The Codex Lacrimae, Part 1: The Mariner's Daughter and Doomed Knight

Book Two: The Roots of Yggdrassil // Chapter 1: The Forest of Alfheim

Servius Aurelius Santini, known for the last five years as Ríg, awakened to the sound of a light shower pattering against leaves, a stream gently rippling somewhere close, and the voice of an old man conversing with small children.

Aurelius opened his eyes. An enormous ash tree loomed overhead, whose green, low-lying and dripping boughs stretched almost to the ground where he lay.

For a disorienting moment, he thought himself returned to early childhood, awakening from a nap in the Calabrian forest of southern Italy after taking cover from a cloudburst. He propped himself onto an elbow and winced at the soreness in his shoulder and wrist. Somehow, he must have managed to take a break from fencing with his trainer, Devrone di Magglia. The swordsman rarely gave Aurelius a rest during the day, and certainly never in the morning when one got the best training done.

His senses were alive to nature's plenitude—the splashing of the river, the sight of pine needles and moss-covered logs on the damp ground, the smell of bark freshened by a recent rainfall and mixed with a variety of bouquets like foxgloves and hyacinth that Aurelius hadn't inhaled in years.

In a rush, he came into full waking and realized that he couldn't be in Calabria—those times were close to a decade past!

He brought a dew-dampened hand to his forehead and sat fully upright, confused; none of the sights nor sounds was of the Syrian landscape of the Krak des Chevaliers. Retracing his memories, he remembered the battle with the assassins before the gate and the renegade knight with the bow and arrow.

The Codex, Santini—awaken it now because the trap is sprung. We're the Huntsmen of Muspelheim. Match our fire with the Codex Lacrimae, or die!

The blond-haired archer's words echoed in his mind but—except for the facts that the traitor somehow knew his true identity and referred to the Codex Lacrimae—they made no sense to him.

At the memory of his injuries, he instinctively reached a hand to the back of his shoulder. When his hand fell back to his lap, he noticed that a long white scar marked his wrist where he'd been struck in the melee by the gate. He was clad in the same garments, but now in a clean uniform of his order, with all his weapons accounted for, the clothes stained neither by the blood of the earlier surgery on Roberto, nor by the gore of battle.

Battle ...

A horrifying concern intruded: Oh, Dio, what happened to Marcus?

He looked cautiously around him, seeing not his younger friend, but instead a bonfire across the open space in the trees.

An old man in a midnight blue cloak relaxed at the edge of the glade, fishing in the river that ran along a rocky shore. The stranger sat on a gigantic, moss-covered yew log and poked at a fire with a different branch. He looked up and nodded when he noticed Aurelius looking at him.

A long white beard marked the elderly man's features, but the wide brim of his pointed blue hat cast the rest of his face and eyes into shadow. The figure seemed so completely at ease in this place that some animals had drawn near him: a sizable squirrel perching comfortably at one end of the log, a rooster trotting to and fro around the campsite pecking at seeds, and—of all the creatures that Aurelius never expected to see in a campsite area—two grey wolves who lay panting at the man's feet; both predators glared at Aurelius with feral yellow eyes.

Aurelius rose, fully conscious of his surroundings and definitely aware that in this springtime environment he wasn't anywhere near the late-autumn desert lands of the Krak des Chevaliers.

He touched the trunk of the ash tree beside him, tracing a forefinger through one of the wooden rivulets that marked its ancient trunk. It felt real. Despite the dampness, when he pried some bark away, the wood had a dry, dusty feel. The sun remained hidden behind the upper branches of the trees, but Aurelius could tell that the hour was just past midmorning. To his north, a mountain loomed high beyond the forest and into storm clouds that gathered at its hidden heights. The meadow where he stood abutted with a lake and what appeared to be a foothill of the mountain.