Storm of Prophecy, Book I: Dark Awakening

by Michael Von Werner

  Master Anthony made an introduction more out of a desire to be polite than a need to familiarize her. “Of course you remember your classmates.”

  “Hi, Stacy,” Jane said.

  “Stacy…um, hi,” Jack greeted, breaking into a shy smile.

  She suddenly felt her right hand being gently picked up by Frederick and looked his way instinctively. “How does this evening find you?” He asked, bringing it up slowly to kiss it. Jack’s eyes betrayed a look of such hatred that it could have torn the drapes off the walls. Jane tilted her head back and rolled her eyes in disgust while turning around toward the table. Frederick glanced quickly to make sure that Jack was watching, then returned his deceptively sly, affectionate gaze to her eyes.

  Before he could lord it over Jack any further, Stacy brought her hand back to try to avoid any bloodshed over her tonight. “I’m fine, thank you,” she replied politely. “Let’s all have a seat, shall we?”

  “Certainly,” Master Anthony said, the romantic squabbles of his students being none of his concern. “I have already reserved them for each of you. Jack, you will sit over there on the left. Jane, you will sit between him and me. Stacy will sit on my right, and Frederick, you will…”

  “Excuse me, master,” Jack suddenly interrupted. “Um…do you think you could…that it would be possible…could you switch the seating arrangement between Frederick and myself?”

  “Why?”

  Master Anthony had caught him off guard. “Because…well…um…”

  “Just sit down Jack.”

  Bested for the moment, he grudgingly acquiesced. “Yes, sir.” Stacy sighed, thinking it was going to be a long night, and sat down with the others. Master Anthony remained standing while grabbing the ceramic water pitcher and filling each of their cups.

  “Thank you,” Stacy voiced, taking a drink.

  Overall she had to say that she was surprised to find that none of her colleagues were the least bit bothered by the recent disciplinary action she had received. Jack and Frederick still fought over her, and Jane appeared to harbor no newfound disdain. It was more or less like before.

  Jane broke the silence before it became awkward. “So, Stacy, I heard you taught some necromancers a thing or two about delving into the affairs of Gadrale.”

  Stacy was unsure of how to respond to this. “I…suppose, but it wasn’t really on my mind at the time.”

  “I can imagine,” Jane said conspiratorially with a suggestive wink and mischievous smile. “Alone in the woods with three dashing men, you must have had your hands full.”

  Stacy blushed, feeling her face heat, and took another sip of water. “It’s not like that actually…I was more concerned with staying alive.”

  Jane’s naughty interest was undiminished. “I heard it was like that…at least with one of them anyway”-her words immediately caught Jack and Frederick’s attention-“particularly that rogue: Vincent Faren. He must have been very persuasive. People say that before the incident, he was persuading you in the library just about every night.” Stacy felt her face become more flushed than she thought possible.

  “What!” Jack exclaimed. He then lowered his voice. “I…mean…um, who’s Vincent?”

  “The ‘swordsman?’” Frederick asked incredulously. “Preposterous,” he dismissed, taking a drink of water from his cup. “That couldn’t possibly be true.” Despite his words, he seemed less sure than he let on, and the certainty began to fade visibly when she said nothing. “Tell them, Stacy.”

  Stacy was still shocked at this strange rumor and didn’t know what to say at first when confronted with this accusation. Jane seemed to get more excited and raised her eyebrows while smiling and looking genuinely surprised. Jack and Frederick froze, staring intently in horror.

  When Jane excitedly began to ask her another question, Master Anthony cut it short, starting to find his position between them tiresome. He told Jane merely that this discussion was inappropriate at this time, and left it at that. Jack and Frederick continued to pass worried glances at her.

  While they waited, servers brought wine glasses and filled them with a white wine. The sweet smell tinged with alcohol filled the air while the talking continued all around her. A woman at another table laughed at some finer point, and the tone of the man telling the story was laced with mirth. No one drank the wine yet, as was proper etiquette, since an occasion such as this was bound to be commenced with a toast.

  Several minutes after the glasses had been filled and placed at their table, Stacy heard a server speaking at a table far to the right of her. “There you go,” came a familiar voice.

  The words were not spoken with any underlying malice, yet she still felt a terrible chill go through her. Her eyes darted over to where she thought it had come from. It was too crowded and she couldn’t see all the waiters. One pushed a finely painted and polished wooden cart that was draped over by a white cloth, but she couldn’t get a good look at him. She stared hard, but try as she might, people kept getting in the way.

  “What is it, Stacy?” Frederick asked from her side, his pretty features showing concern. She suddenly became more self-conscious.

  It must have been her own imagination, she decided. “It’s nothing, I’m fine,” she said. Frederick looked at her curiously and then turned once to look behind himself at her right. From the left in her peripheral vision, she saw Master Anthony look her way, then calmly look past toward where she had. He made no comment on it.

  A short while later, the plates of food were finally brought in, each making a light thud on the table as they were set down. They were of a fine white porcelain, and when made had been fired with a clear colored gloss. On top of each was a colorful meal of carrot and vegetable slices, all neatly arranged; a scoop of potatoes that had been mashed, with a fine cream sauce on top; and a moist warm steak. Unlike nobles, they were not concerned with decadence; a meal such as this would suffice for the occasion. The steak had a few traces of blood, and was covered in a dripping line of dark tangy smelling sauce. The aroma that came from it was quite tantalizing and filled the entire room.

  Jane at last broke the uncomfortable silence again at their table. “Has anyone else noticed the unusual weather patterns we’ve been having this year?”

  “I have,” Frederick put in. “Just over a week ago, the gap in the rain cycle finally closed.” Stacy remembered it well. “Over here, spring is supposed to see more rain than the rest of the growing season, not less.”

  “Yet the grass has still had time to dry and die,” Jane added.

  “It was such lousy luck,” Jack said from Jane’s side. “The farmers all say their crops are off to a bad start: they grew and then the dryness lasted just long enough to choke them before the rain came again.”

  Stacy thought it strange too but didn’t want to jump to conclusions. “It could be nothing more than a rare climatic variance,” she dismissed. “We’ll survive it.”

  “What do you think, master?” Frederick asked, turning the question to Anthony.

  He quietly stared at the table in front of him without answering, looking troubled though not made vulnerable by it. When Frederick called his name again, he whispered softly without looking his direction, seeming lost in his own thoughts. “…it was stirred by a hidden hand…a hand with great power.”

  “What!” Jane exclaimed.

  “Master, why have you not spoken of this before?” Jack asked. “We should mobilize the entire academy if we have to!”

  He looked toward Jack. “I have not been complacent. Until my more recent charge, I have devoted every free hour to this very problem. Watch your tongue.”

  Jack lowered his head, looking at the table. “My apologies, master.”

  Stacy was feeling quite perturbed. “Who could have done such a thing?” She felt her eyes widen with worry. “Someone who commands the climate in this way cannot be allowed to…” her mind scattered with all the implications, “…we must stop them!”

  “The sooner
they’re destroyed, the better,” Frederick said.

  Master Anthony leaned back in his chair and regarded each young face with a stoic reserve that was still visibly colored by a deeply set agitation toward the subject. “One with a strength such as this is not so easily vanquished. Do not be so eager to strike; brawn against brawn will only result in our defeat.”

  “Then how do we defeat them?” Jane asked.

  “With cunning,” he said simply.

  “More importantly, we need to know where they are,” Frederick said next. “Do you have any ideas, master?”

  As was the way of any instructor, he made them supply certain information crucial to understanding the problem, testing their memory and thinking instead of dispensing the answers freely. “You tell me where they are.” From her left, Jack made a long groan at how Anthony was turning this into another class session. No one said anything. They were all at a loss. All except her, anyway.

  Stacy’s mind quickly deduced the answer based on what she knew. “They’re doing this from somewhere in the Great Northern Plain.” Jack, Jane, and Fred immediately snapped their attention to her, startled by this pronouncement.

  “Very good,” Anthony complimented. He looked to the others. “One of you three tell me why.”

  “Just like that!” Jack exclaimed.

  “I’ll start you off with a hint. Their power is great, yet they wasted no effort nor avoided subtlety. They made blatant use of a naturally occurring system.”

  “How?” Frederick asked.

  “First of all, which system do you think they used?” He asked, once again turning the question back on him. “If you’ve kept up in your studies, you should already be familiar with it.”

  Stacy already was. “A continental air mass.”

  “Correct again,” he said, sharing a look with her. He returned his attention to the others. “What kind?” He then added, “someone besides Stacy.”

  They were all silent as they thought it over.

  Jane bit her nails. “A dense air mass!” She blurted out excitedly.

  It was on the tip of Jack’s tongue. “One that’s also warm!” He added. “Warm and dry!”

  “Wait, that can’t be right.” Frederick frowned skeptically. “Those don’t heat up and linger in an annoying way until summer.”

  Master Anthony leaned back, gazing at him. “Exactly.” Since they were all quiet, the sound of people’s conversations in surrounding tables seemed to get louder. He looked toward the others. “It was an unnatural phenomenon. Not a variance. What’s more, it was deliberate in its timing.”

  Frederick looked confused. “Are you saying, master, that someone held this air mass in place, and even stretched it over Ryga, against any ocean wind coming from the southwest? To cause crop failures?”

  “They did more than that,” Anthony said next. “That air mass should have been pushed aside by the prevailing wind from the west, months ago. At most it should only have been able to remain for two months, not three or four. And not during spring, except in even briefer periods. This time one was held in place just long enough to cause the desired damage.”

  Talking in the Masters’ Dining Hall continued all around them while they each considered it. The smell of steak, potatoes, vegetables, and sauces wafted all around them, making her hungry. Stacy gave brief thought to what was taking Grandmaster Treyfon so long to arrive.

  “An air mass like that would be so vast that they could be out almost anywhere on the plain,” Frederick surmised.

  “Then you now understand the problem,” Master Anthony said, Stacy already had from the start and so continued to remain mostly silent while they discussed it, “and why rushing head-on to meet a foe this strong would not only be foolish but impractical.”

  “Then what do we do, master?” Jane asked.

  Anthony took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I don’t know. And unfortunately my time to deliberate on it has run out and must be allocated elsewhere.”

  “Why?”

  “Why else,” he replied. Stacy felt her ears burning, even though it wasn’t her fault.

  Jack seemed to have forgotten one of their lessons. “Then what keeps the Badlands dry?” He asked.

  Stacy decided to remind him. “A rain-shadow effect caused by the high Cremwalt Mountains.” He kept his eyes glued on hers the whole time while she went on. “Most of the rain from the ocean clouds traveling east is dumped there, and the Badlands, which rests in the shadow of the mountains, is left dry.”

  “Quite right,” Anthony commented.

  Soon after when Grandmaster Treyfon finally arrived along with Lady Cassandra, an instructor who was formerly his pupil, Stacy joined everyone else in clapping. The two Elves walked across to a table near the front where three other botanical mages were sitting. Lady Cassandra seated herself by his side, and Treyfon remained standing.

  As the clapping died down, he addressed those gathered. “Friends and acquaintances,” he began in a voice loud enough for all to hear, “today we are here to commemorate an important milestone in a series of rather lengthy negotiations with his majesty the king. A milestone of success.”

  He was applauded by his audience again, and waited until they stopped before continuing. “As you all may know already, his wrath was due in part from an attempt on his life made by a belligerent necromancer. Understandably, he was quite unhappy with this turn of events and with us. But we have convinced him,” he paused and looked across the crowd, “we have convinced him that this aggression can only be met with the help of Gadrale Keep and its academy intact, that together we are much stronger.

  “How fortunate indeed for the fiends who committed this heinous act that we should turn on each other, but no more. King Glidewell is now offering us his full support in resolving this crisis and bringing the perpetrators to justice. I was then given the privilege of assuring him,” he looked across the crowd again, making sure that he held them with each word, “that the resources we committed to hunting down our mutual enemies would be coordinated by the capable hands of Master James Anthony,”-he lifted a hand to indicate him-“our own dean of atmomancy.”

  Stacy joined the crowd in clapping once again and several cheers went up. Master Anthony reciprocated to all the show of attention he received by slowly nodding his head the slightest bit toward Treyfon. A few eyes shifted toward her with uncertainty since she sat next to him, but she did her best to ignore it. She decided that because her master didn’t mind or care that this might happen, she shouldn’t either.

  The ancient Elf lifted his wine glass, and Stacy stood along with everyone else, about to raise hers until something caught her eye. One of the waiters on the other side of the room was pushing one of the carts that held glasses and wine toward the direction of the doorway but hadn’t come halfway yet. Something inexplicable made her concentrate on him. Somehow, he was a danger to them, and she knew it, but her mind couldn’t yet tell her why.

  His clothing was not unusual; he wore the same black clothes and white apron as the others, yet he made her skin crawl. His hair was dark and swept over on one side. That too was not unusual. She couldn’t determine whether it was a bad feeling or something real that was bothering her. She only knew that it was.

  As she stared and watched his approach, she barely heard the toast that Grandmaster Treyfon was giving. Master Anthony nudged her and she lifted her glass up like the others. “…Gadrale Keep, to the health of those in it, and to our continued service to the king…”

  When the mysterious individual came closer, enough for her to look at his face, she noticed something peculiar. She knew this face. Only this time it was clean around the eyes.

  Cleaner than before.

  Her eyes widened in realization.

  “…may our fine institution prevail over any adversity,” Treyfon concluded, bringing the glass to his lips.

  “Don’t drink it!” She screamed at the top of her lungs, but was too late. He had already taken a sip.
Everyone else stopped before drinking and stared in dismay at her outburst.

  Stacy spastically tossed her glass on the table in front of her as though she were holding a snake. It landed near the vase holding the flowers and spilled out everywhere in a mess. “It’s him!” She turned and pointed at the innocent seeming waiter. “He’s General Clyde! The one we met in the forest!”

  Clyde stopped the cart and stood looking around with a guiltless and confused expression. If she didn’t know better, she might have been fooled by it as well. “What? Me?” He asked in that same voice she had heard earlier that night. “I’m just a servant. I’m not the general of anything.” He let out a few nervous laughs, and looked quite timid. She knew it was an act. “You must have me confused with someone else.” People at the tables looked back and forth between him and her.

  The Elvin grandmaster spoke. “This man has worked here for a long time…”

  “How long!”

  Treyfon’s eyes looked up while he tried to remember. “…years. He must simply bear some small resemblance. I can assure you that he’s harmless.”

  “He is a monster who slaughters children!” Stacy yelled back in contradiction, her livid lack of manners drawing gasps. “It’s him! He’s the cult leader! The drinks have all been poisoned!”

  Treyfon looked perturbed at her impropriety but said nothing. The Masters’ Dining Hall remained silent as everyone stared at her. Though they appeared to doubt her, some looked at their glasses carefully and none dared to take a drink.

  Master Anthony leaned over and whispered in her ear. “It’s just the server, Robert. Try to control yourself. You’re making a scene.”

  When Stacy turned toward him, she tried to maintain a level of deference even though her nerves were making her lose patience. Her voice came out in a loud, energetic whisper. “Master, he is not who he claims to be!” Anthony studied her eyes carefully, but said nothing.

  Treyfon lifted his voice once again for all to hear. “I drank the wine and I feel fine, maybe just a little warmer.” A few chuckles rose from the crowd.