Like The Wind... (Closed)

[Mordelain]

...Like the Sea

[Mordelain]

Mordelain was not sure what to say. The infinite complexities of Tama technology fused with Fallieni ingenuity was far from easy to describe. Even she, after decades learning its machinations struggled to comprehend exactly how it worked. She guessed she had to try. Suresh at least deserved that much.

“Less mirage more recollection. What we saw happened at some point.” They stood on the verge of the spectral trees watching the duo walk towards an unknown destination. They laughed with them, and cared beyond care as they did. “Memories sometimes get trapped in the rocks, in the winds, and in the trees.” She chuckled. “Even the seas whisper of yesteryear.”

Suresh furrowed his brow and settled his gaze on the dormant Orrery at the centre of the tower’s inner chamber. He smirked at the thought of his memories languishing in the corners of the desert.

“There’s a rock in the dunes that knows about my marital bed promises?” He broke his frown to smile.

Mordelain rolled her eyes and approached the Orrery. She caressed one of the orbs that symbolised Althanas, a planet alone amongst the recollections. It was cold, unnaturally so, to the touch. The other arms were bronze, but this one was gold, signifying the world’s worth over that which had happened and which one day would happen.

“The memories are kept here as a record of Fallieni history. They are how we move so quickly through the Hydroclast network.” She reached through the mechanism’s outer ring and pressed delicately against the arm at its heart. It vibrated, like the orb overhead, and she prayed it still worked. They had come too far already to die in this silent mausoleum.

“Where are we, then?” Suresh tried to work out what knowing Resolve Curie’s intimate childhood secrets would offer their journey beneath Jya’s Keep. The thought of the dead guiding them, quite literally, sent a shiver down his spine.

Mordelain thought to herself for a moment then smiled. “If I remember correctly Resolve said she was from Astaka. Or rather, she said her family were.”

“Were?’” Suresh enquired. He did not like the sound of that.

“She was from Radasanth yet ties are strong in the blood, even if we do not know it.” She turned to face the merchant. “That means we’re likely nearer the mountains than I first thought. When we activate the Orrery look for anyone who resembles a member of the Bedouin tribes in, or indeed around the Nirakkal plains.”

“Why?” He got a headache from the strain of thinking.

“There is a ruin there I am sure. The Hydroclast is intact because I saw the ruins on the way to the spice fields of Ryuu.” She had. She was certain. She hoped.

“Okay. Let us get this over with,” he grumbled. He produced his pistol just in case, and adjusted his sand goggles to a better lens to see by in the dark. He watched as she pushed miniature Althanas casually to the left.

[Mordelain]

Once again, the chamber burst into life. The Orrery scattered sand through the air and formed memories of past lives and potential all around the duo. Resolve, Luned, and Mordelain walked, talked, and frolicked around Suresh’s head. The merchant watched wistfully, trying to ignore spoilers into his protégées tomorrow.

“You won’t find anything,” Mordelain chuckled. She kept her eyes on the sand mirage, waiting to catch a glimpse of somebody from the eastern tribes or something familiar from her time in the Nirakkal.

“I’m not looking for you,” he spat in reply. He wiped the gobbet from his chin, abashed, and buried his hands in his pockets to find his monocle. “I’m looking for my daughter.”

“What has Khadija done now?” she replied. She smiled, but with her back to her mentor, he did not see her amusement. Suresh’s daughter was an enigma when stood next to her father. She was a waif-like, nimble pickpocket, every bit like her mother and every bit fond of Mordelain.

An image of Irrakam’s winter celebrations rolled past Suresh. He watched the dervish in the streets flipping through stomach wrenching rotations and the streamers fall from the Jya’s Keep. Another drifted by showing the last Jya’s inauguration. The city awash with banners belonging to the priesthood and the tribe from which the daughter in question had hailed. The very essence, the culture, and the providence of Fallien remembered in the unforgotten sands.

“It is not what she has done, Mordelain,” he said glumly. “It’s what I’m certain she’s going to do…”

Mordelain did not need to ask for further explanation. She had hardly been the model of good behaviour in her youth. Now was not the time to judge.

“I wouldn’t worry. If she’s not here she is not destined for infamy.” As she spoke, the il’Jhain ducked beneath an image. She gasped as her knees gave way. She saw somebody in the grains she had not expected to see. “Suresh, behind me!” she whelped.

The merchant turned, widened his eyes, and lurched into a run. He saw the large vision swirl past Mordelain a second time and began to circle her. In the sand, Mordelain depicted with almost perfect clarity. She stood amidst a wide, scintillating sea of sugar glass. There was a Bedouin tribeswoman standing beside her as withered as a date. She looked as wise as the ages true. They both leapt skyward on clothed wings.

“Why the blazes are y-”

“Just touch it!” she roared. There was desperation and fear in her voice. She recognised whom she was speaking. Suresh, in his insular ways, did not. The tension in the room thickened so much so the merchant found it hard to breath and his temples aching.

He reached out and touched the mirage. He and Mordelain left the Hydroclast inner chamber. The sand images lingered for a few moments but petered out and died. With a rush of stagnant air, they vanished to the Orrery and the tower fell silent.

[Mordelain]

Without thinking, Mordelain reached into the folds of her attire and pulled out her pass. The guard snatched it. She tried to look official as she remembered her first few weeks in the city. The guards had chased her from the Outsider’s Quarter to the estuary ruin of Kithdir on many an occasion, shouting and heckling at her from horseback as she skitter leaped between the realms like a will-o-wisp. He scanned it for the Freerunner symbol and chuckled sardonically.

“You may pass,” he said in a monotone voice.

The rigid attire of stewed leather, deep brown tunic and a polished steel kukri at each waist was unmistakable. The Hassid. The city Watch. Neither wore helmets, only turbans, adorned with a large owl feather running up the front of their headdress. She bowed and took back the papers before slipping between them to begin the ascent upwards.

Atop the walkway, there was a bridge. To her right it crossed the crystal waters. To her left it split into two paths, each veering off in respective directions into the two halves that made up Irrakam proper. North of course was the true Irrakam of Fallien, home of Jya and the trueborn. South, which is the road Mordelain trod along was the ragtag assortment of strange architectures and tradesmen called the Outlander Quarter.

"Home..."

The sound artisans dancing with ribbons in the hot afternoon sun warmed Mordelain’s heart. She walked with a pleasant smile on her face as she wove her way through the crowd heading to temple for prayer. She did not need to look over her shoulder to picture the imposing dome resplendent in the sun.

She took two left turns into the residential district of Harrah before looping round through the elven alleys and leafy arches of palms and chestnut. A right turn brought her through a sandy furrow in the island where the stone buildings gave way to wooden shacks, clad with iron and smattered with industry. Dwarves lived here, though she seldom saw them, busy as they were beneath the city in their bombastic forges that you could hear exploding at all hours.

“How I long for you,” she said with a long gasp of air, a slouch of her shoulders and a rub of her sweaty brow.

She did not look a pretty sight but she smiled at the sight of the Abdos. Even in the twilight, it stood triumphant. The vast courtyard in front of the familiar three doorways that lead inside was unusually quiet for this time of the day, occupied only by two carts, loaded with crates and tended to by two weary farmhands in straw hats and jade sari. Their tanned flesh seemed to shine in the heat, their backs crooked, hands dirtied by hours of hard toil.

“How I’d die for you.”

Mordelain scanned the many wide streets that ran away from the courtyard, each turning into a bazaar selling everything you could imagine. Nowhere else made her feel at peace.

[Mordelain]

Mordelain and Suresh tumbled unceremoniously out of a portal. It radiated green light, darker than olive with flecks of yellow. The il’Jhain managed to roll twice before she came to and rose. Suresh, less agile than his protégée, slap dashed across sandy stone with grunts and snorts. Mordelain would have helped him up, had she not seen where they had landed.

“Oh no…”

The tower that once stood around them was no more. A three feet buttress of sandstone wall surrounded the circular platform, a raised dais to technology long crumbled. The wind that whipped over the wall was warm, and the sun high, but still she felt cold at the sight. There was no Orrery. There was no lightning stone. There was no way forwards.

“What is it?” the merchant grumbled. He pushed himself upright with much difficulty and reddened brow.

“The tower is gone.”

Suresh examined his surroundings when he was steady on his feet and took in the severity of their situation. True enough, there was nothing but the circle. The sand had gathered at the foot of the tower’s interior and the wind had mottled the outer wall to within an inch of its life.

“Surely we would have noticed this ruin before?” he enquired. The size of the tower’s base amidst a flat sand plain was hard to miss.

Mordelain shook her head.

“Remember what we saw?” She reflected back on the memories they had witnessed in the Orrery’s recollections. “I think we’re on the very northern tip of Fallien, east of the Zaileya and a stone’s throw from the Outlander’s Post.”

Suresh furrowed his brow. The wind whipped sand over the wall, making the sun glare harder to see through and a wrong move deadly. He adjusted his goggled over his eyes, turned, and advanced to the eastern curvature of the tower. Sure enough, when he looked out across the desert it ended abruptly in a crystalline sea obscured behind hazy veil.

“So much for Bedouin tribes!” he cursed.

Mordelain shook her head.

“This is not our doing.” She was certain she had touched the right memory. The connection was strong. The sugar glass had practically formed in front of them before they dragged through time, mind, and space. “Somebody has tampered with the Hydroclast network.” She put her mind to working out whom, but swiftly came to realise she knew exactly who the culprit was. “Coradan…it was Coradan!” she shouted to the merchant exasperated.

Suresh turned about. His expression was stoic, stony, a cold grimace.

“How could he possibly know?”

Mordelain adjusted her silk scarf: a feeble, but welcome resistance against the encroaching storm. She had to strain to make out Suresh’s features against the halcyon backdrop, but did not like his glare. She waved for him to approach and gestured them out the circle and behind the wall. The sanctuary it offered was all too welcome. The wind died. They sighed.

“It is my place to know," said a husky male voice.

[Mordelain]

Coradan had always been an enigmatic soul. His charisma was his truest weapon, alongside a command of sand and an intellect as keen as it was vicious and calculating. Leering down at his former apprentice, the weight of the desert behind him, she felt his presence begin to crush her.

“I should cut you where you stand,” she spat. The Tama let lose a light-hearted chuckle. It was a dismissal as much as a sign of bemusement.

“You could try Mordelain, by all means.”

From atop the ruined wall of the tower the sand mage let the wind wash over him. His clothes, meagre wrappings and solidified sand plates fluttered. His hair danced, his eyes sparkled, and the talismanic tattoos on his arms and torso flickered with barely contained power. With a lurch, he dropped from the height and crashed to the ground. His heavy bulk from his armour, double his own weight, crushed the ancient rock.

“But I am not here to harm you.”

The blasé manner in which Coradan gave the revelation brought no comfort to the il’Jhain. Suresh, with careful steps, circled around the Exile until he approached his pupil’s side. With a fatherly stance, he stood defiantly between her and harm’s way.

“Why do I not look convinced?” the merchant said sourly. He produced his pistol in a flash, its multi-barrelled mechanism perhaps the one thing they possessed that threatened the plane walker.

Coradan shook his disapprovingly. “I do not expect you to trust me, Suresh. I expect you; however, to listen to what I have to say once. You are here, after all, to kill Priestess Jya. No?” He raised an eyebrow, which solicited a grunt of frustration from the merchant, and a raised heartbeat from Mordelain.

They were. Mordelain would not readily admit to the fact, but somehow, she did not see the point curtailing Coradan’s knowledge. If he controlled the network, he saw all of Fallien and all of Fallien was open to him. If her intentions now known amongst the Freerunners, who saw her as a paragon of equality and a key to the guild’s future success…then Coradan must surely know... Murder, or so it seemed, was just ends to a means.

“Speak, Exile, and then you will answer for your deception.” Mordelain found her strength on the merit of her need, for once, to protect Suresh. He knew the dangers of the desert well enough but this was her foe, this was her history as it lived and breathed.

“I want to make sure she dies in as public a manner as possible. “His deadpan delivery unnerved Mordelain. She had expected resistance, as he had long ago when they were Troubadours vested in Fallien’s religious culture. He was more the desert than the sands themselves.

“What have you got to gain from her death?” she asked hesitantly. “Save for your own empowerment...”

Coradan chuckled. He pointed a finger at Suresh, and then gestured for them all to move out the wind.

[Mordelain]

Sheltered from Coradan’s storm, but not his sadism, the duo glared at their former hero. Idolising this man had been Mordelain’s life, her every waking moment. To gaze upon him haggard and in exile drove a kukri into her heart and twisted it thrice.

“Well…now what?” Suresh asked without an ounce of trepidation. He, used to debate and heated moments of ‘mercantile risk’, flinched not at the imminent and more than likely fatal danger they were in.

“An excellent question,” Mordelain added to reinforce the point. She stood ten feet from her mentor and twenty from Coradan. Arms folded, eyes narrowed, elegant attire stayed to lifelessness. Her hair remained eschew, her skin dusty, her limbs feverish and tired.

Coradan shook his head. “The pertinent question is what I can do for you.”

Hesitation.

“That seems less like a question and more a fact.”

“Your friend is sharp, Mordelain,” the sand mage chuckled. His laughter ground castles to dust. “I have not come to hurt you. I did not know you were here, never mind alive.” His momentary display of compassion threw Mordelain wide of the mark. She baulked. He smiled wider. She frowned. “I am glad you are.”

“Then allow me to rephrase.” She dropped her hands to her sides. “Why should I listen to you when you deserve so much to die where you stand?”

Though free of the wind, they were not free of the desert’s effects. Sweat continued in torrents to roll down Mordelain’s back. Her auburn hair, lacquered and stinking clung to her forehead. Her dagger, produced in a flick of a wrist felt heavy and warm to the touch. Its cold comforting lethality acquainted in the arenas of the Bedouin lost to the turn of time out in the wilds of Fallien.

“You can try.”

She did.

“Millions died!” she roared. In a flicker, she vanished. She reappeared riotously rampant and ruminating the crumbling sandstone beneath her feet. The desert considered her care, and rejected it.

“I played part, but not the lead in that episode!” came Coradan’s reply. The Exile, exiled doubt in readiness for his defence. He span on a heel and conjured a staff from nothingness. It clashed against her dagger and knocked it off course. He vanished to avoid her stumble and she too fled the desert.

“I…,” Suresh made to comment, but produced his pistol and pulled on his sand goggles instead. He was going to need a sharp aim, not a sharp tongue.

Down the sides of the tower, a wail fell like a veil of sadness. Something within, perhaps a fragment of the thunderstone or an echo of an Orrery reached out at the conflict. Suresh felt it as rush of blood to the head, and then silence. Mordelain, from whatever blasted heath appeared twenty feet away soaked to bone.

“No!” she screamed.

Too late. Suresh flinched. The whispers of the ancient technology tearing at his resolve. His pistol fired a single, flintlock shot. Straight into her shoulder.

[Mordelain]

...Like the Sand

[Mordelain]

“Mordelain?” A hushed voice whispered in the odious gloom. “Mordelain, wake up!”

Had she the strength to do so she would have done. Pain writhed over her skin, snakes of torment born of fate and fear. Slowly, she realised she was lying down. Her bruised skin cold against a smooth surface. Her eyes were open but there was no light to see by save midnight.

“Mordelain Saythrou. Wake up!” The voice stopped whispering and made to bark a second time before a rattle in the distance drove the speaker to silence. It sounded like keys on a chain. Footsteps. Echoes.

Am I in a cell?

Her thoughts drove her to further heights of suffering. Her head span. Aching every inch, the planes walker kept trying to move her limbs. She flexed her muscles in many directions, but rewarded her efforts with statuesque abandon. She was helpless. Flashbacks and fumbling drove her to the moment she last remembered being conscious.

“If you can hear me, you have to stay awake.” Undoubtedly, Suresh, Mordelain’s companion through the aeons brought comfort to the planes walker. If she were in discomfort then no doubt he was too. It was a small start to revenge for his terrible aim.

“Open the door.”

Coradan!

Mordelain’s thoughts focussed the second she heard the Tama’s voice. There was a sound alike to a key in a lock, turning, and then a door pushed inwards. Light erupted into the stone chamber and sealed her eyes shut. Pain like a hot iron to the forehead finally brought her to life. She curled her toes, clenched her fists, and ground her teeth.

“Come to torment us again I see.”

Suresh was leant against the opposite wall to the door. Mordelain was in the centre of the cell, head to the door, feet to the merchant. Realised and mobile, she tested her arms and found them unbound. Wherever they were, Coradan believed they were not going to escape. A curse would have escaped her lips had they not been cracked and dry as the drought plains of Shreya.

“Hardly Suresh. You remain here in these quarters whilst I determine Mordelain’s intent. Our reunion was…,” the sand mage trailed off. He stepped into the cell and came into the merchant’s view. His charismatic yet malefic grin kept Suresh on his toes.

“A decade too soon?” Mordelain spat wryly. She coughed. A guttural noise heralded a searing pain as she realised just how dehydrated she was.

How long have we been in here?

Coradan looked down at his former student. He knelt disdainfully to lend a hand. Mordelain refused, though more because she could not stand than because she loathed him so. He shook his head, produced a water gourd from the ether and poured a trickle into her reluctant quivering lips.

“Much of what you have heard about me is hearsay.” Satisfied his charge was comforted the sand mage stood and returned to the portal. “We are in fact working to same ends.”

[Mordelain]

“What could we possibly have in common?” Mordelain whispered hoarsely. The harder she fought against her injuries the quicker she succumbed to them.

Sandstone made the walls frustratingly brittle. The door was nothing more than a three-inch sandalwood divide. The corridor beyond was almost palatial in form. The planes walker strained herself one last time to gaze out at freedom. She felt her body try to fall away into the Void, the space between the nine worlds, but something stopped her. Doubts drew her to blame Coradan, but in her heart – mind damaged, she could not muster a jump.

“Why, we both want to see Jya dead and the Tama restored.” There was no anger, smarm, or bitterness to the man’s statement.

“How could you know of our plans?” Suresh interjected.

He tried to rise, but found his long numb arms chained behind his back; manacles stubborn and steel for a ‘brute’ in the sand mage’s eyes. He swore, very loudly, in three languages. Producing two glasses from thin air or perhaps from the sand that formed his cloth and glamour Coradan offered Mordelain a sip of amber nectar. She refused it at first, but found herself forced into recovery. He spoke not until he had offered the same hospitality to the merchant, who was less than reluctant. His gulped eagerly of the liquor, not as clean spirited as the il'Jhain.

“I may be an exile Suresh but I have eyes and ears everywhere.” He withdrew. Cups turned to sand anew, and wove about his musculature into ribbons and bandages. The desert became one with its self-proclaimed master.

“What have they heard?” Mordelain pressed a palm flat against the floor near her head. With shaking limbs, she pushed herself half-upright.

“Change is afoot.” The sand mage was by her side and helping her up before she could object. “With the death of religion comes the return to the enlightened ways of old.”

“Pre-Vhadya,” Suresh said flatly. He gave in trying to free himself from his bonds.

“Precisely,” Coradan affirmed.

Mordelain rubbed her temple.

“We both wish to see Fallien restored to the way it was before the…incident.” Mordelain snorted at his sincerity. The act brought up blood, clinging to her alveolar from the stubbornness of her wounds. The bullet still lingered in her shoulder; the jabbing pain was testament to that.

“You feel guilt, Coradan?” Rhetoric and disbelief dripped poisonously from her every syllable.

“We may not be human my dear but we are inexorably mortal, malleable, and open to the harsh reality of our actions.” His tattoos glimmered in the light from the corridor. Blue lines of electricity marked ley lines of power on his skin. “I wish to offer a token of my aid and wherever you accept it or not, I shall not keep you prisoner here.” Doubt found its way insidiously into the cell. A deep breath through bloodies nostrils illuminated the state of things. It was the unmistakable smell of guardhouse blues and subterranean dwelling.