Interlude
The small room in the bar at the edge of civilization was cramped, damp, and covered in a perpetual haze, as is usually the case for such an establishment. A tankard slammed into the table, frothy mead spilling into pools on the already greasy wood.
Grayed and stooped like a weathered tree on a stormy mountain, the woman was anything but good-looking, her thin hair hanging in oily tatters. Oblivious to the poor tankard in her grip, she flailed, eyes blazing like a magician calling down lightning from a clear blue sky. But never did she
yell; her words filled the room from wall to wall as easily as the air itself. Her voice sounded like freshly fallen snow, yet it prowled through your chest like distant thunder. This woman knew the art of making a whisper roar.
“How dull, how unimaginative!” she spat, but there was a hungry joy in the corner of her mouth that betrayed her before it set into a hard line. “There’re no dragons or witches or magic. Pah! Child’s play. No, the tale of Ayursha is so much more. Ever-present. Never-where. Has it fallen into legend? Sure. A nursery rhyme to instill fear in the hearts of bairn. A story that never dies, but ripples, transforms, twists, breaks… Whispered in shadows, in ashes and ruins of long-dead worlds, written in the blood of fallen men. You do well to remember: All stories are false. And all stories are true.”
The sudden roar of laughter had the patrons glaring daggers at a group of newcomers squeezed around a table in the back. The younglings ducked their heads behind their pints, muffling their sniggers. Which can be a difficult thing, indeed, if the drink is sound enough. With a humph, the bard lifted her chin.
“Would you care to fill in?” she asked them. “To tell us about Agartha? About the Guardians? Be my guest.”
The pause was dramatic. She was, after all, a performer through and through. The stage was her breath. By simple means, she could make an audience cry, laugh, or scream with rage. Sometimes all at once. A shift in position here, a well-timed frown there, and they were in the palm of her hand.
Receiving no reply, as she knew she would not, she let her expression darken, shifting her gaze into a faraway look; the kind old folk get after a rough life on the road.
“All right then. It began, if one can call it a beginning, on a lonely planet circling the oldest star in the known ‘verse. A step away to the right and through the Veil, a city lay, sprawled across lands now sunk and forgotten, burrowing deep below, conquering the very heavens themselves. Far fairer than a summer’s day, harsher than the Oort on apex turned…” the old bard trailed off and stared in utter disgust at her empty tankard.
She didn’t resume speaking until they put another pint in front of her. While the audience waited with bated breath, the pint was half gone before she blinked in the firelight.
“Where was I? Oh, yes. The City of the Living Fires. That’s what they called it, the bards who came upon it. Some came away with songs, most out of sorts. So, there it was - the city that raised a mighty race, watched it grow and head into the great voids between the realms and settle roots where not even the gods will go. The Akati made themselves known. A force to reckon with. To count on. To believe in. To fear.”
She drew a hand over her brow, itching at a spot behind the left ear. “Hubris. Hubris is the downfall of the arrogant, seeding paths from which none of us will ever return. But enough of that. Let’s talk of gods. Of Ayursha, the Fatestitcher. The Ethereal Tree that graced the flying city of Agartha.”
The bard paused, nodding to herself, smiling at the strangled noises and grumbles. She shrugged by way of saying she was not responsible for how the story went. “As the new silver moon shone high above, a seed fell from the sky upon a piece of soil and grew overnight into a thing so like a tree it was almost alive. More than alive. It called to them, the four chancing upon her rebirth, and from her leaves four stones dropped into the world from golden threads as if through a silken veil which quaked, rippled, and broke.”
For a moment the raggedy performer was lost in thought, a glimmer of fear in the tightness of her grip on the tankard. “Upon their touch, those cursed Orbs awoke, linking them forevermore to the very force of the ‘verse itself - to the Veil between realms when it still held. Those four were the first of the Guardians of Ayursha. Alura of Time. Eio of Worlds. Fahrain of Chaos. And Feya Kalar, the brightest among them, became the Guardian of Fate, for she alone could spin the Weave.”
“What’s that?” a serving girl of barely fourteen piped up.
“It is the threads that hold the fabric of reality together. It is the reason you are alive, the reason you breathe, the reason you remember. It is time, the stars, and the void between. But that’s another story, my dear,” the bard replied with a sardonic smile.
The patrons chuckled and the place settled into a comfortable attentiveness.
“I was just asking,” the girl whispered in defense of her boss’s hushes.
But the bard had lost her thoughts. Her frame tenser than before, though she had moved not one inch. At once, it seemed as if the bar was cold and airless, dimmer. When she spoke, there was nothing jovial left in the lines of her face.
“Rumor has it when the world faces its darkest night and hope has fled to brighter days,” the old woman said, her ragged features grim and terrible. “The veil between the realms will turn in on itself until the stars become figures moving through the voids. And where the Old Guard goes, death surely follows, for they are the darkness where nothing lives.”
“What’s an Old Guard?” Someone called out in a husky voice.
Their mate gawked. “Are you serious? Ask the Terrans,” he said with a shudder.
“Terra is nothing but crumbles and pebbles,” another protested.
“Ever wondered why?” The mate asked. The silence lay heavy as it sank in.
The bard remained silent till she held their uneasy attention once more. When she spoke, her voice was haunted. “The Eight… May their shadow never fall upon our day. Though prophecies about them go further back than memory itself, and few can say; I have met them once and got away.”
One could feel the air thicken. “You want to know their names? Know the hunters of old? Know then the Prince of Lies and She Who Carries Stars in Her Eyes. Know the Heartless Fool Who Walks in Snow and the Named One. Know She Who Bears the Shadow’s Bane and the Twinned Twain. Pray you never meet the Mad One on the road, for your soul will then never be your own.”
There was nothing humorous about the bard’s laugh. The door pulled open just enough to make the candles flicker. Whoever it was moved silently so as not to disturb the crowd inside, who were all staring at the raggedy bard sitting on a stool gazing into her tankard as if it held all the answers.
“What happens then?” the serving girl asked with a trembling voice, though her hands remained as steady as ever. She threw a defiant look at her boss.
“I am a bard, my dear, not a seer. The prophecies fell into the realm of fancy stories and fairy tales, much like this one. As for the City of the Living Fires, it is no secret. We know their stories. We are them. We live in the ruins of their megalomania and hubris.”
“But if there was a veil between the realms,” the girl said, a flush creeping into her cheeks, “how can we be so certain that the Old Guard aren’t just… putting things right? How do we know that our lives, our memories, are the real ones?”
“Quiet, girl!” the man behind the bar snapped. “Apologies, m’am, she’s…”
But the bard held up a hand to silence him and looked at the girl with an expression caught between confusion and amusement, and something else entirely. “You don’t, my dear. You live, you drink, you make gorgeous love, go to bed, and do it all again. For who’s to say that untrue isn’t real?”
At that there was a roar of laughter and scattered hear, hears when tankards met with dull clinks and hearty cheers. The bard wiggled a finger at the proprietor. “And you—I am no m’am, thank you!”
“I have another question,” the girl said, replacing the tankard before the old woman.
The bard smirked at the barman’s groan, but no one else seemed to mind. “Naturally, dear. Spit it out.”
“Is it true? That the Elder of Agartha broke the world?”
The old woman paused mid-sip. “Wherever have you heard that?”
“A teacher at school,” the girl shrugged, seemingly oblivious to the bard’s reaction.
The pause was long and not just because it was so odd to the old woman that there were still schools around, times being what they were and all.
“Yes.”
A hooded figure leaning against the wall started, turning towards the bard with unwavering eyes, drawing everyone’s brief attention. No one had noticed her arrival, and no one saw her leave, but everyone that night would swear she had been one of the mythical Old Guard.
Her hair was jet black and her eyes... Her eyes were eerily translucent, filled with stars. The silence that fell was one the bar had seldom heard. Thundering like a vacuum in her presence. And then the bard spoke.
“Whoever here has heard of the Tale of the Voice and the Veil, raise your glass and drink deep. For this is the story of Elmira Delid.”
