In youth
they had moved across the great plains of the Sel Jermai with their airy
freedom of the clouds themselves. No obstacle had stood insurmountable, and
all the troubles that plagued other lands of Khaldun were as distant as the
earth is to the sky. Then I had come, as one had come for me in my youth,
leaving the harsh lands of the Waste and journeying to the distant plains.
These Haroun, my own people, were as foreign to me as the Drauga. My values
had been warped by my Guardianship. I could not, dared not, try to
recapture the frivolity these children knew.
The
Jermaian elders knew why I had come and yielded their children to me. Seven
times seven youths, beautiful and full of life, twenty-five female,
twenty-four male. I made the fiftieth. We fifty marched back to the Waste,
where I anointed them and introduced them to the secrets of the Guardians.
To the ways of battle and the songs that awaken the wind and call down
lighting. I taught them to dance beneath storms and run through the mist,
to feel the stone beneath their feet and watch the moon above. All these
rituals I gave them.
And now
my children lie dying.
The
Burning Ones spoke of a great darkness gathering over the world. Their
foresight revealed only cataclysmic disaster for Khaldun. Then the Pool
over which we were made Guardians began to churn. Its power to corrupt and
to draw to it all manner of evil knows no bound. We now fight not only
enemies from without, but also our own brothers, turned to the Shadow by the
call of the Pool.
This
second Age is ending.
My
children and I had come to the Pool to destroy the creatures that were
coming from its depths. Instead, we were routed. Now, the corpses of those
who once ran in Sel Jermai make soldiers in the armies of our enemy, the
Fallen Saadya Ahriman. The Burning Ones say that the Kohan will soon join
the battle. That some have fallen to Ahriman’s sway and shall fight under
his black banner. That others will hold true to the Light.
It will
be the first Great War, we are told. But not the last.
All of
that stands in the future. The present is filled only with my guilt, with
the echoed remembrance of my children’s battle-cries and dying gasps. I had
brought them here for a sacred mission, bestowed upon us at the beginning of
time itself. So I thought. In truth, I brought them here to die.
If they
have found freedom in death’s land, then I shall find it there with them.
The dawn comes, and with it, we survivors will try once more to take the
Pool. May the Creator speed us to his side.
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