Seven Sorcerers(8)

As the Living Empire grew, I witnessed the death of free will, the elimination of curiosity, the stamping out of higher thought among the Earthborn. Zyung’s everlasting peace could only be gained by enduring a long age of death and domination. I saw proud peoples become little more than slaves, choosing servitude over annihilation. Always the same choice he offered them, and always the dead outnumbered the living.

One day there would be no more death, no more conflict. There would be only Zyung, who would be the world itself, and all those within the world would be Zyung as well.

So I faced my brother and denied him. A handful of the Old Breed joined me in this. Some were eager to shirk the chains of obedience, while others dreamed of forging their own empires as they had done in past ages. There were not many of us, and so we could not stand long against the growing power of Zyung. We built a fleet of ships and gathered a host of Earthborn from the last of the free nations. We led our people across the Cryptic Sea and found a lesser continent on the other side of the world. The tribes we had saved were free to roam its interior and build their own kingdoms.

Yet our new home was haunted by the great Serpents of old. So I raised up the race of Giants from the stones of the earth and set them to slaying the Old Wyrms. Once this was done, our transplanted tribes flourished, eventually giving birth to five great city-states. I will not describe the long ages of each kingdom’s birth and evolution, yet all the while Zyung’s empire grew and grew across the trackless ocean.

A thousand years ago Zyung conquered the last of the lands on the far side of the world. The ancestral lands of the peoples known as Uurzians, Yaskathans, Mumbazans, Sharrians, and Khyreins were now gone, replaced by the homogeneity of the Living Empire. Yet the descendants of these five noble tribes have long forgotten their true origins. To them, the Land of the Five Cities is the entirety of the world itself.

For such a long time I labored to keep them ignorant of the truth.

Now that truth can no longer be denied.

In his quest to build a paradise that encompasses the earth itself, Zyung is coming.

Now the Kings of this land are united at last. Now they must face the Living Empire and I must face my brother. I do fear the greatness of his power. Yet I knew that one day this conflict would fall upon me. For a time I gave up on saving the Land of the Five Cities from Zyung’s dominion. For so very long I had tried and failed to rid mankind of its lust for war. I nearly lost the hope of ever doing so.

Man was doomed to struggle, bleed, and die. There was no hope of changing his essential nature, which was that of a warrior, a direct manifestation of his predatory instinct. I had grown weary of trying to change the Earthborn.

It was the heart of a single brave girl who gave me the strength to try again.

Sharadza.

I clutch at my stray thoughts now and force them back toward Zyung.

I love her.

Now is not the time for such illusions.

The gray-green ocean simmers beneath a scattering of stars. A bank of stormclouds hides the sinking sun, harbinger of the darkness to come. War is a storm that clouds the affairs of Men as well as those who are more than Men. There will be great suffering.

I hover, legs folded, above a crag overlooking the Golden Sea. The evening winds whip at my robes and make the blue flame upon my chest flicker. The black city of Khyrei smokes with ten thousand feast-fires behind me. Its people celebrate their liberation at the hands of Tong the Avenger, a slave who became a revolutionary. As their new monarch, Tong sits restless upon his throne. He must rebuild a fractured kingdom into something better and stronger, a nation freed from the ancient grip of Ianthe the Claw.

Ianthe had crossed the world with me long ago, fleeing Zyung’s power. I was a fool for her charms, which blinded me to her wicked nature. In many ways, she was far worse than Zyung, yet I had set her loose upon the new continent to stoke the fires of the Earthborn’s worst qualities. She became a conqueror, a parasite, a tyrant. To rid the world of her was as difficult as changing the essence of the Earthborn. Yet now her dark kingdom has at last been stolen away from her, and she has left it behind.

I see it now, clear as the rising moon: Ianthe has returned to Zyung, taking Gammir with her. They will feed him many secrets about my half of the world. Ianthe, who built kingdoms and destroyed them on a whim; who revels in the blood of innocents; whose pattern was blended with that of the predator. And Gammir, who was once perhaps her equal, but now is only her slave. Yet both of them will be little more than slaves in Zyung’s world. There is no room for anything else there.

In the Khyrein harbor the double fleet prepares for a morning launch. I might weep for the fools who are doomed to die beneath those sails, but I do not have the luxury. The regal swanships of Mumbaza sit alongside the Yaskathan triremes, an impressive assembly of no less than seven hundred warships. Tong has pledged another hundred Khyrein reavers, newly liberated and pledged into his service. This brings the total close to one thousand vessels.