Sadavir rolled out of a deep sleep into a ready crouch in one fluid motion. He listened to the night, but everything was silent. He didn’t move, using the darkness as a hiding place. He had always felt very comfortable in the dark.

Still, he had no idea what he was listening for. Something had woken him up and he could sense, more than feel, the faint ripples of darkness on the surface of his Stone. His Stone only activated when he was in danger.

It could mean that he had found what he was looking for.

*******

The past five years had been a booming time for the people of Surac. It had been rough in the beginning. The Creators and Destroyers had been separated for longer than anyone could remember. The fear and prejudices of generations didn’t fade overnight. Still, it’s hard to argue with success, especially success on such an astonishing scale.

The combined powers of the Stones had brought both peoples an era of prosperity none of them could have imagined. The ability to shape the elements at will when a Creator and a Destroyer worked together had led to an abundance for anyone and everyone willing to step into this new paradigm.

There were limits to the power of the Stones. For instance, how well the power worked was incredibly dependent on the two people working together. Physical proximity, unity of purpose, and even personal connection between the two people all had drastic effects on how accurately and powerfully the Stones could be wielded. 

For people who had spent their entire lives hating and fearing each other, there were many obstacles to a system that demanded deep cooperation. Luckily, there were examples to guide them. Leading the efforts were Aric, Sadavir’s father, and Andre, the man who had taken Sadavir in when he had been banished to the land of the Destroyers five years earlier. The two men acted like long-lost brothers, working in unison from the beginning. Their dark blue Stones let them take their imaginings and turn them into solid metal. It wasn’t long before other people were bringing new ideas for them to try out.

Aric had pouted for all of two days when the Destroyers had surpassed all of his cleverness in inventing. Their natural ingenuity had proven priceless and new machines and structures had been popping up all over the land, built perfectly and in shockingly little time, thanks to the constructive power of the Stones.

Used to being the smartest in the village before the Destroyers came, Aric now found that he had been a big fish in a little pond. Even the Destroyer children had been able to understand and even suggest improvements for his most advanced designs.

Still, the feeling of disappointment passed as soon as the Destroyers started bringing out their own designs. His boyish enthusiasm, so contagious and endearing, especially on a man of his immense bulk, had trumped all else and he spent most of his days talking over new ideas with Andre. By necessity, Aric’s wife, Lauria, and Andre’s wife, Nadya, had formed their own partnership. They didn’t have the same color Stones, but they had their own form of power that usually accomplished more than the glowing light of the Stones: influence. The two women formed a bridge between the two peoples. Lauria was warm and caring, the type of person people hate to disappoint. Nadya was direct and forceful, the type of person people hate to anger.

Between the two of them, they managed to direct the efforts of their husbands towards useful and practical endeavors, and then work among the people to get them to adopt the new innovations.

If both gentle and direct methods failed, Lauria didn’t mind invoking her son’s name to nudge a holdout toward a more enlightened way of thinking. What Sadavir had done while bringing the people together had been nothing short of legendary. However, even the fantastical truth couldn’t compare to how the story grew in the years after. 

Oddly enough, it was the fighters and belligerents of both sides that tended to exaggerate Sadavir’s abilities with each new telling of the story. At the end of the day, they couldn’t deny that Sadavir had beaten them. And if given the choice, a proud man would much rather believe that it took someone legendary to beat them.

So while the original battle had been a team effort with Sadavir as the point of the spear, everyone now chose to remember it as Sadavir dominating all who opposed him.

The people now looked to him as a kind of figurehead leader. He didn’t really pass or enforce laws, but everyone knew in their hearts that if Sadavir were to command something, they would obey. It was an amalgam of fear, respect, and awe.

Luckily, Sadavir had little interest in ruling, besides occasionally breaking up the fights that popped up here and there. So Lauria occasionally borrowed her son’s implied authority to help ease the transition.

In the last year, a project had started that had seemed innocent at first, so Lauria and Nadya had decided to let the thing alone to succeed or wilt on its own momentum. Some nameless Destroyer in a nearby settlement had invented a simple modular scaffolding. The design had spread and most people used it to build bigger houses.

Then, Vova, Sadavir’s friend and music tutor, had suggested that the scaffolding could be used to scale the cliffs far to the north.

The cliffs had stood as an absolute barrier for all of their recorded history. Some monumental geologic force had sheared the land like a loaf of bread being torn in half, driving one land mass far above the other at a sharp angle.

If it had been softer stone, the cliffs would have degraded over time and maybe small pathways could have been discovered. As it was, the bedrock had been a granite that held its form remarkably well, so the towering cliffs remained impassable.

In this new age of power however, everything that had once been impossible was now being explored. Teams got together to build the structure. It was the largest single project the people had started on since the hated wall that had split their land for countless generations.

Skill and unity improved as two person teams worked to shape metal and rock. Strong iron molded into place by those with dark blue Stones. Then the rock itself was formed over the metal under the pale blue light that exerted power over the rock.

Day after day the scaffolding grew up the side of the cliff like iron ivy. Construction slowed toward the end, as many of the teams quit, being too afraid of working on the heights. The workers had grown up on plains on the Creators’ side of the wall and forest and hills on the Destroyers’ side. Even the trees weren’t especially tall. So no one had ever been this high off the ground before.

It was deeply unnerving.

Still, a few dauntless souls persevered until finally steel cleared stone and there was a passage that led to this highest land of their small continent.

Oddly, it had taken longer to gather explorers for the new land together than it had to build the scaffolding itself. The daily demands in their own places hadn’t slowed, and many, especially among the Creators, did not understand why they should be sending good men off into the unknown to explore lands that hadn’t ever mattered to them.

Still, Vova had taken ownership of the project and kept pressing until a couple teams had formed. Most of them had been Destroyers, but there were a few of the braver Creators who went along, mostly young men looking to prove themselves.

It was a common impulse among the young men now. Most Creators had grown up only doing light farm work and having plenty to eat. Now that the Destroyers roamed freely among them, many of the young Creator women took more than a second look at the tanned, toned, and rugged Destroyers.

Consequently, the Creator boys had taken a greater interest in the outdoors, trying more things and taking greater risks to stand out from the crowd.

So two exploring parties had climbed the scaffolding, parted ways at the top, and took off in opposing directions, agreeing to come back and report at the end of the week.

They were now three days late.