Feast of Fates (Four Feasts Till Darkness Book 1) (2 page)
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Authors: Christian A. Brown
Lord Augustus Blackmore
: Lord of Blackforge. A deviant powermonger with grotesque appetites.
IV: Lands and Landmarks
Alabion
: The great woodland and the realm of the Sisters Three.
Eod
: The City of Wonders and kingdom of Magnus. Eod is a testament to the advances of technomagik and culture in Geadhain.
Zioch
: The City of Gold and kingdom of Brutus.
Kor’Khul
: The great sand ocean surrounding Eod. These lands were once thought to be lush and verdant.
Mor’Khul
: The green, rolling valleys of Brutus’s realm. They are legendary for their beauty.
Menos
: The Iron City. It is hung always in a pall of gloom.
Carthac
: The City of Waves.
Ebon Vale
: The land around Taroch’s Arm. It has fiefs, farmsteads, and large shale deposits.
The Black Grove
: The forest outside of Blackforge. It leads to the Plains of Canterbury.
Plains of Canterbury
: Wide, sparse fields and gullies.
Iron Valley
: One of the richest sources of feliron in Geadhain.
Blackforge
: A city on the east bank of the Feordhan River. It was once famous for blacksmithing.
Bainsbury
: A moderate-size township on the west bank of the Feordhan. Gavin Foss lords over it.
Riverton
: A bustling, eclectic city of lighthearted criminals and troubadours. The city is found on the east shore of the Feordhan River, and it was built from the reconstituted wreckage of old hulls and whatever interesting bits floated down the great river.
Fairfarm
: The largest rural community in the East. With so many pastures, fields, and farms, this realm produces most of Central Geadhain’s consumable resources.
Heathsholme
: A small hamlet known for its fine ale.
Southreach
: A great ancient city built into a cleft in Kor’Khul.
Sorsetta
: In the South and past the Sun King’s lands. This is a city of contemplation and quiet enlightenment.
Taroch’s Arm
: The resting place of a relic of the great warlord Taroch: his arm. The city is also a hub of great trade between all corners of Geadhain.
Brackenmire
: The realm outside of Mor’Khul. It is a swampy but pleasant place.
Willowholme
: A village located in Brackenmire and famed for its musicians and anglers.
Lake Tesh
: The blue jewel glittering under the willows of Willowholme.
V: Miscellaneous Mysteries
Fuilimean
: The Blood Promise. It is a trading of blood and vows and a spiritual binding between two willing participants. Magnus and Brutus did this first in the oldest ages. Depending on who partakes in the ritual, the results can be extraordinary.
Technomagik
: A hybrid science that blends raw power—often currents of magik—with mechanical engineering.
The Faithful
: Worshippers of the Green Mother. They exist in many cultures and forms, and the most sacred and spiritual of their kind, curators of the world’s history known as Keepers, often lead them.
The Watchers
: The largest network of shadowbrokers in Central Geadhain.
Ode to the East
A weeping sky, a sea of trees that eats,
what foolish hands and little feet
Do poke and tread upon its fright
Do dare to brave its darkest nights
Those who enter, go alone
Bare as babes, chilled to bone
No steel or magik will save one here
From the wildest things that prowl
—the Lords of fang and claw
Nor the Oldest that do howl
—in their cairns of loam and age
Or the leaves themselves that whisper, tease, and hiss:
lost, so lost, and never found,
hope and blood shall feed our ground
You have entered, and now are gone
Into the shadows of Alabion
CHAPTER II WHAT THE STONES WHISPERED
CHAPTER III AWAKE AND DREAMING
CHAPTER VII THE BREAKING OF LIES
CHAPTER VIII THE HEART OF THE KING
CHAPTER XII AN UNFORGOTTEN DEBT
CHAPTER XIV WHISPERS FROM THE EAST
CHAPTER XVII THE LONG NIGHTMARE
CHAPTER XVIII AN UNIVITED GUEST
CHAPTER XIX THE END OF ALL ROADS
PROLOGUE
T
he sky was black over the evergreen sea. No moon, no stars, as if the heavens did not exist in this realm. Creatures sang to a moon that was unseen, each cry more unrecognizable than the last. Elegantly these monsters stalked one another; hunting down in the prison of tangled trees, bracken, and thorns, the serpents’ nests and clutching roots that only the maddest ranger might call a forest. Amid the skulking killers, a solitary woman glided through the darkness.
She heeded the whispery winds, which did not lure her into snares as they would other travelers, but told her where to step truly. She asked the tortoise-skinned, ancient trees to move their branches from her path and thanked them as they complied. Many a time, fanged things leaped from the foliage, snarling and slavering for her flesh, and she banished them with the softest whistle or a reproachful shine of her green glass eyes. With her branch of timeworn yew, she prodded her way over stone and twist. When the wind started to natter, she pulled tight her threadbare shawl and kirtle. And if the hike threatened to exhaust her, she would pause, think of her sisters waiting for her, and then push on through the shadows with renewed and ruthless determination: the final resolve of a soul soon to die. She could sense her end in the brittleness of her bones, the fluttering of her heart like a hummingbird’s wings, and the snotty rattle in her lungs. Death was such a familiar friend to her that she could time its nearness within a sand or two of the hourglass. She knew that she still had time, but also that she would not live to see another dawn.
Onward she plunged, culling kindness from the vicious woods, taming what those who did not listen to the true voices wrongly called the Untamed. As she went, she basked in the beauty of Alabion; her eyes drawn to dewy leaves glittering as if scattered with diamonds, her ears to the music that echoed through the pines, her nose to the earthy pungency of the mulch beneath her toes. She drank in every sight, sound, and scent; missing none of it, adoring all of it. Soon, the trees thinned to brambles, which rustled themselves apart like kindly doorkeepers for her, and she came to a rocky basin and a steeply rising bluff. Difficult the climb would be, yet she wasted not a speck. Stone was not something that one could sing to in the hope of courtesy: it was stubborn, it wouldn’t listen, and it broke in half before it bent to another’s Will. So she did not bother asking the stone to accommodate her, but steeled her way up the bluff, not once crying out from the scraping of her hands, knees, and feet. Besides, the journey and struggle of life was half the joy, and she reveled in the toil, pain, and sweat of her decrepit body, for it was to be the last rush of life she would know for a while.
Surely the moon admired her spirit, and it peeked out in a sliver of whiteness. As she stopped, huffing, to look up at its loveliness, she saw that she had nearly reached the slyly tucked escarpment that was her destination. A ghostly female figure with billowing black hair and a gaze that glinted green, even from strides away, leaned over the edge: her sister. Hurriedly, the traveler clambered up the cliffside. But she had reached the limits of her strength, and at the end, her sister’s strong, pale arms helped to pull her onto a plateau soft with grasses.
“Eean, the paleness of a death is upon you,” said her sister, hovering over her.
“Help me up, Elemech,” demanded Eean. “I feel like a boulder on two spring twigs, and we have precious few sands left.”
Stoutly, Elemech hauled up her sister by the armpits. They walked over a lush meadow of clover, ferns, and flowers, heading for a cavern draped in vines. In the morning, butterflies and birds would play amid the lea on the cliff, though tonight only evening moths were about. Eean indulged in the study of their dances and one longing look to the sliver of the moon until she was pulled into the cave. Illumed patches of nocturnal fungi spotted the walls here, and it was easy for Elemech to find her way deep through the
winding dark, into their refuge. For some time they wandered, deeper, farther into the belly of rock, Elemech never unsure of which branching road to take, even when the fungi dried up and they were panting together in sheer darkness.
Much like Eean was at one with the great wilds, so too could Elemech steer through the unseen. She could find a light in every shadow, a meaning in every casting of the bones, or feel the drop of a tear from spans away in the ripples of her pond.
“Here we are, sister,” said Elemech at last.
Not a sand too soon
, thought Eean, hanging her head; her breathing was a rasp, and she was mostly being carried now. Eean opened her heavy lids to the brightness of their home, snapping bits of recollection here and there. She saw the crystal-studded walls, glimmering as a geode’s violet guts. A flash of the pool where Elemech would often dip her hand and sing of far away lands to them; of the places they would never see. The limestone table, rusty with blood, where they would eat and read entrails together. Their third sister’s cluttered workshop and the stone shelves filled with herbs, skins, jewels, fabric, bones, and knickknacks rummaged from the forest or the cave. Finally she felt the familiar relief of her fragrant pine-and-moss mattress caressing her flesh. In and out she drifted; her pulse and vision ragged. The sand of her death was nearly upon them. She heard small feet running up, and a tiny hand clutched her gnarled one.
“Oh, Eean,” cheeped the sweet young voice. “Do you have to go so soon? The season while you’re away is so gray. You know how somber Elemech can be. Staring in her pool, reciting all the sadnesses of the world. She is so glum without you.”
“My dearest Ealasyd. Let me look at you. At both of you before these eyes fail me,” grunted Eean, and forced herself to see.
Both her sisters were kneeling by her. With her honey-gold hair and innocent gaze, Ealasyd was as beautiful as sunshine. Ealasyd had the same green eyes as her sisters had, tawny skin, and the finest features of the three, yet only because she was the youngest. Come a point, when the cycle repeated itself and Eean was young again, Ealasyd and she would be fair-haired twins. She delighted in those years, when the two of them could play as siblings. Just as many, many seasons past that childhood, she would take
on the wintry beauty of Elemech, with her mystery and darkness, and they could brood and sing as one. As the crone, her final lap of life was always the most tiresome, for she could not play with Ealasyd or contemplate as adeptly with her failing mind as Elemech could, so she was lonely despite all their intimacy.
So, in that season of her life, she would leave, not to be a burden, and would forage the Untamed, gathering gifts for her sisters to use in their craft. A task to which her hardy, dispensable body was better suited than those of her delicate sisters. And she had been lucky this time. She had one parting gift for them.
“Such lovely mothers and sisters you each have been,” praised Eean. “If one of you would reach to my pouch, you will find a few treasures of Alabion.”
Ealasyd clapped her hands and rummaged about in her sister’s garment. She came away with three things: an animal fang crusted in blood, as if ripped out during a hunt; a handful of crimson grass; and a polished black stone, like the scale of an ebony lizard.
“Oh! These…these are perfect, Eean!” Ealasyd clapped again, and scampered off at once, without allowing her scowling middle sister to have a look.
“Bring those here!” snapped Elemech.
“The gifts are for both of you,” reminded Eean, and her sister nodded and took the hand that Ealasyd had left, kissing it.