Chapter 20

Prophecies were cursed. Brynn was certain of that now. Something bad happened every time a new one was revealed to him. It was good thing that Seleeku had left him. Now there were no more prophecies for him to worry about. He didn’t need her. Good riddance.

He stood in front of the Main Building of the College, feeling angry and depressed. The Library was on the third and top floor, which should be where the Codex of Essus was now held. Seleeku had told him that she returned it to Themon’s office, but the College must have been aware of Brynn’s escape and Themon’s disappearance by now. A book as valuable as the original Codex would have been promptly brought back to the Library for safekeeping.

How would he get into the Library? How would he gain access to the Codex? Seleeku would have figured out a way. He remembered when they had first met, she had told him that elves had ways of staying hidden from humans. He didn’t know if it was magic or just cunning, but he had witnessed first hand how the guards in the dungeon seemed to ignore her existence. He doubted he could replicate her ability. He was not a master of disguise.

“Brynn,” said a cool voice.

He recoiled at the sound of his name, and nearly ran, but a strong hand grabbed him from behind and spun him around.

Sibila faced him, flanked by two guards, one of whom had an iron grip on his arm. Her eyes were black pits, staring off into emptiness.

Brynn now understood what had troubled Seleeku back in the park. The Darkness had touched Sibila, warping her soul. But in what way, Brynn could not tell. “High Druid Sibila,” he whispered to her, “what happened?”

“Not many escape the dungeons. None have escaped your cell. Before you, course,” she said, ignoring him. “You could have headed into the mountains. Yet you are here. You need something. Or you think you do. Guard, the dagger.” She pointed at the spot at Brynn’s waist where he had hidden the blade. The guard quickly withdrew it from his tunic and handed it to her.

“Come with me,” she announced, turning and walking stiffly towards the College, as if something besides her eyes were guiding her movements. The guard with the iron grip shoved Brynn after her.

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They stood in front of a heavy oak door, the entrance to the restricted section of the Library, accessible only by High Druids. It contained books and manuscripts on topics considered too dangerous for normal druids. But no prophecies. They were too dangerous for all, and were stored in a sealed chamber, accessible to none. Supposedly.

Sibila knocked on the door in what seemed like a random pattern. A small rectangular portal inset on door opened up and two eyes peered out from it.

“High Druid Sibila,” the woman behind the door said. Her eyes frowned at Brynn. “And who is with you?”

“My guest,” replied Sibila.

“Only High Druids are allowed, Sibila. You know that. That man isn’t even a druid. What is a peasant doing here?” Brynn glanced at his clothing. He had almost forgotten about his multi-colored peasant’s tunic.

Sibila stepped up right next to the door and whispered directly into the portal. She spoke for several moments, but Brynn could not hear the words. When she stepped back, the eyes were wide with fear. And a touch of resentment?

Brynn heard the movement of a heavy iron bar and then a creaky groan as the oak door opened up slightly.

Sibila turned to the guards, her ebony eyes looking right through them. “You will wait here.” The guards cringed at her stare, but nodded their heads in ascent. She faced Brynn. “After you.”

He stepped into a small anteroom, with Sibila following after him. The librarian quickly closed the door and restored the iron bar. Then she backed away nervously. Brynn recognized her as High Druid Jelma.

“You will also wait here,” Sibila told Jelma, before entering the High Druid’s library and motioning Brynn to follow.

Sibila closed the anteroom door behind them. “Everyone has their secrets, don’t they Brynn?” she said cryptically.

They were in large high-ceilinged hall. Tall bookshelves lined the walls, each one filled with heavy tomes of all shapes and colors. Soaring glass windows were interspersed in between to let in natural light. As they walked down the hallway, Brynn saw that every book was secured to its shelf by a heavy iron chain. The chains clinked softly as they passed by.

Sibila stopped at the end of the room, looking straight ahead at the blank wall. A small desk stood in front of her. Brynn recognized the book chained to it. The original Codex of Essus.

“This is what you’ve been searching for,” Sibila stated, gesturing at the tome. “Go ahead. Take a look.”

Brynn opened up the book with a shaky hand. He flipped past the cover page and read the title of first chapter.

on prophecies

The rest of the chapter was difficult for Brynn to read. He had never been very good with the Old Tongue. While the scribe’s lettering had a crisp and clean style, the words were complex and the phrasing hard to understand. In the margin of one page, there was a drawing of a small clenched fist. It had an elongated index finger which wound around the sides until it pointed to a paragraph in the middle. Brynn clumsily translated a portion of it:

… Of course there is in a case like that just considered no question of a disturbance of the system under investigation during the last critical stage of the measuring procedure. But even at this stage there is essentially the question of an influence on the very conditions which define the possible types of predictions regarding the future behavior of the system …

“Does your book have all the answers?” Sibila asked, a thin smile upon her lips.

No, it did not. Brynn grabbed the side of the tome and turned to a random section. He recognized some of the pages. These had been taught to him as an apprentice. He turned to another section. It contained the ritual that the High Druids had attempted in the dungeon. He flipped to another section. And another. Anything not immediately recognizable seemed to be obfuscated, meandering, philosophical treatises on the nature of reality. The portions he could translate, at least.

“How did you know I was looking for this book?” Brynn asked. He was trembling. All his hopes had gone into the Codex, and it was useless. Worse than useless. He had wasted precious time on it. He had broken with Seleeku over it. He had made a monumental mistake. “Did the Darkness grant you the ability to see the future?”

“The future?” laughed Sibila. “Do you mean the spirits with their pathetic prophecies? No one can know the future, Brynn, not even the spirits. The future is a raging river of possibilities, a chaos of waves and foam and froth smashing against each other in an incoherent fury. The spirits pretend that they can read those waves, but they’re lying, both to you and themselves.”

She held out her hand and pointed at him, still staring blankly at the wall. “But the past, Brynn! The past is different! It is crystallized. Frozen. Unchanging. It is Truth! As mortals, we can only view the past through our flawed senses. We use words or pictures to try to describe it, to share it with others, but they are imprecise tools, aren’t they? Not even the Old Ones could capture it in all its glory. We can never truly know the past. Until now! The Darkness has shown it to me, Brynn, all of it, all the way back to the beginning!”

“Be careful, Sibila,” Brynn said evenly. “There are some things that mortals were never—”

“Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do!” she shouted back. “You think you see the world as it truly is? You hide from the truth! You hide from the past! You block yourself from your full potential!”

Brynn stared at her, speechless.

“Do you know who Kodroth is, Brynn?” she asked.

“A r-raider from the Clan Isles,” Brynn stuttered.

She let out an irritated sigh. “I forget what a sad existence the rest of you mortals lead. Think, Brynn, of Arasen, the Bonewalker you encountered. How did he obtain his dagger?”

Brynn considered for a moment. What was so important about the dagger? Arasen’s dagger looked the same as High Druid Themon’s. Could they be the same dagger? No. That seemed impossible. They were copies. How could they each have had a copy?

“Arasen was a druid?” Brynn said, tentatively.

“Close. He was a druid, but not a High Druid. Only High Druids have access to those daggers. Who do you think gave it to him?”

Brynn blanched. He knew. “Kodroth,” he whispered.

“Precisely!” replied Sibila. “Kodroth was a High Druid at the College of Galdur. He was brilliant, ambitious … and power-hungry.” She gestured towards all the chained tomes lining the bookshelves. “When he became High Druid, he spent all his waking hours here, in the restricted area, learning arcane rituals. Here is how he found a way to access the Old Ones’ prophecies. Those prophecies are sealed from everyone, even High Druids. And for good reason, Brynn. The Old Ones toyed with power they didn’t understand. But that didn’t stop them. And it didn’t stop Kodroth.”

She stepped closer to Brynn, and paused, as if waiting for a response. Her black eyes and piercing gaze reminded Brynn of the crows he had encountered. “What did he find?” Brynn asked after an uncomfortable silence.

“The other High Druid’s didn’t know his secret, of course. Kodroth’s behavior became erratic. The prophecies had driven him insane. He became obsessed with treatises on the end times. They’re not prophecies in and of themselves, but discussions about predictions of the end of the world. They never state the prophecies outright, but rather consider their veracity and their implications if true. You can read some of them in the Codex, if you so desire. They are quite dry.” She felt the book with her hands and when her fingers found the right spot, she flipped the pages to a new section.

“Eventually,” she continued, “High Druid Themon discovered that Kodroth had accessed the prophecies and what he planned to do with the knowledge he had gained. Kodroth wants to destroy the world and recreate it to his liking. He wants to be a god over this new world, Brynn. A god! Themon had him exiled, and his tongue removed. Do you know why?”

“The prophecy,” Brynn replied, his mouth dry.

Sibila’s head flicked and for a moment he thought her eyes had focused on him. But the feeling was gone in an instant. “Kodroth was not so easily dissuaded. He fled to the Clan Isles and used his arcane knowledge to gain power there. Arasen was one of several druids who went with him. They went to Brightmyst and the Far Forest to search for the Darkness, following leads they found in this library. I think you know the rest of the story.”

“But if the Darkness is already released, why can’t Kodroth just use it to destroy the world?”

Sibila laughed. “You really are ignorant, aren’t you? Kodroth doesn’t need the Darkness to destroy the world. He needs the Darkness to create it!”

Brynn thought back to what Kodroth had told him in the dungeon. Before there was light, there was Darkness. Of course! How could he have not realized that? Which meant … he needed Brynn’s voice to destroy the world. Somehow. “If you know the past, Sibila, you must know all the Old Ones prophecies too?” he asked. “You can see what they wrote as they wrote it. What did they predict about the end of the world?”

Sibila took out Themon’s dagger and pointed it at him. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to end your story here, Brynn. Don’t struggle. It’s unseemly.”

“No!” Brynn cried out. He lunged for the Codex, bringing the open tome up just in time to catch Sibila’s stab with the dagger. The blade pierced through the left cover of the book, all the way through to the margin of the open page and stuck there. Brynn twisted the book this way and that, attempting to disarm her.

She grabbed the book with her other hand and pushed Brynn onto the desk, leaning over him, pressing with all her might. The Codex loomed in front of his face, the dagger’s point near his eye.

Brynn felt oddly calm. Perhaps Sibila was right and his story should end here. At least he would save the rest of the world. As he stared down the length of the protruding blade, he noticed that it had pierced through a note on the page. The note was in the Common Tongue. That’s interesting, Brynn thought to himself. He recognized Themon’s lettering, but it was strangely disjointed and blotchy, as if some entity had guided the High Druid’s hand:

yOu WILl MaKe The eArth tRemBLE

A sudden rattling sound startled both Brynn and Sibila, causing both of them to pause. The whole room was vibrating. A chorus of a thousand chains clink-clanked to a cacophonous crescendo. Then the tall bookshelves shivered and began a stately dance around the room. Books fell out of the shelves, swinging to and fro and smashing together in sharp claps.

Brynn recovered faster and shoved Sibila away. Everything—the building, the walls, the bookshelves, the books on their chains, Sibila, Brynn—began swaying back and forth chaotically. Brynn stumbled, ran, stumbled away from Sibila. She quickly pulled the dagger out of the Codex, and slashed at him with it. The room jerked and she fell backwards, the tip of the blade narrowly missing Brynn’s face.

The building tilted and they both fell down. Brynn slid down the floor, back towards Sibila. He looked into her eyes. They radiated dark power.

“Sibila, look out!” Brynn yelled, his eyes widening in horror at the sight behind her.

Sibila ignored him, leaning against the slanted floor, holding her dagger out as Brynn slipped towards her. But a bookshelf behind her had twisted, sending books spinning on their sturdy chains into a frenzy of leather-bound vellum. A heavy tome arced out and landed with a dull thud on the back of her head. She immediately went limp.

The floor lurched the other direction, sending bookshelves tumbling all around them. Sibila’s inert form slid towards Brynn now. He snatched the loose dagger and jammed it into the floor, holding onto it for dear life. As Sibila went past him, he grabbed her arm to prevent her from falling out of the building. A bookshelf flew past, brushing over Brynn’s head, and crashed through a window that was now beneath him.

He expected the building to collapse, but at the last moment it tottered upright. Brynn floated upward, involuntarily yanking the dagger out the floor. For a moment, he felt as if he were riding a enormous wave in a tempestuous sea. Then everything crashed to the ground in a roaring jumble.

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Breathe!

Black dots swarmed Brynn’s vision.

Breathe!

He gasped for air. Which way was up?

Breathe!

He pushed himself into a crawling position.

Seleeku!

He frantically looked around the remnants of the High Druid’s library for her, only to remember that she had left him. Sibila was nearby, unconscious but otherwise unharmed. He could only hope that Seleeku was similarly safe.

He spent the next few moments on all fours, taking deep breaths, waiting for his vision to clear. He found himself staring down at the Codex of Essus. The book had been badly damaged by the chaos of the earthquake, its cover bent and sections missing. It lay open, exposing two ripped pages. As far as Brynn could tell, the text discussed a particular philosophy concerning multiple simultaneous realities. The subject matter was beyond his comprehension.

Curiously, the dagger was once again stuck in the margin of one of the pages, right in between two words written in the Common Tongue. The lettering was Themon’s, in the same disjointed and blotchy style. Brynn smiled as he read the words. He laughed. He laughed again. He couldn’t stop giggling. Prophecies were cursed, but the spirits were sending him a message. The future may be full of froth and foam, but they could read the flecks just fine. They wanted it to stay that way.

PrEseRve pOrteNt