Sons of Ironstorm - Book 1: Griffon's Rise

Chapter 17: A Final Duty

"It was grim work, laying to rest thousands slain

Yet there was little recourse; each deserved the honor.

Each was a hero, man and woman, valiant soldiers all.

They had served without question, sacrificed all.

So they were accorded this Final Duty, this last rite.

Paltry payment for all they had given to the Light."

- from a partial history, circa First Alliance 

Like a veritable mountain, the Church of the Sun loomed over Tal Morun, its vast roofs challenging even the greatest spires of the nearby royal palace with their height. Built with blocks of granite hewn from the living stone of the Giant's Teeth and brought by the power of the Cadremoor to the Foundation Hills, as was all of Tal Morun, it was a brooding behemoth. Its roofs were tiled with slate, darkened with age and exposure, its gray granite walls covered with generations of climbing vines that stretched from the ground to the church's highest point, the massive tor of Filagorn's Tower. It was named after the first Master of the Church, having ruled in the earliest days of the Cadremoor, and held in its crown a great assembly of brass bells, to sound out moments of significance with great peels of sound.

The titanic bell tower seemed to climb into the clouds themselves, some saying it was the greatest tower ever raised by the long dead artisans of the Cadremoor, dwarfing all else in the known lands. Rising along the northern wall, the tower served as a center point for the church complex, bringing together the rectangular mass of the main building behind it, the passageways connecting the various out buildings and the Rector's Palace, a polished edifice to the northeast. It was from here that the Masters of the Church overlooked Talemon and received the Word of the Creator.

The leviathan halls that lay beneath Filagorn's Tower had remained silent since Jerald had slain Mern's druids that had desecrated the building's holiness with their debauchery and perversion. The warrior king had drawn and quartered their bodies, sprinkling their blood over every surface of the inner hallways before burning them inside with every scrap of wood that could be ripped out of the floors and walls. It was said that the fires had burned for days, yet could not root out the stench of perversion that seemed to hang in the air before the church's cleansing.

After the great bonfires had cooled, Jerald then had the halls re-sanctified by the druids the Master Council sent to rebuild the druidic orders in Tal Morun, the event called the Rebirth. But even with the halls cleansed, the people the building had been raised to serve refused to come, remembering what had taken place within. So they remained silent, the bulk of worship taking place at Tal Morun's Great Ring. That is, until this day, 874 cycles after the fall of the Cadremoor alliance.

Riding the swiftest of Aramas horses, Tenne's messengers rode straight north with their missives of darkness and sorrow. Already alerted by messenger bird of a rebel siege of the Talemonese capital, Jerald's father, King Festus Ironstorm, the Silvermane and his mother, Queen Dana, had been pushing southward with a significant kevan force for well over a moon before Tenne's riders even left the White City. Well aware of Jerald's skill and experience in war and confident in his abilities to keep his city out of rebel hands, the Silvermane and his queen were nevertheless stirred to action by a strange dream she had the night before the messenger bird had arrived. It was a fell vision of Jerald falling in battle against creatures wielding the darkest of magic, so realistic it brought the kevan monarchs from their spring home at Los Kaleman to Irongraad to gather a force and march southward.