Heroes of the Fall

[Jade_Tarem]

The First Wish
Part 4: Fools Rush In

The children wished for comfort,
the soldiers to be strong.
The fools, they wished for money,
but they didn't keep it long.

The leaders wished for wisdom,
the blind, they wished for sight.
The fools, they wished for power,
but it didn't last the night.

The oppressed wished for freedom,
the lost wished not to stray.
The fools wished to be famous,
but the fame faded away.

The god-child wished for nothing,
the cost was far too steep.
The fools wished to live forever,
And this wish they got to keep.

- Excerpt from a Halvett Clan book of poems and songs, relating to The First Wish

NOW

Against all odds, Faden caught up to the caravan. It was only then that he realized that he hadn't the faintest idea what to do next. It was surprising - given the path events had taken since his fall from the White City, he had fully expected to die of exposure or be consumed by flaming desert weasel-demons before anything unambiguously positive happened.

Once again, the legends delve deeply into artistic license and flowery, duplicitous prose. It is true that when he approached the caravan, he did so under the full beauty of the clear night sky, the South Star shining directly above him. It is true that at that time he was dressed in his iconic multi-layered blue, black, and gold garments. It is even true that his arrival caused a great stir throughout the Hajika-clan caravan, who abandoned their tasks and rushed out to meet him, thunderous cries upon their lips. What the legends fail to state was that with his once-magnificent garments shredded and torn, his skin blistered and peeling, his words nothing but nonsense to mortal ears, his gait a staggering shuffle, and his entire frame - which was none too well-muscled to begin with - dessicated from his travels, the humans of the Hajika Clan had mistaken him for the undead spirit of Zohar-Ahmamesh the Traitor Chieftain. They were, in fact, racing out to drive him off, lest he steal their children.*

Similarly, the legends state that Faden was able to communicate with them even without words, but neglect to mention that he did so through a wild and panicked pantomime that, to its credit, made up for in effectiveness what it lacked in dignity. Hours later, he realized that he could create fairly evocative images even with the limited power over illusion he had left, and everyone felt very silly.

Before too long, he was among them. Despite the size of the clan - nearly fifty family units - it was not a very impressive caravan. The lack of available wood or workable stone made it difficult to create useful vehicles, so most of their possessions were carried by creatures - both enormous lizards as well as curious mammals able to store up water for tremendous periods of time. Eventually he was able to parse enough of what they were saying to hold two-way communication, and they asked him who he was.

It was the beginning of a long conversation, much of it carried out without a single word.

In another land, perhaps, an outsider would have been driven off, or regarded with too much suspicion or distrust to make an extended living arrangement workable. Here, though, every able-bodied human, man or woman, young or old, was needed. Because the land was so unforgiving, the humans could not be.

Faden's first task, while he recovered, was teaching. He made learning their language and teaching them his own his top priority, but they were especially interested in his magic. As unimpressive as it was to him, it was more eldritch power than they had ever seen wielded by a man, even one claiming to have come from the moon. They asked if he would show them how it was done.

THEN

"Okay, Tezzerin, I'm ready!" An extremely excited - and extremely small - Faden bounded into the small amphitheater in the White City. He knew he was bright - Father had made him that way. "Teach me everything you know!"

Tezzerin did not laugh, but something in the way the spirit's face scrunched up suggested that she was trying hard not to. "That may take a while, Faden."

"That's okay! I brought a lunch and everything." At this, Tezzerin did laugh. The spirit slowly settled down on the small, flat dais at the front of the amphitheater. "Oh my. I believe you've settled the question of what the first lesson should be, then."

Faden nodded and sat down too, but didn't say anything. Tezzerin leaned forward. "A *very* long time ago, when there was little else occupying the world besides your Father, he created the first spirits - Eliat, myself, and others, one by one. And upon learning that my first task was to become the greatest repository of knowledge after Baz'Auran, I confronted him in the tenfold paths. 'Baz'Auran,' I said, 'I am to be the First Spirit of Knowledge, but there is so much that I do not know. If you want me to be the best spirit I can be, you need to teach me everything you know, right now!" Tezzerin leaned back. "I was foolish to speak so impudently to Baz'Auran, but he simply nodded to me and told me to follow him, and I did. I was surprised when we left the tenfold paths. We traveled all the way to the Great Disk, and there we stopped, right by the oceans. He told me to lean as close to the water as I could and stare into my own reflection."

"What did that teach you?"

"Nothing. It was a trick. The next moment, His will held me under the water. At first I thought it might be a prank, but as the minutes went by, I slowly but surely began to drown. Right before I blacked out, though, I was suddenly hoisted out of the sea, and Baz'Auran told me to come back to him when I wanted his knowledge more than I had wanted air moments before."

Faden sat silently for nearly a minute. "This is going to take more than one day, isn't it?"

"Oh, yes. I do not think I need an ocean** to make my point to you, Faden - nothing comes freely, even to the children of the Creator. It will take time and effort on your part to make even the smallest foray into everything I know, and bear in mind that even *I* do not know everything. It may take centuries."

Faden looked up at her. "Then we should get started right away."

NOW

Faden frowned, and explained to him, in their broken tongue, that magic could not be mastered overnight. He was still learning it himself, and was not even sure how long he or any of them would live. He told them that their young would grow old, and children would be born, and their old would die - not once, but many times over, perhaps even hundreds of times over. None of them would live to see the full reward for their efforts.

He was ready for disappointment or even outrage, but the humans surprised him again. Upon hearing that it would require hundreds of generations for them to truly master the secrets of magic, the Chief - a powerfully built woman by the name of Brega-Sadeem, nodded and told him that if it would take so long, they had best begin right away.

With that, Faden no longer felt as if he had any right to refuse.

He agreed to teach them as best as he was able. Despite the fact that their own ability to manipulate arcane energies paled by comparison to his own (even suppressed as it was) he was surprised at the tenacity and dedication of the mortals. They had carved out an existence in a land he would have deemed impossible to survive in, and had begun to grow culturally and spiritually in spite of the perils. They had art and music and crafts, and even plans for the future, constrained though they were by the realities of the present.

Time passed. Days turned into weeks. Faden eventually stopped thinking of the humans as 'the mortals' and began to think of them as the 'Hajika Clan,' as they liked to call themselves. There were thirteen total clans, which met and traded occasionally as they traveled in convoluted routes across the desert, stopping at the sources of the water they paid so dearly for, but because only a few Oases were large enough to accommodate multiple clans at once, interaction was limited.

Time passed. Weeks turned into months. Faden eventually stopped thinking of the humans as the 'Hajika Clan' and began to think of them as his clan. As he grew more adept at their language he joined them in telling stories around the fires at night, in learning how to survive in even such a barren place as this, and how to beat the heat - his initial guess had been correct. The less there was between two points the less heat could travel between them. The desert - especially the mountainous areas - was not as barren as it first appeared. For a while, Faden was happy.

Faden found himself distinctly lacking in ambition, and he might have faded from history altogether if not for three things. First, he still wanted to know what had become of his siblings. Second, he remained aware of the awful thing that had evicted the children of Baz'Auran from the White Disk.

Finally, there was the small matter of the water bill...

He had asked the clan about the spirits he had run into, and though they had become evasive, he had eventually learned that as far as the humans were concerned, the two had always existed. The one that stalked the sands was known to them as Qarezel, and the other as Paideiazel.

It was something of a bastardization of the language of the White City, but Faden eventually learned that they meant 'demonic will' and 'demonic desire.' And with that, he knew what the two spirits were. They were the remains of the First Spirit of Magic, a spirit unseen in the White Citadel since before Baz'Auran elected to have children. What his/her/its crime had been was never discussed, but his Father had exiled the great spirit in much the same manner (on fire and screaming) as he had... someone, although for the life of him Faden couldn't remember who.

The stress of the event had apparently fractured the spirit into its two main components - the creature's will and discipline formed the spirit Paideiazel, the swirling vortex-like entity that loaned out the water to the humans at such an obscene cost. The more barbaric desire-driven half, Qarezel, functioned mostly on instinct and hunted down anything with higher brain functions that wandered into its range of perception.***

The clan had grown adept at avoiding Qarezel - the creature was, unsurprisingly, a few pegs short of a tent. Paideiazel, though, was a serious obstacle, and thirteen humans - one from each clan - sacrificed themselves each year so that the rest of the clan might live. The decision on which human would pay the price was decided at random, if a volunteer was not found.

The humans had no idea why the two spirits were after their lives, but Faden had his own suspicions. The two spirits were no longer tied to Baz'Auran nor sustained by his power, which likely meant that they would age and decay just as any mortal creature might. There were ways to extend a life that would certainly be known to the two spirits, though - the catch was the cost. A spirit of the power of Paideiazel or Qarezel would require many lives, every year, to remain ageless, and so they preyed on the humans.

Unaccountably, this made Faden upset. He had never given much thought to mortals in the White City. He hadn't cared, but now he recognized, as the spirits had taught him to, the importance of even the smallest details. They had their own spark - perhaps not the divine spark of Baz'Auran, but it was there. The two desert spirits were consuming people like livestock to support their continuing efforts to cheat his Father's punishment.

So when the time came to select who would be the next to face Paideiazel, Faden volunteered. Despite the protests of the clan, he convinced them that he knew what he was doing, and for the first time in years, the people of the Hajika clan began to wonder if there might be a way out from under the control of the spirits.

The son of Baz'Auran had no death wish. Armed with a solid suspicion of what the two spirits were really after, Faden planned to offer them their heart's desire in exchange for all the water, forever. He would offer them immortality itself.

It was an excellent plan, with two minor drawbacks.

First, Faden did not have the ability to grant them immortality, yet would need to actually be able to do so in order for the plan to succeed. This he judged to be the lesser of the plan's two flaws.

Second, deceptions were most effective when one could play desire and will off against each other. Given that the two abstracts had been forcibly separated in this case, there was a solid chance that Paideiazel would be too intelligent to fall for Faden's ruse, and an equally high chance that Qarezel would be too stupid to fall for it.

Faden tried to think his way around these problems, but then the Hajika Clan's year was up, and there was no more time.

* The humans should not be blamed for leaping to this conclusion - it had happened before on two different occasions. This, however, is a story for another time.

** Liberal and unconventional use was made of the great palace fountain less than a week later.

*** Faden once asked the clan where Sapphire Bleak fit in to the supernatural food chain. Their only response was "Sapphire who?" Faden did not pursue that line of inquiry - all was right with the world.