Beak

a Mage in the Bonehunters

Beak's Candles

.....as he set ablaze every candle within him to make the world bright and to save all his friends.  And before long he no longer sensed anyone else, barring the faint smudges they had become.  The captain, the Fist, all the soldiers who were his friends, he let his light unfold to embrace them all, to keep them safe from that frightening, dark magic so eager to rush down upon them.

 It had grown too powerful for those six mages to contain.  They had created something that would now destroy them, but Beak would not let it hurt his friends.  And so he made his light burn yet brighter.  He made of it a solid thing.  Would it be enough?  He did not know, but it had to be, for without friends there was nothing, no one.

Brighter, hotter, so hot the wax of the candles burst into clouds of droplets, flaring bright as the sun, one after another.  And, when every colored candle was lit, why, there was white.

And yet more, for as each joined the torrent emanating from him, he felt in himself a cleansing, a scouring away, what priests called purification only they really knew nothing about purification because it had nothing to with offerings of blood or coin and nothing to do with starving yourself and whipping your own back or endlessly chanting until the brain goes numb.  Nothing like any of that.  Purification, Beak now understood, was final. (RG)

Beak : “No.  Forkrul Assail and Tiste Liosan.  They fought on the ruins.  During what they called the Just Wars.  Here, it was only a skirmish, but nobody survived.  They killed each other, and the last warrior standing had a hole in her throat and she bled out right where the Fist is standing.  She was Forkrul Assail, and her last thought was about how victory proved they were right and the enemy was wrong.  Then she died.”

“It’s the only dry land anywhere in sight,”  Fist Keneb said.  “Can any mage here banish the ghosts?  No?  Hood’s breath.  Beak, what are they capable of doing to us anyway?”

“They’ll eat into our brains and make us think terrible things, so that we all end up killing each other.  That’s the thing with the Just Wars -- they never end and never will because Justice is a weak god with too many names.  The Liosan called it Serkanos and the Assail called it Rynthan.  Anyway, no matter what language it spoke, its followers could not understand it.  A mystery language, which is why it has no power because all its followers believe the wrong things -- things they just make up and nobody can agree and that’s why the war never ends.” (RG)