The Arkanist

Names

Chapter 20

Names

Aera woke to darkness. Her head ached, and her leg throbbed. That was all she felt. A sudden shriek of an ashen jolted her to life, springing from the ground and sitting upright. She blinked twice, clearing the film of haze that had settled. A single gaunt sentinel fir pointed into the dreary black sky before her, its web of limbs hanging over her, heavy with ash. Away, down a slight knoll in the earth of fractured rock, a river ambled by, gliding at a leisurely pace. Aera could only see the silvery glints dance across the glassy black surface. Farther downstream, rocks broke the water like knives, and the ripples seethed to white.

         A blood-red moon hid behind the vast stretch of grey clouds, with tears of a pale glow filtering down through the grey. Aera pushed herself onto the lonely tree, the pallid bark peeling off and itching her back. She shivered as a gust of wind scratched across her skin, tearing through her thick clothes to chill her very bones. The cold was the worst of anything, even the darkness, for it was winter now, and it was here to last.

         Farther away even, she could see, the ghostly silhouettes of the Mountains of Svaerdon hid behind the curtain of black mist. Their rocky feet, bare and naked, were slipped in boots of shifting grey shadow, and the red moonlight sifted down upon their peaks, which ran red with rivers of blood. Everything else was a blur. The winds howled down from the mountains, unyielding and bitter, wrought with ice time and time again. Each time she thought they would somehow cease, they screamed down fiercer and faster Aera could feel the dusty white flakes of frost cloak her short flaming hair as she huddled on the gnarled feet of the ancient tree the swayed with a scratchy groan as the winds came. She thought that her fiery hair would burn the cold away. It didn’t. How naïve she was, still.

         She was about to close her eyes again and drift off into a dream of summer, when Ollor trudged toward her, carrying logs and sticks for a fire. He was no more a shadow in the black, misty veil as he knelt down. He gathered a tight circle of stones and rocks, each inscribed with the symbol of Fe'u, the name, or essence of fire. He stacked the broken brown arms of wood atop the platform of stone to form a pyramid. Ollor leaned toward the wood and cupped his hands around his mouth, muttering, whispering, and brushed them across the grain, until he flicked his fingers around and Aera watched as a spark of energy ran down his arm, and clashed with another spark wrought of the wood with a flash of white that quickly flushed to red. The writhing fingers of fire gnawed at the wood and ate up the pyramid ravenously in a blazing inferno. Aera watched, her face, flushed pink as the soothing waves of heat splashed across her soft flesh like calm water.

         “Fe'u,” said Ollor, watching the wood bake beneath the curtain of racing red. A crack and pop burst forth with a stream of glimmering gold embers that were engulfed by the darkness. “One of the hardest words to control in the U'un. It changes, and alters forms, much like fire itself. When one finally captures the essence of fire, they can call it by its real name, and control the flames as if they were your own hands. Although, to capture and completely understand fire, takes time, like many other things. You must live with it, learn from it, know it, and in the end, love it, to be connected to its essence, to hold its true form in your hands. That, Aeron, is the basis of Anorian magic, to posses something down to its core, to know its real name.” He looked at Aera.

         “We all veil ourselves in false names. None of them mean you, and none of them mean anything. One’s true name is inside them, hidden from their use. You can use anything and change its name, for nothing is in a name. I could use this tree, for instance. It’s name is tree, or a soldier fir if you want to get deep, but really its what we call it. But what if it was called an… orden, a random jumble of letters? It would still look the same, and still do all the same things as a tree, but it is called something else. The same goes for us. Ollor is not my true name, it is a fake, a shell I wear, just as Aeron is not your true name. Do you follow?” Aera tensed. Did her know?