"All this was here," I said finally. "And I never knew it. My family’s true heritage, stolen away from us by those we were always taught to trust and revere. This should have been made freely available to all of us. We have a right to know where we came from! Who our ancestors were, what they did, and why they did it. It makes me wonder what other secrets the inner circle have been hiding from the rest of us; from the rank and file and all the good little soldiers who went out to fight and die for the honour of the family…We’ve reached the end of the trail, Molly. The answer is here; I know it."
"The answer?" Molly said carefully. "Which particular answer is that, Eddie?"
"To how it all started! Where we came from. Where the armour came from. How we became Droods." I looked at Molly. "I did wonder, sometimes, if maybe my ancestors made some kind of deal with the Devil."
"No," Molly said immediately. "If that was the case, I would have known."
I decided I wouldn’t ask. This was no time to get distracted. I looked around, using my Sight. A complex latticework of protective spells lay over everything, some of them quite impressively strong. And nasty. Some books and scrolls shone brightly on their shelves, radiating strange energies. And one blazed like a beacon, full of ancient power. It turned out to be a simple scroll, words inked on roughly tanned animal hide. The outer markings were in a language I didn’t even recognise. Molly crowded in close beside me.
"Any idea what that is?"
"The answer," I said.
"Well, yes, but apart from that…"
"Only one way to find out," I said, and touched the wax seals holding the scroll closed with Oath Breaker. The activating Words just popped into my mind from the old ironwood staff itself, and as I said them, one by one, the protections around the scroll shattered and disappeared. I unrolled it very carefully, and the dark ink on the interior stood out clearly against the coffee-coloured hide. The text was Druidic, from Roman times. Which was unusual in itself, because Druidic learning was strictly an oral tradition, passed down mouth to mouth from generation to generation. Never written down, in case it might fall into the hands of enemies. But they’d made an exception for this; and I could see why.
"It’s Latin," said Molly, peering curiously over my shoulder. "Strange dialect. Something about a bargain."
"You read Latin?" I said, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice.
She glared at me. "I may not have had the benefits of your private education, but I know a thing or two. You can’t work any of the major magics without at least a working knowledge of Latin. Most of the old pacts and bindings are written in it. What we’re looking at here…is a spell. A spell to reveal hidden truths…about the beginnings of the Drood family! You were right, Eddie; it is the answer. So, do we use the spell? Right here and now?"
"Of course," I said. "We might not get another chance."
"Is this something you need to do alone?" said Molly. "I mean, I’d understand if you—"
"No," I said immediately. "We’ve come this far together; it’s only right we go the last mile together too."
So we both spoke the spell in unison, chanting the ancient Latin aloud, and the world we knew blew away on a wave of wild magic, as the spell gave us a vision of time past.
We were not there. We saw and heard everything, but we were not present. This was the past, and we had no place in it, except as observers.
Before us lay old Britain. The Romans called it the Tin Islands, because that was all we had that interested them. The land of the Britons: a savage place, back when we all lived in the forest, in the wild woods, in the dark places the Romans dared not follow us. The vision shifted and changed, showing us sights charged with meaning and significance. We watched, and learned.
In this time, Drood history began. Fierce men in ragged furs, with blue woad daubed on their snarling faces, ran howling through the trees. My ancestors, the Druids. So fierce, so savage, they shocked even the hardened Roman legionnaires. They fought; tribes against armies, bronze against steel. And yet at first the Druids won, forcing the invading Romans all the way back to their waiting ships, and then slaughtering them in the shallows until it seemed the whole ocean ran red with their blood. The survivors sailed away; but they came back. The Romans came again, and again, until finally they triumphed through steel and tactics and weight of numbers. Because they were an army, and we were just scattered tribes who often hated each other as much as we did the invaders.
The Romans feared the Druid priests most of all, and wiped them out, destroying their spoken knowledge and traditions along with their savage religion. And so it might have gone…until the Heart came, and everything changed.
It did not fall from the sky, as the official story says. It did not fall like an angel from heaven, or a meteor from outer space. It downloaded itself from another dimension, a different kind of reality. Imposing itself upon our world through an act of sheer will. The impact of its arrival killed every living thing in the vicinity and flattened all the trees for miles around. The ground shook for days, and strange bright lights and energies burned in the skies. But the Druids, though sensibly cautious, were scared of nothing and sent emissaries to the Heart.
Those Druids would become the very first Droods.
They walked among fallen trees for mile after mile, and though they saw wonders and horrors and living things twisted and mutated by the terrible energies released through the Heart’s arrival, they did not stop or turn aside. They were shamans whose job it was to defend and protect the tribe from outside threats. And finally they came to the great clearing of dead and blasted earth in which the Heart lay. A diamond as big as a hill, brilliant and beautiful; and alive. It spoke to the Druid shamans who came to it, and they worshipped it as a sign from the gods or perhaps even one of the gods themselves.
The Heart was quite content for them to do this. It was lost and far from home and weakened by its long journey. It had come to our world fleeing something else. Something the Heart was still very much afraid of. So it proposed a bargain to the Druid shamans. It would make them powerful, make them as gods among their own kind, and in return they would revere and protect the Heart against all enemies. In this world…and without.
The Heart gave the Druids their living armour, and they became more than men.
Originally, the shamans only used the armour to protect the tribes against the dark powers and forces of evil who walked more openly in the world in those days. But the armour made these Droods very powerful, and all power tends to corrupt…The greatest threat to the tribes were the invading Romans, but the shamans were wise enough to know that not even the golden armour could hold off the Roman armies forever. So they went to the Romans and made a deal. Rome would rule…through the Droods. And thus the tribes would be protected from the worst of Rome’s power. When, five centuries later, the Roman Empire finally declined and fell, and Roman authority left Britain, the Droods just kept going. Operating secretly, to protect the tribes from all threats, from without…and within.
But what was the armour, this glorious golden living metal? Where did it come from? And what price did the Heart demand to make those first few Droods so much more than human?
A Drood stood before the Heart, presenting a pair of twin babies to the massive diamond. One of the babies was snatched out of the Drood’s arms by an unseen force, and it hung on the air before the Heart, kicking and screaming. And then it was suddenly sucked into the Heart’s shining surface and disappeared inside. Its screams cut off abruptly. And around the neck of the baby still held by the Drood, a shining golden collar appeared. The vision showed other sacrifices, other sights, down many years, until the secret of the family’s armour was plain.