‘Wait,’ someone said, from behind him. Hammerson turned.
Several figures stood behind him, suffused by a soft light which threw back the darkness that clung to the trees. Three elves – a woman and two men, both of the latter armoured, one in black iron, the other in gold and silver. The woman stepped forwards, her forest green robes rustling softly. She wore a crown of gold, and her face was so beautiful as to be painful, even to Hammerson. Caradryan sank to one knee, head bowed. His flames flickered and died.
The Emperor moved then to stand beside Hammerson. He sank down slowly, arms spread, head lowered. ‘Greetings, Alarielle the Radiant, Everqueen, Handmaiden of Isha. We come before you to humbly beg sanctuary and to offer our aid in these troubled times,’ Karl Franz said. His voice carried easily through the trees. He looked up. ‘Will you welcome us to Athel Loren?’
Hammerson lifted his chin in defiance as the woman’s gaze passed over him. He knew of the Everqueen, and knew that she could incinerate him on the spot with the barest word. The runes branded into his flesh ached, and he could feel the power of her through them. But he was a dwarf of the Black Water, and he would not kneel before an elf.
Her eyes met his, and, after a moment, what might have been the ghost of a smile passed across her lovely features. She inclined her head. ‘Be welcome, travellers,’ she said. She raised her hand, and the elves lowered their weapons. The dryads retreated, slinking back into the forest. ‘The world has changed, and old distrusts and grudges must be abandoned. You have done well, Caradryan.’ Alarielle gestured for the Emperor to rise. ‘Come. There is much to be discussed, before the end of all things.’
Teclis, once-Loremaster of the now-shattered Tower of Hoeth, blood of Aenarion and Astarielle, sat beneath an ancient tree in the Eternal Glade, eyes closed, his head pressed against the staff he held upright before him.
To his mystically attuned senses, the heartbeat of the primordial forest of Athel Loren was almost deafening. The forest, and the Eternal Glade in particular, was a place of immense, incomprehensible power. It would have taken him an eternity to learn its secrets, if he had been so inclined. And then only if the forest itself had let him.
The murmur of voices rose and fell around him, beyond the barrier of his eyelids. Not just the voices of elves, more was the pity. There were men as well, and dwarfs. Athel Loren had become the final redoubt for the mortal races as well as the immortal.
When Caradryan, captain of the Phoenix Guard, had led a column of weary survivors into the Eternal Grove that morning, he had paid no notice to the furore it elicited in the inhabitants of the woodland realm. Instead, his mind had turned inwards, hunting, seeking, probing, trying to root out some clue as to the source of his failure.
Where did I go wrong?
He was not used to asking such questions. In him was personified both the capability and the arrogance of his people, and it was not without cause that some – including himself – thought he was the greatest adept produced by the folk of Ulthuan since the breaking of the world in those far, dim days when daemons had poured through the wounds in the world’s poles. He was the first to admit it, and wore it as a badge of pride. Like his brother, Teclis was the best and the worst of his folk made flesh.
I made a mistake. Somewhere, somehow… What did I miss? What factor did I overlook? The thoughts spiralled around and around, like leaves caught in a stiff breeze. Where did I go wrong? He examined the moment again and again, from every angle and facet.
He could still feel the frustration of that moment – the winds of magic raging within the Vortex, even as Ulthuan crumbled beneath him, his ancient home sinking into the raging sea. He could feel the winds escaping, one by one, slipping through his grasp as quick as eels, and the mounting sense of loss. He had wagered everything on a single throw of the dice, and while he had not lost, he hadn’t won either.
His hands tightened on his staff. He knew every groove and contour of it by touch, and he had worked magics into it since he had first taken a knife to the length of wood in which it had hidden. The staff was as much a part of him as one of his limbs. It was warm to the touch, and the pale wood shone with a soft light. The residual power of the lore of Light, the one wind until recently within his grasp, coiled within the core of his staff, where it had slumbered until he’d found the one on whom he would bestow it. The one whom he had resurrected and transformed into the Incarnate of Light, a living embodiment of Hysh, the White Wind of magic.
Oh my brother, what have I made of you? What have I done to you? What have I done for you? The latter question was easier to answer than the former. His sins in that regard were ever at the foreground of his thoughts. Tyrion, his brother, had died, consumed by the curse of their mutual bloodline, his body and soul twisted by the madness of Khaine. And it had happened by Teclis’s design.
It had always been Tyrion’s destiny to become the Incarnate of Light. But if he had done so while still bearing the curse of Aenarion, that power – the power necessary to redeem the world – would have become corrupted, and bent to the will of Khaine… or worse things. Thus Teclis had been forced to manipulate his own brother, to set the one he loved best on a path that would inevitably lead to his death. That such an outcome had been the only way of ensuring that the curse exhausted itself did not ease Teclis’s guilt. Nor did the knowledge that Tyrion’s resurrection as the Incarnate of Light was the lynchpin of his plan to throw back the Rhana Dandra – to win the unwinnable war. All that mattered was that he had killed his brother and doomed the world.
But Teclis had brought Tyrion back from death’s bower; he had transported the frail, mummified remains of his twin across the world, from the shattered remnants of Ulthuan, leaving his people in the hands of Malekith.
He had come to Athel Loren, and watered the seeds of Tyrion-as-he-had-been within the Heart of Avelorn. When Tyrion had awoken from the slumber of death, Teclis had filled the emptiness left behind by Khaine’s passing with the Flame of Ulric, filling Tyrion’s still-weak limbs with new strength. He had damned a city and all of the innocents within its walls in order to give his brother a chance of survival, and he knew, in his heart, that he would make the same choice again. Tyrion had endured too much, and all of it at his brother’s hands, for Teclis not to. And then, when he was sure that Tyrion could stand it, he had given him the power of Hysh, and stirred the ashes of destiny to life once more.
He had given his brother back his life, and in return Tyrion had fought alongside his fellow Incarnates, Malekith and Alarielle, to save the Oak of Ages from the depredations of Chaos’s firstborn son, Be’lakor, and those dark spirits he had twisted to his foul cause. Now, in the aftermath of that desperate battle, the few survivors of another, equally terrible conflict had come seeking sanctuary under the boughs of Athel Loren. And with them had come two more Incarnates.
Through the staff, he could sense the presence of the five Incarnates, their power grounded in frail flesh and bone, and the briefest trace of a sixth. The world hummed with the weight of them. Their every word sent shockwaves through his senses, and he could taste the raw power that seeped from their pores.
Slowly, his eyes still closed, he turned his staff, the gem set in its tip moving like a serpent’s tongue, tasting the scent of each wind in turn. The gemstone was almost as old as the world itself, and it had taken him decades to work it and carve its facets to the proper shape. In his mind’s eye, he saw the radiance of each – the blinding aura of Hysh, the constantly-shifting morass of Ulgu, the throbbing heat of Ghyran, the roaring hunger of Aqshy, the dense power of Chamon and, last and least, the faint thrum of Azyr, the Blue Wind of magic. Light, Shadow, Life, Fire, Metal and the faintest traces of the Wind of the Heavens. Only two were missing… Shyish, the Wind of Death, and Ghur, the Wind of Beasts.