1.9 The Archivist: Rylu & The Stone Seer Archipelago

     Rylu was born under a crescent moon thin enough to cut the night in two. One half was an icy, harsh place in the depths of a sickness it could never recover from. A bloody and violent place full of awakened effigies expelling rancor from their chipped tooth mouths. The other half was quiet and cold, but not too cold to feel the starlight on the edges of your fingers. It was the cold of a summer wind beneath a cloud, and the calmness of silence after joy. She was a child of the latter half, bathed in a breath of perfect moonlight before the burdensome night could curl her toes. 

     When she was seven years old, she watched a sellsword cut down her brother in the street for interrupting his hunt. He fell dead before her and a hundred perfectly smooth stones tumbled out from his pants. Since he was born they had been sewn inside his pockets, weighing him down with every step. Before her father could pull her back, Rylu filled her pockets with as many stones as she could manage. The sellsword escaped, and her brother was buried in the graveyard behind the village. As she grew, Rylu used the weight of the stones to make her stronger. She carried entire families on her back and built farms from the charred remains of King Poliod’s watchtowers. She did all this before she was an age to be respected. The tangle of her braids behind her was like a midnight wyvern, breathing life upon all it sees. 

Ten years after her brother’s murder, Rylu found the sellsword. He was in a great field, surrounded by lions, and doomed to die. She stood between the beasts and the man, ushering him to safety. Even the beasts of the wild respected her, but one of the lions moved forward and roared. “Why do you save this man?” it asked. “Is he not a killer of men? Does he not bathe in the blood of his kind?”

“He is a killer and a purveyor of malevolence, this is true,” she responded. “But were I to look away from killing, knowing I could have prevented it, it would soon become comfortable in my own hands. It shall never be so.” The pride moved away from them, back into the fields. Afraid of another form of justice being done upon him, the sellsword ran off into the woods, leaving Rylu again. When she returned to the fields the next day, she found the pride of lions slaughtered, marked with wounds from a sellsword’s blades. 

Northern Illusia was steeped in chaos, and war. King Poliod was dead before Rylu was born, but his court of cruelty remained, led by Prince Seighbell. A hatred boiled so fiercely within him that his skin was hot to the touch, and his eyes were the color of blood. In his shadow were born many men, learning to set their blood to boil just as he did. Rylu left her village to seek out and extinguish the flames of war. The first trace of the court of cruelty she discovered was in a town not much larger than her own. The caretaker was spurned by a merchant caravan and grew bitter. As the caravan rested on the edge of the town, he called out his soldiers and ordered them to burn the merchant wagons and kill any who opposed too forcefully, but not to kill every one of them because he thought himself a merciful man. Rylu watched as the soldiers hesitantly took up arms and torches, and marched ahead, the orders of their leader nipping at their heels. She gathered up the townsfolk, rousing them with her infectious charisma. Sneaking past the soldiers, she brought the townsfolk outside and stood them alongside the merchants. The soldiers appeared and grew confused. Amongst the merchants they were instructed to kill were faces they knew, and people they loved.

“Those you love are no different than those you seek to destroy,” Rylu shouted. “Put down the burden of your violent masters.” Many soldiers laid down their arms and joined their families, but a few ran back to the caretaker to tell him what had happened. He stormed out to the caravans, burning torch in hand. Before he could lay flame to the caravan, his son, a boy not yet ten years old, stepped out from behind Rylu. He begged for his father to stop, and told him of the friends he had made amongst the merchants. Seeing the fear he had caused in his son, the caretaker quickly extinguished the flame. He asked the merchants for forgiveness and then led the soldiers back to their posts. The town remained at peace until long after Rylu had gone. An ambassador from Gryphon Rask arrived and began to whisper in the ear of the caretaker. Her words were dipped in the poison of a thousand scorpions, and they wormed their way into the depths of the caretaker’s mind. Before long, he ordered his soldiers to find the merchant caravan and take everything from them, leaving none alive. 

Rylu continued through the North and came upon a great fortress in the mountains. Long ago, the fortress belonged to the giants, but an army of men came and forced them out, leaving them nothing but caves and mountain peaks. Shortly after she arrived, the giants besieged the fortress. The captain’s defenses were well prepared. With oil, they blinded the giants, and with fire, they scarred and burned them. As the giants fled, ropes were looped tight around their ankles and they were tripped to the ground. The captain ordered them to be dragged back into the mountains, not to kill them, but to warn the other giants of their eventual fate.

“Why have you taken their home?” Rylu asked of the captain, as he cleaned his blade.

“I was ordered to,” he responded. “What would you have me do? Disobedience is lower even than betrayal, for at its core, it is betrayal beneath a veil of cowardice.”

Rylu held out a wooden box to the captain and asked for him to open it. Inside was a wriggling black form, splashing through a pool of mist. It was the size of a thumb, and it bellowed with a sound greater than the captain had ever heard.

“Try to take it,” Rylu said. The captain reached out his hand towards the creature, but before he could touch it, the mist wrapped itself around his arms and tied them behind his back.

“What is this beast?” he asked.

“This is my soul. And it is mine alone,” Rylu said, calling back the mist and closing the box. “Your decisions are yours, and no one else's. What you do here, what you do to these giants, is stained upon your insides like a disease.” The captain fell to his knees and wept before her.

“Help me undo what I’ve done,” he begged. They freed the captive giants and abandoned the fortress, the soldiers returning to whatever corner of Illusia they hailed from, guiltless and free. Years later, a blooddrunk man rode chariots into the fortress and slaughtered the giants. Out of the ruins, he built a maelstrom of fire that scorched the sky above clear through to the stars. 

Rylu then found her way to a great city, built beneath a waterfall of vines. She needed a cane to walk, as time was weighing heavily upon her. The streets of the city were lined with guards, fully armored and rage-filled. The poor cowered in their hovels, afraid of the boot they had felt so often before. The rich walked proudly with silken cloths tied tightly around their eyes. Leading them by the hand were suits of armor, animated but empty, like puppets. Rylu requested an audience with the king and was brought before a mouse of a man.

“What is it you want?” he asked.

“Why are your streets lined with guards and your poor forced to live in such squalor?” she asked.

“What is it to you?” he responded. “A woman clinging to the fringes of a life sorely squandered. I rule as I do because the hounds are all around me, wild-eyed and hungry. I will eat them before they feast upon me.”

“Enough!” Rylu shouted. The entire city fell silent, and the armor of every guard cracked like shells, falling off of them. “You will never learn. I am beyond this land, sick with malcontent and violence. Ruin each other if you will, I can no longer carry on through this.” Rylu left the city and marched into the western sea. All the stones in her pockets floated to the surface and became a great chain of green islands. Weapons disintegrated to dust on the beaches, and from their dust was born life of all kinds. Hundreds of pilgrims swam to the islands, and lived there, free of the mainland forever. 

Rylu. A tale not told enough, I think. Of course, it isn’t all true. Her brother was killed, and the sellsword was spared from lions, this is certainly true. There are rumors of old bloodlines capable of speaking with beasts, but if it is true, those bloodlines have long since died off. As for the killing of the pride, that remains unfounded. The sellsword disappeared into the woods and was never seen again. Some say he became a blacksmith, far to the East, where no one would know his face. An ambassador from Gryphon Rask did arrive at the town at odds with the merchants, only she didn’t fare quite so well. Her poisonous words were met with rejection, and she was forced out. The town and the merchants developed a healthy trade, that withstood the test of time. The caretaker’s son grew to a young man and lived a long happy life with his partner from the caravan. The giant’s fortress is the most mysterious part of Rylu’s story. There are no first-hand accounts from the fortress, and the captain couldn’t be found after the fortress was abandoned. Many did see a small wooden box in Rylu’s possession, but none were ever allowed to look inside. The siege of the fortress happened, and the blooddrunk man who built a maelstrom of fire on the ruins is true as well, but he is a tale all on his own. As for the city beneath the vines, and the forming of the Stone Seer Isles, there is little truth to it. The city beneath the vines could refer to a few places, but the most likely is Loufiera, a city of a thousand-year peace.

The Stone Seer Isles were recorded long before the tale of Rylu, but there is one oddity to them. Weapons do not turn to dust, and life on the islands is no greater than life elsewhere, but still, the locals believe in the tale. You see, blossoming up from the depths, directly in the center of the islands, is a great weeping tree. The tree doesn’t grow fruit, or bloom with flowers. On its branches, hunched over from the invisible weight upon them, grow perfectly round, smooth stones. The locals say that if you manage to catch a stone as it falls, for it is impossible to retrieve it from the bottom, you will live a life free from violence. A nice story, but not a story true to Rylu. She lived a life drenched in violence, in an effort to stomp it out. She didn’t tuck a rock into her pocket to turn away, she did it to never forget. She fought relentlessly to blot out the cruelty of her world, not to turn a blind eye to it. This is a tale I wish to correct more than any other, for it is desperately unfortunate that her story has become a tale championed by those resigned to the horror around them, and not by those who submerge themselves in it to dig out the heart and stop its hateful beating.