Ariel's Tear Read online

  Ariel’s Tear

  A Tale of Rehavan

  By

  Justin Rose

  Ariel’s Tear. Copyright 2016 Justin Rose. Smashwords Edition. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission, excepting brief quotations embodied in articles, reviews, and other works. This work is also available in print format at some online retailers.

  Sing to me, nymphs of the river!

  Sing to me, sprites of the wood!

  Sing me the song of the Father,

  Who purged your lands in his blood.

  Stanza I of “The Lay of Reheuel

  Acknowledgments

  As my first published novel, Ariel’s Tear marks an exciting moment in my life, the fulfillment of a goal held for many years. Here in the book’s first pages, I wish to thank a few of the many people who have helped me reach this goal.

  Thank you

  to Anna Goodling for always being there to encourage me, for reading and critiquing every draft of every story and every novel I ever pushed at you, and for constantly believing in my abilities;

  to Abraham Feldick for the beautiful cover art that adorns this book;

  to Will LaValley for the author photograph on the rear cover;

  to all my classmates in the 2015 Professional Writing class at Pensacola Christian College, particularly Serena Rose who helped proofread this work;

  and to all those dear friends in my life who have helped foster and cultivate my love of writing during the years I’ve spent learning the craft, particularly Rebekah Cullum and Coartney Freeland.

  Table of Contents

  On Creation

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Epilogue

  From the Author

  About the Author

  On Creation

  Deep in the murk of irreality, Faeja stirred restlessly. Before the light was known, neither was the darkness. Only Faeja. Intellect breathing in the nether preceding time.

  Loneliness, a feeling then unnamed, pricked His soul, and He dreamed. Unwinding a thread of His essence, He cast it forth into the void and named it time. Eternally it grew and crept away from Him, drawing in the wake of its seconds subtle traces of Himself. Every second lessened His being which had once seemed infinite, unwinding His thread of self.

  But still he created. For He loved the newness, the brevity of current, past, and future. A frail and filtered reality beneath His former plane. Existence devoid of the eternal—a novel and ingenious beauty.

  Despite this new wonder though, loneliness persisted, a hunger unsatisfied with simple time. So Faeja drew them forth. Out of His soul He formed the Passions and the Traits to dwell in His new creation. They were beings of Faeja’s own ether, each Passion and each Trait representing an element of His fuller being. Curiosity came first, followed by Love and Malice. And then came the rest, hundreds and thousands of names now forgotten: Lust and Generosity, Cruelty and Kindness, Guile and Honesty—they slid like glass beads upon the thread of time and made their way along its course. They met with one another and mingled, each interaction altering those involved, each perception of another passion diluting the purity of he who perceived. By these dilutions, the Passions and the Traits developed into conscious beings, ruled by their first natures but broadened to encompass all emotion.

  Faeja smiled, but He desired more. He desired a stage, a reality to frame the intellects that dwelt in time. So He created matter in the form of spiraling spheres and molded bodies to house the souls of His first children.

  Ever forward, Curiosity was the first to alight upon a world in the new universe, the first to find that he could touch. And finding touch, he wanted more. He wanted to mold and to alter just as Faeja Himself had done. So Curiosity approached the throne of Faeja and begged Him for the gift of creation.

  Faeja smiled on Curiosity’s request and unbound from His own essence a small portion of His creative force, His cyntras, to give to His favored son. Curiosity, still awed with the sensation of touch, used this borrowed cyntras to create new senses that would complement touch: sight, hearing, taste, and smell. All of his fellow Passions and Traits reveled in these sensations for a time. But the matter of first creation was too uniform to long hold their fascination. They approached the throne of Faeja as a body and begged Him for more creative power.

  Pleased with Curiosity’s creations, Faeja removed all the cyntras of His being, all His creative force, and bound it into the strings of a mighty Lyre. This Lyre He handed down to His children, content to watch them play the tunes of creation.

  For a time, the universe continued in harmony. Curiosity used the Lyre to play the music of reality. With the vibrations of the strings, new melodies sprang forth from matter. Atoms and molecules multiplied and formed into elements. Stars and planets discovered their orbits and the universe began its eternal expansion outward from the Lyre. Creation was a symphony, written for the delight of its own musicians.

  Imagination alone grew discontent with Curiosity’s music. Seeing the eternal repetition of old scales and familiar chords, Imagination begged to take the Lyre that he might discover new melodies. With the Lyre, he crafted life. Plants came first, practice for the coming wonders. Then came the naiads and the dryads, spirits for the rivers and the trees. Fire Sprites rose from the notes of the lyre and fell to fester in the crust of the earth, churning the rock to liquid lava. To balance the heat of the fire sprites, water sprites dripped from heaven to people the seas and the rivers.

  And in all of this, Faeja was pleased. He descended to the thread of time and walked beside His children on their earth, critiquing the beings they had created, the crudeness of their minds and the simplicity of their motivations.

  Imagination again lifted the Lyre and struck up his former tune, gracing earth with all its beasts. But each new creation still fell short of Faeja’s desires. Tired for a time, Imagination yielded up the Lyre to his sister Love. Love played a new song, imparting feeling for the first time into the ordered music of her brothers. From her notes came the merpeople, the first race of the new earth. The merpeople were a deeply passionate race, driven by emotion before thought. Their lives were as wild as the waves of the oceans they swam in, consumed by every feeling both light and dark.

  After Love had finished, Endurance stepped to the Lyre. A perpetually silent deity, Endurance was the last Trait that any might have imagined creating. But Endurance had grown sick with watching the merpeople, disgusted by their inconstancy and subjugation to feeling. So he played his own tune, a slow, haunting melody that clung to every note till the final echoes had faded. And from his song came the minotaurs. A hardy race, they stepped forth from the rock of the mountains and peopled the land left open by the merpeople.

  Then, when the final notes of Endurance’s long dirge had faded, Curiosity once again lifted the Lyre. And he made man, a race to balance the passion of the merpeople and the strength of the minotaurs. Gifted with both high reason and deep passion, man was driven by an insatiable need for knowledge.

  After the creation of man, all of the Passions and the Traits began to understand the nature of creation and its new inhabitants. Many cried out for the Lyre. Philia created the elves, a tribal race bound by familial affection. Introversion created the dwarves, a race given to solitude and art.

  In time, each of these races began to flourish, to grow and to multiply, taught and reared by the Passions and Traits they most admired. The Passions a
nd the Traits became gods—rulers of races and dispensers of law. The world blossomed under the ever flowing music of creation.

  However, the Passions and the Traits were not perfect beings. Though modeled after the perfections of Faeja, their natures were subject to corruption; and experience altered their forms, letting their purity fall into distortion and entropy.

  Malice, twisted by his association with Desire, grew tired of the simple, pastoral world which his brothers and sisters had created and crafted two new races: the eelings and the goblins. Beings of hatred and violence, these new races ravaged the rest of creation with the invention of war.

  Grieved at the violence of His children, Faeja repented His gift of the Lyre and drew it back to himself. He sealed up the music of creation and bound His children within it, cutting them off from all reality outside of matter.

  After the banishment, the peoples of the earth all but forgot Faeja and the time when He walked among them. The Passions and the Traits became lawless, struggling for dominance to fill the void left by Faeja. Their created races became armies in battles for lordship, and the Passions and the Traits became contenders in a battle for godhood.

  Despite the removal of the Lyre, cyntras flowed freely through all of creation in the centuries following the banishment, leftover melodies from the first songs. Directionless, this power sparked creation wherever emotion reached climax. In battlefields and weddings, new creations sprang forth. Whenever a being felt an emotion in perfect sync with that emotion’s Passion, whenever a being developed a trait in perfect sync with that Trait itself, cyntras became a usable power.

  In all this time, the Passions and the Traits struggled for dominance, maneuvering the peoples of creation like pawns on a chessboard, toppling nations for personal grievances. It was not until the day of the first extinction that these minor deities finally repented of their struggles. The stories vary on what race died, but the scholars tell us that on that day Grief became the most powerful Passion the world had ever seen. So many tears fell, both of the Passions and of the peoples, that Grief harnessed the full cyntras of creation. Full of anguish and righteous indignation, Grief used his newfound power to bind all of the most powerful Passions and Traits in prisons beneath the earth, protecting creation from their lust.

  Grief established a covenant with his remaining brothers and sisters to never again reign in the affairs of their creation. He guided the many peoples to a rich and fertile land he called Rehavan and left them there to carve their history.

  Prologue

  A strange hush hung over the festive nighttime streets of Candeline. The circus had come, and gaiety reigned in the tiny village. Above the peeling paint of the carts and the glorious moth-eaten stripes of the great circus tents, flickering candles dripped their tallow and wax in the dust of Candeline’s streets. A single clown wandered these streets carrying a candle-snuffer on the tip of a long pole. He was a gnome, dressed in a grotesque approximation of a human Guard member, his wide, leathery features framed by a cerulean hood. He whistled as he walked the otherwise silent streets, shuffling in a peculiar, exuberant little dance. He spun a quick circle around his planted snuffer and then shot it out from his arm, neatly snuffing a candle that hung from a nearby pole.

  Pastry crumbs and bones from fresh-fried fowl littered the dusty road, remnants of the evening’s festivities. The gnome picked his way over them carefully, still dancing to his own music. It was his favorite time of the circus. His act was over, all of the other performers were sleeping in their beds, and he had the streets to himself, free from his identity as a mere entertainer, free from the laughter and gawking of the audience, many of whom had never before seen a gnome. The people of the village were all gathered together in the big tent, hundreds of silent farmers and miners listening in rapt attention to the circus’s most-valued performer: the story-man.

  No one knew how old the story-man really was. His withered, dried-apple face had seemed ancient when the gnome first joined the circus as a child. The story-man had no name or history, just his self-ascribed title—but he knew things, things old and beautiful and strange that no one could know, stories lost in the folds of time’s cloak or buried in the vaults of death. Some said that he had sold his soul to Ingway for longevity and knowledge. Others that he was immortal. The gnome believed none of these things, but he still spread the rumors. They were good for business. He shot out his snuffer again and neatly extinguished a flame. He would stop thinking about the story-man now, about the circus. It was his time, the time when he was more than just a living novelty. He whistled and danced on down the streets as they darkened beneath his snuffer.

  Under the canopy of the big tent, the story-man sat on a small stool in the center of a dimly lit stage. Spreading before him, a sea of faces stared upward, waiting for the coming tale. His hands spoke as much as his mouth as he began, flowing in rhythms that swelled and subdued the expanse of his tale, that dulled his sharper inflections to render them palatable and heightened his monotones with emotion.

  “Tonight we begin a tale nearly as old as the Iris of the human empire, a tale that was ancient when the hills around you had never felt the cut of a plow.

  “All of you have heard the name of Reheuel, a name so steeped in legend that the stories obscure the man who lived them. The youngest child beneath this canvas tent could tell me the deeds of Reheuel’s descendants, that favored family of immortals. But I wonder how many could tell me aught of the man behind the family.

  “We honor Reheuel because he was the first immortal, because his descendants so faithfully served the Iris of the empire, forming the Guards, the Keepers, and the Healers. But I wonder if any of us pause to ask whether the man would crave this reverence, a man who denounced the empire for imperialism.

  “Tonight I wish to reach back to a time before the Hunter Wars had ended the reign of the immortals, to a time when the Iris of the human empire was still fresh and young. For that is the time when the immortal bloodline was first born, when Reheuel first entered the pages of history, pages he would then frequent for so very long.

  “In this distant year, Reheuel dwelt as Captain of the Guards in the small town of Gath Odrenoch, a settlement carved from the foothills of the Gath mountains . . .”

  Chapter 1

  A tiny, glowing figure cut a swirling arc across the surface of a still pond, her bare feet leaving a trail of tiny ringlets in her wake. In front of her, a dragonfly flitted, its translucent wings casting back a light wind that stirred the fairy’s hair. She laughed and reached out, stroking the dragonfly’s scaly body. It veered sharply and raced away, leaving the fairy to seek other mischief.

  On a nearby hill, a young girl stifled a giggle as she watched. Her older brother laid a warning hand on her shoulder. “Shh! You’ll frighten her.”

  The little girl nodded vigorously and sealed her lips, drawing comically hard lines over her round features.

  Her brother glanced away over the hill and then whispered, “Look! You can see the city now. The sun is just high enough. Do you see it, Veil, that silver shape on the horizon?”

  Veil’s eyes sparkled. “I see it, Hefthon! I see it—the Fairy City!”

  Her brother smiled. “Tell me what it looks like.”

  Veil thought for a moment and then said slowly, “It looks like—more.”

  * * *

  “Dust is a sign of idleness,” Tressa said, sweeping a feather-tipped wand over her husband’s book case.

  Reheuel coughed as his wife continued flicking dust about his study. “And dusting is a sign of avoiding more worthwhile occupations.”

  Geuel, Reheuel’s oldest son, glanced up from the pages of a worn book. “Oh, Father, please don’t.”

  Tressa shook her duster at her husband menacingly. “Cleanliness means gentility! And I shall not have my husband, the newly appointed Captain of the Guards, living like a withered scribe in a dusty cubbyhole.”

  “But he’s nearly fifty,” Geuel called from his se
at near the window. “Pretty soon he will be a withered scribe.”

  Reheuel glanced at his son and raised an eyebrow. “Since when do you get off with such comments, rogue? I raised you better.”

  Geuel set aside the fencing manual he had been reading and shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. Maybe you’ve just been letting things slip in your old age.”

  Tressa nodded with a gently mocking smile. “It has been terrible, darling, seeing you fade these past few years.”

  Reheuel laughed and wrapped his arms around his wife, lifting her from the floor. He swung her around him in a tight circle, clutching her waist in his strong hands. “Fade? Do you call this fading?” He lowered her down softly till she hung over the floor in his arms and planted his lips on hers, laughing through his kisses.

  She laughed also and hung in his arms, staring at his face. “Sure you can hold me here, old man?” she whispered.

  Geuel rolled his eyes. “And that’s my queue. I’ll be in the stables with Hefthon.” He planted his hands on the window ledge and began to launch himself outside.

  “Use the door!” his mother shouted after him. “We need to be dignified.”

  Geuel landed lightly in the grass outside and strode toward the stables, shivering slightly in the evening chill. He was tall, twenty-one with a narrow but athletic build and dark, curly hair that helped widen his otherwise narrow features. As he entered the stable, he heard his younger siblings, Hefthon and Veil, chattering to the horses. Geuel stroked the nose of his charger, Iridius, and watched his siblings as they brushed their horses’ coats. “Where did you ride?” he asked Veil.

  The little girl grinned with ill-concealed excitement as she recited dutifully, “Nowhere special, just around the farms north of town.”

  Geuel laughed. “Don’t bother, Veil. Leave the lying to your brother. He’s better suited to it.”