I lay on a boulder, the stinging ache of cracked ribs coming with every breath even as blood slowly oozed from the slices to my side and hip. The blows had been glancing yet the lizard-lion's claws had sliced through the hardened leather of my jerkin and leggings like so much paper. The cuts were shallow yet still burned; I did not even want to think about what foulness the swamp water might carry into them. As every Crannogman knew, a single untended scrape could kill you in the swamps as surely as a spear through the heart. Greywater fever they called it; a disease endemic in the Neck that most readily affected the young and those that hadn't developed a tolerace for and made frequent use of certain local poisons.
So as much as I felt like resting for at least a few hours, I ignored my body's protests and fumbled at my belt even as I set a painfully slow course for the nearest stream. I opened the second vial of poison I'd brought along with my teeth, the arm that had held my spear stiff from just a push from the enormous lizard and refusing to work properly. Not having anything else to work with, I took off my oiled cloak and tied it up in a crude sack. By the time I went through the knotwork with one arm I'd crawled out of the black bog and reached one of the streams feeding the lake a couple miles further down the path. The crude sack was filled with relatively clear water into which I poured half my remaining poison and counted to a hundred. Then I used the resulting low-strength poison - which would have still killed any human not under a serious antivenom or magical protection - to wash and disinfect my wounds. Had such local remedies been merely mundane the treatment would have been woefully insufficient, but the Crannogmen had survived through their use for millennia; I had to trust they knew what they were doing.
Utterly spent at least physically, I collapsed by the small stream and finally looked into what had been blaring for my attention for the past half hour; fourteen flames, visions of them like tiny stars in my mind. Except they were not mere visions, not anymore. Fourteen plinths of black basalt, tongues of colored flame sprouting from each, were now etched into my senses not just in dreams and meditation but the waking world. Where before I'd needed to be either asleep or deep in meditation to merely bring them up now I could see them before me, hear the crackling of their fire, breathe in the cloying stench of burned offerings hanging heavily in the air.
The flames had come to me in a dream only a few weeks after my new adopted parents had taken me in. Back then I had not made the connection, but in hindsight it had been the night after the first time I'd been given a frog to kill and butcher. Crannogmen being almost exclusively hunters, the dream had become clearer ever since, gaining almost imperceptibly in strength with every hunt. Foreknowledge had done the rest; it hadn't been hard for a Song of Ice and Fire fan to notice how important a dream of fourteen flames might be, or to throw a live frog into a fire just to see what would happen.
But all the rituals since paled in comparison to this day's offering; my first real struggle for life and limb, the first kill of significance as grown men would measure things. Some threshold had been met, some void filled and for the first time I felt pinned under the gaze of something otherworldly, something as great as it was terrible. An anticipatory silence fell on the small patch of muddy ground I lay on interrupted only by the crackle of fire. Fourteen flames... all different in color, a few different in intensity. The anticipation grew into expectation, the expectation into pressure; not a demand as people would make but the natural - or perhaps unnatural - course of things. Water flowed, life grew, shadows lingered, fire devoured. And these particular fires finally had something to devour now that enough offerings had been made.
Merely taking in the black basalt plinths, I instinctively knew there was not nearly enough for all the fires to be fed, not enough of an offering for even a single flame to be fed to its fullness for could a fire ever be full? With that dawned the realization of what all the anticipation and pressure was about; it was I that would choose where my offerings would be made, on which flame the accumulated life-force of my few years exploring magic would be spent, because the fourteen flames were far from identical.
The first flame was the color of molten gold and as bright as a small torch; the most intense of the fourteen. Looking into it I saw not a throne, but the idea of a throne; a thing as shapeless and immaterial as a spoken word that invoked glimpses of every throne I'd ever seen or imagined; from my adopted Father's seat in the crannog's dining area, to the Iron Throne from the television series, to the thrones of Zeus in both historical representations and fiction. The idea of the thrones and those that sat upon them? Not quite; it was more the idea of inherent superiority, Nobility itself.
The second flame had once been just a barely glowing spark but now looked like the tiniest candle, except for its bronze color. Somehow it had grown on its own, if very little. Looking into it I saw the clang of blade against blade, the clash of shields, the struggle for one life and will over another. Echoes from every pre-industrial battle I'd ever seen or read about were in it, even a fleeting image of my own recent struggle to stab the lizard-lion. Strength, courage, skill, carnage; it contained all those things as far as they fell into the common theme of War.
The third flame was silver and it was little more than a spark. A glance into it showed men and women of beauty, from whores to princesses to kings, though beauty was not what the flame was about. It was not about some physical quality, but about using that quality among many other things; clothing, jewelry, cosmetics, art and performance, manners and body language, empathy and manipulation. Though the majority of the people shown were teenagers or young adults, there were also both kids and older people among their number, all sharing a common theme. Whether with silver adorned limbs, a silver harp or pen, silver crowns and medals, or a silver tongue, they exerted Influence on those around them.
The fourth flame was as faint as the third and the color of freshly minted copper. It was the easiest to understand, even easier than the one showing battle, for looking into it showed people, mostly middle-aged men and women, in the middle of some transaction. Coin of all sorts changed hands, goods were bartered, sheets were balanced, from solitary households to the largest empires it shared the gritty details of economics and Stewardship.
The fifth flame was somehow shedding light as the first but its size was tiny and its intensity lacking, giving the idea that the light was not its own. It was the color of liquid mercury, shiny and intriguing and in its depths it held countless students. Whether young children listening to stories at the feet of their grandparents or old scientists and researchers pushing the boundaries of knowledge in their labs or ivory towers, it was all about Learning.
The sixth flame was the color of iron, from the black of cast iron, to shiny steel, to a red-hot bar taken from the forge and a lump of hematite carved out from the ground. As small as the second, it was more than a spark but less than a candle. It was blacksmiths working their forges, stonemasons and workers raising a curtain wall, woodworkers carving tools and shipwrights laying down a new hull. Even jewelers and their arts, especially in the making of gears and lenses rather than works of art. All put together it was the very idea of Craftsmanship.
The seventh flame was dull, the color of lead and with its tiny size hard to see that it was lit at all unless you knew where to look. Looking into it, it was an arrow in the forest, a bullet in the dark, a dagger from behind. It was lead and tin and arsenic to slowly poison someone without a cure, it was snake and frog venom to give a painful death at a small scrape, it was innocuous-looking herbs in the wine. A camouflage cloak in the woods, a black hood in a dark alley in a moonless night, masks and disguises and wearing other peoples' faces. I saw countless people carrying out their business in utter secrecy and recognized none but myself when I snuck into the black bog or made sacrifices away from prying eyes. The ideas of stealth and subtlety, beffudlement and betrayal, all combined into Subterfuge.
The eight flame was white yet not, reflecting light and scattering it. In its size of the smallest candle over black basalt it was a window but also a mirror, yet also a tree. It showed me myself, but the more I looked the more images of Flann appeared, both younger and older. The greater the age difference, the further in the past or the future those Flanns were the more of them existed and the more different they grew. Those younger were unchanging and mostly unmoving, but the older ones moved around, their clothing, bearing and even features seemed to shift from moment to moment. It took me an embarassingly long time to understand what I was looking at, because all the previous flames had showed aspects of, well, human civilization. This one? Foresight and hindsight, pre and post cognition, essentially the magic of Divination.
The ninth flame burned between a candle and a small torch and its fire was emerald green. A glance into it showed all manner of birds, beasts and fish, all that lived and moved on land, in the air, or under the surface of the waters. It showed trees and their roots, and all that died and rotted to eventually feed them, even as they fed on the plants and others in turn fed upon them. It showed how life was shaped by the earth and it in turn shaped the earth as much as any element. And how all those things, all the life, the earth and their cycle could be seen from afar, read like letters on a page to see what was to come or moved like pawns on the battlefield to shape that future. Since this was Westeros and the flame was green, it obviously represented Greensight.
The tenth flame was but a tiny blue spark. Looking into it I saw the storm; clouds and winds, tides and waters, winter and ice, cracks of lightning. It had as many forms as there were natural phenomena, all said phenomena that were either about motion or cold things. There was a disproportionate focus on ice and it unnatural applications, but the same techniques applied to it would also work on water or wind, though they required either different predisposition or a much broader perspective. I wanted to call this ice magic for obvious reasons, but it really was more Elementalism.
The eleventh flame was the color of actual fire and the size of a small torch, the largest of all the flames except the golden one. Within it I saw just fire at first, indistinguishable from any mundane torch. But looking closer I saw more; flames that burned without fuel, men that appeared and disappeared in flashes of light, lizards that spewed fire, magma that spewed from the earth and flowed like great rivers. That same magma moved and shaped like clay, or falling from the sky to lay waste to great areas. The magic of fire, Pyromancy.
The twelfth flame was only a hair smaller than the eleventh and was the color of red rubies or freshly spilled blood. Instead of having to look into it I felt its power flowing in my veins; healing and blighting, shaping and enchanting, inheritance and transformation. It was life itself as it pertained to magic, its greatest use not by itself but grown or sacrificed to empower other forms of magic. An amateur with a smidgen of talent could perform entirely disproportionate acts with enough fuel, for such was the power of Sorcery.
The thirteenth flame was another of the tiny ones and grey in color. Pallid skin, growing rot, bleached bone, one did not have to look for it, for death was everpresent. Except that is not dead which can eternal lie, and in strange aeons even death might die. Whether freshly killed, rotten, or reduced to bones, whether man or woman, young or old, person or animal, the dead rose. And they walked. And they outnumbered the living. Given the world I was in, it was hardly a surprise to find Necromancy here.
The final flame did not appear to be lit at first look. There was nothing there, there was no reason to look, really, just an empty black plinth. Except I knew the flames were fourteen, had seen them in my dreams. So I checked again, despite the sudden desire to look away, the oily, sickly tang in my mouth that made me want to retch. And then I found it, but it had no color seen by human eyes. It looked black but was not, for it was the color of a blind man painting with the fluids of the eyes he used to have. The color of villagers mating with things crawling out from the blackest depths. That of a mother murdering her unborn children and using their tormented souls like puppets for their own gain. That of an emperor in yellow robes building black pyramids under the stars, the hearts and brains of men for mortar. It was the color behind stars and under hills, and empty caves none dared delve and no mapmaker dared record. Its name I neither uttered nor thought as I pried my aching eyes from the certainly empty plinth... Award Quote ReplyReport990Belial66611/8/2024Reader modeNewAdd bookmark Threadmarks StrangeSpeederBelieves in happy endings