The Outcast

Prologue

As the twin moons cast their ghostly light upon the endless wasteland, Lyra stood alone atop the Dragon’s Tooth, waiting for the sunrise. Once each year, for the past thousand years, she had made her pilgrimage to the summit of the highest peak on Athas to reaffirm her vows and dream the dream she would never, live to see. A thousand years, she thought as she shivered in her cloak. I am growing old.

It was nearly dawn. Soon the dark sun would rise to glow like a dying ember in the dust-laden orange sky, and its rays would beat down on the desert like a hammer on an anvil. Only at night was there any respite from the searing heat. The desert sands would cool, the temperatures would plummet, and the deadly creatures of the night would leave their nests and burrows to prowl for food. The day brought other dangers, no less lethal. Athas was not a hospitable world.

Lyra Al’Kali dreamed of the world as it once was, long before her birth. In the moments before dawn, she would imagine that the sun would rise over the horizon to reveal verdant plains stretching out below her instead of barren desert tablelands. The foothills of the Ringing Mountains would be forested rather than strewn with broken rock, and the song of birds would replace the mournful wailing of the wind over the ruined landscape. Once, the world was green. The sun was bright, and the plains of Athas bloomed. But that had been before the balance of nature was destroyed by those who thought to “engineer” it,, before the color of the sun had changed, before the world had been despoiled by defiler magic.

The pyreens were the oldest race on Athas, though with the passing centuries, their numbers had grown ever fewer. They recalled the Green Age in their legends, the stories that were passed on from generation to generation as pyreens matured and took their vows. There are not many of us left, thought Lyra. Each year, she encountered fewer of her kind during her wanderings. She was an elder herself now, one of the oldest pyreens remaining. Our time is passing, she thought. Even though our lives span centuries, there will not be enough time to restore the dying planet. We are too few, and we cannot do it all alone.

Each year on the anniversary of her vow-taking, Lyra made the journey to the Dragon’s Tooth and climbed the towering mountain. For any of the humanoid races of Athas—even the tireless, fleet-footed elves and the nimble, feral halflings—the tortuous climb to the summit would have been nearly impossible, but Lyra did not make it in her humanoid form. Only once, when she first took her vows, had she made the climb unaided by her shapeshifting abilities, and it had nearly killed her. Now, she was no longer young, and even in the form of a tagster or a rasclinn, the climb was difficult for her. Still, she continued to make it every year, and she would do so as long as she still drew breath. And when she could no longer make the climb, she would at least die in the attempt.

The first smoky orange rays of sunlight began to tint the sky at the edge of the horizon. Lyra stood upon the windswept summit, her long white hair billowing out behind her, and she watched as the dark sun rose slowly and malevolently to burn the desert tablelands below. As she had done a thousand times before, from the time she had reached her quickening and began the counting of her years, Lyra started to recite her vows aloud into the morning wind.

“I, Lyra Al’Kali, daughter of Tyra Al’Kali of the Ringing Mountains, do hereby take my solemn vows and acknowledge the purpose of my life, as every son and daughter of the pyreen has done before me, and shall do after me, until Athas once again grows green. I vow to follow the Path of the Preserver, using my powers to protect and restore the land, and to foil and slay defilers who would steal its life for their own perverted gain. I vow allegiance to the elders, and to the Eldest Elder, Alar Ch’Aranol, Peace-Bringer, Teacher, Preserver, Dragonslayer. I herewith dedicate my life to follow in his noble path, and pledge my soul to the service of the Druid Way and the rebirth of the land. So do I vow, so shall it be.”

Her words were lost upon the wind as the light from the dark sun flooded the desert landscape far below her. Just as all our dreams may be lost upon the wind, she thought. Perhaps there would never come a time when Athas would be green again, not so long as the sorcerer-kings still lived and drained the planet of its life to fuel their spells, and not so long as dragons walked the world, leaving waste and desolation in their wake. The Eldest Elder had vowed death to the dragons of Athas, but alone he was no match for their magic. Even all the pyreen together could not stand against them. For as long as Lyra had been alive.

Ch’Aranol had been seeking to overcome the dragons who had once walked as men, but preserver magic had never been as strong as that of defilers, and no defiler was as powerful as a fully metamorphosed dragon.

Many adventurers had met their deaths in trying to do combat with the dragon, and many more would die if the sorcerer-kings continued to grow in power. Each of them had already embarked upon the path of metamorphosis that would transform them into dragons. The process was a slow, and painful one, requiring powerful enchantments, spells that drained the earth of life and sapped the souls of unfortunates who fell under the sorcerer-kings’ dominion.

The Path of the Preserver called for restraint and purity in use of magic, with the spellcaster either drawing on his or her own life energy, or merely “borrowing” life energy from plants and the earth, taking only small amounts so that the plants would be able to recover and the earth would not be left forever barren where the spellcaster had passed. Defilers, on the other hand, eschewed respect for living things and were motivated solely by greed and lust for power. Defilers cast spells that killed off all the vegetation in the area, left animals dropping and writhing in their tracks, and leeched all nutrients from the earth, so that nothing more would ever grow there. Nor did defilers stop at that. Those with enough magical might would not hesitate to drain power from sentient life-forms, be they elves or halflings, dwarves or thri-kreen, or any of the humanoid races of Athas—or even the pyreen.

There was madness in defiler magic, Lyra thought, especially in the devastating spells cast by the sorcerer-kings in their lust to metamorphose into dragons. If she lived another thousand years, she would never understand it. What did it profit them to gain such incalculable power if all that was left for them to rule would be a barren world, devoid of life? Where, then, would they turn to seek the enormous amounts of energy that full-fledged dragons needed to survive? They would kill off everyone and everything, and then, like the maddened beasts they were, they would him upon each other until there would be only one left, and that one would hold dominion over a drained husk of planet. As it gazed out on the ruined world of Athas, that last dragon would have the brief satisfaction of knowing that its power was unchallenged and supreme—before it slowly starved.

How, thought Lyra, as she sadly gazed out over the parched landscape, could they not see it? How could the defilers fail to comprehend where it all would lead? The only possible explanation was that the sorcerer-kings were insane, driven mad by their lust for power, living only to feed that lust. As their powers increased, their appetites grew. There had to be a way to stop them, but the only way to do that would be to destroy them, and defilers could accumulate power much faster than any preserver. No ordinary magic-user could ever stand against them. There was only one chance, one being that could hope to match their power—the avangion.

There had never been an avangion on Athas. The sorcerer-kings and their minions had seen to that. They ruthlessly hunted and exterminated any rivals, either defilers or preservers, and the birth of an avangion took far longer than the creation of a dragon, for it entailed only preserver magic. The path of metamorphosis was long and painful, involving selfless dedication and excruciating patience. Yet, after over a thousand years, there was at least a glimmer of hope. An avangion was now in the process of being born. It would take many, many years, and the sorcerer-kings would do their utmost to seek it out and destroy it before the cycle was complete. But if their efforts failed and the avangion took flight, then the dragons would start to tremble in their lairs.

Still, what were the odds? Before the avangion cycle of creation could become complete, it was more than likely that all the remaining sorcerer-kings would fully metamorphose into dragons, and then it would be many against one. The surviving pyreens would gladly dedicate the remainder of their lives to guarding the avangion until its cycle was complete, but no one knew where the solitary wizard who pursued the arduous metamorphosis could be found. Perhaps, thought Lyra, it is better that way. If we cannot find him, then neither can the sorcerer-kings. But that will not stop them from looking.

Lyra was abruptly startled out of her reverie by the sound of an anguished, desperate cry. A child’s cry, she thought, blinking with surprise and glancing around quickly. But that was clearly impossible. A child could not have climbed the Dragon’s Tooth. Perhaps some freak trick of the wind had deceived her.... And then she suddenly realized she hadn’t actually heard the cry. It had echoed in her mind. It was psionic cry for help, a tormented, unarticulated scream, almost like the dying wailings of some animal. Yet it had been a child, Lyra was certain of it. A lifetime of devotion to the discipline of psionics meant she could not have been mistaken. Somewhere, a child was in desperate trouble, but for the psionic cry to have been projected as far as the summit of the Dragon’s Tooth meant that it was a child gifted with incredible, inborn psionic powers. She had never encountered anything even remotely like it before, and she could not possibly ignore it.

Spreading her arms out wide, Lyra started to twirl in place, picking up speed as her form blurred and grew less and less distinct until, within seconds, she had taken on the form of an air elemental, a whirling funnel of wind that left the ground and swept down the mountainside, heading for the foothills. Lyra focused on that cry, trying to judge the direction from which it came, and then she heard it once again, much weaker this time, as if it were a sob of resignation. She locked onto it and veered slightly to the west, heading directly for the origin of the psionic cry. As she rapidly closed the distance, she marveled at its strength, even in the weakness of it. She swept over the rock-strewn foothills and headed out into the desert. Could it be possible? What would a child be doing out in the desert at night? Perhaps it was with some caravan that had run into trouble. In the desert, disaster always awaited the next step...

And then she saw it. As she skimmed over the desert, she almost overshot it in her anxiety. There was no caravan. There wasn’t even a solitary wagon, or a party on foot. There was but one child, stretched out motionless in the sand, with what appeared to be a feral tigone cub moving in for the kill. She had found it just in time.

Still whirling, Lyra settled to the ground and moved toward the cub, trying to get between it and the child. Even as it flinched and squinted in the powerful blast of sand she raised, the cub would not move away from the prostrate child. Tigones were psionic cats, using their power to stalk prey such as this, but their natural habitat was in the foothills and on the high slopes of the Ringing Mountains. This was the first time Lyra had ever seen one venture down into the desert. She guessed the hungry young cub had picked up the child’s psionic cry as she had, and responded to it instinctively. She changed shape once again, this time assuming the form of a full-grown tigone, and she directed a basic, animal-level psionic thought at the young cub.

“Mine. Move away.”

She sensed sudden apprehension in the tigone cub, and the thought that came back at her was both challenging and surprising. “No. Not prey. Friend. Protect.” The young cub bared its fangs in warning.

Lyra was completely unprepared for such a response. Not only was the cub not interested in the child as food, but it was fully prepared to take on a full-grown tigone to protect it. Lyra reverted to her humanoid form.

“Easy, now,” she said to the cub aloud, reinforcing her tone with soothing thoughts. “I have come to help your friend.”

Warily, the cub allowed her to approach, but remained poised to attack if she made the slightest hostile move toward the motionless child. This, too, surprised Lyra. Ordinarily, she had no difficulty in using her psionic skills to control beasts, but even as she exercised her domination over the young cub, it refused to submit completely to her will, intent above everything else on protecting the child.

Slowly, keeping a wary eye on the cub, Lyra crouched beside the small body of the child and gently turned it onto its back. And she was confronted with yet another surprise. “What have we here?” she said.

The child, at first glance, looked human. It was male, only five or six years old, and yet, as she turned him over, she saw the pointed ears and the sharply defined features—high cheekbones, angular jawline tapering down to a slightly pointed chin, a narrow and well-shaped nose over a wide, thin-lipped mouth. ... All these things indicated that the child was an elf, and yet he did not possess the long and extremely thin, exaggerated frame of an elf. His limbs were proportioned as a human’s, not an elf’s. The legs and arms were too short, and the ears, though delicately pointed, were too small. They were the same size as human ears, except that they had points.

The boy also had some of the features of a halfling—the deeply sunken eyes, the thick and almost manelike hair that cascaded to his shoulders, the delicately arched eyebrows. Halflings, too, had pointed ears, but the child was too large to be a halfling. And yet, he possessed the physical traits of both halflings and elves.

A half-breed, Lyra thought with astonishment. But elves and halflings were natural enemies. And it was unheard of for an elf to mate with halfling, although she supposed there was no reason why it should not be possible. Clearly, it was, for she was looking down at the result of just such a mating. And that explained what the child was doing alone in the desert. Lyra felt a tightness in her stomach. He had been cast out. The result of a forbidden union, he had doubtless, up to this point, been hidden and protected by his mother, but as he grew, it became obvious what he was, and the poor thing had been taken out into the desert and left to die.

However, the child clearly possessed a strong will, for, unaided and without food or water, he had almost succeeded in reaching the foothills of the

Ringing Mountains. Not only that, but he was gifted with incredible psionic talent. Young and untutored as he was, he had nevertheless been able to project his anguished mental cry of rage and despair to reach her at the very summit of the Dragon’s Tooth. Few adult psionicists she knew, even those who had studied the discipline for years, could hope to match such a feat. She had to save him. He was not yet dead, but he was unconscious and very, very weak. That last mental shout had been his mind, pushed to its final extremity, howling out fury and frustration at having come within sight of his goal and yet failing to attain it.

“Never fear, little one,” she said. “You shall not die.”

She scooped out a bowl in the desert sand and shut her eyes, reaching deep within herself to summon up the necessary stored energy for a spell to create water. As she concentrated, water slowly bubbled forth in the depression she had scooped out. She dipped her fingers into it and sprinkled a few drops on the boy’s lips. His mouth twitched, and a parched tongue slowly emerged to taste the precious drops. Gently, she probed his mind... and then recoiled sharply at what she found. As the boy’s eyes flickered open and he stared up at her, she shook her head sadly and said, “Oh, poor little elfling! What have they done to you?”

The young priestess hesitantly approached the high mistress at her loom and waited to be recognized. Sensing her presence, the older woman spoke to her without turning around and taking her eyes off her weaving.

“Yes, Neela, what is it?”

“Mistress, we have a visitor who wishes an audience with you. She awaits outside your chamber.”

The high mistress frowned and turned to face her. “Outside my chamber? You mean she was admitted through the gates? You know we do not allow outsiders on the temple grounds, Neela. Who is responsible for this?”

“But, Mistress... she is pyreen.”

“Ah,” the high mistress replied. “That is a different matter. The druid peace-bringers are always welcome here. Did she give her name?”

“She is called Lyra Al’Kali, Mistress.”

“And you have kept her waiting?” the high mistress said, her eyes growing wide. “Foolish girl! She is one of the pyreen elders! Show her in at once!”.

The young priestess hesitated. “Mistress... there is but one more thing...”

“Well? What is it? Be quick about it!”

“She has a child with her. A male child.”

“A male? In a villichi temple?” The high mistress considered. “The child is pyreen?”

The young priestess moistened her lips nervously. “No, Mistress. I... I do not know what it is. I have never before seen such a child. And there is a tigone—”

“A tigone!”

“A mere cub, Mistress, but she says it will not leave the child, and is bonded to it.”

“How very curious,” the high mistress replied. “Show Elder Al’Kali in, Neela. We have already kept her waiting too long.”

The young priestess went out and returned a moment later with Lyra and a small boy, whom the pyreen held by the hand. A young tigone cub trotted in after them, staying close to the boy. When they stopped, the cub lay down at the boy’s feet. The high mistress first noticed the boy’s emaciated appearance and vaguely unfocused stare, but then she quickly saw what Neela meant when she said that she had never seen such a child before. In her sheltered life at the temple, Neela knew little of the outside world, but the high mistress immediately saw that the boy was a half-breed, which in itself was not uncommon on Athas. However, he appeared to have been born of a union between a halfling and an elf, and that was an unheard of rarity.

“Peace to you, Mistress Varanna,” Lyra said. “And peace to you, Elder Al’Kali,” the high mistress replied. “You honor this temple with your presence.”

Lyra inclined her head slightly in acknowledgment of the compliment. “You are wondering about this child I have brought with me,” Lyra said. “I know that males are not admitted to the villichi temple, unless they are pyreen, but then this is no ordinary male child, as you can plainly see. However, rather than explain further at this point, I invite you to ascertain that for yourself, using your abilities.”

With a slightly puzzled expression, the high mistress nodded and said, “Very well.” Then she directed a subtle psionic probe at the child. Almost immediately, she gasped and her eyes grew wide. The child had displayed no visible reaction to the probe. In fact, he seemed to be displaying no reactions whatsoever. It was as if he were in a fugue state. Yet, when she touched his mind with hers, she had been hurled back with such startling force that it took her breath away. However, in that brief instant of contact, she had discovered why the pyreen had brought the child to her. “A tribe of one?” she said softly, with astonishment.

Lyra nodded. “You have, no doubt, experienced his latent power, as did I.”

“But... so strong!” said the high mistress. “I have never before encountered its like in one so young!”

“Nor have I, in all my years,” Lyra replied. “You see why I have brought him to you.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the desert, struggling to reach the foothills,” Lyra replied. “He was cast out by his tribe and near death when I came upon him. His call reached me at the summit of the Dragon’s Tooth.”

“So far?” asked the high mistress, amazed. She shook her head. “And he has had no training?”

“How could he have?” Lyra replied. “He is no more than five or six years old, at most. Until recently, he must have been hidden by his mother, who would have known his fate if his origin was discovered. And in an elf or halfling tribe, whichever cast him out, he would not have received any schooling in psionics.”

“No, obviously not,” the high mistress said. “To think of such incredible potential nearly being destroyed... to say nothing of the savage cruelty of leaving a mere child to such an awful fate. His ordeal must have been responsible for the fragmentation of his mind, and it may also have brought forth his latent talents. It is very rare to encounter a tribe of one. I have seen it only twice before, both times in girls who had been born villichi and were violently abused before they were cast out. This is the first time I have ever seen it in a male. Poor child. To think of the terrible torment he must have suffered...”

“I could think of no one else who would be capable of understanding it,” said Lyra. “It was my hope that, despite his being male, you would agree to grant him shelter at the temple.”

“Of course,” said the high mistress, with an emphatic nod. “There has never been a male in residence at the villichi temple, but this time an exception must be made. Who but the villichi could ever accept and understand a tribe of one? And who but the villichi could properly develop his potential? You may leave him with us, and I shall personally see to his care. But... what of the tigone?”

“The beast is psionically bonded to him,” Lyra said. “It is his protector. Some part of him communicates with it. Such a bond is rare and must not be broken.”

“But as the boy grows, so shall the cub,” said the high mistress. “Even when young, a tigone is dangerous. When full-grown, even I shall not be able to control it.”

“So long as no one threatens or mistreats the boy, you need have no fear of the tigone,” Lyra said. “However, I would suggest that you do not attempt to feed it. Allow it to roam free outside the temple grounds at night and hunt for its food, as it was meant to do. It shall always return to the boy, and it will accept those at the temple as members of his ‘pack’ and guard them as it does the boy.”

“I shall defer to your wisdom in such matters, Elder Al’Kali,” the high mistress said. “What is the boy’s name?”

Lyra shook her head. “I do not know. I do not even know if he knows. He has not spoken a word since I found him.”

“We shall have to call him something,” the high mistress said. She thought a moment. “We shall call him Sorak.”

“An elvish word for a nomad who always travels alone,” said Lyra with a smile. “It seems appropriate. But then, he is no longer alone.”

The high mistress shook her head. “He is a tribe of one, Elder Al’Kali. One who is also many. And for that, I fear he shall always be alone.”