by Nichelle Rae
“Stop it! You’re being disrespectful,” Meddyn said in Ancient Salynnian with soft urgency. “You have no right.”
Addredoc was about to pull away but, grateful for his embrace, I held him tighter. I was relieved when he took my hint and ignored her, holding me even closer as I cried into his red robes. He even began to pet the length of my hair, which always relaxed me. My mother used to do it whenever I couldn’t sleep.
Finally gathering myself, I pulled away from Addredoc and gave him an appreciative smile. “Thank you,” I said, then looked at the floor. “By the way,” I said in Ancient Salynnian, “Your son was not being disrespectful by comforting me.” I looked her in the eyes and saw she flushed paler than her Salynn skin already was. “My father taught me everything,” I said firmly in the common tongue. After letting those words sink in, I glanced down at my lap again. “So, you don’t believe my father was a coward?”
The three Salynns seemed to grimace slightly at the ugly word. “No,” Thrawyn answered. “Meddy and I have ever since been loyal to the White Warrior and we will carry that loyalty to our graves, even if it should send us there.”
“We were banished from Godel because that loyalty,” Meddy added, and then an unbelievable determination hardened her eyes. “They cut off our hair.”
I looked back up at them with wide eyes. Being a Salynn and losing your hair was the “Absolute Punishment,” as they called it. Salynns who lost their Sallybreath Flowers lost their magic. A magical being cannot live without the energy of that magic—it’s their life force. If a Salynn’s hair was cut off, it amounted to a slow and painful death sentence!
I didn’t know whether to jump up and hug each of them for being so loyal to my father or to burst into tears for their suffering that type of banishment. “But how did you get your Flowers and your magic back?”
“After the war,” Thrawyn said, “I’m sure you’re aware of what most people thought of your father.” I resisted the urge to roll my eyes. “Well, Meddy and I defended him from all the bad mouthing we could for more than 200 years. Thus, we got ourselves banished.” He smiled ruefully. “Meddy and I often wondered if we were the very reason the laws were passed against speaking highly of the White Warrior.” I grinned at that. “Anyway, we weren’t sure how long we were going to live and decided to travel with whatever time we had left so we could see the parts of the land we hadn’t seen since the war ended.
“It was during these travels that Meddyn became pregnant with Addredoc. We grieved that our baby would die with us before even being born.” He smiled somberly. “But it appears the Light Gods were looking after us a bit.”
I hated the Gods, all of them, of Light and Shadow. It seemed they used my father and me as pawns of sick humor and entertainment. While protecting Them, the Light Gods had made our lives a living hell. And it was because of the Shadow Gods that my father and I came into existence in the first place.
“How?”
“Well, Meddy and I were just beginning to feel sick from our magic loss when we came across two young Wizards during our travels. They were on the riverbank, recently tortured, half drowned, and barely alive when we found them. Despite our own wilting strength, we nursed them back to some state of health. When they could talk, they told us how they, too, along with many others in many other lands, had been banished from their homeland for loyalty to the White Warrior.”
I brought my trembling hand up to my mouth. Again, I found myself wondering what my father would have done. What would he have done if he had known about these people? People so loyal to him that they would allow themselves to be tortured and banished and killed!
“The two Wizards—”
“What were their names?” I asked in a breath, feeling the need to be familiar with these two unconditionally loyal Wizards.
“Isal and Fyril. Though they looked youthful, about twenty human years, they were wise, powerful and very clever. They told us that other wizards of their homeland had tortured them and cast a spell on them so their magic would slowly deteriorate until they died from its loss. Sort of the same effect of cutting a Salynn’s hair. The difference being that Wizards keep their magic, and it slowly leaks out of them, while Salynns lose their magic immediately and die slowly from weakness.”
I nodded my understanding and listened more intently than I had expected to.
“They said,” Meddyn continued, “that since they could no longer be of service to the White Warrior, we had to be.” Meddyn’s eyes filled with tears. “So, they took all their magic and allowed our Sallybreath Flowers to grow in our hair again, restoring our magic and our own life force. They passed soon afterward.”
My brows dropped. “They died?” I asked, confused. Restoring Sallybreath Flowers to a Salynn’s hair would not have taken enough power from ancient Wizards to kill them. It would kill a magic user today, for sure, but not an ancient Wizard!
Thrawyn nodded. “We didn’t understand why they died either until Addredoc was born.”
“Go on.”
“Well, before they died, they said that we would get instructions from them on what to do after our child arrived. We didn’t know what they meant. After that, we spent some time on the road to allow our hair to grow back, then used our magic to hide our race.”
My heart twisted sharply thinking about my brother and how he’d done the same—hide his race. Suddenly the pain of why I was here, in this house, became very raw, and I felt sick again. I pushed my plate of food away, rested my elbows on the table and held my head in my hands. To take my mind off Rabryn, I stared at the smooth tabletop and tried to picture again how different things would have been if my father had known about these people loyal to him. Would I have even been born? Would Hathum have been destroyed? My father was probably turning in his grave right now.
“Eventually we settled here, believing it was the last place in Casdanarus we might run into our own kin. We enlisted the help of a few Wizards over the past 3,000 years, to tamper with memories of the people here to keep them from questioning why we never aged or died.”
Meddyn picked up the story. “After Addredoc was born, and as he started to mature, we noticed something”—she searched for a word— “peculiar about him. We couldn’t exactly say what it was we were sensing, but there was something different about him.
“When he was about 600 years old, we finally came to realize why Isal and Fyril died while restoring our flowers and magic,” she gave a mischievous grin which looked odd on a Salynn face. “It was because they didn’t just restore our magic and our flowers. They both also passed on their magic gifts to Addredoc.”
My eyes went wide. I slowly turned to stare at Addredoc. He smiled, almost smugly, then turned up his palm and ignited a ball of liquid red wizard fire. I couldn’t help leaning away from him slightly, staring in awe and horror. Addredoc had the gift of two ancient wizards! Plus his own Salynn magic on top of that! Addredoc had to be the most powerful being in Casdanarus, if not the most powerful being on the face of the earth! Beldorn had only one, modern day gift of magic. Beldorn’s magic was the same diluted magic of today’s magic users, yet he was still considered incredibly powerful; one of the most powerful Wizards in Casdanarus. But Addredoc had two ancient gifts!
“You see,” Thrawyn continued, “Isal and Fyril could only pass their gifts onto Addredoc because he hadn’t been born yet. In doing so, they outsmarted the Wizards of their homeland by allowing their magic to survive through our son.”
I’d stopped listening to him two minutes ago as I stared at Addredoc, unable to look away. How could one fathom such power? Did he even realize how powerful he was?
“You have the gift of two,” I held two fingers up at him, as if he didn’t know how many two was, “two ancient Wizards?”
“Two ancient Wizards,” he replied.
“Two ancient wizards?” I asked again. Maybe if I asked enough times he’d change his answer.
“That’s right.”
I looked
at Thrawyn and Meddyn, astonished. “You have got to be kidding me,” I said, though I knew they weren’t.
Addredoc’s Salynn magic was completely irrelevant. He didn’t even need it. The Salynns of White Veilvin were the most powerful Salynns of the race, but even they were no match for a Wizard. No Salynn was a match for a Wizard today, never mind an ancient Wizard. Never mind two ancient wizards.
A Salynn’s magic is basically concentrated energy that a Salynn could use for different things to suit their purposes. A Wizard’s magic, however, went far beyond energy. Wizards could control the elements, they could control time (to an extent) and the weather, as well as energy to suit purposes bigger than a Salynn’s magic could handle—like tampering with memories. I’d never seen an Ancient Wizard in action, but if a modern-day Wizard can do all that stuff, Ancient Wizardry was something I couldn’t even fathom. Now, this Red Flowered Salynn sitting beside me, was telling me he had two, ancient gifts of Wizard magic.
I rubbed my forehead vigorously with the heels of my hands. This was too much to wrap my head around right now, so a change of subject was in order. “Okay, so what does any of this have to do with me—and you hitting your son? Please explain quickly because I really have to find my horse and get going.”
“Your horse is outside,” Addredoc said. I turned to him as the red liquid fire in his palm vanished. “He was the one who told me you were outside our house, like I knew he would.”
I stared at him for a moment. He looked so young and innocent it was hard to imagine the power he held within him. He was the most powerful being in the world, and I was looking at him!
Suddenly my mind processed what he’d just said. “Wait. My horse told you where I was?”
“Sort of,” he replied. I sat silently and waited from him to explain. Addredoc smiled. “When Isal and Fyril’s instructions came to me as promised, they told me about your horse.”
I suddenly found myself reining in my patients. “Do these ‘instructions’ from beyond the grave also have to do with your father hitting you?”
“Among a few other things.” His eyes suddenly darkened and he looked away. That meant there was bad news.
“Alright, what did these ‘instructions’ say?”
Addredoc looked at me with a soft smile. “See for yourself, White Warrior.”
He held his fingers up toward the wall behind his parents. Small, red currents of energy formed around his fingers, and then, like lightening, shot out from his hands making them jerk with the force. The small red lightening currents squirmed and wiggled as they rested on the wall, spelling out words in Ancient Salynnian.
I read them once. Then read them again. “Okay. What does all that mean?” I asked, annoyed.
Thrawyn’s brows dropped in confusion. “You can speak fluent Ancient Salynnian, but you can’t read it?”
I shot him a glare. “I can read it just fine. I just don’t understand it.”
“It’s talking about recent events that have already happened to bring you to us,” Meddyn answered.
“What?” I looked again at the glowing writing. These words were definitely scripted by two ancient Wizards. They seemed to be a meaningless riddle.
VICTORY WILL STAND OUT IN A STORM WHEN BLOOD IS SHED BY HIDDEN WHITE HANDS.
THE HONEST AND THRICE BETRAYED WILL STOP BLOOD IN THE FACE OF THE DISHONORABLE.
THROUGH THE BEAST SEEK THE WINDOW HELD SAFE BY A BLADE. VICTORY WILL LIE WITH DEFEAT NEAR AT HAND.
A KIND LIGHT WILL ILLUMINATE THE SHADOW AND THE WHITE HANDS WILL BE REVEALED. THEN SHADOW SHALL BE THE BETRAYED, THOUGH ITS POWER GROWS.
“How does this mess describe recent events?” I asked.
There was an awkward silence for a moment. Then Addredoc muttered, “I told you.” His parents nodded slowly, sadly.
“Tell me!” I cried. “I want to be told something!”
Addredoc sighed, “I told my parents that you wouldn’t understand the instructions.”
I felt kind of insulted. “Explain them, then,” I barked.
Addredoc sighed again and looked to the glowing words. “I got these instructions over 1,300 years ago. I was fooling around with my magic, trying to develop it more, when these suddenly shot out of my fingers and into view. I didn’t understand them at first and pondered over them for more than a hundred years. I grasped what they meant only after,” his shoulders slumped, “I was informed that the White Warrior would pass.” He swallowed heavily. “I came to realize that these were instructions to help us locate and save the life of his successor.”
I smirked a little. “You didn’t save my life. You just stopped Loir from raping me. He wouldn’t have killed me.”
Addredoc looked at me with a cool, even gaze. “Tonight, were you not begging the Gods to end your life?”
My expression fell.
“Were you not asking someone, anyone close enough to hear you, to kill you? Were you not willing yourself to die before I found you?”
I flushed red. “Well, yes, but…”
“Are you alive right now?”
“Yes, but…”
“Then we saved your life with kindness and a hot bath.”
I should have wanted to beat his face in, and Meddyn looked on the verge of fainting because Addredoc was talking to me like this. Oddly, I smiled despite myself. He was right, I was wrong, and he had proved that to me without a cruel tone or laughing at me like the other two had. Yes, I had a problem with admitting when I was wrong, but the way Addredoc maneuvered the point that I was wrong, without scorn or anger, made it easy to accept.
I nodded. “You’re right. You did save my life, though I didn’t want to be saved.”
Addredoc looked away, almost annoyed.
I ignored it. “Okay then, explain these instructions to me.”
“‘Victory will stand out in a storm,’” he began. “We still weren’t exactly sure what ‘victory’ was until a few moments ago, when you told my mother what your name meant.”
My brows went up in surprise. How interesting, and terrifying. These two Wizards from ancient times knew what my name was going to be before my parents even met.
“‘…will stand out in a storm,’” Addredoc went on, “meant that you would make yourself obvious in a rainstorm. You did a nice job of that, laying out those prostitutes, bullying your way through those two men in your path, approaching an innkeeper before the men you were with. Women here are not so bold, which made it hard for you to go unnoticed, even to those not looking for you.”
I nodded again, feeling a creepy, crawling feeling that someone who had lived and died over 2,000 years ago, knew these things about me. I didn’t see my actions as bold enough to make me stand out so obviously. I’d just done what I had to do, to get done what needed to be done.
“I had been waiting for you at the inn as soon as this storm began. It was an unusual storm, as you know. Never has it rained so hard for so long. I knew this was the storm that would bring you to us, so I…guided you on your travels a bit to make sure you passed through Narcatertus.”
I wasn’t sure what he meant for a moment until he cast me what seemed like a playful glance. Then I understood. My jaw dropped. “You caused the landslides to the north, didn’t you?”
Addredoc looked back at the red glowing words without answering me. “‘When blood is shed by hidden white hands,’” he said, reciting the next line of the prophecy. He looked at me and waited to see if I would make sense of it. When I stayed silent, he shook his head. “‘White hands’ stands for the White Warrior. ‘White hands’ that ‘hides’ her identity. These ‘white hands’ slammed my face into a counter ‘shedding my blood.’” My eyes went wide again and I looked at him. “It had to happen in order to prove who I thought you were. So, I was as crude as I could possibly be, knowing that the White Warrior, and a woman as bold as you, wouldn’t put up with it.”
I still could not believe this prophecy about me, thousands of years old, was so accurate. Divination wa
s a magic form I wanted nothing to do with. I doubted I would understand it anyway, even if I did want it in my life.
“‘The honest and thrice betrayed,’” he looked at me, clearly bored from explaining something he believed I should already know. “Ibalissa, Rabryn and Ortheldo,” he said, counting on his fingers and stabbing me in the heart with each name. “They betrayed you. I know they did. You don’t have to tell me anything, but just so you know, it’s in the instructions. They had to be carried out to bring the White Warrior to us.”
Why? I wanted to scream as tears filled my eyes. What makes you so bloody special that I had to suffer such betrayal to be brought here?
“‘Honest’ refers to how I accused Ortheldo of my knock on the head, but you stepped up to my father, who was counseled to look as dangerous and as intimidating as possible, and you told him it was you who’d hurt me.
“I wasn’t afraid of him.”
“It doesn’t matter. You were honest.”
I looked away.
“Which brings us to ‘will stop blood in the face of the dishonorable.’” Again, he looked at me for a moment, probably hoping he wouldn’t have to explain this one to me. When I said nothing, he sighed again and looked back at the writing. “You stopped my father from shedding the blood of my face, even though I treated you ‘dishonorably’—badly.”
I nodded, still hurt and stunned that these “instructions” spoke of Rabryn and Ortheldo’s betrayal. Their betrayal was supposed to happen to bring me to these Salynns? I didn’t know why these three beings were held in such important standing. What role could these Salynns have in my life that would make them so important that I had to feel a hurt deep enough to make me want to die?
“‘Through the beast seek the window,’” Addredoc continued. “I saw a horse stamping his hooves and snorting frantically outside my door and realized you had arrived. So, I went searching for you at every ‘window’ of the house, until I found you lying under that one.” He gestured to the window on the wall just to my right. “‘Held safe by a blade,’” he continued, “so I brought my sword, ‘saving’ you from Loir. ‘Victory’—again, referring to your name— ‘will lay with defeat near at hand.’ It’s talking about the defeat of yourself. You were trying to die, and your death would mean the defeat of all Goodness.”
