The Lonely Seeker Read online

  Part Two

  The Lonely Seeker

  Copyright © C. A. Oliver 2019 – All rights reserved

  The right of C.A. Oliver to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents act 1988. A SACD catalogue record for this book is available from the « Société des Auteurs et Compositeurs dramatiques » in France.

  SACD Catalogue record: 000178361 – 28/04/2016

  Book’s cover and portraits:

  Virginie Carquin - Brussels, Belgium

  Heraldry, genealogy and maps:

  Sylvain Sauvage - La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland

  Editorial correction:

  Thomas Bailey - Oxford, UK

  Editorial review:

  Eric Train - Biarritz, France

  Laurent Chasseau - Paris, France

  INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY CLAUSE

  C.A. Oliver owns, or has title to the rights to, all the items that make up this Document, particularly the text, names, maps, logo and designs. It is prohibited to reproduce, represent, distribute or redistribute the contents of the Document by any means whatsoever, whether in whole or in part, without the prior express authorization of C.A. Oliver. Such action constitutes an infringement of rights for which penalties are provided under Articles L. 335-2 et seq. of the French Intellectual Property Code.

  TRADEMARK PROPERTY CLAUSE

  “Songs of the Lost Islands” and all associated marks, logos, creatures, names, races, insignia, devices, symbols, locations, maps, characters, products, games, designs, illustrations and images from the “Songs of the Lost Islands” world that appear on this Document are registered trademarks of Copyright © C. A. Oliver 2019 – All rights reserved.

  Any reproduction, whether in whole or in part, of said trademarks and said logos, made using parts of the Document without the prior authorization of C.A. Oliver or any assignee thereof shall therefore be prohibited, within the meaning of Article L. 713-2 of the French Intellectual Property Code 13.

  SONGS OF THE LOST ISLANDS EXISTING PUBLICATIONS

  Songs of the Lost Islands #1 – An Act of Faith (2019)

  Songs of the Lost Islands #2 – The Lonely Seeker (2019)

  Songs of the Lost Islands #3 – The Valley of Nargrond (2019)

  Songs of the Lost Islands, First Trilogy – Odes to Dusk (2020)

  (Includes An Act of Faith, The Lonely Seeker and The Valley of Nargrond)

  Songs of the Lost Islands forthcoming publications

  Prelude (2021)

  Songs of the Lost Islands #4 – Two Winged Lions (2022)

  www.songsofthelostislands.com

  ISBN: 978-1076079657

  Legal deposit: June 2019

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Maps

  Elvin Nations

  Chapter 1: Dyoren

  Chapter 2: Nyriele

  Chapter 3: Camatael

  Chapter 4: Saeröl

  Chapter 5: Curwë

  Chapter 6: Aewöl

  Chapter 7: Moramsing

  Epilogue

  Links To The “Songs Of The Lost Islands” Existing Publications

  Annexes

  Major Elvin Nations, Factions And Characters

  Genealogy

  Timeline

  Mythology

  About C.A. Oliver

  Acknowledgements

  MAPS

  ELVIN NATIONS

  CHAPTER 1: Dyoren

  2712, Season of Eïwele Llya, 78th day. Nyn Ernaly, Hageyu Falls

  The tree was about to fall. Axes from both sides had hacked their way towards the centre of the great trunk, and the ancient oak was creaking forward over its newly formed hinge. The Men dropped their tools and threw themselves out of harm’s way.

  “Move!” shouted the chief slaver.

  The thick lower branches of the oak crashed into the humid soil below, obliterating every plant within their reach. When the tree fell, a loud howl tore through the air, as if its soul were fleeing its ruined shell in terror. The moment the great trunk lay motionless across the earth, the rain ceased. Midday approached. The forest, indifferent to the loss of one its oldest inhabitants, was suddenly gaining new life. A light breeze carried the murmur of a distant waterfall. Birdsong emanated from the bushes. Scampering squirrels rustled between the tree branches overhead, and even an unseen predator added its low growl to the melody of the woodland.

  “Marshal the Giants,” ordered the chief slaver, eager to win back time now that the rain was over. “Move faster, you lazy scum!” he barked.

  The chief of this site was a Westerner from Nellos, that faraway maritime realm whose main island lay beyond the Sunset Ocean. The Men of his unit came from various barbarian tribes of the Mainland, whose loyalty was now sworn to the Westerners. The slaver frowned; his face made pale by his lack of sleep. As he looked about him, he stroked his beard, to conceal his worry.

  “Get those beasts to work immediately, or this won’t be a day you’ll forget,” he warned.

  The cold hatred in his eyes guaranteed the sincerity of his threat. Then came the screech of steel grinding against steel. A score of slavers, escorted by a dozen soldiers, led three chained Giants to the site of the fallen tree. The scene was overseen by a dozen guards, led by a mounted commander. These soldiers were covered in plate armour and equipped with halberds and lances. The weary and weatherworn Giants were constrained by enormous chains which bound them all together. The slavers relished in reminding their captives who their true masters were: whipping, beating and administering all manner of cruel and degrading punishments.

  At the site of the felled great oak, the sun was already high in the sky, and sweat poured from the Giants’ bodies as the summer’s day reached its hottest peak. One of the three Giants began to express his discontent in wild yells. Its simple language was as rough as the rocky quarries from which he had emerged.

  “JURK, BOTA! JENKCHE! KRABAK! ORKY SU AKAGO LAKBRAR?”

  The chains that ensnared Old Gamo, as was his name, to his unfortunate companion, who was now completely motionless, were severely slowing him down. Fear of punishment soon flooded through Gamo’s mind. The second Giant, who had been named Big Bota, did not seem to hear these complaints.Every ounce of his limited intellect was focused on something else: something invisible, odourless and soundless. Giants of Chanun, natives of Nyn Ernaly, were usually short and stocky in comparison to others of their kin. But Bota was much larger, towering above his two other companions from a height of fourteen feet. He was also extremely muscular, capable of hurling huge boulders. The comparative shortness of his limbs made his thick arms look even more fearsome.

  “TUK FOMEK?” Old Gamo asked, guessing that Bota must have been suffering from the same hungriness that tortured him.

  Giants of Chanun needed a great quantity of food. These colossal beings would devour almost anything, and they were not averse to eating humans. The lash of a whip suddenly interrupted their exchange, and Old Gamo felt the pain searing across his back. The slavers’ punishment had come but a moment after they had paused their work. Now Gamo was angry with his companion, who still seemed absorbed in his inner torment. By stopping, Bota was paralysing the progress of all three Giants, endangering them all. In their society, betraying one’s tribe was the worst possible evil, and though the hierarchy of Giants was determined by a combination of physical strength and appetite for food, solidarity was the cornerstone of their relationships. Big Bota’s refusal to move would lead to retribution.

  “TEN KE ANKAR!” ordered Old Gamo.

  The stress in his voice indicated that his limited patience was already spent. The only answer he could extract from his companion was unintelligible. A horn blew, and soon guards were reachin
g for their spears and halberds. The impending punishment promised to be severe. Suddenly, Big Bota started to move erratically, his hands reaching up to cover his ears. His huge, muscular body was convulsing violently. He then began shouting ferociously, as if possessed by a wild spirit.

  “Can you hear the music? Can you hear that evil sound?”

  Most surprisingly, Big Bota was expressing his anguish in lingua Llewenti, the tongue of the Green Elves. The two other Giants of Chanun looked at each other in total disbelief. There was no sound around them but the loud orders the commander was giving to his troops to begin the punishment. A dozen guards, their weapons raised high, started to encircle the three wretched slaves. The air grew tense with the promise of imminent bloodshed. The slavers, whose sole duty was to supervise the Giants’ work, chose to retreat cautiously, knowing that their whips and short swords would be of no use in what was to come.

  “Do you hear the music; do you hear that Elvin song?” Big Bota roared.

  He gestured chaotically, driven to madness by some unknown soundless witchcraft penetrating his mind.

  “The music must stop! Do you hear? It must be stopped!” he cried, now totally lost.

  Bota pulled at his chains, and the third and smallest Giant was toppled over violently. Rushing towards him, Big Bota started to beat the fallen slave with his huge fists, still shouting out in that Elvin tongue that was not his own.

  “Ogo!Stop the music! Do you hear? The music must stop!”

  But Young Ogo could do nothing to help him. He had been surprised by the sudden violence of his companion. His meagre resistance to the series of blows crashing down upon his head soon faltered. Before long, Ogo was nothing more than a bloody, motionless corpse, his brains seeping out from what remained of his skull onto the humid forest floor below. Old Gamo was terrified. He decided to flee. But the chain linking him to Bota soon became taught, and its sudden steel resistance knocked Gamo to the ground. In a heartbeat, the mad Giant was on top of Gamo, raising a large boulder high into the air. With all the strength that only madness can produce, he hurled it down at his helpless companion.

  “The music must stop!” he repeated incessantly, his horrible voice degrading the Elvin words.

  Not content with the devastating wounds inflicted upon Old Gamo by the boulder, Big Bota set upon the now defenceless body of his companion. The unrelenting blows of his fists soon crushed Gamo’s head into the earth.

  Until that moment, the guards had observed the bloody scene, keeping strictly to their ordered, defensive formation. An encircling wall of their large shields denied any hope of flight to the mad Giant. At the bark of their commander, the soldiers aimed their lances forward, forming an even closer deadly circle around the Giant. Behind their iron visors, their gaze showed resolution mixed with no small anxiety. They had heard similar stories in the taverns of their city, tales of Chanun Giants who, bewitched by Elvin sorcery, had savagely killed soldiers before the rebellious slaves met their own bitter end.

  From atop his horse a few yards from the melee, the commander of the Westerners was coordinating the final assault.

  “Form ranks soldiers of Nellos! Let us show that beast who we are!” he shouted.

  Everything about his attire demonstrated his high status: the glistening plate armour, the navy-blue cloak around his broad shoulders, and the golden helmet bearing the insignia of Nellos, a wide sun setting over the horizon of the sea. Safely positioned a few yards behind his troops, the commander could never have anticipated what was about to occur.

  Bota rushed towards the charging guards, dragging the corpses of his two former companions by his chains. Ignoring the stabs of the lances and the cuts of the halberds, the Giant broke through the circle. After smashing three soldiers to the ground, he grabbed two other guards with each of his big hands. With his unnatural strength, galvanised by the pain still pounding through his head, he threw the desperate Men, one by one, across half a dozen yards away towards their commander.

  The first human projectile hit the horse’s front legs, nearly causing it to topple. The second crashed into its head and ensured its fall. The commander was caught. Failing to remove his heavy iron sabatons from the stirrups, he came tumbling down with his mount on its left side. His leg was snapped and crushed in several places, and the searing pain left him just enough consciousness to hear, rather than see, the continuing bloodshed around him. One by one, his soldiers fell to the wrath of the mad Giant, as they tried in vain to bring him down with their weapons. The last four guards, abandoning all hope of defeating the monster, decided to flee, casting their shields and weapons down onto the forest floor as they ran. Though he desperately tried, the commander could not free himself from the weight of the dead horse that was trapping him. He heard the thudding of the great Chanun Giant approaching, still dragging behind him the heavy corpses of Old Gamo and Young Ogo.

  “The music must stop!” were the last words the commander heard.

  He caught only a glimpse of the madness in Big Bota’s gaze before the Giant ripped his helmeted head from his body.

  *

  Some distance away, up the grassland at the edge of the forest, the Elf Dyoren, wrapped in his long brown cloak, was almost invisible. He was hiding behind a broad oak which, though gnarled and weather-beaten, was still living. Dyoren’s long, thin blond hair was fading to a golden white. His gaze was clear and focussed.

  Dyoren stopped his soundless chant, ending the powerful spell that had drawn away much of his forces. Recovering his senses, he peeked out from behind the oak, chancing a look at how the situation was evolving at the slavers’ site below. A single Chanun Giant, the sole survivor, was just now contemplating with horror the carnage he had wrecked. Indifferent to the numerous dripping wounds about his own body, the Giant began to cry over the corpses of his two former companions. Spurring himself into action once again, Dyoren darted towards a nearby pine, which rose towards the heavens as straight as an upward arrow and started to climb.

  “What will be their next move?” he wondered aloud as if talking to the bare blade of his broadsword.

  Now a hundred feet above ground, Dyoren orientated himself by looking to the tops of the Arob Chanun Hills on the distant horizon. The tips of two twin mountains towered above the rest. Hawks and falcons circled around the slopes, barren of trees and vegetation. Only birds of prey such as these could use those peaks for their hunting ground; the sheer cliff edges kept other predators at bay.

  Drawing a long flute from his satchel, Dyoren began to play a strange tune. The instrument, carved from rare wood, emitted no audible sound. Dyoren played his instrument for a long time. Though he kept an eye on the wailing Giant below, his attention was mainly focussed on the flight of the birds of prey to which his silent music seemed destined. They soared through the air above the mountains, perhaps more than two leagues away from him.

  ‘I cannot be certain they could hear my call,’ he regretted.

  At last, Dyoren stopped his strange flute’s song. Something was happening below. To the south, down the path along which the surviving soldiers had fled, a dust cloud appeared. It likely signalled the arrival of a troop of riders. Dyoren did not have to wait long before his theory was verified. Indeed, two entire units of Nellos cavaliers were riding swiftly towards his position. The group was fifty strong, mounted on sturdy war horses and covered head-to-toe in plate mail. They were no doubt part of the elite army who served directly, the lords of the Westerners, the sea hierarchs. The charging soldiers proudly carried the banner of the setting sun behind a golden tower: the emblem of Tar-Andevar, the capital city of the island of Nyn Ernaly.

  ‘To arrive this quickly, fully equipped for battle, they must have been waiting nearby,’ thought Dyoren. ‘Someone has positioned these cavaliers anticipating I would strike again. This may be a trap.’

  He then made out, among the navy-blue cloaks of the soldiers, one particular man mounted on a great black steed. This confirmed Dyoren’s fear. N
ow that the riders had approached the site of the fallen oak and the surviving Giant, the dark horse was galloping to overtake the rest of the cavalry, eventually positioning itself at the front. The cavalier who rode it was no ordinary Nellos commander. Dyoren recognized his order immediately from his headdress: a ruby-red cloth wrapped about his face and head, masking everything but his eyes. His plate armour, covered in a large cloak the colour of blood, was of the finest quality. He wore a gauntlet upon his left hand, a golden hand of rare design. The gauntlet had six fingers.

  “Find the Elf! Find the Elf!” the knight of the Golden Hand ordered, his growling voice rising above the stomping of hooves as they spread out from the dirt road towards the edge of the forest.

  None but the knight seemed concerned by the fate of Big Bota, the mad Giant who now stoically awaited his end, standing tall and proud at the centre of the battlefield. The navy-blue cloaks continued charging up the hill towards the trees at the forest’s edge, carefully circumnavigating the Chanun Giant. But he who appeared to be their commander stopped his black steed thirty yards from the rebel slave he now intended to dispatch. Slowly, without a word, the knight of the Golden Hand drew from his saddle a heavy war hammer that had hung by the flank of his horse.