Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 3: Nightmare and Awakening - Dark Sun Retelling

Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0

Chapter 3: Nightmare and Awakening

Chapter 3 opens inside Mahtra’s recurring nightmare, and it’s rough.

She’s back at the cavern on the night of the massacre. Flames and clubs and screams echoing off rock walls. She’s trying to find Father and Mika. She runs faster than she ever has, hope building, but hands rise from the darkness. They grab her wrists and ankles, pull her down. Faces hover over her muttering two words: “mistake” and “failure.”

She fights free and runs to the shore, but every path is blocked by the same five mutilated corpses from her past. They blame her, not Death, for their dying. Then a wild-eyed halfling charges past her and finds the path to Father and Mika’s hut. Her protective marks warm up. Her vision blurs. But she’s not the one being threatened. Her makers’ defenses only protect her, and Father and Mika are too far away.

The club falls. She throws herself at the halfling and is simply repelled. Death doesn’t want her. Death won’t threaten a made creature who was never born. Without a threat, her flesh won’t kindle.

She wakes up with sunlight on her face. The nightmare is over.

A Strange Bedroom

Mahtra finds herself in a bright, luxurious bedchamber she doesn’t recognize. Silk canopy. Linen-covered mattress. Her gown folded neatly on a chest, sandals cleaned and oiled. But her mask is gone, and that sends her into immediate panic.

She pieces together what she can remember. After escaping the cavern, she went to House Escrissar. Not to resume her old life, but because Lord Escrissar was her strongest patron. Father had told her to seek her powerful patrons. But the house was locked and boarded. Escrissar had been gone for a long time. Nobody came.

She sat on his doorsill for ten days. Ten days, living on bread crusts tossed by the nightwatch and water from a sealed cistern. Just waiting. Hoping he would come back. Hoping he could help her find Kakzim.

But Escrissar is dead. She just didn’t know it yet.

The August Emerita

The woman who brought Mahtra here is called the “august emerita.” She’s an ancient high templar, retired from the bureau and the court. Her residence has an atrium filled with trees, vines, flowers, caged birds, and a fountain with pebble-filled bowls. Some of those pebbles are cinnabar red. Mahtra immediately tries to grab one and gets bitten by a golden fish named Ver that guards the bottom bowl.

The emerita laughs without moving her lips. She can skim thoughts from minds, just like Father could. She reads Mahtra’s name without being told. And she can suppress Mahtra’s protective powers, something nobody has ever done before.

“I’m long past the days when helplessness excited me,” the old woman says. Chilling words, considering her background.

Because the august emerita, whose name we learn is Xerake, was an interrogator. A deadheart. A necromancer. The same kind of high templar as Elabon Escrissar himself. The black wax seal, the skull-topped rod, the power to read minds. She’s one of the Lion’s cubs.

Mahtra tells her everything. The cabra fruit, the cinnabar beads, Henthoren’s strange warning at the fountain plaza, finding the bodies, Father’s last words and his final image of Kakzim’s face.

Xerake is upset, but not surprised. She knew Escrissar. She knew about Kakzim. But she’s retired. She doesn’t go to the bureau or the court anymore. She says the wheel of fortune should have turned differently. Mahtra should have been underground when it happened. There would have been no tale to tell or no one to tell it.

“This is more than I can know,” Xerake says. “Elabon’s mad slave and Urik’s reservoir.”

To the Palace

Xerake writes a message on parchment, seals it with black wax and a skull stamp. She sends Mahtra to Hamanu’s palace with two slaves as escorts, with strict instructions: show the message to anyone who challenges you, but don’t give it up. Don’t let Mahtra out of your sight until you reach the golden doors.

The slaves are protected by the scars on their cheeks that mark them as an interrogator’s property. Nobody tampers with an interrogator’s slaves, because everyone knows what an interrogator can do.

They pass through layer after layer of security. War bureau sergeants. Civil bureau instigators. Templars with gold and copper threads in their sleeves. High templars with masks and colored robes. Five checkpoints until they finally reach a pair of golden doors. One of the masked templars opens the door, and Mahtra is left alone.

The Young Man

Inside is an austere chamber with a black marble bench and a great black boulder with water flowing over it from no visible source. Mahtra sits against the far wall, far from the rock but with a clear view of the doors.

Then a young man appears. He didn’t come through the doors. He’s just there. Lithe, radiant, with flawless cheeks and wearing little more than his hair and a length of bleached linen. Mahtra takes him for an eleganta, like herself.

But he’s not.

In the space of a heartbeat, Mahtra decides he’s made, not born. And that he’s what the makers meant when they called her a mistake. He’s the perfect version of what she was supposed to be.

She bargains with him: she’ll tell him what she plans to tell Hamanu, if he tells her about the makers. He agrees, asking pointed questions about Henthoren, Gomer, and the reservoir. He tells her the reservoir is Urik’s most precious treasure. “All Hamanu’s might and power would blow away with the sand if anything fouled that water-hoard.”

When she says she wants to kill Kakzim, he arches an eyebrow and tells her “Hamanu’s infinitesimal mercy takes many forms.”

Then she asks for his side of the bargain. What he tells her changes everything she understands about herself: the makers are very old. They were old when the Dragon was born. They make changes, not life. “Their mistakes cannot be undone.” But he says there are masks that cannot be seen. A glamour that would let her speak clearly. Hamanu could grant her that.

Then he vanishes. Wind from where he stood, then wind against her back from the golden doors.

I love this scene. If you know Dark Sun lore, the identity of this young man is strongly implied. The way he moves, the way he knows things, the amber eyes. It’s a beautiful piece of misdirection that pays off moments later.

The Lion-King

Hamanu enters with an army of foot-stamping, spear-pounding templars. “The Lion-King bestrides the world. Bow down! Bow down!” Mahtra presses her forehead to the floor.

He reads Xerake’s message. He acknowledges Mahtra as “made of the Pristine Tower.” His mercy flows. She may ask for anything.

She looks up and sees three things. First: he’s taller than the tallest elf and as strong as a mul. Second: his face is less a lion’s and more a man’s than his portraits suggest. Third, and this makes her gasp: a pair of dark amber eyes beneath amusement-arched eyebrows.

The young man was Hamanu. Or at least Hamanu was the young man. He showed her his true self before showing her the mask of kingship.

He brings his hands together over her head. She hears a sound like an egg cracking. Magic softer than her shawl spreads over her. When she speaks, the sounds are clear and pleasant. An everlasting glamour. A mask that cannot be seen.

And then the assignment: “As you brought me a message from Xerake, you’ll take another across the sand and salt for me. There is a man there, an ugly, human man, a high templar who owes me service. You will give him my message, and together you shall have your vengeance on Kakzim.”

My Take

This chapter is essentially Mahtra’s origin story compressed into a single day. She goes from sitting helpless on a dead man’s doorstep to standing before the most powerful being on Athas and receiving both a gift and a purpose.

The encounter with Hamanu disguised as a young man is brilliant. Abbey gives us a Hamanu who is curious, playful, and genuinely interested in this broken creature his former templar’s slave helped create. He could have just read Xerake’s message and issued orders. Instead, he met Mahtra personally, learned her story from her own mouth, and gave her the one thing she needed most: a voice.

There’s something bittersweet about it. The glamour lets Mahtra speak clearly, but it doesn’t fix what the makers broke. It’s a mask on top of a mask. She’s still malformed underneath. But it gives her agency. For the first time in seven years, she can talk to strangers without being misunderstood.

And now she has a name, a mission, and a king’s authority behind her. She’s going to find Pavek. Together they’ll hunt Kakzim.

Previous: Chapter 2 - Mahtra and the Night | Next: Chapter 4 - Pavek the Druid Templar