TenThousandBrokenDreams/Session25

Mother Cypress speaks:

“Ah, children, children! Come closer, come closer, let me tell you a tale! And what tale shall I tell today? Would you hear of the Ghost Princes of the City of the Scarlet Well, betrayed unto death by their wicked stepmother, and of how they fought one another for the right to be reborn and avenge themselves upon their slayer? Or would you hear more of the tale of the Sun’s bright children, and of the turning of the Age?

“Well then… gather round, my children, and spread ears like elephants; that I may tell you more of the tale of the children of the Sun, and of their departure from the dead city of Kaihan.”

* * * * *

As the red-fingered dawn clambered out of the abyss of night, our heroes strode out of the shadowland and into the light of the living world. Within minutes, they entered the town of Greenline, with its quaint farms and houses wrapped in ivy, its shrines to little gods, its oaks rustling in the cool wind with their last few red and orange leaves. The rich scent of freshly baked bread spread from open doors and rose from chimneys.

Our heroes spent the morning in town. They returned their coats of ivy to the Matrons of the town, who reimbursed them with ill grace. They warmed themselves in the town’s one cozy inn, banishing the chill air of autumn with steaming porridge, hot buttered bread and mulled wine. And by noon, they’d reclaimed their horses from the innkeeper and started on the road west and south, leading first to Idris and then to the city of Tul Tuin.

They walked on through the afternoon, leading the horses along a dirt road rutted with wagon tracks. The long walk in the sun prompted them to sweat despite the chill winds that presaged the coming winter. Zera looked over his shoulder at the others. “So,” he asked, “what do we plan to do when we get to Tul Tuin, exactly?”

Li swept a lock of hair away from her tattooed face. “That is an excellent question, Zera Thisse.”

They spoke for some time as they walked. How would they deal with the demon queen Amalion, they wondered? What of the Tal family, whose demonological experiments had brought one demon prince into the world, and would have brought another had the Exalted not been present to prevent it? Did they have the power to call forth more such demons? How would they conduct themselves once they entered the manse that was Amalion? Would Aekino and Thorwald be endangered by the role played by their former incarnations in dissolving the marriage of Five Moons (Fetek’s former incarnation) and Amalion in the First Age? How would they counter Amalion’s power to bewitch one forever with a smile?

“If one has another whom one loves,” observed Aekino, “bewitchment is more difficult.”

Zera glowered. The memory of Cessair’s face drifted before his mind’s eye, obscuring the crisp afternoon sunlight. “Not so.”

“I stand corrected.”

They walked on among potholes and weeds. Wooded hills loomed to their left; the shadowland receded greyly to their right. Some ways ahead, the forest drew a green line across their path.

“I am curious to meet her,” said Fetek.

Aekino eyed the Lunar, seeking the truth behind the youth’s impassive façade. “You are afraid,” he replied.

“Perhaps.”

“You have not met her,” said the Twilight with a small smile. “That was another. Now who is living in the past?”

Fetek shrugged. “We are the sum of our memories, living or dead.”

“Well,” observed Zera snidely, “there is an old saying: ‘Curiosity killed the stag-horned Lunar.’”

“Indeed. I need only consider the Iron Wolf running naked through the street to recall it.”

They moved on to specific plans, of visiting Brinlack once more, of traveling slyly into Tul Tuin to take the priest Gray Mantle as their captive. Thorwald grew bored of all this talk. He mounted his horse and rode west along the road, towards the trees that loomed starkly amid their westering shadows. His impatience rode him fiercely, and he gave that ferocity rein of his own mount, pressing it harder, driving it faster than a horse ought to go.

Keen-eyed Zera observed this. Unwilling to let his comrade ride off alone, he mounted up in turn and set his steed galloping after. Being smaller and lighter, he could drive his own horse faster than the massive Northerner, and he caught up before the edge of the wood. “What are you doing?” he cried into the wind.

Thorwald looked over his shoulder. “What are you doing?”

“You’re killing that animal!”

“Then I will kill it. And then I will walk.”

“What did it do to you?” demanded Zera. Drawing up alongside of Thorwald, he made a grab for the reins, but the Northman thrust his hand aside.

“Do that again,” Thorwald snarled, “and I’ll kill you.”

“Listen to yourself!” Zera tried to catch his comrade’s eye, but failed. “Give me the reins!”

Thorwald stubbornly refused to speak further, and pressed his horse even harder. Sighing, Zera dropped back to rejoin the others. “Another black mood has fallen upon our brother,” he told them. “He said he’d kill me if I touched his reins. I’d rather let him drive that horse into the ground than have us draw steel against each other.”

Li turned her head to watch sunset colors gather in the west. “I think there is something wrong with us.”

“I think you’re right.”

So the Solars asked Fetek, the shapeshifter, to follow Thorwald and keep him from harm. Well, except for Aekino, whose first instinct was to have Fetek fetch Thorwald back; but the others knew better than to try and bring their comrade to heel like an errant schoolboy. Acquiescing, Fetek took the form of an eagle and winged off to the west.

As full night fell, Thorwald abandoned both road and horse; the road seemed too indirect a route for his taste, and riding his foundering steed among darkened trees would be too slow. Now in the form of an owl, Fetek followed him through the dark.

Thorwald crunched through fallen leaves. His mind tumbling with thoughts of violence and glory, he paid little attention to his environment. But Fetek, as he wafted through the dark, heard the croak of raitons; he saw another figure following the Northman, a slim, dark shape bounding amidst the branches. Forty-Four Devil Blossoms!

Fetek dove at the deathknight. At the last moment, he took on his battle-form, half stag and half man, to knock his foe to the ground; but she dodged nimbly out of the way, and as he fell past, she launched an arrow that shone with cold blue light that pierced Fetek’s side and chilled him to the bone.

Even Thorwald couldn’t miss this! He stopped, turned, and laughed at the prospect of battle. He charged! As Fetek started shredding the raitons that dove at him, Thorwald leapt up to chop off the branch that his foe stood upon; but she danced back onto the stump of the tree limb, and cut him for good measure on his way back down. And as he landed, one of the walking dead stepped out from behind the tree and stabbed at him with a spear!

The battle blazed fast and furious. Though they inflicted a few more small wounds, the ambushers found themselves driven back by Fetek’s strength and Thorwald’s burning Solar light. Fetek tore a hole in Forty-Four Devil Blossoms’ soulsteel breastplate, and she fled into the trees. Thorwald gleefully hacked down the walking dead; the malevolent essence of the ghost Zerus poured cackling from its mouth and followed the deathknight into the dark.

Surrounded by a blazing bonfire of golden light, Thorwald began to track the deathknight by following the rot that her banner of black flames left among the boughs. Fetek accompanied him. The rest of the Circle arrived after an hour or so, drawn by the slowly fading beacon of Thorwald’s anima.

“What’s happened?” demanded Zera of his hard-eyed Zenith companion.

“If you are truly my sworn brothers,” came the reply, “you will not try to stop me.”

Aekino gawked at the shadows carved into the forest night by Thorwald’s anima. He tried to follow the Northman’s gaze into the forest canopy. “What are you doing?”

Thorwald said nothing, so Fetek replied for him: “Forty-Four Devil Blossoms attacked us.”

“Following her trail, eh?” Zera soothed his horse as he led it in Thorwald’s wake. His wood-wise eyes caught the same marks that his comrade pursued, and he caught the same rough scent of rot. “It’s already getting thinner,” he said. “We’re not going to be able to track her for long. We’ll be off course, and we still won’t have Devil Blossoms.”

Thorwald grunted. “I will track her as long as chance exists.”

“Chance doesn’t really exist.”

“There is a chance!” snarled Thorwald.

“She’s a gnat, big brother,” Zera replied. “Furthermore, she is a cowardly gnat.” Slyly, he added, “There is greater danger in Tul Tuin.”

Thorwald finally halted; the trail was so faint that he could scarcely follow it, even with his anima blazing bright. He ground his teeth. “I shit on Creation and the whore that calved your master!” he screamed into the night, that his words might reach the ears of Forty-Four Devil Blossoms. “Come out and fight! Your luck will run out, demon – I need only get my hands on you but once! Then I shall find your master, chain him to my horse, and drag him through the whole of Creation forever!”

No reply came; only the mocking cry of a raiton. So Thorwald and Zera went back to the road, over an hour distant, to retrieve their horses, with the hope that Forty-Four Devil Blossoms might seek to ambush them. The others shadowed them, that they might surprise the deathknight in her ambush; but she was too crafty, and did not show herself that night. They pressed on through the dark.

Even come the dawn, Thorwald would not rest. He would march on until he reached Brinlack, he said, where they might gather an army and storm Tul Tuin. Zera recognized that his comrade had come unhinged, as he had before in their travels; and so he led the Circle in a circuitous route, leading them this way or that to the most inconvenient crossing-point of rivers and gorges, guiding them into twisting caves and ravines, misdirecting them in the night when the woodland canopy concealed the stars, in the hopes that his companion’s madness would ebb ere they arrived among civilized folk. For what harm might the Northman do in his madness?

As they traveled, they encountered wolves and panthers, bandits and wild men, but all slunk away before their wrath. A maddened grizzly bear succumbed to Thorwald’s insensate strength, crushed by his mighty arms as he squeezed out life and blood and breath. But on the fourth day, real opposition presented itself: a score of hobgoblins! Clad in raw and bloody gossamer, these oak-jawed, jet-tusked creatures howled as they rattled sabers of brass and bone. Spears and arrows rained down from their ambuscade upon the five heroes, followed by a tide of goblin flesh.

Foolish creatures! Twenty against five were no good odds against the Celestial Exalted. Li danced along tree limbs to drop into their midst, the great blade Burning Tiger howling its bloodsong in the fires of her anima. Thorwald and Fetek drove forward upon the flanks, while Zera fired arrows of golden light into the pack. And as shocked and bleeding hobgoblins sought to flee, there stood Aekino with his black jade staff to crack their skulls and lay their corpses upon the earth.

But three hobgoblins had fled at the first touch of Li’s anima. Pierced to the core by the stabbing rays of golden light, they ran before Aekino could move to stop them, and vanished into the trees. But Thorwald would let no enemy escape alive! In the depths of battle-madness, he leapt heedlessly after the runaway Fair Folk. His fellows took up the reins of the surviving horses. The chase began.

Hours passed. The sun rode into the west, pursued by dark-cloaked stars astride chill winds. As the sun touched the horizon, our heroes burst into a broad clearing amidst the woods, marked by a lone hill at its center. The fleeing hobgoblins reached the hill, where they passed through a momentary opening limned with firelight. They vanished then, leaving neither mark nor trace of their passage.

Thorwald advanced upon the hill as if he would level it with a stare. Worn with fatigue, his comrades followed. Aekino sat slumped in his horse’s saddle, led by Li; Fetek slumbered in mouse-shape within Zera’s pocket. Zera left the horses with Li and followed Thorwald up the hillside.

They probed the barren slope as the sun sank in a blaze of color. Then they spotted it – there! – the faint but indisputable outline of a stone door, cunningly concealed amidst the native rock. Thorwald pounded upon it.

A voice echoed through the stone: “Go away!”

“Come out, you Fair Folk abomination!” Thorwald’s face distorted with rage. Orange light burst around his hands, and he began to smash his fists upon the stone. Frightened squeals came from behind the stone as he pounded upon it with loud, juddering thuds. Puffs of dust arose; the stone door cracked, and cracked again. It sank in an inch, and then another. Then it fell inward with a crunch, revealing a torch-lit stair. With a ringing noise, the bronze bar that had secured the door fell away in two halves and clattered down the stair.

And as the sunset failed, so too did the madness of Thorwald of Stonehold. He stepped back from the broken door and slumped beneath the weight of fatigue. Shaking his head in confusion at the past four days of outrage, he allowed Zera to lead him back to the others.

“Let’s make camp,” said Zera as he leaned Thorwald against a low boulder.

“What if they come out?” Li asked.

“They won’t. Would you?”

The night thickened, chilled. A few late crickets chirped. Thorwald leaned back against cool, damp stone. “That was foolish of me,” he said at last. “I should not have touched that door bare-handed.”

“You’ve been foolish for days,” replied Zera kindly. “Don’t continue to do so. Li and I will take first watch.”

Thorwald nodded, once, and slept. Zera built up a small fire, and as they sat by its warmth, Zera regaled Li with a tale of his journey into the South, and of how he and his companions of that time did battle with hobgoblins. After midnight, they left the watch to Fetek and Aekino; the former circled as an owl as the latter watched the stars for portents. Their vigil was disturbed by the faint sounds of drum and pipe from within the hill; and later, by the grinding shut of the stone portal, and the clatter and thud of hammers as those dwelling within the hill sealed the door against further intrusion.

The next morning proved to be much more relaxed. Our heroes lazed about their campsite as they breakfasted on rabbit stew with stale bread dumplings. They all agreed that there was no further cause for a forced march. “We’ll go to Brinlack,” said Zera. “We’ll spend a day of rest with Stone Rain, and then we’ll decide what to do next. There’s been too much rushing lately. There will be no haste, and no mistakes.”

Aekino blew on his steaming spoon. “You speak wisdom,” he replied. “And from what I’ve seen in the stars, the slow path is the only one that leads to success.”

“Is that what you were doing, looking at the stars?” Zera grinned. “I thought you were just a little loopy.”

“We can learn much from the stars. Though it is difficult of late; Heaven itself is in disarray.”

“Well, then maybe we can score some bonus points with Heaven by cleaning up on earth.”

They broke camp. Before they left, Thorwald walked alone to the faerie hill. He leaned up against the stone doors and whispered, “I know where you live now.” Then they left.

Progressing west and south, they led their horses out of the hills. The woods parted to reveal the farming villages along the River of Willows. In the afternoon they came to a fishing village over a day’s travel from Tul Tuin. An old man sunned himself upon the dock; on the river, a few small boats drifted with the current or rowed laboriously against it, though most simply bobbed at anchor as they seined the water for eels, sturgeon, bream and trout.

“If we buy a boat,” said Zera, “we can cross here and travel on to Brinlack.”

“We have little money,” Li noted.

Fetek smirked. “We can always sell them a ‘horse,’” he suggested, pointing to himself. He’d taken on the form of a horse enough times in their recent travels to make his point perfectly clear.

“No,” Zera replied sharply. “These are poor folk. We won’t scam them.”

As they approached the sleepy village, the old man on the pier jumped up in alarm and ducked into a house. It slammed, followed by the wooden clack of the man barring the door.

“What is wrong with that man?” wondered Thorwald.

“Look at us,” Li of Orchid replied, pointing to their numerous weapons, their ragged garb. “We look like bandits. It is no wonder that these people fear for their lives.”

“Bah! They have nothing to fear!” The Northman walked up to the house and pounded on the door. “Old man! We wish to purchase your boat!”

A muffled yelp came from inside. “Please, don’t hurt me!”

“I just want to talk to you!” shouted the exasperated Zenith. “Now open the damn door before I smash it in!”

When the old man poked his wan face out, Thorwald explained that he and his companions desired a boat. The old man fearfully replied that all of the boats were on the river. Thorwald offered to chop firewood in exchange for a boat trip; fully expecting death at the hands of these ‘bandits’ if he failed to comply, hurriedly agreed, closed and barred the door once more, and hid underneath his bed.

At sunset, the fisherfolk brought their boats back to the village and began to unload their scaly catch. A hard, wiry woman in late middle age led them to confront the strangers. Thorwald stepped forward again, and explained quite firmly that he had made a deal with her husband, that he had chopped down three trees and piled up the wood, and that the villagers owed him passage to Tul Tuin.

“We cannot do that,” the woman said, mastering her fear. “It is too risky to go down to the city, now that the demons have come. And in any case, it would take days to bring you there and then bring our boats back against the current. We would lose our catch.”

“What of it?” Thorwald was incensed. “We had a bargain. What, should I pay you more?”

“You could not pay me enough to go to Tul Tuin.”

Thorwald grimaced and clenched his fists in inarticulate anger. The woman, perhaps fearing for her life, stepped back a pace. Fetek and Zera advanced on their companion. “Pillar of the Sun,” said Fetek, “this is unseemly.”

Zera nodded. “Just leave them alone,” he said, laying a hand on Thorwald’s shoulder. “We won’t make them starve.”

The Northman shrugged off the hand. He yanked a hatchet from his belt and waved it before him; the woman took another step back, as did her fellow fisherfolk. “I will give you this hatchet!” he roared. “Look at its fine workmanship! It was forged in the North. You will not see another like it in these lands. Just bring us to Tul Tuin.”

The woman shook her head. Grim-faced, their catch forgotten, the fisherfolk at her side gripped oars and gaffs with white knuckles. “The opposite bank is as far as I will go.”

Zera stepped in front of his brawny companion. He spread his hands peaceably. “That will be fine.”

The archer of Thorns apologized profusely to the fisherfolk. Fetek slipped away and, as the others led their horses onto small boats reeking of fish guts, he took owl form and glided silently across the river. He waited there as Zera thanked the fishers again and gave them the very last of his coin. He rejoined them as they started on the southern trail, winding along the base of the low cliffs along the river’s west bank.

As they continued on beneath fleeting clouds in a starry sky, Zera approached Thorwald. The larger man grunted. “What do you want?”

“What was that about?” It was Zera’s turn to be incensed. “What you did back there bordered on bullying.”

The Northman shrugged. “We were just haggling.”

“They thought we were dangerous bandits. She thought she was lucky to escape with her life.”

“That’s not how things work in the North. These people are weak, to scare so easily.”

Zera sighed. “For them to spend two or three days to make our travel a little easier, would make it harder for their whole village.”

“Well, her husband should have thought of that before he made a deal!”

The archer rolled his eyes. “You have an answer for everything.”

Within two days, our heroes had passed the tumbled walls of Brinlack and settled into the suites provided them by the mayor Stone Rain. Thorwald quickly disappeared to spend time with his woman, while Li of Orchid found an isolated pagoda, once a temple to the god named Fading Fire, where she could practice her swordplay and write of her meditations on the Way of the Sword and the Nine-Fold Path.

Aekino went into the Brinlack Manse, whose walls of living wood had shed their last yellow leaves. The guards knew him and let him pass. He settled into the mayor’s office, behind the desk, and propped his feet thereon.

“My lord,” said Stone Rain, “how may I serve you?”

Aekino smiled serenely. This, he thought, was more like it.

As the mayor stood there, Aekino asked him many questions regarding the military strength of Brinlack, the status of Tul Tuin, the fate of Ledaal Vir, and of the military forces of Longcorner. The answers were not entirely pleasing. Brinlack had only a few hundred guardsmen and full-time militia, and though every mortal within its crumbling old walls could fight, they were not trained soldiers. Tul Tuin had fallen wholly to the demons; the Vir mon flew no more over the Tower of Winds, replaced by that of the Darien family. Vir’s own fate was not known; rumors said that he had died defending the Tower, or that he had been captured by the demons for some lingering fate, or that he had led his surviving forces to the Monastery of the Red Butterfly, where they prepared a counterstrike that would retake the city. And while Longcorner’s armies had not yet marched, slaving parties from that city had come as close as a day’s walk from Tul Tuin.

Recalling that Ledaal Vir bore the Hearthstone from the Brinlack Manse, the Dynast went to the central chamber of the Manse to see what he might learn about the prince’s fate. No new Hearthstone grew upon the pedestal of living wood. An attempt to attune to the Manse met with failure. Aekino smiled. Perhaps Vir lived yet.

The last of the circle, Zera Thisse and Fetek Breath-of-Midnight, crossed the river that night. The deaf old ferryman left them well south of the city; they watched him paddle slowly off into the dark, struggling on in the face of the current. Then they stalked toward the city gates, that they might enter Tul Tuin in secret and spy on its new masters.

Zera Thisse slipped through the gate like a shadow, and the guards took no notice of his passing. And who would suspect Fetek Breath-of-Midnight in his many forms, as one dog or rat skulking among many in this ruin of a city?

They moved through alleys and across rooftops, past the light and blare of taverns crowded with the city’s riff-raff, skirting rubble-choked doorways where squatters peered beetle-like from doorways, avoiding the avenues where prostitutes and hawkers of looted goods still hawked their wares in the dim glow of torches and stars.

None saw them as they entered the counting-house temple where Gray Mantle had sermonized before his congregation. Rats roved amidst puddles; water dripped upon sodden sunburst banners reeking of mold. It seemed that Gray Mantle had not returned since his altercation with Fetek some weeks earlier.

They turned away with that place. A fine rain drizzled down from thickening clouds. Their meandering route led them to the dock district, where burned-out warehouses lay crumpled and black. Zera recalled the place where the woman Nala had first introduced him and Thorwald to Gray Mantle. So he led Fetek there, to where a low stair led to a basement, a row of doors to wretched little apartments. But something was different; flowers lay strewn at the top of the stair, colored by the dull blaze of candles in paper lanterns.

Fetek curled his nose in a mixture of wonderment and disdain. “They are worshipping her.”

“Or the place where she met us,” replied Zera.

They went down into the basement. Flowers lay scattered here as well, crushed beneath passing feet. At the end of the short hall, light gleamed from beneath Nala’s door. Zera drew a dead man’s visage over his own, lest he be recognized. He tried the door. It was not locked.

The room looked much the same as before: a wooden chest, a straw pallet, a chair. A muffled figure knelt before a candlelit shrine. The shrine bore the sign of the Sun, flanked with lesser signs of the Moon and the demon queen Amalion. The woman wore black robes embroidered with a sunburst in green and gold. Her eyes were pale, her dark hair thick with gray. This was Nala.

After a few moments, she glanced up from her devotions. Her eyes widened at the sight of two strangers in her chamber, but she showed no fear. “Welcome. Can I help you?”

“Yes,” said Zera in a dead man’s voice. “We are looking for Gray Mantle.”

“Oh, you mean you are looking for Morning’s Promise?” she replied, naming the new name that Gray Mantle had taken as a priest of the demon queen. “Why do you seek him?”

“We are agents of those you serve.”

She shook her head. “He is being punished,” she observed sadly. “He broke his vows; he acted cruelly and in haste.”

“Does he live?”

“Yes. I hope that he learns from his punishment, and comes back to us.”

Zera nodded impatiently. “Our masters seek him. So we have to find him; to do otherwise would be more than our hides are worth.”

“Then I had best take you to him,” she replied. Her old bones still obeyed her; she rose to her feet and took up an ordinary-looking walking stick.

“Remember, Nala, this is a matter of utmost secrecy,” hissed Zera into her ear as she closed the door behind her and stepped out into the basement hall. “It is not for us to question them.”

Nonplussed, the aging priestess led them out into the drizzle. Her walking stick clacked upon the damp cobbles. “It is so sad,” she said eventually, “that Morning’s Promise came to where he did.” Faintly, the lightning flickered overhead. “He was never meant for this. The promise of power overcame him. He became cruel. He found joy in the punishment of heresy, when we should find joy in redemption.” Clack, clack went her stick as they walked up the street, turning a corner toward the high city where black demon towers glistened. “It is so sad.”

The wind and the rain rose in sheets, then died down again, until it merely drizzled upon trickles and puddles when the avenue they climbed opened into Tul Tuin’s high bazaar. A few guards roved among the dripping, empty stalls, or poked at gaping doorways with their spears. There, in an open space amid the wrack of the market, a cage of bronze hung from a gibbet. It swayed there, creaking, as a lightning flash revealed the hunched shape inside, leaning its head back to drink the rainwater as it fell.

“Morning’s Promise,” said Nala kindly. “You have guests.”