They were playing the Battle of Mount Deismaar, yet again. It was Michael’s favorite game, and he stuck to it with a dogged persistence only a twelve-year-old could maintain. He never seemed to tire of it. As usual, Michael took the part of Haelyn, champion of Anduiras. It was just like him to pick Haelyn, Aedan thought. It gave him the chance to die spectacularly and become a god.
Every child in the empire knew the story by heart. Those of noble blood had learned it from their tutors, while commoners heard it from the bards, who sang it as an epic ballad called “The Legacy of Kings.” There were several slightly different versions of the ballad, each divided into four main parts, but in all of them, the story was essentially the same. It was the history of the formation of the empire, and like most children of the nobility, Aedan had been taught it early, when he was only six years old.
It began with “The Six Tribes,” the ancestors of the humans now settled in Cerilia. The story told how five of the tribes came on a mass exodus from the embattled southern continent of Aduria. The Andu, from whom the modem Anuireans were descended, took their name from their god Anduiras, the deity of nobility and war. The Rjuven had venerated Reynir, the god of woods and streams. The Brechts had worshiped Brenna, the goddess of commerce and fortune, while the Vos had followed Vorynn, the moon lord, who was the god of magic. The last of the five Adurian tribes, the Masetians, had been devoted to Masela, the goddess of the seas. These seagoing traders, whose swift, triangular-sailed sloops had once plied the Adurian coasts, had not survived as a discrete culture in the modern empire, though remnants of Masetian influence could still be found in the Khinasi lands.
The sixth tribe were the Basarji, the ancestors of the people now known as the Khinasi, whose temples were dedicated to Basaia, the goddess of the sun. They were a dark-skinned, exotic-looking people who had crossed the storm-tossed Sea of Dragons from their homeland of Djapar to settle in the southeastern region of Cerilia. Their origins were shrouded in the occult mysteries of their folklore, but it was believed that they had come from the same stock as the Masetians, as there were many similarities between their cultures and, like the Adurians, they had worshiped the old gods, though each tribe had its favored deity among the pantheon.
The Adurian tribes had fled from their war-torn ancestral lands to escape subjugation by their neighbors, who were followers of Azrai, lord of darkness. Their flight took them to Cerilia, across the land bridge that once existed where the Straits of Aerele now flowed.
Before the Six Tribes came, there had been no human presence in Cerilia. However, there were other races who had claimed the land for their own. Chief among them were the elves, who called themselves the Sidhelien. Their civilization was ancient and advanced, but they were also capable of fearsome savagery from centuries of competing with the feral humanoids who shared their land. They had carved out their kingdom from territories overrun by goblins, gnolls, and ogres, and in its days of glory, the Elven Court was said to have surpassed in power and pageantry even the Imperial Court of Anuire.
Of the remaining two races living in Cerilia, the dwarves were the most insular. A strong, taciturn, enduring people, they organized their kingdoms around clans, with each clan leader swearing fealty to the dwarven king. Expert miners and skilled fighters, they seldom ventured from their mountain strongholds and lived in peaceful coexistence with the elves. Their only natural enemies were the brutish ogres, who lived deep in the vast caverns that honeycombed the mountains.
Cerilia was also home to a growing population of halflings, though less was known about their history and culture than that of any other race inhabiting the land. Unlike the clannish dwarves, who rarely strayed from their domains, halflings were wanderers by inclination, tending to adapt to customs and conditions prevailing in the territories where they lived. The only permanent halfling settlement in Cerilia, the Burrows, was in the southern region of the Coulladaraight, the sprawling, trackless forest that was home to the reclusive elven kingdom of Coullabhie. The tiny halflings were tolerated by their elven neighbors, but any humans rash enough to venture into those dark woods often did not emerge again.
When the young knights had gathered to begin their game, Michael had decided to cast some of the smaller children as halflings, and an argument had erupted when thirteen-year-old Lord Corwin had insisted that there were no halflings in Cerilia at the time the battle had occurred. Michael had insisted that there were, and his perennial supporters, who had learned the art of sycophancy at a very early age, immediately backed him up, whether they privately agreed with him or not. Corwin wouldn’t budge, however, maintaining that it was a fact, and so Michael, convinced that he was right, turned to Aedan to settle the dispute. When Aedan had confirmed that Lord Corwin was, indeed, correct, Michael had snorted with disgust, then shrugged it off and cast the smaller children in the role of dwarves, instead.
It occurred to Aedan that there had been few dwarves at the Battle of Mount Deismaar, but since none of others seemed to know that, he prudently decided to leave well enough alone. Michael had given him a dirty look when he took Corwin’s side, and Aedan knew that look too well. Prince Michael did not like to be contradicted, regardless of the facts, but Aedan wasn’t going to lie for him.
The truth was that halflings were unknown in Cerilia until about five hundred years ago, long after the Battle of Mount Deismaar. Legend had it that the halflings had fled from their ancestral homeland in the mystic Shadow World to escape some nameless horror that had threatened their existence. Though halflings rarely spoke of it themselves, the bards embellished on this opportunity to whatever fanciful extent their imaginations would allow. They spoke of a “Cold Rider” who appeared one day in the world of faerie, the spirit world, and slowly, it became the Shadow World—cold, gray and foreboding. And the halflings, creatures half of this world and half of the world of faerie, fled the Cold Rider and the darkness he brought with him. Perhaps it was all merely the fanciful imaginings of bards, or perhaps it was the truth. The only ones who really knew for certain were the halflings.
It was said they were the only creatures who could pass between the worlds at will, though exactly how they did this no one knew. It was believed they could “shadow walk,” creating temporary portals that would let them slip into the dark domain and reemerge into the world of daylight at another place and time. Yet at certain times throughout the year, the veil between the worlds seemed to part. At such times, unwary humans could stumble through into the Shadow World, and creatures from the dark domain could emerge into the world of daylight.
At the tender age of six, when he first heard about the Shadow World from the older boys at court, Aedan had been plagued by nightmares prompted by the grisly stories he was told around their evening campfires. His young imagination had conjured up all sorts of hideous terrors that had lurked beneath his bed and in his closet, where he was convinced that portals to the Shadow World appeared each night. He would cower underneath his covers as the candle on his nightstand guttered, casting ghoulish shadows on the walls, and when he fell asleep eventually, despite all his efforts to remain awake, he would dream of fearsome monsters wriggling out from underneath his bed to drag him down into the Shadow World and feast upon his flesh.
A few years later, when he was old enough to realize that his closet, even after dark, held nothing more ominous than clothes and that the only things beneath his bed were dust balls, Aedan had regaled young Prince Michael with lurid tales of the horrors that awaited in the Shadow World, perversely hoping to repay the boy for the indignities that Michael made him suffer in his waking hours. But he soon discovered, much to his disgust, that Michael’s insufferable arrogance, even at the age of five, persisted in his dreams, where instead of being terrorized by monsters, he merely vanquished them with cool dispatch.