The Wyrms of &alon

Dinner at the Howles’ was a curious—and delicious—affair. Like most open-floor plans, our house was a soupçon of pomp sprinkled on a platter’s worth of tasteful circumstance. Location really was everything. Stepping in through our home’s front door, you would be greeted by the entryway. In front of you sat a mahogany table with digital photograph stands, a vase of fresh flowers, pressed up against a wall adorned by an antique painting of a sailing boat at sea which my wife informed me was worth the cost of several masters’ degrees. To the left lay two hallways: one pointed straight ahead to the den and the breakfast nook, the other point leftward where it led the way to the bedrooms and the bathrooms and the door to the garage. To the right, the entryway transitioned seamlessly into the circular sweep of our living room. The wall with the painting melted into stalwart flagstone that reached about half the way to the living room’s circumference, inlaid with a hearth and our wide-screen family Console. The dining room lurked on the other side, around the flagstone bend; our kitchen was an inflated corridor connecting the breakfast nook to the dining room.

The latest in large, soothingly humming slab-shaped appliances could be found clustered along our kitchen’s cozy yellow walls. Square specks of blue and red scattered among the alabaster floor tiles reflected in monochrome on the machines’ silvery surfaces. Breakfast was in the breakfast nook—no ifs, ands, or buts—just as dinner was in the dining room—no buts, ands, or ifs. Our dining room table was made from lush, deeply colored mahogany, and by a minor miracle, it had evaded the ravages of children and time.

I would say Pel had outdone herself with the meal, but that really wouldn’t do her justice. My wife’s preternatural ability to exceed—if not defy—my expectations. Dinner was ama-itamé: a Munine dish of stir-fried rice noodles, bean curd—pressed into pale icosahedra—accompanied by a small pantry’s worth of miscellany—scrambled eggs, garlic, sugar, a spritz of lime, carrots, water chestnuts, and sun-dried tomatoes (one of Pel’s secret ingredients)—smeared all over with a rich, sweet, brown sauce, thick and savory, and freshly snowed with finely minced nuts. And for dessert? Store-bought cinnamon rolls, soft and warm, drizzled with chocolate and caramel Pel had taken from her hidden reserves.

At the moment, Rayph was doing an admirable job of getting most of his cinnamon roll into his mouth, emphasis on most.

“The third time was definitely the best,” I said to him, setting my glass of chai iced tea back down on the tabletop. “All in all, a job well done.”

Downing the rest of his cinnamon roll and slithering his tongue out over the corner of his mouth and his lips to pick up the stray frosting, Rayph pressed his fists upon the tabletop, and then tucked his lower lip beneath his incisors. He’d been going through the “making strange faces” phase of boyhood, but hadn’t quite left it behind him. As it was, he made for a perfect little madman, complete with a frizzy head’s worth of unconquerable curls. Jules, meanwhile, was trying her hardest not to give her brother the pleasure of making her laugh.

But then, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Rayph’s expression relaxed. Contemplation swept over him.

“I still can’t believe it really happened,” he said. “Orrin, Amani, the nanny, the Lassedite, the Crown Prince of Polovia—and then, the Revolution… it’s like…” he gestured with his hands, “Enough already! There’s too much going on! Ya damn kids!” He smiled goofily while shaking his fist like an old codger—specifically, like Storn Elbock.

Mr. Elbock had no need for a cane, but he had one anyway, which he used to play-act the most tottering, squintingest, lawn-defendingest old curmudgeon I’d ever seen. It was his way of coping with his graying sixties, and it never failed to make Merritt laugh—to say nothing of my children’s reactions.

“People often think of history as if it’s just a box of dried dates,” Pel grinned, flashing her tongue, “all stale and tasteless.”

Yes, my wife was a punner.

“But, it can be quite dramatic,” she added, “if you know where to look.”

Rayph gazed at his mother, his smile turning to an expression of concern. “I feel bad when I say Orrin’s lines, Mom,” he said, “especially when you’re reading the role of his mom.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe he told his own mom she was on the road to damnation,” he said, softly. “I don’t feel that way about you. So…” briefly, he flicked his eyes downward, “Don’t go getting the wrong ideas!”

Both my wife and I smiled.

“Rayph, sweetie…” Pel said, “you won’t ever have to worry about that. I love you all, and I know you all love me—and that won’t ever change.”

She glanced at me wistfully.

“Then why did Orrin say those things to his mom?” Rayph asked.

Pel sighed. “Because he loved them. Imagine how hurt he must have been, day in and day out, terrified that his family would be separated from him in the life to come—that they would suffer forever as dregs in the ice of Hell. That was the truth he knew in his heart. He loved them, he wanted to save them, just like how the nanny had saved him by Bonding him with the Light.” She nodded thoughtfully. “Just like how Lassedite Verune had saved him by raising him in the faith.”

“If it wasn’t for the Lassedite, Orrin would have been returned to his family,” Jules said. “Verune was the only one who thought that taking a little kid away from his family would be good for him if it meant getting to be raised in the faith.”

“Mordwell Verune raised Orrin Nadkila as if he were his own son,” I said. “Even after Lassedite Verune’s mysterious disappearance, Orrin never stopped defending his adoptive father, insisting that the man had been nothing but kind to him.”

“But was he kind to Mrs. Nadkila?” Jules asked. “As far as I’m concerned, she’s the true victim here.” Jules turned to her mother. “Mom, how would you feel if an Inquisitor knocked on the door and said he had to take Rayph away, all because the nanny held him in the sunlight as a baby, waved her hand, and said some words?”

Pelbrum winced at the question. “I’d…” she sighed, letting the tension ooze out of her, “I’d protect him just as much as Mrs. Nadkila protected Orrin. They’d have to tear me off him.”

Jules pressed further. “Then why was it ‘right’ for them to take Orrin from his family?”

My wife took a deep breath. “Good fortune often takes unexpected forms.” Pel took another bite from the serving of stir fry in her bowl.

The Nadkila Affair, as it came to be known, was one of those segments of history that made you wonder, for a moment, if God might really be out there, pulling the strings—otherwise, how else would you explain all the dramatic twists and turns? The Nadkilas were a Costranak family from the ghetto of Lassborough—in what used to be Elpeck’s northern fringe—relatively well-off by the standards of their demographic cohort, having sold out to the Second Trentonian Empire and its colonial ambitions for the sake of money and status from overseeing trade between the Costranaks and the mainland. Like almost every ethnic Costranak living in Trenton for the past three-hundred years, the Nadkilas were devout Sunbaskers; a Neangelical Lassedile sect that refused to abide by a Church in bed with the State.

As a gnostic strain of Lassedile heterodoxy, the Sunbasked fully rejected the Church as a physical, earthly institution, including all of the Sacraments, among many other particulars, not the least of which were the centuries’ worth of latter-day scriptures penned by Lassedites ex cathedra. The Sunbasked did not have a clerical hierarchy, and allowed for lay preachers and theologians. Most crucially for the Nadkila case, the Sunbasked did not Bond their newborns to the Light.

While the Sunbasked had it better than pagans—they didn’t get tortured or executed—torture and execution of schismatic Lassedile sects had been abolished at the Second Empire’s outset alongside the ousting of the Munine colonists—heterodox Lassedile sects like the Sunbasked still suffered terribly under the state’s enforcement of the Resurrected Church’s canon laws—laws which reduced them to second-class citizens, at best. The Sunbasked couldn’t employ the faithful as workers or servants; they couldn’t marry members of the faith unless they repented of their heterodoxy; proscriptions of the law drew lines through our cities, dictating where and how heretics, apostates, and pagans were allowed to live or own property. As with nearly all matters of canon law, things got fuzzy. It wasn’t uncommon for the law to look the other way while poor, orthodox Lassediles—particularly women—stooped to work for “outsiders” like the Nadkilas, if only to keep at bay a life of prostitution or crime.

The Nadkilas’ had employed an orthodox twenty-something as a nanny. Elvira was her name. Servant-work gave Elvira a roof over her head and food in her mouth. It kept the rats out of her air and the lechers out of her dress. When the darkpox came to little baby Orrin and laid him by death’s door, fever-wrapped, Elvira so feared for the boy’s soul that she performed the Bonding on him, baptizing him in the Light of the midday sun in the name of the Angel and His holy Lassedites.

By and by, Orrin recovered.

For five years’ time, the Nadkilas lived in blissful ignorance of what had transpired. Elvira didn’t tell a soul—until, of course, the day she did. Historians still debated how, exactly, the news of the child’s Bonding had reached the clergy’s ears. Some said it was Elvira’s gossip, others said it had worked its way up the grapevine through Divulgence, the weight of guilt having proved too heavy for Elvira to shoulder any longer. But the specifics didn’t matter. It wouldn’t have changed the final result. Once baptized by the Light, a Bonded soul belonged to Lassedicy. They could not be raised by non-believers.

That would be a sin.

Fateful was the knock of the Inquisitor’s knuckles upon the Nadkilas’ door, accompanied by officers of the state police. The men were unable to bring themselves to assist the Inquisitor as he lifted six-year-old Orrin up from his bed and carried him down the stairs and out the door. All they did was restrain Mrs. Nadkila to keep her from interfering, or—God forbid—bringing harm to the Inquisitor.

Back in those days, the electric telegraph was still a novelty. The scandal that erupted around the Nadklia case was so fierce that communities all across the world rushed to build telegraph lines just so they could keep up with the news. Riots broke out in Noyoko. Anxious revolutionaries ousted the last Arrakan Prince. Condemnations flew in from every corner of the earth. The crisis only ended when Mordwell Verune, himself—the two-hundred thirty-first Lassedite—intervened and took the child under his wing, to raise him in the “true” faith.

“The Empire was overthrown,” Pel said. “All because of Orrin. One child… one child changed the world. Think about that, Jules, honey. Really think about it.”

“Étro II had just been crowned King of Polovia,” I said. “He was a Neangelical—albeit a moderate one—and was so angered by Verune’s actions that he promptly reneged on his duty to send troops to support the Empire. The Empire didn’t think it was worth antagonizing our neighbors over it, but, one thing led to another, and a couple decades later the Sunbaskers and their allies elected a new Lassedite and ousted the Imperial government, birthing the Trenton Republic. And you know who wasn’t there to help the Second Empire?” I added, “Étro II.”

Rayph nodded. “Yeah, yeah, I know I got that part of the test wrong. You don’t need to keep reminding me about Etro.”

“One: it’s Étro,” Jules smirked, emphasizing the accented E, “and, two: actually, that’s exactly why Dad needs to keep reminding you about it.”

“What I wanna know is: what happened to Lassedite Verune?” Rayph said.

I smiled, in between bites of sweet-sauced bean curd. “You and every historian and theologian in the past two-hundred years,” I said. “Like they said on the last documentary about him, and like they will say on the next one, one minute, he was with the Imperial family, locked in the palace under house arrest. The next…” I made my hands into butterfly wings, pulling them away to either side.

“…He was gone. Verune and the whole Imperial family. They vanished without a trace.”

“Some people say they were called away by the Angel,” Pel said, “spirited off to paradise, so that the people would not have had their loyalties divided by the continued presence of Lassedite Verune or the Imperial family, torn between them and Lassedite Agan and the new government. Others say the Moonlight Queen passed judgment on him for his theft of young Orrin, and the Beast snatched him with its terrible jaws, to smear his callous heartblood across the glaciers of Hell.”

“What about the emperor and his family?” Rayph asked.

Jules grinned. “Oh, they’re definitely in Hell. The Lake of Sorrows, the Glaciers of Regret; the whole shebang. Those tyrannical, slave-owning, money-guzzling proto-fascist bastards got the premium package of eternal torment. The Demon Norms will feast on them for all eternity.”

She smirked at her mother, who responded with a ragged sigh and a shake of her perm.

“Jules,” Pel said, how many times do I have to remind you: nobody knows for sure who is in Hell and who is in Paradise, and it’s improper to spec—”

“—Mom,” Rayph asked, wisely interdicting his mother’s diatribe, “why are the Norms called Norms? They’re snakes. Big, evil, flying golden-eyed snakes.”

I smiled. For once, I actually knew the answer. “The old word for them was linnorm,” I explained, “it meant ‘constrictor snake’. Over time, it changed into the word we use today.”

Pel rose from her seat. “Wait… what’s that?” She pushed her chair back and turned toward the living room windows.

“What is it?”

“Are those…?” Her eyes narrowed. The next thing I knew, Pel’s face blanched and she softly muttered “Holy Angel” while making the Bondsign, stroking her finger across her forehead four times: across, down, across and up.

Standing up for myself, I looked to see what the commotion was about, only for my chest to drop and my shoulders to slump. “It’s the police…”