“Don’t scream,” said Seline, who had also just seen the bones, “It’ll echo throughout the whole valley.” They both slowly stood up and realised that the soldier was not alone. Here was a graveyard.
“I have never seen armour like this,” Seline said, looking at a distance, not daring to touch it, “but I know that flag on the spear. That is the flag of Old Pyresia.”
“No one came to bury them.”
Seline looked at the old soldier for a few moments. “No.”
“I wish to thank you,” said a man’s voice from behind a large boulder to the side, startling her. Seline saw her reaction and turned around to see the man too. They each gripped their weapons tightly, recognising the figure. It was Reilek.
“And the young Yukonian. Please convey my appreciation to her, too, Taer’lyn. I regret I have never encountered her language.”
He was still wrapped in the bandages that the village of Tolvik had paid the price for. His wounds remained unhealed, for the blood had stained the bandages red, and he heavily favoured his left leg. He was more wounded than she remembered from the battle with the Elsgard. It was amazing that he had come so far from the village.
The weakness that Levi had found growing inside of her had sat itself down quietly out of her mind. It would not interfere with the rage that took over her. “Bastmyra!” she shouted, pointing her axe at him, “You fled, you coward! You shamed all of us! They are all dead and you are not among them. How you have dishonoured them all!
“That is but a trivial matter, Taer’lyn. Now please, I beg you, kill me.”
With pleasure, she thought. She dropped her shield and grabbed her second axe, her preferred fighting style. He was injured and carried no weapons. He asked her to kill him, and she would honour his request. But she would make it painful.
She charged at him, without him even so much as bracing. She leapt at him, axe slicing through the air down towards his shoulder. Instead, he simply turned his shoulder and kicked her leg, allowing her to fall into the dirt. Gravel grazed her face, only enraging her more so. She swung wildly at his leg with her left axe as she rose, but he anticipated it and raised his leg just in time.
“Tell your friend to help. Please.”
“No, this is between you and me, Bastmyra.” She swung and cut from all sides, yet Reilek simply dodged and weaved, occasionally kicking out at her legs, knocking her to the ground. She had never seen him fight like this. He never played and pranced. There was no performance in a killing. He didn’t even have a weapon. Why did he call her out here just to die? Why call her out and then refuse to die?
“Listen to me, Taer’lyn, you alone cannot beat me. Please, tell the Yukonian to fight me too. Kill me.”
“If you want to die, stop dancing around and face my axe. I will make it quick.”
“I cannot. Please tell your friend before I grow impatient.”
She screamed and charged at him again. She swung from the right, but he leapt forward into her, and using the momentum of her swing, grabbed her arm and threw her over his shoulder. She winced in pain but got back to her feet as quickly as she could. His wound on his leg had reopened and she could see blood trickling down his trousers.
“Tell her!” he yelled, losing his calm, “I will be forced to make you scream next time so that she will have no choice.”
“You can try,” she said, but deep inside she could feel the early signs of her courage faltering. She hadn’t landed a single blow on him. Before she had worked out how she would attack him next, he came up to her. She swung with her left axe, which he grabbed before she brought it down. He spun around her and twisted her arm around her back. She yelled out in pain. She began to swing her right axe around her body, but instead he tripped her with his right leg, and she fell straight to the ground with her arm still pinned behind her.
“Tell her!”
Levi refused. He tightened her arm, and she involuntarily yelled out in pain, echoing throughout the valley.
“Good,” said Reilek, “She comes.”
He let her go. She rolled onto her back in pain and tried to make sense of what was happening. She had never seen him fight like this. It wasn’t that he was suddenly a better fighter, but it was nothing like the way Reilek had fought before.
She heard Seline yell as she jumped into the fight, with her brother’s greatsword. It wasn’t a weapon suited to such a nimble opponent, but it was too late to tell her that. He easily dodged and weaved her strikes.
“Together, please! End me!”
Levi stood up and grabbed her axes that lay on the ground. Fine, we’ll do it your way. They circled around him, but he simply stood still. Even from behind, he dodged everything that they hurled at him, pushing them off balance, sweeping their legs from underneath them.
“Enough!” Levi shouted, “Why do you dance and weave if you want to die? Do you mock us? Did you call us all the way to the Vieran Pass to kill us?”
“No,” said the man, “I truly hope that you will kill me and end this life. Quickly.”
“Then just let us kill you. I won’t make you suffer. I concede that you are better than us.”
“I cannot do that.”
“Why?” Levi asked.
“Levi,” said Seline, glancing quickly between the two, “Who are you talking to?”
“Who else is here? Of course, it’s him.”
“He has not said anything.”
“What?” She only then realised that he had been communicating with her directly through his mind.
He turned to Seline. “You speak Yupiran? I did not know Yukonians spoke the language. Thank you, Yukonian, for coming. Now please kill me.”
Levi stood in front of Seline, “Nyr.”
He looked deep into her eyes, this time speaking physically, “Nyr? Tel vim ryzc nyr aem e qoch fyn gaelsun byrm alac?!”
“What did he say?” asked Seline.
“I have no idea. That sounds like Old Galascaen.”
“Kill. Me.” Reilek spoke in heavily accented Yupiran. Something wasn’t right here, but Levi sensed that she had more time than he did, so she decided to get to the bottom of this.
“You are not Reilek. Who are you?”
He answered through telepathy, the only way it seemed that he could speak in a language that was understandable to her.
“Rylic.”
-------------------------------------
The Fallen Hero
“Now please, there is not much time. They will come for me. Please, kill me.” The Taer’lyn did not understand the urgency. They were coming.
“I tried. We are no match for you. You predict every move.”
He shook his head impatiently, “No, I will tire, you must keep trying. I know you can finish me. I can see it clearly.” They were his only hope. He had seen it. They killed him.
Levi too, shook her head. “What do you mean?”
He sighed. He hadn’t seen that they refused to fight. Even though he stood here, where Magick coursed in the air thickest in all of Cerenea, time had taken its toll. Perhaps a quick explanation could convince them.
“Once, it was called The Gift. The power of foresight. I do not predict every move, but I have seen it,” he said out loud in the barbarian Yupiran tongue, “And so too has my vessel, Reilek. At least at this place.”
“Your vessel?” the so-called Taer’lyn asked, wasting precious time. He felt like killing her, all those centuries…but he needed her to kill him.
“Please, you must understand. They are close. I will not let them take me again. You must kill me before they arrive. I beg you.”
“What do you mean, vessel?” said the cursed woman, knowing that time was against him.
He swore in his native tongue. “My soul, my essence, was forcefully removed from my body with blood Magick, cursed rituals that I will never get out of my head. Time and time again was my soul bound to another’s body with no purpose but to watch, to suffer, the progress, the plotting of my enemy, my
torturers. If you don’t kill me now, the Taer’lyns will come any moment now and capture me, and you will have condemned me to many lifetimes of suffering, a passenger to another’s life, watching my enemy grow stronger. I cannot offer you anything but a promise of your deaths if you do not kill me before they arrive.”
The dumb woman would of course be lost to deep thought, trying to understand something that no one in this era would think possible; and this took precious time. They would be here any minute now, with their special contraptions.
“Why can’t you just come with us for now? I promise I will kill you, after I make sense of all this.”
“You cannot!” he roared, “only here can I maintain my will over this vessel. If I leave this Pass my soul will once more be subordinate to the will of this body, this Reilek. Please, no more questions, I can hear them. You cannot kill them. I cannot kill them.”
“You are the hero of Taer’lyn, Ryleich,” said the daft girl.
“Rylic, yes.”
“Then why is Taer’lyn after you?”
“Taer’lyn is not my enemy. I was supposed to die when we lost at Mastyr. I was supposed to die with Taer’lyn. But they captured me. A lifetime of torture was not enough for my crimes.”
“Taer’lyn won the battle at Mastyr.”
The stupid, stupid girl. She was not listening. “No. We did not. We died. The end of the rebellion. We failed. The Elder, Galascyes won. They simply claimed the rebellion had won. They knew that Karzark had taken the south, and that Taer’lyn would eventually take the north with their help. They covered it up. They proclaimed Taer’lyn victorious. There were symbolic displays of the overthrow, but it was all orchestrated by the Galascyn emperor. He himself was beheaded and dragged around before the cities, but it was a sacrifice he had made to keep his family in power. The Elder of the West still lives. You have spent your life doing their bidding, just as I have spent lifetimes.”
“Wait, wait,” started the woman again.
“No. No more waiting. You need to kill me now or I will kill you for sending me back to my hell.”
“One more thing, I promise,” she said, switching back to speaking through her mind.
He was gritting his teeth, his heart pounding. He could see that he had lost a lot of blood from his wound on his leg. Shit, if I can’t die from that…
“I think Taer’lyn uses a lesser form of The Gift now. We use it to communicate over distances. I can’t predict, but I can read thoughts. Are you able to read any person’s thoughts that you want to?”
“You are oversimplifying what little you understand, but yes, with time and a face I can-”
“Then I have one favour to ask, and only one before I kill you with this axe, I swear.”
“Quickly, please.” She would surely share his urgency if she only knew what he did.
“Commander Reisch of the Elsgard. I want to know what he plans to do with me after this mission.”
Rylic closed his eyes. The sooner he got this over and done with the sooner he could finally rest. Reisch of the Elsgard, Reisch of the Elsgard…he knew the face after looking through Reilek’s mind. Reilek struggled, but the Magick in the Vieran Pass was strong, and he brushed aside his defences. How he would have loved to have the time to relish this rare moment of superiority and freedom from his binding. He found the face. The man was in Yukonia now, but what was his plans…”
“No! He cannot!”
“Cannot what?” the Galascyn woman asked, with horror forming in her eyes.
“He’s mistaken, it’s not…” Long-repressed memories began to stir inside.
“What’s-”
Why did she ask him to look? And why did he faulter when the gift of death was so close? He could let it all go. It wouldn’t matter. Injustice was a concept for the living to deal with. But what would Yelia make of it? Would she forgive him and embrace him? Or would she cast him aside, along with all his comrades waiting for him? Would they hate him? This woman standing in front of him did not know the weight of what her favour had thrown onto his shoulders.
He let out a long, drawn breath. “It seems that I must endure my fate a little while longer. Your world might depend on it. So, promise me that one day you will grant me death, in this body or otherwise. Swear it.”
Clearly somewhat taken aback by his reversal on his intent to live, she simply said, “I swear it.”
The Yukonian, who had not heard any of his side of the conversation, did not understand what was going on other than something had gone awry. She said something to the Galascyn woman, but he could not understand.
He did have sympathy for her. Having your very existence suppressed and dominated by a foreign host was something he knew all too much about. It was an unkind fate that she would endure, but she was but a single soul amidst a sea of countless victims whose memories were painfully etched into his consciousness. “Sorry,” he said. Then through ear-piercing screaming and shaking, she fell to the ground, and then he took over her body.
Seline stood up, albeit wobbly. She widened her stance for stability as she swung Black Wyke’s greatsword down, removing Reilek’s head from his body.
“I told you, in this body or otherwise. Now, come.”
-------------------------------------
Rhen
The river was partly frozen over, and water only ran at the deepest currents. Thankfully, Rhen and Kiern weren’t required to cross it, only follow its course through the forest. The day was warmer than yesterday, and the sunlight through the trees had melted a lot of the snow. It was still cold and wet, and the dampness had crept into Rhen’s boots. He knew the stories from soldiers about what happens with damp boots, so he vowed that he would dry his boots and feet out around a fire when they made camp. And now that they had reached the edge of the forest and could see the base of the mountain range, it was time to do just that.
He took out Impatientia and hacked off a few branches and gathered some kindle that wasn’t lying in the snow. With the help of Magick, the fire was roaring in no time.
Rhen had been struggling with what Vaelynna had said to him back at the inn. All caranaum were made for each of the youngers. It made sense that they were to be wielded by their chosen people. Rhen’s sword, for example, seemed stronger when he wielded it, and acted like a regular sword when Kiern used it. So, there was no denying it had special power. But it hadn’t rejected Kiern, nor Vaelynna when she had handed it over to him. Had Vaelynna merely tried to discourage him from searching? Had she been telling the truth? Or had she only thought she had been telling the truth and had confused outright rejection for not channeling its power? It made him wonder about his future. If the Dawn Shield did indeed reject Kiern, what would become of him? Would he be allowed to walk away? What if Vaelynna had been wrong and Rhen decided to race for it? Would he claim it for Karzark and seek redemption? Should he claim it for Euphyria? Should he offer to carry it for Kiern and the Elsgard instead? But…what if by rejection, she really meant…fatal rejection. Would it be best to let Kiern try first? Should he risk it himself? He didn’t know. He was too tired to think about it anymore.
Kiern had shot two hares in the morning, and it was just after midday. He took off his boots, resting his feet on a stump to keep them off the cold ground. “Rhen, I need to tell you something.”
“Uhuh,” he nodded as he took the hares out the bag.
“I think Magick is consuming me.” Kiern had a look of genuine worry on his face.
“What do you mean, consuming?” He started skinning the hare. He was getting better at it.
“It’s taking me over. It’s like a bad itch that will only go away when I scratch it. I can’t do anything without thinking how to use Magick first.”
“You can fight it,” Rhen said, looking Kiern in the eyes. He had no idea about Magick; in fact, no one in the world did, except for a select few whose knowledge was concealed from the public.
“It’s easy to say that when you don’t know how it feel
s.”
“Reisch taught you. He’s lived with it longer than you. He’s overcome its pull.”
“Maybe he’s a stronger man than I am.”
Rhen sighed, “That may be true, but he’s also smarter than you, and he would not have told you prematurely. He waited a long time to tell you. He waited until you were ready.”
“Hmm,” the Yalean said as he put on his dry boots, “You’re right. I need to see him soon. The last few days have gotten worse.” He finished with a laugh, “Of all things, air. Ha! The one thing that’s impossible to stop using.”
“Well, once we’re done with our diplomatic mission, the Euphyrians told us to head to Vinrael, where we can find passage on a boat down to Lera. That would certainly expedite the return trip.”
“Well, let’s eat lunch, grab the shield, and be on our way. This itch isn’t waiting around.”
Rhen put the hare on the fire. His stomach had already started rumbling and it was now about to eat itself. The sight of the hare brought guilt into his mind, however. He had meant to tell Kiern, but he got distracted and now it was too late. The Euphyrian yesterday had mistaken them for Khasari. He remembered word for word what he had said right before Kiern put an arrow in his heart. You wasted your time tracking us! We aren’t Sons, though we are all the same to you, aren’t we?! You followed us all this way for nothing! You can’t even keep your own vows, you damn Khasari! Go on, go back and report to your leader. Tell them you killed four armed Sons if you must but know this: you Karzarkis will never win! I gladly offer my life to Euphyre! Go on, let my blood nourish this forest, it too shall remember my sacrifice. The whole encounter had been a misunderstanding. Simply by heading in the same direction as them had been reason enough to attack without asking questions. They didn’t even look anything like Khasari, if the hunters had stopped to think for a second.
Fortunately, his thoughts were interrupted by Kiern.
“Last night, you asked me what my dream was, if the war ever finishes and my job is done. What about you? I mean, after we finish this mission. Are you going to stay with the Elsgard? Are you going to try and get a pardon?”
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