Tom blushed behind the leathern mask that covered his eyes, leaving only slits for him to see through. Ever since Tess had healed him from fatal wounds received in a Bozandari ambush along the road to Anahar, his irises had grown so pale that he could no longer bear bright light. The mask Tess had thought to make for him had saved him from being virtually blind. “I pretended to sleep. I love her like a fish loves the river, yet we have been so busy these past days in preparation for the wedding…and I found myself missing my studies.”
Erkiah waved a hand at his young charge. “Apologize not, my friend, neither to me nor to her. Apparently she waited only minutes after your ruse before scurrying off to meet her sisters at the temple and continue her own work. In other times, lovers might pale at such a thought. But you both know there is much to be done and little time in which to do it. The shame is only that you could not speak openly of it, one to the other.”
“I fear I am not yet accustomed to marriage,” Tom said. “Nor is Sara, I suppose.”
“I pray that you will have time to grow into it,” Erkiah said, sadness on his features. “For all that has happened, the greater burden lies before us.”
“And Lord Archer’s strength will fail,” Tom said.
Erkiah nodded. “Sadly, yes. Thus it is foretold. It weighs upon us to ascertain how, and when, and stand ready to fortify him.”
“Show me those prophecies, please,” Tom said, walking to the shelves on which Erkiah’s scrolls lay. “Nothing we have learned together will matter if in this we err.”
“You speak truth,” Erkiah said. “If my memory fails me not, that text is on the second shelf, third scroll from the right.”
“If ever your memory fails you,” Tom said, reaching for the vellum, “the gods themselves will quake with fear.”
“You do me too much credit,” Erkiah said, laughing. “I am but a man, and like any other I am prone to error.”
“But not in matters of consequence.” Tom met his eyes, then unrolled the top of the scroll. “Eshkaron Treysahrans. Your memory does not fail.”
Erkiah nodded and watched as Tom stretched the scroll over the table and weighted the corners with candlesticks.
He shuddered and spoke. “I would that I had forgotten. This is a text I have not read since I was a young man. It frightened me so that never again have I touched it, save to pack it for my journey here, and unpack it upon my arrival.”
Tom studied him gravely. This was not the Erkiah he had come to know, eagerly seeking knowledge as a hungry man at morning. “I would ask why it frightened you, but I know your answer already. You will tell me to read it, for then I will know.”
“That is true,” Erkiah said, “though hardly prophecy.”
“Of course it was not prophecy,” Tom replied, smiling. “It is simply what you always say.”
“Prophecy,” Erkiah said, “would be to tell me why I say those same words each time.”
Tom shook his head. “No, it takes no prophet to see this. If I simply commit to memory all that you say, I can never be more than your pale image in the mirror of time. Your wish is that I will be greater than that, and thus you compel me to read for myself and challenge you.”
Erkiah smiled weakly. “I would that we had met in happier times, my son. Were it such, we might spar thus hour upon hour and take joy in the sparring. Alas, we have no such luxury.”
“We will,” Tom said firmly. “We will.”
The Eshkaron Treysahrans was the most difficult of the prophetic writings, but Tom slogged through it with a determination that Erkiah found both admirable and almost frightening. While the name of its author had been lost in the sands of time, Erkiah considered it to be among the oldest of the prophecies, and the one least changed by the pens of the intervening scribes, in large part because few had chosen to transcribe it. His copy might be the only one still in existence. If not, he doubted there were even a half-dozen others.
The title of the work—The Death of the Gods—gave little clue as to its meaning. Unlike the titles of most prophecies, this seemed to have been chosen by the original author, for reasons that had little to do with illuminating the text itself. In fact, the author had gone to great lengths to avoid precisely that sort of illumination.
The text was divided into three sections. The first was a series of riddles without either answers or, it had seemed to Erkiah, any connecting subject line. The second part was a fragmentary chronology, beginning with “the death of the last of the First” and ending with “the birth of the first of the Last,” without any context to identify what beings, or even what kind of beings, were referenced. The few scholars who had appended notes to this section had served only to muddle the issue, with interpretations ranging from the gods themselves to the Firstborn to the Ilduin and even, among the last scholars to attempt, to the Bozandari nobility.
It was the third section—Aneshtreah, or “Admonitions”—which had struck fear in Erkiah those many years ago. In the style of a stern master writing to a recalcitrant young student, it was a series of warnings, each more dire than the last. Its central message was one about trust, or, more aptly, suspicion. It began:
Trust not your mother.
In pain has she born you, in hardship sustained you,
And great her resentment, though hidden it may be.
Trust not your father,
For first when he spawned you was last as he fed you,
And greater his wrath at the end of the day.
And so it continued, admonishing the reader to trust neither man nor beast, friend nor foe, neither wife nor children, neither master nor servant, neither god nor priest. The cold dissection of each relationship left no room for honor, commitment or even love. The final stanza banished all hope:
Trust not the Shadow,
For shadow must fail in the presence of light,
The Dark One must yield to the Fair in the fight.
Trust not the Light,
A dagger he wields for the heart entombed,
While cruelty unbounded his soul attuned.
“By the gods,” Tom whispered as he sat back from the scroll. His face was ashen. “It cannot be.”
Erkiah nodded. “So I thought as well, my friend. And yet, thus it is written.”
“Do I read this right?” Tom asked. “Lord Archer is the Shadow, and the Enemy the Light?”
“The legends say that Ardred was the fairer of the brothers,” Erkiah said. “And surely it does not surprise you that Archer would be called the shadow. From his hair to his visage to the way he has slipped through this world almost unseen for all of these years.”
Tom shook his head slowly. “But if that is true, then Archer will fail us.”
Erkiah simply nodded.
Tom’s face fell as he completed the thought. “And our future rests in the hands of Ardred.”
Chapter Five
The temple seemed troubled, Tess thought. All of the joy she had felt in its walls yesterday was gone, replaced by an aching sense of loss. She tried to avoid the statue of Elanor, hoping that perhaps some other niche, some other graceful curve of stone, would speak to her this time. Yet it was as if the stones had fallen silent, save for a grief that threatened to crush Tess’s heart beneath its weight. It was as if the temple had chosen this moment to mourn the loss of every fallen Anari.
“It