Alara Unbroken - Doug Beyer [78]
“Etherium would be wasted on you; you’re an unenlightened people,” she said. “You don’t know how to control your impulses, or your subjects, or your world. You’re imprecise, untuned, unbalanced. You don’t know what to do with what you have. But we do.”
“That’s why you fight us? To claim our resources?”
“Very specific resources. We take your lands to procure the materials that Esper requires, to continue our Noble Work.”
Rafiq looked her right in the eyes. “You’ll fail in this war,” he said after a moment. “Ours is the side of justice. Where is the—”
Drimma closed her eyes. The conversation was going nowhere. She was outnumbered and surrounded; better to be patient, and wait for an opening to outwit them. “Justice is impotent in the face of prophecy,” she said quietly. “Our scholars have always prophesied our victory. The Filigree Texts have always said so.”
“And yet, so have our ancient prayers,” said the man of Bant. “Put her to sleep again.”
As Drimma lost consciousness once more, she heard the Bant creatures’ voices trail off.
“Take her away,” Rafiq told his soldiers. “But keep her alive. We have some very specific questions for her later. Load up this crystal and take it back to Bant. Deliver our reconnaissance to Aarsil the Blessed.”
“What will the rest of us do, sir?”
“You’re coming with me to the next horizon… There we must be the eyes of Asha—and if necessary, her sword.”
THE BLIND ETERNITIES
The five worlds, floating together in the chaos of the Blind Eternities, were not just neighbors, but were siblings. They were all shards of a larger world, the plane of Alara, whose essence had been split five ways centuries before. For reasons Ajani never knew, the shards of Alara had broken like the colors through a prism, and traveled away from one another for a long time. And the shards had slowed in their respective journeys, and begun a return trip back to each other again. It may have been due to the way the mana fractured across the five; they couldn’t live without one another. It may have been due to the efforts of some deep force that pulled their centers to one another, something like the force that pushed water downstream and stones down the slopes of mountains. It could have been meant to be part of the very act that broke them apart, that the five pieces wouldn’t become explosive detritus but missiles in five special orbits, destined to smash back into one another again.
Ajani didn’t know what to make of destiny, nor of history. He had heard the visions of prophets and the declarations of traditionalists, all of who claimed to know how the future would be shaped. He didn’t know whether they had claim to a piece of the truth or not. But he knew that nothing could assail what he saw before his eyes. Against all the theories that said otherwise, and against all the institutions founded on assumptions contradicted by those phenomena, stood the basic facts.
Where once there were five worlds, there was one.
JUND
After Rakka had introduced Sarkhan to her draconic master, she returned to her mission of spreading her master’s war. She traveled the understory of Jund, seeking out other clans to spread her prophecy to. She stayed with the Ripclan Tol Durek clan for a few nights, and told them the story of the first Life Hunt, and told them that the Life Hunt tradition was soon to enter a new phase. She fed them exactly the lines that her master told her to feed them, and their minds devoured the words like starving whelps. She moved on to the Nel Toth clan, and they gorged themselves on her words as well. The words had a power to them, an almost-music that sounded to every listener like the echoes of long-bygone days of glory. Rakka didn’t have to embellish on the stories to make them ring clear and true; everywhere she went she met people unknowingly poised on the edge of conversion.
When the tremors came, of course, ripping the edges of the world and merging with the other planes, it did help. As terrifying as the changes were to Rakka personally, they did serve to back