by Sean Rodden
Far below him, the Lord of the Shaddathair dropped to one knee upon the deck of the ramshackle raft.
Rundul was not so moved.
“Took you long enough,” the Darad called upward to the Ath.
“The Athair take their time in all things, Captain,” grated the grim grey Fian. “Those who do not die place no value on time.”
Sammayal remained kneeling and silent, head lowered, eyes raised.
Atop the summit of Gaddagorth Hass, the Prince of the Neverborn looked around languidly, his pallid gaze sweeping over the swampscape of Coldmire like a cool wind, eventually swooping down and settling upon the three familiar figures beneath him.
“All things grow in value when supply is severely limited, good Marshal.” The Sun Lord’s voice carried with ease despite the distance. “And I fear the price of the time allotted us is become exorbitant.” He gestured with one hand and a subtle flavour of impatience to the kneeling form of the Shaddath. “How many days have passed, Lord Sammayal?”
The Unforgiven rose.
“Coldmire knows neither day nor night, Prince Yllufarr,” said he as he straightened to his considerable height, “not in the conventional sense. But beyond the marsh’s marches, five days have lived and died since first you breached the bones of Maal an Maolach. Your time is indeed short, dear Prince. But I do not believe it is overshort.”
The Sun Lord nodded, then sniffed once, twice.
“The morning smells of blood and rage.” His pale eyes peered southwestward. “War is begun.”
“Yes, Prince Yllufarr,” confirmed the Lord of the Shaddathair. “Battle commenced at dawn yesterday. The Folk of Defurien fought well and retain the Seven Hills. And Doomfall remains in the hands of the Daradur. But this will be a day of much death and misery, and I cannot see the morrow for the blood in my eyes.”
Eldurion stared at the Shaddath, and wrath made a storm of the aged Fian’s visage and heated his heart.
“You knew this, Moor Walker? You were aware the battle for Eryn Ruil had commenced and said naught of it?”
The grave warrior’s fingers tightened about the grip of the naked brand in his hand. But Rundul grasped his wrist, and from that supernaturally strong grip there was no wresting. Eldurion could not have better comprehended the communication in that clasp had the Stone Lord spoken the words aloud: He believes we are beneath him, Fian. For the love of hating the arrogant mudfucker, don’t prove him right. Eldurion nodded, and the Darad released him.
The Lord of the Shadowfolk ignored them both. Completely.
“And the Sun Knights of Evangael?” asked the Sun Lord.
Sammayal only shook his head. “I cannot see them, Prince Yllufarr. It is like staring into the sun in search of a single specific spark. All is lost in white fire and Light.”
Yllufarr was silent for a time, head bowed, chin to his chest. The infrasonic tintinnabulation about his being resounded in the souls of those below like the clanging chimes of doom. About his booted feet black roses bloomed.
“Coldmire is become different,” said the Prince at length. “Changed. Life and health return. Slowly, and unsurely, but they return.”
“You destroyed Ulviathon,” expounded Sammayal, waves of awe reverberating in his tone. “It was the demon’s presence that devastated Eldagreen, ravaged her, corrupted and twisted her into this dread thing called Coldmire. You have removed that poison dart from her heart. The land will heal. Slow years will pass, decades, even centuries, but the grey gurgle of Coldmire will be only a distant and unhappy echo in the ears of the Unforgiven when we at long last take our leave of this world and pass forever into the Evvanin.” The dark Lord spread his arms, his loose sleeves fluttering like funerary flags. “And for that, Prince Yllufarr, the Shaddathair of Sammayal are ever indebted to you. You have our gratitude. And, when King Gavrayel releases us from the misbegotten bond of the Marralin, our allegiance.”
And spectral legions of the Shadowfolk formed behind and to both sides of the mud-marooned raft, standing still and silent, row upon row of half-figures in the fog, seeming solid only when seen by the edge of the eye. And then, as one, the phantasmal congregation kneeled in the mist. And the Song of the Shaddathair arose from them, richer than it had been, clearer, more precise and impassioned, and the sorrow in that refrain was become a bittersweet sweven of forlorn hope.
I’aneth y’Iufarar solli engentem
Echi minar garan a Geatan Dorc Hadais –
Gerent dal Mor, Sul Athairist,
Curth an Ulv’yathon savath.
Eldurion shivered. Rundul scowled. Sammayal sang along.
And then Yllufarr emerged alone
From the Gaddagorth’s house of stone –
Prince of Death, Lord of the Sun,
And bane of baleful Ulviathon.
Yllufarr was as silent as the empty world between screams. He peered palely upon the kneeling masses of the Unforgiven, his eyes as devoid of emotion, of sentiment, as they were of colour. When he sighed, it seemed a sour and soulless sound, the broken breath of dissatisfaction, of displeasure, even scorn – as of Death disdaining the dead. But sounds like sights do deceive, and the Prince was not contemptuous of the Shadowfolk, but only of their veneration of him. Devotion, adulation, worship – such things were for gods and ivory idols and first loves, and he was none of those, nor did he possess the desire to be such. Rise, fools. I am not your King. The darkling Prince of the Neverborn closed his eyes, but could not look away from the portrait of prostrate thousands painted in pastels on the back of his lids. Some images, both coveted and otherwise, might never fade.
And then Yllufarr sensed a certain tension, a tightening of the string of reality to the point of snapping, where absence and presence are both separate and one – an irreparable instant of change.
The Sun Lord opened his eyes.
And lo!
The Shaddathair had withdrawn, like a great grey tide ebbing from a holy shore, receding back and away into the wretched wet wastes of Coldmire. But the place they had forsaken was not utterly abandoned, not nearly so, for others were assembled where the Shadowfolk had knelt in tribute and homage to the slayer of Ulviathon. Others, whose gratitude far surpassed that of the Shaddathair and their Lord, whose appreciation eclipsed even that of the sunken yet stirring soul of Eldagreen. Others, gathered there in shining power and glory beneath the brilliant black stones of Gaddagorth Hass. Others, whose very essence was Light itself.
The sundered souls of seven hundred Sul Athaifain.
Prince Yllufarr crashed to his knees. Nightsong clanged upon the stone threshold of Geatan Dorc Hadais. Silver tears welled in the Sun Lord’s widened eyes, flooding the corners, streaming silently down his cheeks like so much autumn rain on stained glass. His immortal heart ached within his breast, intent on bursting, or so it seemed, for the pain was that profound, that terribly sweet. He hugged himself tightly, rocking back and forth on his heels, great shuddering sobs wracking his entire frame. His lips moved, fought to form words but found none, and no sound did he utter save the incoherent nothings that accompany the unrivaled rapture of absolute bliss.
Seven hundred Sun Knights raised their shining spears, silken pennons streaming from steel shafts like smoky rivers of dragon’s fire. And as one they struck their gold-black breastplates with mailed fists, and the thunder of Light pealed forth from them and shook the heavens and the earth.
Yllufarr stood. He wiped the tears from his cheeks with the backs of black-gloved hands. He took a deep, bosom-shuddering breath. Nightsong floated into his fist. He hoisted the weapon high, and it crackled and blazed, a fulgent firebolt against the scarred sky.
And the Sun Lord punched his chest and cried aloud –
“Ahei! Ahei! Emla vilul Sul Athaifain! Eris! Eris n’vira silmar! Eris! En yi lath vira ethigilliar! Eris n’allaffa em nemomor!”
And the Sul Athaifain roared, and the sound was as a song of morning and mourning, of dreaming and of Light, of love and the most salient
of sorrows.
Then a single resplendent figure emerged from the immaculate lines of Athain warriors. Small and slender was she, and fiercely feminine, possessed of prodigious power and strength. Antlers fashioned of the stuff of lightning radiated from the temples of her helm, and her armour scintillated in ceaseless swirls of black and gold, like sunfire ablaze on churning black ice. Her hair was long and lustrous, and rushed in waves of ebon across her shoulders and back, and her large round eyes were glittering jewels of jet. Upon her flawless face was etched an expression that was both odd and at odds with itself, at once profoundly ebullient and surpassingly sad, and in the soft hardness of her lips was strung the strangest of smiles.
And when she spoke her voice was a lullaby of life, or the whisper of a satisfied soul slipping away from a peaceful death:
“Yllu, Yllu, emla mori fithra.”
The Sun Lord staggered forward. “Carr – ”
“Da’enn mayine mure cullah.” The Athain warrior-woman passed gracefully between two rearing rocks of the cromlech encircling the base of the hill.
Yllufarr took another stumbling step. “Carrin – ”
The woman fairly floated up the slope. “O cullagh se mi, den ensyl ain distra.”
“O Carrin – ” The Sun Lord removed one glove, extended his hand.
“Art sul mayine mori sullagh,” she sighed, coming to stand before her long-lost Lord and everlasting love.
And the two clasped hands, and gazed into one another’s eyes for the first and last time in two thousand years, and the Prince murmured past both his boundless joy and his illimitable pain, “Alli, alli, emla fithra.”
And the song was done.
And she was gone.
The Prince of the Neverborn lowered his eyes, his head, his hand. And as his cherished seven hundred faded from the world forever, the strange smile that had been the warrior woman’s now belonged solely and only to him.
Rundul of Axar stared wordlessly into the desolate absence of song. At his shoulder, Eldurion’s stone-grey eyes glistened with unshed tears. And dark Sammayal of the Shaddathair wept openly.
How long they remained so remains of no import. To some moments no measurement of time might ever apply.
Nevertheless, the inevitable eventuality –
“Come, my dear friends,” the Sun Lord beckoned, his voice rasping with emotion. “A deed long left undone is no longer so, but another task awaits us, and the way has been made clear.” Something in his pale gaze sparkled. “Come now. Ascend to me.”
Eldurion adjusted the anomalous bundle at his back and followed the Shaddath past the towering standing stones that ringed the base of Gaddagorth Hass. Rundul shrugged his massive shoulders into the straps of his ponderous pack and veritably leapt from the raft, taking the hill in grateful, exuberant bounds. Behind him, the craft of petrified wood and weed rope swiftly sank into the mud, swallowed whole, sucked down into the chill damp guts of Coldmire. The fen gurgled and belched. The Darad lengthened his stride and did not look back.
As the three assembled before him, Yllufarr sent a nod to Eldurion and another to Rundul before his cool expressionless regard fell upon the Lord of the Shaddathair.
“You were not entirely forthcoming, Lord Sammayal.”
“How so, Prince of Gith Glennin?”
“The passage of which you spoke.”
“Ah. That.” The Shaddath glibly waved one hand. “Oft is there little or nothing to distinguish between one’s miscomprehension and another’s deception.”
Yllufarr’s odd smile was as cold as the kiss of death. “Verily.”
Rundul glowered, growled. “Did the shade lie to us? I can’t see how that can be. I didn’t detect any deceit in him.”
“All souls deceive, Stone Lord,” murmured grey Eldurion.
“Lord Sammayal did not lie to us, friends,” Yllufarr expounded. “Nor was he entirely truthful. There is indeed a passage within this place, but he did not reveal that this passage is hardly one carved of earth and stone.” The chill in his gaze became absolutely arctic. “A shortspeaking that he will now explain to us.”
The Lord of the Unforgiven bowed his head. “Of course, and with pleasure, Prince Yllufarr.”
Rundul rolled the haft of his axe in his huge fists. “Wise of you, shade.”
Deaf to the Darad and blind to the Fian’s blistering glare, Sammayal gestured with one pale hand toward the ring of standing stones at the base of Geatan Dorc Hadais.
“You will find formations like this throughout Second Earth, Prince of Gith Glennin. Seventeen that the Shaddathair know of, though there are surely more. Some of these stone henges, such as this one and Doras Serrin on Carricevan, were raised and set by the Tuathroth. Others were erected by older peoples, a few so ancient that even the land forgets them. These cromlechs are markers, circles of both warding and warning, designating places of great power, where time and space and energy converge, fold, combine, stretch, creating gashes in the fabric of the universe. Within each stone circle is inevitably found a megalithic monument, a dolmen housing the hole in the worldscape, encasing the rip in existence through which things might conceivably pass. Gates, portals, call them what you will, they are places of incredibly vast power, awash with energies both light and dark, where few known laws of being apply.”
“The Fiannar are familiar with these places.” Eldurion’s breath writhed in white wisps before him. “Hora Erdine. Andal Therion on Evershear. And the Rock of Arren.”
The Shaddath cocked his head to one side and, somewhat surprisingly, paused in his narration.
“Arrenhoth is another tale for another time, scion of Defurien,” he said, his voice quiet and small, as though originating from a considerable distance. “Now it must suffice to say that though it is lost the Rock remains unmolested, and must needs be reclaimed when the war for the North is won.”
Eldurion nodded, certain in his mind that the impetuous Master of the House of Eccuron would have it no other way.
Sammayal resumed his narrative:
“These gates and portals – for apertures in the construct of space and time they truly are – permit virtually instantaneous travel over incredibly vast distances. But no two doors are alike. Some allow transport in but one direction. Some are folk specific. Others are particular to either destination or point of origin. Some are governed by a complex combination of restrictions. Doras Serrin, for example, permits Athair, and only Athair, passage strictly from the First Earth to the Second, but not the reverse – though the Tuathroth believed otherwise, and would leave their noble dead there, only to have the spirits of their honoured ones linger in anguished longing for the Light, until the hallowed house of stones became a dread and haunted place where the ghosts of thousands groaned.”
“And this place, this Way of Darkest Night, Sammayal?”
The shade – who was no longer a shade, but a towering thunderhead of dark and quiet puissance – sighed into the northern morn. He raised one hand to run his long fingers through his winter white hair, seemed to catch himself, frowned against the gesture, dropped his hand to his side.
“This… this Way is… beyond unique, Prince of Gith Glennin. I might dare to assume that you know the nature of the Gaddagorth, its power, its potential, its… peril?”
The Sun Lord nodded. Marginally.
“Then your question, good Yllufarr, concerns not so much what the Gaddagorth does, but rather what was done to it.”
The Athain Prince said nothing, waited.
The Lord of the Shadowfolk heaved a chest-shuddering sigh, almost as though physiological respiration was a process actually necessary to him.
“When the demon Ulviathon fled the Angar ban Gan Gebbernindh, it did not in sooth go far. No, it came here to Geatan Dorc Hadais, to the stone house of the Gaddagorth. For Ulviathon knew of the Gaddagorth, of its power, of its… possibilities. Even as Ulviathon’s corporeal form failed and death came wailing down, the beast devoured the Gaddagorth, consumed it, took the
Way of Darkest Night within itself, to feed on it, to usurp its power, its potential. And in doing so, Ulviathon became both the bared back and the lash. For the very nature of power, of control, demands that every slave is a master, and every master the basest of slaves.”
The Prince of the Neverborn nodded, but uttered not a word.
“There, in that half-place between life and death, fiend and portal became one – or something near enough as to be indistinguishable. Ulviathon used the Way to spirit itself away from all pursuit, to conceal itself, to hide and to heal. Nevertheless, despite its vast power the Gaddagorth could not restore the demon, but could only sustain the fiend – prolong its existence, its being, and even for this, fuel was needed. Ulviathon fed on Eldagreen, leaf and blossom, root and rill, until that paradise became a thing forever dying, hoary and wretched. And the sorrow of the Shaddathair drowned the wasteland in a lake of tears, until Coldmire crawled like a great grey worm from the bleak and blasted heart of boundless despair.”
Yllufarr shrugged a sudden chill from his bones.
“And through the Gaddagorth’s powers of transport, Ulviathion then gathered unto itself the bones of Gan Gebbernin’s dead – the skeletal remains of Men and of creatures of Shadow, mostly, for the Fiannian slain had long since been immolated in the Fires of the Fallen, and the few Daradur that had been killed at Gan Gebbernin could be claimed by no power in the universe save the Mother herself – and with these bones the demon began the appalling labour of raising the Dam of the Damned about Geatan Dorc Hadais. Thus was erected the malignant ganglion of bone upon the world that was Maol an Maalach.”
The Prince’s pale eyes gleamed. Of Men and of creatures of Shadow, mostly.
Mostly.
Sammayal had not mentioned the bones of the seven hundred slaughtered Sul Athaifain. There was no need to do so – Yllufarr had seen the bones of his fellows and followers with his own eyes – but there was also no need not to do so.
The Shaddath, in sympathy and sincere well-meaning, sought to spare the Sun Lord further pain. A generous gesture, noble even, but an unnecessary one. Indeed, such purposeful evasion of painful truth affords naught but denial and delusion, the wild-eyed mothers of froth-mouthed madness. Not very unlike the self-destructive aversion of the bereaved son who insists upon referring to his murdered father as having passed. Such feeble, febrile fantasy. Avoidance achieves only a different anguish, one that lacks all semblance of clarity, and with which come no tools, no skill set, no methodology to deal with the dreadful loss.
