Savior of Istara (3 page)

But no matter where I went,
the silent dead loomed close at hand. The vacant stares of men,
women, children—and even a few remarkable specimens from Faltyr’s
bestiary—assailed me at every turn. A single question touched their
shriveled, stitched lips, the same one pervading in my bewildered
brain.

What was I doing here,
wandering in the land of the dead when I sought only to save the
living?

They made sense in their own
way. How could a single mute priest and a legion of the dead
provide me with the key to Istara’s salvation? Did I actually seek
to solve the problems of my living neighbors by skulking around in
the catacombs?

Legion of the dead, I
chuckled bitterly. Perhaps if they were undead then they’d be of
some real use to our cause. For a moment, I reveled in the
blasphemous fantasy of liberating the residents of Istara with an
army of their bony ancestors.

And it scared me.

Shivering despite myself, I
recalled why such an act had been prohibited by every civilization
on Faltyr since antiquity. And why one man’s jealousy and pride had
led him to breach that covenant, bringing the last cycle of ages to
a cataclysmic end.

As soon as the blasphemer
Ra’Tallah entered my thoughts, the architecture of my surroundings
changed to an older, more sinister form. As I passed through the
low-ceilinged entryway of this unfamiliar section of the
necropolis, I entered a wholly different type of
catacomb.

Skulls beyond counting lined
the walls of the next chamber. Intricate sconces and chandeliers
constructed of bone cast a soft pall on the entire room.
Apparently, their magical torches relied on the same style of
Aethyr-devices to power them as those in the newer sections of this
construct.

The skulls framed small
niches inset into the ruddy surface of the sandstone walls. A
bone-filled ceramic urn rested within each of the shallow
recesses.

Sturdy columns of quarried
and dressed stone supported the ceilings in this chamber. The
pillars of pale marble matched the bleached bone decor and
contrasted the native sandstone in a positively sanguine
fashion.

Bone white over blood red, I
thought, subtle decor indeed.

But where am I? What was
this ancient, terrible place?

I found myself in the center
of an oblong antechamber, standing beneath a mosaic of exquisite
workmanship and frightful imagery. It told me where I’d been led:
the House of the Dead.

I found myself inside the
hoary, bone-riddled core of the Temple of Eresh—commonly known as
the House of the Dead—far below the surface of the city cemetery.
Few of the living had ever set eyes upon it, unless they were on
their way out of this world. In fact, most people wouldn’t dare
trespass on grounds consecrated to a god of the
Underworld.

Guided by one of Lady
Death’s own, I felt welcomed instead. But why had I been led to
this place, so far removed from the concerns of the living? What
did Eresh or her clergyman want with a sixteen-year-old stationer,
scribe, and bookbinder?

I found out soon enough,
just not everything…not all at once anyway. In my naivete, I
trusted in powers beyond me and found salvation. But one person’s
salvation can be another’s damnation. And to those cultures that
had emerged from the aftermath of the Cataclysm to climb to
preeminence on Faltyr once again, that caveat proved painfully
familiar.

As a result, I recognized
the disc-shaped mural on the ceiling immediately. The painting
shone as if lit by an inner sun. The unnatural light it emitted
fell on an ornate dais in the center of the chamber. As I advanced
toward the raised platform, the priest of Eresh faded into the
shadows and out of our story.

Painted directly onto the
back of a massive shell from one of Faltyr’s countless species of
giant chambered nautiluses, the mural depicted the previous cycle
of ages, from the dawn of humanity’s Golden Age to the Cataclysm
that ended it. The spiraling wheel of events portrayed so vividly
in the masterful polychromatic piece captured my attention like the
unblinking eye of a mesmerist. I stood transfixed.

As I watched, an entire
cycle of ages reeled out before the theater of my mind’s eye. An
age after the Schism had sundered the Jade Throne and destroyed
elven hegemony on the mainland, the humans of Ny, Faltyr’s main
continent, arose to heights unseen since the glory days of the
Empire of Chi’kakal. Booming empires expanded outward, conquering
any weaker, scattered peoples in their path. And when the aims of
these imperial juggernauts collided, the result was inevitable:
total warfare.

As petty Pyrrhic wars
threatened to destroy humanity before it reached its full
potential, two parties arose to challenge the existing cycle of
chaos and bloodshed. For a time, their efforts would prove
fruitful, until pride and jealousy divided them and nearly
destroyed the known world.

The marriage of Artemis to
Ra’Tallah signaled the beginning of Faltyr’s Golden Age. Rumored to
be one of the daughters of Ishta’Kahl, Artemis wore the Tripartite
Crown, ruling the Baax Empire as well as the island kingdoms of
Moor’Dru and Corr Deyraire. Whereas, her lover, partner, and
eventually her nemesis, the accursed God-King Ra’Tallah, reigned
over the expansive Ireti Empire and the lands of the conquered
Nubari.

The people loved Artemis as
much as they feared Ra’Tallah. Together they made a potent force
for peace and collected all the tribes of humankind under one
banner, the United Nations of Ny (UNN). Strong alliances forged
with elves, gnomes, and ogres made it possible to establish safe
trade and travel across the Long Road for the first time since the
height of Chi’kakal.

But this Golden Age would
not last, could not last. Even I knew that one cannot build a
stable tower on shifting sand.

As the decades grew into
centuries, the venerable, undying rulers became deified by the
multitudes of peoples united under their banner. Huge cults of
worship sprung up across the land, competing with the gods
themselves for offerings and sacrifices. As their power and
influence grew, so did their discretion—or lack thereof—in using
it.

Artemis utilized restraint
and mercy whenever prudent, preferring to win the people’s hearts
and minds through her stern, sober oratory and equitable public
policies. On the other hand, her husband and co-ruler preferred to
keep the peace and maintain social order in a ruthless,
militaristic fashion. By the height of the Golden Age, Ra’Tallah
was as increasingly despised as his wife was adored. Relegated to
the shadows as she bathed in the warm glow of her subjects’ love
and loyalty, he became colder, crueler, and more
calculating.

And in the end, jealous gods
manipulated this heartless pretender to their throne into
annihilating everything that he’d worked alongside Artemis to
create. Like too many men before him, Ra’Tallah let his pride,
vanity, and ego become his undoing.

The familiar scene passed
before my eyes with the clarity typically reserved for the most
unforgettable of memories.

From astride his throne of
bones, dread Darconius, Dark Father of the Underworld, ordered his
eldest son, Nas’r, to steal the sole unabridged version of the
Liber Inferum
, the Book of the Underworld, from Lady Death
Herself. Nas’r may have betrayed his sister’s trust when he
pilfered Her holiest of holies, but the God of Lies and Intrigue
betrayed all Faltyr when he delivered the source of Eresh’s potent
necromantic abilities into the hands of ruthless, power-hungry
Ra’Tallah.

An Ireti devil emerged from
behind the guise of heavy-handed peacemaker. With the
Liber
Inferum
in hand, Ra’Tallah claimed to be the chosen successor
to Eresh, handpicked by Darconius himself to unite the Overworld
and the Underworld in a true Golden Age, one in which death no
longer mattered. His words seduced those grieving for loved ones
lost in the cycle of bloody wars plaguing the mainland at the time.
But they did not realize the sinister implications of his
silver-tongued oratory.

Within his domain, Ra’Tallah
instituted outrageous policies requiring debtors to provide labor
beyond the point of bodily death, including service to the state in
specialized legions of undead shock troops. While the UNN and the
Churches of the Holy Trinitas protested these decrees and even
threatened military action, none of them were in any position to
remove Ra’Tallah from power, especially with an army of undead to
swell the already impressive ranks of the Ireti
military.

Revulsion and anger filled
Artemis. Her partner’s actions violated everything the gods of the
Overworld held sacred as well as the laws established by the
compact governing the United Nations of Ny. His abominable deeds
drained her heart of any remaining love or devotion she felt toward
her husband.

Artemis had grown tired of
his bullish demeanor and insane jealousy long ago; but some element
of loyalty and concern had remained for the man she’d called
husband, lover, and partner. So she beseeched Ra’Tallah to return
the book to Eresh, the rightful ruler over the realm of the dead.
But he only laughed.

Drunk with power and
convinced of his own divinity, Ra’Tallah had felt invincible. And
he was…until he woke the sleeping dragon within his estranged
wife.

That proved to be his
undoing.

Their epic battle played out
before my eyes with enough detail to jar my senses and fray my
nerves. Under the command of Artemis, the last Dragon Empress of
Ny, the weight of the world fell upon the infernal host assembled
by Ra’Tallah in the shadow of the Meshkenet Mountains.

Drawn into the conflict, I
wept as the best of an entire generation of Faltyr’s peoples
marched off to the slaughter. Men, women, and even children from a
dozen races stood against the tide of terror sent by Ra’Tallah.
They fought to prevent his undead legions from crossing the narrow
neck of the Pelican Gulf into the heartland of the Baax
Empire.

Ra’Tallah commanded his
troops from an Aethyr-powered airship of his own design, one of
many enchanted vessels to travel the skies of Faltyr during its
Golden Age. Although it provided him with relative safety from the
armies united against him, the craft proved vulnerable to the fury
of a woman scorned.

Calling upon the powers
granted to her by her mother, Goddess of the Moon, Artemis reverted
to her true form, a silver dragon. And not the miniature versions
known to the modern age, I remind you, but an elder wyrm of
unimaginable size and power.

As Ra’Tallah struck at her
with tentacles of dark energy summoned forth from the Book of the
Underworld, Artemis plucked the turtleback airship from its mooring
and carried it aloft to the heavens. As her former lover drained
her power and her life, she drove onward and upward through
Faltyr’s atmosphere. The Dragon Empress did not stop until she
reached the cold, unforgiving vacuum of space, for even a newly
christened Lord of the Dead needed oxygen to survive, unlike a
Dragon of Faltyr.

With his final breath,
Ra’Tallah uttered a particularly vicious curse from the pages of
the
Liber Inferum
, sealing both their dooms as well as
ushering in the Cataclysm that ravaged our world and ended Faltyr’s
Golden Age.

As they plummeted toward the
planet’s face, his spell drew in Aethyr energies existent in the
ambient universe to fuel its devastating effect, the separation of
the immortal soul from its mortal coil before the point of
death.

The ruined airship burned
away during their meteoric reentry, leaving Ra’Tallah in the death
grip of his former queen. The damned lovers’ final fiery embrace
ended where their ascent began, on the field of their armies’
apocalyptic battle.

Artemis and Ra’Tallah struck
with the explosive force of a thousand suns, annihilating not only
themselves and their remaining forces but sundering the Meshkenet
Mountains. In the wake of the mountain range, they left the
shifting, sinister Sands of Sorrow, commemorating the Cataclysm for
all time.

The resulting shock wave
shook as many cities to rubble as it buried in sand and stone. And
titanic waves swept away entire civilizations, erasing them from
the next cycle of ages. After the home islands of the Nubari sank
beneath the sea along with the western half of Moor’Dru, the
winters became longer, colder, and darker than in the previous
cycle of ages.

Although history failed to
attest to the success or failure of the Ireti devil’s final spell,
legends and prophecy have speculated on that nagging detail since
that dark day. Though I did not learn the answer during my
cataclysmic vision in Eresh’s House of the Dead, I came to know the
awful truth of the matter years later thanks to my association with
a certain calamitous mage from Moor’Dru.

But that is another
story.

I awoke slowly as if
emerging from a fortnight’s slumber, sore, stiffened, and drained
by the experience. Fleeting remnants of the vision induced by the
mural in the House of the Dead flickered on the backs of my heavy
eyelids.