Thunderwyrm VII

Arriving at Brighthelm, Fiara found herself in a fine lavender palanquin, and beside the presence of Edicus Whitewall and hundreds of eager faces. The city itself had given them multiple hours of ride to the Keep, up hills and along roads, named in old Valk things, in their tongue, Tudingruvåg. But the journey from Meridian to even the road through the Eggshell hills had them in months of ride. Stopping to rest, and further skirmishes throughout Chilternshire, had drained hope for their queen’s living from all but Edicus Whitewall.

‘And thus I am proven right,’ Whitewall vociferated at the sight of Fiara’s eyes. He turned to the roads and the people of the affinity, and to the melting pot of smells and architectures and peoples of Brighthelm and proclaimed himself something proud. ‘You may all now call me Edicus Whitewall, Duke of the Roost, and winner of the wager. Chroniclers, write this down. This will be no funeral!’

He turned back to the incessant blinking of disbelieving Fiara, heiress to Loullands. ‘We are made. The journey is done, and though your neck may be crooked, and my wife may be dead, and your skin slashed by the claws of a dog larger than a bear, the journey is done. This is Brighthelm, my Stone. This is your capital, and these, your subjects.’ Edicus twisted his arm as if the sleeve were a curtain to the fine cobbles and keen faces of smallfolk presented as he spoke.

Fiara watched, blank-eyed. ‘I learnt a grave truth, Duke Whitewall,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘You don’t – the gods… I was right, I was–’

‘We do not take truths as they are. No: people take truths as people are; as they see themselves to be; as they see fit for themselves. Truth, then, is a concept beyond humanity – so don’t dwell on what terrible truth you think you’ve learned.’ Edicus put his elbows upon his knees. ‘Because now, you are. You are the Queen of Loullands. Today, you relish in this victory. Do it if only for the spirits departed that made it possible.’

Fiara blinked again. She was queen. They had won. No victory was so hollow. I must respect those dead. This is what they wanted.

‘What do you want to do?’ Whitewall asked. ‘We need to make our stance clear on the civil war. The Hedets will only swell stronger.’

Fiara’s face was desperately sorrowful.

‘Of course, well, you’ve missed a lot… Brishire has sworn neutrality, to protect her lands alone. Gwyshire is now a puppet of the Hedets, and Cesternshire still in internal turmoil. We’ve most of what’s left of the armies of Scarshire, since quelling some upstarts around Clyreton and Riverside, and Hille promises to pledge fealty as soon as you’re coronated. It bodes long, and it bodes bloody. We only held Meridian for a day.’

‘I’m… I’ll need an Honourable Lord. A right hand,’ Fiara interrupted. ‘Everyone I know has… they’re all dead.’

‘Twyner?’ Whitewall said with an odd optimism, clearly distinct from his usual ironic overtone. ‘He lives. As does your uncle, Riquard Parasquall.’

‘Twyner knows nothing of governance, Duke Whitewall,’ Fiara noted. ‘Riquard must hold Cliffhaven in my absence, or until…’

‘Indeed, you will need an heir… What of Elthor Lithundyre, Duke of Stormbasin? He holds fealty to your order in Scarshire. He is a fair and just man. A proven warrior.’

‘No. We need as many allies outside of the capital as possible. No,’ Fiara said, ‘Uncle Willaem?’

Whitewall sighed and turned his body. ‘I’m afraid the leading theory is that the Duke of Nefae burnt with his city. It is chaos across your new realm.’

Fiara’s sorrow boiled. She paused. ‘Edicus, you’re the only counsel I have left.’

‘I cannot–’

‘Then serve the interim until I find someone more willing.’

‘I…’

‘I need your lessons. I need your clarity of voice.’ Fiara found herself pleading to a man she wished was dead if it brought others in his place. Horrid thoughts, but thoughts all the same.

Whitewall was silent until they came to the Keep. A cold place, where grandeur and ancient history was sold to harsh judgement. It loomed, as impressive as anything could ever be, rising ever broad on the horizon as if a small mountain range made by years of man’s labour. Kings and queens and sovereigns and councils and peasants and foreigners had been at those walls, yet Brighthelm remained. Brighthelm un-besieged, and it was then that Fiara knew just why.

The palanquin lowered close to the ground, and the outside curtain withdrew. An auricomous lady-in-waiting that Fiara did not recognise was with maids and attendants, all laying steps and offering hands to help her down. She had been washed during her coma and dressed and the finery was beyond even the extortion her king father would send. But the musk of must off old clothes was not fully masked by whatever famous scents they sprayed on Stones for such occasions. Fiara heard the cheers and revelry of music, minstrels, musicians, singers, common men, merchants, and low gentry. They sung for the love of Squall. Liberators. Rightful. Honest. True. Benevolent.

‘They love you,’ Edicus said.

Fiara was lost in the noise. It was as painful as it was loving. She clutched tight unto her teeth, squeezing shut the words, but making it slightly easier. Easier to accept. Easier to internalise. Her introspection was a horde: that horde was spectral, and it had many faces and each face was a person that once loved her. But each face did not cheer. They loved.

Whitewall led Fiara through the grandest of all gates, arching doubly, and curling at the top, like the snaking of dragons, where a runner travelled down the marble steps. It was of an amethyst more ornate than the jewel itself, sewn over by silver thread, but most meticulous were the mirrored rows of that Narcugan wyvern. A seemingly endless cascade of forgotten thunder over extinct creatures that meant nothing to anyone but power.

‘The Narcuga is said to hold vast lands,’ Whitewall said.

The moment was too surreal to listen. Fiara had never clutched anything so tight as her teeth then; they felt as though chipping, or close to snapping apart.

‘Their trinities patrol the spine of a continent – the Escocac Ridgewall Mountains of Cirien – and they spawn to create dynasties just as the Squall have. Sometimes the origins are lost, but that foolish concept…’ Edicus trailed again. ‘You know, Lady Fiara, my Stone, I would be… I accept. I wish to hold the title of your Honourable Lord; my thanks for your veneration. I shall begin scouring for strong minds in finance and strategy.’

Fiara nodded, and smiled, and danced towards the throne.

A number of hands grasped at her, each with whispers and words.

‘You must let the heralds write this,’ one said. And Fiara agreed. So they did.

Fiara Squall, Cardinal Lady of Scarshire, Archduchess of Cliffhaven, and impending Queen of Loullands, Stone of Brighthelm, was a ready woman. She, having permitted the many historians to scribe these moments, gave a glass-eyed gaze. Her hair descended in the calm auburn mirror to her father’s ardent equivalent, and her cheeks were high, and her lips were full, and her eyes were of two icicles in the maelstrom; she was truly of the beauty demanded of nobility, and then far more still. Surely, the Squall dynasty was in no greater palms or more readied hips, or more fertile of body. They say all good rulers are first blessed, during birthtime, with the latency of legacy and the capacity to stew heritage.

Karavas Kius built something greater than even two-hundred-and-twenty years could aspire. When he reached that highest peak in our Eggshells, he forged a chair from twisting stern slate with marble that glittered the cream of daybreak; encased after by the crystalline stillness of unmelting ice, given stasis by the ancient Magicks of Valkmen and their proto-Valk Foremyz arts. Since, overlain by the delicate hands of limp Chirons with fine silks and carpet. Just as the original walls of the Brighthelm Keep grew, sprawling from his original scribble on parchment that those same Chirons kept still and un-crumpling and un-decaying and un-dusting in thick glass warded doubly by the watchful eyes of sworn blades and divine guard, the legacy of Karavas Kius grew, and the myth of his chair grew, and the legend of Brighthelm’s Stone grew.

Such history and mythic lore detailed. The oldest part of the Keep, save the seat itself, were those decorated walls. The Valk created frescos and tapestries using techniques forgotten to antiquity, blending mesmerising colours, all in the pursuit of physical memory. There detailed the Trials of Steíínarr in quarrel with the tricks of Heironymous Sava to win back his love Ísfrid; from the subduction of the Slumberers Three: the snow angel Valk Gelidabreen the Bitter, the cloud titan Volk Fulgurlyn the Stormhammer, and the Etin King Vulc Austevete the Smouldering, to out-speeding the White Winter Owl, to plucking an egg from the Magenta Serpent of Lork Isle, even creating a tower-palace purely from ice, Llithras, and snow, deep in the north. Yet, most bloody was the penultimate sheet: in the Blightwood, when Malørshor itself struck its contempt against the mythic Steíínarr – blinding his sense so that he may cut his own wife and two of his three sons down, only to reward his slaughter with realisation over the snow-blooded body of dear Ísfrid. There detailed the tribulations of the Kius dynasty, from struggle with the Jardonic Empire, to the building of Snowshade, and the founding of the land of the Eastern Scar Mountains, uniting foreign Stormlords with native Loulman; the acknowledgement of the five-hundred Lost Years, to Jhorn the Webbed, the Eggshell Underground, and the final collapse with Yhora, the Last Ice King, of the Grey Blood.

From there, the Sileni dynasty attempted to emulate their predecessors. Theirs were paintings of the many named Jeruls, and many called Sellus, and the she-wolf Jene, Serjuses, even one Karavas Sileni; each stroke sprinkled over by the sheen of gold dust, built on the blood of slaving and global trade, wherefrom the short reign of two Threid Hedets was briefly mentioned before the dark ages of Easterntide. Thereafter, the House of Squall had been added. Their armour-suits, their favourite goblets, their blades, and their handwriting; shifting paintings, shimmering in the lucid light of the Stone Court, showing the many Boerises and fewer Maerks, standing on fictionalised cliff edges with purple storms in their gaze at the horizon. Injonem the Aged had himself mummified and encased for any to see.

‘Cyclical so it is,’ Edicus Whitewall, twelfth Duke of the Roost, winner of the wager, had rightly stated. Stated so, just before he watched royal handmaidens fit robes and shoulders and a cape in the colours of the House of Squall. And watched as they passed Fiara the Highrod Staff and an amethyst ball they called the True Stone, and sheathed upon her many basket-hilted rapiers, and stiletto daggers, and laid rich amulets of golden diamond and lilac amber and Llithras-titanias, fit in colour with shimmering rings and glistening circlets, and strung up the bastard sword Lodestar, so that it hung like a cross in front of her, as she stood stern and disturbed in front of crimson and bronze curtains, so that royal artists might paint her, and the political nation might make their observations, and the heralds might chronicle, and the chroniclers might critique. Never had such finery, all the finery of Loullands, even, seemed so agonising; if lost upon an individual then, one wrote.

Though hours it took, the art was complete, and it was hung, and Fiara was still yet to be coronated. So she was ushered by her household, and under the wise gaze of Edicus Whitewall, twelfth Duke of the Roost, and beside the watchful arm of the ghosts she seemed so haunted by. For it was said that those moments had her walk not only toward the throne of all Loullands, but also through the fields of untired spirits that had lifted Fiara Squall of Cliffhaven to the peak. Though after that moment, all heralds were dismissed.

Fiara tried her greatest to have it all absorbed. Her first visit since a babe to Brighthelm or that palace they told was hers. Yet, the dullness came as pressure drops; truly, one of the harrying heralds would note it to be a calm before the storm. Her movements were rigid; restricted in each step by unfitting cloaks, and by long-legged shoes, and by the weight of riches. When finally every judgement upon the faces of on-looking ladies and lords reached her, a tear did slide. It wasn’t stinging, nor was it much wet, seeping instead into the powder that her skin had been dressed with. And there sat the throne.

It was a painful thing, to sit upon ancient ice and stone, such that no amount of carpets and material could cushion. Above her, the walls so recently bare, were now unfurling for the House of Squall either side of a grand glass window that mapped Loullands and Vyrvalk.

The wyvern did not dance.

The banners rolled out again, beside the stone chair.

The wyvern was proud and the wyvern was solemn and the wyvern glanced a beady eye to all lower faces. A beady eye of promise built on blood. And a whistling wind blew them, fluttering the fabric like the wings of butterflies that were stained with the images of creatures far greater, for it seemed the only safety against the predation around it. Saint De’elys the Second emerged from somewhere, grey, and old, and blotch-covered, and thick of snowy eyebrow and overgrown beard and hair. He offered a smile, but Fiara could not help but take it as yet more assessment or critique.

‘Queen Fiara, I inaugurate and bless and adorn you from hence: the forty-fifth remembered and rightful Stone of Brighthelm. May your reign be long and may your rule be prosperous and may your authority compete amongst our divine guardians for rightful truth. As Pious Celestiam, I, Saint De’elys the Second, proclaim our lawful and learned lady; blessèd may you be, heir of Boeris the Sixth the Silent.’ The frail man turned to the still faces and anxious gazes observing the coronation in the Stone Court. ‘Here is our Stone: Fiara Squall the Thunderwyrm. Gods preserve her.’