Sons of Ironstorm - Book 1: Griffon's Rise

Chapter 6: The Color of Poison

                                    “Which snake should you be the most wary of?

                                    The slithering adder the color of brown leaves,

                                    hiding in the undergrowth, camouflaged and unseen?

                                    Or the harlequin viper, in hues of blue, orange and red,

                                    in plain sight of those who pass it by,

                                    warning all of its danger?

                                    The viper; that in plain sight is often dismissed

                                    as harmless.”

                                                - an old woodsman’s proverb, translated

                                                   from the old tongue

The Star of Aramas; it was both the city that ruled Talemon, and the throne that ruled the city.  The throne found its home in the Great Hall, the throne room of the kings of Talemon since the city became the capital of a human nation.  Both at the palace’s crest and at its heart, the Great Hall was a massive rectangular box that, like the Vatakeil, faced east and west.  Seven windows lined the northern wall of the vast chamber, reaching from floor to high ceiling and standing nearly an arm span in width, filled with glass as clear as crystal and strong as stone.  The making of it was lost with the Cadremoor, or Jerald would’ve filled every window in the palace with such marvelous material.  Another seven, identical in size and proportion, lined the southern wall; the two marching in a line to the west where two massive stone doors formed the chamber’s western wall.

Originally an audience chamber for the ancient provincial capital, the throne room had been designed by builders who remembered the minds of the Ancients of the First Alliance, who had come out of the east to look to the west, to the new lands and peoples that lay there.  The room reflected that perception, the doors in the west wall opening into the Sorvakeil and the Vatakeil, with its great slotted windows that lined the front of the palace, allowing the setting sun to illuminate the depths of the palace itself.

Between the windows, on the naked stone that formed the remainder of all four walls, hung massive tapestries, woven in the colors of the rainbow, hanging from ceiling to flagstone floor.  These showed scenes of both distant Keva and of the lands of Talemon, from north to south and east to west: their great wars, honored kings and pictures of daily life.  It was a visual history of the two long-lived lands, one given birth by the fall of the Cadremoor 700 cycles ago, and the other at the failure of the First Alliance, thousands of cycles previous.

Thick carpets covered most of the cold stone floor, hiding the polished granite beneath layers of beautifully dyed wool and silk, except for a broad pathway that stretched from the massive doors, chiseled from rich silver granite quarried in the Giants’ Teeth and inlaid with golden motifs of the sun, to the hand-carved throne.  The pathway was lined on either side by beautifully etched panels in bas-relief that depicted the arms of the ancient Houses of Talemon from the time of the Cadremoor to the present, a fitting pathway to the throne from which the Kings of Talemon now passed their judgments.