Eulogy

Eulogy

Prologue

    Villeen's father should've murdered her eldest brother.  Now… now she'd have to finish it.  She clenched her eyes shut, unable to look at the heap of rags in the corner.  Pale flesh peaked from the half-shredded brown robes.  The corner of a book dug into her breast, but she ignored the pain, only clutching it tighter, wishing she'd found it earlier.

    The heap, once her eldest brother, Torden, breathed in with a haggard burst.

    His chest rose.  It fell.

    Why didn't father kill him?  Why this?

    Gravel and moss skittered toward Torden, sucked in by some strange power.  The stones, dust, and tiny leaves of greenish-brown mold—all were dissolved into his flesh, into his unseeing eyes, into his gaping mouth.  Those fragments of the world ceased to exist.

    Her father had discovered a power, called gentahl, but this was more than simple gentahl.  This was insidious and vile and unknown.

    Fier, her younger brother, pulled her into a hug—comforting, matching sadness.  "Maybe he'll hear us this time—"

    "He can't.  We've tried for three days, and found nothing.  Torden's not there." 

    She'd growled the words more fiercely than she'd intended, and reached up to clasp Fier's arm.  He offered a grim nod.  Perhaps he didn't believe her, or perhaps he dealt with the sorrow in his own way.

    "I'm sorry," she said.  "I didn't mean…."

    She turned to him, to the tattoos—twisting, twining, ugly things—that covered his face and body, and pressed her forehead against his shoulder.  She'd etched the tattoos two days earlier, only hours after they'd discovered their father's treachery.  In return, Fier had pierced her own skin with a needle and ink—hours of pain and determination.  Somehow, they'd needed to hide from their father.

    Neither knew if it had actually worked.

    They stood within an empty room, no more than a cave, deep beneath the bowels of Sky Point.  Firelight danced across stone walls, and their shadows—so deep and long and black—wavered in rhythm with the flames.  Dusty mold invaded her nostrils until only bitterness remained.  In a way, that scent was a blessing.  It helped her remember, helped her forget.  She'd grown to adulthood in these caverns, had laughed and played. 

    Yet this place held other memories—dark, slimy, tense.

    Her tattoos burned, but the discomfort did little to dampen her sorrow.  This place, their home, felt foreign and distant.  The narrow walls pressed against her.  The door stood open to prying eyes, allowing anyone to gaze upon her pain.

    No!

    She plunged an invisible thread of gentahl into Fier, slid it into his mind like a needle through a single layer of cloth.  Forced it deeper.  The door stood open, but gentahl could shift reality.  She nudged that thread, yanked and twisted it to change her brother's mind.  In that same heartbeat she shifted her own thoughts, and the door….

    …it closed.

    The power was new, unknown, dangerous.  It altered thoughts, and those thoughts then changed reality.  Red became blue.  Chairs became tables.  Iron became copper.  In theory, the power should've been able to change anything.  In theory, it could've returned her brother, their father, their lives.

    She knew better.

    A failed attempt—trying to convince someone without possessing the strength to do so, or attempting to convince too many people—led to pain, confusion, dizziness, and a headache to pierce stones.

    Torden twitched.

    "It's dangerous to leave him here like this," she said, and hugged Fier tighter.  "Four days is too long, and the others will become curious.  They'll want to study him, learn from him."

    "So?"

    "We have no way to know what they'd do.  I'm sorry, but we must kill—"

    "No!"  Fier shoved her hands away.  He knelt beside Torden, brushed the hair from his brother's face.  "Let them study him.  Let them see what our father has done.  Prophet!  He's nothing but a self-centered fool.  Maybe if the Order sees what he is, they'll be more careful with their bloody power."

    He spat his final word.  "We won't be like him."

    Her father had led the Order, up until three days ago.  He'd discovered their power long ago, but through the years something, perhaps the power itself, had driven him insane.  He'd sunk into that darkness like the dust and moss sank into Torden.  He'd murdered his eldest son—or near enough that it no longer mattered.  And then…

    …then he'd fled the mountain cavern, losing himself amongst the island populace.  His mind was but one within a vast sea of others.  The Order's search seemed futile.  Their searched seemed futile.

    Fier rubbed his forehead.  The days since they'd lost Torden had proven hard on him.  He was younger than her, but gray strands littered his otherwise red hair.  He gazed at her with green eyes—intelligent, introspective, wise.

    "The Order wouldn't know where to start," she muttered.  "They wouldn't care, either.  We can't leave him with them, and you know it.  His life would be worse than death.  It would be…."

    The Order!

    Those worthless, ambitious men saw the power as a tool.  They'd suggested gentahl to alter her face and hide her.  One idiot had attempted it on Fier, but the power had whiplashed.  Shrieking and sobbing, that man hadn't slept for the past two days.

    The more firm the subject's thought, the more difficult it is to shift.  A shiver swept across her, and she caressed the tattoos on her arm.  How a man or woman looks… ah, that's the strongest thought we can ever have.  They were fools to try.

    Sure, the Order searched for their father.  Sure, they'd heaved Torden in this room with the assurance that their brother would think again, that he'd eat on his own and laugh in the mornings.  They'd even held their arms wide to console Villeen and Fier, but they understood a mere shard of gentahl.

    "The Order is too dangerous," she said.

    He shrugged as if he believed her, but the glint in his eye, the clench of his fist….  "Then what do you suggest?"

    "I'll kill—"

    "No!"  He pulled the book from her hands, flipped to one of the earliest pages, and read it aloud.  "'I'll bring fury upon them, but I'll have a reason.  I want them to feel.  I've never felt, but I've wished for it.  How do I wish for a wish?'  A dead man cannot feel, Vill.  Father must have a reason for the things he's done, but—"

    She yanked the book from him.  Its crinkled pages and loose binding contained their father's notes.  Thousands of pages.  Torden must've found it.  Perhaps that explained why their father had done this to him.

    Too many unanswered questions.

    "The world will change," she murmured.  "You know it as I do.  He's planned this too thoroughly for us to stop with a word or fist or sword.  It will take manipulation, and we must stand at the heart of that.  Torden began the change."

    "So we'll be the end."  He nodded, swallowed hard.  "But I don't understand why we must kill him."

    "A week ago, father strapped a man to a chair and, for two days, he observed.  He watched the man's expression, the man's eyes.  What was he looking for?"

    "I don't want to hear this.  You can't be sure that happened—"

    "I can, because I saw it."  She drew a steady breath.  "The Order doesn't care for you.  They don't care for me, and they certainly don't care for our brother.  To them, we're the man in the chair.  They'll watch us, try to glean our knowledge.  We're the children of the Prophet.  Nothing more."

    Tears tickled her eyes.  One dripped to her cheek, and she wiped it away.  She knew she was right; the Order would use Torden, just as their father had used that man in the chair.  They'd study him, poke and prod at him.  But he wouldn't get better.  No morning sun would ever again shine upon his laughter.

    "What do we do?" Fier demanded, as if she could answer all his questions, as if she could twist and twirl their island until it was right.

    Nothing could do that.  Their island could sink beneath their father's madness.  It could bob and tumble, but how to steady it?  Neither she nor her brother held the power to change their faces, their bodies, but she suspected her father did.  He could be anyone, anywhere—a whisper in the night, a voice on the wind.

    And the whisper could be a maze, the voice a puzzle.

    Now she must finish what her father started.  She forced herself to look at Torden, at the dust and moss skipping across the floor.  His chest rose.  It fell.

    And she'd find her father, her vengeance.  The bastard would taste it, wallow in it.

    "We burn our brother," she whispered, and her voice trembled as she continued.  "We lay him to rest in a way that no one—not our father or the Order or even a rat—can hurt him."

    Fier paled.  "And then?  How do we find Father?  What do we do if we find him?"

    "For now… we run.  We'll study his notes and do as we must."  She lifted the book, allowed a hint of iron into her tone as she glared at its cover.  It would take months, perhaps years.  "We don't have a choice."

    The key to the Prophet's mind lay within.