Vorlan tried time and again to anticipate Myrvaness's movements to the north during their retreat toward Karmand, but the Wind Angel's tactics were erratic beyond any comprehension. Sometimes she would strike far to the north. Other times she would skim over several towns in a westerly direction and hit one deeper into territories controlled by Emperor Rohmhelt. Still others, she seemed to do nothing at all, making a feint that turned into a bloodless retreat.
Failing to anticipate her actions came at a series of devastating prices. Before he could respond, she would lay waste to a town or village, obliterating them with storms of intense lightning that left naught but charred craters in the ground and countless corpses that had exploded from her incredible power. He had seen that horror during the Battle of Eynond where some hundreds of soldiers burst from the inside as she poured her malicious energies into them. Surveying the latest village to fall victim to her, a place called Fidenhelt, he could sense that most of those killed weren't even adults. The Wind Angel had not spared anyone. She could not be bothered to care.
All that remained of what had once been a peaceful settlement of a hundred or so buildings were the shattered remnants of wood and stone and charred exploded corpses numbering in the hundreds. He placed his hand upon a patch of pristine land in front of him and harnessed the earthly Auras to conjure great slabs of dirt and stone to swallow up the obliterated village. The mammoth earthen sarcophagus opened and closed up atop the remnants of Fidenhelt and its residents, allowing them to rest under the cover of a glorious new surface of fertile soil.
When Vorlan finished, Tathyk arrived, floating glumly behind him. Vorlan turned to greet the Harvest Angel, whose face, comprised of his dark damp soil and his seed-like eyes, contorted in agony. Without saying anything, Tathyk passed by Vorlan and raised his hands, which bore roots within clay and dirt, skyward and loosed a pulse of what some mortals had termed the Growth Aura. Its sparkling verdant waves sank into the ground above what had been the village.
Up from the soil sprang hundreds of seedlings. Creaking and stretching, they grew rapidly, their trunks swelling and branches spreading out, sprouting leaves and red fruits.
"Whomever settles these lands in the future will have food and wood with which to build," Tathyk said somberly. He paused then and simply looked over the land. "I can hear their screams. It is as though they are trapped in the air itself."
"I hear them, too," Vorlan mourned. "They died terribly and Myrvaness laughed at them as they did."
"Do you believe she was always this way?" Tathyk inquired.
Vorlan had considered the Harvest Angel's question several times in the preceding days. Myrvaness had struck him as only having some potentially violent appetites as she ventured around the world over the centuries, with a particular fascination with war. Perhaps he should have seen it, but it always had appeared to be simple curiosity as opposed to malice.
"I do not know anymore," the Earth Angel sighed. "Forynda's greatest fear had always been that living among the mortals would cause us to become more like them. I have seen so much cruelty by the mortals throughout their history that I can see where it came from in Myrvaness."
"I once thought that she and the others could be redeemed," Tathyk mumbled. "I cannot see that now."
"We are immortal and so we all have time to right these wrongs. Eternity grants even the worst a chance," Vorlan repeated the argument he always used on himself when doubts crept in. "I concede that it will be exceedingly difficult in her case."
"Parlon, Gorondos, and Omonrel are no better. Perhaps Jagreth, but even there I cannot see it. What he has done to the beasts he claimed to love so dearly makes me wonder how far he has descended into madness," Tathyk countered. "We have not seen Elaous in some time, so perhaps he can be returned to our presence in good faith."
There was no denying what Tathyk said, for Vorlan felt that aching void in his spirit coming from knowing that much of what had happened could never be undone. That destroyed village could be buried and resewn with new life that would fuel a vibrant future. The realm of Ceuna and its original denizens, however, that was a different matter. With even Tathyk not indulging Vorlan in his pursuits of reconciliation with Omonrel, the Earth Angel was left utterly alone with that small portion of his mind that nurtured hope.
"In the meantime, we first must thwart Myrvaness. We cannot allow her to continue this rampage across these lands," Vorlan declared, shaking off his encroaching doubts on the larger subject. "And yet, I see no solution."
"If her assaults would last anything more than a few minutes, then we could respond," Tathyk bemoaned, his sonorous voice echoing inside his body. "We need reliable bait, a lure to drag her in."
"I thought we had that with several of these mages we have scattered about, but that is not the case. I thought she might relish the opportunity to deprive us of them, as they are such a valuable asset," Vorlan grumbled, still mourning the tortured agony that rested in the air around the erstwhile village. "I have a theory."
"A theory?" Tathyk's replied. "On how to lure her?"
"Yes. She does not strike at simply the most obvious targets. If there are three villages and you and I each guard one, she will not strike the third but rather a fourth we have not thought of," the Earth Angel pondered aloud. "I will need to ask the Emperor for permission to borrow more resources from him. This take some doing."
"Absolutely not!" Rohmhelt shouted at Vorlan as he paced about his temporary command post near a black rocky outcropping. The Emperor's eyes had deep bags under them and he had let his beard grow in over the course of the past two weeks. Never robust, Rohmhelt had also lost weight with the stress, his cheekbones now harshly pronounced. He then pointed toward the distant mountains in the west. "Right over there on the horizon is Mount Pivox. My brother is on the verge of starting his campaign against Karmand. Everything I've been planning for... This is it. And you want two hundred mages pulled off my lines?!"
"Myrvaness is a challenge, Your Imperial Majesty. She does not conform to any of our expectations. Thus, we are left to speculate. Along with what the Wingmother can spare, we should be able to draw Myrvaness into a trap with those mages," Vorlan proudly declared.
"Oh, yes, of course I forgot about that, too," Rohmhelt mocked the Earth Angel with a caustic sigh. "Several hundred of Nanikaw's soldiers, just floating around in the air, to help you find Myrvaness when she attacks... Can't you sense that sort of thing on your own?"
"Yes and the Wingmother's soldiers are not for the sole purpose of finding Myrvaness, but rather bogging her down the instant she appears," Vorlan calmly explained under Rohmhelt's strained intemperance. He forgave the Emperor's outbursts given the understandable stresses of the situation. "While I can sense her, given time, her terrible destructive power is such that these hapless villages are always destroyed before my arrival. Thus, we need to delay her for..."
"And even if you do get there in time to fight her, what's the point? She'll just retreat and come back and do it over and over and over again," Rohmhelt tossed his hands up. "Do you have a plan for that?"
That thought did cause Vorlan to ponder for a moment. He had been so eager to thwart Myrvaness's vile raids that he lost sight of the larger context of why she likely undertook the raids in the first place. It was indeed virtually hopeless to defend so much territory against her. It was an escalating problem as the war dragged on.
"I think there's something else to keep in mind," Empress Evinda's voice sounded out from around the corner of one of the black rocks of the outcropping. She stepped before Vorlan, wearing a white and gold dress and her hands folded neatly before her. "Most of our soldiers come from places like these outlying areas. Small farming villages all over the Empire. If we prove we don't care about defending them, can we keep their loyalty?"
Vorlan nodded graciously at the Empress. Rohmhelt's jaw shifted back and forth as he looked between Vorlan and Evinda.
"What you're saying is that we at least have to make a show of it?" Rohmhelt queried.
"That's right," Evinda answered, forming a warm smile while shooting a glance between Vorlan and her husband. "If they see us as powerless to do anything, they'll just desert, pack up their families, and flee to the hinterlands somewhere."
Rohmhelt clenched his jaw and looked toward the west in Karmand's direction. Evinda again glanced at Vorlan, who gave her the slightest of smirks.
"Alright. Just this once," the Emperor said with transparently false confidence. "Try to destroy her mortal form again to at least buy us some time between these attacks. That's what I ask in exchange."
"That was my every intention, Your Imperial Majesty," the Earth Angel humbly replied. "Her malice will be stopped, or at least paused."
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
For the next day, Vorlan fused himself with the ground under a patch of rocks that lay near the center of a hub of several villages to the northeast. He spread his mortal form, and his spirit along with it, into something like a thin disc that stretched for the better part of a mile. He felt the worms and other bugs digging in around him and he sometimes opened holes for them to pass through. Recalling when he had laid this ground those many millennia ago, he marveled at the peace that had once existed between all of Ceuna's angels, without exception. Now, even the soil itself, the soil he created, was unsettled.
He sensed out in the world, through the vibrations to the east, Myrvaness's impatience. She was eager to strike again. Her lust for conquest exceeded that of any mortal he had ever encountered. She needed that thrill. That satisfaction. The exhilaration of triumph. Like the charge that built between the ground and the sky before a bolt of lightning would strike, the tension became extreme. It would release at any moment.
And then it did.
He could not sense precisely where Myrvaness struck. Her speed and erratic movements confused him. She felt faint everywhere he tried to locate her. Tathyk shared his own mind with Vorlan and it was the same. She appeared as only flashes, blips in the abyss. Much as he strained to tighten his focus, he could not track her.
However, he heard from the birdmen circling above, through their loud caws and screeches, where Myrvaness had appeared. It was the village of Tecdron seven miles to the west of where he had speculated she would lash out. Somehow she had shot past Vorlan and Tathyk by a massive distance without ever revealing her position. While there were a dozen mages stationed there to slow her down, there was little else.
He surged through the ground, pushing through the earth and stone as Cyrona would with the waters, all the while calling out to the birdmen above to descend upon Myrvaness. Tathyk, too, sped along through the soil miles to the north on a parallel trajectory toward Myrvaness.
Let us not be too late, Vorlan hoped. Not again.
Myrvaness had unleashed a howling tempest above that Vorlan felt acutely even protected by the ground. It was stronger than any he had experienced before, its horrid winds sweeping soil and rock into the air along with countless life forms. His spirit ached even considering the toll it was inflicting. With the flickers of iridescent silver light dancing across his vision, he knew that she had already extracted a price from the village's defenders.
Not again!
He coalesced his spiritual and mortal forms and sprang up from the earth, tearing vast chunks of it up with him. Emerging, he saw Myrvaness in the distance arcing several bolts of crackling white, yellow, and green lightning around a ward put up by a mage on the village's perimeter. Try as the mage might, he could not block all of the bolts and soon they penetrated into him. Vorlan closed as quickly as he could, but all he did was be close enough to view the horror in full. The mage's entire body glowed and sparks shot out his eyes as he screamed at an unfathomable pitch. He then burst into a mist of sizzling blood and viscera.
Myrvaness, her own tempest swirling around her, turned and faced Vorlan. Her bright green eyes flashed while her red hair lifted behind her, carried by her winds. Vorlan put those gusts out of mind. They could not affect him, no matter how much they pushed and screeched. The same could not be said for the mortal mages on the village's periphery, who struggled to cling to the ground. Vorlan loosed a pulse into the earth below, which then reached up and grasped their legs to give them a firmer stance.
The mages shot bolts of ice and white light at Myrvaness, but she effortlessly deflected them with wards of her own.
"So, you finally caught up with me, Vorlan," Myrvaness taunted him, slashing the ground with her swords. "Those birdmen you sent did delay me for a moment. Enough that you got here."
Vorlan noted the bloodied feathers scattered about the ground in all directions. He struggled to suppress his surging rage at the sight. From Ceuna, Forynda tried to speak to him while he stood there, but he put the High Angel out of mind. Nothing she could say would be helpful in this moment. He sensed still more of Wingmother Nanikaw's forces arriving shortly. The losses, while tragic, were minor in the broader scope.
"That was their intent," he rumbled, conjuring stone pillars that ripped up from the ground but Myrvaness cut them down easily with her swords. Those blades pulsed with unnaturally strong energy, glowing green and yellow. Undaunted, he approached her. "Have you such contempt for these people's lives that you would subject them to this?"
Myrvaness threw her head back and swiped her swords several times before him.
"This life is a misery for them," she laughed. "The best they can hope for is that joyless eternity Forynda made for them in the Communion of Souls. Oh, being close to their loved ones, but feeling nothing... nothing like THIS!"
She grunted as she loosed bolts at several of the mages guarding the ramshackle structures on the village's periphery. Vorlan conjured thick earthen walls to block her attacks and then moved those same slabs in rapidly to encase her. Myrvaness chuckled in a deafening echo and sliced the rock and dirt sphere surrounding her with her crackling swords.
"Not bad, but ARGH!" she screamed as Tathyk emerged behind her, stabbing her through with thick vines lashing up from the ground. Spiked and horrible, their appearance shocked Vorlan. Laced in venom and undulating as horribly as any abominations the Earth Angel had ever beheld, they pressed deeper into Myrvaness's mortal form. "TATHYK, YOU FILTH!"
The Harvest Angel floated behind her, the dark soil comprising his face remaining impassive. He summoned still more spiked vines from the ground. They pierced into her mortal form and wrapped around her in several gnarled loops. Myrvaness let out an awful scream. Then she quieted and smirked at Vorlan. The Earth Angel felt crushing dread as he noticed the row of pale yellow orbs at her waist begin to glow.
High above them, the dark and swirling clouds flashed and flickered, straining to hold in a deluge of bolts. Vorlan ripped up the soil behind him in vast sheets and tried to form a protecting shield over him and Tathyk. But the bolts got there first.
Yellow branches of crackling lightning struck the ground in hundreds of lashes. The blindingly bright lights severed Tathyk's roots, incinerating them even in the heavy rains. The Harvest Angel himself jumped backward and shouted to the mages to retreat. Myrvaness smiled at Vorlan as the storm intensified further, blowing through what portions of the earthen shield he successfully conjured.
"Caught you off guard, did I?" she mocked him. "Oh, you thought you had me? Adorable."
Myrvaness lunged toward Vorlan, both of her swords glowing and crackling. He conjured two stone and metal shields to his hands, attempting to block the blades. The Wind Angel only barely grazed them, her swords letting off a horrid screech as she did. She temporarily transformed into a tight cluster of lightning bolts and pivoted around him, interspersing herself with the countless strikes coming from the sky. Vorlan tried to keep up with her blistering pace, but it was no use.
He suddenly felt both blades drive deep into his chest, a cold and awful shock dispersing through his mortal form. Myrvaness's face appeared before his own as her form coalesced again in front of him. Those terrible green eyes brightened as she smirked.
"How does it feel?" she hissed. While impaled with her swords, he summoned from deep in the earth two diamond-tipped pillars that skewered her through each of her shoulders before she could even respond. She gave a lazy yawn. "Come now, Vorlan. You can do better than that."
She loosed stronger waves of her power into him, this time the black and purple tendrils of the Abyssal Aura accompanying her lightning. The crushing pain, as though expanding voids squeezed both his spirit and mortal body, was excruciating. It pulsed and quaked within him. As when he had faced Jagreth, he recalled Forynda stating he should not fear pain to his mortal form as it would recover in time.
But the Abyssal Aura was doing something else. Something far worse. It was seeping into his spirit itself. He felt it changing at the margins. Serene order being frayed into mad chaos.
Impossible, he thought in raw panic. That cannot be!
He broke away by melding his body into the ground below and reconstituting some distance away near Tathyk. Myrvaness floated where she had been and broke off the Earth Angel's pillars, wincing slightly as she did.
"Anyway," she dispassionately muttered and snapped her fingers. Above Tecdron, the darkest and most sickly clouds formed at her command. So devastating were the thunderclaps that they shook the ground. Then came the first of the new bolts. As wide as a house, it struck between a cluster of three buildings and blew them to pieces, their logs splintering and flying off in every direction.
Tathyk lay his hands over the ground and instantly conjured into being a winding labyrinth of trees that cut through every open space in the village while leaving the buildings undamaged. Thick and massive, they surged upward in mere seconds, a hundred feet into the air and providing a lush canopy. Vorlan then coated all of them in soil, sweeping it up from every available source and caking it onto the dense new arboreal shield just before the next round of bolts descended.
These new terrors from Myrvaness shot down from the clouds above in the dozens, striking fiercely at the soil-covered trees. The crackling and snapping was terrible. Tathyk strained to hold the trees together as this mighty power tried to blow them to pieces with its wild arcing yellow and green bolts. Vorlan observed Myrvaness holding her swords skyward and calling down strike after strike. In one sense, he marveled that she could keep both he and Tathyk so at bay by herself. In another, it drained him of any hope.
Then, he heard cawing in the distance to the south. It closed quickly. Hundreds and hundreds of birdmen swept down from the clouds and toward the Wind Angel Myrvaness. Archers at the forefront loosed volleys of arrows at her. Most never hit her as she directed swirling winds to protect her and even those that found their marks did little. Then, a group of three dozen mages circled above her and began showering Myrvaness in bolts of varying kinds. Fire, ice, lightning, the white light of Ceuna, and even the twisting purple and black of the Abyssal Aura.
Myrvaness was forced to halt her barrage against Tecdron and focus on fending off this new threat. However, several of the tendrils of the Abyssal Aura blasted through her wards and struck savagely against her mortal form, tearing off strips of her yellow skin.
"I WILL RETURN!" she wrathfully shouted and bolted skyward through a portion of the birdmen, slicing through several of them in a split second. They fell limply to the ground below, their feathered bodies cleaved in two, and torrents of blood falling between the bisected portions of their corpses.
But Myrvaness had fled. For now.
While the birdmen cried skyward mourning their fallen, Tathyk eyed the massive wounds Myrvaness had dug into the Earth Angel's chest. He rubbed his finger into one of the glowing holes.
"She touched your spirit with that!" he gasped. "I thought that impossible!"
"As did I," Vorlan murmured, conjuring what he could to try to mend it through the Ceunan Aura. Satisfied that he made at least some progress, he would return to that later. "She feared the Abyssal Aura, too. Those birdmen caused her to run off more than we did."
He paused for a moment to listen to their wails and lamentations as they collected their dead for burial. It turned into a beautiful, if deeply sad, song that all several hundred of them sang.
"I remember when Parlon and Omonrel first unleashed it in battle," Tathyk said. "They thought they were clever."
"Little did they know, this puts us all at risk," Vorlan trailed off, shuddering as his wound still ached. Comforting thoughts, ones he had relied upon for so long to soothe his doubts, were nowhere to be found now. "It amused them. I wonder if they still possess the sanity to see why it should frighten them."