My great gryphon couldn’t keep up with the unearthly stallion Stalnir, even over the relatively short distance from my home to Aesaguard castle and the city of Volhollan (quite literally nothing could, when either Stalnir or my father was in a hurry), so by the time we were landing there was already a buzz of activity as my father began the castle’s mobilization against an attack that almost had to be imminent, though what form or direction it would come from was less certain.
“Send out the general summons,” I told Vastar as I loosed the straps that held me to his saddle while we approached. “Every man and gryphon needs to be armed and in the air by the time I return.”
*Twill be done,* replied my stolid friend. *Circling higher towers?*
“Aye,” I said, plunging off his back thirty feet above the courtyard as he swung cleanly back and away in a maneuver we had practiced numerous times.
Even as the paving stones cracked beneath my feet in one of the sloppiest landings I had had in years, my father was there.
“Your armor is in the Lower Hall,” he told me, his own squires still securing his own about his person, “and Memer has requested your presence after the council.”
I nodded, and took off for the stairs without another word.
I got quite a stir coming through the castle in full regalia. It wasn’t exactly often I even wore the gem-inlaid silver armor and flashy red and blue heraldry anymore, let alone paraded through the halls in it. This would certainly lend credence to any of the speculations and wild stories being concocted to explain the backwash, especially if anyone correlated the timing.
Ah well. None of the stories were likely to be as bad as the truth.
“We have a major new problem,” my father said as we strode into the Hall, I falling into perfect lockstep two paces to his left and rear in the habit of decades that, for once, I wasn’t going to fight.
“Or, technically, four of them,” I said to the small audience, still whispering and speculating about the tremendous magical shock all of them had to have felt a few minutes ago. “Garmondir, Helvara, Fenrar, and Lokigan Faeron, to be more exact.”
Even a national emergency was unlikely to get me to observe protocol on purpose.
My father shot me a furious glance for upstaging whatever explanation he’d had planned, but he really should have known better than to expect me to cooperate that far. “It seems Veydann’s initial estimates of the Great Seals’ longevity were a trifle optimistic. We have a greater crisis than we thought.”
Ouch. Nice shot, Father.
Only Fallon–naturally, it would be Fallon–kept his cool enough to ask a pertinent question. “So that was the etherwave we all felt a few minutes ago?” he asked, those odd ice-gray eyes looking straight through me.
“Aye,” I said mildly, “though the chaos backlash will likely have killed the ones who cast it and anyone in their near vicinity. That may give us a little time.”
“Not a lot,” Thorion growled, smashing his fist down on the table. “Those Fenrar will be on us within the day, no matter the confusion involved.”
“True,” my father agreed mildly. “We will have to amend the plans a little. Fallon?”
Fallon might be my brother, but there was nothing but soldier in his veins, and not a pleasant sort, at that. He moved to the big map on the wall, which already featured splashes of color to highlight opposing enemy forces. “I can finally say that their advance makes sense, at least. With those forces active again, they’ve got a neat little box closing in on us on every viable approach to the Valley.”
“Which ones are where?” I asked, moving to his side.
I didn’t have to like Fallon to respect his expertise. Like me, he was among the small handful of real battlefield generals and strategists who won most of our wars, along with my father, Ulmer Alhas, and Modagni Thorioni. If he said he knew something, he knew it, and he always knew how to win.
We spent some time discussing battle plans and strategies, arguing about deployments of our various armies and what that would mean for us all. It took almost half an hour before I was finally able to break free from my duties as a general and the commander of my father’s bodyguard to do what all involved knew was the single biggest reason I was still welcome in the Capital in spite of my attitude and my politics.
I needed to visit the Well.
Memer's Well
Nobody approaches the Well of Power without an awareness of the raw power of distilled magic that lies in its depths–no one with even a hint of magical sensitivity, anyway. The very atmosphere presses on you when you get close, the whole cavern nearly throbbing with the contained magical potentiality that lies in a maze of honeycombed cells many layers deep along the bottom.
Long ago, when my father first founded what would eventually become the nation of Noldur, nobody dared live in the Valley because of the high concentration of ambient magickal chaos, an ambience nurtured by a nexus of natural ley lines and some peculiarities of chaos-driven weather that aren’t worth going into at the moment. Supercharged animals and storms of every kind, earthquakes, volcanoes and weirder phenomena were both common and hazardous, so much so as to drive the only other native inhabitants, the Kobold dwarves, to live permanently underground and bond magically with the mountains themselves.
What has since come to be called Memer’s Well was my father’s answer to those hazards.
The Well was created out of an immense magical gathering web Father and his allies laid down when he first settled in the Valley, one that took all of that ambient magic and turned it into our own unique and enormous power source. As a result of its existence, the Well has been pulling power from the entire valley and several surrounding it for centuries, fueling most of our major workings as well as serving as a suppressant to the many side effects of the concentration of magic the ley-lines bring and allowing our farmers, workers, and merchants an unparalleled refuge from the risks and troubles of magical storms, beasts, and perils great and small that is even more important to our prosperity than our oft-exhibited prowess at war.
Even I would not be flippant here.
Its emerald-touched waters shimmered with the inexpressibly contained energy it held, and the Well had its own voice, a sort of shimmering throb hung suspended in the air around it. It gave us the bulk of our magical power and was the very basis of everything the Alsir had built, and to tell the truth it frightened me a little. Even after all my years of study and use of it, there was much about the Well we did not know.
But I had not come, today, to partake of its magic or to study its mysteries. I had come to speak to its guardian.
“Memer,” I said quietly, standing near the edge of the shimmering pool of force at the great cavern’s heart. “I have come.”
Memer had been Father’s partner in the early days of our nation, a solid, enormous fellow with a ready temper and an even quicker forgiveness. He’d been the jolly giant of my long-distant childhood and the greatest advocate and enforcer of the Alsir code of honor we still supposedly lived by.
He had also died nearly two hundred years ago during the bloody chaos we called the civil war–when we spoke of it at all.
“Speak your questions, and I will hear, Slayer,” rumbled his deep, powerful voice from the shadows in the back of the rocky hall.
I winced at the name–I always did–but Memer had refused to call me anything else since Father resurrected him by the runes.
I really couldn’t argue with it, either.
I had, after all, been the one who killed him.
“I am come to seek counsel for the war ahead,” I said formally, firmly avoiding that particular unpleasant memory. “What knowledge would the Well grant me this day?”
This was why I was here. The rune-restored were peculiar, individually and as a group, in ways far more important than any insistence on using odd names. Unlike their simpler counterparts in Mithgarian Helvara (who were little more than mindless automatons) , those brought back by the runes had personalities, memories, even some of their magical talents, though their personalities were often grossly distorted from those of their living selves. Memer, in particular, being bound so directly to the Well as he was, had become very possessive of the Well itself and had become far more distant and formal than he had ever been in life. Had it not been for his peculiar gift, nobody would really dare come down here anymore, because exceptions to that formality–including uninvited intrusion–were now met with unqualified violence backed by the full magical and physical power of the massive undead giant and the immense honeycomb of power he guarded.
But his gift was awesome enough to overcome many things.
Memer, you see, had achieved a gift very near to prophecy, the ability to see in the Well’s magic-laden depths certain aspects of the future.
Getting the answers out of him was a bit tricky, since he had become ever more formal, and more protective of the Well, the longer he’d been dead, and understanding those answers was often even harder, but I alone he had never refused to answer, and the information was valuable enough that this had become something of a ritual every time I visited the Valley.
“The Well’s secrets are not without cost,” rumbled the giant from the shadows. “Will you pay the price?”
“I will pay it,” I responded, still in Memer’s own formality, “for the need is great.”
“Very well,” the great revenant rumbled, rising in his shadows. He rarely left them when living folk were in the chamber, since his death had been an ugly one that had forced Father to rebuild pieces of his face and limbs with webbed green rune-force, but for this part of the ceremony he always came forward, and I braced myself slightly as he moved into the shaft of light from the ceiling high above and peered into the depths of the Well.
“Ask your questions,” he said, his eyes fixed on a distant point somewhere far below.
I took a deep breath. “Can Noldur win this war?” I asked. It was always my first question, though this time I was far less certain than usual of the answer.
Nor was Memer particularly reassuring. “Your answer this time is not simple,” he rumbled. “The dragon will die, but the cubs may establish.”
Ouch. That didn’t sound good. Usually the answer was mildly cryptic, but not this kind of doomsay.
Considering that, I decided to rephrase my next question slightly.
“What information do we now lack to establish the cubs?” I asked him.
This one took a while in coming, and when it did, Memer sounded about as emotional as I had seen him in decades, mournful even. “The mountain nest is broken,” he intoned, sounding, for a moment, almost as though he were talking to himself. “Only the hollows remain.”
My heart almost stopped, for this one I knew from previous tortured attempts to interpret Memer’s cryptic warnings. The ‘mountain nest’ could only refer to the entire Valley of Noldur, and ‘hollows’ generally meant caves, crevices, and other enclosed spaces.
Unless I was truly confused, Memer had just told me that our entire Valley–our entire country–would be so thoroughly scoured and destroyed that there would be nothing left but the caves of the Kobold folk, into which they allowed few visitors.
That could certainly change our plans some…
Shaking off the shock, however, I moved ahead. I knew from past experience that asking Memer for details was fruitless. Even if he consented to answer (which he doesn’t usually), he gets his most poetic and obtuse when describing specifics like weapons systems and events. We’d probably be able to figure out what he meant after the fact–but by then, of course, it was invariably too late.
Instead, I said, moving on to the next standard question, “What advice does the Well have for me, personally?”
“Your answer is twofold,” Memer rumbled from the poolside. “The first can be found by the sight of your reflection in the pool of the Well.”
I almost flinched from that one. Reflections in the Well were never the present, and I had a great many demons in my future and my past.
Still, I was here essentially as a beggar, and these answers were generally far clearer than the words. I moved up to the pool’s edge.
The reflection staring back at me did not actually surprise me very much. I knew at what point I had been my most powerful.
“This is the Well’s counsel?” I asked softly.
“That is your family’s only path to a new home,” Memer rumbled.
I swallowed. I’d sooner die on the battlefield than embrace that future, but there was no point in telling Memer that, if he didn’t already know it. “You said the answer was twofold,” I said, after a moment to regain my composure. “What is the other?”
“The One-Eye dies,” he proclaimed. “You must take his place.”
I went rigid. “My father? When?”
Normally I knew better than to throw out a reflexive question like that, but this was hardly a normal answer.
“Now,” he rumbled.
I almost turned and ran from the Well right then, but I checked, for there was still one more aspect of the ritual to observe. “What is my price this day?” I asked the undead rune-giant. It was a trifle more rushed than it probably should have been, but even Memer would likely forgive me a moment of hurry when my father was apparently dying far above us.
“You have already paid it,” the giant said, rising and fading back into the shadows. “But do not forget the advice you would spurn.”
I did not think I could forget if I tried, especially since it was the oddest price in a long list of odd prices, but in the press of his previous answer, there was no time to ponder.
I bowed before I bolted from the room.
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I had spent several decades, over the course of my tumultuous life, in Aesaguard Castle. I was familiar with its self-altering halls, the sets of doorways that could serve as shortcuts or labyrinths based on the thing’s mood, the hidden traps and pitfalls our Drinorae architect (long story) had built into many areas. I had even lived here long enough, in between other “adventures,” to know most of the possible combinations of hallways and stairs that the castle could give you as a route between two points.
I also knew just how fast I was going that day, and I can tell you with absolute confidence that I covered almost two miles of halls–several of them twice–and fourteen floors’ worth of stairs before I found a place I was familiar with enough to make it worthwhile to break through the wall to the exterior of the castle.
It had been so dumb to let a Drinorae be the architect of our greatest citadel. If I’d been more than twelve at the time, maybe somebody would have listened to me…
Then again, maybe not.
Took me about forty seconds, all told, including breaking a hole big enough to get out of without breaking anything important.
It was two minutes longer than I had.
Even as I broke through the castle’s fortified outer wall–man, but that stung my hand–I heard my father’s shrill scream echo across a battlefield none of us had expected so soon.
Though we likely should have. Whatever depths they had sunk to, the Fenrar were Noldur, too, and doing the undone was part of what made us what we were.
The scene that met my eyes as I staggered through the stone rubble of the wall of the world’s greatest citadel was nothing short of utter chaos, and not the organized sort I was used to.
The Fenrar must have come upon us in the very first stages of the Valkonir rally I had asked Vastar to attend to, as a narrow knot of lance-wielders mounted on the great white and blue gryphons was one of the few coherent knots of battle and resistance amid the carnage. Gryphons were still trickling in from the south, confused and ill-armed without their riders’ senses and training, and men in every conceivable state of armor and undress were spilling from the barracks and the city both, most simply adding to the chaotic tangle of friend and foe that lay everywhere I looked.
From a purely professional standpoint, I could only admire the Fenrar. Well aware that they had nowhere near the firepower to confront us directly on anything like a normal battlefield, they had created a battlefield that was a very long way from “normal”. Calling on the speed and stealth of movement that they so excelled at and taking advantage of the inevitable confusion and effects of friendly fire from our various battle-mages, they were recklessly inserting themselves into, through, and even behind our own demoralized and confused soldiers in squads, pairs and clumps of individual soldiers, carving their way forward with a reckless disregard for injury and mayhem that startled my men as much as their sudden appearance had.
The net effect, for which they were obviously better prepared than we were, was a mad mixture of friend and foe in every direction, with the unpredictable Fenrar making it that much worse by switching between various shapes at something close to random, an occasion that made it even more difficult to distinguish targets and who and what we were actually fighting. Horse became dog, hawk became rat became man became lion, in a mad, swirling mix that only added to the panic and confusion the successful assault had already spawned.
I had emerged from midway up the side of one of the towers, and a single sweeping glance told me there was no way to win the battle from here. Fenrar were pouring through the crowd, thriving on the chaos, and a knot of embattled rune-knights around what chill instinct told me could only be my father’s form and the kernel of a Valkonir formation around Vastar’s tower were the only spots on the battlefield where we looked even remotely in control.
But no assassin, even for Lokigan Faeron at his worst, is safe to employ without a leash–and the leash built of blood and death for the Fenrar was a group of stones in their citadel, each of which was tied to the life of a particular assassin.
It was a desperate ploy–but if now was not the time for desperate measures, I would be hard-pressed to find one. Break the stones, and the whole army attacking my father would crumble and die.
Do anything else, and these ridiculous ill-armed bandits looked very likely to take both Volhollan and my father.
“To me!” I called, the full force of runic power behind the words cutting through the chaotic battlefield like a knife as I leaped from the tower with the full force of my legs and my magic.
Vastar heard my call, and his reactions are nearly as well-tuned as mine after over a hundred years of training together. Even as I reached the top of my arc and began to descend, the great blue-white gryphon swooped beneath me in a near-perfect catch angled midway between the two towers as I twisted lithely into the saddle and bumped his left side to swoop outward and gather those knights and steeds who had found each other and could break free.
“All paired to Fenrar. All others to the Odinar!” I bellowed, the power of my runic voice overwhelming, at least for a moment, even this cacophony, and announcing, to any canny Fenrar as well as to my own troops, exactly what I was going to do.
Not all of them would follow me–but I was hoping the desire for survival would outweigh the vengeance quest for at least enough of them to give my father and his knot of surviving bodyguards a chance.
After all, if I succeeded, I would have the power to destroy each and every one of them, one by one or all together, just by breaking their great heap of rocks.
I was pleasantly surprised as well as horrified when almost every Fenrar on the field turned into a massive flock of deadly birds and gave chase.
The Valkonir never bothered with very sophisticated tactics on our own. We participated in gambits and flanking maneuvers and such things when we were attached to the Einherion or the Pulvranin, but alone, we had never bothered with anything much more complex than a skirmish line. We knew our own brute destructive power too well to bother, and the massive force of our weight and our steeds was almost always enough to roll right over anything our lances couldn’t smash.
You see, I am not a conventional general. I do not deal in complex tactics, and my strategies are often called simplistic by the uneducated. I can, when occasion calls for it, deal in the many nuances of war, but I don’t like to; complicated plans just offer more breaking points where things can go wrong. Complex gambits are Fallon’s bread and butter, and long-scale strategies have always been my father’s domain. Ulmer wins by fielding better-trained and more loyal and disciplined troops than anyone else, and Modagni has a fiendish mind for traps and fortifications and an ability to understand terrain.
Me? I win battles by fielding better weapons and more powerful and well-armored troops than anyone else can imagine. My gift is magic, and I use it with the skill of a craftsman and a power greater than anyone or anything else I have ever encountered.
The Valkonir, as a corps, are my greatest example of this. Our steeds are our first weapons, great magical hybrids with three thousand pounds of ice-armored fury, gryphons of the high glaciers whose taming is only superficial and whose natural weapons and armor are the envy of many powerful knights. Warriors in their own right (many more intelligent and articulate than the men who ride them), they have great eagles’ claws on the forelegs beneath their wings, vicious leonine hindquarters, snake-like tails with the strength and length to serve as vicious whips or binding traps at need, and their feather-fur is harder than most steels, far harder to penetrate than most mail when even the most rudimentary battle-magic is placed upon our friends and steeds–and the battle-magic I employ is anything but rudimentary.
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Our rune-armour, a magical gift of the Kobold dwarf-smiths, is composed of perhaps a hundred layers of shellac and ceramic, each layer of which can take a battering ram to shatter, and it is so precious and rare that it requires the magical dissolution of a trained dwarven smith into its matrices in order to function–and this is after the dwarf has spent over a decade crafting it. There are still gaps and cracks to be found, as in all plate armour, but it is very finely jointed and the openings are small. Most enemies never even bother hunting for them, though the Fenrar would likely have the skill to try. Rune-armour also enhances a wearer’s strength manyfold, and can be used to enhance a voice’s carrying power as well, which often comes in handy on a battlefield.
But my greatest triumph with the Valkonir is the wind-lances. They are a magical weapon and projectile without peer, because aside from the fact that they explode like grenades on impact, and are possessed of a peculiar alchemy by which whatever they hit usually explodes as well, they have an ability even my peers in the magical metallurgy community thought a pipe-dream when I first proposed it.
I made a weapon grow.
Put more simply, the wind-lance will extend on command–and as it grows, so does its impact force, because the lance does not merely extend, it literally becomes longer and therefore more massive as it goes forward from the trigger point. The final range is limited by the wielder’s ability to hold it up (which for a knight in rune armour is about twenty yards and can be extended with the ice-gryphon’s strength to almost a hundred), but even for the ‘normal’ knights of my thousand-strong corps (the smallest of Noldur’s armies), the forces deployed at a hundred yards are…spectacular. If we could get close enough, we could smash Fenrar Keep stone by gargantuan stone, let alone any of the assassins themselves, and everyone involved knew it very well.
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Kalerin
It wasn’t the first time she had dreamed of her dead husband, but it was certainly one of the most vivid.
He looked a little older than she remembered, though he certainly should, after so long. He had a scar on his left cheek she didn’t remember that ran into a white streak in his hair, one that must have nearly cost him his eye, and he looked grimmer and stronger than the grief-faded man she had known so long ago, though the wildness only she had ever seen still lurked behind his eyes.
He had always told her he was a prince, running away from war, but she had never quite been sure if she believed him. The dream had, though, because he was decked in a red tabard over a brilliant blue undertunic and stark black pants, with the remnants of a silver bird of some kind embroidered on the front, though it was a little hard to tell what the picture may have been after the damage the battle had done to his clothes. She noticed, though, with a trace of amusement even here, that his boots looked to be the same sort of “eminently comfortable” travel-worn specimens he had always insisted on wearing as an apprentice wizard all those years ago, complete with patches and a fresh coat of glue. There was blood caked here and there, as well, but she could tell from the way he was still moving–swift, sure, controlled, continuous–that very little of it was likely his. The armor beneath the pageantry was silver-gilt and unnaturally shining, strewn with gems and almost glowing with power even in the afternoon sunlight through which he flew.
Dreams were strange things, for she realized only now that he was, indeed, flying, even as he laid about himself with sparkling blades that looked too fancy to be real and let fly runic power from his lips in partly visible displays of power and intent. Flying on the back of a great ice-gryphon such as had never bowed to mortal man when she had walked the world above, and accompanied by a cluster of other knights in the same eerie armor on the same unlikely mounts, the great beasts labored forward and upward under the most bizarre and confusing assault she could imagine, even after all she had seen, as great birds of many different shapes and kinds, great swans alongside eagles and falcons and vultures, vast-winged albatrosses and even a few smaller creatures such as pigeons and bats, each swarmed to assault him and his men and the ice gryphons the dream thought somehow tamed, a thing that would not truly seem as strange as she knew it to be until she woke. As the many flying creatures attacked, some with beak and claw, others transforming to other shapes in an attempt to wield hooves or daggers or simply brute falling weight in frantic mid-air strikes, some dim corner of her unconscious mind realized that he must be fighting shape-changers such as the old Faeron was, or the Fenrar of old Noldur, though neither thought truly registered through the strange haze that was the dreaming vision.
“Upward,” intoned the rune-master, the force of the soul of the word pressing around at his men as they swooped–again, she had the feeling, as if this had happened many times–momentarily above the range and reach of the attacking (was it a flock?) she thought dimly, but the thought faded, as most thoughts did, and the dream’s perspective opened again, as she realized the mid-air skirmish was taking place above a mountain valley, so high in the air that the castle below was no bigger than a postage stamp, the lake surrounding it roiling with unseen force that she somehow knew, in that peculiar way of dreams, was a frantic effort to spirit away the magic that her lost husband’s men were here to destroy.
Even as the peculiar perspective shifted, the great prince who wore the face of her beloved roared forth another command (this one was torn away by the wind before she could make it out) that sent the entire contingent of gryphons and knights, or what of them had managed to stay together amidst the birds’ frantic attacks, heeling over into a dive as each man pulled a mighty white lance from its seat at his side (a few, their larger weapons lost to the avians’ attack, loosed more familiar-looking swords that sent Noldurian light-rays streaming down alongside the mass of the lances that proceeded to grow longer as she watched, her detached dream self smugly certain that whatever attempted to flee the castle below was doomed.
But then, in the disconcerting way of dreams, she felt her vision zooming back in as she watched avians who were suddenly even more frantic, even suicidal, in their frantic, screaming dives, and her gaze locked of its own volition on one particular creature, a small gyrfalcon, less than the size of a gryphon’s great head, that came in at a screaming, vicious angle and a speed that the larger creature couldn’t match, aiming straight for the eyes of the magnificent creature who bore her scarred husband upon his back as he was distracted fending off three others with similar ambitions, all larger and more apparent threats than the speeding, vicious gyrfalcon.
Even in dream state, she tried to cry out, to warn the magnificent beast of what was coming, but her voice never carried here, not truly, and she felt tears well up in her eyes as the bird slammed into the eyes of a beast many times its beauty and its worth, savagely wrecking most of the creature’s great face even as a single swipe of the maddened, blinded gryphon’s beak tore the far smaller flyer nearly in two.
This was not the end, however, for even as the falcon died, a screeching, clawing bobcat formed from its remains, scrambling for purchase as the gryphon’s agonized gyrations actually accelerated the already howling dive towards the clearly doomed castle in the lake below. The warrior upon his back, abruptly forced to use far more attention to keeping his seat than could possibly be the norm, allowed his lance to waver only slightly, though by now it was nearly long enough that its own weight likely held it more stable than not, extending nearly four hundred yards down and towards the castle and the lake; even through her tears she could see the frantic effort to rein in the terrified and blinded mount, to reassert some form of direction or control or simply be rid of the scratching, yowling burden still driving the gryphon mad, but she could also see, likely long before the rider himself realized, that it was far, far too late, and they were diving much too fast.
The lance, and its few dozen fellows, impacted first, shuddering down into the stone and water over a nearly half-acre span, and even through her tears she could see that the explosion was far more devastating than even such remarkable weapons could be expecting.
The mushroom cloud that erupted swallowed the castle, the lake, and nearly a full square mile of the crater that surrounded it.
It also boiled up to swallow the embattled knot of man, gryphon, and bobcat whole even as the force of tears and sorrow finally proved enough for her to turn away.
She woke, as she had woken every time she’d had this dream over the past month and a half, heaving with sobs, so overwhelmed by horror and grief that it took several long moments before she remembered where she was and forced herself to calm.
“You okay?” her son’s deep voice rumbled near her head.
“Just–just the same dream again,” she said softly. “Go back to sleep, Stave, we’ll need an early start in the morning.”
He quieted, though she knew he wouldn’t be going back to sleep until she had calmed her heartbeat enough to convince him she was actually going to be alright.
Sometimes he reminded her of his father so much it hurt.
Really, a hundred and fifty years should have healed that, shouldn’t it? she thought, bemused, as she rolled over and forced her breathing to slow.
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In hindsight, she probably should have realized something was wrong as soon as the call came in, but it wasn’t as if they were ever convenient, regardless.
What galled her at the time, however, was that she hadn’t even finished putting the Healerie back together from the last geas-driven patient they’d had (a particularly cranky and particularly poisonous adder the size of a small mountain, who had torn out half the east wall in its haste to leave once it was healed), and there was a mild storm brewing. Stave and Kalerin together should have been able to finish patching the wall in plenty of time, but she couldn’t help with a major geas-call pulling her somewhere out in the wilds, and it was doubtful if he’d be able to finish it in time alone, not while the magic and the chaos winds were blowing through the series of pocket dimensions that was the Nethergates of Chaos, and who knew what was going to come through in that etheric storm or its aftermath.
And of course it was now, at a critical household juncture, that one of the greater demons who ruled the Nethergates got itself injured enough to be in dire need of help.
Not for the first time, she considered saying no, letting the creature die and severing her own immortality and power along with it, but even here, life was still precious, and she knew, even if she wouldn’t admit it, that she didn’t mean it–not yet, anyway. She dared not leave Stave–and more pertinent, Asheiğh’s precious little ones–to flounder through the hazardous chaos without her. Once they were all grown…
For now, though, she sighed, took up her medical tools, and followed the call.
The area the call led her to seemed innocuous enough (for the Nethergates at least); its only real magickal-chaotic oddity was that the rolling hills were actually on the backs of enormous overgrown tortoises which did, occasionally, move, at least a little. At first she was surprised not to see signs of any major damage or disruptions; usually anything that could cause serious problems for a higher-order demonlord was also inclined to spread the damage around a bit, but this place looked so calm she wondered at first if she might have misread the summons’ pull and was somehow in the wrong place or time-dimension….
There. Finally spotting what must be the patient (though far smaller than she was used to), she had the great roc swoop down a few dozen yards from something that had every appearance of being both a terrestrial ice gryphon and a very crumpled sort of dead. It still didn’t fit, since a gryphon was nowhere near powerful enough, magically, to send out this kind of call even at the height of its health, but there was nothing else here, and the thrumming, aching call vibrating her bones was quite insistent that she was in the right place. It had never been wrong before, but surely even a Nethergates demonlord didn’t expect her to raise the dead…
Then that very dead gryphon heaved, and she saw a lightning bolt that could only be the physical form of a hostile demon appear on the horizon.
Necromancy? From that far away? She blinked, and it almost cost her life, as the demon from the horizon moved so fast that even as her defensive circle activated with literally the speed of thought, she felt the wind from its jaws snapping shut inches from her face before the beast–it had an uncanny resemblance to a terrestrial horse–was hurled back by the force of defensive magic, nothing being allowed to come near her or the patient before the task was done.
She had had some close calls before, but that–as she watched several severed strands of her own pale gold hair floating down before her eyes and shook like the proverbial aspen leaf–she was pretty sure that was the closest she had ever come to staring her own death in the face.
Beyond the circle, the great gray horse whinnied loudly, striking and moving so fast she could scarcely track it, circling and battering as she allowed her nerves to run down before she approached the patient.
Then the gryphon moved again, and she realized that something was trying to get out from underneath it (really a much preferable alternative to dealing with the undead), even as she ignored the suspiciously familiar pattern of claw wounds on its face.
Limbs still shaking, she moved to the gryphon’s side to free the whatever-it-was whose injuries had called her here.
Even as she hesitated, trying to determine a good way to lift a three-thousand-pound dead beast off of a (possibly critically injured) demonlord, she saw a very human hand and head emerge from underneath the ice-blue juncture between wing and shoulder, tendons strained with effort.
She stared in shock as a man in peculiar armor (it looked as though it was made from a set of the world’s largest gems, these covering more of the surface area than the precious metals that seemed to be holding it together) struggled to free himself from the encumbrance of his dead steed. She thought for the first time in years of her own people, of what it was like to be one of many rather than the last and lonely One. Likely enough, she knew, the human shell was just that, the physical avatar of something darker and more powerful than she had yet encountered even here, and he would almost certainly be just as cruel and callous as every other demonlord she had dealt with, but the pains of hope and loneliness were whispering in her soul, and she could not completely turn them away.
Then he spoke, a low, raspy, wounded voice that, in a sort of surreal shock, she recognized, but the voice was that of a man a hundred and fifty years dead.
For one breathless moment, she was in that room again, watching in dumbstruck horror as a half-finished Summoning circle imploded and a terrible violet-scaled beast erupted in blood from the space that had so recently held her husband’s body, even as she felt an impact and fell…and fell…and fell…
“Recoil…troops…Vastar,” he whispered, in nearly the same husky tones he had once asked her to marry him in. “Need to…find out…what…Father,”he murmured, trailing off as he slid down in a dead faint, still with most of one leg trapped under the steed she had watched bear him to a fiery, desperate death in the most horrible dream of her long life every night for the last six weeks.
Still reluctant to believe, she knelt to tug off his helmet, ignoring her usual protocols, hands shaking so badly it took three tries to get it off.
“Neval,” she whispered in shock.
For crumpled before her was, indeed, the long-lost love of her life, her husband of only a few months–whom she had believed dead in the first cataclysms of the Greater Demon Wars a hundred and fifty years before, the same cataclysms that had landed her down here, pregnant and alone.
Eiandor Aerina Mitlon was, apparently, not dead.
And it seemed that not only was the dream true and her long-lost husband not dead…the Nethergates had called her to heal him, a power she knew to apply only to the higher-order demonlords of blood and death and bone who ruled their wyrd fiefdoms in this peculiar collection of pseudo-realities that had become her home.
She sat frozen for several minutes before the insistent call of the summoning geas forced her back to reality, and she began to examine him, trying as hard as she could to put her many questions aside until he awoke.
----------------------------------------
Veydann
Even drifting in a sea of grief, pain, and uncertainty after what I could only assume to have been a successful assault on Fenrar Keep, I felt Memer’s words working in my soul–dire, catastrophic words that, in the mad tumult of the response to the Fenrar’s assault, I had had no chance to speak of to anyone else.
The dragon will die, but the cubs may establish.
The mountain nest is broken. Only the hollows remain.
The One-Eye dies. You must take his place.
Now.
And looming in the background of the more pressing concerns, the most confusing–and the most dire–pronouncement of all.
That is your family’s only path to a new home.
I was only vaguely aware of the body I had so thoroughly abused. I remembered a vague struggle from beneath a crushing weight, and before that a tumbling, wild fall from some kind of great height, but that mattered very little next to the pressure of those terrible pronouncements falling from Memer’s lips, and the knowledge that I, alone, had heard and could not act upon them.
The mountain nest is broken. Only the hollows remain.
Someone had to know. Someone who could do something.
Decision made, I flung the connection to my body into darkness and rocketed past reality to the dream plane, searching for the ethereal connections that would lead me to the people I knew.
It took me far longer than it should have to find anyone receptive enough to hear me in the dream-state. Apparently, the chaos caused by the Fenrar had been greater than I knew; every mind I tried to reach, Fallon, Thorion, Modagni, even my stepmother Freya and the Himdalls, were so absorbed by dealing with the fallout, political, military, and emotional, that I couldn’t penetrate their consciousness far enough to be heard. All of them seemed very firmly of the opinion that I was now dead, as well, which made creating a substantial enough connection extraordinarily difficult.
Not that that was very far from the truth at the moment, anyway.
Finally, in desperation and unsure how long I could sustain this kind of flight even with my body’s injuries (whatever they were), I located an existing dream-link of sufficient fragility that I could essentially break in, probably because one or both parties weren’t sure what it was yet.
Beavan and Trinda? What on earth could they have to say to one another that would spark a dream-path? Ah well. At least Beavan had enough authority as the castellan of Aesaguard Castle to get my message through, and while I had never liked Trinda (she was far too fickle in her affection for my taste, been married sixteen times by now and caused more trouble and quarrels than any other woman alive, and she frequently used the Brisingamen necklace’s hypnotic powers in less than ethical ways), I also knew she had a fairly level head on her shoulders as long as sex and romance got kept out of it.
I emerged into the dream-world as Beavan was making a rather elegant bow to Trinda (both thankfully fully clothed and several feet apart) in what looked suspiciously like my father’s throne room, but with Trinda in the big chair.
You must take his place. Guess that made it my throne room now, disturbing as that thought was, but I shook it off. We had more important things to deal with than delusions of grandeur–hers or mine.
I cleared my throat as loudly as I could. “Sorry to interrupt,” I told them, “but I’ve got news that won’t wait.”
Both turned to see me with genuinely comical stares of shock, and I couldn’t help but grin, despite the circumstances. I must have made quite a sight, too; I wasn’t wasting effort on my appearance, so I was still dressed in the shredded and bloody battle gear in which the Valkonir had likely seen me devoured by fire.
“Veydann,” Beavan said with a sigh. “And here I thought this was going to be a nice dream.”
“This had better be good,” growled Trinda as she rose from the throne.
“Oh, it’s important,” I said, affecting an airy wave that nearly toppled me over before I steadied on a nearby pillar. Chaos-blasted blood loss wasn’t supposed to be affecting me here, but sometimes it got through… “It’s about Memer’s latest prophecy. Quite unusual, this one.”
“Do we really need to do this now?” asked Beavan, with an unreasonable, unresponsive tone that told me he was definitely unaware of the connection that had been forged–and, therefore, that we were anywhere except in his own dreaming head. “She’s not even wearing those chaos-dusted jewels this time.”
I glanced over at Trinda with an eyebrow raised, wondering if she would explain.
Instead, she sighed heavily and waved a hand to put a barrier between herself and my youngest brother.
“He never accepts anything I tell him in here,” she said wearily, “and I doubt we have time to convince him.” Trinda was, perhaps predictably, the expert on dreaming connections, so she was likely right. “Speak your piece, Odinar. How is it you are still alive?”
Ouch. No wonder my father hated me calling him that. The weight of that title stung. “I don’t know,” was my honest reply, “nor am I sure how long we have. How long has it been?”
“A week,” she said tightly, “and the situation is bad. Thorion and Modagni took the Pulvranin east as planned, but the rest of your war council got torn apart. Fallon insisted on taking the Einherion south, in its entirety, and Ullan was forced to flee the city with what sympathizers and Koboldin he could find, probably headed north to Drinorae and the Magna. The Himdalls and my brother have taken the garrison force and what’s left of the Valkonir northwest to stop the Faeron, but nobody thinks much of their chances of doing it.”
“Say what you mean, love,” said Beavan flatly. “Ullan and your brother may have started another civil war, Fallon has abandoned us entirely to chase future specters, and the shattered remains of the Valkonir and Friyar’s fancy dress parade are all that stand between the full Waesir host and Volhollan itself. Half the populace is already preparing to swear fealty to the Faeron and the other half is swearing the Himdalls will come up with another miracle.”
Normally, Beavan was much less blunt, but being stuck in what he still thought was his own dream was likely making him surly.
“And it is still worse than you think,” I told them quietly.
Both of them looked at me, surprised and not a little afraid.
I took a deep breath before I continued. “As heir apparent and acting Odinar after my father’s death, I am hereby ordering evacuation of the entire Valley of Noldur to the nearest available refuge beyond its boundaries. Anyone with connections to the dwarves may seek refuge in the caves, as Memer has declared the hollows will remain, but nowhere else in our borders can be considered safe. Beavan, as ranking Alsir left in the kingdom, it will be your job to implement. I am trapped in what I believe to be somewhere in the Nethergates, so you’ll be on your own for the most part, but I will attempt to communicate as best I can. I–”
I felt the world dissolving around me as the insistent tug of my bodily faculties hauled me unceremoniously from the dream realm into true unconsciousness.
No warning, either. Not a whisper or a tickle. Just the full-blown slam of summons to my body-that-was-home. Didn’t even let me finish my sentence. How rude.