Shadow's Rising - Chapter III

Chapter III
The Silence Broken

Meanwhile, having stated her intentions, the would-be daemon raiser went about the business she had so determinedly meant earlier. She set the leather bag she had brought on the ground and opened it carefully. Out came all the usual equipment of the practical side of daemonology – candles, torches, chalk, incense and other things of a more esoteric nature. The woman took first the chalk and drew several symbols of an obviously sinister nature – pentagrams and suchlike – both on the ground, on her own robes, on the stone, and even several tiny runes on her forehead. She took out the candles – all were dark black, of course – set them up in a geometrical constellation around the obelisk, and lit them in turn, mumbling incantations in a soft voice.
After she had liberally strewn incense into each of the candles, causing them to burn with light green flames, she began the actual ceremony. Dancing around the stone in slow, but powerful movements, she sang discordant melodies and disconnected words, in a loud, sometimes melodious, sometimes screeching voice, shattering the total silence that had engulfed the stone for the last several centuries. Since the Great War, it was almost certain, no one had ever made such a racket in this place.
The mage was a lot more comfortable now. This was familiar stuff – raising daemons, if not of that power, was a skill she was trained in. Oh, if those dumb fools at the academy would see her now. She, the best student of her grade, the entire academy at her time, dishonorably expelled for misuse of power and unsuitable experiments. How impressed they would be now. Finally, they would respect and admire... No. She stopped that thought. No, she did not want them to be impressed. She wanted them to be despaired. She did not want them to respect her. She wanted them to fear her. Oh yes, how she would relish being feared, rather than reviled. As Maara the Glorious would she be known, as beautiful as she was powerful. Everywhere, the people would despair as they saw her. And, though in another way than Maara thought, the wizards at the academy would despair if they saw her right now, knowing how utterly their incessant attempts at rearing the little orphan girl to do good rather than evil, to control her dark drives and the inexplicable desire for power, had failed. Though she was oblivious, they would know what she was bringing down upon the world and herself.
The dancing had reached a frenzy. Maara was positively shrieking now, ranting and raving in a language that it pained the ears to listen. The dancing was now not a tame, slow motion. It was wild, it was exhibiting, and in several moments it was purely sensual. It was supposed to: The objective was to seduce the imprisoned daemon. Once it was released, she wanted it to follow her command to the letter, rather than eating her on the spot, which was always a professional risk that came with the practice of daemonology. And this was one big daemon. To be on the safe side, Maara did a lot of seducing. She was not ugly in any meaning of the word, and if the L'zothgwaur did not come out, at least he had a good time tonight. In that respect, Maara had been truthful: She did offer something more interesting than sitting in a rock for a thousand years with nothing to do.
Finally, with a loud scream of "YLZGRATH SHENNAHIYAR!", the daemonologist stopped in her tracks and crumpled to the ground as if struck down by lightning. The candles had long burnt down and flickered out; she had been dancing for more than hour, and was near death from exhaustion. Onlookers might have taken her for unconscious, but far from it. She was exhausted, but still very much alert. She knew the next point in the ritual: She would have to sit still for well over an hour now, waiting for a certain event to come to pass. Pulling herself to her knees, the mage started to meditate in a calm posture, occasionally glancing up to the bright night sky as if searching for something.
By now, Rinjo had moved on in his orbit, and had almost completely covered the constellation of the Mariner, extinguishing with his light even those stars not obscured by his form. Lyrissia, the bright sickle almost filled to an orb – Lyrissia was erratic in her phase changes as well as her path, and she would oft times visibly change her form even as she traveled along the firmament – Lyrissia had risen higher and was now balancing on the tip of the Unicorn's horn. In the East, several more stars had risen above the horizon. A new constellation was about to come up.
Maara Shinnora was sitting in front of the rock in total quiet, not making a sound. Utter silence shrouded the area, as it had before. But the atmosphere had definitely changed. What engulfed the stone now, after the ritual, was no longer the totally unbroken, maybe even unbreakable silence that had reigned here earlier. It was that sort of silence that always seems to ring with the echo of the loud noise that preceded it. It was a broken silence. Not as it had been earlier, an unending, unchanging silence that had been here more or less since the great war a thousand years ago, but an uneasy silence, something that covers the scene after a loud cataclysm. A waiting silence. An eager, an anticipating quietness surrounded the monolith. Yet the silence waited for a long time.

Time passed.

Rinjo, the moon of forgetfulness and rest, was now covering the Mariner completely. The Mariner, protector of the West, was sleeping and not watching. Lyrissia in all her brilliance, the moon of White Magic and Innocence, had obscured the Unicorn as if trying desperately to shield the defenseless creature in the absence of the otherwise vigilant Mariner. A foreboding constellation… and… There! What was this? Something was happening to the small silver moon. Lyrissia's phase was as erratic as her orbit, but even her shape did not naturally change that quickly. As if some invisible, gigantic monster was nibbling at the edge of the moon, it slowly started to shrink to a sickle again, but much faster than her earlier change. Also, it came from the wrong side. A shadow seemed to pass over the moon of Innocence, and in another moment, she was gone. The now unobscured form of the Unicorn shone brilliantly, but as if defenseless and unprotected, down upon the stone.
The stars, like a spray of little dots of milk, or like the silver sparks that are the byproduct of a magic spell from a skilled hand, glittered down upon the wide expanse of the meadow in silver brilliance, illuminating the world almost as much as the two moons on the far side of the horizon, just slightly above the mountains. It was a jumpy, uncertain, scattered light, but it was visible nonetheless. Pure starlight. What was so special about it anyway? Was it the way it shone on the dark-black obelisk that was the focus point of any gaze over the landscape, which made the whole rest of the meadow just a background? The stone glistened in the silvery light, but did not reflect any at all. Utter darkness marked the place where it stood, two slightly darker shadows cast on the ground by the two moons in the East.
The mage that had so far been kneeling in front of the monolith lifted her head and glanced upwards to the zenith. She turned her head to the South. Rinjo had passed the Mariner. It was almost time. She turned her gaze to the west. The eclipse of Lyrissia had already started to fade, and a narrow sliver was visible over the Unicorn once more. It was extremely nearly time. She looked down again, in quiet meditation.

Time passed again.

But only for a short moment.

And suddenly, a wind rushed through the long grass stalks. Not a breeze like before, but a veritable gust of storm. Clouds rushed in from the North, passing over the center of the sky, but leaving the moons untouched. The storm bent the grass and ripped at the bushes and small trees. It could be heard howling past the stone. It was not a true storm, but it seemed like one in contrast to the utter silence that had permeated this place only moments ago. Something was happening. The background of total silence was now so filled with so much suspense and tension that it could almost literally be grasped. The celestial spheres had come full cycle, and what had been bound an aeon ago was now to be freed. Let the world weep; weep and wail for this dreadful day in the dark days to come! Let the world lament the loss of peace! Let the world bow to Maara Shinnora, Maara the Powerful, and her consort Mordaures, and know the bite of pure terror!
The storm subsided. Nothing else happened. A bit anti-climatic. The local weather and the nocturnal astronomy could have used a little timing.
And then something else did occur, distinctly after the storm that was probably meant to accompany it. It was quite obviously the event that the silence, the woman and the stone had been waiting for; the dreadful tension suddenly released. It was as if the stone itself gasped as an aurora of strange light suddenly rose in the Eastern horizon. There were still many hours left from now until the first rays of the sun would mark the dawn of the next day. It was quite obviously not the sun. The light filled the horizon from north to south, above the hills. Slowly filling the whole sky, the light spread from the west towards the zenith. It was dark red. An ominous color, yes? A prairie in utter silence, a dark stone not reflecting any light, a black-robed mage kneeling in front of it as if waiting, and then a dark red light fills the air… Not a good omen, certainly.
The light continued to fill the sky, growing brighter and brighter. The stars were extinguished by the brilliant glare. It might have been a polar light, but it was too regular and uniform to be a flare. And then, the color was no longer only in the sky, but also on the ground: The hills in the west were bleeding, bleeding red light. A single ray of redness shot down from the hills, hitting the stone. The stone lit up so suddenly that it must have been magic. Red light reflecting from the stone, the dark, ominous obelisk suddenly shimmering dark red in the light of Blethar, the Red Moon, the bloodhound of the Hunter.
Once more, the black robed mage, Maara, lifted her head to examine the skies. Other than the earlier times when she gazed upwards, she seemed satisfied with what she saw up there, for this time, when she had finished, she did not lower her head as before in silence. Instead, she straightened as well as she could while remaining on her knees, bent her neck backwards as if to increase her vocal capacity, and opened her mouth wide. Her ecstatic, wide open eyes rolling in their sockets, the daemonologist let out a loud, shrill, ululating keen. The painful sound spread through the cool night air discordantly, distinctly audible for miles.
At last, the dreadful moment had come. The red moon of blood had risen. The three moons were forming a triangle whose bloody point pointed towards the East, towards the Isles of Blood, the heart of the former realm of the Daemon King of the Third Age. The constellations of the Unicorn and the Mariner extinguished by the fierce red light. The Sign of the Ravager was completed once more, like it had not come to pass in a thousand years; the orbits come full cycle at last, the celestial bodies standing like they had on that dreadful night when Baltazar, with a dreadful oath, had lifted his hand balefully towards the West and sworn that the Dark Alliance would be avenge him when the time came, before falling under the blades of the Paladins.
And then, with a dreadful voice like Ice and Fire, seductive and abominable at once, subtle as Silk and deadly as Steel and rough as unhewn Stone at the same time, the stone finally answered.

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