Artifacts
an excerpt

A storm broke overhead. Lightning filled the sky as bright as daylight for a few brief seconds to be followed by jagged thunder as the energy struck something close by. On a hill overlooking the streets of respectable Rune a great stone building stood tall casting a sinister shadow against the bright skyfire.

The asylum.

The word was supposed to mean refuge, a place of safety and rest, and maybe in the twisted way these things worked it was – for those not condemned to live and to suffer and to die behind its walls abandoned by a world which could accept magic and people who were not humans but which drew the line at any hint of madness.

Once upon a time the world of Kien-Altair had been a world of Once Upon a Time, a place where heroes rose up to wield sword and sorcery to carve civilization out of chaos, to retrieve lost treasures for greed or the sheer joy of discovery, where villains plotted subjugation by means both magical and mundane, where farmboys could become kings or Master Magi so great that nations would shiver at the mention of their names.

In a way, Kien-Altair was still that place. But not as much. Magic still flowed, Elves still held court in their forests and their cities, but humans and dwarves and gnomes had changed the world. Lightning had been harnessed, and not through incantations and the proper arrangement of symbols and powders. Men trained in deliberate study had harnessed the flow of skyfire and used it to power devices.

It was still a parlor trick for the wealthy and the advantaged, but time would change that. It always did.

Kien-Altair was growing up.

The lightning filled the sky above the asylum and somewhere, deep within its walls, an inmate screamed. There is magic in a storm, in skyfire unleashed to truly be what it is – wild and free and thoroughly beyond control or any sense of respectability. It was a strange fact of life that the unbalanced and those who utterly resisted conformity to the detriment of their minds were particularly sensitive to the magic in a storm, to any magic that still ran wild and natural.

Storm magic wasn’t respectable, and Rune had become obsessed with respectability.

Granted, so had the rest of the so-called civilized world, the nations surrounding rune on the eastern edge of the Old World. Over the water to the East lay a New World, a young civilization caught in growth and freedom. To the west was the land of the Setting Sun, the Orient, and cultures so old as to be deemed barbaric and fascinating. But the civilized world, Rune and her sisters, were obsessed with the limits they placed upon what could and could not be and so sought asylum from those who would not, or could not, conform to the standards of respectability.

A cloaked figure walked through a stone hallway deep in the castle that was now the asylum, silent except for the swish of fabric and the click of heels on stone. In the cells to either side sounds could be heard, the moaning of a man in agony beyond words, the rambling murmurs of one locked in paranoia and his own obsessions. The figure passed them all until a certain door was reached. This one caused the figure to stop and to turn and to listen.

On the other side of the door a man prayed.

“Elar, Lord God Above, whatever I have done to arouse Your anger, forgive me, please. Please, send Sainted Anodyne with her healing. Send Your warrior Saints to tear down these walls and set me free. Send the Man in Black, if You must, for I sorrow and grieve wrongfully imprisoned.” The voice grew louder, as if the speaker lifted his face towards the storm. “I even implore Lady Fate, who will admit no authority but Yours, to trap the ones who bind me in their own webs, to grant me justice if I cannot have freedom.” The voice broke, then, in sobs. “Please, God, Everlasting and Immortal, do not abandon me.”

The figure stood behind the man, inside the dirty cell. The door was still locked, still closed. “Your prayer is heard.” The figure had a woman’s voice.

The man whirled around and backed up against the wall, crouched on all fours like an animal. He was very thin, and his face had the haggard look of one who had been severely mistreated. His hair was shock white, completely, though he did not appear to have the years for it to have turned such. He seemed human, though something in his eyes and the delicacy of his features spoke of elven blood and perhaps something else. He was pale of complexion, and even more so in his fear and surprise. “Who are you?”

The figure lowered herself down to sit on her haunches, balanced on the toes of her heeled boots. “I am your kinswoman and I have come to take you from here.” She reached a hand out to him from the folds of the cloak. “Come, Kinsman, it is time to be gone from this place.”

The man looked at her hand in conflicted hope and fear. “You are here in Elar’s name?”

“Yes, Kinsman, I am here in Elar’s name.”

He reached out and took the offered hand.