Chapter 1
Fenelon
We have been looking up at the stars for so long, probably because some of us thought the gods had gone there and would come back from there; others who did not believe in gods thought that the stars in our sky were the home of many cultures of men-folk and domns kind and that one day, maybe, some would find a way to sail the vastness between out worlds and theirs and they will come to us. But all that was religious mishmash or child's tales to him. He was here, now and his problems were of this world and none others. Or so he thought.
He had always had difficulties looking at the stars anyway, for one, the crisscrossing of Uithil was particularly visible to him at night and its light almost occulted the flickering one of the stars. Seconds, this world was already hard enough as it was for him. Being the only son of a men-folk woman and a domn merchant from the closed Quertig lands had marked him from the onset.
Yes, he was the child of the passionate love between his father and his mother.
No, he had not been expected.
Yes, his father upon going back to the Bogatzkoï had provided him and his mother with and estate and enough liquidity to see them through almost anything life could throw at them.
But he had always been the odd one. Even in a city like Sàmàs, hybrid and cosmopolitan where men-folk and domn kind had been mixing for centuries, he was the odd one.
The Quertigs of the closed realm of Bogatzkoï were a rare tribe of Domn, they never allowed anyone inside their lands and the sole merchants leaving the peninsula would come to the great markets of the world only to trade, they would sleep in their own safe houses with others of their tribe and let none enter. The wildest legends use to circulate on the Quertigs and not all of them kind. Some even pretended that their isolation was punishment for destroying the thirteenth tribe. Others claimed that they actually hid so because they committed the most shameful acts between each other.
Fenelon tried to ignore the rumors and the odd looks, the gestures warding off evil when his mother and himself walked the streets of the market and the alleys of the city.
As an infant, his link to the magical network, Uithil, became undeniable when his mother found him sleeping in the air above his crib time and time again. She called the local Magus to have him tested. The man left telling her that her son could be what the magaï of Sardi in Humala, called a 'natural'. As the boy grew up the more power he demonstrated, in the fair season he would play in the walled courtyard of the mansion floating in the air as high as a man's head, making his toys float around himself, at times he would bring his mother herself into the air. She would open her arms and he would float into her embrace and, as she kissed him time and time again, they would float down to the ground where he would race around, shouting merrily.
The Magus came often to visit. He was a young man with a flowing yellow beard and eyes clear and pale as mountain lakes. The boy Fenelon remembered him talking quietly to his mother, his deep warm voice going on and on late in the evening. What he did not know, nor cared about at the time was what they were talking about. The magus was making the case so that his mother would allow him to be taken to the Halls of Sardis, far away in the forest at the feet of the great mountain chain of Goldrac. He needed to be trained as his powers developed, the magus reasoned. The boy could become dangerous to himself and to others, for there were no limits to the powers of naturals. It broke his mother's heart to let him go, but she knew that she could not be the one to teach him how to control something she did not understand. And so, he left on the long journey down to the realm of Ukko where the Halls of Sardis with its floating towers rested at the heart of the city of Humala.
For whole revolutions he was there, an anonymous child with red hands and feet, average and withdrawn. Fenelon was never loud and resented crowds and noisy groups of people, he made a few very good friends and went through the floating towers without making a ripple while most other children burned up in the bright fires of Uithil, wielding complexe spells and conjuring wonders.
A great plague struck the boreal reach and Sàmàs killing scores of people including his mother. Returning to the riverlands he found the bittersweet memories of his childhood the only thing he truly cherished. He inherited the estate but since there was nothing for him there anymore he elected to return in Humala where people treated him with respect and gave him the distance he needed to cradle his pain and deal with his nature. However, the older Fenelon became, oddly, the weaker his powers were. His status of natural had been verified by the members of the Four Rings, in a series of tests and trials that he had passed with flying colors. Since then it seems that each year he could do less and less. It became so bad that he even started to attend class with novices to learn the basis of Uithil wielding. By the age of fourteen Fenelon decided that he was of no use to Sardis anymore and left the great city of Humala to go back to his home of Sàmàs on the Greyflow River. His life there was one of a recluse. His servants had been his mother's and had seen him grow up, their discretion and trustworthiness were exemplary. They were the only people seen leaving and entering the estate. Fenelon spent his time in his study reading books sent to him by the magaï of Sardis on the lives of past naturals and on the use of Uithil. The pleasant gardens sloped down toward the waters of the great river across which one could see endless prairies stretching towards the rising sun. He could be spotted at times walking the grounds or sailing a small sailboat on the dull waters of Greyflow.
"It is in your blood."
"What is?"
The very young messenger from the floating towers was shuffling from feet to feet trying to deliver the message that he had consigned to memory. The boy could not have been more than eleven and Fenelon had already forgotten his mumbled name.
"It is fighting Uithil."
"What is?" Fenelon snapped, "you are making no sense."
"Gods, you are as grumpy as they said you'd be!" The kid mumbled under his breath, "it's your dad's blood, duh! Your mom's gave you the innate link to Uithil, but since you came of age your donmviik blood is fighting or limiting it." The child pointed needlessly at Fenelon's hands where the dark red skin of the Bogatzkoï's nation proclaimed his link to them.
"Why would it?"
"Donmviik lore is forbidden for us, we know shit about it but their source isn't Uithil, they tap into something else."
"There is an other source of divine power?"
"Just said that, didn't I. No magaï from Sardis has ever been able to so much as sense it, they call it the silent art of the gods."
"But their gods aren't ours, does that mean that Agatha and Orno weren't the only deities on the surface of the world?"
"Yeah, maybe, I don't know." The child shrugged. "Can I get food around here for me and the guys with me or do we need to get back to Šamaš?"
Fenelon was looking at the immature messenger considering the main fault in Sardis' very existence, they recruited their magaï young because usage of Uithil burned the very life force out of them. The only ones older than thirty had stopped using long before and there wasn't any older than forty unless they would like him, inept. Incompetence ruled supreme and juvenile impetuosity was kindling to the flames of Uithil. So it was his father's legacy that meant he was crippled. What to do with this information, even if he pealed the red skin of his arms and legs it still was half of what, who he was.
"Take yourself to the office, the midday meal will be served in time and sufficiency for all of you."
***
Many years later the man called Gerrek of Mèn was noticed walking the streets of Šamaš, no one could report having spotted him enter the estate nor leave it but days after his departure from the city, Fenelon was seen for the first time in ages to leave his voluntary seclusion. A merchant barge sailing down the Greyflow stopped at the private dock of his estate and he boarded it. The barge, a Temme Nakka from upcountry reached the confluence and started sailing upriver on the Darkwaters.
***
As he disembarked the light was getting dim in a clear sky devoid of clouds, he was at a small trading counter on the lower shore of the Darkwaters Fenelon was still unsure about the journey he had set upon. He purchased a horse from a Tannoz along with a Kaabutar saddle and rode away from the town of Enlil deep into the Leni Forest. The great commotion he had felt rocking Uithil for a whole night had come from far away, from lands he had never heard of and that were not even on the maps of Sardis. Gerrek however, had come knocking on his door asking him peculiar questions about it. It was almost as is that Gerrek man knew Fenelon better than he did know himself. He showed him maps he had drawn during his travels. They were unlike the maps he had seen in the palace of the governors of Šamaš, and much more exhaustive than the map Sardis had sent him, the details and the names they bore covered all the space on the soft leather sheets. The scruffy traveler asked him to point out where the disturbance had come from, in so far as he could.
A landmass, lost in the ocean below the sunset lands, almost right under the circle sea. Gerrek called it Sété.
But he had been positive; this was where Uithil had suffered a commotion that had reverberated worldwide, there was still a spot on the upper rising side that he could sense, like a dull throbbing he could place precisely on the map; the oddest thing was, after seeing Gerrek's maps he could almost conjure them in his mind. It was as if he could construct a mental image of the maps that shaped the world in its entirety, and on this mental map he could see himself and the throbbing point on Sété and if he focused enough he could see the Magaï of Sardis and yes, Gerrek too. The wanderer, as he called himself in jest, left the day after with a warning for Fenelon:
"If this is what I feel it is, then my boy your lonely days in this lovely voluntary prison are at an end. What will come will rock the world and lit a fire so large and wide it may very well burn Šamaš and all the realms around it." He then proceeded on giving instructions to Fenelon on what to do next. Who to go to, and what to ask of them.
As he was traveling to the Steps to Heaven, Fenelon started hearing stories of the faraway land where whatever it was that had happened, had happened; some of the names were familiar, they appeared in a popular story of star-crossed lovers who fought for the rights to build their city after long years of wandering on the oceans.
***
'Etheldene and Lepentar had all but conquered the isle of Sété in the war to settle the empty lands on its boreal rising side where they had landed with their people. The tale tells of how Etheldene had been shot by an arrow on the battlements of a city he was besieging. The scene when Lepenthar puts his lips to the wound to suck the poison out is famous for many poets have used it as an illustration of the absoluteness of love. Etheldene and Lepentar both die in each other's arms in the city their army had overrun.'
Etheldene's father was a demon lord who had been cast out of his realm on twenty-seven ships and had protected and fed his people during the twenty-seven years of being lost at sea with his powerful magic. That demon took revenge for the death of his son on the people of Sété and subdued the Tjetjian senate forcing them to settle peace with him. But the demon was weary of conflict and mourning his son, so his demands were reasonable and the senators found it in themselves to grant him the lands he wanted and control over the cities his son had vanquished. Much later the demon died and his descendants inherited the throne and ruled benevolently over the people and the sailors of the city of Erii.
Navigators by tradition, the Eriian people kept building ships and exploring the seas in order to find the lost realm of their demon king; where legend had it, immeasurable wealth awaited them. The Eriian citadel ships became famous worldwide for every time they would enter a harbor their holds were loaded with the most extraordinary goods from places no one had ever heard of. But the one item of greatest value that the citadel ships carried were the maps of the Cartographical Office. The first of their kind, they quickly acquired enormous importance for they allowed the rulers of the world a comprehensive view of their own lands and the lands of their neighbors. Some realms even forbade private ownership of said maps.
Traders, cartographers, and explorers, the Eriian ships were welcome in the harbors of the world and the city-state of Sété soon had trading counters in the cities that mattered for trade and politics.
Daringly crossing the Sea of Storms, the sailors of Erii had opened the route to the Alvarve cape and the Setting side had discovered that past the gargantuan peaks of Goldrac, there were lands and realms. One of the cities of the rising side at the mouth of the Magris River, on the high red cliff coast of Nadistec was the ancient city they had sailed from so many years ago.
Today the impotant descendant on the throne of Erik conjured the spirit of his ancestor and brought him back welcoming him in his own body, the demon king was back. He was already subjecting the remaining realms on the Isle of Sété and enrolling them in his armies. Entire forests were being logged and sent to the shipyards to build what can only be described as an armada of citadel ships whose only purpose was reconquest of the long lost city on the rising side of the world.
Fenelon looked up at the mountains in front of him. From Sàmàs you could only glimpse the outline of the highest peaks when the sun would set on a clear day, from a second to the next its light would go out and the glorious outline of the peaks would appear in the skyline just above the horizon.
Two days after entering the great Gatlin plains he was now at the foot of the Goldrac. The road to Lugalbanda was going up straight in front of him and soon got lost in the chaos of rocks that he was looking at. Peaks upon peaks, mountains piled up one on top of the other, never-ending rock-faces and cliffs that confused the mind with their sheer verticality. The sun was rising behind him as he checked the line of his packhorse and spurred on his roan. The climb was arduous but there were good inns at a day's distance all the way to the great Gatlin city.
The merchant caravan that took him through the pass across high Goldrac was forty strong, discounting the mercenaries. They were under the orders of a Helehalian. The tall graceful woman of the Lakes region kept to herself mostly but Fenelon felt oddly drawn to her. One evening after an easy day in the ice tunnels he went to her after supper. As he approached, he was still searching for an excuse to come and initiate a conversation, but she spoke first:
"Welcome child of the two races, I hear you have finally met with the wanderer, did he show you his maps? I am sure he did. Come, sit by my fire." Fenelon did not know what else to do so he did as he was told.
"How do you know... How do you know what you know?"
The Helehalian smiled a sweet motherly smile.
"You are known, Fenelon of Šamaš on the Greyflow. We have seen you come since before you were born. And we have seen you go ever since. You have the sight; now that he has shown you his maps, you can see all who have powers in this world. Even places with strong convergences. Try focusing on the Lakes. I know you know where it is."
The young man thought about the map and it conjured itself in his mind, he then thought about the Lakes and he could see them, the long narrow strips of water lost in an ocean of evergreen fire-trees. It was full of people, many people, suddenly he realized that the only reason he could see them, all of them women, was because they all had powers. They were all to some degree using Uithil. But his mind was attracted to something, something powerful and very near. It was on a peak. On the very top of a rock needle; something, not someone; something monstrously powerful was there. Somehow, when his mind touched it there was a deflagration and Uithil shone brighter and was covered in thunder-like flashes. Fenelon fell to the floor and opened his eyes. The Helehalian was looking straight at him, a thin smile on her lips, she hadn't moved.
"You have sensed it." She rose and offered her hand to help him from the ground. Her grasp was firm and powerful, her hand callused with sword and bow training, it spoke of violence, the finality of a well-aimed arrow, the difference between victory and death perfect swordplay could make. Fenelon was shivering a little, he did not know if it was from the vision or the contact with the warrior's hand.
"My name I offer as a sign of trust. I am Ozna of the last Step, of the Helehalians." She bowed deeply to him and sat down before saying:
"What you saw, the sisters call the Singing Rod. It is a very powerful object; we have only heard legends about it. But there is a song the priestesses of the Lake have been singing ever since the lakes filled with water from the winter snows and the summer rains. That song had been given to us by the gods themselves and it speaks of you and of the Singing Rod so high in High Goldrac that no man can go there, for there is nothing left to breathe and only the red drakes live in these parts. But you, yes, you little man of two people. The natural of this age, you will go there and retrieve it for us, so that we can have it cut and forged into the Tools of Peace before the demon lord of Erna rises again and forces us to hide them from his power-lust."
