“I live to serve,” the short reply came. Immediately Traax sheathed his dreggan and took off into the air, followed first by his officers, and finally by the rest of the legions. As the sky began to darken with their numbers, Tristan stood there, almost speechless, trying to become accustomed to the fact that he was their new lord.
Once they were gone, the wizard took a step closer to him. “Well done,” he said dryly. “It should be interesting one day to see the results of their labors.”
“Yes,” Tristan said blankly, the sadness of Narrissa’s death suddenly revisiting him. So much had happened so quickly that not only his head, but also his heart had been overwhelmed—lost, swimming through the concurrent mazes of new life and sudden death.
Wigg laid an understanding hand upon his shoulder. “We have the stone, Shailiha, and her firstborn. In addition, the Coven is destroyed, it is all we could have asked for.”
Tristan turned to look at the body covered with the blanket, thinking not only of the woman with the white wings who had cared for him so much, but of the little grave that lay next to the Recluse.
“Perhaps not all,” he said softly. With a blank look on his face, he went to Narrissa’s body and sat on the ground beside it, his back up against the wagon wheel, looking out at the awful carnage in the square. Taking her in his arms, he pulled the blanket away from her face and began to rock back and forth gently, as if he and Narrissa were the only two people in the world.
Wigg looked cautiously at the glowing vortex as it continued to revolve. He could easily envision Faegan as the rogue wizard sat in his chair on wheels on the other side, waiting anxiously to see whether anyone could be coming through as he held the vortex open for the last time.
The Lead Wizard then turned to Geldon, the hunchbacked dwarf who had been so brave and true. He paused for a moment, smiled knowingly to himself, and then pointed a long, bony index finger at the dwarf. A narrow azure bolt of pure energy immediately scorched through the air and onto Geldon’s collar. With a snapping, cracking sound, the iron collar split instantly in two and fell to the dirt.
His eyes wide as saucers, Geldon unbelievingly rubbed his neck where the collar had been, finally free of it after more than three hundred years. “Thank you, Wigg,” he said, crying unashamedly. His voice was breaking, and he was barely able to get the words out. “Now I can live as a free man, and no longer a slave.”
Wigg placed his hands into his sleeves. “It is we—the nations of both Eutracia and Parthalon—who should be thanking you,” he said simply. “For your services to this cause.”
Then the Lead Wizard looked down at Tristan, still sitting in the dirt. “It’s time to leave,” he said quietly.
“You, Shailiha, and the baby go now,” Tristan said gently, without looking up at the wizard. “And take Geldon with you. He deserves a better life, a life away from this awful place. I have almost an hour before the vortex closes. I wish to stay here for a time, and be alone.”
Wigg was about to speak again and order the prince to come, but then he stopped himself. I can no longer give this one orders, he realized.
“Very well,” the old one said reluctantly. And, at that moment, his eyes widened in disbelief. Tristan’s blood, still trickling from the wounds in his shoulder and side, was glowing.
No longer red, the prince’s blood was a radiant azure that twinkled and sparkled as it dripped from his body. And the wizard instinctively knew that it was due to the fact that the Chosen One had made his first real use of the craft.
Wigg’s mind was immediately sent back in time to that night in Faegan’s tree house, just before the rogue-wizard had sent the two of them to Parthalon, and to the words Faegan had whispered after giving the Lead Wizard the locket of water from the Caves.
“It may be possible for the prince to perform some small use of the craft, despite the fact that he is untrained. If you are dead or incapacitated, it may be his only salvation. Although they do not say how, the second volume of the Tome affirms that after he has accomplished it, he will be forever, inalterably, changed. You must stay on the lookout for this change, whatever it is to be…”
Wigg continued to look down at the prince, thinking of the Tome of the Paragon, the book that he had so long ago found with the stone, and to one of the many lines written therein: “The azure light that accompanies the births of the Chosen Ones shall be the proof of the quality of their blood…”
He placed his hand on the prince’s shoulder once again, and Tristan turned his face up to him, smiling slightly through the pain in his heart. “I know,” the prince said quietly. “This feeling has been with me for several hours, although I could not discern its meaning until just now. It began when you first opened the locket and removed the Paragon, exposing it to my blood. And I could feel the change strengthening even further just now, as the Paragon came closer.”
With fresh, tearful eyes Wigg took a newfound look at the man who sat before him and then, without speaking, went back to gather up the princess, the baby, and the dwarf. Without looking back, Wigg, Shailiha, her baby, and the dwarf named Geldon walked into the vortex… and vanished.
It was only then, as Tristan sat finally alone in the dirt, holding Narrissa in his arms, that the full realization came to him. Not gently, as if upon silent cat’s feet, or whispering softly upon the flutter of the afternoon breeze, but suddenly and fully, from his blood.
And then he understood.
Understood what his mind had come to accept, but until now his heart had not. Understood, finally, that those things his family and the Lead Wizard had been asking of him, he had ultimately achieved. You have survived, and ascended to manhood, he heard his endowed blood call out to him. Your careless ways are no more. And you have become, truly, the Chosen One.
He looked down to the brilliant azure blood that dripped from his shoulder. It was his transformed, endowed blood and his transformed, matured heart that spoke to him, he now knew. Speaking, somehow, from the Prophecies of the Tome, the great book that he still knew so little about, but was nonetheless tuned to -come, but shall be preceded by another, he could hear it saying to him. And the Chosen One shall take up three weapons of his choice and slay many before reading the Prophecies, and coming to the light…
Looking down at the gentle woman who lay dead in his arms, his mind was taken back to what the monster Kluge had said, just before he died. “There are still things you do not know, and even if you should somehow return to your homeland you will be a wanted man, hunted day and night because of me, your forever-damaged sister a mere shadow of her former self. No, Galland, your victory over me here today is far from complete…”
Tristan sat there silently, hugging Narrissa, and looked out at the charred and broken landscape, and upon the bodies that lay there. And then, just as he had sworn to avenge the deaths of his parents that rainy night in the graveyard, he made a new covenant with himself.
I will not rest until I have discovered who has poured such endowed blood into my veins, and why. I shall know why I have become the vessel that contains the blood of the fates. And the answers lie with the Tome.
Looking down into the soft, gentle face of the Gallipolai, he felt the tears once again begin to roll down his cheeks.
Picking her up, he turned and walked up the little knoll, into the swirling light.
Epilogue
Recluse
The following day the weather surrounding the Recluse turned harsh and cold, the wind whipping steadily through the cloudy air, wheeling the cold rain into heavy, swirling patterns before it hit the already soaked and muddy ground. Thunder and lightning barreled across the sky from time to time as the Vagaries continued to mark the passing of the Coven, unleashing yet more wind before finally relenting. They were soon followed by a dense fog that had slowly snaked into and around the once-magnificent structure, carrying with it a silent, foreboding kind of impenetrability. With the slow, final cessation of the wind, nothing moved and there was no sound. The deserted, ruined Recluse rested awkwardly, split open and broken, on the island in the center of the surrounding lake.