Realm-Lords, page 12
Desriel seemed puzzled by that revelation. He looked to Serath, then to Veloryn.
‘He wants his possessions to be unique,’ the steedmaster clarified. ‘One of a kind, solely his.’
Ferendir felt a small shudder pass through him. The willpower! The naked desire! To hunger for knowledge and rare collectibles so fiercely that you were willing to kill to either acquire them or increase their value. What sort of a diseased mind was capable of such wastefulness?
‘It was that knowledge,’ Hirva said, ‘that forced us to re-evaluate Ezarhad’s relative importance to what was unfolding here. Given his peculiar interests and desires, it seemed unlikely that he would press for the mountains so steadily if he did not have some object in his sights – some ultimate object of obsession.’
Ferendir studied his masters. Desriel and Serath were staring at one another now, their gazes sober and sickly all at once – horrifying revelation coupled with perfect, undesired understanding.
Hirva saw it as well. ‘What? What do you know?’
‘Clearly,’ Desriel said, ‘he knew precisely what he sought, and where to find it.’
‘Impossible,’ Serath spat. ‘Our temple has possessed the Eidolith for centuries, and we have done everything possible to eradicate knowledge of its power and purpose from all the records of the Mortal Realms.’
‘Apparently,’ Desriel said, lowering his eyes, ‘we failed.’
‘Speak,’ Hirva pressed. ‘What do you know?’
‘We know what this Ezarhad Fatesbane was after,’ Serath said bitterly.
‘Worse,’ Desriel added, ‘we know that he acquired it.’
Hirva stood tall and met both of their gazes. Ferendir felt the air in the pavilion change, as though it had grown suddenly colder. The lady regent’s transformed mood was unmistakable.
Worse, Ferendir himself felt a terrible dread stir inside him.
What are they hiding? he wondered. What could possibly be so terrible?
Desriel sighed. ‘Once, in the quiet years preceding the Ocari Dara and the Age of Chaos, there was one of our kind – an Alarith Stoneguard named Lariel – who saw his Hyshian homeland and all the Mortal Realms endangered by creeping corruption and the shadow of coming ruin. The cause, by his reckoning, excess. Be it excesses of pride or emotion or desire – usually compounded by too much power and not enough control – always, always, the world’s pain was born of excess. Knowing that weakness and excess could pave the way for the growth and dominion of Chaos in this realm and elsewhere, Lariel sought a means of combatting the plague of excess wherever he found it – a panacea to cure all the peoples of the Mortal Realms of their most destructive impulses.’
Serath took over. ‘After years of investigation and experiment, Lariel believed he had found the answer – an aelemental cosmic force that he named Kaethraxis. According to him, Kaethraxis – in its most abstract form – was the natural impulse of an environment towards destructive self-correction – chokingly dense forests purged by fire, weakening, half-eroded hillsides smoothed by avalanches or mudslides, droughts or diseases that culled the unchecked growth of populations and the rampant abuse of resources. It was the natural world’s corrective impulse made manifest – Creation deploying Destruction to save itself from ruin.’
Hirva Windstrider had barely moved since the tale began. ‘He courted apocalypse – sought to enslave catastrophe itself.’
Desriel gave a slight shrug. ‘He was convinced that harnessing Kaethraxis – actualising it, controlling it – would allow him to aid all the peoples of the Mortal Realms in abolishing their worst, most excessive impulses. And so, after years of struggling to isolate and manifest this terrible power – without success – Lariel finally attempted to give Kaethraxis form by giving it a host – to be its avatar, its high priest and its most humble acolyte. To aid him in this magical communion – a dangerous magical operation, to be sure – he enlisted a group of his most trusted teachers, peers and students.
‘Unfortunately, they underestimated the mindless, impulsive power Kaethraxis would possess once incarnated, and likewise overestimated Lariel’s own ability to harness or control it.’
Desriel paused. Breathed. It was as if the very telling of the tale freighted his heart with sorrow and shame – as though the sin of this long-ago mage called Lariel was Desriel’s own. Ferendir did not understand his master’s depth of feeling, but he could not deny the fact of it. Part of him wanted to offer solace. He knew that if his master showed any outward signs of emotion – hurt, shame, regret – no matter how subtle, then the forces moving within him must have been infinitely more powerful. Such a reality now presented itself, subtle signs that there was a storm raging inside Desriel.
Serath seemed to grow impatient. He carried on with the recollection. ‘Lariel took Kaethraxis into himself, tried to contain it, to control it. It overwhelmed all the natural and magical defences arrayed against it almost immediately. An eruption of raw, destructive power instantly consumed his friends and companions, destroying them utterly. Realising what he had done, Lariel was seized by a grief so deep, so scarring, that he was consumed by the aelemental urges of the entity he’d created, unable to reconcile his rational mind with the rash, destructive passions embodied by the creature.
‘Thus, Lariel, subsumed by Kaethraxis, became a blight upon Hysh – a looming disaster threatening all the realm with sudden, impetuous outpourings of destructive force driven by a shattered psyche – a cyclical storm that could lie dormant for years before bursting forth without warning to torment the very place it was summoned to protect and purge.’
‘But it did lie dormant for a time?’ Hirva asked. ‘It was capable of withdrawal? Of being contained?’
‘It was,’ Desriel said, ‘but as time went on, each cycle of activity and inactivity shortened. Its destructive power and propensity to roam grew larger, while its periods of hibernation grew shorter. All the good and wise of Hysh knew that if something could not be done to contain it, the whole realm might be destroyed.’
‘I cannot believe it,’ Steedmaster Veloryn broke in. ‘Such a force as you describe, and the havoc wrought by it – I’ve never heard of it, never even in passing. How can such things simply be wiped from the great record? From collective memory itself?’
It was Lady Regent Hirva who answered the question, though it had not been posed to her. ‘All things can be forgotten if they can first be concealed. All that is required is the collective will to forget.’
Ferendir felt a strange sense of shame and abomination at such a suggestion – that the Lumineth, a people dedicated to knowledge, to enlightenment, would wilfully forget or suppress any crumb of knowledge. It seemed almost blasphemous to even suggest it.
And yet… was it truly outside the realm of possibility? Could a perfect storm of fear and shame not move a people to collectively, wilfully forget that such terrible power was once within their grasp?
Desriel nodded. ‘Aye, and our ancestors certainly had that collective will, for they realised what a monster had been created by their attempts to control forces that could not be controlled. All the Lumineth of the Ten Paradises were eager to tame the blight that Lariel had become. They sent many powers against Kaethraxis to try and contain it. Soldiers, mages, scientists – all failed to stop its mad, convulsive rampages. All failed to ferret out a great weakness to exploit.’
‘All except the forebears of our temple,’ Serath added. ‘It was, in the end, a trio of Alarith Stoneguard who volunteered to track Kaethraxis to its lair, deep in the Vertiginous Mountains, to make a last-ditch attempt to either tame it or imprison it.
‘It was they who ventured through the most treacherous regions of the mountains, to the very threshold of the hidden valley where Kaethraxis slept during its dormant seasons. And there, in the monster’s lair, the Alarith attempted to become one with Kaethraxis itself – just as Lariel had. But the difference was their collective spiritual nature, as well as the forces that moved and shaped their psyches. They were already bonded, partnered – a trio of peers and comrades capable of acting as a single unit, a single entity, when necessary. Likewise, they thought to employ their knowledge of the soul of the mountain, of its patience, its understanding of slow change and cyclical growth, to pacify and restrain the destructive aelemental that Lariel had unleashed.’
‘Were they successful?’ Hirva Windstrider asked.
‘No,’ Desriel said. ‘Not entirely, at any rate. Two of the three were destroyed in the attempt. But their sacrifices laid the foundation for the third member of their party to finally break through the aelemental’s psychic defences, to find Lariel’s broken, aggrieved soul lodged in the heart of Kaethraxis like a splinter spreading an infection, and to drag it into a state of dormancy and suspended consciousness. If that last, lone Stoneguard could not truly heal Kaethraxis, she would at least put it to sleep, and keep it so until the knowledge and wisdom of the Lumineth finally caught up with our desperate need to control or destroy the beast.
‘And so the last Stoneguard of that brave trio remained in the secret vale, in what came to be known as the Kaethraxine Blight, surrendering her life and freedom to the ongoing, age-long task of using her mind, her will and her heart to keep Kaethraxis pacified in an aeons-long hibernation, from which it could not wake to wreak its havoc upon Hysh.’
‘But her sacrifice was only half of the solution,’ Hirva said pointedly. ‘Where was the promised means of controlling or destroying the creature? Is this poor, burdened Stoneguard still dwelling in the mountains, even now, her sole purpose to keep Kaethraxis sleeping and neutralised?’
‘Our temple accepted the responsibility for finding that solution,’ Serath said, seemingly insulted by Hirva’s intimation that the Alarith had somehow failed in their guardianship. ‘From the time of Kaethraxis’ imprisonment to the present, our most potent minds have sought a means of relieving that last guardian from her eternal vigilance, whether it meant controlling the creature or simply destroying it.’
‘We thought we had found the key,’ Desriel said, ‘though it had not yet been attempted. The greatest minds of our temple had fashioned – after decades of study and experimentation – a large aetherquartz gem containing the power necessary to keep Kaethraxis dormant indefinitely or to control it if it ever reawakened. Experiments were conducted with less powerful aelementals and rogue spirit constructs, but no one had as yet ventured back to the lost valley to see if the gem would work upon the being it was created to control. Whenever the time came to make the attempt, it was decided that Kaethraxis yet remained dormant and we should leave it be, for fear of rousing a force we could not contain.’
‘Because you do not know if the gem works,’ Hirva said. It was not a question.
Desriel nodded.
Serath added, ‘There is little doubt it can awaken the creature. There is considerable conjecture, however, as to whether it can control it.’
Hirva Windstrider bent over her map table, hung her head and sighed. A long, pregnant silence fell upon them as they each tried to digest what the other had divulged. Ferendir, for his part, did not know what to think. He’d had no inkling that his home temple held within it weapons or artefacts of such immense power. For that matter, he’d also had no idea that such creatures as this Kaethraxis could even exist. He knew all about the aelementals – the spirits of the land and wind and water of Hysh whose power and understanding of the inherent symmetries of creation and existence provided conceptual frameworks and spiritual guidance for his kind. He knew that, in theory, there were other spirits – even malevolent sorts – aside from the thousands of aelementals that moved and dreamed behind the material face of the realm they called home. But he had never imagined that, in all the history of the world, anyone of his kind – of any kind professing to serve light and order – could summon such an entity of pure, destructive force and try to contain it within themselves. What had this Lariel been thinking? What had made him so sure that he could control the immense powers and destructive potentiality of one of nature’s most fearsome correctives?
Then a new thought occurred to Ferendir, blooming unbidden in his mind like a poisoned flower. If such things as Kaethraxis could be – could exist – and yet remain unknown, what other terrifying destructive entities and treasures yet waited throughout the Mortal Realms for rediscovery? What if this Kaethraxis, far from being rare and unlike any other thing in existence, was actually… common?
At least, as common as such things might be without wholly revealing themselves.
More to the point, what would they now do? If they knew that this Ezarhad Fatesbane possessed the gem stolen from their temple – a gem solely intended for the awakening and controlling of this sleeping aelemental – they could safely assume that Ezarhad’s next destination was the secret valley where Kaethraxis slept.
And they would have to stop him.
‘We have the advantage,’ Hirva suddenly said, standing straight and sweeping one hand over the great map laid out before her. ‘We routed Ezarhad’s troops and we have them trapped in the hills.’
Veloryn stood straight as well, already showing signs of renewed life, clearly anticipating what her lady regent was about to suggest. ‘The Dawnriders could split into two squadrons, supported by Vanari wardens and sentinels. If we can move fast through the night and encircle the Slaaneshi while they’re still regrouping–’
‘We can smash them before they retreat to higher ground,’ Hirva finished. ‘If we can keep the host from moving and draw this Ezarhad Fatesbane out, we may yet be able to strike him down before he has the opportunity to go searching for where this Kaethraxis sleeps.’
She looked to Ferendir’s masters. ‘Does the gem have any other uses? Is it a weapon? Does it, in itself, pose a threat?’
Serath and Desriel both shook their heads.
‘No,’ Desriel said. ‘So far as either of us knows, the Eidolith’s only use is as a talisman to commune with and control Kaethraxis. Without the spirit, the gem is just a bauble. Without the gem, the spirit is wholly uncontrollable.’
Or with it, Ferendir thought mordantly. Hadn’t we established that? That no one knows if the gem actually works as it was intended to?
Hirva, meanwhile, was nodding in answer to Desriel’s assurances. ‘Good, then,’ she said. ‘That means we need only worry about the inherent ferocity and power wielded by Ezarhad and his foul servants without having to anticipate a new variable. Steedmaster Veloryn, prepare your riders and summon the Vanari. The moment night is upon us, I want your forces moving into those hills. We’ll encircle them in the night and attack before dawn.’
Steedmaster Veloryn nodded in the affirmative. ‘As you wish, lady regent.’ She moved away from the table, striding confidently towards the pavilion’s entryway. ‘I’ll report as soon as I–’
The entry flap of the tent was suddenly thrown aside. One of the two sentries posted outside entered with a new arrival in tow, one of the Alarith whose battle line Desriel, Serath and Ferendir had joined on the ridge. His normally silver-white armour was encrusted with enemy blood, mud and soot, his thin, hawkish face criss-crossed by dark smudges that Ferendir supposed were simply dirt or, perhaps, faded camouflage of some sort. Clearly, he had still been bent to some taxing – and bloody – labours, even once the battle had ended.
The Alarith swept past the sentry, marched forward and dropped to one knee a short distance from the map table, making obeisance to his lady regent.
‘Lady regent, I come with news of import,’ he said.
Hirva Windstrider rounded the table and stood beside the now-frozen Veloryn. ‘Report, seneschal.’
‘We sent troops into the hills, to trail the invaders and try to deduce their next move. The main force remains, regrouping and eager for another fight, but a smaller detachment – between one and two hundred, no more – broke from the main body and marched out of the hills and up the mountainside, north by north-east.’
‘Where is Ezarhad?’ Veloryn demanded. ‘Did he remain with the bulk of his forces?’
The Alarith seneschal slowly shook his head. He seemed suddenly puzzled, as if the steedmaster’s question was more pointed than he had expected.
‘No, steedmaster,’ he said. ‘The pretender, Ezarhad Fatesbane, is leading the splinter company. We thought he perhaps intended to seek a path by which to outflank and encircle us, and so I ordered a small squad of Stoneguard to track him. They broke off when Ezarhad and his company reached the lower slopes of the mountain. He wasn’t seeking a path towards our position – he’s going somewhere else entirely.’
‘Did you engage them?’ Hirva asked.
The Alarith shook his head more emphatically. ‘No, lady regent. We thought it best to hurry back and report. I left a small team – three Stoneguard – on their trail, leaving signs in their wake that we can follow if we wish to take up the trail again.’
