House Varalei

The two armies clash outside a dilapidated town surrounded by a low stone wall. Banners of House Varalei, rulers of Gnufinlun, advance on the stone wall, forcing their increasingly desperate hereditary enemies, House Ydroil of Olfinlun, into a retreat. With snarls, the Varaleian foot soldiers strike down straggling Ydroilans, while Varaleian lances regroup at the flank to continue the assault on the retreating infantry. Ydroilan archers behind the ancient stone wall fire down on the advance, but scattered, the retreat is crumpled by a cavalry charge, and soon Varaleian infantry are mounting the waist high wall and slaying the defenseless archers. You watch the battle unfold from atop a snorting black stallion, clad in imperious armor embossed with the sigils of your house. You breathe easy, the tension in your chest absent in this vision.

“Varalei stands the victor today!” you shout, kneeing the horse to a trot as you approach the captured stone wall. Shouts of jubilation shower your arrival on the scene. Before you, the town is defenseless, the remaining Ydroilan soldiers retreating in between poor buildings down muddy roads.

You feel yourself drawing a longsword from its scabbard at your waist. You point it dramatically towards the town.

“This pitiful warren is your reward tonight! But tomorrow—” you move the sword to point east by northeast, and there are already cheers, “your reward will be Moat Barenar!”

The roar of the fighting men is deafening, and already many of them run to descend on the town like locusts. Sheathing your sword, you turn from the sight as a thatched roof nearby goes up in flames to hooting and whooping.

Another rider pulls their white and gray horse alongside you.

“Good work with the van, Ardryll,” you say flatly.

“Good work looking pretty, brother,” the younger man says, his helmet’s visor tilted up to reveal his wide grin, spattered with mud and blood.

“A king does not have the privilege of placing himself on the frontline. Princes are more disposable,” you say with a snarl passing as a grin, “besides, the real battle starts tomorrow.”

✧✧✧✧✧

Sat at the top of a ridge overlooking rolling hills and a fast river, the only approach to Moat Barenar is mediated by a steep climb up to the ridgeline and then across the moat to the fortress itself. It was an ugly, squat castle, but it, and not the city Ydroigan, was where the Ydroil of Olfinlun had decided to make their last stand, and for good reason. For generations, war had raged between Ydroil and Varalei, and for generations those wars had ended either at the doorstep of Moat Barenar or The Stone. The advancing army, sure of victory, having ruthlessly captured the towns and smaller castles throughout the land, with overwhelming advantage in numbers, or strategy, or supply, would wage a fruitless battle against a smaller force holding the twin fortresses. The siege always ended in stalemate, with the attacking army exhausting itself against the defense, returning to its ancestral lands to await for the next conflict.

“Today, the moat falls,” your dry throat rasps. You breath is heavy, but steady.

Ardryll shifts uncomfortably to your right. To your left, a wizened woman wearing a robe of patched leather chuckles, saying,

“Aye, good lord. Today your House earns its revenge.”

“Cast your foul magic and be done with it, then, witch,” you respond harshly.

“You must give blood, you must swear the price will be paid, good lord.”

Impatiently, you unbuckle your gauntlet, freeing your left hand. Drawing a dagger from your belt, you slice it along your palm, and squeeze, letting the blood trickle out, dripping onto the dry grass.

“There, witch.”

“Swear it, fully.”

You glance at Ardryll, who looks away nervously.

“The light and life of my firstborn is yours. I will make no claim to the babe.”

The witch smiles deeply, and begins to mutter in some infernal tongue, contorting her hands. You watch, feeling your chest slowly begin to tighten as the red blood dripping from your palm becomes a sticky black, and begins falling into a pool of shadow at your feet. More quickly than a hare, the shadow darts out, arcing across the grass and up the ridge, towards Moat Barenar. Ardryll mounts his white and gray horse, and sets his helmet’s visor down.

“You will need to act rapidly, lest the shadow grow overwhelming, good lord. Act while the defenders are distracted.”

“Quiet, woman,” you hear your father’s voice growl. You hold your hand up, and then motion Ardryll forward. Following the charge up the climb towards the fortress, you begin to see shadows moving along the battlements, fighting with horrified Ydroilan soldiers. Abandoning their posts, the defenders fight nameless enemies within their own walls. Ardryll leads a grim battalion of soldiers up and across the Moat, landing siege ladders along the fortress walls. You follow in his wake, until Varaleian soldiers stand atop Moat Barenar for the first time.

Scaling the siege ladders after your brother, you arrive at the top of the walls in time to see chaos unfolding in the courtyards below. Soldiers, refugees, and Ydroilan nobility scramble or bolt or stagger across a scene from living nightmares, shadows with torn and screaming faces that catch, consume, and appear to turn life into unlife around them. Each Ydroilan that falls soon rises as a shade to stalk out their former countrymen. Your Varaleian warriors, controlling the walls of the keep, appear unsure how to proceed. The tightness in your chest deepens.

“For House Varalei! For Gnufinlundia! Rid this place of Ydroilan and shade alike!” You hear yourself yelling, and rallying to your call, your warriors descend upon the chaos like beasts out of hell. Cleaving through shade and Ydroilan alike, setting into a fury of death and destruction, the battle rages through the halls and courtyards of this once formidable keep. You walk through the hallways of Moat Barenar, occasionally running a fleeing soldier through with your longsword, mutters to yourself about your father, and his father’s father’s, the tightness in your chest growing.

Ardryll stumbles through an adjacent door, two shades grappling him and bringing him to the ground of the fortress hallway with a clatter. You snarl, and rush to aid your brother. Seeing the shadows up close, for the first time, brings you screeching to a halt a pace away from your struggling brother. The shades scream, not aloud but as if projecting their horror into the back of your mind, the sound growing louder as you approach. They contort, their faces a mix of torn flesh and darkness and exposed bone. They shift shape and form, roiling between clouds of dark ash and dust into inky water and vapor. Their faces change too, moving between the shapes of skulls and snarling wolves and their former selves, but always with one throughline. Your own face, appearing from beneath the surface only to be subsumed into the broiling tumult again, to reappear a moment later as the shade shifts, always screaming.

Ardryll grunts as one of the shades slams his helmeted head on the flagstone. You snap out of your shock, swinging your longsword at the nearest of the two shadows. The sword slams into the darkness like sinking into a block of wet clay, but the shade staggers back, and with another stroke you remove the shifting head from its shoulders, just as you recognize you own expression beginning to re-materialize there. Head swimming, you spin to swing on the shade sitting gleefully atop Adryll’s chest, slamming his helmeted head repeatedly on the ground. Another swing destroys the demon, its “body” falling from atop Ardryll to pool in the cracks between flagstones, before evaporating.

✧✧✧✧✧

“Itham, while I am delighted at your offer, it is reckless to give these memories up given your position as King of Gnufinlun,” says Gyllandrel, standing before you as a lithe man, whose face is blurred beyond recognition. You sit in a secluded copse of willow trees an hour’s ride from The Stone, and butterflies seem to flock to the Faceless Man, landing in his hair and along his shoulders and outstretched arm.

You feel your father swallow with some difficulty.

“I need to be rid of them. I… it is difficult to sleep. My dreams are consumed by fire and… and their screams. Even when I wake, I can still hear their screams echoing," you say.

"Itham, for your brother this loss was, is of no consequence. You, on the other hand… To rule not knowing the consequences of your actions is foolhardy, to say the least. What, when the Ydroilans return to exact their revenge, will you be able to do, if you cannot remember the devastation you have inflicted on them? You would rid yourself of a serious advantage, the knowledge of beating them once before," says Gyllandrel, but his foggy face seems hungry.

"I ended the sick bloodline of House Ydroil," you mutter, "ended it for good. There is no more revenge."

"That may be, but King Ydroil was rather promiscuous— well, if you will not be persuaded," Gyllandrel shrugs, lofting a silvery flower towards you between two lithe fingers.

✧✧✧✧✧

The last shades scamper behind the doors of a large bedroom at the center of the keep. Your heavy armored boots clang on the cobblestones as you march down the hallway towards the broad oak door engraved in the Ydroilan crest: a helmeted sealion. There is silence, except for the panting of your warriors, recovering from the fight, and the scraping of furniture being barricaded against the bedroom door.

"Find me a torch," you hear your own voice rumble. The tightness in your chest is strained with the pounding of your heart, your jaw is hardset.

A man in a Varalei cloak steps up with a brand of flickering flame held aloft.

"Check the perimeter. Find the other exits and block them too," you say grimly.

Warriors nod and rush to do your bidding. The scraping behind the oak door slowly stops.

You feel yourself stepping towards the door with the torch in your hand. Screaming internally to stop, the tension in your chest mounting, but unable to halt your father's steps, you move closer to the oak door. Pressing an ear to the oak, you hear the same echoing screams of the shadows in the back of your mind, but you hear whimpers and crying too.

"Foul magic," your father mutters under his breath, clutching at his heart with one hand while holding the torch in the other, "foul and deceptive and indecent. I will have that crone hanged for this. I did not ask for this horror, I did not!"

You feel your arm, like lead, swing the torch limply down to press against the oak. The aged and lacquered wood hisses and spits as it begins to sear, then it pops and crackles and spits black smoke as it catches. Still your father's hand presses the torch, until the haft of the fiery brand is pressed through on to the barricade of flammable furniture behind.

The echoing screams intensify, the shadows being banished by the flames as easily as they were by the sword. But soon real, throaty screams adjoin the shade's wails. Soon cries for mercy and frantic pleading can be heard, and as the smoldering black smoke now roils along the hallway, and your soldiers turn away coughing, you can hear sobbing and hacking and wheezing from within the chamber.

Ardryll, a bandage wrapped around his head, rushes up to you, shouting,

"Itham, what is this?! What are you doing, man?! This is madness!"

"I am killing shades," your father says flatly.

✧✧✧✧✧

So Itham gave up his greatest victory, and his evilest deed. I do not need to remind you of how his treatment of the Ydroilan heirs ended, for you suffered the consequences of his cruelty. A wedding planned to unite the Sunken Isle, a betrayal twenty five years in the making. The fall of House Varalei, your escape, and exile. The sins of the father… well.

But your father was not the only member of House Varalei to visit me.

✧✧✧✧✧

Pain. Unimaginable pain. Blinding pain. Your vision is white, tears digging canals down your tender cheeks. They have given you a strip of bark to clamp beneath your teeth, but its faint anesthesia has long since vanished, and it serves now only to prevent you from chewing through your own tongue.

In a moment, the pain is less. Your screams halter, and become body-wracking sobs. There is silence from the women gathered around, and the head midwife cradles an unmoving mass in her hands. Your vision is white at the edges, and blurry in the center, but you can hear no cries, no gurgling, no cheers or awe from the women in waiting, the midwife clutching your arm.

The only two men in the room, your husband and the knight standing guard at the door, are silent also. Where the knight, Gurney, looks concerned, your husband looks horrified. His lips are twisted in disgust and his face is screwed up in a mixture of displeasure and… is that fear? remorse?

You turn, your vision returning, to see the umbilical cord wrapped like a noose about your stillborn daughter's neck.

✧✧✧✧✧

You stand before the Faceless Man in one of the many hidden courtyards of The Stone, the solemn, diligent hedge knight at your side. He agreed to give up his memory of that night, of Desta's birth, of your plea, and the Storm's gift, too.

Gurney looks warily down at the reflective flower held beneath his chin and asks Gyllandrel simply,

"Will I still remember she's special? I have spent my entire life searching for something worth protecting."

"You will remember that much at least, for that belief is in your heart, which my magic cannot touch, gentle knight," the Faceless Man says warmly.

Then Gyllandrel is turned towards you.

✧✧✧✧✧

The wind along the castle walls forces you to your knees as you struggle from the doorway out onto the battlement. Your armor clatters as you crawl along your hands and knees out into the gale, the storm erupting into light as lightning and thunder explodes about you. You look up, and before the white glow of the crackling storm fades, you see your Queen silhouetted against the roiling sky. She is clutching the stillborn babe, screaming out at the cracked and breaking darkness.

The slick stones of the castle battlements prevent you from racing to her aid, but you continue stumbling forward through the howling tumult. As a torrential rain begins to fall, you become drenched as water rolls along your armor. The Queen’s robes are still flowing around her, as if untouched by the rain.

You can barely hear Queen Nyanna's shouts over the roaring of the turbulent ocean and the gale, but you hear anguish in her voice as she raises the child to the sky, as if to drop it over the wall.

"No!" you shout, but the cry is lost in a deafening explosion of lightning in front of the Queen that knocks you backwards onto your back. Head reeling, vision swimming, you look upwards to see a massive hand reach for the upheld child.

✧✧✧✧✧

The clang of clashing swords echoes through the halls of The Stone as guests flee disguised assailants. There is no shining armor, or knickering warhorses, or lances here. You feel deeply out of your depth. Drawing your decorative longsword from your scabbard, you leap to the defense of two distant relatives, beset upon by three knaves dressed as party goers. Your steel flashes, drawing blood from one, but already the other two have stabbed your third cousin, once removed, through the eye. The familiar scent of iron and sweat fill your nostrils. Dispatching the attackers, you leave your cousin in a pool of blood, rushing up a staircase and out onto one of the inner walls of The Stone.

“Prince Ardryll!”

You turn to see a spearman, captain of the guard, jog across the wall to you. He is nursing a deep gash in his left bicep, and has a bruise blooming across his face.

“My Lord,” he gasps, reaching you and steadying himself on the wall.

“What is it, man?” you half-shout. Your voice, the melodious, evergreen tenor of Uncle Adryll, devoid now of its charm.

“They’ve opened the gates and dropped the western drawbridge. Some made their way in through the sewers. The Stone will fall, my Lord.”

Over the wall, you can see Ydroilan soldiers streaming across a drawbridge into one of the many courtyards of The Stone, upturning banquet tables and scattering wounded wedding attendees.

“Where is Princess Desta?” you say, filling with panic.

“Gone, my Lord, the Hedge Knight took her,” the captain says, breathlessly. His face is draining of color, and you notice another, deeper wound along his thigh.

“Gather the men who live and retreat to the inner keep, captain.”

✧✧✧✧✧

“Find me Gyllandrel, gentle Ser,” you whisper, caressing the Hedge Knight’s neck. His face is sharp, but his gentle eyes look confused.

“My Lady,” he says in a hushed murmur, “what need have you of that mage?”

“A grave and urgent need, Ser,” you say, laying your head against his rough-spun tunic. Around you, in one of the secluded gardens deep within The Stone, the croaking of the pond frogs and the chirping of small decorative birds alights the garden with whimsy. Your heart feels heavy.

“Gurney, I cannot look upon my daughter without seeing her as she first came into the world, I—” but the kind knight cuts you off, saying,

“I understand, Lady.”

“I do not think you do,” you murmur, your hand around his arm. You pull the knight closer, and whisper,

“She is everything a daughter should be, and she will be a better Queen than I. I want to see her for what she is, what the storm has made her. I want to forget what she was. I want to stop seeing a rope about her when I dream,” you shudder, taking a long pause to breathe slowly. The knight does not interrupt.

“I see terrible visions of her when I dream, Gurney. Terrible things, and I cannot tell whether they are being done to my daughter or by her. I cannot know whether it was right to ask the Stormfathers to save her, or whether, in meddling with fate I have brought some greater doom upon my daughter. I know, I know in my heart, she will be a just Queen and a good woman, a strong and gentle and kind heart. You’ve seen her these past years, how good she is—”

“Aye, I have—”

“I want to see only that, Gurney. Only ever that.”

The knight pulls your arms from around him, and places his hands around yours, resting on your heart.

“I will find the wizard Gyllandrel, Nyanna,” and as he speaks your name, your breath catches in your throat.

“Do not presume too much, gentle Gurney,” you laugh, and you see his wide smile overshadow the beauty of the garden, if only for a moment, before his face lapses into concern and apprehension.

✧✧✧✧✧

You thud down the twisting staircase, torch spilling flickering golden light along the slippery rock of the sewer system deep beneath The Stone. Your vision is foggy, and you can feel the gashes and bruises twinge and pulse as you wearily make your way towards the sounds of the sea.

“Damn that traitorous Hedge Knight,” you mutter, grunting as your wounded foot slips a few steps worn smooth by saltwater and sludge.

“Damn the Ydroilans, damn that witch, damn that Faceless prick, damn my brother!” you shout, defiantly, into the empty sewer. Ser Gurney would have taken the girl here, you feel yourself thinking.

“He would have taken her here to sell her off to those cowardly Ydroilan scum,” you spit, slipping again as your knees buckle. The wound in your side turns your vision white, as you feel warm sticky blood paste your ruined wedding tunics to your torn skin.

You come to the bottom of the stair, and the spray of the sea greets you. There is a small fleet of fishing boats and rowboats here, the armada of vermin that must have snuck their way into the castle to open the gates, once the fighting began. The boats are tied off against each other, some run aground to prevent them from washing out to sea. Only two men, both as young as fifteen, remain here to guard them.

You toss your torch onto the ground, and they look up from their game of dice nervously. They stumble to their feet, drawing short, viscous swords.

“Where is that traitorous knight?!” you roar, brandishing your longsword.

The two young men look at each other, confused. Then one blinks, saying,

“We let a man in Ydroilan garb take a small girl out on a boat. He said she was a captive of the royal house, some distant relative of the New King,” the pimply boy admits. The other nods, saying,

"He was taking a relative of the King to safety, out of battle."

You gather the residual blood from your mouth in a glob of spit, and fling it onto the floor in between you and the men.

“I’ll be needing one of those boats, then,” you growl dangerously.

They straighten up and seem to notice the Varaleian sigils embroidered on your breast, emblazoned on your sword hilt.

You charge, disarming the left guard with a well placed flick of your sword arm, turning to plant an elbow in the right’s face. Both grunt, and you drive your blade through the neck of the disarmed man. His eyes widen, and his mouth opens in a bloom of red, before you whip the sword from his throat to meet the meek swing of the second. You batter his sword in a flash of strikes, intending to numb his sword arm. Two overhand blows knock the blade from his grip and crush his clavicle. You stomp at the man’s knee, and he topples backwards, crying out in pain, writhing against the rocky shore. You drive the point of your blade through his eye, ceasing the protestations.

Gathering yourself into a rowboat, you begin to paddle yourself out to sea.

✧✧✧✧✧

The Faceless man cocks his head as you speak your request. Gurney sits on a bench, a few feet away, cradling his temples as if suffering from a strong headache.

“Nyanna, you would deny your own daughter the truth. Her own origin, her own strength. You would hide these from her, perhaps forever. The day will come when this girl needs her strength,” the mage says, as if stating fact.

“She will be a great Queen, and she will not suffer,” you whisper, unconvincingly.

“Very well,” the blurred face says cooly. It argued as if to change your mind, but always, there was a hunger there within the blurred and ever changing expression. Now there is satisfaction, as it lifts a brilliantly reflecting flower to your nose.