Location: Arbola Forest
Timeline: Sixth Age, 52 Year, Spring to Summer
Time is not a straight line for the Architect; it is a tapestry that I have spent eons unraveling and reweaving. While I wrote abot the Drokka princes pace their “gilded cage” in the summer heat of the 52nd year, my mind drifted back to the spring of that same year long ago. To understand the “Wrath” that is coming, one must first understand the “Silence” that preceded it.
Before the iron boots of Barkla and Brega ever bruised the silver-wood of Arbola, there was the elfess’.
Nathily—the adoptive daughter of Regent Rian and Fara. To the world, she was the would-be Azora trainee with a troubled heart. To me, she would become the unaccounted for variable – a mirror that would eventually reflect the light of Emcorae Azop, the one mortal whose destiny slipped through my spectral fingers.
The paths of the stone-sons and the elf-maid were destined to cross, for they were both searching for the same thing: a reason to believe that the world had not already been sold to the shadows. But while the Drokka sought their salvation in a lost mountain of the north, Nathily sought hers in the quiet, treacherous corners of her own soul.
Let us look back to the early rains of ’52. Before the council met with Barkla and Brega. Before Emcorae arrived back in Arbola in the Fall. Let us look at the moment the mirror of Nathily’s heart finally became clear.
The Glade
The scent of damp moss and jasmine was usually a comfort to Nathily, but today it felt cloying. The warrior elfess stood on a high bough, her wooden practice-saber trembling slightly in her grip.
Across from her, teacher El-Janus was a shadow among shadows. He hadn’t drawn his weapon. He didn’t need to. He stood with his hands tucked into the sleeves of his grey robes, his diminutive frame radiating a stillness that Nathily found maddening.
“You are thinking of the wasteland again,” El-Janus said. It wasn’t a question. “You are wondering if Azop has decided to return.”
“I am thinking of the kata,” Nathily lied, her voice tight.
“Hoooot!” Nathily’s faithful friend, Master Hoobab the wood owl, shifted on a branch above her, his golden eyes full of insight.
El-Janus continued. “The Amora speaks of kata, but her feet speak of flight. You cannot plant a tree in moving water. And you cannot master the Azora blade while your heart is elsewhere.”
Nathily lowered her saber, the frustration boiling over. “He is gone and I am here… balancing on branches and fighting ghosts.”
“If you can’t find the best part of you,” El-Janus said, stepping forward with a grace that made no sound, “then you have already lost the battle. An Azora must be whole in mind and body, Nathily. Not a fragment lost in someone else’s shadow.”
He gestured toward the path leading down back to the village. “Go Home. Do not return until you are clear on why you want to be an Azora – IF you want to be an Azora.”
The silence that followed El-Janus’s ultimatum was heavier than any blow he had ever dealt her with a practice stave.
Nathily stood frozen on the high bough, the wooden saber hanging limp in her hand. Below her, the forest floor was lost in a sea of ferns and mist, a dizzying drop that mirrored the sudden hollowness in her chest. She looked at El-Janus, hoping for a flicker of his usual stern patience, but his face was as inscrutable as the bark of the Great Weir-Tree. He wasn’t just dismissing her for the day; he was dismissing her from her own destiny.
“Master…” she started, her voice cracking.
“No more words, Nathily,” El-Janus said, turning his back to her. He began to adjust the ties of a training target, his movements precise and dismissive. “Words are the rust of the spirit. Go.”
Nathily didn’t sheathe the wooden blade. She couldn’t. Her fingers were locked around the hilt in a white-knuckled grip of shame. She turned and began the long descent, moving from the high, sun-drenched training boughs down into the deeper, darker layers of the Arbola canopy.
Every step felt like a betrayal. She passed other trainees, but kept her head down, her golden hair falling forward to hide the hot prickle of tears in her eyes. She felt like a fraud wearing the leather bracers and the tunic of a warrior.
“Hooo-ut,” Master Hoobab glided down, landing on a branch just inches from her head as she reached the suspension bridge leading toward the residential vales. “Amora carries sorrow. Drop them or bridge will snap.”
“Not now, Hoobab,” she whispered, her voice thick.
Once on the ground, she soon reached the village outskirts, where the familiar sights of home usually brought her peace. She saw the smoke rising from the communal kitchens and heard the distant, melodic laughter of children playing in the root-hollows. But today, the beauty of Arbola felt alien.
She stopped at a small forest pool, looking at her reflection in the still, dark water. The girl looking back didn’t look like an Azora. She looked like a ghost—pale, uncertain, and hollowed out by a longing for a man who had chosen to leave.
Was El-Janus right? Did she even want this path now? Or was she only trying to become an Azora for other reasons? The realization that her entire ambition might be a secondary orbit to someone else’s sun made her knees weak.
She sat on a mossy stone. For the first time since she had been a child, Nathily didn’t know who she was. She wasn’t an Azora, she didn’t know why the thought of Emcorae made her heart ache, and she didn’t know what the future held for her.
She stood up and began the final walk toward her mother’s cottage. She was going home, but she felt like a stranger returning to a place she had already left in her heart.
The Confession
The interior of the Regent’s bungalow was an architectural poem, carved directly into the living heart of a massive oak. The walls were smooth and warm to the touch, polished to a dull amber glow by generations of hands. Soft light filtered through windows made of translucent, honey-colored resin, illuminating the drifting dust motes and the intricate tapestries woven from spider-silk and willow bark.
Fara sat on a low, moss-cushioned bench, her hands busy with a spindle of silver thread. She was the picture of Amorosi elegance, her long, wheat-colored hair braided with small, dried blossoms. She wore a gown of deep forest green, cinched at the waist with a belt of braided copper. Her face, though serene, bore the soft lines of a mother who felt every tremor in her child’s heart.
Across from her, Nathily was a jagged contrast. She had spent the last two weeks cloistered in her upper room, emerging only for meals she barely touched. She wore her old traveling tunic—faded, dusty, and frayed at the cuffs—as if she were still trying to cling to the road she had been forced to leave. Her eyes were rimmed with the red shadow of sleeplessness.
“Rian sits in the council chambers and worries about the world,” Fara said softly, her voice like the rustle of leaves. “But when he comes home, he sits by the hearth and worries about the amora who won’t look him in the eye. We missed our fierce girl, Nathily. The one who used to challenge the wind to a race. Where has she gone?”
Nathily pulled her knees to her chest, huddling on the floor. “Maybe she’s gone, Mother? Maybe El-Janus was right? I feel like a fragment, a hollow reed.”
“You are a hollow reed because you have let someone else breathe through you,” Fara replied, setting her spindle aside. She moved to the floor, sitting beside her daughter and taking Nathily’s cold hands in her own. “Tell me what’s wrong?”
The interior of the kaza suddenly felt smaller to Nathily, the amber-polished oak walls closing in on her as she arose and moved towards the window. She had foregone her armored greaves, her padded vest, and her weapons, but her blonde hair was pulled back into a severe ponytail—the uniform of a warrior, even if her heart currently felt like a wounded bird.
Outside, a pair of white-tailed hares nibbled on bramblethorn fruit, but Nathily didn’t see them. She was looking past the trees, past the forest, toward the burning horizon.
“He’s not out there, you know?” Fara looked at her daughter’s “un-maiden-like” attire with a soft sigh, but her eyes held a deeper, more ancient worry.
“Who?” Nathily asked, though the heat in her cheeks gave her away.
“Your…friend… Emcorae,” Fara said gently. “You’ve spent half a moon tracing the horizon as if you could pull him back with your eyes alone. Nathily, he is a human. His life is a candle flame in a gale. Ours is the slow, steady growth of the mountain. Be careful you don’t tether your spirit to a human – you’ll invite a grief that will last centuries after he is dust.”
Nathily turned back, her jaw set in the stubborn line that Rian always said reminded him of a storm. “My spirit is tethered to the goddess, Mother. Alyssa herself gave me this quest. To be the first female Azora! That is my purpose. It has nothing to do with Emcorae.”
Fara stood and walked to stand beside her daughter. She reached out, gently lifting Nathily’s chin. “Is it? You say you dress in leather for the goddess, but you watch the road for the boy. Hear me – you cannot become an Azora if you are using the sword as a way to bridge the gap between your world and his. Alyssa seeks a champion of the Amorosi, not a girl chasing a human’s shadow.”
Nathily felt the truth of it sting like a lash. Fara rarely spoke such harsh honesty to her. Yet Nathily thought of Alyssa—the goddess who felt so close yet so distant. She didn’t know the secret Fara guarded and Alyssa’s true relationship to Nathily, instead the young elfess only knew the weight of the expectation laid upon her.
But eventually she broke. “I…I think…I love him, Mama,” Nathily whined, the warrior-veneer cracking. “I know he’s ‘his kind’ and I am mine. But how can I stop my heart from beating?”
Fara’s expression softened into something profoundly sad. “Patience. Time. Letting the Goddess spin your fate. These are the only virtues that survive the passing of ages, Nathily. Yet know this – even the gods suffer from longings they cannot fulfill, but still they move forward to shape their destinies – and ours.”
Nathily leaned her head against her mother’s shoulder. The amber light of the kaza seemed to dim as the sun dipped lower. “What if I’m not strong enough to be what Alyssa wants me to become? What if I’m just… me?”
“Then you are exactly who you need to be,” Fara whispered. But then she changed the mood and smiled, “Now, enough of this melancholy. Leave these dishes for your father to clean when he returns for lunch. You and I are going for a run through the forest. Let’s see if those Azora legs of yours can actually keep up with your old mother.”
Nathily’s mood shifted at the prospect of competition. “Hardly! You’ll be eating my dust before we hit the Great Weir-Tree!”
The Breakthrough at the Pool
The center of Arbola Forest was a masterwork of natural geometry, where the massive silver-barked oaks spiraled upward like the pillars of a forgotten sky-palace. Some time later Nathily walked until the sounds of the village—the distant chime of wind-bells and the rhythmic thrum of weaving looms—faded into the deep, rhythmic silence of the ancient wood.
She reached the Pool of Whispers, a perfectly circular basin fed by a hidden spring that bubbled up through quartz-veined roots. The water was so dark and still it looked like a sheet of obsidian dropped into a bed of emerald moss. Here, the air was several degrees cooler, smelling of damp stone and the sharp, clean scent of crushed pine needles.
Sitting at the water’s edge, as her doehide shorts pressed into the soft moss, Nathily looked at her reflection. In the dim light beneath the canopy, her blonde hair looked like spun silver, and her blue eyes seemed too large for her face.
A bird with two nests is never home, she thought, echoing wisdom her friend Hoobab had shared with her days earlier. I have been trying to live in Emcorae’s world while standing in Alyssa’s. No wonder I can’t find my footing.
“The water only reflects what is on the surface, little bird,” a voice rasped. It was a sound like dry parchment sliding over stone.
Nathily jumped at the unexpected intrusion. From the hollow of a massive, gnarled root system emerged Dallegheri. The oldest of the Amorosi looked less like an elf and more like a part of the forest itself. His robes were stained with the dust of old libraries, and his clouded eyes seemed to be looking at something a hundred years in the past.
Just then Master Hoobab flew down from the canopy, landing on the scholar’s bony shoulder with a respectful hoo-ut.
“Nonni,” Nathily exhaled, her heart slowing. “I didn’t hear you. I thought I was alone.”
“In Arbola, one is never alone,” Dallegheri said, leaning heavily on a staff made of petrified weir-wood. He sat on a root beside her, his movements slow and methodical. “The trees listen. The water remembers. And the old ones… well, we simply linger.”
He looked into the pool, his reflection joining hers. “You have the scent of conflict on you, Nathily. Like a sword that has been forged but not yet quenched.”
“I’m trying to be what the Goddess wants,” Nathily admitted, looking down at her hands. “But I feel… divided. Mother says I’m tethered to…that which cannot be. El-Janus says I’m a fragment. I just want to be whole.”
Dallegheri turned his clouded gaze toward her. “Your mother speaks of the tragedy of time. She is right. But El-Janus speaks of the blade. A blade must be tempered by both heat and cold to be strong.”
He reached out a withered hand and touched the surface of the water, sending ripples through their twin reflections. “Do not fear the division, Nathily. Use it. The Azora are not warriors because they lack emotion; they are warriors because they have mastered them. If your heart is on fire, know that it can heat the steel. But let your devotion to Alyssa be the water that cools it. One provides the edge, the other provides the strength.”
“Hooo-ut,” Hoobab added, his head swiveling 180 degrees. “Forge Sword. Fear Hammer. Uuuuniiiiite.”
Nathily looked at Dallegheri, perhaps seeing the weight of his own secrets in the lines of his face. “Is that what you do, Grandfather? Do you use….secrets to stay strong?”
Dallegheri flinched almost imperceptibly, his gaze drifting south toward the centuries old memories of Ramos. “I use my longing to true to the forest. Even we Amorosi needs a reminders to keep us from becoming as cold as the stars.”
Their talk continued for some time. Eventually the lore master stood up, the ancient wood of his staff creaking. “Go back to your training. Not to please the Mysstro. Go back because the world is changing. I feel a chill in the North that the summer sun cannot warm. The Pietromi are coming, and behind them, a shadow I haven’t seen since the Fifth Age.”
He leaned down and kissed Nathily’s brow, then turned to disappear back into the emerald gloom.
Nathily stood, the hollowness in her chest replaced by a low, steady hum of purpose. “I’m ready, Hoobab,” she said, her voice ringing clear through the trees.
“Hoo-ut,” the owl replied, taking flight. “Go. Flyyyyy. Fiiiiiight.”
The Witness from the Shadows
The humidity of the late summer hung heavy over Arbola, but for Nathily, the air had never felt clearer. Over the months, the training boughs had become her sanctuary of solitude. She had followed Dallegheri’s advice, using her heart’s fire as the forge and her duty to the Goddess as the quenching water.
When the unusual summons came for Azora trainees to stand guard in the Great Green Hall, Nathily didn’t hesitate. She stepped into her polished leather greaves, cinched her doehide vest, and took up her position in the shadows when the Pietromi envoys made their appearance.
From her vantage point, Nathily watched as the two dwarves were escorted into the living cathedral. Like the rest of the Amorosi villagers, she knew about the strange visitors who had been housed in the Root-Villas for weeks, but now, seeing them for the first time, they were a jarring sight—dense, earth-bound, and clad in clothing that seemed to absorb the emerald light rather than reflect it.
As the one named Brega began his plea, Nathily found herself leaning forward, her blue eyes locked on the “Red Prince.” She expected to feel the usual Amorosi disdain for the “clumsy” races of stone, but instead, she felt a profound sympathy. When Brega spoke of his father, King Hanbull, and the fading light of the Rhokki Pass, Nathily didn’t hear a diplomat; she heard a cry for help from a dying people.
They are fighting for time, she realized, her grip tightening on the railing. They don’t have centuries to wait for the ‘cycles of the leaf.’ To them, every season is a battle against the dark.
Then came the moment of the Great Refusal. Nathily watched her father stand up. She saw the worry in his eyes—the same worry she had seen over the breakfast table—but here, in the hall of power, it looked like stagnation.
Later when Dallegheri and Adarius delivered the news of Akka’s fall and the scavengers of Fubar, Nathily felt the air in the hall grow cold. She looked at her grandfather. He looked so ancient, so detached, as if the death of an entire clan was merely a footnote in a scroll.
“The Amorosi do not march for vengeance,” Rian’s voice echoed through the hall.
Nathily happened a glance in the direction of her mysstro – she felt the subtle shift in El-Janus’ demeanor. The Mysstro remained a statue, but his eyes were fixed on Barkla, who was vibrating with a tectonic fury.
He’s going to break, Nathily thought as he looked at the black-clad dwarf. He’s going to scream at the trees.
And he did. When Barkla slammed his staff down and called them “silk-wrapped statues,” a collective shudder went through the Amorosi audience. The younger trainees near Nathily flinched, whispering about “dwarf-filth” and “brutes.” But Nathily remained still. She saw their wrath not as a sin, but perhaps as a mirror of her own burgeoning turmoil.
As the brothers turned to leave, rejected and alone, Barkla’s gaze swept across the upper tiers. For a split second, his jewel-like eyes seemed to meet hers. In that look, Nathily saw the raw, unpolished truth of their tragic world: it was a place of blood, iron, and a desperate urgency – and she admired him for it.
Eventually when the crowd and even the Council began to disperse, the Amorosi who remained in the Hall were left to their songs and their long, slow thoughts. But Nathily remained on the same bough.
“They are going to die,” she whispered to herself.
“Hoo-ut,” Master Hoobab landed on the railing beside her, his feathers ruffled by the tension still lingering in the air. “But stiilll iiiiit iiiiisss Liiiife.”
Nathily looked down at the silver-wood floor, where the heavy boots of the Drokka had left bruised imprints. She felt the weight of her Azora training—the strength El-Janus had forced her to find. She realized then that Alyssa hadn’t made her a warrior so she could stand in the shadows of a dying peace. “The Goddess didn’t give me these legs for standing still, Hoobab.”
Leaving the hall, Nathily watched the emerald light fade into the grey of evening, the “fierce girl” Fara had missed was finally, fully back. And she was no longer waiting for permission.
She had been made for the storm – and although she didn’t know it yet, a big one was soon to come for her.
The Apocrypha of Azazel 