The night arrived as the sun slipped down into the ocean. The moon crept up into the sky, but no stars were visible yet. To the east, a dark bank of clouds rolled toward the city.
Nio sat in his library and stared out the window, a book open in his lap. Fynden Fram’s Endebyrdnes of Gesceaft. The Order of Creatures. He knew the book by heart. There was not much point in reading it, but he was looking for reassurance. Vainly looking, of course.
When he had returned to the house after meeting the Juggler, he had found the wihht shambling about the rooms. It was unsettling, for his command over the thing should have kept it waiting in the basement. Somehow, his control was fraying. The thing had been unwilling or unable to give him much of a reason for its behavior, only mumbling that it was hungry. It needed food. Just some food. Just a taste. A bite. But wihhts didn’t need food, like a man or an animal needs food to survive. Wihhts survived on the strength of their maker’s will.
At least, that’s what he had assumed.
The thing had lurched off to the basement without protest as soon as he snapped out the order. Still, it made him uneasy. There were definitely some things about wihhts he did not know yet.
But Fynden Fram, despite his genius, had nothing to say in his Nokhoron Nozhan Endebyrdnes of Gesceaft that Nio did not already know. Wihhts only ate on command of their master, and only then to bring about a modification their master willed. Nio thought uncomfortably about the wihht absorbing his blood. It had wanted to take more than he had wanted to give, hadn’t it?—right at the end? That didn’t line up with what old Fram had written. No matter. He would unmake the wihht soon. Besides, it would be good to have the thing unraveled and gone before Severan or one of the other old fools might come by the house and stumble on it.
The irritating thing about Fynden Fram’s writing was that, despite the wealth of detail, his descriptions of creatures tended to be divorced from historical context. For example, if he wrote of giants, he had nearly nothing to say of their origins, or in what lands or wars they had been encountered. Rather, he provided terse descriptions of physiognomy, habits, and social customs. In addition, there were often details on how a creature interacted with magic or was affected by the same.
The giant, or oyrs, can live to ages of over three hundred years, though they reach their full maturity at the first hundred. In death, they are laid out upon the ground where, in some curious interaction of the moonlight, they slowly turn to stone. In appearance, the giant resembles the race of man, though one must be a distance away from a giant in order to notice the similarity. If one gets too close, besides the hazard of proximity, one will find the giant’s face so large that it cannot be viewed in entirety; rather, it must be looked on in part—here is the nose, here is a huge, staring eye, over there is a portion of mouth or cheekbone.
The scarcity of historical setting in the entries gave one the unpleasant feeling that all the creatures the old scholar wrote of were still alive.
Such as the sceadus.
A scant page in the book was devoted to details of the sceadus. It was the shortest entry among hundreds of other entries that ran from the next shortest—five pages about cobolds—to the longest—seventeen pages about dragons, a section that made for fascinating, but unsettling reading. Almost as unsettling as what Fram had written concerning sceadus.
The sceadus were not created by Anue. Rather, they were made out of darkness, woven from the feorh of it into forms of their master’s choosing. Legend tells that only three sceadus were ever brought into existence, though I am not certain of this claim. Some analogy exists between the making of a wihht and the making of a sceadu. An external will must be brought to bear upon the essence desired as the foundation material for the creature. There, the similarity between the two types ends. A wihht, of course, can be made from nearly anything, combinations of material such as earth, wood, water, fire, or stone. A sceadu, on the other hand, can only be made from darkness, and thus is a thing of pure evil. Certain histories indicate that the sceadus are close in power to the anbeorun themselves. While some have claimed the ability to fashion wihhts of all shapes and strengths, no man has ever had the power to fashion a sceadu. No man ever will—thankfully. This begs the question: if not the gods, then who was powerful enough to have created the three sceadus?
That was the question. Perhaps one of the four wanderers, the anbeorun, could command enough will to shape darkness? But they would never have reason, for the creation of a sceadu meant a level of evil in the creator equal to the abomination created. That made no sense in light of what was known of the wanderers. According to history, the anbeorun existed to guard against the Dark. Yet the mosaic indicated a tie of some kind between the anbeorun of fire, Aeled, and a sceadu.
The entry in Fynden Fram’s anthology continued.
A sceadu can take any shape it chooses: stone or shadow, the wind crossing the plain, animals, man, a tree growing in the forest. It mimics the shapes of things that already are, just as its power is merely a reflection of the strength of its maker and the darkness. There is no reliable way to determine the presence of a sceadu, though one account of the death of Allevian Tobry—
Who was Allevian Tobry? Nio had always wondered about that, for he had never come across any other mention of the name.
—records that a stranger appeared at his gates, cloaked and hooded despite the summer’s heat, and so brought death to that lord with a touch of his hand. Everyone of his household felt an intense cold emanating in waves from the stranger, as ripples do spread out around a stone tossed into a pool. After the stranger had departed, all fell sick of a lingering fever. The wizard of the household claimed it had been no man, but a sceadu. I cannot vouch for the truth of this account, as there is little other firsthand knowledge of encounters with sceadus. There is no known way of killing the creatures, though they themselves feed on death and will kill for no reason at all. They need death in order to live. This is not surprising, as they are the oldest servants of the Dark.