Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen Read Online Free PDF

we were outcasts? A castle doesn’t sound like the sort of home for an outcast.”
    Merlin sighed. “I agree, but the Pale Sybil didn’t see it that way and exercised her own right of choice. As I’ve said, she considered her rightful place to be among the Olympian immortals, and being a vainglorious woman with great powers was able to indulge in her own earthly deification. The only consolation is that apart from an old female hell hag of a retainer called Santa, she lived alone in the castle until Idris the Former came to sit at her feet.”
    “And Idris and your teacher, the Elder Pendragon, what status did they give themselves?”
    The boy’s dark eyes glowed with the wonder that he was part of such an august lineage.
    “Idris was the son of a Celtic thane and not given to any flights of great fancy. He accepted his gifts as tools for the betterment of mankind and traveled among them, mostly in ragged beggary, doing all he could for the poor and the downtrodden. He never settled anywhere until he began to pass on the enchantments in later age to the Elder Pendragon. Then he took up residence in what had been his father’s house in Caerleon and stayed there until his one hundred years were up. As for my mentor and teacher, the Elder Pendragon himself, he was born a royal king. His father was Uther Pendragon, a name that means ‘Head Dragon,’ and he was the spiritual leader and outright ruler of the Welsh tribes. Recognizing his gifts rather late, in mid-life, the Elder Pendragon did not take up his rightful place as king when his father died in battle, but instead took his wife and two small sons to Caerleon to sit at the feet of Idris. His reasoning was that he could accomplish far more for his people as a veneficus than he ever could leading them into one battle after another as the regional warlords of Prydein, Mercia, Deira, and Wessex fought for supremacy. Leaderless for twenty years while the Elder Pendragon learned and honed his venefical enchantments, the kingdom of Wales was soon torn apart by tyranny and the imperial evils of claimed succession that, paradoxically, the Elder Pendragon could never subdue with his learned enchantments. There are lessons to be learned there. In the end, the reclamation of the kingdom for the house of Pendragon passed through his two sons and fell to his grandson.”
    “Who was that?” said Twilight, sensing something special.
    The old wizard’s emerald eyes flashed a particular image of a tall, strong young man wearing a breastplate, a glinting raised sword in his left hand and a shield in his right.
    “Arthur Pendragon. He who became the mighty King Arthur. The head of the court of Camelot, rightful holder of Excalibur, the mighty sword of freedom, the leader of the Grail Knights, founder of the Round Table, husband of Guinevere and defender of the lands of the Celts, and one to whom I pledged my total support as counselor. Only to later realize that I had been well and truly mistaken.”
    The old wizard fell silent as his bright eyes filled with sadness and swam with distant memories. Then he spoke again in a quiet voice.
    “I did not learn well enough the lesson of the Elder Pendragon’s futile attempts to subdue internecine warfare through the use of enchantments. War is a floodplain that ebbs and flows with a constancy that will never allow it to dry up. The desire to conquer and dominate others is an infamy engraved upon the soul of all races. As fast as one quarrel is settled, another springs up and ten others are being plotted. Wars will always date history for humans, the great battles echoing down the bardic pages of time until mankind finally extinguishes himself. Peace is, and always will be, merely a name. That is why our powers are imperfect and incomplete because we cannot stop man’s will to dominate other men. Only the universal ownership of the absolute truth will ever stop warfare, and that, I fear, is an impossibility.”
    I feel your pain.