4.88 Summer Storms are the Worst
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Lhani closed her mouth as her mind rejoined her body. She ran at Glim, punching him and hugging him at the same time, trying to shake the truth from him. Glim looked at her with some flicker that passed for emotion.
Lhani felt her mother's arms around her, pulling her back to the table. Lhani sobbed; great, body-wracking sobs. She felt her mother's hands stroke her hair, only to jerk away. Lhani heard an intake of breath at her ear.
“What is it, mother?”
“Your hair is turning white. And your arms…”
Lhani looked at her forearm, which had become distorted by a smattering of blood and bubbling flesh. She wiped the blood away to find neatly-twined lines in the shape of an eye, with a large dot at its center.
“So, Glim, you protect me even here?” She waved her mother off and looked at the stranger. “This guardsman is named Glim. He hails from an ancient Elderkin fortress which no longer has a people to call it home. It has been destroyed.”
Glim winced and looked at the floor.
“I don't know what comes, but have seen its tenor. The Eye of Algidon, it is called. A powerful storm, with a Great Mage at its heart. The Father, Glim called him. He is merciless.”
Day had dawned once more, though overcast. Lhani heard her own father barking orders for the town's defense, and ice ran down her back:
“Summer storms are the worst. Prepare for anything.”
Lhani bolted from her chair.
“No!” she screamed. “I have seen this already. We must leave, now, and not look back! This storm has will and menace. We'll not survive it!”
“Lhani, calm yourself!” Her mother's sharp tone softened. “Calm yourself. You are new to seeing. It can be difficult to filter another's vision. Do not interpret too quickly.”
“I am not a daydreaming child, mother, and the visions were clear. How else would you interpret dead bodies, and babies tossed into the wind like dolls? Whatever is coming will bash us into rubble without a care.”
“This is no time for exaggeration. Be rational! A seer must be dispassionate above all things.”
“An entire army of trained soldiers fell like dry reeds before this Storm-Father. How should we fight him? The storm comes this way and we must outrun it.”
Glim gripped Lhani's hand and nodded fiercely at her words. He sliced his hand across his throat and pointed at each of the people in the room.
Tomyko nodded too, in complete agreement with the stranger. “I don't even know why we are still here!” He ran for the door again. This time, no one stopped him.
Lhani rushed to her room and grabbed a knapsack. When she came back, she saw Arrad checking the saddlebags and wheeling over a new cart.
“Still two day's provisions.”
Tomyko fetched fresh horses from the stable. Her brothers had obviously made up their minds: they were leaving Hiehaven. Lhani felt warmth at their faith in her vision.
Her father was too busy with the town's defense to notice them, but her mother realized that all three of her children were about to flee the town and head into a magical maelstrom. She wrung her hands in her shift, bunching the fabric in knots.
Gerard took her hands in his own. “I will watch them as if they were my own, Maggie. When the storm passes we'll come back.”
“I must warn the rest.” Mhagi hugged her children. Lhani took comfort in her mother’s warmth and strength. “Be safe!” she told them. “Protect each other!”
Arrad placed his hand on Tomyko's shoulder and nodded. “As always.”
The riders gathered outside the palisade on the path. Lhani rode with Glim in the cart. She looked at the bloody mass of goose feathers on the trail and shuddered at the memory of the lizard-geese ripping each other apart.
“The storm moves southwest. We should head east,” Arrad said.
Glim stiffened and shook his head at Lhani. He pointed west.
“Head west,” she called out. They looked at her in irritation.
“Lhani, we saw the storm's path from the ridge. East is safest.”
Lhani played a card that she rarely played, knowing it would infuriate Arrad. “You children will head west with Gerard and I, or else turn back and go into Hiehaven.”
She silently bore Arrad's outrage as they rode west toward Adversity. The river had been so named for its frequent stretches of whitewater that could carry the unwary to watery deaths. None of them would look forward to riding that river in the best of circumstances. And these were not the best of circumstances.
Lhani whispered to Glim in the back of the cart.
“Now tell me: why have I just sent us into harm’s path?”
Glim shook his head in horror. He touched Lhani's face and stared into her eyes, willing her not to press.
“I must know, Glim. I know how afraid you are of it. I do not want that fear for myself. But someone has to tell them what is coming.”
She took his hands in hers and fell into his mind.
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Blood pooled in the snowy ground. Men hung limp, impaled on spires of ice. Glim's eyes did not go to the place where his father lay.
His hands closed into fists and his shoulders tensed. Hot tears streaked down his cheeks. He ran to a horse and set off. Reins bit into the flesh of his hands. Lhani could not tell how long he had ridden. A day? A fortnight? She knew only that Glim stood at a confluence in the river, watching a canoe come down the current. He froze the river and chased after the fleeing figures.
The entire river. And Glim had not even strained himself doing so.
Lhani guessed Glim had drawn close to Master Willow when his horse turned its head back and tried to bite his foot. Then the vision became strange and indecipherable to her.
Lhani heard Master Willow's presence in Glim's thoughts. She heard voices and snippets of other memory, all to jumbled for her to make any sense out of. She only knew overwhelming disgust, and rage, and her mind disintegrating. A snippet of lore seared itself in her mind: words she’d heard Glim speak through the raven. And then, a single thought formed:
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I must get to Hammerfall before Algidon.
Lhani shuddered out of the vision. The cart slowed as it came onto the plain at the foot of Summerling Ridge. Lhani craned her head over the side of the cart and saw Adversity in the distance, sparkling in the sunlight. Hadn't it been frozen, just now? The timeline in the visions and the timeline of her own body diverged and converged in such a way to fatigue her mind.
They rode to the water and dismounted. Canoes had become stuck inside thawing floes of ice. One further downstream from the others. Arrad and Tomyko looked at each other. Lhani knew their minds: wondering how so much ice could possibly be in the water. She knew her explanation would not please them.
“Glim ambushed his master here.”
“So he is the source of the power?” Tomyko's eyes narrowed.
“How is he not dead?” Arrad frowned.
Glim shrugged. He touched the ice he had wrought and looked at them in puzzlement.
Lhani tried to explain.
“It has to do with that storm. Master Willow said it was something literal from the myths. But I don't know which myth.”
Gerard grew solemn as they looked at the storm darkening the horizon to the south. “Lhani, you said before it was the Eye of Algidon. Algidon is the ancient name for ice essentiæ, so I took that to mean the eye of a blizzard. Are you suggesting that something out of myth physically walks in that maelstrom?”
Glim panicked as Gerard spoke. His body shuddered and he fell to the ground. His eyes fixed on the sky, glassy and still.
“I suppose that answers my question,” Gerard said ruefully. “In any case, the storm has passed us. We should get back to Hiehaven.”
Lhani's stomach fluttered.
“And a bath!” Tomyko said. “Particularly for Arrad here. He smells like an elk's rear.”
Arrad smiled. “I will be glad of a bed.”
They have no idea what is coming.
Gerard and her brothers turned back towards the horses with a passing glance at the storm. Lhani realized that her fists were clenched at her sides. She felt Arrad's eyes on her. Clinical, as always.
“There is more,” Lhani said. The others stopped. “I saw Master Willow's mind. He burned with a desire to reach Hammerfall before the storm. Something important is there. He knew an old legend.” She recited what she could recall of the snippet she had gleaned from Master Willow's mind: “Algidon's coming is foretold by crazed beasts and tremors, and gray clouds that swallow all in its path. People who see him turn mute and succumb to apathy.”
“Who cares?” Arrad interrupted and gave her his most exasperated look, the one that came right before his nastiest insults. Their worst fights had come after this very look he now gave her. “Lhani, I have been hunting for days. Found murdered women, fought crazed animals, and this,” he nudged Glim with his foot, “man right in the middle of it all. I want to go home. Get as far away from this stranger as I can. Start the hunt over and become a member of the village. Whatever he’s gotten involved in, it is not our fight.”
Lhani looked north towards home, and south towards the storm. Her brothers had become fatigued, and so had she. But she thought of the panic she'd felt at the attacking geese, and the horror of what Glim had endured. She steeled herself against her brother’s resentment.
“Hammerfall is about to be destroyed. You didn't see it, Arrad. Glim's entire town is obliterated. Every single person crushed to a pulp except for him. If I can prevent that from happening to others, I will.”
“If is the key word. If you can prevent it. Can you? The storm is south of us. What if we must go through it? Will we survive?”
Adulthood had been nothing special to Lhani. Akin to a birthday, where everyone asks: ‘How do you feel, now that you’re a year older?’ Pretty much the same as yesterday, thanks.
But watching the retreating storm, and knowing that another village would suffer the same fate as Glim’s, she realized what it truly meant to leave childhood behind.
“If I turn my back on those people, I may as well be dead already. I won't be able to live with myself.”
Lhani was deeply surprised, and a little moved, when Tomyko stepped beside her.
“Lhani is right. Something rots within Æronthrall, Arrad. The trees know it. The animals know it. I know it in my heart and my skin crawls with it.”
Arrad sighed. “Don't start this nonsense again, Tomyko.”
“I'm not surprised that the ground trembles and animals bash themselves against rocks. The same thing has been happening our whole lives, only in slow motion. Finally it moves fast enough for everyone to see.”
Tomyko's eyes pinched at the corners and his brow furrowed as he watched the storm. “If facing this Algidon will give me some answers, I am willing to risk it.”
Tomyko took Lhani's hands and swayed them back and forth. He took a step, then another as though dancing, and spun her until she smiled. “Besides. If there is an adventure to the south and the boredom of mucking stables to the north, I choose south.”
Tomyko's eyes flashed for a moment at Lhani, betraying the seriousness of his mind to her as they danced.
Arrad did not seem amused by Tomyko's bravado.
“So Lhani, you want to stave off future guilt, and Tomyko wants to soothe some metaphysical angst while dodging chores. I alone shall be left to explain your dead bodies to our parents.”
Lhani scowled at him.
“I'm not being dramatic, Lhani. You realize that this stranger you have fallen in with so readily killed at least five people? And by your report, did so unconsciously? We should strand him on the nearest mountaintop.”
Anger flashed in her, but Lhani realized that Arrad was trying to do the right thing. As was she.
“Hiehaven emerged unscathed. Can you really leave this menace to fall unannounced on Hammerfall? If so, I will go back with you.”
Arrad looked at Gerard for support, who said not a word. Arrad shrugged and walked towards his horse.
Lhani watched him carefully. Arrad tread heavily from exhaustion. But guilt also weighed his steps. Lhani was certain of it. Turn around, Arrad. You know I am right.
She grinned when he stopped and looked over his shoulder. “This is a terrible idea,” he said.
Lhani ran and wrapped her arms around him. She didn't speak, just held him until he shook her off. She considered hugging him again just to annoy him a little, but didn't have the energy for it. She’d become more tired than she realized.
Gerard clapped. “Arrad, help me get Glim into a canoe. Tomyko, see what you can do about that ice.”
Tomyko knelt at the frozen canoes and concentrated. A warm glow came from his hands as he ran them around the prow of the first boat. Humidity fogged the air and the white ice turned clear and melty.
“That is enough, lad!” Gerrad barked as he struggled to lift Glim. “You still have one to go! Don't drain yourself.”
Lhani watched the others work, unsure of what to do, and exhausted by her readings. Gerard set to the melting ice with his hatchet. Large chunks floated down the current, bobbing in the water. “Pull this canoe out!” he called to Arrad, and set to the second one. By the time both bobbed free, Tomyko had a tired smile on his face. Lhani watched it all as though it was happening to someone else.
“Great work, brother!” Arrad seemed truly impressed. “Now rest. Speaking of, how are you, Lhani?”
Lhani needed no mirror. She felt it within herself, and Arrad's expression confirmed it: she'd become drained. If she continued to ply Æolia, it would fuel itself from some other part of her, like fat burns itself during starvation. Her body would break down, or her mind would be addled. Memories or language lost.
Arrad took her into his arms and waved Tomyko over. Arrad touched his head to hers and gripped Tomyko's shoulder. “Listen, both of you. Recharge awhile. Think happy thoughts. Let us not overtax ourselves.”
Lhani nodded and sat down. She tried to find warm thoughts as she watched the others transfer packs, weapons, and supplies from the horses to the canoes, but happiness eluded her. Tomyko unhitched the cart horse, which milled about with the other horses.
“We must send them home,” Tomyko said under his breath. He looked at Lhani surreptitiously, but she caught it.
Lhani walked to the horses and prepared to nudge their minds towards home. At Arrad's protestation, she turned.
“This is but a trifle, Arrad. At least let me send them back home!”
Arrad's eyes filled with concern but he demurred. Lhani gathered the horses around her and bowed her head. She tried to find the minds of the horses, but they danced just out of reach of her scattered thoughts. Fluttered like butterflies at the edge of her own mind. She reached further outward.
Home, she pushed into their minds.
Ordinarily, Lhani would paint a picture of carrots and grain to cheer their steps. But that was not to be. As the horses ran for home, she crumpled into a ball on the ground.