Good Tidings [Chapter Two - On the Boy from Kaedrin]

[Lhindir_ 3691]

Another chapter, surfaces from the underworld. . . Circulating to any who care to read the work of the lich. 
 

ON THE BOY FROM KAEDRIN

Being a Chapter of Good Tidings

 

“...And when the world shall listen, and when the world shall see, and when the world remembers, that world will cease to be.”

Chronicle of Rh’thoraen Necromancy

 

I was not always what I am.

Kaedrin was a farming commonwealth, vassal to the Empire, sprawled across the western reaches beyond Haense. Wheat and barley and cattle and mud. A stagnant country where a man’s worth was weighed in bushels and sons, and I possessed neither in quantity. My soil was clay. My harvest was adequate. My name was Carrion, which the farmers acknowledged with a nod the way one acknowledges a headstone in a field one passes daily. They knew the word. They had long forgotten what it commemorated.

The Commonwealth smelled of ploughed earth and woodsmoke and the damp that colonises stone when the masons have cut costs. Farmers gathered at market on Wednesdays to trade grain and grievances in equal measure. I stood among them, seventeen years old, and observed the mechanics of their fellowship. The laughter that passed between them like a signal fire. The hand upon the shoulder that communicated belonging. I could identify each gesture with precision. I could reproduce none of them. I had been studying this particular insufficiency for as long as memory permitted.

I did not have companions. I had tenants who paid and left. Neighbours who were polite in the way farming folk are polite, which is serviceably, and without warmth. I had a house built for a family I did not have and I walked its corridors counting things, because counting was something I could do and doing it was better than standing still in the silence that gathers around a man the world has decided it has no use for.

 

Hera came to my door in autumn. The fields had been cut and the stubble was grey and the crows were thick upon the eastern pasture. I remember the crows. Forty-seven.

He was an elf. Old. Far older than anyone I had met in Kaedrin, where old meant sixty and he was something past that, something the face did not show but the eyes did. He wore black. Not the black of mourning or fashion but the black of a man who has worn the same colour so long it has stopped being a choice. His face was painted white. The paint was thick and careful and it sat on his skin like a second face laid over the first, and I understood at once that the paint was not decoration. It was practice. It was something he put on every morning the way I would later put on the wig.

He offered to tutor me. Those were his words. No preamble. No account of who he was or what road had brought him to a farmer’s door in Kaedrin. He said: I would like to tutor you. As though it were the most mundane proposition in the world.

I said yes. I did not ask in what. I did not ask why. I said yes because no one had offered me anything before, and because his eyes were steady, and because when he looked at me he did not look away after one or two or three seconds the way the farmers did. He held. I counted to nine before I stopped counting.

 

He did not begin with the old knowledge. He began with mathematics.

I had expected otherwise from a man who bore himself as Hera bore himself, with the gravity of someone who had outlived the relevance of most things he had witnessed. He gave me arithmetic.

We sat at my kitchen table and he taught me to count with purpose. Not the compulsive enumeration I had practised since boyhood, fence posts and crows and seconds of eye contact catalogued to no end. He taught me to measure. To discern the ratios that govern the relations between things, and to read in those ratios a language more fundamental than any tongue spoken by men. Mathematics, he said, was the script in which the world was authored. The speech of men was merely commentary laid atop it. A man fluent in both could perceive what a man fluent in only one could not.

Then philosophy. We read together by candlelight in the kitchen that had been built for a family and now held two. He brought texts in languages I could not read, and translated as we went, his dry voice turning foreign words into ideas that rearranged the inside of my head. The nature of knowledge. The nature of perception. Whether the world as men experience it bears any true resemblance to the world as it is.

Hera did not explain things the way a teacher explains things. He dropped a sentence into the room and left it there. One night, late, the candle burned low, rain on the windows, the kitchen smelling of damp stone and tallow, he said, “The blind man and the seeing man stand in the same field. The blind man says it is empty. The seeing man says nothing, because who would he say it to.” Then he drank his tea and did not speak again for the rest of the evening.

I sat with that for three days. On the third day I understood what he meant, or part of it, and when I told him he looked at me for a long time and said, “You are closer than most.” The highest praise he ever gave me. Closer than most.

I did not sleep well during those months. I sat at the table long after he had gone to bed and I turned his fragments over in my head, trying to fit them together, trying to see the shape he saw. Whether my solitude was, as I had always believed, a deficiency. Or whether it was something else entirely. He never answered that question directly. He answered it by continuing to show up at my table every morning with another text and another silence and another fragment that fit into the growing shape of something I was not yet ready to name.

Then alchemy. The properties of reagents. The interactions between substances. The precise measurements that yield specific effects. This was the first discipline that produced a result I could verify with my own senses. A compound either reacted or it did not. The outcome was consistent, repeatable, obedient to laws that did not warp according to who was present. No ambiguity. No secondary meaning. Only the substance and the method and the result. I loved alchemy the way other young men loved women or horses or the blade. It was the first thing in my life that did not lie to me.

We talked long into the night. Every night. For months. Mathematics at the table with the candle guttering. Philosophy in the dark after the flame died, his voice arriving from across the room, the white paint on his face catching the last glow of the embers. Alchemy at dawn, in the lean-to behind the house that I had fitted as a workspace, the smell of reagents mixing with the smell of wet clay from the fields. He was patient. He was exacting. He never told me I was wrong without showing me why, and he never told me I was right without showing what I had missed.

It was months before he touched the old knowledge. Months of laying foundation, stone by stone. I did not understand what he was building at the time. I understand now. He was teaching me how to think before he showed me what to think about. He was putting tools in my hands before he showed me the material. He was making certain, with the patience of a being who has centuries and knows it, that when I finally saw what he meant to show me, I could hold it without breaking.

 

He told me, in time, where he came from. Not at once. Hera parcelled his past out across weeks and months, a sentence here, a detail there, and you assembled the shape of it yourself or you did not.

He had loved a woman. He did not speak her name. She had lived on the distant shores of Yulthar, that godless land in the far east, a land of the dead where no child could be born and no ordinary seed could take root. She grew roses there. Gardens of them, climbing the stone walls, the salt air curling the petals inward so they looked like fists that would not open. Hera’s voice cracked when he spoke of them. A fracture in the cadence. A pause where no pause belonged. Then he continued as though nothing had occurred.

She was lost. He did not say killed. He said lost, and in a place where death does not work as it should, that word carries a weight I will not attempt to describe. Hera did not describe it either.

When I was initiated, Hera drew the first line of red ink on my wrist himself. The exiles watched from their circle. When it was done he placed a rose petal in my hand. Dried, ancient, faded to something between rust and dust, fragile enough that closing my fingers too hard would have destroyed it. He closed my hand around it gently and said nothing.

I still have the petal. I sustain it each day. It sits in a glass case on my desk. The sole object in my possession maintained for sentiment rather than use.

Everything I have built since has been an attempt to deserve it.

 

Hera did not speak the way other men spoke. He spoke in fragments. The edges of larger statements, the rest of which he had decided you were not ready to hear. He would say something and then go silent and then say something else hours later that connected to the first in a way you had to work out on your own, and if you could not work it out he would not explain. He simply waited until you did.

“His roots will bury deep into the earth,” he said to me once, early on, while we sat in my kitchen and I did not yet know what we were speaking of. He said it gazing out the window at the fields. I did not know who he referred to. He did not clarify. Weeks later he said, “The soil must be made ready,” and I understood he was still speaking of the same thing, and that the thing had a shape I could not yet discern but which he had been contemplating for a very long time.

He taught me the way you teach a boy who takes everything apart. He did not lecture. He presented systems and let me pull them to pieces. The Aenguls and Daemons, the supposed shepherds and tormentors of the mortal world. He laid them out the way you lay out the parts of a clock and asked me what I saw. I saw self-interest. I saw beings who claimed impartiality while chasing their own designs. I saw a cosmos governed by creatures who demanded worship from mortals the way a landlord demands rent, and who gave nothing in return that they could not take back whenever they pleased.

“The Way of the Primeval Man,” he called it. Xionism. The old belief, older than the Empire, older than the faith, older than the recorded memory of mankind. The conviction that the gods were not gods at all but parasites, and that the mortal powers, the arts the Church called abominations, were the true inheritance of man, stolen from the very daemon who had cursed them, turned against the divine order by men brave enough or desperate enough to try.

He told me of the Old Lords. The first men to defy the gods. They had stolen necromancy from Iblees himself and used it to transcend their mortal forms, becoming the First Wraiths, unshackled from the curse, immune to the covenant that bound every descendant race to suffering. There were four. They had names. The names are not important here. What is important is that they failed. They stole the fire and they burned for it and they scattered across the planes and the work they began was left unfinished. Four lords. Four paths. Four failures.

The Rh’thoraen faith waits on the fifth. The provident lord. The Red Lord. The son of God.

“His roots will bury deep into the earth,” Hera said again. “And when they have reached the bottom of things, the earth will split, and through the split the light will come, and the light will be terrible, and the light will be the last thing this world sees before it becomes something else.”

I asked him who the Red Lord was.

He looked at me with the white-painted face and the old eyes and he said nothing for a very long time. Then he said, “The soil must be made ready.”

 

He took me to meet them on a night without moon. We walked for hours through country I did not recognise, south and east of Kaedrin, past the last of the farmland and into terrain that bore no name on any map, through woods that smelled of copper and old stone. Hera did not speak during the walk. I did not speak either. I was counting my footsteps. Four thousand, two hundred and seventeen.

The tomb was cut into a hillside. The entrance was narrow. The stone was old in the way that bedrock is old, without apology, without announcement.

Inside, the air was dry and thick and tasted of dust and something beneath the dust that I did not have a word for then and have a word for now. It tasted of death. Not rotting death. Still death. Death that has been dead so long it has become a condition rather than an event.

Seven of them. All old men. I had expected something else. Something grand. Something formidable. What I found was seven old men in a dusty chamber lit by four candles, sitting in a circle on the stone floor with their legs crossed and their hands upon their knees. Their robes were grey. Their skin was weathered and folded like parchment that has been creased and recreased until the creases have become the dominant feature. And on their arms and necks and faces, lines of red ink, red tattoos worked into that ancient skin in a script I could not read, and the tattoos shifted in the candlelight, and I knew it was the candlelight doing it and not the ink, and I noted it regardless.

The exiles of Rh’thor. Followers of the missing prophet Geitheros, banished from their homeland for practising the very art their faith was built upon. Their numbers had been harrowed. Seven old men in a dusty tomb. They had not taught many. A shame. That was going to be their undoing. An entire tradition, centuries of accumulated wisdom, carried in the bodies of seven men who were all closer to death than they were to the day they received their first marks. If Hera had not found me, if I had not walked through that narrow entrance on a moonless night, the whole of it might have died in that chamber and no one in the world would have noticed.

And among them, at the edge of the circle, not quite part of it but not outside it either, a boy. Younger than the rest by decades. His name was Thales. He was quiet the way stone is quiet. He sat and he listened and his face gave nothing away. I took to him at once, which was rare for me. With most people, trust is something I assemble from observed parts over time. With Thales it simply appeared, whole, without assembly.

I offered to house him afterward. I told him he could stay with me in Kaedrin, in the house that was too large for one person. He accepted. He stayed. He stayed true, which is a thing I can say about very few souls in my life and which I say about Thales without qualification.

None of them stood when we entered. None of them spoke. Eight pairs of eyes turned to me and held. I counted the seconds. They kept accumulating. No one looked away.

The silence in that tomb was nothing like the silence of Kaedrin. The silence in Kaedrin was the silence of people who had nothing to say to me. This was the silence of men who had been saying the same things for centuries and were deciding whether I was worth saying them to.

The oldest of them spoke. His face was more tattoo than skin, red lines nesting around his eyes like the roots of something that had been growing there for a very long time. He addressed Hera first, in a tongue I did not know. Hera answered. Then the old man turned to me.

“What do you see,” he said, in Common, “when you look at the world.”

Not what I thought. Not what I felt. What I saw. The distinction mattered. I had been making it my entire life without anyone acknowledging it existed.

I told him. I told him I saw connections. Systems. The way a man’s fear connected to his debts connected to his wife’s illness connected to the physician who could cure her connected to the lord who employed the physician connected to the trade route that funded the lord’s estate. I told him I perceived these things without effort. Without cessation. Without the ability to stop.

The old men listened. None interrupted. None shifted. They listened the way Frederick would later listen, the way Hera listened. As a discipline rather than a courtesy.

When I finished, the oldest looked at Hera and said something in the old tongue, and Hera nodded, and something passed between them that I filed for later examination.

Then the old man said, “The world is a machine. You have seen this. Most men live inside the machine and do not know it is a machine. You stand outside it and watch the gears. This is what you are. This is what we are. And we have been standing outside for a very long time, watching it grind, working to bring it to a stop.”

 

He spoke of the Red Lord. The provident one. The son of God. The one the four failed lords had been clearing the way for since before the recorded memory of the descendant races. He would gather what had been scattered. He would end what had been broken. He would remake what could not be repaired. The exiles of Rh’thor were his heralds. They viewed necromancy as a misery, a blight, a hex, and they practised it anyway, because the blight was the tool, and the tool was necessary, and the work was larger than comfort or cleanliness or the approval of men who did not understand what was at stake.

I sat in that tomb for three days. They taught me the fundaments. The fracturing of the soul-planes. The curse of Iblees running through every descendant race like rot through timber. The absent Creator. The scattered afterlives. The promise that all of it, every broken shard, could be gathered and restored and made whole, if someone possessed the patience and the will and the stomach for what the gathering required.

 

On the third day Hera laid us on the slabs.

Thales had been sitting across from me in the candlelight for three days and we had not spoken. I did not know him before the tomb. I do not know what road brought him there. We lay side by side on the stone, which was cold, and the old men stood around us in their circle, and Hera stood over us, and he did not explain what was about to happen.

He cut us open.

I will not describe the full procedure because the details serve no purpose and because there are things the body remembers that the mind will not put into words. What I will say is this. He brought us to the edge. Death. Not the idea of death. Not a symbolic death, not a ritual approximation. The actual edge. He opened our bodies with a blade that had been used for this purpose for longer than the Empire has existed, and he held us at the border between living and not, and he kept us there, balanced on that line, while he spoke words in a tongue that was old when Yulthar was young, and the candles flickered, and the red tattoos on the old men’s faces moved in the light, and I could no longer tell whether it was the candlelight or whether the ink itself was alive.

The pain was absolute. I have endured many things since. Broken ribs. The transformation. The long, grinding process of undeath. None of it compared to what Hera did to me on a stone slab in a tomb south of the farmlands of Kaedrin. He took me apart. He showed me what I looked like on the inside. And then he put me back together and the mending was worse than the opening because you feel every seam closing and you know that the seams will never be invisible again.

Then he pulled us back. Thales and I, gasping on the slabs, covered in our own blood, shaking, weeping, alive. Barely. He pulled us from the edge and set us down on the living side of the line and he drew a mark on each of our wrists with a needle dipped in red ink. One line. The ink was warm. Warmer than it should have been. It settled into the skin the way something settles when it has found the place it was always meant to occupy.

The scars from the cutting never fully healed. They marred my mortal body for the rest of my natural life, white lines across my chest and stomach where Hera had opened me and looked inside and decided I was worth closing back up. I wore long shirts. High collars. The wig covered the face. The clothing covered the rest. No one saw.

My body became a vessel for processing life force that day. Whatever Hera had done on that slab, whatever he had opened and closed and rearranged inside me, it had changed the way my flesh took sustenance. Anything but the most dense was consumed before it reached me. Bread, fruit, grain, wine, the staples of Kaedrin, the things the farmers lived on, all of it turned to ash on my tongue. The body burned through it and took nothing. It needed something heavier. Something closer to the source.

I developed a craving for meat. Human was always best. Raw. But others would suffice. Elf, lamb, calf. Wine was vinegar unless it was made from a living thing, pressed from something that had bled. The farmers sat at their tables and ate their bread and drank their wine and tasted what they tasted, and I sat among them and chewed and swallowed and tasted dust, and smiled, and nobody wondered why the young lord never finished his plate.

 

It is amusing, when I consider it. I received my tattoos, the red ink of the Rh’thoraen tradition worked into my arms over the years that followed, line by line, mark by mark, as I earned each one. And not a soul ever thought to look beneath my sleeve.

“This is the beginning,” Hera said to us both. “The rest you will earn.”

 

I earned it. Every line. Every mark. Every secret those old men carried in that dry tomb south of the farmlands. It took years. The testing did not stop. I did not break. And in time the exiles died, one by one, the way old men die when they have been carrying a tradition too heavy for their numbers, and the things they knew passed to me and to Thales, and the tomb emptied, and we carried it all forward into a world that those seven men had been watching from the outside for so long that the watching had become the whole of their existence.

I owe Hera my life. He came to a boy drowning in a kingdom of wheat and mud and showed him that the drowning was sight, that the alienation was a gift, that the cold and relentless attention that rendered him strange among the farmers of Kaedrin was the very quality the work demanded.

“His roots will bury deep into the earth,” Hera said once more, the last time I saw him, standing at the edge of my property where the crows gathered on the stubble. He was looking at me when he said it. Not at the field. At me.

I did not understand then. I understand now.

And for that, Hera. I thank you. And I will bring us to providence.

 

O.C
Dated 1874

 

[DahStalker 3692]

Isolate and gloomy. That ungodly estate of Carrion clung to the stone perch of blessed mound, said to reach the heavens uptop. It was the first of homesteads one would encounter on the main road prior to hitting Haense then Helena, followed suit by the curvature of the Commonwealth's natural basin full to the brim with golden wheat that stuck to the muddied floors much like babe's to their mothers. The center of Kaedrin was decorated madly with strong licks of red and white and shacks of strong oak where the farmers' lie, though further in the backyard did the chorus of musing chortles echo -- for that is where the aristocrats remained. Often those spoke of how abnormal it may seem that the Carrion Estate was separated by that flock of colorful manors, for one would know surely the young Lord could afford such a gated lifestyle. Yet, alas, there in its shallow silence did that household of perpetual gloom linger, its liveliness stunted by the muted croak of a crow or bristle of a depressing tree sapped of all nutrients.

Mariana Dubois had found herself always uneasy at the foot of that estate, having been near it only a sparse few times, and the young Lord even less. She was similar in age, yes, and drawn to him much in a way any would approach whimsical curiosity. But one could not find themselves able to shake off that gnawing dread that loomed anytime she were near the boy. A growing sensation as more years ticked on by. When it came time for that woman to raise her proclaimed nieces and nephews, she found herself gently coercing them away from that Carrion Estate, warning them of bad feelings based on a heavy instinct. Perhaps he was abnormal, perhaps he was cunning, perhaps even kind. But she would not forgo that heavy pit formed in her abdomen anytime she stared toward those closed curtains and gawking crows from afar.