“I don’t hold with books,” the king remarks bitterly to his son, whose footfalls I can hear, walking at his side. “Baltazar spends far too much time among the books.”
Perhaps anger feels good inside the old man, warm and bright, like the fire of the lamp.
“It was the books told us that they were going to return to us and look what came of that! Books.” The old king snorts. “I don’t trust them-I don’t think we should trust them! Maybe they were accurate centuries ago, but the world’s changed since then. The routes that brought our ancestors to this realm are probably gone, destroyed.”
“Baltazar has explored the tunnels, as far as he dared go, and he found them safe, the maps accurate. Remember, Father, that the tunnels are protected by magic, by the powerful, ancient magic that built them, that built this world.”
‘Ancient magic!” The old king’s anger comes fully to the surface, burns in his voice. “The ancient magic has failed. It was the failure of the ancient magic that brought us to this! Ruin where there was once prosperity. Desolation where there was once plenty. Ice where there was once water. Death where there was once life!”
He stands on the portico of the palace and looks before him. His physical eyes see the darkness that has closed over them, sees it broken only by tiny dots of light burning sporadically here and there about the city. Those dots of light represent his people and there are too few of them, far too few. The vast majority of the houses in the realm of Kairn Telest are dark and cold. Like the queen, those who now remain in the houses can do very well without light and warmth; it isn’t wasted on them.
His physical eyes see the darkness, just as his physical body feels the pain of the cold, and he rejects it. He looks at his city through the eyes of memory, a gift he tries to share with his son. Now that it is too late.
“In the ancient world, during the time before the Sundering, they say there was an orb of blazing fire they called a sun. I read this in a book,” the old king adds drily. “Baltazar isn’t the only one who can read. When the world was sundered into four parts, the sun’s fire was divided among the four new worlds. The fire was placed in the center of our world. That fire is Abarrach’s heart, and like the heart, it has tributaries that carry the life’s blood of warmth and energy to the body’s limbs.”
I hear a rustling sound, a head moving among many layers of clothing. I can imagine the king shifting his gaze from the dying city, huddled in darkness, to stare far beyond the city’s walls. He can see nothing, the darkness is complete. But, perhaps, in his mind’s eye, he sees a land of light and warmth, a land of green and growing things beneath a high cavern ceiling frescoed with glittering stalactites, a land where children played and laughed.
“Our sun was out there.” Another rustling. The old king lifts his hand, points into the eternal darkness.
“The colossus,” Edmund says softly.
He is patient with his father. There is much, so much to be done, and he stands with the old man and listens to his memories.
“Someday his son will do the same for him,” I whisper hopefully, but the shadow that lies over our future will not lift from my heart.
Foreboding? Premonition? I do not believe in such things, for they imply a higher power, an immortal hand and mind meddling in the affairs of men. But I know, as surely as I know that he will have to leave this land of his birth and his father’s birth and of the many fathers before him, that Edmund will be the last king of the Kairn Telest.
I am thankful, then, for the darkness. It hides my tears.
The king is silent, as well; our thoughts running along the same dark course. He knows. Perhaps he loves him now. Now that it is too late.