

  “There are many unknown things still living in this world of ours, North Wolf,” Deryn said in reply. “Though not all will we name friend.”

  “So let us pray that we find this light of yours before we have to call them enemy then, huh?” Yasen said as placed his hands on Cal’s shoulders.

  “Agreed, brother. Agreed,” said Cal.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  The great walled city of Haven was plunged into utter chaos at the unexpected felling of the second to last branch of the great tree. Riots had broken out all over the boroughs as citizens clamored to get their hands on whatever remaining timber there was in the city. Though not five days ago the people of Haven had prayed their pious words over their great sailing hope, cheerful in their newfound optimism, the latest dimming had robbed them of whatever hope they had managed to muster. The citizens knew that if light had failed in such a great way here, in such close proximity to the tree, the men of the first colony could hardly be expected to navigate the treacherous waters of the Dark Sea in almost complete darkness.

  Nothing remains sacred when the threat of obliteration rules the hearts and minds of men, and no one felt the consequences of such a lawless state as fully as did Armas, captain of the city guard. Reports began to arrive as messengers rode with the haste of dread-filled urgency. The most startling news came from the northern borough of Piney Creek, where the marshal sent word with increasing frequency of dark fog and strange disappearances. Armas knew that Piney Creek was the least fortified of all the boroughs, and if his conversations with Hollis and the accounts from the gatekeepers were indeed to be believed, something had to be done about the protection of those people, and it had to be done with great haste.

  Armas walked through the receiving chambers of the office of the Chancellor with reports in hand and a plan of action on his lips.

  “Greetings, Captain,” the scribe said as he crookedly stood to welcome him. “His Brightness and the Chancellor are indeed expecting you.”

  “Thank you,” Armas said with a bow of his head.

  The sentries saluted their captain and then swung wide the large, carved doors to let him enter the office of Chaiphus.

  “Captain, thank you for coming. We unfortunately have some dark business to attend to on this sad and joyless day.” The Priest King did not rise to greet him, but merely spoke in a formal tone while staring out the window.

  “Your Brightness, Chancellor, I have received the reports from all three boroughs and I have much to discuss with you both,” Armas said, not wasting any time. “At the moment, the least of my worries is the southern borough of Abondale. There is still a relative feeling of safety there, seeing as they are guarded by both the Talfryn pass and the inhospitable shores of the rocky bay.”

  “Well, it is of some relief to hear that at least one of our boroughs can compose themselves with enough civility to keep from plunging into a fear-induced panic,” Chaiphus said.

  “It is indeed, Chancellor. However, whereas the riots of Westriver have consumed most of my men’s attention, the people of Piney Creek have had the worst time of it. Apparently the shadows there are haunted by the strangest and most frightening reports, and yet the a
rea is largely unpatrolled by any real presence of our city’s guardsmen, save the small contingent of those stationed to keep the gate.”

  “Oh?” Chaiphus said with sarcastic annoyance. “What are the latest apparitions that our half-witted northern citizens have dreamt up this time? Have they been talking to that fool of a woodcutter Hollis again about phantoms and green-eyed ghosts?”

  “It is not the citizens who send me the reports, Chancellor,” Armas said with the faintest hint of displeasure towards the unbecoming way in which Chaiphus spoke of his people. “It is our guardsmen. And our guardsmen have given account of similar incidents to those that Chief Hollis has previously reported to this office. With all due respect, sir, it is my advice that we take these reports seriously.”

  Chaiphus was about to speak in aggravated response to the tone of his captain’s voice, when Jhames intervened and asked his own question. “What do you propose be done about the worrisome reports, Captain? For I cannot have my people abandoning duty or turning to any more acts of recklessness here in these tense and darkening times.”

  “Agreed, your Brightness,” Armas said. “I have already sent word to the woodcutters in the northern territories, requesting them to report, along with their chief, to the Northern Gate of Piney Creek. The timber in the retreating forest is all but gone, and there will soon be no need for axes in the North. I hope to station those men there, inside the walls of the borough, to act as keepers of the peace.”

  Jhames made a face that suggested he did not wholly disapprove of this recommendation, then he turned to the Chancellor to get his thoughts on the matter.

  “If truth be told, this might be one of your first worthy suggestions, Captain,” Chaiphus backhandedly complemented him. “For our conscribing of their axes to patrol the northern borough would bring some semblance of peace and protection to our citizens; perhaps it would also keep the unruly blades of the woodcutters from joining the timber riots here in Westriver.”