Whatever it was, Snowfire was certain, there was going to be a great deal more to it than appeared on the surface.
Snowfire was so deep in his own thoughts that it startled him when the boy spoke. “Who are you? What are you doing here?” came the muffled voice from behind his back.
He considered the language carefully before he replied. He did not want to answer the wrong question and give the boy the impression that he was being uncooperative. “Myself, specifically?” he asked. “Or my people? There are more of us here, not far from here, as I told you.”
“Your people,” Darian answered, and Snowfire felt him take one hand off of Snowfire’s waist; he sniffed, and Snowfire fished in a pouch at his belt to give the lad a bit of unused bandage to wipe his nose with. “Th-thank you,” the boy said carefully.
Interesting that his own thoughts had just been on that very subject, of why the Tayledras were here.
“We are a very special group of Tayledras - your people call us Hawkbrothers, usually - and we are here for a number of reasons which all mesh together. What know you of the mage-storms?” he asked. “I ask this, because it is relevant to why we are here.”
He felt the boy shrug. “Not much,” Darian admitted. “They upset the weather a bunch, made things bad around here, turned monsters loose. I guess they made it hard for mages to work.”
Snowfire thought for a moment, and decided that the most complete, if abbreviated, explanation would certainly not be amiss, and would fill up the time until the moment they arrived at the camp. And besides, it might help keep his mind off how his arm hurt. “I will go back to the very beginning, then - to the cause of it all. Once, so many hundreds of years ago that most of that time is lost even as a legend, there were many of what we know as the Great Mages. These were Adepts so powerful that they had the ability to actually create new creatures that had never existed before, to change the weather, or to make the rocks run like water.”
“Was that where the monsters came from?” Darian asked, as Snowfire paused.
“Some of them created creatures that you would take to be monsters, I am sure,” Snowfire told him, craning his head around to smile at the boy with encouragement. “But I think that the monsters you speak of were all created later - and I am coming to that. One of these Great Mages was very evil, and he made war on the rest. In the end, there was only one left to oppose him. That one invented a kind of weapon that was so terrible that he swore he would only use it if he himself were dying. He made two of these - and when the time came that he was, indeed, dying, killed by a slow poison delivered by an assassin loyal to the evil mage, he sent one into the hands of the evil mage himself, and triggered the other in his own place.”
“Why?” Darian asked. Snowfire suppressed a smile at that oldest of childrens’ questions.
“Because,” he said patiently, “the way that this weapon worked was to release all of the magic contained within every object within a certain area. It released all of the magic in the good mage’s Tower, at the same time as the other released all of the magic in the evil mage’s stronghold. Now, think for a moment about how powerful these two men were, and think how much magic must have been released. Why, in the case of the good mage, his very Tower had been built with and relied upon thousands of magic devices. Then think what must have been contained in that Tower, and around it.”
The boy pondered that for a moment, then shuddered convulsively. “That - must have been big. And awful,” he said, in a subdued voice. “Worse than a forest fire.”
“Much worse,” Snowfire assured him. “Where the good mage once lived is now the Dhorisha Plains; where the evil one lived is now Lake Evendim; since both those places were strongholds among hills, that should give you an idea how dreadful it was. I assure you, nothing that was caught inside where the bounds of the Plains and the Lake are now survived. That Cataclysm completely reshaped the world, it was so powerful. And the effects of two of the weapons being triggered simultaneously were worse and more complicated than the good mage had ever dreamed possible. Having two of them go off created theirs? mage-storms, and those, in their turn, created the Pelagir Hills and the Pelagiris Forest.”
“Huh.” The boy digested that. “I thought they - just were. I thought the Forest had always been like that.”
“They were created by the cataclysm and the mage-storms that followed,” Snowfire replied. “And it was longer ago than I think you would dream possible, and the Pelagirs extended far out beyond what is now Valdemar. Now, the Tayledras were given a duty, and that was to set things to rights in the Pelagirs, and in return were given the secrets of how to control and confine very powerful magic. And the odd thing is that we were very nearly done with that task, when the mage-storms returned, and they returned because not only did they reshape the world, they made an echo of themselves back across time, exactly like the waves of a stone tossed into a quiet pool will reach the shore and reflect back again.” He paused. “Do you see what I am saying?”
Thousands of years of history compressed into a few sentences, but if he is really interested, there are plenty who will teach him the tale in its fullest.
“Not really, altogether,” Darian admitted honestly, “but enough so I think I’m following the story right. So the mage-storms we had were the . . . echoes of the ancient ones? That would be why they made monsters like the first ones did?”
“Exactly,” Snowfire said with encouragement in his voice, thinking as he did so, that this was a good thing to be talking of, for it gave the boy something to engross his mind. Snowfire had a growing suspicion that the barbarians had attacked his home, and that he was the only one to escape, if not indeed the only one to survive. He would figure that out as soon as he had time to think about the attack at all, and he would need to grieve eventually, but it would be better if he did so in a safe place.
For now, I will keep his mind on the strange Hawkbrother, so that he does not think too much about what has happened to him. I cannot afford to cope with a hysterical child right now.
“The new Storms were bad in effect, but worse in potential,” he continued. “And they were building up to a second Cataclysm, because they were a reflection of the originals, which was why they grew stronger instead of weaker. We are not precisely certain what that new Cataclysm would have done, but several folk determined to prevent it, and succeeded.”
“That would be Herald-Mage Elspeth, Adept Darkwind, and Adept Firesong, right?” the boy asked, as if he had suddenly made a connection for himself.
“Yes! Yes, and some others as well.” Not all of them human, or even by common standards, alive, he thought with a little amusement. But he can learn that for himself later. No point in piling strangeness upon strangeness. I am impressed, that he would know those names. “I must continue to shorten the story a great deal more, but if you wish to know all of it, you have only to ask. I will say only now that they did prevent it, they did stop the Storms and have made it so that they will not reecho at some later time, and that the result of this was to change all the magic as we knew it.”