Prologue #2
For the first time in twelve hundred years of life, Rainier vel’En Daris knew absolute terror.
The magic he’d woven throughout the Hall would never hold a Tairen Soul caught up in a Fey Wilding Rage. All would die. The world would die.
The Tairen-Change moved over him in horrible slow motion, creeping up his limbs, taunting him with his inability to stop it.
The small sane part of his mind watched like a stunned, helpless spectator, seeing his own death hurtling towards him and realizing with detached horror that he was going to die and there was nothing he could do to prevent it.
He had overestimated his own power and utterly underestimated that of the Eye of Truth.
“Stop,” he shouted. “I beg you. Stop! Don’t do this.” Without pride or shame, he fell to his knees before the ancient oracle.
The rage left him as suddenly as it had come.
In a flash of light, his tairen-form disappeared. Flesh, sinew, and bone re-formed into the lean, muscular lines of his Fey body. He collapsed face down on the floor, gasping for breath, the sweat of terror streaming from his pores, his muscles shaking uncontrollably.
Faint laughter whispered across the stone floor and danced on the intricately carved columns that lined either side of the Hall of Tairen.
The Eye mocked him for his arrogance.
“Aiyah,” he whispered, his eyes closed. “I deserve it. But I am desperate. Our people—mine and yours both—face extinction. And now dark magic is rising again in Eld. Would you not also have dared any wrath to save our people?”
The laughter faded, and silence fell over the Hall, broken only by the wordless noises coming from Rain himself, the sobbing gasp of his breath, the quiet groans of pain he didn’t have the strength to hold back.
In the silence, power gathered. The fine hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end.
He became aware of light, a kaleidoscope of color bathing the Hall, flickering through the thin veil of his eyelids.
His eyes opened—then went wide with wonder.
There, from its perch atop the wings of three golden tairen, the Eye of Truth shone with resplendent clarity, a crystalline globe blazing with light. Prisms of radiant color beamed out in undulating waves.
Stunned, he struggled to his knees and reached out instinctively towards the Eye. It wasn’t until his fingers were close enough to draw tiny stinging arcs of power from the stone that he came to his senses and snatched his hands back without touching the oracle’s polished surface.
There had been something in the Eye’s radiant depths—an image of what looked like a woman’s face—but all he could make out were fading sparkles of lush green surrounded by orange flame.
A fine mist formed in the center of the Eye, then slowly cleared as another vision formed.
This image he saw clearly as it came into focus, and he recognized it instantly.
It was a city he knew well, a city he despised.
The second image faded and the Eye dimmed, but it was enough.
Rain Tairen Soul had his answer. He knew his path.
With a groan, he rose slowly to his feet. His knees trembled, and he staggered back against the throne to collapse on the cushioned seat.
Rain gazed at the Eye of Truth with newfound respect.
He was the Tairen Soul, the most powerful Fey alive, and yet the Eye had reduced him to a weeping infant in mere moments.
If it had not decided to release him, it could have used him to destroy the world.
Instead, after beating the arrogance out of him, it had given up at least one of the secrets it was hiding.
He reached out to the Eye with a lightly woven stream of Air, Fire, and Water and whisked away the faint smudges left behind by the fingers he had dared to place upon it.
?Sieks’ta. Thank you.? He filled his mental tone with genuine respect and was rewarded by the instant muting of his body’s pain. With a bow to the Eye of Truth, he strode towards the massive carved wooden doors at the end of the Hall of Tairen and tore down his weaves.
?Marissya.? He sent the mental call to the Fey’s strongest living shei’dalin even as he reached out with Air to swing open the Hall’s heavy doors before him.
The Fey warriors guarding the door to the Hall of Tairen nodded in response to the orders he issued with swift, flashing motions of his hands as he strode by, and the flurry of movement behind him assured him his orders were being carried out.
?Rain?? Marissya’s mental voice was as soothing as her physical one, her curiosity mild and patient.
?A change of plans. I’m for Celieria in the morning and I’m doubling your guard. Let your kindred know the Feyreisen is coming with you.?
Even across the city, he could feel her shocked surprise, and it almost made him smile.
Half a continent away, in the mortal city of Celieria, Ellysetta Baristani huddled in the corner of her tiny bedroom, tears running freely down her face, her body trembling uncontrollably.
The nightmare had been so real, the agony so intense.
Dozens of angry, stinging welts scored her skin .
. . self-inflicted claw marks that might have been worse had her fingernails been longer.
But worse than the pain of the nightmare had been the helpless rage and the soul-shredding sense of loss, the raw animal fury of a mortally wounded heart.
Her own soul had cried out in empathetic sorrow, feeling the tortured emotions as if they had been her own.
And then she’d sensed something else. Something dark and eager and evil. A crouching malevolent presence that had ripped her out of sleep, bringing her bolt upright in her bed, a smothered cry of familiar terror on her lips.
She covered her eyes with shaking hands. Please, gods, not again.