017 – Wardstone

017 – Wardstone

PRINCE LOHR: Forsooth! The ORIG-AH demand of mine kingdom a price terrible, a gild tyrannical! I am a destroyed man, fatherless, kingless! Destroyed!

THE SUN HAG: O good Prince, Heir to the House of LOHR. I shall advise thee like I hath advised thine father and thine father’s father, with the words of THE PROGENITOR, who left wisdom behind beyond mortal ken.

THE SUN HAG: ‘Tis the wisdom of the PROGENITOR that all peoples shall shelter under the VE’UN or perish, sharing in that GIFT OF NOR left to mankind through HER wisdom and HER KARR-E-VARR.

PRINCE LOHR: Aye, t’may be truth you speak, HAG. But LOHR shall be beggared under that VARRAN yoke, plundered and brought to heel. Nay, tis no choice at all. I must prepare, HAG. To battle!

PRINCE LOHR exits.
THE SUN HAG monologues.

THE SUN HAG: Thou hast doomed thine kingdom to THE SHADOWED DARK, o foolish PRINCE LOHR, for the ORIG-AH speak with the full confidence of the KARR-E-VARR, heirs to the WISDOM OF THE PROGENITOR.

—Excerpt from the Varran tragedy Prince Lohr, written c. 230 Y.S.

It was just before sunrise, The world teetered between the fear of the dark and the dawn of a new day.

Ai stood near the edge of Outpost Avna’s existing Ve’un barrier, the air-conditioning spell on her robes keeping her—and Aru, who was once again ensconced under her cloak—warm against the night chill. Ahead of her, Karravar Benessel and Aspirant Sarila walked toward the Outpost’s new shrine to Nor. The ritual they were about to perform was, in a word, formal, the real thing that Benessel could only attempt to replicate out in the field.

Behind them, what had to be half the town had gathered to watch the proceeding, kept behind a line drawn in the soil by Avnan soldiers under the direction of Lieutenant Baior.

Captain Iorec had come to watch as well, attended to by a small cadre of aides. He looked well considering the circumstances, though his arm was in a sling and he was leaning on a wyrmbone cane.

Sari began to recite a prayer, though perhaps it was more accurate to call it a mantra. Her voice was level, melodic but not in a sing-song way as she recited a [Prayer to the Dawn], gently pressing the semiotic link into reality with her Semblance. Her voice was far from loud, but it carried across the area in the silence of the early morning.

Now watching the pair conduct the ritual, it was clear to Ai that the Ve’un that Benessel had cast while they were on the road was an abbreviated version of the full one unfolding in front of her. Each step the Karravar and his Aspirant took was measured, deliberate, and clearly well-practiced, a single component in a spell woven of centuries of tradition.

The two were wearing fresh robes stiff with starch for the ritual ceremony, their silhouettes a picture of rigid order in the gloom. Their movements were, in conception and practice, somatic components designed to align themselves with the magic they were about to weave.

Beyond them, pressing against the barely perceptible curvature of the current barrier, were the Veh.

There were hundreds standing silently in the dark, a sea of wispy shadows and hollow malice. They were motionless, faceless, but still somehow recognizably staring into the Ve’un, as if peering into the light of civilization at the feast which lay inside.

Ai’s gaze drifted to the shrine itself, a simple pavilion of white stone. It was built just inside the edge of Avna’s current Ve’un barrier, so that there would be some overlap in case one or the other failed—nobody was planning for failure, but it seemed that preparing for the worst possible scenario was something that was burned into the Varran mindset.

At the center of the shrine was a raised platform, upon which laid the wardstone that was the focus of the ritual.

It was a nonagonal disc of polished black stone roughly a meter in diameter. It possessed a prismatic sheen, shimmering with the slick, iridescent quality of oil on water. Carved into its surface was a complex lattice of spellscript, spiraling inward toward a central, nine-pointed star—

[Nine-Pointed-Sunstar].

—the emblem of the Varran Republic.

Even from twenty meters away, Ai could feel the stone ache. It hummed with a hollow longing, seeming to be yearning for connection to the greater network of Ve’un that spanned the continent.

The sun crested the horizon.

“It begins,” Benessel whispered, his voice carrying in the stillness. He and Sari took their positions on either side of the wardstone. They raised their hands in unison, their movements synchronized down to the millisecond.

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The first rays of dawn struck the desert floor, a wave of light rushing toward the Outpost.

As sunlight hit the mass of Veh outside the barrier, they simply ceased to exist. Like ink dropped into clear water, their forms dissolved into wisps of black dust that swirled for a heartbeat before vanishing entirely.

In seconds, the threat that had loomed over the night was gone, scoured away by the absolute authority of the [Sun].

In their wake was left only sunlight.

Ai watched with a critical eye. The timing of the ritual was, of course, deliberate. The ritual was keyed to [Sunrise]. In a culture that venerated the sun god Nor—a deity Ai herself had cobbled together from dozens of gods each representing some form of [Sun], [Humanity], or [Protection] during the Titanomachy—the dawn was more than just the rising of a celestial body. It was the ultimate symbol of life, victory, and faith. The modern ritual seemed to be designed to draw on the massive well of power that was this core cultural belief.