Chapter 1

"The Language of Death and After-life is frigid silence, for their words are beyond the horizons of human tongue.

But His voice, it is akin to neither that of man, nor of beast; it sounds forth like the roars of Levin, the blare of lightning, the rush of the tiding clouds, the call of the constellations of Stars and the cries of all things from beyond the visible heavens...

Makes a musing heart wonder if the voices of the thunders are truly just the battle cries or premonishing heralds of the skies that Man cannot understand"

~

It was an age when Death walked the face of the earth; few the mortals, but great their demise for Wars and Conquest held sovereignty over the heart of man that ruled the societies of all kinds. Death could never outrival Life, for without Her, He was not.

But the weight of blood that was shed called His office far more for imperialistic thirst than when His afore-appointed time was attained.

There was also the wild, apart from those starving dominion, that held stake in exhausting the lives born. Many a ravenous beast prowled through the lands, airs and seas, but the most blood-thirsty and ruthless of them all were the terrifying, fire-breathing, colossal reptiles –Dragons.

They waged carnivorous mutiny, incinerating every village or town or city they foraged, with no discernible ambition, be-cause the heist and destruction of life form had not always been the achievement of every massacre. These cold-blooded serpentine tyrants had an ulterior and more covert zeal to accomplish, when they slaughtered the species of humans, but such intentions remained mysterious at the time.

Further, the unsaid portions of these inceptions were the arcane powers vested with a few chosen out of the race of man. These, however, remained secretive for the gifted were novice to the state of innocence towards the existence of their own bestowed powers.

Death, for reasons beyond the execution of His charge, was largely riveted, like a scavenging Vulture, to the unfolding of the Chronicles that pronounced the End of Bestial Carnages and Ravages.

~

The Hyll-decantan westward Promontory,

Night without moon,

The first Thursnight of the Second month,

XXI Year of Regency

Michavel Ryder, the wakeful Knight

He surveyed in silence, his dark hood drawn deep over his face, eyes vigilantly following every detail that formed his vision: from the large expanses windswept for the eyes of the starless night sky to the most hidden nooks that dwelt in the reign of its own stillness, whilst his presence stayed eclipsed in the shadows.

The night was cold and moonless, where even his breath would betray his ambush by emerging in clouds of fog against the frigid air.

The man stood still and motionless, like a haunting gargoyle placed deeply secluded rather than at the capital of some high pillar, and continued watching, sure-footed upon rugged and unkempt rocks at the pinnacle of the promontory that overlooked the land of Tristendyre and the eastern banks of the Prussian Farriage Sea.

It was a perch wherefrom even the elusive reptiles that crept up the barks of trees couldn't dare escape the sharp surveillance of the tall and hooded man.

The whole country appeared to be a single and great composition of ancient construct: cold stone walls, floors, staircases, pillars and corridors forged the rustic exterior of the architecture with houses and towers, gravel streets and stairs aligning the narrow clefts between residences, wooden doors and windows, rusty metal railings, trellises, lattices, grilles and gates in ornamental curves and edges.

Grounds of cobblestone that built the floor roused escalating stairs, slopes and archways from the streets hither and thither; with lanterns bowing from the lampposts and torches fastened to the walls of houses to shed light for passersby. The infrastructure ascended forth to altitudinal heights into towers and roofs until the exalted, crowning peak of the Empire was held by the regal castle, which spread its grandeur over a substantial portion of mounting land, be-cause it was of aristocratic possession.

There was a mammoth bridge that emerged from the principal point of the towering castle, leading a great way into the mist of the sea, but the farther end seemed demolished and ruined to crumbles.

It was as if the massive construct had seen finer eras of vintage times, when trade and amicability had thrived between provinces here and yonder, allied by the gargantuan build. But, now, the senile remains of once the mighty Cross-Fraught stood, still strong, though barely a chance at the erstwhile fortitude, for its midriff, that made the latter edge, had peacelessly reclined into the domain of the Prussian Farriage Sea, with moss spreading its finesse over the massive and unwind columns that had once composed the pillars of the Great Bridge.

Legends and rumours had it that the gigantic Cross-Fraught Bridge had leaned into the seas when a troop of mighty Rengaulian dragons had rested their perch thereupon, after a raid that claimed an ample portion of the kingdom's worth.

Others had interpreted that a war waged oversees had claimed the poise of the bridge where mere humans had brought the fall thereof.

Though by physique, such contentions as the latter seemed irrational, controversial opinions were largely welcome, for one could never know the depth of how greatly the power of mankind is misread.

In all things gravel and iron, the land still saw its fair share of nature in the ferns and vines erupting out of ruptured stone, climbers that sprang out to carpet the surface of the walls and the height of lampposts, ungroomed roots that broke forth to establish their domain, whilst their trees stood with open arms and branches extending to the balconies or windows, undeterred, despite how unwelcomed they appeared.

There was gray and pale-yellowed cobblestone covering nearly every part of the town that laid claim on the foreign surveyor, Michavel Ryder's focus – the town of Hazenvale, closest the streams and brooks that ran south-eastward until they converged into the massive body of the proud and boundless Prussian Farriage Sea.

The town's was a rather humble presence in the grand Kingdom of Tristendyre with the seas boasting titanic conquest and wild forests, their own mastery of land mass, the mere fringes of which this town had held.

Even so, amidst the grandeur of all things scaling the roguish expanses of the face of the earth, a speck in omniscient perspective –the heart of men, had mounted such great heights of treachery that even the seas and forts could scarcely compare.

It was, however, advantageous that such treachery was hardly physical, for all the world or even the stars in heaven would not suffice to accommodate, therein, the growing greed in the conceited heart of man.

Dark, midnight eyes, which otherwise were as brown as juvenile honey at the touch of the Sun's light, stealthily gazed at the stone walls, architecture, lights and trees that made the alpine view of the town of Hazenvale, till the dusky and bare town square stole his attention for consideration.

It was no more than a large open space (void of any markets), with its stone floor and pillory, the stump of a hewn down tree for the criminal to be seated on, except in the shadowed man's vantage point, there was no criminal standing fettered to the pillory, but a victim in the game of the Regents.

~

The Town-square of Hazenvale,

Kingdom of Tristendyre,

Night without moon,

The first Thursnight of the Second month,

XXI Year of Regency

Nathan Jehu, the nesient Bishop

Cold and unsheltered, the man whose wrists and neck were locked to the Pillory breathed in silence. Longish dark hair lay wet against his toned back, drenched from the rains of earlier that evening. The shackles against his ankles were heavy and frigid, causing his feet to feel numb and cold.

He silently watched as Mister Joab Xavier, the man that lit candles for the lampposts, was gloving his hands before leaving to the next street to continue his nightly duty.

The aroma of the candles had seemed sinisterly different this night: a detail Jehu paid attention to. He was much too calm for someone who was to face his death sentence the following morning.

Criminals at the pillory were oft shamed so for reason of petty crimes. His crimes were far from petty. In all faith, they were hardly even crimes.

He was of those that censured the Frontiers of "Law" to be short of the dark realms and realms of victims; a crusader for justice, merely a man in the shadows, who had been exposing the wrongful deeds of the government. The people of Tristendyre were greatly terrified of those ruling overhead, for the men that held the throne used pulverising and deathly means of commanding such fear.

Being one who had tasted the fire himself, he needed his voice be heard. So he had chosen his quill and written of all he could find about the Regents and spread his word far across the country.

They were, however, merely as whispers against the raging roars of a Wroshmanian Dragon. The people who had received his message were enslaved by the reigning terror, far more that the faint hues of redemption.

But he continued writing his part under the guise of a nom-de-plume, "Nathan". It wasn't one entirely fresh; it was the name his parents had given him at his birth. That was, of course, before 'Jehu' was bestowed upon him, after their demise was followed by his adoption.

A fair few weeks of circulating his discoveries against the Regents was all it took for the people to shed the fears that once had them chained.

But not a large period of days had expired before the government itself had come to find of his work, and somehow traced the origin to his inkwell. Since news as this had blazed the land and challenged the Rule, the men had sought other ways to deal with him and had framed him for crimes worthy of shame and subsequent death: theft of price and ranking that could not be lightly esteemed.

To take his final breath was something he was prepared for. The purpose of awakening his people had been played, although the recipients were still faithful to their fears.

Jehu knew that none but the men on high were aware that he was the 'Nathan', who was being put to death; his sentence: in a period of ten days, the time spent on a dragon's journey hereto. At the end thereof, he would be served to their incinerating flames.

Oddly, however, his execution had been respited a fortnight and it was miraculous mercy that has left him last long enough to see the day. The man closed his eyes, head throbbing, yet nowhere to be rested.

There was nothing he was hesitant of, at the prospect of facing death; none but the safety of his young sister, Imogen.

Of everything this world had offered him in two decades and nine years, she was solely one he could trust, for even his eyes betrayed him oft-times, in the guise of a prophet's gift. The chained man had always been able to see visions out of the past or the future, but the disposition of such visions had been difficult.

His predicament was so:

In the sight of one idly watching the waters roll forth to kiss the carpet of the shore's fair sands, or the rise of waves clashing against the moss-covered rocks that lined the rim of land beyond which was only sea, there was only as much as superficial scenery to gaze at.

At closer glance, perhaps, the bubbling sea-foam that fringed each wave, the wet darkening of the sands in the shapes left at the wake of the withdrawing tide, the continuous, rippling shadows of the water dancing beneath the surface of the waves could be admired; but Jehu's eyes granted him to behold– with a pulsing premonition, the great waves renouncing their claim over the borders of land and evacuating there-from towards the bosom of the sea till the coral reefs were visible, but roaring and mounting till it stood as a large surging body that willed to assault the land's contents in a frightful tsunami, when such calamity was destined to occur.

His visions were nebulous; though, upon glancing at a certain place, he could see either the past or the future events that betided the field of his surveillance.

When such mirages plagued his sight, it was sometimes hard to tell whether it was something in the present that he was seeing or otherwise, but that would depend on the weight of the vision. Even the sight of a possible rat scurrying past when he stared at a blank corner could be a vision of one that had run by earlier, or would later, if it appears hazily.

Conveniences or inconveniences were merely as dew in the ocean of his talent, or in a finer choice of description: his power.

In fact, not a few months ago, he had seen, whilst passing the town-square, most fatally, a flash of his own battered self chained to the pillory and Jaycob, the Head Archer of the castle, with his mask covering his eyes and a scart his nose, leaning by his side, flinging the axe in hand like he was going to strike Jehu to his premature and brutal death.

~