New world, young world. So unexpected, so premature, this rain of death.
Endest Silann could feel every breach as he knelt on the cold mosaic floor of the temple’s Grand Vestry. He had once held the waters back from Moon’s Spawn. He had once, long, long ago, guided his Lord to the fateful, final encounter with Mother Dark herself. He had clasped the hand of a dying High Priestess, sharing with her the bleak knowledge that nothing awaited her, nothing at all. He had stood, gods, so long ago now, staring down at his blood-covered hands, above the body of a sweet, gentle woman, Andarist’s wife. While through the high window, the flames of dying Kharkanas flickered crimson and gold.
The Saelen Gara of the lost Kharkanan forestlands had believed that the moon was Father Light’s sweet seduction, innocent maiden gift to Mother Dark. To re-mind her of his love, there in the sky of night. But then, they had also believed the moon was but the backside of Father Light’s baleful eye, and could one rise up and wing the vast distance to that moon, they would discover that it was but a lens, and to look through was to see other worlds for whom the moon was not the moon at all, but the sun. The Saelen Gara talespinner would grin then, and make odd motions with his hands. ‘Perspective,’ he’d say. ‘You see? The world changes according to where you stand. So choose, my children, choose and choose again, where you will make your stand…’
Where you will make your stand. The world changes.
The world changes.
Yes, he had held back the sea. He had made Moon’s Spawn into a single held breath that had lasted months.
But now, ah, now, his Lord bad asked him to hold back Light itself.
To save not a fortress, but a city. Not a single breath to hold, but the breath of Kurald Galain, an Elder Warren.
But he was old, and he did not know… he did not know…
Standing twenty paces away, in a niche of the wall, the High Priestess watched. Seeing him struggle, seeing him call upon whatever reserves he had left. Seeing him slowly, inexorably, fail.
And she could do nothing.
Light besieged Dark in the sky overhead. A god in love With dying besieged a child of redemption, and would use that child’s innocence to usurp this weakened island of Kurald Galain-to claim for itself the very Throne of Darkness.
For she has turned away.
Against all this, a lone, ancient, broken warlock.
It was not fair…
Time was the enemy. But then, she told herself with wry bitterness, time was always the enemy.
Endest Silann could not drive back every breach. She had begun to feel the damage being wrought upon Night, upon the Tiste Andii in this city. It arrived like a sickness, a failing of internal balances. She was weakening.
We are all weakening.