Aldreia

Excerpts from the journal of Aldreia of her journey in Fiadhach.

Childhood
I was unnaturally quiet as a child, barely speaking and never crying. When I was young, members of the Apocary found me living on the street and discovered that I was hardy and resourceful. They began to give me errands to run in exchange for food. I was diligent and a fast learner. They took me in, and I trained hard. Every day, dawn till dusk. The adults liked to banter and tease me during training. When I was beaten in a fight, they expected me to cower and cry, but I always quietly got up again. I bruised and I bled, but I never cried. They found the silence disconcerting. And when I started beating them instead, the teasing quickly stopped. Before I was initiated into the Apocary, I had been raised by my mother. We were extremely poor and often homeless. One day, when I was small, my mother took me into town. She tucked me away behind some barrels near a vendor’s stall and told me to wait there until she came back. She never did. I didn’t cry then, either.

Fael Dinea
Fael Dinea is shorter than you might think, given her reputation. The stories like to describe her as at least ten feet tall, but actually, nearly every one of her captains has to look down a good few inches to meet her gaze. Unlike Earous, she doesn’t bother with lordly condescension and ethereal nonsense. She dresses simply and speaks plainly. She could put on airs to try to make herself appear more powerful, more important, more intimidating. But she’s never had to. She does wear a single piece of jewelry, though: a fat, uncut gem, wire-wrapped and hung as pendant around her neck. It’s a black heashstone—and it glows like an ember when she’s angry.

Striking a Blow
Fael Dinea likes to spar with her captains and lieutenants. Most days, it’s more like dancing, if you can believe it. Her movements match theirs so perfectly, her evasions so precise, that it looks choreographed. But that’s without magic. When she wants to spar with magic, it takes several mages just to put up a barrier to conceal the arena. They might even conjure a thunderstorm to cover the noise. But this only happens on very rare occasions, such as during the promotion of a new captain.

When I faced her in the arena, I was one of sixteen lieutenants on trial. We had to strike a single blow. She told us to try to kill her—that any determination less than that, and we would never get close. She also told us not to bother fighting each other. It didn’t really matter who hit her first, only that the blow made contact. We realized that she fought us all at once, not because she wanted us to compete with each other, but really just to save time. Even if we all worked together, we had almost no chance of succeeding. But that was it—we could all work together.

I had always been observant, and I was familiar with all of my fellows’ strengths and weaknesses. I had a sense of how they could balance each other and how we could operate as a single machine to hone our attack. By the end of the trial, unsurprisingly, we were all on the ground with Fael Dinea standing over us. She was unfazed, but she had a single scratch on her left cheek. Another lieutenant was promoted for striking the blow. And I was promoted for organizing it.

The Assignment
She gave me many assignments over the years. Slowly, she began to trust me with increasingly difficult and delicate tasks. I performed well, and she was pleased. Sometimes, it even seemed like she had made me a favorite. Maybe I let it go to my head. Here is the last assignment that I ever received from her:

“A group has apparently stolen a high-class heashstone from the water serpent that guards the Shimmering Isles,” she explained, pointing to the locations on the map.

“We’ve gotten word that that the group is hiding out in a village near Terek’s Peak. I want you to go to that village, find them, and bring back that stone.”

“It will be done” was of course my answer.

The Shimmering Isles are high up in the mountains. They take their name from the heat haze of the hot springs that surround them. Their guardian serpent is one of the largest creatures in the Spolan Ring to command the powers of both ice and fire. Clearly, whoever these people were, they had not fought him, but it still would have taken quite some skill to steal from him without being noticed. I would need to be careful of them. I took my best team for the confrontation. Serus was my lieutenant. Every captain in the Apocary has one. He was a powerful magic-user, with a focus on support spells. He was also a jokester and touted among the squad as the only one who could make the Captain smile, if only a little. Serus had a familiar: a silver-eyed bird of prey. He called him “Omen” because his flight signaled death for our enemies. Serus was very proud of being so clever with naming him.

When we reached our target for our newest assignment, Omen was the first to investigate, leaping from his master’s arm and taking to the skies in one swift breath. Serus’s eyes gleamed silver like his familiar’s as he used their connection to look around. He shook his head, frowning.

“Something beat us here. The village is completely destroyed. The buildings are smashed, bodies are shredded. It would take a powerful enemy, but there’s no sign of anyone or anything like that coming or going from the village. Unless they flew, which isn’t likely. Unless you think Earous himself showed up.”

“Even less likely,” I said. “Either way, there’s no one there now. No one alive, that is.” “So, what’s your guess?” I asked.

He thought for a moment. “The place reeks of heash magic, and there’s ice everywhere. My guess is that someone who didn’t know what they were doing tried to use the stone and lost control over it. In that case, the stone would still be there somewhere.”

I nodded. “Then let’s go.”

Maybe if I hadn’t been so eager to impress Fael Dinea, I wouldn’t have been so reckless. We went down to the village. It was horribly quiet. Blood and ice everywhere. The air vibrated with magic, but there was no sign of its source. But it didn’t take long before we learned the truth. It was true that the enemy had neither entered nor left the village. It had originated there, and there it had stayed. It ripped its way out of the ground right under our feet, quickly rising to a height of five men at least. It was a massive elemental of rock and ice, and its heart was great, blue heashstone the size of a griffon egg. We were all seasoned warriors, and we were well-practiced as a team, but none of us had faced anything like this.

The noise alone was crippling. It was like the screech of metal on stone and bored into our minds like no natural sound would. And while we were stunned, the beast raged and smashed with the force of an avalanche. It conjured masses of ice spikes and fired them like bolts from a ballista. Our magic, our bullets, our weapons, all glanced off its jagged hide, ricocheting in a spray like sparks. All of our usual strategies were useless. It killed everyone. My lieutenant is the only reason I’m alive.

Did you know that when a mage uses up their stores of magic, their spells draw power from their body instead? Did you know that your own magic can sheer your soul from your body? When Serus threw up his shield around us against the overwhelming force of the elemental’s blast, it only took moments for his nose to bleed and his eyes to grow bloodshot. A few moments more and a streak of black bruise formed, clawing its way over his skin, down his arms, up his neck. He gripped my shoulder with one hand and gave me the last of his strength. It was enough for me to deliver a single blow directly to our enemy’s heart. The force of the strike shattered the bones in my arm, but it was just enough to knock the stone loose. Without the heashstone, the creature collapsed and crumbled into nothing. And the stone rolled to a stop by my feet, there for the taking.

Mission Failed
Our leader found me a few days later, seated at my campfire, my arm in a sling. She wandered casually into the camp as if she had been on an easy stroll and decided to drop by. That put me on edge more than anything. Fael Dinea is a lot of things, but she is not whimsical. She observed that I was alone. She asked me what had happened, and I explained the fight with the elemental. Most of it, anyway. She didn’t seem surprised.

“That’s the thing about stealing energy from the land,” she said. “Sometimes the land wants it back. Did you recover the stone?”

“No,” I said. “It was destroyed when the elemental was defeated.”

Her face was carefully expressionless, but the black heashstone at her throat glowed brighter. At its heart was a piercing white glare that made my eyes water, like trying to look directly into the sun.

“You know,” she began, “I’m not entirely without mercy. If you had simply failed at your mission, that would have been one thing. Not that there wouldn’t have been consequences, but you might have come out of it alive. But I heard that you did recover the stone. That you took it back to the Shimmering Isles, rowed a boat out to the serpent’s island, and flung it right into his gaping maw. Is that not what happened?”

Nothing could freeze my blood like Fael Dinea’s anger. Not the rampant elemental, not the towering serpent, not the wrath of all the armies of Fiadhach. But still, I looked her in the eye.

“You’re mistaken,” I said. The heashstone pendant flared. She smiled. “You’re a terrible liar.”

Aftermath
I spent the next several days in the cottage near death and delirious with pain and fever. I drifted in and out of consciousness several times before I finally woke up properly. I vaguely sensed a man moving around nearby. I tried to sit up, and he rushed over to help, propping me up with pillows. He expressed his pleasure at seeing me responsive. When I asked him who he was, he introduced himself as York. He asked me if I had a name, and I said no. He frowned and grumbled, “We’ll work on that later.” He fed me a bowl of broth and turned chatty about how he had found me in the snow and then brought me home and took care of me.

Quite an accomplishment, if he did say so himself. It didn’t seem like I would make it. “I’m impressed that you could survive a blow like that,” he said. “It must have been a hell of a fight.”

“There was no fight,” I said. “I fell.”

“Fell?” he repeated, baffled. “I slipped from the cliff face, and it was a long way down.”

“You’re a terrible liar,” he replied. Hearing those horrible words again, I almost threw up right there.

“You think the ground can’t do that kind of harm?” I challenged to distract myself. “The ground must have a lot of skill if it can punch you square in the chest with a closed fist. It broke every one of your ribs, and that’s just for starters. You were attacked by something. I’d guess one of those elementals. We’ve had a nasty problem with them lately.”

I didn’t answer, so he continued.

“I thought you might be a bodyguard for one of the caravans, but if that were true, why lie about it? That must mean, one way or another, you’re not supposed to be here. You’re one of those bandits, aren’t you? A looter? Robber? Mercenary?”

Again, I didn’t answer. He shrugged. “Well, it’s none of my business. You’re pretty harmless now.”

I looked down at my body, broken and useless. I remembered my failure and the lives it had cost.

“You should have let me die.” He raised an eyebrow. “Well, I didn’t. You’re here now, so don’t go wasting all my hard work.”

He patted my knee—which was excruciating—and then he got up to leave the room.

“By the way, you should thank your friend over there,” he said. “Without his help, I wouldn’t have found you.”

“My friend?” I said, confused. On the windowsill sat a bird—translucent, as if made of swirling white smoke.

“Omen!” There was no mistaking him. He was no longer a bound familiar: merely a fragmented, wandering spirit. The death of his master came vividly to mind. “Forgive me!” I gasped. I’d never asked anyone for forgiveness. Not even Fael Dinea. Omen leapt from his perch and carefully alighted on my arm, long raptor claws pricking the skin. He gave me one of his steady looks and then bowed his head. I leaned in and touched my forehead to his. In a strange way, I felt Serus there, and I began to understand. Omen was a part of his soul and a part of his consciousness. When Serus’s spirit was torn from his body, this was the piece of him that didn’t die. Instead of passing beyond the Veil, it found me. Of all the things that I had lost in my life, Omen was the one thing that came back. The bond formed in an instant. It shot between us like an arch of lightning. Omen became a part of me. And, for the first time in as long as I could remember, I cried.

Trivia
Aldreia was played by Laura Wagner during the Heashlands podcast.