Adventurers of Elandris: Book 1 Prologue
Adventurers of Elandris
A Magical Empire
Book 1: Venus Vanguard
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by John Kim
A Note on the Timeline
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The events of this volume take place in a world that runs parallel to the Chronicles of Elandris, close enough that you will recognize its peoples and its purple sun, its dragons and its elven crystal, its long-held imperial peace.
But this is not the same timeline. Different choices were made here. In the Chronicles, the elven princess who climbed onto a dragon’s back was called Lyriana, and she went on to build her empire in ways no historian had a name for: through unlikely friendships, through a sisterhood of advisors that crossed every people and every border, through a thousand small and stubborn refusals to do things the way they had always been done. The peace she built was strange. It was also unprecedented.
In this world, the princess who climbed onto a dragon’s back was called Lyriana. She made the same fundamental choice, to bind the peoples together rather than rule them apart, but the road afterward diverged. Lyriana chose the conventional path of empire: treaties, garrisons, councils, careful administration, the long patient work of statecraft as it had been done for ten thousand years before her. There was no sisterhood. There were no peculiar diplomatic experiments. There was, instead, a competent and careful empress doing what an empress was supposed to do.
It worked. The peace held. The empire stood. By any conventional measure, Lyriana’s reign was a success.
And yet, if one knew the Chronicles, if one had glimpsed the other road, there were nights when one might lie awake wondering. What if the conventional path was the lesser one? What if a hundred small acts of imagination, taken together, would have built something more durable than treaties? What if the empire of this world was, quietly and without anyone noticing, missing something it could not name?
These pages do not answer that question. They only follow what happens when peace, however carefully maintained, begins to fray at the edges, and someone has to ride out and find out why.
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Adventurers of Elandris
A Magical Empire
Book 1: Prologue
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The Empire of Elandris
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Long after the Shadow Wars had faded into legend, and long after a small elven princess had climbed onto the back of a dragon and changed the world forever, there remained a kingdom unlike any other. Elandris, once the proud and isolated jewel of the elves, with its crystal palace and mushroom-houses and rivers running honey-sweet under the purple sun, had become, over the slow centuries that followed, the beating heart of an empire that no historian had ever quite believed possible.
In this world, the sun rose purple and set in long swirls of gold. Rivers carried water that tasted faintly of honey if you knew the right places to drink. Flowers sang on certain evenings, and stars, if you were quiet enough, sometimes whispered back. Five great peoples shared this world. The long-lived Elves, with their crystal cities and fireflies as bright as lanterns. The bold and curious Humans, with their kingdoms of stone and steel. The fierce Orcs of Sorath, with their fortresses of obsidian and iron. The stubborn Dwarves of the deep mountains, master forgers of impossible things. And the ancient Dragons, who ruled the skies and answered, in this age, to no one but their Mother.
There had been a time, in the long centuries before, when these peoples had hated one another with the patient generational fury of those who had long since forgotten what they were even fighting about. There had been wars without end. Forests had burned. Mountains had crumbled. Rivers had run dry from the magic spilled across their banks. Then a small elven princess had stepped onto a dragon’s back, holding the hand of the Shadow Sovereign himself, and over the slow turning of years had stitched together a peace that, while perhaps not as inventive as it might have been in some other world, had nonetheless held.
Her name was Lyriana. She was Empress of the Shadow Empire, dragon mother to Tiamara’s legion, signatory of the Concord of the Five Thrones, ratifier of the Sorath Compact. She had been, for centuries now, exactly the empress her advisors had hoped she would be: diligent, cautious, conventional. The kind of ruler who consulted the council on every weighty question and trusted the long, patient machinery of governance to grind the right answer out in the end.
Beside her ruled Amon, the Shadow Emperor himself, ancient beyond reckoning, his four mithril orbs orbiting him in slow and patient circuits like quiet moons that had decided, long ago, to follow him wherever he went. He had loved Lyriana for the four hundred years of their marriage and had never once openly disagreed with her in council. He had also, on many quiet evenings, looked out from the high balconies of the imperial palace toward the western horizon with an expression his wife had learned not to ask about.
Together they had built an empire of treaties, of careful balance, of patient diplomacy. The peace held. It always held. Whether it was the peace it might have been was a question no one in the imperial city was permitted to ask aloud.
It was into this empire of long-earned and conventionally-administered harmony that two girls were born, and grew, and became something the careful machinery of the empire had not quite been designed to account for.
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End of Prologue
Adventurers of Elandris
A Magical Empire
Book 1: Chapter One
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Sword and Shield
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They had been inseparable since the age of seven, when a young Elyndra Dawnshield had climbed a courtyard oak that was decidedly too tall for climbing, and a young Seraphina Vale had stood below with her arms outstretched, perfectly certain she could catch her if she fell. Elyndra did not fall. But she remembered, forever afterward, that Seraphina had been ready.
Elyndra was half-elven, born to House Dawnshield, the elven noble line that had served Elandris since before the Shadow Empire was founded, and to a human father of the older Eastern stock who had fought alongside her mother in three campaigns before he ever asked permission to court her. The Dawnshield crest bore a rising sun cresting above a knight’s helm, and every generation of the house had produced at least one warrior the bards still sang about. She had inherited her mother’s silver-white hair, which fell long and unruly past her armored shoulders, and from somewhere in the deep blood of both her lines the clear pale blue eyes of a winter sky. Her ears were faintly pointed, less than an elf’s, more than a human’s, and she had a bearing that suggested she had been born standing at attention. Even as a girl she moved with a quiet, coiled readiness, as though the world around her were something to be protected.
Seraphina Vale was half-elven too, daughter of a human temple healer mother whose people had joined Elandris in the early days of the empire when Empress Lyriana herself had welcomed the human refugees of Sorath into the new world, and of a quietly devoted scholar-soldier father from one of the empire’s older mixed houses, in whose blood the elven line ran a little stronger than the Dawnshield records would have predicted. Which perhaps explained why Sera grew up equally at ease with a medical herb kit and a shield strapped to her arm. By coincidence or by quiet magic her hair was the same silver-white as Elyndra’s, her ears bore the same faint point, and her eyes were summer-sky blue, warm and open, the kind of eyes that made the wounded feel less afraid. It had taken some explaining, when they were small, that the two of them were not in fact sisters, a misunderstanding their mothers had long since stopped trying to correct.
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There was one part of Elyndra’s childhood, however, that she did not often speak of, even to Seraphina. The Dawnshields were a famous house, but a busy one. Her parents bore the obligations of nobility and warfare in equal measure, and the years of her early life had often passed without either of them home for more than a season at a time. The warmest hours of her childhood, the ones she remembered most clearly when she was tired or homesick or afraid, had been spent in the company of her godmother.
Lady Venusia of House Brightspire was tall and bright-haired and laughed often, and was, by reputation, one of the most decorated A-Rank adventurers the empire had ever produced. The court called her Lady Venusia. The barracks called her Commander. The taverns called her Venus, and her closest friends called her nothing else, because she had said, more than once, that she had no patience for titles when there was good wine on the table. Children, by special exemption, were allowed to call her whatever they pleased. To Elyndra, from the age of three onward, she had simply been Aunt Venus.
Venus had been, in her quiet way, one of those at court who held private opinions about the empire’s conventional choices. She had served Lyriana loyally for nine decades. She had also, more than once, observed in private to Elyndra that an empire run by ledger and protocol was an empire that asked rather little of its heroes, and that adventurers, real adventurers, were what filled in the gaps that paperwork could not reach.
It was Venus who had first put a wooden practice sword in Elyndra’s small hand. Venus who had taught her that armor was a tool, not a costume, and that the weight of it was the price of being someone other people could stand behind. Venus who had told her, on more than one quiet evening in the Dawnshield gardens, that the truest knights were never alone, that a warrior without companions was a tragedy waiting to happen, and that someday, when Elyndra was grown, she should gather around her the bravest hearts she could find and call them something worth remembering.
Venus did not live to see Elyndra grown.
She had fallen, three winters past, on a campaign in the deep north, the kind of fall that warriors of her caliber sometimes met when they refused to abandon a wounded squire to save themselves. There had been a state funeral. There had been songs. There had been, for Elyndra, a long and quiet grief that had not entirely left her even now, and which she suspected might never entirely leave.
But there had also been, ever since, a name kept private and patient in the back of her mind. A name for the company she would, one day, gather around her, when she was ready and the empire had need of her. A company worth remembering. For Venus, who had taught her how.
She had told only Seraphina. Sera, who had attended the funeral at her side and held her hand through three songs and one silence, knew the name. They never spoke it aloud in casual company. It was not a thing for casual company.
The Venus Vanguard. Someday.
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Together, the two friends were two halves of a single conviction: that service was the highest form of power. They argued about tactics the way other children argued about games. They healed each other’s scrapes with the focused seriousness of apprentice surgeons. They trained in the temple courtyards of Elandris long after their cohort had retired, the pale crystal columns throwing long shadows across the stone, neither willing to be the first to say enough for the night.
When the time came to choose their formal paths, the choice felt less like a decision and more like a recognition.
Seraphina chose the path of the Cleric, healer first, divine shield second. She devoted herself to the Twilight Domain, where compassion meets the courage to stand between the fallen and whatever darkness pressed at them. She trained with shield and mace, weapons that could turn a blade and break a threat without drawing blood if blood need not be drawn. Her calling was restoration: to be the still center that kept others standing.
Elyndra chose the path of the Paladin, holy knight first, divine healer second. She took her Oath of Vengeance not out of hatred but out of absolute, uncompromising love for the innocent. She devoted herself to the great two-handed sword, Venus’s weapon, the same hand-and-a-half pattern her godmother had carried for ninety years, a weapon that demands full commitment and cannot be wielded halfway. Her calling was retribution in service of righteousness: to be the bright edge that strikes before the darkness can reach those behind her.
The difference between the two paths was subtle, and the two friends discussed it at length over many late evenings. Seraphina would say, “I heal so that warriors can return to the field. Elyndra hits so hard there is less field to return to.” Elyndra would counter, “I strike so that Sera never has to. And when she must, she holds the line while I recover enough to strike again.”
The symmetry was, by any assessment, remarkable. Where Elyndra could deal catastrophic damage, Seraphina was there to cover their flank with shield raised, mending wounds with practiced calm. Where Seraphina might need a moment’s recovery, Elyndra’s own divine training let her extend a hand of healing to her best friend before wheeling back to face whatever came next. Each made the other more than either could be alone.
They went on many adventures together, small ones at first, the kind that barely warrant telling. A haunted mill outside the farming district. A river troll that had grown bold enough to threaten a bridge. A missing merchant caravan that had taken a foolish detour into the Mossbeck Hollows. Each time, they returned slightly wiser, slightly more seasoned, and with another shared story added to the long, comfortable catalogue of their friendship.
The people of Elandris began to know their names. Then they began to speak them with a certain reverence that the two friends privately found embarrassing and professionally found useful. Indra and Sera, they were called in the streets, the names worn smooth with affection, like river stones.
They were, by any measure, exactly where they were supposed to be.
And then the summons arrived.
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The Imperial Throne Room of Elandris was built to remind visitors that they were mortal. It had been carved, in the old elven way, from a single vault of pale crystal that glowed softly from within, a glow that had not faded in eight hundred years and showed no sign of fading now. Its ceiling vaulted so high that swallows were rumored to nest in the moonflowers carved along the upper ribs. Two solemn rows of crystal columns ran its length, each wrapped at the base with living silver-vine that had been growing, uninterrupted, since the founding of the empire. At the far end, on a dais of three broad steps, sat the paired thrones, one of crystal and moonflower bloom for the Empress, one of black mithril and shadow-glass for the Emperor.
Empress Lyriana sat with the careful, balanced posture prescribed by the third volume of the imperial protocols, the same posture every empress of the Shadow Throne had used in formal audience for four hundred years, and which she had practiced as a girl until it became as natural to her as breathing. Her silver hair was bound in the diplomatic braid. Her circlet of moonflower silver sat precisely level on her brow. Her spring-green eyes were calm, attentive, and gave nothing away.
Emperor Amon sat beside her, and he was something else again. He was tall and broad-shouldered, his hair midnight-dark, his eyes the soft grey of a storm cloud just before it breaks. Around him, in their slow and silent orbit, the four mithril orbs of the Shadow Sovereign turned at the speeds they had turned for ten thousand years, one for defense against blade, one for striking back, one for warding away magic, one for unmaking it. He had agreed, long ago, to defer to his wife in matters of governance, and he had kept that agreement faithfully ever since, even when his own ancient instincts whispered otherwise.
Elyndra and Seraphina knelt together at the base of the dais, as protocol required, and waited.
“Rise, Lady Elyndra. Rise, Seraphina Vale,” the Empress said. Her voice carried easily across the great chamber, the practiced cadence of one who had given a thousand formal audiences. “The council has reviewed the recommendations submitted by General Karkan and Captain Thrace. We have considered the relevant precedents. The matter is irregular, but the precedent of irregular missions in irregular times is itself well established.”
She paused. The faintest hesitation. As if some other, less protocol-bound version of herself wanted to use plainer words and was patiently overruled.
“There is something amiss in Wyrmwood Vale.”
Beside her, the Emperor leaned forward slightly. “More precisely,” he said, “there is something preventing us from perceiving events there. My orbs find no resistance, and yet no answer comes back. Tiamara’s scouts return without memory of what they saw. The dwarven seer-stones go silent at the Vale’s borders. What lies within the Vale at this moment, we cannot say. And that, Lady Elyndra, is not a condition this throne is accustomed to accepting.”
“The council has weighed military intervention against discreet investigation,” the Empress continued, “and has unanimously recommended the latter. We ask, therefore, that the two of you travel to the Vale, observe carefully, and return to report what you find. Eyes we can trust, carrying heads we know will not be turned by whatever waits inside. Will you accept this commission?”
Elyndra did not hesitate for long. She glanced once at Seraphina, a glance that communicated approximately forty words in the span of half a heartbeat, and received a small, sure nod in return.
“We accept, Your Majesties,” she said. “The two of us together have walked into worse places than a quiet forest, and we have always walked out again.”
“So your records indicate,” the Empress replied. “A contingent of Karkan’s shadow-scouts will be authorized to shadow your route. They will not enter the Vale itself; the council deems the suppression effect too uncertain to risk imperial assets within. Consider them your safety net. Plan as though they are not there.”
“We are told, additionally,” the Emperor added, “that a number of independent adventurers have entered the Vale over recent weeks and have not returned. They may still be alive inside, trapped or stranded. If they can be recovered, recover them. Add to your number if the Vale yields willing hands.”
At this, a chamberlain stepped forward bearing two scrolls on a velvet-lined tray.
The first was sealed in imperial silver wax, bearing the moonflower-and-sun crest of Elandris, an authorization scroll, granting the bearers full cooperation from any imperial officer, garrison, or institution encountered along the road. It was the standard form, properly counter-signed by three council members, the chief chamberlain, and the under-secretary of irregular missions.
The second scroll was different.
It was sealed in black wax, not the dark navy of formal mourning, not the charcoal grey of military dispatch, but absolute, lightless black, the color of the spaces between stars. Pressed into that wax was the Shadow Black Seal of the Shadow Empire, the personal seal of the Shadow Sovereign himself. Elyndra recognized it at once, though she had only ever seen it twice in her life and once was in a forbidden book her tutor had pretended not to know she had read. It was a seal used so seldom across the long centuries of the empire that to see it was to understand, immediately, that the matter had passed beyond the ordinary authority of councils and protocols. The exterior of the scroll bore four words in a hand precise and deliberately unsettling: Read and Tremblingly Obey.
Elyndra stared at the scroll for a moment. Then she picked it up, without trembling, and tucked it into her satchel with a composure that earned the Emperor’s barely visible approval.
The Empress, beside him, watched the gesture with something that looked very nearly like surprise.
“The Shadow Black Seal supersedes all other authority in regions where the imperial writ is not recognized,” the Emperor said. “It carries no countersignature. It requires none. Use it carefully. Its existence implies cooperation from forces I would prefer remain quiet. That is all I will say about it here.”
The Empress was silent for a long moment. When she spoke again, her voice was quieter than the formal cadence she had used until now. Almost ordinary. Almost warm.
“The scroll also carries a secondary purpose. By imperial authority, Lady Elyndra Dawnshield, you are hereby granted the rank of A-Rank Leader of the Venus Vanguard, operating under the seal of the Shadow Empire. Whatever company you build along the way, those you save, those who will not let you go alone, that company is yours to command. Bring them home, Lady Dawnshield. All of them.”
Elyndra did not, for a moment, trust her voice.
The Empress’s spring-green eyes had not left her face. There was something in them now, something kind, something that had been waiting to be said.
“Yes, Lady Dawnshield. We know whose name you would have chosen. The court keeps records, and Lady Venusia of Brightspire was a friend of this throne for nine decades before she fell. She told me once, in a private audience I have never repeated to anyone, that I governed too cautiously. She did not say it unkindly. She said it the way an old friend tells the truth.”
A pause. A breath. Something very nearly like regret moved across the Empress’s face and was, with practiced discipline, set aside.
“I did not change. But I never forgot. We thought the name would suit you better than any we might have invented. It is yours, formally, from this day. Carry it well, Lady Dawnshield. Carry it as she would have.”
Elyndra bowed her head, not the careful, calibrated bow of a noble before her sovereigns, but the deeper bow of a knight before something larger than herself. When she straightened, her voice was steady again.
“I will carry it well, Your Majesty. On my oath. And on hers.”
Seraphina, beside her, had begun very quietly to cry. Elyndra did not look. She did not need to look. She simply reached out without turning her head and took her best friend’s hand, the way she had been doing since they were both seven years old.
Together, they bowed once more to the thrones, and then they turned, and then they left.
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Seraphina leaned close to Elyndra as they departed down the long crystal corridor, their footsteps echoing in the vaulted silence. Above them, faint motes of moonflower-light drifted slowly through the air, the way they always had in this palace and the way they always would.
“She named it for Venus,” Seraphina whispered.
“She named it for Venus,” Elyndra agreed.
“Indra. Did the Empress just admit something? In a throne room? In front of the whole court?”
“I think she did.”
“You know what ‘Read and Tremblingly Obey’ means, don’t you?” Seraphina said after a while. “That’s not decorative language. That’s the Sovereign’s own words. He hasn’t used those four since before our great-grandparents were born.”
“It means whatever is in Wyrmwood Vale already knows we’re coming.”
“That’s what I thought.” Sera was quiet for a moment, then asked the question that had been waiting since they left the throne room. “Are you frightened?”
“I have you beside me, Sera. And the name of a woman who never ran from anything. There’s no room in the schedule for frightened.”
Seraphina smiled, the particular smile that meant I know you, and I am with you regardless, and the two of them stepped out of the palace and into the purple light of an Elandris evening, when the sun rolled down toward the western mountains in long swirls of gold and the first fireflies of the night began their slow, blinking ascent into the sky.
Behind them, the great crystal doors closed with a sound like a book being shut.
Ahead of them, the road curved toward a forest whose edges already felt darker than distance alone could account for.
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They rode out the next morning at first light, beneath a sky just beginning to bloom from indigo into pale violet, with the moonflower mist still clinging to the lower terraces of the imperial city. Two riders, two horses, no escort. Sera in temple-white over chain, her shield slung across her back and her mace at her saddle. Indra in plate of dawnshield silver, her great two-handed sword wrapped in oilcloth and lashed across her own pack.
They did not speak much during the first hours. They had never needed to.
A few miles past the last imperial waystation of the capital ring, where the high road narrowed and the city walls finally fell out of sight behind them, Seraphina drew her horse alongside Elyndra’s and broke the quiet.
“Indra. Whatever we find inside that Vale, promise me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“If we have to choose between the mission and each other, we choose each other. Always. We’ve been a pair too long to be anything else.”
Elyndra was quiet for a long moment. Then she reached across the space between their horses and took Seraphina’s gauntleted hand in her own.
“We choose each other. Sword and shield. As we have always done.”
They rode on.
Behind them, the crystal spires of Elandris caught the late morning sun and threw it back in long rays of gold and violet. Ahead, the trees grew slowly closer together, and the road rose by gentle degrees into hills that no map of the empire described in much detail.
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End of Chapter One
To be continued…
Adventurers of Elandris
A Magical Empire
Book 1: Chapter Two
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The Third Waystation
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It was one of the small mercies of the empire that travelers along the imperial high roads did not have to sleep on the ground. Every fifteen leagues or so, the Shadow Throne maintained what was officially called a Waystation of the Imperial Post and unofficially called, by everyone who had ever stayed at one, a godsend. Each was a fortified inn-and-stable combination, manned by a small garrison of imperial soldiers, stocked with fresh horses, dry beds, hot food, and (depending on the captain in residence) good wine, passable wine, or whatever the local merchants had been willing to part with that month. Travelers carrying valid imperial credentials could exchange tired horses for fresh ones, sleep without standing watch, and continue their journey at first light.
For Elyndra and Seraphina, this meant they were able to travel about three times faster than they would have on their own.
By the time they had passed the first waystation, they had ridden farther than most patrols managed in a day. By the second, the high mountains of the imperial heartland were already softening into the gentler hill country of the eastern marches. By the third, the road had begun its slow eastward bend toward the wilderness that surrounded Wyrmwood Vale, and the fresh horses of each station had given way, by patient relay, to the fresh horses of the next.
It was after that third waystation, on an evening when the purple sun was already low and the moonflowers along the road had begun to open for the night, that they decided to call it a day.
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The third waystation was set on a low rise overlooking a meandering river. Its walls were stone, its roof slate, and its pennant, a moonflower-and-sun on a field of imperial silver, caught what was left of the evening light. A pair of garrison soldiers waved them in through the outer gate without ceremony. A boy took their horses to the stables. A second boy led them inside.
The captain on duty was a human of perhaps fifty, with the squared shoulders of a man who had spent his entire adult life standing at attention. His name, according to the brass plate over the duty desk, was Captain Holvar. He took one look at them as they entered and did not, as so many waystation officers did, demand their business immediately. He simply waited.
Elyndra produced both scrolls from her satchel and laid them on the desk.
The first was the imperial silver-sealed authorization. Captain Holvar examined it with the practiced attention of someone who had checked thousands. He nodded once, satisfied. Then he reached for the second scroll.
What happened next was very subtle. To anyone watching him casually, nothing changed. But Elyndra was not watching him casually, and she saw the precise moment his eyes registered what was pressed into the black wax. His shoulders, already squared, became somehow squarer. The muscles in his jaw tightened, just slightly. His careful neutral expression became, by some craft she could not have named, even more carefully neutral.
He set the second scroll down with both hands. He did not break the seal. Only a fool would. But he had seen enough of the exterior to understand what he held.
He looked up at the two of them with the kind of attention a man pays to objects he suspects might explode.
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Captain Holvar cleared his throat.
“Forgive the intrusion, my ladies,” he said, and his voice was very careful indeed. “I do not wish to impose on travelers carrying documents of such weight. I would not normally ask. But I wonder, before you retire for the evening, whether one of you might happen to be familiar with the healing arts.”
He had, of course, already noticed everything that needed noticing. The plate armor with the rising-sun-and-helm of House Dawnshield. The two-handed sword wrapped in oilcloth. The temple-white over chain. The shield with the moonflower-twilight crest of the Cleric orders. The mace at Seraphina’s saddle, kept ready but never drawn in a waystation. He had been a soldier for thirty years. He knew exactly what he was looking at.
But he had also been a soldier long enough to know that asking imperial agents for favors was something one did with great care, if at all. So he had phrased the question in a way that allowed them to refuse without anyone having to acknowledge that a refusal had occurred.
Elyndra and Seraphina exchanged a glance.
They both nodded.
“Captain,” Seraphina said gently, “we are here to serve those in need. Tell us what is wrong.”
The careful neutrality of Captain Holvar’s face cracked, just slightly, into something that looked a great deal like relief.
“We have a gravely ill mage in the clinic, my lady. He arrived three days ago, half-collapsed against the saddle of his horse. An itinerant scholar, by his papers, traveling east from Veilmere on independent business. He fell unconscious within an hour of his arrival and has not woken since. Our station healer has done what she can. Light Heal, Light Cure, the usual restorative rites. None of it has reached him. He has only grown weaker.”
He hesitated.
“My lady, this is not, forgive me, this is not an ordinary illness. There is something wrong with his magic. Our healer says it is as if something is feeding on him from within. She has done what she can, but she is one woman with a country priest’s training. She cannot reach whatever is doing this.”
Seraphina’s expression had gone still and focused, the expression Elyndra had learned, over many years, meant that her best friend had stopped, for the moment, being her best friend and become instead what she had trained for two decades to be.
“Take us to him,” Seraphina said.
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The clinic was a small white-walled room at the back of the waystation, lit by two oil lamps and one low fire. The station healer, a tired-looking elven woman named Sister Oma, rose when they entered and nodded once, professionally. Word had clearly traveled ahead.
The patient lay on a narrow cot under a thin grey blanket. He was a man of perhaps forty in human-reckoned years, though the unmistakable elven cast of his cheekbones suggested he was at least three times that. His skin had the pale, drawn quality of someone whose body was burning through reserves it should not have been touching. His breath came shallow and irregular. There was a faint shimmer in the air around him, not the pleasant glow of a healthy mage’s working, but something thinner, more frayed, as though the natural arcane currents around him were being slowly siphoned away.
Seraphina sat down on the stool beside the cot. She placed two fingers, very lightly, against the man’s wrist. Then against his temple. Then she closed her eyes.
After a long moment she opened them again.
“It isn’t a sickness,” she said. “Not a natural one. There’s something attached to him. Something feeding.”
Elyndra had drawn closer and was studying the air above the cot. Her own training as a paladin gave her a different kind of sight, less precise than Sera’s clerical reading, but more attuned to the moral character of magical things.
“It feels old,” she said quietly. “Whatever it is. And it does not belong here.”
Sister Oma nodded slightly, as if her own suspicions had just been confirmed by witnesses she trusted more than herself.
“Can the two of you do anything?” Captain Holvar asked from the doorway. He had been very careful not to enter the clinic.
Elyndra looked at Seraphina. Seraphina looked at Elyndra.
It was, again, one of those glances that communicated approximately forty words in the span of half a heartbeat.
“We will need to work together,” Seraphina said, half to Elyndra, half to the captain. “Whatever has hold of him is beyond a single caster’s reach. I can hold the channels open and feed restoration into him, but I cannot break what has fastened itself in. Indra, if you can lend your light to mine, your fire to my mending, we may be able to draw it out without breaking him in the process.”
Elyndra nodded once. “You hold him steady. I will pull.”
“Slowly,” Sera said. “This isn’t something to rip free. Whatever it is, it is wound through him. We bring it out the way you draw a thorn, not the way you pull a weed.”
“Slowly, then.” Elyndra rolled her shoulders once, a small habitual gesture from a hundred other dangerous moments. “Sword and shield.”
“Sword and shield.”
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They knelt on either side of the cot. Seraphina took the unconscious man’s left hand. Elyndra took his right. They closed their eyes, breathed together once, the way they had learned to breathe together as girls in the temple courtyards under torches that had long since gone out, and began.
The light that rose from Seraphina’s hands was the color of a winter morning sun. A clean, warm yellow-gold, the color of hearth-light and harvest-light, the color of every Cleric’s blessing that had ever called the wounded back from the edge. It spread up the mage’s left arm in slow, patient pulses, like the slow climbing of dawn across a mountainside. It was not a light that hurried. Healing, Sera had been taught, never hurried. Healing was patience.
The light that rose from Elyndra’s hands was a different color entirely. It was blue. A deep, clear, almost-violet blue, the color of an evening sky just before the first stars, the color of the great two-handed sword her godmother had carried for ninety years before she fell. It was the color of paladin’s holy fire, of vows taken and kept. Where Seraphina’s light was patience, Elyndra’s was conviction. Where Sera’s said come back, you are safe, Indra’s said get out, you are not welcome here.
The two lights met above the unconscious mage and braided together. Yellow and blue. Patience and conviction. Healing and holy fire. They worked their way slowly inward, threading along the lines of the man’s failing body, searching for what did not belong.
They found it.
It was a thing of black thread and patient hunger, anchored deep in the mage’s mind, wrapped along his arcane channels the way a creeper vine wraps around a dying tree. It had been feeding slowly. Patiently. The way certain old and clever predators feed. It was small, by the standards of such things. Almost trivial.
Almost.
It also bore the unmistakable signature of something that had originated, very recently, in the direction of Wyrmwood Vale.
Seraphina’s eyes opened first. She looked across the cot at Elyndra. Her face had gone a shade paler than it had been before.
“Indra. This is not random.”
Elyndra had felt it too. The blue light around her hands had gone, for a moment, very steady and very cold.
“No,” she said. “It isn’t.”
They began to draw the thing out.
It would take most of the night. By the time they finished, the unconscious mage would be breathing easily for the first time in three days, and Sister Oma would be openly crying, and Captain Holvar would have given up pretending he was not watching from the clinic doorway. But that was still to come.
For now, in the light of two oil lamps and a low fire and one blue-and-gold working that lit the small clinic like a sunrise indoors, the paladin and the cleric began the patient and dangerous work of pulling something foul out of a stranger they did not yet know.
The empire’s quiet errand, it seemed, had just become considerably less quiet.
☙ ❧
End of Chapter Two
To be continued…
Adventurers of Elandris
A Magical Empire
Book 1: Chapter Three
☙ ❧
The Mage and the Warrior
~ ❧ ~
The fire had burned low. The oil lamps had been refilled twice during the night. Outside, the first thin grey light of dawn was beginning to mark the eastern horizon, that hour when night and day exchange custody of the world.
For the first time in three days, the unconscious mage drew a full, unconstricted breath. His eyelids fluttered. Opened.
Aetherion Sol, what would have been a man of perhaps forty in human years, though the elven cast of his cheekbones told a different story, looked up from the cot and found himself being watched by two pairs of pale eyes.
His voice was hoarse from disuse.
“Thank the Gods for healing,” he said. Then, with the careful precision of a man who had spent decades being scrupulous about credit where credit was due, he added, “And thank you, my ladies, for the work of saving my life.”
Seraphina, who had not moved from her stool in seven hours, set two fingers very lightly against his wrist, found his pulse steady for the first time since they had begun, and only then allowed herself a small, weary smile.
“You have been to the Vale, Master Mage,” she said. “I saw your memory fragments while we were drawing the thing out of you. They were not the memories of an itinerant scholar.”
It was not, strictly, a question. But she had given him room to answer it as one if he chose.
Aetherion Sol closed his eyes briefly. When he opened them again, something old and tired moved behind them.
“You saw correctly, my lady. The papers are not a lie. I am, by license, a Grand Wizard of the Veilmere academies, and white I do travel under a scholar’s commission, I am a combat mage. The deeper truth is that I was investigating the silence around Wyrmwood Vale, on behalf of a small circle of mages who had grown concerned that no farseer could pierce its borders. I was not alone. We were a party of two.”
He paused. His breath hitched, and not from physical weakness.
“What of my companion? Valerius Drakon. Where is he?”
☙ ❧
Captain Holvar had been standing at the clinic doorway since just before the mage’s eyes had opened, with the patient stillness of a man who had been a soldier long enough to know that some conversations were not meant to be interrupted. Now he stepped forward, carefully, and bowed his head once.
“Master Mage, our scouts found you alone. You had ridden out of the southern woods slumped against the saddle of your horse, and the horse had carried you to the edge of the imperial road before its strength gave out. There was no second rider. There was no body. We have searched a half-mile in every direction around the spot. If Valerius Drakon was there when you fell, he was not there when we arrived.”
The mage absorbed this. He did not, Seraphina noted, look alarmed in the way a man looks alarmed when he has been told a friend is dead. He looked alarmed in the way a man looks alarmed when he has been told something that does not yet make sense.
“That,” Aetherion said softly, “is not nothing.”
“Valerius Drakon is, by reputation, not a man easily killed,” the captain said. “It is told in the garrisons that he once held a bridge alone against an army for nine hours. He will not be so easy to kill. What is your last memory, my lord?”
Aetherion was silent for a long moment, gathering the shards of three lost days into something he could speak.
“We had been ambushed,” he said at last. “Not by men. By presences. A circle of something that moved like wolves and watched like priests. They surrounded us in a clearing perhaps ten miles south of where your scouts found me. Valerius drew his sword and put himself between them and me. He told me to weave a portal. I tried.”
His mouth twisted with the faintest bitterness.
“I am, by some measures, one of the better mages of my generation. And in that clearing I could not pull enough threads of the weave together to make a doorway the size of my thumb. The Vale was suppressing my magic. I felt my mana, my magical energy, draining out of me like water from a cracked vessel. I remember Valerius shouting something. A command, I think. Then nothing.”
He looked at the two healers with the expression of a man who has, very calmly, accepted the worst possibility of his calculation.
“If I lost consciousness, then he was overrun. And if he was overrun, then I do not understand how I am here speaking to you. He must have sent the horse away with me on it. Which means he chose to stay.”
Elyndra and Seraphina looked at each other across the cot.
Forty words in half a heartbeat.
If a Battle Master of Valerius Drakon’s caliber and an archmage of Aetherion Sol’s had been overwhelmed badly enough that one fell unconscious and the other became separated, whatever was in Wyrmwood Vale was not a problem two riders, however gifted, were going to handle with a sword and a mace alone.
But they had been given a mission. And there was a man missing.
“Captain,” Elyndra said quietly. “Take us to where you found him. At first light.”
Captain Holvar nodded once, the nod of a man who had been expecting that request before it was spoken.
“First light it is, my lady.”
☙ ❧
They rode out beneath the same pale violet sky that had received them four days before, when they had first left the imperial capital.
Captain Holvar rode ahead with two of his scouts. Elyndra and Seraphina followed in close formation behind. Aetherion Sol, who had insisted on coming despite three days of unconsciousness and the strong objections of Sister Oma, rode at the rear on a borrowed horse, looking like a man who had decided that the only thing more dangerous than what waited ahead was the alternative of staying behind while it happened.
The waystation fell behind them. The road thinned. Then the road became a track. Then the track became simply the path Captain Holvar’s memory traced through the underbrush.
After a half-hour, he raised a gloved hand. They stopped.
“Here,” he said. “This is where he was found. His horse standing over him. The horse not letting any of my scouts come closer until I myself walked up and put a hand on its neck. He had come from the south, by the broken branches and the print of the hooves.”
Aetherion looked south. So did Elyndra and Seraphina.
The woods that direction were thick, the canopy low. Light fell through it in fragments. Even at full morning, the spaces between the trees were the color of dusk.
☙ ❧
Seraphina dismounted. So did Elyndra.
“We need a prayer that will find a living man,” Sera said, half to herself, half to Elyndra. “Not a rite I have ever needed for someone I have not met. The orders teach it, but it does not come easily.”
“It comes easily for two,” Elyndra said. “It has always come easily for two.”
They knelt on the ground at the spot Captain Holvar had pointed to. Seraphina drew a slow circle on the earth with her finger. Elyndra placed her left hand over the circle and her right on the hilt of her sword.
They prayed.
Not aloud. Sera prayed in the Cleric’s silent rhythm, the patient breathing of someone listening for an answer rather than demanding one. Elyndra prayed in the Paladin’s way, a held conviction, a vow renewed at every breath, an oath that the world would yield up its missing if she asked it properly enough.
The two prayers reached out from them and found, slowly, each other. And then they found something else.
A thread.
It rose from the earth where Sera had drawn her circle and braided itself together in the air above their joined hands. Gold and blue. Patience and conviction. And then, slowly, the braid uncoiled in one direction, pointing the way a compass needle points when it has at last remembered what it is for. South. Into the woods.
An arrow of light, hanging in the air a hand’s-breadth above the forest floor, no thicker than a fingernail, pointing very steadily into the trees.
Aetherion, watching from his saddle, drew a slow breath. “I have never seen that working,” he said softly. “Not in three centuries of academy archives.”
“It is two prayers,” Seraphina said, not looking up. “Not one. The orders do not teach it because the orders do not pair their healers in this way.”
“He is alive,” Elyndra said. “The prayer would not have answered if he were not.”
“Then we follow,” Sera said, rising.
☙ ❧
They moved through the woods at a brisk walk. The arrow of blue and gold light kept pace with them, hovering always at the height of their hands, always pointing forward, sometimes shifting slightly to account for fallen logs or thickets that required a detour. Captain Holvar and the scouts followed at a distance with the horses, careful not to disturb the working.
Five minutes. No more.
They found him in a small hollow between two great oaks, the kind of natural shelter a wounded man might crawl to if he could not walk and could not bear to die in the open.
He was alive. Just.
Valerius Drakon lay on his side, his armor torn in three places, his sword still in his hand though his fingers had gone too weak to grip it properly. There was blood on his temple, blood at his ribs, blood pooled beneath one thigh where something had bitten or cut him deeply. His breath came shallow. His eyes were closed. His chest moved, but only barely.
He was not, Sera noted with the trained precision of a healer, going to be moving much longer without intervention.
Elyndra knelt on one side of him. Seraphina knelt on the other.
“Cure Light Wounds,” Sera said, beginning where any cleric began, with the simplest of the restorative rites. Yellow-gold light, warm as harvest sun, settled into the warrior’s worst gashes and began to close them.
“Cure Light Wounds,” Elyndra echoed, the same prayer in her paladin’s voice. Blue light met gold above the wounded fighter and braided into him from two sides at once. The closing of his wounds accelerated. The breathing steadied.
“Cure Moderate Wounds.”
“Cure Moderate Wounds.”
The deeper damage began to knit. Color returned, in faint stages, to the warrior’s face.
“Cure Serious Wounds.”
“Cure Serious Wounds.”
Bones aligned themselves with the gentle, patient insistence of healing magic at its fullest. The man on the ground was no longer dying. He was now merely badly hurt, which was, in the trade of healers, a vast improvement.
Seraphina looked across at Elyndra. Elyndra nodded.
“Bless him,” Sera said.
And they both spoke the blessing together, the divine rite that opened a body to receive what came next, that amplified the healing already given by half again its potency. Bless was a prayer of preparation, of opening, of permission asked of the divine on behalf of one who could not yet ask for himself.
And then, what came of two friends praying together, what had always come, since they were small and had first learned that their two voices in unison reached further than either alone, their synergy doubled the effect again.
Half again, doubled, in a man already cured of the worst.
Valerius Drakon, Battle Master, who had held a bridge for nine hours and walked alone out of three campaigns, opened his eyes.
☙ ❧
His gaze focused, slowly, on the two pairs of pale-eyed half-elven faces leaning over him.
“…Am I dead?”
“Not anymore,” Seraphina said.
“Imperial?”
“Of a sort.”
The warrior considered this with the calm of a man who had, by appearances, expected nothing in particular and was prepared to revise his expectations as the evidence came in.
“Aetherion?”
“Alive,” Elyndra said. “Recovering. He gave us your name. He gave us, more importantly, the direction of the woods.”
Something moved behind the warrior’s tired grey eyes. Something that was not quite a smile but was nevertheless almost certainly relief.
“Then I have been very lucky,” he said.
“We have been told you are not, in fact, a man for whom luck does very much of the work,” Elyndra replied. “But yes. You have been lucky today.”
Valerius Drakon, who had been close enough to death’s door to have inspected its hinges, exhaled the long slow breath of a man who had decided that he was, after all, going to be required to remain in the world.
“Well,” he said. “Then I suppose we should talk.”
☙ ❧
They got him back to the third waystation by midday.
He could walk by then, with help. He could speak. He could not yet fight, but he was already, by the squared way he carried his shoulders even when leaning on Elyndra’s, the kind of man who was going to be ready to fight again much sooner than anyone with sense would advise.
That evening, in the clinic, Aetherion Sol and Valerius Drakon sat across from each other in chairs that had been pulled into a small circle. Seraphina and Elyndra sat with them. Captain Holvar stood by the door, having decided, on balance, that there were some conversations he was now formally a part of whether he wanted to be or not.
The mage and the warrior had not yet spoken to each other since the rescue.
They did not need to, immediately. The way they were sitting, facing each other, neither of them looking at anything else in the room, was already a conversation older than words.
It was Valerius who finally broke it.
“You owe me a flagon.”
“I owe you my life,” Aetherion replied.
“I’ll take the flagon. The other can be settled later.”
The faintest smile crossed the warrior’s face. The same faintest smile crossed the mage’s. Whatever bond ran between these two men had survived the Vale, had survived the loss, had survived the long passage of unconsciousness, and was now, with the quiet humor of veterans who had done this together before, picking up exactly where it had left off.
Elyndra glanced sideways at Seraphina.
Forty words in half a heartbeat.
The Venus Vanguard had, in the space of a single day, grown from two to four.
☙ ❧
It was Aetherion who, after a long pause, addressed Elyndra directly.
“My lady. We were not adventurers passing through. We were sent. By a council that does not wish to be named in waystation clinics. And we were not the only such party. There are at least three more, somewhere inside or around the Vale, who have similarly failed to return. If your imperial commission gives you the standing to find them, I would suggest, with respect, that finding them is now the most useful thing two such gifted healers in the empire could do.”
Elyndra met his gaze. Then she met Seraphina’s. Then she nodded.
“Then tomorrow,” she said, “we ride.”
Captain Holvar, at the door, said nothing. But the very careful neutrality on his face had become, by some small craft, even more carefully neutral than it had been before.
☙ ❧
End of Chapter Three
To be continued…
