🏵 The Signet - Part 22 🏵

Helios

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Philip.

There was only the ethereal light.

Philip.

The voice was immense and ancient, but somehow not loud.

Philip Beckwith drew a breath and sat up.

He was in the middle of a mountain road. Morning. Warm sun from a clear blue sky. He sat very still for a moment, hands flat on the ground, feeling the grit of the road beneath his palms, making sure the world was solid before he asked anything more of it.

Three bodies lay around him, each turned to ash and still smoldering.

He touched his forehead.

Something that was gone had returned.

He stood, slowly, and found his legs willing. Soot everywhere. The road was scorched in a radius around where his body had lain, as if the entire area had been engulfed in flames.

He remembered it now. The hand on his forehead. The draining. The loss of control. The desperate prayer. And then the flame. Not around him. Through him.

He had been the conduit.

Philip Beckwith had become something more.

Go to the mountain.

The voice again, but not an audible voice. A reverberation within his body and mind. He turned slowly, taking in the scorched road, the ash, the ordinary mountain sky above him, and understood that the question he might have asked—who are you?—was unnecessary.

He knew upon whom he had called at the end.

He also knew where the mountain was.

He stood in the road for a long time, longer than he needed to, because his body was asking for it. His hands had stopped shaking by the time he heard a step on the gravel. Then another. Bella pressed her nose to his shoulder and he raised his hand to her face and held it there.

“Good girl,” he said.

He gathered his things, feeling the aches in his body, packed them up, and got on the road. He felt no hunger and did not make a breakfast.

Philip headed east. He tried to recall what had happened in sequence, but memory kept sliding sideways on him—he would reach for the moment before the hand touched his forehead and find only the feeling of it, not the fact. The creatures. The dark road. The words the voice had said. The master wishes you to know. He held each fragment carefully and set it aside.

She has her own path. Go to the mountain. Learn what the Knights Celestial have forgotten.

Helios. The word came to his mind. A place.

But Philip struggled with the divided attention. The mountain was east. He wasn’t sure how he knew that, but he did. Scarlet was also east.

He rode east.

Shortly after noon, Bella came to a halt on her own.

Philip flicked the reins, but she refused to move.

“Come on, girl. We need to make progress.”

She turned left.

Philip looked and saw a path leading up into the mountains. Strange that he had not noticed it before.

Scarlet was east. The mountain was north.

He held Bella, unmoving for a long time.

Forgive me, Esme.

Philip turned north and began riding higher into the mountains.

Two hours went by before he could no longer bring Bella.

The question was what to do about the horse. He had no idea how long it might take him to reach the mountain, what was there, or how long he might be there. If it was an hour, tying her up was fine. If it was many hours, he’d have to let her loose.

“Well, if Epherion can guide her while I’m riding, he can very well guide her when she’s on her own.”

He stripped her of her saddle, packs, bit and bridle, and stacked those things neatly in a small copse of evergreens just off the path.

He stood there watching her for a minute and was just about to turn up the mountain when he saw the Uruk.

Big, burly, bearded, with heavy horns.

Philip placed his hand on the hilt of his sword as the Uruk approached, a spear in his hand.

When they were twenty feet apart, the Uruk stopped.

Philip studied him and recognized him—the same Uruk he had fought wolves with. They had eaten together on opposite sides of a fire, two people who had spent years trying to kill each other finding common ground in the dark.

“You look older,” the Uruk said.

“I do?”

“Hairs are grey at the temple. They were not before.”

Philip said nothing for a moment, and then nodded. “Why are you here?”

“Helios.”

Philip’s eyes went wide. He knew the word. Somehow he knew that’s what he would find at the top of the mountain. But he had no idea what it could be or what it meant.

“I will join you,” the Uruk said. “I will join the Knights Celestial.”

An Uruk in the Knights Celestial. The idea shocked Philip for a moment, but in the more than two thousand years the knights had existed surely there had been Urukesh and Oroquai in the order. Maybe even Aelvani.

“You are Philip,” the Uruk said.

“How did—”

“Epherion told me,” the Uruk said. “I am Haddagan. Chief of my people.”

“Chief?” Philip asked. And then he repeated the word in Urukesh. “Krang.”

“Just chief. Not chief, chief.”

“Huh?”

“You repeated yourself.”

Philip shrugged.

“What else did Epherion tell you?” Philip asked.

“That there would be others come. There would be nine of us. And we would learn what the Knights Celestial have forgotten.”

Philip nodded. “I feel the same things.”

Krang Haddagan strapped the spear to his back. Philip dropped his hand from the hilt of his sword as they walked together.

“Forgive me for saying so,” Philip said. “But you seem to speak Bravian better than when we last met.”

“What? I was just going to say that I did not expect you to speak Urukesh with no accent.”

“I’m not speaking Urukesh,” Philip protested.

“I am not speaking Human,” Haddagan said.

They stared at each other, and then they both shrugged and turned up the mountain.

The last mile was stone stairs cut into the mountain.

The stairs ended at a gate.

It was not a large gate—not the towering thing Philip might have expected. It was the right size for a man to walk through with his head up and his shoulders straight. The stone around it was white, catching a light that was not quite the sun’s light, though the sun was the only thing in the sky. The gate stood open.

Philip stopped at the threshold.

Behind him, Haddagan waited, arms at his sides, steady as the mountain itself.

The citadel rose before them—towers capped in gold, walls the color of first light, every surface catching and holding the morning in a way that stone should not be able to do. It was not large by the standards of the great fortresses Philip had seen. It was precisely what it needed to be, and nothing more.

He stood there long enough that Haddagan put a hand briefly on his shoulder and said, “Let us see this mystery first hand.”

Philip stepped through.

The warmth hit him as soon as he passed through—a warmth that had nothing to do with the sun or the season. Around him, outside the gate, he saw snowpack that had been there for a thousand years, but the chill could not penetrate within.

Three figures stood in the courtyard.

A man of deep ebony skin, head shaved close, a scar running from his jaw to his collarbone, who looked like he had been meditating on this moment for four seasons. A woman, tall and strong, who met Philip with the nod of one soldier to another. A second man, quieter, who said nothing but whose bearing shifted almost imperceptibly as Philip and Haddagan entered.

“I am Drogoth,” the first man said. “This is Senna. And Aldric.”

“Philip Beckwith,” Philip said. “This is Haddagan.”

“Five,” Senna said quietly.

“Five,” Philip agreed.

He felt it then—the awe, arriving late, as awe sometimes does when a man has been too busy surviving to feel it. The white stone. The gold towers. The light that should not have been possible at this hour or this altitude. He was not worthy of this place. He was certain of that in a way that had nothing to do with doubt and everything to do with understanding the size of what he was standing inside.

Drogoth came to stand beside him.

“I felt the same as you are feeling when I first stood here,” he said. “It is not we who are worthy. It is Epherion who is worthy. And he chose us.”

“Yes,” Philip said. It was all he had.

They moved together, five of them.

The armory was off the main courtyard, behind a low arch. The door was unlocked. It had been waiting.

Inside, the weapons were arranged as though laid out for inspection—nine blades on nine rests, nine sets of armor on nine stands, nine helmets, nine shields. Untold centuries of waiting had done nothing to them. The steel was bright. The leather was supple. The gold inlay on each grip caught the light from the courtyard and threw it back.

Philip walked the length of the room slowly.

Two thousand years and not a mark on any of them. The broadest blade ran warm; he could feel it at a distance, the air around it slightly wrong in a way that was not unpleasant. The plainest blade said nothing about itself, which was its own kind of statement. The shortest one sat between two of the others and looked at first like it didn’t belong, and then he understood why it was there, and moved on.

Each blade was marked with a name in the old script—the archaic lettering he had never learned to read. But he did not need to read it. At the fifth and middle stand he stopped. The blade was neither the longest nor the plainest. It was the right length.

He lifted it.

The grip fit his hand as though it had been made for it.

Which, he was beginning to understand, it had.

Drogoth read the name aloud from over his shoulder.

“Lightbringer.”

Philip turned the blade in the light.

The others were finding their own—Haddagan standing before Shadowbreaker, Drogoth lifting Sunfury with careful hands, Senna taking Sunflare without ceremony, Aldric taking Darksbane and saying nothing.

They dressed in the armor. It fit each of them. Nobody had expected otherwise.

At the far end of the citadel stood the Temple of the Sun.

Its doors were the only things in Helios that were closed.

Philip stood before them for a long moment. The stone around the doors was carved with figures—nine of them, arranged in a half circle, each holding a blade aloft. The carving was old enough that the details had softened, but the shape of it was clear. It had always been clear to anyone who cared to look.

He placed his hand flat against the door.

It did not open.

“We are only five,” Philip said.

He lowered his hand.

“Then we wait,” Drogoth said.

They turned back to the armory. Philip was studying the remaining swords when he heard a step on the stone behind him.

Chenguer stood at the entrance, the light full on his face, his eyes wide and still. He was not looking at Philip or the others. He was looking at the weapons the way a man looks at something he has seen before in a dream.

A long moment passed.

“I was called,” Chenguer said.

Drogoth and Haddagan both nodded to him.

Philip clasped his friend’s shoulder. “I am glad you are here.”

But it was as if Chenguer did not notice him. He stepped to a golden sword adorned with seven jade inlays.

“Constellation,” he whispered.

Philip and Drogoth exchanged a glance. Drogoth smiled.

“Six,” Senna said.

“Six,” Philip said.

“How long do we wait?” Aldric asked.

“Until the remaining three come,” Haddagan said.

“We can become equipped, but we cannot open the vault until all nine have arrived,” Philip said. “So we must wait.”

He unsheathed Lightbringer and looked it over. It was a relatively simple design. A knight’s weapon rather than a king’s. A doubled-edge straight sword, slightly longer than a standard garrison issue, which suited Philip’s longer arms. The crossguard was simple and functional, the quillons extending just far enough to catch a blade catching nothing else. The pommel was a sphere of white stone that caught the light the way the citadel walls did. Along the flat of the blade, a set of words in the ancient script.

“Drogoth.”

Drogoth read it aloud. “It says, ‘Nothing is Hidden.’”

Philip nodded, resheathed the blade, and turned to his companions.

Five people had crossed the world to stand in this room. Chenguer had left a garrison under siege. Drogoth had walked out of a monastery in Frostfall and crossed the world on a vision and a borrowed text. Haddagan had climbed a mountain his people had avoided for generations. And here they all were, waiting for three more.

He should stay. He knew he should stay. The archive was here. The vault was here. Everything the order had forgotten was in this building and it needed to be read and understood before whatever was coming arrived.

He thought about Scarlet riding east with Benedict, into territory he knew better than she did. He thought about Ashcroft—the claw marks on the boot, the undead who had nearly taken everything from him on a dark road. He thought about what the undead did to the people they found.

He thought about Esme.

“I must go,” he said.

“We just got here,” Senna said. “You just got here.”

“There is someone I must find,” Philip said. “I’m sorry that I must do this, but I must. The others will come. Wait for them.”

“We will accompany you,” Chenguer said.

Philip smiled at him. “I appreciate the offer, my old friend, but there is a moment coming that is mine, and must be mine alone. When I return, we will open the vault together.”

“How long will you be?” Haddagan asked.

“It is unclear,” Philip said. “Possibly two weeks, possibly more.”

“What should we do?”

“For you specifically—the order requires you to give up your titles and take a new name. Think on that while I’m gone. For all of you, await the others and, I think, pray. I feel that darkness is coming.”

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Stephen B. Anthony is the author of Transmigrant, an epic science fiction thriller, available on both Amazon and Audible. The first seven chapters are available on this website for free.

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