“Do you know what this is?” the curate asked as they circled the tree, their horses pulling strangely at the reins as if willing their riders to move away.
One of the acolytes nodded. “From the Book of Ancestors,” he said. “One of Scylgrogh’s trees.”
The curate pulled to a halt. “Yes,” he replied. “Or as they are properly called, the Lograel.”
Another acolyte had tied his horse to ancient, crumbling pillar, and was walking around it, staring at the bark. Seven faces, expressionless, seemingly ageless, stared back. Seven faces, not carved into the bark, but formed from the wood itself. Though the faces were weathered with age, the features were clear, sharp, unnaturally so.
“I recognise four,” the acolyte said, brow furrowed as he examined the three others, “but what are these?”
“The first is an uncommon race, though one very much still extant on the far continents,” the curate said. He leaned heavily on his staff, wrinkled skin tanned and as expressionless as the faces in the tree. “The other two are a mystery, even to me. Some say they are races that once existed, but have died off. Other think they are races that have simply disappeared. Others still think these are the two races that will return at the end of time.”
The acolytes crowded around the tree, examining the strange features. “Tusks,” one said. “No race on Thyr has tusks.”
The curate nodded in agreement. “And look at the size of that last creature’s face, whatever it is. Some of the schools think it stood ten feet high.”
“Then their coming would indeed be the end of the world,” someone said.
“Who knows why these trees grow?” The curate scanned his group. “Certainly one of you must remember this.”
A thin figure, hardly even a man, shorter than the others and afflicted with a strangely curved back, spoke. “They grow wherever there is a confluence. Wherever there is a massing of power.”
“Duket. Right as usual,” the curate replied, smiling ever so slightly.

* * *

“You should have been a mage!” his father thundered, towering over him with the implied threat of violence he always exuded. The warlock king seemed to reach skyward, as if his sorcery were more real than him, as if the weaving together of his power was more substance than trickery. When he called on all seven of the Paths, the power he wielded was beyond impossible, beyond reality.
And it didn’t help that he was mad.
The boy had never stood up to his father. Though related by blood and flesh and time, they were a different breed. They spoke a different language into the fabric of the world, and the friction of their mistranslations mangled that fabric. Horribly.
It began with a certain tension. You could see it around his eyes, the straining muscles, the clenched jaw. If his father, if Scylgrogh saw it, he paid it no heed, as if he was unaware what lived inside his son. With all his sorcery at his fingertips, with all of his thousand years and the piercing insight it brought, his child was opaque to him, a realm that — unlike any other realm — remained beyond his understanding. And in Scylgrogh’s burgeoning rage, he sought only to humble. He sought to beat it down, to destroy it. As always, he failed.
It began with tension, and turned into rage, the sort of white-hot rage that leaves no place for rational thought, the sort of rage that can only barely be contained.
He began to weep in the centre of the temple. The priests hung back as his passion turned to tears, and tears eventually to dull acceptance. They could see the power coursing underneath the boy’s skin, and understood that he was a Path of his own. More powerful even the Scylgrogh, filled with a sorcery more ancient than his father’s, a sorcery that had long before faded from the memory of the races of Thaepha.
A priestess comforted him then, when the memory and the power it provoked had begun to fade, a hand on his back, soothing him. A priestess of his father’s temple, whose name he did not know. She kneeled beside him, helped him to his feet, all the while weaving a web of sorcery around him, for what little good its healing might do.
The boy returned to his father’s house that night, when the memory faded. His father would be receiving reports from his armies, spelling out for his commanders what must be done. Which fields of battle must be sought, and which must be abandoned.
He wondered how many of those men hated Scylgrogh as much as much as he did. Or if any of them respected the tyrant, rather than simply fearing him. He wondered what it would be like to own seven realms of power but not own the love of anyone.
Except his mother. Why she stayed, he would never know. Why she loved the one man the rest of the world either worshipped or feared. That, the son though, is insanity.

* * *

The curate turned back to the tree, as the sky began to turn brilliant colours with the setting sun. “I have not told you this story,” he said, motioning to the Lograel. “But you are standing on ground that has seen the most powerful confluence in the history of this world, perhaps in the history of any world.”
“You mean the Sundering,” one of his students said. Eyes widened in the group as they realised where they were, and what events had unfolded here.
“Yes,” the curate nodded. “Your school has taught you that a Sundering took place, but not its method and its brutality.” He paused for breath and continued, “This is where the warlock king was killed by his son.”
More shocked looks. “What sort of son would kill his own father?”
“Perhaps,” said the curate, “you should be asking what sort of father deserves to die.”

* * *

He was eating the mid-day meal when his father stormed into the hall, his mother on his heels.
“What is this?” Scylgrogh screamed, tossing at the boy’s feet a painting. The painting that he had been labouring over for months. It clattered against the flagstones, the wooden frame cracking and splitting free. “What is this?” his father screamed again.
They both knew what it was, of course. The warlock king had no trouble understanding its meaning, its portent. There could only be one reading of it, a canvas filled with pile upon pile of dead bodies, ravaged armour, and tattered standards. It was the Imperial army, laid waste and scattered across a seemingly endless plain. It was Scylgrogh’s ambitions… destroyed.
Then it snapped. The white light of rage and power and sorcery in his head, through his body. He sought to contain it, he sought to keep it inside as the force of it gathered. He sought, and succeeded.
A confluence of forces as his father called on each and every of the paths: madness, of course, enough sorcery to destroy not only the royal house, but the entire continent. Maybe even the world, should he wish. He called and they answered in twisting ribbons of light streaming from the warlock king’s fingertips.
The boy rocked back on his heels at the detonation, but did not fall. He watched as fire consumed the hall, watched the walls crumble, watched the roof buckle and fall inward.
He watched as the painting danced like a living creature on the floor, but was not touched. Was not destroyed.
He watched his mother retreating backwards, her face a mask of terror as her skin began to burn.
And the son sought to save his mother.

* * *

“Enough energy to attract the attention of the Primal God himself,” the curate said. “It was that day this tree and all others like it began to grow. Wherever there is a gathering and outpouring of sorcery, when those who wield it too broadly meet in a place and form a critical mass, a Lograel grows. Some say the roots of these trees extend throughout the entire world.”

* * *

What Scylgrogh felt for the first time in many centuries was fear. Fear that somehow all his power was not enough. His son, that darkness he had ground so often underfoot, that void he could not plumb, had become something altogether different, somehow foreign but at the same time altogether familiar.
Something terrifying. Where the warlock king lashed out with power, his son absorbed it. Where he drew back, his son’s power filled. But in his fear and rage he forgot his wife, the queen, who stood behind him, slowly burning to death, now bleeding from her eyes, from her nose, blood seeping over her lips, bubbling out of her lungs.
One last scream was enough to distract him. And enough to seal his fate.
The warlock king whirled to see his wife, realising with a growing revulsion what he had done. Before he could gather his thoughts, he was lifted into the air, painfully, agony coursing through every nerve in his body. He screamed as he rose, as the pain grew and grew, as each moment brought a fresh wave, as each passing height of torture passed and an impossibly greater height of torture began. He screamed, and the world shook with his voice. He called with one last burst of sorcery on Path Maothurra, and felt it fracture with his mind. The Path itself torn to pieces, riven, split into countless fragments.

* * *

“He screamed,” said the curate, “and the world stopped.”

* * *

The world stopped, and The’er himself stepped from his realm, light streaming through the rift. It sealed behind him, as he surveyed his surroundings. “I have watched this long enough.” The Primal God spoke in the ancient tongue, a language beyond time itself, a language of which the world itself was formed. “One world already torn apart. Six others in mortal danger. And this, the world of the humbled, containing power that does not belong to it.”
Son and father held immobile as The’er spoke, the son a dark blot on the face of the world, the father a distant spot in the sky.
“I will make an end to this now. Warlock!” he shouted into the sky. “I require of you the blood of countless races, of which I measure from your body from this day forward. You will be a seal on the whole Paths, that no such power shall be wielded on this world again. And Loathgrael, I require of you the Path that you are to yourself, which I shall measure from your body as well. Your father will seal shut, and you will break apart.”
Both Scylgrogh and Loathgrael vanished from sight. Where the son had been, a tree stood, its roots reaching deep into the earth, seven faces, one for each of the races of Thaepha. And where the father had been, nothing.

* * *

“So they died.” The curate motioned for one of his acolytes to help him back on his horse. When he had mounted, he continued, “And so the races of this world lost the memory of the other Paths and how to access them, leaving for us only the Riven, or as some call it, the Path of Tears. But come, we must not linger here much longer. The Lograel are dangerous come night.”

The tree watched them go. It watched and remembered, and as it did the faces in its flesh began to whisper, their lips moving crudely in the fading light. If the curate and his acolytes had been there to hear or been able to understand the ancient language, they would have heard seven voices correcting the story. They would have heard the most human of the faces whisper the name of his mother. They would have seen sap run like tears and fall to the ground.

Tags: fiction