The Gifts of The Four to The One

The child must have thought that it had been borne into a treacherous storm of winter the way that the ash fell in soft drifts over the chasm in which it lay. Cool to the touch even as it fell from the underbellies of the winged beasts that circled overhead. The child was confused, not much more than a babe in height, and his eyes flitted in a panic over the walls of what had quite recently been a great chapel nestled deep in the forest of a plummeting valley.

The child had no memory of this place. No memory at all, not even the fleeting ones accustomed to his age. He laid in a ravine that spread wide around him in a bed of what appeared to be clear stone spheres that glinted in the light of the five moons overhead. He could see the great spheres through the splintered and charred tops of the trees that surrounded the horg.

As he looked upon the moons he was flooded with thoughts he did not understand. Feet were to move, arms were to flail, the rubbery mass in his mouth could be used for language, but what language would he speak should he put it to motion? He writhed in the bed of clear stones as he was plagued with a thousand commands. Walk, rise, run, fear, danger, scream, do not scream. His small chest rose and fell as he struggled to sit and look with wide eyes at the destruction around him.

Directly ahead, on a great arched wall, was a haunting image. Spiritual, divine, angelic. His small brain struggled to make sense of it. To him it was a man, a beautiful man—father—standing with hand raised, fingers poised to touch a cowering figure in a ravine, not unsimilar to the one he sat alone in. The man appeared to have wings, skin pale white and dark hair drawn away from his head behind a small band of a crown. The wings were horned, fleshy, and scaled, and a billowing cloud of smoke seemed to envelop him. The child was entranced by the vision.

The eyes that did not yet understand this world made note of the scaled rocks that surrounded it, mounting high around the image. His eyes followed up the stones to a beastly head high on the wall above the man, and again many ripples began to take shape on the child’s unimpressed mind—danger, run, danger. Yet he could not run. He sat in the snowfall of ash and rolled the glittering glass stones around with his small hands and feet. Unexpectedly, the light of the five moons was obscured and a rush of wind fell down around him. He heard the trees of the great forest snap like matchsticks beneath a considerable weight.

“Blessed be, they say, are The Four that deceived The One.” The child started but made no sound as he looked up to see a prodigious beast slither through the pronounced hole in the ceiling. He heard the soothing voice of a woman both within and without, it seemed, and he struggled to put meaning to words.

He was panged with a vision that seemed more like a memory; very near, very recent. Four beautiful visages wreathed in a light so stunning it brought tears to the boy’s eyes. A soft kiss to the head. He was held by the one feminine energy among the three masculine and otherwise undefined that surrounded her. His previous form uttered, “Mother,” in a gasp of breath as he was pushed from the edge, plummeting.

The boy looked up at the beast with a brow that furrowed with the burdens of a man, and he said in his mind to correct it, “Blessed are The Four who vanquished The One.”

“Oh no, sweet child of starlight, we do not utter those words here. There is no praise for The Four, only The One, deceived and cast out, as you have been cast out.” As the dragon slithered into the great hall to stand at the mural before the child, it was bathed in the light of the moons above.

Its golden scales had faded and grown weak like pages of parchment. Each breath of the beast was ragged and forced. The body was long and lank and coiled like a snake around the room. The child felt its frailty, and somehow simultaneously knew that he was the remedy to this deterioration. Tendrils of black blood the size of forest streams oozed from fresh wounds. The smell of molten ash was now suffocating to the child as he beheld her.

“I have a feeling,” said the child and the dragon heard it within and without. “It would be called desire in other realms.”

“What would a babe know of desire?” the dragon hissed and made herself low to the waylaid floor of the room. Her golden eyes, streaked with red, took in the boy whose skin glowed with the same vigor as the moons.

“I…do not know what it means. But I feel it in you,” said the child.

“You are most precious to me, child,” said the dragon, and the child watched with great interest as the serpent moved like a feline across the floor, growing ever closer. “Do you have a name?”

The child pondered this…what was a name? He had nothing, and he was now aware that he had been sent to this world like all who enter it—naked and alone. The dragon noticed, too, and her strange eyes flicked side to side. In her teeth, the size of church spires, she took the drapes of the destroyed windows and flung them about the child.

“I have nothing,” the child responded. “Do you have a name? Is it worth having?” The dragon laughed and sauntered once more onto her belly, eye level with the child.

“Only if it is a good name,” she hissed. “They call me Felsyrie.”

“What is they?”

“The Dragon Lords, my star. The Dragon Lords of Kemantis Calderas, whose halls you have maimed with your descent. Though you have come at a most blessed hour.” The eyes of the beast looked past the wrecked hall and the scorched forest to where the fields of men burned, regathering strength as she and her siblings regained theirs. “You will be the undoing of men. The Four at long last understand.” She turned back to the child who stared up at her with ignorance.

Felsyrie laughed once again as she now drew so close to the child that he could reach out and touch her. He felt the tremendous draw of her breath as she inhaled him, and he placed his small hand on the curve of her nostril. He did not know if it was his scent, or his touch, or a combination of both, but as their flesh met, he felt the light within him transfer to her. He watched through fluttering eyes as her scales grew hard, her muscle more pronounced, and the withering flame grew strong in her belly. She was consuming him, and he was unable to break their fatal bond.

———

The autumn night would have been crisp, filled with an illustrious cool and a comfortable quiet had it not been for the moans and screams that trickled from the gates of the Jade Keep to the torn and upturned plains of battlement that now stretched far from the city. In the light of the five moons overhead, the crushed and melted armor of the fallen sparkled like the mines of the dwarves, hidden far to the north of this place. Those left with any breath of life in their mangled bodies used it to call out to The Four, true and blessed above, to give them peace, though they knew that the gods would answer no call that night.

A bereaved farmer in his field of ash knew this to be true as well as he knelt beneath the great moons that threatened to cover the sky with their gentle light. The largest of the five splintered and grew at a glacial pace as it began to reach out for the four above, as if to devour them—The Great Devouring—as it was known in this land. No, the gods were preoccupied that night.

The Farmer’s eyes brimmed with tears as numb hands ran blindly over and through the scorched earth, feeling with crippling reassurance what his eyes were unable to look upon—the charred remains of a son of but ten in age. He let out a scream that was lost in the wailing of the wounded and the flutter of fleshed wings overhead. There was a bristle of cool air that smelled of sweet oils and fallen leaves, and it moved swiftly upon his trembling form. The farmer recoiled with another startled yell as a hand the color of honey fell tenderly upon his shoulder. The remains of his son scattered as he crawled over the earth; eyes blind with soot and loss, looking for the source of the touch.

They fell upon The Elven Prince, who stood not much higher than his own son had. The sage robes trimmed with beaded and embroidered flowers were bloodied and soiled, yet the young prince was beautiful to behold. His cheekbones were high with a garish slash at his temple. Golden blood matted his bramble of dark hair where sat a rugged gold crown of twigs and leaves. He stepped forward, and it made no sound.

“Be not afraid, son of the soil,” he said softly in his elvish tongue.

“It is lost,” the farmer sputtered; spittle and tears escaped him on a foul and ragged exhale.

“Only if you believe it is so…” The young prince knelt to the earth where the bones of the boy were disarrayed. Eyes closed, he ran his hands over the soil and muttered low a language that was neither Elven nor of men. “He has gone to the house of your fathers, and they have received him before his time in splendor.”

There was a rustle of soil as suddenly, up from the earth there sprang small white flowers that wound around and covered the remains. The farmer looked in astonishment at the spot and another sob pressed from his soul as he laid down beside where the flowers grew and ran his hands through the blooms.

“Olendian, rise from there!” His father’s voice was stern but not unkind as he materialized through the waste. His gold cloak, embroidered with a golden willow, flapped on the breeze as he regarded his son knelt beside the mourning.

“We cannot let the soil lay heathen—ravaged this way,” said The Price in Elvish as he rose from the soil. The Elven King came shoulder to shoulder with his son to look down at the blooms among the ash.

“You cannot weep for all the dead, my son, for in the span of your life you would create a sea over the lands of men.” Weluein brushed the bloodied nap of hair from his son’s brow behind his pointed ear. “Your heart must harden to the fate of men.”

“Thank you, thank you…” They were cut short as the farmer reached out for the hems of their cloaks to kiss the sullied cloth. Olendian shuddered at the sight and turned to his father, now lit treacherously by the fires that burned across the plains behind him.

“How does one harden to such sorrow?” Weluein looked over his son before turning his eyes to the growing moons in the sky. He meant to answer him in such a way that it might have changed the young prince’s heart for millennia to come. However, as he opened his lips, the four moons in the ether quivered. They each pulsed in tandem and it was only the keen ears of the elves that heard it on the ground. The flash, however, was like lightning across the realms, visible in every corner of the world. Four lesser moons of astonishing light surged from the greater and they thrashed against every unseen barrier as they catapulted towards the realms.

“It is true!” gasped The Farmer as he tore at the earth to stand. “The myths are true…” He stared at the sky as tears fell heavily down his face. “The Gods will save themselves and forsake us…”

“Why this night?” muttered Weluein as he, too, was overcome by the sight.

“Father…” Olendian watched the orbs with trembling hands. They spread wide from one another, so far over the kingdoms that some disappeared from sight. All but one now shone white and blistering in the sky as it grew ever larger. The dying and the living all paused to watch it soar low over the fields and disappear into the south where they heard it make landfall, and the earth shook greatly as it did. Towers that hung by a thread of mortar crumbled in upon themselves. Leaves and shanties and encampments fell with no sound at all to the ground at the quake.

“FUCK THE GODS!” The Farmer spat as hysterics took him. “They’ve damned us! They’ve damned us all! Fuck them! FUCK THE FOUR! BLESSED AND TRUE!” He balled his fists and waved them at the heavens. Some form of this began to reverberate across the battlefield.

“Father,” whispered Olendian again. His eyes had followed the orb, and the keen sight that was gifted to his race saw as it laid waste to the Adulatory Horg of Kemantis Calderas—City of the Dragon Lords—where now dragon and lord alike licked the wounds of a pyrrhic victory. “What does this mean?” The Elf King, too, stared into the dark forest of unspeakable evil where the orb had struck. “Fadrir.”

“Either they mean to make a mockery of us…” He paused as he turned to the four moons above and watched as the fifth diminished and became but a star in the heavens, “or this means something more…” His eyes fell on his son as the screams of the dragons rose up from the spiked and scaled palaces in the valley. “Go now, into the forest of light and do not stop until you have returned safely beneath the boughs of Lithwel. GO!” Olendian stood rooted, his breathing became heavy. The King’s jaw clenched as he unsheathed his curved blade and held it to his son’s throat. “This is not an order that I will suffer arrogance to defy. I would send you to the One Lady Eternal by my own hand rather than have you suffer the fate of The Four.” He removed the sword and kissed his son long on the temple. “Prepare Lithwel for war. I love you to the land beyond our undying.” He shoved his son greatly and screamed in a voice bestowed by some other power for him to be gone.

———

The child’s body was all but spent as Felsyrie drained the celestial light from his new, lesser body. He now laid writhing above the glass marbles as the gift of The Four to The One was absolved. The other dragons screamed and flapped their wings in envy above as Felsyrie diminished the child, growing ever larger and stronger as the moments passed.

“My star, my beloved,” she sighed as her body regained its former strength, yet tears poured from her eyes as the body of the child grew pale. The child looked up to the sallow moons and begged to be drawn back; he begged the feminine why she had done this to him as the last morsel of celestial light seeped from him to the dragon’s snout.

His sight blurred as his body sank low to the glass stones, and just as his hand was to slip from the snout of the dragon, his life all but spent, he saw a flash of golden cloth fall from the sky. Felsyrie screamed as The Eleven King’s blade sliced from her twisted horn to the curve of her jaw. It slacked as a spray of dark blood splattered The King’s robes, his golden boot pressed hard against her scales as he forced his blade from her skull.

Weluein watched in astonishment as the boy’s fingers slipped from Felsyrie’s snout and like the crack of a whip, the former Adulatory Hall of The Dragon Lord’s was bathed in celestial light. The child reclaimed his birthright and the small body once more floundered as it resurged from the dragon, who wailed and thrashed as all light left her. The Elven King watched as she tore at what was left of the hall and he lurched with agile grace to scoop the child from the molten nest. He cradled the child as if it were his own, placing a warm and blood covered hand to his head as he whispered Elvish lullabies to calm the seizing.

“You were not meant for such a purpose…” said Weluein as Felsyrie continued to screech and claw in an agonizing frenzy behind him. Yet, over all of this he heard the snap of a twig and looked up to find The Farmer, gazing in awe at the sight as he climbed clumsily over the wreckage. “You have lost much this night, Lukkas Barley of the Plainlands. See what it is to hold a child of the celestial; you will find there is hope in such darkness.”

He held out the boy and The Farmer crept towards him, never taking his eyes from the writhing dragon who clawed at her neck and the dirt as she spouted sparks of fire up the wall. Lukkas looked down at the child and quickly removed his own shirt to wrap him in it and drew him close to his chest. His eyes swam with the memory of his first son as he looked over the boy and said, “What madness has driven The Four to this?”

“Every thousand years The Four offer a gift to The One who was deceived so that he would not devour them. They could not have known that banishment would heighten his power. The underworld suited him far more than the halls of Olympia, and he grew strong enough to supplant them. The light of the celestials is what keeps his beasts strong, able to conquer the world of the living….” Weluein looked to Felsyrie who now panted in the shadows of the altar, gasping yet again for every breath.

“You offered them offense, before,” said Weluein softly to Lukkas the farmer, “You might now offer your praise once again to your gods…Blessed are The Four that vanquished—” The Elven King stopped short as his embroidered armor was shattered and a great horn protruded from his abdomen, spraying the farmer in a rush of sparkling, golden blood.

Weluein gasped ruggedly as his hands ran over the spike of Felsyrie’s tail that jutted from his torso. He wretched, uncontrollably, a deluge of golden bile that ran over his robes. He fished furiously for the sword at his hip as his body convulsed.

“Take…take him…let the Elves…teach him…” His hand found grip on the carved handle as The Farmer looked on in horror. Felsyrie used her waning strength to lift Weluein high from the ground. “It will be sung…” Weluein sputtered, “That a farmer begat a king…that…that reigned a thousand years.” With one final blow he sliced the tail from the dragon’s body and fell with tremendous limpness to the floor. He laid winded and looked through fading eyes at a farmer cradling a celestial. With his last words, the king who had reigned three and a half thousand years muttered, “Make…haste…farmer…”