Sci Fi & Fantasy / Promise Keep - Chapter 1, Scenes 1-8

Sodden beneath fitful spits of chill autumn rain, the plain bore the stark, colorless grace of desolation:  the rain had come much too late for the reedy clumps of drought-dried grasses.  Pallid late afternoon light hinted at dark shapes   perhaps mountains   along the cloud-draped northern horizon, but the mist merged into the featureless flatness to the east and west.  Subtle convections of vapor cast shifting shadows through every stony crevice and faceted surface of the plain’s central feature, an unlikely upheaval of dark stone.
Real and surreal intertwined in the traveler’s disconnected and dreamlike observation until a gust of cold wind blew back the hood of her cape and she shivered.  A blinding spasm shot through her head and her hand flew to the spreading extent of softness beneath her damp reddish curls.  She moaned softly as her fingers explored the wound, but the pain brought her awareness back into the moment along with an overwhelming sense of being watched.
Her olivine eyes focused first on the stony height before her, then on the surrounding plain, but the only indication of activity lay in the impressions left by her rhythmic procession of muddied boot ahead of muddied boot through the anemic clay.  Runoff water already filled her tracks with cloudy ooze and soon her passage would be obliterated.  As she retraced her steps toward the darkening southeastern expanse, she found…nothing.
Amorphous emptiness in the place where her memory should have been was an unpleasant surprise:  she didn’t know where she was, how she came to be here, or from whence she had come.  Tired and sore, she felt as if she had been hurrying onward for quite some time, but was she running to something, or away from something?  Alone and completely lost, she closed her eyes tightly like a frightened child, hoping that when she opened them again, she would again be somewhere she recognized.  What arose behind her eyelids instead came from another place and time.

You’re not lost, Dahni. The laws of nature are the same everywhere on Caldria.   If you cannot find the path, find the house.  Then you will find the path again.  She certainly seemed lost.  A forced detour around a dead tree fallen across the familiar path brought disorientation, and suddenly the summer woods seemed transformed.  The dark forest towered over her, cold, menacing, and utterly alien as she sat on the deadfall and cried.  How can I find the house if I can’t find the path?
Her father’s thoughts didn’t answer her again, and she buried her face in her hands, certain that she had failed.  Only a short time before she had been so sure of herself:  she didn’t need an escort; she was a big girl and knew the way.  She had been so pleased to have won the right to go to her friends’ house by herself.
Her imagination was busy weighing which was worse, trying to survive a night alone in the forest or facing her father in humiliation, when the breeze wafted the smell of baking.  Forgetting her tears, she ran into the wind to the clearing surrounding the neighbors’ house, emerging from the forest only a few feet to the right of the path.

The grown Dahni opened her eyes, little comforted by the girlhood lesson.  It only works if you know where you are going, if you know that there is a house that will welcome you in a time of need.  Father, what do I do now?  A vagrant gust through the reeds seemed a broken-hearted sigh: my fault, my failing, my sin.  Not her father’s voice surely, but was it an answer to her question?  She looked around for the source of the girlish whisper, but the restless swirling of the lifeless grasses followed only the vagaries of the wind.
My sin?!  She looked skyward: was the Holy watching her, judging her?  With dread stirring her imagination, Dahni pulled up the hood of her cape and set out once more, now certain that she was running from something, and not at all certain that outrunning it was possible.  As she walked, the sense of being watched deepened: the gaze of the Holy seemed to be upon her and she started to walk faster as the inexorable pressure of the Presence built around her.
I don’t know what I did! Dahni’s terrified thoughts cried out to the Infinite as she began to run.  I can’t Rectify  what I can’t remember!  The sound of a thousand shattering mirrors crashed upon her and the accompanying pressure wave drove her down into the mud.
Sparks shot across her vision as her injured head hit the ground, leaving afterimages of equations that persisted as the sound echoed across the plain and resonated strangely off the towering height at its center.   Astonished to still be alive, she scrambled to her feet.  “Holy, guide me, bring me to your Mercy,”  she prayed, her voice torn from her as she fled.
[Scene 2]
The Temple was silent and dark save for the single spotlight above the solitary figure kneeling motionlessly in prayer-trance, his purple robe of office casting a miniature Circle  around him.  His perfectly bald head was bowed, and a single tear clung tenuously to the tip of a short blonde whisker on his chin.  When it fell on the back of his right hand, the sensation shattered his inner Silence  and he opened his eyes to see the tear roll down between his thumb and forefinger.  The symmetry of his posture broke as his body again bent in anguish:  his best friend was dying, and even with all the Magick in the Realm , there was nothing he could do about it.
Vroy, it’s not your fault.  The words of Avery’s apprenticeship master, spoken to him so long ago, still echoed hollowly in his heart.  Vroy hung his head as much from guilt as from sorrow.  So many times he could have intervened!
When he overheard Tel-Thet and Mandel discussing how to deal with Avery following Drillian’s banishment, he should have championed Than’s third alternative:  to simply take Avery out drinking and wenching to distract him — with his considerable powers of persuasion, it would have been an easy matter to set Avery up with a cute Novitiate.
Failing that, he should have listened to his gut and followed Avery into the Deep Thicket where he could have beaten some sense into him.  A good brotherly fight could have surfaced many of the emotions that had trapped Avery between his conscience and his sense of duty.
After Avery’s encounter with Dahliah, he should have counseled Avery to set aside his romanticism and see her for who she was:  an Unknown  who made it perfectly clear that she wanted nothing to do with the Realm.  So much might have been different if Avery hadn’t built the Keep hoping she would join him, and instead had returned to Ab.  Avery had already defeated Nirel; had he been in Ab when Nirel and Drillian returned, he could have done what his father could not.
Vroy also should have known Nirel and Drillian would not be so easily Banished,  and been better prepared for their raging return.  He should have known that their hatred would be focused as much against Avery personally as against all the Worthies of Ab.
After they had cursed Avery, he should have used more of the Realm’s resources to break the curse.  No man, no matter how Worthy, could stand to live as Avery had for the past two centuries, a prisoner inside his Keep, surrounded by land laid waste by Unholy magick, knowing that if his love did join him, her very presence would activate the curse and kill him, and if she did not, he was destined to grow old and die alone.  That Avery had chosen to end his life was no surprise and certainly no shame.
The shame was Vroy’s:  he should have done anything other than what he had done, which was not enough.  Vroy prostrated himself, profoundly aware of his failure and wishing he could bear the brutal consequence being visited on the only man he thought of as a brother.
[Scene 3]
Impending nightfall brought a steady outpouring of north wind to whistle through the grass and sweep away the rain.  Exhaustion and piercing cold inspired Dahni to seek shelter, but the only shelter within sight was the strange stone extrusion rising like an island in the sea of desolate flatness that was Alone Plain.
Alone Plain, at the center of which is Alone Keep.  She shivered as her imagination eagerly seized upon the disconnected information: perhaps the Wizard  was watching her from within darkened chambers at the apex of his construct.
There is a fine line between Magick and Unholiness, and not all know when they cross it.  The memory was of her mother’s voice:  for an instant Dahni could see the concern etched upon her mother’s delicate features and the shadow of secret fear in her dark eyes.
Perhaps this Wizard is Unholy!  Maybe he sent his magick crashing down around me to frighten me and make me feel cut off even from the Holy!
In a nightmarish flash, Dahni recalled the leering face of the Dark Wanderer  who came out of the storm and pursued her — she was running from him still!  A puff of wind breathed the warm, waxy smoke-smell of a burnt out candle, and she looked over her shoulder, certain that she was still being followed.  In that distracted instant, the world fell away beneath her.
[Scene 4]
“Worthy!   Wake up!  Are you ill?”
That which once was Drillian smiled faintly in recognition: the voice was his.  Her returning vision showed an angelic image of him above her, his bristling grey hair transformed into a backlit halo against the bare emitter of the ceiling light.  Then she remembered why he was here and how she had come to be on the floor: her low moan of recognized failure he mistook for pain.
“Ryder-Heron, can you answer me?” he asked.  Concern furrowed his florid brow, and her heart skipped a beat: he cared, at least a little.  “Can you sit up?”
“Worthy Mandel,” she spoke, her voice diminished by grogginess, “I’m sorry, I seem to have missed our appointment.”
“Oh,” Mandel sighed out his relief, “you gave me a fright.  What happened?  You were passed out cold.”
She took his proffered hand and allowed him to help her sit up.  The arm he put around her in support was more welcome than he knew, and she cherished every second of closeness.  “I suppose I overworked myself,” she told a half-truth as she straightened her clothes and finished collecting her wits before she let him help her to her feet.
Her gaze strayed to the rough wooden table: the thick candle, new when first lit, had burned itself out.  The burn time of such a candle was at least ten hours; as expected, Mandel had been late.  An unaccustomed smile tugged at the corners of her full lips: her plan may not have worked exactly as she had intended, but causality remained at least partially intact.  Perhaps she had been too hasty in adjudging failure.
For a moment, she thought to feign dizziness and thereby find an excuse to be in his arms again, but her dignity would not allow it and she forced herself to pull away on unsteady limbs.  When lingering shock produced the same condition as the considered ruse, Mandel caught her and drew her tightly to him.  His outwardly rounded appearance – typical of an academic – concealed surprising strength:  his youth as a Knight Defender remained in stalwart muscle-memory.
“Just stand here for a few seconds,” he told her, “to be sure that your blood pressure has equalized.  You look quite pale.  It wouldn’t do to move too quickly and pass out again.”  So thin was she that he could feel her every bone beneath his hands.  A suspicion seized upon the circumstances and made itself known to his conscious mind, which quickly derived a troubling reason for her summons:  had he happened upon a failed suicide?
As she rested lightly against him, he looked around the tiny room, assessing her desperate attempt to maintain proper bearing as a Quorum  member despite abject poverty.  Suspended from a nail driven into peeling, mold-stained plaster, on a hanger with a twisted neck, was the silken grey robe she wore to Quorum sessions.  Beneath it, a rickety bench bore three neatly folded outfits and two pairs of worn-thin shoes polished to a semblance of newness.  In the corner, three crates topped by stacks of old papers and folded blankets formed a makeshift bed, and at the foot of this bed, a threadbare rug covered the opening to a closet that probably concealed a chamber pot.
Between bed and kitchen was the only attractive feature of the room: a very large window through which the street lights outside appeared as strange iridescent halos in the crazed glass.  The kitchen – if it could be called that – consisted of a large and rusty metal sink hung on the wall above a deep bucket where the drain should have been, a deeply gouged tradesman’s bench, and a single gas burner on spindly metal legs.  A sagging shelf held a dented teakettle, a soup pot missing a handle, a baking stone brown with age, the old type of flat iron meant to be heated over a fire, and a small assortment of unmatched china.  A cracked ceramic bowl on the workbench held three vegetables and half of a thin loaf of bread.
At the center of the room was the only substantial furniture: a table that must have seen several seasons out in the weather, but the top had been sanded smooth to make a reasonable work surface.  It was here that he found the purported reason for his visit:  a thick, leather-bound volume — an outstandingly expensive item — opened to a page filled with mathemagickal notation.
Large flakes of ash, centered on the burned-out candle, dusted the table and book alike.  Mandel’s brow knotted as the evidence came together and he realized what type of magick had been worked only hours earlier at that table, an operation that Ryder-Heron apparently had not expected to survive.  He carefully released her and stepped back warily.  “I trust you are recovered.”
“Recovered enough, thank you.  Let me put on some tea and we can begin work,” the Worthy said, her tone neutral, as if nothing out of the ordinary had happened.  She went to the table and casually brushed away the ashy remnants of the spell-parchment.  “Here are the calculations I told you about; you can look at them while the water boils.”
Mandel found a stool under the table and sat on it, careful to position himself where he could see her at all times as she retreated into the kitchen.  Had the spell been directed at him?  What other surprises might this evening hold?  The formulae before him seemed familiar, recursive as she had described, but unlike his sets, these seemed to be non-repeating.  The soothing flow of numbers soon overtook his consciousness, leaving only a small part of his attention to stand guard as he immersed himself into mathemagickal theory.
Fleeting contentment washed over Ryder-Heron as she watched her work capture Mandel’s interest until he seemed oblivious to everything else.  For years she had dreamed of this moment, but she had imagined seeing it from the life between lives. Why didn’t I die? her mind whispered to the Holy as she put the teapot on the burner.
The room was stuffy and smelled its age, so she lit a stick of incense in the burner and wedged it into the crack behind the sink.  The flames reminded her of her spell and she stared pensively into the lovely blue-robed jets.  For seven years  she had constructed, refined, and replayed the plan in her thoughts:  she was supposed to die from spellshock as a result of setting her Rectified Will against her prior Unholiness; he was supposed to come in and find her dead, see her work upon the table, and add it to his own.  What else hadn’t worked the way she had planned?  Avery!
“What did you say?” Mandel asked without looking up from the equations.
“I didn’t say anything,” the Worthy answered truthfully and quickly resumed her appearance of indifference; she would have to be more careful with her thoughts if he could read her so easily.
“Must have been the sound of the water boiling,” the stout mathemagickian dispassionately explained away the phenomena.  As the Worthy Ryder-Heron arranged fragrant leaves in the infuser, she smiled secretly to herself as her worries momentarily evaporated with the steam.  He can read me!
[Scene 5]
Shredded clouds fled across the face of a waxing moon, playing light and shadow across Dahni’s closed eyelids and awakening her to cold misery.  Slowly, she sat up and took inventory of her situation.  She sat at the bottom of a deep ditch; its muddy walls rose high above on either side of her.  Most alarming was the throbbing pain in her right leg:  she remembered falling, striking her leg on the way down before the hard landing snuffed out her consciousness.  She probably hit her head again, too:  she had a splitting headache and each movement of her battered body seemed to send a glass dagger of pain into her skull.
While the ditch afforded some protection from the wintery wind and her body craved rest, her clothes were soaked through and her hands and feet were already completely numb.  She would have to keep moving to stay warm.  With a groan, she forced herself to her feet.
Slippery clay and the fine roots of grasses gave way as Dahni tried climbing out of the ditch, so she began walking along its length, searching for a means of escape.  The footing was treacherous:  runoff water trickled through mats of dead grass washed down by the ferocity of the storm.
She remembered the storm in random snapshots:  screeching gales, seething lightning, and the branches of trees crashing down upon her.  Dahni’s hand again fled to her head as she remembered the wound; the small laceration had clotted over, but the mere touch of her fingers on the engorged knot brought a wave of nausea.
The weak and unreliable moonlight made it difficult to see where she was going: wet rocks and weeds slipped beneath her feet, and several times she stumbled.  At last she came upon a place where one side of the ditch had caved in, providing a slope to climb.  She scrambled up, only to find the Wizard’s keep directly ahead of her, impossibly close.
“Oh, no,” Dahni breathed:  she thought she had continued westward, away from the Keep and the Wizard she imagined lurking within.  The fear she had seen in her mother’s eyes became her own:  she was in no condition to face unknown, possibly Unholy magick.  She flattened herself on the muddy slope, searched the restless patches of open sky for a familiar star to guide her, and considered her next move.
[Scene 6]
The aethyr  vibrated with the pulse of a failing heartbeat — the time was near.  Vroy arose from his prayers and ascended to the Holy of Holies.  He took a staff of purest crystal from its holder and held it aloft.  Come to the Temple, the staff amplified his thoughts to a chosen two.  Sit with me the death-vigil of the Worthy Avery.
[Scene 7]
At first she took the low moan for the sighing wind; when it repeated, Dahni startled violently and lost her grip on the slippery slope.  The tumble was brief, but left her again at the bottom of the ditch.  As she picked herself up once more, the moon wrested free of the clouds, illuminating the weeds beneath her feet.  With a sharply indrawn breath, she took a step backwards, slipped as the mud liquefied beneath her heel, and had to sit down hard to avoid falling entirely.  Only the crackle of wind-buffeted grasses could be heard as she stared long at the hand:  knotted with age, the pale skin caked with grey mud, root-like, it moved not.
When at length the moan came again, weaker and rasping, compassion overcame fear, and Dahni arose to her knees and began to excavate a length of arm.  Clumps of sodden straw came away to reveal a very old man:  parchment-like lids hooded deep set eyes beneath long, matted brows, desiccated skin stretched over a straight nose and high cheekbones, and a deeply furrowed ribcage rose and fell fitfully with what shredded breath of life remained in him.
“Here, old one,” Dahni whispered as she removed her cloak and spread it over his naked body.  The wind whipped a curl of reddish hair into her eyes; she quickly tucked it behind her ear as she leaned over him.  Her hands found his life-energy centers,  and she addressed each one in turn to stabilize his condition.  The old man stirred and his chest heaved and rattled ominously: without shelter and warmth, energy healing would only delay the inevitable.
Having done as much as she could under the current conditions, Dahni took a moment to regroup:  if she hoped to save the old man’s life, she would have to face the Wizard, but if she left the old man to die, she would have to face the Holy.  The decision was hard but obvious.  “I will look that Wizard in the eye and demand a place at his fire,” Dahni told the ancient, her voice firmer than her quavering resolve, “if you will stay with me among the living.”  Grim-faced but determined, Dahni bound the old man into her cloak and dragged him up the slope, a feat made possible by the withered condition of his body.
The decision made, she trudged toward the spire with the old man in tow, singing “Kyrie’i, Kyrie’ae”  to summon the spirits of life, not just for the old man, but to bolster her own courage of spirit as well.
[Scene 8]
“Worthy, this is extraordinary work,” Mandel passed judgment as he abruptly closed the notebook, “but it is more than I have time to absorb tonight; Vroy just summoned me.  May I take this with me to study, and we can meet again later in the week?”  Mandel sat back in his chair and glanced around the tiny room Ryder-Heron called home.  Not one to put on a display of wealth and position himself, he was nevertheless severely discomforted by the abject poverty on display before him.  “Perhaps in the future we should meet elsewhere.”
If Ryder-Heron had not been preoccupied with worry over the probable failure of her spell, a grin might have betrayed her.  As it was, a blush lit her fair cheeks and she quickly turned away and busied herself with putting away the teacups.  She had hoped to have more time with the Realm’s finest mathemagickian, but she could not expect him to put off a summons from the Wizard Supreme.   Her disappointment for tonight paled before genuine hope:  Mandel wanted to see her again!  “That would be fine,” she replied.  “You can leave a note for me at the Collegium’s  office.”
“I must go now,” the mathemagickian said quietly.  “Tonight I sit death-vigil for the Worthy Avery.”
Ryder-Heron froze, but Mandel had retreated within himself and didn’t notice.  Once the door closed behind him, she fell to her knees, weeping.  Her spell had failed disastrously.

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