Feast of Vengeance

By C. E. Winterland

 

 

 

Cree stalked into the storm darkened throne hall.  His rhythmic footsteps echoed like drips from the walls of a dank cavern.  His father was going to be upset, but the man left him no choice.  Mecured had to hear him out this time.

“Father!  I must speak with you!”  Cree’s demand assaulted the air, severing the quiet discussion near the dais.

The heads of the councilmen whipped about as the sound reverberated from the stone façade behind the throne.

“My liege…” Tennery said, half rising from his chair.

Mecured held out his hand, and his gaze sauntered back to Tennery’s face.  “Gentlemen.  Excuse us please.”

Cree slowed his approach as the council stood and filtered by him.  Tennery was the last to pass.   The white haired old soldier grunted as he nodded in Cree’s direction.

King Mecured turned his head enough so that he could squint sidelong toward the southern windows, darkened by rain that flowed in sheets down the glass.  “Barring that you’ve just interrupted my council, this must be important for you to come through this squall.”

“Father, you must…”

“I must nothing!”  Mecured’s jowls shook as his growl overwhelmed the cavernous, gloomy throne hall.  He pushed his chair back from the council table and rested his elbows on his knees with a sigh.  “Why do I have the feeling you bring me nothing new today?”

“It’s the boy, father,” Cree said, cringing at the sound of his voice.  He sounded defeated, even to his own ears.

“Ah,” Mecured replied, nodding at the floor with his hands hanging lax between his knees.  “The boy.  Listen to yourself.  For six months now you’ve spoken of nothing but this boy.  You’ve never seen him.  You don’t even know he exists.”  Mecured ran one of his large hands over his eyes before dropping it back into his lap.  He leaned back in his chair and peered steadily at Cree.

“Not so!”  Cree’s voice charged across the table to his father’s ears.  “I have seen him.  We must bring him here, father.  Everything depends on it.”

“Everything…” Mecured muttered, crossing his battle-trained arms within his wine colored brocatelle sleeves.  “Everything is this kingdom.  The dwarves call it ‘the kingdom of peace’, Cree.  To the north, all is turmoil.  Tribal societies brutalizing each other upon first meeting.  Here in Mecured, we have security, we have freedom.”

“That is exactly why we must rescue this boy from the north, father.”

“Rescue?  You mean kidnap, don’t you?  If this boy does exist, he knows nothing of our kingdom, nothing of you, and nothing outside of his world.  You propose to steal him from his parents, from his life, and bring him here, where he knows nothing of anyone.  What kind of life will he have?”

“Father,” Cree said, dropping heavily into a seat across from Mecured, “think of what he is capable.  If raised improperly, as are so many impoverished northerners, he could be a horror on the world.  You raised me, father.  You cared for and nurtured me.  You kept me safe from the hardships of the world.  What is there for him, then?”

“You believe there is another boy out there like you?  Cree, your powers are beautiful.  They are wondrous and touching…”

“No!  They are not, father!  Power is none of those things.  Power simply is.  It is the wielder that gives it quality.”

Mecured sighed as though his resistance was fading.  He peered over darkened half-moon bags beneath his eyes that seemed filled with liquified time he should have spent in sleeping, and his gaze steadily narrowed like the tip of a dagger.  “I will not allow it, Cree.  I cannot condone kidnapping.  My kingdom will not support this notion of yours.  My soldiers will not be used for this.”

“Then you are a fool.  And you doom us all.  Mark me, father...  your decision today will cast the world into upheaval and destruction.”  Cree stood and again tramped through the hall followed by the echo of his heavy steps.

 

 

 

¯¯¯¯¯¯¯

 

“Where ‘you goin, Whinnie?”

“Home,” the boy replied.

“Don’t you be goin that way now.  There’s elves in town.  They’re meeting with your folks.  Your folks don’t need you and your bad luck in their dealings.  You best stick with me a while.”

Kort flashed his black-toothed smile and thumped his scythe on the dusty earth twice.  Whinnie never liked Kort.  He always wanted someone to help him with his work, so he could get to his jug sooner.  Whinnie liked to brush Kort’s face with wheat stalks after he had drunk too much.  It was funny to see him mumble and twitch. 

Whinnie had to go home, now.  Elves in Damior?  That would be something.  Whinnie had never seen much of anything.  He certainly had never seen an elf before.  He turned his back on old Kort and continued walking toward his parents’ farmhouse.  Kort kept calling for him to come back, but Whinnie didn’t listen.

Thoughts of fancy, rich elves giving his parents lots of money put the quick in his step.  By the time he reached the edge of the struggling farm, he was running.  He skidded to a halt at the sight of eight stallions tethered to the oxyard fence.

Whinnie had seen stallions twice, when his father had brought him down to the docks to sell meal.  He’d never been this close to them though.  Whinnie’s five years had barely brought him high enough to reach their knees.  They were giants, and when they turned to look at him, skidding through the dust, Whinnie yelped.  He tried to turn, but fell sprawling into the floury dust in front of the house as he caught the side of his boot.  With a last glance at the steeds, he pushed himself up and ran into his dim home.

His father and mother sat at the table, deep creases in their foreheads, staring across the room.  Whinnie turned and saw six towering elves facing them.  They seemed almost as big as their stallions, their topknots nearly touching the ceiling as they turned to look at him.  They did look rich.

“This is the boy?” the one furthest from Whinnie said.

Whinnie heard his father grunt a reply that he didn’t quite catch.  The elves kept looking at him over crossed arms.  They seemed like trees, or statues.  None of them moved as they peered at him.  Even the one that had spoken seemed as though he had not moved in months.

An elf with a blond topknot reached with both hands into a satchel that hung at his hip.  Whinnie, gaping at his sword that glittering with bright colored gems and shiny metal, almost did not see the two sacks he took from that satchel.  A sound like golden rain brought his eyes to the elf’s hands though.  He held two leather bags, synched at their tops, each as large as Whinnie’s head.

The elf tossed them both onto the table in front of Whinnie’s father, but they didn’t bounce.  Each of them thumped with that bright, shimmering rain sound, and just squished into flattened patties, like a mudball after a hard rain.  Whinnie gaped at the two bags, then at his father.

His father reached out tentatively, his eyes never straying from the elf that had spoken, and untied one of the bags.  He punched a fist into it, and golden chimes dripped from his palm. 

“Gold,” he said.  “All of it.”  His voice was quiet and breathy, like when Whinnie had heard him talking to the elders about the myths and the Gods.  He glanced at Whinnie’s mother, and she just shook… gently at first, then uncontrollably.

“Do we have a deal, Walfor?”

Whinnie’s father looked again at the elf, his eyes wide and his brows arched high.  Whinnie thought he heard a whimper from his father’s throat.

“But our child…”

“Walfor,” the elf said with calm force, “we will give him a good life.  That is why we come.  Whitsinne will enjoy all that the riches of the Kingdom of Mecured offer, I assure you.”

Whinnie cringed.  No one called him ‘Whitsinne’ unless he was in trouble.

“But he’s my baby!” Whinnie’s mother said.

“Rédoe,” the elf continued, “your farm is failing.  It has been a hard year in Damior.  None of you may survive the winter.  Please.  Let us help you.  Let us help Whitsinne.  You are very young, Rédoe.  You will have more babies.”

Whinnie’s mother leapt up, causing the ladderback chair to teeter, and ran out the back door to the fields.  Whinnie’s father also stood, but he did not run.  He still had his hand inside the gently chinking bag. 

“Leave us two of your stallions,” he said, his eyes narrowing.

The elf glanced at the uneven, earthen floor of Whinnie’s house.  He stepped forward and held his arm outstretched above the knotted, rough tabletop.  He looked up at Whinnie’s father again.  “Done.”

Whinnie watched as his father clasped the elf’s forearm, his other hand still holding both bags of gold on the table.  His father looked at him, his eyes as wide as the mouth of Kort’s jug beneath peaked brows, and Whinnie wondered why his cheeks were wet.

Strong hands suddenly lifted Whinnie by his shoulders.  Whinnie tried to turn, but the elf held him around the waist, his arms pinned to his sides.

“Let us go,” said the elf that had shaken with his father.  Whinnie could still see him as the elf that held him turned.  “You will have a good winter now, Walfor,” the elf said as he turned to follow.

“Father no!  Father!” Whinnie screamed as the elves carried him to their mounts.

 

õõõõõõ

 

In two whole weeks, the elves had barely spoken to him.  One time, the one who had offered his forearm to Whinnie’s father - the lead elf - said, “You will live in a palace, young Whitsinne.  But you must learn to speak the language of the Kingdom.  It will be the common language of the world soon.”

They were nearing a city.  Whinnie could smell it.  Smoke snaked into the sky in the distance, and the stink of fish had come back to the air, though Whinnie had not noticed its absence until now.  Whinnie knew it must be a city because he couldn’t see it yet.

“Stay close,” the lead elf said.  “Something is afoot.”

The elf holding Whinnie rode closer to the rest, and the other elves surrounded them.    They had crossed a river two days ago, and the elves had done this then.  Perhaps there are wild creatures here… wolves, maybe.

They rode forward in their elven huddle for another ten minutes before they heard it.  Whinnie saw the steed’s ears prick up, then heard a hoarse, high-pitched cry on the wind.  It was more a wail, like when old Kort killed his pigs.

Whinnie turned to his right and gasped.  His mother was running toward him.  She carried a pole in her hand, a long, thin blade dancing above her head.  It looked like Kort’s scythe, and Whinnie wondered if she had been reaping the old man’s fields.

The elves leapt to the ground, spreading out in a circle around where Whinnie and the elf that held him still sat on their horse.  A hand covered Whinnie’s face, but not too well.  Whinnie could see through the long, thin fingers as the lead elf blocked his mother’s scythe with his blade.  A second elf ran by her, slashing with his sword, and Whinnie saw his mother fall to the ground.  The scythe toppled slowly as the elves turned back, its long, curving blade bounced first on one end, then the other, until it settled into the grain with a fluff of dust.

“Ride!” the lead elf shouted, running back toward them.

The hand left Whinnie’s face.  Their horse leapt forward.  Whinnie turned to see what the elves were running at, and saw his father.  He stood like a piglet trying to flee Kort’s grasp, crouched, and lashing out in wide, slow swings with a shovel.  His father yelled and swung, fell and quickly got back up.  Whinnie heard the clang of blade on spade a few times.  Just as his father was disappearing behind the belly of the elf that held Whinnie on the horse, one of the elves’ blades ran him through the shoulder.

Whinnie’s face flushed hot as he turned back and stared at the long, whisping hairs of the horse’s mane.  The elves had sacrificed his parents as if they were great, two-legged pigs.  He imagined the elves sitting to a feast of parent chops, breaking bread over his father’s head stuffed with a great, round aurantin.  Whinnie saw the edges of a city marching to the beat of the horse’s hooves over the top of the next hill as he glared, bleary-eyed, at the road ahead.

 

The elf did not enter the city, but turned aside just within site of the guarded gatehouse.  Whinnie smelled cookfires on the wind, and his stomach churned as the image of steaming slices of his parents flashed in his thoughts.  The elf lifted him over the horse’s neck and held him as he leapt softly to the ground.  He turned Whinnie by the shoulders and knelt to peer into his face, dark eyebrows arching high on his pale forehead.

The elf spoke strange words, soothing, and somehow like the songs old Kort used to sing from his porch.  He flashed delicate-looking white teeth, and brushed Whinnie’s hair from his forehead. 

Whinnie felt his eyes getting hot.  He could nearly feel the fires that cooked his parents on his cheeks.  He heard the sound of hooves coming toward them from over the hill, but stared into the amber eyes of the elf, the color of wet clay.  Suddenly the plates on the table in Whinnie’s thoughts held pale, steaming elf meat and Whinnie imagined himself picking out one of those eyes with his fork. 

The elf picked Whinnie up in one arm and hoisted him to his chest.  Whinnie clamped his arms firmly around his neck, and his legs around his waist.  The elf started walking and Whinnie watched the back shoulder of the stallion rolling beneath its dark, dirt colored hide as it followed.  The other elves were galloping toward them, but Whinnie did not want to see them.  His eyes burned, and he buried them in the elf’s soft jerkin, seeing himself feasting on elf meat, which he sliced from the roast with the slender, shiny sword that the lead elf wore at his hip.

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

Whole seasons might have passed before Whinnie noticed a giant forest.  It looming from the top of a field so green it might have been the scum growing on the surface of the trough in his parents’ field.  He had never seen anything so green, and so big, in his whole life.  Even the trees were green.  They looked fuzzy from the road, like ox hide after a cold winter.

He barely remembered riding on the big ship.  He couldn’t picture anything he saw along the ride from the smelly harbor.  It didn’t matter anyhow.  Whinnie knew that his feast, the one that he saw in his thoughts, would be coming soon.  He wasn’t sure if the elves had spoken of it to him, but somehow he knew that the feast was coming.  It had been more real to him than anything he had seen on the long ride. 

The green field and trees ahead made him forget the feast.  It drew his eyes.  Whinnie could smell moisture coming from them, pleasing scents that were soft, but somehow spicy too.  His gaze combed the treeline in the distance as the elves started up the hill toward it.  They were nearly to the giant trees, so close that Whinnie could see the dark cracks in the dusky bark and hear birds calling from within the forest.  Then he saw a man step out into the sunlight. 

The man was shorter than the elves.  He had long, dark hair that he had tied in cords, just above his ears, so that it hung straight from the top of his head to the back, and down his neck behind his ears.  He wore a smile on his sun-darkened cheeks that spread like ivy to his eyes.  He was looking at Whinnie.

The elves approached him up the hill.  They spoke in a different language than they had used during their journey from Damior.  It was choppier, more rhythmic than the singsong language the elves spoke.  It seemed almost familiar to Whinnie, despite the fact that he didn’t understand any of it until he heard his own name.  He peered at the kindly face of the stranger from the forest and frowned.  Kindly was not what Whinnie was used to.

The stranger came toward Whinnie and took his little hand.  His hand was strong and rough, like his father's.  He felt the hardened bumps of calluses on the back of his hand when the stranger cupped it in both of his.  Whinnie looked into his warm, brown eyes.

In his gaze, the green hillside and dusky brown bark of the trees disappeared.  It seemed that they stood alone.  They might have been standing in the tall, brown grain of Damior, in Whinnie’s own backyard.  Or they might have been standing anywhere.  There were just those kindly eyes, and for a moment, Whinnie didn’t trust that kindness.

Then there seemed to be nothing.  A voice came to him from the nothing, as if gliding on the breeze like an albatross floating over the cliff edges of Damior.  Whitsinne, it said.  I am pleased to finally meet you.  My name is Cree. 

Whinnie blinked.

The stranger seemed to be talking to him without talking.  His lips did not move, even when that voice sounded.

I am afraid I do not speak your language, young Whitsinne.  In your thoughts, I do not need to speak.  You do understand, don’t you?

Whinnie nodded.  Don’t call me that, he answered.

The stranger’s eyes - Cree’s eyes - widened for a moment, but their happy glint returned with his grin.  Don’t call you what?

“My name is Whinnie.”

Cree looked confused for a moment, and Whinnie mirrored his expression.  His own words had sounded strange to his ears.  Whinnie hadn’t heard his language spoken since… he did not remember. 

Cree spoke in that other language, but all Whinnie heard was his name.  Then the voice sounded in his thoughts again.  Very well.  We shall call you Whinnie.

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

“Good, Whinnie,” Cree said.

Whitsinne glanced from the floating quarterstaff to Cree’s face.  He let the quarterstaff fall to the hard wooden floor in a clatter.  “Don’t call me that.”

Cree sighed and hung his head, leaning his elbows on his knees.  He glanced at Whitsinne, turning only his head so that he peered sidelong with one eye that seemed to glare back.  “What should I call you then, boy?”

“My name is Whitsinne.”

“You prefer the name my father calls you now, do you?  Very well, Whitsinne.  It does not matter.”

“Are we done?”

Cree sighed again and glanced about the brightly lit workroom. 

Whitsinne always found it a chore to walk from the palace through the southern fields to Cree’s little lodge in the trees.  A chore to walk all that way, only to do more mindless chores.  Here Cree sat for hours, sometimes days, working on little carvings, sometimes of stone, sometimes of wood.  He had been working on a smooth, palm sized bit of what seemed to be jade for almost a year now.  Whitsinne glanced at where it sat on a tall, slender wooden stand in front of a southern window.

The stone leapt from the stand and shot toward Whitsinne’s outstretched palm.  Like the flitter of a snake’s tongue, Cree’s hand shot out and caught the stone a foot from Whitsinne’s reach. 

“This is not for you,” Cree said. 

Whitsinne’s teeth ground at the sound of his voice.  It irritated him to hear strength in Cree’s soft tones.  Cree was not like his father.  Mecured was a burly man, whose voice boomed with potency, even when he did not mean for it to.  Cree was soft-spoken.  When he meant to be firm, that voice dulled its edge, made it blunt and stole color from his words.

“What is for me, Cree?  Endless exercises?  I can lift anything you ask,” Whitsinne said, and Cree floated up from his stool.

“Stop that,” Cree said, straightening his legs and standing up full.

“Is there nothing more for you to teach me than lifting objects?  Have you no insight into our powers?  Don’t you know why, or how it is we can do what we do?”

Whitsinne had probed Cree’s thoughts for years when he was younger, seeking the depths of his knowledge.  He had gotten clumsy, though.  Cree felt him there, and it was as if solid iron gates had come crashing down, locking off every access point he had found.  Whitsinne immediately locked off his own mind, and neither of them could see into the other any longer.  They had never spoken of it, but since then, Cree had been mistrustful of Whitsinne.

“No.  I do not know why.  I do know how, as do you.  What I don’t know is why we can do it, and no one else can.  It is a gift, Whitsinne.  It is as though our spirits burn more brightly than our fellow man’s.  Do you not see it around me?  Do you not sense a dulling of what you see in me around others?”

Whitsinne refused to give him the satisfaction of acknowledgement.  Cree did not know, but after Whitsinne had locked him out of his thoughts, he began to remember things.  The childhood he had forgotten began to come back to him.  He remembered his parents, and their deaths.  He remembered a language he couldn’t remember speaking.  Most peculiarly, he remembered sitting alone at a long supper table, cutting off chunks of steaming meat with a longsword, and feasting alone.  It was a feast of elven flesh, and it had made him happy.

“You and I have been blessed by the Gods, Whitsinne,” Cree rambled on.  “We can do wondrous things if we just try.”

“Wondrous things?”  Whitsinne did not try to keep the venom from his voice.  “Like carving little baubles and reading through the night?  Those are wondrous things?”  Whitsinne stood and caught his quarterstaff from the air, then made for the door.  He flung it open and turned to his tutor of nearly twenty years.

“If you’ve nothing further to instruct, I will learn the rest on my own.”

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

Whitsinne sat in his office, scowling at the desk littered with parchment.  His old dwarven friends were all long dead, even Kretchan, the former headmaster, who had outlived most of his colleagues.  He poured himself a goblet of uisge, the Kerinian liquor Kretchan had been so fond of, and tossed the warm liquid down his throat in a gulp.

His students were far less astute than he had been at their age.  Even the current headmaster, Raethallin, was a certifiable idiot.

“He doesn’t like it when his precious students fail, does he?  Well maybe if he wasn’t such a fool, they might actually learn something.”  He didn’t care that he was talking to himself, or that he spilled half of his next goblet of uisge on his robes. 

Forty years at the Logic Institute and this is the thanks he receives?  For all those years, Whitsinne had kept his powers hidden from the others out of a sense of academic morality.  Until two years ago, he had aged along with them, taught alongside them, and felt with them the success and failures of their students.

Two years ago, he had made a bitter breakthrough.  Thirty years studying metaphysics had finally brought him something tangible, something that changed his life.  It had been a student’s thesis that had brought it to him. 

The student had theorized that people were really beings of what he had called ‘æther’.  To Whitsinne, this was elementary.  A lifetime of exploring his own power had shown him as much.  But the student’s theory had been that this æther, like matter, was permanent, unlike the breaths of men.  He had ended the essay with a question, something that Whitsinne frowned heavily upon, but it had grown in his mind for almost two full weeks. 

If aether be permanent, elemental as water and stone, then why do we not live forever?

Those two weeks had produced an answer for Whitsinne.  It had been Cree, his long-forgotten half-brother, who had given him the logic with which to find it.  Cree had been fond of their discussions on the “brightly burning spirit”, which gave them their powers.  The words “burning spirit” rang sharply in Whitsinne’s mind while he had wrestled with the student’s question. 

Finally, Whitsinne realized that was precisely why the body died.  The spirit consumed the bindings of the body, and cast them off in search of freedom.  He had taken a month off from his teachings to explore this theory, and by the end, he had identified the bindings, and found them in poor shape.  He knitted them back to their utmost strength, and from that day forward felt almost a child again.

His energy returned to that of the teen he had once been.  His mind was sharper.  His fervor for teaching grew.

He hated that Cree had never told him.  The moment he had learned of it, he knew that Cree had known all along.  Along with the sour stomach it gave him, that realization left Whitsinne with a question clanging around in his head like the wake of a clumsy cook.  What else did he not teach me?

Cree.

The very thought of the name aggravated Whitsinne.  Even the day that king Mecured had died, the very day Whitsinne had left for the Logic Institute, had seen Whitsinne and Cree avoiding one another.  Mecured’s wife, Lollynia, had not been there at the funeral to force them to speak to one another.  A good thing, thought Whitsinne.  He had never liked her.  Her elven magic had always given him the worst headaches.

“What secrets are you keeping from me, Cree?”  He heard the words slurring around his alcohol-thickened tongue, like the belly of a snake slithering through dried branches, and he laughed aloud.  “You do not want me here, Raethallin?  Fine, I shall grant your wish,” he said, realizing he did so to just laugh again at the slurring of his own voice.

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

Sitting atop his old, mildew-colored mare, Whitsinne grinned.  Seven rotting corpses hung, suspended on stout poles in a semi-circle, just outside the gates to Tannerfeld.  He watched as crows perched on their shoulders and picked flesh from their faces; chuckled as a particularly large one wrestled with the tongue of the middlemost, dangling body.

It was funny to him.  Nearly a year ago, in a moment of anger, Whitsinne had cast his image into the air like an early morning fog in his likeness.  He had delivered an ultimatum: that medichas stop extending the natural lifespan of those that should be dead, or that the races of man would die out in complete.

He had been attending a college of medicine, two weeks north of his boyhood home of Damior, when a professor there gave a lecture on how medichas gained power in society.  He spoke of offering their medical services to rich lords, or even marrying into their families, to preserve the lives of whomever they chose.  Very often those lords, whose scruples were shallower than a half-consumed saucer of milk, needed a certain person alive, to mine their knowledge or position for a path to power.

It had angered Whitsinne.  Not because he could not respect the deviousness of the idea, but because he saw them all as weak imbeciles.  He could not respect fools with power, and had not known even one medicha who saw past his own selfish desires.

Right there in the auditorium, Whitsinne had seized the professor, held him floating in midair, and disemboweled him before his students.  He had meant to cast his angry lecture to those students before the entire city, but in his anger had cast it above every major city; his face, his anger.

For months since, each city had greeted his arrival with the public punishment of its medichas.  Word spread that the visage they had all seen was his, that he was a man walking the earth, and not a God.  Now the cities did not wait for his arrival.  They had taken it upon themselves to punish their medichas without his presence. 

All because he let his anger get the better of him.

As he looked on the seven medichas dangling from the saplings, he turned away to the west.  He had been headed into the mountains, to Jennor pass, but realized that he would find no peace there.  Small towns were less likely to offer respite than the larger cities, as word spread quickly that he was in their midst.  Instead, he decided to visit his long dead foster father’s palace.  He set out around the mountains to Mecured, after forty years at the Logic Institute, and ten years wandering the world, he wanted to see how Mecured fared without its stalwart king.

 

õõõõõõ

 

Less than a day’s ride from Mecured, Whitsinne came to a roadside camp.  Thinking he might share breakfast with the traveler, he called toward the small cookfire as it came within sight.

A familiar figure stepped into the road and planted his feet firmly, resting fisted hands on his armored hips.  Like so long ago, a smile broadened the lips on his sundarkened cheeks, but this time it did not reach his eyes.

“Welcome home, my brother,” came that soft, weak voice.

Whitsinne dismounted and approached his former instructor at a walk.  He was careful to hide the seething animosity from his face as his thoughts pounded with an old question as if Whitsinne’s mind was the road beneath the hooves of a thousand warhorses:  What else have you not taught me?

“Cree.”

Whitsinne knew it had come out as an unmasked growl, but Cree seemed not to notice.  He stopped within ten yards of his old instructor, and took his flask of uisge from his saddlepack.  “How did you know I was coming?”  This time he managed to control the anger in his voice.

Cree shrugged, still wearing that smile beneath his frozen gaze.  “I have always known where you are.  We are linked, Whitsinne.  Did you never learn to feel my presence?  After all those years?”

Whitsinne took a long drink from his flask.  The vapor from his breath on the early evening air appeared for a moment like smoke rising from Cree’s shoulders.  He thought of saying: I never cared where you were, but held his tongue.  Then a thought came to him and he frowned at his brother.  “Why have you come to meet me, then?”

Cree sighed, and again Whitsinne took note of his full suit of chain and plate armor, the sword at his side, and its pommel, which was a small, blood red orb.  Cree raised a gauntleted hand, and rubbed absently at his unbound hair for a moment.  “Won’t you sit with me at my fire?”

“I don’t think so, Cree.  My journey has been long, and I should like to reach Mecured by morning.”

“Very well,” Cree said, his smile fading like the sun over the western cliffs.  “I’ve come to ask you a favor, my brother.”

Whitsinne laughed, and a dozen grouse in the field behind Cree fled into the darkening sky.

“I saw your image, and your entreaty to the medichas.  I believe your intent was noble, Whitsinne.  But the results are horrific.  Even outside the palace grounds, good medichas dangle from pikes or makeshift gallows.  My soldiers cannot even get close enough to cut them down so that the children do not see rotting corpses every day.  I have come to ask you to put a stop to it.”

Whitsinne’s gaze narrowed on the severe face of his former teacher, and he wondered how Cree could pretend to be the king of a nation as powerful as Mecured had been. 

“How can I stop it?  I did not ask that they all be sacrificed.”

Cree stepped forward, his sword arm outstretched in a pitiful plea.  “You can do it again, Whitsinne.  Cast your image up again for all to see.  Tell them that killing is not what you intended.  For the Gods' sakes!  End the massacre of these innocent men!”

Whitsinne lifted the uisge flask again to his lips, growling as the heat of it burned in his throat.  Cree’s imploring stance shifted, and his hands again found his hips above his shoulder-width stance. 

“What if it is what I intended, my brother?”

Cree’s jaw fell open and Whitsinne grinned at him, depositing his flask back into his saddlepack. 

“Medichas are selfish, power hungry imbeciles.  Even in Mecured they vie for power they do not deserve, simply because of their gift of healing.”

Cree pulled his features together into a scowl and poked a finger in Whitsinne’s direction.  “And what are you doing that is different?”

“I am helping those who cannot fend for themselves, against those who inflict their power on the unwilling!”

“You are condoning the deaths of innocents at the hands of the ignorant, Whitsinne!”

“I promoted the truth!  If I could not teach them everything, I could at least show them the truth about these leaches!”

“You are a fool!  You are preying on their ignorance!  They do not know better!”

“They do not.  I do!”  Whitsinne pushed his palms out toward Cree, and the man flew backward, crashing onto his back, his armor making a pleasant clatter on the hard pack of the road.

Ever the agile warrior, Cree somehow rolled over backward and gained his feet.  In his fist, he gripped his sword, that red pommel now sending writhing tendrils of angry light down the grip and hilt, as though it was alive. 

“You will attack me now, my brother?”  Whitsinne laughed loudly, the sound crashing through the quiet of the plain much as Cree’s armor had.

“I’ve known for years, Whitsinne, that you are a danger to the world.  In fact, I’ve known since before I sent the elves to bring you to Mecured.  But I have taken steps to stop you.  If you will not heed my lessons, you will not be allowed to wield your powers.”  Cree’s voice was quiet, barely audible over the resonating echo of Whitsinne’s laughter.

He darted, lightning quick, his sword aimed for Whitsinne’s chest.

Whitsinne yowled wordlessly as Cree sought to skewer him with his red, writhing blade.  Though he couldn’t see it, he knew that the shield around Cree’s mind had crashed down as he had intended, for his brother missed a step, though he continued to come forward, that murderous glare in his dark eyes. 

“I don’t think so!” Whitsinne bellowed into the plain.  He thrust out a hand, and watched as Cree’s sword arm buckled below the elbow, the sword clattering to the ground, skidding in the dirt toward Whitsinne’s feet.

Cree stumbled for a moment, clutching at the broken bones beneath his bracer.  He glanced up with hatred in his eyes, and continued running toward Whitsinne, nearly within reach.

“It is time to feast, my brother,” Whitsinne said quietly.

Smoke billowed suddenly from beneath Cree’s breastplate, covering his helmetless head and hiding the mouth that screamed in the agony of helpless failure.  In a din of hollow metal, Cree fell forward.  Whitsinne smiled as he heard Cree’s burning flesh pop like boiling water in a covered cauldron. 

His helplessly dying brother still stretched out his searing sword arm, smoke issuing from the joints of his armor accompanied by the smell of broiling meat, and touched the pommel of his fallen sword.  Whitsinne laughed, and in his own voice heard the sound of a ruthless predator… the growl of wolves, maybe.  The red, burning orb of Cree’s pommel flashed in the shadow-laden roadway, then darkened completely. 

In the dusky evening, as Whitsinne gathered up his mount, the only light remaining was the red glow of Cree’s burning body between the cracks of his armor, like a poorly built kiln that leaked its precious heat from between its stones.

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

Whitsinne galloped through the night, reveling in the memory of his former teacher’s burning, hissing body, lying like the ruins of a pillaged village along the road.  The power of his emotions seemed at times to shake the very earth as he rushed toward the city of Mecured, the remnants of Cree’s flames of death in his eyes.  It wasn’t until he arrived on the outskirts of Mecured and dropped to the ground that he felt the actual rumbling beneath his feet. 

Earthquakes continued beneath him, sometimes as often as two violent shakes every quarter hour, as Whitsinne laid waste to his foster father’s kingdom seat.  He began at the palace itself, exploding the graceful pillars that held the roof above the throne, and worked his way outward, through the city itself, destroying all that lay before him.  As tons of marble and sandstone crashed to rubble at his feet, Whitsinne no longer felt the quaking of the earth, but reveled in general destruction at his hands.

All around him, the citizens of Mecured wailed in pain and moaned in the throes of death.  Dwarves, humans, and elves alike fell beneath the power of Whitsinne’s private feasting.  The sun rode high in the sky before he heard the deep booming of war drums and the chant of elven voices over the din of destruction. 

He turned toward the forest edge.  Over the hill swarmed a host of elven warriors.  At their head rode an elf that Whitsinne remembered from his childhood, a master magician named Rowass.  Even the magician had cast off his stately, flowing robes and loomed forward wearing the garb of the warrior, a large tome clutched in his fist in the place of a sword.

“Cree warned us that you would turn, Whitsinne!” Rowass cried above the din of the dying. 

The earth shook beneath settling stones, crumbled pillars, and Whitsinne’s firmly planted feet.

“Cree is a dead fool!”  Whitsinne watched as half of the elven warriors flew through the air from the force of an explosion he willed into their midst.  “You are about to join him, Rowass!”

Rowass, still approaching as quickly as his long, elven legs could carry him down the hill into the valley of verdant, crumbled Mecured, muttered into the air.  A slender, silvery-white tendril shot from the thick tome he carried.  Whitsinne tried to dodge the tentacle of light, but it bobbed and swayed with his every movement, until it pierced his forehead and held him like the hand of a wraith, clutching at his mind.

Whitsinne could not lash back at the magician.  His mind was held as firmly as though tied to a stake, or skewered like a dangling medicha on a pike.  “Cree!” he growled into the afternoon air, his voice only adding to the klaxon wail of crumbling stone, dying citizens, and fallen elven warriors.  His brother was reaching out from his open-air grave.  Only with Cree’s help could Rowass know to cut off his power.

Whitsinne tried to shake off the effects of that writhing tendril of brilliant white light.  He looked up even as he backed away from Rowass and his guard, and grinned to realize that his feet were not held, as was his mind.

Whitsinne ran.

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

 

A dark cliff face, topped by towering evergreen trees, appeared at intervals between the swells of the ocean’s horizon.  It had been an interesting two years, but now Whitsinne would finish his feast.  He still imagined steaming cutlets of pale, white elf.  Now though, it was not a table covered with the feast, but all of what was once the kingdom of Mecured.  The entire city of Druumaun Fare, the home of the elves, would be his table, and he would feast upon a nation of them.

He turned from the bow and looked behind his ship at fifteen more that followed his lead.  The angular visage of Rowass filled his mind’s eye as he looked upon his armada, filled with vegrato soldiers.

The elves had chased him all the way to the port city of Tannerfeld two years ago.  Rowass’s spell had filled his mind the entire time, compressing his thoughts until he could barely see from the pain it caused.  Whitsinne took a ship from the harbor, killed its captain as an example to the crew, and set sail from Tannerfeld, still with that blasted tendril of light sapping his strength, following him everywhere.

He knew the elves would follow him over the sea.  He had nearly made land on the Northern Continent, when he remembered a legend that the elves used to tell at the Logic Institute.  They said there used to be a continent to the west, near enough for canoe voyages to reach in a couple of days.  It was a myth, Whitsinne knew.  But the elves were an ancient race, and perhaps the myth would prove fact.

He turned the ship westward, and plied the Western Sea for three months.  Rowass’s tendril of white-hot pain faded a week into the journey, and Whitsinne had regained his full capacity in time to put a brewing mutiny to death.  They had arrived at a filth-ridden city called Dragnot with a crew of less than a dozen, all of whom died of starvation or illness within a few days of docking.

Dragnot was threatening to become an advanced society.  Human tribes had enslaved a race of beings, apelike humanoids, covered in fur, their cheekbones somehow evolved like tusks and poking from their faces.  They were a strong race, these vegratos, but not too bright.

Whitsinne immediately set to subverting the humans’ control over the vegrato majority.  He set up a resistance to the human suppression movement, and watched as a rebellion overwhelmed Dragnot.  The vegratos saw him as a God, an image he spent the first year fostering.  As he took control of Dragnot and the surrounding areas, vegratos made pilgrimages from afar to see the living God who had freed them.

He made an army of them, and trained them for combat.  It took another year to build the ships he now sailed back over the great Western Sea, and three more months to reach the shores of Esturiask, only a matter of miles from where Mecured once stood.  The cliffs now loomed above the waves, waiting for his armada to land, waiting for the army of two thousand vegrato soldiers to swarm over them toward Druumaun Fare.  He would have his feast, and revel in the scent of roasting elves. 

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

Word of the fast advancing army of black-furred beasts swarmed over the countryside of the former kingdom of Mecured like a blazing wildfire.  Whitsinne thought it fitting that he make the rubble of Mecured the base of his army.  Tremors from deep within the earth, though not as frequent as they had initially been two years ago, still rumbled the countryside, disturbed the ponds and lakes with sudden ripples, and shook the trees.  Whitsinne enjoyed telling the vegratos it was he that caused the tremors to frighten their enemies.

On the evening that they reached Mecured, Rowass and an army of elves greeted them from the forested hillside above Mecured to the east.  Whitsinne saw them as a nuisance, temporarily blocking his path into the forest, where the great city of Druumaun Fare stood - at least for the moment.  The armies bided their time until the morning, but Rowass did not wait.

Over his supper that night, the white tentacle of Rowass’s magic shot toward Whitsinne.  Two years had been quite enough to learn how it had worked, however.  Whitsinne captured the tendril, and made a show of holding it in his hand like a writhing snake, so that his vegrato army would see his power.  They were a superstitious bunch, and seeing their God take control of the enemy magician’s attack renewed their faith in his war on the elves.

“On the morrow, foolish Rowass, you will roast on my cookfires with your king Bafetre Alms.  Tomorrow, my feast begins!”

He wasn’t sure why armies played this waiting game, or why he complied with it.  He could easily cast light enough for the battle to begin in the darkness.  It was the way of the times though, and his feast would begin soon enough, he decided. 

The hours of waiting made him impatient, however.   In the darkness following pre-dawn, Whitsinne led his night dark army of vegrato soldiers through the valley.  They quietly stole up the hillside and surrounded Rowass’s army of a thousand elven warriors, their fires too dim to penetrate the early morning dark.

When they were all in place, Whitsinne wrapped the magician up in sorcerous bounds, and signaled to his soldiers with a bright, light-casting fireball above the elven encampment.  Once his soldiers had slain most of the elves, Whitsinne entered the elven camp and found Rowass, standing there as though tied to an invisible stake, as the carnage ravaged his warriors all around him.

“You should have fled in the night and died with your nation, Rowass.”  Whitsinne calmly sat on a stump that he imagined Rowass had sat on mere hours ago.  “At least then you could have died with them, instead of out here, alone.”

Rowass did not look at him, but stared up at the horizon, where the sunrise burned on his face like the reddened coals of a fire.  “You only free us this way, Whitsinne.”

The elf’s simple words struck him like a blow to the face.  Whitsinne smiled in spite of them.  “You should never have taken up with Cree.  The elven nation will feed my will, be my sustenance for all time for the crimes you have committed against my family.”

“So you choose to become the prophecy,” Rowass said lightly, as if they were discussing the weather over a mug of tea.

“What prophecy is that?” Whitsinne replied, feeling his jowls shake as he clenched his teeth at the magician’s continued insolence.

“There is only one prophecy, though it is told across the world.  Opposite ideals as one.  Out of the dissonance of difference, one harmony.  You are but a pawn, the tool by which the world is shown the richness of the good through the trials of your own evil.  You are a puppet, Whitsinne; all the more foolish for not understanding the hand that controls you.”

Whitsinne laughed, despite feeling Rowass’s words sink into him like the unrelenting bite of a feral predator.  As he laughed, Rowass glanced down at him and grinned.

“Interesting tale,” Whitsinne replied.  “A foolish one that will die with you and your race, Rowass.”

The elf continued to smile down at him, even as Whitsinne stretched his thoughts out, into the elf’s body, and crushed his elven heart.  Rowass vomited blood down his shiny, chainmail shirt, the smile on his lips faltering under its force.  He made not a sound, which was striking amidst the screams of his warriors all around, who fell like the grain at harvest beneath the scythe of Whitsinne’s vegrato army.  Glancing at the field of bodies, Whitsinne decided to leave Rowass suspended there in the air like a waking corpse.

 

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

 

The sun had barely risen to illuminate the field of slain elves surrounding the lone figure of Rowass’s lifeless body, which stood over them in death like a single, missed grain stalk from the reaping.  Whitsinne commanded his army southward, into the thick forest, toward the elven city that he had seen only once when traveling with old Kretchan, scores of years past.  With each step, Whitsinne became more ill with some malady, which he tried not to show to his faithful soldiers.

Within a mile of Druumaun Fare, he fell from his horse in uncontrollable seizures, and realized that the elves must be using their bloody magic against him.  One of the vegrato commanders picked him up, fear showing in his beady, black eyes.  In that look, Whitsinne saw the fires of his feast dwindling, and he wailed in rage.

He opened his mind and lashed out in every direction.  The earth seethed with a great, percussive crunch as if all of the small quakes that had been going on for two years suddenly became one giant voice.  The trees of the forest uprooted, toppling in thunderous crashes above the comparatively tiny voices of vegrato soldiers crushed beneath their weight.  Rumbling earth blotted out everything, as Whitsinne felt himself lifted from the ground and carried unsteadily at a run by his soldiers.

He still faced the direction of Druumaun Fare, gaped southward as though he could see it falling beneath the rumbling of the earth.  His eyes were wide and his ears strained to hear anything over the sounds of the earth crushing in on itself.  He felt himself ordering soldiers to continue to the city, to take it at all cost and slay every elf within, and wondered how they could hear him over the deafening throes of the quake.

As the rest of the vegrato soldiers carried him back toward Mecured, Whitsinne could not help but wonder.  He had not willed the earth to shake, had not lashed out at it, and had not the control even to lift himself from the hands of his soldiers.  He could not help but wonder why the earth shook to carry out his will.  These were his thoughts as he lost consciousness.

 

 

õõõõõõ

 

Whitsinne awoke amidst the rubble of Mecured, his host of vegrato soldiers milling about, appearing unsteady, as if waiting for the ground itself to unfoot them.  As he sat up, he remembered the violent rumble of the earth, and didn’t blame them for fearing it would continue.  The ground remained quiet, and felt as solid as ever it had.

“Kroshinok,” he said, pointing at the officer sitting to his breakfast a few yards away.  “Have you captured the elven city?  Are the elves slain?”

Kroshinok turned and faced him fully, his head hanging low on his thick neck, and Whitsinne felt his guts knot as though the sickness of elven magic had returned.  “Mighty Whitsinne,” he said around the thickened tongue of his kind, “we have slain many of them.  But many more flee into the plains to the east.  I have not enough soldiers to chase them and kill them all.”

Whitsinne felt the ball of knots in his gut drop.  He gritted his teeth as he clamped his eyes shut, barely managing to keep from killing Kroshinok.  “What of the city?” he said, muffled by his uncooperative mouth.

“The city is buried.  The shaking earth swallowed it up.  I saw the great dome drop beneath the ground as my first legion entered it.  When the ground stopped shaking, we searched… but we found nothing of it, and no way to enter.”

Whitsinne’s jaw relaxed.  The elven city destroyed, and all of the elves within it.  Yet his feast was not complete.

“Take all of your soldiers… I want you to hunt down and kill every last elf that fled the city.  They must all die… or the feast is not finished.”

 

õõõõõõ

 

Whitsinne sat alone in the tower of his palace at Zebasten, drinking uisge as his thoughts strayed almost beyond his control.  He had never forgotten Cree or Rowass.  In eighteen hundred years, he had never forgotten the dream of a five-year-old boy sitting down to a feast of roast elf. 

His vegrato soldiers had not found the elves all those centuries ago.  They had escaped into hiding and remained elusive for nearly two millennia.  Whitsinne ruled much of the Western Continent, and more than half of the Northern Continent.  His agents forcibly took, or secretly usurped nearly every realm that had sprung up in the years since his war with the elves.  If it weren’t for those blasted kingdoms in the mountains, it would all be his, every square mile.

Esturiask had never recovered.  Nothing remained of the kingdom of Mecured except a tiny village with no more than a handful of people.  The dwarves had never sought to rebuild any of it.  Out of his memory of a friend named Kretchan, Whitsinne had let them be.

The realms of the Northern Continent – Arcania, Cairellar, and Tendwyr – would all succumb in time.  His vegrato soldiers, which had been given the slang nickname of draks, mounted carefully controlled attacks all along the Arcanian borders.  Cairellar is nothing without their powerful neighbors, and Tendwyr is nothing but a wasteland of tribal people who never crawled out of prehistory to become a nation.

In eighteen hundred years, Whitsinne had also never forgotten the words of Rowass.  The prophecy was indeed at work, Whitsinne had felt the evidence of it just this morning, near enough for him to touch.

Outside the gates of Zebasten, in the squalor of the unclean, amidst the frozen feces and disease of his people, a baby cried for the attention of its mother.  Whitsinne had awoken that morning to a thunderclap in his mind.  Like the quaking of the earth around Druumaun Fare all those years ago, his thoughts had rumbled with the birth of that child, threatening to shake his nineteen-hundred-year-old teeth from his skull.

A knock on the door shook him from his reverie, and he tossed back another goblet of uisge. 

“Yes?” he called as kindly as he knew how.

A confused guard peeked around the door.  “My Lord… Here is the family you wanted.”

“Ah yes…” Whitsinne replied in a soft tone.  He stood with a smile and approached the tall, ungainly woman who stepped into his chambers with a bundle in her arms.  Looking past her, he growled at the guard, “Wait outside.”

As he ignored the filth-covered woman, and looked to the child swathed in rags in her arms, Whitsinne smiled inside.  Though she could not see it, the bundle in her arms glowed to Whitsinne’s eyes with an undulating aura.  It reminded him briefly of Cree and he struggled not to scowl.  He would raise this child, teach it everything that nineteen hundred years had revealed to him, and finally see the end of the elves.

“My lord…” an unexpected voice said. 

Whitsinne glanced about to find a pitiful example of manhood tottering to the woman’s left.  “My lord,” his voice eked again.  It screeched in his ear, as though trying to dislodge the smile he was working so hard to maintain. 

“Might… uh… I ask,” the little man stuttered beneath his furrowed gaze, “w-why… why have you summoned us?”

Whitsinne ignored the man for a moment, his gaze sliding back to the child.  Why, he thought, to begin the preparations for the feast…