Hadrin Winterwise
“You belong to the mountains,” I had said. Esterra smiled. “No,” she answered. “I belong to the people who have not yet reached them.” Then the smile faded. “And yet I belong with you, to you.” And because she belonged to me, with me. I belonged to and with her. I said that where she chose to go I would choose to go there also. She bowed and entered my embrace. I held her for a long time. I still hold her. I hold that moment.
My eyes close as I remember. Raksha and I are sitting, as we have done most evenings of this long journey through forested valleys, at our own fire, a little distance from the campfire of the other rangers. They are Elvakai as am I. Raksha is not. She is Manakai, or ‘human’ as they say outside of the Commonwealth. She is asking about Esterra, about whether my Soulbond had ever made the journey to Elcantar in the mountains. I open my eyes and smile offering only a simple “Yes”. Raksha does not press. I like that about her. She does not fear to ask but does not demand answers.
“Hadrin Winterwise” she says. “Haadi Rina”.
She is not addressing me. She is playing with my name.
‘Hadrin Winterwise’ is not my birth name though Hadrin is not too far from ’Alderin’ the first part of my Elvakai name. The names of the Elvakai are very long and are shortened in conversation with non-Elva who have no time for that. ‘Hadrin’ is a combination of ‘Haadi’, meaning leader or guide and ‘Rina’ meaning ‘joy’ in our language. I had earned ‘Haadi’ in Al-Sindhe. ‘Hadrin’ is a contraction of ‘Haadi Rina’ given to me by Esterra and meaning ‘beloved leader’ or more literally ‘leader, my joy’.
We are camped by the stream that flows from Elcanta’Nar. The great mountain that holds Elcantar as hands hold a bowl and keeps her warm. The moon, Miranda, is a sliver in the cloudless night sky and no longer outshines the stars.
Raksha Redmist
I do not press Hadrin. He will tell me more in his own time. I ask about Esterra not simply because I wish to know more about the legend of the Elvakai who bonded with a Manakai woman and learned how to grow old with her. I ask because it gives him permission to speak. In his own time.
Hadrin has never asked me about Vailarin, Vail, but he knows. He knows that Vail is the reason I no longer sit and sing with the Elvakai rangers and have not done so since we left Pact.. Not that I sang much but sometimes I repeated verses of songs in languages I don’t know.
But I’m a liar. Vail did not reject me. I rejected his love because I couldn’t share it with others the way he expected me to. I am the reason I don’t sit with the Elvakai not Vail whose invincible smile and unfailing courtesy still offer the love I will not permit myself to accept.
“Asato mā sad gamaya
Tamaso mā jyotir gamaya
Mṛtyor mā amṛtaṃ gamaya”
That chant tells me that the Elvakai at the main fire have turned from revelry to a quieter mood. One moment they are lost in laughter and play and the next they are lost in contemplation or devotion. I can’t keep up with either their lightness or their depths.
Hadrin Winterwise tells me that the songs the Elvakai sing are not in the Elvakai tongue but in another ancient language from another world and another time when Elvakai and Manakai walked and sang together. He says that the Elvakai tongue cuts reality too sharply for Manakai and they sheathe it in our own tongues to protect us. I’m not sure what he means. It reminds me how different his people are from ours. Nevertheless I like this song.
He rises and I rise with him to walk towards the main fire. From a third campfire three Manakai and two Dwarakai are also walking to join the twelve Elvakai in their evening chant. The Dwarakai brothers, Balandur and Balindur, joined us at Thul Dural. The rest of us have been together since Vamlodar. The Manakai are Ephurt, Wine and Ulf, all men of Narshadow.
The Elvakai are Vailarin, Arundel, Tantarin, Gildi, Iraldar, Pendalor, Iloth, Undrina, Edla S’arel, Galorn, Egrimilor and Enlor. Iloth, Undrina, Edla S’arel and Arundel are female. Don’t bother trying to remember their names. I’m probably mangling them anyway.
Most Elvakai look much like Manakai varying in skin colour from white to darker brown and distinguished only by their longer ears and the light that seems to play around them. The exceptions are Vailarin whose skin is black and Tantarin whose skin is blue. And Arundel. Arundel’s skin is white like my own and her hair is blonde to my red. But there the likeness ends. Arundel is absurdly beautiful. Not the kind of beautiful that men want to possess but the kind of beauty that possesses them. I don’t have either kind of beauty, I wouldn’t be like that, even without a twice broken nose.
Morning
Raksha Redmist, the Demon-Bearer, wakes at first light realising that she is happy. The demon and ghosts she carries have been extraordinarily quiet over the past weeks. It is the sixth hour of the fourteenth day, Occultum, last of the eleventh month, called Thot in the Commonwealth and Undecimus in the Empire, six hundred and eleven years after the accession of the First Adzar Emperor. Most of her companions are still asleep in their cocoons of furs and Ankora silk. The birds that sing at dawn are different from those that sing at night and the insistent noise of insects has quietened now. But the sound of the rushing water never ceases.
Blue skinned Tantarin who has kept the last watch of the night is kicking at the embers of the watchfire. He smiles at Raksha and she smiles back.
Raksha likes to rise earlier than the Elvakai. This morning she looks forward to bathing alone in the stream that descends from the Elcantanar Mountain after relieving herself among the trees. She no longer minds bathing with the other rangers and has learned how to remain private when she is naked among them but it still feels like holding up a shield.
The idea of public nudity would horrify the people of the village where she was raised. She smiles remembering the saying that you can take the girl out of Ethrania but you can’t take Ethrania out of the girl. But Raksha puts that from her mind. She had no wish to remember Ethrania this morning. She rolled up her cocoon and headed for the trees.
Hadrin
Hadrin Winterwise had risen even earlier than Raksha and was gathering mushrooms for the party. Gathering mushrooms or berries in the forest was a task he enjoyed as a morning meditation and it pleased him that his reputation as a gatherer nearly equaled that of his reputation as a battle leader among those who knew. This morning Balandur and Balindur had woken early to gather with him. Hadrin was a legend among the Dwarakai as among the other peoples of the Nar Mountains and Narshadow.
The Nar Mountains are resource rich. Bloodbond trees, Ankora Silk, Songsteel and Drakai scales can only be found there. For decades before the ‘Trade not Raid’ Pact, Hadrin’s Rangers had worked with Paldir to establish a peace first between the Kai peoples of the Nar Mountains and then between the Mountains, the Adzar Empire and the Arten Commonwealth with Narshadow becoming a relatively autonomous and peaceful province of the Empire for twenty five years until Adzar chose to break the Pact in order to extract more of the unique resources of the Nar Mountains, particularly the Drakai scales which are both obdurate and possessed of gravity resistant properties.
The Drakai, manta-like flying sentients, were part of the Pact and sometimes graciously allowed other Kai to fly on their backs. They had flown the party from Thul Balahm to the foot of Mount ElcantaNar, a journey of 1500 kem. The flight had taken five days and ended here at the beginning of the long path up to the city. The path that is the only permitted route up the mountain. One does not simply fly into Elcantar.
The Path
The path up ElcantaNar is not hard. It is a trail that traverses the mountain rising from west to east gently enough to avoid real climbing. There are places where it is steeper but in these places rough stairs have been fashioned from the stone.
Hadrin does not lead the line, Vailarin and the rest of the Elvakai are at the front, then the three Manakai Rangers and the two Dwarakai. Hadrin and Raksha are at the rear of the group. For the Elvakai this is a return home, for the Manakai Rangers it is an honour and one that Hadrin had assured them that they deserved many times over. For the Dwarakai brothers it is a diplomatic mission that will strengthen the bonds between two peoples. But the mission of Hadrin and Raksha is to alert the Elvakai of Elcantar to dangers that threaten not only the Nar Mountains and Narshadow but the whole of N’Ume.
Farjika Pendragon, chief of the Paldir and newly named Protector of Narshadow has sent Hadrin and Raksha to Elcantar to engage the Elvakai in a struggle against an Empire that has grown more dangerous, an empire that threatens to open everywhere the gates of hellworlds where demons dwell.
Neither Hadrin nor Raksha are Paldir but Hadrin is Elvakai and for decades the most loyal ally the Paldir could hope for. As for Raksha she is inhabited by a demon. Not possessed, because she has overcome it, but one who knows the power of demons more intimately than most and holds with that knowledge the hope of resistance.
The mountain, Elcanta’Nar, is an extinct volcano within whose forested crater the Elvakai city, Elcantar, is built around the shores of a lake fed by hot springs that keeps the crater warm in the harshest winters.
The path does not lead over the lip of the crater but to a narrow passage tunneling into the stone. Eventually what was little more than a tight crack through which a single man might pass widens, becoming a passageway whose carved walls arch upwards to meet in a high ceiling. The passageway, lit by bioluminescent lamps, is a road, sometimes broad, sometimes narrowing, that is not straight but winds and slopes downward becoming stairs in places.
Raksha has felt the eyes that have followed the party since they entered but there is a point at which the passage widens into a circular cavern, it is a garden and a courtyard above which is a chimney through which the sky can be seen. Around the courtyard is a fortress carved into the mountain’s stone.
At the entrance to this environment are Elvakai guards. The Elvakai rangers are greeted and permitted to continue along the passage without ceremony, beyond nods to the guards, but Raksha Redmist, the Manakai Rangers and the two Dwarakai are invited into the fortress. Hadrin Winterwise will stay with them, but instructs the other Elvakai Rangers, who hesitate, to continue without them.
That outsiders, Manakai and Dwarakai, are with Hadrin means that they are no enemy. Still there are procedures to be observed.
The Fortress
Raksha stares at the fortress carved from the stone of the mountain and inlaid with expanses of clear crystal. Inside, its great hallway is not dark at all, but filled with light magnified by the crystal. Raksha hates being told where to go and what to do but is too stunned to do anything but follow the guard that guides her. Belatedly she notes that the guard is an Elvakai woman with golden skin and long black hair wearing silver armour.
The other visitors are similarly guided to rooms where it is explained that they may bathe and dress in clothing provided for them before meeting the Sentinel for dinner.
Light from the wall’s crystal panels fills the room and Raksha stands in wonder before a pool of clear water set in the polished stone floor.
“There is your bed. And some new clothing on it.” said the Elvakai, directing Raksha’s attention towards them. “There is a toilet where you may relieve yourself and this is the pool where you may wash yourself.”
The guard said more but Raksha heard nothing until she said that she would return later. When she had left, Raksha, alone, fell to her knees and sobbed.
Hemidel and Frey
“Does it speak?” Hemidel asks the question after staring at Raksha silently for perhaps a minute.
The demon stirs. “Don’t kill this one.” It whispers. Raksha smiles. She says that the demon only speaks to her and then only to demand that she kills. Perhaps it has developed a sense of humour.
“It speaks. But only to me.” says Raksha.
She is sitting at a long bondwood table with Hadrin, the three Manakai Rangers and the two Dwarakai. Before them are ladened plates of what Hemidel and Frey call ‘plant and mushroom based foods’ and fish from the lake
In Ethrainia beauty was considered a distraction from Godliness and luxury a sin. Raksha has accepted the luxuries of flush toilets in Stormhaven and its architectural diversity, its artifacts, sculptures and clothing; she is well travelled and rejects the puritan aesthetic of Ethrainia, but if this fortress at the entrance of Elcantar, with its smooth stone floors and carved walls, is a foretaste of the city then Elcantar will be like nothing she has seen before.
At the head of the table sit Hemidel and Frey. Hemidel has asked a few polite questions of the Manakai Rangers and thanked them for their service with Hadrin. He has discussed a little the news from the Dwarakai cities with Balandur and Balindur and welcomes them as honoured guests. Frey says that arrangement will be made for them to have suitable lodging in the city but that until then they should consider the fortress their home.
“How did you come about your demon?” asks the Sentinel.
Hadrin had spoken of Hemidel and Frey to prepare Raksha for just this moment.
She knew that Hemidel is a Guardian, that he has come to be called ‘The Sentinel’, that it is not a name of his office but a name that has been given specially to him. Unusually large for an Elvakai Hemidel was once called the Elvakai who guards the Mountain, he is now called the Mountain who guards the Elvakai.
As for Frey, Hadrin had said that as Hemidel will say what others dare not, she will see what others do not. She is the other half of Hemidel, while he is large and dark skinned, She is slight and pale of skin. As Hemidel is called ‘the Mountain’, Frey has come to be called ‘the Light on the Mountain’.
Raksha holds Hemidel’s gaze and replies, “I was abused and tortured by the Adzar until I lusted for revenge more than life and love.”
The room went still. Suddenly, no one was eating. Frey touched the Sentinel’s hand and said, “Perhaps we should discuss this in private.”
“No” said Raksha, looking around the table. “There is no one here I fear to share this tale with.”
“The Adzar sorcerers wanted my rage and hate to resonate at the same frequency as the wrath demon they wished to enter me.”
“It did.”
“I was intended to be nothing but a meat vehicle, full of rage and hate, that the demon could inhabit.”
Raksha waited for the next question. It came from Frey and was not the one she expected.
“These Adzar sorcerers” she began, “were they all Manakai, human?”
Raksha’s lips tightened, then she replied. “No, not all, some were like you, Elvakai.”
No one spoke so Raksha continued. “It wasn’t the ears alone. It was the light around them. Except it wasn’t light like you have. It was a kind of … visible darkness.”
“Bent Elvakai” grimaces Hemidel.
“Still Elvakai” replies Frey.