Written by ONAEDO
Year 1029
After the Leviathan died, after her blood turned the ocean black and poisonous, there were no gods for over ten thousand years.
In 1023, that changed. The people of Leera cannibalized their homes and, with the material, built catapults and towers, and laid siege to the city of Mireea. The Leeran people claimed that they were the Faithful of a new, yet unnamed god, but it was not until the Mireean people retreated to the Floating Cities of Yeflam that she appeared.
Six years after that event, most people think Se’Saera was named there, and the Breaking of Yeflam was the first display of her power. It is not uncommon for men and women to claim that, as Yeflam’s stone floors were torn apart, a giant made from a storm arose and spoke her name. But that is not true. Se’Saera was named across the ocean, in the country Ooila, in the First Queen’s kingdom. Nor was her name said by any creature or being of immense power. No, her name was spoken by the saboteur Bueralan Le, a man who had been exiled from Ooila for over a decade, and whom our new god sent there to draw one of history’s monsters, Aela Ren, to him. Only a few know that Se’Saera’s first act after she was named was not to destroy a city, but to take the soul of a dead man and place it in the womb of a woman Bueralan Le had befriended. This first act of the newly named god, the cartographer Samuel Orlan wrote days after, was a most revealing one.
But few spoke about what happened in Ooila.
Instead, people talked of Yeflam, of its destruction, and of the trial of Zaifyr, the immortal man known more infamously as Qian.
Lady Muriel Wagan brought Zaifyr to Yeflam in chains at the end of the Siege of Mireea. In Yeflam, the head of the Enclave, Aelyn Meah, met Zaifyr at the gates of her giant stone city, and tried to convince him to leave. The two called each other brother and sister, and considered each other family. But Zaifyr would not listen to his sister. He had come to Yeflam to convince the immortals in the Enclave to stand against the new god and to go to war against her before she became too powerful. In the Siege of Mireea, he had learned that Se’Saera kept the souls of the dead in the world, in an endless state of hunger and cold, to fuel her own power. She had to be struck down, he believed.
What he did not know – what he could not know – was that the new god had already reached out to Yeflam. With the help of the Keeper, Kaqua, she had turned many of the immortals to her cause.
Zaifyr was killed by Aelyn Meah in the Breaking of Yeflam. The storm giant so many remember was her creation. Once dead, Zaifyr fell from the sky, into the black ocean, and was lost beneath the poisonous waves of Leviathan’s Blood.
There were others in Yeflam, figures who were important to history, men and women we must not forget.
The first of these was Ayae, the former apprentice to the great cartographer Samuel Orlan. She arrived in Yeflam with the refugees of Mireea. Because of her newly risen powers – at that point little more than the ability to control herself during a fall and to create fire – she was not sent to one of the barren islands beneath Yeflam, but allowed to live with two friends, Faise and Zineer. There she acted as an envoy between the Keepers’ Enclave and the people of Mireea. If the task was not a poisoned one when it was given, it could only become one. Ayae’s attempts to help the people she had grown up with were thwarted, her friends killed, and in her grief, she began to turn to stone. She was forced to confront the notion that if she did not learn to control her powers, they would change her in such ways that she would always be a slave to the divinity within her.
With the aid of Zaifyr and his oldest brother, Jae’le, Ayae found a balance. It did not come from books, but rather from Yeflam’s descent into civil war. She found herself fighting to protect the people of Mireea and Yeflam from the Keepers and Se’Saera’s own hideous soldiers. In that turmoil, Ayae did survive and, I would argue, flourish. She did what all great warriors have done in a time of need.
It is strange then, that in so few years, history has all but forgotten her.
It has not forgotten Aned Heast, however.
This former mercenary, a man who had lost not just his leg in battle but also his reputation, began the war against Se’Saera as Mireea’s captain of the guard. In the Siege of Mireea, he paid an expensive price to force a stalemate onto General Waalstan and the Leeran Army. It was one designed to give him time to rebuild the Mireean force. If he had stayed there, he might have still been known as the Captain of the Spine. However, a letter penned by a former soldier was delivered by a Hollow, a warrior from the Pacifist Tribes of the Plateau. There were no words on the letter, just an image, but it was an image that forced Aned Heast to return to the position he had held years before: Captain of Refuge.
What can be said about Refuge that has not already been said? How can I describe a group of soldiers who do not work for money, but who answer the cries of those most in need, and who have fought and died through the most terrible battles of history? The recounting of their deeds through previous volumes of Histories will have to suffice. It is enough to say here only that Aned Heast was not the first Captain of Refuge, but he was the last. Under him, Refuge had been broken in Illate by the Five Queens of Ooila. He had been one of the few to survive.
The letter that the Hollow, Kye Taaira, held demanded Heast’s return. He left Yeflam at night and travelled over the crumbling Mountains of Ger, through the haunted city of Mireea, to find the witch of Refuge, Anemone. She lived in the small town of Maosa, a settlement ravaged by Se’Saera’s soldiers. By the time Heast arrived, the old witch was dead, and in her place, her granddaughter stood, instead.
Yet it would be the two of them who rebuilt Refuge, the two of them who history would not easily forget.
Of Bueralan Le, the man who spoke a god’s name, we can only wish kindness. After the loss of his soldiers in Ranan, after his own blood brother was slain by Se’Saera and his soul given to Bueralan, after he sailed to Ooila . . . after all the tragedies of those days, and the days that followed his naming of Se’Saera, we can only hope that peace will find the former saboteur.
After the Siege of Mireea, Bueralan returned to his homeland in the company of Samuel Orlan. The two were the only survivors of the ill-fated mission Muriel Wagan sent into Leera, but it did not leave them allies. Every Orlan has had his or her own game to play, and the eighty-second Samuel Orlan was no different. When he and Bueralan arrived in Ooila, the latter thought it was but a matter of time before the former would betray him. When Bueralan presented himself to the First Queen of Ooila, Zeala Fe, and begged for his exile to be lifted, he thought that moment had come. But it was Orlan’s intervention that allowed him to be returned to his home.
What neither man realized was that Zeala Fe was in a difficult situation. She was dying in the fashion that only those with a protracted illness can, and her children had begun to plot against her. As if that was not enough, the stories of Aela Ren’s arrival in Ooila grew, and Zeala Fe knew she would need all that she had if she were to survive. A desperate, exiled baron was a man she could easily manipulate to serve this goal.
Yet, for all of Zeala Fe’s power, for all her cunning, she could not stand against the brute force of Aela Ren’s power.
Ren was the servant of the god Wehwe, who had died during the War of the Gods. Driven mad by the loss of his master, Ren gathered the other men and women like him – the god-touched, as they were known – and began to purge the world. He believed that if there was no god, there was no truth, or absoluteness. The horrors he committed in Sooia because of this are many and well documented. When word of a new god reached him, he came to Ooila in search of the man who knew her name. Aela Ren knew that for a god to be real, its name must be said by another, and that name must echo through all living creatures.
I have only my sympathies to offer to Bueralan Le. I fear little else can be done for him.