Tak

Experiments - Part 5

     Lirenna was no longer listening, though, and Thomas stopped when he saw the thoughtful look on her face. "What is it?" he asked.

     "The shae folk also have an ancient legend concerning a golden age that was ended by a global disaster," she said. "Fire is mentioned, followed by an age of darkness and freezing cold in which all those who ventured out onto the surface died. It also states that the fell men are descended from the shae folk. That they emerged as a separate race at that time and that they decided they preferred life underground to being on the surface. Do you suppose there actually was some kind of world wide disaster, and that both these legends are memories of that event?"

     "I think we need to bear in mind that legends can change out of all recognition with generations of telling and retelling," pointed out Thomas. "Also, Elmias told me once that most of the civilisations he'd visited on other planes of existence had legends of an end of a fabled golden age, or an expulsion from paradise. That sort of thing. It seems to be a recurring mythological theme in all the races of humanity. Probably, the similarity between the human and shayen legends is just coincidence. Nothing to get excited about. It is an intriguing thought, though, isn't it?"

     "Yes," agreed Lirenna, looking out the window to see the time by the sky. They still had plenty of time. "So, what happened next? Did Tak discover the secret of the strange artifacts?"

     "He had some limited success," replied Thomas, "and he learned a great deal about the people who'd made them, but he never discovered the secrets of the demigods' power, if there ever was such a secret. The artifacts fascinated him, though. So much that, for a time, he completely forgot the real reason he'd come back to the heartlands..."

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     Which, it turned out, was no bad thing, for Tak later found out that Gannlow was watching him very closely, by means of hidden mirrors and peepholes that wouldn't trigger Tak's magic sense as a crystal ball might have. The rak would have been alerted at once had he made the slightest move towards the forbidden door. As it was, though, Gannlow saw only the younger wizard poring intently over the assembled notes and records, and occasionally trying something out on the artifacts themselves. Exactly what he should have been doing, and as the weeks turned to months the rak eventually came to believe that Tak was truly all that he seemed. That he had no hidden motive for being there.

     He relaxed his vigilance a little, therefore, having many other things to occupy his time, although he continued to peer in on him from time to time, just in case. For his part, Tak didn't doubt that the rak had him under observation somehow, but the three artifacts fascinated him to such an extent that he rarely thought about anything else. The mystery they presented took up almost all his attention.

     When five months had passed, he'd succeeded in piecing together a fairly complete picture of the city in which the owners of the artifacts had lived, based on the background images behind the people making the recordings. The woman who'd owned the first artifact had never taken it outside her room, but the high ranking man and the woman who'd owned the third artifact had taken them with them wherever they went, apparently using them to record thoughts that had occurred to them while in the course of their daily work.

     The first thing he'd established was that they had indeed lived on Tharia. There were several entries in which one or other of Tharia's moons were visible in the sky behind the speaker, and one especially valuable entry also contained the images of two comets and the red sun, although Derro seemed to be slightly smaller than it was in modern times. It was a slightly less garish shade of red. More a dark orange than the ominous blood tone it was in his day. What this meant, he had no idea.