Chainfire: Chainfire Trilogy Part 1

Ann found herself wishing that it wasn't dark, and that they weren't in a graveyard. And that Jennsen didn't have such long legs.

It suddenly occurred to Ann why Nathan would need Tom to stand guard and "make sure no one was around that they didn't know about," as Jennsen had put it. Just like Jennsen, the people in Bandakar were pristinely ungifted. They were devoid of that infinitesimal spark of the Creator's gift carried by everyone else in the world. That essential connection made everyone else subject to the reality and nature of magic. But for these people magic did not exist.

The absence of such an inherent, elemental nucleus of the gift not only made the pristinely ungifted immune to magic, but since they could not interact with what to them did not exist, it also made them invisible to the power of the gift.

If even one parent possessed the pristinely ungifted trait, then it was always passed on to the offspring. These people had originally been banished to preserve the gift in mankind's nature. It had been a terrible solution, to be sure, but as a result the gift had survived in the human race. Had such a solution not been undertaken, magic would long ago have ceased to exist.

Because prophecy was magic, it too was blind to these people. No book of prophecy had ever had anything at all to say about the pristinely ungifted, or about the future of mankind and magic now that Richard had discovered these people and ended the banishment. What would happen now was completely unknown.

Ann supposed that Richard would have it no other way. He did not exactly enthusiastically embrace prophecy. Despite what prophecy had to say about him, Richard by and large discounted it. He believed in free will. He took a dim view of the notion that there were things about himself that were predestined.

In all things in life, and in magic especially, there had to be balance. In a way, Richard's acts of free will were the balance to prophecy. He was the center of a vortex of forces. With Richard, prophecy was attempting to predict the unpredictable. And yet, it had to.

Most troubling was that Richard's free will made him a wild card in prophecy, even those prophecies in which he was the subject. He was chaos among patterns, disorder among organization, and as capricious as lightning. And yet, he was guided by truth and driven by reason, not whim or chance, nor was he arbitrary. That he could be chaos among prophecy and at the same time be completely rational was an enigma to her.

Ann worried greatly about Richard because such contradictory aspects of the gifted were occasionally a prelude to delusional behavior. The last thing they would want was a leader who was delusional.

But all of that was academic. The central problem was that while there was still lime they had to find some way to make sure he took up the cause fated to him in the prophecies and to fulfill his destiny. If they failed, if he failed, then all was lost.

Verna's message sat like the shadow of death in the back of Ann's mind.

Having spotted their light, Tom appeared out of the darkness, sprinting Through the long grass to meet them. "There you are," he said to Ann. "Nathan will be happy that you're finally here. Come on and I'll show you the way."

By the brief glimpse she got in the weak yellow light from the lantern, Tom's face looked troubled.

The big D'Haran led them deeper into the graveyard, where in areas there were rows of gently mounded graves outlined in stones. These had in be newer, because most of what Ann could see was nothing but tall grass that over time covered over stones and the graves they marked. In one area there were a few small granite gravestones. They were so weathered it could only be that they were ancient. Some of the graves were marked with simple boards with names carved in them. Most such markers had long ago turned to dust, leaving much of the graveyard looking like nothing more than a grassy field.

"Do you know what the fat bugs are that are making all the noise?" Jennsen asked Tom.

"I'm not sure," Tom said. "I've never seen them before. They suddenly seem to be all over the place."

Ann smiled to herself. "They're cicadas."

Jennsen frowned back over her shoulder. "They're what?"

"Cicadas. You wouldn't know what they are. At the last molt you would have probably still been a toddler, too young to remember. The life cycle of these cicadas with the red eyes is seventeen years."

"Seventeen years!" Jennsen said in astonishment. "You mean they only come out every seventeen years?"

"Without fail. After the females mate with these noisy fellows, they will lay their eggs in twigs. When they hatch, the nymphs will drop from the trees and burrow into the ground, not to emerge for another seventeen years where their life as adults will be brief."