Chapter Nine - Revelation

"Where to begin?" Mh'repha hesitated, then continued. "Tam, do you remember what was one of the first things I told you about our people?"

Tam thought a while, then replied: "You told me that the skill of the Nephilim with bows and arrows are unsurpassed by any other people."

Phamh'rir drew his face into what looked like a grin, a strange sight on one so calculating. "It would be like her to speak of archery, when she has probably never touched a bow in her life. Her skills lie elsewhere." Mh'repha opened her mouth as if to protest, but Phamh'rir went on. "I do not suppose she has told you that she is the greatest alchemist our Clan has had for the last two hundred years?"

"Uh... not that I can remember, no." Tam turned to Mh'repha, suddenly understanding why he had gotten the impression that the Nephilim were such masters of alchemy: When their knowledge of this lore - though not her own skill - had been explained by one so well-versed in it! Mh'repha's whiskers, however, twitched nervously, and she hastened to change the subject.

"It is not relevant now," she said, "because that is not what I meant. Tam, when I noticed you were awake, the first thing I told you was that we had not met one of your kind for centuries. That the arhmshar called you an enemy. They explained that your kind is arrogant and ruthless, and that you rarely see beyond the immediate personal gain, and never beyond the glory of your own kind. That you claim to be the first, and above all the only creatures that the gods created - to keep the precious balance. Balance and serenity are the things you preach, but from what we have read, you are neither balanced, nor serene."

I am not the first to notice that, it would seem. Tam nodded in agreement.

"We learnt a great lot about your people from one traveller who visited us many centuries ago. His name is Zadal-Ihrno." A-ha!, thought Tam, I am finally going to learn some more about this man! But Mh'repha did not intend to change the subject just yet.

"But there was much that he did not need to teach us, that we knew already. Our legends have been wrought with your culture, your religion, your history and even your values - we have gone different paths, naturally, us devoting our lives to the longbow and the brewing of potions, while you perfected your knowledge of spellcraft and the carving of crystals. But our roots run together. We did not know this before Zadal-Ihrno arrived, of course, since we had never heard of your people. Zadal-Ihrno himself did not say much about the religion of the Vahnatai unless we asked him about it; it is thought he found the apparent hypocrisy too shameful to bear. He never wrote about it in his book, but it is fortunate indeed that he told us about the religion, for it gave us the missing keystone in this riddle.

"The other tribes have never realized it, since Zadal-Ihrno only ever visited three of our clans, and did not stay long enough to impart his wisdom on the other two. We of the Claw are the only ones who gained his knowledge, and thus were able to compare his descriptions of the Vahnatai culture with our own." She paused. "With a stunning result. As I said, there are so many parallels it is immensely unlikely that our races have never had contact. More, that they apparently communicated with each other, and exchanged knowledge. Even our religions possess so many similarities that they can be drawn together to a point-by-point parallel, deriving all tenets, deities, myths and principles of one religion from the other, and vice versa.

"With one notable difference."

Phamh'rir looked a bit impatient at seeing that Mh'repha did not make much of an effort to keep her explanation brief, but for the moment, he did not protest, and Mh'repha continued.

"The creation myth. Tam, what do your religious texts have to say about the genesis of your people?"

Tam's head was already slowly revolving from the concept that the cultures of their two races could be so alike, but the voice in the crystal-shaping hall remained imprinted on his mind as fresh as it was yesterday. How did I forget my name and remember this in such clarity? He inhaled and prepared to speak - "It was a whisper--", but at a glare from Phamh'rir, Mh'repha interjected; "a short summary."

Tam decided to cut the stuff concerned with metaphysics that seemed less to tell anything important and more to serve to build up a suitable atmosphere. Instead, he began: "Well, they speak of three gods, Rehlko, Dahrnai and Zaratis, who argued about how to forge the perfect order. Rehlko wanted to fashion it like a crystal, a minimal structure that would be perfectly stable, Dahrnai wanted to give it the complexity and evolution of life, and Zaratis finally told them that they could have it both ways, and made us."

"Exactly. You claim a place as the product of balance, and most importantly, you have a trinity of three creator gods. While we have deities that can be drawn as parallels to these, they had nothing at all to do with our genesis myth.

"Instead, our religion tells us of many powerful beings - a whole race of pure light - that made us. They did this to no high and noble end, but simply as an extension of their own will. Later, they forgot us and we gained our freedom from them. We have a great number of tales related to this, but some of them tell of the legendary dungeon termed Phorhachide. I am sure you can recognize the name."

"I believe our language lessons have also gone far enough to let you translate the name from our language."

"Phor - hach - yide," Tam said, thinking, and translated it. "Cave of dark dreams". With the neutral meaning of the word "dream", nightmares had to be set apart by an added label, in this case 'dark'. "The Cavern of Nightmares?"

"Indeed," Mh'repha replied. "Curious, how words so similar-sounding can have such different meanings in two languages.

"The meaning is not that different," Tam interjected bitterly. "If anything, your translation describes the testing caves better than our own does."

"Yes, that is what makes the phenomenon so odd. Were it an entirely unrelated word, I might believe in coincidence. However, the words Can you tell me what sort of tests your forachid entails?"

"A hall filled with ferocious monsters to be defeated or escaped from, a maze through which you are chased by a rapidly spreading magical fire, and a hall of riddles that alternates between the silly and the murderous. In summary, a test that is either survived or failed."

"Who designed it?" Phamh'rir asked immediately.

"Bugger if I know. The teachers at the academy would not give me a straight answer when I asked them, and at the time I thought they were just keeping their identities secret to prevent retaliation by some of the more infuriated students. That is about what they said, as well." And you swallowed that, too, he silently chided himself on his gullibility.

"The question that remains concerning the meaning and origin of the word then is whether it was originally a Novah word that got a second meaning in our tongue, or whether it was first the name given to our equivalent of Hell, and then got adapted to your test. I find the first more plausible, since it is much more likely that a student's reference to it would result in the connotation 'Dark Dream Cavern' than that your people would name a test after our name for the Underworld." Tam nodded, although he seemed skeptical.

"Tam, our tales concerning the Phorhachide tell us that Nephilim were sacrificed in this cave - or many such caves if there were several."

"Sacrificed?" Tam did not believe his ears at once.

"Yes. Sacrificed to the forces of discord. At least that is what the tales say. They speak of a dark, ancient ritual that resembles the elements of your test in many ways - battles and fire, riddles lethal in their nature."

Tam suddenly remembered his conversation with Olidra like a whisper on a wind, hundreds of years ago. Had he not been surprised that the riddles had been changed and made more deadly? Had he not said that the halls with the animated statues were the only part of the riddle hall that had existed when he himself took the test - not including the multitude of death traps? There was something feeling enormously wrong about this.

"Finally, the makers of those halls were allegedly the same beings that had created our race."

"The beings of light?"

Mh'repha nodded. "We call them 'the Shining Ones'."

Tam shuddered. He had heard that name only a short while ago, and he believed it was from Phamh'rir. He turned to face him.

Phamh'rir nodded in response to the unspoken question. "We believed these beings to be mythical in nature, supernatural beings no different from the gods that we also pray to. Potentially existing, but far removed from anything but either blind faith or critical scepticism. The greater was our surprise when Zadal-Ihrno arrived."

"I have read of this Zadal," Tam said, "but I ever wondered about his origin, or his fate! What became of him when he left? For ere I read his work among the books you so kindly provided me with, I had never heard even his name - and nor have most of our people, I am sure!"

"It is a long tale, and not easily told, that tells us of his intentions and his wanderings as he related that to us. But what became of him when he left! What do you mean by this? For he never left us, indeed. And if things were but a little different, he would still be dwelling among us! I know, for I met him." Phamh'rir had taken the thread of the conversation back to himself, and as he spoke, he seemed to be caught in an inner monologue, and a flood of memories. His golden eyes glittered.

Tam stared, bereft of speech for a moment. "But... so many centuries..."

"He was young when he came, a traveller of many years but young for his race, and you know yourself the lifespan of your people. He was young, and I am old."

Tam was taken back. "You hide it well. Is it not true that the Nephilim live past the first half of a century only rarely?"

"Old for one of my people, though not as ancient as our arhmshar, who can outlive a century. I have seen forty-three summers.

"Yes, I have met him myself, the great Zadal-Ihrno, though I was but a child then. I was one of the last to see him alive."

"Alive? Then he died?"

"Aye, he was slain. Slain by an accident, as it later seemed. Slain by a vicious plot of revenge, as it looked to my young eyes then and continues to do now." His face was grim, and Mh'repha looked just as surprised by this as did Tam.

"But what slew him?"

"A stray arrow. It came out of the shadows as we spoke, and..." his voice trailed off in silent remembrance as he seemed to relive the event.

He caught his voice and began to tell a tale that seemed all the more unnatural because he was telling it - Phamh'rir, who had threatened force to capture Tam for questioning earlier, and who considered diplomacy and conversation both as means to an end only when other lines of action were impractical. Tam was straining to listen to Phamh'rir's words, but instead found that the strain of talking and listening was wearing him out - Mh'repha had never taught him this long without letting him rest. It was for this reason that Tam found his eyes closing, as the voice of Phamh'rir seemed to reach him from far away, and the tale he was describing replayed itself through his vivid imagination before his closed eyes...

Evening is silently passing over the hilltops. The evening air is fresh and cool, but not yet chilling. Clouds at the horizon are painted blood red by the setting sun, and the sky is darkening to a deep, clear blue. Glittering stars twinkle in the zenith and in the eastern sky, where the remaining sunlight does not blot them out any longer. The air is still and hardly a breeze shakes those tall, silent tree-tops that stand against the red western sky like giants covered by the blood of battle, like shadows looming over the world and threatening to cover it eternally.
The great moon is new, and the smaller one has not yet risen. The play of colours, red, blue, purple and ever turquoise, gives the sky, a wild, stormy appearance even though the few clouds that stand in it barely move.
Fog is rolling over the hilltops and enveloping it like a blanket, its tendrils reaching out to cover everything, though the tall trees stand clear of the mists and continue to loom before the setting sun. The image is frozen: Wherever the eye turns, the clouds, the trees, even the tall blades of grass on the ground, they do not move save when they are disturbed by the observer.
No bird dares disturb the silence of the late summer evening, but millions of cicadas endlessly sing a song without words or tunes, and the world is covered by their buzzing sounds.
A man stands in the mists in silence. But if one comes closer, where the fog does not blur the image of the dark silhouette, it is hardly a man, but more a boy, barely adolescent. He stands without moving, and looks at the setting sun in silence, almost reverence. The figure is that of a Nephil, slender and catlike in grace, the head and build clearly that of a feline.

Sounds are unnaturally muffled by the still air and the mists, as well as the roaring, monotonous song of the cicadas. It is therefore a long while until the young Nephil perceives a presence behind him.

"A wonderful sunset."

The Nephil jumps at the voice and turns around to face the one who has spoken. It is a warm, pleasant voice, and devoid of cunning, but he is tense and not used to being approached from behind, and the surprise has alarmed him. But when he turns, his terse expression relaxes, for the man who is standing behind him is no stranger - although he has not seen him often.

"Erae mh'row, the Stars guide you, " he greets the man, and his voice, like that of the Vahnatai, is muffled slightly by the heavy surrounding fog.

"And likewise to you, Phamh'rir," the Vahnatai responds, and then looks past the Nephil back to the setting sun. "It is a cold evening for the summer, though I have seen colder." Though the Nephil - whose name is indeed Phamh'rir - has seen the Vahnatai before, he is nonetheles surprised at finding he knows his name. He knows the Vahnatai's name, of course, but then he is very well known among his people.

"You know my name, Zadal-Ihrno?"

"As you do mine, Phamh'rir. Though I must tell you that the Ihrno is but a title, an honorary appendage to my name, and largely undeserved. Call me Zadal, if you would."

"What does it mean, Zadal?"

"Ihrno? In my language it means 'Wise Speaker', closely translated. But only fools think they are wise, and the wise know they are fools. At the risk of sounding wise, I will not call myself so, for that reason."

"Now you have confused me." The Nephil cannot help grinning.

"As we are all wont to do, both fools and wise men alike." The Vahnatai smiles as well.

"Why are you out here in this fog, Zadal?" The Nephil asks. "It is cold, and you have no fur to warm you."

The old Vahnatai chuckles. "That I do not, though my robe is enough to ward off the cold. But why I am here? For the same reason you are, I dare say - Look at the sun!" he exclaims, and Phamh'rir turns his head. The sun is balanced on the tip of a distant tree, looking like a gigantic red lampoon on a pole, hundreds of leagues away. "Some legends say that ere sun and moon were made, and ere the stars began circling, the world was lit by two lamps that stood in the south and the north, and it was always day, without night or evening..."

"Do you believe that?" Phamh'rir asks, wonderingly, for he has never heard this tale.

"No, indeed. How could we live if it never grew dark? How would we sleep? It sounds like a folktale, though it is widely believed among those people who I heard it from in my travels. But just look at the sun as it is balanced there - and now, even as it slides off its pole like a falling, broken lamp: If you wondered what the sun was, would you not think of the same explanation?"

Phamh'rir nods slowly. "Perhaps I would..."

"It is always the same way with us; Nephilim, Vahnatai, Humans, even Troglodytes and the meanest goblins; we need some way to understand nature. The Troglodytes have their great weather gods, the goblins have their mighty ancestors, and we have the forces of arcane structures and mathematical principles. The more knowledge we gain, the more we are able to do with our explanations, but in the end our calculations are little different from the troglodytes when they dance for the rayne to fall. I think if we lived in a world we could not explain, we would go mad with the knowledge of our own impotence and the tiny breadth of our comprehension. Could you bear living in a world and not know how it works?"

Phamh'rir, who knows little enough about how the world works, can only shrug.

"At the very least, you wonder about it, do you not?"

Phamh'rir nods.

"As do I. Just look at the stars, as they come out from the cover of day now. A rare evening indeed, when the stars grow so clear before the sun has even set... I wonder what they are made of. And what makes them circle? For they seem so much more distant than the sun, and yet they circle just as fast as she does. I wonder..." He trails off, his eyes lighting up as if he had had a sudden idea, but he does not speak on. Phamh'rir knows not what to answer, and instead they both look on for a few minutes as the sun sinks toward the horizon, almost touching it already. They stand in silence, until Zadal breaks it again.

"Phamh'rir, it is good that I met you, for I had been looking for you for some time. That is another reason I came out here, for I believed that would be where I could find you. And I was right, which is fortunate, for I do not have much time."

"You were looking for me?" Phamh'rir is astonished, for while he has heard much of the great Zadal, he has never met him personally, only seen him from afar. Why would such a renowned man come looking for him? "Why do you seek me?"

"Because I need someone to speak to, and I am afraid none of those I normally speak to will do. If they would even listen, which I doubt." He sighs.

"Who would not listen to one as wise as you?" Phamh'rir asks, shocked. "It would be madness!"

"Those that think they are wisest are those that listen the least. And the ones who seek my company do so because they think themselves wise - for why else would they want to speak with me? But as it happens, I cannot blame them. For if one of your kind - or of my own kind - came to me and wanted to tell me of the idea that I now have, and I had not seen as much as I have, I would probably laugh him off. It is the most ludicrous thought I have arrived at in a long time, and yet it strikes me as clearer and more obvious with every passing day that I dwell on it."

"What is your thought?" Phamh'rir asks, eagerly, with only a mild trace of impatience. Zadal seems hesitant to tell, for he keeps speaking vaguely without getting to the business.

"Sorry if I ramble. The sun is sinking, and I do not have much time. For the first time in centuries, my time is running short. I have never had that feeling before, and it makes me nervous - as do the implications of my idea, and the uncertainty of how to put it." He hesitates for a while. Then he continues, eyeing the sun that is now perched on the horizon like a ball.

"Tell me, Phamh'rir, what do you know about how your people were created?"

Phamh'rir is surprised, he has not expected this. Zadal seemed so sceptical when he spoke of religion earlier; is it a thought related to religion that he has chosen Phamh'rir to tell to?
"The armshar believe that we were made by the omh'phtah, ancient beings of light. They were mighty, and they had the power to shape life itself to their will, though they were mortal in spite of their power. They made us to be their servants, and their slaves. The old legends tell of terrible things they did, but they vanished and left us on our own, and we were free."

"Free, indeed." Zadal's brows crease as if in sorrow. "Do you believe this legend?"

"I have no reason to distrust it, though I wonder if it is not an explanation we have made up to better understand our world." He smiles as he repeats what Zadal said minutes earlier. "It seems less strange than all the other stories I have heard tell."

Zadal is interested. "Why?"

"Because it is a sad tale. And the world seems to be full of them! If it were but fiction, then why could those who first told it not told a happier legend?"

Zadal nods slowly, and looks curiously at the young Nephil uttering words that sound so far beyond his age. "Indeed they could. I thought the same, Phamh'rir.

"I have studied that matter for a long time. And what is a long time to me must be an eternity to your people." Phamh'rir looked awed, for to him even a span of ten years - longer than he had lived - would have seemed near eternal, and Zadal must be talking about many decades if not centuries."

"What did you learn?"

"Much to suggest its truth, and much to suggest otherwise, as is always the case when trying to investigate the truth of old legends. I was stumped. There was so much to suggest that the Nephilim were created - created not by some divine process, by immortals, but by mortals who really existed and walked the earth in flesh at least at some point, if they were not still alive. The evidence could be seen everywhere in your culture and race. But at the same time, there was so little that appeared to remain of that mysterious race of light. I never found it on the surface of the world, nor anything to suggest it had ever existed.

"Until I found this."

Zadal reaches within his cloak and his hand re-emerges holding an object, that glints a bit in the crimson light of the dying sun. The sky is too dark for Phamh'rir to recognize it, but Zadal has studied more than history and geography. With a small flick of his wrist, he conjures a sphere of light in his right hand that illuminates the metal piece in his left.

Phamh'rir cannot recognize it even now, for it seems wholly alien to him in shape and appearance; even the metal looks unfamiliar and strange.

"A tool like this," Zadal weighs it in his hand, "is used by our wizards to hold a crystal in place for carving, when great delicacy is needed. Do you see the three heavy feet that let it rest on the carving table like a tripod - and here, the intricate shape of these bars and wires that intermesh to form a fine web of metal and claws to hold the gem in place? When it is magically charged, it neutralizes the gravity field and lets the crystal hover in its grasp without moving."

"Is this one charged?" Phamh'rir asked, fascinated by the intricate structure.

"No, and it has not been for a long time. It is only charged when it is to be used, because it can only keep its charge for a few hours.

"Now, ordinarily, a thing like this should be an everyday sight to me - but when I found it, it was many leagues from any place known to the Vahnatai, and even further to any settlement or carving hall. And also..." he brings the light a bit closer to the glinting tripod-like object, and beckons to Phamh'rir to come closer so that he can see better, "can you make out the fine runes that run along the ring?"

"Yes, but I cannot read them," Phamh'rir replies, quite naturally - he is currently struggling to learn to write and read in his own language; the Vahnatai language is as alien to him as the concept of magic.

"No, even the arhmshar or the learned of my own people would have difficulties with them. The letters seem to be a more ancient mode of the phonetic letters of Novah that has not been used for many centuries, and the words are of a language I had never seen in my life when I found it."

"Then do you know what it reads now?"

"I have found out, though it took me most of the last five years." Phamh'rir looked stunned again at the long time - he could not imagine spending more than half his life so far trying to translate the writing on some ancient device. "It turned out that it was not the language, but the writing itself that was the problem when translating."

"But you said you could read the letters!"

"Yes, and I thought I could. They seemed to be an ancient mode of Novah... but I had not taken into account the phonetic shifts of the many ages that lie in between. Do you see that squiggly line there that would now represent the 'p' sound? It once meant 'ph'. The list of these differences goes on, but the end result is the same: I could read the mysterious symbols, and when I transcribed them again, the meaning became clear." He basked for a moment in remembrance.

"It is hard to imagine a moment more joyful in the life of a scribe or a sage than that moment in which he can translate a previously unknown piece of writing. It is as if the letters suddenly shift apart and rearrange themselves, and a veil parts from your eyes and allows you to read the meaning as clearly as if you were able to gaze into the mind of the writer directly, in spite of the centuries that lie between." He looks at the sun that is now only half-way over the horizon, and half sunk. The sun sets slowly over the world of Olm, but yet he needs to hurry.

"The words are quite clearly Novah, though the dialect is archaic of course. And the words are:

Bel'a'to pen na'a'bit, sten gho vah'na'tai ten na pen mehd.

Which is, when rendered in your language:

"Balance is Creation, the Life is Order, praise the People of the Living Crystal that shape Life and Stone."

There is an odd significance about these words, Phamh'rir recognizes at once. It takes him only a few moments to figure out what it is. "That word, what did you say? Vahnatai?"

Zadal nods, glad that Phamh'rir seems to be so quick to understand. "Vahnatai indeed. The people of the Living Crystal. My people."

"Would that not mean that the Vahnatai were the beings of light that created us? The Shining Ones?"

Zadal nods again. "In my darkest suspicions, I would not have thought of this. But here we have the evidence: The culture of the Nephilim is drenched with parallels to the Vahnatai civilization, it shows clear marks of a race created, rather than evolved naturally, and there is a distinctly Vahnatai tool referencing them as the Shapers of Life, that I found in a place that could well have been the birthplace of the Nephilim.

"It took me lifetimes of your kind to discover this, but now my time is running out. I must go. Perhaps we will meet again; meanwhile, keep this safe." He takes the carving claw and hands it to Phamh'rir. "Remember the words I have told you tonight, for you may one day bring the truth."

Only a sliver of the sun is still visible, and Zadal's face is illuminated by crimson light, and by the white sphere of brilliance that he now extinguishes in his hand. The remaining sunlight is not even enough to glint in his eyes, but blotting out the rising stars, he forms a vague silhouette against the night sky.

"Farewell, young Nephil."

Zadal seems suddenly to sense something, for he tenses up, his face showing stark terror, and, whispering "Fly, while you can!" he hastens off into the night.

But before he has taken five strides, there is the singing sound of a bowstring in the darkness, and the whirring on an arrow speeding through the air. It only lasts a second, then a sick, muffled thud tells of the arrow finding its mark.

Zadal does not scream, for the arrow has pierced his heart with such force and precision that he is already dead before he hits the grand. His hands clutch the arrow around his chest, but he is already no longer moving as he lies twisted on the wet grass, in the fog of the night, even as the last rays of the sun have vanished.

Phamh'rir feels a brief urge to run to his aid, but he sees that all aid is too late for the slain sage who was talking to him only seconds earlier. Instead, he heeds the wise man's last instruction: Turning around, he soundlessly flees into the shadows before the slayers can find him too. In his hand, he is still clutching the object Zadal gave him: That which was the final key in the long riddle unravelling the origin of his race.

 5174 words.