Prelude (The Songs of Aarda Book 1) Read online

  Prelude

  The Songs of Aarda, Volume 1

  K. R. Schultz

  Published by K. R. Schultz, 2019.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  PRELUDE

  First edition. November 30, 2019.

  Copyright © 2019 K. R. Schultz.

  Written by K. R. Schultz.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Prelude (The Songs of Aarda, #1)

  Laakea

  Theophany

  Rehaak Preaches

  Strange Dream

  Dilemma

  Isil

  Exiled

  Dead End

  Sickbed

  Road Less Traveled

  Going South

  Twinbridge

  Chance Meeting

  Frustration

  Premonition

  Attacked

  Early Snowfall

  Friendship

  New Home

  New Life

  Village Toughs

  Shadows

  Strange Allies

  Night Watch

  A Puzzle

  Showdown

  Flight

  Nightmares

  Escape

  Discovery

  Wolves

  Meeting

  Sanctuary

  A New Friend

  Fear

  Lessons in Trust

  History Lesson

  Rehaak’s History

  Theology Lesson

  Laakea Shares

  At the Mill

  Home Alone

  Battle-Fury

  Regret

  A Purpose

  Sword Oath

  Revelation

  Laakea’s Homecoming

  Aelfric Home

  Blood Debt

  At the Forge

  Welding Characters

  Isil Meets Laakea

  Isil’s History

  Isil’s Revelation

  Aelfric’s Dream

  Abused

  Rehaak’s History

  Decision

  Rehaak’s Decision

  Laakea’s History

  Shipwreck

  Laakea’s Song

  The Creator’s Forge

  Into the Surf

  The Forging

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  About the Author

  To those who dream and dare to believe, and to Patricia and all the others who encouraged me to continue writing, dreaming, and believing.

  To Stevie, Jovie, Aidan, Roan, Nate, and Benjamin. May you find truth and adventure in equal measure throughout your lives.

  The Characters

  .

  Aelfric: Laakea's father

  Aelrin: King of the Eniila, Aelfric's twin brother

  Aert: innkeeper at the Dancing Dog

  Ak'eldemea: Eniila god of metalcraft

  Ashd'eravaak: the Abrhaani’s god

  Baeddan: Narragan’s herald

  Bajan Lanier: Rehaak’s fellow scholar

  Bram: miller’s 8-year-old son

  Digon: Golden Crown innkeeper

  Eskel: a Council of Barons member

  Eyhan: Isil’s son

  Gael: the miller

  Gil / Gillam: miller’s 11-year-old son

  Isilakari/Isil/Lucky: mithun drover, Rehaak's friend

  Jesh'zed'haak: Eniila god of war

  Keria: Rehaak’s sister

  Laakea: 13-year-old Eniila youth

  Latonia: Raamya's wife

  Leda: barmaid at the Golden Crown Inn

  Lord Arven: a member of the Council of Barons

  Mato: Raamya's 14-year-old youngest son

  Naom'han: author of Aetheriad, Aethera scribe

  Ogun: Raamya’s 16-year-old middle son

  Radik: Raamya’s 19-year-old eldest son

  Raith: chandler in North Narragan

  Raamya: the sawyer

  Radomir: a historian

  Rehaak Eskolar: scholar, healer (and heretic)

  Riata: the miller’s wife

  Rogan: The Gilded Swan innkeeper

  S'ek'zekaar: god of death

  S'enkashaar: god of storms

  Sahki Lorg: confectioner in Dun Dale

  Selvyn: the last Eniila to work with ehlbringa

  Shelhera: Laakea's mother

  Steen: miller’s 5-year-old child

  Tano: Rehaak’s older brother

  Uele: miller’s 4-year-old daughter

  Peoples

  .

  Abrhaani/Greens: A green-skinned nature worshiping species

  Aethera: Powerful spirit-beings of the Aetherial plane

  Eniila/Whites: A large pale-skinned warlike species

  Nethera: Corrupted spirits/fallen Aethera

  Sokai: A vanished species

  Places

  .

  Aetherial Plane: A plane of existence of pure energy

  Aeron Suul: port on Khel Braah’s south coast

  Arkad: the great hall of the Eniila afterlife

  Baradon: The Eniila homeland (continent)

  Berossus: city abandoned by the Sokai millennia ago

  Camikola: a coastal city in Baradon

  Chavanel: a volcanic crater east of Lake Korath

  Cherith Pass: the only pass through The Spine

  Dun Dale: logging village in south Kel Braah

  Gergana: an Eniila hell (a frozen wasteland)

  Tatras: an Eniila hell (place of fire and torment)

  Gilded Swan Inn: posh inn in North Narragan

  Golden Crown Inn: inn in South Narragan

  Harthang: Aelfric’s birthplace

  Khel Braah: The island homeland of the Abrhaani

  Khel Nett: A small island rumored to be unlucky

  Laughing Lark Inn: inn in New Hope

  Lake Korath: lake near Rehaak’s Birthplace

  Lake Tir: a lake near Isil’s childhood home

  Lone Wolf Inn: inn in Twinbridge

  Narragan: Abrhaani capital city on the Tikaani River

  New Hope: small logging town in south Khel Braah

  Scriptorium: The great library in Narragan

  Sethria: where a massacre occurred

  Sanchal: Rehaak’s birthplace

  Shivar: city near the Cherith Pass, produces white marble

  Stone Song River: runs south from Cherith pass to Aeron Suul

  Syn Gersuul: the sea between Khel Braah and Baradon

  Tikaani River: separates the north and south Narragan

  The Spine: mountains dividing Khel Braah

  Twinbridge: prosperous town on the Stone Song River

  Life

  .

  We begin life in the dark safety of the womb, linked to our mothers, who nourish our growing bodies and souls inside themselves. We are two separate beings. One of us connected, enclosed, and protected inside the other. The process of birth severs that physical connection, but the desire for intimacy is built into our bodies and souls.

  Since we are created through intimacy, we cannot overcome the hunger for connection. From the moment of birth, the world bombards us with images, sounds, smells, feelings, and flavors, but nothing replaces our need for intimacy. Our starving souls instinctively seek it, driving us to connect.

  Often we fail, occasionally we succeed, and when we do, our connections are both precious and precarious. Sometimes we discover intimacy in unusual places, and we mourn when fate or circumstance tears it from our grasp.

  We are social beings who cannot live for long disconnected from others. We cannot live
alone, for even when we try, the world conspires against us and draws us into relationships.

  —From Life and Love by Menal Mujib

  Laakea

  Laakea twisted and raised his weapon to block the next blow, but he was not fast enough. The blade bounced off his guard and struck his nose. His eyes watered, and blood dribbled into the downy fuzz of his upper lip. Laakea staggered and fell when his heel caught on a stone. The damp, hard-packed earth did little to soften his fall. Aelfric, his father, stood over him and jabbed his chest with the wooden practice sword. Laakea forced his lungs to obey and draw the next breath.

  “Get up. Don’t wallow around like a pig in a mud pit. Next time keep your guard up and watch your footing. If this were a real trial in the Arena of Justice, you’d already be dead, and your possessions and obligations would be mine now.” Aelfric shouted. “If you die, the gods we serve will judge you guilty. You’ll never feast with the glorious dead in Arkad, and you’ll spend eternity shivering in frozen Gergana instead.”

  Laakea wiped the blood from his upper lip with the back of his hand as he struggled to his feet. He ignored the pain radiating from his bruised ribs. Laakea had gained a hands-width in height, since his mother’s illness, but his head still only reached as high as Aelfric’s chest. Both Aelfric and his son had the blond hair and blue eyes typical of the Eniila species. Laakea’s face resembled Aelfric’s, minus the pale scar that ran from the center of Aelfric’s forehead to the left cheek. The boy’s cheeks and upper lip held the promise of the bushy beard that concealed his father’s other battle scars. The boy, gangly as a young lamb, lacked the musculature of his father, but given time, that would change.

  “Put away your sword and load the forge with charcoal while I tend to your mother. She’s not doing well this morning, and when you’ve finished, take the sheep to pasture and make sure they get watered.”

  “Yes, Pa,” Laakea said through gritted teeth. The wounds to Laakea’s pride stung more than his bruised ribs and his bloody nose. He treats me worse than a servant or a hired hand. I can never do enough to please him, and he won’t let me spend time with Ma. She hasn’t the strength to get out of bed anymore. “I must honor my father.” He repeated the phrase like a mantra to hold the fury at bay.

  Laakea made his way to the forge house, scooped handfuls of charcoal into the forge, and used the flint and steel to light the tinder. He fanned the kindling into flame and heaped charcoal around the tiny blaze, careful not to smother the fire. Once the charcoal glowed red, he pumped the bellows a few times, then stacked more charcoal in the forge’s center. Laakea stared at the glowing coals, fists clenched, gut still burning with anger at his father. He winced and rubbed his bruised ribs again, shook his head, and began the short walk to the sheep pen.

  Both sheep and young shepherd knew the familiar pattern of their days. The woolly beasts lined up as he unlatched the gate to the sheepfold with hands blackened from charcoal dust. Tending the sheep allowed Laakea to escape Aelfric’s temper but kept him from spending time with his mother.

  The clang of hammer on hot iron meant Aelfric was hard at work, and work seemed the only outlet for his father’s anger. Aelfric flew into rages for trivial reasons, and Laakea often hid in the forest until his father’s dark mood passed. Sometimes that worked. Other times Aelfric whipped him when he returned from his hiding place. The solitude of the forest was preferable to his father’s angry outbursts, but today Laakea would defy his father and spend time with his mother.

  With the sheep watered and penned within the fenced pasture enclosure, Laakea set his sights on home. He slipped quietly toward the circular wattle-walled forge house where his father pounded out a new iron farm implement for an Abrhaani farmer. Aelfric chanted a work-song in time to his hammer blows, unaware that Laakea peered into the open entrance, through the acrid charcoal smoke.

  The plow, with its handle, frame, and share were nearly complete. The water bucket, filled earlier from the nearby brook, stood almost full beside the anvil. Good...he won’t need me for quite a while. Aelfric’s shoulders flexed and bunched with every stroke of the hammer as Laakea tiptoed past.

  Laakea slunk toward the daub-and-wattle house, the only home he had ever known. Anticipating an angry voice calling him back to the forge house, his heart thudded faster. He cast a glance back toward the forge, across the garden, overgrown with weeds, where he and his mother, Shelhera, had spent so many pleasant hours. He reached the house, lifted the latch, and cringed as the door creaked open. He was about to step through the opening when a rough hand grasped his collar and jerked him backward. For the second time today, he lay on his back, staring into the angry eyes of his father. He rolled sideways to avoid the big boot aimed at his ribs.

  “You devious little dung eater! You thought I would be busy for hours yet, but I finished early and caught you. I told you to stay away. She’s too sick for you to pester her with your stupid questions today. The past doesn’t matter anyway. We’re here because I have chosen this life. That’s all you need to know. Now get your useless lazy ass back to the forge and help me assemble that plow.”

  “But Pa, I won’t disturb her. I just want to see—” Aelfric’s fist in Laakea’s gut ended Laakea’s explanation and left the boy doubled over on the ground, gasping for breath.

  Aelfric stared as if deciding whether to mete out further punishment. He stooped, grabbed Laakea’s collar, and dragged the winded youngster toward the forge like a piece of luggage. The boy’s heels dug shallow furrows in the dirt path, and like the plow, they were about to assemble, his heels prepared the soil for a bitter harvest.

  Theophany

  Rehaak lifted one web-fingered hand to block out the sun from his emerald eyes. The sunlight glowed dull greenish through the webbing, which stretched from the first joint to the palm. The sun, warm on the webs of his hands, energized Rehaak. His mustache tickled his prominent hooked nose, and he once again contemplated shaving off his forest of facial hair. He shook his head. It adds to my mystique as a prophet, so I’ll keep it for now.

  He glanced up at the few moisture-laden clouds overhead as he strolled toward the massive structure at the end of the broad, paved street. Narragan’s Scriptorium, built entirely of white marble dragged from the quarries of Shivar, stood atop a low rise. Behind the carved pillars and beneath the red-tiled roof lay dusty rooms that contained the collected and often neglected work of Abrhaani sages and historians. Abrhaani scholars boasted the scrolls and parchments in those rooms encompassed the history of Aarda since their world’s creation. If the curators had suitably organized the collection, Rehaak might have already found the Aetheriad.

  With the Aetheriad in hand, he could settle his longstanding debate with other scholars about the supreme deity called the Creator. His lifelong obsession with this mysterious deity had begun in childhood. His mania had already cost him his family and led him on a thirty-year quest, the last seven spent in the capital city, Narragan. Instead, he faced another day of inhaling the accumulated dust of centuries and tearing through cobwebbed corridors to rooms where decades of mouse droppings, mummified spiders, and other filth lay scattered across the floors.

  He nodded to the scholars gathered on the sun-warmed steps. It had been months since he was sober enough to visit the Scriptorium, and his arrival caused a hushed conversation among his peers. His head, throbbing like a drum, ached from the effects of last night’s excesses, so the Scriptorium was the last place he wanted to spend his day. The compulsion to make the long walk from his room in The Gilded Swan this afternoon baffled him. Drunken debauchery had filled his days of late and eaten away his ambition. So why am I here?

  Halfway across the broad topmost landing, his stomach heaved, and dizziness overcame him. Rehaak staggered under a weight that descended. It enveloped him like warm oil, drove him to his knees, and then flattened him. He lay blinded, face-down, and unable to rise or even lift his head. Voices penetrated the darkness as people gathered around him.


  “Pissed to the gills again. Sad, really.”

  “He showed such potential when he first arrived. Now look at him.”

  “Should we rouse him?”

  “Naw, let him sleep it off where he lies. If we pick him up, he’s likely to wet himself, and I don’t fancy a urine bath.”

  The warmth intensified. The voices faded, and a golden glow brightened the edges of Rehaak’s vision, and a melodic voice whispered a single word from within the light. “Observe.”

  When his sight returned, Rehaak viewed his body from above the crowd of people gathered around him. One of his scholarly rivals prodded his body with the toe of his boot, none too gently, in an attempt to rouse him. The view faded, and swirling colors replaced the scene below him. Rehaak sensed motion, but without a reference point, he couldn’t estimate speed or direction.

  The colors faded, and a vast plain stretched out below him. Across that expanse, a battle raged between his people and their hereditary enemies, the Eniila. The Scriptorium contained many accounts of the longstanding conflict between his people and the Whites, the Abrhaani name for the Eniila, but this skirmish was not a historical report.

  Vast ranks of Abrhaani soldiers, driven forward by creatures from his childhood nightmares, threw themselves against Eniila warriors. Behind the Abrhaani lines, grotesque misshapen beings consumed the wounded and sucked the life from the landscape, leaving a barren, blackened wasteland behind them. Rehaak plunged, screaming in terror, toward the front lines amid the thickest battle.

  He landed facing the Abrhaani troops. Projectiles whistled past his head. He danced away, dodged an Eniila spear thrust, and rolled to avoid an Abrhaani blade. What is wrong with them? Abrhaani do not fight like this. Impossible, my people do not use edged weapons. We cannot stomach bloodshed. He looked at his attacker’s face. The fellow’s eyes, black as polished obsidian, gleamed with mindless fury. Rehaak dropped to the ground as the wave of black-eyed Abrhaani troops pressed forward past him.

  As troubling as the black-eyed Abrhaani were, what skittered and slithered behind them was far worse. A horde of creatures followed in their wake, each one more grotesque than the last, and whoever they touched turned to ash. The soil blackened and crystallized beneath their feet. The nearest beast with the body of a scorpion and a man’s face lunged forward. Rehaak ducked under its snapping claws, but it stabbed at him with its tail. Rehaak rolled aside. The point zipped past him and plunged into the dirt. The soil steamed and blackened around the impact point. Poison splattered onto Rehaak’s bare leg. Dark worm-like tendrils branched upward beneath his skin, and agony accompanied the tendrils’ upward progress. Rehaak shrieked and blacked out again.