Born of Darkness (William King) - William King Page 0,42

locked it. He considered whether this might be a trap. He did not hear anything or smell anything or sense any change in the flows of magic around him.

He let his nose and his mage senses guide him and he came, at last, to the coffin. It seemed so small. He could not see how it had held his entire form, and he realised that once again that was mortal thinking. His shape was fluid. It would fit.

He considered the vessel. It was beautiful in its way and it hurt his eyes just to gaze upon the runes inscribed on it.

Some of the text looked like it came from scripture, his human memories told him. It resembled the temple calligraphy of the Solar priesthood. His victim had been an educated man, and Vorkhul did not doubt that this was fundamentally correct.

He studied the inscription despite the spikes of pain it drove into his head. He ignored the ripples of giddiness and nausea cascading through his body. The runes were wards. They had not been created by his people but he recognised their form and function.

Like all runes they shaped and guided the flows of magic. They transformed aether from ambient energy into an active force, making it bend to the will of the scribe. Such fixed spells required no supervising mind to function. Close study revealed their purpose to him, even if the style of calligraphy was alien.

These were runes of binding, designed specifically to contain him, to prevent his escape. They had done so for an unguessably long time. In the end, they had failed. The question was why.

Several of the runes were flawed. Damage had altered the flow of energy, distorting it, ensuring they were no longer fit for the purpose intended. Time had eroded them and sudden violence had broken them.

Once again he felt the deep reverberation of utter certainty within his being. More missing knowledge bubbled to the surface, displacing the tattered shreds of the old man’s awareness.

An overwhelming memory flooded his mind, of being confined within great jars of steel, glass and sorcery. Long needles of sungold inscribed with divinatory symbols prodded his skin. Beings of metal and crystal monitored him, their bodies blazing with signs of power. They wore many shapes, quadrupedal, bipedal and many legged like centipedes. Some had no limbs at all. They were mere floating spheres and polyhedrals.

The animated metal forms were not the enemy. They were sorcerously created vessels that housed the enemies’ minds. The Auratheans were capable of shifting their consciousness from vessel to vessel at need. They changed bodies the way a mortal might change the tool he held in a hand, depending on the goal he intended to achieve.

The enemy had forms for every conceivable purpose, from making war to swimming through the depths of the ocean. They could divide their consciousness among a myriad of slaved drones, or concentrate it in one mighty hub.

The Auratheans had captured him and bound him and shipped him to a place of incarceration. They had blasted his mind with magic. They had inspected his physical form with sorcerous probes. They had experimented on him an as Eldrim biomancer might test a subject in his alchemical laboratory. No need to ask what they had been seeking. They had been hunting for the same things he would have been in their place, looking for flaws and weaknesses in their enemy.

The Auratheans had not acknowledged him as one of the world’s masters, an equal. They had experimented on him. They had treated him as a laboratory subject on which to test their weapons and their theories about the nature of their Eldrim foes. They had smashed his mind with spells and crippled his body with magic. They had ripped his memories and his power from him. Finally they had placed him in storage within that sarcophagus. They had filed him away and forgotten about him. They had left him imprisoned and going mad until he lost all sense of who he was.

More memories flooded back—of the ancient wars when the Elder Races had clashed for control of the world. The Eldrim had known many enemies but the Auratheans had been the greatest.

It seemed they had fallen even further than his own people. The conflicts which had left the Eldrim a degenerate mockery of their former greatness had destroyed them.

He thought about the strange Solar faith the humans possessed. It bore the hallmarks of the Auratheans. It was as if the whole fabric of