Chapter 1: 1. On Morsearn Field

Something's been broken. A tether stripped away.

On the slopes of the great nameless mountain that marked the southern border of the Grasp, on a morning painted by golden sunlight, a lone falcon took flight. Quite what had caused it to stir from its nest was unclear. A feeling, perhaps? Birds are often the first to notice when something is very, very wrong. The falcon fled northward. There was nowhere to go but north. To head south from the Grasp was to invite death; nothing lived for long in the blighted mire of the Outlands, not man nor beast. Nothing but the twisted abominations that surely grew there, at least. Even a falcon on the wing knew to avoid the Outlands.

The falcon's flight led it down the slopes of the mountain, through a forest of sinuous trees that quavered with every gentle breeze, whose green-brown leaves sighed and rattled. Upstream it followed the course of a river, as the water beneath it changed slowly from bitter yellow to crystalline blue. The falcon's flight did not end when the river's water became a more palatable colour. Discoloured water was to be expected, so close to the Outlands. It was just that dead land's sickness spilling out. The falcon did not fear it.

No, what ended the flight of the falcon was an arrow, fletched roughly by a nimble-fingered craftsman, tipped with a heavy point of flint. The arrow pierced a course through the neck of the bird, and shorn of momentum it plummeted. Down, to the fields below.

Two great armies stood across from one another in those fields, each filling one side of the great plain known as Morsearn Field, each army measured in tens of thousands of men. They held sword and pike, longbow and quarterstaff, any weapon they could lay hands on. Itchy gambesons and glinting cuirasses marked the tumultuous parallels of the battle-lines—on one side painted with the aquamarine of the Kingdom of Dael, on the other the red-and-goldenrod of the Kingdom of Méor. Men held, or advanced, on the word of their captains, word passed by hurried messenger from two masterful Generals—one for each kingdom—who watched the unfolding battle from canvas tents on high promontories overlooking the Morsearn Field. Dael and Méor were well acquainted with war. They were the Marcher realms. Each had faced down more than a hundred wars small and large—skirmishes with over-reaching bandit groups were commonplace, and odd sorties from easily-defeated savages in the southern dry. In days long past, greedy northern monarchs had chanced their hand at an invasion, an expansion of their territory, but so often had they been soundly defeated by the resolute armies of Dael and Méor that they'd learned not to even try.

Already, each army had made three charges, and had been thrice rebuffed. It was a matter of time before one army tried for a fourth. That was the borderland doctrine, on open-field battles: charge, until the opposite lines break and are routed. Foolproof doctrine, when your opponent is not equipped for war. When you outnumber him by a few dozen to one. Not so effective when the army you face is just as strong as you are. The green grass of Morsearn was spattered with the red of spilled lifeblood, too many dead for so early in the morning.

Somewhere in the fifth file of the army of Dael, behind a line of pikemen that hewed close to the river, an archer rose—his bow drawn, his arrow nocked. Mardan Eltrier allowed himself a breath before he loosed. Unseen by his opponents in their crimson, he had all the time in the world to aim true. That was what he'd prayed for, over breakfast. Time.

This was a war that had never sat easy with him. Dael and Méor should not have come to war—not ever. Their ruling families so often intermarried specifically to stop it. Blood shared was better than blood spilled, so they said, and the two kingdoms were charged with the defence of the southern border. How could they stand firm against the depravities of the Outlands when they were consumed by their own squabbles? But Mardan was only an archer. It wasn't his place to question the wisdom of those who sat the thrones. His place was to stand and die at their command.

Time had made the war more palatable for him. He remembered young Jerram, barely old enough to shave, marching out from the shelter of his mother's skirts in his father's ill-fitting armour. Méorin butchers at Geánan Ford had stuck Jerram with a dozen holes and left him to weep and die. Mardan had acquired a distaste for Méor that day, which had grown and festered into bilious hatred. He had no issue killing those bastards now. Better to wipe them out entirely, and let better men take on the job of defending the Grasp. But there was still a deep-seated reticence for the whole thing. Every skirmish meant the deaths of good men, boys even; Jerram was far from the only one to have died far too young.

That was why Mardan planned to be a hero. He was not one to squander an opportunity. Everyone in the Grasp knew that Edman Corrade was one of the finest Generals of them all. Corrade was the mastermind of the Méorin campaign. There was no other explanation for it: the armies of Dael outnumbered their counterparts in every engagement, their soldiers all well-trained, their battlefields chosen for maximum strategical advantage, and yet every pitched battle had ended in defeat. Only a tactician like Corrade could be behind so many reversals. It had come to Mardan in a dream, three nights earlier, as he marched with his company to Morsearn Field: Edman Corrade had to die. Without him, the Méorin armies would break. The war would be over in a trice.

And Edman Corrade was watching over the battle without even wearing a helmet. The fool.

He didn't seem to realise that he was about to die. He hadn't noticed Mardan lining up the shot. Nobody had. Thirty thousand men or more, and they were all posturing, waiting for somebody to tell them that now was the right moment to die on a neighbour's sword. None were watching. Only Mardan was taking actions into his own hands. Only Mardan had seen the opportunity to kill Edman Corrade, to end the war.

After this, he'd be a hero for sure.

In one motion, Mardan released his bowstring, and the arrow flew. He breathed in relief, watching it arc through the air. His aim was true. The arrow soared, just as the falcon had soared, over the heads of men, towards the crop of rock where Edman Corrade stood. Straight towards his eye. Perhaps, at the last moment, he saw it coming; it made no matter. There was no time to duck out of the way. No way to prevent the arrow from hitting its mark, robbing Méor of its greatest commander, breaking the country's spirit. There'd be disorder. Once the lines buckled, the battle would be a formality. Over in an hour.

Méor would fall in a week. Two, maybe, if Corrade's replacement holed up in the capital for a siege. Sooner or later, Méor's rulers would negotiate surrender, executing or exiling a few of the lords who had most fiercely pushed for war. Lords who would need to be replaced. Mardan allowed himself a smile. Yes, he'd be well rewarded for this. The King was sure to grant a title to the Slayer of Corrade, the Hero of Morsearn. He'd tried on the lordship for size a few times, in his slumbered fantasies, and it fit him well. And Amabel would surely not rebuff his advances if he could offer her a proper Lord's manor rather than the wind-beaten shack he called home.

Arrow met eye in an explosion of flesh and membrane. Edman Corrade's head fell back, and he began to fall.

That was when time stopped...

It happened as a ripple, the wave cascading outward as from a stone dropped in the pond. Corrade froze in mid-air, leaning back so far it seemed impossible for him to stay upright. His attendants froze too, their faces etched forever in expressions of shock. And one by one, the rows of Méorin soldiers froze too.

This all took just a few seconds. There was no time for Mardan to run, no time for him to even lower his bow. Only time enough for him to realise that something was very wrong indeed.

And then the wave hit him, and he was condemned to the odd stasis that held Morsearn Field in its clutches.

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It was a peculiar sensation, he reflected, to be frozen in time. Not at all what he was expecting. He could see, for one thing—lucky he’d not been caught mid-blink; an unending darkness would have been more than he could bear. And he could hear, as well. In fact, he was willing to bet that he still had all of his senses, should anything have happened to trigger them. But for all of that, he couldn’t move. Not even a muscle.

Nor could he keep track of time. Well, it was hard to, when time had frozen in place around you. Day still faded into night, and night into day, but unnoticed by Mardan. He just became aware, every now and then, that the sky was lighter or darker than it had been before.

Oh, by the Forger’s Eye, Amabel! To think that he’d dreamt of her, that he’d come so close to having her. How long had he been frozen here? A day? A year? Ten? Perhaps Amabel was in Tarhanen, unaware of what had happened here, still expecting her gallant hero to come riding home to her. Or perhaps she’d given him up for dead, found another man to make her happy.

Maybe she was dead now herself. For all he knew, it might have been a century or longer he’d stood in paralysis. Flesh would age. All memory of Amabel Entane, eldest daughter of the Steward of Tarhanen, most beautiful women in all the Grasp, would be lost, in time. And all the while Mardan was trapped, out of time.

Now and then a bird flitted across the Morsearn Field. They did not bother with the frozen armies, except occasionally to rest for a time upon shoulder or helm; whatever curse had imprisoned the armies, it had passed. Anything that had escaped it was in no danger from the field any longer. That realisation lightened Mardan’s heart. He couldn’t see behind him, couldn’t know how far the paralysis had spread. Maybe it hadn’t taken the Endael ranks. Some might have lived to run home, back to Tarhanen, to spread word of what had happened. Queen Jelestal would summon a Magus from the Octal Tower, and maybe they could find a way to break the ice. Free the frozen.

Maybe, just maybe, Mardan could go home again.

But that was maybes piled on maybes, too many hopes and prayers to rely on. And anyway, the opportunity might have passed him by already. Could it be that he was already starting to go mad from all of this? Could he ever have hoped to stay sane?

A man walked across the Morsearn Field. Mardan didn’t know how many days had passed before the man came, only that it was daylight right now. And cold. A blanket of powdery snow had settled all over the field, on the soldiers that stood like statues in place. The fall was finished; odd that he hadn’t noticed it before.

The man seemed not to mind the cold. He wore a long woollen coat, black, with red embroidery around the hem and the collar—but the coat was not done up, and underneath he had only a thin undershirt. He must have been frozen to the bone, and yet he gave no indication of discomfort. He had a young face, with an angular chin and cheekbones that straddled the border between handsome and gaunt. Blonde hair, cropped to barely an inch, covered the man’s head. And his eyes… he cast them over Mardan only briefly, as they wandered over the Endael ranks in their entirety, but they blazed with a fearsome intensity. Even if they hadn’t, Mardan would have been driven to fright. The man’s eyes were chimeric. His left eye was the blue of a balmy summer sea, but his right was orange-red, like the setting sun. A fire-eyes.

A chimera was a rare sight indeed. An adult chimera, walking without shackles on his wrists or worry in his face, was just about unheard-of. Every child knew that the orange-red eye was the sign of one who had witnessed the fires of the Sidereal Forge, witnessed the birth of magic. Long ago, wars had been fought to subdue the Sighted, as they were known. Centuries had been lost to ruin, half the world destroyed, before submission was achieved. It had cost most of the world, all but the narrow confines of the Grasp, but at last accords had been signed. The Octal Tower could continue to practice magic—Mardan had always suspected that this compromise was because even those so opposed to the Sighted that they fought a war did not want to do without their resident Magus to cure their headaches and warm their baths—but no chimera was allowed to be trained. Not just in magic; in anything. Usually they were put to death at birth. Few lived long enough to start talking.

Before all of this, Mardan had only seen one adult chimera. He’d been nothing more than a page-boy at the time, sixteen years younger than he was now, and only in the upper floors of Tarhanen’s Beryl Palace because Queen Jelestal—then Princess—was in labour, and the whole household a dither. Well, what boy wouldn’t sneak up to where he wasn’t meant to be, to try and catch a glimpse of the Princess herself? What Mardan had seen was pure chaos. A dozen hard-faced royal guards hauling a single man away, to the distant accompaniment of frantic screaming. That man had been wild-eyed, unkempt, in frayed rags. “My boy,” he’d yelled, as he was taken away. “My lad!”

The ragged man’s head had decorated a spike embedded in the keystone of the Beryl Palace gate until the stench of rot was too much for its residents to bear. The Princess Jelestal’s son was never born; he’d died that very day, so the attendant Magus pronounced, and everyone knew the chimera had caused it. That’s what they did. That was why they were killed at birth.

The blonde man didn’t seem the least bit mad. He stopped in the gap between Mardan and the Méorin army, leather-booted feet sinking gently into the powdery snow, and turned to face the way he had come. His arms rose up at his side. “Behold,” he said, addressing a person or persons unseen out of Mardan’s eyeline. “The armies of Dael and Méor. The great defenders.” He laughed. It was an icy laugh, that would have driven Mardan to shivers if his body could move at all. “These are the men who will fight in my name.”

“Marcher armies?” A man with a gravelly voice spoke—spat, near enough. “You think they will swear to you, Desmer?”

The chimera—Desmer, he must have been—laughed again. “When their kingdoms are broken down and forged anew as one, I will release them from their bonds here. They will kneel, then. It’s written in Prophecy.”

“Ancient words, translated so many times their true meaning is lost.” The gravelly-voiced man could not conceal his disdain. “You can't even count on a prophecy made today. One made in the First Forging is wishes and no more. These men have set aside enmities to defend their border for a thousand years.”

Desmer smiled. “And those same enmities drew them into war. They will awaken to a world rid of Dael and Méor, and they will serve. The old Prophecy was plain enough: ‘out of the wildlands, he will come who saw the flames. And from the corrupted alloys of the old, new chains will be forged.’ I am he, who was prophesied. And I have come to forge.”

And in the back of Mardan’s mind, he saw tongues of fire lashing at the walls of the Beryl Palace. He saw the spike on the keystone, only it wasn’t the ragged man impaled there: it was Amabel, her face melting in the heat of the fire like wax from a candle, screaming in pain even as she choked on her own deliquesced flesh. He would not serve a chimera, prophecy be damned; if he were to be frozen in time forever, until the winds blew the Morsearn Field to dust, he would not serve.

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