The Curse of the Mistwraith

only alternative at hand to thwart that turn toward disaster: let the Mistwraith’s hold over sky and sun abide unbroken, while the powers that offered its sole downfall, two princes’ inherited gifts of Light and Shadow, became sundered by their hand to preserve the peace.

Shocked through change by a rippling cascade of forecasts, the pattern hardened. The motif that represented the Paravians dimmed to invisibility, then vanished away into darkness.

The spell froze. Stunned shock passed between the sorcerers; the impact of their collective dismay threatened to stop Dakar’s breath.

The disappearance of the old races had been sorrow enough to endure: the potential for their irrevocable extinction became as a tear in the fabric of Ath’s creation, an insupportable loss to any who had known their living presence. Although Dakar had been just a boy when the last of the creatures had vanished, childhood memories of one encounter had left him marked for life. Tears ran unchecked down his face.

That such shining beauty should pass beyond memory into legend could not be borne. Distinct from his own experience, Dakar shared poignant memories from the sorcerers; and the one that cut deepest was that of the solstice dance under starlight in the vale of Caith-al-Caen. The blighted patch of dark amid the strands, that had personified the penultimate grace, warned of a harm beyond healing.

‘So much for allowing events to run their course, untouched,’ snapped a thought from Traithe across silence.

As one, the Fellowship sorcerers rallied crushed hopes. Devastated by necessity, grimly wedded to purpose, they recast an alternative sequence they had earlier hoped to avoid. The strands flickered, interlaced, clean curves and sharp angles reformed to show a coronation at the trade city of Etarra. Charged by the Fellowship to accept Rathain’s crown, Arithon’s line bloomed into a jagged nexus of anguish, that peaked and peaked repeatedly, yet endured; and still the axis of Lysaer’s power roused the townborn to war. A great schism tore the width of the continent, with strife predominant. Yet the cipher that reflected Paravian survival glimmered on wanly, preserved.

Sethvir’s observation cut between. ‘Desh-thiere. The Mistwraith itself lies at the root of this.’ He need not belabour his frustration that the entity inflicted upon Athera by the worlds beyond South Gate could not be directly tracked: as a thing un-Named and foreign in origin, it had no signature energy that could be set into the pattern. The strands could only reflect its effects. As the sorcerers refocused their resolve, Traithe’s face showed a drawn look of anguish.

Again the pattern flowed into change, with discord harrowing all order. Futures in their myriad thousands described a legacy of battle and bloodshed. Dakar stared at violence until his eyes burned, and Kharadmon’s image became partially transparent with negligence. The strands flicked and interwove above the velvet, their motion unbroken but for the split-second needed by the Fellowship to assess the impact of each destiny. And still the patterns forecast war. The room grew stale with pipe smoke. Beyond the window, night gave way to hazy dawn, while the sorcerers pursued cascading trains of circumstance, unsatisfied. Their persistence unveiled no solution. The strands unravelled over and over into strife. Thwarted in their search for a peaceful expedient, the Fellowship sought answer in the far-distant future. Despite the expanded awareness of the tienelle, Dakar was left hopelessly behind.

Midday washed the chamber in dull grey before the strands stilled, freezing to a last blazing pattern that faded away like after-image. Sethvir raised eyes reddened from smoke haze. Kharadmon’s colouring was dimmer and Luhaine had lost detail. No face present escaped the impact of the quandary spelled out in the strands. Dakar tapped ash from his pipe into the lid of the tienelle canister, and as though roused by the sound, the Warden of Althain spoke.

‘Never in memory have the patterns converged so strongly to a path of alternatives this narrow. We are forced to unpleasant choices.’

The strands foretold, unequivocally, that Lysaer and Arithon would oppose, with full and bitter consequences. To strip them of their inborn powers as a deterrent in all cases yielded Desh-thiere’s continued dominance. That in itself promised changes in natural order, none of them to the good; but to deny the vanished Paravians a return to natural sunlight was to take the role of executioner. Men might engender war and suffering, but over the course of ages, even fanatical hatreds must fade. To act for immediate peace was to seal the extinction of a mystery beyond mortal means to restore.

‘If we only knew where they had fled, we might shelter them,’ Traithe said on a clear note of anguish.

‘Desh-thiere caused their disappearance from the continent,’ Luhaine pointed out. ‘If the old races allow themselves to be found at all, the Mistwraith’s fall must come first.’

The last avenue of debate became Arithon’s royal inheritance. No longer able to follow nuance, Dakar hunched in a stupor in his chair. His head was beginning to pound and his stomach tightened with the first unpleasant symptoms of tienelle withdrawal. Through a haze of mounting discomfort, he gathered the Fellowship inclined toward freeing Arithon from obligation to Rathain’s throne. If schism between the half-brothers must occur, best the powers of sovereignty were not involved. Dakar lost the thread of concentration. Words whirled in and out of his pain-laced thoughts, unheeded. Hounded by rising nausea and dripping poisoned sweat, he knew he should rise and find drinking water. His mouth was bitter with the burnt taste of tienelle; his awareness rolled like a ship on oily billows, jumbled and buffeted by after-visions. No mage in the chamber was more surprised than he when the name of the outcast sorcerer whose works had engendered the rebellion fell through his thoughts like a stone.

Davien.

Dakar shoved straight as his gummy, clogged perception broke before a cold wave of prescience and prophecy claimed his tongue. Though churning sickness tugged at his gut, his words fell in solemn clarity on a sudden, arrested silence.

‘Davien the Betrayer shall hear no reason, nor bow to the Law of the Major Balance; neither shall the Fellowship be restored to Seven until the Black Rose grows wild in the vales of Daon Ramon.’

‘Black Rose!’ Sethvir shot upright, intent as a hunting falcon. ‘But none exists.’

‘There will be one,’ Dakar gasped, slammed by a second precognizance that blazed through him like lightning etched across darkness. ‘The briar will take root on the day that Arithon s’Ffalenn embraces kingship.’

A dismayed round of glances crossed the table; for the strands had not deviated on one point: that if Arithon were left to free will, he would live and die as a bard. Only under duress would he accept the sovereignty of Rathain, and not even then with sincerity.

‘Arithon’s freedom must be sacrificed,’ Traithe said. ‘The choice is a foregone conclusion.’

That moment, amid strained and unsettled apprehension shared between Fellowship sorcerers, Dakar gave