Ruin Mist Chronicles Bundle

by Robert Stanek

  The overlords hovered high above on their floating platforms, gathered in clusters. Their staffs of office, transformed into fiery whips with long sinewy tendrils, lashed out occasionally at the empty spaces between the illuminated lines and the deepening shadows. Rastín knew this without having to look back as he began to make his way forward through the lines. His youth and lineage ensured that he had only to touch a hand to the shoulder of anyone blocking his way to be allowed to pass, so in this way he made his way toward the front of his line.

  Reaching the gate platform, he stepped forward and made ready for the brief passage between this land and that of the overlords. A dense bunch of mute beasts moved before the gate, however, refusing to pass through or allow others to do so. Two guardians, one on either side of the gate, brought their weighted chains around and carved a swath through the gathered beasts. Yet this did not stop them from blocking Rastín’s passage until several other laborers moved ahead of him and went through the gate.

  Shaken by the incident but resolved to leave the dark land, Rastín stepped into the gate. Bone-chilling cold found him for an instant, and then just as suddenly he was walking through one of the colossal passageways that led through the massive fortifications surrounding the immortal city of the ageless.

  The cool, moist air in the corridor was invigorating after his long day. As he emerged from the corridor, open skies and mammoth towers greeted him. The way paths between the towers were crowded, the air paths no better as peoples and beasts of all manner abided in the city. He was excited about the prospect of speaking with his father and conferring with him about the possibility of yet another cornerstone find, and for this reason he made his way rapidly to the encampment of the people of Élvemere, his people.

  His family’s pavilion was in the farthest corner of the camp, its aging silk and cloth a reminder of a past lost to the mists of time. Looking at the tattered silk and cloth fluttering in the wind, he could not help mourning a time he had never known, for his father’s mind lived in this time.

  Alborn and Djerg, who stood guard outside the pavilion, stepped aside as he approached. He returned their gesture of respect with a kind word of greeting. “Pritish,” he told them in the language of ceremony. It was a greeting of praise and honor and the guards returned it heartily, for in this place none were slaves or masters.

  King Enáthon Túrring was lying in his once-garish bed of ruined silks and satins with many bloated pillows to keep him upright. Rastín no longer noticed the ruin of his father’s body or the serpent magi who kept his father alive, even though little flesh remained under the blankets.

  He knew the ageless maintained his father because his father kept order, and without his father there would be chaos. He did not resent the serpent magi, but he knew their duties included keeping watch and reporting back to their masters.

  “Salus, salut,” he told his father, again using the language of ceremony. It was tradition, speaking to his father’s health and honor. After kissing the living side of his father’s face he knelt and bowed his head, waiting for his father to speak.

  “Dny, my son,” the old king said, the living side of his face suddenly showing color. “Sadly, you have only just missed your mother.”

  Still kneeling, Rastín Dnyarr Túrring looked up at his father. He said nothing of the fact that his mother had gone to the blessed land many cycles ago. Instead, he smiled and said, “I should have liked to have seen her. She would have been pleased at my discoveries this day.”

  “She would have been,” his father said turning his good eye to regard his son, his dead eye continuing to stare off into the distance. Then he muttered something about food and drink.

  Rastín knew the food and drink was for him, because his father rarely ate now. He stood, poured a glass of water from a silver pitcher. He drank deeply, and then ate the leftovers from his father’s discarded meal. The food quenched a hunger in him that he had not noticed until he started eating.

  While he ate, his father spoke of the flat, open grassland beyond his pavilion and the forest that was just beyond the line of sight. Though this place existed for them only in dream now, Rastín knew it well, for it was the land of his people and his father spoke of it often. “Your mother walks to the trees. She wants to speak to the ancient ones. Will you meet her before she returns?”

  “I will, father. I will take your stallion, Windrunner. I should like to speak with the ancient ones myself.”

  “Good, good. She will be so pleased to see you, and the two of you can talk. You know my time comes, I can sense it, and so it will be you who must lead our people. Do you honor the old ways? Do you sing the praises of your kin?”

  “I do, father. I honor always those in the blessed lands. I pray for them to protect and keep me on the path.”

  “This is good, my son. You will make a fine high king. The kings of all lands will swear fealty to you, and our people will regain our rightful place.”

  “On my honor, as I live and breathe, father, I will restore our family name.” As he said this, Rastín hid a tear that came to his eye, for the truth of those words was too close to his heart. And although this great sadness was fleeting, it was enough to interrupt his second consciousness—the self he kept hidden to all save his father’s second self.

  His fingers lost their grip on his father’s arm. The lost grip broke the connection. His father uttered a stray word—a single word, no more, no less, but it was an unexpected word for those who kept watch and thought they saw and heard all.

  Rastín pretended not to hear the word. Instead, he picked up the silver pitcher and filled a cup, then helped his father drink from the cup, careful not to raise the cup too quickly as his father could only drink from one side of his mouth. He dabbed the side of his father’s face with a cloth, and then returned to the affectedly proper speech to which the magi were accustomed. “Father, I should be going soon. Do you have a message to pass along to mother?”

  “I should like to go with you, my son,” his father replied, “but as I cannot—”

  Rastín’s second self heard no more of the other self’s conversation as he continued with his account of the dig. “Seventeen unearthings is unprecedented. The whisperers say a cornerstone is at hand.”

  “Indeed,” his father said, “the final one at last then.”

  “The last, are you sure?”

  “We are elf kind, High King of Élvemere. We see it, fully formed.”

  Rastín had not meant to offend his father. “What will come of it?”

  “It will open the path to a place not seen since the Firstborn walked and dreamed. A place both outside time and within it. In this place, you could live a lifetime, return to our place, and find that millennia have passed or that no time has passed at all. From this place, the ageless will rule over all living things for all time. I can see this as clearly as I’ve ever seen—”

  Rastín interrupted, speaking quickly while the vision was at its strongest, “What will become of us? What will become of our people?”

  “The ageless,” Túrring began to say, but further words became impossible as he gurgled and gasped for breath as blood bubbled up from his lungs.

  Rastín collapsed his thoughts and became one within himself. He picked up the churn bucket from the floor and put it under his father’s chin while leaning his father forward with his other hand. While his father coughed and sputtered, he said a silent prayer to his mother. “Protect and keep us,” he whispered, imagining her waiting for them both in the blessed land.

  Chapter 3

  Outside his father’s pavilion, Rastín, son of the High King of Élvemere, received no extra comforts. He was treated with deference, but beyond this he was regarded no differently than any other of his kind. In the dark before dawn, he awoke with everyone else when the first toll sounded. He ate, readied himself for the long day, and went with the others when the second toll sounded.

  In the predawn twilight, the immortal city of the ageles
s was at its worst. Not only were the way paths and air paths overflowing with all manner of peoples and beasts, but also the great towers were alive—breathing fire, venting smoke and ash. At times, the ground beneath his feet rumbled and quaked as the towers rumbled and quaked. This brought with it the sounds of the damned, which surged forth over and over in howls and wailing.

  Rastín despised the ageless because of those sounds. Backbreaking labor was one thing, torture and damnation another. To him, the ageless were lower than the dumb beasts who worked the excavations.

  Suddenly, a stinging chain ripped apart the flesh of his shoulder, arousing him to conscious thoughts. He stared blankly at the gate guardian and quickly moved through the gate. Bitter cold and darkness followed.

  For an instant, in this place between the ancient city and the windswept plains of a distant land, Rastín found solace. In this darkness, no one or no thing could touch him. He was beyond everything and everyone. Here he lived for two heartbeats a day, reconciled his two selves, and became one with both for those instants. And in those instants, he knew all that both had seen and heard. The sting of leaving this place behind was no less than the sting of the chain, and it left emptiness within that nothing else filled.

  As he emerged from the thousand-fold gates into the dark land, he saw, a league or more distant, jagged mountains of purple stone. He marched with the others of his kind a hundred abreast toward these mountains and the dig site where he would spend the day laboring under blood-red skies—the same strange skies that had darkened the skin of his once fair people until it was a deep, lustrous silver.

  He arrived at the dig site, sweating but not tired. The forced march was oddly cleansing and renewing. In a way, it prepared him for the day’s labor. With pick and ax, he began to break the hard surface and dig. Mute beasts carried away rock and soil with ropes and carts. All the while, the overlords looked on from their floating platforms.

  Early in the day, he knew he was close to a find. This frightened him because he did not want to become one of the blessed. He did his best to work other areas of his excavation pit, but he could only delay for so long. By midday, he had dug down an additional five spans—more than half his height—in all areas of the pit save one. He was about to begin digging in this area when a cry of discovery came forth from the far side of the excavation site.

  Relieved, he heaved his pick and ax to his shoulder and raced with the others toward the caller, then worked with the others as one until a massive metallic shard was unearthed. Because this was the first discovery of the day, the regional overlord was both pleased and displeased as he stepped from his platform down the living stairs formed by the workers.

  Rastín and another formed the bottom step of the living stair, and it was here the overlord stood as he surveyed the find. Rastín dared not make a sound as he strained under the weight. He dared not look up, but he could not help the feeling of awe that swept through him.

  This was the closest he had ever been to one of the exalted. He seemed to be but a step away from the ageless gods that had subjugated his people. He could not hold back the flood of hatred that raced through him and yet felt humbled, powerless in the exalted’s presence.

  As the overlord stepped across a living carpet of Rastín’s people, Rastín breathed a sigh of relief. He turned his head to watch the overlord until the other stood before the worker who had made the find. Rastín was surprised to recognize Holsteb. He remembered that Holsteb had once been kindly toward him, so it angered him even more when the good man was forced to his knees to accept an unwelcome reward.

  Unwanted or not, the overlord touched the tip of his staff to Holsteb’s head and imparted the gift of the ageless. At the end, in the last moments as his flesh was torn and rent, Holsteb thanked and blessed the overlord and the ageless. Then lightning flashed from the heavens, and Holsteb was no more.

  Every worker and every beast in every corner of the dark land paid tribute to the blessing by crying out. Rastín wanted more than anything to stand and scream a curse against the ageless and damn them, but the overlord was close and getting closer as he walked back across the living carpet toward the platform. So instead, he cried out with a tribute, telling himself his tribute was to Holsteb and not to the blessed event.

  Rastín was still crying out when he felt the overlord’s foot on his back. For a moment he shouldered the overlord’s full weight, nearly buckling; but he ground his teeth, closed his eyes, and fought to remain steady. Instead of climbing, however, the overlord pivoted, turning to face the mass of workers as he granted reward and the liquid bread flowed freely. Under the strain, Rastín blacked out, but knew he must have succeeded in holding his own when the overlord’s platform began rising into the sky and he no longer felt as if his back would burst.

  Shouldering his pick and ax, he trudged off to find a new area in which to dig. Although there were many diggers, there were scores of open areas; he chose one of these. It took the rest of the day to excavate a pit ten spans deep and twenty spans across.

  By evenfall, Rastín was spent. He made his way very slowly to the thousand-fold gates. His position among the old and infirm must have seemed an invitation to the night criers, for they howled in the shadows not far off. A part of him would have welcomed the end they would bring. Death in this way would cheat the ageless, because it would bring no glory to them or anyone else.

  The fiery tendrils of an overlord’s whip lapping at the darkness just behind him stirred Rastín into a run. He pulled the old one to his right along with him, urging others to run as well. For a moment, as he turned his head back, he could see many pairs of glowing red eyes staring at him from the darkness.

  Reaching the gate platform, he pushed the others ahead of him. Because the old one could barely put one foot in front of the other, Rastín led him to the gate. The two guardians, who stood one to either side of the gate, brought their weighted chains around as if to strike him for trying to enter the gate two abreast, but apparently thought better of it and stopped midstrike.

  As Rastín stepped into the gate’s magical field and the bone-chilling cold, he glimpsed his father’s face—not the ruined face of the present, but the noble face from a past Rastín had never known. Emerging into the colossal passageway that led through the fortifications into the city, his thoughts turned inward. This day the dearth of discoveries was as remarkable as the abundance the previous day.

  He was slow to realize, as he made his way to the central laborers’ encampment, that none of his kind were in the corridor with him. Instead, he was in a corridor filled with the mute beasts who carried and pulled things and did the other heavy work in the excavations. Before this day he had not realized his kind and their kind were separated in some way on the return, but now it was not only readily apparent, it was unpleasant and unnerving.

  Entering the vast city with its great stone edifices, he did not find the familiar path to the central camp. Instead, he stood before an endless span of twisted serpentine towers; directly in front of him was a sloping passageway with arches on both sides that looked like it would take him under the towers.

  Faced with the unknown and a break from his routine, he felt suddenly afraid and alone. He tried to go back into the corridor and return to the gate platform, but the moving mass of beasts prevented this. Soon he found he was being ushered forward toward the passageway beneath the towers.

  Although confused, he did not allow panic to set in. Cycles earlier when he was taken to his first dig, in what was already without question the most terrifying experience of his young life, he had been slow to the gates and had come face to face with a pack of night criers. The fact that he survived the encounter led many to believe the ageless smiled upon him and that he walked within their grace. But it was his father’s council on the previous day that had saved him.

  Túrring had told him, “No matter what you encounter in the dark land, you must find calm and resolve not to show anguish, sorrow, or fear. If you show an
y of these weak emotions, our enemies, even those amongst our own people, will use those weaknesses against you and you will live forever after in fear.”

  “I will make you proud, father,” Rastín promised. “I will not show weakness.”

  His father finished, saying, “You will be allowed to cry later beyond the hearing of others if need be.”

  And indeed he had cried later, sobbing long into the night though he was weary to his bones from the day’s labors.

  So now, as then, he closed his eyes and waited. Seeking to find inner calm, he breathed in deeply and exhaled slowly. He opened his eyes only after a ten count of heartbeats, finding clarity and strength instead of confusion and fear.

  He stepped forward unafraid and started through the passageway, because it seemed the only way to go; but one of the she-beasts in the moving mass stepped around him and blocked his way. Although she could not speak, her eyes told him that she meant him no harm. For his part, his eyes told her that he had no ill intensions toward her, and his lack of fear seemed to calm her.

  The calm was fleeting. Suddenly she was upon him, grabbing him and dragging him into a dark recess where a large drainage pipe emptied sewage from the towers above into a narrow maw. He started to speak, to question her as he would have one of his kind, but stopped when she looked puzzled. When he started to speak again, she rushed a mud-covered hand to his mouth. The hand, though clawed and thick with fur, had five digits. One of these was like a thumb in that it was shorter and thicker than the other digits and adapted for grasping, yet it did not seem as dexterous as his own thumb.

  Forcibly, she stripped him of his thick shirt and began covering him with the sewage-laden mud. He tried to resist, but the she-beast was surprisingly strong. Later he emerged from the dark recess only when she allowed him to. Covered in mud and muck from head to heel, he appeared as any other mud-covered creature, moving through the passageway.