Thursday, December 13, 2018

The First High King

Here's a little story about the first Rev Liesseassar, and how he came to wield the Fimbetamur. Dingus is telling it to Vandis for the first time.



Once upon a time, so long ago nobody can count the years, no High King sat guard at the Way’s Opening, which the People call Shirith. Back then the land was a lot like it is now, a broad waste of smoke and ash, with air that would poison anyone who stayed too long. At the center stood ridges of mountains, tall and black, and the heart was the tallest of all, the High Fire Mountain herself. Fimberevell, they called her, and she spat molten rock and fumed out dark clouds that kept sunlight from touching the Mother’s face. Only a desperate man could look at that land and think it was a good place to settle. Only Bearach of the Nenastan could think it was better than what he had.

What he had was nothing but mouths. He and all the Nenastan had got their land pulled out from beneath their feet just that spring, and they’d grown hungry and tired of wandering place to place, finding tribes everywhere they went. They’d had to fight to fill their stomachs, and run from fights with nothing to show for their dead, and by the time they got to the edge of Fimberevell’s land there was nowhere left to go, nowhere at all. They pressed on and on, but even without crossing the mountains into the dark land, people started dropping in their tracks from the volcanic stink, dead as if they’d been stabbed through the heart, dead, dead.

Finally Bearach said he would go in, and see if there wasn’t a solution somewhere to their problems. "Maybe," he said, "there’s a spirit of some kind I can appease, or maybe there’s something the mountains want that I can give."

“And what if it’s your life?" asked Fialt, the tribe’s priest. "What then? Don’t go." But Bearach shook his head. He’d go no matter what anybody said, and he did. Early one morning, when overnight they’d lost three children to the volcano’s gases, he got up before everyone but the grieving parents and tied a wet rag over his mouth. He took two skins of their precious water and set off into the waste.

Bearach didn’t get far before he was filthy and gasping, but he didn’t stop. He didn’t stop when his lungs burned and his legs buckled beneath him. He drank water and went on under skies black with Fimberevell’s rage, under lightning-clouds flickering and flashing, under rains that made his skin itch and sizzle. The closer he got to the High Fire Mountain, the more difficult his passage was, until he was crawling, dying, dying.

“Help me," he gasped, thin, with the last of his breath. "If you’re there, help me. I want to help you." Then he lay still. He couldn’t move anymore; he couldn’t catch his wind, no matter how he tried. He shut his eyes with an airless sigh of pain. He would give anything to save his people, but he’d given everything and come up empty-handed.

As he lay there suffocating he thought he heard a little child calling to him, "Bearach… Bearach…"

When he opened his eyes he saw a girl all made of glowing stone, and her long loose hair streaming smoke. "You’re killing me," he said, in his mind, wishing he could speak out loud.

The girl reached down and touched his forehead. Fire seemed to break over him there, and he screamed.

“Why did you come here, Bearach?" she said. "You know I can kill you without even trying."

He found he could breathe, and spoke. "There might’ve been a chance. You never know."

But the girl shook her head. "There wasn’t."

“Isn’t that what life’s about?" he asked her. "The might-have-beens. The almost-theres. That’s what makes a life; what it isn’t as much as what it is. People will talk of me and say that I tried, and that’s enough for my story."

“She looked away from him, out toward where the sea boiled from her anger. "And what,” she said, "what if there was a chance?"

“Then," said Bearach, "I would do anything. I would even bind my fate to yours, and the fate of my children, and my people. Let’s make a bargain," he said, inspired. "I’ll be your hand, and my children after me. And you’ll be my hand, and the hand of my children, for ever and always. You’ll never be forsaken."

The girl didn’t say anything, but she reached down and took Bearach’s hand in both of hers. He shouted again, with agony and joy both ringing in his voice, and knew nothing.

The next time he opened his eyes, it was to a gull’s cry. The bird winged free through the clear blue heavens, and he understood. The Mother’s face trembled beneath his steps as he walked down the mountainside and up the next, and he waved the stump of his right arm to his people, and shouted down to them; and that’s the story of the first High King.

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