The Great House of Silence was a place of dusty, faded glory; it was perched upon the great hill at the center of the city, with a bright golden dome shining in the light, a thing that remained in place despite centuries of Dara's decline, guarded by the priests devoted to Udrau the Omni, whose temple it was. Once an order solely devoted to contemplation, they became warlike and vigilant as the centuries wore on and Dara's citizenry sometimes came upon the idea of looting some part of the great, rich temple for their own benefit.

Some succeeded, but not in many, many years – the priests had grown fierce, even if they remained silent. There was not as much to plunder as in centuries past, for the outer walls were crumbling and many of the treasures were long since taken, but what remained was guarded most ferociously. It was a cavernous labyrinth of columns and low-burning candles and hooded brass lanterns, redolent with the scent of incense. Here, the inner temple, was reserved for Udrau's own priests, those warlike men with their sickle-swords, heavily weighted blades curved forward and designed to chop – they were weapons of ritual sacrifice, but could cleave through mail easily enough in the right hands.

Kanros always felt like an interloper in Dara's oldest and most hallowed hall. Dara welcomed all, tolerated all faiths, but this was a uniquely Daran place. Udrau, though, was considered to be the deity of all peoples, but that not all people recognized Udrau and called him by different names. It was a conceit of religion that put some teeth on edge, and yet the thousands of years passed and the city's uniquely universalist faith remained. It was a weathered thing of faded, half-remembered glory, like the temple itself, but was nonetheless a link to a time when Dara was great, rather than a crumbling city in the middle of a dust basin.

This part of the temple was off-limits to most except for the sanctioned few; priests of varying faiths that might come in supplication to Udrau, the priests of Udrau themselves and those receiving a ceremonial blessing of the priests, including the Guardians, when one was made.

Kanros was being made a Guardian.

The black-eyed barbarian wasn't sure who came before him or who came after, and it really didn't matter – in a his decades here, he'd never heard of so many Guardians being made at once. But then, as far as he was aware, the Guardians had never been all killed off all at once the way they'd just been. A fearful city turned to its heroes, such as they were, and thus was Kanros the Raven keeling before old Anu the High Priest of Udrau, a wizened figure in blue and white robes that called out his incantations in ancient Daran as he waved a censer of smoke above him. Meanwhile, an ox was strapped down above the altar, bellowing in confusion. The priest took no notice of the cloying smoke, the ruddy half-light of the lanterns or the animal's fear as he continued his ritual, no doubt practiced many a time in his near-century of life.

That was the part of the ritual that applied for all Guardians – Kanros had no idea what the old priest was saying, just that he was to stay still until pulled up from his knees. He wasn't a native of Dara, but even very few natives spoke Ancient Daran. They spoke a mongrelized descendent of the language.

A Guardian could come from anywhere, but Dara was the All-Home, a city where any could become a resident and a native. Kanros, for better or worse, might have come from a mist-shrouded northern fishing village called Brynsvar, but he was a Daran by his own hand; Malezus sealed him to this city.

Guardians could come from anywhere. There had been times of Dara's weakness when a Guardian was made of a would-be conqueror or one of their captains, in order to subvert that person and weaken their loyalties. There had been times in Dara's strength when the Guardians were made from natives who feared no interloper. Dara had many chapters in her history, but the ritual was largely the same, even if the rules of who would be made a Guardian, as chosen by the whims of their people, guided by the wishes of their patrons, changed. The Guardians were chosen to benefit the city, but it was an oligarchy – once in, they were in for life. Only death defrocked a Guardian.

The other part of the ritual was usually very different for each Guardian, because part of the ritual was Udrau's priests granting a blessing but, in keeping with the Daran belief system, the Guardian to be then chose his own priest to put them through a ritual in keeping with the practices of their faith.

Many came to Dara, but Dara changed them more than they changed Dara. And Kanros was another that came to Dara and was changed in some ways, but not in the essentials; he still had the fire in his eye, the barbaric temperament that made him a natural warrior, an adventure seeker, a man of restlessness and little complacency. He was self-sufficient, because that was his upbringing – he was given little and had to make what he could for himself. The lessons he learned in Brynsvar and in other cities, as a pirate and then a captured slave-gladiator, merely reinforced that notion.

But Dara did not change his heart, and in the hour of his ascension to the mantle of a Guardian, he could have chosen a number of local priests of more familiar deities to oversee the blessings. It would have been a politically sound notion to do so. Instead, he sought out something else; a priest of Thran the Forger.

The second part of the blessing was dependent on the faith – many of them were similar to old Anu's chanting and blessing, though they didn't necessarily involve being drenched in the blood of an ox that was being sacrificed.

Thran's faith was of different stuff – Thran did not answer prayers, he did not give blessings. The Forger once made a race that he loved so dearly that he gave them much easily, and this race grew spoiled and degenerate from such gifts earned easily. As coddled children, they were brought down by a fiercer, more resourceful people. Mourning and desolate, Thran forged the Second People, from whom the likes of Kanros descended. Their lot was not made easy – Thran witheld help, except perhaps to issue cryptic challenges, so the tales claimed, that the supplicant then had to figure out. Nothing of value came easily – the strongest sword had to be forged with more effort, sharpened with a harder stone. The harder stone required a stronger chisel to work it. And the greater adversity forged the greater man.

And so Sig, the priest of Thran that Kanros' messengers found, when asked to preside, gave his assent to test Kanros, not simply to annoint him. When asked by Anu what he would require to give Kanros the blessing of his deity, Sig replied, “Thran does not dispense blessings. He does not hear prayers. A man must be able to carry his own burden.” They were taciturn words from a grim-jawed old man of long gray hair and a seamed mask of windburnt old leather and bright, hard blue eyes.

Sig led him from the temple down into the streets of Dara itself, dark and dusty in the night, with but a torch for light, the flame rippling in the gentle breeze off the river banks; the river emptied nearby into the Sea of Sunil, and the Khammis Quarter, the ancient district of docks was silent this night – the rumors of what killed the Guardians muted the raucous proceedings of Dara's lower city for almost a month now.

“Where are we going?” Kanros asked Sig, as they stepped through the River Gate and out into the Quarter of Tombs, the city's cemetaries built atop the city's catacombs, a bewildering array of stone markers of varying types, from obelisks to statues to gateways leading down into a family's burial ground of many centuries. There were always superstitious legends that clung to this place of death, and the danger of being attacked by footpads that lay in wait here, but the priest was secure in his faith and the sellsword secure in his swordarm; he was starting to feel age, mostly in the form of the odd occasional ache and pain that didn't exist before, but he was still a fit and trim man. He got up early to stretch his muscles and warm them up before he practiced in his courtyard with those men that guarded the Skaltun, the native argot for the Shield Hall.

Sig paused and looked sideways at the younger man, considering him for a moment before deigning to reply; he was not a man used to questioning, but Kanros was a long time out of Bryndsvar, and had lost the part of his upbringing that obeyed priests without question.

“To face the things men dread most.” They were atop a hill with a flat stone laying there, perhaps the roof of a mausoleum sunken into the ground; it briefly reminded Kanros of the way Melazus sank when they flooded the tunnels, sealing the secrets of the place for at least a lifetime.

He didn't see the priest come up behind him and circle a brawny arm around his throat, cutting off his air. He struggled as he might against the old man's surprising strength, but to little avail – the whoreson was squeezing the air out of him.

Kanros' last thought before it went black was that he couldn't believe he let his guard down like that.

–

The ancient chamber where they fought Pykas and Cyrabassis was, in actuality, a dangerous catacomb where the thing that took Pykas' body at the behest of Cyrabassis and turned him into a thing of furious lightning that flung arrows of something not mortal at them, that glowed dully from a light source in the center of the room. The place was cobwebs and dust among the columns, the smell of musty time flooding their nostrils, along with the fresher coppery scent of blood and cooking meat.

All that was gone; the chamber was there, the altar was there, and the light source...well, that gave a clearer view of the murals on the chamber walls, things he'd never seen before, because he'd been busy fighting the guards of Cyrabassis and Pykas at the time and had no moment to admire the artwork of ancients. There was writing, but it was indecipherable to him. The artists, however, also left artistic depictions. All of them were mosaics showing scenes of destruction and chaos, all emanating from a shapeless and riotous swirl of color and shape, no symmetry, no balance. At the center, a sphere of rippling darkness sitting in a large floor-standing device wrought like a lamp of intricately filigreed metal that wrapped delicately in a cage around a sphere of dull gray stonelike material; the metal and the sphere were wrought from substances Kanros could not identify. The dull, uniform darkness of the ball in that filigreed was marred with but one thing – the impossibly bright, riotously pulsating light that the artists tried to depict on the wall murals.

He'd never paid attention to the sphere at the time, so busy was he fighting the thing that Pykas became, and then as he and his friends hauled the babbling Cyrabassis from Malezus to stand for his crimes in Dara. Later, of course, the man would disappear – the Guardians had the men holding him executed for corruption, but the ones who fought Cyrabassis thought, well, it was entirely possible that Cyrabassis used some other method.

But now the sphere commanded his attention, as a voice, gravelly and grim, speaking in the native tongue of his people, said merely a word, “Unlocked,” as the sphere started to disintegrate and the light consumed the dull darkness.

Then his vision was awash in the flood of color, and he too felt seared and consumed by the force of it.

–

He came awake somewhere in the Khammis quarter, his wrists bloodied and his naked torso's flesh painted in the runes of his people's priests. Sig was nowhere to be found, but his sword was belted around his waist.

What had he faced? Death? Himself? His fears? His past? The future? Why had he faced that?

The question made him more confused than before, which meant that it probably was a good question.

It was a long, surreal walk back to Skaltun in the pre-dawn, and he found himself crawling into bed as soon as he arrived, though only staying up long enough to scrape the damned priest's runes off him. His chambers were comfortable, if perhaps a bit overly rich with the wealth he'd not known as a young man – baubles for the barbarian, the haughty Daran aristocracy would quip behind their hands with a smirk, but he could take it or leave it. Even so, he had servants and the like to see to his needs, and one of those woke him with the summons; one of the others called the Guardians to their hall to meet for the first time.

Guardianship's burdens were already showing – he no longer walked through the city on his own, but with a small group of Daran youths serving as lictors; guards, couriers, body servants to a Guardian, for they were not unattended in public. They would call out the approach of the Guardian to an establishment or home and knock upon the doors with their staves to demand entry. It was all ceremonial, but Kanros didn't think these young scions of noble families were likely to be worth much as bodyguards...and so he didn't get into the mindset of thinking of them as such. They were terribly serious, wearing the short tunics, bright green in hue, of their station, left bare legged so they could run and fetch or carry whatever was commanded of them, and in that sense they were a useful service to have.

His attire, however, was out of tradition – he wore a breastplate of lamellar, with its engraved ravens, for luck, upon the shoulder pauldrons and carried Vindurfang, as worn and old as the blade was, in a sheath that was newer than the blade, and decorated with gold and gems. Riffraff tended to carry much wealth on them, and the barbarian had always been disreputable enough to carry on doing so. He wore his hair, pride, joy and namesake that it was in staying jet black through the years, though his eyes had wrinkles around them now, unbound to his shoulders, held back only by a braided leather headband that he'd brought with him from all those years ago -- adorn himself he might (and some might whisper out of his hearing, like a slattern) he never did see the need to change that. He did wear the emerald green of a guardian, though as the scarf around his neck, to prevent chafing by his breastplate. Green was fertility, food and prosperity. It was the ancient color symbolic of the Guardians, a reminder of their duty of stewardship.

There was still a pall on the street that Kanros could discern, less people out and about even in the daylight. Crossing the Guardian's Circle, the center of town, toward the Hall of Guardians, an edifice that stood directly opposite the temple of Udrau on its hill, he saw little commerce. In most days, there'd be a throng here conducting business agreements in the sight of Udrau and the Guardians, along with the hired witnesses to make ratification of contracts legal, but today the place was silent and the commerce hushed.

Trade was the lifeblood of Dara, the source of its revival. If people were too scared to make money, they had a crisis indeed...

The hall itself was simple to enter; two stout doors thrown open to signify that the Guardians were indeed actually in session in their Hall, petitionable by those that got past the lictors at the door. It was a bad security arrangement, for determined enough assassins could come through and kill the Guardians by overpowering the lictors, youths like the ones surrounding him, easily. Tradition forbade private guards, to keep the Guardians from becoming insulated by too much security as they conducted the business of the City – the warning was apparent; to occupy power in this place, you had to conduct your business behind one set of doors, guarded by youths who were not likely to fight off a determined mob very well, though they could sound an alarm and call for help. But if one was unpopular, who would come? That kept the system healthy, in a sense. A Guardian ruled for life, but law forbade them from being able to surround themselves with guards of their choosing, like a king, in the places where the Guardians made their decisions and carried out their duties. It left the public servant at the mercy of his public.

It was a system that prevailed for centuries, if not millennia. It was why many nobles declined the honor of being a Guardian. Something came through and killed the last bunch of Guardians, but it was a mystery – no one took credit and stood for election, as tyrant-killers had in the past, and no one was sure who did it. The rumors were fell, of some beast of shadow and flame, and there were scorch marks to prove it around the frame of the doors.

Kanros strode through as his lictors announced to the hall his presence. Inside, more scorches along the wall, though there were servants scrubbing it. The place was pleasantly shaded in the dark, built of stout marble with cracks here and there. It was a simple chamber, round in shape with a dome overhead, pierced with only a little light and lit by torch. It was simple and elegant, with simple chairs for the Guardians, rather than thrones of any sort. There were rows of benches for advisors and others that they would speak to, if they cared to summon such an audience or allow one, but it was, at the essence, a system very like a village's council of elders, but with more money at stake and certainly more danger.

Anu was there again, along with the others, his one-time comrades. A few of them were still friends, others were like strangers to him. It was Anu who kept the laws, who saw to the rituals, minor in nature, of opening and closing a session. But he did not offer opinions on how to govern. He merely recorded the proceedings. When he saw Kanros, he thought he detected a cocked eyebrow for a moment -- apparently word of what old Sig had done to Kanros, what passed for a blessing among his people's gods, was on the tongues of others in the city. But the moment was gone, and Kanros was glad enough of that.

“Guardians," the old priest intoned, with a rapping of his staff upon the floor of the chamber, "the session opens now. May Udrau watch and favor. May you rule well.”

Kanros, once the short prayer was over, settled on the chair he picked for himself, mindful of his sword belt, and perched forward a bit; the lictors had arrayed their chairs in a circle so they could speak to each other and there were no summons or petitions for the day, not for a first. But there was much to discuss. Kanros stood first, daring to be so bold as to speak first and break the awkward silence.

“Well, fellow Guardians,” Kanros articulated carefully, wary of the people here now, though he smiled with that crooked, inappropriate smile he oft-times cracked, to the dismay of more staid sorts “Our first order of business is obviously the city. It is drowning in this fear. No business is being done. Those that aren't hiding are scurrying. When they speak, they are whispering. We must address that.”

"The Raven is right," Rickas said as he stood. He nodded in Kanros' direction, friendly enough. The two men had never been anything but friendly acquaintances during and after their time as adventurers.

He took time to adjust his tunic and make sure the emerald pin on his collar was straight. An old orator's trick, to start the conversation and pause long enough for the others to wanting more. Although, he could tell from the half-hearted looks from the group that it was a trick that didn't particularly work on them. Instead, he cleared his throat and pressed on.

"The oath we took, the rituals and sacred acts we performed all reminded us that is our sacred duty to protect this city and its interest. If people are scared, if their tongues wag about nothing but scandal and fear day and night, then we need to simply change the conversation. The city knows about its new Guardians, but they have yet to see them together. We should put together some sort of festival that will serve as both a coming out party for this group as well as a reminder to the people what it's like to have fun."

Guardians? What possible use would an old widow be to them? Resa found herself wondering this as she prepared for the meeting that morning. She found herself wondering it again as she sat among the others that afternoon. She hadn’t spoken with many of them in several decades, save for a passing cordial nod when they met on the street. Indeed, Devon and Rickas were the only two she had had much to do with after the birth of her children.

Resa surveyed those before her, a bit coolly and extremely calculatingly, as they spoke. They had all made names for themselves and Resa felt pangs of envy rise in her stomach. This envy though was immediately replaced with a feeling of guilt and ungratefulness at her lot in life. For, although she would have chosen a far different path for herself, she was quick to acknowledge that her family was a blessing of no small consequence.

Speaking of her children, she was preoccupied with their welfare and, quite frankly, a bit annoyed that she had been obliged to leave them in the care of her servants and her brother. Devon was the only other one among them with who was a parent, and he had but one child to look after. But what did Kanros or Seeker or any of the others know of such an obligation? Their words were pretty enough, and perhaps tinged with some bit of genuine concern, but the cynic in her doubted the true depths of their devotion to Dara.

And yet, did such motives even matter? They had all been drawn together for the good of the community and there were pragmatic reasons for each of them to be there in the first place. But Resa tried to have as little to do with politics as possible, and this all seemed political in nature. The Raven’s wry smile and Rickas’ usual grandiloquence gave indication that her former comrades had changed little in the decades they spent apart, and again she felt a pang of envy and an accompanying sense of loss for her younger self. The suggestion of a festival seemed to be met with largely positive responses, though Resa found herself thinking it was a bit frivolous when there were such issues with education and food distribution. She said nothing though she found herself tempted to when Seeker spoke. During their travels together, she was somewhat predisposed to fighting with the assassin almost reflexively. Instead, however, she merely looked at the three men who had spoken with raised eyebrows.

"A festival? Perhaps," Kanros conceded, and then carried on, "Drink, merriment, music and all that to take minds off matters..." he shrugged a bit before adding, "...that we as Guardians cannot afford to ignore. Our predecessors were slain here."

He stood up and paced over to a spot on the marble where the blood still stained, scrubbed a little, but not entirely removed, as if that mute testimony helped make his point. And then, after a moment's pause, the shaggy-haired barbarian continued, "A festival is useful, aye, as a means to see what the merriment brings -- travelers on the road will lure in bandits. We can find out who is encouraging those bandits, and if there is a pattern, we'll know from whence they were sent." Mercenaries, after all, often turned to such in desperation when the money wasn't forthcoming, when there wasn't a campaign to sign on for. Kanros knew this end of the business, and knew how to subvert such men once caught. He didn't advise, yet, that they start recruiting forces to mount security on the roads -- that, of course, would probably enrich him considerably, but it made a certain sense. But he could take one look at Resa and know that she came in with her armor on, in the figurative sense, and the timing would be bad. It wasn't as if he wasn't known for profiting off killing, which was why they called him the Raven as much as because of his hair. Proposing something profitable like authorizing funds to raise mercenaries to guard Dara's roads, while worthwhile in his mind, had to be brought up delicately and argued carefully, lest it look like baldfaced opportunism.

Not that he wouldn't mind profit eventually, but there were other issues at hand.

"And of course, a festival will invite sabotage. If we manage to catch conspirators in that time, certainly, it allows us the chance to interrogate them, if we are lucky enough to find some alive. And perhaps in learning who is prepared to attack Dara when she is weak, when the leadership is new and inexperienced, we will have a sense of who was behind this, or at least catch a scent of the trail. But a festival alone?" The barbarian scoffed, even as he showed that he had spent the last twenty years learning something at the knee of Jalal, son of Jalal, the Prince of Killers, the man that groomed Kanros to be his successor in mercenary work. Hells, the man married Jalal's daughter. He was a headstrong hell raiser in his youth, but now? Well, it seems Kanros had changed -- no one would have ever accused him of laying out such a trap in the past, of thinking more than a swordpoint ahead of anything. He didn't have the patience for it back then. Cunning, aye, that was what a man gained as he aged and lost the advantages of youth.

"So perhaps a festival, it's not an idea without merit. But mind you the stain on the floor there, because our predecessors were murdered. Whoever had them killed had help and they have not been caught. We are the new Guardians, and we cannot rest easy or be sure they won't come for us. And if they did this with the idea of putting some or all of us in the position of Guardianship, what do they gain and what do they expect from us?"

Her life had become wrapped up in banal and fate deprecating repetitions. If it wasn’t for that exact moment that had brought them here, her dull life would have seemed enough, but that had not been their path. It was their joint experience that left her life on one path and her mind constantly wandered down animalistic trails. These trails trickled into perceived true religious fervor and found their confines in esoteric corners that made for dull conversations that only really picked a pace when held alone. It was a deep secret and cherished place in which she longed for when they had battled for something worthy. If anyone had asked, that is why she was here.

But, it was more than that too. She had truly seen the touch of the Gods in those moments. She glimpsed what power the smallest sliver of fiend flesh could create with the proper influence (She couldn’t voice it as influence. She couldn’t dictate what it stemmed from as it was never explicitly clear. This was an unanswered question that had persistently licked at her thoughts to occasional degrees of unhealthy obsession). Her life had been dedicated to studying tomes full of stories that her people preached. Irrational stories that were held together with the thin strands of faith, made strong with a yearning for something else. That was her life, but her mind…her mind forfeited to the truth of sighted belief and delved deeper into the reanalyzing of the tomes of Noteyalis and invocations long since broken by something yet sleeping in her ignorance.

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The first of us drove a melody deep into the terrain and blessed the mud with such a joy that water delivered upon the newly birthed shoreline. But that song instilled an unquenchable need for life. A goodness and purity that gnawed at the dying sand until the tree was born.
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She had been staring off at where she instinctively knew the seven stars of the exiled destinies would be reaching out in the darkening sky. Lashes, thick and dark in contrast to the glimmering blue they trembled across, gave way to a focusing gaze that finally removed itself from the sheltered constellations and thoughts. She didn’t know how long she had been indulging their past in favor of their tragically jinxed present. She turned her attention briefly to each of them. Perhaps she did not know of their current lives, as she glimpsed at each of them this came as a stunning realization. There was something else there though, connections that surpassed the trivialities of daily life; connections like those creatures that had taken permanent dwelling in her nightmares. Those whispering ghouls that sometimes wink from the shadow of her mind.

“Perhaps a challenge of bow, sword, brawn at this festival? Fun for the citizens who want to jump in on the Guardian bandwagon? A festive release of anger, revenge?” Even with her face uncovered in the presence of proven companions her expression was hard to read. Her lips were curled into a deceptively playful expression, unaccustomed to visibility that masked the more serious planning already tussling about her mind and glittering in her traveling stare. Her smirk calmed into what could only be called a serious smile while she nodded her head and continued, “Plus, A few important citizens would be flattered to be held as honorable judges of the competitions.”

Was this trivial? Maybe just a little. A faith affirming battle of the gods? Perhaps not entirely. But a good poke at death never hurt those chosen to fill the chairs of the dead. There was no better way to poke at death than to surround yourself with the creators of your fortune and murderers of your predecessors accompanied with the intoxication of festival. It sounded delightful and she had needed a reason to touch up the tattoos that claimed a surprising portion of her torso.