The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Episodes 1-3 of 7)

THE PHILOSOPHER - KADMALLIN

SPARKLING EMBERS of crimson and gold floated upward on wafts of heated air, glowing against the charcoal-tinted clouds still coating the sky, concealing the noonday sun that gave the dark canopy above a dim glow. Kadmallin sat before a small fire outside the tent where Sketkee meditated, her clothes hanging on a makeshift rack fashioned from long sticks. He wriggled his bare toes before the blaze, enjoying the warmth and dryness provided by the heat of the flames. The rain had fallen all through the previous night, and well past dawn, encouraging the pilgrims to maintain their camp and huddle in their tents or beneath their wagons and wait for the seemingly ceaseless torrents to end. He and Sketkee had spent most of the morning beneath the waxed canvas of their tent, she either in meditative repose or reading a book, while he cleaned his weapons.

The rain finally stopped at midmorning, and the pilgrims decided to spend an hour or two drying out before heading down the road again. Kadmallin had helped collect branches from fallen trees in the surrounding woods, stripping back the bark of the largest pieces to find drier wood to chop for tinder. After assisting in starting a central campfire, he made a smaller one near the tent he shared with Sketkee.

Kadmallin put his back to the flames as he watched the pilgrims slowly packing up the campsite and drying their clothes beside the large blaze between the wagons. As his eyes scanned the roadside, he ruminated about his exchange of words with Sketkee the prior day. She continued to surprise him. So very much like her people as a whole, but unique in curious ways. To steal the artifact struck him as deeply irrational, an act he would never have expected from her when they traveled together two decades ago. She had changed. Possibly the roots of this difference began with the shift in her endeavors. He had known her as an ambassador, someone skilled in the arts of delicate communication, schooled in the histories of many lands, and fluent in multiple languages. With her father's passing and her return to the Sun Realm, she had altered her path and redirected it unexpectedly.

He received several letters from her throughout the years, and had replied in kind, each informing the other of the progress of their individual lives in the absence of the other. While he took up a position as captain of the targas in Vendau, a middle-sized town in the north of Punderra, she abandoned her station as ambassador and returned to the Kidjat University in Taknaht, the capital of the Sun Realm, to study the various schools of natural philosophy. She spent fifteen years buried in libraries and laboratories, her descriptions of which left Kadmallin's imagination alight with images of books stacked in endless rows and unfathomable equipment turned to the investigation of nature's inner workings. Rakthors always advanced beyond the knowledge of the other realms, until they collapsed back upon themselves in inevitable war. It made them a people of severe contrasts. Intelligent, purposeful, insistent that rationality guide them, but frequently consumed by the two emotions they did comprehend — fear and anger.

Had fear or anger driven Sketkee to steal the artifact? Her mind demanded answers when presented with enigmas, and the artifact represented a great mystery, one nearly as intriguing as the dreams and the new star that set the pilgrims they traveled with on the road. Could her theft of the artifact and the dreams and the pilgrimage be connected somehow? Sketkee would deride him for conjecture in the absence of evidence. Nothing concrete linked the artifact and the dreams, but Sketkee leaning of it in the Sun Realm at the same time the dreams arrived in the Iron Realm struck him as an interesting coincidence. She had a point, though. The human mind did tend to see patterns where none existed. People commonly read meaning into random events. A flock of birds overhead might portend a bad omen. A broken glass might presage death. A found coin could mean good health. Or the reverse for all of them. Different superstitions for different lands.

His own mind eschewed superstition. He had seen enough lands and enough believers in various gods to avoid holding firm to any faith of his own. Time spent with a godless rakthor only confirmed his predisposition. Of course, they did not discuss their lack of faith with the pilgrims. The faithful would not understand their skepticism. He and Sketkee might argue over the cause of the dreams and the star, he favoring a conspiracy of dark seers and she preferring the numerical probability of random chance and mass delusion — but neither expected to find a god of any sort behind the events they witnessed.