sruthanliar

[sruthanliar]

The desert beyond the Red House, Dwelling place of The Druids, 2452 {2000 years before the culmination of the S’ruthan Civil War}

“How is this possible?”

“I don’t know.”

Miriz, Danail, and eight other scribes and astronomers gathered around the teakettle which boiled gently over the table stove. Miriz’ house was illuminated by the candleflames from the table and the fire.

A tense and troubled hush crowded itself around the people in the room.

Yeen brought the cup to her lips once more, drained it, then placed it back down with the air of one who is trying to order their own thoughts. She was Miriz’s best student. Young but extremely talented.

“Is it possible she somehow…accessed the nexus? Even accidentally?”

Miriz shook her head.

“No. the nexus is very specific. Every single line is a code designed for one body. One Reach pattern. It wouldn’t even be akin to trying to open a door with the wrong key. It would like trying to open it with the wrong tool altogether. The nexus at both ends, is coded for him. And it’s a re-coder as well, it enables the physical body to flow from one place to the other without compromising it.”

The concern settled on Miriz’s face. She pushed her hair back with her hands and sighed, drawing her knees up to her chest where she sat. It was a hot evening, and it had been a strange day. Everyone in the room was looking to her.

“No, that’s not what happened. That woman shouldered through, body and spirit. Even thread speech exerts a certain strain on the participants, but that’s just signals….to travel whole and without a conduit?” Miriz let her hands drop and looked toward the flames dancing in the hearth.

“If she got back…I hope she doesn’t attempt it again. It poses a risk to the integrity of the body itself.”

Danail nodded. “There are records, only a handful. Anyone who had enough command over the skill to even initiate the movement…well…” The astronomers’ fingers danced lightly through the air. "They were scattered.”

“But its one of the Shades is it not? This is a good sign, it means the stone reached them.” Yeen responded hopefully.

“True.” Miriz nodded. “But she is the closest and dearest of their leader, if she gets herself lost it could up end the entire plan.”

The quiet reasserted itself. The fire crackled.

Danail stood up from the table and started quietly for the door. He paused with his hand on the doorframe.

“Well, we better get prepared for a number of eventualities.” He turned his gaze to the others. “I’m going to take a walk into the mountain, we need to find information.”

As one the gathered scribes and astronomers got up from their seats and followed. Danail had never given an order; his word held a quiet respect that is earned through care and dedication. Miriz moved to follow suit, before her husband’s reach gently grasped her shoulder. She looked to him, questioning.

He nodded to her gently.

Rest my darling, you need it, there is time. We have that much on our side at least.

Miriz’s face glowed with warmth and she nodded. Danail and the others flowed out into the night air, toward the red mountain.

@theshadowsnetwork

[sruthanliar]

{S’ruthan Liar 4449, the Red Palace, slightly less than three years before the onset of the civil war}

“Is it possible it was a projection? That you saw something that is yet to pass? Or happened already?”

Orlagh, Kerai’s handmaid and closest advisor, followed the Empress hurriedly from the flight hangar and into the long corridor which fed into the heart of the red mountain.

“No.” Kerai uttered resolutely, discarding her boots and breaking into a run. Orlagh sighed and jogged along behind her. The Great Seer sped away with the lithe ease of a gazelle. She did this when she was thinking hard about something. The way her feet rolled over the stone. It was a little like flight.

She skidded to a halt a little way from the great arch that opened into the main hall and sped up the stairs to her chambers, striding through the code locked door and peeling out of her flight suit like it was causing her pain.

When the door chime sounded again Orlagh found Kerai on the balcony, a loose skirt wrapped around her waist. Her torso was bare to the air and her eyes were shut. The handmaid looked at the other woman. The Great Seer was hundreds of years old, but very occasionally she seemed quite innocent.

“You’ve been troubled since Warrat passed…”

“This is not about Warrat. It isn’t Orlagh.” Kerai sighed and looked at her friend.

“I swear to you. There was a woman in the back of the plane. As real as you or me, right this moment.”

Orlagh nodded. “Well then, we should consider this a potentially hostile action.”

Kerai looked pained. “I don’t think that’s what it was. But maybe you’re right.” She turned away from the balcony, back into the room. With legs folded she sat down by the shallow stream which cut through the natural stone of the chamber. She looked at the water. Orlagh sat down opposite her.

“What do you think it was? Who?” She asked gently.

Kerai’s fingers flexed on her elbows. “I don’t know. But I have this strange feeling that everything is moving around me. That something is happening, and I can’t see it, can’t predict it. It feels massive.”

Orlagh looked at the Seer sympathetically. “I think that’s just life. All we can do is the best with whatever we know. Even you.”

The sound of the gentle water filled the chamber. Orlagh bit her lip and decided to say it;

“You’ve been far too isolated…”

“Orlagh please don’t, not again.”

“You have Kerai! The people want to see you, they want to know you. Right now, there is an uprising being drummed up in the Drey City and it is fuelled by ignorance of who you are!”

“So I am to blame for people who burn temples and peddle lies!?” The wound of the suggestion showed on Kerai’s face.

“No.” Orlagh acceded. “But you’re here in this mountain or you’re up in a plane somewhere. You draw your loneliness around you like a blanket. Your mother…”

“Please no.” Kerai’s voice rasped. Orlagh felt herself standing perilously near a painful edge. She raised her hand defensively. “…Would not have wanted this for you.”

A sound thrummed against the wall of the mountain. At first perhaps the roar of the wind. But then undeniable; engines. Rotar blades. Both women’s faces turned to the balcony. A hot twinge of fear ran through Kulani.

“Orlagh are we expecting anyone?”

The handmaiden reached the balcony first and looked down onto the airfield which extended over the west quarter of the land outside the Red House. Kerai was behind her. A ship was touching down. The fear diverted into anger.

“That’s Minister Hosh’s ship…From the delegation. He has not requested an audience…”

The console on the tabletop chimed. Kerai activated it with a swipe of her fingers and read the message that had been hastily constructed by Evun, her first advisor.

Hosh requests emergency audience regarding Drey unrest, we will receive him in the great hall. We will send him away if you will it.

“He cannot be serious.” Orlagh uttered, staring at the message. “With no invitation? Get rid of him.”

“No.” Kerai stared at the message, hastily typing out a reply to Evun. “I’m going down there.”

When the Empress arrived in the great hall, she did so without ceremony or change of dress. She strode down the long corridor to the top of the set of steps that swept down into the man-made cavern. Hosh was standing by the doors, the women she’d seen at the delegation flanking him to either side. Neither of them officials.

Her eyes raked over both of them. “Get out.”

They paused a moment, looking nervously to Hosh before turning toward the grand double doors. Hosh extended his hands to bar them.

“Your Grace, Rosin and Bridgit are trusted advisors of mine. Their witness would be most beneficial to them and-“

“Then they may both pay for a rail tour of the mountains edge like every other tourist. Out.”

The doors opened, slammed. Kerai did not move an inch from her position at the top of the stairs. Some forty feet separated her from Hosh but she could feel the hostility curling from him like an acrid smell.

“You embarrass me Kerai.”

“You embarrass yourself, you address a head of state by their given name?”

“Well, that’s just the thing isn’t it...” The sentence leaked out of his mouth a little too easily. The man in the suit moved forward a few steps. The great hall was lit by the organic crystal filaments which wound through the mountain, and still Hosh looked like a shadow cast on the floor.

“You are a head of state…for now. By a few hundred kilometres from your mountain they aren’t so sure about that anymore…are they?”

Kerai fixed her violet gaze on the dark smear of a man that was gradually approaching the foot of the steps. She said nothing.

“…This Bairre Vardan character is proving very motivating for the common man.” His lip turned in distaste. “And it turns out that motivation is worth something. The people in Drey City are turning on the old beliefs. They want no more of your fear and witchcraft.”

The reach snapped outward for Kerai like a flail, but she caught it short before it sent Hosh sprawling.

“Fear?” Her face contorted with enraged bewilderment. “You’ve come to talk to me about fear? You terrorise the women on your world with murder, of both body and spirit…and you teach your boys nothing but that murder. And, you speak to me of unrest when you have just beheaded your own monarch?? You are absurd.”

Hosh smiled, rolling one shoulder in a gesture of acceptance. “To some extent you are correct. I am, we all are who play at this. But the emperor is a practical man. It doesn’t matter in the end who holds the titles, it’s who holds the land and what is beneath it.”

“Speak clearly.” Kerai’s voice was a whip crack.

“Without our help you will lose this war. Granted, you have an advanced air force. Good for tactical precision, but you do not have the numbers. Without our help Vardan will rally thousands with more resources than you…and we will fund them, because they want what we want…” Hosh’s hands parted, and he looked up at the grand maroon walls of the Red House. He had stopped at the foot of the steps.

“It’s time you relinquished the heart stone to the people. To technology. To the future. Turn over one third to Dagilach, and our numbers, ships, munitions…they are yours instead.”

Kerai had never felt her own heart beat so hard. It took every fibre of her being not to snap Hosh in half like a reed. She wouldn’t even need to use her hands.

“Get. Out. Of. My. House.”

She spoke, and the silence after the words oozed down and over the steps like a black ichor. Slow, dense and terrible.

Hosh nodded. Turned, and followed his women out. The doors echoed behind him.

When Kerai finally turned back toward the long corridor Evun was already hovering there, grey faced and quiet. She gave him a look that can only pass between old friends, or people who understand the same unique and dire situation.

“Evun…Please assemble the war council.”

@theshadowsnetwork

[sruthanliar]

Cathedral of Selime

[sruthanliar]

Oued Draa, Morocco // Raquel Guiu

[sruthanliar]

{S’ruthan Liar 4449, Drey City, slightly less than three years before the culmination of the civil war, three weeks after the execution of Orlain Oirsolise, Empress of Dagilach}

The Scree Plaza sat at the intersection between a major sky port for air shuttles serving the east side of the city, and a main thoroughfare which jutted between ore processing plants and factories. The huge concourse was cut from granite, and the rare rain which had fallen a few hours previous had made it a dark mirror.

A large crowd was unusually gathered around the huge lcd screen which normally displayed the arrival and departure times of the various shuttles. But now the screen was black. It had been hacked.

In a tower block about a mile away, a crew of five people were checking their broadcast equipment. Audio only, no video. One of them placed a mic on the desk in front of a man in a well cut black suit. They tapped it to check it was working.

“Nearly ready to go live Sir.”

The man in the suit nodded with a cool expression. It was a well-oiled team, this would be the third time they had done this. The switches were thrown. The one wearing a VR headset and flying the observation drone turned the camera down toward the crowd.

“We’ve got seven hundred people out there easily.” He muttered quietly behind his visor. Someone at a console fluttered their fingers over the keys and a mile away a huge face appeared on the lcd screen. It was a very ordinary looking woman. Possibly someone’s mother. But then she shifted into someone else entirely. The faces were pulled from the databanks of recent deaths recorded in the city, and rendered with lifelike accuracy.

“Mic is live in 3, 2, 1…”

When the man at the desk spoke, his words left the mouths of ghosts, via the hacked PA system that served the port.

“People of Drey. You are true friends to be here this evening. True friends not just to me or any cause, but to yourselves, and to the people you love.

You understand what is at stake.

You understand the cost of so-called destiny.

When I watched my son, not even a year old perish in my arms I knew what had killed him. The doctors said it was infection. That much was true. But that was the symptom. The cause, the true cause was Reach.

My son died the moment I saw it, before it had even happened.

So, you too will have seen. So, you too will understand;

Reach does not show us potential. Reach writes our destinies; it steals our universe given free will from us. No matter what some monstrous aristocrat in her red mountain might tell you, know this;

Reach does not make you free, we will make ourselves free.

We are growing in strength. Soon we will outnumber them, soon we will take this war all the way to the Witch of The Red Mountain.

I am Bairre Vardan, a son of Dagal and S’ruth. And soon, the plague of destiny will be over.”

The cry that went out over the plaza rippled over the hard granite, and people extended their hands upward to the screen as the picture died and the speakers fell into silence.

That night, fourteen temples burned to the ground on the east side of the city. One hundred names entered the postmortem records the next day. Bairre and his closest team of associates would have no difficulty utilising their faces in the next broadcast.

The last temple to be attacked was still burning as daylight broke on the broad horizon. From that temple, there was one survivor.

@annalis-e--shadowofpanem

[sruthanliar]

Timeline Notes

Yep I’m aware how galaxy brained this is starting to look lol, but I sat down and decided I’d try and make sense of the various timelines at work in the various verses x subject to change x

@annalis-e--shadowofpanem

[sruthanliar]

Text of a poem inscribed Cordis Hall, 2452

Two mothers meet at the threshold A weaver, a seer. The earth rejoins, as a sleeper awakens. from the mouths of babes, the voice of hope echoes; No secrets.

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Miriz, first scribe of the Sruth Druids, circa 2452 {2000 years before the culmination of the S’ruthan Civil War}

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Grossglockner High Alpine Road, Austria by Mark PARADOX

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@annalis-e--shadowofpanem

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grimes by u/michaellehbk

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bangkok

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Dilwara Jain temples, Mount Abu, Rajasthan, India,

Credit: olderock1

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Stairway to Heaven. 

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Maruyama senmaida rice terraces.

Kumano, Japan.

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???