Kevin's Watch

Well, I've started writing again, after a hiatus one year long. My mind is bubbling with ideas, and I thought I would share the first story with you. At the moment, it's a short story, not a novel, although I can't predict how long it will become - and it is the first draft, so it might use some polishing, especially given the fact that english is not my native language. Still, I'm glad to contribute to the Hall of Gifts with this little thing of mine.
Oh, I've borrowed the idea of creating two threads - this one for the story, and another for the comments, so if you wish to read the whole story once it's finished, you won't have to sift through the comments

Here is the comments thread:
kevinswatch.ihugny.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=9185

I hope you'll enjoy it!

Silent Guardians
From ancient graves
Stone and earth
With raised staves;

And a notched blade
To call to blood
Red on black
Life’s true flood.

Three times three days
To seek for lore
Wisdom and secrets
Of old times of yore.

And a bone white throne
For Death’s visage,
Mettle of spirit
Trial of lineage.

Mark the anointed
Stains in a Stone of Fate;
Awakened, aware,
Eyes that once beheld the Gate.

-Antin Agulf Chenirem, The Crowning of the Emperor


There is peace, in death, when the chains of the world fall away, and the true splendour of the cosmos is revealed in all its glory and extension; when blind eyes see for the first time, beyond the illusions of life and reality, a gaze that looks into the kingdom of the gods, and sees what it was denied for so long – the secrets and the serenity that lay behind the gates of Death. Yet sometimes, the lure of the world of the living is too strong, and too much remains to be done for the spirit to move on to the afterlife, even though Death herself would lead it there; and sometimes, duty and age prevent a soul from following Death to her timeless realm.
Such is the fate of the Akun-hem, the Silent Keepers; few are those who are chosen for this great sacrifice, those whose spirit and whose mettle are strong enough to withstand the duty; for the duty of an Akun-him is eternal, until the Twin Worlds are dust in the void of time, and Time itself comes to an end, leaving behind only dreams and memories, and the echoes of a last battle, of the last breath of the Twin Worlds, and the fading light of a glory that endured the Ages, though diminished by suffering and tempered by pain.
For the Akun-hem watch over the ancient graves of the Emperors of Mathklyr; the marble mausoleums, carved into the very living rock of the canyon that bards call the Hand of Destiny, and the people of Mathklyr simply the Necropolis, the final resting places of those whose courage was strong enough to accept the challenge of the Crowning, those whose willpower, strength, and intelligence allowed the Empire to survive, and prosper, for uncounted centuries, while all others crumbled and fell into dust. Within those sepulchres, the elder Emperors rest undisturbed, but it is said that while their spirits sleep, their minds wander the Empire that once was theirs, and they grow in wisdom and stature, as the years slowly pass by, moulding them into legends.

ALRIC

I was not among those blessed souls – charged with the protection of the sleeping Emperors. No, my story is that of a simple man, son of a bookbinder, born in the city of Alduen, on the shores of the river Hegard. My name was Alric Ingeist, for I was born a member of the artisan class, and was not important enough to warrant a third name; but early in my youth, I decided that my father’s life would not be suitable for me – I wished to see more, to experience more, and to rise the ladder of castes as few had done before me.

Childish dreams, perhaps, but they survived into maturity, until the time came for me to decide what to do of my life; on my nineteenth naming day, during the ceremony that would mark my entrance into adulthood, the priests of Oinrin-Laurel came to me, as they did with all young men and women who were joining me for the celebration, and asked me what my fate would be – that it might be written in the Book kept in their temple, under the great statue of Oinrin-Laurel herself, blessed by the goddess of fate and destiny. It was said that the goddess would smile upon those whose fate was written in the Book, and would grant them their heart’s desire; that she rewarded the humble, and punished the arrogant, for she was one aspect of the great goddess Oinrin, who, in her natural guise, was the goddess of sovereignty, and the chief deity among the Kerrethain of Mathklyr. In front of her, even Emperors would bow; and it was said, indeed, that all Emperors meet the Lady Oinrin and receive both Imperial authority and long life from her hands.

The priests of Oinrin-Laurel came to me, and asked me what my fate would be. I had given long thought and consideration to the matter, as all my companions had, for our choice would also serve to declare us adults or children in the Empire’s eyes. Stories were told of those who had claimed a fate too high for themselves, and had been denied the ceremony of adulthood until such a time as they had understood the reality of the world, and chosen a lesser fate for themselves. So, it was customary for partecipants to the ceremony to spend the night before in meditation and prayer, considering what lay ahead of us and how best to fulfill our potential. And I had found my answer, in the silence of the night; I desired to be a warrior, a soldier for the Empire.

I was not particularly strong, and my endurance was not superior to that of most other men of my age; but I was swift, and I had a talent for stealth and hiding, skills that would be better put to use as a scout for the Imperial army than as a humble bookbinder of the artisan caste. And I knew that soldiers were beyond castes; in the army, the sons of farmers mingle with the sons of artisans and noblemen, and the only rank that matters is military in nature. Women, of course, are forbidden from entering the army: it had been thus for uncounted centuries, and traditions and custom have the same weight as law – to the point that even imagining to break one such tradition is unthinkable for any citizen of the Empire. But then again, perhaps it is best that way: war is not a simple or pleasant affair, and the natural kindness and soft-heartedness of women, which we cherish, would likely make them a liability in battle. And the army was the only way for a man to rise through the castes, whereas women could do so simply by marrying into a higher caste: blood was the price both of us would pay, our blood spilled on the battlefield and theirs in the nuptial bed.

In any case, I was not the only one who had chosen the path of the warrior, to escape the strictures of my caste; many other youths, sons of farmers, herders, and artisans followed the same reasoning, and decided to risk entering the army rather than pursuing a life with no hope of improvement. Even some of the sons of merchants chose such a fate for themselves: it was said that many minor noble Houses had arisen from the ranks of wealthy merchants, ennobled for acts of bravery and heroism on the field on the part of their founders. And though most of these ennoblements had taken place in the past, none could say whether such a chance could present itself again?

The priests of Oinrin-Laurel listened to the fates all of us had chosen for ourselves; none of those was a surprise for me, for I had long known most of the young men and women who had joined me, and we had often discussed our dreams, our hopes and our desires. There were those who were content with their parents’ choices, and those who were not; those who dreamed of being soldiers, those who desired to delve into the art of magic, those who wished to join the clergy in various temples, and those who chose a fate of marriage and a simple, but full life. And there were those who could not or would not choose a fate for themselves, letting the goddess Oinrin-Laurel choose one for them; in that uncertainty they would find a challenge that would delight them, regardless of how cruel or rewarding the fate she had in store for them would be.

One by one, each of us chose his or her fate: and the priests moved to the rows of youths behind mine, and I could no longer see them, only hear their soft questions and the fates chosen by those they interrogated. And one by one, I heard the fates of my friends and loved ones. With each fate, I relaxed slightly; the ceremony would soon be over, and my new, adult life would finally begin. How had I waited for this moment! I was full of the excitement of youth, full of dreams that were perhaps foolish and childish, of glory, victory, acknowledgements. I daydreamed as the priests approached the last few young men and women; cobbler, soldier, loving wife, cattle herder, leatherworker, scribe, priest of Laerius, loremaster… but in the end, one clear, ringing voice shook me from my daydreaming, as the last of the line, a woman by the sound of her voice, a voice I did not know, chose for herself an impossible fate: “Akun-him!”, she proclaimed proudly, and the whispering of those who had attended the ceremony – children, parents, relatives – suddenly fell into silence as the last echoes of her voice vanished in the great Hall of Oinrin-Laurel.

ELIS

I was never blind, and I never felt as constrained by old traditions and superstitions as almost all Mathklyrians use to feel; my rebelliousness showed from an early age, even though my parents did all in their power to quench it before I reached womanhood. My destiny, after all, was decided the day I was born; women in Mathklyr aren’t allowed to do much in the way of activities – gender discriminations that endured the millennia until they became so powerful that no one would have dared disobey them. This I discovered as I grew up, resisting my parents’ attempts to make a “proper young woman” out of me; I would not accept the role I was being imposed, but I did soon learn that, despite my refusal to accept the traditional rules of our society, and no matter how much I would fight them, I would be unable to break through the wall that others would build around me.

I learned this the first time I was given my kadala, by my mother, on my fifteenth naming day. It is a beautiful object, to be sure, but I could not stand the meaning of the item – I could not stand the chains that I could almost feel attached to it. The amethyst hanging from the kadala’s delicate net – artfully set to lay on my forehead whenever I would be in public – felt heavier than lead. And yet, I could not refuse to wear it: the one time I tried to leave my family’s house without wearing the kadala, sneaking through the rooms to make sure neither my parents nor the servants would see me go, I found out to my dismay that no one would acknowledge me, much less talk to me, outside the mansion’s walls. Worse, all eyes would be on me as if I were a madwoman, or a creature so repelling and so horrible as to evoke feelings of disgust and nausea in those who would look upon me.

However much I detested the item, I realized I would have to wear it if I wanted to interact with people. What the point really was in doing so, I did not know: their minds were so closed and walled up by meaningless traditions and customs, that to be able to talk to them and be understood I would have to think like them – close my own mind. But I did need contact with other people from time to time, and eventually, I accepted the kadala even though, in my heart, I kept detesting it.

And then, on my seventeenth naming day, I joined the many other young men and women in the Hall of Oinrin-Laurel, to take part to the ceremony of adulthood, and proclaim my fate for the priests to write into the great Book of the temple. I had given little thought to my decision: I knew that it would be done for me, regardless of what I would say. I could claim for myself the fate of becoming Empress, for all it mattered: but my parents already had found a suitor for me, and no doubt they would have tried to match us as soon as I had been welcomed into adulthood. The thought was unbearable, and yet, what choice did I have? So there I stood, dressed in white, like all the other young women, whereas all the young men were clothed in black; and while they bore the katain dagger to their side, all of us wore our kadalas, and sparkling gemstones, from malachite to aquamarine, dangled on our foreheads according to our caste. My father was a merchant, and a wealthy one: no doubt any match he had made for me would be so that his business would prosper long after his death. Yet it galled me, that he had not even had the decency to discuss it with me.

The priests walked along the rows of young men and women who had come to proclaim their fate: each of the young men had his dreams and ambitions – whether to be a merchant, a soldier, a loremaster, or simply to pursue his father’s craft and art. But most of us knew that our fates would be far different from theirs – that we had little choice in our own fate. Ironically, the young women who were truly able to choose what to do of their lives were those from the lower castes – daughters of farmers, of herders, of artisans. But the merchants… ah, just a step beneath the Noble houses: who would waste a “commodity” so precious as a daughter, especially if young and attractive? I saw my destiny walking with the priests as they slowly moved along the line I was standing in; I knew that, upon their coming, I would be whisked away, married against my will, and probably I would have grown old and died, or maybe – and this scared me the most – I would have eventually accepted my fate and rejoiced at the good choice my parents would have made for me.

And then, just as the priests interrogated the young man to my left, I suddenly had an inspiration. As my eyes wandered across the dome of the Hall, I saw frescoes of the Crowning of the Emperors, of the Necropolis, of the dead Emperors sleeping in their mausoleums as the Akun-hem stood silent and eternal guard, perpetually vigilant against those who would try to violate the graves of their charges.

I wanted a life in which I could gain honor as any man would; I wanted a life of purpose, not the dreary half-existence my parents were preparing for me. Perhaps Oinrin-Laurel had led my eyes to those frescoes for a reason; but regardless of whether the deity had taken a hand in that, I saw what I could do to change my destiny. There was one way: one perfect way, for even if I had been refused – and I had little doubt that I would be – still the outlandish fate I would have proclaimed for myself would have made sure no one would consider me an adult, perhaps for years yet. I would need not fear the looming shadow of marriage.

And admittedly – the expression on the priest’s face as he asked me, finally, what my fate would be, and he heard my answer, was priceless. “Akun-him!”, I exclaimed, and the sheer impossibility of my choice created silence in the great Hall. Akun-him – one of the greatest warriors of the Empire, sworn to protect the Emperor after death. But women could not enter the army, much less become warriors; and no Akun-him had ever been a woman. All of my companions in the ceremony turned to look at me as if I had lost my mind; but I did not flinch under their scrutiny. I felt elated: whatever would happen, I was now past the point in which Mathklyrian traditions still affected me.

One single face made my heart skip a beat; a young man, from one of the front rows – his katain dagger marking him as the son of an artisan – whose eyes were filled with surprise, perhaps tinged with the horror of how any young woman could desire such a fate, but not with loathing or accusations of derangement – though he, too, was wrapped within the blankets of Mathklyrian traditions so closely, that without any doubt, he would have never understood either.

ALRIC

She was fair, in the soft light of the Hall; her full golden hair sparkled and shone almost of a light of its own, her skin was pale as alabaster, and her eyes were green like a sea of grass in a sunny meadow, on a fair spring morning. She wore a delicate kadala, with a gossamer veil of pure white shadowing her lower face, and on her forehead dangled an amethyst, marking her as the daughter of merchants; but despite the beauty she had been gifted with, her mouth was set, her eyes shone with a green fire the likes of which I had never before seen in any Mathklyrian woman, a fire that spoke of defiance and frustration, anger and despair. Was there madness, in that viridian fire? How else would a woman – any woman – have chosen for herself an impossible fate? My thoughts were undoubtly echoed by my companions, by the priests, and by the assembled audience; in the silence that blanketed the Hall, I winced as I heard the priest’s ritual slap on her face – the mark of refusal, which few had been dispensed in the last few years. Despite the fact that the slap was intended to be purely ceremonial, the priest hit her with great strength, and she almost fell as the blow unbalanced her; that fire in her eyes only burned hotter, and I wondered why the priest would not burst into an emerald conflagration at the mere touch of her gaze. But he was protected by his own belief as his anger echoed through the words he uttered.

“Such a fate cannot be yours, not now or ever, with the blessings of the gods! You are but a spoiled, mad child, unaware of the implications of your choice, and unprepared for the burden of adulthood: better it would have been for you to be killed at birth, than to allow you to grow to maturity with such madness in your mind; you are outcast! You are sentenced! By your own mouth you have chosen repudiation – yes, repudiation and contempt! Begone, fool child; Oinrin-Laurel rejects you and your worm-tainted desires!”

The vitriol held within that declaration made the girl flinch, but did not daunt her; and at that point I was persuaded beyond all doubt that she was mad, and that only the strength and bravery of those touched by the worms allowed her to stand her ground in front of the enraged priest. Indeed, few had ever elicited such a response: but she had claimed the most exalted fate in the Empire, save for that of the Emperor himself, and the fate she had claimed did not belong to women; with her words, she had attempted to shatter customs, laws, and traditions that had more strength to them than any dream a young woman could have. As she endured the verbal onslaught, two women, slightly older than she was, hurriedly emerged from the audience and grabbed her arms, whispering frantically and pulling her back with them among the audience: the priest’s dark gaze encompassed them, and they missed a step, just as all the priests of Oinrin-Laurel turned their backs on the young woman.

“Leave me be! Can’t you see? How can you accept such a thing so blithely?!” She cried as she was taken away; her cries were half filled with frustration, and half with pleading. The crowd whispered and made way as if she had been afflicted with a most horrible disease – as she was, for the worms of madness were gnawing at her mind; her cries grew fainter as she was dragged away, until the crowd closed itself behind her, and the priests, their faces marked with fury, slowly returned to their duties. The ceremony was almost over; and in short order, all of us were declared adults, and able to take on our responsibilities, pursue the fates we had chosen. Even as I rejoined my parents, who had not known of my decision and were startled, but proud of my choice – they, too, could see the reasons behind it – I found myself looking around, wondering whether the madwoman would still be around. But of course, she wasn’t; undoubtly her parents, among the crowd, had sent servants to recover her and bring her home in shame.

Whatever truly happened to her that day, or why did she claim such an impossible fate for herself, I never learned until much later. She entered and left my life as swiftly as the summer rain, and in time, my memory of her receded in the depths of my mind, until I only vaguely remembered her face or her defiance – save for the fire of those eyes.

Months passed as I trained in the military academy built centuries earlier, a day’s ride south of Alduen; even as my skills with the blade and the bow improved, and my training as a scout continued, I found within myself an aptitude for strategy and tactics that pleased and amazed my instructors. Although I was never more than a decent swordsman, and a good, but by no means excellent archer, my grasp of the basics of strategy and the permutations of battle, of logistics and tactical advantages, of historical battles and the philosophies of great generals, revealed itself to be my true asset, even beyond my skills in the arts of stealth.

One year and a half after the ceremony in the Hall of Oinrin-Laurel, I was summoned in the office of the Swordmaster of the academy. As the appointed hour approached, I reached his office with trepidation: students were rarely called to a private audience with him, and then only when they had committed acts that required discipline – or banishment from the academy. And yet, though I racked my brain, I could not remember any single act of mine that could be so terrible as to warrant such an audience. Thus it was that, when I was finally admitted into the office, my head swam with the implications of banishment.

But it was not banishment he wished to talk me about. The Swordmaster understood war and knew more about it than most at the academy, having been himself a war hero in his youth, during the War of Imbrar; and now, in his twilight, he was still as strong as hale as a warrior half his age, and his mind had become keener with age. He welcomed me sternly, but not unkindly; and as I anxiously waited for the reason for my summons to become clear, his eyes ran over me, studying me and taking my measure, before he spoke.

“Your instructors tell me that your training is progressing nicely, and that your qualities as a scout and a skirmisher are overshadowed only by your understanding of tactics and of strategies; I am told you understand the philosophy of Alleon Aurius, and that you grasped the battle plan of General Buingar Felesil in the Goldast Wars with an ease that astounded them. They praise your skills of planning and your grasp of logistics; and claim that you have often spoken of ancient battles with an insight into how they might have turned differently, elaborating battle plans that the brightest generals of the time were unable to produce.” His gray eyes fastened to my gaze as he continued, “It is my understanding that your skills would be wasted as a common warrior, and even as a scout; no, if what I am told is true, another destiny awaits you – not here, but in the city of Mathklyr, in the Academy of the Warshifters.” As he spoke the name, he stopped, and gauged my reaction.

It took me a moment to grasp what he was suggesting. Me, a Warshifter? Not even in my wildest dreams would I have ever imagined I would be granted such a honour! In the Imperial army, the Warshifters were the greatest tacticians, the military leaders, the minds behind all wars; legend held that their skills were legendary, that they would never lose a battle, and that entire, hopeless wars had been won just because of the presence of a Warshifter on the field of battle. It was said that the mind of a Warshifter was ever at work, trained to observe, memorize, and elaborate plans that the Warshifter himself would set into motion; but a Warshifter was not simply a tactician. He was a general, a leader: Warshifters would not hide in their tents as battle commenced, but they would ride with their soldiers, and draw upon the skills of the Warshifter’s craft to inspire the soldiers to greater acts of courage and heroism, turning even a lost battle into a victory.

And Warshifters were granted great respect from all in Mathklyr: together with the Akun-hem, they were the only members of the Army who would surely be granted an advance in their caste, for they were assets that Mathklyr prized and rewarded. Was I to become one of them? Had I chosen my fate so well, or had Oinrin-Laurel smiled on me, blessing me with a greater destiny than I could have conceived?

The Swordmaster’s eyes did not leave my face as he asked whether I would accept to enter the Academy of the Warshifters. Custom required that all Warshifters choose their destiny voluntarily: Mathklyr would not allow its highest military rank to be made out of unwilling pawns, for just as a Warshifter could be a great boon, so could he create unspeakable damage. Thus, even had I refused, I would have faced no coercion, although undoubtly, I would have had to face disappointment and anger. But then, who would have refused such an unexpected, exalted offer? I did not need to think in order to give my enthusiastic acceptance: and when the Swordmaster smiled wryly and nodded, I suddenly felt as if a lock had been closed or a prophecy sealed – as if my choice had sealed a destiny for me, which I could not yet fully see.

But I would be a Warshifter.

ELIS

I did not listen to my parents, as they demanded answers, and turned against me in their fury at a daughter who had shamed them, a daughter whose worm-ridden dreams had brought them only pain and blame. The marriage they had been planning would dissolve, and word of my madness would spread, whether they wanted it or not; it would be difficult for them to find another man willing to marry one such as I. But they intended to punish me for my madness – for even though they knew my mind, they thought me mad, since no sane person would have admitted such an insane wish for a fate that could never be her own. And even though I understood that they were limited and constrained by customs and laws that I would not acknowledge, even though I understood that their answers to my behaviour were completely justified under the paradigm they were wrapped in, I refused to be humiliated further – refused to be crushed against their relentless attempts to make a proper lady out of me. I knew that, in time, they would find a way to quench my spirit and make me into another of the numberless young women whose greatest desire was to find a worthy husband and tend to his house and his children, while he sought out honour, be it in battle or in trade. I would not allow myself to fall into that pit; and so, the very same night after the ceremony, while my parents still despaired about me and racked their brains as to what could be done to salvage their reputation, and change me, I decided to flee.

Once again, my madness – if madness it was – came to my rescue: for my parents would have never imagined that I would be so bold and so foolish as to flee their house, no matter how great my “crime”. This was simply not the way any young lady would have behaved, no matter how much she had misbehaved before: young women were supposed to be proper and demure, to obey their parents, to the point as to almost forget they had a will of their own. But I did not forget. And since my parents would have never dreamed of me fleeing their house – even despite what I had done at the ceremony – escape was easy, as I chose clothes that would impair me as little as possible, and entered the kitchens of our mansions after the servants had gone to sleep, to steal food I would need on the road. I was perhaps naïve, in believing life outside my parents’ house would be easy; I had never been truly outside on my own. But I was not so naïve as not to realize that a lonely young woman outside would attract unwelcome attention; and that I needed to know what I was doing, rather than wander aimlessly, if I wanted to have any chance at making my own life, unconstrained by the bonds my parents would have thrust upon me.

Even as I stole a pouch of sovereigns from my father’s desk, my mind worked and thought about what I could do, where I could go. There was little in the way of options for a woman outside her household – and I refused to disguise myself as a man, knowing that doing so would have only been a more complicated acceptance of the strictures of Mathklyr. Whatever fate I would seek out, I would seek out as a woman; this was the certainty I held to my breast as I prepared to leave. But there was little in Mathklyr for one such as I – and as I thought about it, the only solution that presented itself to me was so alien and strange that, for a moment, I refused it outright.

If I could find nothing in Mathklyr – then I would have to leave Mathklyr. It is true that, despite the choke hold of traditions, I loved Mathklyr and, like most of its citizens, I was loyal to the Emperor; indeed, when I had claimed the fate of Akun-him, I had consciously chosen it, for I would have been glad to take the Oath and offer myself in sacrifice as the Akun-hem would do at the Emperor’s death. And the thought of leaving the Empire behind tore at me; but I could see no other option. Perhaps in time, when I would grow more mature and knowledgeable, I could find a claim to the fate I would build to myself, strong enough to withstand the weight of Mathklyrian customs; perhaps I would even be able to follow the fate I had chosen for myself, and return to Mathklyr to become the first female Akun-him. That would have been something!

As I fled into the night, leaving behind the house where I had grown up, my parents, my family, and all that I had ever known, I felt both lost and thrilled: I did not know what the future would hold for me, but finally, I would be able to create my own rather than having others dictating it for me.

I said that I was naïve in my knowledge of the world outside my house; but at the same time, I was not stupid, and I knew that I could never make it alone. I would need help and support; and I thought I could perhaps pay my way in a merchant caravan, maybe persuading them that I was traveling to visit my relatives – or maybe persuading them that I was a merchant myself, or the wife of one, bereft of her carriages and goods, and in search of a way to return to my city and my warehouses after the disaster. I spent the last hours of the night in the graveyard of Alduen; the presence of the dead was comforting, and no one among the living would have disturbed me there. Lady Oinrin rules the dead, and death and sovereignty have always been linked in Mathklyr’s history: thus, all Mathklyrians feel a kinship with the dead, and honor them, treating death not like a foe to be fought, but a ruler to swear allegiance to. I was not afraid of the dead; and the hours I spent in the peace and quiet of the graveyard gave me the chance to build a story that would fool, I hoped, the merchants I would approach. My kadala, after all, proclaimed my caste as that of the merchants; I knew, however, that I would have to conceal my age somewhat.

I decided to claim an identity as a merchant’s widow. In the story I fabricated, my husband died, murdered by brigands as he followed the Eastern Trade Road to Alduen, and all of our carriages, horses and servants were lost in the attack. I had been waiting for him in Alduen, after a visit to my relatives, so that, when his caravan would have come, I would have joined him for the return trek; but news of his death had reached me, and in my grief, I had spent weeks with my relatives, trying to come to terms with his death. And now that I had somewhat recovered from the shock of his loss, I was facing a long trek alone to return to our home, and I knew that I could not make it without help.

I knew the story had holes, but I hoped that the thought of further distressing a recent widow would have dissuaded most people from inquiring further; I had to hurry, because I knew that, in the morning, my parents would find out I was gone. At first, they would perhaps not call a search, believing me to be hiding in shame or fear; but eventually, they would realize that I had either fled or been kidnapped, and they would mount a search that would easily find me. But I had to do one thing before finding the appropriate merchant – I had to look the part of the widow. It was not unusual for married women to be as young as I was – after all, I myself had been destined to marry a man soon after my adulthood ceremony – but I certainly did not look grieving, and my kadala was not that of a married woman. So, at dawn, as the first shops in the city started to open and artisans and craftsmen sleepily started their working day, I joined the people who already were flooding the streets, moving along with them from shop to shop, trying to make myself as unobtrusive as possible as I approached the nearest clothing store, and examined with a critical eye the opaque kadala veils the shopkeeper had displayed for women to buy. Whereas the kadala of an unmarried woman had a transparent veil, a married woman wore an opaque veil, which concealed her lower face; this would have served me well, allowing me to escape casual notice by those who might have otherwise recognized me. I purchased a veil and a thick cloak, and I hastened back to the graveyard, the only place where I was unlikely to meet other people yet; there, I donned the cloak and changed my kadala’s veil, hoping that I might pass for a recently bereaved widow. My lack of sleep and the exaltation of the previous day had given me – I hoped – a tired appearance; I rubbed my eyes until they were red and bloodshot, spread some grime on the too-pristine dress I was wearing, undid my hair enough as to look like I was distraught. Not a good disguise, but still, better than nothing; if worst came to worst, I could always claim I did not love my husband, and his death had been freedom for me, but that I had had to keep up with the appearances.

Thus fortified and ready, I left the graveyard of Alduen and made my way to the Trades Ward; and in my heart, I knew I would never come back.

ALRIC

I spent years in the Academy of Warshifters. It was a grueling training, much harder than I had received in the military academy of Alduen, but it was fitting, given the tremendous burden of responsibility a Warshifter bore into battle. The lives of countless soldiers depended on us, our choices, and our ability not to buckle under pressure; our analysis skills, our memory, and grasp of details, and our leadership. We were trained to be generals, not soldiers; we received extensive education in tactics and strategy, studied each battle, ancient and recent, for which documentations had survived; we staged mock battles on the great fields encompassed by the Academy, directing common soldiers in copies of historical battles, attempting to surpass the generals of the past, while drawing upon the philosophies of millennia of warfare. The Empire was old beyond memory, and it had refined the art of war to levels that no one else had been able to grasp; even the weakest troops of Mathklyr were far above their foreign equivalent, and it was commonly believed that, with Warshifters to command them, they were invincible.

This belief was shattered during our third year of training, when we were given access to the secret records of the past Warshifters. It was believed that only by understanding the mistakes of the past, it would be possible to avoid them again, and thus every Warshifter was required to register his experiences and entrust them to the Academy after each battle, each war, so that the next generation would be able to study his choices and his actions, and learn from his successes and failures. In those records, we discovered what no Mathklyrian knew: Warshifters were fallible like all human beings. The records mentioned terrible disasters caused by incompetent Warshifters or by the choices of those who had not had enough informations to perceive their true danger; of hundreds of thousands of wasted lives due to a single tactical mistake, due maybe to laziness, lack of proper information, or blind trust into a report that had been perhaps forged by the enemy. The records were vivid in their portrayal of the despair that followed those mistakes: though Warshifters were trained to keep their emotions under control, we were also trained to assume responsibility for our actions, and in the words of those long-dead comrades, we could hear the overwhelming grief of those who understood how their actions – however noble they had intended them to be – had caused an onslaught, and flooded the field of battle with the blood of innocent soldiers.

It was not unexpected to learn that most of the Warshifters who had failed so terribly in the past, in the end had taken their own lives.

This was the first true test of our mettle and loyalty: no one would have remained unmoved by the appeals written on those ancient parchments, no one would have been able to shrug off the dread that one day, it would be his turn to put pen on paper to describe his own failure, the death of his own soldiers, like the failed Warshifters of old, such as Antrin Engis, who commanded the Imperial army during the Aidon Wars, over two millennia ago:

“I have seen much blood spilled in my life, but never I would have imagined I would bear witness to my worst nightmares coming true; I have erred, my judgment has failed, and all my knowledge and training are as dust under my feet. I blinded myself when I should have seen most clearly; I chose not to see, and now I have no choice but to see what my mistakes have wrought. Blood flowed down the battleground like a crimson river, through stained stones, over broken shields, and shattered swords; the blood of my people, the blood of my soldiers! Dead for nothing! For the vanity of a man who thought he could win an unwinnable war!

“Even as I write, I see their faces in my dreams, haunting me, accusing me. Was I not a Warshifter, was I not infallible? Did they not trust me to the full extent of their will, trust me as I sent them to death in my ignorance? Am I not as guilty as those who wielded swords and axes, and brought my army to a massacre? The stench of death fills my nostrils, and it will never leave; it is a remainder of the burden of the dead. So many dead, and I remain alive; because in my cowardice I ran, claiming that I was too important for me to die on that battlefield! I cannot bear the sight of weeping women, of wailing children, that follows me wherever I go, as they look at me knowing that their husbands, their fathers, will not come back. That my hands, my hands!, are covered with the blood of all my soldiers – yes, even as if I had raised the axe to execute them all myself! When their eyes accuse me in the night, when broken hands and bloody faces look at me from the darkness of my nightmares, I hear them calling my name. I have failed them, and I am broken. The war is lost, and I am forlorn. There is no absolution in life, so I must seek it in death; it is in death that I will rejoin my army, and accept the judgment they will bestow upon me.”

Upon seeing the shattering of their beliefs, many of us chose to turn their back to the Academy: rather than risking to turn into another Antrin Engis, they chose to leave the Academy and return to their military studies, choosing a lesser path for the sake of safety. And few blamed them: despair could be felt like a thick blanket on those secret records, and it infected those who came into contact with them.

But I withstood it. I wanted to become a Warshifter, and rise among the castes; and the whining of ancient Warshifters slowly began to annoy me. It seemed that the price for passional inflessibility was increased despair upon one’s first mistake; but after a while, it also seemed to me that failed Warshifters enjoyed self-loathing and self-pity far too much for their own sakes, seeking the easy way out – death – rather than striving to restore their honour and give meaning to the sacrifice of so many lives. I could not believe that any Warshifter would be so selfish and suicidal; I refused to believe that we could fail. I would not fail.

It became my motto, as I walked along the corridors of the Academy, as I studied, as I read and re-read the records, as I practiced military drills, as I staged mock battles. I would not fail. My name would not enter those secret records as a name to be ashamed of. My records would not be studied by young students as the records of a man who had failed his duties, a man who had taken his own life. No, I would not fail.

I was ambitious; and as time passed and more and more of us left the Academy, a fierce competition started among the survivors. Such competition was encouraged by our tutors; the ability to resist it was one of the qualities of a Warshifter. Attempts were made to ridicule the others, to belittle their skills, to outperform their results; mock battles became fiercer and more intense, study became frenzied, and an undercurrent of envy, of ambition, of arrogance, even, spread through all of us. But I would not fail, and I would not stand by and be ridiculed. Still, I waited. Patience was a virtue, and all our senses were keen to the point that my companions started fearing I was hiding something from them – a devious plan, maybe, to bring about their own downfall. They became nervous in my presence, tried to find ways to expose me, to either have me reveal my plan, or to cast me away. But I endured their puerile attempts, gave them no reasons to ridicule me; and all the while, I waited.

I started taking walks in the Academy gardens at night, trying to clear my head and to think about how to deal with my companions; it was becoming increasingly clear that few of us, perhaps only one of us, would be granted the title of Warshifter. It was in the gardens that I met and conquered the trust of one of the night guards, whose name I never learned. I never really cared that much; I simply needed a tool, and he would do for one. I exercised all of my leadership skills upon him, won his loyalty with a silver tongue and with hard coin; I needed eyes and ears, and he would do for one.

I would not fail.

ELIS

My journey eventually led me outside of Mathklyr, but not before much had befallen me: already in my trek from Alduen to the northern border of the Empire, I learned that the sovereigns I had taken from my father would not last forever, and that my choice would have implications far beyond those I had expected when first I had set foot outside my father’s mansion. I would need to find a way to earn my living, I could no longer rely on my father’s support, or on the simple benefits my status would grant me when dealing with lesser castes. The thought scared and elated me: I did not know what I could do, but at the same time, I felt that this would have been the first true test of my mettle – the test of my choice, proof of whether I could indeed live by myself, or if instead I had just deluded myself, and was at heart like all the other young women of Mathklyr.

I exploited the trek from Alduen to talk with the merchants who led the caravan I had joined; feigning confusion due to my husband’s loss, and diverting my ignorance towards more acceptable channels, I probed and attempted to learn that which I had been denied in my old life. I wished to learn about the outside world, beyond the borders of Mathklyr – of what I could find there, of what it could offer me. In the words of those merchants, filtered through years of preconceptions and prejudices, I saw a world I had never imagined, I had never dreamed of; whereas they spoke in disgust of the barbarian customs of the lands outside of Mathklyr, I heard words of freedom; whereas they discussed the infidelity and independence of women, I heard words of hope. And all that they could denigrate only spurred in me the desire to see for myself, and to create my own life, write my own fate, in the great book of Oinrin-Laurel.

For the whole trek, apart from these talks, I kept to myself, and tried to be as unobtrusive as possible. Despite my claims of widowhood, and the fact that tradition dictated that a woman’s word was sacred, I did not wish to expose the members of the caravan to my youth, in which they could find suspicions about my story, if they were to look deeply enough to see my age.

In due time, the trek ended – but my journey had only begun; from caravan to caravan I moved, striving to leave Mathklyr behind; day by day, I approached the Craveth Kedern, the great mountains that marked the northern border of the Empire. The forbidding, mysterious Ellemere lay, verdant and bountiful, to the east; the rays of the rising sun bathed it in golden light, every morning, a sight unlike any I had ever seen – power was within that forest, a power no one knew or understood. Few dared enter the Ellemere, and even those few only entered its outskirts, never daring to approach its deepest recesses. It was said that strange, faerie creatures lived in the depths of the great forest; that the trees themselves had given birth to otherworldly creatures, that unicorns roamed the nameless valleys the Ellemere concealed, and that the music of the fae echoed far above the trees during the summer nights. It was a realm of mystery and legend; and I had never thought in my life that I would be able to see it, even though from afar. For days it lay at our eastern side, as the hills gradually became steeper, and slowly gave way to the roots of the great mountains. The more we approached the Craveth Kedern, the closer we got to the Ellemere: the great forest embraced the mountains like a mother holds her child, and the trade way had little choice but to run close to the woods, for the Craveth Kedern were treacherous mountains, and there were few places where the crossing could be attempted.

I traveled with a caravan of merchants from a country they called Erkanth; and for the first two weeks of our trek, nothing seemed to be amiss. I was secure in my story, which I had told so many times now as to half-believe it myself; and tradition protected me, or so I thought. I was naïve, even though I did not think of myself as such: I never thought that those same traditions and customs that had protected me in Mathklyr would not necessarily be respected by people from other kingdoms and countries. The Mathklyrian merchants would see in me a bereaved widow, worthy of respect and in need of peace, and would not intrude on her mourning; unthinkable, that a merchant could try to take advantage of such a woman, or to rob her of her belongings, no matter how rich her kadala proclaimed her to be. But the Erkanthian merchants had no such scruples: and I blinded myself to their gazes, even though the closer we got to the mountains, the more those gazes became tinged with concupiscence, be it hunger for gold or lust for a young woman. In all my life, I had never thought about what young women from other kingdoms likely learned upon growing up: lessons of vulnerability and helplessness, of fear and caution that were totally unknown to me.

Thus I was unprepared, when one night, after we made camp no farther than a stone’s throw from a cliff directly above the Ellemere, as I prepared myself to sleep, one of the merchants – a burly man with an unkempt beard and garish, but worn apparel, and with the bloodshot eyes of one whose drinking had brought him to the limit of his mortality – approached me wordlessly, and suddenly took hold of me, blowing fetid breath through unwashed teeth. Caught by surprise, I stood still one moment too long; he needed no further encouragement, and my cries as his hands took hold of my dress and tore it only led him to laugh raucously. Surprise gave way to fear: in despair, I turned to cry for help towards the other merchants and guardsmen in the caravan. I saw them all around the fire, chuckling and looking at us with amusement, playing dice to decide who would take the next turn at me.

As the man held my rent and shredded dress in his hands, I took a step back, but he followed me, a feral hunger in his eyes; my heart beat furiously, and at the sight of his face, of those bloodshot eyes, of his tongue running over dry lips in anticipation of the pleasure he expected, I gasped for air: all the air in the world would not have sufficed for me. He threw away the shreds of clothing, and tried to reach for me again; my shrill yelp would have accomplished little, had he not stumbled in his drunken stupor and missed my shoulders with his hands. My mind was paralyzed: I did not know what to do. I had never been prepared for such a thing. I took another step back, but did not dare turn and flee: I feared he would simply grab me from behind, and I could not take my gaze away from his face, from the hunger I read in it, a hunger that sent shivers of dread through my spine, buckled my knees and washed over me so intensely that I almost fainted. I felt cold wind behind me, and I knew I was approaching the edge of the cliff; there would be no place for me to go, except death. Even as the man stood again and scrambled after me, closing the distance rapidly, two of his companions approached to help him, chuckling among themselves as if they found the situation supremely amusing: I staggered as I saw the man’s same hunger reflected in their eyes. I felt torrents of fear running through me; I was galvanized into action, and yet I could take no action, I could barely move. I did not know what to do, and I had never felt fear as acutely as in that moment: nothing in my life had ever prepared me to face the moment in which every woman understands the darker side of man.

Their hands groped towards me, latched onto my arms; I cried and screamed, trying to pull my arms free, but I had little strength, compared to theirs. I staggered and slipped on the scree, trying to maintain my balance, to hold my position; I planted my feet on the ground, frantically, pulling to get free. My screams and the tears of fear that ran down my cheeks only made them laugh harder, only increased the dark hunger of their gazes as they pulled me closer to them. I knew that I was doomed.

But a scream suddenly echoed from the cliff: the three men’s gazes suddenly shot behind me, and with a scream of fright, they suddenly let go of me, scrambling to get away, slipping on the scree of the cliff and trying frantically to return to the safety of the campfire. A dark shape rose behind and above me, chasing behind them in the night sky. But I only saw it for one instant: the moment they left me, all my efforts to pull myself free only succeded in toppling me down the cliff, and I fell screaming into the night of Ellemere, out of the mortal world.

ALRIC

By the end of the fourth year of my training, thirteen of us were left, out of over two hundred possible candidates who entered the Academy with us. Most had left after discovering the truth about the burden of the Warshifters; some had been found lacking, and had been cast out; and a few had met unfortunate accidents.

Competition was fierce, after all: and the more we learned about war, the more we applied our lessons to the battle we waged against each other. And as I said, this was encouraged: the loss of a few students was nothing compared to the possibility of gaining a true Warshifter.

I might speak of kindness and goodness, of moral qualities, of honour: but there was nothing like that in the Academy. We all wanted to be Warshifters, and we all wanted to excel. We plotted against each other, counter-plotted and defended ourselves, and alliances and enmities flowed like water. By the time the thirteen of us were left, a fragile balance had been reached, and alliances melted and reformed whenever one of us seemed to be gaining an advantage on the rest of us.

Then the battle went underground. We would spend more time watching each other and trying to guess at each other’s plans than paying attention to our lessons; yet, we were learning just as much about the covert aspects of war. And I knew that although striking at the others would be more difficult, it would also make it less likely that anyone could find out who had ordered the attack. Yes, it was war, regardless of the circumstances: and we all knew there would be casualties.

For over three months, nothing happened: the fragile peace that held us from attacking each other seemed to endure, and we started concentrating on our training once more. But the mock battles had an undercurrent of nervousness, and the very air in the Academy was fraught with caution.

My first strike was against the youngest of the group – a bright but odd young man from the southern provinces, who, despite having joined us seven months after most of us had started our training, had quickly risen in his training and his drills, and had eventually reached us. Some of our mentors thought he might outshine and outsmart us, one day: but I knew it was not yet that day.

He was a strange person, and as I studied his battles and plans, I saw how his impulsiveness had not yet been quenched, despite the efforts of his teachers: indeed, his plans were those of a genius who bordered on madness, even though tightly controlled. And after all, how thin is the line between madness and genius! I talked with him whenever chance would allow me to do so without being suspected of preparing an attack, and learned that a fire burned inside him – he was determined not to fail, to become a Warshifter, so that he could bring honor to his family, so he said. But I sensed something more at stake; and I asked the night guard I had bribed to try and find out more about him. We were mostly forbidden from leaving the Academy grounds except on special occasions: but the guards, of course, had no such prohibition. I waited for almost one month, but eventually, the informations I gathered turned out to be well worth the price in gold I had had to pay the guard – and other sources.

The student had a weakness – a weakness he had not wholly concealed. He had committed one of the worst mistakes – he had allowed his feelings to get free, and as a result, he had fallen in love with the daughter of a minor nobleman in the city of Mathklyr. I did not know where or how he had met this young woman: but I learned that she was the true reason behind his fanatic dedication – the hope that, as a Warshifter, he could claim her hand in marriage. Even more – I learned she knew of his passion and returned the feeling. She was the reason behind his actions: and at once I saw a way to turn this against him.

In the night, I managed to leave the Academy unseen; my skills at stealth had not atrophied, and if anything, they had been further refined by the constant war we were waging against each other. And, thanks to seemingly casual talk with a few guards, I had learned their shifts and the way they guarded the Academy against external intrusion and internal evasion. So I sneaked out of the building, and into the night of Mathklyr I ran to the nobleman’s residence. It was lightly guarded – it was not a problem for me to avoid the guards, and soon I approached the windows of the young woman’s bedroom. It was early autumn, but the window was closed – a sensible precaution, but not against what I had come to do. Silently, I slipped beneath the window a folded parchment. The letter asked for her to meet him, the following night, in the gardens before the Academy gates: it called her love, and said that he had something important to tell her; and the handwriting was so similar to that of the student, that she would not notice the differences.

The following night, as soon as I was sure she had arrived, I immediately told my guard to go through the various student rooms, supposedly to find out who was the student who was breaking the Academy law and meeting with the lady in the gardens by the pool. I told the guard to make sure he would describe the woman in some detail, to all students he would “find” in their rooms: and then I sat, and watched. At any time, chances were good that at least one of us would sneak out of the Academy at night, either by stealth or bribery; and so, when my guard reached my target and, “relieved”, revealed that the reason he had bothered him was because another student was meeting with a certain lady by the garden pool – which was the prearranged spot for the meetings between my target and the woman – as I expected, impulsiveness took hold of him. He had guards and spies of his own: he knew that at least one of us was outside, and he recognized the description of the woman. Had he been more level-headed, he would have realized how suspicious all this sounded; but I counted on his hot head to overlook any problems, and I was not disappointed.

In a paroxysm of rage, he decided to act, and scurried out of the Academy, not caring about guards. He came upon the woman, waiting by the pool; and I suspect he immediately imagined the other student had fled upon hearing his approach, after having instructed the woman to behave as if nothing had happened. But of course, despite her apparent gentleness and the surprise at his rage, he knew she shouldn’t have been there, and yet she was. Why? He surely accused her, ignoring her surprise and pain; in tears, she undoubtly showed him the parchment she had received – but equally obviously, he had learned in the Academy how to detect a forgery, and his trained eye could not overlook that the letter was unsigned, not written by his own hand, and in a style that was even just slightly different from his own. Had he been more careful, he would have wondered why another lover would have gone to such lengths and tried to forge the letter in my target’s handwriting: he was not careful, and overlooked even that detail, as I expected. He was too furious; and in his madness, the madness I had recognized and stoked, he listened to no reasons. unaware or unwilling to recognize the guards who had spotted him and were moving to intercept him, amidst his outraged screams and her frightened pleas, he drew out his katain and plunged it into his beloved’s breast.

Ah, that was exceptional! Persuaded that another student had wooed his beloved, that she had betrayed him, he killed her with a single stroke: lost in an ululation of rage and grief, he didn’t even notice the guards who, horrified by the suddenness of his actions, shouted at him to drop the blade. He needed another outlet for his pain; he needed revenge. As I said, he was young, impulsive, hot-headed, and in love: when he killed his love, his mind snapped.

He ran from the guards, and they chased him, preparing to subdue him – and then, without a doubt, Oinrin-Laurel further blessed me, for the other student had chosen just that moment to re-enter the Academy, having noticed the commotion and believed he could exploit it to enter quietly. Too late did he notice the guards chasing my target; too late did he recognize the burning fire in my target’s eyes, the bloody katain in his hand. Caught while climbing the outer wall of the Academy, he had no chance to dodge as my target screamed an inarticulate cry of rage everyone heard in the Academy, and jumped on him with murder in his eyes. In his surprise, our companion was dragged down on the ground before he could react – and from my window, I saw the moment in which my target plunged the katain, still stained with his beloved’s blood, into the chest of the supposed betrayer. I saw the blood flowing, I saw his cry of rage as he turned the dagger in the student’s chest, as if he could kill him even more. The agonized screams of the dying student galvanized the guards, dismayed and horrified, and who instinctively knew they had had a part in this second murder, if nothing else because they had been unwilling to seriously harm my target. Fearing more blood, while he was still stabbing the body of the supposed betrayer, the guards rushed at him and attempted to subdue him; his thirst for vengeance sated, but his rage still burning bright, he tried to refuse them, to battle them – and in the commotion, as I had foreseen, his life abruptly ended on a guard’s spearpoint.

ELIS

In the extremity of my danger, I was saved; I was succoured when most I needed succour. As I lay deep in the forest, my bones broken by the fall, my mind shattered by the events I had been a victim of, as I waited for the release of death and could not stop my eyes from weeping, my throat from sobbing miserably, a creature came to me from the depths of the forest and the shadows of darkness behind the first rows of trees around me.

She resembled a human woman, but she had the size of a child, no taller than my shoulder; but a faint yellow-white radiance emanated from her, and at times I could almost see through her lithe body, peer into the trees beyond. Seen through the light of her body, the forest transformed: then I could see the life of the trees and the vitality of the Ellemere, the magic that coursed through bark and leaf and grass, without cease. She approached me silently, clothed in a simple, flowing white dress, a suspicious expression on her face. I did not know who or what she was – except that she was obviously one of the entities of the Ellemere, and I had heard the stories about what destiny awaited those who had entered the great forest. There was little I could do; my body hurt terribly, my legs and arms were broken, and I knew I would soon die of starvation and exposure, unless some creature from the forest didn’t find me sooner.

Through the pain, I tried to focus on her, to speak of my need, to plead with her for my life to be spared; but before I could speak, she knelt beside me and ran her gaze over my body, as if every bruise, every hurt were visible to her. She didn’t look into my eyes as she suddenly whistled softly; but all at once the grass beneath me stiffened, lifting me up, and as she stood and left the place where I had fallen, I was transported behind her by blades of grass, rising as in a wave to carry me along, while those I left behind fell back to their natural state. So smooth was the process that I felt no additional pain at all; and the more we went deep into the forest, and the starlight and moonlight disappeared, the more I felt drowsiness stirring within me, at the sound of a soft music I suddenly realized was filling the forest. It was a song of love and longing, a melody of desire and yearning, of contentment and peace; it had no words, and yet it seemed to speak directly to the heart. I did not know who the singer was: at times it seemed a woman, at times a man, and some times a whole choir seemed to spring up to hold the song. The leaves of the trees seemed to dance in answer to the song, and the very air of the Ellemere seemed full of expectations; and before I could realize it, I had fallen into a deep sleep.

In my sleep, I was not dreamless: instead, I dreamed that I was brought in a hidden meadow, where soft grass made up a bed, and the starlight shone on me as if wishing me to rest. A clear stream ran through the little meadow, glittering under the moonlight; and the creature who had brought me there took water from the stream with her hands. She came to my sleeping form, and carefully washed my body free of dirt and grass, of blood and pain; all the while she murmured words I could not understand, and a soothing warmth chased away all suffering. Then the dream changed, and I found myself flying through the air until I reached a large city, with great walls, and a majesty that outlived time. And I knew I was looking at Mathklyr, the capitol city of the Empire.

My flight brought me through the city, until I came to a forbidding cliff face, cracked as if by a terrible cataclysm. Large metal gates closed the entrance to the cliff, and the symbol of the raven stood out over them: and I knew I was looking at the entrance to Mathklyr’s Necropolis, where the dead slept eternally, where the Akun-hem guarded their wards for eternity. I passed through the gates, and I saw the Seven Graveyards: where members of each caste would be buried. The spirits of the dead seemed to be visible to me, and greeted me with a bow as I passed; I flew swiftly through the Graveyards, until I reached the Seventh – the Emperors’ Graveyard. Here, great mausoleums carved out of the very living rock of the cliff walls housed the mortal remains of the great Emperors of the past; other cracks opened into the cliff walls, making the area look as if a titanic hand had left its imprint into the stone of the plateau – the Hand of Destiny, as it was known. And at its center, on a raised dais, stood a black altar, veined with red: but the red veins writhed and flowed within the black rock as if they were alive, and fluid within the stone. It was unadorned, and rough in appearance: and yet it emanated a power I could not understand. But even as I watched it, mesmerized, the air filled with fog, and colors faded: and I suddenly saw two men wrestling on the same raised dais. I could not make up their faces, but one of them seemed to hold a dagger raised high, as if to strike the other; and I knew that was the spider’s sting. But I did not know why or how. The other man seemed to be grappling the first, to prevent that dagger from plunging into his breast: but then a woman’s scream shattered the air, and I looked around, shaken and surprised, and seen no woman. When my attention returned to the two grappling men, I saw neither; and the mists closed to hide the sight of the black rock and the Necropolis, until only the night sky, the twinkling stars and the shining moon remained, and filled my vision with mystery.

And slowly I realized that the stars and moon were real, and that I was no longer dreaming: I was awake, and laying on the grass, in the meadow I had dreamed of. The song had ceased; but the moon was low on the horizon, and I wondered whether I had slept little or too much. My pain had died during my sleep: my limbs were restored, and to my surprise, my body was clothed in the same apparel as the strange creature who had found me. I stood hesitatingly, but my legs had healed just as my arms had, and I found that I was not hungry. But my throat ached with thirst, and without thinking, I rushed to the stream and gulped down its water, surprised at how clean and pure, how cold it was. It ran down my throat and I felt new energy filling me: my thirst extinguished, I stood and looked around.

The meadow was silent, and the trees that surrounded it on all sides seemed to be standing watch, their leaves fluttering slightly in a light breeze that seemed to carry with it the scent of pristine earth and dew-covered grass; but even as I watched my eyes were drawn back to the stream, where the moon’s luminescence started to gather in tiny motes of radiance, flowing down as if from a pillar that spanned the heavens, and gathering like silver fire around a figure they slowly defined, rising from the crystalline waters. She was a woman, tall and regal, with flowing robes bathed in moonlight and hair that reached down to her feet, as if it rose from the very stream; her countenance was breathtaking, and her eyes were luminous as if twin stars had taken their place in her visage. As she gradually made herself visible, as she appeared in front of me, a soft hymn came from the trees, and it seemed to me as if they bowed to the silver lady of the stream; even the breeze failed to touch her, as if she were too holy, or too powerful for simple wind to caress her, and droplets of clear water, sparkling with silver moonlight, fell from her robes as she turned towards me. The light of her eyes bathed me with a peculiar mixture of kindness and diffidence; she seemed at once utterly similar and utterly different from the creature who had saved me from the brink of death and allowed me to recover. She needed no crown to proclaim her as a queen. Instinctively, I knelt in front of her.

I felt her radiant presence approaching me as she left the stream; she made no sound as she drew close, and her silver luminescence shone softly upon me. I raised my gaze to meet hers, and found that I could not: in her eyes I could see a reflection of my life thus far, seen as if from a great distance, as if it had been small and petty in the lady’s attention; and I could not bear such a judgment. But her voice held no judgment as she bid me to stand, and I obeyed, compelled by her majesty.

“It has been a long time, time beyond memory, since need and loss, desire and yearning, have brought one such as you in the heart of Ellemere, where mortals do not tread and magic sings to those who have ears to listen. You come from a world that has forgotten the meaning of life, and worships death; thus it is that few of your people approach my realm, and even then, the death they carry in their hearts prevents them from seeing the truth of life, graven in the bark of trees, etched in blades of grass, echoing in the voices of my vassals, blowing in the wind, running in the waters.”

She stunned me with her presence; and I could only ask her, in a trembling voice that seemed appropriate to a mortal who approached one such as she, “Who are you?”

She looked at me with the full strength of her gaze and opened her arms to encompass the meadow; her voice was passionate, though her lips showed no mirth. “I am the leaf and the bark, the soil and the grass; I am the wind that blows through the forest and the streams of the forest’s lifeblood. I am the music sung by the woods, and the light of the moon; the mother of all that surrounds us, and the magic that holds it together. I have no name that mortal ears can hear; thus can you call me Ellemere, for this is the name mortals would give me, if they knew my mystery.”

ALRIC

In due time, my actions shattered the fragile peace we shared; the deaths of two of us signaled that someone among the surviving eleven students had decided to break the peace, and none could find out who the culprit was. Suspicion curdled into despite, alliances broke and enmities were renewed. Our mentors also knew that those three deaths could be laid at the feet of one of us; but they turned a blind eye, for this was the way of the Academy. I do not know how the parents of the young woman, whose only fault had been trust, had been appeased: very likely, the Academy had power enough to silence any dissentions, regardless of the source. Perhaps they were given gold to compensate for the loss of a daughter; perhaps they were threatened with ruin if they had chosen to complain. The young woman was buried in the Necropolis; and so were the two dead students, although there were few words for them.

None of us attended the burials: we had little time for pleasantries, and none wished to witness what his fate could be. But as a side effect, everyone believed that at least one of the others had not gone because he would not be able to contain his glee at admiring his handiwork: and so suspicion grew ever harder.

Two weeks later, another of us was found dead; a guard he had attempted to bribe had likely been bribed by another of us, and he had led the student into a carefully prepared ambush, from which he had been unable to escape. His body was found two days later, floating in the river, his own katain plunged into his throat.

Ten of us remained; and as if feeling the end approaching, our attacks, defenses and counterattacks rose in pitch and violence, as well as cunning: the more we learned, the better our strategies became, and as if on cue, we were given more and more instruction, so as to be forced to do the best we could in our private war, using only the little time we had available. It didn’t take any of us long to realize how this fit into the training of a Warshifter: we were supposed to destroy each other so that only the best would rise into the exalted ranks of Warshifters – and we were given less and less time to do so as to prepare us for the demands of war and the little time we would be able to use to solve them.

Thus we became more creative and more cunning; yet, we also became more cautious and more determined not to fall into each other’s traps. Our perceptions increased to the point of delusions: we attempted to see everything that occurred as part of someone’s plan to destroy us. Another student was slain in his own room, through a poisoned arrow shot when he foolishly decided to sit with his back to the window. Carelessness cost him his life, a carelessness he should have known how to avoid by then. The archer was never found; but one of us recognized the poison as the extract of a rare flower few had access to, and decided to investigate. In time, his perseverance and attention to detail eventually uncovered the identity of the one who had hired the archer, if not of the archer himself: and so the employer - another student, who had not learned how to efficiently cover his tracks – was summarily tried and executed for murder. Eight of us remained.

Three months had passed since my stroke, the stroke that had stoked the war to new heights; and I had not yet acted again. I had hatched dozens of plans, and dropped hints here and there, so as to caution my adversaries and make each of them think I was aiming to kill him: then again, all of us pretended to be plotting against everyone else, in hopes that our true target would not realize his peril until it would be too late for him to escape it. Eight of us remained – and I decided to act.

During one of my forays into the city, I managed to contact an apothecary who dealt in poisons and venoms of all kinds. From him, I obtained a slow, insidious poison which would not immediately kill, no – it would take some time, and it needed only contact to be absorbed. I was able to purchase both poison and antidote; alas, while the apothecary was preparing the vials, I accidentally poured a few drops of one of his most lethal poisons into the cup of edim he had prepared for himself – a terrible carelessness for a merchant who dealt in death – and so the poor man died shortly after I left his shop. No one had witnessed my gesture, or my visit to his little shop – and so most believed he either had mistakenly ingested some of his own poisons, or he had been poisoned by one of his most dangerous customers. Thus my tracks were covered. Yet I waited for two more months, biding my time, hiding the vials, and slowly attempting to withstand the poison he had sold me. Little by little, I became resistant to it; and when at last I realized I could withstand a dose strong enough to kill another person, although I would feel greatly ill for a while, and I had enough antidote for good measure, I started my plan.

I entered the library, and visited the secret archives of the Warshifters. By custom, only one of us could enter at any given time: the documents were precious, and violence would not be tolerated there. I slipped in, and exploiting the time I had been given, I smeared the poison – light and scentless – on several of the most important parchments. It wouldn’t last very long – two to three months at most – but it would be enough. I made sure I would touch the poison during this time: in due course I would fall ill, although not as much as to be risking my life. The poison would be slow in acting, even more so due to my partial immunity; I had no doubt that by the time I would fall ill, most of my companions would have been poisoned already.

And so it was. Within three days, I was laying in my bed, sweating and suffering, yet knowing I would survive; but by the time my sickness manifested itself, three of my adversaries had been poisoned and showed the same symptoms, and two more had visited the secret records and would likely soon be dead as well. In a single stroke, I had removed five of us from the Academy – and only three remained, including me. But I had not counted on the ruthlessness of the two doomed ones.

They had figured out by then that all who had been poisoned had visited the secret records; and they had likewise guessed that the cause was poison, and that they, too, had probably been poisoned. Their lives were very likely forfait, for they did not know what poison had been used, and they could only hope that it had lost some of its potency so as to give them a chance to survive. In their despair and rage, they decided that such hope, small as it might have been, was better than nothing; and that the only for this hope to be worth the cost was to make sure that no one else would be there to oppose them. Thus, they decided to bring the war to an end – to murder the remaining students so that they alone would remain.

They pretended to fall sick, and it was not a whole lie: the poison had started its effect on them, though it was slow, and would not make them delirious for perhaps one or two more days. As they retired to their rooms, ostensibly in hopes of recovering, the last two healthy students celebrated: they expected all of us to die within two or three days, leaving them alone in the Academy, and bringing the war to an end. In fact, the two became careless: they did not expect any more attempts upon their lives, at least until they would be certain that the six of us would die. The uneasy peace between them, though, did not protect them against their fate.

Though three of the poisoned ones were almost dead by then, and I was feigning great sickness, the two who had contacted the poison later were still well enough, even though they would soon be forced to bed: and so, in the night, they crept up to the rooms of the two healthy students, and, exploiting their carelessness, they entered the rooms and smothered the students in their sleep. Not satisfied, feeling poison running through their veins, burning them, they slowly entered the rooms of our other three dying companions, and smothered them as well with their own pillows.

Then they came to me. I was sleeping, though only fitfully: despite my partial immunity, I was still sick and weak from contact with the poison. It had been necessary to hide my involvement; but it became a danger to me when they entered my own room, and approached my bed to kill me as they had killed all the others.

I woke up as I heard the creaking of the wooden boards beneath their feet; even as I pretended to still be asleep, I moved one hand beneath the blankets, in order to search for the dagger I kept in case of such an attempt at murder – all of us had at least one dagger always ready, a sensible precaution which had not saved my doomed companions. When the two students approached me with a large pillow, ready to smother me in my sleep, I allowed them to approach me as closely as they could, and when they lowered the pillow on my face, I exploited the chance to reach out with my dagger, stabbing one of them in the belly. He screamed and fell on his knees, his hands gathered around the wound, vainly trying to stop the flow of blood; but the other, shocked and enraged, pressed the pillow on my face and tried to finish the murder.

I stabbed around wildly with the dagger, trying to slay him; but he was cunning, and avoided my blade. I was in need of air; weak and unable to think clearly, I knew death was coming to me. I wish I could say it was skill, but it was really only luck when I stabbed the blade through the wrist of the student who was smothering me. He cried, and lost his grip on the pillow; I threw it away, but I had not enough strength to hold onto the dagger as he took a step back. For a moment, he stood there, looking in horror at the dagger running through his wrist, the bloodstained blade sticking out of it, the steady flow of blood dripping on the floor. His face contorted into a grimace, he unsheathed his katain and attacked me; I tried to dodge the blow, but I was still laying on the bed, and the other student has slumped on my legs, preventing me from moving quickly enough as to avoid the gleaming blade. Pain shot through my shoulder, as the katain bit my flesh; I screamed, and screamed again as the student twisted the blade in the wound. I flailed around wildly, with the strength of despair: I knew my death would come swiftly, unless I could kill him first. The strength born of this despair was enough for me to move the unconscious student away from me, and to unleash a kick at my assailant. The blow was not so strong as to truly hurt him; but he staggered, and as he did so, I opened my eyes through the pain and grabbed the hand he was wielding the knife with. My right arm was almost useless, but the left still worked; before he realized what I was doing, I grasped one of his fingers and broke it savagely. He screamed again, and instinctively let the katain go; bracing myself, I clenched my teeth and drew it out of the wound.

Pain shot through my shoulder once more, unbearable through the haze of sickness that still filled me; my blood flowed out of the wound, and dripped from the blade of the katain I held in my hand. It took me all my strength of will not to faint in that moment: we had been exposed to the theory of war, but we had never been forced to endure the truth of it. But I knew that, if I fainted, I would die; and so, with a terrible effort, I turned my head towards the student whose grimace of fury had turned into a grimace of fear. The finger I had broken hung at an impossible angle from his left hand; the right was covered with the blood which flowed steadily from the wound in his wrist, where my dagger was still lodged. He was pale and covered with sweat: the poison was running its course through him ever faster. As he saw me looking at him, he clenched his teeth and tried to grasp the slippery hilt of the dagger I had stabbed his wrist with; I did not let him. With all the strength I had, screaming in pain, I forced myself to lunge at him, and he did not step back in time to avoid the blade of his own katain, slicing through his belly as I tumbled to the floor. I heard his surprised gasp just before he fell on the floor, his life oozing away due to poison and wounds; numbly, I lay on the floor for time without end, before the cold creeping into me warned me that if I did not staunch my wound soon, I would follow my attackers in the grave. Painfully, I stood on my knees and grasped one of my blankets: with the katain I still had in my hand, I sliced a strip which I wrapped thickly on my wound, as a makeshift bandage. When I was sure that the blood had stopped flowing, and that I was no longer in danger, only then I allowed myself to faint, and all went dark around me, bestowing the gentleness of oblivion on me for a while.

ELIS

I will never forget that moment, under the moonlight, when Ellemere made herself visible to me. The spirit of the forest, the queen of the fairy creatures that dwelt deep within its borders, the very life that filled the trees, that ran along the streams, that sang over the branches, that blew with the winds. She was beautiful beyond belief: radiant in the splendor of her raiment. Despite the knowledge of my own beauty, I felt ugly in front of her, but no mortal woman, no matter how beautiful, would ever have been able to stand the comparison with her. She was Ellemere, immortal and ageless; as old as the forest, and just as powerful.

In front of her, I could not speak: I could not find the words, nor think of what I could ever ask one such as she. All the questions I had wished to ask now seemed so meaningless! But she did not need me to utter words in order to read my thoughts; and she told me:

“No life is surrendered within the boundaries of my realm, without my permission; and on you I see the mark of fate. It would be ill served, were I to forsake your life. Thus I have had you brought here, where you can rest, and recover. You are a daughter of men, but there is still innocence in you; should you wish it, you shall be welcome in my realm and among my children. There you may perhaps find the peace you desire, if only for a while; someday, the mark you bear will call you back for you to fulfill that fate.”

Her words were soothing as the song of a mountain stream, as the shadow of a willow on a placid lake; as she spoke, I felt my dread and confusion fade away, replaced by simple awe and wonder.

“What fate?” I could barely reply. And she smiled, a smile strangely tinged with rue and sadness.

“Of this I cannot speak; my sight does not discern all the future holds, and there is great danger in revealing imperfect knowledge. Know, however, that the gods do not lightly mark mortals; whatever fate awaits you, it will be a fate of greatness, beyond any dreams you might harbour. When the hour will come, it will be you, and only you, who will decide whether to claim that fate for yourself, or let it disappear like a dream upon waking.”

“How will I know?” I asked, for her words sounded strange to me, and not altogether convincing; part of me suspected she knew more than what she was telling me, but I knew I should not mistrust her, and I felt she was too above me for me to judge her in any way.

“Your path will lead you to the fateful moment; your heart will lead you to the choice you will make.” She smiled again lightly. “Do not fear; destiny is not always easily borne, but whatever awaits you, always remember to trust your heart. It does not lie; whereas the mind does.”

She raised her head, and looked beyond me; and as I turned, I saw the diminutive woman who had saved me, emerging from the darkness behind the trees. Bathed in yellow radiance, despite her eerie otherworldliness, she seemed but a pale, diminished reflection of the majesty of Ellemere. And yet, I felt kinship between them; and I realized that her resemblance to the spirit of the forest was not shaming to her, but liberating. She bowed to the moon-limned spirit, and looked at me with curious eyes; she smiled, a shy smile, but warm and full of welcome. I felt my last doubts dissolve like snow under the sun; and Ellemere said:

“This is Melyelle, of the Korrigan; she saved your life and brought you to me in my realm. Now I ask you to go with her; she will see to it that you are fed, and show you the true life of the forest. I want you to know the beauty of my realm; few mortals are welcomed among my children, but to those mortals I offer my hospitality, my blessings, and my lore, because of their innocence, their bravery, their worth – or their fate. Do not be afraid, and know that no harm will befall you within the boundaries of my realm: here, you are safe from the cruelty and darkness of mortal men.” She bent and placed her ethereal lips on my forehead, bestowing upon me a gentle kiss, and smiled softly. “Go with my blessings, child of mankind; be at peace, and be welcome. We will speak again, when the time is right.”

Even as she spoke, the moonlight radiance that surrounded her and defined her seemed to coalesce into tiny motes floating upwards, towards the heavens; and soon she was gone, and it seemed to me as if a song in my heart had started and then been muted, but if only I could see Ellemere again, then the song would flare once more into life.

With a pang of regret, I turned to Melyelle of the Korrigan; and with friendly words, she invited me to follow her deep into the forest, where no one had adventured and returned to tell the tale. But under the moonlight, under the starlight, the forest of Ellemere was neither terrifying nor threatening; it was beautiful, a beauty unmarred by mortal hands, and at every step I could feel its breathing, I could feel its lifeforce flowing strong beneath the ground and through the trees, pulsing in each blade of grass, in each shrub, in each little mushroom. I could hear a muted song in the breeze, and recognized it to be the same that echoed in my heart: it was the song of Ellemere, which no mortal can ever sing. For it is a song that comes from communion with the great forest itself, from being one with all its verdant splendour; and no mortal man or woman will ever be able to experience such unity.

Even so, the song moved me beyond all words; and then Melyelle brought me to another small clearing, just beside a cliff face, from which a small spring flowed into a crystalline pool, and soft grass, akin to the grass I had seen in Ellemere’s meadow, covered the ground. Fireflies danced happily at the edges of the clearing; and the Korrigan invited me to join her on the grass, and offered me fruits she had gathered through the forest. Some of them I recognized; others I had never seen, and others yet were not of this world; yet she and I ate them quietly, as if afraid that our words could break the spell and silence the song carried by the breeze. And when I was done eating, I felt the call of sleep taking me, and I barely could excuse myself before laying on the grass, looking at the stars, idly wondering how had I stepped out of the ordinary world and into such an extraordinary dream. But sleep took me, and I slept deeply, dreamlessly, for the first time in months.

For almost seven years afterwards, I remained in the Ellemere. I did not see the spirit again; but Melyelle and I became friends, and she introduced me to others of the Korrigan – others of the fairy creatures that called the forest home. And I saw unicorns, so majestic and white as pure snow, their gleaming ivory horn as straight as a spear and as beautiful as a sunray. Their eyes seemed to hold the wisdom of the world; and Melyelle told me, “These are the children of the Ellemere, and it is said that none in the Twin Worlds is wiser than one of the unicorns. When the worlds will be old and all will be turned to dust, the last of them will lead the way for the end of the Ages, and until a single unicorn endures, the Ellemere will live.”

In those seven years, I learned much about the ways of the forest. I learned much about the knowledge and magic of its fairy children; secrets they had learned in turn from Ellemere herself. They taught them to me gladly; for, as Ellemere had said, those mortals who were welcomed in her realm were given love, friendship, and respect, and required only to show them in return. And also, Ellemere had asked them to teach me; and such a desire the Korrigan would honor at the best of their abilities.

I knew of magic, and I had seen some in my early years; although magicians were not at all common in Alduen, they were common enough that children of wealthy families could have chances to witness their power. But the magic I was taught in the Ellemere was completely different; it did not twist the laws of nature as much as encourage them, it flowed in accordance with the forest’s desires, and allowed me to commune with its essence. The Korrigan taught me how to summon the Ellemere’s creatures to my side, if I had need of them; how to draw on the verdant power of the forest to grow plants and trees, how to awaken the sentience of the trees themselves, how to call upon the most violent manifestations of natural power – storms, lightning, wind – and persuade them to help me. There was no coercion in the magic I was taught: it was a matter of persuasion and gentleness, of going along with the natural world rather than denying it.

I learned quickly: Ellemere’s words about my mysterious fate had given me new purpose, at a time in which I had little purpose to begin with. I had thought myself alone and friendless; in the forest, I found both friends and company. And one day, I learned something wonderful.

I sat in a clearing, opposite Melyelle; I was being given instruction in how to leave the physical body behind, and look at the true spirit of the forest with the eyes of my own soul. It was a difficult undertaking, and yet, Melyelle promised it would be extremely rewarding and amazing; and I desired to see the spirit that gave rise to Ellemere herself. I followed the Korrigan’s voice as she guided me through the steps of the meditation; she sang softly, and her song slowly filled me, infused me with its purpose, loosened the chains that held my soul anchored to my body. I took up the song, softly, making it mine; and through my will I slowly felt myself releasing my mortal body, at least for a while. When I opened my eyes, all had changed.

I could see my body, sitting cross-legged ahead of me with closed eyes; but all around me, the world had changed. Azure light seemed to seep from the very sky, bathing all the forest in an eldritch glow: the trees pulsated with life, throbbed with energy, and their health, their strength, their sentience was made manifest; they swayed lightly in a breeze I did not feel, and I could feel the strength of their yearning. For what, I could not say; yet they yearned, and mourned the lack of fulfillment for that desire of theirs. And yet, all around me was beautiful and pristine: the flowing water was radiant with vitality, the very grass wavered like verdant flames. Only Melyelle’s body appeared unchanged: she was of the Korrigan, and she sat on the boundary between body and spirit. She could enter both realms without leaving behind her physical essence.

As I looked upon me, I saw that I was myself, a copy of the woman sitting on the ground, deep in meditation; but I saw with surprise a thin, glowing, throbbing line of energy joining me to my motionless body. Melyelle noticed my surprise; “It is your life force”, she said, “the means by which you can return to corporeality when you desire to do so. Should it be cut, you will die, and you will never return to your mortal body; but do not fear, for few have the power to cut such lifeforce, and you will find that no matter how far you roam, it will always lead you back to yourself.”

But as she spoke, I gradually became aware of another line of force; whereas the first was silvery, the second was red in colour, even though “red” or “silver” were not colours as much as feelings I received: and this one was larger than my life force, heading south, far from sight.

“What is this line, then?” I asked Melyelle; and she looked at me, surprised, noticing the line for the first time. She studied it carefully, and then nodded gravely; but before she could answer, a tremor shook the spectral forest, and all of a sudden, the azure glow coalesced into the form of Ellemere herself.

“I will answer her question”, she said to Melyelle; “her time has come.”

ALRIC

I was made Warshifter; I had survived the trials and tribulations of my apprenticeship, I had demonstrated my grasp of the art of war, and I had defeated all my foes. Where once thirteen of us studied and discussed, plotted and planned, now twelve stone graves held the corpses of those who had failed, and only one – I – had ascended to the rank for which we had fought so much.

The day I was informed of the end of my apprenticeship, the day I was informed that I would be titled Warshifter in front of the Emperor himself, as tradition wanted, I felt as if all my dreams had turned to reality: I had found all I had fought to obtain, and my career, my life, were assured. I had earned a privileged place, striding like a giant among the layers of Mathklyrian society, and it mattered little how many I had crushed under my feet to reach the position I had grasped; the faces of those whose blood had been spilt due to me, directly or not, did not haunt my dreams, so sure I was of the justifications and the reasons behind my plans. I had sworn I would not fail, and had I not succeeded?

Yet I would lie if I were to say I felt nothing but excitement; for another feeling I could not identify stirred within me, yet I could not recognize it, and it alone disturbed the joy I felt at the thought of having reached my goal. Such a feeling had become so strange, so obscure, I had forgotten its name, and I did not pay attention to it, while I prepared myself to complete my instruction and become a true Warshifter.

The day I was introduced to the Emperor, however, that same dark feeling crept into my heart as I prepared for the ceremony, as I knelt at the feet of Keth Makhrath IV, as I heard the ritual words, as I was invested with the authority of a Warshifter, as I was given the slender sword that was my badge of office, as the chrysoprase of my kitain was crushed with a silver hammer and an aquamarine, the gem of minor nobles, was set in its place, as the Emperor officially introduced me to his court, as all my dreams became reality. And while everything happened, I felt in my heart that a crisis was approaching, slowly but inesorably, and a storm was on the horizon, though no sign showed yet and its time had not yet come.

Events turned into a frantic vortex, of which I was the center; day followed night, and there came ceremonies, introductions, names, titles, my entrance in Mathklyrian society; I would only rarely have time for myself, to wonder what sort of distant crisis was approaching, and I could hardly wonder about my future, about what would happen once all the chaos generated by my ascension to the rank of Warshifter had dissolved.

A Mathklyrian Warshifter is an asset of the Empire; in war, he is a commander, a general, a tactician, a leader, followed by his troops even into certain death, bold and invincible, wrapped in the legend of his own kind, protected by tales of certain victories won by those in whose footsteps he walks; in times of peace, he is an advisor, a counselor to the Emperor, for the arts of strategy and of war he has mastered are useful not only on the field of battle, but also in subtler battles, where words and plots, reputations and rumors take the place of swords and shields. I was an example of such mastery: for I had shed the blood of only two of my companions by my own hand, yet I had killed almost all of them. And few Warshifters were at the palace: not many earn the title, and at that time, the best ones, the most experienced ones, were at the borders of the Empire, and acted as envoys of the Emperor, invested with his power and charged with protecting the stability of Mathklyr. Only six Warshifters, me included, were in the capitol city, in service of the Emperor; four more protected our borders.

I was given apartments in the imperial palace; the Emperor might have urgently needed my advice at any time, and besides, every Emperor since the founding of the Academy had acknowledged the importance of the Warshifters, and, above all, the importance of keeping us satisfied, and granting us incentives enough to ensure our fanatic loyalty. And it worked: after all, was this not all we had wished for?

But the Emperor was not old, and his mind was exceptionally sharp. From time to time, he would ask our advice on problems which, I am sure, he could have easily solved himself; but apart from this, once the excitement of my victory had faded, I discovered that the work of a Warshifter in the Emperor’s palace was little more than nothing. Keth Makhrath IV did not believe in delegating his power, at least not in any significant way, and so our role was mostly ceremonial, while we waited for conflicts to erupt and our presence to be needed. We would spend our free time keeping ourselves in shape, refining our instruction, discussing strategical, tactical and philosophical problems and situations, as we all had once done in the Academy; but since the Emperor had no favorites, and since no one among us felt directly threatened by the others, our conversations were far more relaxed than I had ever had in the Academy: we all were united by the desire for our role, the role of the Warshifters, to be less ceremonial and to receive more responsibilities, as it had been in the past, before the Taeketh dynasty’s rise to power.

And then, one day, the Emperor summoned us. A great conflict in the southern provinces had been quashed, and the victorious Warshifter was returning to the capitol city, where he would have been granted a Triumph. As etiquette demanded, we would have joined our brother, and all of us together would have knelt in front of the Emperor; in such a way, according to tradition, the Emperor would not have honored a single man, but all Warshifters, creating neither envy nor hatred, and reinforcing the common beliefs about our brotherhood. Yes, brotherhood: this was what united the Warshifters, though it was a fragile brotherhood, far more volatile than others could see.

Great preparations were undertaken, to welcome Orwedd Madreth Llyryn adequately; this was the name of the victorious Warshifter, a name that was already legend to me, for I had read about him and I had studied his writings ever since my time in the Academy. Orwedd was the greatest living Warshifter, and the oldest as well; some said the blood of elves ran in his veins, others said he had fought and bested an Ellemere spirit and, in exchange for mercy, he had received the gift of long life. But whatever the truth, his career as a Warshifter had lasted more than forty years, and in all this time, he had never been defeated; no, not even the secret records in the Warshifter archives bore any traces of failures on Orwedd’s part. For this reason, among other things, the Emperor chose to grant Orwedd a great gift: to honor the Warshifter, the Emperor would leave the Imperial palace, and he would show himself to the people of Mathklyr, for the first time in ten years.

When the day came, the city of Mathklyr was ready; great celebrations were planned, and every street, every balcony on the Victorious Way, was decorated with flowers and adornments to welcome home Orwedd and his victorious army. Heralds had spoken about the honor the Emperor would have granted to the Warshifter, to demonstrate his gratitude to Orwedd and to us all; and so, the common folk had slowly gathered along the Way, and each held chrysanthemum petals in their hands. This was the flower traditionally associated with Lady Oinrin, for after all, Orwedd’s victory represented the principles the goddess incarnated: the death of his foes, the sovereignty earned through victory in battle, and the fate he had fulfilled. At Orwedd’s passage, the people would have thrown those petals to celebrate his return, covering the Victorious Way with a soft, pale carped on which Orwedd would have walked, barefooted, as a mark of humility, and on which we would have joined him to reach the Emperor and receive, all together, his gratitude and his blessing.

I had never seen a Triumph; and certainly I had never dreamed I would be in one. But as I put on the clothes which had been prepared for me, the symbols of my status, my kitain, my Warshifter sword, as I moved my boots out of the way because - like Orwedd, and like my brothers – I would have joined the parade barefooted, I wondered whether our brother’s victory would have changed anything in the way the Emperor treated us in times of peace. And a small part of me wondered whether, and when, I would receive a similar Triumph, myself. As the youngest Warshifter, I would probably have been given only minor tasks, due to my lack of experience; years would have been needed, before I could receive a task as demanding as Orwedd’s, and earn a similar Triumph as a reward. But I was still young, I was just twenty-four years old, and doubtlessly, my future was bright: and holding this thought in my mind, I left my apartments, walking along the corridors of the Imperial palace to reach my brothers, and start our procession to the Victorious Way, where we would have joined Orwedd.

ELIS

What Ellemere told me that day filled me with horror: even the most horrifying tale cannot do justice to how it feels to see the foundations of your life crumble as a paper castle, it cannot explain how it feels to discover you hold dear something that does not exist anymore, something of which only an empty shell remains, stained by a desecrating darkness.

How to explain what the spirit of the forest told me? An invisible, but deadly disease held Mathklyr in its grip; but every single citizen of the Empire was blind to the symptoms, and did not know the cause. As a malignant parasite, something was eating the very roots of the Empire, something was crawling along its veins, sneaking into its depths, and drinking of its fruits; dark entities, once believed destroyed and defeated, but who in truth had only waited until the moment was right, hidden by the darkness of ignorance, forgotten by those who should have paid attention to the signs; and they had struck, dealing a blow that could have been deadly to Mathklyr, had someone not acted in time.

This, Ellemere told me, was the fate for which I was destined: this, the spirit of the forest explained to me, was the choice that would have decided my destiny. I had been given the secrets of her magic as a gift, through her children; I had been given the gift of knowledge, as painful as that was; but the choice was to be mine, and mine alone. I could have stayed within the Ellemere, ignored this disease; I could have waited until it would be so terrible and so deeply rooted within the Empire that it would never be defeated; or, I could have left the Ellemere and gone back to Mathklyr, to its traditions, its uses, its customs, which I had hated so much, and which would have been swept away by the coming storm, if I decided not to act. Yes, the Empire would have needed a restoration, it would have needed new life’s blood; but what the storm would have brought would have been destruction, and I did not want for my homeland to be crushed and destroyed.

I did not realize I had made my choice, until Ellemere looked at me with kindness, and smiled, saying:
“Do not fear; the choices the heart makes lead along the right path. And your heart is brave; many would have chosen escape. If all sons and daughters of mankind were as you are, the mortal worlds would be realms where no fairy creature would fear being seen, nor would there be need of magic to protect ourselves from the depredations of humans. And it is not necessary for you to leave now; gather your strength, prepare your spirit and your heart for the hard path you have chosen, for you will need all of yourself to face the trials to come.”
“Will I be capable of doing what you ask of me?” I asked her, for I was afraid of failure, and if I failed, who would have stopped the progression of this canker?
“This, only your heart may say,” Ellemere told me, touching my chest with the tips of her fingers, “but as long as it will be steadfast, there will be hope. And if hope were to die, remember what you saw in my realm, and the gifts you received; as long as your resolve and your courage will hold, hope will never truly die.”

“Yet what you ask of me goes beyond the skills of any mortal man or woman!” I protested; for indeed, what Ellemere had told me required me to undertake an action no one would have been able to execute. But the spirit of the forest nodded, and smiled sadly, and she said, “For this reason, I tell you, do not let your resolve die. For your fate sends you into war, though not on the battlefield; and great sacrifices might be required of you, so that you may succeed in your task. Ah,” she said, sighing and looking at the distant stars, “if I could, I would take this burden off your shoulders, and I would take it on myself; but neither I, nor any of my children could succeed in the task fate gave you. But whatever destiny awaits you along this path, be it victory or defeat, be comforted at least by the thought that you were chosen for a reason, even though that reason is unknown to us now.”

And as Ellemere spoke, I felt a strange feeling falling upon me like a blanket; I felt fear, terror even, for who would not have felt this way, at the thought of doing what I was preparing to do? But at the same time, I felt a strong resolve being born within me: who else could do all this? I alone, in all of Mathklyr, was aware of the danger, and of what it was necessary to do so that this danger would not destroy my homeland, the Empire which had resisted the ravages of time for over ten thousand years. Had I not acted, Mathklyr would have fallen, and who can say what would have risen in its place? But all I had loved, all I had desired to change, would doubtlessly have disappeared forever. As much as the Empire was static, crushed by tradition, it deserved a better ending than the one which was waiting for it, if the disease Ellemere had described had reached its goal.

And so I understood: I would not let Mathklyr fall, for beyond all else, beyond all I hated about the customs of the Empire, I loved the Empire, and it was my home, the place of my birth, and for good or evil, I could not turn my back to it, even though, choosing to act, I could have met with death. For I did not doubt that the task I had chosen to undertake would have led me to death: there would have been no other alternative, not even if Lady Oinrin and all the Kerrethain had watched over me.

When I lifted my gaze and met Ellemere’s pure, crystalline eyes, I saw reflected the very same awareness, the very same truth: the spirit of the forest knew that our meeting would have ended with a farewell, and that I would never come back to the trees of the great forest, to dance with the korrigan or sing with the nymphs, to study the magic Ellemere had taught to her sons and daughters, and to taste the beauty, the magic that Ellemere herself was. For a moment, my resolve wavered; and I came very close to changing my mind.

But I am a daughter of Mathklyr, and my people’s courage, pride, and strength flowed through my veins; perhaps it was the hardest thing I had ever had to do thus far, but I faced that fear, and I crushed it under my heel. Whatever my destiny, my choice was made, and I would have faced it proudly: once I had claimed the fate of an Akun-him, but the task I had taken upon myself was far more burdensome, and yet far more important. This, then, was the meaning of the line of fate I had seen when Melyelle had brought me into the fairy world that surrounded the Ellemere; this, then, was the fate which was waiting for me, and the spirit, like the korrigan, had always known it. For this I had trained in the past seven years, so that I may have a chance of success. Yet the choice had never been taken from me: I alone would have been arbiter of my own destiny.

Ellemere did not stop me, did not try to make me change my mind. She knew, like I did, that this fate had to be fulfilled, or a dark and grim future would have befallen Mathklyr. And so she gave me her blessings, and with a heavy heart, but a determined spirit, I finally left the great forest, and stepped once more within the Empire of my birth.

ALRIC

The day of the Triumph, according to tradition, the Victorious Way was barred to common people, cleaned, and carefully decorated; as the crowd gathered at the sides of the street, ready to honour the Warshifters by throwing chrysanthemum petals, guards placed themselves at the forefront, at regular intervals, and the twenty Imperial guards tradition required to surround the Emperor in this ceremony prepared to leave.

And we, the Warshifters, clad in our formal garb, left the Imperial Palace as soon as word came that Orwedd and his men had been sighted and were approaching the gates of the city; there, the army would stop, while Orwedd and some elite battalions would enter to meet us, and all together we would then return to the Palace, meeting the Emperor midway along the Victorious Way. As we walked down the Way from the Imperial Palace, we could not help but be dazzled by the majesty of the Triumph, the lavish decorations covering the whole Victorious Way, the great crowd gathered at the sides of the street, men, women, children and old people, filled with pride and joy at the thought of watching the triumphant return of their loved ones, and the celebration of their victory. A multitude of colors filled the air – flags flew in the wind, banners and cloth strips decorated the houses and buildings that faced the Way, and each citizen wore his best clothes, from the poorest to the richest. Here and there, pavillions had been raised for noble families who did not wish, understandably, to mix with the common folk; their banners, decorated with gold, silver and previous gems, sparkled in the sun, shining onto the Victorious Way as if they were small suns. Chariots of every size and shape hosted those who had come late, or who had been unable to rent a pavillion; but most of the people were on foot, and without any doubt, those who were standing in the back rows would be unable to see anything. But the cries of rejoicing and welcome we received as we were seen advancing along the Way, in our uniforms, were like thunder, and they moved us: even though we had not actually taken part in the campaign, we shared the pride of being Orwedd’s brethren, and of being members of the highest military tradition of Mathklyr, seen as infallible and almost divine by the common folk, and only little less than that by the noble-born.

We walked along the Victorious Way, surrounded by those same cries of rejoicing and triumph; I felt as if I were drunk, so high was my exaltation. Yet, even in that state, none of us was so distracted as not to pay attention to our surroundings, to the crowd; a difficult instinct to repress, even knowing the security measures that had been taken. Beyond the twenty guards who would have protected the Emperor, the guards standing by the sides of the Victorious Way, and the six of us, a large number of guards in civil clothes was among the crowd, and archers were on the roofs, ready to act at the smallest sign of danger. Not that we expected any: no one would have dared attack the Emperor in public – tradition would not allow it. Yes, there had been assassination attempts against Emperors in the past; but – as it was in the Warshifter Academy – tradition required that these attempts be carried out in secret, not in public, and no House would have broken this unwritten rule.

And so we continued until we reached the gates of the Inner City; here, a lone man came to meet us, on foot, following the Victorious Way from the gates of the Outer City, and followed in turn by elite battalions of various armed forces. Orwedd was a tall and imposing man, with a thick black beard, cut according to the fashion of noble Houses – he was the lord of House Llyryn, one of the most important in the Empire. He had black eyes, which seemed to bore straight into the soul of those he looked at, and long black hair, though touched with silver as the years took their toll. Years he did not show, however: it was difficult to believe that a man like him, who seemed to be barely forty years old, was actually at least twenty-five years older. Orwedd was clothed in the same Warshifter uniform we wore, but he seemed to wear it with a dignity and a bearing we lacked, and it seemed to belong with him as if he had wore nothing else in his life. When we met, beneath the archway of the gates, we greeted each other with a formal bow, but no word was exchanged among us: part of the ceremony required that we Warshifters appear as if we were a single entity, as if we had always been aware of our brother’s actions, and his return among us had not been reason for surprise or welcome. He had simply come back, and just like a sick man, upon healing, does not talk with his own health, so we joined Orwedd and welcomed him with that simple bow. But when we gathered around him, the guards and the people raised the cry: “Honor to the Warshifters! Honor to House Llyryn! Honor to the Fallen!” and chrysantemum petals fell upon us like a light snow.

To that cry, as a single voice, we answered: “Honor to Mathklyr! Honor to the Fallen!”, and as a single man, we began our procession along the Victorious Way in the Inner City, towards the Emperor; but as we started, slowly, along the street which was now covered with flower petals, my gaze was attracted by a flash of blonde hair, and for an instant, it seemed to me I was seeing a familiar face, a face I believed I could recognize. Blonde hair and emerald green eyes… but the moment passed, and the face disappeared. Together with my brethren, I joined the procession.