“I’ll tell the story as it came to me,” Iriani said.
Kithri nodded. “So start telling. It’s a long way to the bridge.”
The Solstice War between Arkhosia and Bael Turath was not its own war at all, but a change in plans. Yet it was called its own war because of the periods of quiet on either side of it, and because it decisively changed everything that came after. Both combatants were exhausted and winter was on the way; they fell back to their lines, entrenched, and got down to the business of preparing themselves for spring, when snow would retreat from the mountain passes and the gods would give their signals for the great war to begin again.
Then a midwinter thaw changed everything.
Later, the survivors would blame a dispute among the gods Melora, Corellon, and the Raven Queen. The Queen, it was said, was angry that the fighting had stopped so soon because the battlefields were so very good to her black-feathered subjects. But she loved winter too, and was torn between the pleas of the ravens and the immutable paths of the sun and stars.
“Melora,” she said. “The wilderness is yours to command and to love. What of this great bridge the Arkhosians have built across the Gorge of Noon?”
“The Arkhosians are builders,” Melora said. “I cannot interfere with their nature any more than a beaver’s.” In truth, though, her heart stormed at the thought of the bridge.
“But surely the gorge’s majesty would be restored by the destruction of the bridge,” the Raven Queen purred. “Surely you could bring this about. The Arkhosians and the forces of Bael Turath are camped not twenty miles apart, in the lower vales of the Serrata with the bridge between them. Neither force wants to move farther away lest the other claim the bridge and the only passage over the gorge for fifty leagues in either direction.
“In these lower vales, winter is not so bad,” she went on. “But it is still deep in snow, and the passes choke in avalanches. Here is what I need from you.”
Melora’s temper was as wild as the wilderness and seas that she commanded on the earth. She knew what the Raven Queen was doing when she leaned in a little too close and spoke with a husk in her voice. She knew what the Queen was offering and what she was asking in return.
And wild, untamed Melora thought it a workable bargain.
“All I ask of you,” the Raven Queen said, whispering into Melora’s ear as her heart leaped and tossed like the storm-driven surf, “is that you ask a little favor of Corellon…”
Corellon who could sing stones into life! Corellon who lent power to the singer’s voice and the artist’s eye, the mage’s spells and the sculptor’s chisel!
Corellon, who when the seasons were divided at the beginning of the world begged for spring and received it because along with it came the knowledge that everything must ultimately die, that the green abundance of spring is the flare of a candle cupped against the everlasting wind and dark of death. This knowledge is the fuel of art, of thoughts of beauty, of all sorceries light and dark. Corellon is the patron of those who know they will die but are determined that they will bloom and learn and love first.
It is said that Corellon lives in a castle whose rations and dimensions haunt the dreams of artists, adorned with tapestries telling stories the troubadors can never find tongue to repeat. Vine-haired and stone-toothed, Melora strode through the arches of this castle and found Corellon, eyes closed, listening to the music made by dust motes dancing in sunlight.
“How would you like to push the Raven Queen a little?” she asked. Corellon’s eyes opened. Melora scattered the motes and their music jangled into chaos. “How would you like to have a little spring in her winter?”
“If she has sent you, there is more to this offer than what you’re telling,” Corellon answered. “And I can smell her on you, which makes it a simple matter to guess what is motivating your wild little heart.”
“To each her reasons,” Melora said. “Spring in the high country, just for a week. Think of it! What new life might grow, what stories might the peoples of the world tell of your strength in the face of the Raven Queen’s deepest winter?”
“And why is she willing?” Corellon asked.
“She is a good queen to her subjects, who belong to me as well,” Melora said. “The ravens are hungry.”
“Well,” Corellon said. Already he had begun to think of the songs that might be sung. “What the Queen offered you, will you offer me?” he asked, archly, as the sculptures around them began to dance.
That the gods have human desires is known to every child-else why should they have given those desires to us? Ah, the wilderness is fickle!
A southwest wind curled over the passes at sunrise the next day, bringing with it smells of the lower territories where winter was forbidden. For nine days it blew. At the end of the third, each army sent scouts up the passes toward the gorge. Avalanches drove them back.
At the end of the sixth day, each army sent scouts again. They returned, most of them, reporting that the way would be clear if the freakish thaw held for another three days.
And hold for three days it did.
On the morning of the tenth day, the armies marched. On the morning of the twelfth day, they stood on either side of the bridge. By noon of the twelfth day, the bridge ran knee-deep with the blood of human and tiefling, dragonborn and dwarf. The fighting on the bridge went on into the night as both sides mustered sorcerous lights to guide their armies lest they wake up in the morning and find the other side possessing the bridge.
Centuries before, the bridge had been the Arkhosians’ mightiest work of engineering, a monument to the vision of their emperors and the building genius of the dwarves who lived in the caves along the gorge. It was a thousand feet long and wide enough for twenty men to walk across abreast, with buttresses curving down into the walls of the gorge hundreds of feet below. It was large enough that all manner of creatures had taken up residence in its stone eaves and crevices, its drains and arches. The tiefling shock troops of Bael Turath had long since slaughtered the Noon Gorge dwarves, keeping only those as slaves who might teach the Turathian architects the secrets of stone that dwarves seemed to be born with-yet the secrets of the bridge over the gorge remained known only to one man, because only that one man had performed the magics that bound its stones together. The bridge, too, had been a symbol of peace between Arkhosia and Bael Turath… or perhaps it had only come to seem such during a pause between two wars. When it did not carry soldiers, it carried caravans-and then in times of war, soldiers carried back as spoils what the merchants had once carried as goods.
The greatest wizard of the Arkhosians was Iban Ja, confidant to emperors, Seer of Infinitudes, and magical overseer of the dwarf engineers who had built the bridge. He watched the battle from a cliffside perch on the Arkhosian side of the gorge, participating as the battle demanded and commanding the ranks of Arkhosian wizards who found their way across the bridge with the armed soldiery. Iban Ja was a thousand years old, the stories went. Iban Ja had never been born, but made from the bodies of ten great wizards who gave their lives knowing that they would be part of the greatest wizard ever to walk the earth, the other stories went. None of them were true and all of them spoke the truth of the Arkhosians’ regard for him.
He looked down as dawn broke on the thirteenth day and saw the best of the Arkhosian troops, the mighty dragonborn warriors known as the Knights of Kul. A hundred selected from ten thousand, they were the finest foot soldiers in the known world. Any one of them could cut their way through ten men and be laughed at if they got a scratch in the fight.