ALLORY ACCEPTED ASHUELI’S HELPING hand with a weary chuckle. “Alright. Only three feet deep this time?”
“I only just escaped alive,” the Elf chirped.
“I learned something, I think,” the Scintillant said soberly. “When the Giants perish, that’s what adds the weight to my soul locket. It’s linked. Something about the wrongness here, the way this is happening –” She paused, touching her temples. “Oh no.”
Yaarah said, “What is –”
The soundless perturbation struck her like a landslide. Dimly seen through the blinding pain, Allory’s entire world shook. By the wavering of her companions’ shadows and their shocked gasps as everyone tottered and staggered, she realised that there must have been another attack on Middlesun. So sustained and violent was the cataclysmic strike on this occasion, their shadows swung back and forth with a pendulum-like motion. The sunlight flickered several times in addition, causing her to gaze upward in search of a cloud or a passing flying creature. Sunspots danced in front of her eyes, strangely laced by the fibrous intrusions she had begun to notice before, that seven thousandth day when Yaarah had showed her the Shyraiama Dragons.
She rubbed her temples. “Ouch …”
Bad one. One stonking migraine throbbed between her ears, but she had made it through somehow and learned something valuable. Was this an assault not on Middlesun but on the Shyraiama Dragons? Her brain ached its way through the implications. Could the Dragons be the sun’s protectors, its shield against the foe? Was the point to burn up the Dragons – surely, they could not survive flying into Middlesun itself? If Middlesun was left exposed then all Spheris must inevitably burn …
Harzune called, “They’ve stopped. The fighting has stopped.”
“Has it?” Sabline hissed.
“They’re disengaging, anyways,” the Elf noted calmly. “The Dragons are collecting their fallen, look, and flying back toward the mountains. These must be the Dragon forces allied with the Axis of Seven. I wonder if they came from beyond the Gate? Yet why would they have Fire Raptors in their ranks?”
“The egg stealers, hrrr-mrrr?” Sabline reminded her.
“Darker than night?”
“Gnarr! I had nothing to do with it, Princess!”
Ash nodded bleakly. “I know. I must be picking up the thinking out loud habit from our Allory Fae.”
“Excuse me!”
“Babbles under stress,” the Princess noted smugly.
Folding her arms across her chest, Allory retorted, “Fancy having those bushy eyebrows plucked, lady?”
Her jest rang hollow, the attempt at mirth no relief. She wanted nothing more than to escape this horror, yet she knew she had been hiding, ducking and making excuses all her life. What reprieve had that ever given her? No, this was reality. Cold, callous reality.
She had to face it.
After a brief discussion, the group waited under cover just below the hill’s brow until it became clear that normal service was restored in the animal kingdom. All across the ravaged plain, this charnel house of the dead and the dying where countless columns of black smoke rose from mounds of smouldering bodies to assault the heavens like a cry of grimy outrage, the surviving creatures shook themselves as if coming to their senses at last. The reptilian flocks and herds picked themselves up and walked, limped or flew away on their usual migration paths. The Dragons retreated en masse, taking all of their dead and injured with them. With Middlesun’s oscillations now ended, the surviving Giants also picked themselves up and began to gather together in their usual tribal groupings, casting suspicious glares at one another as they claimed their respective dead.
Yet they shambled to and fro like dead people themselves. Their actions were mechanical, as if the will to live had been hollowed out or even stolen from them. None would ever be the same. This, she understood all too clearly.
As she and her companions looked on for the longest time, certainty gathered in Allory’s breast. At last, she said, “I have to go down there.”
“For the tenth time, Sparkles, Giants are not our friends!” Ash growled.
“Maybe not yours, but we Scintillants have nothing against them.”
“Attempts to eat your friends don’t count?”
“Ash, would you look at them? No creature should suffer like that,” Allory pleaded, hating the way her voice wobbled and cracked. “I can do something about this. Maybe.”
“No.”
“Please, Ashueli. You have to understand. I can’t leave this be –”
“No! Which part of no do you not – can somebody please, please beat some sense into the ridiculous sparkling butterfly-person?” the Elf demanded. “We’re supposed to be keeping her alive here. Giants are neither misguided, nice nor redeemable creatures!” Waving her hands, she stormed off a few steps perhaps in fear that she might do something foolish. “They’re not one of your projects, like Sabline –”
“Murrr-GNARR?” spat the Dragoness.
“One of those random unwanted healings, I meant!” snapped the Elf.
“You take that back!”
“How? This stupid tongue wags as it wishes. You said it yourself, Felidragon –”
“What, now you’re telling me what I meant? Oh please, o precious Princess who’s the only person who can possibly know these Canyonlands, do give us the best of your vaunted wisdom!”
“Enough!”
With a roar and a battle cry respectively, the pair sprang at one another!
Yaarah tried to leap in as a peacemaker but received an Elven boot to the ribs and a brutish sable fisticuff to the stomach at the same time. He fell away, wheezing. The Chameleon Fae also crowded in with an attempt to separate the combatants which whipped Sabline’s paws out from beneath her and landed the Dragoness in a furious, spitting heap on the ground with the Elf atop her.
Frightened and maddened in equal measure, Allory fled from the conflict. Not a question.
Well, not so much fleeing as retreating toward even more trouble. Pinning back her pointy ears and fluttering her wings with a more economical and aerodynamic wingbeat and body orientation which Varzune had been trying to teach her, Allory shot down the vast slope like a sapphire butterfly suddenly possessed of the desire to break the sound barrier. Her friends! Who needed enemies when they behaved like the animals they most certainly were not? She had only tried to do her best for the Sabrefang. Nothing more. These Giants might think they did not need help, but the bodies of their fallen screamed otherwise. They screamed in ways perhaps only one person living could understand.
Help us! We’re boneyard bound …
She could not let that happen. If those vile creatures or the Wraith itself were gathering stolen magic to wreak destruction upon her world, then for once, this Fae girl would not let whatever sparkle she might possess go to waste. Time to take the next wingbeat toward wholeness.
Every creature under Middlesun mattered. Even Giants.
To her surprise, the day was already aging toward a deep, smoky azure twilight as she approached the nearest group of Giants, the Armos. The eerie quality of the light made her fear to enter this true charnel house. Not bones – not yet. Real bodies, real lives, spilled in rivers of crimson a colony of Fae could have swum in. Eight mighty Giants stoically gathered their fallen in a circle, laying them out head inward, arms folded across their chests, feet crossed at the ankles. The oldest, a rheumy-eyed Giant elder with a snowy beard that reached down to his waist, moved around the circle of heads, checking each one before pressing their eyelids shut with a ritual gesture of his thumbs.
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He wept.
Each teardrop was taller than she stood. They splashed upon the pain-wracked faces before him like a waterfall. Approaching, Allory realised that the Giants had each been targeted in a similar manner by Raptor stings, perhaps dozens of individual stings to deliver enough venom to finally paralyse even these immense creatures. This was an intelligent attack, and a strategy she doubted the Giants had ever encountered in all their centuries of living in this land they shared with the Fire Raptors.
She sensed the Wraith’s signature touch must lie behind this change.
Even the elder Giant’s eyes were twice her height, great, dark liquid pools of grief. She could have swung off his eyelashes like jungle vines if she dared to.
“Hey you, get away from there,” one of the Giants boomed.
“What – who?” the others variously called, before their eyes fell upon her.
“A Faerie? Out here?” puzzled the elder.
“Begone! These are sacred rites!” a younger Giantess fumed, making to swat Allory with her hand.
She somersaulted over the turbulence before steadying herself aerially and calling, “Please, wait. I can help. I’d like to try – watch it!”
Having forgotten how quickly Giants could move when they wanted to, Allory found herself snaffled up by the Giantess like she had seen Ashueli practising reflex catches of flies. In a second, a massive thumb and forefinger held her fast by the legs, threatening to crush her tiny bones.
The Giantess raised the Fae up to her face for a closer look. “What kind of Faerie are you, butterfly girl?”
“I’m a Scintillant Fae,” Allory said.
“A what? Speak up.”
She yelled, “I’m a Scintillant Fae! Please be careful with me. You’re very strong.”
“Of course, I am a Giant!” she guffawed roughly. “And do these trespassers upon Giant territory belong also with you? Why are you here?”
“A moment, Imorenne,” said the Giant Elder, stooping to peer curiously at her catch.
Meantime, her pursuers in the form of Yaarah, Sabline, Harzune and Ashueli called over various suggestions, placations and even a threat or two from a safe distance. Not helping. Nor did her realisation that an impetuous, fed up someone might just have led her friends into mortal peril for the sake of proving a point.
Proving a point disguised in her misfiring brain, at least, as doing the right thing.
Great. Truly wonderful.
Humiliating as the realisation was, Allory also recognised that she had enough of Yaarah’s moralistic lecturing swilling about inside her head to understand that even if her motivation might be questionable, doing the right thing remained the right thing to do.
She might just be going about it the wrong way.
“I’ve heard of the Scintillant Faerie,” the elder rumbled meantime, as his kin gathered around, all gazing at her as if she were a great curiosity. “The murmuring around the canyons is that many of her kind have passed through the Gates of Saradoom of late. Hold, my kin. Why are you here, little one? What do you want of us? Know you what caused this fell, foul miasma of the mind that came upon myself and my beloved kin, now journeying to the afterlife?”
“I have my suspicions and I think I can explain,” Allory piped back nervously, “but whatever we do, we need to be quick.”
He blinked slowly. “What would you do?”
“I … I want to dance on your kin.”
The blink arrived again, even more slowly. “Dance? On my dead kin?”
She spluttered, “I’m sorry, friend Giant. That came out badly. I need to dance – to find their souls – I mean, they journey to the afterlife but they aren’t there yet, if you know what I mean? I can’t – I need to heal them, see? It isn’t really a question. I have to try.”
Very, very slowly and terribly, the face before her mottled with rage.
The Giantess gasped, “You can’t heal the dead.”
In a thunder that echoed across the barrens, the elder roared, “You – you want to dance – on our dead?” The other groups of Giants turned, seeking the source of the confrontation. He stormed, “Who and what are you? Are you a practitioner of necromantic lore?”
“No. Never!”
She pressed against the thumb and forefinger, but she might as well be trapped between two boulders. Her wings buzzed in futile striving.
Panting hard, the elder modulated his voice to a minor crack of thunder. “These are my kin! How dare you disrespect them? You are a speck! A mote of dust!”
Allory shuddered violently, yet heard herself whisper, “I have power.”
“YOU WHAT?”
“I have power and I will prove it to you.”
Freeze.
Sap of my ancestors, did I just say that? I’m the biggest fool beneath Centresky!
He stared at her so long and hard, Allory was certain the day’s temperature rose at least ten degrees. She tried not to imagine she stood next to a white waterfall of beard some eighty feet tall. She also tried not to think about what her bowels were trying to do. It involved a great deal of squirming and potential messiness. Why, o why, did she keep stumbling into these sorts of situations in the name of something resembling courage?
Yet she refused to back down, no clue as to how or why. Allory knew only that she had to see this through.
He ground out, “Get rid of her.”
“Grandfather, wait,” Imorenne put in. “Could we pause to –”
“GET RID OF THIS AFFRONT OR I WILL!”
His roar crashed away over the flats with a thunderous echo.
No. It was not that they did not want healing. They lacked belief. So did she, mind, but Allory also knew she had seen stranger things happen than what was about to transpire upon this barren plain that ran crimson with rivers of blood. Her skin prickled in anticipation. Even Middlesun needed to believe. Whatever that entity might be, it needed to waken to the fact that it was needed. Needed, because ten thousand Scintillant Fae could not supply the power she would require to accomplish what she intended. Needed, because the beauty of justice demanded a weightiness of purpose akin to gravity; because belief was akin to gravity, she realised in a glorious flash of insight, drawing together boundless potential and the nature of imperatives that kept a world like Spheris in existence.
Immutable, it had to be.
Ignoring the Princess’ begging in the background, shutting out the thumping footsteps of other Giants of at least seven different tribes drawing near to see what the commotion was about, Allory inhaled to settle her nerves and cried in her clearest, most piping voice:
“Great one, I mean no disrespect to you or your kin. Of my own colony of Scintillant Fae, twenty-eight were murdered by Marakusian Slavers only weeks ago and the rest taken captive. Their memory is fresh in my mind –” and their bones groan in my boneyard “– and I assure you, therefore, that I know the face of death.”
Perhaps she had seen death in ways he never could.
Undeath.
The elder’s mouth cracked open. In a terrible voice, he grated, “I’m listening. State your business and be quick.”
“If I can prove I have power, would you permit me the honour of attempting to recall your kin from their premature journey to the afterlife?”
How she trembled now! Allory clenched her teeth in the hope of denying a violent urge to vomit everywhere.
Even the silence groaned as if Spheris itself longed to voice its distress. A chill wind stirred the slow smouldering of bodies and clothing, bringing to her ears the faint cries of the wounded farther away. This night would bring the carrion eaters to feast.
She dared not glance across at her companions. She knew what she would see. Aghast expressions. Befuddlement. How could she comfort them if she, first and foremost, had no idea what she was doing?
He said, “I said, I am listening. Speak!”
“Hear my challenge. I can prove that I am stronger than any Giant. Let me stand upon the palm of your hand. If you can keep me aloft with your great strength, then I will accept that you are right and I can do nothing for your kin. In that case, I would beg that you permit me and my companions to pass through to the Gasheni Road unmolested. However, if I am able to crush you to the ground, then I ask that you grant me the chance to try to put right the evil that has been wrought here this day.”
The Elder regarded her unspeaking for the longest time, only the bulging of his eyes revealing the fury swelling beneath that grief-stricken face. She knew how this proposal must sound to him. Foolishness of the highest order. Utter folly.
“How’s about if you’re wrong, we crush and eat you and your companions?” another Giant cut in.
“This is madness!” roared another. “Our dead lie all around us, our tribes and our strength lie broken, but we must hear this miniscule fool’s prattling piercing our eardrums?”
“I will have no part of it!”
“Nor I!”
They argued vehemently among themselves. The other Giants who had approached shook their great heads in incomprehension as they relayed her challenge one to another. Aye, what else could this be than the nadir of foolishness? Many stomped away in a fury, but some stayed in the gathering nightfall, eyeing their friends and enemies across the circle – and, over and over again, their gazes returned to the petrified, trembling girlfae who shimmered as much as she shivered in the Giantess’ pinched fingers.
The Elder simply stood and stroked his beard until Allory could no longer hold her breath and let it out in a gush. She met his dark gaze steadily.
Drawing a cavernous breath, he said slowly, “My brethren, I have come to a certain age of my life beneath Centresky where I have learned that hubris is ultimately futile, and that despite the great strength of Giants, I know that we all will one day return whence we came and re-join our lives to the eternal Sphere. What has happened here today is beyond travesty or tragedy. It can only be a signal, a warning to us all, of an unimaginable evil at work in the greater realm of Spheris.”
Those Giants who remained, who overhead, bobbed their heads or made low grunts that she took for agreement. The Giantess eased her grip on her feet.
“I spoke hastily in the storm of my grief, friend Scintillant. Sometimes, it is given for the little things of this world to humble the great. I cannot say that the heart of this Giant harbours the slightest hope, but let us test the fates, lest our characters be found wanting.”
His kin and the other Giants listening in raised a mighty chorus of hooting and booming at this speech. She did not understand all it might mean for them but knew only that his words resonated as powerfully as their voices in her being.
The hoary Elder thrust out his calloused palm. “I accept your challenge, bold little Scintillant Fae. Come stand upon my hand and prove your worth – if you can.”