CSS 1391 - An ancient temple in Helios
The old man never finished his prayer.
The words dissolved on his tongue, the chill of the cellar receded, and every sound in the world withdrew in a single instant. When the man kneeling with his forehead against the stone opened his eyes, he was no longer in his cellar.
He saw black clouds; clouds burning with violet lightning, heaped upon one another, heavy as blood gathering around a wound. Beneath the clouds walked a figure. His hair was white. A worn black cloth covered the lower half of his face, and his stride was not the stride of a man, but of a verdict. Behind him stretched a sea of steel. A hundred thousand spears, a hundred thousand shields, and banners that could not decide upon their design. The old man did not count them; he found the number in his flesh, as if someone had carved the knowledge into his bones.
And on the horizon rose walls. White and gold walls, climbing to the sky, carrying the sun upon their face. They were shining. But there was no sun in the sky. The light was like the stone's own dying memory of it.
The figure stopped and turned his head. Two eyes burning in the coldest shade of amethyst passed over the army, over the walls, over the storm; they passed through time itself and fixed upon him. It was not a gaze. It was a claim.
Then the world returned.
The cold of the cellar seeped back into his knees. The oil lamp still burned; its flame had not even wavered. The old man remained motionless for a long while. His heartbeat drummed in his ears, and on the tip of his tongue rested a sentence that did not belong to him.
The sun shall lie buried beneath its own walls.
With trembling hands he felt for the cord of nine knots around his wrist. The knots were in their place. On the wall before him, nine nameless stones stood silent in the lamplight. In his grandmother's tongue, that old migrant tongue almost no one spoke anymore, he whispered: "Arun."
He knew this had not been a dream. Dreams do not look back at a man from the outside.
But he did not know what he had seen, either. He had recognized the walls; everyone would have, for the city of the sun was the jewel of the whole world. But who was the one walking? Was this a punishment, or a promise? Were the Nine breaking their silence at last? The old man searched for an answer and found none. He was certain of only one thing: this vision had not been shown to him. He had merely been permitted to watch.
Above, at the end of the street, the bell of the Sun Temple struck midnight. The old man flinched and put out the lamp. If the priests of the sun ever found this cellar, they would burn the nine stones and him in the same fire; on this continent, praying to any god but Aurora's was heresy. In the dark he found his inkwell by touch, ground the ink, and wrote a single sentence, that sentence, upon a thin strip of parchment. He did not sign it. In place of a name, he drew a circle of nine knots.
He laid the parchment in the hollow behind the ninth stone and pushed the stone back into place.
The record would wait. His faith knew how to wait better than anyone.
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CSS 2122 - The Outskirts of Oliar, within the Gallant Empire
The village began to burn before dawn.
The flames took the granary first, then the roofs. Columns of black smoke climbed the sky, piling upon one another until they shut it out; the first light of dawn drowned somewhere inside that smoke and was lost. Ash fell like snow.
The white-haired man walked up the road to the village. The ash settled on the worn black cloak at his shoulders and on his hair, vanishing into its whiteness. When the bite of the smoke reached his throat, he drew the edge of his cloak up and covered the lower half of his face. His stride never changed.
The last resistance had gathered before the palisade. Some twenty imperial soldiers, the remnants of the border garrison. They leveled their spears at him, and the spearpoints trembled. One of them, the youngest, was praying behind his shield. "Helian's light upon us..." The rest of the prayer never came.
The man walked through them.
Had anyone survived, they could not have described what they saw. A dark blur, a scattering, the short scream of steel. When the white-haired man stopped on the far side of the palisade there was not even blood on his sword; the blood was still falling to the earth behind him, together with what remained of the men. Dark elf soldiers poured through the breach like a flood, and the ring of steel rose within the village.
A dark elf captain in black armor came to his side and bowed. "Tharn'ai. A group has fled north. I await your order."
"No one survives." The man's voice was flat and tired, the voice of a judge reading a sentence. "Send the riders."
"At once."
"And burn the fields." The man looked past the village to the wheat beyond; the stalks still swayed in the morning wind. "Fill the wells with stone. This land will never feed the empire again."
The captain hesitated for a breath; burning a harvest was no easy order, even for a people bred to war. Then he bowed and was gone.
The man walked toward the village square. The heat of the burning houses beat against his face and narrowed his eyes. In the center of the square stood a small shrine; upon a stone pedestal, a gilded disc of the sun. Before the disc stood the village's old priest, holding the sun up with both hands, his lips moving without pause. The heat had already begun to blister the gilding; the sun was melting in its own light.
The priest saw him. His prayer broke and gave way to a single word. "Demon."
The man looked at him for a long moment. In the priest's widening pupils, the violet of his own eyes burned. Then he turned his head, and as he passed, he left two words to the soldier behind him.
"Flay his skin and crucify him when the sun reaches its zenith. Let us see if his beloved sun will show him mercy."
He crossed the square and climbed the low hill at the village's northern edge. Below him the village burned like a bowl of fire. The dark elf companies moved through the streets in ordered ranks, and the work was ending. Swift, silent, complete. His army no longer needed to be told.
The man raised his right hand and rubbed the ring on his finger with his thumb. It was an elegant, old ring; worked upon it were a rising phoenix, a silver crown, and a pair of violet eyes. Rubbing it was a habit. He no longer remembered when it had begun.
Soon, Lenore.
Something inside his chest found the flames beautiful. He had learned long ago not to ask whether that something belonged to him.
He looked south; the main body of his army filled the road, advancing slowly. Thousands of figures beneath the smoke, carrying no banner. A true storm was gathering in the sky, and the first thunder rolled in from far away like a muffled drum.
The man turned north. The road stretched on until it vanished into the smoke; and at the end of this road, at the end of all the world's roads, stood walls of white and gold.
He kept walking.