The Tears of Kas̆dael

Eligon always dreaded the clean-up after the battle. It wasn’t merely taking count of the wounded and dead on their side, though that certainly played a part. It was also dealing with the stoneflesh survivors.

When the Zalancthians had first appeared, nearly two hundred years ago, they took no prisoners. Their every move seemed to be calculated to exact maximum morale damage. They killed any who dared to resist them, whether they surrendered or not, butchered entire noble lines, and razed thousands of temples, shrines, and manors whose foundations dated back to ancient times.

But the Zalancthians, despite their prowess in the field, were a short-lived people. Most of their warriors had already lost their vigor by their sixtieth year and even the halest rarely lived long enough to see their hundredth. The warriors who had first attacked the Empire were dead and gone, as were their heirs, and their heirs’ heirs.

Much had changed since then. The Zalancthians no longer killed their prisoners. No longer did they destroy temples and shrines - indeed, many of them had been rebuilt in nearly perfect replicas, though those replicas lacked the ancient magics the Corsythians had imbued them with. The Zalancthians had even begun to heavily intermingle with the population of the lands they had conquered, often marrying into the same noble lines they had almost exterminated.

And that was what Eligon dreaded the most about the clean-up - the mercy he was forced to grant those bastards. The atrocities their ancestors had committed had been the forge of his childhood, but they were little more than a far-off memory to the new generation of Zalancthians. Eligon had no desire to give quarter to the stoneflesh, no desire to spare them from the wrath they so rightly deserved. But the emperor was above all else a pragmatic man; despite his hatred of the invaders, he knew that slaughtering those who were willing to surrender would do nothing to help his reconquest. He needed the Zalancthians to lose the will to fight, not incentivize them to resist to the death.

So he waited in his tents while the prisoners were sorted and bundled off, sent back to Qūd-Urudur to await an honorable ransom. But when they’d departed, Eligon emerged to examine the equipment they had confiscated - the reason they had struck this fort.

Naklāti was patiently waiting for him at the workshop where the stoneflesh had been assembling the potions. She’d cleaned the worst of her blood off her armor, but her usually pristine hair was knotted and bedraggled, with clumps of blood still clinging to her long blonde locks.

His new aide snapped to attention as he approached, bowing her head respectfully before she began her report. “We managed to secure the facility before they destroyed it, my lord. I was just about to begin sorting through them.”

He beckoned for her to fall in step beside him and headed for the door. The warehouse was built from the ruins of Kār-Arḫu, and the front half of the building was almost entirely constructed from the shell of an old shrine, while the second had been built with blocks scavenged from other buildings.

He paused at the door to read the faded script that ran above the arch. Time and the ravages of war had rendered most of it unreadable, but a few words could still be deciphered. Ekāllu s̆a Ildas̆s̆u, il s̆a…lidallūs̆u mus̆tēmiqus̆u likrubū…. “The temple of Ildas̆s̆u, god of…may his faithful supplicant praise him, may he bless him…”

Grief washed over the emperor as he read the words out loud. He’d never heard of Ildas̆s̆u, so the god was likely a local spirit who’d been forgotten and forsaken after the city of Kār-Arḫu was destroyed, a fate he didn’t deserve. And now, even his temple had been defiled by being transformed into a manufactory for the stoneflesh’s blasphemy. How much have we lost that can never be reclaimed?

Anger followed close on the heels of his grief and his fist spasmed. “Lady Naklāti,” he spoke with subdued rage, “make sure priests are brought to examine these ruins and salvage anything that remains of Ildas̆s̆u’s service.

She nodded briskly. “And do you wish to set aside funds for the shrine to be rebuilt?”

“No,” the emperor replied with a grimace. “I do not intend to hold Kār-Arḫu for long. The population is long gone and the city naught but ruins, so there is little point in wasting the money. Perhaps, though, we can fund a small shrine in Qūd-Urudur, and see if the priests can find any survivors who still worship Ildas̆s̆u.”

He waited for Naklāti to hastily scrawl his instructions in her notebook, and they entered the warehouse together. A dozen soldiers were sorting through the booty, and a large number of packed crates were already clustered around the door. Eligon peeked inside the top one and paled when he saw the box was stuffed to the brim with glass vials filled with a black, oily liquid. Surely they can’t all be those damnable potions. Moving the crate to the side, he searched the one below. More of them. Raising his voice, he called out to the nearest soldiers. “Are these boxes all filled with the potions?”

“Yes, my lord, we packed them all.”

He cursed as he counted them. Seventeen boxes, each one filled with dozens of potions that could turn a normal soldier into a wrecking ball of destruction for a few minutes. Is this all the stoneflesh produced, or had they already sent some off? It was a question that couldn’t be answered.

The rest of the day was spent in examining the workshop. As much as Eligon wished to smash the dangerous equipment, he knew such a course would be folly. They’d looted the potions a few times in battle, but this was the first time they’d seized the means of production; the knowledge that could be gained from studying it was too valuable to waste.

Instead, he dispatched messengers back to Dūr-Ṣadê to fetch Eṣidānu.

The next two weeks passed in a flurry of activity. While Eligon had no intention of trying to hold Kār-Arḫu for long, the captured fortress was a perfect staging point to strike deep into the heart of Zalancthian territory. Their forces along the border were stretched too thin to truly protect them, as the bulk of the troops had been drawn away by the conflict raging between the young General Kurus and the Protector of Agāmīn, General Menos. By all accounts, the conflict had started over a woman - Menos had set aside Kurus’ eldest sister to take a Corsyth bride, but Eligon didn’t care. As long as the bastards were killing each other, he was happy.

It was the seventeenth day after seizing Kār-Arḫu that Eṣidānu arrived. The black-haired mage looked miraculously untouched by the days of travel, with not his garment speckled by the endless mud of the failing roads, so Eligon wasted no time hurrying him to the warehouse - despite the mage’s insistence that he needed a nap.

But Eṣidānu’s protests fell silent when he entered the abandoned workshop. The place really wasn’t that large. Despite the hundreds of potions they’d found, the mages in his corp had estimated that a handful had worked there, which at least reassured Eligon that he had likely seized almost everything the place had produced. It was broken down into three work areas: tables where the ingredients had ground, cut, or otherwise processed as needed, a series of lidded cauldrons where the potions were boiled over a network of runes embedded in the ground, and finally what appeared to be an altar.

The Zalancthians had both a smaller pantheon than the Corsyths, worshipping just 12 gods, yet the altar was dedicated to none of them. Eligon did not recognize the name inscribed on the stone monument, whose smooth surface had been charred nearly black with repeated sacrifices. Ṯulepikkaku. The emperor was no expert on the Zalancthian tongue, but it didn’t seem like a word in their tongue. Something foreign perhaps?

“Intriguing, is it not?” Eligon glanced up to see Eṣidānu standing next to him. “Have you heard of this god of the cursed blade?” The mage continued.

The emperor raised a brow in surprise, though perhaps he shouldn’t have been; the mage was brilliant after all.

“And just how did you work that out.”

“It’s simple.” The mage bent down and traced a finger over the inscription. “They just ran the words together. Ṯu is ‘god,’ and kaku is ‘evil.’ Unless I miss my guess, lepik is derived from the lepid, ‘blade.’ The ‘d’ has simply assimilated into the ‘k’ over time. Such processes are natural in language, but they do not occur overnight - this surely means it’s not a new name,” the mage concluded, as he rose from his haunches. “But neither is it among the gods the Zalancthians are known to worship.”

“Come,” he sauntered over to the now empty cauldrons with a lazy wave of his hand.

Eligon had a good guess what the mage would say. “I already know that these are not the runes we normally use. And neither are they the ones the stoneflesh usually use - the Zalancthians have never shown much aptitude at magic after all.”

Eṣidānu smirked. “There’s a reason your mages are in the army, my lord. These runes are rare, yes, but they are not unknown.” The mage paused dramatically, expecting Eligon to react with surprise, but the emperor didn’t give him pleasure.

“Go on.”

Scowling, the mage continued. “The runes are those of the Ḫuedar.”

“The Ḫuedar?” Eligon scoffed. “The Ḫuedar are little more than a myth.”

“Have you forgotten the Empire itself sought to establish contact with them,” the mage retorted.

“Because Emperor Attals̆ams̆a was desperate for any allies against the Fey. You know as well as I that our envoys never returned.”

“On that you are wrong, my lord. It is true that no alliance was concluded, but one envoy did come back.”

“Before the capital fell, I had the fortune to stumble upon his account. It seems he had found the Ḫuedar and even been permitted to dwell among them for a time. Sadly, much of his account was missing, but among what remained were a few dozen pages detailing the strange runes they used. I’m quite certain these are a match.”

“The Ḫuedar are real?” Eligon remained stuck on the first point. The stories of a fey kingdom that rivaled the hostile Ya’ari in power had always seemed a fantasy too good to be true, the wishful thinking of an empire that had found itself twice in a deadly struggle for the south.

“Without a doubt, my lord,” Eṣidānu replied.

“You said you found this book in the capital before it fell. I assume, then, that it has been lost along with the rest?”

The mage avoided his gaze. “Well, I might be able to remember a few of the runes.”

A suspicion crossed Eligon’s mind. “It’s been nearly 80 years; even your memory isn’t that good.”

“Perhaps,” Eṣidānu replied carefully, “perhaps I might have forgotten to return it. It may have been accidentally included in my luggage when I fled.”

“You weren’t there when the city fell,” he responded flatly. “You’re saying you stole it.”

The mage had the good grace to look guilty, although Eligon doubted it was more than a show. “I meant to return it.”

There was little point in complaining about it now. Regardless of Eṣidānu’s dubious motives at the time, his act of pilfery had benefitted them in the end. “So I take it you can translate them,” Eligon sighed.

“I’ll need to send for the manuscript first, but, yes, I do believe I can decipher them,” the mage agreed. “But you’re not asking the right questions, my lord.”

“And what is that?”

“Considering how little we know of the Ḫuedar, where did the Zalancthians get these runes?”

It was a question the emperor didn’t want to consider. The thought of the Zalancthians allying with the Fey was one too horrible to contemplate, so he didn’t. “Just work on translating them,” he grunted. “And I won’t be paying your usual fee for this - consider it penance for your theft.”