AUTHORS NOTES:
Thank you for your continued reads everyone! I'd love to see a review, just to let me know what you are thinking so far? Please, pretty please?
Slyksylva: Some dishes were based upon a meal I have eaten at Tenryū Shiseizen-ji, a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto. Good memories and their diet matched what I was after with the elves perfectly.
Archer1eye: Oooh ooohh… foreshadowing for SO SO much potential (both trouble and otherwise!)
Chapter 5812th-19th Day of Middle Spring 768 n.c
Each night was no better than the first. Horrible, unimaginable pain that left me reeling. If it weren't for Shard next to me when it ended, I would have been stuck in bed and awake until morning; suffering the aftershocks, the echoes of pain. Each time, after it had finished I questioned my own sanity with continuing it. Surely it was having an affect on my body? The longer it went on, the more I questioned whether or not I would survive it. Surely, I would just not wake up? Find myself forever in Tenebrae's realm, with her apologising for overestimating a mortal's resilience? With each night however, came the reward: knowledge. I gradually understood the prayers that I could beseech Tenebrae to enact, even how her church operated and how she wanted it to operate. I knew that Shard's stories of the origin of the Gods were absolutely true and correct (not that I doubted her). I knew Tenebrae's hatred for Celestine, I felt it. I didn't think that I had ever hated anyone, but I hated Celestine with such a passion! I also had knowledge of the other Deities that owed their existence to Tenebrae.
Including Thornas, the Allarthian God of Hidden Things. I put together fractured bits of information after the second night and raised the questions that begged with Shard.
"Of course I do," replied Shard when I asked if she knew of him, "I've spoken to him a time or two."
"Mother's description of the God who granted my family's prayers at the altars, matches his usual form," I suggested.
"Yes," Shard replied innocently, "yes it does."
"But of course, you would have had to forward Mother's prayer onto him," I suggested.
"I did, yes," Shard admitted. She sounded like she knew exactly where I was headed with my questions.
"Did you know that you were destined to be the one I would marry?" I asked carefully.
Her reply sounded a little odd, "I did, yes."
"Do you know why?" I asked.
"Not a clue," she replied, "it must have been something that Thornas and Tenebrae had decided together."
"I'm not complaining," I told her as I reached out to take her hand (which she likely moved to intercept), "It does not change my love for you."
"Nor mine," she replied before we joined together once more.
Once I experienced the last of those nighttime 'lessons', I felt… full. I also felt exhausted. The effects of each night were cumulative and despite Shard's attempts to help me forget the pain after each event, it was all leaving me very tired indeed. I expected perhaps to feel something 'more' in myself, but aside from the tiredness and the feeling of fullness, I felt normal.
Shard helped me with breakfast every morning, with both of us taking great pride in her results. I tried teaching her more and more difficult things and the worst that happened was a burned sausage that we had both forgotten. She left after breakfast, to 'attend her duties', and Malkarov began my lessons. We covered enchantment, rituals, potion making, magical theory and he even ventured into magical tactics in war (which I confessed was extremely interesting to me). My confession prompted him to begin telling me stories about his adventuring and war-wizarding days (for he had volunteered to serve a term of five years in the orc wars).
He had decided to set aside his blower idea and work instead on a silencing door. It would connect to a rune on the wall near the bed; that when pushed would prevent sound from going through the door. The bit that he was having trouble was to allow knocks.
I had asked, "if the door doesn't prevent sound from coming through, what if I need to get your attention?"
He replied, "you could push the bell, the sound would still go into the bedrooms."
"But how would I know that the silence enchantment is active to push the bell? I could be standing there knocking on the door with no idea that you couldn't hear me," I replied.
Malkarov was pleased with my thinking and implementing such a small change should have been easy, he had claimed, but it was proving itself anything but. His enchantment work seemed to be taking up every spare moment of his, but I was already used to his methods when an idea struck him after what I had observed when he first thought of the blower.
Alladrial had left the day after he prepared our feast with the promise, "I'll return when his first love isn't taking up all of his attention."
Dinner most of the rest of the tenday was cooked by Missus Rose. Shard loved the seemingly endless variety of dishes that were brought to us each evening and I loved her reactions to each one. She was discovering new flavours and textures with each dish.
"I don't know why I didn't try eating things earlier," she confessed one night.
"Why didn't you?" I asked.
"It wasn't necessary," she explained, "I don't need to eat, so why bother? Besides, I couldn't travel very far from the altar so there wasn't really much choice."
"How long were you alone, there?" I asked.
"I wasn't really alone," she told me, "I went off to visit other powers most of the time and only returned when somebody or something came near. A group of adventurers stumbled upon my clearing once, right when Easthaven was first founded. They were looking for a tribe of goblins that had been raiding the village that had come out from the mountains. They were entertaining and a thief among them was secretly venerating Drua."
I immediately recognised that Drua was an 'old god', one who no longer existed. He was once an aspect of Tenebrae's and was the God of Death. He eventually evolved to become Druaga, the Allarthian Demon God of Death.
She giggled, "I told the thief that I had message from Drua, instructions for him to go on a quest to bring me back a squirrel. The fact that I knew of his deity was enough to convince him of the truth behind my request and he was left trying to make up a story as to why he needed to tote a squirrel around and why he needed to bring it back to my altar," she laughed, "it was the most fun I had ever had to that point."
I had to restrain my laughter, but at her confession I let it all go.
"Why…" I tried, once my laughter had calmed to giggles, "why a squirrel?"
"I had seen them in trees in the distance, but they stayed away from the clearing," she told me, "I wanted to see if I could tame it."
"Could you?" I asked.
"Oh yes. 'Squirrel' stayed with me for most of his life, him and his mate and his children and his children's children all lived in a tree close to the clearing," she told me, "His mate wouldn't step foot inside, but his children and grandchildren would. Eventually one Summer a fire swept through while the whole family was out foraging and they all must have died or fled."
I hugged her and when she did not return the hug, I guessed that she might have been still reminiscing about the squirrel family. When I kissed her to bring her back to the present, I could taste the saltiness of her tears.
"I'm here now," I told her, trying to comfort her of her memories of loss.
"Now," she answered sadly and I was at a loss of what I could say to make her feel better.
Alladrial returned near the end of the tenday, "to make sure Mal is eating."
It was the first time I had heard Alladrial refer to him as 'Mal', which set off some giggles.
He merely responded to Shard and myself, "Shar and…. Shar," before he walked off laughing at my sudden silence.
"You can't try it out on the door!" I heard Alladrial shout from upstairs a short time later.
"I'm not!" Malkarov's reply came.
Shard and I made our way upstairs to find out what was going on. It seemed that Malkarov was implementing Shard's 'suggestion' into his rune scheme for the silence doors. The problem was of course, if it didn't work then anything could have happened (including blowing up the tower). Alladrial was of the opinion that was a bad idea. Malkarov agreed, which was why he was intending to write up that portion of the rune scheme onto a staff to test out first. I argued that it was silly of both of them not to trust Shard and there was no reason why he shouldn't just work it into the silence doors to start with.
Alladrial just said, "do you see this?"
I frowned at him, "of course I don't see that."
He laughed and responded, "this is why we shouldn't trust your judgement about consequences."
I growled and stomped my foot, "It's not my judgement, it's Shards!"
He laughed again, "Shard merely told him it was possible, not exactly how. What if he makes a mistake in the scheme?"
"Oh," I said aloud and confessed, "I didn't think about that."
"So, testing it out on a staff seems like a good idea," Alladrial said, "are you using your staff or making a new one?"
"Not my staff!" Malkarov announced, "Sharein will be carving it on her staff!"
"My staff?" I asked.
"Sure, why not?" Malkarov responded, "you haven't started enchanting it yet, so your first power bank is a good start to that, and as you haven't actually done anything to it… if it explodes then you haven't lost anything."
"Except me!" I complained.
"But we should trust Shard's judgement?" Malkarov said slowly.
"Ye.." I started before I realised how he had trapped me. I growled at him and he laughed.
"Not to worry, without the rest of the ward scheme any explosion shouldn't be shaped into a specific effect and once we start activating the scheme we can put some distance between ourselves and the staff before it's fully charged so that we can protect ourselves that way," Malkarov explained, "plus we will lay down every protection spell we know of. It should be okay."
"Should?" I asked incredulously.
"Not something to worry about right now," he dismissed, "we'll do it next tenday, once you can see what you're writing."
I was very surprised when I woke up on the last day, that the tenday seemed to have gone so very quickly. No more pain. It was done. I would travel to the farm to spend the day with my family and then at night go straight to the altar. Technically, I knew that I didn't have to go to the altar, but it felt like the correct thing to do for some reason. It was where I first spoke to Tenebrae, where I dedicated myself to her. Malkarov offered, at breakfast, to teleport me to the farm; which I readily agreed to. I wasn't looking forward to the long awkward walk back to the farm with Shard's assistance the entire way.
After breakfast, just as we were about to leave, the front door bell chimed out. Malkarov ran downstairs and returned a short while later.
"I've had a message," he said after a moment. He sounded almost… excited?
"It's from the King's Army, Chief War-Wizard Alabas. He is requesting my presence in Castlemere. Something to do with the orc-wars, mobilisations," he continued, "we will leave once you return on the 'morrow. I'll get everything ready in the meantime."
Castlemere? I was going to see the King's Capital? The grandest castle in Carn?
"We'll have to pay a visit to the Mages Guild while we're there, of course," Malkarov said, disrupting my thoughts just before he began the teleport spell.
Teleporting while blind was the most disorienting thing I could have ever imagined, Malkarov (curse him forever) merely laughed at my misfortune of falling on my backside as soon as we arrived.
Before he left he wished me a happy reunion with my family and instructed Shard to, "take care of her, I'd hate to take a blind apprentice with me to the Mages Guild… they'd think I was insane for taking her on. I'd never live it down!"
Arm in arm, Shard and I made our way towards the farmhouse. I felt the change from path to stone slabs and was ready to reach out to the door when we arrived.
"Mother? Father? I'm home! You'll never guess where I'm going to be off to!"
