Wolves of Empire [EPIC DARK FANTASY] [Book One Complete]

Twenty-Nine

Tali

Kaltoren, Drasken

17th of Otanus

Following her unexpected confrontation with the Novhar, the Jalin refused to oversee further training sessions with Tali. Though she hadn't been formerly punished, he'd made it clear he deemed her responsible for the danger she'd put herself, Renna, and Benji in. During a brief conversation with him a few days ago—the last time he'd suffered her presence—he'd gleaned the truth about that fateful night. She'd told him how she agreed to join Renna in visiting her imprisoned mother, and how she'd thoughtlessly revealed the true extent of her magic to her friends. She hadn't expected the Novhar to follow her into Drasken's heart, and though Fell seemed to understand this, he believed she had an obligation to keep herself safe, for her own sake if not for others, and shouldn't have left Ren Câdern's grounds.

"You must remain within the College at all times now. It's very likely the Novhar was drawn to your magic. It surely knew you practised alone, without me or Malena there to oversee you, and so thought you a tempting target," he'd said. "If the Novhar is willing to follow you here, that is the only place you'll be truly safe, concealed by our aasiurmantic influence."

"I would be safer if I could fight for myself," she'd argued, knowing it was a mistake even as she spoke.

He'd frowned. "And if you mishandle your powers? Already you're using what I teach you to break into government buildings. What danger would you pose to yourself and others if you possessed all the strength of a Novhar?"

She'd had no argument to that. The Jalin had gone on to tell her Benji and Renna had been warned away from her, and that he'd offered them a half-hearted explanation about what had happened. Apparently, her ability to perform multiple branches of aasiurmancy had been explained as her uncle teaching her the rudiments of magic before she'd been enrolled at Ren Câdern. The only reason she'd hidden her skill, her friends had been told, was to avoid obvious favouritism on Fell's part, as enough of the College's staff knew of his friendship with Helleron Boratorren that any interest he took in Heller's niece would seem unprofessional and unfair. If Tali pretended to be unskilled, the Jalin would have a reason to privately tutor her without appearing to afford one student unearned attention.

As to the identity of her Novhar attacker, Fell had been vaguer; he'd told his son and Renna that the Novhar was a Karhes native donned in experimental armour who'd struck at Tali to get at her uncle. Neither she nor Fell thought the two youths believed the explanation, but the truth was too delicate to share.

"If the rest of the Varkommer find out there's a Novhar in the city, there will be panic and chaos."

Tali assumed Fell had already told the Varkommer. She wasn't well-versed enough in politics to understand the significance of the Jalin keeping the information to himself, but she supposed he stockpiled power where he could find it. From what Renna had already told her, most prominent positions in the Drasken Empire were held for limited terms. Power and authority were finite, and Malena was more than halfway through her twenty-year term as Keizerin, after which another Kommer would be elected.

She was beginning to understand just how valuable a weapon she could be to Fell. Might he use her to hold onto his wife's title?

Despite the warnings, Benji and Renna continued to sit with her in class. They were even willing to suffer each other at meals or during the first-year lectures, and no longer traded insults. Whatever else had happened during their brief fight with the Novhar, a fragile sort of friendship had developed between them. Tali suspected it had something to do with Renna saving Benji's life, though neither would admit to it.

Something else bound them too, Tali knew. Something deeper than a shared brush with death. Renna had seen the dislocated manner Fell had addressed his son with, and likely empathised. Both had dysfunctional relationships with their parents. All three of us do, Tali mentally corrected herself.

They were clustered around a corner table as the evening's dinner hour wound down when Renna leaned in close, a conspiratorial smile on her face. "So, I think it's about time we got that explanation."

Tali feigned ignorance.

"We don't believe what my father told us," Benji added. "We know what we saw. That was no mortal in 'experimental armour'. And you're no simple pyromancer whose uncle gave you a head start."

She shrugged. "Why is that so hard to believe?"

Renna scoffed and Benji wagged a finger at her. "I know there's a reason my father favours you beyond his friendship with your uncle," he said. "Don't worry; I won't tell him if you tell us the truth."

"Doesn't seem like you tell your daddy anything, and vice versa." There was no cruelty to Renna's jests anymore, and Benji responded with a sarcastic smile.

Benji turned back to Tali. "At least tell us what that creature was. It's only fair. Renna and I almost died."

Renna raised a silencing hand to Benji. "Fuck that. A minute or two in the library and I'll figure out what that thing was. What I wanna know is why you can worldstride, and why you let everyone think you're a Blunt."

Tali had promised an explanation, but Fell's warning and the Novhar's parting threat hung heavy in her mind. Would Renna be safer if kept ignorant, as the Jalin seemed to believe, or did she deserve to know the truth, if only to be better prepared? But then, if Tali revealed what she knew, would Renna take the revelations to her father, a man who, from what she knew of him, would be motivated to use such revelations against the Jalin, who'd destroyed the Westervelt family? Would the Jalin's attempts to keep events to himself ruin his reputation and see him unseated? Would she be further endangering the Drasken Empire by robbing it of a man perhaps best suited as its protector?

She didn't know the answer to any of these questions, nor did she think herself mature enough to even guess. So, rather than give her friends the much-desired reality, she plastered a fake smile onto her face. "I'm just that good."

Renna made a show of spitting out a drink she didn't have, then slapped her on the shoulder. "Sure thing, my enigmatic friend."

"My father would tell me, if it was something we needed to know," Benji said. He sounded like he tried to convince himself more than them.

Tali felt a pang of pity for the boy. As far as she knew, he'd been staying at the Kronhus outside of his lessons because of his pariah status, and he didn't want to sleep in the place where he was bullied daily. The incident aboard Risyán with the Novhar, which he'd passed off as a scuffle with Renna, had seen him banished from his one safe haven by the father he now claimed to trust. She wondered if Fell knew how his son was treated, or if he even cared to know.

Does my father even know where I am? Does he care? Probably not. But that was an old wound, too familiar now to be easily reopened.

They returned to their rooms after dinner, and Tali placed herself at her desk with the intent of going over several chapters of a dense volume used during the day's lecture. It covered the theory behind Gnostic Planes, and her experiences in Fell's thundermantic mindscape had inspired curiosity in her. She needed to know more, not only to further her studies and keep pace with her fellows, but to avoid hurting her mentor, and to better utilise her abilities against her enemies.

Was it possible to replicate what she'd done to Fell on the Novhar? Did the Novhar even require the use of a Plane, if his species' magic was anything like her own?

She was rereading, for the tenth time, a particularly impenetrable paragraph concerning the disparate nature of the Planes when she heard a scraping outside her door. At first, she thought it her imagination, then it sounded again. The scratch of claws on stone.

She rose slowly from her seat, lifting it and placing it out of the way so it didn't grind against the floor. On bare feet, she padded towards the door, dread expanding in her chest and constricting her lungs as if she'd swallowed rocks. Her legs moved slowly, reluctant to carry her towards the danger beyond her rooms.

Her first thought was the Novhar. Did he dare penetrate Ren Câdern's heart in search of her? But no; he'd fled as soon as Fell appeared. Either he feared the Jalin, or he hadn't wanted to risk capture.

The door handle was colder than it should've been. An eerie sensation swept across her, blurring her vision. She pictured an oily blackness consuming her, turning her inside out and smashing her down to nothing. An odd prickling painted goosebumps across her skin, and she felt the faded thud of an old pain, as if an ancient wound the size of her entire body now plagued her anew.

Beyond her threshold, shadows suffocated the hallway. The torches, always lit no matter the time of day, had been snuffed, and the air was chillier than she'd ever known it. She stepped out, the stone icy beneath her bare soles, her breath misting before her face. Am I dreaming? Hallucinating? Have I studied myself into delusion?

The darkness was total, and not even moonlight could slice through the windows set at regular intervals along the wall. Her door creaked shut of its own accord behind her as she padded out into the corridor. She was a limping deer with the scent of its predator in its nostrils; the weight of unseen eyes draped heavily over her shoulders.

All at once, the firmness of the floor beneath her and the press of the walls around her vanished and she floated in a void.

You are starting to realise, no doubt, that your mentor will only hone you in ways that benefit him.

The voice was disembodied, projected in the depthless, infinite tones Erun had used when first communicating with her, months ago now.

Do not bother with denial. The Jalin will neglect you if he does not believe you can serve his best interests. You attempted to stand against a Novhar, and yet he blames you for the danger you found yourself in.

She said nothing because she couldn't argue. Already she'd gotten the sense Fell valued her only regarding how he could use her for his own ends. Even the Keizerin seemed to share this sentiment.

He will not allow you to protect yourself.

"Why not?"

The moment he does is the moment you no longer need him. He will refuse to be expendable to you.

She didn't want to believe that. Her uncle trusted the Jalin, had been mentored by him in his young adulthood, considered him the only mage worthy of tutoring her. If Tali truly was being trained to serve him, she'd never be free of the College, or Kaltoren. She'd be reliant on Fell's protection against the Novhar, just as she had spent her life reliant on her elders, on her uncle and father deciding her fate for her.

"What about you?" she asked. "You just want to use me, like you'd use my father."

Erun's sculpted face melted from the darkness, illuminated by an unseen light. "You would be our champions, both of you, not our dependents."

"You'd use us to restart the Cataclysm, wouldn't you?" she asked, recalling the vision the monster had shown her of apocalypse. "Did you work with Erdohan, all those millennia ago?" The idea hadn't occurred to her until a moment ago; everyone else in her life seemed somehow tied to the infamous Novhar and his legacy, so why not Erun?

"Is that the story you mortals tell yourselves?" Erun chuckled derisively. "How twisted you all have it. I suppose the passage of time distorts history."

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

"What do you mean?"

Erun canted its head to one side, its long hair dripping like ink across its slim, delicate shoulders. "Erdohan tried to stop the Cataclysm. He was its opponent, not its author. His contemporaries, and all those who followed, paint him as the Vast Infinite's villain because he is far more palatable than the truth."

"The truth?"

Erun's wordless reply carved itself in the pristine, sharp-toothed smile it flashed at her. Though spotlessly white, Tali could well imagine those fangs stained with the lifeblood of entire planets.

In that moment, she knew the truth without Erun having to elaborate, the enlightenment of it striking her without warning, a thought injected into her brain matter by someone—something—else. She understood what Erun drove at, what it implied through the visions it had thrust upon her and the decaying influence of its aura. Whatever brand of monster it was, Erun and its kin were the Cataclysm's architects. The histories were wrong, Lord Indro was wrong, even Fell was wrong. Whoever Erdohan had been, he'd been miscast as the cause of humanity's downfall.

Erun was apocalypse personified, somehow condensed down into a form small enough to ride pillion within her skull.

"What are you?"

Erun smiled wolfishly, gleaming fangs exposed. "I am whole."

She turned away in irritation at the vague nonanswer and strode into the darkness, willing the College's mundane hallway to coalesce around her. Behind her, Erun snarled, a bestial sound devoid of the sentience and intelligence it had so far displayed. When she glanced over her shoulder, it had shed its human form and crouched in the blackness, a wolf readying its ambush.

I grow impatient. Many times now I have offered you the gift of wholeness, yet you turn away from me. No longer.

She threw herself into a sprint, panic blinding her to all else. Even when she found herself stumbling back through Ren Câdern's guts, the world devastatingly real around her, she didn't stop. Foul breath brushed the back of her neck, and she pictured an elongated maw thrusting towards her skull with teeth poised to crush. She sensed a beastly hand raised with the intent of flattening her beneath its weight, and dove forward, landing painfully on her front. The breath was punched from her lungs. A crash of thunder erupted from just behind her. Gasping for air, she flung herself onto her back and propped herself up, her eyes fixing on an empty corridor snaking away from where she sprawled. The torches, so recently snuffed, blazed to life, and in the pulsing light of fire she saw nothing. No Erun.

But, between her feet, the stone floor had been cracked. The blow meant to end her, somehow manifested in a reality Erun hadn't been able to enter before.

―

She didn't sleep that night, afraid Erun would find her again in dreaming. When Fell summoned her to his quarters at dawn the next morning, she coasted on a wave of over-tiredness and splashed cold water on her face to keep herself alert. She saw the cracked stone as she left her room and couldn't supress a shiver.

Last night had been real, then. Somehow, Erun had transcended the previously rigid borders of her dreamscape to not only appear in reality, but affect it too. What would happen the next time she slept? If the monster killed her as she dreamed, would she perish for real?

As she paced up the myriad stairways to the Jalin's quarters, she resolved to unload her burden. She couldn't hoard these troubles anymore, not when her inexperience endangered her, not when someone more learned, someone like Fell, might be able to help. Erun had been right, of course—Fell would mentor her only as it benefited him—but Fell hadn't attacked her, hadn't tortured her father, didn't want to do the same to her.

Fell perched at the fountain's edge, beside the statue of Jalin Vala, when she reached his courtyard. He looked up as she approached, then patted the space next to him.

"I'm sorry we haven't had time to talk," he began.

"I'm sorry for dragging Renna and Benji into what happened with the Novhar," she replied numbly. "I haven't told them anything."

Fell waved her apology away. "In truth, I'm glad my son has found friends. I know how others view him, and I know he's called 'kolmas' and people think he's favoured because of who his parents are." He frowned. "As much as his birth was unplanned, I'd never wish it was any other way." His frown dissolved into a soft smile, and Tali wondered whether he'd ever said these things to his son's face. Judging from their dislocated relationship, she doubted it. Then again, had her father ever said anything like that to her? Did he feel the same way? Probably not.

She knotted her hands in her lap and swallowed to loosen a leaden throat. "I need to talk to you about something," she said.

Fell leaned back, as if to give her space, and waited.

"I read in a book somewhere that Erdohan didn't cause the Cataclysm. I was wondering if you knew anything about that." A lie, but the only way she could rationalise how she knew what she did.

She could tell from the flicker in his eyes, the slight twitch in the corner of his mouth, that he knew what she was talking about. "Like what?"

As frayed as her mind had been over the previous day, she'd played this conversation and its many potential threads through her mind. She didn't want Fell to know about her connection to Erun, in case he thought her compromised or dangerous, but she needed him to know the monster existed.

"You know my father was tortured on Shaeviren, right? Well, when he was on Alzikanem with me, he'd sometimes talk about what happened to him. He wasn't lucid all the time, so it never made much sense to me, but he spoke of a monster that oversaw his torture. He couldn't describe it, but it was like a nightmare. He never saw it, but he said it was a huge, evil mass, and he knew it meant him harm. More than harm, though. It wanted to grind him down to nothing, make sure not even ash was left of him. Tear him from existence." She knew she became emotional as she spoke, injecting her experience with Erun into her words, talking not like someone who'd been told a story, but someone who'd lived that story. "I saw one of his sketches in his office one day. Before I worldstrode myself and Shira to Sinnis, we ended up on Shaeviren, because I'd remembered that picture."

Fell was leaning forward now, one hand cupping his chin as he watched her. "What did you see?"

"I thought I saw the thing that hurt my father. Or an impression of it. I felt everything he told me he felt: the terror, the sense of impending death, the violence of the monster and the way it wanted to destroy me."

It was as much of the truth as she was willing to divulge. She couldn't tell him the monster still lingered in her mind like a tumour, having somehow clung to her during her brief time in Shaeviren, and used its knowledge of her father to remain, parasitic, in her consciousness.

The Jalin's eyes left hers and skimmed across the courtyard. He was silent, the only sound their breathing; hers loud with resurrected terror, his calm with contemplation.

"What you describe sounds like a Ravessi," he said at length, his voice made booming by the courtyard's tranquillity. "But your father can't have encountered one on Shaeviren."

"Why not?"

"They were sealed in the Abyss, tens of thousands of years ago. Sealed again after they escaped during the Cataclysm. In ten millennia, none have escaped again."

"How would anyone know?"

Fell settled his gaze back on her, his expression troubled. "If the Ravessi had returned, the world would've already ended."

"How?"

Maybe he might've tried to deflect her or outright refused to answer. But she knew the accuracy of her information, the accounts she'd claimed to be her father's, had both interested and worried him. "Understand that what I know, what anyone knows, is based on records taken from the Novhar Empire. The Ravessi are older than the Novhar, older than the Vast Infinite, and disappeared ten thousand years ago. No one truly knows what they are, but we have theories and educated guesses." He shifted where he sat, unconsciously moving further into Vala's shadow. "The Ravessi were supposedly created by the Architects, the same omnipotent beings who forged the Novhar. The Ravessi were a race of executioners, built with the intent of destroying any worlds the Architects had no further use for. When the Novhar reached their height, the Architects feared they might be usurped as the universe's most powerful entities, and the Ravessi were set on them."

"Why did they fear the Novhar?"

"There are rumours the Novhar created humanity, yes? Well, only the Architects were supposed to be able to create life from nothing. When the Novhar crafted our ancestors, they reached too high," Fell answered. "All that I know comes from what Malena was told by her ancestors, who were alive during the Novhars' waning years. They were told by the Novhar themselves, so please understand this is third-hand information I have no way of verifying.

"The Ravessi and the Novhar fought, and the conflict ended with the Architects themselves banished from the Vast Infinite, and the Ravessi locked in the Abyss. From there the Novhar ruled over their empire, over us, until we toppled them. With the Cataclysm, the supposed release of the Ravessi onto Eld, the Novhar all died." He flashed her a look. "Well, almost all of them died. Apparently, your pursuer survived."

"So Erdohan released the Ravessi?" Erun had denied this, but she wanted to know what Fell knew. What he thought he knew.

He shrugged. "That's what the Novhar histories say," he replied. "But the Novhar histories have us depicted as mindless, primitive animals good only for slave labour and food. We can agree, perhaps, that not everything they wrote was accurate."

"The Ravessi are gone, then?"

"Absolutely."

There's one in my head. It's on Shaeviren even now and it almost killed my father.

She almost opened her mouth to say those words but instead choked them down. Either the Jalin wouldn't believe her, or he'd think her an immature child who'd taken her father's mad ramblings far too seriously.

Besides, as dangerous as Erun was becoming, it was a part of her, and she a part of it. Not whole, not bonded, but perhaps connected irreversibly enough for Fell to view her as a threat if he found out.

They lapsed into an uncomfortable silence, until the Jalin slapped his hands against his knees and pushed himself to standing, then gestured for her to follow him to his quarters. "As much as I like that you're taking an interest and reading about such things, perhaps we should focus on your training."

For the rest of the morning, their conversation was forgotten and Fell attempted to catch her up on all she'd missed since their last session.

―

But Tali didn't forget. Couldn't forget. She drifted through the day mostly unaware. Rather than take diligent notes in class, as was her habit, she ran through everything the Jalin had told her and compared it to what she'd read, what she already knew, and what Erun had told her. Even when called on to answer a question by her tutors, she remained trapped in the prison of her mind. Even Benji and Renna's attempts to cajole her fell flat, though they still sat with her. She suspected they waited in hope of an explanation for what had happened that night with the Novhar, but she had nothing to offer them. Especially not now, with this much more pressing, prevalent issue to tackle first.

The Novhar could wait. Erun would not.

She was ready for the monster when she finally convinced herself to sleep the night after it had attacked her in the corridor. If she hadn't curled up in her bed that evening and forced her eyes closed, she expected she would've expired from exhaustion before long.

Erun waited for her. Human in aspect this evening, set against a backdrop of the Jalin's courtyard. The creature pondered the statues, paying particular attention to Vala. "This one resembles you."

"Impossible," Tali replied. She screwed up her courage and marched towards the monster's slender, looming form, halting at its flank. "We need to talk."

"Perhaps I am done with words." Erun looked down at her.

She pulled away and paced towards the courtyard's edge. The stone parapet ringing it was waist height, a scant barrier between herself and a lethal fall of hundreds of feet. In the waking world, she'd never dared to approach, but here she rose onto the tips of her toes and peered out at Kaltoren, unfurled beneath her like a fine tapestry.

"I kept asking you what you are, and you always dodged the question. But now I know." She waited until Erun stood beside her, its presence sharp and cold. "You're a Ravessi."

Erun shrugged as if the revelation—accusation—meant nothing. "I never dodged the question. Ravessi means whole, and whole means Ravessi. You knew the truth from the beginning."

"Are you here to destroy the world?"

The monster looked strangely human as it glanced down at her. "The Vast Infinite, if we can."

"Why?"

"Why do mortals draw breath? Why do they clamour for power at the expense of all else? Why do they feel the need to breed and populate the world with their replacements?" It bared its fangs. "Why does the wolf hunt the deer, why is the deer itself prey? Everything has its inescapable nature. Ravessi are no different in this."

Tali pondered this. "It's in a warrior's nature to fight, but if he has a reason not to, or if he's asked to set aside his sword, he will. Why can't the Ravessi set aside destruction?"

"A warrior's love of the blade is not fundamental. If the warrior desires, he could take up another vocation and excel at it. To ask a Ravessi to not destroy is not to ask the warrior to set aside his sword. It is to ask that warrior to stop breathing. It is impossible. It is how he was created, just as my brethren were crafted for destruction. We cannot deny our nature, just as the warrior cannot stop breathing, and the wolf cannot stop hunting."

It was too much to comprehend. "So, you're the enemy," she said simply.

"In your eyes, I suppose I am. In my eyes, you are the enemy. Does it matter?" Its eyes narrowed, gleaming with an inner light. "Destruction is assured. The only thing certain in life is death. The Ravessi are its heralds, which is why we are whole. Mortals cannot accept their own extinction, and so they are lacking."

She put her back to the distant city and leaned against the parapet. "Why do you want me, then? And my father, for that matter?"

If this monster was truly the force of destruction it had framed itself as, two mortals as simple as Tali and Endarion would make little difference to its mission. Even accounting for her Valhir nature, she remained an untrained youth, and her father possessed no magic at all.

"I have been alone for decades," Erun replied. "Alone save for the company of Shaeviren's brutish natives, and they are undesirable companions."

"Decades?"

"Ever since I escaped the Abyss."

The Jalin had been certain the Ravessi were irretrievably trapped. How wrong he was.

"The infinite prison beyond this mortal plane is not as secure as Erdohan first assumed. I exploited a temporary weakness in its design to free myself but find myself stranded and alone. Almost un-whole. My experiments with your progenitor were an attempt to craft another Ravessi, to imbue him with all the qualities that make me whole, so that I would no longer be alone. He would have been my champion in my attempts to free my brethren, just as you could be."

An involuntary shudder gripped her. This monster had been trying to make of her father an extinction-causing demon? How close had it come? Was Endarion's madness a symptom, or a side-effect?

"I can't help you," Tali said. "Even if I was your brethren, I couldn't open the Abyss."

Erun shook its head and smiled, and Tali suspected it had always meant to steer the conversation towards this end. "Erdohan can because he forged the lock. If you find him, he will free my brethren or allow me to return to them."

Causing another Cataclysm, no doubt. Tali doubted Erun would return willingly to its imprisonment. But that didn't matter, because Erdohan was dead. If no one else could break his lock, the prison was permanent.

She told Erun as much, and it looked taken aback.

"Erdohan may have disappeared since the Cataclysm, but he is not dead."

"How can you know that?"

Erun replied easily. "Our prison was sealed with his life's energy. That is what the lock is—his own body and soul. The lock not only remains intact, but it still pulses with his energy. Do you understand what that means?"

Tali nodded, stunned. "As long as the Abyss is locked away, Erdohan is alive somewhere."

"And the moment he dies," Erun continued, "is the moment the Abyss opens and my brethren are free to purify this universe."

-- End of Part Two --