Chapter Fourteen Legend of the Guardian #2
“In Alethia, healers are sent to train at a temple like this for a year,” Caelan said.
“To serve and humble ourselves before Iena. I hated it. Spent my days changing bedsheets and mopping up bloodstains.” Lost in the memory, Caelan looked almost wistful.
“But I would have never learned to restart a heart if I hadn’t first learned how to cleanse a wound—if I hadn’t been made to listen to what Iena was trying to teach me.
” He faced her then. “So listen, thief. Ask for the answers you need.”
Every respite they’d taken thus far had been out of necessity, either for food or water or sleep.
Reya couldn’t stop herself from feeling touched that he’d deemed getting her answers to be one of those necessities.
She smiled at Caelan, forgetting what had brought them together and where they were going.
For the briefest moment, she gave herself permission to enjoy having someone watching out for her.
He looked away as if her smile had pained him.
One by one, they ripped away the vines, revealing each of the All-Gods.
Tika, the All-Goddess of tricks, bore a gold band across her brow and a mischievous smile, with a single playing card clutched between her pointer and middle fingers.
Rova, the All-Goddess of justice, wielding what looked eerily like an Etellinian steel sword, stood blindfolded beside her lover, Rathos, the All-God of vengeance.
In the northernmost point of the structure, surrounded by tiny eight-pointed stars, was carved a woman draped in flowing robes, one hand over her heart and a crown of brilliant stars across her brow. Una, the Holy Mother of Creation, her face impassive, as if she knew something they did not.
And around her, beautifully etched and preserved in stone, was the story Rhiterra had attempted to wipe from history through the destruction of these sacred temples.
Three beings with cupped hands knelt before a small pool.
“In the version my mother told me, it was a queen, a soldier, and a farmer,” Reya said, lulled by the past as she brushed a hand over the ripples in the water.
When the Lower All-Gods led them to the Pool of Life and asked them what they would have if they could be gifted anything, the queen said “Knowledge,” and drank from the waters first. She was gifted eternity to amass the knowledge she sought and became the first Fae.
The soldier said “Strength,” and drank second.
He was gifted magic from the All-Gods themselves and became the first Sage.
The farmer said “Power,” and drank third.
He was given virility, so that he might amass a great population to rule over, and became the first man.
“My father told it differently,” Caelan said. “We were all the same, he said, equal, before Una’s children interfered in the world.”
When creation drank from the Pool of Life, it invited chaos, opening cracks into the Void—Una’s enemy’s domain.
Una could not bring herself to destroy what she had made even to prevent the centuries of bloodshed and conflict that would follow, so she gifted a drop of her own power in an effort to restore balance.
From the Sages, the only beings strong enough to wield it, she chose the most worthy to be her Guardian.
One Sage to unite the people that had been divided against the destruction of the Void.
“Inside the Caeruleum, this same scene is painted with the intent to strike terror,” Reya said, recalling the first time she’d walked through the behemoth basilica of the Church of the First in Edris. “To the Rhiterrans, the All-Gods are not deities but demons, corrupting Una’s perfect creation.”
“I’ve seen it,” Caelan said roughly.
Beneath Una’s flowing robes were a series of smaller scenes. In one, the All-Goddess had been etched with her hand atop the brow of a male Sage, gifting him her power. “What happened to the Guardians?”
Reya felt the heat of him at her back, and held her breath as Caelan gently touched her shoulders, slowly turning her toward another carving of a winged male Sage locked in battle with another male.
“Before the Age of Men, a male calling himself the Harbinger had declared war upon the continent,” Caelan answered.
“The Dread Wolves are just one of the many creatures he rallied to his cause. They swept Ianess like a plague. Whole cities were decimated, with millions dead, and the humans blamed us for all of it.” He seemed to choose his next words carefully.
“In the final battle of the war, Gerhardt Everlight, the last Guardian of Alethia, took the Harbinger with him into the next life. It was the last time anyone saw the God Power.”
Reya knew Sages were a powerful people, but their history—so much of it had been lost when the Rhiterran Empire swept the continent.
Alethia, the God Power, the Harbinger—to Reya they were just myths, too fantastic and frightening to possibly be true.
And yet, here she was, talking to an eyewitness.
He angled her toward the next carving of a great billowing mist creeping toward a city. “After the Mists came down upon Alethia, it was prophesied that another Guardian would rise, and that we would return home. My people have been waiting ever since.”
Reya turned in his arms, and he searched her irises like he might find some answer there.
Her lips parted around a question that never came, because he let go abruptly, like he didn’t trust his hands on her.
Caelan gave the art one more cursory glance, as if he had seen places like this countless times before, as if it were not some precious thing the forest had chosen to protect from the ravages of time and men for people like her, who had not seen the world when it had been better.
“Take the time you need. I’ll start on dinner,” he said, and left the temple to untie the rabbits they’d come across that morning from Ciz’s saddle.
Reya had been keeping food down easily since they started training, just like Caelan had promised. Unfortunately, that food was now running short.
She meandered through the temple, committing the painstakingly detailed scenes to memory, trying to humble herself in the way Caelan had described, to ask for answers that didn’t come.
Dusk settled, and Reya nestled onto her bedroll across from Caelan, the fire crackling between them.
“I have a question,” she said between mouthfuls of mushrooms and the last of her dried cranberries. What she wouldn’t give for a potato. And butter. Maybe some garlic.
“You usually do,” Caelan said wryly, rotating the rabbits on a makeshift spit over the flames. When she’d asked why he didn’t simply use his magic to speed the process along, he’d mumbled something about useless expenditures of power.
“What do you plan to do with those letters?”
Caelan looked up, but his hand kept rotating. “How about one of your deals? I’ll tell you what you wish to know in exchange for something I wish to know.”
“Fair enough.”
Without missing a beat, Caelan nodded to where her father’s sword lay propped against her saddlebag. “How did you come to possess that sword?”
She thrummed her fingers against her knee while Caelan took a swig from his waterskin. This was what she agreed to. Information for information.
“My father was Steelborn,” Reya said before she could change her mind. Caelan nearly choked. “The sword is his, not mine.” She gave him an ironic smile. “I bet you’re wishing you’d pawned it while I was unconscious.”
“Even as your blood poured out onto the streets, you clung to that sword like your life depended upon it. I would never have taken something so precious from you.”
Reya swallowed the lump in her throat, suddenly feeling terribly guilty for what she had done to Caelan. Not that they weren’t even now, but still. She picked the sword up by the hilt, unsheathed it, and ran her hand along the flat side of the blade with the lightest touch.
“This sword has been passed down to the eldest child in every generation of Connerys for seven hundred years. It was meant to be Leo’s.”
The name slipped off her lips before she could stop it.
“Leo?”
Her instincts told her that family wasn’t something he would ever wield against her. He was too honorable for that. “He’s my older brother.”
“You have a sibling.”
“I have two, actually. Leo’s six years older.”
“Why not give the sword to him?”
Reya stared into the flames. “Leo enlisted in the Rhiterran army when he was sixteen, and my father was not about to let him use the Connery blade to go kill magic-born.”
“I like your father already,” Caelan growled, and she smiled to cover the burning in her eyes.
“Forging was always more of a religion than a craft for my father. He worshiped Ryksis above all except Una.”
“Ryksis was generous to the Etellinians in a way he never was to my people,” Caelan said. “Alethians crafted excellent weaponry, but nothing like Etellinian steel. It’s an honor that he gave the sword to you.”
But it was an honor she’d never deserved. “I was his apprentice.”
“What?”
The urge to punch him in his perfect face was palpable. “Etellina is not like Rhiterra, where it’s unheard of for a woman to smith.”
“Then you know how to forge Etellinian steel.” Reya warily met his gaze, and saw a glittering ambition there that she recognized. “That could change the tide of a war.”
Caelan might have been honorable, but this secret wasn’t really hers.
It was bigger than empires, wars, and legends; it was the core of her father’s faith, her faith, and the fewer people who knew what she could do, the safer that secret would be.
“He died before I could learn,” she lied with the kind of grief she didn’t have to fake, and knew he would believe it.
“I’m sorry.”
Reya picked up a branch and held it over the flames the way her father had once held the makings of an axe. “I spent almost every day in the smithy until I was eleven. Leo and Paxton had no interest in learning my father’s trade.”
“Paxton?”