Neverquest - Part 100
Characters: Kendira, Master Luna
Location: Outside the Tower of Azure
Time: Day 4 - 6:45 PM
Night had fallen. Young Kendira sat on the slope of a grassy hillside and hugged her knees to her chest, trying not to think about anything. But she couldn’t escape her thoughts. They haunted her. All she could see, the terror echoing through her mind, were thousands of Men falling. They fell forever, crying and begging, like they had done through all of time. She heard their voices. She saw their bodies appear through an imaginary faucet, dripping into this life one by one, before at last vanishing like drops of snow under the endless footsteps of Master Luna. They were flushed away. The pounding went on forever. The throbbing, the falling, the shrieks of horror and snapping marrow and hope, the cold silence that followed the pain. The frozen heart. She saw it over and over again. She saw it until the terrible reality was burned in her mind, the torture that wouldn’t recede.
And she tried to breathe again. What had happened to this world? Why had Master Luna betrayed the very foundation of her existence? What was going on? She shivered and looked to the western skies for some truth.
“…This is not the Abbey you are used to,” Master Luna said, approaching Kendira from behind. There was something different in her voice. It wasn’t as ominous as before. It was more real, more human, more gentle than it had ever been. “The heavens get cold here at night. You should come into the tower.”
Kendira said nothing. Her small eyes glistened with the stars that were just beginning to appear.
“I started a fire. I thought we could share it.”
“…I don’t understand, Master.”
Slowly, the warm glow of light beneath Master Luna began to disperse and her hovering body sank down to the earth. She landed on the grass, whose soft blades of life bent to her will like an army of green Men. They didn’t even rise as she walked across them, almost drifting as if being carried along the threads of a magic carpet, and stood next to Kendira.
“…I did not expect you to so quickly,” she said. “These things take time. There is a cycle, always in motion, and we are part of it. Day and night, summer and winter—these are our guides, our pasts and our futures. It is nothing we can escape. There is no power that can face it. There is only the cycle, always spinning, choosing by the hand of our Nature what lives and what dies. Time is all that separates us. Time is all we have to live for.”
“But you killed those Men… A race you swore to protect… You told me…so many times… You promised us…”
“I wish it did not have to be this way, dear Kendira. I look at you and I wish we could live in peace, in the sweet harmony that once existed between Women and Men. I would think it wonderful. You know that of me. …But I have seen a new Light. I have realized a new truth that shatters all that might have been. Yes, I knew, long before you even, of Sorena’s rebirth. It was always part of the cycle. As the prophets of the old used to say, it was something not yet finished, something yet to find resolution.”
“But why now…? Why did Sorena take so long to be revived?”
“Like I said, everything is simply a matter of time. Her time has come. Our time is over. Seasons and years are all that separate us from fate. In the light of the third dawn from today, Sorena will rise with the sun and the world will fall to her feet. So it is written and so it shall be.”
“But I know we can defeat her! Ellewyn, Kaligar, Penee… We’ve had our differences in the past, but there isn’t a kingdom among us who isn’t against Sorena. Together, we can stand as one. We, the free people, can defeat her. Master Luna, why don’t you believe…?”
“I believe in our Nature, the chosen hand. Any other faith is sacrilege. We are at the mercy of our own magic.”
Kendira shook her head.
“…What I am important to tell you is very important, so listen to me. In three days, the members of the royal council will meet in Felwinter for a meeting that I called. There, as far as the court is concerned, we will discuss the future of Penee. …If it has one.”
“In three days? But Sorena will be resurrected by then…”
“Yes, and that is the real purpose of the meeting. Nobody else in the royal council but the legitimate Queen knows about this yet. That is why I had to get you away from Isabella. She is young, inexperienced, and like so many children her age—you included, my dear apprentice—is cocky to the point of recklessness. She thinks she can take on the world herself. This is why she must not know of Sorena until the meeting.”
“Master, if I may… Even Isabella knows of the dangers that Sorena possesses. The history texts are flooded with stories of the legend. There is no doubt in my mind that both Isabella and the other members of the royal council will vote in favor of destroying her.”
“I am sure they will. They will think it best, but they do not know what I know. The only way to rid this world of Sorena is to put her spirit to rest…by eliminating the race of Men. Only then will her eternal rage be subdued to slumber.”
“Eliminating…the race of Men? Master Luna, you can’t…”
“If we do not, Sorena will. And she will take many more innocent lives with her.”
Kendira lowered her eyes. She ran her fingers across the grass and it felt so cold, so brittle to the touch. “…I get it now. You’re going to instigate war against Penee, aren’t you? You think if…if you can kill enough of them that Sorena’s spirit will be at ease? Is that it?”
“They all need to die. There can be no exceptions in this case.”
“You will be locked up. They won’t take you seriously.”
“They will when I show them the images I captured in my crystal ball. Images of the land of the Forsaken. I spent the past few weeks there, Kendira. While you remained at the Abbey, protecting our home, I learned of many things that disturb my very core.” She paused and then gently kneeled down next to her apprentice. “Sorena’s arrival has awoken life that has remained dormant for too long. There are creatures—alternations of Women created by the hands of the first deities—once thought to be myths that now walk the barren earth. There are blood angels that sing the most haunting elegies on the highest peaks of mountains of fire. There are draconi that reign the skies and banshees that haunt the mortal bodies of the departed. There are creatures there that do not sleep, that thirst for human flesh, that scream until their voices are twisted into sheer madness. In the land of the Forsaken, there is only unrest, chaos unforgotten. There is only Sorena.”
“So the legends are true…”
“More than I once feared.”
“But how can you be so sure that the royal council will see things in your light?”
“It is true that my reputation has suffered over the years, but this time the Queen’s credibility is on my side. She has seen what I have seen. With her word, even Riva the Wise—my greatest adversary in the royal court—will have to agree that Men must be destroyed in order to preserve our race. Those two have been all that kept the race of Men around for this long.”
“You’re forgetting yourself, Master… You once fought for the rights of Men. You once believed…”
“Since I took you under my wing and you swept me away with your ability in the arcane arts, times have changed. I am no longer the Master I used to be. I see in me a woman who has been degrading for three hundred years, who has seen too much to be considered a saint. These blackened eyes have aged and led me to extinction. I do not feel dead, and yet the world has turned against me. I am forsaken. But you, my dear and sweet apprentice, are the one person who has renewed the fading light inside of me. I do hope you understand that I still believe. I want to live. I want to see our world, the one molded by the terrestrial hands of our Nature and blessed by the holy angels of Dai Celesta, live on. Men have been plagued our dreams for too long. I want to see a better world…”
Kendira looked into the eyes of her master. She didn’t look three hundred years old. Maybe three hundred months, thirty years of age. But she knew Master Luna was older than that. In the same way, Kendira was at least twenty-six years of age, but she only looked half of that because of the power of the arcane ages. It slowed aged, it slowed dying, but like Master Luna said, it was only delaying the inevitable hands of fate from turning her to black ash. Her eyes sank. She felt colder now.
“I want to see that, too…” she said.
“Then you must understand there is no right path for us to take. The religion of Dai Celesta is too simple, too engrained into black and white for what we now know. That is why the arcane arts strive to teach the laws of color, of understanding rather than labeling. We know that life must continue, but time has taught us that only the strong will survive. Men have lived a good existence. They should have been destroyed by the first wave of Sorena, but Nature spared them with her merciful hands. Now, Nature has decided to crush them with those very same hands. She will crush us, too, if we should stand in her way. We have to be the stronger ones. We have to make the hard decision. That is what it means to be a Master.”
“But the others… Countess Olivia, Princess Erika, Duchess May…”
“All children, like Isabella, who can persuaded to think otherwise. One by one, they will understand why Men must be eliminated.”
“There must be others in the council who will disagree…”
“With the exception of the royal court of Ellewyn—governed by the Queen, Isabella, Riva the Wise, Countess Olivia of the House of Sienna, and Duchess May of the House of Femmington—there is only one delegate from each faction allowed in the council. There is, of course, Princess Erika of the kingdom of Kaligar, who owns the land that Penee is built upon. Men are slaves to her and her family and have been for generations. Then there is the High Priestess Jania, who represents Dai Celesta, the Seven and a Half Apostles, and the School of Light. We both know how she feels about Men. Under her, there is Sensei Nikkilet of the Sisterhood of the Blue Rose, but the Monks have always sided with the Apostles for many centuries. What hope is there then? The Druids? All three of them—Elder Terra Thule of the Earth Tribe, Warden Katrana of the Storm Wall, and Prime Animist Lexus of the Feralkin—are followers of our Nature. They understand the cycle. What about the Forsaken? The only Necromancer to make it into the royal council in our time, the Arch Lichess Hadie, is a true worshipper of Sorena. She would like to see nothing more than the race of Men fall. What then? Where do we go? There is only the Arcane Order left and I am their representative. That makes thirteen voices to speak out against the race of Men.”
“But there are fourteen members in the royal council…”
“Leaving the last vote to King Kazekov, leader of the Men of Penee. Do you honestly think they will listen to him? He will be laughed out of the council. He will be ridiculed, turned away, like Men have always been. And he will die along with his people. Men will be no more.”
“…And Sorena?”
“At peace with herself. And so will we. Harmony will follow the elegy of chaos.” With that, Master Luna rose to her full height and looked to the moon, whose face was as much of a mystery as hers. “…Now, Kendira, I must ask you again. Come sit by the fire with me.”
“…I cannot, Master.”
“And why is that?”
Kendira squeezed her knees tighter and closed her eyes to a cold wind that was blowing through. “I don’t think I’ll ever be warm again…”
And so they remained there, staring at the darkness all around.
Giantess World
