The First Collier (2 page)

Soren opened the book and looked at his young nephew. They would read it together, slowly, carefully. And although they would both be learning together, Soren knew that now he must become the ryb, the teacher, the guide to this young owl who was king.

C
all me Grank. I am an old owl now as I set down these words but this story must be told, or at least begun before I pass on. Times are different now than they were when I was young. I was born into a time of chaos and everlasting wars. It was a time of magic and strange enchantments, a time of warring clans and warring kingdoms, a time of savagery and evil spirits, and worst of all, a time of hagsfiends. The days of old King H’rathmore, the High King of all of the N’yrthghar, were dark days, indeed. Lords and chieftains and petty princes raged against him and against one another, fracturing these kingdoms as surely as the summer breaks the frozen seas into the bergs and shards and floes of ice.

The lust for war carried from one generation to the next until there seemed no escaping it. When King H’rathmore died his young son, H’rath, then became High King. And I, being of noble birth, and dearest friend of King H’rath and his mate, Queen Siv, was drawn in deeper
and deeper to this world of blood and battle, of intrigue and anarchy. It was not to my liking—unlike young King H’rath I was not the fiercest of soldiers. But I did serve him well as a confidant, and often as emissary to a restless clan or disaffected lord. I was, in truth, better with words than with the ice weapons with which the owls of the N’yrthghar fought. Better at planning strategy than rallying troops for battle. I had neither an affinity nor a temperament for this world of blood and battle, of intrigue and anarchy. And yet I felt duty bound to stay at my young king’s side to help him unite his fractured kingdom, to resist and perhaps annihilate the hagsfiends and their insidious magic.

But even chaos has its rhythms and ongoing wars have their idle interludes, their moments of fragile peace. And it was during these times that I often ventured off by myself to explore matters far removed from those of war. You see, Good Owl, you must understand that even though H’rath, Siv, and I grew up the closest of friends and shared so much from the time before they became mates, I always was, and have remained, my own owl. I realized early on that I was one of those creatures destined to be alone, never to have a mate. The one owl whom I had desired, the one for whom my gizzard fairly sang was already…well, no need to talk of that now. I will simply say it was not to be.

I
t was during the early part of H’rath’s reign when a period of fragile peace had been achieved that I first took wing across the Sea of Kraka—or the Everwinter Sea as some called it—to that distant territory known as Beyond the Beyond. I wanted to see that fiery part of the world where it was said that the tops of mountains opened up like the mouths of enormous beasts and licked the sky with tongues of fire.

You see, fire had fascinated me from an early age. I saw things in fire that disturbed and intrigued me. And I found that for me to study fire was a way of steadying the gizzard and concentrating the mind. Whenever I suffered a dreariness of the gizzard I took quietly to the wing to lose myself in the sky I so cherished, and if I was lucky, to find when I looked down on the earth a fire, or a place to build one.

Almost immediately upon my first arrival in the Beyond, I felt my discontent ease. In the course of years, I
would make many trips to the Beyond. And during those visits I enjoyed the hearty companionship of the dire wolves, the strange, loping creatures who had found their way to that fiery place some years before. I counted as a good friend their leader, the immense silvery wolf named Fengo. With Fengo by my side, I spent hours studying the eruptions of the volcanoes and, in particular, the trajectories of the embers that fell from the glowing fountains of fire. You must understand that at the time the world knew fire only for its destructive powers. In the kingdoms of N’yrthghar we did not even have a word for fire, for we lived in a nearly treeless place where lightning, when it struck, struck only rock or ice.

And so it was not through flame that I experienced my first visions. It happened on an early spring day. My parents had brought my sister and me out to learn the rudiments of First Flight. We were perched on a sloping expanse of ice on a part of the glacier popular for early lessons in takeoff and landing. The sun was quite fierce for that time of the year on the glacier. A shard of ice that stuck straight up from the ice beds had caught the sun, and the brightness was so dazzling that the air seemed to spin with a radiance I had never seen before. In the midst of this radiance, I began to see things. This struck me as odd, for owls are supposed to see best in darkness, but I
was seeing beyond any darkness into a light that seemed to open up new realms of vision.

And what exactly did I see? Myself flying, doing everything my da had told us about lofting and ice hopping, and catching a breeze by tipping our primaries just so. The countless instructions came together within this vision and suddenly I knew in my gizzard how to fly. I lifted off the ground in one swift motion. My da and mum said they had never seen anything like it. My sister, Yurta, cried with envy. But oddly enough, I soon forgot about those visions over the long winter when the sun never rose above the horizon.

Forgot about them until I experienced my first forest fire. Only then did I remember what I had seen in the dancing radiance of the sun upon the ice. I was with my mother on an island in the Bitter Sea when a summer storm hit hard. A nearby tree was struck by lightning and burst into flame. My mother and I fled. I say fled but, in truth, I was almost transfixed by the fire. For it was in that sea of raging flames that I had what I have come to think of as my first true vision. It was a vision not of fire the destroyer but fire the creator. I saw not feathers being burned or animals screeching in terror, but owls pulling from the flames useful things that I had no names for, but which I knew could be put to good service. In the
reflections of the sun on the ice shards, I had seen the present and the secrets of flight. But in the flames, it was as if I had glimpsed the future, or what might be. It was with this in mind that I set myself to the task of discovering the benefits, the blessings of fire. I intended to learn all I could and I was determined to capture an ember and with it explore how I might kindle a fire, and tame it as well.

Since forest fires were hard to come by in the N’yrthghar, I returned to the ice beds in a far corner of the Hrath’ghar glacier. It was spring once more, and the strength of the sun would be gaining every day through summer, which, though very short, was a radiant time of year. For the ice of the glacier never melted, and those reflections that had first ambushed me in a confusing crossfire of bouncing light when I was learning to fly did bear some resemblance to flames. I thought that they might help me delve deeper into my visions, this “magic” of seeing the present and, perhaps, the future and the past.

For me, it was a most wonderful spring and summer. Flying to that corner of the glacier was great fun as well. The katabats, those special winds of the N’yrthghar, were wonderfully boisterous that spring. I would sometimes go out of my way to ride the thermal drafts of the smee holes, those steam vents far to the east of the glacier near
the Bay of Fangs, which offered a bouncing good flight. And the tiny beautiful flowers that dared to bloom at the edge of the avalanche and on the icy rim of the glacier delighted me. Their blossoms made gay the white and ice-bound world of the N’yrthghar. During those long, nearly nightless days of summer, illuminated by the tireless sun, I would immerse myself in the reflections bouncing off this dazzling whiteness. I wandered through radiant forests made of light shards and reflected beams; I found the bright shadows of all manner of creatures and friends, and the fleeting images of events, both past and future. I came to understand my visions more fully. For one thing, I understood that this was not a phenomenon that I could simply will to happen. The visions rarely came on demand. They came as they pleased and, perhaps, as I might best learn from them. But still they were not fire. They were not flame. They were merely shards of reflected light—never as clear and crisp as the images I had seen in the forest fire.

I began to think deeply about fire, and then one day, dancing in the sharp edges of that fractured light, I had a most intriguing vision—a patch of frost moss that appeared to smolder. Buried at its very center was a tiny glowing spark. I began to blow on it, which I quickly realized was ridiculous as it was only a vision and had no
substance. But visions can be transformed into reality. I immediately flew out and gathered some of this frost moss and placed it on a pile of clear ice. I then found some pieces of loose ice and propped them up around the moss, in much the same manner as an ice nest is built, save for one difference: The pieces of ice faced the sun in such a way as to focus its rays on the moss. In essence, I had built a reflection chamber. It did not take long. Soon the patch of silvery-green moss was turning darker and then that scent that I had not smelled since the forest fire began to swirl through the air. I saw a spark of orange. My gizzard leaped! And then a flame. A true flame! I had made fire! The ice pieces were now melting and I quickly flung them away so that the water would not extinguish the tiny quivering flames that were just beginning.

Quite soon, I became adept at making these “moss fires,” as I called them, and within the flames I found many visions, images that were far clearer and livelier than the ones borne by the sun’s reflections. Thus, as I grew older, my visions enabled me to trespass the borders of time and fly into what I can only describe as another world, one that was not constrained by the movement of the sun across the sky, nor the phases of the moon. When I was experiencing visions, I was truly in a timeless universe.

But was this magic? I was not sure. There seemed to me to be a logic to the way this fire had ignited that was not at all magical. Yes, I did have powers of vision, but making fire from ice had been more the work of my gizzard and my brain than anything else. I felt I had discovered a connection not with magic but with certain laws of the natural world. In truth, I was relieved. I liked the notion of laws, for our N’yrthghar was a lawless place. I began to think that laws were in some way like trees, and without laws the winds swept through the N’yrthghar so fiercely that no owl could fly a true course. But it would be a very long time from these first moss fires until I would go to Beyond the Beyond to further my studies of fire.

Dear Owl, if, indeed, you are reading this book centuries from now, you probably do not know what a frightful power magic was in those days so long ago. You must first understand that in that time before time, there were fewer kinds of birds. In the most ancient of times, long before I had hatched, or even my great-great-grandparents had come into the world, there had been just one kind of songbird and one kind of seabird and one kind of bird of prey. After thousands upon thousands of years, the various species of birds separated and became distinct. There came to be robins and nightingales and larks, and so on
and so forth. At one time, as unimaginable as it may seem now, there was a bird that was both crow and owl—a strange commingling of blood! Then gradually over many, many years these “crowls,” as they were called, separated into distinct species. Yet, oddly enough, some never did. And these remnant crowls came to be known as hagsfiends. Their gizzards were different, warped, many said. And although they had somewhat primitive brains, these birds possessed strange inexplicable powers that could only be called magical. When I was growing up, it was still a time of great magic. And through my experiments and study of fire, I knew that I, too, possessed certain powers. I still had much to learn, and it was this thirst for knowledge that drew me to Beyond the Beyond—that land of erupting volcanoes—to study fire more closely. I wanted to learn how to fly the hot drafts that spiraled from the flames. I wanted to look into the gizzards of the hottest embers. For me, fire was alive. Fire had a body, an anatomy like any living thing.

O
n my first visit to Beyond the Beyond during that peaceful lull in the wars of the N’yrthghar, I not only learned more about fire, but I learned about dire wolves, the immense creatures who had migrated to this region some years before. I remember as clearly as if it were yesterday when I first met Fengo, their chieftain. He had brought his clan to the Beyond when they could no longer endure what they called the Long Cold that had settled on their homeland. Fengo knew the terrain of the Beyond well and, most important, he knew the volcanoes. There were five volcanoes in what would later become known as the Sacred Ring. Fengo had an intimate knowledge of these volcanoes, their individual behaviors, the rhythms of their eruptions, the kinds of coals they spewed from their mouths.

When I first saw Fengo, he was perched on a high ridge. His incredible green eyes were fastened on a volcano on the north side of the ring. He did not say hello.
Nor did he scent mark immediately to warn me off or engage in any of the very complicated displays by which wolves signal their acceptance or rejection of any creature who is approaching. Furthermore, he gave no indication of his rank to suggest what honors were his due. No, there was none of that, which surprised me for I had met several wolves since I had been in the Beyond and they were quite touchy about such things. But here their chieftain, Fengo, remained perfectly still as I lighted down on the ridge not far from him. He did not look at me, but he spoke.

“Watch that one straight ahead on the north, right between the stars of the Great Fangs.” He pointed with his muzzle to a volcano that was precisely centered between the lowest stars of the constellation that rose at this time of year. The constellation was identical to one that in the N’yrthghar we called the “Golden Talons.”