As time dragged on Vidarian grew increasingly restless, finally forcing himself to sit on a large spur of rock that climbed up out of the ground. Some interminable minutes later, the steady but painfully slow sound of hoofbeats began to echo from further down the foothill to which the Temple clung.
Vidarian stood and waited long enough for his legs to start stiffening in the damp air before a covered cart arrived, drawn by a grey donkey. Its driver was a shadowed figure wearing one of the now familiar burgundy robes.
“Greetings,” Vidarian called, raising his hand. “I come seeking the Gatekeeper of Sher'azar.”
“Then I'm afraid you've come at the wrong time,” answered a dulcet voice from inside the hood of the burgundy robe. “The gatekeeper is not here.”
“Not here?” Vidarian asked, startled out of protocol. “Where is she? This is a matter of most urgency.”
“She has gone Down to teach children at a neighboring village,” the priestess answered with peculiar emphasis as she pulled the cart to a stop. Tossing back her hood, she unveiled a rather startling mass of deep red curls that bounced across her shoulders as if thankful for freedom. Her pale green eyes turned upward as she gave voice to a strange, warbling chant.
A smattering of hooded figures began to materialize out of the mist, many of them carrying baskets partially loaded with mountain vegetables or wild mushrooms. They gathered around the cart.
“We will help you if we can,” the redheaded priestess offered, a less than reassuring smile on her thin lips. She remained in the cart.
Vidarian stared at her, wondering where to begin. “A trio of gryphons brought me to your Temple…”
“Gryphons brought you here?” she asked, looking at him slantwise. “Strange, we had no word from them, and they did not remain to introduce you?” She clucked her tongue.
“They claimed urgent business with the high priestess,” Vidarian frowned, brow furrowing.
“Ah, and so you seek the Gatekeeper,” his erstwhile hostess smiled, folding her hands around the cart reins. “I'm afraid that in her absence, your only option would be to ascend the mountain yourself. And by our law, we cannot offer you more than a token assistance with such an undertaking.”
At her words the other followers of Sharli exchanged a few surreptitious glances. More of them were smiling more than Vidarian liked, but all he could do was forge ahead.
“Very well then. I will gratefully accept any assistance you can render.” He decided on forthrightness, which seemed to inexplicably miff the priestesses slightly.
“Come, then,” the one on the cart said, with abrupt coolness. “We are permitted to trade with you for supplies.”
He had very little coin on him, but the attendants accepted what Vidarian did carry with his gratitude. They did not offer a mount, but supplied him with a rather disturbingly small quantity of food in a canvas sack along with a firebox and a very basic assortment of medical supplies. Then all of the priestesses gathered to see him off, bowing with synchronized solemnity. Without preamble he started off along the ascending mountain trail, but he caught a flash of white teeth as the priestesses turned back to their chores. He hoped he had imagined their smiling mouths, and all disappeared into burgundy velvet and mist before he could decide one way or the other.
The mountain loomed before him, indistinct in the mist. Drawing in a deep breath, he filled his lungs with the pine-laced scent of the thick air, then started up the rocky slope.
Time gradually lost its cohesion, punctuated only by the heightened rush of blood in his veins. He repeatedly steered his imagination away from thoughts about the fanciful forms of torture a telepathic race might visit on a captive.
He did not know precisely where he was going, but the priestesses had offered only a single word in response to numerous queries: “Up.” Presumably the High Temple was at the pinnacle of Sher'azar Peak itself, lost somewhere in the maddening fog that engulfed the mountain range. The muscles of his legs and arms began to grow stiff in the clammy air, but he grit his teeth and forged on up one craggy pass after another.
Only when he first began to hallucinate did he stop to rest. The slender demi-peaks that reached up off of the mountain began to take the shape of hazy hooded figures, shadowed against the mist. Their invisible eyes seemed to reach right to his bones.
Blinking rapidly, he turned at the next spur leading off the trail and sat gingerly on an outcropping of blue slate. But the shadows still watched, and after a few moments he spurred himself on again, unable to stand their scrutiny while sitting still.
Driven by that new discomfort, he passed a ghostly night climbing the mountain. The unending mist made sunset unclear; he only became aware of it when there was so little light that he stumbled on the forbidding terrain. At last he found his legs would carry him no further; the air had grown cold and thin in the heights. Dizzied from lack of air, he made a poor excuse for a camp, did not bother with a fire, and set himself down in a shallow hole dug from the gravelly floor. He tried not to compare it to a grave.
The darkness that shrouded the mountain came at last to drape itself across his mind, and he slept.
The pale grey light of dawn did not wake him. Only when the sun began to burn through the mist, falling like liquid flame through the morning fog, did Vidarian stir. He struggled upward in his pit of a bed, blinked bleary-eyed at the rising sun, and prepared to force his aching muscles once more into movement.
A flicker of motion from the eye of the sun gave him pause.
Before he had time to stand, a figure separated itself from the crimson sphere that slowly flooded the morning with scarlet light. Her hair burned with wild abandon down the length of her back, seeming to take its color from the blood of the sun itself, and her skin in the painfully bright light was whiter than the finest porcelain. Sharp blades of sunlight, now streaking down across the mountain, gave the illusion of elfin slenderness to her burgundy-robed form and sheltered her feet from the indignity of making contact with the cold, wet earth. In the tepid twilight her hands glowed golden at her sides.
In a moment the fiery vision was gone and in its place stood a woman of indeterminate age and build. Her hair was indeed red, and gloriously so, but when separated from the sun her entire form seemed to dim into mortality. The smile that lit her features when she caught sight of him, however, reminded him of Ariadel. Presumably they instructed all fire priestesses in the art of smiling to dwarf the breaking dawn.
“Well, hello there,” she said, and there was a strange hollow quality to her voice as it echoed against the stone mountainside. “You certainly look a sight.”
Vidarian scrambled in the gravel, surprise making his sore muscles move faster than they might have otherwise. “Er, good morning, Priestess…?”
She smiled again. Her voice was like crystallized honey-strong and hard but sweet and bright at once, as if just on the verge of bursting into song. “My name is not important now. I was simply out on a…morning constitutional, you might say, and was surprised to see a Son of Nistra this far up our mountain.”
“S-son of Nistra?” Vidarian echoed, unsure that he'd heard her correctly.
“Well, yes, of course,” the priestess answered, pursing her lips and folding her arms across her chest. “You have the mark of Nistra all over you. Didn't you know that, boy?”
Miffed at her overfamiliar tone, but unable to argue, he only shook his head. She sighed in heavy exasperation, but did not drop her smile; if anything, it widened.
“It's no matter. Tell me, what do you want here on the Great Mountain of Sharli?” The title she emphasized grandly, as a jester would of a king who thought too much of himself. Vidarian had never heard the name of the fire goddess used so lightly, and this strange priestess intrigued him. She took a seat beside him on the shale and he found himself drawn into telling his story-for once not begrudging the time that slipped away while he did so.
When he had finished, she drew him back into a retelling of the spell cast on the sun emeralds.
“Do you remember, dear Vidarian, if the priestess stopped for breath when enchanting the two stones?” She looked at him intently, but, as before, there was a smile hidden beneath her seriousness.
Vidarian thought deeply, trying to call the memory back to his mind. “No,” he said at last, “I'm almost certain she didn't. There was only that strange glow, and then both stones were changed.”
“Interesting,” the priestess smiled. “Very interesting. Endera is out of practice.”
Vidarian tried not to gawk. “And-why would you say that, my lady?”
The priestess only broadened her smile. “If I were you, I should find those emeralds. They're quite valuable, you know. As for answers, you ask for too many, when you know them yourself.”
At length she stood and brushed off her robes. Vidarian spoke hastily as she turned to go.
“Lady, I must know. Who are you, who are so-wise?”
Her eyes were alive with secret mischief as she looked back over her shoulder, voice fading as she walked off into the mist. “The gryphons called me Ele'cherath of old. The seridi, my children, who have also been called so many different names, called me San'vidara. But for myself, I call me-”
Vidarian woke, gasping desperately yet finding no comfort in the air that rushed into his lungs. It was thin and cold, sending spangles of black across his vision as he attempted to focus on the blinding glare of the sun that beat down into his eyes. Thrown so suddenly from consciousness to darkness and back again, his body could not keep up, yet from the depths of his soul he clung to the striking sensation of a vast, pulsing rhythm that seemed to come from all around.
Gradually sounds began to separate from the pulsing beat-a flurry of rapid, excited whispers.
Finally his eyes focused, but he blinked again, not quite accepting what he saw. Leaning over him with an expression he guessed to be concern was a sleek face with a narrow nose and a line of golden dots painted above each eyebrow. The eyes below were a warm, almost molten gold, exotically tilted.
“Ah,” his watcher murmured, with a tiny tap to her nose, “he wakes.”
At her words the whispers that surrounded them increased in velocity and volume, though in his dazed state Vidarian could not make out any individual words. Shaking his head, he sat up.
There were fewer whisperers than he had initially thought, but the small handful of priestesses that crowded around him drew back as he moved. Only one among them did not.