Earth Chapter 5: Consequence 3
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Another cry pierced the air, followed by a new, pulsing silence that beat against the ears. Every heart trembled. Every hand felt insecure. Frustration etched itself onto his face, and he looked down at the Cor Blossoms nestled in his horse's mane. He shook his head.
“I do not know the conflict that once ignited that foul northern people descending from above upon to wreak havoc our ancestors. But the reports from our frontier leave nothing in doubt. Entire farmsteads laid waste, and whole families taken. Crops burned, and the land itself scarred with salt and sulfur. The annals of old speak clearly. The Culling of the Madgyi has returned, and it is my father's folly, that has brought this ancient threat down upon us all.”
The assembly was thrown into dismay as panic seized hold. People shouted out and women snatched up their children, while merchants scrambled to stuff their wares into bags. But the heralds stemmed the madness with the piercing sound of trumpets' song cutting chaos like a knife.
"Would you weep, my people?" the Shadowsun thundered, “would you scatter and run like cowards and fools? Would you hide? I ask you, to whom shall you go? To the caves to eat twigs? Will the Culling not find you even there, once it has desecrated your brethren to the north and laid waste to your abandoned homes?"
His commanding presence guided his steed about the dais, dark cloak fluttering in the torchlight, his armor gleaming with a sharp sheen, fixing each citizen with his gaze, one by one, as he spoke. “I speake as your King,” he declared. "I have come to wake you from slumber. Your kin are ravaged, their crops razed, their children stolen, their bodies brutalized. Destruction and decay are left behind. The ancient foe has awoken, and I have come to call you to action."
“Join me," he urged them. "Let us stop this vile infection. Ride with my insignia on your shoulder, and let us be a wall of fire and bone. Though the heavens fall from the sky, though the abyss roar and foam, though I be untimely born and my father the maddest of men, I am yet the Shadowsun. Bastard? Half-blood? I am of Ambra!
“Just like you,” he said in a hushed tone, and his eyes suddenly watching as if very far away. “They will say of me, ‘This one was born there, on the Ambra Coast, where the Cor Blossoms grow,’ and then they will sweep me away like ash as I stand there alone, a King who found only cowards in his land when the day of reckoning dawned.
The entire crowd remained in awe as they left, the retinue processing to the rustle of armor and occasional snort of a horse. Flower garlands still hung from the rafters, and soft golden petals littered the ground all about, but the Festival of Cor Blossoms left with their King.
The story of Earth continues…