Cinnabar Shadows Chapter 4: Pavek the Druid Templar - Dark Sun Retelling
Book: Cinnabar Shadows by Lynn Abbey | Series: Dark Sun - Chronicles of Athas, Book 4 | ISBN: 0-7869-0181-0
Chapter 4: Pavek the Druid Templar
After three chapters of scheming halflings, massacred cavern-folk, and a mysterious New Race woman meeting the Lion-King, we finally meet our main character. And he’s… weeding.
Pavek is on his knees in the dirt at the edge of a druid’s grove, planting scraggly weeds in rows that aren’t quite straight. He shed his yellow templar robe over a year ago. He doesn’t count time in Urik’s weeks or administrative quinths anymore. He measures it by how long plants take to grow and die.
Welcome to Quraite.
The Man
Pavek is a former low-ranking civil bureau templar. Street-scum, as the book keeps reminding us. He grew up in a templar orphanage where a mul taskmaster taught him the five templar weapons. He spent his off-duty hours in archives, hunting for lore-scrolls about magic. Not the borrowed magic Hamanu grants his templars, but real magic. Something of his own.
When fate brought him to Quraite, he seized the chance to learn druidry. Now he tends Telhami’s grove, the community’s largest, oldest, and most unusual grove. Telhami, the former high druid, died during a battle with Elabon Escrissar and left the grove to Pavek instead of to Akashia, who everyone expected to inherit it.
The grove is wild. It’s larger on the inside than the outside. The air feels different under the oldest trees. There are clouds visible only through its branches. Gentle rains fall here and nowhere else. And there’s a rainbow-shrouded waterfall, a black-rock chasm, bogs full of creatures that consider the under-talented druid “Just-Another Meal.”
Telhami is still around as a shimmering green spirit, bound to the grove’s magic. She’s both his mentor and his tormentor. She calls him “Just-Plain Pavek” and nags him about his work. But at the end of each day, she teaches him druid magic. He can call water from the ground. He can summon lesser creatures. Soon, she promises, they’ll work with fire.
The Dustweed
Out of hundreds, maybe thousands of weeds Pavek has planted along the grove’s edge, exactly one has survived. A hairy-leafed dustweed that’s waist-high and in full, foul-smelling bloom. It makes his eyes and nose water. He cherishes it like a firstborn child.
This detail tells you everything about Pavek. He’s doing thankless, backbreaking work with almost nothing to show for it, and he’s proud of a single ugly plant that nobody else would want. That’s the kind of hero he is. Not flashy. Not powerful. Just stubborn enough to keep going.
He’s so careful with it that he hand-pollinates the flowers with his little finger. Telhami yells at him to leave that for the bugs.
Akashia
The relationship between Pavek and Akashia is the quiet heartbreak running through this chapter. She was supposed to be high druid. She’s the one who grew up here, who was raised by Telhami, who knows more about druidry than Pavek ever will.
After the battle with Escrissar, when Telhami was dying, Akashia turned to Pavek for comfort. He opened his heart to her completely. Then Telhami gave the grove to Pavek, and Akashia turned away from him. She stopped speaking to him privately. She wouldn’t meet his eyes. If he approached, she retreated.
Pavek doesn’t understand what he did wrong. He admits it’s probably his own lack of understanding. “Street-scum templars knew as much about solace as they knew about weeds.”
There’s a painful story he remembers. He found a rainbow waterfall deep in the grove. Three days lost, but the beauty was incredible. He took Akashia’s hand, wanting to show her the way. Her response: “Sit under your waterfall and never come back, if you think there’s nothing more important to be done. But don’t drag me after you. I don’t care.” And then she seared the landmarks from his memory so he could never find it again.
He’d give up Telhami’s grove in a heartbeat if Kashi would invite him to hers.
Ruari and Zvain
Ruari and Zvain show up at the pool, Ruari having goaded Zvain into a race the boy could never win. Ruari is a half-elf who’s grown into his looks: copper hair, copper skin, every woman in Quraite swooning at his feet. Pavek and Zvain are both typical Urik stock: solid, swarthy, good for moving rocks, not hearts.
They horse around in the pool. Pavek can’t swim and is terrified of deep water. They dunk him anyway. He trusts them not to drown him, which is the first time in his life he’s trusted anyone with his life.
But there’s darkness underneath the fun. Zvain has no place in Quraite. He was Escrissar’s pawn during the battle. Telhami imprisoned him in the grove as punishment. The guardian’s anger nearly destroyed him. The farmers make warding signs when his shadow falls on them. Akashia wants him exiled to die on the salt flats.
Zvain stays because Pavek says so. He survives on charity and sufferance. When a breeze ripples across his shoulders, the boy cringes, still afraid of the grove’s power even after all this time.
Pavek sees Zvain shrink into himself and thinks about the one good reason to accept Hamanu’s offer of high templar power: getting the boy out of this misery.
The Message
After the pool, Ruari sheepishly admits that Akashia sent him with a message. Hours ago. There’s someone on the Sun’s Fist, the brutal salt flats east of Quraite, heading straight for them like an arrow. A woman. And the only thought in her head is: “Find Pavek, high templar of Urik.”
Not the erstwhile templar. Not the just-plain civil bureau templar. High templar. The title Hamanu forced on him.
Pavek is speechless. Akashia is furious. She throws the title at him like a weapon. He can’t explain who’s coming because he doesn’t know. But he knows Hamanu is behind it, because nobody else would send a lone woman across the salt flats aimed directly at a hidden druid community.
Telhami, the old spirit, has been suspiciously quiet. She knows something. She’s not worried. But she’s not sharing.
My Take
This chapter is pure character work. No action, no violence. Just a man who doesn’t belong anywhere trying to build a life in the cracks between the worlds he’s known.
Abbey makes Pavek deeply relatable. He’s ugly. He knows he’s ugly. He’s got a scar that makes his smile a lopsided sneer. He used to put that to good use intimidating people in a yellow robe, but here among the gentle folk of Quraite, he’s just embarrassed. He’s in love with a woman who won’t speak to him. He’s raising two kids who aren’t his, poorly. His greatest accomplishment in a year of druidry is one surviving weed.
And yet he keeps going. He plants more weeds. He clears blocked streams. He drills the villagers in martial skills every four days. He sits on his rock in the shallow water and lets the boys dunk him because that’s what family does.
The tension at the end is masterful. We know from chapters 1 through 3 who’s coming and why. But Pavek doesn’t. He just knows his past is about to catch up with him, and there’s nowhere left to run.
Previous: Chapter 3 - Nightmare and Awakening | Next: Chapter 5 - Visitor from Urik