Stone Pass Keep - Working Title

Chapter One - Questions with no Answers

Chapter One

Questions with no Answers

Night was a time when most people would be asleep, of late Jalos found it hard to do so.  Lying on his pallet he could hear Marth's steady breathing from the study.  By the light of a guttering candle he could see the old man hunched over his work bench, quill still in hand and ink spilled over the parchment he had been working on.  Again the old man had fallen asleep at his work, it seemed to have become a habit in recent weeks, and perhaps age was finally catching up with him.  Careful not to make too much noise Jalos rose from his pallet, instantly the cold hit him and he hurried to pull on his boots and cloak.  Somewhat tall for his age Jalos stood at nearly six feet, he had short brown hair and hazel eyes.  Most in Stonepass commented on how strange he looked, different to the expected blond hair blue eyes that were common in Stonepass.  Not that brown hair was uncommon, in fact the blond hair blue eyes had long ago stopped being the dominant features since the influx of southerners.  It was the Hazel eyes that most commented on, they were the rare part of his features.  He often had to explain that he was not born in Stonepass.  Marth had told him that he came form Utarvia, a country far to the south, his parents killed in the Utarvian civil war.  Marth did not talk much about where he came from, all he knew was that Marth had taken him in as a child and fled here away from the war.

  A shiver ran down his back, the cloak did little to ward off the cold, winters were the worst in Stonepass, especially in the cave that he and Marth called home.  With a longing look at his warm bed, he contemplated going back to sleep, the thought of lying there for several hours without sleep was enough to change his mind.  Instead he picked up a blanket and walked softly into the study where he draped it over Marth's shoulders.  It wasn't much, but at least it might stop the old man from getting a chill.

The workbench was littered with scrolls, old tomes and various odds and ends that held some significance to Marth.  Jalos never took much notice; his interests were on his lessons not on what Marth kept.  The thought of his lessons made him look up at the brown leather bound books resting on the bookshelf.  He had mastered most of what was contained in them, all except those that involved the use of the four elements.  Any by itself was okay, he could handle that easily enough, but as soon as he combined more than one together, things that weren't suppose to happen, did.  He had no problem mastering the other things that a sorcerer was supposed to be able to control.  Monitoring a person's dreams was easy, as was walking in the sprit realm.  Both were things that Marth had only recently taught him after nine years of training, he said it was because of the danger involved, so far Jalos had not seen any of the this danger Marth mentioned.  The books he read spoke of men, and women for that matter, who had been driven mad by the dangers that lurked in the spirit world, other stories spoke of death or a sleep they never woke from. 

At the moment he got more danger from working with the elements, a recent lesson in which he was supposed to heat up a cup of water had ended in disaster.  Marth had tried to make the lesson easy by having sources of the four elements handy rather than having to conjure them up himself.  It was not necessary to have all four present, it was fairly easy to convert one form to another, fire from earth or water from air, he found conversions easy but most of the time you had to maintain them otherwise they reverted back to their original form.  Marth had said that he might find it easier to control the situation if he only had to concentrate on one thing.  A similar experiment a week earlier had involved using conversions to perform the same task.  That experiment had started good, he produced fire from earth with no problems, the hard bit came when he tried to draw the heat from the flames to the cup, which was on the other side of the room.  That was when things went out of his control, the components he was working with were somehow incompatible, or at least that's what Marth had said.  The end result was that the cup melted and the water was nowhere to be seen, not even as a vapour, Marth said it had fused with what was left of the cup.  Jalos should have known that, it was one of the first laws, conservation of matter.