Welcome to Quraite
This chapter pulls a nasty trick on you. It starts with Zvain, not Pavek, and it’s one of the most disturbing scenes in the book so far.
Zvain’s Nightmare
Zvain wakes up in a plush chamber with a pale, half-elven man who talks like a gracious host. Silk voice, colorless cushions, honeyed fruit on a tray. Everything screams “trap” and Zvain knows it. He’s a street kid. He refuses to eat because in Urik, accepting food from the wrong person can cost you your freedom.
But this guy isn’t a slaver. He’s a mind-bender. The fruit has spices that blur Zvain’s thoughts, and the half-elf pulls him into his own memories. Inside this mental trap, Zvain watches a fake version of Pavek get beaten by the Laq-sellers. Then the mind-bender peels away Pavek’s face to reveal a gold-etched black mask.
Elabon Escrissar. The High Bureau interrogator. King Hamanu’s favorite monster.
Escrissar manipulates Zvain perfectly. He twists Pavek into something beastly, whispers that Pavek abandoned him, then offers two things: vengeance and magic. Zvain accepts both.
In the theater of his own mind, Zvain uses real magic. He speaks words that summon dust and ash and watches Pavek’s body transform into a writhing slug-thing covered in tiny screaming mouths. Genuinely grotesque writing from Abbey.
But here’s the gut punch. The walls behind Escrissar are bare afterward. The vines and flowers are gone. Ash covers the carpet. Zvain didn’t just imagine the magic. He drew real power, and it consumed real life from the world around him. He became a defiler with one thoughtless act.
“Zvain’s one of us, now.”
A child turned into a weapon through manipulation and trauma. Abbey doesn’t flinch from it.
Pavek Finds the Grove
The shift to Pavek’s story is almost jarring. He spots the green-crowned grove on the horizon and runs himself to exhaustion before realizing it’s farther than it looks. Classic. He waits for Telhami’s cool wind and follows it obediently this time.
When he steps onto soft green grass, the grove is alive with the sound of water dripping through trees. He’s never seen anything like it. He stumbles around staring at the canopy like a tourist.
Telhami waits by a spring-fed stream, veil off, looking younger than he expected. She immediately starts messing with him. Power drips from the trees here, she says. But can he catch it? Can he bend it with his will? She can’t teach him that. She tells him to make something happen. Light, water, a bird. The invocations are the same for druids and templars. So do it.
The Breakthrough
Pavek tries. He grunts, strains every muscle. He puts out enough effort to wake Quraite’s guardian spirit. But the guardian isn’t impressed. And Telhami reveals something terrifying in her thoughts: if a stranger rouses the guardian and fails to shape its will, the ground opens and swallows them. Those bones Pavek found under the trees? Other people who tried and failed.
Pavek gives up. He explodes at Telhami, calls her a liar and a cheat, and quits. She starts to leave, planning to let him spend the night alone. Then Pavek panics. Ruari’s spiteful words echo through the trees: “Feed his bones to the trees, Grandmother.”
Terror makes him desperate. He squeezes his eyes shut. No grunting. Just one long exhale that empties his mind.
Telhami sees an image forming: King Hamanu astride vanquished warriors, holding a severed head. Her blood freezes. If he summons the sorcerer-king through the guardian, they’re doomed.
But it’s a fountain. Water seeps from the warriors’ wounds, spouts from the severed head’s mouth, loops and spirals around Pavek. Telhami laughs with real relief. “A fountain! Water and stone together!”
Her words break his concentration. The fountain collapses. He’s drenched and dazed. She waits for the ground to open and claim him, because first invocations are the most dangerous. But it doesn’t. He blinks, raises his dripping hands, and says: “Water. My water.”
She presses her fingertips against his. An awesome accomplishment for a faithless man. And a chilling precedent.
The Chapter’s Real Move
What I love here is the parallel construction. Zvain accepts power through manipulation and becomes a defiler. Pavek earns power through desperation and connects to something alive. Abbey sets these two paths side by side without spelling out the comparison. Even the good places on Athas have teeth.
The Brazen Gambit by Lynn Abbey, Dark Sun: Chronicles of Athas, Book One. ISBN 1-56076-872-X.