Chapter Eight #3
Age was finally outpacing magic. The time of his next incarnation—so long postponed by Elfeya v’En Celay’s impressive talents—could
no longer be held in abeyance.
Death was drawing near.
Shadows rot Kolis’s soul! The Sulimage’s ineptitude in Celieria City had cost Vadim dearly—the price far more than Celieria’s discovery of Eld’s secret
aggression and the loss of a valuable Fey captive.
A Mage, when the time of incarnation came upon him, needed a new vessel to house his soul. Only the strongest, most magically gifted vessel would do, because though a Mage’s memories and knowledge transferred to his new body during the incarnation, his powers did not.
Over the millennia, more than one High Mage had ousted his most dangerous rival not through direct combat, but rather by waiting
for the time of his enemy’s incarnation, stealing his chosen vessel, and replacing it with one of the rival’s powerless mortal
umagi. Once reincarnated, the Mage’s helpless new form could then be effortlessly mined for all its centuries of precious knowledge
before the pitiful living husk that remained was left to wither and die in the obscurity of captive servitude.
The greatest High Mage ever to rule Eld had no intention of meeting such a fate. Long ago, before the Mage Wars, before the
scorching of the world, the germ of his grand idea had formed and taken strong root. Since that moment, every day of his life
had been spent in pursuit of his dream.
Ellysetta Baristani was Vadim’s greatest creation, the culmination of all his long, painstaking centuries of experimentation.
She was his child, born of Fey flesh but tied to pure power through Vadim’s most skillful manipulation of Azrahn’s darkest
secrets.
She was the Tairen Soul vessel whose birth he had engineered to house the next incarnation of his soul.
Through her, he could have what no other Mage before him had ever had: the pure, limitless power and destructive force of
a tairen and—best of all—the immortality of the Fey.
And Kolis had let her slip through his fingers.
Vadim’s hand was trembling again, but this time from fury. He forced himself to calm. He was the High Mage, a man who mastered
adversity rather than succumbing to it. He would continue with his efforts to recapture Ellysetta Baristani—she was the ideal
candidate to serve as his vessel—but Vadim had always been too wise a Mage to hold all his coin in one purse.
He had succeeded with Ellysetta Baristani. He could succeed again.
The Fading Lands ~ Eastern Desert
As the Great Sun began its descent towards the western horizon, Ellysetta caught sight of a city rising from the flatness
of the distant desert.
“What’s that?” she asked, pointing.
“That is Lissilin, light of the east,” Rain said. “Our destination for tonight.”
Lissilin, which they reached before twilight cast the Rhakis into shadow, was another abandoned city of the Fey. Like Elverial,
there was a haunting beauty to the place, the otherworldly grace of the immortal Fey evident in every curving archway and
artistically carved stone wall. Unlike Elverial, however, there was no sense of a sleeping city waiting for its inhabitants
to return. Life had left Lissilin. Its gardens were parched plots of sand, its buildings and fountains the dry, sunbaked bones
of a dead city.
Ellysetta felt a deep sense of sadness as she walked through the empty, sand-blown streets. “How many Fey once lived here?”
It must have been many. Lissilin was no mere village.
“Twenty thousand,” Dax supplied the number.
She winced. “Where are those people now?”
They had reached the center of the city. Five thoroughfares converged on a pentagon-shaped center dominated by a large, dry
fountain filled with a half a dozen stone tairen. Once, no doubt, this had been a beautiful, lush park as lovely as the cherry-tree
orchard at the base of Teleon.
Rain met her gaze, his own bleak. “Gone.”
“Dead?”
“Most. The rest moved to Dharsa when they realized Lissilin was fading.”
Ellysetta glanced around at the dry, abandoned buildings. So much beauty lost. What a terrible, sad waste. “Of all the cities
in the Fading Lands, how many are still inhabited?”
He drew a deep breath and let it back out as a heavy sigh. “A few Fey still live in Tehlas and Blade’s Point, and a few live alone, but only Dharsa still thrives.”
Only Dharsa. In all the vast kingdom of the Fey, only Dharsa was still populous.
Rain gestured to a beautiful rose-stone building on the left where graceful, columned arches led to a brightly tiled inner
courtyard. “Shei’tani, you and Marissya can wait there while Dax and I hunt. That building holds a few rooms still kept up for travelers. I’ll
fill the fountain so you will have water to wash and drink.” He turned to the tairen fountain and spun a cool, blue weave
of Water magic. Moments later, clear water spouted from the mouths of the stone tairen and rapidly began to fill the fountain’s
large pool.
Ellysetta frowned in bewilderment. His weave had not been powerful enough to create that much water from nothing. He’d merely
summoned it from beneath the sands. “I don’t understand. If there’s still water here, why did the city die?”
Rain didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he gathered a handful of sand, spun it into a small cup, and filled it from one of
the streams pouring out of the tairen mouth. He handed the cup to Ellysetta. “Taste it.”
She took a tentative sip. Cool, sweet water touched her tongue. “It’s just water.”
“Precisely.” Rain spun another cup for Marissya as Ellysetta quenched her thirst. “It’s just water. But this fountain is—or
was—Lissilin’s Source.”
Her eyes widened. She looked at the tairen fountain with dawning dismay. There was no crisp tingle of faerilas magic in the water pouring from those stone mouths. There was nothing but . . . water.
“It isn’t lack of water that made the city die, Ellysetta. The magic of Lissilin died too.”
For the first time she began to truly understand just how desperate the plight of the Fey really was. They were living in the shadow of extinction in every possible way. The death of the tairen, the decline of their numbers, even the slow eradication of their magic.
“Do you think everything could somehow be related?”
Rain took a drink of the magicless water, then poured the rest out onto the sand. “The tairen are sickening in the egg, the
Fey are childless, and the magic of the Fading Lands is slowly dying. Do I think they’re all related? Aiyah. I am certain of it. But what’s causing it all is the question we have yet to answer.”
Eld ~ Boura Fell
Accompanied by half a dozen servants, Vadim Maur walked down the corridor that housed the luxurious cells reserved for his
most magically gifted female captives.
For many years, Elfeya v’En Celay had resided here, garbed in delicate silks and left to await his pleasure as he sought to
mate his great mastery of Elden magic with her countless Fey gifts. That attempt had come to naught, except that he’d discovered
truemated Fey did not breed with any but their bound mates.
That limitation was not true for unmated Fey. Though the unmated Fey females he’d captured during the Wars had been too fragile
to survive more than a few decades in captivity, the males were both hardy and fertile. Over the centuries, his captive Fey
and dahl’reisen males had successfully impregnated thousands of Celierian and Elden females, and in an effort to bring additional magic into
the bloodlines, he’d even released a number of their offspring back into the Celierian populations in the magic-infused lands
near the borders.
All along the borders, the unwitting descendants of Vadim Maur’s centuries-old breeding program lived their lives, Celierian and Eld mortals crossbred with a mix of Fey, Elvish, and Mage bloodlines, propagating amongst themselves with the genetic drives he had manipulated into their flesh, building the pool of increasingly gifted prospective breeders, females for his dahl’reisen studs, males for those rare females whose genetic makeup had left them too gifted to tolerate the touch of dahl’reisen flesh.
In his office, entire volumes of books documented the specifics of the bloodlines he had bred and crossbred over the
centuries.
Three of this generation’s strongest females were just entering the last quarter of their yearlong pregnancies. The fetuses
in their wombs were powerfully gifted, showing signs they possessed each of the five Fey magics. And that meant it was time
for Vadim to work the miracle of soul manipulation once again.
He stopped before one of several gilt-chased doors. The guards on either side hurried to unlock it for him, and with a wave
of his hand the heavy door swung inward, revealing the lush wonderland inside. In what had once been an enormous cavern carved
out of the rock, live trees and grasses grew along gentle hillocks bordering a stone pathway. Sun-bright Fire burned in sconces
overhead that traveled the domed ceiling daily in an imitation of the Great Sun’s daily trek across the heavens. A soothing
breeze rustled through the trees, and in the distance, water fell gently into a clear pond.
He had discovered long ago that serenity improved the number of live births amongst his breeding females, while privation
resulted in a higher level of miscarriages and stillbirths. So he had learned to provide serenity through pleasant surroundings
and a strong Mage spell that erased all memories of his prisoners’ previous lives and supplanted them with the desire to enjoy
their tiny slice of paradise, please the High Mage above all others, and willingly mate as directed.
Vadim followed the path to the tree-shaded pool, where he knew he would find the three women he had come for. A young black-haired
child clothed in servant’s rags was with them. A tray of food on the grass nearby explained her presence, but he was not pleased