Chapter 116: Chapter 116 – A Gathering Mist (Lily’s Tale)

In the days after the fall of the Firstborn, in the plains which would become the Ionderai lands and in time the Principate of Ionder, tens of thousands lucky enough to survive the cataclysm were proud and joyous, and they had grand plans. The sed there survived in some number, and with them three Ironfolk who had their ten thousand years, and great were the cities and works of magic they began.

In the low hills and in the Green Valley, the Hytherians survived in great number to die in droves as the weather turned against them and their magics struggled to sustain their cities. Along the great trade-roads were the Peacebinds, meeting points where the traveling folk and the merchants could meet and be at ease together, and many of those dwelling there survived the fall, for the magics of peace were strong in those days, and many among them were Ironfolk besides; and in the Jagged Wastes, some few tazi sustained themselves somehow on that nigh-barren land.

It was in the high mountains, the Pillars of the Sky where now they call themselves the Heharai, that the Breathing of Iavshet had its greatest expression. There, the people built for themselves small, scattered townships, each some few families gathered in those places where the lightning dwelt; for these were the Stormborne, the children of the resonating thunder. The sky itself reached down to them, in those days, and the Irons amongst them could fly unaided, and teach the mortalfolk to enchant wood into vessels, storm-skiffs, that could ride the flow of lightning into the sky, and from there glide down.

These were the townships of the Iavshetani Shieldrange, the great ring of mountains which circles most of the continent; it was called, by those few who remembered and had reasons to know, the Glyphrange, for it was and remains a great rune written in sky-reaching stone raised out of the bones of the world to contain and preserve the Shieldstorm. And surrounding them was a wilderness that whispered, once tamed and constrained by the will of the Firstborn, but now beginning to awaken.

As the mortalfolk took their first breaths of freedom, tentative and slow and precious, so too did the land itself.

Beyond the townships, not far beyond the scattered steadings of those who could not tolerate even the loosest of communities beyond the extended bounds of kinship, three mountains met and joined to form a great plateau, covered in forest and cleft in twain by a deep mountain lake. The lake thrust its tendrils into the rock and carved itself paths and trails through the rock below it and through the sediment above the ground, in routes both direct and meandering down through falls thundering and gentle to the Ionderai plains; and this lake they called Yama, and its waters teemed with life in its many forms, and fed the forests which would in time become the first of the Blessed Woods.

These were the first days of the Breathing, and there was neither lordship over these lands nor the stewardship of the Spirits, nor had the Gods risen to dominion; but there dwelt two Ironfolk, women who had seen come and go their ten thousand years. Yashan and Ayef they were called, old and tired and weary of spirit, and they tended a home dreamt into the stone of the mountainside, taking for themselves only the forest-fallen fruits and those animals which came to them for a merciful end or to barter themselves for aid or vengeance to supplement what they grew in the moist darkness below. Lightly, they lived, cultivating a contentment that left their lives to rest only gently upon the weaves of fate.

They were centuries, those Breathing years, and in that slow time the two Ironfolk came to cultivate with their contentment many places. A trail through the deepest woods where no harm could come to you on your journey, save what harm you brought with you; a subtle curve to the stone below a cliff, which ensured unusually restful slumber; a pond whose waters rose from one of the tendrils of the lake Yama, where the mists would rise in the morning and dance as though they lived; these and more, they cultivated. But the mortal few who survived the days of rebellion proliferated into tribes and nations, and the steadings of the Heharai began to spread across the Pillars of the Sky; and the two Ironfolk, Yashan and Ayef, left their cabin which they had lived in those hundreds of years, and left the pond they tended and the forests that were so lightly in their care.

These two left behind them a letter, asking only that their place of peace and power be left to fallow. Not even their names were known, nor who they were, and the Heharani who found their letter did not do as they asked for the game trail, on which they lost one of their number and then in rage rent its magic asunder, nor for the stones of resting, which they quarried to build their homes; and so for many others, but the pond that rose from the waters of far-off Yama they left in its peace, to sit by the banks in peace and look at its splendor.

In time, those who settled there died, as mortals are so wont to do. Their children and their children’s children kept secret the pond from those few outsiders who traveled in those first centuries, but in time it became a refuge from inclement weather and beasts alike, a place where none dared bring more violence than the plucking of a berry from the vine. And so the place drew into itself power from the myth of itself, and when one day a Firstborn was born in that community, she found herself unable to leave the pond, drawn deeper and deeper into the waters and the weeds until the Temple spilled her heartsblood into the waters and burned her soul as an offering to the System that empowered them even then.

I woke then, woke and walked the lands around the pond that was my birth and birthright. One foot, two feet, then one hundred, and finally two hundred feet around my pond I claimed as my demesne, a reflection of the mists of the morning and the shattered glints of the sun at noon and the reflection, still or broken, of the moon at night.

I stopped at the crossroads. Some magics are not to be trifled with.

This, for the later centuries of the Breathing, was my life. It was quiet, in its grand and glorious way; I was, in a small manner, a sliver of perfection, and it was a deep joy to tend to the land which was my Self and to join with the mortalfolk who dwelt there and who propitiated me through the joy they took in my beauty. They were magics that would have been subtle, if not for their strength; a stranger met in the mists would be a boon companion, a conversation had over the scintillations of noon would be from the heart, to walk the winding path blindfolded trusting in another’s directions and then dive into the depths to catch a glimmerfish would have you rise out of the waters perfected in mind and body, and a night spent making love under the moon would ensure a healthy pregnancy if such a thing was at all possible.

Here, then, is the story of how such a time can come to an end, and how a small deed can shatter a world. Odyyr—who was Edelherr of those woods and the plateau they grew upon, and in these days would be called Lord Mayor—was born Oshyr, of Guzhilde and Heinrich, and he did each of those things. He met Fey, who would become his wife, and together they spoke to each other their deepest desires and fears; he trusted her to guide him, and after he dove and surfaced out of the shattered ripples of the moon, they kept a kind of vigil of joy together. And the child of Fey and Odyyr wedded Segi Prymja, though his truer name would have been Segi Lljos, and they took between them a lover, a woman by the name of Aemilia, and they were all three in love with each other in a fierceness that blazed high.

The spirit who dwelt in the crossroads that bordered my demesne, that spirit whose grounds I dared not tread upon nor cross, turned loathsome in those days. It grew to deeply resent the three, and resent the joys that they found with each other, and even more to resent the fulfillment they found in their lives; for it was a malformed spirit, a spirit of travel and travelers in a lull in which decades passed without an arrival or departure.

It is true that Aemilia stepped upon the crossroads, and did not give a libation or other offering, nor barter for safe passage. But this was a venal matter; she wished for no particular blessing, and did no harm. So when Odyyr heard of Aemilia’s death and how it came to be, and when Odyyr saw the lamentation of his child and of his son-by-marriage, he brought the most powerful of his allies and also his liege lord, Herzog, who was accounted mighty in keeping with his millenia, for he was of the Ironfolk; and Odyyr brought with him the spirit of the Yama-fed pond; I went with him on that day, and when Odyyr summoned the spirit of that crossroad, and when Herzog died rending the spirit asunder, I feasted upon the shards of that spirit’s soul and upon the penumbra of Herzog’s passing, and grew aware of myself as the ilks of kindred are likewise aware.

In the wake of this, that spirit did not rise anew. The crossroad which was its grounds and its Self became mine, and I grew some distance further, until I brushed upon the boundaries of the cleared lands where a mortal had built his home; and that mortal’s tales, and the tales of the allies of Odyyr, spread across the Pillars of the Sky and to every corner of Iavshet, and the spirits of the land began to die, and to give way in their deaths to the first of the gods.

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