“Is it really over then?” Oroza asked, looking at the images the moon played upon her waters. “Is the age of man over? How long will the darkness rule this time?”
Lunaris shook her head. “The Kingdom of Hallen might encompass your whole world, Oroza, but it is but a small part of everything. The Underkingdoms are still largely intact, so I’m told, and even if the mages did not still stand, or the children of the forest, there would still be other champions. The Northern Kingdoms, the Westerlands across the sea, and even the Isles yet remain untouched, and they are just as full of heroes as anywhere else. This evil may fester and grow here, but like any fire, it will run out of fuel and exhaust itself soon enough.”
The two goddesses sat there on the small delta island looking at the moon Goddess’s scrying magic as the city burned, and crazed shadows multiplied to devour the whole place like a growing tumor. Both of them looked worse for wear after the last several years of ever-increasing violence.
Oroza’s skin had begun to wrinkle, and her hair was more than half gray now. She’d never been particularly vain, and wouldn’t have cared about that if she wasn’t so weak. The Lich’s poisoning of her watershed with saltwater via the canal was taking it toll. She’d collapsed the thing again and again, but each time, it was rebuilt, and more plants and animals that made up her little world died as a result.
The moon Goddess, by contrast, was looking as young as ever, but she was paler than usual, and she seemed thin and worn out. That was the way of things since that last terrible ambush on the moon. A full conclave of the divine had not happened since that awful night, but that didn’t bother Oroza. Someone would tell her if important things were happening, and the rest of the time, she would focus on thwarting the darkness wherever she could.
As Lunaris spoke, she waved her hand, and the nightmare that was Rahkin was replaced by a wider view of the world from high above. Oroza could only barely make out the peninsula that her river traversed as it lay there in the shadow of the Wodenspines. At this scale, it was impossible to see cities, but she knew where places like Abenend and Siddrimar must be.
She’d spent some time exiled to the oceans, where she’d prowled restlessly and devoured what ships she could find when her river had been so forcefully dried out. So, she’d known that the world was much larger than she could see from the snow-capped mountains where her headwaters originated. Still, it was one thing to know and another thing to see.
Even as vast a domain as the Lich now controlled, it wasn’t even close to the majority, and from this height, she could scarcely even see the slender tower of darkness that marked its domain.
“Does it really stretch so far up into the sky?” Oroza asked, noting the black thread that rose far above even the tallest mountains before disappearing in the night sky above the two gently glowing women.
“Indeed,” Lunaris nodded. “It goes past the domain of the wandering stars and even the fixed stars beyond them. According to the All-Father, it descends deep into the core of the earth as well. We know not what that monster plans to do with such a thing, but there are many possibilities.”
“It doesn’t seem to move or even do anything at all," the river Goddess said as she dragged her fingers across the waters and dispelled the ugly illusion lest it somehow draw the dread eye of the Lich itself.
“It doesn’t have to move,” Lunaris breathed, suddenly speaking quieter. “There is very little darkness in the sunlit world, but past the domain of the dwarves, and forever churning in the night sky the number of shadows is truly endless. If the fiend ever figures out how to make contact with these reservoirs, who knows which deity he might attempt to slaughter next.”
“It has been trying and failing to kill me for years now, and it has yet to succeed,” Oroza said with a thin smile, trying to put a brave face on their predicament. “Surely, when it comes to Niama or to you—”
“Niama is still grieving the loss of her daughters,” Lunaris said with a shake of her head. “And most of my battles will never reach your shores. Pray that they don’t, or we would all be lost.”
Oroza’s eyes drifted up to the sky, where the flickering constellations held the endless void at bay. From the moon, one could see the arcane arrangements that the stars held, like giant wards, but from here, all she could make out were the general shapes, like the Hunter and the Leviathan. The river goddess had no idea what it was such things must fight, and honestly, she didn’t want to. She had her own nightmare to face and was better off not knowing what the constellations and the moon warred against each night.
Support the creativity of authors by visiting the original site for this novel and more.
The two Goddesses talked a while longer after that, but since Lunaris had already given Oroza her message and begged her to abandon her one-woman war against any undead that should find themselves within arms reach of her river, she finally left in a ray of light to attend to other matters.
That left the river goddess alone to ruminate on what it was she should be doing. The kingdoms of men had largely fallen everwhere that she could see, and other than a few small settlements like the Siddrimites that held the gap between the mountains and her banks, and the farm where the children of light lived in their tiny bubble of peace so far from the fighting, the rest of the world seemed to be dead or dying.
That was true of places well beyond her salt-poisoned borders. The All-Father had sworn that he would repair Siddrim’s chariot so that his fiery steed could be gathered once more, but until the dwarf did that, the world withered, snows gathered, and mold blossomed. Oroza couldn’t remember the last time it had been warm; even the hottest days were merely pleasant now, and there were far too few of them. She could hear it in the whispers of grasshoppers and the creaking of the growing glaciers.
According to the stories, that was the way of things in the last age before Siddrim’s rise, too, but Oroza did not know the old stories well. Until these dark days, she’d been too wrapped up in the rhythm of the seasons to pay such ancient history much attention. She dearly wished she could go back to when she was only concerned about today, without care for the things that might or might not have happened hundreds of years before.
Oroza glided back into the water at that thought, looking for some sort of comfort, but she found little. Though this river would always be her body and her home, it was dying. The resurgent darkness that the Lich called Cholorium sickened her, and the ever-growing amounts of salt stung her eyes.
Still, neither one could stop her as she swam up river with ever increasing speed. The Oroza river spanned hundreds of miles from one end to the other, and she could navigate the entire length in less than an hour. This was not something she’d done much in the past, though.
Why should she ever be in a hurry when she could linger in the mangrove roots or explore shipwrecks that had been unearthed once more after the latest storm? That had been her way for the longest time, and she missed it terribly, but it wasn’t enough to stop her from soaring now as her long, sinuous river dragon form swam with mighty strokes of its tail.
There were only a few spots she did not navigate the world like that at this point. The upriver shallows prevented it, of course, but not half so much as the wall of darkness that bisected her river almost directly in half. It was there, where the perpetual crust of ice marked a line in her domain, that she always paused.
She could swim through. She told herself that. Even if the Lich had created some awful new trap, she could probably fight her way free.
She didn’t try to, though. Some fears could not be escaped from so easily, and though she no longer had a real body, she could still feel those terrible shackles around her wrists and ankles.
Instead of risking it, she rose from the water as a mist and dispersed along the band of grasses that ringed the edge of the shadows that were still part of her domain. When she’d first escaped and had a chance to study this thing, she feared it would continue to expand until her domain was cut in half.
That never happened. Instead, it had merely sat there unmoving, issuing foul monsters nearly every night. So, while she could traverse her whole domain in less than an hour, this one spot took nearly half that time, and she was always on guard that some new terrible thing might exist to ambush her if she traveled during the night.
Tonight at least she was lucky, and nothing stirred, letting her travel ever more north. Eventually, she left her river and her dragon form behind as she swam up the streams, fanning out into her headwaters. Here at least she could feel clean again.
Oroza looked for the hand of man throughout the whole of her trip as she always did, but they were rarer now than they had ever been before. They were practically an endangered species.
It was only when she reached the glaciers frozen solidly into mountain passes that she finally paused to think clearly. Here, she could do little to save the world or help anyone, but she doubted very much that anyone could hurt her either. She could probably crawl up into this giant block of ice and slumber away an age, hoping that when she woke, someone else would have solved this problem.
She didn’t do that, though. She couldn’t.
Her life, precious to her as it was, mattered little in all of this. What did, was that she found something to do to turn the tide in all of this. Oroza no longer knew whether she would live a year or a decade. Until now, she’d been functionally immortal, but death didn’t scare her. Only the idea that she might waste that time without striking a blow against the darkness was enough to give her real fear.