Chapter 20
Had it been Elias’s will alone, he would have never gotten into the skiff.
He would have waited out the end of the battle in some secret corner of the Isles, then declared himself a survivor.
But this will that was moving through Elias was not his.
He was being controlled by Mortandagh, and part of that control was making him do things he’d never done before.
Since he had never learned how to teleport, he couldn’t perform that magic.
What he could do was steer the skiff and propel it with his magic.
The man that was Elias Solwyn was gone. What was left in his stead was a thrall created from Hell-craft.
He knew only one thing. He was going to Umbrveyl to get his hands on the Spear.
He would do whatever it took.
Underneath every action, every alien thought, he was somewhere buried deep within, realizing with great horror what he had done. He had killed his grandfather and was escaping.
No. Not escaping. I am going to put an end to this madness. The Grath Nomad is going to come attack at Umbrveyl. I need to gather my forces. They will answer to me. I am the champion of Sol.
Even though this was an alien thought, it placated much of his horror.
Elias braved the storm and the waves that sent his skiff hurtling through the air and across waves. Overhead, thunder continued to roar and the storm sent lightning after lightning.
And he used every bit of magic at his disposal to accelerate his path toward the continent.
It was a long journey, but it was not as long as most people made it out to be.
The Doldrum Isles were close enough to Aladria that prisoners could be taken back and forth with relative ease.
The court itself could reach the Isles from Rubien on short notice.
Regardless of that, the journey took Elias several hours, and by the time he reached the continent, it was nightfall.
His stomach was rumbling with hunger, and his mind and his body were on the verge of collapse. But he kept going. He kept walking until he appeared barefoot and bedraggled at the shores of Rubien. He could not afford to show himself to anybody. Not right now. Not while there was a task at hand.
It was still night. The capital was asleep as Elias moved through it, finding food in closed-up shops, finding new clothes for himself.
He even went inside an inn and took a bath.
When he looked at himself, he could see his former glory—the champion of Sol, the student who was hailed as the brightest in all of Umbrveyl, the guy who was all set to take the reins of this country after his graduation.
He smiled at himself. Of course he was going to do all of that.
Of course he was going to take the Sunflame Spear and kill Mortandagh with it.
Now it was only a question of how he was going to get to Umbrveyl on such short notice.
“Well, that is not a matter any longer,” Elias said to himself.
He explored this cobbled town, with its winding streets and its tall buildings, until he came to a bookstore.
It was a standard bookstore, shuttered down, that he opened with his spellblade and stepped inside.
This was so elementary, a lapse in his knowledge so wide that it should have been filled during his second year at Umbrveyl, and yet here it was—a book that would help him realize how to teleport himself.
He opened the book and read the instructions of the spells.
At one point in his life, he was really repulsed by the idea of teleportation.
In fact, when he had used the teleportation device to come back and forth from Wilted Hamlet, it had done a number on his psyche.
But he was not the same old weak Elias anymore.
Now there was a new drive in him, a drive that made him learn the teleportation spell, then step out of the bookstore having unlocked this new ability.
And so he did. He teleported for the first time in his life on his own, and came to Crook Haven, the town closest to Umbrveyl.
At this time of night, a low moon hung over the quiet Crook Haven.
It was so quiet here that it was hard for him to believe that a war was waging on this continent.
It was so quiet, with people sleeping, the windows robbed of light, and no sound other than the ripple of the wind through the leaves and the gentle flow of water through the stream, that Elias could not recall why he was here.
Why am I here? he wondered.
There was a little bit of slip of control from whoever was controlling him, and Elias realized, just for a brief spell, what he had done and why he was here.
He was about to scream out of pure horror when the control slipped back on him again, and he was fine.
Somewhere deep inside his mind, he was trying to fight this control, but there was no fighting it.
It was as if something had been rooted deep inside him, and was guiding his every move.
He closed his eyes, and in the darkness he only saw the radiant Sunflame Spear hanging in Umbrveyl. He needed to go there, and so he crossed the town on foot. It was not that far. He could make it.
In the distance, Umbrveyl, the magnificent castle, rose above the valley, competing in height and stature with the rest of the mountains of the valley. He had loved this place from the start. It had been the mecca of knowledge and learning.
Except, who was he? Was he Mortandagh, or was he Elias? Because Elias had not loved this place as much as he pretended to. It was just another arena where he could lord his stature and his legacy over others.
No. It was Mortandagh who loved Umbrveyl.
Yes. Yes. Mortandagh, who had been shunned from everywhere in his life, ridiculed, cast away for his use of magic as a boy.
Mortandagh, who hadn’t grown up in Aladria but somewhere in the outskirts of Romania, where the nomadic tribes had seen his terrible power and had decided to kill him.
He had resisted death. These were not magical people, and so they did not understand, and he had wandered like a nomad for a long time.
This was such a long time ago that these memories, coming to Mortandagh as he sat in his town hall controlling Elias’s doll, became swept by deep emotion.
Such a long time ago that he was so weak and would look to others for help.
In Romania, he found people who could do magic, and he showed them what he could do.
“You’re one of us,” one of the people said, “and you’re of age. Come by. We’re gonna do something about you.”
This was a traveling troupe. They would travel all across Europe, entertaining other people with sleight-of-hand tricks, never actually revealing that it was real magic.
If somebody wanted to live amongst non-magical folk, they had to pretend to be normal, and this troupe, the Knight and the Moth, did exactly that.
They traveled, entertaining people, singing songs, dancing, and as part of their travel they also went to Aladria, traveling across the island: Golgora, Lynsfeld, Umbrveyl, Crook Haven, Warrowden.
And while on their journey, they dropped Mortandagh at Umbrveyl.
These were not the bad times. At this particular point, there were so many temples to Aeterna all over the country.
Mortandagh had been impressed by all of it.
In fact, the woman Aeterna had always seemed maternal, always seemed inviting.
By the time he enrolled at Umbrveyl, he discovered his true legacy—that he was not somebody from Romania, but an orphan whose parents were actually from Aladria, and that they had gone on a vacation trip to Eastern Europe, where they had died, leaving a baby at the mercy of a strange land and a strange people.
He had learned of his legacy, of the old blood that ran in his veins, and then he had witnessed the horrors of Solaris and the Solwyn family.
He had seen the temples being destroyed.
He had seen the books being burned. In the meantime, he had strengthened himself by learning of the arcane arts, of the old books which taught profane-craft, which taught Hell-craft, and, more importantly, which taught Aeternumancy.
He became a scholar of all of it, but yet, even though he became quite adept at raising the dead, it was never quite a true resurrection.
His actions had not gone unnoticed. After he had graduated from Umbrveyl and had opted not to work for the government or hold down a traditional job or a business, people began flocking to him.
Some of them heralding him as a leader, as the promised messiah of this age.
Others trying to bring him down, for he was spreading word of profane-craft and telling others how it was not actually that profane.
Mortandagh had taken immense strides in the world of magic, and at that point people had compared him to the great magicians of old, including Balthazar.
Some of them even said that he was the second coming of Balthazar.
Some of them said he was the prophet of Aeterna.
But despite all of these titles and laudings, he was never actually able to find the spiritual transcendence that would affirm his bond to Aeterna.
And then the war had happened, and the war had killed several of his men, imprisoned them.
Eldric and the Vanguard and the Solignis Covenant had all risen against him and stripped him of his power, his repute.
They had rewritten history. They had burned the shrines and the temples, and they had destroyed the books.
To witness his own world coming to an end a second time had driven Mortandagh into hiding. As he hid, he healed himself. As he hid, he planned deeply, and he declared his arrival fifty years later with the murder of Vincent Crenshaw.