The pain is unimaginable. It is not a physical sensation—that kind of pain ended quickly—it is the sensation of your soul choking, being forcibly shunted into a chute too narrow for single thread to pass. Souls are more resilient and, it would appear, compressible than threads.
I have existed in this state now for a timeless time that gives every sign of being an eternity, but the part of me that is still conscious rejects the notion that eternal pain is my just reward. Then it ends. There is no transition; it is as sudden an end as the beginning, which was also an end. Again, I am reminded of the single thread, but this time of the shears which cut it.
“Son,” a voice calls. I do not turn, but my perception shifts and the speaker is before me. He looks exactly like he did when I saw him last.
“My lord father,” I answer.
“I am no lord, here, only Gideon and your father” he corrects me. “Rest with me. The journey to this place is hard, I remember.”
I am seated; it is a change of state which occurs, again, without any action or effort. The change is a dramatic one. We are seated together in a cavernous hollow of a tremendous branch of the most impossibly large tree I have ever seen. Half of the hollow is open to a blue and empty sky and the brilliant golden sunlight. A waterfall is visible in the distance, but the sound is of a flowing river coming from below.
“How do your brothers and sisters, son? I loathe being cut off as I am.”
“They were in danger when I left them. We were seeking the Eye of the Avatar.” I pause. “I am dead, aren’t I?”
My father nods. “I have longed for the company of my family here. You are not long for this world, though. Your siblings will show your soul the way back to life—oh yes, such paths exist.”
“But how?”
“Why confuse the issue. It is the will of Elos, or maybe the will of some other power in the universe. Either way, it is beyond you or I to answer how.”
“You longed for our company? Is mother not here?”
“Your mother is someplace else, and Jacob has gone elsewhere in his rage.” When he speaks of mother he smiles, but he quickly sobers as his thoughts turn to Jacob. “It would seem the Bale family kept secrets hidden, but I know not what those secrets are; they are silent to me. They might talk to you. You are their blood.”
“Where are they?”
“Right here,” he gestures at the tree in which we sit. “This hollow is all I am allowed. It is your mother’s, although she has not yet joined me here.”
“This tree…”
“It belongs to the ancestors of the Bale family. I am a Harmonant. There is a home for me as well, and you, in another place. For now, though, it is the Bale in you from which you seek more answers.” He smiles.
“No, it is you I seek answers from. What happened at the Avatars? Who destroyed them? Who killed you, mother, and Jacob? Why? What will happen now they have been destroyed?” I feel I should be perturbed by these unanswered questions, but the urgency can find no fertile ground in which to root, so the questions remain floating seeds of curiosity.
“A wise man once said, ‘Everything is illuminated by what has come before.’” My father looks apologetic, “I should have spoken of this to you, to all my children, before my death—I was wrong not to trust you.”
“You ask of the Avatars. You must look back to find their importance. Ambira’s Loom was crafted by the Weaver, your mother’s distant ancestor, as a gift for the goddess Ambira in the Age of Legends; it is also called Ambira’s Cog, but only by the dwarves.”
“Is not that the name of the mysterious constellation that appears in the sky only during times of great moment and change?” I ask.
“It is that and more than that. It is also the source of all magic that belongs naturally to the world. Hekar the Destroyer created a twisted counterpart, the Shadow Loom, from his imprisonment so he might have a source of power to free himself. It is through the Shadow Loom that the Dark Prisoner weaves his dark magics to control his minions and defile all of Aethe.”
“Four centuries ago, the Avatars were created by Priamus, Iriel, and Gilrodeme to bring the Shadow Loom to a halt while Miroth the Just, Ranoc the Reborn, and Nikander Flamehammer strengthened the bonds which kept the Lord of Death imprisoned and which had decayed for millennia. The gods, through their chosen servants, spoke of slowing the weaving of Ambira’s Loom to the pace of a slug drake, that they might close that avenue to the Dark Prisoner as well. In the years that followed, to most folk of Aethe, magic, both arcane and divine, simply ceased to be. To the learned and wise, magic became forbiddingly difficult.”
“Father,” I ask, “where did you learn all this? And is the world at an end now that the last Avatars have been destroyed?”
“For your first question, I learned most of it from our ally, the Chancellor Othelius, who held many of the writings of Miroth the Just before they were destroyed by my royal father as Justiciar heresy. For your second question, all is not at an end, yet.”
“Although your mother, our allies, and I were hopeful of protecting the Wyntish Avatars, we did not count solely on our success in the matter. There remains one hope – the last of the Colossal Avatars that protect Aethe from the Shadow Loom. The Blind Avatars of the Isle of Emet still stand.”
“The lost Wyntish colony?” I interrupt.
“Indeed. Your time on the Wyntish border as a boy was not completely wasted on pranks, I see.” He smiles. “When the Wyntish explorer Tupper Crake conquered the Isle of Emet in the name of Wynt nearly two hundred and fifty years ago, he took the eyes from Avatars there as a small portion of his tribute for his beloved Republic. Although Wynt lost its colonies in the Long Winter that followed a hundred years after that, the Eyes remained in Wynt until seventy-five years ago, when they were given by the Red Houses of Wynt as a gift of friendship to my great-grandfather Breward, King of Prendor. Sadly, Ingvar the Scourge did not share in Breward’s magnanimous goodwill toward Wynt and conquered the country a mere fifteen years later, proclaiming himself king there and in Hathaine.”
“King Breward sent one of the Eyes as a gift of his own to King Nikander of Turingard, who would most assuredly have disapproved if he had ever received it. But the expedition was ambushed and the Eye was taken beyond the Candlenox Door…”
“So, Simon does have the Eye of the Avatar in his haversack,” I offered, “and the Eye of the Avatar is hidden behind the Candlenox Door, also.”
“Clever boy. Those are two of the six eyes of the Blind Avatars. The one your brother Simon has is one of three your mother found. Another, which you and your siblings unknowingly saved from the goblin horde, is hidden in Blackwater Keep and the third she kept on her person. Your uncle Brandon found one which, to my knowledge, he still keeps in hiding at the Baelery in Oldshire. There is the one guarded by the White Horned Drake who brought it behind the Candlenox Door. That leaves a sixth, and I know nothing of its whereabouts.”
“White Horned What?”
“There is no time to explain that with more important matters to tell. The Eyes are powerful in themselves, though how to wield them I do not know. But they must be returned to the Blind Avatars of Emet for the good of all. That may not be enough, however. Ambira’s Loom must be empowered to weave at its full speed, and the scions of the Weaver who crafted it may have an advantage in this. Seek the rest of the Eyes to restore the Avatars! Until you find them, the Shadow Loom weaves on unimpeded. And revive the weavings of Ambira’s loom to counter what damage Hekar may have done already with the power he has already obtained.”
“But how? I am here…”
“Not much longer. And I must tell you—the men of my father, King Harl, will wait for you outside the Candlenox door to take you to Larrae alive and unbound, but as prisoners nonetheless. You could evade them (I am sure), but if you do, you will never see your mother again.”
There are no words for my surprise, but my father sees clearly how I feel.
“She does indeed live. I wish I could say more, but your time here is at an end. Other children of mine have indeed found a way to work miracles.” He smiles, his pride evident.
And the unimaginable pain is in me, again, and unimaginably greater than before. It feels like a thousand hooks pulled in a hundred different directions are buried in my heart and tear me into fragments. “Father, I cannot do this. The pain will destroy me.” I am sobbing. “Let me … stay. More rest… rest…”
He looks grieved, but my father does not reach out to me. “I have no power to give what you ask. But,” he says as he addresses the tree suddenly, “Bale-tree. Ancestors of my wife and our children! A scion of the Weaver is being called back to the world of the living, but it is so soon after his voyage here. He is weak and needs assistance! Can you succor him?”
The entire vastness of the tree answers his plea. “Child of the Weaver! We will aid you. You must answer to this summons, no matter the pain. Let yourself be called, and we will play mendicant and guide.”
So I have let go – my father’s voice straining in the distance to remind me of avatars and looms. I am soothed by ancestors whom I have never met, long dead. Many of them I have heard of, some I did not know before, but I hear all their stories as they bear me, each carrying one of my thousand shards back home.
Victor was slumped against the cave wall when the voices began to whisper. He woke and drew his axes, seeking a foe in the murk at the edge of the light cast by the everburning torch Josiah had carried in his last battle. Nothing stirred except Oberon, who made occasional motions in his prayer vigil over Josiah’s body, and Elissa, whose watch it was. A compassionate voice whispered again to Victor, as though the speaker were speaking with cupped hand against his ear.
“Young scion, be well. We are here to bear your cousin back,” the voice whispered. Stunned, Victor’s arms dropped slowly to his side.
Oberon’s eyes crept open cautiously as he listened to the voice of Erebus Bale explain how the potion which was used was not meant to call a soul back from the beyond, how only the nature of the caves behind the Candlenox Door and the help of the ancestors of the Bale line made it possible, and how Josiah’s soul was ‘only beginning to settle into the recesses of the flesh in which it did reside until late ago.’ The frail-seeming corpse of his brother appeared no different than it did a moment before the spirit of his ancestor announced his soul’s return. It seemed the process would take a full cycle of the sun in its path overhead.
“And we will be near to knit your brother’s soul back to his flesh,” assured Erebus, “for as long as the task will take.”
Elissa was finishing her rounds about the small camp for the third time in an hour when Victor jerked violently to his feet. Before she drew her sword in response to whatever threatened him, she was awash in light and color which she knew could be from nowhere in the cavern in which she stood.
Elissa stood on the tourney grounds at the Castle of the Star, but it was like no tourney she had ever witnessed. The world seemed brighter than it ever had, and of the banners that flew, few were not outdated, and all of those belonged to houses bound to the Bale line by marriage or blood. Most of all, the competitors in this tourney were all women, and the men watched from the stands.
“Elissa. You’ve grown into quite the young woman. I know your mother is so proud of you,” a woman in ornate plate armor greeted her. Her wide smile was inviting and somehow familiar. “You do not know me, do you? Come join in the day’s competitions! I am assured you handle my sword with skill.”
-- by Kyle and Abram
