Days passed before Rastín felt strong enough to do anything other than sit idly and talk with Dierá, G’rkyr, and the other Empyrjurin sharing the cavernous cell. At times Dierá, G’rkyr, and others would be summoned out of the cell. When Dierá returned, she would always go directly to one of the open cisterns along the southerly wall and bathe before joining Rastín. He never dared ask why.
While Dierá bathed, she sang. Her voice carried well. It was as beautiful and haunting as the songs she chose. Most were ballads that told of battles lost, the death of the great ones, and the final days of Élvemere. Rastín’s second self was always keenly aware of the songs and their words, even if his other self in the waking world paid them little attention.
G’rkyr used these opportunities to batter Rastín with stinging banter or open mocking. The gargant had taken to calling Rastín “Exalted” or “His Empirical Majestic Exalted One.” Rastín knew the gargant had no idea that Rastín was actually a prince among elf kind, but these and other quips only made Rastín increasingly resentful of G’rkyr and the other giantfolk.
As G’rkyr began this day’s tirade, Rastín looked up at the gargant with indifferent eyes. His expression told the gargant his thoughts.
In response, G’rkyr took his huge finger and jabbed Rastín in the gut, making Rastín double over. As the gargant did this, he said, “Remember, Exalted, you are here only because she would not leave you and begged me to find a way to help you.”
Hoping to avoid goading the gargant on, Rastín said, “I was told I have you to thank for this. On behalf of my people, the Élvemere, I thank you.”
“Your people, your people. His Empirical Majestic Exalted One sure is fond of himself. You think I swept you from dream and shadow willingly? That one—” G’rkyr pointed to Dierá as she bathed “—has the ftokish tongue.”
“I hear you,” Dierá called out.
Rastín grinned. The word ftokish was a vulgarism particular to the southerly region of Jurin where G’rkyr’s clan lived. The closest Rastín had ever come to understanding its meaning was through Dierá’s reaction to it. He suspected he would understand all the Empyrjurin idioms and vulgarisms in time—or at least those used by the Three Hammers clan. Still, it irked him that Dierá and G’rkyr had such a strong connection.
Rather than stay and argue with the gargant, Rastín went to a place he knew the other would not dare to go. He went to the cisterns where Dierá bathed and sang the saddest song he had ever heard. The elf maiden did not shy away from him. Instead she finished her song and then asked, “You have decided, then?”
“I have decided nothing,” Rastín replied as he sat.
“Do you find me unattractive or unsuitable in some way?”
He regarded her, taking in the deep bronze of her bare shoulders, the long line of her neck, the perfect oval of her face, the roundness of her gray eyes, and the silver of her hair in a single, lingering glance. “You are beautiful,” he told her, and he meant it. “But I will not do this thing because they command it.”
Dierá stood and walked from the cistern. Her naked form drew Rastín’s eyes as was her intention. Her breasts were not as full as some, but they were pleasing. Both round and firm. Her slender waist accentuated the curve of her hips. Her backside was shapely, and she turned to ensure he saw this. “Then do this thing for me,” she said as she leaned down to him.
At her touch and at the press of her lips against his, Rastín felt his desire rise. He could not help this, but he could not allow himself to continue. Dierá had twice been given to him—once by his own people and once by the ageless—though for different reasons. It was all the same, and all meant to sink him to a level of depravity where the ageless owned not only his life but his soul. Though his life might be forfeit, Rastín decided his soul was his own, and for this reason he gently pushed Dierá away. One day, if Dierá came to him of her own free will, things would be different, but that day was not today.
Across the cell, G’rkyr applauded and jeered, causing Rastín to charge with a ferocity that surprised the gargant. As G’rkyr landed on his backside, smashing his head against the low ceiling, Rastín’s charge ended with a flying leap as he kicked out at the gargant’s chest with both feet. The gargant fell flat on his back with Rastín straddled across his neck.
“Mock me now,” Rastín said as he choked the gargant, squeezing with his legs and hands. “I dare you.”
G’rkyr, for all his size and might, had never suspected Rastín was capable of knocking him down, let alone trying to choke the wind out of him. G’rkyr flailed about, trying to knock Rastín off; but Rastín only tightened his grip.
Having slipped on her light shift, Dierá stalked across the cell until she was standing at G’rkyr’s shoulder. “G’rkyr, Rastín does not understand that you mock him because of your fondness for me. He can be as thick-headed and single-minded as you!”
Pulling Rastín off the gargant, she said, “Rastín, I am as fond of G’rkyr as he is of me.”
Rastín’s expression spoke of the incredulity he was feeling. “You have feelings for a gargant?”
“I do indeed,” Dierá said, kissing G’rkyr’s cheek and helping him sit up.
G’rkyr smiled and gloated.
“Have your gargant, then!” Rastín shouted, throwing his hands up in the air and walking away. As he moved to the opposite side of the cell, the other Empyrjurin shied away from him. Preferring the company of Dierá and G’rkyr to his, they left him alone. Even Zanük, G’rkyr’s closest rival, would not speak to Rastín.
Dierá sulked for the rest of the day. When the dinner cauldrons were brought in, Dierá served Rastín as ever. However, instead of handing him the bowl of stewed meat, she shoved it at him, causing much of it to spill. “Do eat what is on the floor,” she told him as she stalked away. “Otherwise, you are likely to get hungry in the night.”
“Dierá,” he called after her. “It doesn’t have to be like this. I’m sorry. Sit by me.”
Obediently, Dierá sat where she stood, refusing to look at him.
Frustrated, Rastín walked over to her. “You do not have to sit if you do not want to sit.”
“Oh, but I do,” Dierá told him quietly, bitterly.
G’rkyr looked up from his bowl, started to grunt something. Rastín ignored the gargant as he knelt next to Dierá. “If this is how you will be, then I free you. You are free, I tell you. Go. From now on, I shall be as nothing to you and you shall be as nothing to me.”
Dierá mocked him then, much as G’rkyr had done earlier, and her scorn cut him more deeply than any blade ever could. “‘I free you,’” she laughed, mimicking his movements and expression. “You free me…Ha! Have you ever in your life considered your words before they came out of your mouth? Have you ever thought of anyone else beside yourself? Have you ever truly seen what is right before your eyes? Do you understand nothing?”
Her large eyes were so wild and angry that G’rkyr and the other Empyrjurin turned away from them. Yet as she spoke, Rastín could tell that Dierá knew that every word was wrong and that every word cut at his heart, but she seemed unable to stop herself. It seemed he was there and those she wished were in his place were not, so she raged and she raged.
“I was to have been your queen, your wife, your beloved. I was to be the air you breathe, the water you drink, the light of your eyes. I can never be free of you though you, without a care, wish to be free of me. How dare you!
“And how dare you take out your anger on G’rkyr? Do you not see that he is more child than adult? As are they all.”
Rastín looked past Dierá to the hulking mass of gargants clustered tightly on the far side of the cell. Most were half crouching with their heads bent over. In this position, their fisted hands touched the floor. Although he looked and looked, Rastín could not see youth.
“If G’rkyr and the others were adults, they would not be here with us. You do not understand what it means for the masters—” Dierá used the gargant’s word for the ageless. “—to make us gifts to them. We have known nothing save lies. Go beyond the doors of this cell. You will see the truth of it all. You will pray to your mother in the blessed land then. You will pray for one such as G’rkyr.
“When all others had forsaken us, G’rkyr dared befriend me. G’rkyr kept me alive in the masters’ halls when so many others were not as fortunate. The masters’ halls are places beyond horror—beyond the horrors of your worst imaginings.”
Dierá pounded her fists against Rastín’s chest, but it did nothing to slow her angry outpouring. “Oh, it would all be so much simpler if you would just do what the masters wish. It is why they punish us and make us a gift to the Empyrjurin. Why can you not do this one thing? Why can you not do this one thing for me? You said I was beautiful. Are your words as full of lies as theirs?”
As she pounded and pounded her fists, her words became increasingly hateful and wrathful. She blamed Rastín for anything and everything that had ever happened to her and hers. She blamed Rastín’s father for his failures on the day of reckoning. She cursed the House of Túrring. She vowed to kill him in his sleep. She cried out until she was spent and there was nothing left but fitful sobs.
Although Rastín’s heart was cold because of all the hateful, loathsome things she said, he held her. They remained thus, with her at his feet and him hunched over, holding her, through the long tolls of the night. While she slept, he lay awake whispering the words he wished he had had the courage to say earlier. “I see you, Dierá,” he told her as she slept. “I see you and I find your beauty beyond anything I had ever dreamed. You have beauty in your heart and in your face and in your form. Hate me, curse me, if you now must, but I know now for a certainty my father chose well.
“I forgive all you have done in my name. I thank you from the bottom of my heart. You kept me when there was no other. You held faith when no other would. And yet I could not, cannot, do the one thing you so wish.
“You do not understand that this thing you wish can never be. It is simply another lie, another way to control, another way to bend and break us. Alborn understood. He helped me see the truth within the lies. I am a king, Dierá, I feel it in my heart, but I have no land and no people save you now. And what will happen to this dream, to this wish that is Élvemere. Does it die with us? Or has it already died within us and we are as yet afraid to say that it is so?
“In Élvemere, you would have been my queen—you would have been the High Queen. Our people would have loved you as I would have loved you. But this is not, nor will it ever be, Élvemere. I have lain with Wërg—the beast people—and I am ashamed to say I did not dislike it. At times I feel that I am Wërg, Dierá, and at these times Élvemere is not even a dream in my heart.”
Drawing back her hair from her face, he whispered a promise into her ear, “Whatever comes of this defiance, I take upon myself.”
In the morning, Rastín and Dierá were called out. Dierá’s tears and sobs began anew as they followed a chained and manacled slave of a winged and horned race Rastín had never seen before. As the cell door closed G’rkyr held out a burning hand to them, but neither saw this. Rastín’s attentions were on Dierá, for she was in such a state that it took everything he had just to keep her moving.
“Tell me of the songs you sing?” he asked her, to change her focus.
At first he thought she did not hear him, for his voice was very soft, and then she said in hushed tones, “They are songs of Élvemere lost.”
Through the eyes of his father, Rastín had traveled to many lands and feasted in the halls of many kings. But those experiences hardly prepared him for the great hall of the masters, with its ceiling lost from view in shadow and its walls so far off that it seemed he walked in a chamber without walls. Yet it was not so much the hall itself as what was in the hall that made his stomach churn and his heart pound. Here the ageless walked.
Before this day, before this very moment, Rastín would have sworn that he would have gone to the blessed land before ever seeing a living ageless. For in his mind the ageless were the never seen, and yet there they were—everywhere as far as the eye could see—and they were more terrible, more horrendous to behold than his worst imaginings.
The winged and horned one had been silent as he hurried Rastín and Dierá along dark pathways and up stairs; but as they raced along a curbed path behind a table of impossible dimensions, the creature spoke.
“Slaves must keep within the slave runs. Slaves do not deign to look upon their masters. It is not for slaves to behold unless beheld. It is not for slaves to speak unless spoken to.”
Rastín cast his eyes down and concentrated on quieting Dierá, yet he could not shake the images of the mammoth, scaly darkspawn he had seen. In many ways they appeared both humanoid and lizardlike, yet each had a pair of great wings protruding from its back and thick spikes longer than he was tall along the shoulders, arms, and tail. He was certain these were the ageless. Although he knew he should fear them as Dierá did, he did not, for if they were truly of flesh and bone, they were no longer the dark whisperers who walked veiled in shadow.
The winged and horned one whirled around and cast his weighted chain at Rastín. “It is not for slaves to decide whether their masters are of flesh and bone.”
Rastín dodged the chain easily and without a thought, but the creature’s words caused him to retreat within his second self. It was from this place, once removed from the world, that he came face to face with the great king of the ageless—a behemoth who sat a colossal gilded throne like any two-legged creature might, yet his shape was that of a great, grave winged and armored caiman covered in thick scales, long claws, and curved horns.
The back of the throne was open at the bottom to accommodate the thick tail with its pairs of spikes that projected sideways and ran partway up its length as well. His head with its enormous rounded muzzle and great black spheres for eyes was monstrous and crowned with an elongated crest of burnished scales and curved horns that were ringed from base to tip. The gaping maw filled with razor sharp teeth had oversized canines, and below this an apron of thick bones embedded in the scales protected the throat.
Even as the great king of the ageless spread his barbed wings wide, and his guide and Dierá cowered on their knees, Rastín stood as if in his father’s hall. His head was bowed, as he was outwardly tending to Dierá even while contemplating all that was before him.
His stance made the ageless king laugh loudly and raucously. “Impenitent, unabashed little bit of nothing,” the king said as he reached out and picked up Rastín.
Coming to his own, Rastín knew he dared not speak, so he looked on silently, unable to keep hatred from his eyes.
“We disgust you. We abhor you…and yet you amuse us,” the king said. Speaking to someone Rastín could not see, the king asked, “Pray, do tell us of little king’s last.”
A serpent magi slithered across the floor. Its head had two great horns, its long muscular torso rested on a serpent’s body, and its body otherwise covered in gold and black scales had a broad strip of reddish scales running from its chest down the front of its body. “The little king told us, ‘The Túrring crown shall be passed to my son, my heir. House Túrring shall stand and our people shall serve your masters as one.’ ”
Still holding Rastín by the back of his shirt, the king asked, “And did the duplicitous ones serve us as one?”
“No, no, your majesty, they did not.”
“And yet we keep the little king’s own—and have we mistreated it?”
“No, no, your majesty, we have not.”
“Indeed, we have not. Perhaps this little bit of nothing would like to be impaled upon the roasting spit and served up with the others of his kind?”
Revulsion getting the better of common sense, Rastín stared directly at the king.
“Sullen, angry, little plaything. Does it want to say something?” Before Rastín had even started to speak, the king began shaking him and repeated his question. “Does it want to say something?”
As Rastín started to speak, the king tossed him up into the air, and now Rastín knew for certain that the great hall had a ceiling. He would have crashed into it had the king not snatched him out of the air an instant before impact.
“Plaything,” the king said, “be careful lest you cease to amuse us.”
“I am Rastín Dnyarr Túrring, of House Túrring. I am my father’s heir. My people are the Élvemere and we have never done harm to your people.”
When Rastín spoke, every other sound in the great hall fell away. The king kept his awed followers in check with a glance while he gripped Rastín between two fingers like a doll. “And yet you have done harm this very moment, by your very words. House Túrring, indeed. I do recall the little king standing before me. And did he not then cower and beg on his knees?”
The serpent magi said, “The little king begged and groveled on his knees. He begged your majesty to spare his people and the life of his son.”
“My father could not have knelt before anyone,” Rastín said boldly. “His body was ravaged from the waist down.”
Without warning, the king dropped Rastín. The fall from over half a chain would have seriously injured the untrained, but Rastín rolled as he landed, distributing the impact. As he started to stand, Dierá grabbed his right arm in both of her hands and pulled him to his knees beside her.
The king’s raucous laughter returned. “And did the little king not tell you it was he who declared war on us? We merely asked for homage and tribute. And did we not spare his people and his heir in the end?”
“Your majesty did most graciously, and for very little, I might add. One royal person to spare the people. One-half royal person to spare the son.”
“One and one-half royal persons indeed, and what grand entertainment. The little king plotting and scheming. The little queen going behind his back. The little king pleading and begging for the little queen. The little queen with more pleading and begging until I finally delighted of her flesh.”
“You spin lies within lies!” Rastín shouted. “My mother died in the camps. My father’s legs were gone of the wasting before we came to this accursed place.”
Without word or warning, the king snatched Rastín up from the ground, took up the spear of a guard and impaled Rastín. Dierá’s screams and cries for mercy were nothing compared to the death rattle from Rastín’s lungs as the spear entered his body between his legs and exploded out of his chest.