Work Text:
A raindrop hit Caipha Morarg on the tip of the nose. He tried to ignore it and concentrate on the book in front of him. There were half a dozen holes in the roof that had been there since the last overlord raid that they hadn’t had a chance to fix yet and now, looked like they never would.
That had been three months ago when the farmers had sown the root crops. Normally they would have gone north to the base of the cliff called the Shattered Wall to pick slate to repair the roof with, or used leftover thatch from the farmers to tide them over until they could get slate, but there was no thatch available, and going to the Shattered Wall required an escort of tech-nomads through bandit territory. The tech-nomads hadn’t been seen anywhere in the Frayed Valley since the eastern warlord had begun its war with Overlord Kiterif. They should have been here by now, to update their records in the Archive and trade for charms. Nothing had been the same with two armies on the move in the valley, and it had everyone in the village on edge.
Grandpa said that they would just have to wait it out, but there were whisperings amongst the older Morargs. Just this morning, Caipha’s uncle had brought up the unthinkable. “We have to ask ourselves—is it worth our lives?”
Caipha shivered. Leave the Archive? The work of generations? Their family’s whole purpose? How could he say such a thing?! Ever, let alone now, with Grandpa’s health failing. The Morarg family patriarch was old, nearly fifty, and they knew he wouldn’t last much longer. Leaving the Archive behind wouldn’t just break his heart, it would break everything he had. They couldn’t leave, not now, not ever. They would just have to wait out the war.
But that had been easier to say this morning, before the runner arrived. The warlord’s army was on the move. It would be in Fray-Ford by dawn tomorrow.
“It’s not like we haven’t seen war before,” Grandpa had insisted. “Remember the old house? Before the overlord’s revenants tore it down? We saved what we could and we rebuilt. We didn’t run then, we won’t run now.” It was just like him to be optimistic. But the rest of the family had just exchanged glances over their porridge. Caipha recognized the look that passed between them and it turned his stomach. He’d been hiding in the barn, the current home of the Archive, since this morning.
The young man blew on his fingers, rubbed his hands together, and pulled his cowl further over his face against the sprinkles from the sky. He picked up the pen and leaned over the page.
“When we live in interesting times,” Grandpa always said, “it’s all the more important to record every event.”
Caipha tried to push the worries out of his mind and looked at what he had written so far.
In the Year of the Late Storms, on the 33rd day after the root-sowing, war came to the Frayed Valley. The army of an unknown warlord came from the direction of the Scarred Lands to wage war against the Overlord Kiterif. Within 12 days of the beginning of the war, the Storm Bellows and the Hammers of Desolation deviated from their ancestral paths for reasons unknown.
He bit his lip. The disappearance of the tech-nomads was suspicious. He could only hope that they were safe. The nomads could be ruthless and cold, but they lived harsh lives, and their expertise was essential to life in the Frayed Valley. Their close association with the Archive almost made them allies, just as much as the farmers in the rest of the village were.
By the fourth day of the Root-Harvest season, the Shattered Wall had been taken by the forces of the eastern warlord, who then turned towards the village of Fray-Ford.
A soft knocking at the half-rotten wood of the doorjamb behind him caught Caipha’s attention and he turned his head to see his older sister in the doorway, cradling her baby against her chest. “Family meeting,” she said. “In the house.”
Caipha set his pen down and followed her back to the house.
The Morarg family had never been large, in any sense of the word. The soil in the Frayed Valley had once been fertile, but the life in the earth had long since been sucked out of it. Everyone in Fray-Ford was smaller than their ancestors, but in no family was this as pronounced as in the Morargs. Their work in the Archive kept them away from the fields more often than most of the other villagers, and their share of the harvest was sparser as a result. It also kept the number of children in each generation low. Caipha had only one surviving sibling, as did his father. He had only one cousin. Until the birth of his niece, he had been the youngest member of the family, and after the death of his brother-in-law in the last overlord raid, Caipha doubted the family would grow much more. The whole family could gather around the table by the hearth and still have room to breathe.
He was the last to arrive, and as he took his place alongside the rest of the Morargs, his uncle straightened up. “The eastern warlord will be here by dawn,” he said. “We need to leave.”
Caipha had expected some resistance, some outcry, someone to object. They couldn’t leave. They didn’t have anything to carry the Archive in. They would have needed half a dozen wagons at last, pulled by strong grox, but they had neither the wagons nor the grox available.
If they left Fray-Ford, they would be leaving the Archive behind.
No one said a word. They stared at their hands, at the grain on the table, at the guttering fire on the hearth, or at Caipha’s niece, asleep in her blanket.
“I’m staying.” At the gravelly voice, the Morargs turned to look at Grandpa. His shaking hands clutching his cane, their patriarch looked at each of his family members in turn. “I’m not leaving the Archive behind.”
“Pa,” Caipha’s uncle said.
“No,” Grandpa said. “I’m staying. I won’t last long anyways on foot. We all know I’m dying. But when I die, I’ll die here, where other Morargs have been proud to die.”
“I’m staying too,” Caipha blurted out. “I’ll stay with Grandpa.”
He tried not to look at the face of his father or sister. If he did, his resolve would break. “You’re going to die,” Esthra whispered, her grip on the baby tightening. “When the soldiers come, they’ll crucify you, or turn you into a golem, or burn you up—”
“I know,” Caipha whispered. “But I can’t leave Grandpa alone. And I won’t leave the Archive.”
“Foolish boy,” his uncle said. But he didn’t argue. After all, Caipha was just doing what they all wished they could do.
***
Caipha looked up at the walls, covered in shelves full of boxes and crates, all covered in oiled skins and weatherproofed as best as they could be. Books and scrolls and precious maps of faraway places—as children, Morargs learned the geography of all the valleys they could never go to. It was a rite of passage, in a way—to learn that the world was so very large and that you were so very impossibly small, incapable of ever leaving this place and going somewhere else, somewhere better. The equatorial seas, the endless stretches of acidic ice on the poles, the long stretches of deserts. Harsh and evocative names—Thorngarden; Blackhand Glacier; the Sea of Bile; the Scarred Mount. There were atlases and gazetteers, but most of the books in this library were records. Records of births, of deaths, of plagues and famines, of conquests and calamities. Tech nomads that traveled along the Frayed River would come to the Archive to record their great deeds and everything that had happened since last they had passed through. They exchanged information for stories, and stories there were a-plenty. The Archive collected those too. Anything that can be written down is written down, was the philosophy of the Morarg family.
Most intriguing of all were The Artefacts. These were objects the size of an adult’s hand, made of something halfway between slate and hardened tree resin. They were in poor shape, cracked and corroded. Most of them would break if they were handled improperly. Some would crumble if they were handled at all. They were kept wrapped in wool in the hopes that the lanolin would protect them from the damp and the fiber from being jostled around. It was probably a vain hope. The Artefacts were dying. Everything was dying. But they held onto them, because they were the Morargs, the guardians of the Archive. Everything in the Archive was under their protection, even if it didn’t seem to belong with the others. Grandpa’s grandpa’s grandpa’s…well, anyway, family legend had it that The Artefacts had been documents once too, some kind of book. But there was nothing left to read on them. The Morargs kept them nonetheless. They were a stubborn breed, or they had been, once.
The rain was falling through the roof more steadily now. Caipha wiped the water from his face. Some of it tasted like salt on his lips. The old house had been destroyed long before Caipha was born, or even before Esthra had been. The old house had been built specifically for the Archive, and according to the pictures his mother had shown him as a child, it had been beautiful, all pale stone and carved figures. But then Kiterif’s forces had come. And they’d had to move to a barn on the edge of town. This was the only archive building that Caipha had ever known. This village was the only one he’d ever known—and no one knew where they would go now.
The rest of the family would leave before sundown, along with the rest of the village. And that…would be it. Generations of the Morarg family, going back into pre-history, had tended the Archive with their lives. But that would all be over. The work of eternity, and the records of their people, would be gone. Caipha ran his hand over an ornately carved wooden box. This one was special. This box contained the birth and death records of every member of the Morarg family—or all of the records they had, at least. The Archive may have been piecemeal before, threadbare from raids by Kiterif, but it had never been lost all in one go. That was about to change. Everything was about to change, and to Caipha, it felt as if the world was going to end.
***
He said good-bye to his family and watched them leave. By the time the last of the light had left the sky, Fray-Ford was empty, save for the last of the Archivists. They lit the pitch torches around the house and the barn and went to bed side-by-side in the cellar, surrounded by the most important crates from the Archive. Caipha lay awake for hours staring up at the ceiling, listening to Grandpa snore. What would they do when the soldiers arrived? How long would they last? Neither he nor his grandfather were fighters. They had never learned how to fight—how could they? Who would have taught them? Even the nomads ran when they were faced by real soldiers. Even bandits wouldn’t stand and face the creations of the overlords. No human would. It would be suicide.
Just like staying here.
They would hide in the root cellar until the soldiers left. But the hours inched by and the walls were closing in on Caipha, and he couldn’t stand to stay in the cellar anymore. He snuck out, grabbed a torch, and headed to the barn. There, he set the torch in a sconce above the desk and got to work.
A raindrop hit Caipha’s nose. He ignored it. He dipped his pen in the ink and wrote clearly on the page:
On the sixth day of the Root Harvest season, the village of Fray-Ford was abandoned as the army of the eastern warlord approached. The Archive was left in the hands of Cember Morarg and his youngest grandson, Caipha Morarg.
Caipha set down the pen. There was nothing more to write.
A soft knocking at the half-rotten wood of the doorjamb behind him caught Caipha’s attention, and he saw Grandpa standing in the doorway. “I couldn’t stay away either,” he whispered. He shuffled over to the bench next to Caipha and slowly lowered himself next to his grandson. “We’ll meet them here, and die like Morargs.”
The young man wrapped an arm around his grandfather and they sat together in the Archive, waiting for the world to end.
Dawn broke over the abandoned village. Caipha could hear the sound of many feet in the village square and the rattling of weapons and armor.
He closed his eyes.
A sharp knocking of metal on the half-rotten wood of the doorjamb echoed through the barn and Caipha turned around. In the doorway, framed by the grey light outside, a giant creature crouched. He froze, his heart hammering in his chest, his mouth dry and bitter. The light from the holes in the roof and the last of the torch did little to illuminate the creature, and for that, Caipha was grateful. He did not want to see what the eastern warlord had sent to destroy the Archive for once and for all.
The thing in the doorway moved inside, and as it got closer, Caipha saw that it had been built on a human frame. It was huge, tall enough that it could stick its fingers through the holes in the roof if it wanted to, but it was slender, almost elegant in proportion. The way it moved was like liquid—Caipha didn’t know whether to be horrified or entranced. From here, he could see that it was clad in grey armor and a pale wool hood, like the kind a human would wear.
Caipha blinked in shock. It was human, or at least, once had been. There were no tumors, no horns, none of the jerkiness of gait he expected from revenants, golems, or kill-beasts. Its—his—armor was dented and scratched, but too well-taken care of to be an overlord’s soldier. He had a scythe strapped to his back—a human tool. No soldier of an overlord had ever been recorded using a scythe. Between the hood and the scarf wrapped around his jaw, Caipha could see little of his face, but what he saw was clear skin etched with scars. But what convinced Caipha more than anything else that this was a man, a human man—one stretched beyond normal height, yes, but human for all that—were his eyes, clear and bright, the color of summer honey.
Then the man spoke, and Caipha almost missed his first words, so distracted he was by the sound of that voice. The man’s raspy voice was so deep that Caipha almost felt like his guts were vibrating. And yet, the voice was soft, gentle almost. No overlord creation spoke like that. “Excuse me,” the stranger said. “Is this the Archive?” He looked around the room, taking in the crates and boxes on the shelves. His expression was unreadable with the scarf in the way, but Caipha got the impression that even had his face been visible, it would have been unreadable.
“I-it is,” Caipha whispered. “It is! This is—this is the Archive.”
The giant looked down at him and nodded. “Good. I had hoped it would still be intact.”
Caipha frowned. His free hand clenched in his lap, and his arm around Grandpa tightened. “What do you mean…?”
The giant tilted his head at Caipha. “I was afraid that it would have been destroyed by the overlords long ago. I am glad to see they have not gotten to it.”
The young man took a deep breath and swallowed. His heart was in knots and breathing hurt. “What do you want with us?” His words came out so softly that he thought he would have to repeat them to the stranger. But apparently his hearing was better than Caipha had thought.
“I would like to preserve your archive.” He gestured at the boxes with the sweep of a graceful hand. “This is one of the greatest collections of human knowledge on all of Barbarus. It cannot be allowed to fall into overlord hands, or to be lost to time or weather.” A drop of water fell on the giant’s outstretched hand. Caipha watched, transfixed, as he flicked his finger, and the glittering drop of water flew into the shadows. “Already Barbarus conspires against us.”
“You can’t take our Archive,” Grandpa snapped, and the other two turned to look at him. Grandpa tried to look defiant, but he was taken over at that moment by hacking coughs that left him bent double. Caipha put his hand on his chest and squeezed his shoulders. “You can’t…you can’t take the Archive from us,” he rasped. “It’s ours…our sacred duty…the Morarg duty.”
Caipha looked back at the stranger. The giant man’s words had tightened the knot in his chest and it was all he could do to keep tears out of his eyes. After all they had done, after all they had faced, would they still lose the Archive?
But the stranger was looking at Grandpa. “What is your name?” he said.
“Cember.” The old man coughed fitfully. “Cember Morarg. The boy is Caipha. My grandson.”
“Cember and Caipha Morarg,” the giant whispered. He touched a fist to his chest. “I am Mortarion. I have no intention of separating your family from the Archive. You have guarded it well for millennia. But you and the Archive must be moved somewhere safe. I propose to move it to Safehold, where it can be protected by the Death Guard.”
Caipha’s scholarly mind, scrabbling against existential despair, finally found a handhold. “Safehold?” For a child who had grown up paging through the atlases, he had never heard of a place called Safehold. He had never heard of a place name like Safehold, not in a scholarly source. It was a name with no sharp edges, like the name from an overly optimistic child’s story, not a real place with houses and soldiers and privies. “And who are the Death Guard? Are they your army?
Mortarion inclined his head. “Yes. Safehold is our fort in the lowlands below the Scarred Range.”
“Safe,” Grandpa scoffed. “Nothing can be safe in the Scarred Lands!”
The stranger jerked his head in Grandpa’s direction. “We have made it safe,” he said firmly, but not unkindly. “No overlord’s army has breached the walls, and we have not yet been defeated.”
Caipha stared at him. “Defeated by who?”
“An overlord,” the strange, slender, elegant giant said. “Desalem, Hethemre, Talometh, Thevost. And Kiterif is next.”
Grandpa laughed, but Caipha stared at Mortarion. His shoulders were broad, his movements confident. His face and armor bore the scars of battle; the scythe on his back was worn, but well-cared for. And there was a look in his eyes, Caipha could see that. In the same room as him, Caipha could feel a power coming off of him that he could not describe. In that moment, he believed Mortarion. If ever a man existed who could slay an overlord, it was Mortarion. He looked like he could mow down a mountain or harness a hurricane.
“You’ll take us with you?” he said. “To Safehold? And the Archive along with us?”
Mortarion looked at Caipha, transfixing him with his gaze. He nodded. “I will take you with me back to Safehold, and the Archive, if you will let me. No harm will come to you.”
Grandpa snorted again, but Mortarion continued, looking at Caipha as if there was no one else in the world, let alone the room. “You will have food, and medicine. And we will find the other people who lived in Fray-Ford and invite them back with us.”
“Then what?” Caipha said. “When—if we go back with you—what happens to us then?”
“You tend the Archive,” Mortarion said. “As you have always done.” He tilts his head. “And perhaps, when you have free time, I will teach you how to defend yourself.”
Caipha’s eyes grew wide. To not be helpless? To not have to hide in the root cellar when the soldiers came? “I’ll come with you,” he said. “I’ll come with you to Safehold.” He turned to his grandfather. “Grandpa…please…”
Grandpa sighed. “Alright,” he said. “Find my family, bring the Archive—intact! And I’ll come with you to this…Safehold place.”
“Very well then.” Mortarion reached over to a shelf and effortlessly picked up a stack of crates. “I have sent scouts to find the other villagers, they can’t have gotten far. In the meantime, we will get the Archives loaded onto wagons.”
Caipha wiped tears from his eyes and got up, rushing to the ladder leaning against the shelves with trembling limbs. Behind him, his grandfather squinted at Mortarion. “You have enough wagons?”
“We brought them with us. I’d heard tell of the Archive and came prepared in case the legends were true. Besides, the tech-nomads who joined us have plenty of wagons.”
On the middle of the wall, Caipha found the ornately carved box and picked it up. He turned around and looked at Mortarion. “Thank you,” he said.
The man they called the Reaper of Men nodded. “Think nothing of it, Caipha Morarg,” he said, and led the way into the dawn.