Free Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen by Chris Page Page B

as the crane fly. The wings of this elongated fly are marked in the most delicate, almost clear patterns fused with silver and turquoise. It is said that these wings are so fine that to look through them is to gaze upon the world through a mother-ofpearl mirror that will not reveal evil. You would know them by the more popular name of daddy longlegs …”
    “Ho ho,” said Twilight sarcastically.
    Merlin leaned on the great sarsen stone sunk into the ground, pressed his cheek to its smooth coldness, and closed his eyes. He remained like this for a long time as Twilight walked around the stone, inspecting it and running his fingers over its bumps and fissures. With almost a third of its mass underground, it towered above him at three times his height, a solid, immovable, roughly diamond-shaped edifice to a hundred years of venefical life, wizardry, and dedicated teaching. Merlin spoke reverently, without opening his eyes. “This stone is called the Summit. It is the burial stone of my mentor and teacher the Elder Pendragon. I placed his body here, deep in the damp, protecting earth, and then put this mighty sarsen from the chalk downs over him. It was the saddest time of my life, a time when I questioned everything yet felt the heavy hand of destiny on my shoulder. Intense grief, even though the death is foretold and expected, forces a certain questioning of beliefs. Every time I come here, even now, I feel intense poignancy at our years together, and heavy-hearted at his loss. Of all my travails, his passing cuts the deepest swathe across the waving grass of my eventful life. His teaching was sublime, his insights beyond prophecy, and his patience endless. I have not lived up to the expectations he had in me, and for that alone my sorrow is heavy. He will always be with me.”
    He opened his moist eyes and pointed toward another great stone thirty paces away.
    “Idris the Former lies under that one. It is called the Turret. The Elder Pendragon put that in place. The next one is called Presidium - it is where Idris placed the Pale Sybil.”
    He then pointed at each of the individual stones as they stood out proudly against the bright blue of the sky atop the earthen ramparts. “Point Hill, Great Crag, the Peak, Long Crest, Eyrie, Giant Tor, High Mount, Overtop, the Tower, Behemoth. This outer circle consists of ninety-eight great stones, each one of them sheltering the bones of an ancestral martyr who lived the prescribed one hundred years. Nine thousand eight hundred years of venefical existence is represented here. The ghosts of countless small miracles and huge, heroic deeds shimmer around each stone. Here lie the bones of your ancestors, Wessex history, the magnificent teachers, and every one of them indomitable in bringing the enchantments to bear upon their annual equinoctial duties and whatever else they believed in. Those buried here lived through and influenced all the great upheavals of the last ten thousand years - at the sides of kings, by the hearths of peasants, in the shrines of religious orders. Beneath these stones lie the perpetrators of all the eternal truths that shone through the wars and tragedies of those times, the holders of the magical resonance and universal earthshine in the shape of the enchantments. We stand now among the epic echoes of thousands of years of human folly and imagery and their mighty attempts to cease its restless quest for death. We stand among the frailty of sorcery in the face of the vitality of warfare. We stand among the bones of the few who have given their all to halt the spread of evil. We stand among those who understood, enchanted, transformed, moved, reshaped, and changed … yet seemingly made no difference.”
    “Did you make a difference?” the boy asked.
    Merlin sighed and gently ran his long fingers over the Summit stone.
    “No.”
    “Why not?”
    “Because I allowed myself to be blinded by what I perceived as greatness instead of seeing that it was just