A Malign Endurance

A young apprentice tests the limits of magic

On the day of the disaster, two monks labored up the slope: an elder named Dalfre, and a prodigy many years his junior. This younger one was gifted with the Voice, and was known, in those days, as Brother Valdoran.

The pair had trekked up into the hills to fetch more winterberries and chanterelles, if they could be found. They’d walked an hour or more up the slopes already, weaving through the trees and bushes. At first, they could see through the foliage and spy the town and monastery of Umbrisia in the valley below. But the fog thickened, and then condensed, and then chilled. Soon sleeting rain coated the stones and loosened the forest floor.

Dalfre, old enough to be laboring on these slopes to begin with, lost his footing entirely and slid from a ledge. Dalfre shouted out in fear, and Valdoran in surprise. When the older monk landed, seven or eight spans below, the cracking sound that reverberated around the woods was not that of branches and brambles.

“Oh I’m sorry, Brother Valdoran,” Dalfre said once the younger monk had found him spread out on the wet ground. “I shouldn’t have—ooh!”

Valdoran watched as pain overtook Dalfre’s face. He stooped down and put a cold hand on his comrade’s cheek. “I am here, brother,” he said.

“I shouldn’t have gone that way. We should have turned back when you said.”

“No, no, Dalfre. Be at peace. Let me look at that leg.”

The younger man shifted in the wet pines. His hands were already numbing in the chill, but he forced his fingers to their work. He unwrapped the monk’s cloak, his long robe beneath, and felt along the trousers around the ankle. Something there gave way with very little force. Something that Valdoran knew he could fix, if only he knew how.

Dalfre cried out in pain. “Words Above! Don’t! Don’t, please!”

It was several minutes before Dalfre caught his breath. Gusts of wind cut through the trees.

“This ground is cold, brother,” Valdoran said eventually. “We have to get you back down the mountain.”

“I… I can’t walk. You go. Go for help.”

“No, brother. I won’t leave you. Come, let’s get you up.”

With a groan and help from the younger monk, Dalfre achieved a sitting position. “There’s no chance I’ll make it down those paths. Not in this rain.”

“I’ll help you.”

“It will take hours. It will take all night. And in this cold…”

Valdoran looked around at the trees, searching for some salvation. He thought of the way they’d come up the hills. He thought of how to get down. The sleet began to bounce off his cheeks. “What about the hermitage?”

“That is not on the way back.”

“But nor is it far from us now. And Sister Maerwen could help. She has herbs and medicines. And fire, Dalfre. We could get you dry, and warm at least. I could go for help then, knowing you are safe.”

Dalfre nodded assent.

They left their foraging baskets on the ground and began to shuffle—two men on three legs—down the treacherous slopes.

The clouds were creating a premature dusk.

The sleet was turning to snow.

✹ ✹ ✹

“You are right: the boy has the Voice,” Sister Maerwen told the collection of brothers, down at the monastery, “and his understanding does seem beyond his age. There is potential in him. Now tell me precisely why you brought me here.”

The monks exchanged glances. Maerwen the Hermitess was an odd and prickly woman; most of her days were spent alone with no one but trees and the Words. But her Voice was strong enough that she could not be ignored, and there was no better teacher for those monks who could Read. At least, no better teacher this far from Amelond. Through silent consensus, the monks chose Rector Wurdred as their spokesman.

“Good Sister,” he said, “you have no doubt guessed what it is we ask. Will you take him on as your pupil?”

“Tell me more about the boy,” Sister Maerwen told Wurdred, as if he had not spoken. “How did he come to be here?”

“His mother brought him,” the rector explained, “just before the start of his twelfth year. She offered him to the Words of Heaven as thanks.”

“Was there some favor?” asked the hermitess.

“His very life, Sister. The Plague of Damrion claimed his father shortly before he was born, as well as nearly every child born that year in his village, but this boy survived, thanks in part to the late abbot’s ministering of the holy Words. And so, as he nears maturity, the mother has brought him to us, so he can live among the community and the Words which saved him.”

“Twelve years since the Plague of Damrion,” mused Maerwen. “Has it been that long already?”

The question hung in the air over the memories of that grim winter.

“His mother must be a pious woman indeed,” said the hermitess. “She named him well.”

“I… am not sure what you mean, good Sister.”

“‘Brave Endurance.’ That’s what his name means.”

“Ah,” nodded Wurdred. “Perhaps the good abbot had a hand in that.”

“I should hope so,” said Maerwen, “or else it means that a peasant woman has a better grasp of the holy language than you lot.”

The monks tried to take this jibe with grace. They mostly failed.

“Very well,” said Maerwen. “I will teach him. Bring him to my hermitage tomorrow, mid-morning.”

“Thank you, Sister. We will leave after the dawn-meal.”

The hermitess did not acknowledge this. She pulled her hood over her whitening hair and left.

Rector Wurdred was the one to enter the room where Maerwen had performed the test. The windows’ shutters were closed and a curtain had been drawn over them; the test only worked in darkness, but because it had already been done, the room was no longer dark. Rather, a tallow candle burned brightly on the central table. Beyond it, a hand-book lay with its golden pages open to the candle’s light, and beyond the table’s edge sat a boy on a stool. The fire had come from his Words. From darkness, bringing light.

Wurdred saw the flicker reflecting in the boy’s huge, watery eyes.

“Well done, Valdoran. Now come: we have good news for you.”

✹ ✹ ✹

Sister Maerwen’s forest home had always been a little thing: a rectangular structure of wattle-and-daub, a single window and doorway both shuttered with blankets of stitched rabbit skin, a roof which was only a heaping mound of evergreen branches needing perpetual care.

As soon as they laid eyes on it, Valdoran and Dalfre recognized that it was not going to save them from the cold.

A great tree had snapped near its base and thrown its aging trunk down atop the hut. That roof hardly existed now. Two of the walls had collapsed. The place lay completely open to the sky and to the snow which fell from above.

“Words of Life preserve us.” Dalfre either swore or prayed. “What are we walking to find? Is Sister Maerwen alive? Has the tree killed her? Words of All Life.”

Valdoran tried to hurry the elderly Brother over the slushy ground. It was not easy.

✹ ✹ ✹

The eyes of Maerwen’s student were wide in astonishment. His jaw hung open. He was a teenager now, but the wonderment was so plain on his face that he appeared like a little child. His innocence lightened Maerwen’s heart.

“Did I not tell you?” she asked with a smile.

The teenager held his open palm out in front him, and in it was a red-hot coal. They could smell smoke, but he did not flinch.

“Why does it not burn?” Valdoran asked. “It’s warm, but only warm.”

“I told you. Fear not.”

“But why does it not burn?”

“Because true gifts do no harm, and the Words are true gifts.”

Valdoran looked down at his hand again. Even as his face came close he could feel an intense heat on his cheeks, yet his palm wasn’t even sweating.

“Now what?” he asked. “How do we use it?”

“Quickly,” Maerwen smiled. “The ember will go out soon enough. Here.” She produced a wide ceramic bowl, within which lay a pile of pine needles and twigs. At a gesture, Valdoran duly turned over his hand and let the coal drop into the bowl. There was a loud hiss and bright light filled the gloom of the woman’s tiny hermitage. In seconds, the bowl was filled with a hungry flame.

Valdoran reached a few fingers towards the flame, but Maerwen slapped his hand away.

“Careful,” she said. “It is only fire now. Nothing more.”

“But…you said gifts do no harm?”

Before answering, the hermitess dumped the burning kindling into the hearth in the corner, and there she used the flame to grow a larger fire to warm her home. Once the larger pieces of wood had caught, she placed an iron kettle on the spit over the fire. “This fire sprang from nothing but the Words of Power, and now it will keep us warm. That is gift enough. Even when you held its ember, it would have burned my hand if I had reached for it.”

“Why? Would it not be a better gift to have a fire that does not burn us at all?”

“That would hardly be a fire, then.”

“Or why not have the Words make the large fire in the first place? Why create a tiny ember?”

The smile that had graced the hermitess’s face was now entirely gone. She waited a long time before she answering:

“Few are the Speakers strong enough to mingle new Words among the old, and in the ages since heaven first gave Man the Words of Power, even fewer have tampered with the Words without drawing down their own damnation. The very purpose of the Words is to help us, heal us, sustain us, and in due time to bring our spirits to the heavenly realm, where the Words live on in us and we in the Words. If we twist them to suit our needs, we will harm only ourselves and others. We did not make our own bodies; we do not make the Words. And we can use our bodies for great evil, if we choose. The Words of Power too, can be twisted and perverted, though it is not easily done. It is far better to accept them as they are; mysterious, powerful, and most of all, good.”

“But man can create bodies, and more people.”

“And do we use that power lightly?” There was an intensity in Maerwen’s voice that Valdoran had never before heard. “Does that power not instill fear in our hearts? It is a miracle that men and women have such grave power at all! To create life from passing desire. To create fire from thin air. To Speak Words whose Powers are beyond our reckoning.

“Do not ever forget, Valdoran,” she went on, “that there are things far beyond our understanding that are ever at work in this world, and in the next. Our very lives are subject to these forces. Do not stroll idly among giants. Not all of those powers are of the Words; not all are good.”

“But—”

“—No! No more. We are done for today. Go back down to the abbey.”

✹ ✹ ✹

“Can you hold it closer?” Dalfre asked through chattering teeth.

Valdoran brought his palm nearer and they both felt the heat of the coal which burned within it. The younger monk had his arms around the older, rubbing the man’s back with his off-hand and trying to get some warmth into his comrade.

Then he smelled burning hair.

He threw the coal away and helped Dalfre smack out his singed beard.

The coal had landed on the floor of the hut, in a pile of snow that was ever growing. The ember went out. The light disappeared, and the hermitage had no more except that of a moon, barely shining through the clouds.

Snowflakes continued to drift down through the collapsed roof, over the tree trunk that hung over the hermitage, and down all across the floor. Compared to the wind and rain before, this was almost peaceful; but even so it brought death. The rain had soaked everything, then froze.

The world was ice.

The two monks huddled under the trunk of the great tree, which was held up by one of the uncollapsed walls. Thanks to that tree, this was the only corner that was spared direct snowfall. They were near the hearth, but it was little use; the rain had gotten deep into the hut, and nothing was dry. Even the ashes of the hermitess’s last fire were covered in a layer of icy frost.

“Make another ember, would you, brother?” Dalfre’s voice was getting weak.

“What good will it do?” muttered Valdoran. “It will take time, and the last six haven’t helped. What use is one more? There is no tinder.”

“Please, Valdoran.”

✹ ✹ ✹

“How are your lessons with Sister Maerwen progressing?” asked Rector Wurdred.

“I am learning much, sir.”

“The sister says the same. In fact,” a smile crept into Wurdred’s face, “Sister Maerwen believes it would benefit your instruction if you were to become more ingrained in the regular practice of the rituals here at the abbey. To that end, the abbot would like you to deliver the first litany of the Codex of Everburning Embers.” The rector stood up from his desk and brought a large tome over to the young novice.

Valdoran’s fingers caressed the book’s leather-and-wood cover as he took the news in.

“The first night’s litany,” Wurdred went on, “is traditionally reserved for either a community’s most recently-elevated Reader or the best student among the most recent class. In this case, it will be both.”

“Rector, does that mean—?”

“Yes, Valdoran,” Wurdred smiled again. “You’ll be inducted as a full brother before the end of the year. Then, your first official Reading will be to herald in the new year on the eve of the first Ember Day. You’ll be one of us, Valdoran, and we’ll all celebrate with you.”

“Thank you, sir,” Valdoran beamed.

“You’ve earned it, young man. Now, we have only a few weeks to teach you, and it is an arduous spell. We had better get to work.”

✹ ✹ ✹

“You’re losing your heat, Dalfre.” His whisper clouded the air. Another coal burned away its tiny life within Valdoran’s palm.

Dalfre did not reply at first. His eyes were shut, his face fraught with the pain from his leg. “You must go, Brother Valdoran,” he said at last. “You will die here with me. Make your way down the mountain. You know the way. You are strong.”

“No.”

“Don’t be proud. It would have been better to leave me. Go now, while there is time for you, though not for me. I am at peace. Especially if I know you can make it to safety, I will have peace.”

“No. My magic will save you.”

“I am old, Valdoran. It is time. The Words are with me, and I will go to the blessed realm. The Words have already given me long life, and saved me. Please. For me and for the peace of a dying man: go.”

Valdoran looked out from under their tree-trunk shelter and into the night. The world was silent in the snow. It must be nearing midnight. The second night of the Ember Days. Even now, their brothers would be keeping vigil in the shrine, the lead Reader delivering the repeated litany, over and over, until dawn.

Deep in Valdoran’s mind, there was a decision.

He looked around the dark shack. A few of the hermitess’s books were soaking on the ground where they had fallen from the destruction of the tree. They were wet and frozen and the vellum made poor tinder to begin with.

But what if…

The young Reader picked up one of them. He peeled away the icy pages. Gold leaf fell away. No matter, it was the Words he needed. Not this one though. He discarded the Codex, found another. No. Then another, then another.

Then he found it.

“Valdoran… what are you doing?”

“I’m improving the Codex of Everburning Embers.”

“What?” Dalfre’s eyes popped open. “The Ever-embers? No.”

“It is still the Ember Days. A few hours yet till dawn.”

“It’s too late to start it, we won’t—.”

“I’m changing it. I’ll combine it with the minor ember-spell.”

“Combine? No. No, Valdoran. That is profane.”

Valdoran opened the book to the litany. “My magic will save us, Dalfre.”

“Don’t do this. Go down the mountain. Back to the monastery.”

Valdoran propped the book up where the moonlight shone even through the fog. Not that it mattered: Valdoran knew the Words by heart, and he was going to add his own, anyway.

“Please, Brother… better for me to die, while I have peace. Don’t do this.”

Valdoran calmed himself, and began to Speak.

✹ ✹ ✹

“You are missing the purpose of this,” Wurdred was frustrated. “Repeat the lines as they are written, and allow the Words to work.”

“What is there to miss? It is called the Codex of ‘ever-embers,’ yet you also say that the fires within will run out eventually.”

“Not for years and years, though, and it requires no fuel. It’s not limitless—that is symbolic language—but it is still miraculous.”

“And those embers become natural as soon as they are poured out!” Valdoran was ranting. “It makes no sense. It is hardly more useful than flint and steel.”

Wurdred asked his student a question: “Why does it work only during the Ember Days? Why not every night?”

“Yes, exactly, true wisdom would allow the Words to—.”

“Perhaps you should listen before you blaspheme!”

Valdoran had learned not to protest when Wurdred used that tone. “Yes, Rector.”

His teacher sighed. Then explained, slowly, as if to a child: “It is about more than just utility. In the darkest days of winter, when the world is cold and nature would kill us, the Words come through the night and give us three—yes, only three—jars of immense fire, each night. A light in the dark. Heat in the cold. Hope in the long night. Do not miss that, Valdoran.

“Then after: you and I and all our brethren can carry that light out into the world, lighting candles and hearths and cookfires. The fire itself is natural, yes, but it comes to us as a gift, unexpected and unmerited—except through the Words which are gifts themselves. It is more than simple heat, Valdoran. It is a sign. It is a connection to our own origin, and to our future. It roots us in our purpose, and links our passing age to eternity.”

Valdoran had stopped listening. He was thinking of his childhood, and his mother collecting sticks in the snow-covered woods near their hovel. To the shivering child, there had never been enough warmth.

✹ ✹ ✹

Valdoran’s Words were booming around the tiny hermitage, louder than a human voice could achieve and yet not deafening.

Whenever he veered away from the old ritual, the echoes faded and his voice lost its life; the echoes returned when he went back to the litany. But also: each time, Valdoran felt something beyond the edge of his vision, something calling to him, some words that he could almost hear and grasp and use.

Valdoran heard protests from the other one. Please stop, Dalfre was saying. This is not right, brother. It cannot help. What is that thing outside? What is that darkness? Other ravings of a dying man. They sounded far away.

Valdoran came near the end. Normally, he would have to repeat the Words again and again until dawn, but what good would that do?

It was time to conclude. Here, in the dark.

He reached the final intonations, the final requests, the final stanzas.

The unseen presence reached out to him. He reached back to it.

He Spoke its Words.

✹ ✹ ✹

Brother Valdoran was reading the litany in the shrine, before his whole community. The great tome lay before him on the altar, with the three Ember jars dormant beside it. He had been repeating the litany again and again since the sun had set. He was not tired, though dawn was near.

A gentle hand on his shoulder told him: time to conclude. One of his brothers turned the huge page from the litany to the end of the spell.

Brother Valdoran reached the final intonations, the final requests, the final stanzas.

He looked at the gleaming page, hesitated, Spoke its Words.

At that very moment the light of dawn came through the highest window—and sparks appeared in the jars. They were simple earthenware, almost round, tiny-spouted, and little enough to fit in a hand. They were empty. Fire stirred in them anyway.

Soon the altar was aglow with light from their mouths.

The many watchers gasped and spoke to their neighbors with delight; the hushed reverence retreated. The Words had come. Light had come. A new year, and with it, hope.

Valdoran watched the flames and thought them too small.

✹ ✹ ✹

The ice that had been in the hearth evaporated in a windy, hissing instant. The fire leapt to the half-gone roof of the hermitage. Flames exploded from their origin in the ashes and began to consume the tilting walls.

Dalfre was already screaming.

Valdoran retreated from the heat, his feet carrying him backwards. Snow began to melt off of the massive tree-trunk and it was turning to steam.

A moment later he was outside the hut completely. He was alone. The flames enveloped the whole trunk, the remaining roof, the walls, and all that was within them. The glade was filled with a light brighter than the sun and with the screams of an old monk.

Words came through the yelps and horrid screeches. “Faces! There are faces in the fire! Devilry! Words Above! Words take me!”

The tree finally broke; to the one watcher it looked like nothing more than a piece of spent firewood dropping into the coalbed of a domestic fireplace, sending sparks and heat, signaling to the fire-maker that it was time for fresh fuel. Nothing more than a kitchen’s cookfire, expanded to monstrous size.

The trunk landed. The screaming stopped.

The explosion of heat was intense, and Valdoran spread his arms wide and opened his hands to the flames, to warm his freezing limbs in the wind, to welcome the fruit of his Words.

The red fire filled his vision. And there was delight in his eyes.

✹ ✹ ✹

“I have never seen a young Reader, fresh from his first Ember litany, looking so glum,” the abbot’s face was kind as he spoke to Valdoran in the corner of the morning banquet-hall. “What troubles you, my son?”

Valdoran sought for the right thing to say. Something that could help this old relic understand what he was thinking. No one else thought the way Valdoran thought. No one would suffer his questions. It was lonely. And infuriating.

“It is nothing, Master. I suppose I only found the moment, once it came, less exciting than I had hoped. I am tired. It will pass.”

The abbot gave a sage nod. “Get some rest, Brother Valdoran. And this afternoon, I want you to join Brother Dalfre when he goes to forage. He always goes, even during the Ember Feasts, and I’m sure he’ll be glad for your company.”

“Old Dalfre?” Valdoran asked before he could stop himself, “he’s not even a Reader, just a scribe.”

A look of concern passed over the abbot’s face and then was gone. “We depend very much upon scribes like him, and Dalfre is wise. You could learn much from him, as I myself have. Go with him. It will be time for you to reflect on what we do here, and what we could accomplish. Together.”

✹ ✹ ✹

They found him the next day.

The monks had seen a light up in the mountains—a false dawn? No, a great fire. Even through the gloom Maerwen named the spot to the monks. Two of their number were missing, after all, and it was clear to everyone that they were in need of help.

Wurdred and Maerwen led the party that went up the slopes to the hermitage. They watched in stunned silence as their brethren pulled away the wreckage and found a shrunken, disfigured thing which was once a man.

The body’s identity became clear only once they found his comrade. The searchers cried out in surprised delight when something moved—then rose, then opened its eyes—a survivor, huddled in the last of the warmth, half-buried in ash.

“Rector! Sister!” Valdoran gasped. Awake now, he scrambled up them: “I’ve done it. I’ve finally done it. A great fire! Adapted from other spells! And I remember how, I can write it down! I will share this with you, with the world!” Pride filled his voice. His euphoria shone through the soot which coated his face.

But the joy Valdoran expected to receive from his mentors never came. Nor did Umbrisia—when they heard of his deeds—give him praise. Instead, the uneasy silence born in that moment beside the wrecked hermitage followed him down the mountain and into Umbrisia. News of his deed—of his endurance—traveled quickly, and grew in the telling. Gossip drowned out any future pronouncements of the young man’s potential.

The other monks gave him a new name. It began with secret whispers. A pun, a quip, a flash of uneasy banter. But the brothers found the witticism humorous most of all because it helped them mask the fear they felt under the gaze of the wide-eyed, unrepentant Reader.

He is not ‘Brave Endurance,’ went the watchword, but ‘He of Malign Endurance.’ Not Valdoran, but Maldurian.

✹ ✹ ✹

This is the third story, at least by order of publication, within a loosely-connected series, “The Delver.”

Each story is stand-alone, and each is very different from the last.

However, if you want to start at a beginning (of sorts), then you can read “Ash and Death on a Dangerous Road.” You can also see the other parts, as I publish them, in my table of contents.

If you like what you’ve read here and want me to keep making stuff like this, you can help me do that by liking, commenting, or sharing this post.

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