The Medievals 1, page 15
part #1 of The Medievals Series
The sorrow felt from leaving her home revisits her heart. The wagon rail is hard against her back. The stars are hidden by clouds. The only light comes from a greenish glow beneath a burlap sack sitting next to her father on the seat. It is the glowing plant. Their home can be left behind, but not the glowing plant.
Through tears, Wendolyn begs her father to stay. She does not want to leave her friends. Her home.
“You will find a new life, with new friends,” her father promises half-heartedly as he looks back at her, his assurances leaving her colder than the winter around them.
The memory halts suddenly. Waldron has pulled his finger away.
Wendolyn feels the tears forming in her eyes. But not because of the impossible pain. These tears are tears of the past. Tears that her heart has already used once before.
The edge of Waldron’s fingernail touches her forehead again to continue the search.
“No more,” Wendolyn pleads, her lips so dry she can barely utter the words.
She opens her eyes, her vision blurred by the tears.
The cavernous room seems to spin, the rush of memories leaving her head dizzy. Her stomach tightens of its own accord. She wants to vomit, but there is nothing left except the fear that coats her insides. And she wonders if this is the same fear she saw in her father. The fear that rose up from a deep, secret place within him; and that he tried futilely to guard behind his eyes.
Is Waldron the Nameless Fear?
She turns her head to the evil looking down at her. His red eye moves with the spinning room.
“I know nothing of the staff you seek. I promise. Please,” Wendolyn says, “have mercy.”
“Mercy?” Waldron asks, a mirthless laugh simmering beneath his question.
Waldron turns his head to the two saurians standing sentinel at the doorway to the vast room. Speaking in the guttural foreign language Wendolyn heard in the forest, Waldron gives them an order, directing them to leave. The two saurians obey, the groan and clank of the door punctuating their exit from the Memory Chamber.
Waldron remains silent for a long moment, his intentions hidden behind his mask. The dizziness in Wendolyn’s head has subsided, the room now without a spinning motion. She is left with only a suffocating stillness as Waldron stands over her.
Finally, he speaks: “When I was no older than you, I also asked for mercy. Do you think it was granted?”
There is a dark past that lives in his words.
“Would you like to see what no mercy looks like?”
Wendolyn eyes the silver mask on his face, torchlight flickering in its reflection. She does not want to know what ugliness must hide behind the mask. For what other reason does one wear such a mask?
She shakes her head as a shiver escapes down the length of her legs.
But just as Wendolyn thinks Waldron is about to remove his mask, he instead turns to the wall of caged birds. With the wave of his hand -- his fingers curling upward like a spiral staircase -- Waldron unlatches a single cage somewhere below the platform, and a darkling flies up out of the dark depths to its master, alighting on his shoulder.
“The darklings and the Runes have always had a special relationship,” Waldron says. He speaks in a hushed, solemn tone. It is a voice that a bard might use to recount haunting tales around a fire.
“For my people, the darklings are the keepers of our history. You see, these birds have a rare ability to preserve memories across generations. Everything they have seen in their lifetimes is then passed on to their spawn. And in doing so, each of these birds may have memories that reach back through all of time. The darklings are my eyes, which means I see everything that has come before us. The vastness of history is held within the walls of this room.”
Wendolyn watches as Waldron sets the darkling on the perch beside the Rune Stone.
“This particular darkling holds in its mind a piece of my own history.”
Waldron touches his finger to the bird’s head. But instead of touching the Rune Stone with his other hand, he reaches out to Wendolyn, pressing his finger to her temple. Suddenly, a memory that is not her own appears upon the walls of her mind.
She is floating high above the earth. Wendolyn feels weightless. She is a bird, her arms tingling with the wind against her feathered wings. Her eyes move rapidly, taking in all things at once. Below, a war is raging, the fading sun staining the battlefield a blood-orange hue.
Hovering in the air, Wendolyn can see two armies: one that bares the lion crest of the King; the other marked with the symbol that she drew in the dirt for her father.
There must be thousands of soldiers. They are tiny at this great height. Up here, Wendolyn is beyond the reach of arrows, which arch through the air before impaling their victims.
As she floats, Wendolyn’s eyes are drawn to a powerful and inhuman being that leads the charge of the warriors crested with the unusual symbol. His head is framed by a band of black feathers. His warcry seems to make the air itself shiver around him. And the King’s soldiers retreat in fear, the war slipping from their grasp.
The memory disappears as Waldron removes his finger from her temple.
“The Endless War,” Waldron says. “For thousands of years, a peace had existed between my people and mankind. Between those marked by magic, and those without. But my people, the Runes, had grown weary of humans as they pushed against our borders in search of wood for their ships and steel for their swords. The King -- the very ancestor of the King that now sits on the throne -- prized the needs of his people over the needs of the Runes. He fooled himself into believing humans were the rightful heirs to our land and all that came with it. But we were the superior beings -- in both mind and body -- and we were not willing to give up what was ours. And so we went to war with mankind.”
Wendolyn has heard the tale of the Endless War. A battle between the mystical Runes and mankind that lasted for years. Children in the villages would reenact it, using wooden swords and sticks. And often, as Wendolyn was falling asleep, her father would recount the war and the devastation it brought to many of the Nine Territories within the Realm.
He told her of the Runes’ brutal campaign, which nearly led them to victory as they scorched the earth. And he told her of Merlin magically transforming the King’s Lead Guard into saurians -- who vanquished the Runes and won the war for the King before the beasts turned their bloodlust onto humans.
Her father had recounted the tale as yet another lesson: The Great Merlin’s magical power was capable of both saving the Realm and utterly destroying it. This was a notion that filled Wendolyn with both wonderment and fear.
“I was but a boy when the Endless War set fire to the Realm,” Waldron says.
As Wendolyn lies there on the table remembering her father’s bedtime stories, she realizes that the war was over three hundred years ago, during the days of King Avedon. How is it possible that this monster before her has survived three centuries?
As if reading her thoughts, Waldron says, “Runes have their own relationship to time, one that sees us live long beyond the humans. The cycle of a year for Man is merely days to my people.”
In another language, Waldron speaks to the darkling. Wendolyn can remember her father speaking a similar language to the birds of the forest. It is a language that relies on utterances from the pockets of one’s cheeks, and the movement of air through a curled tongue.
The bird flies back to its cage, and Waldron closes it with the wave of his hand. For a being that seems so angry and violent, the Rune is gentle and calming with the darklings. There is a shared fondness between him and his birds.
Then, another darkling is summoned from a cage on the other side of the wall.
As the new darkling reaches the perch, Waldron joins its mind to Wendolyn’s, and another memory of the Endless War appears behind her eyelids.
Wendolyn is flying right through the middle of the raging battle, carnage all around her. The perfume of death and smoke assaults her nose. Violent screams and war cries fill her ears.
The sky is peppered with darklings. But saurians also occupy the air. The reptilian beasts are massive. And they are ruthless and punishing in their attacks, their fiery breath eating away at the skin of the Runes.
She lands on the hilt of an abandoned sword, one that sticks straight up out of the belly of a dead soldier. From this new perch, the bird’s view reveals a young boy in warrior’s garb slashing his way through saurians and the King’s soldiers. A sudden blast of flame from a saurian redirects the boy as he rolls to cover beneath an overturned munitions cart.
“Is that you?” Wendolyn asks, her consciousness peering out from the darkly-lit scrim of the memory playing in her mind.
Waldron nods. “From under that cart, I watched my father, the Master Rune, as he was slaughtered.”
Wendolyn’s view holds on the young Waldron. While he looks different to her, his face still shares certain features with humans. He has eyes, a nose, ears, and a mouth. But he is hard-faced with a ridged forehead and arched eyebrows, like the other Runes that Wendolyn sees on the battlefield.
As Wendolyn takes in the face of the young boy trapped beneath the cart, she sees fear strike his eyes. He screams.
Waldron’s disembodied voice penetrates the memory: “As the saurians tore my father limb from limb, his heart still beating, I begged for mercy, as you now beg me. But mercy did not come.”
“If the saurians murdered your father, why do you now keep their company?” Wendolyn asks.
“It is not the saurians who are to blame for destroying my kind. They were simply violent and useful instruments created by Merlin and the humans. And like the Runes, the saurians were killed off by the humans. So now we have a common enemy. In exchange for their service to me, I have promised them a reunion with their own kind. And that day will soon come.”
As Wendolyn wonders how many saurians still exist, and what a reunion of these beasts would mean for humanity, Waldron again touches his finger to her head:
The bird turns its head, showing Wendolyn the Master Rune upon the blood-soaked earth, his inhuman body being savaged by the saurians. Flesh and bones are ripped away. It is more blood than Wendolyn has ever seen.
While she can no longer see the young Waldron, she can hear his desperate cries for mercy. She can hear his soul dying.
Tears leak from Wendolyn’s eyes as she is pulled out of the nightmarish memory that was not hers before, but now, somehow is. She can feel the wetness reach her ears and slip into her hair. Wendolyn is crying for the young boy, forced to watch his father be gruesomely murdered. She knows that pain. It lives inside of her.
“Never before have I shared this memory,” Waldron says, a hint of emotion that softens his gravelly voice. It is the first time Wendolyn has sensed more than malice beneath his words. “In truth, never before have I had someone to share it with.”
Wendolyn’s heart seems knotted with two battling emotions. For the young Waldron, her heart loosens with sympathy. Wendolyn and the young Waldron share the same grief. But for the masked Waldron before her, the Waldron who killed her father, Wendolyn’s heart tightens with anger.
“Do you know what they did to me after I begged for their mercy?” Waldron asks.
Wendolyn shakes her head.
“First, they branded me with a hot iron, burning my flesh into blisters.”
As Wendolyn recoils at the image of skin burning, Waldron opens his cloak to reveal the symbol that has been burned across his chest:
⍦
“Then, they set fire to me. Soldiers watched me burn. Their laughs still echo in my ears, or what is left. My flesh melted onto my bones. And my face...“
As Waldron reaches to his silver mask and begins to pull it off, Wendolyn squeezes her eyes shut, not wanting to see.
“Look at me,” he commands. But she refuses to open her eyes.
Against her will, Wendolyn’s eyelids slowly open, even as she tries to bolt them closed.
Scars from ancient blisters cover his face. Blood fills his one eye, the one that burns a bright crimson. He bears the visage of a horrific monster, far more frightening than she could have imagined.
“I survived the fire only to become a leper wandering the Beyond. No village would have me. No creature would walk alongside me. And the draughts of death refused to take me. I was alone. You know what that feels like, do you not?”
She does. Wendolyn thinks of Leeta, the way she and the others looked at her differently after the incident in the Cumbrian mountains with Galen and the deer. That moment in the marketplace when Etan and Landon turned away from her. Leeta calling her a ‘witch’ beneath her breath.
She felt friendless. Like she did not belong.
“Wendolyn,” Waldron says, replacing the mask, his voice almost soothing now, as impossible as that seems to her. “I know what it is like to feel alone in this world. To have a shadow as your only companion. You and I, we are more alike than you know. We are the Others. We are the things that the humans are afraid of, that they wish to keep out of the Realm by building their walls. Our very existence makes their world incomprehensible. Thorne, the man you thought to be your father, kept the truth from you. And I am going to help you find that truth.”
“There is nothing to find,” Wendolyn insists.
“Your mind holds within it so much more than you know. And all of it wants to get out. You must feel that.”
Wendolyn does feel it. The sense that something is desperate to break free from her mind. And it scares her.
“You are not so different from the darklings. Like them, you are the keeper of memories going back generations. Memories of your ancestors, they are all in your head. But you do not know how to call them forth. They have been locked away somewhere in your mind. And I can help you find the key. I want to help you, Wendolyn.”
◆◆◆
SKREEEEEEEEEEEE!
Wendolyn wakes with a start, the shriek outside her cell ripping her from her dreams, the only place she wishes to be anymore.
She is not yet used to the discarnate shrieks that race past her cell door, though they happen regularly. The shriek comes and goes quicker than a breath, but it is shrill enough that it feels like teeth sinking into her breastbone.
Wendolyn cannot guess the source of the cry. It is not human. But its sound also does not belong to the darklings or the saurians, she knows that. It is like the agony of a soul being ripped from a body. And whatever it is, she hopes to never meet its face.
As her heartbeat slows, resuming its normal pace after the inhuman yell had sped her heart, Wendolyn realizes that she was just startled awake from a dream. It was a dream that had been warming her blood. A dream that still has her skin tingling with its faint echo.
She was dreaming of the boy from the King’s Market. They were together. An unwavering stare between the two of them. And their only company was a gentle evening, with a blanket of distant and muted stars suspended above.
In the dream, Wendolyn was unembarrassed as she looked fixedly at the boy, his eyes smiling, inviting, as blue as truth.
Held within their gaze was a sense of lived intimacy. An ancient understanding between them that stretched across the yawn of history. As if Wendolyn and the boy did not simply know each other, but knew the all of each other.
But as the boy’s mouth moved toward words, with Wendolyn anticipating the unmapped sound of his voice…
The shriek invaded her dream, breaking the spell.
Lying there on the cell floor, Wendolyn closes her eyes, hoping that the boy’s image will find her again. And that she can hear whatever words were about to fly from his lips.
Is there a way to make dreams replace your reality? Wendolyn thinks. To live inside of them forever and never wake up again?
Wendolyn squeezes her eyes together tightly, willing the boy’s image back into her mind. But nothing comes. The moment is gone. Stolen from her.
Wendolyn sits up.
She rubs her hands, feeling the scabs across her knuckles, still healing from hitting the walls of the cell, perhaps weeks ago now.
Her lips are dry. While the Saurians bring her rations and water, she is always left thirsty after the hours spent on the cold stone table as Waldron crawls through her mind. It is as if the process draws out all of the moisture from within her, and leaves her with the taste of metal in her mouth.
Each hour spent in the Memory Chamber with Waldron’s finger pressing against her forehead -- searching her memories -- feels like another year being stolen from her life. She is left weaker, as if something vital inside of her is disappearing.
And the pain in her head, the pain that began in the Cumbrian mountains, has only grown stronger. It has fastened itself to her mind. Wendolyn wonders how much longer she can endure this pain before she breaks, before her mind and body say, No more.
She sits there on the floor of her dark cell, her back pressed against the rocky wall. Wendolyn has been beyond the sun’s reach long enough to forget what the sun looks like. What daylight means. Instead, she has become the eternal guest of this sunless cell, a place where any hope of escape has surrendered to this unbeatable night, like a flower surrendering to winter.
And in this cold darkness, her mind has been consumed by a single thought: My father lied to me every day of my life.
At first, Wendolyn did not permit herself to believe those words that Waldron uttered as her father’s life leaked into the snow: “So that is what she believes? That you are her father?”
The man she called father for her entire life is not her father at all.
Wendolyn feels betrayed. She is angry with her father. No, with Thorne. She will not call him father again. Until her dying breath, he is Thorne now. And Wendolyn must remake herself in this new truth.
Tip-Tap-Tip-Tap-Tip.
Suddenly, the sound of something scurrying around her cell breaks through Wendolyn’s thoughts.
She backs into the corner, unable to see the source of the noise. Since the first moment she was locked in this cell, she has not had an unexpected visitor. But right now, there is something crawling somewhere around her in the dark.
