“Three cycles hence, according to my source, Milord.”
“That gives us time,” Jera said, twining her fingers together, her expression thoughtful. “Time to plan. And time to get a message to his people. When Prince Edmund doesn’t return, they will guess what has happened. They must be warned not to do anything until we’re ready.”
“Ready? Ready for what?” asked Alfred, perplexed.
“War,” said Jera.
War. Sartan fighting Sartan. In all the centuries of Sartan history, there had never been such a tragedy. We sundered a world to save it from conquest by our enemy and we succeeded. We won a great victory.
And lost.
26
One cycle following the prince’s death, the dynast canceled his audience hour, a thing he had never before been known to do. The Lord High Chancellor gave it out publicly that His Majesty was fatigued with pressures of state. Privately, Pons allowed it to be known to a privileged few, “in strictest confidence,” that His Majesty had received disturbing reports concerning an enemy army camped across the Fire Sea,
As Kleitus had foreseen, the alarming news drizzled down among Necropolis’s inhabitants like the incessant laze, creating an atmosphere of tension and panic quite conducive to his plans. He spent the cycle secreted in the palace library, quite alone, except for the dead who guarded him and they didn’t matter anyway.
Elihn, God in One, looked on Chaos with displeasure. He stretched forth his hand and this motion created the Wave Prime.[11] Order was established, taking the form of a world blessed with intelligent life. Elihn was pleased with his creation and granted all good things needed to sustain life thereon. Once he set the Wave in motion, Elihn left the world, knowing that the Wave would maintain the world and a Caretaker was no longer necessary. The three races created by the Wave, elves, humans, and dwarves, lived in harmony.
“Mensch,” Kleitus declared in disdain and scanned rapidly over the next few paragraphs of text, which dealt with the creation of the first races, now known as the lesser races. The particular item of information he sought wouldn’t be found in this section, although he remembered it as being near the beginning of the dissertation. It had been a long time since he’d read this particular manuscript, and at that time he’d paid scant attention to it. He’d been searching for a way out of this world, not a history of another world long dead and gone.
But, during the small hours of a sleepless sleep-half, a phrase had come to His Majesty’s mind, a phrase he recalled reading from the pages of a text. The phrase brought him bolt upright in his bed. Its discovery was of such importance that it had prompted him to cancel the cyclical audience. A rummage through his memory brought the book to recollection. He had only to track it down and corner the words.
In its effort to maintain balance and prevent degeneration back into Chaos, the Wave Prime constantly corrects itself. Thus the Wave rises and thus it dips. Thus there is light and thus darkness. Thus good and thus evil. Thus peace, thus war.
At the world’s beginning, during what were known falsely as the Dark Ages, people believed in magical laws and in spiritual laws, balanced by physical laws. But as time passed, a new religion swept the land. It was known as “science.” Propagating physical laws, science ridiculed the spiritual and the magical laws, claiming that they were “illusions.”
The human race, because of their short-lived span of time, became particularly enamored of this new religion, which held out the false promise of immortality. They referred to this period of time as the Renaissance. The elven race maintained their belief in magic and were now consequently persecuted and driven from the world. The dwarven race, quite skilled with things mechanical, offered to work with the humans. But the humans wanted slaves, not partners, and so the dwarves left the world on their own, taking refuge beneath the ground. Eventually, humans forgot these other races, ceased to believe in magic. The Wave lost its shape, became erratic, one end bulged with strength and power, the other end was flat and weak.
But the Wave would ever correct itself and it did, at horrific cost. At the end of the twentieth century, the humans unleashed a terrible war upon themselves. Their weapons were marvels of scientific design and technology and brought death and destruction to untold millions. In that day, science destroyed itself.
The dynast frowned in displeasure. Certain parts of this work appeared to him to be wild surmise and speculation. He had never known any mensch—all those in Kairn Necros had died before he’d been born—but he found it extremely difficult to believe that any ‘J’ race would bring deliberate destruction on itself.
“I did find corroborating texts to back this up.” He often spoke aloud to himself when in the library, to relieve the incessant, nerve-racking silence. “But the writers came out of the same early period of our history and probably shared the same faulty information. Thus they all might be considered suspect. I shall keep that in mind.”
The survivors were plunged into what was known as the Age of Dust, during which they were forced to struggle to simply remain alive. It was during this struggle that there arose a mutant strain of humans who could, now that the incessant din of science was shattered, hear the flow of the Wave around them and feel it within them. They recognized and utilized the Wave’s potential for magical power. They developed the runes, to direct and channel the magic. Wizards, male and female, banded together in order to bring hope to lives lost in darkness. They called themselves Sartan, meaning, in the rune language, “Those Who Bring Back Light.”
“Yes, yes.” The dynast sighed. He’d formerly had little use for history, for a past dead and gone, a corpse decayed beyond the point of resurrection.
Or, perhaps not.
The task proved enormous. We Sartan were few in number. In order to facilitate the rebirth of the world, we went forth and taught the most rudimentary use of magic to the lesser peoples, reserving the true nature and power of the Wave for ourselves, that we might maintain control and prevent the catastrophe that had occurred from reoccurring.
Fondly, we believed that we were the Wave. Too late, we realized that we ourselves were only a part of the Wave, that we had become a bulge in the Wave and that the Wave would take corrective action. Too late, we discovered that some of us had forsaken the altruistic goals of our work. These wizards sought power through the magic, they sought rulership of the world. Patryns, they called themselves, “Those Who Return to Darkness.”
“Ah!” Kleitus took a breath and settled himself to read more carefully and concisely.
The Patryns named themselves thus in mockery of us, their brethren, and because, in the beginning, they were forced to work in dark and secret places in order to remain hidden from us. They are a close-knit people, fiercely loyal to each other and to their one abiding goal, which is the absolute and complete domination of the world.
“Absolute and complete domination,” the dynast repeated, rubbing his forehead with his hand.
It proved impossible to penetrate such a closed society and learn their secrets. We Sartan tried, but those we sent among the Patryns disappeared; it can only be assumed that they were discovered and destroyed. Thus we know little about the Patryns or their magic.
Kleitus scowled in disappointment, but continued reading.
It is theorized that the Patryns’ use of rune-magic is grounded in the physical portion of the Wave, whereas our magic tends to be based in the spiritual. We sing the runes and dance them and draw them in the air, resorting to physically transcribing them when necessity dictates.
The Patryns, on the other hand, rely heavily on the physical representation of the runes themselves, even going so far as to paint them on their own bodies in order to enhance their magic. I trace—