A Banner Torn (Book 1 Complete)

Kaelid:

The great stone gates of High-pass receded behind them, the cacophony of its streets gradually fading to a muted hum, then silence, replaced by the rhythmic creak of wagon wheels and the steady plod of hooves. The air tasted cleaner out here, tinged with the scent of pine and damp earth from the recent rains. He walked beside their allotted wagon, the familiar weight of his pack comforting, the new leather thong of his crystal necklace cool against his skin. Three days, Aelrik the caravan master had said, to reach the familiar forests that bordered Aldermere. Three days that stretched before him, filled with a quiet anticipation that had little to do with returning home.

The second day of their journey dawned clear and cool. The caravan maintained its steady pace, and the rhythm of travel settled deeper into his bones. During a long midday halt, while the animals were watered and grazed in a meadow bright with late-season wildflowers, He and Rannek found a quiet spot away from the main bustle of the caravan. He pulled out the journal, its smooth cover already feeling familiar and comforting in his hands.

"Let's see what else it knows," Rannek said eagerly, already rummaging in his pockets. He produced a collection of items: a curiously shaped grey stone, a shed bird feather of iridescent blue, and a small, tarnished copper coin he'd found near their previous night's camp.

They took turns. He placed the grey stone on a blank page. Silver script flowed, identifying it as a piece of flint, noting its conchoidal fractures and its historical use for tool-making and fire-starting. Rannek's blue feather was next. The journal described it as belonging to a Sky-Dart Finch, a migratory bird known for its swift, erratic flight, and even detailed the microscopic structures that gave the feather its shimmering color. The tarnished coin, the journal explained, was an old trade token from a northern barony, its copper content high, its markings nearly worn away by time and handling.

He was fascinated. Each object, no matter how mundane, held a story the journal could unlock. It was like peeling back layers of the world to see the intricate workings beneath. He thought of the library, its vast, silent knowledge, and how this small book was a tiny, portable piece of that immensity.

Then, Rannek had an idea. "What about these?" he asked, touching the Petrakharn heart-stone necklace at his throat. Kaelid felt his own crystal, a familiar warmth against his skin. He'd wondered the same thing.

"Let's try yours first," he suggested. Rannek carefully unfastened his necklace and laid the dark, subtly glowing shard on an open page of the journal. They both leaned in, expectant.

The journal responded, but not in the clear, concise way it had with the other items. The silver script began to flow, but it was different, more complex. The lines swirled and eddied, forming intricate, almost impossibly dense patterns rather than legible words. Some symbols flashed with an internal light, then dissolved, replaced by others that seemed to shift and change shape even as they watched. It was like looking at a map of a city that was constantly rebuilding itself, or trying to read a language made of flowing water and smoke.

"What's it saying?" Rannek whispered, his brow furrowed in concentration. "I can't… make it out."

He couldn't either. He felt a sense of immense complexity, a depth of information that the journal was struggling to translate into a form they could understand. It wasn't that the journal didn't know what the heart-stone was; it was more like the stone was too much, its nature too alien or too multifaceted for simple description. After a minute, the swirling script faded, leaving the page blank once more, as if the journal had given up, or perhaps decided the information was beyond their current comprehension.

They tried his necklace with the same result. The script was a cascade of beautiful, unreadable symbols, a silent testament to the profound mystery of the Petrakharn and the shards they had gifted. He felt a renewed sense of awe, and a touch of frustration. The journal had shown them so much, but it also hinted at depths of knowledge that were still far out of their reach. He carefully refastened his necklace, the crystal feeling heavier now, laden with unspoken secrets.

That evening, as the second day of their journey ended, the caravan made camp in a sheltered hollow. Kaelid held the journal in his lap, not intending to use it, just finding a certain comfort in its presence. He was tired from the day's travel, his mind replaying the strange, unreadable script from the heart-stone scan. He idly watched Rannek, who was now trying to balance the stick on one finger. The end of the stick glowed faintly where it had touched the embers.

Suddenly, he felt a familiar sensation, a subtle thrum from the journal, as if it had awakened. He glanced down. To his astonishment, a blank page was filling with silver script. He hadn't placed anything on it, hadn't even thought of scanning anything. He read the words as they formed: Stick. Wood, ash, approximate length two cubits. Distal end charred, retaining residual heat. Currently held by male human, approximate age eleven standard years, exhibiting signs of mild boredom.

His jaw dropped. The journal was describing the stick Rannek held, several feet away. How? He looked from the journal to Rannek, then back to the journal. It couldn't be. He'd always assumed it needed contact, or at least for an item to be placed within its pages.

He concentrated, trying to understand. As he focused on the space between the journal and Rannek's stick, the air seemed to… shimmer. It was incredibly faint, like the heat haze above a summer road, but it was there. He held his breath, narrowing his eyes, trying to see it more clearly. The shimmering resolved itself into almost invisible lines, threads of faint, silvery light that pulsed with incredible speed. They flowed from the journal, touched the stick Rannek was waving, and then flowed back to the journal, seemingly undisturbed by Rannek himself, or the smoky air, or the flickering firelight.

The discovery of the ripples consumed his thoughts for the rest of the evening and into the next day, the third of their journey. As the caravan moved, he found himself constantly glancing at the journal in his pack, wondering about those fleeting, silvery lines. He had to know more, to understand what he had seen.

During a rest stop, while Rannek was engrossed in a game of chance with some of the younger caravan guards and Marta was conferring with Aelrik, he found a secluded spot behind a cluster of tall ferns. "Okay," he whispered to the journal, his heart thrumming with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. "Scan the stone."

He focused his gaze on the space between the journal and the stone. The journal obliged, and Kaelid saw them again , the faint, shimmering ripples of energy flowing out, touching the stone, and returning. They were incredibly fast, almost too quick to follow, but he could perceive their path.

Now for the real test. He took a deep breath and positioned himself so his arm was directly in the path of the ripples. He let the first few pulses pass through him, feeling nothing more than the faintest, almost imperceptible tingle, like a strand of a spider's web brushing his skin. He remembered how they had passed through Rannek and the campfire smoke without effect.

Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

He then tried to will them to stop, to create that mental barrier he'd imagined the night before. He pictured a wall inside his arm, solid and unyielding. The ripples approached, and for an instant, he thought he saw them waver, but they passed through. He tried again, concentrating harder, but the effect was negligible. It wasn't about a simple wall, he realized. It was something else.

It took several tries. Sometimes he was too early, sometimes too late. The ripples would simply flow around his mental 'nudge' or pass through it. But then, he felt it. A distinct, though subtle, sensation of… contact. And he saw it. One of the returning ripples seemed brighter, more forceful, as if it had indeed bounced off something with more energy than just the leather of his boot. He felt a slight drain, a fleeting weariness, as if he'd flexed a muscle he hadn't known existed, or spent a bit of his own inner warmth.

He tried again, focusing on that feeling, that timing. He let the journal scan a nearby tree trunk. As the ripples flowed, he stepped into their path and tried to replicate the 'nudge' with his whole body, not just his boot. This time, the effect was more pronounced. A whole series of ripples seemed to rebound, flaring slightly as they hit his focused intent before speeding back to the journal. The journal itself paused its writing for a moment, then resumed, adding a curious note: Scan encountering intermittent energetic resistance. Source unclear.

He grinned, a thrill of accomplishment coursing through him. He could do it. He could interact with the journal's seeing-ripples. It was a small thing, perhaps, this invisible dance of energy, but it felt momentous.

"Hey Rannek," he called out, a mischievous glint in his eye. " I want to try something. Try scanning me with the journal now!"

Rannek, always up for something new, especially if it involved the mysterious journal. "Scan you? What for? Will it tell me if you're going to finally beat me at stones?" he joked, but his curiosity was piqued.

"Just do it," he said, grinning. "Point it at me and let it scan, like it did with the stick last night."

Rannek shrugged, a playful smile on his own face. "Alright, if you say so. Don't blame me if it says you're part squirrel yourself after all this time in the woods." Rannek aimed the journal towards him, who stood a few paces away, trying to look casual but feeling a thrill of anticipation.

Kaelid watched as Rannek focused his attention. He saw the faint shimmer in the air as the journal initiated its scan, the familiar ripples of silvery energy flowing towards him. This time, he was ready. He didn't need to close his eyes or concentrate with all his might. He met the incoming ripples with a focused pulse of his own will, a confident mental push, imagining them hitting a solid, invisible shield around him and bouncing straight back.

The effect was immediate and startlingly clear. The ripples, which normally would have passed through or around him to scan what was behind, visibly recoiled. They struck his 'shield' and rebounded with even greater speed and intensity than when he'd practiced on his own, flaring with a brief, bright light before racing back towards the journal in Rannek's hands.

Rannek gasped, his eyes wide. "Whoa! What was that? Did you see that, Kaelid? The air went all… sparkly! And the book felt… tingly for a second!" Looking from him to the journal and back again, his earlier playfulness replaced by genuine astonishment. "What did you do?"

He couldn't help but laugh, a mixture of triumph and sheer wonder bubbling up inside him. "I bounced them!" he exclaimed. "The seeing-ripples from the journal, I bounced them back!"

The elation of his successful ripple-bounce was short-lived, extinguished by the journal's utterly unexpected and alarming reaction. It happened the moment the amplified, rebounded ripples struck the book still held in Rannek's hands.

From his perspective, the journal, which had seemed like a simple, if magical, object, suddenly writhed. Its dark, smooth leather cover seemed to twist and contort, the surface rippling as if it were made of water rather than bound hide. For a horrifying, stomach-lurching instant, the familiar black transformed, taking on the appearance of ancient, scorched parchment, brittle and fragile, the color of burnt vellum. The silver clasps that held it shut seemed to momentarily elongate and sharpen, looking less like metal and more like tarnished, yellowed bone. The image was fleeting, gone in the space of a held breath, the journal snapping back to its normal appearance so quickly he might have doubted he'd seen it at all, if not for the gasp that tore from his own throat and the sudden, sharp cry from Rannek.

For Rannek, there was no visual distortion. One moment he was holding the familiar journal, watching him with astonished admiration, the next, an agonizing pain shot through his hands, as if the book had instantaneously sprouted a thousand tiny, razor-sharp needles. The sensation was shocking, a fiery, stabbing torment that made him yelp and instinctively fling the journal away from himself as if it were a viper. He stumbled back, his hands flying to his chest, his face pale with shock and pain. He stared at his palms, expecting to see them bleeding, but there was nothing. The pain vanished as quickly as it had come, leaving only a phantom tingling and a profound sense of bewildered alarm. Rannek looked at the journal lying innocently on the dusty ground, then at him, his voice trembling slightly. "It… it hurt me! Like it was covered in thorns!"

Kaelid's moment of triumph vanished, replaced by a surge of cold fear. Rannek's cry, the sight of the journal falling to the ground, the memory of its horrifying, momentary transformation , it all crashed over him. He had done this. His playful experiment, his proud display of control, had somehow hurt the journal, or at least frightened it into such a bizarre reaction.

"Rannek, are you okay?" he asked, his voice tight, but his gaze was fixed on the still form of the journal lying in the dust of the campsite. He barely registered Rannek's shaken nod, his own concern for his friend momentarily overshadowed by a desperate worry for the book.

He rushed to it, his heart pounding. "I'm sorry," he whispered, gently picking it up. The cover felt normal now, smooth and cool beneath his trembling fingertips. "I'm so sorry! I didn't mean to… I didn't know that would happen." He ran his hands over the cover, as if trying to soothe an injured animal, then quickly flipped through the pages, looking for any sign of the scorching, the brittleness he thought he'd seen. The pages were pristine, the silver script from their earlier experiments clear and undisturbed.

But the visual check wasn't enough. He felt a profound, aching need to know if it was truly alright, if he had caused some internal, unseen damage. He clutched the journal to his chest, closing his eyes, focusing all his being on it, pouring out his remorse and a desperate, heartfelt plea for it to be okay. He wasn't trying to do anything, not consciously. He just willed it to be whole, to be unharmed.

As he did, a faint warmth bloomed in his own chest, a sensation startlingly similar to the thrum of his crystal shard, but softer, more diffuse. It grew, and then, without any conscious effort on his part, a soft pulse of energy flowed from him, through his hands, and into the journal. It wasn't like the sharp, directed ripples he'd been practicing with. This was gentler, like a sigh, or a wave of warmth washing over the book.

The response was instantaneous, not in words, not in script, but in a sudden, overwhelming flood of pure knowing that filled Kaelid's mind. It was as if a door had opened, and he was experiencing the journal's state directly.

The journal was fine. More than fine, it was… amused? No, not amused. Startled, yes, profoundly so, like a shy forest creature that had unexpectedly been shouted at. It had recoiled, reflexively, defensively. But there was no lasting harm, no anger, just a lingering sense of surprise and… caution.

And then, a deeper understanding, a truth so immense it stole his breath and left him reeling. This was not a book. Not in the way he understood books. It was alive. It had an awareness, a consciousness, it wasn't ancient like the library. It felt like a child, curious and energetic. The form it wore, the bound pages, the silver clasps, was a disguise, a convenient shape for interacting with a world. A disguise so others wouldn't see it as a threat. What it truly was, he had no name for, no concept to grasp, only the undeniable certainty of its living, hidden nature. Seeing its mind ever so briefly is extreme detail, it didn't feel like a threat, so that was good.

He sat there in the flickering firelight, stunned into silence, the journal held loosely in his lap. Rannek was saying something, his voice still shaky, asking what had happened, but he barely heard him. He lightly, almost reverently, rubbed the smooth cover of the object in his hands. A living thing hiding in plain sight. And he, somehow, had touched that mind, had communicated with it on a level beyond words, beyond ripples. The journey home, he realized, had just become something far stranger, and far more wondrous, than he could ever have imagined.