Fire Angels

Chapter 10 Part 2 The Raven

Thanks for reading. I hate to nag but please vote. It helps me get more readers. In this episode Dion finds out more about her future and about the Wanderers.

"Thus my father was found and lost again in the space of a few sentences. Such things leave you breathless.

"Are you troubled by the story?" Causa asked gently.

"I do not know what I think," I said.

I had found both parents now. Neither of them was very satisfactory. I wondered if my mother with her foretelling skills had known Darrah was going to die. Why didn't she do something about it, if she did? I shook off these thoughts. It was twenty-two years ago. I couldn't know.

"What did you see in your visions yesterday?" I said in an attempt to lighten the mood.

"Among other things I saw you placing the crown on the head of the next ruler of Moria again," said Causa.

"Who was it? The ruler I mean."

"It changes. Let the future reveal itself to you with time, Dion."

"I knew you were going to say something like that."

She smiled at me.

"Believe me. It's better not to know such things."

I remembered a moment ago I had been about to blame my mother for my fathers death. I began to see her point.

How little I knew about the Wanderers. In my lifetime they had been undergoing this great rebirth as a people, refinding their skills at magic, learning how to deal with foretelling again and looking forward to a time when they would return to their homeland in the great waste. I had not noticed this change as and as far as I knew, nobody else had either. Who bothers himself with the activities of a band of wandering beggars anyway? Mind you I had no doubt that the Wanderers had quite intentionally hidden their activities. This was wise in them since their survival depended on the perception that they were inoffensive and a growth in power and organization is hardly inoffensive. Moreover this desire to reclaim Ernundra, and the echo of the old Klementari power in Moria politics that came with it, might well have alarmed the Lords of Moria, even to violence. Even my foster father who had been a mage, had been torn between approval of a time when magecraft was a ruling force in the Morian state, and discomfort with the fact that it was these spirit worshipping foreigners who lead that force. I could not imagine what the autocratic Leon Saar would say when the Wanderers retook Ernundra. My impression was that he preferred to be the only power in his dominions.

Had the Burning Light been aware of the Wanderer's push to return to Ernundra? Was this why they exiled the Wanderers from Moria? I doubted it. They had simply not liked the Wanderers' wandering and had exiled them for that. Wanderers who were settled and not using magic were left alone only to be picked up later by the Hand of Truth as Shad's family had been.

There was no chance that the Wanderers would ever have become Tansites like the rest of the peninsula folk. They had a religion of their own which they held to strongly no matter where they were. Always they rose at dawn and prayed to the spirits that they believed lived in all nature. The ritual consisted of kneeling on the ground and drawing five interconnected circles while repeating a chant about the five elements, earth, water, fire, air and life and the interconnectedness of all things. Each morning was a renewal of their compact with those spirits and a promise to respect the balance of the world.

It was Shad who showed me this ritual and translated the chant into Morian for me. The other Wanderers sat by and smilingly corrected his mistakes.

"Tch tch," said one called Kindylan. "You have been neglecting you duties, Shad Forest."

"When I went to live among the New People, I learned to go to church like them. I have not said the Morning Chant for many years," he replied. "I had forgotten how beautiful it is."