Waydren/Books/Druid of the Spire

Preface

I closed my last account with a full quiver and a clear target. I named the Heralds the rightful rulers of Elanthia. I wrote it plainly. I believed it.

Eight years have passed since I set down that pen. I do not apologize for the wait. Wisdom takes time. A tracker who loses the trail does not run in circles. He sits, and watches, until the ground speaks again.

Every hunter misreads the signs at least once. The fortunate ones live long enough to say so.

The tracks I followed were real. The Heralds tended Elanthia That Was. Dragons, Druids, and Empathic Man shaped Primal Elanthia together. Elanthia showed us this, and I do not doubt her.

My error was not in reading the prints. My error was in judging the animal that left them. I saw the length of its stride and called it noble. I never asked what it ate.

Since that writing, fire fell from the sky four times. Four times a lifesculpted spire rose where a village stood. The same spires seen through the eyes of Elanthia closed over Knife Clan, Wolf Clan, Tiger Clan, and Dirge. Most inside had no hand in the sorcery that drew the Heralds’ eye. They were simply standing where the stone came down.

We mourned them. Every one. We were wrong to. Adventurers and Immortals allied to tear the encasements down. As they fell, the onlookers eyed living, scared villagers within.

A wolf that culls the sick keeps the herd strong. A hunter who snares the whole herd only to prove a point has forgotten what the herd is for.

The Heralds are gone now. The Immortals stand alone. That is the ground this book is written on.

This book is an accounting. Of what was seen. Of what I got wrong. Of where the trail turns now.

Before we set out, let us take stock of those who walked this stretch with me: Aislynn, Allye, Anuril, Casari, Damoone, Golameth, Hanryu, Illiya, Karthor, Kerennya, Kethrai, Leilanie, Lexxa, Lupdels, Nawain, Sarugar, Shaylynne, Valynn, Vaerek, and Zersha.

And a second list, for those who warned me and were right to. Golameth, who took my inkpot and walked with both eyes open. Saragos, who asked whether any gardener lets every plant grow. Dasheek and Crobin, who asked whether one vision was enough to build a creed upon. A hunter who listens only to those who agree with him walks off a cliff in good company. Thank you. Every one of you.

The trail forks ahead. Let us walk it.

Fire from the Sky

Let us begin where my last account ended, so no one mistakes where I stood.

I gave up Sorcery. My inkpot, and the runes it held, sat in Golameth’s keeping. I told a gathering of Rangers and Empaths that we side with the Heralds. I said that if anyone stood between us and Elanthia That Was, my bow had a clear target. I meant every word.

Those were my tracks. I will not hide them now.

I was not present for what came next. I was deep in the wilds, and word reached me the way word reaches any hunter far from town. Late and secondhand. A tracker arrives after the animal has passed. Reading what it left behind is the work. So it is with much of this book.

On the 9th day in the month of Lirisa the Archer in the year 450, another attempt was made to open a way into the Null Prison and bring home the five who were taken. Valenal and Unaka were among those present. The attempt failed. The sorcery worked that night tore something loose. Something formed, and the Heralds turned their eyes toward it.

Fire fell west of Crossing. When the smoke cleared, Knife Clan was gone from sight, sealed inside a spire of living wood. No door. No window. No way in or out.

Those who were there described it to me, and I knew the shape before they finished. I had seen it in Elanthia’s own memory. A spire of twisting branches, growing inward, a lattice for life. I had perched upon one as a bird, in vision, and looked out over a forest of them. I called that place home in my last book. I did not expect to hear of one again with a village sealed inside.

We believed the people of Knife Clan were dead. I believed it too.

Here was the first wrong note on the trail. I did not stop for it. A single odd print does not change the animal. A hunter who abandons a trail at every strange mark never finishes one. So I told myself, and I kept walking.

A wolf that culls the sick keeps the herd strong. I had not yet seen a wolf take a whole village.

The Messenger's Last Word

On the 21st day in the month of Lirisa the Archer, Asildu came to the spire over Knife Clan.

You will remember Asildu from my last account. Breath of the Heralds. He joined the link of Ranger and Empath when we Beseeched Elanthia to Reveal, and through him she showed us Elanthia That Was. I called him Dragonkin that night. I offered him my Staff and my Bow. I will not pretend otherwise.

I was not there for what followed. Those who were tell it this way.

Asildu stood before the spire and named it the price of ignored warnings. He had told us not to work Sorcery. We had not listened. Here was the cost, grown up out of the earth for all to see.

Adventurers pressed him. They asked him to speak to the Heralds on our behalf. He shouted to the sky instead. A meteor answered, and Wolf Clan was sealed.

They killed him for it. As he died, he asked the Heralds to avenge their messenger. Another meteor answered, and Tiger Clan vanished behind a wall of green.

Let us stop and examine what was done.

One man shouted, and a village was taken. One man died, and another village was taken. Hundreds who never heard his warning, never worked a spell, never raised a blade against him, paid for both. We believed them dead. We mourned.

On the night of the Reveal, Saragos asked me how I squared what we had seen with Asildu’s own word that the Heralds do not much care for us. I had no good answer then. I have one now. They do not.

Asildu did not stay dead. He was raised, and raised again. Each time he returned more monstrously shaped than the last. Even at the Reveal his skin had begun to change. When Larasa offered an Empath’s touch, he told her he was what he was, at this point, and had come to accept it. I took that for courage. I now believe it was the butcher's bill coming due.

Each time he rose, he wore less of himself. That is what their service costs a man.

I pledged him my Bow. The Heralds made that pledge hard to keep.

The Gardener's Hunger

On the 37th day in the month of Lirisa the Archer, we gathered in the Eik Wood, near ground where Sorcery had been worked, to mend what we could.

This one I witnessed. I led it.

The plan was simple. Two Beseech rituals had shown us that Elanthia was wounded. Elementalists had long used Othersight to pierce the boundaries between planes, to drive holes and build bridges. Lupdels, Sorrow Seeker, and Anuril, Aether Weaver, would turn that sight to the opposite purpose. Find the wound. Stitch it shut. Rangers and Empaths would link to them, and to Elanthia, and serve as the conduit between.

Asildu stood among us. He had risen once already.

Before we began, Kethrai spoke. He spoke of gangrene, and the surgeon who takes the limb to save the patient. Of the farmer who burns healthy crops in a wide margin around the blight. Of the herder who culls the healthy with the sick. Pain, he said, to prevent ruin. The Heralds’ actions had grown drastic, and we should read that as a measure of the danger.

I nodded along. Kethrai was right. He was right in a way I did not want to hear until later. The surgeon takes the arm to save the body. No one asks the arm.

We gave our gifts. I knelt and planted an oak seed. Life is returned. We honor the Garden.

Then Lupdels listened, and Anuril looked, and they found nothing. The Aether appeared whole. We came to stitch a wound and found the skin healed over. Whatever cut it, cut it long before our grandfathers’ grandfathers.

But Elanthia was not finished with us. What follows is the vision she gave, shortened to its bones:

Elanthia lingers at the edge of your senses. A spire of living wood spans two rivers inside a ring of tall trees. An orange dragon settles at its foot, folds itself low, and becomes a woman. You look down at small hands. She lays her palm on your brow, and you know her words without hearing them: “You will be one of my Gardeners.”

Centuries pass in moments. You shape creation, and every working leaves you hungrier. No stream of mana is ever enough. At last you cut into the strands that guard the plane and pull new mana through from beyond. The hunger quiets.

She returns. Rejection. Failure. Her touch unmakes you, and what remains is bound to a speck of dirt in a beam of light, held in a null prison, watching your work wither.

She makes new creations, warded against rot. Something is beckoned through. War follows, and one of them speaks a word of terrible meaning. The green world becomes a wasteland.

Let us stop and examine what was shown.

I confess that on the night, I understood almost none of it. I said so plainly: abject confusion. Time has given me a better read.

Here is what I take from it. The Gardeners were partners. When they failed, they were not corrected. They were caged. And when the rot came, the answer was not a cure. It was fire across the whole field.

Some hunters take a deer with one arrow. Others set the forest ablaze to drive it out. Both eat. Only one has a forest left.

Note the prison, too. A null prison, holding one who had erred. Our five sat in the Null Prison still. I did not yet know what to make of that. I set it down here so you can track it with me.

The Snare Tightens

On the 13th day in the month of Shorka the Cobra in the year 450, adventurers gathered to repeat the very experiment worked on the night the five were taken. The same Sorcery, the same steps, in hopes the trail would show more on a second pass.

I was not there. This, too, I tell from the sign others left.

As the energies rose, Meraud came. What those present saw, as it was told to me:

Time slows. The air turns gold, and every sound falls away. A hooded figure in midnight black stands before you, his staff crackling with power. You cannot see his face. A great black wolf steps forward, cocks its head, and grins, its tail wagging.

The figure tells you that your pushing weakens Them. “You fight for Us,” he says, “and We are grateful.” The wolf barks and leaps for joy.

He strikes his staff to the ground. A silver haze spills out and fades in crackles of starlight, and the world feels strangely slippery. Man and wolf are gone.

Let us stop and examine what was shown.

Grateful. As a general is grateful to the soldiers he spends. Watch the wolf. It wags because it has been praised. A hound is praised for driving the deer toward its master’s bow. The praise is real. So is the leash.

Then something I will not hide. For a breath, the Sorcery worked. Those present felt a calm wash over the land. The wild storms stilled. They felt a sense of Balance. I was not there, and I will not tell them what they felt. I will only say that I do not trust a calm I did not earn. A still pond can hide a pike.

The calm did not last. Those present felt themselves watched, with nowhere to hide. Then came a voice. The Heralds. They told the gathering it had learned nothing. They named us a virulence. They called the Immortals’ aid a filthy intercession, and promised we would be made to understand. Disgust and hatred pressed every onlooker to their knees.

The sky split. Meteors fell on Dirge. Four spires now. Four villages we believed dead.

Here is the sign I could no longer step around. Each power calls the other "Them." Meraud calls us "allies" and means "hounds." The Heralds call us a "sickness" and mean it. Neither has a word for us but hound or sickness.

Kethrai’s gangrene had a patient after all. Us.

Sixteen days later, adventurers set upon the spire that held Knife Clan, meaning to break it open. Drakes came to defend it. The binding thickened under every blow.

Pull on a snare and it bites deeper. That is what a snare is for.

Mark this carefully: drakes defended the cage. I wear dragon magic in my own skin. The scales of the Cycle. The flow of the river across the Sky. Some will ask whether I should cast them off. I will not. Not every dragon is a Herald. The Life Dragons who gave those gifts still live in harmony with Elanthia. The scales on my arm are a dragon’s gift. A gift is not a leash.

And the townsfolk of Knife Clan, Wolf Clan, Tiger Clan, and Dirge? They worked no Sorcery. They raised no hand against Asildu. A snare does not care whose leg it closes on.

Reflection

Much has been written thus far. Let us stop on the ridge and look back down the trail before we climb further. The ground we have walked:

• The Heralds tended Elanthia That Was. That has not changed. Nothing Elanthia showed us was false.
• Lifesculpted spires, once homes, now hold Knife Clan, Wolf Clan, Tiger Clan, and Dirge. At this point on the trail, every one of us believed those inside were dead.
• The Heralds answer rot by cutting, burning, and sealing, whoever stands nearby.
• The Gardeners were partners once. When they failed, they were unmade and imprisoned.
• The Heralds’ own messenger was raised from death again and again, and came back less himself each time.
• The Immortals are interlopers still. Nothing seen has changed that, Meraud’s thanks least of all

A wise reader is questioning many things by now. Is the Gardener’s prison empty? Did the Heralds ever mean to share the garden with us, or only with those they made? What is owed to those caught in a snare they never saw set?

The ground ahead is steeper than I thought. The trail is clearer than I wanted.

The Unseen Chorus

On the 37th day in the month of Shorka the Cobra in the year 450, we returned to Arhat’s Tower, where we had first Beseeched Elanthia to Find. I was there for this. I led it.

Three times we had sought Elanthia. To Find. To Reveal. To Mend. Three times she had answered with the past.

I told those gathered the truth before we began. I confess that I am conflicted. The visions were compelling. The Heralds had stood beside Elanthia That Was. But the present cost was high. Heralds and Immortals, both pressing toward their own ends. Both leaving damage across our Home. So we did not ask to see Elanthia That Was. We asked to see the desires of Elanthia That Is.

Aislynn led the Empaths. I led the Rangers. We gave our gifts. I drew my axe across my forearm and let three drops fall to the dirt. Life is returned. We thank you for your provision. Then we gave ourselves into Elanthia’s embrace, and asked her to show us her heart. She did. Here it is, shortened to its bones:

Your sight dims as you reach for Elanthia. The link is duller than before, less raw, and that dullness lets you see farther than any single moment.

Epochs pass in moments. The primal world gives way to crops, then to cities. Through it all, something is always present: one guiding force with many voices. Guardians, drinking pure mana in vast quantity, shaping the rise and fall of peoples and the drift of continents with small gestures spread across thousands of years.

You feel the breath of an unseen chorus with every stroke of creation, and the mana that ebbs with each. Gardeners are made to aid the Guardians in smaller, steadier work. But the Gardeners are flawed. They mix streams of mana to widen their own reach, and draw in beings the Guardians never meant to come.

Each sorcerous working leaves a trail that scatters the streams the Guardians need. Then a new power arrives, with its own font of creation and its own kind of mana, and new shapers who think nothing of mixing it with ours. With every act of their will, the Guardians grow more distant.

The unseen chorus changes its tone. The newcomers shape without understanding, and starve the Guardians of the lands they tended so long. In a single act of will, the Guardians answer. The newcomers are diminished, bound by boundaries and rules. They persist anyway, pursuing their own plans and shepherding their own flocks.

Let us stop and examine what was shown.

The first three visions came like a warm hand on the shoulder. This one came like a ledger. Shaylynne called it harsh. Kethrai said it felt more distant, and that the distance let us see more. Both were right.

The Guardians are the Heralds. I read it so then, and I read it so now.

Note what they are doing in that vision. They are not tending us. They are managing us, the way a warden manages a herd: thin it here, move it there, let it starve when the grass is wanted elsewhere. Elanthia showed me a garden. She never told me I was a flower in it.

The Gardeners again, the same flawed partners Elanthia showed us in the Eik Wood. And Sorcery, thinning the very streams the Guardians lived on.

The newcomers are the Immortals. A shepherd did not make the sheep. He claims them all the same.

Read now, knowing how it ended, one line matters more than all the rest. The interlopers persisted. They outlasted the Guardians.

That night I also said the Heralds and the Dragons were one and the same. I spoke too broadly. Not every dragon is a Herald.

I was not the only reader of that sign, and I will not pretend my read is the only one. Zersha held that the Guardians and the Heralds may not be one and the same. Lupdels warned that we had more names than groups, and that an escaped Gardener might wear a Herald’s face. Nawain asked whether the newcomers were the Immortals alone, or every god of every people. Good questions, all. I hold my read the way I hold a bowstring: firm, and ready to let go.

But I hold it.

The Snares Spring Open

On the 17th day in the month of Uthmor the Giant in the year 450, the spires came down.

I was not there for this either. Adventurers and Immortals, working together, tore them open. Knife Clan, Wolf Clan, Tiger Clan, and Dirge still stood. Dirge had sat sealed for forty-four days. Knife Clan, longer still.

And as the spires fell, the onlookers saw the people inside. Frightened. Living.

We had mourned them. Every one. We were wrong to.

On the 5th day in the month of Dolefaren the Brigandine, the Immortals lent their hand again. Ayrell, Mazrian, Miskton, and Navesi were brought out of their cells in the Null Prison. Dantia, too, came home. All five who were taken are free.

Let us stop and examine what was done. There are three hard truths here, and I will not step around any of them.

The first. The Heralds did not kill. They caged. A live snare, not an arrow. A hunter sets a live snare when he wants the catch whole. Someone wanted these catches alive. I would like to know what for. A lesson? Leverage? Patience? I have not found that track.

The second. The Heralds let a whole land grieve, and said nothing. Families mourned kin who were still breathing. A warning no one can hear is not a warning. It is a punishment. We mourned the living. That grief belongs on the Heralds’ ledger, not ours.

The third. The Immortals’ hands were on the ropes. At the spires, and again at the Null Prison. I say it plainly, both times. A liar can still lift the log off a trapped man. It does not make him honest. And Meraud had already told us whose war this was.

Twice the Immortals lifted the log. I will say so twice. It still does not make the forest theirs.

Now the pattern comes clear. A Gardener bound in a null prison. Five of ours in the Null Prison. Four villages in four spires. The Heralds’ first answer is not the arrow. It is the cage.

The freed have not spoken of their time inside. I do not press them. Some sign is silence.

The Forester Falls

The war ended as the year 453 turned to 454.

I was not there. I had turned my back on both Herald and Immortal. While the powers met, I was on my knees in ground the war had left dead, planting a field of young trees where devastation had held sway.

I heard the news the way the forest hears a storm on the far side of a mountain. A long rumble, and then a silence that tells you more than the thunder did. The Immortals had defeated the Heralds. The Heralds are no more.

Let us stop and examine what was done.

I did not cheer. The cages were the Heralds’ work. So was the First Garden. Both truths stand. I do not mourn the cages. I mourn the first hands that planted the forest. A man can hold both.

Meraud said it at Dirge: "you fight for Us." The war ended the way Meraud wanted, and mortal hands helped win it. We were the hounds that drove the deer. The masters have their kill.

Here is what the Immortals won. The only god-like beings left on this Plane are the ones who came through the wound. They told their faithful they made the world. They told them they raised the continents and shaped the races from beasts of the field. No rival remains to say otherwise. The forester is dead. The poachers hold the woods now, and they have told everyone they planted it.

But some still remember. Elanthia remembers; She showed us four times. The Leviathans remember; they watched the great revisions. The Kather remember, in their tale of Sun Dragons and upstarts. The Life Dragons remember. And now this book remembers.

They revised the world once. They will not revise it in me.

The forester is gone. The poachers hold the woods. The woods still need tending, and my hands already move and mend. While the gods fought over who owned the forest, I was planting one. That is how mortals fight for Elanthia: seed by seed, on ground the war left dead. Every gift we ever gave at a Beseech, grown into a field.

Life is returned. I said it at every ritual. That day I said it with a spade.

The Fork in the Trail

Every trail forks eventually. This one forked years ago. It has taken me this long to see which way each branch ran.

Here is the distinction this whole book has been walking toward. The forest is not the forester. Elanthia is not her keepers. To be for Elanthia is not to be for the Heralds. It never was.

The Heralds were makers and keepers. I wrote that in my last book, and I hold to it still. But planting a forest does not grant the right to cage every village that grows in it. They were not the rightful rulers of those who live here. They are gone now. The judgment stands.

Anmuva taught us this long before I could hear it. He showed us the bloodthorns of the Vela’Tohr: life that grows where it should not, that suffers, and yet thrives. He called it hope. Not weed. Hope. Saragos said it plainer on the night of the Reveal. We may be what was not pulled up before it could take root. Let us be worth the root.

Anmuva taught us something else, through a tall tale about Tolle and a field of carnivorous snails. I gave my answer that night, and I give it again. Tolle could have waited, and perished. He could have killed them all, and broken the Balance. Instead he walked the knife’s edge between the two.

The Immortals waited. They took up the tending of the wounds and never did it in earnest. The Heralds struck at everything: the cage for whole villages, fire for whole fields. Anmuva taught us a third way. The knife’s edge.

Now the Immortals. They came through the wound and claimed to have made the body. They helped free the clans and the prisoners, and I name that debt. I pay it in honesty, not in allegiance. They are the only god-like beings left, and only Elanthia remains to contradict their story. Crows on another hunter’s kill, telling every traveler they brought the stag down.

Sorcery. I stay clear of it. Not out of loyalty to the Heralds; they are gone. Because the wounds are real, and Elanthia bears them.

Dragon magic. I keep it. Those are gifts, and I use them for what they are. Not every dragon is a Herald. The Life Dragons still live in harmony with what is. I will follow their trail.

The cages are open now. The prisoners are home. The clans stand. What remains is living beneath the only power left without bending the knee to it.

One trail more, which I will only mark here. On the night we sought Clarity, Kerennya asked whether those of us who care for Elanthia ought to answer for the damage Sorcery does. Golameth and Malkien had come to the same thought on their own. Three hunters reading the same sign from three directions. That trail is for another book.

The forest is not the forester. I serve the forest.

Breaking Camp

I closed my last book with these words:

The Heralds are the rightful rulers of Elanthia. They guided it. Shaped it. It is theirs. Let us return to what once was.

I let them stand here, whole, so no one thinks I hide from them. They were my tracks. I made them honestly. They led me somewhere I did not mean to go.

Eight years on, I write them differently.

This is how it was. It is not how it must be.

We cannot return to what once was. Let us tend what is.

The fire is banked. The snares are checked, and empty. The ground where I slept is smoothed, so the next traveler finds no sign of me but what I choose to leave.

One thing I mean to leave. In Elanthia That Was, Dragon, Druid, and Empathic Man tended the garden together. The Heralds are gone. The garden has no keepers now but those willing to kneel in the dirt. The Life Dragons remain. So do the Druids. So do the Empaths. The partnership can stand again, with no one ruling it.

The Heralds grew spires to hold what they feared. I mean to grow one that shelters what is. Not of wood and branch, but of practice and people. The Spire I mean to grow has no bark. Its roots are how we live. Its branches are who we stand with.

The forester is gone. The forest is not. Someone must tend it, and I would rather it be us than the crows.

The quiver is still full. The trail forks. I take the one that leads Home.

Waydren Amlir
Druid of the Spire
Written on the 39th day in the month of Akroeg the Ram in the year 458