Chapter Eleven
The Fading Lands ~ Fey’Bahren
“You should have warned me.”
Rain smiled. “You should have known. It was the obvious outcome.”
Swimming was over, and Steli, who seemed to have adopted Ellysetta as her own kit, now held Ellysetta firmly between her forepaws
and, like tairen mothers throughout the ages, was diligently licking her kitling dry. The tairen’s deep blue eyes gleamed
happily, though Rain thought he detected a hint of mischief mixed in with the happiness.
Ellysetta accepted the maternal attention with patience and good grace, once she recovered from her initial shock. By the
time Steli finished and blew puffs of warm air to complete the drying, Ellysetta was nearly purring. She leaned against Steli’s
neck and stroked the tairen’s soft white fur. “Thank you, Steli.”
Around them, tairen lay basking on the broad, flat drying rocks that encircled the lake. The slow flap of drying wings sent
warm breezes circulating through the chamber and rippled the lake’s glassy surface. The familiar warm scent of tairen filled
Rain’s nostrils. It wasn’t the clean, light fragrance of the Fey, but something deeper and more complex. Fey smelled of blossom-filled
meadows and spring breezes. Tairen smelled of the earth, rich and full of life.
Steli rose to stretch and yawn before settling back down and lifting her own wings to dry. Ellysetta ran her hands through her hair and winced as her fingers snagged on a tangle.
“If you come here, I will brush it for you,” Rain offered.
She glanced up, startled, then smiled when she saw a brush appear in his hand. “Magic can be convenient.” She walked over
to sit beside him.
“Rain?” she asked as he methodically worked the brush through her curls. “What do you think I heard during the Fire Song?”
He paused in midstroke. “I don’t know, shei’tani. Sybharukai says you have the scent of old magic about you. Perhaps that allows you to sense what the rest of us cannot.”
She turned around. “What’s ‘old magic’?”
He sighed. “I don’t know that either. Sieks’ta. I should have answers, but all I have are the same questions as you. Sybharukai says the tairen will follow us to Dharsa
and sing pride-greetings to the Eye of Truth in the hope it will give us more information than it has in the past. The Eye
is tairen-made. Perhaps the pride can convince it to cooperate.”
“If that’s the case, why didn’t they do the convincing last time, when you asked it for help and it sent you to me?” There
was a fierce light in her eyes. She hadn’t forgotten that the Eye of Truth had hurt him. Now he realized he probably should
have kept that information to himself.
“Apparently, it wasn’t the right time.” The tairen were like that—mysterious and unpredictable—and Sybharukai often knew much
more than she let on.
“But this is the right time?”
“So it would seem.”
Ellysetta’s lips pursed, but she nodded and turned back around. He plied the brush again.
“Rain?”
“Aiyah?”
“What happens if I can’t do what everyone thinks I can? What if the kitlings still perish, the Fey remain barren, and the magic continues to die in the Fading Lands?”
“I have faith in you, shei’tani.”
“But what if your faith is wrong?” she persisted. “What if I fail?”
“You ask that as if you expect me to revile you.” He set the brush aside and moved in front of her to grip her shoulders and
look her steadily in the eye. “Listen to me, Ellysetta. I vowed the night of our wedding that I would never turn from you
again, and I will not—no matter what miracles you do or do not bring about, no matter what sort of magic you possess, no matter
even if you never accept my bond. I am yours, utterly and completely, from now until the end of time.”
“But—”
“We are both beings of great power, but we are not gods. You are not to blame for our troubles, nor will you be to blame if
you cannot solve them.” His thumbs traced the soft fullness of her lower lip, then brushed the creamy silk of her cheeks.
“Just do the best you can, shei’tani. That’s all anyone can ask of themselves.” He lifted her hand and pressed a kiss to her palm, then another to the fragile
pulse point at her wrist, and gave her a reassuring smile. “Enough of this dire talk. Come with me, and let me show you the
wonders of Fey’Bahren.”
The caverns of Fey’Bahren were wondrous indeed, an entire city of tunnels and chambers hollowed out beneath the volcano. The
tunnels, Rain told Ellysetta, extended beyond Fey’Bahren itself to the jagged peaks of the surrounding Feyls, a reminder of
the days when the tairen had not teetered on the brink of extinction.
Rain showed her the crystal-lined caverns at the mountain’s deepest heart, where veins of gemstones and precious metals colored the walls with glittering mosaics, and a stunning, mist-filled chamber where the still-warm waters of the bathing lake merged with the cool silver ribbon of an underground river and plummeted down a sheer cliff face.
At the base of the waterfall, another smaller lake formed and spilled over into a stream that disappeared from sight.
Ellie’s favorite was a chamber Rain called the Cavern of Memory, whose entrance was guarded by a pair of exquisitely carved
stone tairen with diamond claws and glittering Tairen’s Eye crystal eyes. Within, every wall was covered with etched reliefs
that depicted the countless past ages of tairen and Fey. The scenes, Rain told her, had been carved by artistically inclined
Feyreisen over the millennia. Ellie recognized familiar Fey tales in some of the carvings, famous battles in others, but most
were of scenes that the mortal world had long ago forgotten. Ellie could have stayed in that chamber for months, years even,
absorbing the amazing visual documentary of ages past without ever losing interest.
It was only as Rain escorted her out that she saw the series of reliefs retelling the fateful day when all the world had changed.
She stopped in her tracks, her fingers trembling as she reached out to touch the image of a man’s face carved with raw, untutored
starkness in an expression of eternal anguish.
“Oh, Rain . . .” Beside that single, heart-stopping image were others, more crudely made, of a tairen blasting a battlefield
of tiny soldiers, of a woman crying out as a robed man brought a blade slicing down towards her neck, of a barren, desolate
wasteland empty of all but the broken skeletons of dead trees and a tiny kneeling man lifting his arms in grief to the heavens.
“I lacked the artistic skills of those who carved the walls before me,” Rain said softly.
“You carved these yourself, without magic,” Ellie murmured. She could feel the embedded memory of his ancient torment locked
within the very stone itself, captured for all time as the images were carved. Rage and pain and grief beyond reckoning. She
pulled her hand away. “You channeled your sorrow into the stone.”
“Did I?” He sounded surprised. “I didn’t realize. I knew only that working here, carving my own story into the stone, was the one thing that gave me some small measure of peace.”
He had suffered so much . . . and now, all his suffering, all the sacrifices he had made to save the Fey, were threatened
by the nameless power that was slowly eradicating the tairen. For a thousand years, he had lived in torment, fighting for
sanity and for release from the mad grief that consumed him, fighting to live because the Fey needed him to survive.
Rain said he didn’t hold her responsible for saving the tairen, but that did not absolve her. She had sensed something in
Fey’Bahren that neither Rain nor any of the tairen had ever felt. Something evil and gloating. It wasn’t the familiar malevolence
of the High Mage or the nightmares that had haunted her all her life, but it was just as frightening.
She touched the carved image of Rain’s face, absorbing the echoes of his torment and his desperate resolve to live when all
he wanted was to die. Had she ever been so selfless? So brave?
No, she’d been frightened all her life, running from her nightmares, her enemies, her magic. She was tired of being afraid.
And she was definitely through with running.
“Would you take me back to the hatching grounds? I don’t know if there is anything I can do to help, but I’d like to start
trying.”
The tairen had all returned from the lake and were perched on the ledges of the large cavern when Ellysetta stepped out onto
the nesting sands and approached the still-buried tairen eggs. Steli glided down and flapped her white wings to blow away
most of the black sand covering them before leaping back to her ledge.
The five remaining mottled gray eggs were nearly as big as Ellysetta was tall, reaching up to her shoulders.
She laid her hand on the snub, bluntly rounded top of one of them.
The outer shell was a tough, leathery, pebbled substance, neither as hard nor as brittle as the eggs of birds.
She gave a gentle, experimental squeeze and jumped as the egg twitched in seeming response.
Yanking back her hand, she turned nervously to Rain. “Can the baby tairen feel when I touch it?”
He nodded. “The tairen are sentient even in the womb, though until the eggs are actually laid on the sands, their sentience
is mostly limited to emotion and sensory impressions rather than actual thoughts, much the same as what we receive from an
unborn child of our own species.” A shadow darkened his eyes. “Sybharukai says there are still three fertile females in this
clutch. The one taken last night was male.” A muscle ticked in his jaw. “I suppose we should be grateful for that.”
On her ledge above him, Sybharukai growled softly. Ellie glanced up at the tairen. Fourteen pairs of eyes watched from their
ledges, gleaming in the red-orange glow of the nesting lair. Fourteen. All that remained of the once-thriving prides. And
if these unhatched female kits died, the pride would end with this generation.