The Empty Ones (Fantasy Romance)

8. Links

The priory tower above the library, rather the roof of it, is the highest point you can climb to on the monastery grounds.

When I first set foot there and my eyes fell on the magnificent, diverse, and strange landscape unfolding in front of them, I knew that the location of the priory had not been chosen by chance.

Enclosed in the walls of the monastery was green and luxuriant vegetation from all the parts of the continent, but outside of its walls everything was barren. To the east was The White Desert, to the west was the red one, and to the north was a steep mountain wall. The priory was a human and probably magic-made oasis in a sea of stone and dust.

There was also something else visible from the roof of the tower, something that till that moment I had only read about. The Rift.

The Rift had formed more than one thousand five hundred star circles ago, or so I was told, and all people had a different legend regarding its formation, but nobody had certainty.

The cues, the native desert people, say that the deserts were once fertile plains inhabited by two tribes that fought for supremacy, but the blood they shed angered the gods so much that they opened the ground to swallow them all and dried their lands to punish them.

That something Maleficent lays down in the rift is pretty believable because, from the priory tower, I could see the dark shadows that emerged from it and rose to the sky inexhaustibly, like an ominous curtain.

The bones of the last dragons supposedly lay at the bottom of that deep canyon too, together with death, ghosts, disease, and every other bad thing one can come up with. This knowledge wasn't really a fact, but rather legends and speculations, but most legends guard at least a kernel of truth in them. After all, The Rift was frightening, fascinating, and intimidating.

To me, the most interesting and ominous fact of all was that it looked like it was pointing directly at the priory and stopping only at its walls as if they would block and swallow its dark force. The image was breathtaking: an immense dark canyon, long and straight that just stopped at the brink of the white walls.

"It will be dawn soon; we have to go down," whispered Mairi.

"Just one more instant," I begged and returned to observe how the bright star that brings daylight, Shams Soleilis, swept its first rays over the landscape evaporating the dew from the monastery grounds and heating up the desert sands.

The image reminded me of my father's palace, of home, where I also used to sneak into The Tower or Daylight, watch the star raise over Miayatma and the first rays reflect in the water of the hundred lakes. Those moments seemed a lifetime ago. Even if barely one star-circle had passed since I arrived there, it felt as if I was a different person back then. If I think about it, I likely was, because, in the moons since my family's death, my perspective of the world was enriched and had changed from more than one point of view.

"Come on!" urged Mairi, that wasn't used to me being the one that didn't want to leave after one of our nightly lessons. The, at first tedious, reading exercises turned out to be something she quite enjoyed in the end. Not the writing though; she still hated that part.

That night when we concluded the reading lessons, which we did only once in a while, out of caution after the incident with Sita and the caravan, Mairi thought it was a good idea to climb on the roof as one of my lessons.

I didn't like the process, as I still had to fight slight fear of heights, but the image at the end was a brilliant reward.

"Don't you find it beautiful?" I asked her. "It humbles one to watch like this the creation of the gods. It feels like the thread that cradles the universe goes right through this point."