The Assassin King

27

Faedryth, king of Nain and Lord of the Distant Mountains, stared ruefully into the darkness beyond the gleaming throne in the center of his Great Hall hidden deep within the cavernous earth. Though the seat of power had been his, undisputed, for nearly a thousand years, it never ceased to give him pause whenever he beheld it.

A single slab of crystal purer than the flawless diamonds adorning his crown, the throne was a rough-hewn chair shaped from the living rock, growing seamlessly from the cavern floor, reaching in jagged and uneven slabs skyward to the dark vault of the Great Hall above. The Nain who had lived in this place before Faedryth, despite being the greatest miners, architects, and road builders the continent had ever known, had left the miraculous formation almost untouched, preferring to merely polish it and tolerate some discomfort of their monarchs’ hindquarters rather than insult the earth that had given birth to such an awe-inspiring wonder by altering it in any way. Accordingly, they had also deemed it appropriate to outfit the Great Hall with only the barest of torchlight, so as not to presume to externally illuminate the giant pure gem that glowed with a light of its own.

The Nain king glanced around the empty, cavernous room, and returned to his musings. He recalled the first time he had ever seen this place, led here under a flag of truce by the guards of Vormvald, the Nain king who had reigned over these lands when Faedryth came, more or less as a refugee. Vormvald, then in the hundred and twelfth year of his reign, had graciously taken in Faedryth and his followers, thousands of Nain from the other side of the world where Faedryth had once been their king. At the time they were both men in their middle years, but unlike Vormvald and his subjects, Faedryth and his followers had been granted an enduring and uncanny youth, a dubious blessing of near immortality, conferred somewhere in the course of their flight from their doomed homeland. This dubious blessing had already caused several of their number to take their own lives.

But Vormvald did not know that. The appearance of thirty thousand of his kind, under the banner of a seemingly humble and cooperative leader like Faedryth, had been seen as welcome reinforcement of the military, mining, and construction brigades of the Distant Mountains. He made Faedryth’s people, survivors of the destroyed Island of Serendair, at home in his lands, appointed Faedryth his viceroy, allowed the newcomers autonomy under their king, and set about, with the former king’s help, transforming his own kingdom, achieving even greater visions of magnificent architecture and invention. The production of the mines doubled, the artisanship and artistry of the forge and smelting fires became legendary, and the kingdom, now united, continued its self-sufficient progress hidden a thousand miles away from any of the other races of man.

The influence of the Cymrian Nain, as Faedryth’s followers were known in the Distant Kingdom, was immediately apparent. Their ingenuity with the hinge and pulley, in the forging of weapons with which Vormvald was not familiar, their ability to move earth and sculpt the stone of tunnels and mines, quickly became part of the societal fabric of the Distant Mountains. The old Nain king was delighted with the accomplishments that were wrought, the cities that were built, the works of art that were fashioned, the inventions that were realized. All the while, as each new era of advancement came and went, replaced by another, greater era, Vormvald’s eyes began to dim, his hand to weaken, his beard to gray into the whiteness of mountain snow.

But not Faedryth. He remained as youthful as on the day he had arrived in Vormvald’s court. He had been a partner in vision, in labor, in the rule of the United Kingdom of Nain, and when Vormvald finally failed in his fourth century of life, passing from the world as each man passes to the next one, Faedryth became the kingdom’s undisputed ruler. Vormvald’s heirs squawked for a generation or two, but in the end Time erased his dynastic line, and their claim to the throne, and eventually their mortal memories, as easily as the jeweler’s cloth polishes out a scratch in an otherwise flawless gem.

Now the crystal throne was Faedryth’s. It had been for a millennium and yet, somehow, there was still a newness to it, and an uneasiness, a vague sense of intimidation each time he placed himself on the horizontal plane in the rock that served as the seat. He had become accustomed to its deep power, the pressure and flow, the sheer might that radiated from the depth of the earth through the giant glowing crystal, an authority sanctioned by the very mountains over which he ruled. Faedryth could feel bloods he had not been born to, as if he could feel the breathing of the earth, and that power was now his power. Nonetheless, Faedryth had never taken the throne for granted. Great and vain as he was, the mighty immortal leader of a deep nation of hidden men, smiths and builders, miners and jewelers, and an army numbering almost half a million, in spite of all the riches at his disposal, recognized that there were still a few things greater than himself.

One of those things might be within the black ivory box he now held in his hands. A soft cough behind him stirred Faedryth from his reverie. Thotan, his minister of mines and his only nonmilitary earl, hovered at the edge of the fireshadows, respectful in his silence. Polite comportment was unusual for a Nain lord; most Nain spoke little unless they were in their cups, but even so did not give much concern to how they were perceived by others. Thotan was different, being the administrator of the merchants, the upworld Nain who took the wares from their mines across the seas to the kingdoms of men and sold them, allowing the rest of the kingdom its peace and solitude in the silent earth. His job required uncharacteristic forbearance and civility; Thotan had been waiting patiently beyond the gilded doors of the throne room since the king had summoned him more than an hour before. Faedryth exhaled, then nodded to him, almost reluctantly.

Thotan turned on his heel and hurried from the room.

The box in Faedryth’s hands felt smooth against his calloused palms, and cold. He continued to stare at it, lost in thought, until Thotan returned with Therion, Faedryth’s aide-de-camp, followed by fourteen of his most highly trusted corpsmen, each in the silver fittings and banded black leather of Faedryth’s personal regiment, in pairs. In their arms they carried something wrapped in linen, heavy, bulky and regular of shape. From the expressions of measured concentration on their faces, it was clear that their cargo was both fragile and precious beyond reckoning.

Faedryth watched in grim silence as the corpsmen gently set their burdens down around the base of the crystal throne and carefully unbound the silk ropes that secured their wrappings. The flickering torchlight flashed ruby-red suddenly as it came to rest on the first of the objects, a large, smoothly honed piece of colored glass with a thickness the width of Faedryth’s hand. The piece had a perfectly curved edge on the outside, an arc of a circle a little more than a seventh of the circumference, and tapered like a wide pie wedge to a smaller, similar arc, which Therion’s corpsmen were busily fitting into place at the base of Faedryth’s throne.

“Careful, you oxen,” the king muttered under his breath; he clutched the black ivory box more tightly as the second and third pieces were simultaneously unwrapped, revealing similar pieces of glass the colors of orange fire opal and yellow citrine. A moment later an emerald piece emerged from its bindings, deep and green as the ocean most Nam would pass their lives without seeing. As it was carefully fitted into place, a large gleaming piece of sky-blue, like a topaz of clearest coloration, and a deep indigo arc emerged, not as wide as the others, for its place in the spectrum was smaller than the six core colors. Until the dim torchlight fell upon it, the smaller piece seemed almost black, but in the flicker of illumination the rich sapphire hue glowed quietly, unobtrusively, becoming part of the darkness when the light moved on.

Finally, with the greatest of care, the last piece was removed from its linen wrappings. The violet arc was perhaps the most beautiful of all; there was something achingly clear about the amethyst hue, something fresh, like the beginning of a new day after a dark night, the clearing of a smoke-filled sky when battle was done. As it came forth, the scent of the room changed, the thick staleness of stagnant mountain air giving way to a fresh breeze that stung the king’s eyes, making them water at the edges in melancholy memory. The corpsmen, affected similarly, sat back on their heels, almost reverently. The last piece remained, out of place for the moment, awaiting Faedryth’s order.

The Nain king looked down at the box in his hands again. The tip of his beard, resplendent gold that curled into platinum at the ends like the hair of his head, brushed the black ivory lid. There was irony there, in the contact of dead hair with the box; black ivory was the rarest of all stones, harvested from the deadest parts of the earth, not from living animals as traditional ivory was. The places from which it was mined were spots of utter desolation, where magic had died, or the earth had been scorched beyond repair, devoid of its unique power to heal itself, unlike after wildfire or flood, where new life sprang up from the ashes or mud. Black ivory was the physical embodiment of an emptiness beyond death—of Void, the utter absence of life—and therefore anything that was hidden within a box fashioned of it was surrounded by total vibrational darkness, invisible to every form of sight, even the most powerful of scrying.

Even holding such a box made Faedryth’s soul itch.

Knowing what was inside it, or rather, not knowing, made it burn. “Is my daughter here?” he demanded tersely.

“Verily,” Thotan replied. “And each surviving generation of your line as well.”

Faedryth snorted. “Send in my daughter,” he said, beginning to pace me dark floor. “The rest are too old.” Thotan nodded; like Faedryth, he was a First Generation Cymrian, one of the more than one hundred thousand original refugees from the Lost Island of Serendair, and thereby seemingly immortal as well. Also like Faedryth, he had seen that immortality eke slowly from his own family, so that while he himself maintained the same vigor of youth he had possessed on the day fourteen hundred years before when he set foot on the ship that bore him away to safety, his children had aged as if they were of his parents’ generation, his grandchildren more so, until his more distant progeny had grown old and died, while he continued on, as if frozen in Time.

The gilded door opened again, and Gyllian entered the room. Like her father she had wheat-colored hair, but whereas his was tipped with the beginnings of silver, all of hers save the faintest of golden strands had been given over to the metallic color. She bore her age well in spite of it, and strode directly to her father’s side, the lines of her face deepened into creases of silent concern.

Faedryth reached out his hand and brought it to rest on the side of her face for a moment; to touch one so aged and wise in such a fatherly way had always seemed strange to him in his eternal youth, but in the few moments of tenderness he allowed himself, the object was always Gyllian.

“The Lightforge has been made ready,” he said quietly, words he had spoken to her on several occasions before. “Are you, in the event you need be?”

His daughter nodded, still silent. Faedryth inhaled deeply. “Very well, then. Stand at the door. Tell the yeoman to make ready.” He nodded to Thotan; the minister of mines bowed quickly and left the chamber, followed by Therion and the corpsmen. The Nain king allowed his hand to linger on his daughter’s age-withered cheek one moment longer, then let it fall to his side. “All right,” he said brusquely to the ghosts and memories that lingered, invisible, in the air around him. “Let us do this.”

“Do you want to wait to speak with Garson one last time?” Gyllian asked, her mien calm and expressionless, as always. The Nain princess had forged her reputation in the battles of the Great Cymrian War, and had been cured in the smoke of those battles like leather, molded and shaped in their endless campfires into a woman with steel in her spine. That notwithstanding, she was measured and deliberate in her counsel, always seeking to exhaust other means before opening doors that, once opened, might not be able to be closed again.

A small, sarcastic bark escaped Faedryth’s lips.

“You want to see me heave yet another Orb of State into the wall?” he asked, his eyes twinkling fondly above a darker expression. “There are still shards from the last one scattered on the far floor.”

Gyllian’s expression did not change. “If that is the price of appropriate consideration, it is a small one,” she said evenly. “Before you resort to using the Lightforge, I would see you shatter a hundred Orbs, until you are certain of what you undertake.” The stoic expression in her eyes softened into one of concern. “The risks are far too grave not to. And besides, I know it feeds your ego to know that you can still heave and shatter a sphere of annealed glass the way a mere youth of a hundred winters can.”

Faedryth chuckled. “All right, then, Gyllian, if you wish it, summon Garson.” The princess nodded slightly and returned to the doorway, leaving the Nain king alone in the flickering darkness with his thoughts.

And the black ivory box.

Faedryth was afraid to hold it and, at the same time, afraid to set it down. He had been bedeviled by the contents ever since they had been unearthed from the deepest of the crystal mines almost half a year’s time before, was nervous in their presence, fearful that this odd magic might be the final straw to tip the scales of his sanity. While the Lightforge might assist him in knowing, finally, what they were, expending its power was something Faedryth considered only under the rarest, and gravest, of circumstances, knowing the risk to himself, and the world, that came in the process.

The door of the Great Hall opened again, admitting Garson ben Sardonyx and the royal yeoman, wearing a miner’s helm with a dark visor, bearing his enormous crossbow across his back and carrying a heavy stand. Faedryth swallowed, his mouth suddenly dry, and gestured impatiently to Garson, who doubled his pace until he was standing in front of the king. The blue-yellow tapetum in the back of his eyes, the physical attribute that allowed all Nain to see in the blackness of their underground dwellings, caught the torchlight and gleamed, making him appear like a feral animal approaching in the dark.

“Tell me again what the Bolg king said during your visit to him,” Faedryth demanded as Gyllian returned to his side. “Recount each detail—there may have been something we missed on the previous reports.”

Garson’s broad shoulders and chest expanded as he inhaled deeply. He ran a hand over his magnificent beard, brown at the chin, tapering to a silver middle and curling into white at the tips; Garson was Faedryth’s official upworld ambassador, the only Nain of the Deep Kingdom to speak in diplomacy with men of other races, and had been trained since childhood in perfection of memory. His brows furrowed, but patiently he began to recount the conversation he had already related on three other occasions since returning from his state visit to the Bolglands.

“King Achmed was annoyed from the beginning at my presence, of course,” Garson said. “I gave him your message—that you knew he was attempting to reconstruct the Lightforge of Gwylliam and Anwyn in the mountains of his realm, and that you had bade me to tell him that he must not.”

Faedryth nodded. “And?”

“He told me I was a brave man with too much time on my hands to have traveled all the way from our lands to dare to instruct him in such a manner.”

“Pompous fool,” muttered Faedryth. “Go on.”

“I told him you had commanded me thus, and he said that he was puzzled, then. He said he knew of no Lightforge, and yet you had risked his ire, which you knew to be considerable, by sending me to barge into his rooms in the middle of the night to issue him an order regarding it. He stated that even he, who places less stock in diplomacy and matters of etiquette than anyone he knew, found that offensive.”

“No doubt,” said Faedryth dryly. “And he then denied knowing of the Lightforge?”

“Yes. I suggested that perhaps he did not call it by the same name, but that I suspected he knew to what I was referring. I told him that the Lightforge was an instrumentality that the Nain built for Lord Gwylliam the Visionary eleven centuries ago, a machine formed of metal and colored glass embedded into a mountain peak, which manipulated light to various ends. It was destroyed in the Great War, as it should have been, because it tapped power that was unstable, unpredictable. I told him that it poses a great threat not only to his allies and enemies, but to his own kingdom as well. I told him that he was attempting to rebuild something that he did not fully understand, that his foolishness would lead to his destruction, and very possibly that of those around him. I reminded him that he had already seen the effects of this; the tainted glass from his first attempt still littered the countryside around Ylorc. I repeated that this is folly of unspeakable rashness, and that you, Your Majesty, commanded that he cease at once, for the good of the Alliance, and for his own as well.” Gyllian sighed. “You expected a different answer than the one you got, Father? Did you really think the king of the Firbolg would listen sympathetically to a demand phrased thus?”

“I should have asked you to craft the missive,” muttered Faedryth, beginning to pace again. “But the Bolg king has always been a plainspoken man. I thought that by speaking plainly I was sending him a message he would respect; obviously I was wrong. Then what did he say?”

“He asked me casually how I knew this, citing the distance of our kingdom and our isolation from the world of man. When I told him that you made it a point to monitor events that might have a dangerous impact on the world, he called me a liar, then said that he knew we had one of our own, and were using it to spy on his lands.”

Faedryth exhaled dismally.

“A reasonable guess,” Gyllian said. “He was half right.”

“He then demanded I leave his lands and deliver this message to you,” Garson went on. “He said, and I quote, ‘Return to your king and tell him this from me: I once had respect for him and the way he conducts his reign; he has as low an opinion of the Cymrians as I do, and is a reticent member of the Alliance, just as I am. He keeps to himself within his mountains, as do I. But if he continues to spy into my lands, or send emissaries who tell me what to do, when my own version of your so-called Lightforge is operational, I will be testing out its offensive capabilities on distant targets. I will leave it to you to guess which ones.’” The air seemed to go out of the vast cavern.

“When I said that I doubted very much he wished for me to convey that message to you, he said, ‘Doubt it not, Garson. Now leave.’”

Faedryth wheeled and stared at Gyllian.

“Do you still believe that there is another option?” he demanded. The princess came slowly to her father’s side and gently kissed his cheek. “No,” she said simply. Then she bowed slightly and left the room, casting a glance at the yeoman but not looking back at Faedryth.

“Prepare, and be quick about it,” Faedryth commanded the yeoman. The man nodded and quickly began to assemble the stand, setting the crossbow atop it, aimed at the crystal throne. “Stand ready,” he said to Garson.

“I am, m’lord,” Garson replied stiffly. “We will be making use of the blue spectrum?” Faedryth exhaled again. The blue power of the spectrum was the only one with which he was at all familiar; while he did not know the words in the ancient tongue that had been used by Gwylliam, he thought he recalled that they had translated to Cloud Caller or Cloud Chaser. He did know that the strength of elemental blue was in scrying, seeing across vast distances, to hidden places or, when reversed, to hide from eyes that might be similarly seeking him. He had only made use of one other color on one other occasion; when the Molten River of magma that perennially flowed on the border of his lands went dormant two centuries before, his sage advised him to use the orange power of the spectrum, Firestarter, to summon the lava back from beneath its dome of ash. Had the river not served as a protective wall between his kingdom and the lands of a neighboring wyrm, and had its liquid fire not been critical to the survival of the Deep Kingdom in winter, he would never have attempted it. The resulting explosion and destruction had convinced him never to do so again. He nodded curtly at Garson, trying to block the image of that devastation from his mind. Without another word he went to the gleaming crystal outcropping, stepping carefully through the opening in the otherwise fitted pieces of colored glass that formed a spectral circle at the base of his throne, and sat slowly down on the seat ledge. He stared at the box in his hands a moment longer, then looked up to see Garson, his official witness of state, watching the king unflinchingly behind the yeoman, whose crossbow sight was trained on his heart. “Close the circle,” Faedryth commanded. His voice was deep and resonant, containing none of the uncertainty it had held a moment before.

Garson moved quickly to the center of the vast, dark hall and knelt at the foot of the king. Faedryth blessed him impatiently; Garson rose and stepped out of the circle of colored glass, then carefully took hold of the last piece, the one fired in the color of the purest of amethyst, and gently moved it into place, the final piece of the circular puzzle. As the king watched his upworld ambassador adjusting the violet arc, he thought suddenly of Garson’s great-grandfather, Gar ben Sardonyx, who had helped him fire that very piece in the annealing oven centuries ago. He tried to close his mind to the flood of memories, but it was impossible; the power of the throne, though still sleeping, was alive, opening long closed places in his mind, heedless of the wards or locks he might place in its way. The memories it brought back were painful ones, pockets of acid in the recesses of his brain. He had been the original builder of the first Lightforge, the one in the Bolg king’s now-broken tower, had constructed it at the command of his lord and friend, Gwylliam the Visionary, only to see its power misused, its mission corrupted by that very lord and friend in the course of a long, bloody, and pointless war. Faedryth had turned his back on Gwylliam and those who had followed him then, had tossed his sword into the king’s Moot in disgust and quit the place, returning to the Distant Mountains and his Deep Kingdom, and had remained there until recently summoned again by the Lady Cymrian, asking the Nain to rejoin the Alliance for the good of the continent. Against his better wishes he had agreed; now, as he sat within one of the wonders of the world above a source of its primeval power, he wondered if he had made a terrible mistake.

As Garson maneuvered the piece into place now, Faedryth thought dryly of how he had condemned Gwylliam’s thirst for power, had left all the plans and glass color keys behind him, disavowing all that he had done in the building of the Visionary’s great empire, only to find himself, deep within his cavernous realm, thinking endlessly about the rainbow of glass that channeled the very power of life.

The thoughts that had at first plagued him in those days long ago had come to haunt him; like demonic whispers in his ears, the memory of colored glass spoke to him in his dreams, reminding him mat their knowledge was fleeting, evanescent, that he would need to hurry if he was to re-form the instrumentality. Even he had needed a detailed schematic when building Gwylliam’s original Lightforge, a set of drawings drafted by the greatest of Cymrian Namers that was impossible to commit to memory, which he had consulted every day in the course of the project, staring at them each morning as if he had never seen them before, he, the builder of one of the greatest mountain cities in the world, the man with a ferocious memory who had taken the Visionary’s prescient ideas and brought them to reality. Now he couldn’t remember from day to day what was on the drawings. Because he had left behind in the library of Canrif the fired bricks of colored glass keyed to the exact hue on the spectrum necessary to make the instrumentality work, he had no tool with which to compare any future firings. The only thing that saved him was the memory that each of the glass pieces in the dome of Gurgus Peak had been the same color of the light spectrum that was reflected in different gemstones in their purest state. And his kingdom had no shortage of pure gemstones for reference. So he had reproduced the glass spectrum in a simple circle, while the voices in his head had screamed cacophonously at each step of the way, with the pouring, the annealing, the cooling, the engineering of the crystal throne, urging him onward, only to fall into a complete, almost smug silence when the Lightforge was finally finished.

So now he had one of his own, albeit a much smaller one that was only assembled on extremely rare occasions, only a handful of times over the past four centuries. The only thing he feared more than using it was the thought of losing the power altogether. The deep, melodic voice of the Earth itself hummed around him, rousing him from his musings. The circle was complete.

“Open the vent,” Faedryth commanded through gritted teeth.

The yeoman lowered the visor of his helm to shield his eyes.

Garson grasped the lever that was masked by the lower stalagmites of the crystal throne, and pulled it toward himself until it aligned with registrations of the blue arc. He then fell back, shielding his eyes, as a concealed slab of stone below the throne moved aside into the rock below, revealing the light of the flame-well over which the crystal had formed, a direct vent to the fire that burned, thousands of miles below, past the crust and mantle of the Earth, in the very heart of the world. Even with his hands before his eyes, the light was blinding. The pulsing flames from deep within the Earth sent flashes of hot blue light spinning through the Great Hall, illuminating the distant ceiling, dancing off the stalactites, spitting and hissing in time with the fire below the giant crystal, making it glow like a star hidden in the darkness. The radiance engulfed the crystal throne and the Nain king upon it, turning them both the color of a cloudless sky on a summer’s day in the up-world, a color so pure and clear that it stung the back of Gar-son’s eyes though the shield of his fingers. Breathing shallowly and willing his racing heart to slow, Faedryth, translucent in the grip of the Lightforge’s power, opened the black ivory box.

At first he saw nothing, and panic tickled the outer edge of his consciousness. The contents of the box had been brittle, almost vaporous when they were first discovered, and in the dazzling blue luminosity of the crystal throne, lit from below by the very fire of the Earth’s core, they clung to the shadows, all but invisible.

Faedryth tilted the box until the contents caught the roaring light. As if it were a living entity, that light growled into the comers of the box, seeking its contents and catching them, illuminating them, giving them color and shape.

At first they emerged from hiding as little more than an evanescent glow, dusty and changing, second by second, like summer sunlight filtering through a window. The Nain king gingerly reached inside the box and lifted one of the scraps into the blue radiance that was pulsating around him.

Draped across his finger was a fragment of what looked like clear parchment, though it was filmy and inconstant and yellowed with age. It seemed to be a made thing, part translucence of gem, part gossamer. Faedryth had never seen its like, not in sixteen centuries of life, nor on either of two continents, nor had any of the advisors to whom he had apprehensively shown it. The place where it had been found—the deepest reaches of the crystal mines, where the diamond-like formations believed to have been brought to the Earth from the stars in the form of meteorites lay beneath immeasurable tons of age-old granite—was in and of itself a miracle of recovery; it had taken thousands of years for the Nain to broach that mine. That anything had survived the pressure and cold of the crystal bed was improbable at the very best; but here, now, between his fingers was a scrap of delicate material, fragile and changing with each breath he drew. Faedryth disliked the concept of magic, distrusted most of those who used it, who manipulated words or songs or vibrations to alter the world, but even a skeptic and unbeliever as curmudgeonly as he could not help but be awed, and terrified, in its presence.

It was, as far as he could tell, like nothing that existed anywhere in the Known World. And for that reason, he had to know what it was.

“All the way,” he muttered.

Garson, the blinding blue light leaking in behind his closed eyelids, felt for the lever again and pulled with all his might.

The double metal disk below the throne that Faedryth’s smiths had sawed through the base of the immense crystal to install four hundred years before ground into place again, focusing all the light from the flame-well through the center of the blue arc, turning the crystal, the king, and the room beyond an even more intense, pure, and imperceptible hue of blue, a holy, elemental color at the very center of the spectrum.

The crystal formation sang with a primal vibration, the clearest of notes, inaudible to Garson or the yeoman, but Faedryth could hear it in his soul, felt it ring through his blood, opening his eyes, not only in the darkness of his throne room, but beyond it, to the world around him, across the plains to the horizons, to the very edge of the sea. Faedryth gripped the throne, knowing what came next.

The yeoman, who knew what might, sighted his crossbow on the king’s heart. Suddenly Faedryth was engulfed with sight of a capacity beyond anything imaginable by a human; it was as if all the world, in every bit of its detail and magnitude, was apparent to him instantaneously. Like being swallowed by a tidal wave, he was suddenly drowning in information, exposed to every flock of sparrows’ migration pattern, every racing front of every storm, the number of shafts of wheat bowing before the sun, the heartbeats of the world, assaulting him from every side.

His mind raced at the speed of a flashing sunbeam, shooting crazily skyward like an arrow off the string, then plummeting suddenly down into the earth, where the passageways sculpted by his own subjects scored the crust like tunnels in an anthill. It swept briskly over troves of treasure, of volcanic lava flowing in the Molten River, dark shafts of endless anthracitic night, speeding beneath the roots of trees and the burrows of forest beasts, until it burst through the Earth’s crust again, absorbing all there was to see, all there was to know. Seeing everything. In that instant, the Nain king realized he was seeing as a dragon sees, with wyrmsight that transcends all physical limits. And it terrified him, as it always did. With great effort Faedryth tore his mind’s eye away from the racing vision by dragging his head down and staring at the piece of fragile parchment in his hand. He knew there was an image on it, an image he had only glimpsed when the brittle piece of solid-yet-everchanging magical parchment was first brought to him. At that moment, he could sense that there were colored lights in some form of spectral arrangement, some source of power, light as bright as that from the flame-well beneath him, which he had assumed to be the rebuilt Lightforge of Gurgus Peak. In addition, he had felt something then, just a brief sensation of being aware of another person’s thoughts, and it had seemed to him that the Bolg king was present in those thoughts. For a man who eschewed magic lore and vibrational study, whose joy was engineering, mining, the smelting of iron and the building of tunnels, the sensation of reading another’s mind, especially when the thinker was unknown and most lilkely long dead, was particularly unsettling.

With immense difficulty he kept his vision fixed away from the avalanche of images swirling before him and held the fragment up in the clear blue light before his eyes. The image he had seen once before, at the time nothing more than a hazy smudge, refined instantly into a crisp clarity that was painful in its sharpness. Despite being utterly clear, the picture still made almost no sense to Faedryth, whose eyes throbbed, threatening to burst. It was as if he was standing himself in the place where the image had been captured, a familiar dark hall that could have been within his own mountain. Faedryth sensed, by the thinness and striations of the stone, that it was within a peak. At the end of the tunnel an arm’s length away was an opening, past which there appeared to be a laboratory of some sort, within a large clear sphere suspended in the open darkness of the upworld sky. The colored illuminations he had seen and mistaken for the Bolg king’s Lightforge were in fact gleaming lights inside the dome, set in uniform lines into panels that encircled the transparent room. Beneath the panels was a table of sorts, with a doorway in the horizontal surface from behind which light as bright as the flame-well leaked.

Beyond the clear walls of the sphere he could see the world down below, burning at the horizon, as fire crept over the edges, spreading among the continents he recognized from maps of the Earth.

As bewildering and horrifying as these images were, they paled in comparison to what stood between him and the glass sphere.

Hovering in the air before him was a being, a man of sorts, with the characteristics of several different races and all the aspects of youth except for his eyes, blue eyes, deep as the sea, scored with vertical pupils. Those eyes held the wisdom of the ages, and pain that matched it. His skin was translucent, motile, altering with each current of air that passed by or through it. The man glowed with the same light as the crystal throne, especially his hair, curls of brilliant gold that seemed almost afire. And despite his knowing eyes, and the calmness of his expression, his clenched jaw betrayed a quiver of nervousness. He stared at Faedryth, as if looking at him for the last time. His mouth moved, and words formed; Faedryth did not hear them in his ears, but rather internally, as if they were resonating in his own throat. Will I die?

Faedryth felt his burning eyes sting with tears be had no connection to, felt his throat and chest tighten in sorrow he did not understand. He heard his own voice then, speaking as if detached from him; he heard himself cough, then form words that rang with awkward comfort.

Can one experience death if one is not really alive? You, like the rest of the world, have nothing to lose.

The translucent being in front of him nodded, then turned away. Faedryth was suddenly gripped with a sense of sadness and loss that shredded his soul; in his mind he felt himself reach for the lad, only to watch the image fade into darkness. Then, as if underscoring that he was reliving someone else’s memory, he was surrounded with another notion, the impression of the Bolg king he had picked up from the first sight of the parchment scraps, and was left with one last thought, which he heard in the voice of the translucent young man.

Forgive me. In my place, I think you would have done the same. Given the choice, I think you would have wanted it that way, too.

He did not know why, but Faedryth was certain that the strange youth was speaking to the Assassin King.

Overwhelmed and without even the slightest clue of the meaning in what he was perceiving, Faedryth’s mind threatened to snap. And worse, deep beneath him, channeling up through the living rock of the crystal throne, he felt a different vibration, atonal and physical and slight, almost imperceptible.

As if the very earth was shrugging, dormant parts of it stirring to life. Terror consumed him as the speeding vision returned, because this time it was as if he was seeing in darkness into his own lands, his point of sight very far away but growing rapidly closer. Looking for him with the same clarity he just experienced. In that moment, the Nain king understood what he had done.

He was seeing as a dragon sees because the sight he had called upon, had tapped with the elemental power of color, was dragon sight.

The inner sight of a blind wyrm long asleep in the very bowels of the Earth. The eldest Sleeping Child, said to comprise a good deal of the Earth’s mass. Witheragh, the dragon that had whispered the secret to him, had warned him of a prophecy that one day the Sleeping Child would wake.

And would be famished with hunger after its long sleep that commenced at the beginning of the world. And he, Faedryth, was nudging it from its slumber, directing its vision into his own kingdom. A hollow scream tore from Faedryth’s throat, a war cry that had gone up from his lungs many times in his life. With the last of his strength he pitched himself from the crystal throne, feeling it strip years from his life as he broke through the column of elemental blue light, tumbling roughly to the floor, bruising himself against the crystal stalagmites. His falling body dislodged the pieces of colored glass, breaking the circle and extinguishing the blue light; leaving only the pulsating dance of the radiance from the flame-well spattering off the ceiling high above. As Garson pushed the lever with all his might, shutting the vent once more, and the yeoman lowered the crossbow sight, Gyllian hurried to her father. Faedryth was facedown on the stone floor; she turned him over gently and winced, seeing the new whiteness in his beard, the new wrinkles in his brow that had not been there a few moments before. It was as it always was, and yet the strong-willed princess never could become entirely accustomed to the sight of her father, so clear of eye and mind, staring wildly, blankly above him into the dancing fire shadows, panicked by the return of darkness when the vent was closed again.

“What did you see?” she asked gently, stroking his hair and sliding her age-crinkled hand into his. Faedryth continued to stare, agitated, his eyes glazed, breathing shallowly on the floor of his throne room. Finally, when his eyes finally met Gyllian’s, they contained a desperation she had never seen before, not in the horrors of battle, or the nearness of defeat, not on the banks of the swollen river of fire that he had caused to return from its sleep, swallowing mining towns and miners with it. He clutched her hand, trying to form words, but only managing to resemble a fish gasping for the breath of water.

“The Assassin King,” he whispered when he finally could generate sound. “We have to stop him.”