HOW ODD. GIVING UP could be the right thing to do? How could a lifelong limp leaf like her discover now, of all the moments to pick, how challenging it could be to relinquish what control she unknowingly clung to? She no longer knew this Allory.
Inhale. Outbreath. Earthquake!
Released, she popped up into the air with a sense of unbearable lightness. The weight had vanished as if it had never been. Illogical yet authentic – leaving one Allory wholly befuddled as her instinctual wingbeat stuttered, bringing her over to the Elven Princess in an arc that contained a surprised, weightless-seeming bounce. Ash stood upon Sabline’s shoulders as if flying above an instantaneous chasm of unknowable dimensions was as natural as strolling along a bough of a morn. Elven balance. Nothing quite like it beneath Middlesun.
Fifty people yelled at Allory to get back onto solid ground. This instant.
Oh. Aye. Should it strike again, she did not want to plunge into the earth’s heaving bowels. The ground quivered with aftershocks, groaning at a pitch so deep that the sound defied description.
Had she hurt Spheris itself?
No! How easily the healer became a destroyer.
Darting toward the nearest edge of the rift, Allory’s gut spasmed in horror as a herd of smaller herbivores raced toward the chasm’s edge at an angle. Small still meant over forty feet tall at the shoulder, animals with blocky, green-tinged bodies balanced by long, slender necks presumably useful for reaching foliage at a height. The foremost animals baulked before the yawning gap but the weight of those following shovelled dozens over the edge before the herd managed to change direction. They charged away along the rim as if guided by invisible cords.
Allory braced herself for a horrific backlash. Nothing.
Sabline and Yaarah alighted beside her, along with the Chameleon Fae force. The Elf leaped lightly to the ground, but was beaten by Harzune, who immediately took her hand in his. Allory stifled an urge to giggle. What did a girl do when an earnest hero took her hand hostage? Blush? Beam inanely? Sing praises to the heavens?
He inquired, “Art thou injured, alarmed or beset by divers evil forces within or without, Allory Fae?”
Elven eye roll.
“Er … not injured, no,” she smiled uncertainly. “I am indeed alarmed, Harzune, thank you for asking, and as for the last, I truly have no idea. We should –” she tried another smile and found it even more dysfunctional than the last “– well, um …”
“Avoid setting off any further ahrrr-thquakes?” Yaarah finished off for her, ever so kindly. Trying for a jest, her sweet fire-breathing friend.
Allory just hung her antennae.
Hard not to imagine the entire world had just gone utterly, suggid-juice crazy and that it might, somehow, be her fault.
How could she meet her companions’ pitying, wondering gazes? Whatever this was, it terrified the living sap out of her veins. She had to clasp her hands together to stop them from shaking right off her wrists, but that only transferred the helpless quivering to her wings. Why should the wrongness in her world choose to focus on her? It felt so wrong, so distressing, so perverse! She had not even found Annioli Fae to create this mayhem-generating magical artefact that she wore about her neck. Spheris was backwards. Time itself must be. All the inner yelling about how this could not be possible simply had to be discarded.
It was. It existed. It had all too real, terrible consequences for her friends and companions, never mind the greater Spheris out there.
Deal with it, wreck-a-realm runt!
Curl my antennae, Middlesun, but why choose the eleven-and-a-quarter inch runt to pick on?
Was she being picked on?
By Middlesun?
Examining her toes for defects, Allory breathed, “Aye.”
“Better still, go investigate what’s really going on beyond the ridge?” Sabline added, so close by that the Fae shrank away from her heated breath.
“Sure, Sabline.”
“I’m with blacker-than-black,” Ash agreed grimly. “Whatever’s sending that smoke skyward can’t be good news. I want to know what we’re facing before it finds us.”
Allory nodded as meekly as a petal unfurling of a dew-spangled morn. “Maybe I should fly on my own?”
Fairly much everyone cleared their lungs at her expense. Again.
With the littlest one roundly castigated for nothing that was her actual fault – hopefully not – they set out for the next rise. She flitted above Yaarah, who glide-loped along, just skimming over the waving grasses. Twice on the way, she had to yell a sudden warning as the unseen power did its best to smash her through solid rock once more. Someone would be surprised one day to find two pairs of Fae-sized footprints thrust four inches deep into solid rock. How was she not flatter than a leaf crushed by a boulder? Brittle bones? Not a chance beneath Centresky.
Tougher than granite. Grrr. Eleven inches of pure sparkly savagery!
Convinced she should have been celebrating her newfound toughness, Allory instead struggled against rampant nausea. The knowledge that something dreadful was afoot in the world, something adding not fractionally to the soul locket but in great, world-trembling wallops, lay at the root of her greatest fears. What could this portend? Could the ancient vampiari spirits be loose in the world once more, feeding insatiably? Could this be the Wraith’s master plan?
All she knew was the reality of escalating weight in the existential realm, of a burden greater than any mortal soul could bear. Did Sabline know she had just saved this Scintillant’s life?
Warrior clarity. Invaluable and humbling. If only the eyes of her being could learn to look upon life unencumbered, with the clearness of a cloudless sky.
Allory reacted belatedly to the warriors calling a halt at the crest of a hill steeper than any before. The approach had been typically gradual for this grassland, but beyond the terrain sheared away in a dizzying slope, a grass precipice that swooped down to a bleak rust-red plain far, far below.
To a plain covered in a seething mass of creatures fighting both on land and in the sky.
So many, she could only make out knots of colour – green, yellow and blue-clad Giants besieged on all sides, wedges of heavy, grey reptilian bodies smashing into the fray, and above … Dragons.
Dragons! Oh my palpitating sap …
More Dragons than she had ever seen in her life. Great, spiky crimson Dragons four to five times Yaarah’s size that, from the visibly glowing furnaces in their throats, gushed flame out of their maws as if they meant to set the entire world alight. Whole battalions of sleek black Fire Raptors, stabbing and slashing in rabid fury. Enormous green Land Dragons that tore at the earth with their mighty paws before sending dirt and rock whirlwinds crashing into their enemies. Sneaking, slinking yellow Dragons, much smaller than the others, which attacked in fluid packs often numbering hundreds at a time.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.
Staggering carnage.
Everywhere she looked, the bodies piled up – over a range of miles. Not merely hundreds. This was a vista of innumerable deaths. Halted by a golden paw, Allory staggered to her knees, staring out over the plain in utter incomprehension. Every Giant in the canyonlands must be here, being mobbed. Fighting for their lives. Dying. Could this be what had overloaded the soul locket?
Was the connection so direct?
“We … we have to stop them,” she croaked.
“Mrrr-frrr, how?” Yaarah’s eyes darkened with distress. “We are too few.”
“We’d be torn to pieces out there,” Ash added softly. “I understand your pain, Allory, but we must wait or die like them.”
How could this be? How could anything in the world be so awful? This had to be the Wraith’s work. Only that creature could cause corruption, distortion and devastation on such a scale. After watching helplessly as the group of Giants nearest to their position finally fell, stung into submission by multiple Fire Raptor attacks and then executed by Dragons slitting their great necks, she buried her face against the Elven Princess’ shoulder and wept.
What use, sobbing her tiny heart out? Allory did it anyway.
Too much to bear.
She feared to close her eyes but knew the darkness must steal her away. If she was ever to understand this phenomenon, the boneyard was the place to start asking her questions.
This time, she would enter of her own will.
* * * *
A Faeling stood upon obsidian rock, careless of an elemental chill which, in keeping with the eternal purpose of this place, never changed. With her child’s eyes she gazed first at the horizons, seeing no hint of any stars or clue as to where this place might be. Then, with the utmost reluctance, she dropped her gaze to the bowl.
There they were. Immense bones. White with newness.
No shadows?
She searched carefully with her eyes alone, fearful to move a muscle, but the seven terrible spirits were nowhere to be seen. The eerie wind that always stirred less of the air and more of her own soul, moaned over desolation. It must be that the Ascended Septuani could escape the boneyard. Maybe they left to feed and returned after? Might their immortal lives even be bound to this place? Or did she misunderstand something fundamental about the nature of these visions?
Giant bones could be clearly identified by their size and Human-like skeletal structures, the massively thick femurs, ribcages that could have housed entire Faerie colonies and vast eye-sockets that stared at nothingness. Less obviously identifiable were the mountainous heaps of other new skeletons – perhaps Dragons or the teeming reptiles, she supposed? These were not nearly so complete. Some appeared to be blackened by a different process, perhaps by fire or acid, and they stood in jumbled piles whereas the Giant skeletons were whole – perhaps only to start with, she realised. The shadows would return to feed more. Their hunger could never be quenched.
How had she never noticed all the different types of bones? Allory’s gaze roamed with understanding that no longer belonged to an innocent Faeling. Many-fanged Dragon jawbones lay atop piles of tiny, multicoloured yet faded fragments that could only belong to Faerie – hundreds of thousands, if not millions in number. Her grieving gaze picked out the partial skeletons of creatures Ashueli’s size, perhaps those slender ones for Elves and more thickset ones belonging to Humans; or, one must imagine, any of the myriad Human-like species of Spheris. Other types she barely recognised at all, honeycomb bones, lattices, wing structures alien to her experience and phalanges of all sizes that might belong to water dwellers, she imagined.
So many, one could spend many lifetimes counting them and never be done. Billions of bones.
Words stole into her consciousness.
Softly
Wail the wounded
Souls never shriven
Ensnared in
Eternity
She frowned, understanding only in part. Somehow, it must be that souls became trapped here in the boneyard, in this place of never-sleeping, never able to enter their final rest. Perhaps the vampiari bound them here with bonds of immortal power, never to die in the full sense of death? Yet why should they be shriven? Absolved or acquitted of what? Who would presume to judge the dead? Mystery indeed.
The Faeling’s eyes widened as a new, complete Giant skeleton began to coalesce before her anguished gaze, as if animate mist drew new patterns of being upon reality or transferred the bones from one reality to another.
She hated this place.
Renewed weight tore her away with a soundless gasp, but not to where she expected.
* * * *
Fifty-two beasts strong, the mighty flight of green, crimson and black Dragons roared in over jagged spears of obsidian stone that lay diagonally as if a greater shard once had been shattered and then affixed in place to create a rampart impassable even to Giants. Flaring their forty- to seventy-foot wings, they sideslipped deftly through chill, moaning winds that swirled about the obsidian shards and landed upon the edge of a natural, shallow bowl of the same shiny black stone, a mile or more wide.
Back-winging sharply to cushion his landing, the largest onyx male snarled, “What is this abominable location? Its foul miasma offends my nostrils.”
The other Dragons snarled in agreement.
One, a wily four-winged green, hissed, “An ancient boneyard this is, o Frakkan, great Talon of the Tribe.”
Frakkan cursed hideously.
When four or five deep, belligerent voices demanded explanation, the green Dragon said, “A place of abominations it is reputed to be, where Anjubar Greater Fae once made child sacrifices to the Shyraiama Dragons of Middlesun and drank their blood. That was over 1,000 years ago and the Anjubar are now considered extinct. After that, it became a haunt of vagabonds and Human trash, before Wranthon the Necromancer moved in here and helped himself to the bodies and bones of those Human scum in order to fuel a fresh series of atrocities – dark experiments relying on the twisting of vampiaric magic, and the like.” The Dragons spat as one; some of their spittle burned and bubbled like acid. “It is he who swore to fill this boneyard with the remains of his enemies, and he who was said to have lived over 500 years. All that is long in the past.”
“So, this is a message?” Frakkan growled.
“An unequivocal statement,” agreed Lumbarax, a larger green and the leader of their tribe. “I fear no necromantic magic –”
“Yet the Anjubar, who fancied themselves masters of death, developed a forbidden method of parasitizing Fae magic called askûo-ortimë extraction,” the smaller green put in dogmatically. “The methodology was called the necromancer’s fantasy, for all that it promised –”
GNARR!! The larger green rounded upon him with a violent snarl, sinking his fangs into the other’s shoulder. They clashed briefly before Frakkan roared:
“Enough! I am here for business, and business only.”
“And business you shall have.”
The ravaged whisper silenced every last Dragon. The entity had come.
Darkness surged from amongst the obsidian spars, moving more like mercury flowing up and down surfaces with equal facility. The already overcast day dimmed as it gathered form and solidity, coalescing into a form far larger than any it had assumed before – perhaps betraying the intent to intimidate the Dragons, for their immediate reaction was to draw themselves up, flaring their wings and champing their jaws. Bravado.
Indeed, the Wraith knew this for it waited with ageless patience before grating, “I need a Dragon army to raze villages, cities and kingdoms, to fill this boneyard for me.”
The boneyard! The watcher’s gaze jerked frantically from side to side, up and down. This was it? Empty?
“In return for your allegiance and a few Dragon eggs for my use – no more than a few dozen – I promise to grant you the first spoils of everything you seize or destroy, and territories and fiefdoms and vassalages beyond your wildest dreams. What say you to this proposal?”
Frakkan said smoothly, “The Axis cities are tall of battlement and heavily armed against Dragon attack. Do you propose to expend our blood upon the breaking of these mighty citadels?”
The Wraith chuckled indulgently. “No, my friend. My gift to you will be new armour. Impregnable Dragon armour.”
As one beast, the fifty-two growled with bestial hunger.
“Aye. Ancient knowledge and ways I will share with you. You will become fortresses on wings, giants of Dragons as in the days of yore, when your kind were rightly feared across the length and breadth of Spheris. You will ravage the lands unchecked and plunder at will.” Over their rising chorus of snarls, the entity boomed, “With the power of your minds, you shall compel these weak Humans into your service and the fear of Dragons shall come upon them. You shall have minions!”
“MINIONS!” roared the Dragons, leaking fire around their fangs.
“Uncountable minions!”
“GRRRRARRRGGGHH!!” the audience thundered with unholy wrath and bloodlust.
The Wraith might have smiled, but it was impossible to tell. “Now,” hissed the entity, “turn the horrific fires of your Dragon bellies upon the treacherous Elves of Ahm-Shira, and swear allegiance to me, your new master!”
“MASTER!” they snarled. “You are our master! We swear!”
“Glory, riches and power!”
“GLORY, RICHES AND POWER!”
As the echoes of their thundering faded, the Dragons launched into the air with massive wingbeats, stirring the dust of the ancient boneyard. The darkness did not budge, but she knew the entity watched them leave with a cold, undying sense of satisfaction.
After a long pause, it rasped horribly, “And if indeed you read your histories, friends, you would know that an oath sworn in this boneyard is an oath bound beyond death. Now, you will be mine indeed.”
That was the moment she realised what the Wraith had accomplished. So subtle, a twisting of their inner fires to suit its malign purposes.
This entity was not solely about brute force.