The Runes of Norien Read online



  The Runes Of Norien

  Book One: The Hidden Nowhere

  By Auguste Corteau

  Copyright 2014 Auguste Corteau

  Prologue

  Vast is the world, and numberless its mysteries.

  But none greater than Norien.

  Sages well versed in the study of reality, and of the wonders hiding in its folds as pearls in the garments of a queen, dismiss Norien’s existence, deeming it a worthless tale fit for the minds of fools and madmen – and it is true that the humble narrator of this chronicle has often been accused of being both. And yet, since foolishness and madness stand apart from what the common mind perceives, couldn’t it be that they are best equipped for the understading of things so great that they surpass the common man’s perception? Not that it would ever be possible to contain the essence of the Ever- Shifting Sphere: it is uncertain if the Gods themselves, who chose it as their dwelling, could ever fully fathom the changing currents of its soul.

  But every story, every myth, begins by acknowledging the parts of it that shall never be known, and which govern what little is known, much like an ant’s fate, as it trails the hills and valleys of a human hand, is governed by whether the mind ruling the hand will order it to close into a fist.

  So let us plunge, unknowing, into the unknown.

  When the cosmos sprung from stillness into sudden life, most celestial bodies and the worlds they made up and were made of tore through the blackness urgently, frantic to put the terrifying memory of nonexistence as far behind them as possible – and rushing so, they lost that shimmering, fast mutability that was their primal state and became fixed entities, ruled by fixed dimensions of space and time.

  Yet along with them another world was born, which, devoted as a child to a dying mother, remained steadfast, close to that daunting birthplace that almost stands outside of everything that ‘everything’ denotes. And as a parting gift, or curse, this sphere of existence maintained the ability to change, to bend or break the dimensional laws, and shift through more selves, in an instant, than a legion of lunatics.

  That was, and is, and ever shall be Norien, mystery-world without end.

  Imagine a field of pink flowers; a blink of time, and it becomes the rosy tongue of a young boy, stuck out in playful defiance; a shimmer of time, and, diving into the darkness of the boy’s throat, there emerges a watery star that hovers in black emptiness, and somewhere on it – in another wink of time – lies the corpse of a beast which, even as it decomposes, turns into a sea made not of water but of wood, great still sharp crests of wooden waves, tree rings in a widening pool as made by a cast pebble, the fine grain of oak, intricate like the white lace of oceanic foam. Norien was a bustling galaxy one moment, and a tiny grain of rice the next.

  But the Gods, children of the same birth though rendered grim, arrogant and unforgiving by the immensity of powers that allowed them to rule all Creation with a blink of their all-seeing eyes or a snap of their immaterial fingers, could not abide Norien’s inconstancy, if for no other reason because, like insidious illness manifesting in distant relatives and offspring, the rabid volatility of the Ever-Shifting Sphere infected the rest of the universe to its furthest corners and deepest recesses, breeding chaos.

  Thus the Runes of Norien came into existence. Their precise nature is as impossible to describe as an aeon of feverish dreams, but it is said they were crafted partly in firm matter, so as to be able to connect with, and govern, the material world. The same is believed of the Gods: that, binding their essence to Norien, the better to tame its waywardness, they too became in part corporeal, and therefore exposed to the inevitable erosion of physicality, the wear and tear of mortal mass.

  In The Eyes of the Gods, the legendary epic poem which is considered to be Norien’s earliest written document – and of which, sadly, only fragments survive, preserved through the oral tradition of Norienic lore and the painstaking work of adepts in the Original Language – the nameless poet, narrating the early Ages of the Ever-Shifting Sphere, speaks of the Runes as actual, precious stones, engraved with the infinite wisdom of the Gods, who used them to oversee and reign the cosmos. They were three, one for each God and the powers It commanded: the Rune of Life, the Rune of Death, and the Rune of Fate and Chance. The well-known verse illustrating their purpose, salvaged intact from The Eyes of the Gods, goes like this:

  In these Runes Three, all things once made reside,

  And their unmaking, such as it may be.

  And from their light, no one can ever hide.

  And in their dark, no one can ever see.

  However, says the poet, the use of the Runes over the millennia made the Gods’ own, true eyes idle and dim, corrupting their omniscience as flesh, with its alluring senses and primitive pleasures, can corrupt the mind. So, when, according to the poem, they came to after a small eternity spent in their usual surfeit of godly debauchery and found that the Runes had been stolen, they fumbled in furious blindness, realizing that, along with their sight, the greater part of their powers was gone.

  Incensed, the God of Life turned against the God of Death, blaming It for the theft of the Runes. You are an insatiable pit of destruction, It said, and now you are bent on our own undoing. To which the God of Death replied, It is you, and your creatures’ mad desire for immortality that has brought this plight upon us. Finally, reaching a tentative agreement that neither of them could profit by the other’s extinction, they both attacked the God of Fate and Chance, who was responsible for the ruinous randomness which poisoned all existence; but the third God smiled at their accusations and remained serene, knowing that no force in the universe could ever predict and preclude every single event. I am content with being blind, It said, for we know not if what befell us is unfortunate; it may well prove to be a blessing, a burden lifted from our minds and souls.

  What they all agreed on, however, was that the thief, either made of flesh or of pure spirit, must be a dweller of Norien, the erratic ancestor and heart of the cosmos, where the Runes could be most securely hidden, and, through the ethereal tendrils connecting Norien with the rest of reality, exert the greatest power.

  Thus they unleashed what was left of their still potent godliness on Norien’s three realms – Lurien, Feerien, and Ienar Lin – to seek out and retrieve the Runes, before the dominion over which they held sway brought about the end of all things.

  And it is in those times of fear and uncertainty, while the Eyes of the Gods were lost and the spectre of doom hang over the entire Creation, that our story begins.

  PART ONE

  Realms in Disquiet