Chapter 1: Prologue: Brother Tanel

In the north, the frost was master. Brother Tanel walked over the crisp grey grass and breathed, the air tainted now with the scent of wet burn. With one careful step, then another, he crossed the collapsed and blackened threshold of the heathen’s chapel.

“Sometimes artifacts remain after a cleansing,” High Glinnel Seli had said, one steady arm on Tanel’s shoulder. “We must be sure none are left.”

And so Brother Tanel made his careful way through what remained of the Kelthi place of worship. He hadn’t been there the evening before, when the Brighthand had come with their ceremonial torches and watched the thing go up in flames. He’d heard the screams only. It was well known that the Kelthi worshiped their horrid gods at night.

He dug about with his staff, searching for any flash of metal among the charred bits of rafter. This was a laborious job given mainly to young acolytes. He would not be baptized in the water of the Underserpent until he was twenty, a good four years from now. He cringed as he twice edged his staff into a pile of rubbish that turned out to be a body. One of these had a serpent stone beneath it, likely once worn on a chain around the creature’s throat. He took it with some distaste and pocketed it for the Brighthand to purify later.

He came to a stairwell made of stone. Wafts of ash-laden air rose from below, swirling in ghostly eddies. If any of the Kelthi had fled down the steps, they would have died last; smoke rose. But eventually the hungry fire would have hunted each pocket of air like a ferocious stoat in search of miceling. They would have had a choice of three deaths, rather than the two of their brethren above in the chapel.

And if they hid the egg of a Wyrm – or worse yet, a hatchling – it would be here, beneath the earth.

He cracked a torchflare and it glowed soft red in his hand. He took a deep breath, covered his mouth and nose with his scarf, and descended.

Already he could smell them. The heat of the basement intensified. Tanel tried not to think of their flesh cooked on hot stone. He tried not to see the black crackle of their skin like a stuck pig on coals.

But the smell.

He came to a door. Wood, heavy, still hot, even though the fire had quit its ravaging many hours before. His heart battered against his ribcage. He brought his gloved hand to the iron handle, tugged it open before the heat of it could pierce his leathers.

He caught only a glimpse of the horror in the red light of his torchflare, and that light wavered in his hand such that all piled within seemed to move, to writhe with pain, to reach with cooked limbs, to curse him from the depths of all that heated stone –

He fled up the stairs, sliding in slick black ash. When he reached the top he scrambled over the snow-caked beams, spotted the rear door whose floor was piled high with those that had fallen there, pleading for the safety of the cold dark night only to find themselves locked inside.

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He thought nothing of the door he’d come by. He clambered over fallen beams to a piece of collapsed wall and threw himself to the snowbank on the other side.

The cold crackled in his lungs and he gulped it down with great relief.

Something moved beside him.

He yelped, rolling away.

The little something muttered, fidgeted. Whatever it was, it was buried slightly in a fresh down of snow.

Brother Tanel brushed the powder away.

Eyes blinked up at him, wide and strangely violet, the rest of the little face wrapped in simple warm cloth. Tanel gasped, frantically raking the snow from the rest of the babe, whose careful swaddling had surely been the only thing to save it from the jaws of the frost.

He thought about lifting the child from the snow.

But what if it was Kelthi?

Careful not to touch it with his bare hands, he tugged its hood aside. The ear of a fawn peeked out where a human ear should be, the fur downy and brown.

A glimmer of blue-white scale marked the side of the creature’s neck.

He could leave it here. Bury it further, even, so its death would come quicker.

The babe met his eye, fussed, its little pink nose twitching now that it was exposed to the cold.  It mewled plaintively.

It looked mostly human.

They’d never told him they looked like humans.

He lifted the creature in his arms.

It couldn’t have weighed more than a bushel; perhaps it was a newborn, but he wasn’t well-versed in Kelthi infants nor how big they ought to be. It fidgeted, and in his empathic channel he could feel its hunger. He did not know how to obtain Kelthi milk, but he did have some soft sheep’s cheese in his satchel. He brought it out, softened it further in his mouth, and fed it to the little one. It suckled it from his fingers, swallowed, cooed for more.

He wondered what mother had tossed this child into the snow, and how it was that no Brighthand had seen or heard the little package, the last hope of its monstrous parents.

He would never be able to save this one. The Brighthands would cleanse it, leaving it with the other bodies. This village was tainted with Wyrmrot. There would be no survivors.

He fed the babe a few more softened morsels, and rocked and hummed, all this by instinct. The babe listened raptly as he sang the Warming Song, and burbled when it was finished, and he felt that warmth returned – weaker, scattered, but present.

The babe was an empath.

It suckled on his finger for a while, its little eyes falling shut. The empathy moved through touch. If he had not risked touching it, he would never have known.

“Perhaps there’s a path for you yet.”

He stood, sinking knee-deep in powder, the movement waking the child again. The babe shook a hand free of its swaddle, and raised it once, twice over Tanel’s shoulder, fingers flexing. At least those were human. He was loath to check the creature's feet; he'd heard a rumor that they had hooves.

He turned to where the baby pointed and saw the chapel’s bell, hanging crooked from the last of the standing rafters. The bell that summoned the Kelthi to worship.

“No more of that for you,” he said. “You’ll be following the bells of Saint Fillain and the Dagorlind, little Lain.”

And thus Brother Tanel unwittingly named the girl after those called to follow Saint Fillain, whose Bernane bell had caught and held the Underserpent of Ivath.