Bravos
“Dastar has failed.”
The words were spoken without surprise, without any semblance of anger and without even the courtesy of grief.
The man kneeling in the soil did not stop working.
A leather apron hung over his fine clothes, and black gloves covered his hands as he packed dark earth around the roots of a newly planted flower.
A small garden shovel rested beside him, its edge stained with dark soil.
Around him stretched a private garden of remarkable color.
Reds, violets, pale yellows, and deep blues stood in careful arrangements, though many had not yet fully bloomed.
Spring had not truly come, but the garden already looked as if it were trying to defy the season.
Draqen stood beside him, younger, olive-skinned, and visibly unsettled by the news.
“Failed?” Draqen asked, shock cutting through his composure.
“He did,” the other man said.
Draqen’s face morphed into a frown.
“And our spy?”
“He was caught but released.” Came the answer, and that made Draqen pause.
The older man reached for the shovel again and sank it into the earth with quiet labor.
“He let him go so he could crawl back to us and tell us what had happened,” he said, his voice calm and almost contemplative.
He paused, turning the soil over with care.
“And also with a message?” The old man chuckled faintly, though there was nothing warm in it.
A silence settled between the two, and the flowers swayed gently in the cold air.
Draqen’s expression hardened.
“What kind of message master?”
The older man brushed a smear of dirt from one black glove before finally looking up. Find the original chapter at g.com.
“He wants us to meet.”
“That is impossible!” Draqen snapped.
“Preposterous. If he killed Dastar, a man who served our society for fifteen years, then what peaceful discussion could possibly come from meeting him?”
His voice rose despite himself.
“He is our enemy!” Draqen added.
The words came out sharper than he intended, but grief had a way of stripping discipline from even careful mentally restrained men.
Dastar had not merely been another name in their ranks.
He had been a colleague, a mentor in some matters, and a man Draqen had shared wine with, secrets with, and long nights of unpleasant work with.
Hearing that the very creature his master now wished to meet had butchered him struck something raw in him.
The older man did not rebuke him, yet he took note of his insolence.
“Dastar went against my orders,” the master said, his voice calm and unchanged.
“Against my trust, and those are equally punishable by death; he got what he deserved.”
Draqen stilled for another moment at those words.
“I ordered observation,” the master continued.
“Nothing more. Dastar chose to turn that into an attempt on the man’s life. Whatever fate found him afterward was not martyrdom or injustice. It was a consequence of his disobedience.”
Draqen was not a man given to questioning the master lightly.
Not after everything the man had done for him.
Years ago, when Draqen had been little more than a chained thing in a slave market, nameless to those who bought and sold flesh, this same man had taken him from bondage and given him purpose.
A name.
A place.
A doctrine to live by.
He was a servant of the Covenant.
He was a faithful devotee of this secret order.
That loyalty would not change.
But if the master spoke true, if Dastar had indeed acted beyond his command, then his death was of his own failure. New chapters come out on novelping.com first.
Draqen lowered his gaze and rubbed the gold ring on his index finger, turning it slowly around the knuckle.
“And the spy?” he asked at last.
“What of him? Surely the rest of the council will want to hear his testimony.”
The master looked down at the new flower he had planted, adjusting one delicate stem with the care of tending to a baby.
“No, that will not happen.”
The answer came from the sixty-year-old man swiftly, with the finality of a door being barred.
“The council does not know,” the master started.
“And they will not know until the proper time.”
Draqen gasped at that.
“We cannot afford their scrutiny, not now, not when the moment we have waited centuries for may finally be upon us.” The master’s voice remained undoubtful, but something had entered it now.
“Dastar’s death is unfortunate, yes, but it being reported does us no good. Its secrecy is an opportunity. A greater one than any of them could possibly understand without ruining it through debate, suspicion, and old men’s caution.”
He turned slightly, though his back remained mostly to Draqen.
“The prophecy has run through our order for centuries unfulfilled. Generation after generation has prayed over its words, bled for its signs, and died wondering whether they had served only a beautiful lie.” His gloved hand tightened around the small garden spade.
“And now, at last, it may be stirring into truth.”
The garden seemed quieter than before.
“What we felt those weeks ago was no mistake,” the master continued.
“It was no farce, no fever of the mind; I have touched the Aether in ritual, in dream, in blood, and in silence. I have felt it move through storms, through dying men, through the black water beneath the old temples. But never, never…have I felt such a power like that.”
His voice receded, recounting the moment.
“Such mastery of the aether. Such an impossible force, the power to set us all free.”
Draqen swallowed, his earlier anger slowly giving way to something else.
“The Fallen has risen, Draqen. He has risen and is calling those who wish to serve.”