The Eternal Kingdom (The Children Trilogy Book 3) Read online

  THE ETERNAL KINGDOM

  Book Three of the Children Trilogy

  BEN PEEK

  MACMILLAN

  For Nikilyn Nevins

  Contents

  Histories

  Prologue

  Devastation, Birth

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  A Small Flame

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The Last Story of Asila

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  12.

  An Unfinished Divinity

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  Cannibal Messages

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  A Baptism of Fire

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  Heüala

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The Black Lake

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The Confessions of an Innocent Man

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  Brother Mother Sister Father

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The Children of the Gods

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  7.

  8.

  9.

  10.

  11.

  The Last Designs

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  Epilogue: Postscript to Histories, Year 1029

  1.

  2.

  3.

  4.

  5.

  Histories

  Written by ONAEDO

  Year 1029

  After the Leviathan died, after her blood turned the ocean black and poisonous, there were no gods for over ten thousand years.

  In 1023, that changed. The people of Leera cannibalized their homes and, with the material, built catapults and towers, and laid siege to the city of Mireea. The Leeran people claimed that they were the Faithful of a new, yet unnamed god, but it was not until the Mireean people retreated to the Floating Cities of Yeflam that she appeared.

  Six years after that event, most people think Se’Saera was named there, and the Breaking of Yeflam was the first display of her power. It is not uncommon for men and women to claim that, as Yeflam’s stone floors were torn apart, a giant made from a storm arose and spoke her name. But that is not true. Se’Saera was named across the ocean, in the country Ooila, in the First Queen’s kingdom. Nor was her name said by any creature or being of immense power. No, her name was spoken by the saboteur Bueralan Le, a man who had been exiled from Ooila for over a decade, and whom our new god sent there to draw one of history’s monsters, Aela Ren, to him. Only a few know that Se’Saera’s first act after she was named was not to destroy a city, but to take the soul of a dead man and place it in the womb of a woman Bueralan Le had befriended. This first act of the newly named god, the cartographer Samuel Orlan wrote days after, was a most revealing one.

  But few spoke about what happened in Ooila.

  Instead, people talked of Yeflam, of its destruction, and of the trial of Zaifyr, the immortal man known more infamously as Qian.

  Lady Muriel Wagan brought Zaifyr to Yeflam in chains at the end of the Siege of Mireea. In Yeflam, the head of the Enclave, Aelyn Meah, met Zaifyr at the gates of her giant stone city, and tried to convince him to leave. The two called each other brother and sister, and considered each other family. But Zaifyr would not listen to his sister. He had come to Yeflam to convince the immortals in the Enclave to stand against the new god and to go to war against her before she became too powerful. In the Siege of Mireea, he had learned that Se’Saera kept the souls of the dead in the world, in an endless state of hunger and cold, to fuel her own power. She had to be struck down, he believed.

  What he did not know – what he could not know – was that the new god had already reached out to Yeflam. With the help of the Keeper, Kaqua, she had turned many of the immortals to her cause.

  Zaifyr was killed by Aelyn Meah in the Breaking of Yeflam. The storm giant so many remember was her creation. Once dead, Zaifyr fell from the sky, into the black ocean, and was lost beneath the poisonous waves of Leviathan’s Blood.

  There were others in Yeflam, figures who were important to history, men and women we must not forget.

  The first of these was Ayae, the former apprentice to the great cartographer Samuel Orlan. She arrived in Yeflam with the refugees of Mireea. Because of her newly risen powers – at that point little more than the ability to control herself during a fall and to create fire – she was not sent to one of the barren islands beneath Yeflam, but allowed to live with two friends, Faise and Zineer. There she acted as an envoy between the Keepers’ Enclave and the people of Mireea. If the task was not a poisoned one when it was given, it could only become one. Ayae’s attempts to help the people she had grown up with were thwarted, her friends killed, and in her grief, she began to turn to stone. She was forced to confront the notion that if she did not learn to control her powers, they would change her in such ways that she would always be a slave to the divinity within her.

  With the aid of Zaifyr and his oldest brother, Jae’le, Ayae found a balance. It did not come from books, but rather from Yeflam’s descent into civil war. She found herself fighting to protect the people of Mireea and Yeflam from the Keepers and Se’Saera’s own hideous soldiers. In that turmoil, Ayae did survive and, I would argue, flourish. She did what all great warriors have done in a time of need.

  It is strange then, that in so few years, history has all but forgotten her.

  It has not forgotten Aned Heast, however.

  This former mercenary, a man who had lost not just his leg in battle but also his reputation, began the war against Se’Saera as Mireea’s captain of the guard. In the Siege of Mireea, he paid an expensive price to force a stalemate onto General Waalstan and the Leeran Army. It was one designed to give him time to rebuild the Mir
eean force. If he had stayed there, he might have still been known as the Captain of the Spine. However, a letter penned by a former soldier was delivered by a Hollow, a warrior from the Pacifist Tribes of the Plateau. There were no words on the letter, just an image, but it was an image that forced Aned Heast to return to the position he had held years before: Captain of Refuge.

  What can be said about Refuge that has not already been said? How can I describe a group of soldiers who do not work for money, but who answer the cries of those most in need, and who have fought and died through the most terrible battles of history? The recounting of their deeds through previous volumes of Histories will have to suffice. It is enough to say here only that Aned Heast was not the first Captain of Refuge, but he was the last. Under him, Refuge had been broken in Illate by the Five Queens of Ooila. He had been one of the few to survive.

  The letter that the Hollow, Kye Taaira, held demanded Heast’s return. He left Yeflam at night and travelled over the crumbling Mountains of Ger, through the haunted city of Mireea, to find the witch of Refuge, Anemone. She lived in the small town of Maosa, a settlement ravaged by Se’Saera’s soldiers. By the time Heast arrived, the old witch was dead, and in her place, her granddaughter stood, instead.

  Yet it would be the two of them who rebuilt Refuge, the two of them who history would not easily forget.

  Of Bueralan Le, the man who spoke a god’s name, we can only wish kindness. After the loss of his soldiers in Ranan, after his own blood brother was slain by Se’Saera and his soul given to Bueralan, after he sailed to Ooila . . . after all the tragedies of those days, and the days that followed his naming of Se’Saera, we can only hope that peace will find the former saboteur.

  After the Siege of Mireea, Bueralan returned to his homeland in the company of Samuel Orlan. The two were the only survivors of the ill-fated mission Muriel Wagan sent into Leera, but it did not leave them allies. Every Orlan has had his or her own game to play, and the eighty-second Samuel Orlan was no different. When he and Bueralan arrived in Ooila, the latter thought it was but a matter of time before the former would betray him. When Bueralan presented himself to the First Queen of Ooila, Zeala Fe, and begged for his exile to be lifted, he thought that moment had come. But it was Orlan’s intervention that allowed him to be returned to his home.

  What neither man realized was that Zeala Fe was in a difficult situation. She was dying in the fashion that only those with a protracted illness can, and her children had begun to plot against her. As if that was not enough, the stories of Aela Ren’s arrival in Ooila grew, and Zeala Fe knew she would need all that she had if she were to survive. A desperate, exiled baron was a man she could easily manipulate to serve this goal.

  Yet, for all of Zeala Fe’s power, for all her cunning, she could not stand against the brute force of Aela Ren’s power.

  Ren was the servant of the god Wehwe, who had died during the War of the Gods. Driven mad by the loss of his master, Ren gathered the other men and women like him – the god-touched, as they were known – and began to purge the world. He believed that if there was no god, there was no truth, or absoluteness. The horrors he committed in Sooia because of this are many and well documented. When word of a new god reached him, he came to Ooila in search of the man who knew her name. Aela Ren knew that for a god to be real, its name must be said by another, and that name must echo through all living creatures.

  I have only my sympathies to offer to Bueralan Le. I fear little else can be done for him.

  Aelyn Meah visited Leviathan’s End five years after the Battle of Ranan.

  She was a diminished figure by then. Physically, she was tall and narrow, a sinewy white woman emotionally fed on regret and sorrow. The last was so palpable that it could be felt when she entered a room.

  To the people who were not yet part of Se’Saera’s Faithful, Aelyn Meah was known as the Betrayer, the Fool’s Breath, and the Daughter of Lies. Over the last five years she has been hunted and attacked by people from all over the world. She has survived not through her own cunning, but through the will of our new god. Stories of Se’Saera striking down those who lift a hand against Aelyn Meah are not uncommon.

  It is not a blessing, or even a kindness, that sees Se’Saera protect her. It is, ironically, a curse.

  —Onaedo, Histories, Year 1029

  Prologue

  At the age of six, Eilona Wagan’s mother told her stories about the gods.

  It had been her father’s idea. Eilona was a quiet child and, in an attempt to get her to interact with other children, he had taken her to an afternoon performance of Tall Tales, a popular children’s performer in Mireea. When the two arrived at the tent, Eilona had been so overwhelmed by the size of the crowd that she had panicked and her father had been forced to take her back to the Keep. The sight did not go unnoticed, but despite the potential embarrassment, her father returned alone and purchased all of Tall Tales’s books. One of Eilona’s lasting memories of him was when he returned and told her that, if she loved the stories, she could have Tall Tales come and perform for a smaller group. She told him that she did not care and he, for his part, ignored her. He sat down on the floor next to her and read. The afternoon’s sun sank while his deep voice shifted between a whisper and a shout, depending on whether the scene was one of solitude or of action. He introduced her to knights and maidens and to their worlds of horses and swords and gowns and evil wizards. He laid the book in his lap so that his long arms could stretch and flow during daring chases and sudden rescues. He even made the sounds of hooves thundering down roads and swords crashing into each other. By the time the moon had risen, he had enthralled her with the stories printed on the roughly cut pages. He had done such a good job that it became a ritual, and after he died, two years later, her mother continued it.

  Her mother was a very different person to her father, however. Whereas he was tall, lean and dark-haired, her mother was solid and fleshy and changed her hair colour regularly. She turned it from red to black to brown and, occasionally, she mixed lurid bright blues and greens into it as well. After Eilona’s father died, it remained a sombre dark brown for nearly a year, as if, in her grief, a part of her had stilled.

  Unsurprisingly, there were no knights and no maidens in the stories her mother told. Instead, she spoke of creation. She spoke of how a giant god tamed the elements and became their jailer with his huge stone weapons and long, long set of chains. She spoke of how the God of Death wandered the roads, and how he met with the stone statues of the God of Life in the first and last light of the day to discuss who had been born and who had died. She read stories of how the continents had been made by the hands of a woman, and how the sky was given currents and pattern by a man. She spoke about how fire was given to humanity, not stolen as others said, and how the first creatures to live in the ocean were commanded by their god to tell the humans who hunted them their names, so that they knew who they hunted and would do so with respect.

  Even at the age of six, Eilona knew her mother’s stories were morals disguised as fictions. It did not surprise her. Her mother did not believe in a world of gilded cages or fanciful illusions and, with her father’s mortality now an event in both their lives, her mother would not indulge in it even briefly. Every fantasy she told her daughter had to have a point and a lesson. But it was not until much later that Eilona realized how rare the tales her mother told her were, and how they revealed in her a more educated mind than she had ever suspected.

  When Eilona first learned this, she was far away from Mireea. She was in Zoum, in a small mountain town named Pitak, where the campus of the University of Zanebien lined the mountains like a series of old, broken guard posts. The nation of Zoum was defined by its bankers, by the solitary men and women who were called to witness deals, to act as proxies in sales, and to ensure that the finances of the world were kept in order. Most bankers believed that their work was important because there was no natural order in the world, but many people would have been surprised t
o learn that in the University of Zanebien, economics was not what was studied. It was, instead, a domain for philosophy. It was there, in these small classrooms, that Eilona discovered how her mother had pieced together her god-inspired tales from books so old that they survived only in half-translated copies, in rare editions, or in largely oral traditions. It was just one of the many surprises the university held for her.

  Another was the experience of how, with Eilona living abroad, she and her mother became closer. She would not say that they were intimate – Eilona could admit now that she left Mireea in disgrace and that the contact she and her mother had until she was twenty-two was strained – but each year she was away, she saw the references of her childhood unravel and felt herself draw closer to a greater understanding of her mother. When she finished her studies and was offered a job as a lecturer, she stayed, as much to further her knowledge of the woman with whom she had fought as a child and young adult, as to further her academic pursuits.

  When her mother’s letter had arrived three months ago, Eilona had been relieved. News had reached Pitak that Mireea had been destroyed by Leeran forces and she had sent out letters to learn the fate of her mother and stepfather. But no matter her gratitude at the confirmation that both were alive, Eilona greeted the sight of the woman who delivered it, Olcea, with a terrible certainty.

  It is much worse than has been reported, she thought as she met the witch. My stepfather is dead. My mother is crippled. A witch does not deliver good news.

  Yet the letter the other woman gave to her was three pages in length and contained nothing personal. Instead there was a set of instructions for Eilona to deliver to investors and bankers throughout Zoum. It was, she thought, a letter that would have been surprisingly cold, even when she and her mother had been at their most distant.

  Olcea, who wore layers of thick black and grey, sat before her while she read. Her wrapped hands rested on the table, while at her feet sat a solid backpack.

  ‘Is she well?’ It was the first question Eilona asked. ‘She is not injured?’

  ‘Physically she’s fine, but mentally?’ The witch offered a slight shrug. ‘Things are difficult in Yeflam.’

  ‘Is that why she sent this?’ Eilona had led them to an outdoor table made from white-painted wood. ‘It is – if I do what she says here, she will not be able to provide for herself, much less a nation.’