Soulwoven: Exile

Chapter 20

~20~

Fifty-eight days before the destruction of Emeth’il

Tsu’min stood on a small ship that bobbed on dark seas. Clouds rolled in long, bulbous lines above him. The wind whipped his face, and the ship bucked and pitched in heavy swells. In front of him, a small bay opened beneath green canyons that ran like claw marks up the mammoth side of a cone-shaped volcano.

Oleguash’ma’ame, it was called. The mountain of God. The place Yenor had told Tsu’min’s father Aimere many things about the world. Many things that had been remembered. Many others that had been lost.

“There,” Tsu’min said to a gray-haired, frowning Aleani next to him. A tiny stone landing lay at the foot of one of the chasms.

Tsu’min’s eyes floated up to the mountain’s cloud-shrouded peak. In the summit crater there was a small, broken temple, long overgrown by grass and ivy and creeping vines. Beneath it lay a chamber of glittering white feldspar. And in the floor of that chamber was a round disc of perfectly smooth crystal.

Sh’ma’ame had erupted twice in Tsu’min’s long lifetime. But the temple had never been touched, and the crystal had never been sullied. Beneath it was something even Tsu’min couldn’t fathom—some connection to the god Yenor Hirself. Some conduit that allowed those on Guedin to commune with Sherduan’s other half, the white dragon Arenthor.

The wind whistled over Tsu’min’s skin, but he no longer felt it. The mountain clouded his eyes, and he recalled the white dragon—how it shimmered with its own bright light. There was an aura around it, a sense that everything would be all right, that you were loved, that the world you lived in was the most beautiful thing that had ever been created, even with all its many flaws, and that you were blessed beyond belief to have lived in it.

That feeling, he wondered. When did I lose that feeling?

Below the mountain, Maegan stood at the bow of the ship.

She had made this journey happen. Pressed her hired crew farther than they’d expected to go, farther than they’d contracted to. She was a strong child in many ways.

She reminded him of Mi’ame.

Your name is Eraic, she’d said.

And as if the words had been a command, he’d begun to remember. Old thoughts, locked away after Mi’ame’s death, after his father’s murder and the downfall of his people, had trickled back to him.

He was Eraic a’Soulth—bastard, half-breed son of Aimere Ith’a. Unintended consequence of the first Sh’ma’s first contact with the human race. The first nar’oth, doomed never to age and pass as his human mother had, never to procreate and die as his na’oth among the Sh’ma had. Doomed to watch his father lose his way and destroy his people. Doomed to be too late and too weak to save the one being who’d ever understood or loved him.

No one told those stories about Eraic a’Soulth. The Aleani spoke of how the wanderer had spent centuries traveling with Mi’ame Greatheart. The Nutharians remembered him as an adventurer—a roguish, tall man with an easy smile and a companion who lit the night with her joyfulness. The Sh’ma remembered him as a dutiful son and a stalwart counselor. The Eldanians, it seemed, didn’t remember him at all.

The green slopes of Sh’ma’ame towered over his head. Waterfalls poured from ancient cataracts over the old stone pier. It was two days’ climb to the top, if he remembered correctly. The Aleani wouldn’t follow, though they’d been invited. They would remain at the mountain’s foot with their ship and wait with their nerves until either their food ran low or their client returned. Only Maegan Heramsun would climb the peak with him. Only Maegan Heramsun would watch as he and the other na’oth’na searched for the three souls around which they could create the body of Arenthor.