I laid my brother's body in the dreaming grove with my own two hands, while his widow and young daughter looked on with wet eyes and drawn, expressionless faces. We all wore our finest ceremonial outfits, white with silver thread, and outside the low, mournful voices of our kin performed a funeral dirge that rose and fell on the wind.
Lienne cradled her daughter against her side, attempting to lend strength she no longer had left to give. The little one didn't really understand what was happening; the concept of death was completely new to her. She was too young, even for an elf, to remember the Empire War, too naïve to grasp the dire new threat of the Nadirak. In the past year alone I had been to the dreaming grove six times.
Anneal Lightbringer and Lienne Hawksbreath
As I arranged my brother in his alcove and placed the traditional greenery around him, I paused, unwilling to step back. I stared at him for a long time, uncertain of what this moment meant to me, only that it was intensely significant. He was pale and still, not really my brother at all. Essean Hawksbreath had died before my very eyes just over a day ago when a single Nadirak famine fiend lumbered upon us unawares and crushed his chest cavity with a single blow. This thing before me was just a shell, a hollow husk without even a trace within it of who he had been.
Although I had dispatched the fiend mere moments after it had wounded Ennean, I was years, decades, Ages too late. When my brother left this world, everything I had went with him. The sun failed to warm me and the breeze kindled no joy. My blood turned to lead, sluggish and heavy in my veins. All had become empty and still, without vital force at all. May the Shining One forgive me, but I wished with all my aching heart that the fiend would have murdered us both. I wished it still, with ever-compounding urgency. As all that remained of Essean Hawksbreath was a fragile, pallid affectation, so too could be said of his brother, Anneal.
I turned to Essean's wife and reflexively consoled her with a mechanical embrace before moving aside to allow her and her child to step into the narrow alcove and offer up their prayers. The little one, Illiele, peered up at me with wide, woebegone blue eyes and I made a point to present her with a mask that was suitably somber without revealing the crushing desolation that now dominated my being.
Lienne wept anew, as she had since the news first reached her, and I placed my corpse's hand on her shoulder and waited patiently for her to run out of tears. I hadn't cried at all yet, and I doubted I ever would. Crying seemed better suited to someone who had an incomplete future to lament or a stolen past to grieve. I had neither of these things. In fact, I had nothing at all.
As had been our departed father's wish, I took the sword my brother had inherited from him five decades ago and carried it out of the dreaming grove with me. It felt like dead weight in my hand, pulling on my arm at every step. I used to look on it with pride and near-reverence whenever my father or my brother wielded it. It had been handed down for generations, since the Hawksbreaths had first sailed across the Tanthic from Illanthia about a thousand years ago. Now, I couldn't help but notice that all this time it had been no more than a piece of metal that my ancestor had pulled from the earth and bent into a shape he could hold. Worthless. Meaningless.
Like a mindless, unseeing, unfeeling drone, I turned before reaching my home and crossed the short way to where my brother had once lived. I hesitated outside the wooden door, prepared to press my palm against it and have it swing wide as I had done countless times before, but I did not. I feared what I would see if that door opened. Or, more accurately, what I would not see. Without a sound, I leaned the Hawksbreath sword gently against the jam and left it there, unable to bear the thought of stepping through that door ever again.
After that, I returned to my home and locked the door. I lay on my bed for days, remaining motionless for hours at a time, not even moving to eat or wash. I was pretending to be dead, you see, and I thought about death near constantly. The Shining One be damned, my existence was as wretched a life as I could have ever imagined and I wanted none of it any longer. No one, mortal or god, had the right to shackle me to it.
Somewhere in the timeless, drifting murk I had embraced, I heard a sound, a sound which sparked a thought, a thought which commanded movement. I shifted my weight and slowly, ponderously, righted myself, then rose to my feet. There were voices outside calling about in alarm. Something to do with trouble near the northern border.
I picked up my breastplate and sword, both exactly where I had unceremoniously dumped them the day my brother had been slain, and opened the door to my house. The small group of panicked Kemilnar border guards stopped immediately and stared in shock the instant my door creaked open. I imagine I must have looked rather ghoulish to them, standing in the shadow of my doorway, my face pale and wasted, squinting into the weak afternoon sunlight. I could feel the bones in my chest and shoulders very acutely as I strapped up my breastplate. It hung loose, like it had been made for someone else entirely, a younger, more robust Anneal.
"Where?" I croaked at them, belting my sword around my waist, two notches tighter than usual.
They continued to gape for a moment before they understood what I had asked. It had been so long since I had spoken, I was rather surprised myself when the pathetic sound finally escaped the tight dryness of my throat.
"Threnallis." One of them answered with a slight tremor in his voice, "Near the western shoreline."
I wasted no time, mounting up and heading out with more energy than I had felt since exiting the dreaming grove weeks ago. I didn't feel renewed in the slightest, though. It was urgency that pushed me at a madman's pace toward Threnallis. An opportunity awaited me there, one I had a sudden, newly-ignited desire to seize.
I made Threnallis in record time. My steed bolted down the main road on the way into the town, following a trail of small-scale destruction and dead elvan bodies. The fiend was a large one, a four-armed creature with a thickly-muscled, vaguely female shape and a tight band tied across the place where its eyes should have been. In each of it hands, it held a different weapon, two swords, a mace and a dagger, all deadly and cruelly-forged. It prowled outside a hastily-fortified inn like a rabid wolf, raging while a number of Threnallis peacekeepers huddled fearfully trapped within.
I dismounted while still on the move and hit the ground running. Long sword in hand, I charged, heedless of my own safety. Where there had been dull, heavy emptiness inside me, I found a fount of fiery rage. It burned through me like the heat of a dragon's breath, searing my starving muscles with a surge of strength. I was angry and I wanted the fiend to feel that anger.
I must have caught it off-guard with my straightforward attack as it barely turned before I was upon it. My perception shrank down and focused on the war fiend. Its dark, otherworldly flesh, powerful limbs and fang-filled mouth became everything to me, my whole world. I wanted with all my being to destroy that world. Time seemed to shift and bend out of proportion. It was as if I'd lost my past entirely and assumed a new existence, one where blinding rage and cathartic pain were all that existed. When I returned to the world I had been born to, that empty realm of senseless living, I found myself on my hands and knees before the brutalized corpse of a war fiend lying in the street.
Disoriented, I arose and brushed the road dust from my clothes before wiping my sword clean on the hem of my cloak and finding my horse. Some of the peacekeepers had emerged from their hiding place and gaped at the fallen fiend in awe. One of them followed me, gushing thanks and praise to the Shining One for my arrival, but I ignored both his congratulations and his pious reference. As I walked, my face a stony mask and my mind hovering in a dull fugue state, I felt distant aches, wounds I had sustained in battle with the fiend. The small pains didn't mean anything to me. I was finished here. It was time to leave.
I turned away from Threnallis just as the townsfolk began to gather around the war fiend's corpse. When they called to me, I kicked my horse into a run and charged away. Their gratitude meant nothing compared to the discovery I had made. In battling the war fiend, I had surrendered myself to blinding rage. For that brief time, I had found escape and I needed more of it. |
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Over the next year, I relentlessly sought out challenges against which to pit myself. Attacks on travelers and settlements had been growing steadily more common and I found no shortage of combat. Savage jabberwocks eagerly threw themselves on my blade and I cut down undead ghouls and zombies by the dozen. My forays took me farther from Kemilnar on longer and more dangerous journeys, across the borders into Larocia and Cladash. I became known as Anneal Doombringer, a celebrated hero of New Illanthia who had saved the lives of scores in his quest for justice. No one realized the frightening reality of the matter.
I didn't care about the safety of those people. All I cared about was combat. Every battle rescued me from the horrible truth of my life, short but precious stretches of red-tinged amnesia. What I'd wanted was release. In all honesty, what I really wanted was to die.
When I finally returned to Kemilnar, I had become an entirely different being, bearing the scars of a career soldier and the weight of too much experience. The old roads looked familiar but felt very foreign to me as I made my way toward the stables where I planned to obtain a fresh horse and set out again. I passed by my old home, no different than I had left it save for the obvious wear a year of neglect had wrought. Across the way, a small congregation of elves stood near the door to my dead brother's home, their faces turned up and hands folded in prayer.
I brought my steed to a halt and watched them in puzzlement. It seemed like some kind of vigil, but I could only guess its purpose until a familiar figure pushed her way through the crowd. My brother's widow, her face pale and gaunt from many obviously sleepless nights, approached me with a strange combination of sorrow and blind hope.
"Anneal," she breathed, her voice catching with emotion, "I'm so glad you came. It's Illiele."
I thought I was beyond the point where I could feel anything anymore, but the fearful tone of her voice when she spoke her daughter's name cut me like the finest blade. Without a word, I slipped out of the saddle and allowed her to lead me inside her home. She opened the door very quickly and ushered me inside before closing it quickly behind us again. The main chamber was pitch dark, sealed against the light with thick curtains over the windows, and the air smelled strongly of acrid, herbal poultices and ointments. There was also a sickly underlying scent of death waiting in the wings.
Lienne found a taper and lit it carefully, shielding the tiny flame in the cup of her hand. Something shifted as the meager orange light flared to life and I saw Lienne flinch guiltily. A palette had been laid out in the center of the room, dressed with thick linens and covered by a sheer cloth canopy that hung over the top. The source of the smell in the room was inside, a little girl who was so small and young I barely recognized her.
I drew aside the drapery and the little fragment of my heart that remained shrank in sadness and compassion. Illiele lay still and unseeing, her eyes sunken and dark, her flesh sallow and her bony limbs pulled in tight, clutching the hem of her blankets. The disease that ravaged her tiny body was obviously in its final stages. By my judgment, she wouldn't live out the night.
Lienne gripped my arm tightly, her fingers digging into my flesh in desperation.
"Help her." She pleaded, her voice weak and tremulous, her eyes red-rimmed and long since empty of tears.
I took a startled step back and stared at her in horror. Help her? She thought I was a hero. She somehow imagined that Anneal Doombringer had ridden into Kemilnar to deliver her child from certain death. Could she not see what I had become? I was a pitiful coward whose only goal was to leave this life as quickly and violently as possible. I could be of no help to anyone.
I started to pull away and she squeezed my arm tightly.
"Please," she begged, her delicate jaw trembling, her eyes boring into me, demanding the hope that deep down she knew did not exist.
I looked to Illiele, so small and wasted lying in her bed and knelt down next to her. Her mother did the same on the opposite side and we each took one of the girl's clammy hands and held it, waiting for the end to come.
I raged silently in that thick, cloistered darkness, cursing my impotence. I could face a Nadirak marauder without a moment's hesitation, but against this, I was helpless. I couldn't accept the injustice. First my brother and now my niece. How could the Shining One allow such tragedies to occur? In a world that supposedly flourished with vitality and life, why could I find nothing but death?
My fevered mind wandered, recounting every moment of pain I had suffered since my brother's passing, and I realized how fruitless it had been. All of it was as nothing compared to the suffering my niece and sister-in-law were now forced to endure. Selfishly, I had pursued death, consumed by the depth of my own pain and cursing the Shining One for failing me, while completely ignoring the pain of those around me. I had been spared the famine fiend's wrath only to waste the gift of life that I had been given. Shamed by my blind ignorance, I gripped Illiele's little hand tightly in my own and wished with all my heart that I could take back that year of selfishness and spend it with her.
For the first time since before my brother's passing, I wept.
The sun sank and then rose again, creeping ever so slowly over the edge of the horizon. I had dozed off sometime throughout the night, slumping forward against the edge of the bed. Moments before I opened my eyes, Illiele's hand had slipped from my fingers. I arose with a start, noting immediately the empty bed and the child-sized depression at its center. Her mother stood across from me, staring straight ahead, her hands knitted tensely together and her face stricken with emotion beyond what she could express.
Warm, yellow light suddenly flooded the room as someone swept aside the thick blinds from one of the windows. I whirled around and froze, stunned at what I saw. Illiele smiled with happy exuberance, standing with her hands outstretched as if she could catch the rays of the morning sun and hold them.
Lienne rushed to the child and whisked her up into a tight, desperate hug, sobbing with joy. Illiele was still very thin, with dark smudges in her sunken cheeks, but her general pallor had improved tenfold and her eyes were bright and alive. In the course of a few short hours, she had inexplicably returned from the brink of death.
My eyes filled with moisture and the corners of my mouth turned up in a broad smile. The Shining One had taken pity on me and granted a desperate, unspoken request to one who had given nothing but disdain and dishonor in return. Sunlight from the window streamed in across my features, dissolving the weight of months of self-torture and denial. I understood now. Death was a natural part of life and the demise of a body was not the demise of the person. Looking now at the joy between Lienne and Illiele, I realized that my brother continued to live on and would do so for generations. Ennean Hawksbreath had changed a small piece of the world in a profound and lasting way. Silently, I vowed to do the same.
Famine Fiend
After six months of devoted dedication, I emerged from the main temple in Tal Edrin wearing the mantle of an Emissary of the Silver Light. I returned to my home, smiling and waving to the people of Kemilnar, those who I had sworn to serve in the Shining One's name. I entered my house and felt at peace there like I never had before. The Hawksbreath sword hung over my hearth, returned to me by my sister-in-law Lienne, and I peered up at it with a new level of renewed pride.
I was lost, but now I am found. Where I had touched the depths of darkness, I now reached for the heights of illumination. I am Anneal Lightbringer and I have made it my mission to leave this world a better place than when I found it. - Anneal Lightbringer, Emissary of the Silver Light |
