Tuesday 11 February 2014

The final Chapters of Thrice Advent


Chapter 33
THE LAST SOLUTION.
Aflarien released Rabranath and the UnAuthor raged faster than the fire burning all through the Forests of Soen. The UnAuthor came to the gated entrance of Thet, the deep cave city of the Shouels and with a gale of demented rage blasted open the sturdy gateway. He entered in.  His master had ordered that he should spare none and he obliged with a murderous gusto. The rage and fire within him was boundless and he felt himself become huge with death. Pitilessly he ripped heads and limbs from the defenseless young, he searched out those in the deepest tunnels none were able to withstand his onslaught, none escaped.  Those that stood against him he pulverized into the cave floor, or thrust them mindlessly into the cave walls like so much rotted fruit. He bit into the flesh of the Shouels, drank their green blood that gushed from them like an over flowing spring. In mere moments he killed more than the deadly flames In the forest.  When he was done the caves and ways of Thet ran free with blood, their flesh and viscera smeared by a perverse gravity upon the red stone walls.
The Shouels that escaped out onto the Hill of Soen looked about them and to them it seemed the world had died.  The forest that had clad the land for countless centuries was gone. The colour, the bright verdancy of a land beloved had been stripped of anything lovely and lay in a smoke filled monochrome.  Tree’s remnants burned like corpses on a stake, for them Shouels sent out  a keening, a weeping that the grey wind carried away as if grief itself had been stolen from them.  Those that remained, stock still awaited Rabranath rather that they be slain than endure to live another day and carry with them the sudden death of the final day of Thet.  When they were dead, half devoured, like a beaten whelp to his Master, the Unauthor returned to Aflarien.
‘It is accomplished, my Lord.’
‘No.’ Aflarien said. ‘More still remain scattered about these lands and you will hunt them down until no Shouels remains to haunt the Land of Man.’ he sneered at the repulsive face of the UnAuthor. Only I say when it is accomplished.  Once you bring me the heart of Dalrosse will I be, perhaps, satisfied.  My plans are great, and I will always have a need for you. Now go and wash the filth of Shouels from yourself in the Lake.  Then come to Helvearn and join us for dinner, my Lady and King Loor.  My wife is keen to meet with you.’
The UnAuthor had heard of the beauty of Shaneal and was likewise keen to meet with her. On the voyage from Esplomeoir he had been kept in the hold, but for some sailors that fed him he had been alone on Fine Misgivings , only the churning of the waves and the laughter and chatter of the fair folk his only companion. He scrubbed himself clean in the Lake, fouling the water.  He swam, floated on his back, his vile face staring upward, unblinking at the sun.  About him the water itself was revolted by his presence, yet could do nothing but bear him.  He laughed at the sun as if with a threat that he could devour its brightness and feel no remorse, with his mighty fist he could tear down the vaulting sky, he fist could strike out to smash star cradles, obliterating the phantasmagoria of cluttered nebula. He would feast upon the light and leave Menerth in darkness and ruin. And not care.
The sun slowly fell, the long shadows of Ashenmoire blackening the Lake.  Rabranath swam to Fine Misgivings and dressed in tight, ill fitting garments King Loor had brought from Demorol. On his way to Helvearn a weakness fell over him, torpor and slow-wittedness accompanied the feebleness in his body.  He felt he was trudging through a merciless desert, mirages too far away to be hoped for, as he climbed the step stair of Helvearn he thought his legs would buckle under him, but from somewhere he found the strength to force himself upward. The black rose oil’s potency was wearing away in his blood.  None of the power he experienced while exterminating the Shouels lingered within him as if his powerful spirit had taken from him and replaced by a feeble, crippled soul, his thoughts demented by his powerlessness. His rage now a hollow shade of the megalomania imprisoned in his mind. Some invisible chain of steel led him to Aflarien’s side and an unbreakable collar of hard dark metal that had fallen from the sun tightened about his neck. At last he reached the final step; he walked tentatively over the glittering stone of Aflarien’s apartment to his lord’s side.
Rabranath’s eyes tired from holding back his tears of pain hardly flickered from Aflarien’s boots. Yet they yearned for a moment to stare upon his wife, but he felt the dark metal of Aflarien’s grip bite into his neck and he did not dare.
‘Did you have a good swim, Rabranath?’ Aflarien asked, his voice underlain with a mocking laughter.
‘Yes,’ he stuttered. ‘I hope I am clean enough for such a grand audience.’
Aflarien sniffed, his lips scowling with distaste. ‘You smell still of Shouel muck, but let that be, yes, you reek still with their polluted blood.  And that is good for it is the smell of sudden death and I relish it for the stench of dead Shouel is far more satisfying than the smell of those that live. Don’t you think Loor? Do you like his cologne?’
‘Alas, Aflarien,’ the King said, his eyes barely looking up from a book. ‘Age has diminished my
senses and I barely notice that which you find so piquant.’  Aflarien laughed and sat beside Shaneal.


‘Come, Rabranath sit with us.  I’m sure King Loor will join us once he’s finished his chapter.’ For
a moment the king eyes rose from page his anger undisguised, he felt a curse at the back of his
throat. Yet he smiled and said.

‘I will join you now.’

He closed the book and sat at the long, low table, sinking into large embroidered cushion beside
the UnAuthor. He smiled at the simulacrum of Shaneal.  He recalled the night that she had
disappeared from Demorol, that is the real Shaneal.  He had lost his capital, his Tasen; he was
the King of nowhere, and that night he had lost his only hope of regaining Tasen. Then his
trusted Phytomonger, Graheal, voiced an idea  that was to prove to be Graheal’s masterpiece.
From some wisps of the girl’s fallen hair, left upon her pillow he grew a psybot. A psybot so
perfect that though barely a month old, had a lifetime of memories.  A lifetime waiting in the
high tower room of Demorol until she was given by the King into marriage.  That he was the
fabled Anti-Author she had read of in her Father’s books thrilled her.  She was to marry a prophesy made real.

Servants came and went with many courses of food.  Aflarien talked of his plans, talked of the
death of Gods, those careless unthinking Gods whom decreed Man live with beasts such as the
Shouels.

‘I hear the whimpering noise of those that remain, their profane tongue bickering in my
thoughts.  I will have done with them and make all things new.  They prick at my mind,’ He
laughed again. ‘Soon too to die.’

With a thought King Loor could make Shaneal stab her new groom with the nearest knife. But
he knew that Rabranath would protect his lord so he stayed the thought. For now. Aflarien ruled
Menerth from Lake Leme to the walls of Tasen, all that the king coveted.  Aflarien had told him
earlier that Marriamme had taken Nen-Resul and Kren into the labyrinth of the tidalverse. 
Tasen was leaderless. He had said they had become lost in the probabilities. That he had found
them camped not far from the Island, had almost tricked him, but it was just  echo of a choice
Nen-Resul might have made. Soon Tasen would fall to Aflarien. Then he would reach out over
the sea to the islands and southern lands.  He would have Esplomeoir and the Author’s seat.
With a simple thought Aflarien would be gone. But later, later he whispered to himself,
when I can have it all.















Chapter 34

The silence of Thet

Shrouded in silence and the long shadows of Thet Marriamme with Nen-Resul and Kren
emerged from the tidalverse. Here, there were no children singing, no brightly dressed female
Shouels calling out their wares to the workers on their way to burrow new routes through the
caves.  No there were no children singing, or tired arrow folk back from the forest telling tales of
their days away from home. Nor now as they walked the empty pathways of Thet, a lurid gleam
of blood green thickening on the mourning stone, corpse lined, no more than fodder for the creeping carrion, the air thick with the shadows of flies and the ghosts of sudden death, they did not hear the music of the Shouel’s hearts. The caves did not ring as once it did nor did the songs of a thousand years reach them in this deadpoint of time. All was hollow quiet that stole into their stomachs and lifted wearily into their souls.

Marriamme walked ahead of the other two, her eyes ever searching, piercing into the dark, and listening, listening for the merest breath, the most quiet cry of a Shouel that might still live.  Yet she seemed with each step to fall into a void of noise, as if the whole of Menerth was encompassed by silence, the world bereft of voice that choked on its own lost tears.
Nen-Resul who knew not of the long, beauteous lives of the Shouels, who had never heard there songs, or the tales of the first ones, those ancients deep as the meres in the mountains, Nen- Resul knew neither of a life that was simple, those lives gossamer webbed, like a cloth untarnished with stains power and politics or a greed of knowing. None of these things did he know as wandered through the dreadful silence.
Yet it seemed as he walked one of his hands trailing along the smooth stone of the caveway that the earth spoke of her haunted memories, and in its portion, in each pause of breath the long lifetimes of Thet unfolded through the stone to him.  In the rock of Thet the past resonated strong and vibrant with energy and the power of the past had sent tendrils of fire into the future. It seemed that the dreams of the stone solidified about him and he was ushered into a excited dance of the interlinking city that existed beyond the Unauthors cleansing.  About thronged the singing joy of the little ones, the booming of dreamtellers and poets, the taletellers echoing through the caveways, the laughter of the females, about the air was perfumed with the scent of the ararine flower that grew down in the deepest cave where a pool of blessing lapped against the happy stone. About him the revenants of the future grew with the telling of each moment, stitching through time to a fixed moment that led to innumerable futures.
Shouels came up to him, resonating with a blue fire of luminance, told him of the unsullied time beyond the bloodstains of Thet’s final day, of a past forgiven, and the future flooded with a delta of cleansing  fire, each possibility racing toward the ocean new nows.
 Nen-Resul found he was seated facing a bodiless blue fire the spread over him, touching hope against the walls of his heart. A Shouel sat beside him and spoke of the land that was redeemed by the warrior with no sword, the last hope that had no hope or himself, the heart that spread solace, and joy. Another Shouel clad in the blue fire like the skins of old gods told Nen-Resul Thet had always been, that Thet remained like the soul that tarries and dashes through lifetimes to lifetime. At last to rest as glory become reachable and the hearts of men are filled with the lore of the Shouels and healed by joy and by the promises of Drendunde. Knowledge that man and Shouel were strewn upon the lands by a single hand, knowing that together they would not just be brothers and sisters, but true friends as they were conceived to be, their hearts meshed in empathy.  All indifference and all things base by the blending of the blood new purpose would be loosed upon the world, and the arms that hold Menerth would draw to them forces and beings from beyond stars reach and gather them into the unity. This Nen-Resul learnt from whispering stone of Thet, a final voice stretching into his cast of blue fire said to him.
‘The empty handed one, the gift-giver and the slayer of the sleeping soul will awaken the Shouel and man. With a whisper and with his tears he took tyranny, took hate at last from the minds of all and smiled, as new birds sang. His smile lighted upon the world’s beauty, his smile joy, like the sunlight on a lover face. This joy sprang from the fountain that is Menerth and now will never diminish although it dances on and on.’
Marriamme led the two men to the gateway of Thet and wandered over the raped land beyond.  As she wandered she wished for blindness, for a loss of memory so profound that with these horrors so too would memories of happiness and contentment would be lost. She staggered like a drunk, and it seemed she would stumble and fall, fall and never rise again, but before she fell Kren took her arm, let her support herself upon him as he led her to a large outcrop of fire blackened rock.  He set her down and sat beside her.  All the birds and creatures of Soen had fled and it seemed the silence here at edge of the dead forests was deeper than that in the cave city.  Kren would have wiped the tears from Marriamme’s face had she shed any.
She spoke. ‘Now you see- how can hearts be bold, how can hearts feel love when such things as this can be accomplished. To fight such things would make the avenger full of greater hatred than those that did it; they would be unable to fight cruelty without greater cruelty. And there would be no end to it. At such a thing as this all would desire to retaliate, but we know all that it would mean was nothing less than man’s extermination in return. The Menerth would be soaked with blood of generations.  Cruelty and murder will revenge upon itself, and the world will become insane with death.
‘Such sorrows we bequeath to our children ripped from the peace too soon from their mother’s bellies. Our children ranged against each other destined for murder, lives silenced like a stifled song. So why? Better that we fall from the world and become finished. Why do our cheeks wait patiently for steel fists that mock our-aphasia- trampling its knowledge, casting catastrophes after catastrophes? So as we fall we fear the final fear of stamping boots transforming us into the makers of harshest brutality.  Would it better that we could Mindcall to all men, remind them of the unity we peoples shared? With what?  Feeble whispers of us remain behind the walls of war, this war justified by lies and on Menerth all will fight.   Would it not better that we were slain by our own hand? I will not fight them and barter hate with hate, just leave us here where we lie.  Fix our corpses in your roads and fine highways and when you march off to fight those new foes that take our place.  Listen to your God of undoing and be empowered by the fire of righteousness.
‘So now we surrender Menerth to Aflarien. We give him the Menerth and all the powers of the peoples of the far reaches, we  let him enslave the creatures of the lost ways of Menerth,  Surrender possession of hope and sacrifice and unconditional dawn light that they  have pondered upon since the forests of Menerth first grew.   So now do you see Aflarien has left us with no choice – we give everything to him, the world will be as he commands and all the powers and passions of the myriad lands of Menerth will be the AntiAuthor’s toys.  All Shouels shall perish and become lost in the long grass. The streams and lakes, the forest full of oak groves, sycamores riding on a high wind protecting Soen forgotten with our passing .We  fall into a sleep of flowers, while steel boots  stamp the divine beauty of the Shouels with a sickening  crunch and cracking bones. He covets all.  He would claim the world with all its beauty, with all its artistry and flooded with hate, a misshapen land beautiful and perfect under Aflarien’s gaze.
Now we have no reason to live in this world.  We would rather vanish from the walking earth.  We would have no reason to remain in this world where our crimes equaled his.  So you see now with our passing we fade, to the hopes  of good, green place, tarnished  and justified with our of self immolation.  We will fade and Men will own time without us there. Those heroes of men that carry on, who hold the power will in time fade and find forgetfulness. yet till then Man shall have the world and Aflarien-  The Rex Mundi –will set free his rage and look about the emptiness of the Meringal and see his ghostly face in all men’ miens. And Aflarien abomination and the accomplisher will be all that remains.’
Beside her Kren still stood up, turned his head to look for Nen-Resul but could not see him. A harsh wind ripped over the denuded hills fresh with the smoke of the fires slowly dying. Yet upon the wind Kren thought he heard a voice, a voice as green and fresh, vital and vibrant as the land about had once have been.  Perhaps it was Nen-Resul whom they hadn’t noticed going on ahead of them.  But- the voice seemed too far away.  He put a hand on Marriamme’s shoulder.
‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.
She looked up from the bare stone at her feet.
‘Listen,’ Kren said. Long moments passed. The Shouels eyes pieced into the long shadows of the approaching night, as if she could with her visual senses encode the slightest murmur, below the gusts of wind. ‘Listen,’ Kren repeated. ‘I think …I think I hear singing in this unhappy place. He was about to take a few strides forward but Marriamme’s small hand clutched onto his as if she could enhance her own senses with his.
And, yes she heard it, a bright piecing of sound above the keening grief of the wind. The song rose up, powerful enough to dispel the storm, unblacken the harsh clouds, and let the dying sunlight revel in the song. She stood and clutched tightly onto Kren’s hand.
‘Yes, I hear it.  I can almost make out the sound of the words; do you hear the words, Kren?’
He laughed for he seemed surrounded by joyousness, his laughter a duet to the song on the wind coming from deep of the damaged earth and echoing up from the gut rock below. The song issued up the hill where they stood in expectation, with each moment the song grew louder. And when the voice became so clear, the physical world transformed about them, seconds shifted as if to make way for the two moments, the crescendo of the song and the silent joy of the Princess, which yearned to meet there on the wounded hillside.
Marriamme let go of Kren’s hand, slowly at first she walked forward then she began to rush forward to the brow of the hill.
O, she almost sang to herself, it is him.




After their meal was finished King Loor returned to his book while Shaneal and Aflarien went to the balcony of the glass edge at the highest point of Helvearn.  She looked up at the star drenched night and down to the reflection of the moon upon the waters.  Rabranath wondered if he should return to Fine Misgivings, thought that if he went or stayed he imagined his presence one way or another would be unnoticed. He took food from the plates the others left behind, stuffing, guzzling down the flesh and fruit, and noisily slurping down wine. When the glass was empty he found a decanter of black wine. Aflarien’s wine-the only liquor he drank.
It was a special blend made from the grapes of Erafian Omelyns vineyards the AntiAuthor had found a number of the bottles in the lower levels of Helvearn. The Shouels had blended Omelyns wine with distillate of the Black Rose. At first Aflarien thought to destroy the bottles, as he had burnt the Lore Books of the Shouels. Aflarien though drank a glass of the ebony liquid down there in the forgotten cellar decorated in an age of cobwebs. Often he had imbibed the Black Rose oil, but the effect of the wine was completely different.  The oil he realised was limited and slow to control, whereas the wine, with the first taste, eviscerated the reality of the cellar, of Helvearn rising above him as if they were but paintings discolored with the dirt of time, denuded of magic. The oil had given him access to the tidalverse, but the wine made him the tidalverse. With that came such knowledge, great with power.  He knew where all the white holes and capillaries of the tidalverse  led to, but knew also of the shadow tidalverse that led to all unmade choices- to histories that had never been and of all the futures that might be, or might have been.  Yet much more he realised as he drained the first glass- he was the Master of Now. In a handful of half moments his being knew all thought, all deed, all the dreams that a single moment contained upon Menerth.
Yes, Aflarien coveted the black wine, the wine that put him in all places, made him part of all that never was and never will be. With the single glass Aflarien knew the dreams and the daydreams of all those that lived, he was the crux of every beings choice, he could dismantle past and future. As the mingled grape and rose blossom revealed to him all the many, many realities sprung from a single choice.
Rabranath, unseen, poured a glass of the dark liquid from the decanter.  Before he drank he looked surreptitiously to the couple of the balcony, they had no eyes for him and the Anti-Author the collar of sun steel and the invisible chain that controlled him seemed slack about his neck. He felt no resistance when he raised his head higher and stared through his discolored eyes at Shaneal, then he was incapable of lowering his gaze, his eyes feasted upon her, lingered along  the tender slight lines of her body of her body.  His fingers moved as if they were stroking her pale cheeks and spreading the hair from her brow. He gazed at her lips as she spoke with Aflarien and he felt their soft touch on his, the damp moisture of her tongue darting into his mouth.
He picked up the glass of black rose wine and tossed it down his throat.
Aflarien laughed at something Shaneal said and tentatively took her hand.  Rabranath scowled at him, saw that Aflarien was like a weak fawning puppy willing to fulfill her every desire, saw too that if she asked it of him he would gladly tip himself from the tower of Helvearn. The UnAuthor derided his own weakness.  He was the Unauthor and this little, jumped up despot should have power over him.
Araden, long ago had explained to Rabranath his purpose in the Story. ‘For our brother who lived but a few hours we make our story-I give him life and the entire worlds to create .I give him purpose and a place for his dreams. Jon is his friend and leads him through each adventure of life upon life. While you, dear Rabranath, counter all, you take his freedom and leave him useless.  You are there between his lives sowing conflict. you deceive him with power and are there to put despair into his thoughts, set futility in each of his actions, you are there to blind him to the love his creation has brought into existence.’
Araden concluded.’  He who is many-named needs what all three of us give to the story, give to him. Always he will be unaware is us, mapping or destroying his onward journey. There would be no journey, no need of creation if there was just me, or just you, there would be no point to the Story and his life a meaningless waiting.  Far better for him that he had been smothered in his cradle and forgotten. Yet we weaved together in the conflicts of his life offer his Story no ending, no end to striving, a life lived in the light hope, he struggles because he must, for he has seen hope and wishes it for all.
Rabranath poured himself another glass from the decanter, drank the ebony liquid slowly this time. He remembered how Aflarien had subdued him on Esplomeoir and compelled him to murder Lebin.  Aflarien had desecrated Esplomeoir where no such humble beings should dare traverse. In so doing he risked the Story and the existence of the brother’s lives. Aflarien sought to usurp the place of the brother of the Esierk, the only one. Aflarien sought to be Author and UnAuthor.
As Rabranath stood by the dining table pouring the last dregs of the decanter into his glass knew Aflarien for the first time, could see that his body was but a glamour disguising the woman, Krostic within, then like disguises striped from flesh he saw beyond Krostic the glamour’s that hid far within older beings, unknowable beings that Rabranath could not bear to witness. Yet in that moment wine dark on his tongue the UnAuthor knew that with all his malice Aflarien was but a bit part in the brother’s tale. He walked toward them; the Anti-author seemed lost in the dark while the pale beauty of Shaneal was lit by the constellations. He stood in the doorway looking out onto the balcony. Aflarien gave him a quizzical look. Shaneal stopped speaking mid sentence and turned to look at him,
‘Can I join you? Rabranath asked. His tongue tingling as the wine dried on his tongue.
Shaneal looked surprised and took a step almost daunted by his presence as if he infected the atmosphere of the grand balcony with his despair.  Thick clouds covered the Moon and stars and the lake like black ice below them. Anxiously she looked at her father reading, she thought, if this creature became his own rage there would be death this night.  Her Father or Aflarien wouldn’t be able to protect her. As she watched Rabranath she saw the look of contempt on his face when he stared at Aflarien. When she held his gaze she saw a look of slavering lust, she felt his eyes clamping on the swell of her breasts, felt the many hands of his mind crawling between her legs, scratching upward, invading her body. His stare filled her with nausea of dread.  She looked at Aflarien, a plea on her face.
Rabranath fell to his knees as if the weight of the sun had slammed down on him.  Shaneal saw Aflarien’s fist clench, his nails digging white welts into his hand. Rabranath whimpered, bereft of will or the imaginings of power. Even as Aflarien slackened his grip a tighter bond of fear held him on his knees. Rabranath relinquished desire and hope, he could not fight Aflarien.
‘No get out of here, you no longer amuse me.’
The UnAuthor slowly got to his feet, daring not a final look at Shaneal. Ungainly he took his leave, haphazardly down the stair spine of Helvearn. He emerged from the tower and was wracked with sobbing. Through eyes blistered by tears he stared up to the balcony.  Thought of Rabranath had skittered from Aflarien’s mind and for a moment he was rid of him and his dictates. Staring upward he imagined that he saw Shaneal looking down at him. If he had the stomach, a strength of self, all that the will of Aflarien had excised from him, he would have thrown him from the tower and taken her there, under the blanket of unquiet clouds which obscured the moonlight, he imagined tearing her garments from her, almost tasted the salt as his blunt tongue licked perspiration from arms, her back, her legs, and slavering spittle on her breasts and buttocks, Taking the bright light from her eye with each scream he forced from her. But, below, whimpering there and alone, huddled round his panting thoughts he knew he was too cowardly to realize such desires. He stumbled away from Helvearn; wet faced with weeping and went to the hold on Fine Misgivings, threw himself down and imprisoned himself in sleep and old dreams.


The Last lovesong of Jon Esierk
chapter 34
Jon Esierk sun burnt and made tall by an inner energy, crushed Marriamme in his embrace. ‘Ah, my Love,’ he said. ‘I thought I would never see you again.’ Marriamme surrenders to his embrace, the strong arms about her lifted her above the awful despair  of the earth, that until Jon came she would have willingly sunk down to the blacked, raped hills and let them pull her down into a silent world where there was no grieving and where weeping was unheard.  She kissed his neck, tasted his skin still fresh with the pure air of The Unwritten Lands.
Slowly, so slowly as slow as the movement of the moon across the night’s sky he released her.  She spoke, but the words seemed to choke in her mouth. Breathlessly Marriamme coughed out the words.
‘Our Son?  Do you know if he is safe?’
He shrugged his shoulders.
Not dead, she thought, please not him too.
‘I do not know,’ Jon said. He looked about the smoldering wastes of the hills as if he had not yet noticed the desolation. ‘Dalrosse takes a hidden path and I think even Aflarien cannot find him.’
Her eyes tense with unshed tears relaxed.  A smile tried to lift up her lips, but failed. Even now with Jon here where so much had been lost she knew this was not a place for smiles. Yes, she thought, Jon here with me at last, far too many years had passed since they been together she was keen to speak to him, but not here. Words too had no place here where thousands of her people had been murdered.
‘Jon, my Love.  I cannot stay here. Please. Let’s just go. Let us leave this place to the wind and time.  It is no place now for the living.’

On his balcony a moment paused and Aflarien sensed something on the hot wind over the water. Shaneal like a statue stilled in an animated midsentence. Aflarien moved to the balcony rail.  His nose and eyes sensed keenly into the night and over the dark waters. Yes, he thought, I can almost smell it on the air.
He snapped the moment back into time.  His wife chatted on amiably. Orders raged from him to where Rabranath skulked on the ship.  He whimpered as Aflarien gripped the invisible chain taut, the collar biting blood from his throat.
Aflariens words clanged into his mind.
‘I want its heart,’ the Anti-Author said. ‘Bring it to me.’
Rabranath knew innately whose heart and where it would be, his mind made ready for action by the clamor like an untuned orchestra filled with the orders of the lord of Ashenmoire.

Nen-Resul watched the couple walking hand in hand towards him where he stood near the riven entryway into Thet. About them like an old saint’s halo the air seemed redolent with love’s power. But a hard wind stole over the land from the lake, a silent wind that tried to suck lithe Marriamme and Jon from the ground.
As Nen-Resul watched- he could do nothing else but watch as if he were dressed in a stone cloak of immobility. He saw Rabranath’s corpse pale face illuminated upon the dark hill by the moon’s feeble light. It seemed a hand clutched at the Chamberlain’s throat so that he could not cry out a warning. He could not fight the iron grip of immobility that had fallen over him; all he could do was watch.  Eerily the figure of Rabranath advanced upon the couple.  Nen-Resul’s scream leapt from his eyes as the UnAuthor grabbed Marriamme by her hair and snapped her neck.
Her hand was still held by her husband as she slipped to the ashy earth. Not until grief wept tears of rage from the storyteller’s mouth did Jon see his brother.
With the death of the Shouel, of the Princess of Thet, Marriamme’s control of the stream of the tidalverse that she manipulated, no long held it in place. Kren, Nen-Resul saw could not resist the iron pull of the stream.  Neither could he. A brief second only passed, as life was released and she lay like a broken manikin, before the tidalverse took the two men of Tasen back through the possibilities of new and old chances and choices, along shadow streams to the camp in Meringal, or briefly as the fixed moments of their lives flashed back to The Legein House where the two had argued about the best way to deal with Aflarien after his failed attack on Tasen. There the tidalverse and its shadow passages, twisted and tumbling like two snakes in an epic battle and through these the two where nudged onward, on, on to the true probability that hinged on freewill and the truth of their hearts. The streams danced them until finally the tidalverse set them free.
Nen-Resul found himself upon a horse, Kren by his side looking over the water of Lake Leme to Ashenmoire skirted by morning mist. At ease, awaiting orders behind the one hundred Legein men gazed as the sun slipped above the Island, the Lonely Isle that last day when The Gardener came.
Marriamme, in all things now, looked up from through warming water, out from atoms of light; her gaze flitted through earth and the sand on the beach.  She saw the Legein on the beach about Delgdreth. She knew her long sorrowful plan had brought them here and she was glad for she had found herself reunited with Jon. Despite losing him she knew she had made the right choice and was content.

Jon held her body in his arms spilling his tears of loss upon her face. ‘Why? Why?’ The words like curses he could not utter. Yet as he held her, the limp body grew lighter as if a Soulsearcher was taking her home. ‘No,’ he whispered. ‘Don’t go. I need you.’  But Marriamme didn’t answer, or his ears were not keen enough to hear her answer that curled about a soft wind.
‘Go on, my joy. Do not remain in this place. Go on.’ She left the dreary hilltop and the caves darkened with death and went to join the clamoring of the Shouels slaughtered in Thet who had waited for her. As the last light of joy faded from Jon’s eyes, so too did the Shouels fade and pass through the door that would lead to the High Road.  Silently the door closed behind them and the sky itself was hushed and reverent at their passing.
Rabranath and his elder brother were now alone outside the broken gateway of Thet.  Jon laid her body to the ground, stood and looked at the UnAuthor whose mind was filled with the caterwauling screams of Aflarien that demanded he kill his brother.
Rabranath slick with strength advanced toward him the clubs of his fists ready to smash the spindly bones and tear the flesh from the storyteller. Jon was too numb now to weep, with slumped shoulders and a lowered head he waited for the gift of death.
                                                                              Chapter 36
Angel
He remembered they’d dragged from his cell, cleaned him up and made him dress. After that he did not remember. After-images remained, clues that might make him recall whatever happened next, but he could find no meaning in these fleeting images.  He would always find himself lost in the darkness, then the door was banged open, heat and light harsh as the desert sun left him half blind as he was dragged along the cold, cold stones of the dungeon.
Again and again he felt the blessed release of the water that cleansed him, of the darkness and the crust in his eyes. At times he would wonder, so many times, maybe this time he would be set free, free to walk the forest tracks, free to think his quiet thoughts. Not the same day repeated: the dark, the heat, white blindness and the desperate need for the cold water  his feet following once more the dream of the woods those familiar pathways shadowed by the dance of the forest canopy. Each new path would surprise him as if he was following new ways that no feet but his had wandered. Yet each time he forced on overlarge clothes and he let them lead him out of the dungeon. But to where? Never the forest for which he yearned, not to that place of rest, the green unity that guided his boot steps to the undiscovered fields of clairvarics.  He could remember the forest and its ways, but where they took him filled Aflarien with terror. His fear had erased that place, up out of the dungeon, that place beyond memory was cut from his mind.
Once, while he waited for his cell door to open and the guards to drag him out, he begged the darkness to tell him why he had been so abandoned, locked here in the dark away from all the joy in the world. His dull eyes searched out the black as if that would answer him. He imagined pin-prinks of light, like a crowd of faces, luring him and urging, faces he felt he should know, the dark itself slowly seemed pattered with dim rainbows and waterfalls of dank red and green. Aflarien’s hands grasped at the turgid rivers of light, but they spilled away, splashing back into darkness, to re-emerge elsewhere, tricking and teasing him.
One day, as he was being pulled from his cell, Aflarien found himself staring down upon a stooping, half naked creature being roughly dragged from the dark stench of the cell. He was surprised to hear his own voice whimpering and calling for help. He felt he was perched upon an edge of darkness, one with hallucinatory half lights in air. As the cell door closed he realised that he was formless and weightless, as his body slanted off into the mockery of its existence, he remained, here, without pain, thirst or hunger.
The next day the same thing occurred. Alone upon the swells and colours of the thought, he found that he could escape the confines of the cell, without effort, desire for the arching sight of the dawn, and the spread of the hills beyond R’thera, took him from his cell. Joy arrowed through his thought as the first day he lifted into the blue haze of morning, amazed at the sun’s amber glow as if he were seeing it for the first time. Below in his cell he could never have imagined such a world, where the slants of sunlight began to dress the world anew. In sleep his dreams were filled by the colours of the day, dreams uplifted by the tentative shadows of joy, though about him the oppressive confines of his body lay, and the darkness and the dank odour pervasive as a twisted soul.
Yet each day he could explore further from the walls of his imprisonment. He escaped on the wind. The thought, or being without carnate form drifted or darted across the soft undulations of the farms of Meringal. Swift as a soaring arrow through the bending gullies of the salmon rivers Aflarien tested his abilities. In mere moments he could be at the edge of the Nelhdar desert than back, fast as a whiplash hugging the old stones of the Keep.
On the wind one day, formless as the breeze he heard his name being called. The voice was cracked with fear and urgency; the air itself seemed to demand that he find the source of the bitter voice, its anguish pulling him towards the crying of his name.  Edges of the wind carried him and he tore through the walls of time, leaving it meaningless, to a clearing in a vast forest where a pristine white cottage lay.
He tried to approach the cottage, but there seemed some kind of forbidding about it, like a memory of nausea haunting the land about that halted him.  He hesitated on the wind looking downward at the cottage, more dreadful than voice that pleaded for his help was the silence without it. He tried again, yet futility to get nearer to cottage. He felt impotent, like a single falling leaf, held in hesitation, then a new voice called on the slow air, chiming musically through veils of time like an echo from the dawn of Menerth. He followed the sound of the voice, a voice imbued with goodness that led him over trees and earth devastated with miasmic floods, then on to a stark white city upon the edge of a landward sea. The air seemed crowded with gulls, their calls disorientating him, he felt lured by waters as if the enticement of the voice had been replaced by a need for the free purity of the light lashed sea.
Energised by the sights in streets and marketplaces of Paternor he heard a booming call. He focused upon the sound deep beneath the noise of a thousand calling seagulls. Then uncontrollably he plummeted down to the city afraid that he would fall crashing on Paternor’s white walls and break upon the iron of the earth. Yet it seemed a wisp of a hand held him and guided him down to a domed sacred house of learning and led him to a chamber like a soft couch. The chamber was illuminated by what seemed a thousand candles. Not only gold light flamed but purple flames, reds and yellows, green flames sputtered from the wicks of the candles higher like a straight backed man. It seemed Aflarien was asleep being watched over by a figure coloured by the candlelight.  In his sleep his voice mumbled and with a cracked, hesitant voice he asked for the name of his companion.
‘Schriven. I called you here to offer you safety for you seemed so lost, led her by a deep need  I could not comprehend.’
Though somnolent in the flickering, mixing colours and the pungent smoke they issued he said:
‘I was imprisoned in a cell far from here yet I heard voices calling me to come this way. I saw a white cottage where I felt so much pain as if it were not my own. I heard I a voice in a song that I remembered before the Dark. There were tears in the song imploring me to go down to the white cottage. I tried but a barrier was set about it in the air all around.’
Schriven said. ‘The only cottage near here is the Caretaker’s before the Muem Marsh. he covets his privacy and is an issuer of evil. Perhaps he imprisons those whom you search for.’
 The Necroman as Aflarien fell into a deeper sleep, so deep as if the world had ended. Two days passed before he awoke.  For a dreadful moment he thought he was back in his black prison In the red stoned keep, but new candles had been lit and the air was adorned with a vibrancy of scents. As if smiling he told himself he had found finally a place of peace.  Schriven was beside him as if he not left Aflarien’s side that whole two days.
Schriven as he sat and waited though had left his body; rose up from his form twisted out up through the domed ceiling and left behind the houses and squares of Paternor. He gusted over desolate marshes, over the woods that lined the Forgotten Way.  Then he was stopped and unable to force his way through an iron fast barrier around the white cottage. Schriven could almost taste the fetid air emanating from the caretaker’s cottage that seemed to vomit out into the day a name.
Dalrosse.
Was this the name that had called Aflarien? Dalrosse. Dalrosse. Who was he? Once more he tried to force his way through the barriers of nausea about the cottage. Although the necroman’s strength was great he was not powerful enough to break through.  so defeated by the forbidding  he retreated back to Paternor, roused his body and sat beside the beautiful soul smiling as if all his days of dark and hate of the world he’d known now for so long was cured by the vigil of Schriven.
He slept and had his first Godsleep and the new soul half-wakening joined him there.  together they wandered the old citadels of the Ailves, those beings lost to the world more, much more than  a millennium ago walked through the insubstantial dreams of Schriven and Aflarien and with each passing through they drew energies circling about the Godsleep. Schriven laughed and led Aflarien to a purple gold temple and they lay down under the vast high dome.
Then the Godsleep ceased and they woke vibrant with the ancient power of the Ailves.
‘You must go to them now.’ Schriven told Aflarien. And Aflarien soared to the Cottage of the White Rose through the barrier of malignant nausea about it. He watched over him, his brother the Shouel, his Dalrosse from that moment on. Instead of Dalrosse looking for Aflarien and Shaneal they had found him in the end and the Angel Aflarien never left him until that day he died.







                                                                   Chapter35
                                                                THE RESOLVER
Aflarien leaves Shaneal on the balcony and goes to get a glass of the black oil wine.  He sees the empty bottle on the table. A scream in his head cymbal crashed him into a state of immobility. Something or someone ordered that he sit. He sits. He stares ahead of him self – to a point of space that fluctuated with incredible speed.  His hand reaches out to it.  There she is holding his hand, his Shaneal. Between them was a glimmer of a shadow walking, its shoulders happily hunched with tired contentedness.
Aflarien, King of the World was released and Shaneal took him into her arms. She felt the coldness of a tear upon her breast. He laughed.
‘I was thinking of somebody else, someone I knew so long before.’ Again he laughed ‘I get to distracted.’ He wrenched his gaze round as his head lay upon her shoulder and saw King Loor.  He was content as usual, reading, reading, and always reading as if he were gobbling up the words from the page.
Loor told himself. A moment more. Be still.  Rabranath was at the empty cave of Thet and Aflarien was unprotected, but I enjoy so watching them together. Loor noticed Shaneal guide her lips to his: her tongue like a panicking bird between his lips, easing open her husband’s mouth.
Now, thought Loor.
-a needle pierced through the skin at the tip of her tongue, but before it could prick Aflarien he snapped the psybots neck.
Loor did not move, for a moment. He thought he should at least show some surprise. Then Aflarien’s bellow roared across the dark waters of Lake Leme to Thet.
‘Rabranath. What have you done? The Shouel bitch.  I want its heart. Forget your brother. Its heart.’ the desperation in the Anti-Author’s howl of desolation seemed to suck into it the cacophony of noise of the whole of Menerth. The hills about Thet shuddered at the sound, yet upon the hill Rabranath whipped from his lips a single word. No.
Aflarien trembled.

Before he could kill Jon Esierk the UnAuthor tore Marriamme’s heart from her chest. He let Jon watch as he feasted upon her green heart.  With the taste of the flesh he had a memory of that, a  that that too briskly passed through his mind seeing  in fleeting the psybot Shaneal as she fell broken from Aflarien’ lips. Again he cried. No.  The surface of the lake became vaporous with steam, the tower of Helvearn rocked on root stones of the foundations of the world. Aflarien went sprawling to his knees while the book fell disjointedly from Loor’s hands
The UnAuthor left Jon alone and raced over the lake. Every atom of the air that his presence flooded through was imbued with the savor of the Black Rose. Tears of joy fell from his face as he imagined that at last he could devour the long roots of the Black Rose. With the Shouel Queen’s blood on his face like a slap of envy he was at once at his lord’s side.
‘Aflarien lick her blood from my face if you desire it so greedily.’ However he was not looking at Aflarien, he was not aware of the King; all he saw was the surprised look on Shaneal’s face as if she were caught in a portrait.
‘Just this,’ he mumbled. ‘Why could I at least have this? Her, just her?’ That it was a fool’s dream that they could have returned together to Esplomeoir. Let Kings and men have their fill of the flesh of the world. Loudly he ordered Aflarien. ‘Give her to me.’ Yet, he felt the tug of the sunsteel collar about his neck. ‘Still? Still. You go on with this. I said no. I no longer submit to your whims.  Murder the Menerth on your own. I want …nothing; there is no longer anything I want from you.’
He picked up the psybot, dormant, useless, so soft, and smelling of waspwillow leaves in the rain.
A song fell upon the thick air, heavy with particles of endless night, a song that drifted like a balm of the waters. ‘Shhh,’ the song told them. ‘Listen. I have a story…’ All three at the tip of Helvearn listened. The voice rang out clearly and slowly drifted nearer and nearer towards them.
‘I was told once that the universe is a safe place if you believe it to be so, that I was to remember it always and such safety would be. Yet I know that too will pass for fear and lies have disguised and distorted all hope and such safety now is fitted with a cloak of deceit. And we laughed. Don’t you remember, Rab, don’t you remember when we laughed together before the story unfolded. It wasn’t much then just a thing we did, a project we fitted in between rewriting equations for moving a bloodstar a fraction out of orbit.  It was game. Like any other game until it robbed us of our sleep and our lives. We loved it and it was dear to us. Those that followed the fate of the Esierk they too too completely lost themselves, stitching in the tale a tapestry of time. Our gift to our brother. You remember Rab it began with our laughter, yet we became snow-blind as our gift with its tragedies and woes we made him suffer.  What right had we, we designers, we giftgivers to give him the responsibility of a world to save?  Wasn’t our gift for him a place for him to do what he wished?  We butted in, pleated in parts of our heartsongs for ourselves not for our brother. If I were offered such a gift this moment I would refuse it.’
The words reached Aflarien’s ears, all he could hear was a grating jabbering. The UnAuthor was listening intently. Unnoticed Aflarien took to his lips the bottle of black rose wine and the last few droplets touched his tongue. He became as tall as the night, more expansive than the water’s of the Hidden Ocean on the far side of Menerth.  All that energy condensed in a brief moment and with it Aflarien stabbed into Rabranath’s mind.
Deftly he sliced parts of the UnAuthor’s brain leaving him lobotomized, crushing all anger and violence, and love, finally leaving him in peace. Rabranath’s urine like a releasing of his crimes gushed from him, the waters staining his garments of the psybot still in his arms like an unthought-of deed, Aflarien looked about him.  King Loor was nowhere to be seen. Alone, Aflarien stood and waited until Jon reached the top of Helvearn.
‘Stop prattling. Take this thing back with you to Esplomeoir. I…’ but Jon’s words carried on rising above Aflarien’s voice, his voice not directed at the lord of Ashenmoire but to his brother. ‘Do you not remember how we used to laugh? Do you Rab?’ Spittle drooled from the UnAuthor’s slack mouth.
‘I said,’ Aflarien’s hands snaked about Jon’s neck.
 ‘To be silent.’ Disgusted with the old tale teller he released him. ‘There,’ he pushed Rabranath towards him. ‘Take him. Tell him your stories and of the gift that has taken your lifetimes to give.’
Jon though began to sing a song long lain upon a flame. Of the passing of all things. The notes and the timbre of Jon’s voice knitted a healing in Rabranath’s mind.
‘We go now to Esplomeoir.’
Now, but for Aflarien, Helvearn was empty. Ashenmoire, his Ashenmoire all about him. On the edge of hearing there were the sounds of the men of Tasen upon the lake sailing to the island. He lifted up a bright flag, the flag of the five Roses and draped it over the rail of the balcony.  Almost at once a brisk wind ripped the flag from its place and Aflarien had to watch it drift away until it became indistinguishable in the night. He laughed a laugh that sounded like a profanity, as if he were  bereft of joy, as if he had always within himself a rainbow of tears since that first in the garden with Countess Krostic who had made him monster. He descended the stairways of Helvearn and walked the cluttered path up to the Hollow where the air was thin. Sitting on a flat ledge of rock was Dalrosse he was gazing as if amazed at the rose, as if before he had been blind. Dalrosse saw new colours sneaking between each particle of earth and green as the morning came.
Aflarien kicked over the pile of rocks Dalrosse had collected. Patiently, for time itself seemed to be waiting on him, he gathered together the rocks and when the Shouel seemed satisfied Aflarien kicked them apart again. Once more Dalrosse gathered them. Then the sun rose over the horizon and seemed to laugh with expectancy. For the first time Dalrosse lifted his head and met the gaze of his brother.
So silent up above as if waiting either for the end of the world or the fresh flower of new one the female blackbird circled, unseen.
‘Brother,’ Dalrosse said as he walked toward Aflarien, he repeated the word so softly that it was a voice speaking the slang of the soul. ‘It is enough,’ he said. The Angel of Aflarien fleets down like a dancing wind into his body. Dalrosse stood beside his brother within arm’s reach, then Dalrosse the Shouel took Aflarien in his arms, holds him tight, hugs him as a child would do. As joy would do.
The blackbird circles down swiftly as if gravity in the moment had strengthened.  As she fell her wings slowly transformed into arms, her bill and sharp feet revolved and resurrected into the face of Aflarien’s sister and Dalrosse’s best and final friend.  Her sharp feet and tiny claws stretched into pale, freckled skin and bone.  She falls, yet not too harshly and is softened into the embraces of Aflarien and Dalrosse, the kingfisher flying like a rainbow watching over her.
Within Aflarien the wretched shrieking of Krostic, that being who had possessed him, raged on and on. ‘You will love none be me,’ but the words were obsolete in their embrace and the embrace of the Angel within him. The music that had been Aflarien rose from a whisper and he began singing of the woods and old, old pathways through the trees, he sang of the surprises of wild flowers,  stutteringly, then finding his true voice. Dalrosse heard the song and held him tighter. And with them holding him and the Angel singing made Krostic, stabbing inside his brother’s soul, a statue, crumbling and blackened by time like those old gods in the gardens of R’thera, her desperate screams diminished from time and life as the song flew, freeward into joy. Now she had no grip upon the child of the forestways, the mushroom dreamer and the flower in the long grass.
‘Am I free? Really, is she gone? ‘He smiled and in a whisper and the earth shook in affirmation. He remembered what he had done to the forest, those forests he had burnt. There in the Hollow of Armoroth where the black rose grew imbued with the power of the five roses, away from Ashenmoire over the Water of the Leme he sent his song to Soen. New trees grew, thrusting up from the fire eaten hills, in moments mighty, a green tsunami flowing over the land, the wind in their branches played to the sun. Then he was silent and in the arms of his brother, The Shouel, his sister, his wife. Aflarien died, as he should have died so long ago upon the green mound at R’thera, but here he did not perish alone or unloved. His last sight was of their smiles. Shriven the kingfisher alighted upon his shoulder, singing. They lay his body in the hollow and built a mound for him under the shadow of rose.
The Black Rose finally bloomed, its flowers were of many colours like the sunset and sunrise on the waters of the lake. Menerth had finally found hope and Shaneal and Dalrosse danced at the edge of the water, as children would, as they danced they laughed remembering the manic, stamping dance of Aflarien in big clunky boots and how free he was then and now.


The second part of
Thrice Advent,
The History of the Psybots
continues this tale.

Monday 10 February 2014


THE KISS OF A CAT
Chapter 31

Dalrosse, Merve and the birds travelled for miles through the vast fields of Orange Roses.  Eventually tiredness overtook them and they built a fire. A cat emerged from the tangle of sharp rose thorns to share the warmth with them, her name was EmiLeah.
It was the evening on the day they berthed in a natural harbor on the coast of Strianval Merve told Dalrosse they had travelled almost five tiaga.  The air was thick with the scent if the Orange Roses.  Thick, and almost cloying, as if the smell had congealed in his lungs. He was glad when Merve decided they should rest. Despite being tired, he was surprised that his journey had led him to this new bizarre place; his feet were treading a path that had been created for him long before memory.  He sat beside a sharply cold, yet refreshing river or rivulet that crissed and crossed the Strianval. He looked up over the bushes of roses, many thorned; the plants erect with vain pride, making them seem stately.
As evening drew on and the sun seemed to cower away from the majesty of the land of roses, a land that usurped the coming darkness as it sent an amber hot mattress of light into the rose sweet night.  Dalrosse drank deeply to stave off the tiredness he felt. He had to think clearly. For all intents and purpose he had already collected the Orange Rose, he could have one of millions. But the Masterdom was the next place he had to reach.  In which direction was the Masterdom? Once he had found the Purple Rose there then he could return to Meringal and see Ashenmoire again.
Dalrosse presumed there must be people in Strainval – he hoped so as they had very little food.  There must be a city, or farms, yet they had walked half the day and they had seen no-one.  Neither had Shaneal nor Shriven and they had flown much further than Dalrosse and Merve. Above the crowns of the flowers he could see Shaneal circling above. Fear for him had not taken her much further than eye reach of Merve and her brother. Schriven had headed further South, had returned at dusk, perched mutely staring at Dalrosse then he took to flight again heading back Southward.
Merve had told him that he had never been to Strianval, but suggested if they follow one of the water courses they would be more likely to find someone. But when?   Another day, two until they found help? The food would be gone by then. Yet every step Dalrosse trod southwards seemed familiar.  The soils embraced his footsteps and the lightness in his heart grew.
He felt something touch his arm and rub itself against him. Looking down he saw a slim tortoiseshell cat.  The cat looked up at Dalrosse, emitted a tiny squeal from her fanged mouth.  Dalrosse smiled and said hello.
‘Now don’t you go bothering the birds,’ Dalrosse told the cat with stern pretense.  He picked up the cat and began to stroke her, tickle her ears and beneath he whiskers.  H er purrs seemed like a lulling lullaby that would put even the hardiest of insomniacs into a dream filled slumber.
Above the amber lit moon slowly rose.
Shaneal dropped from the clouds and landed on a rose bush near Dalrosse.
‘Where did you find that?’ Shaneal asked suspiciously.  The cat saw her and a white flame of light flashed from her eyes. Protectively Dalrosse caressed her vigorously, her purrs intensified and the cat folded into his embrace like a weary sailor on a hammock.
‘I didn’t find her, I suppose she found me.’  He said smiling.
‘Well I hope she can find her own way home.  I don’t like cats.’
‘You’re a bird now, I suppose it’s natural.  Don’t worry. I’ll make sure she’ll not touch you.’
The blackbird laughed. ‘As soon as your backs turned that cat will have to grow wings to catch me.’ She repeated, ‘I don’t like cats.’
‘I know. You just said.’
‘But still I don’t like them.’ Then Shaneal flew up and off into the rose-scented sky.
With Merve heavily asleep a few feet away Dalrosse felt comforted in the night by the cat and as he had no-one else to speak to he chatted away to her as if she were a long lost friend.
‘Well? What will I call you?’ Dalrosse asked as if questioning the cool breeze from the Fordeni Sea, ‘What was that again?’ He said pretending to reply to something the cat had told him. ‘So EmiLeah is your name. Is it? EmiLeah you are very beautiful, don’t listen to a thing my sister says. I love cats- she won’t make me drive you away.  You can sleep here until morning.’ All night he whispered and soothed EmiLeah until she slept. He kept a relaxed vigil, Merve snoring and hiccupping in his his dreams while the heartbeat of the cat echoed in his body.
He knew that he was truly free from the miasma The Caretaker had sickened him with, he knew he was healed. He felt his own heart loud and strong, as reassuring as the surf on the coast. Dalrosse was filled with such a joy, an intense gleefulness. All that first night in Strianval he humorously derided himself about all the hurts and fears, the worry that his past life had been.
‘Look,’ he told himself.  EmiLeah seemed quite attentive. ‘Look how lucky I am. I am alive.’ All the days of pain and worry he had dwelt in, back in those days before his heart was healed and Verlover had bathed him in laughter. He felt clean for the first time in his life and he felt new. Now Dalrosse knew each step he took was a blessing, another footstep away from the prison he had lived in. Each movement onwards would strengthen him filling the future fertile with possibility and knowledge. Moment upon moment passed as the night sky looked down upon the orange adorned Strianval. Slowly dawn’s light returned, it mingled with the glow from the roses leaving the sky a painter’s pallet, a mishmash of colours and streaks of cloud, with out of place, obscure shapes appearing in the sky above the Strianval like silk flags enfolding rainbows to bless the day. Yet, as the sky grew a faded blue the new days light emerged feebly it left the sky heavy, like lifeless granite gray.
Merve woke and smiled at the cat in Dalrosse’s lap- both were fast asleep and their noses almost touching.   Merve yawned deeply and wondered if Schriven had found a village. He was hungry and the scraps of food he’d taken from Hazeldreame would barely satisfy him, let alone the need to share it with Dalrosse.
I hope Schriven’s found somewhere. Merve laughed to himself. In Paternor Schriven was known as the best spinner of yarns, and had once spoken all through a day and the one after, yet, Merve hadn’t heard a peep from him since they’d met on Hazeldreame. He wasn’t particularly  surprised Schriven was a kingfisher, he was the kind of person who would be a kingfisher, but still he wondered why he hadn’t gone on to explain the myriad significances of the myriad colours of his feather’s and explain the varying colour’s meaning in different societies through the ages. What’s spooked him? Merve wondered.
‘Just hope if he’s found somewhere to eat he’ll be able to tell us where it is.’
Dalrosse startled awake.
‘Morning,’ he said as if he was disappointed.
Between them they had some bread and pieces of dry meat.  Alert, EmiLeah pestered Dalrosse to distraction, the last bite of the meat hovering at his lips as EmiLeah’s yearning eyes choked him with laughter.
‘Aright then,’ the Shouel said and held the meat to the cat’s mouth so she could nibble it down to his fingertips.
‘We’ll never get rid of her now,’ Merve said, his gruff tone tinged with a sense of acceptance. ‘She’s not getting any of mine and crammed his mouth with the last of the meat.
‘Don’t be like that Merve, she’s only little. I think she’s lost.’
Merve crunched down the last of the crust of bread and as he chewed as he stared at Dalrosse. Through his mouthful, he said, as a slow blue eye smile grew on his face.
‘I haven’t eaten properly since Paternor and if that slinky thing wasn’t so small I’d be building a cooking fire right now.’
Pretending to be shocked at Merve’s joke he said. ‘EmiLeah, you’ll be getting the rest of Merve’s meat. He obviously prefers bread.  Look there’s you’ve missed couple of crumbs on your lips.’
Dalrosse scooped the cat into his arms, stepped purposely over the watercourse and disappeared into the tall rose busses. Merve sighed, slurped some water from the rivulet and followed Dalrosse.

Schriven was tired and he’d come to the conclusion that the world had been covered in orange roses.  He was many tiaga south of Merve and Dalrosse and on ahead the orange roses stood row upon row as far as he could see.  He had seen other birds, insects, of course- he had to eat. He’d tried to hunt for fish in the rivulets of water that crossed Strianval, but they seemed lifeless, empty even of weeds as if some invisible workmen missed in an eye blink regularly cleaned and unclogged the watercourses.
Like Merve he had never ventured this far south.  As a boy he had swum in The Little Sea and his tutors would take him and his fellow students as far south as the foothills of The Mountains of Drendunde.  They would search the Lost Places and the ruins of the Ailves. Excavating, or in Schriven’s case escaping to the nearest shade.
His father was a tree-feller in the vast woodlands of the Forest of Without.  He lived with Schriven’s mother in C’mithra, a tiny village on The Forgotten Way. His parents were wealthy and had sent their son to the University of Ojinth along the coast from Paternor. Each summer he returned to C’mithra, each year he returned to his ageing mother and  father  a man who had became more and more disgruntled that age had robbed him of the ability to work in the forest.  He would endlessly reminisce  about how he had battled the Bolved Devil for the heart of the forest, where the tree were almost half a tiaga in girth and so tall that low clouds were brushed away by their branches and still giddying the trees soared upwards. A month it took us, he would say, to fell just one tree - a whole half a year to take it the lumber yards.  Then he’d sigh and go over in his mind the story again and again as he slurped the soup his stomach could barely digest. Schriven wondered if it was age or boredom that had taken his mind.
He’d arrive home each summer and those last few years she would flutter and fuss about, then, in a moment as if she had been switched off she would sit silently by his father, try to smile, perhaps thinking smiling  was a strange thing to do and stared at the forest beyond C’mithra.  For a long time before they died he felt his parents were caricatures of the people he had known as a child. When his father was strong and battled a horde of Bolved Devils and Evema so beautiful, a teacher in the village, the only teacher who seemed so excited by the knowledge she shared to the children.  What they became- a misplaced smudge of lip rouge, for beauty, for strength, chattering lips dripping with thin soup. His holidays one of blank looks and lost smiles.  Schriven felt no love or a kindred spirit for those people.
After university having to decide whether to teach or just drink all the money he had inherited.  Instead he travelled alone to the Mountains of Drendunde, wandered through the ruins of the Ailves cities. When he had been with the other students one or two would boast that a godslumber would fall over them.  Entombed within the godslumber the students would dream of city walls rebuilt. Peopled with the young of the world, the Ailves, beings that had dwelt on Menerth long before men came. The Ailves were lost,  their cities once paradises destroyed, left ruined upon tiaga after tiaga of salt flats, lost in vast gulfs of dry lakes, the lands pitted with the scorch marks of fiery stones flung from the night.  Though the godslumberers dreamt and the songs of the Ailves long in memory and rich voiced the air of the Mountains were enraptured by their existence.  These students in their godsleeps would hear songs and tales that were far more ancient than any volume in the oldest libraries.  Schriven had seen a few of these students as they awoke-he’d seen how completely they had changed, no longer children, or even men, but creatures longing for a place that was lost. These godslumberers perhaps were collating all the images and thoughts of the godsleep yet the immensity of a hundreds of lifetimes to recall it correctly and a hundred more years to explain it drove them insane.  Of course they did try to explain, but even the tutors would laugh at them, point to the mountains, say, ‘Drendunde’ as if the name of the god would drag the sleep from their eyes and get them back studying. In the nights, one by one the students still yearning the Godsleep some would be see them leave the camp, but none ever saw them return again.
When he went he went to the foothills in the year after he finished University he had walked to ice marble steps that curled in great semi-circles to the first of the gates of the ruined city. He lay at the base of the first step trying to imagine the Godsleep as something as once as mighty and awe-inspiring as the Mountains as filled with the Ailves. Shriven failed, was not taken by the sleep, was not, as he had desired led a long a road of a higher purpose. He returned to Ojanthe to teach, not only orphaned from family, but by life. So he taught, drank, lived.  Or he thought he lived.
At that moment his thoughts of Dalrosse seemed to make his head judder with energy, the energy awakened him and he foresaw that the world could be as beautiful, an incomparable paradise as the Land of the Ailves had once been. Schriven over his life had learnt many things, studied many lost knowledge’s, but he had never been I the presence of purity before he met Dalrosse. He would use all his knowledge and all his powers to protect Dalrosse, but, he fumed angrily to himself, first I must find him some food.

Shaneal high above Dalrosse, saw him half-hidden, but for his movement through the bushes.  She saw Schriven returning.   The sun was almost setting by the time he reached her. Shaneal greeted him in the air.
‘I wouldn’t go down there just now. There’s a cat’
‘A cat?’ he repeated. He was almost thrown off kilter, his reason for swiftly returning skittering from his mind. ‘All there is roses, then suddenly there’s a cat. I suppose it’s a slight improvement.’
‘Where have you been all this time?’
‘Looking at roses- flapping my wings- thinking- looking at roses- flapping my wings. It made me come to a decision.’
‘What?’
‘To tell Dalrosse to turn back.’
‘Oh.’ Shaneal let the silence linger. ‘So are you going to tell him? Or am I?’
‘You can...if you want…unless you don’t want to go there, where…’
‘I’m not afraid of cats’
‘Quite right,’ he said as her tail feathers bristled the air in front of his beak and she darted down to Dalrosse and Merve calling her brother’s name.
Warily as his ruby dark feet perched upon a wavering rose blossom teetering beneath him Shriven addressed  Dalrosse his eyes boring into the languid eyes of the cat resting on the Shouels chest as if she were a second head.
‘Even if you had a wagon load of food it would be gone before we crossed Strianval, in no time it would be gone and still you would starve.’
‘So we should go back, there’s no other choice?’
‘Rose Soup I suppose,’ Schriven said.
‘But that wouldn’t get us very far and what about this cat-EmiLeah?’
‘Yes.’ Schriven attempted to put a smile in his voice. ‘What a lovely name.’
‘I know it just came to me.’
‘Yes, sir Shouel we should go back to the boat. Head for Peth and turn south-east.  We might bypass Strianval by following the River Grule.  My old teachers spoke of the Masterdom of the Purple Rose, said it was before and over the other side of the river. I presume River Grule is the river- you know I doodled too much in atlas classes to learn very much. If we go to Peth and sail in that particular direction I’m sure we’ll find The Masterdom.’  Schriven felt he had been talking too much, suddenly he realized he’d taken his eyes off the cat as the kingfisher gazed down at Dalrosse.
The Shouel looked disappointed, sullenness overcame him and his fingers gently kneaded Emi- Leah’s head.  Quietly he asked Merve if he knew a better way.
‘Yes. Seems the kingfisher is right. One way or another we have to go back for food and it seems sensible once we get to Paternor we head for Peth, then as the kingfisher says on from there’
‘It might be sensible, but is it safe.’  The Shouel mumbled, barely audible. His eyes squinted at the final sharp shafts of sunlight.  The brightness of the light sent a jolt through him and his back clenched with pain. The thought of returning north teased at his memories. Each step back to the Muem Marshes and The White Cottage gripped him with fear. How would that make him feel? The pause between his heartbeats told him he still held feelings rekindling murderous thoughts. If The White Cottage was not burnt to the ground, I would rebuild and burn it all over again. If The Caretaker still lived this time I would kill him properly.
Dalrosse sighed, dropped EmiLeah to the ground and reluctantly started walking back to the Fordeni Sea.
That night Dalrosse did not stop or sleep and for most of it he kept pace with Merve. EmiLeah followed behind, sometimes she’d scramble forward, and sometimes she’d race ahead and tried sneakily to get in front of his feet. When they did stop in the morning to rest Dalrosse looked and couldn’t see EmiLeah anywhere about. He called her name but she didn’t run back to him.  By the evening they had reached the cove where they had left the boat tethered.  Dalrosse looked over the sea; his eyes were wet, perhaps with sea spray, perhaps not.
Merve got into the boat and gestured to Dalrosse to get in.
Dalrosse laughed. ‘I almost forgot,’ and raced back to the nearest Strianval rose and took a cutting, He was about to call Merve, say, and how stupid I would’ve been to forget the Orange Rose, but air was thumped from his lungs. One moment he felt he was descending to the far side of Menerth, the next he was being propelled towards the stars. Shaneal and Schriven flew protective circles about him as if to reassure him of his safety. Yet the blackbird and the kingfisher cheed and chikeed and emitted chuckling screams in their alarm.   Dalrosse’s head hit something hard. Then there was s blackness. In sudden excitement unconsciousness relinquished him and his hand holding onto the Orange rose lofted him up as if it could save him from drowning back in unconsciousness. Dalrosse dragged his eyes into awareness.  Slowly his purple eyes caressed the contours of bright green clad hills about him. His rose had fallen from his hand, he bent to pick it up and when he looked about him over the turquoise coloured grass he saw ahead a shallow hill where at its crest a throne sat.
The moment before morning dew splashed onto his face and his eyes blinked fiercely, he was certain he saw EmiLeah circle about the throne; jump up on it and to find a comfortable spot. When he opened his eyes instead of the cat a brown haired girl sat, she was deeply freckled in face and she smiled at the Shouel from her throne.
Overhead he could her Shaneal’s piping song and at the corner of his eye the bright swopping tumble of the kingfisher with his whistling trills- the two birds together filled this new place as if there laughter in the air.
Tentatively Dalrosse walked to the  girl on the throne.
She said. ‘Thank you for getting me home.’
‘Where are we?’
‘Strianval, I am the quaen of these little lands.’
‘Where are the roses?’
She laughed again as refreshing as a sweet pool of water. ‘There is one in your hand, yet hereabouts there is nothing like that. Where did you get it?’
Dalrosse was bewildered, he looked al about as far as he could and saw here there was only rolling heathered hills.  From the south he could hear the rumour of storm so far off that he thought he was only imagining it. When he spoke again he turned his attention back to her. She said:
‘How can I repay you for getting me home?’
‘Home? What do you mean? Who are you?’She stood proudly as if she were a tomboy vainly displaying the mud collected on her in a game of race to the hedge.
‘I…I am The Quaen EmiLeah of Strianval I told you that ages ago, but you weren’t listening. Have you forgotten me already, are all your caresses so easily garnered?’ Then her sweet laugh rang out again, she rushed from the throne and deeply hugged the Shouel. ‘Thank you I am home now.  The wind that rushes over Strianval sometimes carries me off when I dream-this time the dream led me to you.’
‘You were a cat.’
‘The Queans of Strianval are picked out almost entirely by how imaginative there dreams are.’
‘But, there were tiaga after tiaga of orange roses.’
‘As I said we Queans have fertile imaginations. When the wind takes me I usually find myself as a lost cat nobody understands. Luckily you fed me and seemed to understand me.’ She kissed him. ‘You got me home. Ma and Pa will be annoyed that I’ve gone so long. Quick tell me of what do you wish?’  Dalrosse thought silently while EmiLeah seemed to be squirming with impatience.
‘I need to reach the Masterdom of the Purple Rose.’  He said at last. EmiLeah looked at the gathering together of great clouds on the southern horizon. A flashing of bright lightening as if thrown by the Moon bleached the clouds with iciness.
‘Are you sure? You can come and have supper with us. Ma and Pa won’t mind.’
Dalrosse, though ravenous, wished that he could, but he had to carry on his journey, feel each step beneath him as true, taking him home to Lake Leme. How he yearned to see Ashenmoire again.
Once more EmiLeah kissed him and then she dashed behind her throne, out of sight towards her supper.
                                                        
                                              THE TRUTH OF THE TIDALVERSE
Chapter 32
As Marriamme’s tale came to an end, in the trees, well hidden Aflarien stood his eyes blazing with jealous hatred. She had birthed the thing that the Shouels had set against him. He knew she would suffer and he would feel such glee at her suffering. He saw the enamored look upon the psybots faces, saw a lighter look on the miens of the stoic Shouel’s, even the men of The Legein had needed sleep but Marriamme’s words had taken the need from them.  How they looked at her, the strident voice in his head bitter with envy. The memory of his body still felt Shaneal’s caresses and kisses; he hugged his arms about himself as if he were bitter with cold trying to hold her to him. She, even, had not looked at him as these people looked at Marriamme now.
He wanted to tear away from his hiding place and snap her neck, but did not. He would be patient, he would hold her broken body like a ragged witch-doll from a marketplace, a mere child’s toy thrown to the ground and forgotten. He would display her dead flesh to his enemies and say:
‘This is what I do with love.’
Soon, soon all the Shouels, the fickle psybots and the pathetic Legein his patience would end and stood still hidden like a ghost.
There was something about this place. He sniffed. The air was rank with a smell similar to the Black Rose oil that he had employed to control the unAuthor on Esplomeoir to kill Lebin. The same smell that had lifted him from his marriage bed. Despite his learning and power he also had the ability to traverse the tidalverse, yet his control was limited and at best merely experimental. Slowly though each small drops of the oil he imbued enabled to learn new things and affect his control of the tidalverse. Of course he wanted Marriamme at the last conflict with The Esierk.  He was wrenched from the softness of Shaneal’s touch and the heady calmness of Helvearn and he had found himself here. But why this place? Why now? Then he saw them Nen-Resul and Kren talking, making plans, but the longer the Anti Author eyes lingered on them he realised they were hollow within like a malfunctioning psybot a  purposeless beings, their real selves fluctuating along a steam of the tidalverse. Then he realised there was an endless open loop of one of the streams, the oil in him opened his thought to a third stream,  that cut through the loop. His senses were heightened and at once he could see all. The witch had done it. He looked along the open streams of the tidalverse. Marriamme was talking too Nen-Resul in the Legein House in Tasen, he listened intently to what they were saying. She was trying to eviscerate hope in them, telling them not to fight. It surprised him, but she was a witch and a Shouel so it did not surprise him, there was a subtle ploy in her words of despair. She had ripped a hole into a time and place that had no existence.  Where he stood in the shadowy copse of trees beside a slow stream two days march to Delgdreth, yet he saw that environment all about was false, a vivid hallucination, like an empty auditorium but for the actors endlessly rehearsing a play. By ripping open the tidalverse by taking her life she had created this world about Aflarien. Nen-Resul had compacted to a placid peace, while Aflarien hatched his plans in R’thera, and on Ashenmoire. By abandoning the Meringal, as he was left safe from Tasen, the Lord of Ashenmoire and anti Author was left free to carry out his plans for the whole of Menerth. Once more he saw the fluctuations in the tidalverse, the intricacies of its looping strands and branches veined through history. Stealthily like the thief he was with murderous glee like the maniac who owned his heart he slipped into one of the strands back to Helvearn and Shaneal half asleep in their bed.













                                                                             Chapter 33
 THESTORM.

With EmiLeah kiss- all knowledge, destination, up down, left or back, anything conceivable real- vanished.  An immense wind encompassed him.  Booming deep drum like banging deafened him, he was completely drenched, rain and hail coming from all directions. And the unknowing of what was beyond the storm that he had become part of terrified him.  He saw no sign of Schriven and Shaneal, felt no sense of them once more alone as he had always been. A hailstorm leapt up from the ground battering into Dalrosse unable to protect himself from the unrelenting pugilist.  Unable to comprehend the desecration of nature he screwed his eyes shut.  Then as impossible things were heaped upon impossible things the wind increased lifting all rules of gravity unfounded and the wind sped him tiaga after tiaga. Then abruptly let him go, he fell heavily, surprised on a low bank of the River Grule, on the border of the Masterdom of the Purple Rose. Yet still was he caught by the cacophony of rage, the storm had a dread deafening of the wind, exterminating thought. Dalrosse rose upon weak legs the wind ice jagged too soon seemed to arrow at him whipping pellets of ice, sucking life-giving sustenance from the river.  Then f
From high above the wind returned raging downwards and cast him into the thick, black mud of the river then a vast wind, rise of thunder, yet a meek thick clasp, stilling the thunder but the sky wracked a crack into the sky reaching beyond the Menerth, a noise reverberated in his head as if vast islands crashed into each other sending an endless rain of hot ice. Of Shaneal and Schriven he saw no sight. Once again darkness plunged as if stars were but memories and the Shouel was left in darkness and silence.
The storm carried him over the River Grule to the heart of the Masterdom of the Purple Rose.  He finds himself in a vast amphitheatre.  In its midst the purple Rose blooms. Wearily he took samples of the rose, yet a tumult grew out of the sand and a figure rose, an eyeless giant, well armed.  The giant cast a sword at the Shouels feet. Dalrosse did not pick it up refusing to fight and let the sword fall like a useless thing-the giant advanced three long strides, but Dalrosse stood still and the eyeless Giant’s smiles.
‘And now I will find rest again; find new soil to rest within.’ The giant said.  ‘Your bravery brings doubt into the cruelest heart to new thoughts of hope.’  The giant slid back down into the drudge of the mud of the amphitheatre and all that remained of him was a full grown, purple dappled rose bush.
The storm once more battered and blew him beyond the Masterdom and he is reunited with Shaneal and the kingfisher.
He spoke of Merve.
‘I hope ,’ Dalrosse said,  ‘That his boat steered him to the Isle of Surcease and he meets once more his love on the harbor pier and is glad lost  to love and lives to his last day in a first loves tryst.  I hope that each new day he fashions new wonders from his wood carvings with his whittle knife and while he works he lies mellow in the long glass with the love beauty brings.  I hope that he lays his lips upon his first loves face, a fairest face of golden tresses, and holds her subtle with his peaceful knife, a kiss of sweet grapes and the long, long life clenched into one another and such softness of kisses. Yes. I hope it is so.’  Shaneal, exhausted burrows under the kingfishers wing.  Dalrosse whispers.’ I hope it so, I hope it so.’ Shaneal and Schriven are asleep cuddling beside him.
Then Dalrosse is visited by the Angel:
‘This last road is your road yours alone, see each of the Roses, all sprang from the soil, garnered from sap of the black rose, as Ashenmoire grew from the Tears of Drendunde and Astor grew from the tears of the world and so from you, for you as were they the Gardener, designing nature, nurturing life. The Roses you have gathered have awaited you, waited for you, summoned you, to feel the Gardener about them again.  So touch each of them. Think again of kada, once more make the Morning Prayer and these five will join, entwine within- mingling altogether their power.  The red rose of love and loss, the white rose of forgetfulness and forgiveness, the blue rose to heal all hearts, the orange rose that is limitless, strength filled, iron willed and the purple rose the power of the Creator who lays his fingerprint so none forget. Touch each one and let them grow within you until you are The Rose that yearns always to return to Ashenmoire. Say kada and when you lift back from your knees, beckoned by the daylight hold firm the image of the Black Rose healed, whole, a beacon for all those on Menerth.  Then as they day grows bright its energy will send you to Ashenmoire, calling you. And you will stand full brimmed with green sap within the Hollow of Armoroth. Do as I say for I am finished now, go alone, these sleeping friends leave to rest. They have aided you and taught you who you are. And with last syllable of kada you must free yourself of them.  For you are the Gardener and deigned to live in solitude with the Black Rose. Speak kada and it is done.  Know that when Drendunde wept he created this world, that Astor made the grass laugh, the tree’s giggle and the mountains roar with laughter.  As for you, Dalrosse, it will be your heart song that alters the world, the five roses within you have perfected your song, every pore of your body will sing it, send out its power with a mere touch of your voice. And the deep roots of the Black Rose will rejoice and grow as once it grew and the rose will hear your voice and wake from its long, long sleep. Do not be sad that you remain alone with the Rose, for before the end of your long vigil it will grant your dearest wish and you will dance in the sand with Shaneal and Aflarien on the shores of the Lake. Know that when you tend and nurture the Black Rose and heal Menerth from strife you will know the difference between loneliness and solitude.  For solitude does not leave you bereft, or abandoned, solitude does not forget all that you are, but brings bright moments, filled with flowers in the long grass and brings forth new blooms and memories of all who have loved you. Drendunde’s tears will water the song in you.  There Dalrosse the music of your thoughts accompany you through you vigil and sing on although you sleep at last, in the Hollow, under the shade of the Rose. This song of solace will play on the winds of Ashenmoire, blow in the hearts of the peoples, and linger over all the lands.  And should the world change and the Rose fall back into slumber your song will remain, a gift of solace from a world they never knew, the song of the Gardener calling out from the roots of Ashenmoire. To those who will return there and take the place you left, that one will kneel in the hollow there and sing a nurturing song to the sleeping rose, singing your song that remains on the wind and crashes on the waves of the shore and this new gardener will hear the call of world and in his way whether with song or tears or laughter, or a mix of all in a story sent from the bright star and a whisper on the wind- a story to calm the cries of Menerth, the story of the gardeners and the hope that remains.’