Bloodheir

PROLOGUE
I

I will set the tale down here much as I had it from an old woman in Hoke, as she had it from her grandmother, and she from her grandmother before. I doubt there is anyone who has not heard it in one form or another. It is a good tale, but the wise will not take it as the truth, whole and entire. However flawed our understanding of the Anain may be, we can assume that they would not trouble to be so clear in the expression of their desire as this tale would have us believe. Nor does it seem likely that they would display even such brief patience as the story suggests. We lesser races, after all, must seem to them as slow and stilted and inconsequential as the mute and dull beasts of the field seem to us.

Tane, the Shining City, had fallen. The Kyrinin were undone, their lords and captains slain, their armies scattered to the winds. The streets were strewn with bodies and the drains overflowing with blood. The triumphant Huanin armies, marching under the argent stag-banner of the Alsire King, had broken down the walls and claimed the city as their own.

The conquering King stared out from the highest room of the Rose Citadel, in Tane’s gilded heart, and he looked upon his work and was glad, for though he saw ruin and fire, still the city was the greatest in all the world and in it he would be the greatest King.

Now a tall tree grew in the courtyard outside that noble tower. The tree stretched a branch in through the window, and the branch twisted and cracked as it came. In the sound of its wooden bones breaking was a voice that spoke to the King.

“This city has run with blood, and the mind of the world is riven with pain and grief and fury. It is enough. Now we claim this place and will cleanse it and make it ours. You must take your armies away.”

“I will not,” the King replied, “for my warriors have given their lives to win this great city for me and it is to be the home and heart of my people.”

At these words, the branch withdrew and the great tree was once more a tree, silent and still. The King summoned his servants and said to them, “Take your axes and cut down the tree in the courtyard, for I mislike its countenance. And when you have cut it down, burn the wood so that not a twig remains.”

On the evening of the following day the King was again in that high chamber. Leaves blew in through the open window and spun upon the breeze and filled the room, and in the sighing of their dance was a voice that spoke to the King.

“This war of yours fouls the mind of the world. This city is filled with the cries of the dead and it is no place for the living. We will see an end to this war; we will take this city and still its torment. Yours is the heart that will be broken if you do not depart from here with all your host, for this is a city of the dead and so it will remain.”

But again the King shook his head. “If I leave as you request, all that has gone before — all the strife and the struggle that cast their dark pall over the land these last years — all this will be for nothing. I will not go, for all the lives that have been taken and all the loss that has been suffered were for the purpose of bringing me here.”

And at these words of the King, the leaves that were in the room fell to the floor and spoke no more to him. The King summoned his servants and said to them, “Clear out these leaves and make a fire of them in the courtyard. When they are burned away to nothing, return and close this window up with shutters, and nail it fast. I dislike the breeze.”

Now the King had a daughter, who was as bright in his eyes as the morning. On the third night the father and the daughter ate together in that highest chamber of the Rose Citadel, and made one another great promises for a glorious future.

But the Citadel shook in its stone bones, and the walls trembled. The shutters that had been fixed across the window were torn apart. Vines that grew without the Citadel came in like a thousand writhing snakes and they seized the King’s daughter. They lifted her from the floor and coiled about her.

And the voice of the vines said, “Twice you have refused us, and thrice we will not allow. You will depart from this place on the morrow, or nothing of your happiness will remain unruined.”

And the vines broke the neck of the King’s child, and cracked her spine and snapped her arms and legs and cast her down on the cold stone floor at the King’s feet.

As the heartbroken King’s host departed the next morning, the ground shivered behind them and brought forth saplings: an ocean of trees sprang from the blood-fed loam and reached up towards the sun. When night fell and the King turned and looked back the way he had come, he saw not the great plain there had once been but a forest so vast that his eye could not track its limits. And of Tane, of the greatest and most wondrous city in all the world, there was no sign, for the forest had swallowed it and all its countless corpses.

Thus ended the War of the Tainted. Thus was born the Deep Rove, and men called it the Forest of the Dead and did not walk beneath its ill-rumoured canopy. from Tales of the Anain by Arvent of Dun Aygll