Shadow of the West

[Kransha]

It was a nice day, a calm, warm day in Kanak. In the quaint little chamber, though, it was cold. Nowadays, the palace was always cold. Not icy cold like a blade or chilly like a windy day – just cold. The walls of the chamber had been wrought over with ebony stone that glistened dimly in the light of blue-tinted torches, casting a blazing whitened shadow against sable stone, grimacing arches and lifeless statuary. At one end of the chamber lay a small, stool-like tablet flanking a long, overly polished slab of gleaming ebony, like the glinting material that made up the walls. Rhythmic tapping sounded, echoing like a consistent beat, rapping tentatively against the slab. Fingers drummed the makeshift table, drowning out the other sound that filled the room – singing.

It was amazing, really – a stroke of luck – that Morgôs had not been exiled from the court of the King, even after six long months of total chaos and fluctuation in Pashtia. After six months of pain and war, Morgôs was still General of Pashtia, albeit not the elf he once was. He had not been demoted, but his position was entirely ceremonial.

He remembered the day it had all changed. An attempt was made on his life, not a truly abnormal thing in wartime, but it had jogged his senses. He had been gravely ill, and became steadily sicker during that day and the coming weeks, losing much of his stamina. The Elf had found out, on that very same day that Bekah was dead and Pashtia was at war. He would’ve, under normal circumstances, jumped at this opportunity to dive back into himself and become the furious War-lord, Morgôs, once again, but his form was diminished and frail. He was to weak to attend the council of that war, and his adjutant Gyges went in his stead. When Faroz, now called Khamûl, took the armies of Pashtia to war, Morgôs was given command of several battalions and ordered to annihilate the tribesmen who had been attacking Durvelt – the task he’d shirked for a month.

When he returned to Pashtia, triumphant, his arrival was overshadowed by the grandeur brought by Khamûl, who came with a terrible horde in his thrall and a force that had overwhelmed Pashtia’s most ancient enemy. On that day Morgôs felt terrible resentment. It had been his charge to wipe out Alanzia. Alanzia had cost him countless kinsmen and fought him in combat for millennia. Khamûl was no more than a yawning pup compared to him and yet he, clad in ebony armor whose passionate light glowed brighter and more powerfully than Morgôs’ silver panoply ever had, wielded a greater power and the unflinching allegiance, and fear, of thousands. But, that resentment decayed and disappeared. Morgôs held on doggedly to his allegiance to Khamûl, and it was only rewarded by Khamûl’s allowing him to remain in his court.

Now Morgôs had no real job, only a shadow of one. He did not control the things that ruled the streets or the armies. He felt, though, that he had no reason to turn from the rule of Khamûl. He may be deluded, but many kings had been. Someday, Faroz would die, and Gjeelea or Siamak would take over. Certainly neither of them would bow into the will of their father, and would distance themselves from this vile change. He held nothing against these beasts that roamed Pashtia, called orcs, and saw in them only rank brutality and stupidity, rather than untainted evil. Others told him he was blind not to loathe them, but something in him saw them as hounds, and no more than that, who did man’s bidding. The ejection of countless courtiers from Khamûl’s court was unexpected and unfortunate, but not terrible. Even though Morgôs’ own position had lost potency, at least he retained it. He had, though, been addressed on several occasions about resigning.

The one thing he couldn’t do.

As long as Khamûl reigned, Morgôs would be at his side. This was his doom, by choice of his own; his everlasting doom, which would ride him until the end of his days. He followed Khamûl still, not blindly, but without protest as the world became a stranger place than any world Morgôs had ever known. Several of his Elven kin had approached him about resigning in the wake of the change. Some were calling it the Cataclysm of Pashtia, a terrible event. Others hailed it as the nation’s Golden Age. His kindred though, Elven and mortal, close to him, seemed to agree more with the former. Morgôs, though, could not agree with them. He continued to go to the palace every day and wait for something, anything, to happen. He was loaded with political duties relating to the military: rationing, recruiting, volunteer numbers. Nothing his former occupation had entailed.

Morgôs remembered when he’d been called Warlord, the title of Army Commander used before everything in Pashtia was “modernized” by Khamûl’s grandfather. He’d been “Karandûn, the Warlord of Pashtia, Garok of the East, Mightiest of the Mighty.” Then he was “General of Pashtia, Hero of Pashtia.” Now, he was no more than Morgôs, the highest ranking non-commissioned officer with no real purpose in all the land: depressing. His frequent bouts of madness had not stopped either, leaving him sicker and sicker daily.

He’d attacked a soldier while camped outside of Durvelt, a serving girl who’d tended to him when he returned, and a courtier in the Palace. Since, each time, he almost immediately forgot his actions; the matters were not further pursued. The young girl who he’d injured on the day of Bekah’s death brought the issue to the King, but, since it was Morgôs’ word (what he thought had been an honest word) against hers, he won out. Strangely, though, the King had not seemed affected by the accusation, as if he had some preternatural knowledge of it. Still, he’d dismissed it without expressing concern. Some had commented on Morgôs’ behavioral alterations, but none many. Most were more worried about Pashtia’s alterations.

All that Morgôs was worried about at the moment was his work. He was not doing any official business, as he was supposed to, but rather consulting his own volumes, which he had brought to the Palace with him. Since he really had nothing else to do, this seemed logical. Ever since the end of what was now called “The War of the Orc” he had doggedly examined his archives. He found no evidence of any creature resembling orcs, or any other modern happenings that related to his lost memories. He was instead met in the tomes with more fantastical beasts, not these simple creatures or their smaller kin that patrolled Kanak and all of Pashtia in roughhousing gangs of armed thugs. Though he searched without end, he found nothing save for the familiar hauntings that plagued him before, but even more now. Nothing but pain…

“Cuiva, Ellerinon, cuiva!”

…and voices, as well. Recurrently, for months, he’d suffered another plague. Weekly, for the most part, but sometimes for days in a row he was pestered by the voice that had come to him on that day kneeling before the statue of Rhais. He’d forgotten about it, so the next time it came he was taken off guard. But that was the time that he was ill with the fever of war, so he dismissed the nonsensical voice as a hallucination. Then, it came again, and again, and again, all within days. He dismissed these to as freak occurrences, random side-effects of the bizarre happenings. As his detachment from himself grew, the voice, becoming clearer and stronger day by day, continued to berate him. The General no longer saw the serene beauty in the foreign words or the melodic sing-song of the spirit’s voice; he only felt the annoyance of one plagued by a gnat.

“Not now,” Morgôs growled mentally, “I’m not in the mood.” After two months of enduring the voice and trying to find meaning to it or its unknown tongue, he stopped looking for signs and either ignored it or argued it down. He found that it at least knew when he was “speaking” to it, and did not interrupt, so he could carry on conversations with it, though its words were not translatable. Lately, he simply tried to drive it away whenever it came, rather then let it continue to whisper into his mind. The voice was never satiated immediately and, as Morgôs predicted, it continued. “Á tulta tuolya,” It scolded brusquely.

“Quiet,” Morgôs shot back in his mind, but the voice ignored him altogether, as it often did. “An mauya mahta.” Morgôs had entertained the idea that he was mad, and the idea that he was literally being haunted, and many other theories. None held sway, and all fell short, so he gave the voice no name and let it attack him as an anonymous assailant, daily, weekly, or monthly. With a snarl in his mentally manufactured voice, he spat at the voice. “Go away.” He thought, simmering, but still the voice remained present. He could feel it.

“Á lasta!” Trying to be patient, he thought more calmly. “Have you not pestered me enough?” He asked.

“Haryal úruva fëa! Áva tinta ormë ilfirin óressë!” Declaimed the voice, with sudden reserved anger in it and, frustrated, Morgôs responded similarly, lowering his head wearily into his ready hands, “Why do you speak so that I can hear but cannot tell what you are saying?” He moaned, kneading his brow, elbows pushed against the paper-strewn slab of a table, “What purpose lies in this but to drive me away? Speak a tongue I know or begone!”

“Ellerinon,” the tone of the voice calmed and turned to a familiar whisper, “Ánin anta estelya.”

“GO AWAY!” The sound of the General’s voice boomed in his head, shattering the whisper.

To Morgôs’ great relief, the voice died, and he quietly resumed his work as he always did.