Glossary

Working names and definitions for various aspects of the book.

Characters

• Dainen Vahkaren

  Our hero.

• Ariande Stormrider

  A bard and Dainen's lover.

• Taim Kadere

  The Captain. Leader of the King's taken coterie.

• Mako

  Dainen's primary rival amongst the King's coterie. The two came from the same village and Dainen's rage at him for serving Maloch's cause, even before being taken, is very strong. Mako is irreverent, witty, deadly efficient, faster than Dainen, and a deadly opponent. It is unclear which would win in a direct confrontation and the matter is clearly one both men would like to settle.

• Elisayne

  The Captain's lover and a mage. One of the coterie. Dainen hates and fears her. She is something of an enchantress (mind witch), but her real talent is with electricity and elemental forces.

• Justin Maloch

  The King. Justin is a true believer in uniting the peoples of the two kingdoms at any cost. He was the first to find the ancient power, and claimed it as his own even as it claimed him. Now he is consumed with the resurrection of the ancient kingdom from which that power sprang. He holds absolute power over his coterie of marked men by infusing them with a portion of that power. They cannot disobey him, or even travel too far from the Source of that power or they weaken and die.

  As time goes on, Maloch seems less and less connected to the people around him. All of the Taken know he hears voices speaking to him, but it seems he becomes more and more a direct personification of the power, and less of the man he once was. Most of the coterie were his most loyal followers well before discovery of the power.

Setting

• Realms

  Reality is split into multiple levels of being. The realm of our story is the Mortal realm, while the Aether is humanities name for all of the realms that lie beyond human perception. One can think of the realms as a spectrum of realities that all bleed into one another to a greater or lesser extent. Nearly anything in one realm has a representation in all the others, though things which have just been created in one realm may be simply an idea or a whisper in another. Most of humanity thinks of the oceans and sky as essentially shores where the Aether laps up against the mortal realm, and home to many of the gods.

  Mages and priests may understand that this is not as far off as a modern perspective might suggest. Both the seas and the heavens lie close to certain realms of the Aether and are home to various beings of great power that humans may worship and who gain strength from such focus of belief.

• Exarch/God/Angel - Need a Name

  The gods of the previous warring nations which underlie the current warring nations. These beings drew their power from their followers, warring in the heavens even as the two nations struggled on earth below. When the final battle came, the two powers fell to earth, locked in mortal combat. Their bodies pierced the surface and dispersed into the arteries and aquifers beneath the ground in a great explosion that rocked the earth with only the fraction of its force that could be felt in the mortal realm.

• Katari

  The race of beings that once ruled these lands and held humans in slavery. The Katari are essentially the precursor of the elves, taller and stronger than humans. cold and beautiful on the surface, their passions ran deep and their force of spirit was such that their drives and beliefs shaped the aether in permanent ways. The Katari had no use for human "technology" (smithing,