her first husband. She could still picture him all too easily, tall and mighty, with his strange, sad eyes and that terrible blade glowing on his hip.
Better to be ashes than dust he always said, and yet in the end there had been no hero’s pyre for him. He had walked into the fire and it had rejected him. Now his bones were dust that mingled with that of the millions his sword had killed. No one even knew where he had fallen in the end. She had looked many times and she had never found him.
They said that Tethlis the Slayer had found his broken armour but there had been nothing in it. She could not believe that he had rotted away. She did not like to think about it either. She preferred to remember him as he had been, brutal and beautiful and burning like the sun. There had never been another elf like him and she did not know whether that made her sad or grateful.
Poor Malekith, she thought. Her son had tried so hard to be like his lost father but he had never managed it. Malekith had his own cold genius, and he could make himself feared but never loved. He was stronger in some ways than Aenarion and certainly cleverer, but he lacked the fire that had made Aenarion what he was. He built empires as monuments to his desire to impress his absent father, a goal that defeated him even when he succeeded.
Aenarion was not there to be impressed and his achievements could not be matched. Malekith did not even understand why. Aenarion was safely dead. The elves could project onto him their own idealised image of themselves and there was no awkward living being to contradict them with his inconvenient goals and desires.
She sometimes wondered whether that was his appeal to her too. Their love, if love it had been, had not had time to grow stale, for her to learn to hate and despise him. She pushed that thought aside, not wanting to consider it.
No, Aenarion was the one the elves would always remember, their first Phoenix King, the warrior demigod who had saved them from certain doom.
Except, of course, that he had not.
He won every battle and yet he would still have lost that ancient war, had it not been for his so-called friend, the Archmage Caledor Dragontamer. Caledor had been the architect of the spell that had finally driven the daemons away and stabilised Ulthuan, keeping its quake-ravaged lands from sinking below the sea.
The elves choose to remember only the great battle and the heroism of Aenarion as he fought to protect you during those final hours, but it was you that saved the world, wasn’t it Caledor? You built the spell that drained magic from the world and sent the daemons back to hell.
The Chaos army had noticed her now, as she had intended that they do. Even at this range, she could hear the bellowed threats and promises. They were so lacking in originality that she could not even muster any contempt. The worshippers of the Dark Gods were ultimately so banal that she struggled to keep her attention focused.
It seemed to be a day to remember ancient times so she gave in to the desire. She thought about Caledor. With his gaunt features, his high balding forehead so unusual in an elf, his eyes cold and blue as a glacier in the Mountains of Frost, the master wizard had been as memorable as Aenarion. Perhaps he would have been a better tool than Aenarion. But no – he was too cold to be manipulated and far too clever, and she could not have loved him as she had loved Aenarion. Caledor was no hero.
And yet in his calm, calculating way he had been as terrifyingly brave as her husband. In the end, he and his fellow archmages had laid down their lives to make their great spell work, knowing that it would bring them only death and worse. Their ghosts were trapped to this day, frozen in the eternal amber of the moment they had died by the power of the spell they had woven.
Are you out there now, old ghost? Can you see me? Do you understand what I do and do you shiver at the thought? For millennia you have woven and re-woven your ancient fraying spell, and for millennia I have tried to unravel it. The day is fast approaching when I will