The Throne of the Gods

Prelude-2

Fifteen years before the revelation of the Raven in the Heart of the World…

Rogned, prince of Karila, balanced on the tip of the highest point in his land. Before him plunged a sheer fall, thousands of feet down to jagged, teeth-shaped rocks. Behind him a narrow spur was all that kept him from another drop, down to a tarn said to be so deep that the bottom grazed the bones of the great serpent that formed the backbone of the world.

Something beyond the water pulled at him, calling with the intensity of a love song. He forced himself to look away.

Rogned had never quite appreciated the name of this crag—the Fang of the Giant—until this moment. It did not take a wild leap of the imagination to feel the stone heaving underneath him, as though an invisible upper jaw were coming down to meet the upward thrust of the Fang, to crush him before depositing him into a giant’s gizzard.

The thought thrilled him: to be churned up and swallowed by the divine. It was what he had come here for, after all.

It had taken him most of the morning to climb the pockmarked Fang, through the bone-cutting winter wind and the ice-flecked mist. He thought he would never again hear anything other than the howl of the wind.

Better that than the screams of the dying in war, he thought.

From the top of the Fang he looked down at the green earth, and all sound ceased. The clouds tore apart slowly, silently. Three shafts of sunlight shot down into the land below him, and the tarn’s frozen surface flashed.

Tears filled his eyes. He gritted his teeth until his jaw ached. Something like curdled milk filled him inside, something that would burst if he didn’t let it out. He roared.

“How dare you reveal the land’s beauty now?” he cried aloud to the Heights. “Now, when the grass and the rocks will be defiled with blood!”

No answer came from the Heights.

A flock of ravens flew underneath Rogned, bringing into sharp relief the army of five thousand Nebesti who were marching on Karila, his beloved home. Just three hundred fighting Karilans stood in the pass between the Fang and the Needle—an impossibly thin pillar of rock that reached half as high as the Fang. Kneeling, the Karilans faced the Needle—sacred to their old gods, who had been suppressed by the victorious Vasyllian invaders, hundreds of years ago. But then Vasyllia fell, ending the confederacy of the three city-states of Vasyllia, Nebesta, and Karila. What followed was internecine slaughter, a war that was about to end with the total destruction of Karila, the runt of the three. How fitting that Nebesta, jealous first daughter of Vasyllia, would do the deed.

“Rogned!”

The voice was hardly more than a whisper in the howl of the wind. Rogned turned around, careful not to slip. The man who had followed him was past the first flower of youth, and his eyes were as deep as the tarn. Those eyes were filled with more pain, sorrow, and anguish than anything Rogned had ever seen. They called him the Healer. He healed everyone but himself.

“I was hoping you’d follow, Voran,” said Rogned. “I wasn’t sure you’d believed me.”

“Have you finally lost your mind? I know you artisans are impulsive, but this?”

“It’s halfway to the Heights,” said Rogned, not trying to hide the elation that rose inside him. Not long now. Images from last night’s dream flowed through his mind—a wing the color of lapis lazuli, an eye that blazed golden fire, the simultaneous pain and elation of the thrust of a giant sword through his heart.

A muffled roar rose up on a draft of warm wind. Rogned thought he could smell the stench of the sweat and fear of his people.

The Nebesti were no longer advancing in their perfect ranks. They were throwing themselves chaotically at the three hundred defenders of the city of Karila. Even from here, Rogned could smell their war lust.

“Quickly, Voran. This may be our only chance.”

Voran’s face blanched at the sight of the knife, which Rogned had pulled out of his boot in a smooth, practiced motion. He had rehearsed this moment many times during the last week.

“Rogned!” Voran’s hands shook. The deep purple of the shadows under his eyes made the paleness of his face ghostlike. “You’re mad! Just because of a few dreams? You can’t force an encounter with the Heights. High Beings come to you in their own time. You’re just going to kill yourself.”

“That’s the idea,” said Rogned. He sliced the knife across his left wrist. It hardly hurt at all, to his astonishment. It was even pleasant to feel the hot blood on his frozen skin.

“I promised myself no one else in your family would die!” Voran screamed as he ran to stop Rogned, nearly falling off the edge in his haste.

Too late.

A wave of exhaustion swept Rogned into unconsciousness. He fell, and there was no bottom. He kept falling and falling and . . . Rogned awoke in mid-fall.

What in all the . . .

He was no longer falling.

White sand as far as the eye could see. It crackled under him as he rose up from a crouching position. Now it felt more like glass than sand. Rogned’s hands were covered in the stuff. Before he realized what he was doing, he licked his right thumb.

His eyes grew large in surprise.

Salt.

Then the immensity of the landscape pressed in on him from all sides, along with a smell like rotten eggs. There was nothing but salt—ranging from white to grey to slightly pink—in all directions. The sky above him looked like a mirror image of the salt. Perhaps the sky in this place was not blue.

Where am I?

A scented breeze played with his hair. His mind processed the smells—impossible in their profusion and intensity. There was orange there, and lilac, and morning grass after a spring downpour, and logs burning on the coldest evening of the year, and—

Rogned was running before his mind registered it. No, he wasn’t running. There was no word for this. Each step was a leap miles long, as though his essence strove to tear itself out of his body and to dissipate in the perfection of that smell ahead of him.

His mind hiccupped—there was no other way to describe the way it was functioning as it tried to sift through the everything he saw, smelled, felt. But below thought, deeper, in the throbbing warmth of his chest, longing burned him.

I am going home. The thought rang out like a choir singing from a mountain peak.

Before his limping thoughts could retort—what is home?—something formed out of the shimmering mirages rising from the salt. A riot of color, spinning wildly, yet anchored more firmly than a mountain. A tower of white, whiter than any white he had ever seen. Walls encircling it. Seven of them, each made of stone that shimmered; and Rogned somehow knew it was harder than any stone he had ever seen in Karila. Set in the center of each encircling wall was a gate. They were too far away for him to make out the details, but they reminded him of what he thought diamonds must look like. He had only heard of diamonds in stories.

Trees, laden with red fruits with a golden innerglow, seemed to embrace him as he sped into their groves. They grew directly from the salt. Their smell—pomegranate mixed with cinnamon and honey—finally slowed him down. That and the winged giant with a sword made of lightning.

The giant’s skin looked like marble—marble that was living tissue, not stone. His eyes shone bronze, and six wings of gold, lapis, emerald, ruby, silver, and topaz flickered in constant movement about his body. The lightning sword looked like a part of his arm, something as much belonging to him as the presence that emanated from him. The presence felt like a mountain about to fall on an ant.

Rogned fell on his knees, though the shaking of his hands was more joy than fear.

“You,” Rogned whispered. His voice sounded foreign to this place. He didn’t belong here, and he was beginning to realize how mad he had been. And yet . . . how had he gotten here?

The giant spoke. “You came too early, child. My call was only a whisper. A preparation for a later time. No mortal can gain access to the Gardens of Aer before death.”

“There will not be a later time,” said Rogned, gathering courage from the shards of what was left of him after the voice of the giant had shattered him. “Karila is about to be wiped off the map. And I know my lessons: ‘Those who take the Heights by force—they are the only ones worthy of it.’”

The giant laughed. Rogned had to look down at himself to make sure he had not burst into flame from its power.

“You quote scripture at me? I am of the Palymi, the highest order of the Powers that encircle the throne of the Unknown Father. We inspired that scripture.”

“Then you know why I am here.”

Something shifted in the Power’s living-marble face, as though he were listening to a wind miles away.

“So you took the scriptures literally. You poor fool. You’re not ready.”

“I demand that the Heights answer the groan of Karila. We have been pushed back, inch by inch, forced to give up our lands, our very way of life to those who would exterminate us. I demand audience before the throne of the Unknown Father.”

“You’re lying.”

If wind were a living thing with an emotion like anger, then it might have come close to what pressed Rogned to the salt-earth in that moment.

“You do not come here with a desire for justice. Do you not realize that I can see through you?”

Images and emotions bubbled up, pressing on his brain. His elder brother Karakul’s dead body on top of a pyre. The fury Rogned had felt at seeing it. The urge for vengeance that boiled inside. The desire to tear down Vasyllia for what it had done to his brother. The burning madness of artistic creation. The sense of being possessed by an outside force when he sculpted. The feeling of power over the whole earth, as though he could turn it inside out at his own whim. The thought that he so often pushed down, though he gave himself over to it in his dreams—I am touched by the divine. Only I can stop the war.

Rogned grabbed his head, trying to ward off the onslaught of his own thoughts. His heart beat savagely, as if it were going to burst.

“Pride, anger, vengeance. Smallness of mind. Of such are the Gardens of Aer?” The giant seemed to grow even higher. “Raw metal in my hands. That’s what you are. Don’t you understand? Until you’ve been tempered, the fire of my power will melt you, not make you stronger.”

“And what of courage?” Rogned pushed himself up to his feet, grinding his teeth against the power pushing him down. “What man has courage like mine? I’m not doing it for myself! I do it for little Nadina, the five-year-old who lost both her parents in a raid by the Nebesti last week. For my brother, who was murdered by a man he loved like a father. For all those innocents who are being destroyed, wiped off this good earth, punished for crimes and sins they didn’t commit.”

The sword flashed upward. Rogned’s anger blazed out of him so hot, he thought he would be immolated in it.

“No! I know you, Palymi,” Rogned said. “You guide my hand when I sculpt. That work of putting chaos into a form more perfect than creation itself—you and I have done that together. Don’t deny it! I know you. You will give this to me, because it is the only way left. The war will tear the land apart. There will be no one left to worship at any altar.”

The sword plunged into his heart. Rogned screamed.

Through the firelight of that agony, he saw the giant step aside. The first gate to the Gardens of Aer stood open before him. Flowers and trees of color and variety that he could never have imagined—they beckoned to him. No human love impelled like this. Rogned rose up, through the agony, and ran to the door . . .

The world yanked up from underneath him, and wet mist covered his face.