The Heirs of Azil (3)

I remember the first time I saw the Sleepers.

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We were ten years old, my brother and I. Father had decreed we were finally old enough for this secret knowledge, for this experience. He said that it was something we needed to understand fully.

We didn't often go into the Tower. We'd been introduced to the Lanstone, of course, and visited it many times. Each time we would pass the door to the Chamber, and we knew only that secrets lay beyond.

As boys, we used to imagine all kinds of things lurked behind that door. Nothing compared to the reality. Can any child's imagination compare to the cold harsh reality they are later confronted with?

Father trudged solemnly up the stone steps. Outside the door, he turned to lecture us on the importance and seriousness of what we were about to see. He used the tone we were all too familiar with, the one that implied we would be quizzed on the subject of his words at random intervals for the rest of our lives. The rest of his life, anyway.

"This is our deepest secret," he intoned. "Do you understand?"

"Yes, Father." Two small voices echoed along the stone landing.

"This, and all our secrets, define us. They make us who we are. They are why we are important. Do you understand?"

"Yes, Father." It was the only acceptable answer. What matter that we were too young to really grasp all the levels of significance without them being spelled out to us?

Satisfied with our meek compliance, he turned to the door. We didn't see the magick he performed to open the door. We weren't supposed to see. We weren't ready to know that. But I still felt that slight tingle in my own depths that told me a working had taken place.

The door clicked, as if some simple bolt had been turned or had fallen away of its own accord.

Father pushed the door open, and it creaked like something out of a nightmare, or a fairy tale. Like the scream of the undead.

Within, darkness. Utter darkness. A lack of any light but that which came through the open doorway. That is, until Father crossed the threshold. He stepped into the Chamber and, all around, there was now the full light of a summer's day.

The smell is what I remember the most. Staleness in the air. Like some musty cellar, some hidden corner of it, where no one ever ventured.

Father beckoned us to enter.

"Look at them," he commanded. "Study their faces. Tell me what you see."

"Brown hair," said my brother. Such an idiot. So eager to please. So desperate to be right, and to be first.

Father displayed uncharacteristic patience. "Go on."

I could see it. But duty demanded that I let my brother shine. It was his place, not mine.

I stared at each of them. Each familiar face in unfamiliar forms, in unfamiliar clothes. I would never know any of them beyond a name, a scattered biography. There really was no point of anything more.

I heard my brother gasp. He'd realized. "They are our cousins!"

"That's right. Well done. Each of these Sleepers is a cousin of ours, a cousin of the ages. They lie here as surety against our failure."

My brother gasped. I admit I was also surprised. Father never spoke in such terms. Failure was not to be sanctioned.

"Yes, our failure is inevitable. We have failed many times before, and we shall fail many times more. It is all we can do to delay our failures, to spread them out, so there is time."

He didn't need to explain what that meant.

"Think of these men every day," he said, because of course they were all male, even the baby. "Think of their sacrifice, for you, for us, for everyone. Would either of you be man enough to make it, I wonder?"

The minutes between my brother and I had made all the difference in the world. I was spare. I was extraneous. I lived and breathed only by virtue of my obedience.

I looked at those somnolent faces, so clearly related to my own, to my brother's, to my father's.

I understood perfectly.

If I did not comply, obey, and remain imprisoned by duty, this would be my destiny.

Continue reading with Part 4 - The Follies of Dragons.