The Winds of Crowns and Wolves

by K. E. Walter

  “Neach, this forest shows the good that can exist in the world. A coalescence of multiple creatures that are capable of living together in peace. Unfortunately, in our world, danger sits closely over the crest of the western hills. We must ride in the morning, to Leirwold. The sooner we assess the situation, the sooner we can do something pragmatic about our militant King,” Tyrin stated ominously.

  Neach paused for a few moments before bringing up a different topic.

  “These fairies remind me of an animal I saw one time while I was in Spleuchan Sonse,” Neach paused again, scratching at his arm as he recounted the event that had occurred what seemed like an eternity beforehand. He and his brother had headed out into the night and gotten lost in the darkness. Out of the darkness came a wolf with purple eyes that ultimately guided him and his brother homeward.

  Tyrin let out a hearty laugh before commenting on the tale that Neach had just described.

  “Purple, you say? I didn’t realize you’ve known Fenris for that long.”

  Neach’s eyes grew wide at the mention of his elderly instructor.

  “That was Fenris? How could that be? It was a wolf!” he shouted.

  Tyrin grabbed a flat rock from the ground and skimmed it across the still surface of the lagoon. It skipped and hit the opposite side of the water with a thud.

  “It was indeed the man himself. When the Gods see fit, they bestow upon us the ability to transfigure into our natural ancestors. His purple eyes symbolize his royal blood. Before he was initiated as a member of the House, Fenris was a Prince in his own right. He lived across the sea in a distant Kingdom where his father ruled the land,” Tyrin said calmly. He continued to skim rocks across the surface of the water as if he were biding his time, before the inevitable descent into the depths of hell that waited in Leirwold.

  “But I have overreached my boundaries, Neach. To learn more about the man, you must ask the man himself,” he concluded as he reached for another flat rock, finding the ground barren except for the glowing flowers.

  “How proficient are you in our native tongue?” Tyrin inquired. A core facet of Neach’s training in the past weeks had been grasping and comprehending the language of the House Goedwig, which appeared to be an archaic form of all the languages of the world, combined into one cohesive form.

  Neach rubbed his hands together before he answered. The sun had since set, and the temperature inside the woods was now dropping quickly. He may have imagined it, but Neach thought he saw his breath in front of his eyes, if only for a minute.

  He shivered as he answered.

  “Not very, but I have learned some choice phrases,” Neach proclaimed.

  Before Tyrin could respond, a stick behind the two men cracked and Tyrin jumped to his feet with his sword drawn.

  A thick fog had encompassed the ground and it was now much more eerie than previously.

  “Who’s there?” yelled a defiant Tyrin.

  Neach was unsure of what was occurring, he only knew that Tyrin was better trained to handle aggressive behavior than he.

  There was no response, as Tyrin’s question echoed through the trees of the forest. He creeped forward, slowly, toward the mossy tree that stood near the bank of the lagoon.

  You could hear the birds above singing a much more melodramatic tune as the night grew darker. Their tunes transitioned from comforting to a sense of unease, as the two young men stood near the water behind them.

  “I ask again, who is there?” bellowed Tyrin. His voice was as intimidating as his stature. The voice which emanated from his body sounded like it originated from a full grown man, not a boy of less than twenty.

  Once again, silence. This time, however, the silence was total. Even the birds above stopped singing, and all was still within the Forest of Light.

  Tyrin inched forward again, circumventing the base of the thick tree he was now standing in front of. As he arrived at the other side, he only had seconds to react. Out of the foggy darkness, a blade came slashing down, aimed at his neck. Tyrin swung his own blade to meet it and parried it away before surging forward with a ferocious two handed swing. He grazed the leg of the attacker, and blood began to seep out of the wound. With a noticeable limp, he hurdled forward before Tyrin landed another blow across his arm.

  He fell to the ground, defeated.

  Tyrin grabbed him by the collar and shouted in defiance.

  “Who sent you? Tell me and I may spare your life!” His shouts boomed across the dark forest.

  The man looked up with a brazen smile, blood dripping from his mouth, as he must have taken a blow from Tyrin in the heat of the battle.

  Without a word, the man laughed and whistled five notes that called the fairies to his side.

  Purely out of anger, Tyrin looked down at the man who refused to speak, and swung his sword. With one fell swoop, the man was dispossessed of his head, and it rolled into the tree behind his limp body.

  Neach could only look on in horror.

  A peaceful night had been transformed into one of blood and treachery.

  Around his arm, a band was worn which bore an orange circle with a yellow and green diamond in the center of it. Neach recognized it immediately as the crest of someone who was very well known within the communities of Duncairn: King Henrig.

  “We must go, they will know where we are,” Tyrin said coolly. His steely resolve was not tested, as the man whom he had just killed was undoubtedly not his first.

  He picked the head and body up and threw them into the lagoon. The fairies hovered around the man’s remnants for a few seconds before flying off into the darkness again.

  Without a word, Tyrin headed off in the direction of Jorwel, expecting Neach to follow. Though he said nothing, Neach felt cold inside. The chill was not derived from the drop in temperature outside, but rather, from the hardening of his soul. If he wished to survive, he would need to get used to this reality: people live and people die, many times at the hands of each other.

  In the depths of the Forest of Light that night, a whippoorwill sang a song of mourning. Its hymnal grief brought gloom to the site where a man was killed in cold blood. Though the chill ran deep and the fog was thick, the cold ran further than that. For the glowing entities which resided inside the Forest of Light, the first drops of malicious blood were spilled by a man who wanted little more than to be alone.

  Oh, the blood of one, the blood of all, runs cleanly through the veins. Ironclad and bladed crowns, the blood flows all the same.

  XIV

  “He may be the first, but he isn’t the last.”

  Tyrin wiped his blade with a rag inside the safety of his home. The only light which shone was a single burning flame, a few feet from where he stood. It was as if his face had aged thirty years in a few hours; long lines drew taught below his eyelids and it look as if he hadn’t slept in days.

  “They have been hunting down our House for weeks now, but this is uncanny,” Tyrin said quietly. He appeared to be subconsciously acting in his stealth training. The journey back to the home involved a heat run around the village, past various partying locals.

  “We must act quickly. Though Henrig no doubt knows of my existence, he will not yet be aware of you. This is why you are crucial to the plan, Neach, you are a hidden agent in the fabric of our bloodline,” he said this with a growing admiration for the young man who he had scorned upon his initial arrival to Jorwel.

  He threw his rag to the ground and slipped his sword back into its sheath. The blade was crafted of the finest steel, probably from the coastal community of Cyll. Cyllian steel was said to be the strongest in the Kingdom, and the unique proximity of the mines to seawater provided an exponentially more rigid metal.

  Along its hilt, there were various inscriptions made in their language. Goedish was an aesthetically pleasing language, with each letter looping together to form a cohesive linguistic unit. Neach’s proficiency was still limited, but he could read the phrase that was directly below the blade.

/>   Frillo dirry nervos tun

  Translated, it meant “only the righteous can rule”, but Neach was only aware of that because he had seen it before on the blade which Fenris had gifted him. Though much smaller in size, the phrase was encrusted just the same, directly below the blade.

  He must have admired the exquisite piece of craftsmanship for an elongated period of time before Tyrin scolded him and regained his focus.

  “That blade is like mine,” Neach said.

  Tyrin nodded, his mind elsewhere as a terrible plot was being unfurled across the Kingdom.

  “It’s tradition in our bloodline to gift new initiates a token of our appreciation, for the oath of our brotherhood is not something which should be taken lightly,” Tyrin spoke as he looked toward the door, his mind already on the road to Leirwold.

  “We must go now, through Endal to Leirwold,” Neach proclaimed.

  The renewed spirit in the young man, who had rarely spoken since arriving at his door step, brought a smile to Tyrin’s face. He nodded in agreement, and the two men headed out the door.

  In ordinary circumstances, they would not have risked travelling by night; however, the circumstances were indeed far from the usual. The aid of darkness would provide cover for their escape from the village toward the capital.

  Rine remained tied up outside Tyrin’s home as Neach removed his bind. He mounted the trusty steed and handed him a carrot to gnaw on for the next few minutes. If they were to make it to Leirwold by morning, he would need all of the energy he could gather.

  Tyrin brought his black horse round from the back of his house and kicked at his side urging him forward. The horse resembled its rider strikingly. Both held the same chiseled features and angered posture.

  Tyrin kicked on toward the southern road which was located only a few hundred yards from the entrance to the spot where Neach had entered the village earlier.

  Unsurprisingly, the road was barren. Not a single person was seen for the first few minutes as they headed south toward the village of Endal. Along the road, there were small communities, but nothing of organized stature. The clusters of homes littered the dark night with small, flickering fires that seemed to be burning on embers. There was no doubt in Neach’s mind that the people who inhabited these homes had been fast asleep for a long time. He wished to accompany them in their spring slumber, but the issue at hand required immediate attention.

  They rode for what must have been near an hour before a dark, looming structure came into view to the west. Not visible from the village, it seemed that a large wall had been erected just east of Jorwel. Perplexed, Neach moved alongside Tyrin and asked about the monstrosity.

  “What is that wall?” Neach asked tentatively.

  Tyrin did not break his gaze from directly forward. He seemed to understand at this time that Neach had not been exposed to much as a child, and was generally uninformed about the Kingdom.

  “That there is what the locals call the Gate of Flaws,” Tyrin responded.

  “Hundreds of years old, it was erected by the late King Rillod in an effort to keep his enemies at bay,” Tyrin continued, “these days, no one knows what lies beyond the wall. In the past it had been manned by an army, keeping out what must have been a real threat. Today, it stands solitary and undefended, a relic of times passed. The ground remains perpetually scorched in front of it as a testament to the struggle which ensued at that place in the distant past,” Tyrin concluded with a sigh. It seemed he had drawn the parallel between the time he told tales of and the time which they were moving toward. The conflict on the horizon could result in much more scorched earth at the cost of human life.

  Hours passed before the village of Endal appeared in the distance. Along the southern road, the only light that existed was that of the moon above. Luckily for the two young men, a full moon illuminated their path and provided a reassuring breadth of vision on their dark and mysterious route.

  The sun would not be up for yet a few more hours, but the men proceeded at the same pace. Rigorous enough to make good time, but not so much that it would wear the horses out, they galloped into the village at a brisk pace and spared no time for niceties. Though it was Neach’s first time entering the eastern village, he lacked the attention and energy to take in his surroundings, as his mind was transfixed elsewhere.

  Endal was a smaller version of Leirwold, in that it served as the hub for the eastern half of the Kingdom. Though its edifices were less impressive than those in the capital, deeming it a village seemed a little unfair to the craftsmanship which had erected such an organized community of thousands.

  On its northern, southern, and western borders, it sat along the Forest of Light, which Neach and Tyrin had spent time in earlier that day. A great stone wall had been raised in an effort to keep any wildlife from interacting with the townspeople on a regular basis. The forest was a beautiful sight in the nighttime, as it seemed to glow from the inside, permeating out into the darkness, and acting as an explicative form to comprehend the delineation of its given name.

  Before long, they were headed west out of the village, directly toward Leirwold. Their path would not deviate much until sunrise, as they headed on a direct route through the heart of the forest toward the capital.

  The forest cocooned the two weary travelers in an embrace of mystique. On either side of the road, trees rose as high as the eye could see and acted as a natural barrier for Neach and Tyrin. They spoke little in the hours preceding, but as they entered the depths of the forest, Tyrin slowed to a trot and began conversation with Neach again.

  “Amazing that this place exists, isn’t it?” he asked Neach. The answer he sought was obvious, but he seemed willing to hear Neach’s take on the natural beauty of the wooden fortress that was the Forest of Light.

  Neach nodded in agreement and looked to his right. Tyrin’s chiseled face was illuminated by the moonlight and he looked the part of a stoic military leader in the current atmosphere.

  “When this is over, I hope to see more of it,” Neach rebuked.

  Tyrin vigorously shook his head in concurrence, and appeared to appreciate Neach’s desire to return one day to his oldest haunt. Since he was a young boy, he had spent countless days exploring the interior of the forest, learning it’s every crevice.

  As a child, Tyrin was brought up by his father, who was an active member of the House Goedwig. He sent him into the wild on his own from the age of eight, in order to allow for the growth of a relationship with the nature that their lineage hearkened back upon.

  In one specific instance, Tyrin had entered the forest from the northern edge, close to where he and Neach had entered earlier in the day. After wandering deep into the grip of the woods, Tyrin found himself lost and alone. A common occurrence for those who spend their days in the forests of Duncairn, he gambled on a direction and headed that way with conviction. Night fell, and he was forced to take shelter in the forest for the duration of the evening. This was the first time that Tyrin had fallen in love with its ethereal beauty. While he lay at the base of a tree, the fairies had come out and greeted him with their song. They saw that he was not hostile, and cradled him in their glow to remove any sense of fear from the young boy’s mind. It was on that night that Tyrin grew fond of the otherworldly beings that inhabited the land. Their benevolence in the face of his adversity created a soft spot in his heart for everything that lived within the wood.