The Threat of the Faery Queen - Vayon Talks to Prince Giles

Below the Keeper of These Chronicles has attempted to transcribe a tale recounted to him by Prince Giles, the great Champion of the Demon Battle of Hroha-ro-ha, who is also known as the Slave-Prince of Kula.

Prince Giles told of a parley he had with the dark elf Lord Vayon, one night as they journeyed to Gormallion on a mission of great import to the war against the Luhani Uprising (though the Prince did not wish to expound on the nature of the mission, saying only that if they had not succeeded all would have been lost).

In this parley, Lord Vayon gave the reasons for the battles against the fae a millennia ago, and why some among his circle remain always vigilant against the return of the Faery Queen.

To do justice to Prince Giles' eloquence,the Keeper of These Chronicles has tried to provide some atmosphere with his turn of phrase, but his skill lies more towards the dry and accurate recording of facts than to storytelling, and he therefore humbly craves the reader's gentlest judgement of his writings.

At Taskers' Resting House, On the Road to Gormallion

Vayon sighed and drained his rhum, savouring the last mouthful as he rotated his glass in the flickering candlelight, staring absently at the pattern of lights playing on its surface.

"This was a millennia ago, laddie. You never meet the Faery Queen, but believe me, she had to be stopped and she has to stay stopped. The tragedy was that she was very hard to stop... and many lost much in the struggle. Some lost too much." The dark elf's voice was softer than usual and almost sad, as he twisted the glass in his fingers.

Giles wondered if Vayon meant himself, recalling how the dark elf had touched the face of a decaying statue in the ruins of Bevantine, and the deep sadness that had rested on his own face for one brief moment.

"She wanted to rule the Lands?" asked Giles.

"She wants to rule everything." muttered Vayon.

Vayon poured another finger of rhum and lifted the glass to look through the liquor. "You know how to tell that your rhum has been aged a long time, that it has reached a proper maturity? The colour. Hold it up to the light, any light but sunlight is best, and watch the light bend through it. You should see silver, gold, earth and iron. Hard to explain but you know... once you have seen it."

He looked up at Giles, "You want an answer for why we went to war with the Faery Queen, and why we are still so pre-occupied with her, as you put it. I was a young soldier in the first years of the Wars, but I understood well enough that her intentions posed a threat. The Peoples of the World, we each had our own life-ways and she wanted to take that away from us. But it took me a few centuries more to understand, really understand, the existential threat of the Faery Queen."

He set his glass down. "We don't know what she is, we're now not sure she is actually even fae. She is something, birthed of this universe, yes, but perhaps she was not birthed of this world. How she wound up here no one knows, but she came to be in this world somehow. And those stupid fae went and made her their queen."

Vayon paused, his eyes on the dark brown rhum, his fingers running over the surface of the glass but he didn't lift it to drink. Instead he kept talking, "She needs power. She likes it certainly, but somehow she needs it. If she was content to live an ordinary life, and just absorb only as much as she needed from the aether or the Elemental, it would be fine. But she wants to rule the whole world and all that is in it. To rule the whole world and all that is in it, she has to be the most powerful being in the world."

He had put his feet up to rest on the table, still wearing his boots, and now he uncrossed and re-crossed his legs. "I remember us coming face to face with her once, and her saying that she wanted to know every living thing in the world, man, woman child, goblin, gibkhin, stallion, fish, grasshopper, to see through their eyes and hear through their ears, to know every thought of every living thing, even the mindless thought each blade of grass. And when we asked her why, she said so that she would know how to make anything, everything, do her will."

"She wants to be a god." said Giles.

Vayon was still staring into his rhum. After a brief pause he said, "She wants even the gods to bend to her will."

"Why?"

"Because she wants it."

"Vayon," said Giles, his tone quiet in the stillness of the room. "That doesn't make a lot of sense. That isn't a reason. There has to be something she gains. No one simply wants to dominate. They always want to dominate for a reason."

Vayon nodded and sipped his drink. "Aye, laddie, I used to think so too. I used to think a person can't just want everything, pure unfettered control, simply for the sake of having it. Then I realised that she does. And it will never, ever make sense to me. 'Cause she's just one mad-ass bitch."

He pulled his feet off the table with a quick jerk of his body and leaned towards Giles. "And, eventually, I grew up and came to understand, the "why" doesn't matter here. Understanding her is never going to change her. We didn't need to understand her, or what was driving her. We just needed to defeat her. And once she was defeated, make sure she stays defeated."

"You did defeat her." Giles said with some distaste. "You said you put her in a deep, dark hole that will drain her power slowly- till she dies. A death that will take thousands of years, you said. In short, you condemned her to the slowest, most tortuous death you could imagine for her."

Vayon shrugged, "No one had any better ideas. Taking her power is really the only way, even the dragons couldn't kill her."

"Was her crime so great?"

"Laddie, do you understand what she wanted? How much power she needs to get what she wants? She needs the power but she doesn't retain it somehow, so she has to feed the need constantly. Like I said, she can absorb it slowly and she would live just fine, but that would make her an ordinary adept, that wouldn't make her into the thing you called a god. For that she needed a constant, unending supply of pure, raw power." He swallowed hard. "Our problems really started the day she learned that it was possible to get that power. And that the answer lay in the peoples of the world. "

Gile's browed furrowed. He was losing Vayon again. "You aren't explaining yourself too good, old man."

"She can use people, ordinary or adept, to get the power she needs. Everyone has a base power, it is probably the only power that can't be harnessed as magick, as we understand "magick". This power is inside people. Whether it is created at conception or sparked on birth, that's another thing we don't know. But every person has it. She can use it, but she needed a way to get it. It's not like the different magicks of the World, she can't absorb it without expending her own power, which sort of defeats the purpose eh? Then one of those bloody fae warlocks of hers found a way to draw this power, and collect it, so that she could tap it steadily."

Giles' felt an uneasiness rising in his chest. "She can draw this power? This power that is inside a person? What happens, what becomes of a person if she takes this power from them?"

Vayon grunted and muttered to himself, and Giles was unsure whether the elf had heard his question. "She and those seven-times damned warlocks of hers called it 'power'. It wasn't just a power, it was life-force, the livity of the living being. You take that from a person, laddie, you don't have a person any more. You have something... else..."

Vayon looked up and fixed Giles with an odd, expressionless stare and Giles had the sense that the dark elf was fighting to control something inside him. "Then she realised she doesn't need that many people, because child beings, as she liked to call them, were just as good as adult beings. The base energy is always the same- man, or woman, girl or boy, youth or babe. Her trouble was that elves, trolls, dwarves, the fae- all take too long and make too little progeny. But Man, now Man renews himself at a greater rate than the Fae or any other species, with the Goblin coming in a hot second in that race. All she needed was a breeding population- separate a portion of the offspring to grow to adulthood to maintain the breeders and the rest can feed her need for power."

Giles was confused again, as he tried to take in what Vayon was saying. Then he began to grasp Vayon's meaning- the best sources of the power she craved were human and goblin because they produced the most offspring, the most often. Children could readily supply her with the power. The adults could supply the children. Giles felt the heat leaving his body, draining away to be replaced by a cold dread.

"You're white as a new linen sheet, laddie." Vayon muttered, an angry growl that betrayed his feelings. "Why do you think we've spent a thousand years working to keep that bitch in her hole? Because we didn't like her face? That's what she had planned for Man and Goblin- fodder for her never-ending hunger. And the dark elves were to be her tools, our magic, our knowledge, our skill, to drive the mechanism to draw the power to feed that hunger."

He put his head in his hands and Giles sensed that something he was holding back was threatening to escape from his control. "The pale elves, somehow in her breeding of pale elves, she bred out the deep elvish affinity for magicks and a lot of other things, like compassion and good sense. She couldn't use them, she needed us. But she didn't need a lot of us to drive the mechanism, only the most powerful adepts among us. The rest of us she could use for labour or whatever else came to that twisted mind of hers."

Vayon's voice fell to a whisper. "My mother saw it. She was peculiar kind of adept, she had the power of all-sight- past-present-future. She could see the lines, the paths, see past the Faery Queen's lies to see her true intent. She and my aunts chronicled it all, it was a race against time, to get it all down and then get the knowledge away to safety, before the armies of the Fae arrived. The Faery Queen was determined to destroy the chronicle, she planned to force my mother to reveal its whereabouts, and failing that to speak what she saw. But Mother didn't know where the chronicle had been taken, that had been her express wish. So the Faery Queen learned a lesson that day, when my mother fell on her own sword rather than give up our secrets."

He raised his head and Giles fell backwards, for the look in his eyes was terrible, the starlight of elven power blazing out into the dim of the candle-lit room, mingled with rage and grief. "We weren't going down without a fight. That bitch wants the World, she is to going have to fight for it, and we have no intention of letting her win."