Chapter 26: The Last Battlemage
Chapter 27: The Basilica
Chapter 28: Those Who Fight
Chapter 29: Those We Fight For
Chapter 30: Apotheosis
Chapter 31: The Seeds of Chaos
Chapter 1:
The Climb
Alone and afraid, the young mage tried to move, but his body refused to comply. With no eyes to see or mouth to scream, he could do nothing but succumb to the terror that came upon him.
***
The rising sun burst over the horizon of the Eternal Sea, spilling golden light over the Clifflands of Alabach. Fiery rays licked the Teeth of the Glenn, but little heat reached the poisonous valley beyond. The tide, now gilded under the morning’s influence, crashed against the cracked cliffs of the country’s western coast. On the beach lay a dying Simian, desperately trying to remember who he was.
Saltwater filled his lungs, cast out again by a spluttering cough and a barrage of retches. The taste of vomit stung his throat.
Somewhere between the throbbing ache inside his head and the sharp pain at the back of his skull, the Simian remembered a time when he was young, running through the dusty streets of Penance. He saw himself as if a spectator, watching the child weave between the crowds, a coin-purse too large to be his own clutched against his chest.
Two men dressed in the scarlet robes of the Churchguard gave chase, but the young thief was too fast for them.
Swift.They used to call me Farris the Swift.
Then Farris saw himself treating with criminals, led by a Simian with greying hair across his face and shoulders. Next, he was in Cruachan, capital city of Alabach, telling lies to King Diarmuid the Third and Nineteenth.
He held a knife held against a drunken Simian’s stomach. He boarded an airship larger than the Basilica itself. He fled from a pack of beadhbhs, then from a mountain troll. Farris remembered it all, along with the dozens of names he took throughout his life.
Another wave, stronger than the first, washed over Farris’s body. As he closed his eyes to keep the water out, a woman’s face appeared before him. A young, beautiful woman dressed all in white. Or blue. Or both. The image was transient, threatening to vanish at any minute.
After a moment, he recognised her as Slaíne the White, the healer he had travelled across the Glenn with, but she was gone before he could be sure. A voice, fainter than the water washing against his ears, spoke to him.
“Because the gods have willed it, Chester.”
He remembered. Slaíne had told him about destiny and fate, though she believed his name was Chester at the time. The healer had described her own struggles in a world without free will, and how every moment in Farris’s life would lead to this final one.
But the gods didn’t send me here. A deranged king did.
Even with the last of his life slipping away, Farris smiled. Before he left the capital, King Diarmuid had given him instructions to destroy the Simian skyfleet harboured at the ruins of the Tower of Sin, in Penance. The king claimed he was attacked by the Silverback and the other Simian dissidents, but Farris knew this could not be true; he himself was allied with the separatists.
So why did King Diarmuid lie about the Silverback? Why did he think attacking Penance was the best solution? Farris had never known, but the answer was clearer now than ever.
King Diarmuid has lost his mind.
The tide rolled back, and Farris struggled for another breath. The next wave would kill him. That was the only thing he was certain of now.
But the king’s madness left a bitter taste, worse than the salt and sand, for Farris was now the only living person to know of his plans. Soon, there would be nobody left.
The woman flashed before his eyes once more, with a terrible smile spread across her face. In an instant of clarity, Farris saw that this was not Slaíne the White. Before he could put another name to her, she was gone, and the tide came creeping back.
My time has finally come.
His lungs exhaled his last breath, his heart thundered out one final beat, and each muscle in his body began to relax. The wave passed over his face once more.
No!
A maddening desperation took hold of him. He pushed his lips out over the surface of the water for another breath of air. His heart gave another beat, and he slowly tilted his head forward. For what seemed like an eternity, the tide remained over him, but Farris fought the thousand voices in his head that begged him to lie back and die. It almost seemed as if they sang to him, telling him that his pain would cease if he just lay his head back into the sand.
But another voice cast them aside. A voice that roared ‘No!’
He balled the fingers of his left hand into a fist, shifting the weight of his body onto his arm. As the tide retreated, he pushed himself up, agony in every movement.
He slowly sat upright, the water now only up to his waist. Through blurred vision, he saw the face of the cliffs bathing in the morning sun.
A shrill shriek cut through the air, and Farris looked up. The cliffs were perhaps thirty feet tall, but the distance did little to dampen the sound of the troll’s slaughter. The troll he and his companions had brought to the fields by the cliffs.
Farris shook the memory from his head.
More will die worse deaths if the king goes to war.
He tried to stand, but his left leg buckled under his weight, sending him splashing forward into the water once more. With salt upon his tongue, he pulled himself up and crawled towards the cliff-face, dragging one useless leg behind him.
Don’t stop.
