Fugitive Prince: First Book of The Alliance of Light. Janny Wurts
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matriarchs had wielded its dire focus since the cataclysm and war which had cast an uprooted humanity from its homeworlds. The jewel’s deep lattice was said to encompass them all; their unquiet memories; the imprint of each departed prime’s experience mazed like etched knotwork beneath its stilled facets.
At times in past history such knowledge meant survival. The records in the crystal could not be replaced. Nor could they be transferred. Stones mined in Athera fell under the Fellowship’s compact with the Paravians. The knowledge from outside worlds was proscribed. Limited to those crystals brought in by the order, every Matriarch since had no choice but to adopt the fixed practice, that its original set of jewel matrixes must be maintained without cleansing.
No stranger to the contrary properties of first focus stones, Lirenda required firm discipline to stamp down her apprehension. Her gnawing unease was no phantom. The Great Waystone’s secrets were held at perilous cost. Twined through the stored experience of the former matriarchs’ collective memories ran vicious, ingrained crosscurrents: the coiling, sullen residue left layered by centuries of arcane bindings, crammed together and entangled into dissonant, unquiet knots.
One day, these must become the prime candidate’s trial to master.
The protections Morriel laid down for this first exposure were forbidding enough to intimidate. Lirenda resisted the urge to break discipline and steal a glance through cracked eyelids. Against the mild fabric of summer night, she felt the formed lattice of wards stab her flesh like the prick of a thousand fine needles. The passes the Prime completed to frame each new sigil raised dire cold, and the salty damp that freshened the sea breeze came whetted by a bitter taint of ozone.
Minutes passed. Through the still blaze of stars and the tidal draw of the moon on the western horizon, Lirenda followed the pained shuffle of the Prime’s steps, circling, tirelessly circling. The low, flinty whisper as the Matriarch chanted in rhythm to align each intricate, chained set of runes. Perception itself drowned. Sensed impressions strung out to elastic proportions, as if moving time and the rustle of dune grass had slowed to congealment in amber.
Elsewhere, the world turned untouched. From the tide pools beyond Thirdmark’s harbor, a curlew called. A kicked cur yelped in the fish market alley, and the martial jink of steel as the wall watch changed guard reechoed off the city’s gabled roofs. Sounds reached Lirenda as if muffled through gauze, and then not at all, as her awareness submersed, ringed about by ambient power.
When Lirenda’s consciousness became a joined circle, sealed into relentless isolation, the Prime Enchantress said, “We are ready to begin.”
Instructions followed, the husk of each syllable sandpaper sharp amid that enforced web of stillness. “Do not look upon the Waystone as I raise its grand focus. To try is to beg for destruction. My set protections cannot shield you from direct interaction with the event unless you maintain perfect balance. No matter what happens, through temptation or disaster, remember you follow as observer. Stay passive. On pain of annihilation, however much you feel traumatized, do not exert your conscious will outside the bounds of my ward ring.”
One second passed in unbearable suspension. Lirenda fought down the dizzy pound of her pulse. Then in shared resonance, the plunge snatched her up in a rocketing, exhilarated rush, as Morriel Prime bent her will and invoked the Great Waystone’s focus.
Stark silence descended. Wide as old darkness, deep as the floor of Ath’s oceans, the stillness reigned absolute. Lirenda felt walled in unbreakable black glass, reduced to a dust speck captured and prisoned in jet. Of her Prime’s guiding presence, no sign remained, as if her aged flesh had succumbed to blank death, then faded to final oblivion.
Panic raked through, a blind, clawing terror of abandonment. Lirenda could be left here, forever entombed beyond reach of life and movement. She wrestled to breathe slowly as she had been trained. All of her pride and practiced control seemed trampled and torn into shreds. She had no dignity. In gasping, sweaty struggle, she fought herself steady. The need to leap up, to flee headlong without heed for safeguards became almost too overpowering to deny.
Then abrupt change overset even terror.
The eruption was cyclonic, an invisible whirlwind of force barbed in malice. The vicious, leading edge had a thousand voices, cursing, crying, tearing with words and far worse: the scything, bitter edges of passionate hatreds all stabbing to flay and draw blood. Even sealed beyond harm, Lirenda felt her mind become milled into fragments, her thoughts consumed by unadulterated violence.
No prior experience prepared her, although every other ancient focus she had handled harbored such coils of trapped rancor. By nature, all crystals absorbed the essence of spells raised to resonance through their mineral lattice. If the patterns were not cleared, the vibrations over time and usage thrummed into rank dissidence, a resentful moil of caged energies. A stone pressed to heel by the will of many mistresses was wont to reflect twisted spite, or worse, become warped into hideous subterfuge, to turn on new wielders and seek domination in turn. Greatest of all matrixes, the Waystone’s stored patterns spewed forth in unparalleled viciousness.
Lirenda felt the blast as an obdurate, scorching tide of hatred that strove to unravel her being. Never had she witnessed such forceful malevolence. Her own strength was inadequate. Before such a flux, her deepest defenses would snap like so many dry twigs. She shrank inside the Prime’s warded circle, cowed to a whimpering huddle.
She was not alone in her terror. The screams of Koriani predecessors who had failed to overmaster the Waystone’s maze of trickery roiled through the crystal’s depths also. Their despair charged the mind, shrank the flesh, and became a scourge defined unto itself; as if those vanquished, consumed spirits sought to lure fresh victims to succumb to the inner flaws that destroyed them. Their bodiless thoughts whirled in tireless search, seeking, prying, scrabbling to exploit any small chink of uncertainty. The peril of their assault was real, unforgiving. Lirenda’s skin rose into prickles of fear. Despite the assurance of Morriel’s wards, the danger sang through like the instant before a lightning strike, with her naked selfhood exposed but one breath shy of oblivion.
An inflexible truth, that if the Prime Matriarch failed to subdue the roused Waystone, her frail circle of protections must crumple. If those thin lines of power once faltered or faded, Lirenda would be cast to ruin in the turmoil of upset control.
As never before, the lesson thrust home: to succeed the Prime’s power, a candidate must become nothing less than a faultless instrument. No prime applicant would ever achieve dominion of the amethyst without unbreakable strength and no fault left to admit weakness.
Then Morriel made her presence known. Her confidence unassailable, she configured the Waystone’s seals of mastery, laid them down in silvered vectors of power, fast and precise as thrown knives. Runes arced into sigils, symmetrical, perfect, to shape raging passions to order. Through the convulsed moil of energies, Lirenda caught the half-glimpsed imprints of past conjuries, the ghost echo of old currents chained through the quartz axis: of storms and disease bent awry or tamed outright; of the very slipstream of time challenged and reversed. She heard, too, the dusky voices of past matriarchs, their words, their deeds, their arguments all melded like the sussurant scrape of dry leaves. Then one last stamp of mastery sheared the whispers away.
The Waystone’s sullen stew of resistance tore asunder, then surrendered to limpid clarity.
Lirenda watched, awed, as the limitless vista opened before her at second hand. As often as she had experienced the rushing, exhilarant joy in her mastery of other focus jewels, the Waystone yielded an order of magnitude more. An indescribable passion plunged through her, sensation shaved to an exquisite knifepoint of ecstasy. The fired thrill of self-awareness seized her unaware, left her flushed and craving. She lost herself. Rapture beyond all imagining rolled like sweet thunder down her nerves. As if she stood poised at the pinnacle with all Ath’s creation strung on its axle, turning; and her hand, hers, to grasp the rein and drive the wheel, to prod the harnessed vector of fate to the dictates of her chosen whim.
Revelation flooded her, a keen exhilaration spiced by addictive longing. She would own this power herself one day. At whatever cost, no matter the sacrifice, Lirenda knew she would pay