The sun reached its apex several hours after they launched their small craft into the ocean, its rays catching calm waters and setting the surface glittering like chain mail. An easy breeze carried them across its surface at a gentle pace, the forest-covered coast drifting by on their right.
It would have been easy for Casek to forget a lot of the awful things he’d witnessed since his waking for just a moment but for two things. First, was the incessant cruel murmurs of the Bel’gor held within him. It hissed and spat constantly, an insidious undertone underpinning his every waking moment. He chewed at resin, and did his best to distract himself with plans and thoughts and even daydreams, but it was fruitless.
The voice of the Shadowspawn was like oil, seeping into every part of his consciousness and smothering it with its taint. His teeth ground, fists clenched and unclenched, but still it penetrated every pore of his consciousness. He missed the sound of Tauph’s voice every second that passed without it. His presence had been a calming, welcome distraction from the Drau’s influence before—even when he was being a shit.
Without him, Casek was wondering how long it would be before the constant assault on his mind would degrade his thinking, or wear away at his sanity. Part of him wondered if it already was, and that was the reason he was even contemplating the plan that had come to him as he was speaking to Raelynn about Taran that morning.
Another, darker part of him wondered if the plan was even his own to begin with.
The second thing preventing a peaceful day’s travel had just now loomed visible above the eastern forest they sailed beside. A single, grand tower climbed skyward in the distance, its black-stone walls capped with an impressively intricate pointed turquoise roof. He knew what it was immediately, misty, barely coherent recollections pooling together, stirred into action by the admittedly spectacular sight.
“Pyry’s Grand Tower,” Idris muttered, barely disguised bitterness lacing his tone.
Before they had set off this morning, Raelynn had apologised for the things she had said to him out of anger, but had still refused to walk back her insistence that they attempt to rescue Taran. Likewise, Idris had not wavered in his own insistence they press on to Oreia, and so they had sailed onward in weighty silence. Though the decision had not been vocalised, it was Idris who had taken command of the boat when they boarded that morning, and he was the one setting their course.
Raelynn simply stared bleakly at the tower’s peak, and Casek could guess well the dark thoughts burning her through her mind. One of her family was being held by the Shadow in that city, and she was having to travel straight past it. Logical or not, Casek wasn’t sure he could have done it.
“The Moon Tower of an’Dáire,” he said, shattering the tense silence.
The eyes of both his companions shot towards him, and he scratched at his beard, avoiding their gaze.
“The name came to me the moment I saw it,” he muttered. “A memory, I suppose.”
“Casek, there’s nobody alive—besides you—that could have remembered the name of that place. The Grand Tower is the name Oreia’s binders have since given it,” Raelynn said, eyes wide, before letting out a long breath. “Gods, how much of our lost history lay dormant in your mind, just waiting for you to remember it’s there?”
“Do you remember anything else?” Idris asked, gazing at him as though he were some interesting bug he’d never seen before.
“Small things. We didn’t really know who built it either. It, and Pyry itself, are ancient.” He spoke slowly, foggy recollections taking time to gather into tangible thought. Despite this, the clarity and completeness of the memories that returned as he did startled him.
“There are two origin stories. People argued over which was true, but they’re quite similar. The first is that the warrior Dagan built it and retired here after freeing the nations of Feres of their slavery at the hands of an ancient empire. The second is that he built Sindar Banir—the fortress the Moon Tower is built upon after freeing Pyria, and using it as a staging point for his liberation.” He quirked a smile, eyes distant. “Folk from around here much preferred the second. We were a small country. Unimportant. It was nice to think our blood was the first to stand against evil—even if it was just in the stories.”
“Dagan is a popular patron deity for those that still worship in Oreia, even today,” Idris said, a contemplative frown on his face. “Given that we are in the southernmost lands of Feres, I suppose it makes sense the most prominent deity would be one that originated here. It is interesting to hear you refer to him as a warrior, and not a God, however.”
Casek blinked owlishly. “If folk around these parts ever thought he was some kind of God, I’m yet to remember it. For us, he was just a part of ancient history.”
“It’s possible that he never was, then,” Raelynn said. “Faced with overwhelming darkness, people reached for any kind of light they could find. Makes sense they would reach for heroes of legend. Makes even more sense those legends would morph into deities. A historical hero can’t save you from demons, but if you worship a God with enough devotion, he just might.”
Idris smiled for a moment and leaned back against the guardrail of their craft. “It is…invigorating to discover that despite my disdain for the failure of reason that drives theism, it’s persistence has at least served to safeguard knowledge we’d long thought lost forever. How much can we still rediscover, relearn or recover, if we can only survive long enough to make it so?” He glanced over toward Casek, a stare so penetrating that Casek had to fight the urge to shift away from his gaze. “All the more reason to ensure you make it safely to Oreia. That is more important than anyone, or anything.”
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Raelynn’s jaw tightened and her eyes narrowed but she said nothing, an act of restraint Casek could see was taking considerable effort. Idris pretended not to notice, turning his attention once more toward the horizon, and their direction of travel. Casek’s stomach twisted, and guilt attempted to gnaw its way out from his gut. He did his best to brush both feelings aside. Idris might have been right, but Casek had already made his choice.
That the Bel’gor’s presence in his mind vibrated with excitement at the thought of it brought him no comfort, however, that it was the right one.
Before long, they were clambering down from the ship to a quiet beach on the forest’s edge once more. According to Idris, the water became significantly less safe after dark, with several of the ocean bound Shadowspawn preferring to hunt at night. After his encounter with the marsh Drau, Casek was not inclined to disagree with any course of action that resulted in him not being dragged into the ocean depths by an oily, tentacled limb.
Setting camp had quickly become a swift affair. Raelynn prepared fire and shelter whilst Casek set snares around the forest’s edge. He might not have been able to remember when or how he learned to spot tracks and runs, or the subtle indicators small mammals were using a place to store or forage regularly; but the instinct had remained strong in him, bone deep and unshakable, just as the knowledge of how to actually build the things was.
Usually Idris set off around the perimeter of their camp, doing something that involved his foci and subtle surges of power each time he paused and crouched low to the ground. Idris had never seen fit to explain what he was doing to Casek, and Raelynn had only ever described it as ‘setting the perimeter’ in case they were attacked. He was apparently done especially quickly today, however, because he appeared behind Casek and hovered as he set his final snare, watching intently.
“Your memory is an interesting thing, Casek,” he said, suddenly, just as Casek was setting the trigger.
Thinking of Tauph, he carefully kept his expression neutral. “You’re telling me. Knowing how to do things, but not knowing how I know it is… unsettling.”
“I suppose it would be, yes. You know, before our current High Seat ascended to his position, the binder corps were tasked to search for knowledge pertaining to memory loss. On the surface, a waste of resources you might say, but you see, the incumbent High Seat had reached an old age that most do not these days, and his memory had degraded beyond what we could attribute to simply old age.”
“He had amnesia?”
“Not exactly. At first, he simply struggled to remember places and names occasionally. Then, as it worsened, he would forget entire years of his own life for hours at a time. It was truly a terrible thing, seeing the man unable to recognise his own children. Soon, those hours became days. Then weeks. We scrambled for months, combing through town libraries, under constant attack looking for any knowledge that might maintain the mind of the man who’d led us for near enough half a century.”
“Did you find it?”
Idris smiled ruefully. “No. We discovered enough that it was a known disease in The World that Was. Terrible, and as far as even your people knew, incurable. Still, as a matter of interest, I learned an awful lot about memory loss and conditions centered on amnesia.”
Casek froze, head jerking to meet Idris’ stare, temporarily forgetting to be guarded around this man. “Do you know of a way to help?”
“Well, that’s just the problem. Your case is like nothing I’ve heard of before. The way only the things that might trigger an emotional reaction being absent—friends and family, experiences and a life. All the things that will have made up the person you were before your, ah, ‘sleep’, almost surgically removed, leaving conveniently behind all the useful skills you would need to not only function upon your waking, but even thrive. The only way it might make logical sense would be if—”
“If it was deliberate,” Casek finished for him.
Idris saw too much to obfuscate the general truth from him. If he was to hide Tauph’s existence from him, it would have to be by burying it beneath as much truth as he could muster.
“Precisely,” Idris agreed, eyes never leaving Casek’s own. “You said you awoke not inside a stasis crystal?”
Casek shook his head. “I was inside a building. Strapped to a table, even. I would have said I was a prisoner, if it weren’t for the fact the guards’ bodies and defensive positions I found clearly set to defend against outside attack.”
“So not a prisoner, but strapped to a table in a purpose-built facility, protected to the best of their ability from attack?”
“That’s about the sum of it, yeah.”
“And you protected above all. Even placed in some kind of stasis to preserve you beyond any of them,” Idris said, hand rubbing his chin. “An experimental facility, then. And, what do you suppose was their chief output?”
Casek shifted uncomfortably and struggled to meet Idris’ intense gaze. The moon had emerged from its slumber, and its light reflected bright in the older man’s eyes. “Me.”
Idris smiled and raised his hand. In his palm was a ring, golden and fragile, made of two intertwined serpents. A foci, he realised.
“As an artificer, my primary role is utilising the foci to the fullest of their capabilities. At their most basic, they create weapons for Binders to use, but they can be so much more. With enough time and material, I can manipulate these constructs to do any number of things. But the one thing I can’t do, is the single most important. No artificer can. Do you know what that is?”
“Raelynn said you couldn’t make more of them.”
“No!” The half-shout almost caught Casek off-guard with the intensity of emotion behind it. “That is only half-true. We could make more of them—we have the knowledge and skill to.”
“Then why don’t you?”
Idris chuckled. “We are missing a key material for the crafting. You see, there is one component that we have been utterly unable to acquire in the entire thousand years you have slept. Everything else, we can do. Unfortunately, that component is the most important. The part that allows its wielder to interact with the Other.”
Casek was almost afraid to give voice to the question. As though he already knew the answer, but his mind was protecting him from having to hear it. The words, however, tumbled free before he could help it. “What component.”
“Human blood. But not any old blood—the blood of a human that could interact with both worlds. Ours and the Other. And, here you are. A human that can affect stasis crystals and bind Shadowspawn. Found in a laboratory deep in the land where we know the foci were first developed. Bound, but not help captive, in a time where we know the foci originated. No, it’s not any old blood we need.”
“It’s mine,” he whispered, as another wave of memories flooded his mind. His bare back lying on cold steel. The biting touch of shackles on his wrists, and the constant frigid chill in the air. And pain. So much pain. He’d known it was coming, been warned of it, even. But still he begged them to stop by the end. He’d fought dozens of battles and taken all kinds of wound with all the stoicism that could be expected of a soldier at the end of the world and still fought on.
And still, upon that cold slab, he’d begged and wept and begged again. For hours, or days, or months. It was impossible to tell when you could see no light, or feel no breeze. They never stopped—why would they when he was already bound and unable to flee? Casek wasn’t sure when he’d fallen to the ground. He was only dimly aware that Idris was shouting his name, panic-stricken across his face.
All there was, was the pain and the screaming, before finally, blissfully, there was the dark.
