utfrysning

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Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine
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Joined: Thu Feb 15, 2018 11:20 am

utfrysning

Post by Teeth of Lions Rule the Divine » Thu Feb 15, 2018 1:45 pm

," finished my brother, Abaidas, gesturing wide with his spoon for a punctuation of his tale.

Now he did look briefly back down to his bowl of soupy gruel, but I knew he expected something from me in return. It was that on most days I would have sneered, and then gave him a curt, hollow phrase of gratitude and gone to my cot otherwise silent.

But it was that his face was still smeared with the crimson and the lachrymal that came with having his markings done, so after some guilty consideration I sat back down upon the stone floor and wove unto him a story of my own.

"You know, of course, that a hundred upon a hundred upon a hundred years ago, Thay once did not call herself Thay, but only a part of great Mulhorand. Do you know how the Red Wizards, whose urine is the wine of their subjects, did mark themselves as now free Thayans, rather than subjects to the rule of Helcaliant?"

Abaidas, of course, did shake his head in the negative. For it was that among the Order few did share my lust for things outside of our Ebon Tower; so too was he many years younger than I.

"Do you know the Palace Umratharos?" I asked him, setting my chin aloft.

"Aye, I do!" chirped the boy, with a little nod. "Past the Thaylambar, and to the east." It was that Abaidas always did excel ahead of his brothers in geographies and the cartographic despite his youth; we were all taught these things for a lictor must know them if he was to walk the sands and the crags with the hydrargyrum blade that was bereft of point.

"You are right," I told him, smiling for his benefit, "and it was in that tharch that Thay marked itself free. For it is that in the days of Mulhorand it was well-lit with the fires of civilised men, and now it is cold, and dark."

"But what happened, sieur?" he asked me, and I saw that his curiosity did begin to overtake the pain of his new markings.

"The Red Wizards, whose hands run with gold and whose enemies kiss their heels, brought upon a great catastrophy that can be felt even now. The skies wept blood, and the ground cracked with black fires that struck men blind to look upon. Whips of fire held by demons with a thousand tongues and no mouths lashed the greatest priests of Osirant and Tholaunt for nine days and eight nights. Children ate their fathers, and babes fed instead their mothers."

Perhaps a boy of another Tower, one not Ebon and silent rather than ringing with the hurt of our clients, would have bawled at such a litany of horrors. But not Abaidas, and it was not because he was brave.

"Now," I continued, too entranced with the sound of my own voice to realise that the rainfall of nighttime Thay had begun to mark the walls with a gentle, droning beat, "it is that today any man who does walk there becomes a leper, and any woman a madwoman. Creatures with tongues but no mouths, and with no eyes but sight without failure, stalk the soil."

"But I don't understand, sieur," he said deigning to interrupt me now, "how did this make Thay its own country, rather than a mere piece of Mulhorandi empire?"

"If," now I let my voice sharpen into a hiss, "you would let me finish, you would know. It is that the divinity which did rule Mulhorand was so struck with fear, and grief at the magic of the Red Wizards, may their spirits live on in a thousand successors, that they turned away. And then our new crimson-clad masters did declare: this is Thay, and she is free."

Our conversation did not long last afterwards. He had begun to droop, and only stayed conscious for he knew I would have been unkind were he the fool who let drowsiness overtake him.

I did awaken then, to a familiar ceiling of iron coupled with a familiar taste of copper, and I did consider faces with which I have not paid consideration toward in many years. I lifted heavy covers from my sleeping form, and

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