“Do you know why people become seasick?” he asked in his gravelly voice as they sat down on the bench. “Humans especially—for all that they are descended of a race born of water, and are themselves composed largely of it, one might think they would be naturally attuned to the rhythm of the ocean. But it is in their unconscious resistance to it, the desire to be a separate entity, that the vibration is unbalanced, thereby making them ill. If only they could learn to embrace the element within them.” He reached out one hand to the water cascading in pulsing rivulets in the fountain, the other to Rhapsody’s forehead. Unconsciously she closed her eyes.
She heard the sound of the fountain grow louder, and realized after a moment that it was Jal’asee’s voice, perfectly matching the vibrational tone of the splashing water. Within her she felt the nausea abate; her stomach settled, and her balance returned, along with the clarity of her sight that had been blurry since the child’s conception. She felt a sudden sense of wellness, as if she were floating in a bubble, protecting her from the jounces and jolts of the air that had been assaulting her for the last few months of her pregnancy. She opened her eyes to see the tall, golden-skinned man with the bright eyes smiling down at her.
“Better?”
“Yes, thank you,” Rhapsody said. “Now, please tell me what you meant last night.”
Jal’asee looked at her thoughtfully for a moment. Rhapsody was certain that she heard the splashing of the water in the fountain growing louder.
“When you lived on the Island of Serendair, had you ever seen one of my race?” he asked finally. His voice was soft, less scratchy than before, blending into the sound of the falling water.
Rhapsody considered his question. “No,” she said, “though I had studied a bit about the Ancient Seren. My mentor, Heiles, the man who instructed me in the science of Singing, had introduced me to the ancient lores, and told me of each of the Firstborn races, but before we could go into more depth he disappeared. I never saw him again, so I had to finish my studies alone.”
Jal’asee nodded. “Had you lived always in the fields, or did you ever go to a major city?”
“I—ran away from home as a young girl, and lived for several years in Easton.” Rhapsody’s face flushed with the memory of her life there and what she had done to survive.
“Easton was the largest city on the Island, a port city, with commerce from all parts of Serendair, as well as from other lands. And yet you never saw an Ancient Seren in all the years you lived there?”
“No. In fact, I thought they—you—were extinct; that except for Graal, the king’s vizier, who was known in the tales of the traveling storytellers, your race had died out in an earlier age.”
The Sea Mage settled himself more comfortably. “M’lady, long ago, before the grandfather of the king that ruled the Island you knew as a child was crowned, I was an instructor, a lecturer, at Quieth Keep, the royal college of Serendair. I also am a professor in the study of natural magic and tidal vibration in the academy of Gaematria. I tell you this for two reasons—the first is that I wish to present my information to you and have you see it, as a Namer, as close to lore in its accuracy.” Rhapsody nodded. Jal’asee chuckled. “Additionally, while telling you my tale, should I adopt an imperious, condescending, or arrogant tone, it is because once an academician, always an academician. I mean in no way to condescend to you, but some things are bred into professors, and sanctimony is one of them. I apologize heartily in advance.” Rhapsody laughed.
Jal’asee cleared his throat. “Forgive me for reiterating anything you already know,” he said. “In the history of this world, the earliest age, before recorded history, was known as the Before-Time. It was in this age that the Firstborn races, those sprung directly from the five elements themselves, came into being. The Seren were the first to evolve, as the element of ether was the first element. Ether came into the world from another place; it is the fire of the stars, and has a natural music to it, the music of light—I assume you know this, yes?” Rhapsody nodded. “Good. And had you ever seen a member of another firstborn race? Had you ever met someone who was Kith, or Mythlin, or a F’dor? Nor wyrm—you had never met a dragon in the old world, had you?”
“No,” Rhapsody said. “Mostly humans. A few of later races descended of the Firstborn—I saw a few Gwadd, and my mother was Lirin. I think I may even have seen a few Nain, though I did not know what they were at the time. But I never saw someone of a Firstborn race. I thought they had all died out, as we had been taught they had.”
“Well, as you can see, we did not.” Jal’asee covered his eyes as the sun rose higher in the sky, brightening the garden with intense light.
“So where were you, then?” the Lady Cymrian asked.
“In hiding,” the Sea Mage ambassador said seriously. “For many ages.”
“Why?”
“Self-preservation,” Jal’asee said. “The Seren were the first race to appear on the Island, but we were not alone for long. In the early days, after the F’dor were imprisoned deep within the world, peace reigned for a time; a long time by your measure. But eventually came the younger races, the Lirin, and the Nain, who did not care for each other’s ways. In their day, the Island still saw peace for the most part, because the place each race chose to live was distant from and unlike that of the other race, so there was little conflict.
“But then, after millennia had passed, came man—humans, or half-men, in our language. They were long generations removed from the primordial magic which had brought the Firstborn races into being, and mortal, bent on living short, violent lives. At first it seemed they would come and go more quickly than the wind, snuffing themselves out in their impatience, but we underestimated their strength, their endurance—and their pure bloodthirstiness. They were avaricious, jealous of land and power, and they set about taking it in any and every way they could, through war and murder and genocide.
“And there were many of them. They filled our once-open and spacious land with their settlements and cities, their fortifications and their prisons, continuing to multiply, until they had all but choked out what had gone before. We had welcomed them as refugees—and now they were poised to eradicate all the civilizations that had come before. Much the way Gwylliam did, ironically, to this land.”
Jal’asee paused for a moment, as if the tale had winded him. Rhapsody looked into his eyes; within the golden irises a dark swirl was dancing, as if he were looking directly back into a painful history. She waited quietly for him to continue, watching the bronze color return to his lanky, hairless forearms after a moment. Finally he shook his head and looked down at her, an awkward smile crooking his wide, thin mouth.
“I beg your forgiveness, m’lady,” he said hastily, mopping beads of sweat from his forehead with a quick motion. “When one is designed to live forever, history sometimes takes on an immediacy that Time strips from it in the eyes of those over whom Time has sway. It is as if a thousand years ago was yesterday.”
Rhapsody nodded, continuing to wait. Finally the Sea Mage shook himself, as if shaking off sleep.
“And that is the way of the world, I have learned over Time. In each era of history a civilization is formed, holds sway for a time, and then is displaced by another, either over centuries, or quickly, brutally, in conquest, until history is but a swirling sea of change, supplanting what had been before, keeping pieces of it, moving on. It is foolishness to hope that what you have built will survive—though we all do.”
The golden-skinned man blinked in the light of the sun, then turned his gaze on her once more.
“When, in the Second Age of history, known to scholars on Gaematria as Zemertzah, literally ‘The Broken World,’ it became clear to the Ancient Seren that our culture and in fact our people were facing destruction from the advancement of the human habitation of Serendair, and the conflicts that habitation brought with it, we decided there were but two choices for our people if we were to survive. We could leave the Island, emigrate to a distant and unoccupied land, as Gwylliam later did at the end of the Third Age, or we could go into hiding in the earth, deeper than the mountainous realms where the Nain lived, in catacombs left over from the birth of the world.