Sons of Ironstorm - Book 1: Griffon's Rise

A Vision Shared

The tall, slender elf swallowed heavily and pushed himself away from the gently curving wall he had fallen against, and returned to his feet.  What by the frost of the Abyss was that?  The vision, terrible and great had been nearly enough to knock him completely from his feet instead of just into a wall.  Thankfully he possessed an uncanny sense of balance or he would’ve been standing on the tip of his nose instead of the soles of his boots.  Pushing the haunting and disturbing images from his mind by shear will power, he gave himself a shake and continued on his way down the broad corridor.

Wiry and muscular, lithe and graceful, the man moved with the easy grace of an s’tauro knife fighter, looking dangerous without effort and ready to spring into deadly action with razor-edged reflexes.  His knowledge of warfare and battle tactics, engineering and strategy was prodigious, his skill with a cornucopia of weapons legendary.  Yet this man was no warrior, or holy fighter.  He was a king.

Ciradaan Aeinwaje, Scion of House Aeinwaje and king of Aquila, wasn’t a man easily swayed by visions and mystical journeys.  After all he was an elf; a people born in the glorious magic and light of lost Rimnor and forged in the fires of battle on Ramnor for ten thousand cycles.  Long before the first War of the Shadow the elves won honor and glory in battle against the dakern troll clans of the eastern and western mountains, honed their martial skills against volsha trolls of the southern swamps and carved out legends in battle against the great dragons of the north in the War of the Nine Scales.  They had gone nose to nose with demons in the War of the Shadow, monsters in the War of the Crimson Sword and each other from the very day of their creation.  There was very little the elves hadn’t seen or done during their long existence on Ramnor.

And as king of Aquila, born and bred a warrior, there was little Ciradaan hadn’t seen or done in his days of mortality on Ramnor’s varied face.  Yet there was something about that vision, a tableau usually reserved for loremasters, high wizards and seers, which gnawed at the wiry king’s vitals, like a keila worm.  Something beyond the fact that kings seldom looked beyond Reality, through the ether and into the unknown, something that could impact not just his kingdom but also all the Elves of Ramnor.

His face a thoughtful mask, Ciradaan continued down the hallway, a graceful corridor made more so by its concave walls of finely crafted wood, beautifully tiled floor and narrow, floor to ceiling windows placed at regular intervals to let in Ri’im’s life-giving light throughout.  It was as he passed through one of the pools of brilliance that the Aquilan king was finally revealed. 

A handsome man even amongst the most fair of the mortal races, with chiseled features, high cheekbones, a strong jaw and powerful blue and silver eyes, the flecks called suura by those that had them, Ciradaan was marked by snowy white hair and eyebrows, hereditary in high lords of House Aeinwaje, his since he had hair.  That hair, arrow straight, would fall onto his shoulders, if allowed to.  This day, as on most others, he wore it in a traditional da’godei, or battle tail as he had since he was raised from boy to man in the Va’adahn, a ceremony where Sylvasin boys achieved their manhood.

A cycle long process that began with a young man’s declaration of intention to make his ascension, the Va’adahn saw that young man grow his hair as long as he could while he performed a series of challenges and tasks that included hand-to-hand combat with an enemy.  After the cycle had passed, a record of the young man’s exploits was brought before his cleric, father and high lord.  If the three determined the youth successfully proved himself throughout, maintaining the highest levels of honor, integrity, courage and intellect at all times, he was declared a man through a brief ceremony, his hair cut with a special knife to make each hair the exact same length.  Only then was he allowed to form a da’godei by drawing all his hair directly back, over the ears to the nape of the neck where it was tied with a single cord of leather.  Other Sylvasin cultures did it somewhat differently but the Va’adahn was universal amongst them.