Танит Ли - The Storm Lord

Raldnor?

In the dark of the tomb he felt her physical life return to her. She stirred in his arms.

“Are you here?” she said aloud.

“I am here.”

Somewhere, a dawn rose over a forest and filtered between the drifting smokes. It struck a half note of color in the black gallery, through the open doorway, across which a man was lying.

Raldnor took Astaris’s hand. They crossed the stone room, stepped over the dead man, went along the empty corridor.

Much of the palace had burned in the night. Many rooms were gutted. A few dogs ran yelping about the streets outside. The sun stained everything with nebulous gold and wine-red panes.

Only a child saw the wagon pass. He was to remember later, twenty years later, when, as the result of various promptings and by various means, he had crossed the mountains and assumed the yellow robe of the Dortharian Anackire.

A white-haired man and a scarlet-haired woman. He had thought they must be blind, for they seemed to see nothing at all, and yet, when they had glanced simultaneously aside at each other he had been aware, despite his lack of years and the terrors of the night, that they did indeed each see one thing, which was the other.

When grown, the child—then a man—discovered so many legends concerning Raldnor and the manner in which he had vanished from the world. The Lady of Snakes had taken him, or he had gone below into the earth, for gods cannot remain as gods; they can only transcend themselves, or in some inferno of mythology forget their power and die.

And so the Thaddrian priest would tell what he had seen, for it appealed to some streak of logic in him, that piety should not necessarily be coupled with conjecture and fable.

Raldnor, son of Ashne’e and Rehdon, Raldnor called Am Anackire, the Storm Lord, had gone with Astaris the Karmian, the most beautiful woman in Vis, into the great jungle forests of Thaddra on a rickety wagon, both of them riding like peasants.

And it was not legend, but the forests that had swallowed them. Though it was legend which would preserve their names thereafter, until some final chaos—not change but annihilation—sank Vis in ocean and pulled down the sky.