DRISHYA HAD A LOT on his mind. He knew there was a great deal of time left before he would face the urrkh who masqueraded as a prince of the Arrgodi. He knew this as surely as he knew the urrkh’s name was in fact a title, Tyrak of Keravalune, shortened to Tyrak in the urrkh tongue. Tyrak the Urrkhlord as he had been known once, in a forgotten age.
Drishya knew this just as he knew that he himself was born of the essence of Vish that had been left in the Auma surrounding Arthaloka, awaiting just such a contingency. Stone god Vish had defeated Tyrak in that Age of Myth, and the Stone Sages had imprisoned him in a secure place with countless other urrkh—not their physical forms, for those had been destroyed when the stone gods unleashed the dreaded celestial weapon that erased all physical life on Arthaloka. Their essences were held captive; call them souls, if you wished—it was as good a term as any.
Somehow Tyrak had escaped and assumed a temporary physical manifestation which he used to impregnate a mortal woman, Queen Kensura of Arrgodi, before his urrkh essence was forced back into that prison by the power of Auma. Queen Kensura then gave birth to the mortal Tyrak, passing him off as the son of King Ugraksh instead of the urrkh-human half-breed he was. The same force of Auma, to maintain the Eternal Balance, had released a portion of Vish’s essence and allowed it to take physical form as well, to counter that of Tyrak. Thus was Drishya created, with Vasurava and Kewri’s eighth child acting as his physical vessel. All this he knew already. There was something else that troubled him.
How had Tyrak escaped his eternal prison? Only a Stone Sage or a stone god had the power to release him, even for an instant. Yet there were no Stone Sages or stone gods in this era upon Arthaloka. On distant planets and far-flung worlds, yes, but that was of little relevance to this matter. Whoever or whatever had enabled Tyrak’s escape had to possess great power, perhaps even urrkh maya, and that troubled Drishya. Even as he spent his days playing at games and sports and herding the cows, his mind continued to seek an answer to this riddle.
The answer came to him one fall day, from an unexpected source.
He was sitting beneath a shady tree on a hillock with a clear view of his family’s herd. The rolling green hills of Harvanya, long said to be the richest and most nourishing grazing in all the Sea of Grass—which they truly were now, simply because Drishya enriched the soil he walked upon, and he had walked every mile of these hills of his homeland—lay lazily in the genial sunshine of an autumn afternoon. A flute rested silent in his lap; he had set it down a moment ago to muse upon the same old quandary that had preoccupied him almost since the day of his birth.
After several minutes of fruitless musing, added to the tally of tens of thousands such minutes he had expended in the pursuit of this same question, he raised the flute to his lips again.