Scrolls Cair Coradon

COPIED FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF CAIR CORADON BY RIPIROS NOONCAS SBIELIO, AUTHOR UNKNOWN. SCROLL NUMBER ONE, OF SIX.

After the lowest of the low slaves had been with us for a year and two festivals, he complained of an ache in his side that did not relax. We kindly ensured that he received healthy work, work to keep the mind free of physical concern, but he grew worse and then laid down. Our leather could not make him stand. Even bronze bits made him wail but not move. We gave him up for dead. Bearien Hulpas chose to honor him with a death in Ereal's eyes at daybreak.

I, as young then as I am old now, was chosen to keep him through the cold night until Ereal awakened the next day. I was recklessly idealistic, certain that he would go to his death with more honor if he could only understand what it meant to shed blood in the eyes of the Great Sun. He was a barbarian from the south, and his dark purple eyes were dim with resignation. It seemed pathetic to me that he refused to stand tall, bright-eyed with wonder at the fate he had been given. We had not brought him low in the waning twilight! What more could he ask of us?

I spoke at him for seemingly hours. He scarcely moved, only clutching at his side from time to time when a pain struck him. I soothed him. I gave him water, and even left him once to get mud from the river to cool his feverish head. Eventually even my innocent patience was exhausted, and I left his side to stare out the window at the cloudless sky.

He murmured something, and I turned to him. He was clutching his head as he stared past me, out the same window, at a dark spot in the sky. I was bitter and did not ask him what the problem was, but as time went on he continued muttering in caustic tones. I snapped at him to cut out the foolish utterances. He went quiet immediately, then said with immaculate diction, "The Comforter is gone, my son."

His tone frightened me. The edge of aggression, a somber finality in his tone told me more than the seemingly incomprehensible words. I finally stuttered, "Who?"

The old man - I only noticed his age then, the graying hair and the bushy silver eyebrows that framed his violet eyes - said, "The Comforter. The dark moon. I don't know his name in Cineran. It has been years, now, and still his absence pains me. I know that my journey through the Twilight will be hard-fought, a battle. That is not how it should be."

COPIED FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF CAIR CORADON BY RIPIROS NOONCAS SBIELIO, AUTHOR UNKNOWN. SCROLL NUMBER TWO, OF SIX.

I had heard stories from my parents, who heard from their parents, who heard from - Ereal above knows how far it goes back, but the stories had come down that the night sky in which three moons flew was once home to four. A dark gray moon that never rose much above the horizon, that lingered at all times as a reminder that however long Ereal graced the sky, the night would fall on schedule. Then, without a whisper, the moon had simply disappeared. There was no explanation, not even in the learned institutions of Cair Coradon. To men of my generation, this all seemed fanciful. How could something as immutable as a moon disappear?

The old man continued, "My name is Ceg'airn. I am old, weak, and close to my death. You are young, Cineran… ignorant."

I did not correct him. He was correct on one count, mostly correct on another, and completely wrong on the last. I had never been ignorant in my life.

Ceg'airn sighed deeply. "If now is the time, I suppose you are to be my last connection to this earth. You are not how I would have chosen," he smiled as I bristled, "But you will do."

"I was the first man to meet our Queen. When I was seventeen, I was called upon—calm, now, you'll know by whom shortly - I was called upon to greet the baby girl. Her parents -earthly parents - were farmers a good ways east of the city. They were amazed by the speed with which she graced the earth. They had no idea of her provenance or why a priest, as noble a bloodline as could be claimed, would want to bring their child into the city."

"Yes, I was a priest, but not of your god. Your god - I do not know him. I cannot know him. My blood, the very essence of what I am, screams against your beliefs - just as your Cineran blood must scream against the thought that the gods of the moons might be as potent as the sun Herself."

I kept very still, my heart racing. This old man - priest - could not know that I was born of a lowest slave and her master, that my mother had come from the same southern place as he. He could never know what pull the red moon had on me, how my fingers tingled when it was full and high.

"I brought the child to the city. She was precocious and gravely serious. Her eyes were a gray violet. From the time she first talked, she seemed to know what role her parents had destined her for - not the parents of flesh, but the two gods that had come together in the bodies of two poor farmers from outside of Seld. Her earthly parents were never known to the rest of the city - my dreams told me that I must bring her to the orphanage of the sun to mature. Her parents thought it best if her nativity were secret.

"I did not see her much in the early years. She confused her teachers, the men that sought to pigeonhole her into one of our cults. She amazed them all with her precocious grasp of the sun's powers, but shocked them into disbelief with her grasp of the dream."

COPIED FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF CAIR CORADON BY RIPIROS NOONCAS SBIELIO, AUTHOR UNKNOWN. SCROLL NUMBER THREE, OF SIX.

Ceg'airn rubbed his temples and complained, "Cineran is a clumsy language. I can't describe the power of the dream, the feeling of corporeal effervescence." He bit his lip. The decision was long in coming, but he finally leaned in towards me. I had sat on his threadbare cot during the story, riveted - fearful of what he was saying, more of never hearing what he had to say.

His gnarled fingers dextrously traced a small pattern in the air as he gazed into my eyes. With a defining flourish, he dropped his wrist. His eyes blazed with a violet flame. The suction that I felt caused me to whimper in alarm, but it was not unpleasant. I knew he had taken something from me, but its loss caused me to feel more whole, more at peace.

He murmured, "Close your eyes." I did so without thinking. Everything seemed far away. Beyond my eyelids nothing existed for miles. I could hear the mumbling of foreign words in the background, then silence.

It was as bright as day as I had ever seen, and I felt warm, comfortable. My eyelids were shut tight but the green grass, tiny blue flowers and even the shade of an olive tree were as real as my own ear. Low above the eastern horizon sat a dark gray moon that was unsettlingly unfamiliar. If I looked too far in any direction, a mist seemed to appear. I did not look too far in any direction.

A girl of fourteen stood in front of me, talking with a man. The man was not overly young -he had passed three decades - and his dark purple eyes were familiar. He looked at me, and it was clear - in front of me stood Ceg'airn, decades before. He regarded me calmly for a moment and then turned back to the girl, who was speaking soundlessly.

The girl was striking. Every feature was delicate, fragile as glass. Her fingers were remarkably long, despite the close-clipped fingernails. The neck was curved, every vertebrae visible against the alabaster skin. I couldn't gauge her height well. She was clearly shorter than the man, but every time I looked at her for a reference point she seemed to grow taller, more substantial. I could not hear her words, but I could see the sincerity of every syllable.

The thirty year-old Ceg'airn made a sharp gesture towards me with his wrist angled out, and darkness plunged over me momentarily. In another heartbeat, the scene had changed. We stood on the edge of a cliff behind an old woman. She was on her knees with her head tossed back. It was mid-day, but darkness hung in the air as though a choking cloud of black soot covered the sky. In the west, I could see three moons hovering above the horizon. They were engorged, all full, pregnant with desire. A row of arches stood amid a turbulent sea - not the full ocean, but an enclosed harbor. The four arches glowed with the reflected light of the moons they sat beneath.

COPIED FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF CAIR CORADON BY RIPIROS NOONCAS SBIELIO, AUTHOR UNKNOWN. SCROLL NUMBER FOUR, OF SIX.

Ceg'airn—not the young man, but the old man I knew - stood next to me, regarding the scene with passionate sorrow. Long seconds stretched by, and I realized that the old woman would not move - would never move. Her position defiant, on her knees before her god, she had died. I had missed the moment of importance, now was merely the epilogue. The air was slowly clearing, bright beams of sun lancing through the dimness of artificial twilight. Neither the sun nor the moons moved. All was still, except the dissipation of dusk. As the sun's light finally grew so bright as to be intolerable, I felt the words enter my head, "Queen Iridine, savior of our world."

The vision ended in a flash that left my body cold, aching. I collapsed on the dirt floor of the hut, exhausted, spent. I caught my breath, but the pain of loss would not go away. My insides rebelled against my common Cineran sense, and I finally half-screamed, "My Queen!"

I must have blacked out then, because the next remembrance I had was of Ceg'airn lightly stroking the back of my neck. I looked out the window. The first fingers of false dawn had begun to stretch along the eastern sky, and I looked at him worriedly. "They will be coming soon," I told the old priest. He nodded gravely to me.

"You should have told me," he said. "I would not have wasted so much time before, I would have told you sooner. The Dreamer promised me that I would have one last audience with a native of my land, and so you are. I did not expect you to be bloodsoaked, but that is beyond our control.

"Listen, you must learn what happened in the last days, as Moonfall approached and our Queen inexorably marched to her final act. She was our Queen; she had ruled us as her parents, the sun and my moon, had promised. She was the best of us, the most powerful, and it was only through her sacrifice that we were saved from the inevitable destruction the Comforter - how cruel that nomenclature now sounds - the Unraveller meant to visit upon us.

COPIED FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF CAIR CORADON BY RIPIROS NOONCAS SBIELIO, AUTHOR UNKNOWN. SCROLL NUMBER FIVE, OF SIX.

"The Council had already expelled the followers of the Unraveller, those who had gone insane when their god became enraged. The three of us - I of the Dreamer, Heialen of the Shadow, and Y'cria of the Bloodsoaked - were all that remained to advise our Queen, she of the sun. We railed against her decision, her destiny. We told her that the city, our nation, could never survive her death. As the dark moon grew larger in the eastern sky, our pleas grew louder. She would not hear, even as we argued and bargained along the path to the sea cliffs.

"It was there that she knelt, as the shadow of the Destroyer obscured the earth, and prayed to her mother to accept her sacrifice, for her father to use her power to cleanse the infection that the Unraveller had become. As gods are wont to do, He accepted - undoubtedly with pain, for she was His daughter, but he accepted.

"Before her final breath, she called us three together and gave her final instructions. She warned that our people would be spread far and wide, that an invader approached that would overwhelm our powers with brute force and a foreign god. She gave us instructions to burn our records, to destroy the great family archives that held the records of our priestly duties. In her final gasp, she ordered that the great Tower of the Heavens, the pinnacle of our combined strengths, be sealed against any intrusion by the aggressors.

"She turned once more to her mother and, in strident tones, beseeched the sun to accept her sacrifice. With a final tear dancing down her left cheek, the color left her eyes. She died."

Ceg'airn was openly sobbing, now. My hand rested on his left shoulder. I had no questions that I could ask, only a sense of the moment's enormity. The false dawn had given way to the salmon-colored dawn, and I could hear the jingle of riveted leather marching towards the small cabin. I barred the door, then knelt by the old man.

"There is no way to prevent my death," he said, salt glistening on his leathery cheeks. "My death is unimportant. But you must remember what I tell you, because when the Unraveller reappears - and no matter how strong my Queen was, she could not be rid of him forever -when He reappears, the Tower must be reopened. To restore the balance and bring the Comforter into alignment, the power of the Tower must be unlocked and repatriated."

There was a rap on the heavy wooden door. I shut the shutters on the window and listened to Ceg'airn in the dark.

He continued, "We sealed the entrance of the Tower with our strongest rituals. Y'cria guided the stone to grow, shrouding the great windows and arches of the bottom floor with feet of thickened granite and marble. Heialen brought the power of his god to bear, bringing perpetual darkness upon the entrance and caused illusory patterns to appear on the walls, ever shifting from wall to wall. And I - I am in fear of what I did, fear that the power of the Dreamer will obscure the opening of the Tower forever."

COPIED FROM THE GREAT LIBRARY OF CAIR CORADON BY RIPIROS NOONCAS SBIELIO, AUTHOR UNKNOWN. SCROLL NUMBER SIX, OF SIX.

He paused. The knocking on the door had grown increasingly insistent, and now I heard angry bellowing from outside.

"My first step was to keep out the followers of the Unraveller. It would take enormous willpower for one of His devotees to enter. Then, as one walks around the colonnade, all sense of space and direction are confused; up is down, and east is west. The pressures mount - if the subject does not have the blood of our people in her veins, then the pressure of intense nightmares will strike, perhaps permanently. A man could go insane, or die of starvation before finding his way out. Remember that the key is water, taken from the Harbor at night, focused with the energy of the arches, kept in a vial of obsidian. Our acolytes, we dispatched to the garden to obfuscate the clues that might lead a future explorer to the right answer.

"Each of us left a back door, a way for the devotees of our god to enter the Tower. Only through the combined efforts of one follower of each can the Tower of the Heavens be opened from the inside. If a man can make his way into the Tower, then he must be powerful enough to figure out how it can be opened. But if the Tower is opened to early or too late…"

The door splintered from the force of an axe.

Ceg'airn pointed to me and murmured under his breath. A cool gust of air washed over my eyes and I slept.

When I came to, blood had congealed all over my face and hands. Ceg'airn lay on the bed, hacked beyond any resemblance to a human, those pieces still together only dangling by a tendon or two. I was seized as soon as my consciousness was evident and dragged into the sunny courtyard, a challenge coming immediately. I was barely aware as a dull-edged dirk was flung at my feet. This was no Screnaca Coranadin, but a blood fight to the death. I overcame my first attacker, my dirk stuck in his windpipe as he reeled away, and was seized upon from behind by the next assailant. It wasn't until he had died, the bloody rock embedded in his skull that the circle of onlookers backed away. Whatever stature I had lost by sleeping during my watch had been regained with the two deaths.

It is important to commit these words to paper now and bury them here, in the dirt floor of this hut. There is no youth to watch me as I watched Ceg'airn, merely iron bars. The first fingers of false dawn are visible beyond the rusted steel, and soon it will be my chance to shed blood in the presence of Ereal's dawning. I know that as the blade comes close, my eye will drift to the blood red moon that will hang low in the western sky, only setting after the dirt eats my last drop of blood. More than anything else, that feels… complete.

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