PROLOGUE
Whiteveil, Whitewulfe, and Red Snow
The boundaries between realms thin and separate like layers of flesh: on the surface is the Grave which is called in the tongues of Anima "Mortelle", mundane, misocainean, without mystery beyond the cruelty men are capable of without the influence of magic; beneath lies a reliquary - the Realm of Possibility, relative, paliscent, retroflux, the dolmen of what was, the palimpsest of what is, the delirious rebirth of what will be; centermost is the Cradle, calycine crucible, calyx calcifuge, charming cryptadian charnel house which in the aretaic tongue of the fair folk is called "Anima".
Two ages and some past in 3808 Roimh Feall was it that the Monger people of Mortelle stumbled into the ephemeral realm with King Electulf Whitehelm of Röhm and his dread Whitewulf at their backs. The tail end of a hard blackthorn winter, and a long one, chandeliers of glittering frost alighting the boughs of black poplar, golden larch, and silver fir; the wealth of Röhm not in its jewels or its precious metals but its desolate high-hilled beauty. The trees had stood bejeweled in icicles from seemingly the moment the last of the harvest was pulled from the carefully tilled soil well into the dead of dread December, as if the earth herself remained reluctant to change her attire, but the Röhme were a hearty people who dreamed hungrily of the next harvest even as they measured their grain stores for the second or third time that month. It was the work of the ancients, they said to one another, a lesson from the ancestors whose point would become apparent when they were ready to know it, and that was that.
But it wasn’t. Not for the King.
King Electulf Whitehelm, fruit of Evard, came not from a line of great kings, nor from a noble house, nor from anywhere of any particular note. His origins are of less importance than his peak, for it is at the zenith of his power that the Monger Brood sought refuge in another realm entire. For 11 years the lowborn youth-proud barbarian laid siege to the valley of Rohm where it lay nestled between two great mountains, malcontent to maintain his station in life when the kingdom would prove ripe for the taking if one was of a military disposition. One was and it did, when at last the smoke of battle cleared and the din of ringing metal quieted; Electulf later erected a throne of iron made from the blood of his enemies and it is upon that seat he sat to watch the borders of his kingdom stretch ever further.
Under Electulf the Borderless the peaceful, hardy Röhmens slowly but surely became a people of warfare and conquest, their farms and kitchen witchery little more than remnants of a bygone era. City after city fell to the Whitewulfe of Whitehelm, a sea of marble arms swept by a blizzard of helms twisted into the fearsome visage of an alabaster hound with its ears pointed and poised to assess both prey and predator; in the years since this time has been referred to only as the Marbletide, the white tidal wave of Electulf’s war machine swallowing father and spitting out son while wives wept and daughters despaired. It seemed the Whitewulf could not be defeated as marble spread across the map, but he would come to know its taste in the time of Queen Vigilantia of Havenhold and her faithful champion, Hierax, for when the king set his eyes upon her lands atop Mount Maor to the west Vigilantia accomplished what no man could and brought Electulf low.
On the coldest night in 100 years which history calls Whiteveil and with silver censers in hand her scouts came to the valley of Röhm and set themselves as watchmen along its borders, releasing thick clouds of pale grey smoke through which her waiting warriors poured from all sides like specters through the manufactured veil, as if Death himself did haunt their every step and forward, ever forward the only choice. Cloaked in shadow and silk they moved over and through the valley as does the storm on its approach. Before any alarm could be raised the throats of Röhm’s unlucky sentries were slit, the barred entry gates of its capital Whitehelm flung wide, and hell unleashed upon the jewel in Röhm’s crown.
The Whiteveil Ambush is remembered primarily in fits and starts, flashes of light and a clamor resounding, the milk-white air occasionally beset with scarlet bloodmist and a snowfall of bone fragment, but for all her efficiency in the shedding of blood Queen Vigilantia was not without reason or mercy: none but those directly engaged in combat suffered harm, all orphaned children were taken into Havenhold’s embrace, and when at last she stood before King Electulf with the razor’s edge of her blade beneath his haughty chin, she issued a warning:
“Come not for Havenhold, good king. Raise your banners and ride hard to Howlinghearth or Fellsong, send scouts to Springtide’s Reach and Winter’s Respite, conquer all that lies to the North and the East and the South, but know the West belongs to me and your whitewulfe will find no welcome there but the grave.”
There the Queen and her army of Heartwardens left humbled Electulf and melted back into the fog which seemingly birthed them, no trace of their presence but crimson footprints in the snow.
Electulf could not abide this insult. Worse than the damage to his kingdom was the damage to his pride, above which he held nothing else; For a fortnight after the Whiteveil Ambush he did not sleep, plagued by the Queen’s insinuation that he could not rise to the challenge of the mountain kingdom or its high-altitude fortress of Dead Man’s Heart. What had been meant as mercy turned to vinegar in Electulf’s hand, and he began to plan his assault: while Rohm held the advantage in numbers and connections to the scattered barbarian tribes of Europe, Havenhold’s geographical advantage could not be ignored, nor could its varied and preferential sightlines that spanned for miles in every direction, which would not allow them to make their way up-mountain in secret, nor its paper-thin air, in which Rohm’s warriors were not practiced, nor its height in tandem with the angle of its incline, which would leave any and all who tried to advance sitting ducks for a volley of arrows. Even to the most unseasoned of eyes, an uphill battle to a fortified and well-rested army could not be won outright.
Electulf elected to take the mountain as he had taken his own kingdom:
One step at a time.
The fires at the base of the mountain burned all night and all day, melting the snow as it went and enshrouding the high-altitude fortress in acrid black smoke, Electulf having harnessed the ability to make his own spring during the lingering frost, and it is plain to any left that still remember that when the first sunstarved and color-leached grasses poked their heads through the cracked earth and into view that the villages of Falentien’s Scar, Fool’s Hollow, Lovelantern, Wisdom’s Waste, and the Queenswatch who held the gap at Banrighrean Pass stood no chance against the Whitewulfe, let alone their conqueror king. Vigilantia gave not an inch more ground, mounting archers on the ramparts to keep the wash of Rohmen soldiers at low tide and sending hunting parties down-mountain to destroy their redoubts as quickly as they could construct the temporary fortifications if not before they could lay their foundations at all, and both sides settled in to wait out the rest of the Blackthorn Winter of 921.
Vigilantia had not risen to her station without an equal measure each of hindsight and foresight and thus had dried meat and grain stores enough to withstand another 20 winters, but as the crimson stain of of hubris and subjugation slowly crawled toward Dead Man’s Heart as ink traveling across parchment she despaired for her people, for they bore the weight of her choices. To her younger brother the Prince Falentien she took her concerns and, laying them at his feet, asked him to walk with her a while beyond the boundaries of their fortress.
The winds whipped the snow into a froth as the two carried aimlessly on, twin figures in armor of platinum and mother of pearl slipping in and out of a vortex of crystal and snowflake and ice, the carefully punctured and filigreed cutouts above the breastplate’s heart not visible from behind but no less striking for the glittering cluster of Merovingian garnet punched into its scalloped edges; the honey-haired queen slight in form with dangerously navigable curves and twined arm in arm with the tall, tender-hearted prince, chocolate of hair and lean of build, both with eyes like the first frost at the very dawn of men, little more than ghosts in fog at 1000 paces from Dead Man’s front door.
“What kind of ruler am I, Falentien, if my people are broken over the back of my pride? Electulf would have his war and Havenhold alike and I fear I have only created an enemy where might have been a friend.” The low, musical voice of the queen was hoarse with but no less sweet for its 40 winters, and now held a note of strain.
“He would have come, Vigil, as he came for Daybreak and the Windswept Gate. Perhaps we might not have fared as poorly as Masgream or Carantania, thank Angharad, but we would have perished on these slopes as surely as Warmia Loneoath and Locus Battlehorn and left our people entirely defense against assimilation. Instead we lived to fight another day and, if we are very lucky, another winter. I consider that a victory, my good Queen Sister.”
Falentien’s voice spoke of warmth and comfort even as the temperature plummeted further still, hearkening to a lovingly-tended fire and well-tended roof as if the very breath leaving his body were steam, all light and crackling flame where he grinned and spun on his heel to face his sister, “I would be troubled too, if I were Electulf - we have the best view for a thousand leagues and you’ve just done him the kindness of reminding him his great kingdom lies in its shadow-”
As quickly as it had flickered to life the flame snuffed out.
A glittering red outline against mirrorshined platinum were the last Vigilantia saw of her brother, his steam, or his fire as a sudden swift gust of wind caught his cloak. Between one blink and the next, time slowing to a wounded crawl, his boots slipped in the lather of powder at their ankles and he tipped backward , tumbling headfirst down Mount Maor’s steep southern face without so much as a cry.
Where many would have considered him lost to the elements and mourned accordingly, Queen Vigilatia was not just any regent. One blink, perhaps two blinks after Falentien slid from sight, Vigilantia slid into action: without concern for kingdom or enemy approaching her doorstep or her own life she sprinted ten feet, twenty feet, thirty, dropping onto her back a hair’s breadth before the speed accumulated beyond her control and diving after her kindred.
They fell.
For an age they fell, a pair of warm-blooded dervishes awhirl in a maelstrom of glacial wind and unforgiving stone. Gripping to consciousness with cold-white fingertips, Vigilantia distantly heard the fresh rhubarb crack of splitting bone and only loosely associated it with the bloom of heat in her left shoulder - or was it her right? No matter. Urgency pushed sensation to the background. She must stay awake and she must not lose sight of Falentien, ragdoll-limbed, already half a league ahead as if spirited away on some great invisible wing and getting further still. There was no getting around it, drifting lazily between her ears with nowhere else it needed to be for the moment: f there was to be any hope of catching up to him before he reached the bottom and perhaps even his own end, she would have to surrender. With a last fleeting glimpse granted by the vortex, little more than a St. Elmo’s Fire of scarlet and silver appearing now and then and vanishing silently again, Vigilantia of Havenhold closed her eyes and gave herself to the wind.
Without sight or sound she tumbled forever, buffeted by gust or gravity or both, picking up speed and velocity. Pain sharp as the honed edge of a beloved blade lanced through skull and Vigilantia sank into darkness, unknowing and unfeeling to the edges of boulders and jagged corners of pack ice that greeted her on her flight ever downward. Had the darkness been less absolute it would have comforted her to know that she came to a stop beside and because of Falentien lying in a crumpled heap at the base of the southern face, but it was not for she or he to know where they fell or how it was that they came to consciousness in soft golden grass in the realm of spring eternal. Knowing would come later.
Waking must come first.
Of the same mind was Angharad Goldenhand, Queen Rampant of Ithir Orga - her own fall downmountain had of course been far more straightforward, but things are always simpler in hindsight, particularly when hindsight reaches back some 4,000 years.
So Angharad Goldenhand turned her golden gaze toward the past even as her hands worked with lethal efficiency in the present, feeling for a familiar pattern of splintered limbs and chips of bone trapped beneath the skin as if she could gather them all up in her hands and press them back into an unbroken whole.
