Sovereign Night, Chapter One

Chapter One: Words For Binding

(As narrated by Luke Orimar, a Knight of the King)

A chill bit through my body as I lay tossing and turning in restless, nightmare laden sleep. It would be the darkest night of my entire life, despite what awful moments my future held, and the unearthly cold that erased the last vestiges of summer heat was perhaps a warning of what time would reveal.

In my dream I sat a table. A simple wooden affair riddled with stains. My brother Logen and my sister Lorelai were there with me. They were both garbed in black, as was I, I noticed as I looked about. The walls were an incomprehensible blur. I noticed my siblings' faces only. I heard but could not see a door open, and a man with silver hair sat at the table with us.

His face was a blur.

He reached from nowhere and pulled out four tall, slender cups, and sat one before each of us. Their dingy glass was stained, the liquid within a noxious violet color. Blindly I reached with numb fingers and made to take a sip, but Lorelai beat me to it. Instantly her face became blurry, and then she dropped to the table, dead.

A moment later, Logen moved to take a drink, but I preempted him and drained my own glass, hoping somehow to stave off my brother’s death. The blackness at the bottom of my cup quickly swallowed me and I felt myself falling into a massive void that grew and grew.

With a start I awoke, my blankets tangled around my body in disarray.

That was different, I thought to myself, shifting on my mattress and glancing around the tiny dark room I called home. This dream was different. But why? Ever since the death of my parents six years ago, I had been haunted by nightmares of my death nightly. It had made sleep a difficult and frightening prospect, but this was worse in ways I could scarcely fathom. The thought of my baby sister Lorelai dying was much more difficult to accept. She was just six years old and had recently begun her training as a mage.

I rolled over again and mindlessly tried to straighten out my bedclothes, knowing I would never get back to sleep. Especially given what today was. The day of my shield ceremony. Every knight on their seventeenth birthday was given a shield, marking them as an adult, a man. The day would be especially painful with no parents to present me my shield. The captain of the guard would have to do it in their stead.

I sat up and reached for a match from my bedside table, flicking it against one of my boots that lay strewn on the floor. I lit a candle inside a lantern next to my bed, waiting as my eyes adjusted. I felt an uncharacteristic need to warm my hands against the softly flickering light. The hardwood floor, too, was strangely cold against my bare feet. I stood and slowly, mechanically got dressed, daydreaming about a hot cup of coffee and fresh milk swirling within.

And then I noticed with a mixture of horror and curiosity that my sword, most beloved and personal possession of all I owned, was missing. Kept within easy reach on the bureau near my bed, I had put it in the same place every night for ten years. A strange feeling of dread came over me as I stared at the place where it should have been, its lack puzzling. At once I raced for the door, heart pounding terrifically as I fumbled with my doorknob. It was this dread, and the chill that seemed to seep everywhere that led me to panic. June in Tarn was never cold.

At once as I hastily burst from my room I was sent sprawling, tangled with a very young boy. Some new recruit whose name I could not recall. The barracks of the knights are arranged around a courtyard, with my room being on the third and highest floor. I pushed the boy away without a thought and planted my palms on the guardrail, eyes searching for the thief.

It didn’t take long.

Illuminated in harsh white moonlight a cloaked shadow stood just twenty feet below. Pinned by some mysterious force, my sister Lorelai knelt before him. I made to scream but the words died in my throat. As I watched helplessly, my blade flashed through the air and pierced her abdomen. Once again I tried to yell, but my throat was sealed, to where I could barely breathe.

Finally finding my legs, I raced down the nearest stairs five at a time and leapt the last ten feet, nearly breaking my ankles. The shadow being was at the gate. Escaping. I had two options, I could go to Lorelai, or I could pursue him.

Yet there were no real options. Nothing in me could run while my sister lay bleeding to death at my feet. A haze of panic still flooded my mind. I knew I should be calling for help before he got away, but still I seemed incapable of words. My feet crunching in the dry grass seemed to be the only sound. My sword lay a few feet off, abandoned now that the deed had been done. I dropped to the ground and took Lorelai in my arms. The spell seemed to vanish. Only a moan escaped my lips.

She was still breathing, I could feel her ribcage as I hugged her to me. Her hands guarded a wound that was gushing blood all over both of us. I gasped. It felt like I could only gawk while I lost the precious being I’d sworn to protect above all else.

“Luke…” She murmured. I feebly attempted to occlude the massive wounds in her belly and back, but she moved in equally flimsy measures to stop me. Her voice nearly imperceptible, she began to whisper what sounded like nonsense.

“Between Saltwater and Cumulus Cloud…

The ocean is rolled back into the sky…”

“Shhhh,” I whispered, trying to lay her down so I could better dress her lacerations. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Relax…” She fought me, clutching weakly to my wrists.

“The Void Above the Horizon swallows all light,

Death crossed the Void to Strike…”

And then, just like that, as I stared into her eyes, they went flat. All the life within her vanished, like smoke escaping an open bottle.

I attempted to solemnly close her eyelids, but as I reached to pull them down, a sudden rage overtook me. Who could do such a thing? To kill an innocent child? And worse, I knew I’d been framed. She had died by my blade. There was no motive, not when I loved her the way I did, but there would be no evidence to suggest anything else. The Knight’s Barracks were supposed to be impenetrable. Dizzy with anger, the night seemed to press in on me, glaring through my skin. It suddenly became hot again. I rocked back on my heels and roared with such ferocity that my throat was instantly raw.

“I swear I’ll kill you!” The words echoed off the walls around me, sure to bring knights running. I had mere seconds now to make my escape. As soon as I said the oath, I knew it was binding. I would kill this murderer no matter what it cost me, even if I myself died, that beast would know vengeance, and he would know it on the sword he’d killed with.

I swept up my blade and raced for the gate hoping to escape by whatever eerie fortune had allowed the killer to come and go. I didn’t even have time to clean myself of Lorelai’s blood, my sword still stained with it. I raced over the gate, climbing the crossbars, and once again nearly shattering my foot bones as I came down for a rough landing. In the guard tower I could hear a man fumbling with a bow, seeming to have just come out of some sort of stupor.

Bathed in milky moonlight, the world spilled out before me, like a river running into the sea. No trace of the fell murderer lurked in the shadows. I realized as I took off running that I would be hunting blind for someone I’d never seen.

I was twenty feet away when an arrow found me, hitting squarely in my left shoulder. I broke off the tail and kept going, adrenaline fueling my flight as knights assembled outside, ready to track me down. Murder was not a tried crime in the ranks of the Knights. There was no margin for error allowed in such areas. I would get beheaded immediately.

A shiver rolled down my spine as I contemplated my own head rolling across the dirt. I sped up, till I was going faster than I ever had in my life. I tried to force myself to think of escape plans, and remember every detail I could about the killer, but all I could see everytime I closed my eyes was the light vanishing from Lorelai’s big brown eyes.