Elyasin and Therel had shed all their jewelry and other clothing, except for their keshar-claw pendants, in preparation for the ritual. They’d taken time to bathe each other in the shallow river that ran behind their rotunda, a slow thing of kisses and gentle touch as they stood in the calf-deep water, feeling their sorrow; sharing it. Cleansed now and dressed, Elyasin felt more herself, her aches from the reparation of the White Ring gone as the fire of Hahled’s wyrria resurfaced. Her body felt hale once more, a heat and gentle fire simmering through her crimson Inkings, though her heart still hurt.
Now, she and Therel shared a quiet solace as they faced each other, ready, Therel clasping Elyasin’s hands with a solemn smile. Thad stood to Elyasin’s left, wearing his spectacles with his silk shirt and trousers. His participation wasn’t needed in this ritual, but he was part of it – to observe the proceedings and stand strong if any of them should fall. Gazing up at Therel’s beloved wolf-blue eyes, Elyasin heard Ghrenna began to sing a haunting melody from their right, with the guttural, lilting syllables of the Giannyk.
Elyasin shivered as an etheric wind swept her, her senses heightening as fire kindled in her veins – the same as when the Nightwind had touched her before. As Ghrenna’s alto voice wreathed the Alranstones, they began to brighten, their humming rising to a musical cadence. Elyasin’s skin shivered as she felt all seven Alranstones entrain to Ghrenna’s voice, tuning with each other and thundering through Elyasin’s bones in a weaving, sinuous, penetrating harmony. As that music intensified, braziers of fire-rocks began to flare to life all around the perimeter of the plaza – bursting into flame in a ring between the Alranstones.
Elyasin heard Therel’s sharp intake of breath. His hands clenched hers. Gazing up into his eyes, she saw the shock writ in them; that the braziers had flamed, repeating his seeing-dream of fire ringing them in the darkness. Humming filled Elyasin’s bones; music filled her body. A languid bliss began to surge through her with her burgeoning heat as Hahled’s inkings brightened on her skin, pouring through with a weaving, sinuous fire. That same golden-bright rune appeared in her mind again, when suddenly, it was carried away by a series of white sigils blazing within her. Like a rippling wind, that binding language sighed through Elyasin’s consciousness as Ghrenna sang; as Ghrenna called their meaning with her wyrria.
Sigils began to flare in the air also, upon ripples of etheric vapor, true manifestations that Elyasin could see with her waking vision. Like the coil of a vast serpent, they surrounded Elyasin and Therel. Pulling them closer; binding them into one heart, one mind, and one body. Elyasin flushed and she stepped in to Therel’s body, compelled by the sigils that wreathed them, as Therel moved forward into hers. Cool vapor sighed off him, catching her breath, gripping her belly, tightening her thighs in an erotic pleasure like ice smoothed over her skin.
Elyasin’s breath caught, captured in Therel’s flow, feeling the currents of a highmountain river surge all around her. Her heat flared, a surge in her crimson inkings like lava moving through a channel, seeking the cool of the river to capture it – to bind it into impenetrable strength and stone. A shimmering mirage lifted up around them as Elyasin’s fierce heat met Therel’s smooth cold, twisting with vapors as their purple and red markings simmered and lit. Etheric fire surged through her and Elyasin cried out, caught in the power – and the passion, as Therel gripped her around the waist, tight, and drew her in.
His eyes burned like icebergs and tundra-wights as he twined her fingers in his, lifting them to his lips. Kissing her fingers softly, his blue gaze devoured her, just like the first time they’d met. Elyasin heard a wolf howl in the rising music that shivered all around her, Ghrenna’s voice droning on in lilting patterns that caught the power of the crystal Alranstones and shuddered it back through Elyasin’s most intimate places.
Therel stared down at her, devouring her with his need and the feel of a desperate winter’s night. All Elyasin wanted was to heat, to sear in the depths of that flow, her power brightening tenfold as she shuddered to that carnal pull in her husband’s being. Devotion shone from his eyes. Passion and lust surged from his flesh where he pressed her, hard, commanding her body to be close to him with his hand strong upon her back. In the darkness, strong as mountains and howling wild in the night, Elyasin could feel the triumph and fall of the Elsthemi people and their King, holding her so strong and ready – ready to give his all just as she gave hers to this last hope they shared.
From his body, from his eyes, from their lips as hers reached up and his descended, she felt his fury and howl – that he would stand with her, loving her, until the end.
Elyasin’s heart opened as their lips met. Pouring up through her, rushing up from her heart and through her lips into his, Elyasin’s wyrric heat exploded. Devouring her husband as his eternal darkness came flooding down her throat with cold clarity and unimaginable power. Elyasin felt them take each other, eternally. Power flowed through them; her into him, him into her, forming a double-matched ring within their bodies – and then, in a towering wave of heat and cold flame, exploding through them both. Erupting Hahled and Delman’s twinned wyrria and flaring the braziers to columns of fire all around.
Therel cried out, seizing Elyasin around the waist, crushing her to his body with lupine madness and passion. Releasing their twined fingers, he hauled her up with both hands under her thighs and Elyasin seized him with her legs around his waist. A powerful strength shuddered through them both, upon a surging rip-tide of need.
Sigils poured through Elyasin’s mind as she was taken down to the golden dais by her husband. White fire rippled around them, flaring inscriptions upon the air as their silken clothing was torn away by their own hands. Therel was a wild beast as he attacked her, kissing her neck, kneading her bare breasts with his hands, gripping her waist. And Elyasin surged for him, growling, her own passion flaring high as she bit his neck and cried out her own need into his beloved flesh.
Positioning himself at her opening, Therel gripped her hard by the neck, holding her still, feeling her writhe beneath him, taking her with his burning blue eyes and the searing chill of his body before he took her with the rest. Elyasin burned, a towering inferno of passion, her inkings searing through her flesh, on fire with light. She needed him – it couldn’t wait. With a cry of rage and passion and devouring lust, she thrust her hips up onto him, hard – slamming him into her and spilling an obliterated cry from her lips as he roared out in agony and triumph, his body spasming and his fingers seizing her throat.
And then it began.
There was no time as Therel fucked her. There was no space as she clutched him, wrapping her legs around his hips, pulling him on and on. There was no mind left in Elyasin as she devoured her husband like an animal, like rutting beasts, furious and wild upon the passion and power now pouring through the ring of Alranstones. The braziers roared, flooding the plaza with fire. The Alranstones flared, sigils igniting upon their surfaces in coiling spirals as they resonated the heady power of the raw union inside their ring. The diamond-black darkness flooded with light as Therel heaved and gasped, gripping her throat while Elyasin seized his nape and held on, digging her fingernails in like claws until he roared with pain and fury.
She was fire on the mountains. She was molten ore moving inside the earth. She was the power of that flow, just as Therel’s wildness was the thrust of rivers in flood and oceans smashing cliffs into ruin, breaking icebergs to its raw glory. As they sundered each other, through each other, an impenetrable ring of fire and ice and might flooding the plaza, all the eyes upon the Alranstones began to open. Starting from the base, sigils flared with rippling white ether as the onyx eyes eased open first, then the crimson. One by one, all eyes opened, rising up through the pinnacle of pale violet, until all were wide, upon every Alranstone, all around them.
Seven eyes upon seven Alranstones – all flared to the carnal wyrria being wrought in their midst.
As they fucked within that all-seeing ring, Elyasin fe
lt power flood from her skin, devoured by those eyes. As if the world watched her carnal glee; as if the entirety of the cosmos could see their bliss and devoured their heady abandon. An explosion thundered through the circle, blasting out from the Alranstones – a shockwave rushing into the center, hitting Elyasin and Therel with a hammer of power and ecstasy that made them both cry out in their final moment. And as Elyasin came, in completion and glory from Therel’s last wild thrust, pouring her fire up and out through her husband, he came with an obliterating roar that poured a cool river through Elyasin’s core – and Elyasin felt them twist into one.
One heart. One body. One mind and one strength. One swirling vortex of wyrria, flowing upon each other’s tides – the perfect balance within the perfect union. As the power twisted into an inseparable coil, pulling them through each other as they collapsed, an immense blossom of white etheric fire exploded around them. Sigils flared through the shivering air – and a portal opened in their midst, swallowing the golden dais.
Reeling in glory, her heart thundering as Therel crushed her beneath his exhausted weight, Elyasin lost herself to that wyrric flow. Some part of her saw that they were elsewhere, no longer in the diamond caverns. That she and her beloved were somewhere in the sky, a lightening dark which held burgeoning clouds above and all around. Therel’s heart hammered upon her chest and his deep breaths heaved, his exhausted lips at her neck. Wind licked Elyasin’s bare back, and she gazed over her shoulder, seeing nothing but clouds and a golden dawn beginning to seep through the endless sky.
Floating upon her bliss, she realized she and Therel were suspended in midair, wreathed by etheric sigils that flared up from the air itself, rippling with white-gold curls of wyrria. Looking down, she saw Ghrenna, laying upon a white stone altar ten lengths beneath them, sundering to a ring of etheric sigils just the same. Surrounded by three massive archways, each rippling with pale fire in a wyrric barrier that surrounded the central space, Elyasin saw Ghrenna writhe upon the altar. With sinuous movements, she surged, as if aroused by the touch of the dawn wind that curled past Elyasin and licked the altar below.
The entirety of the white tower and its cloverleaf platform began to swirl with that wind. In her exhausted, blissful fugue, Elyasin saw Thaddeus, on his knees upon one of the clover’s petals, his wide-eyed gaze devouring the scene from where he watched from outside the wyrric barrier. As the wind swirled and the tower began to hum, and Ghrenna surged upon her altar below, clasping her breast, gasping and arching as she touched between her legs, Elyasin felt a devouring wind of ether pour through her.
A sundering, opiate ecstasy, the powerful sweep of the wind made Elyasin’s mind flee and her muscles lax. She felt Therel shudder atop her, their magic still twined deep in a blissful coil as the Nightwind poured through them both. Ghrenna heaved in sinuous glory below, the wind surging through her, pouring from her, opening within her. Elyasin felt that mighty call resonate in the stone of the White Tower and explode outward – devouring the land. Calling everything; everyone. Calling the wyrria of the earth itself to hearken to the last Wind of Night before the Rise of the Dawn.
And they came. Like the a sundering ocean, they came, flooding Elyasin’s bliss-emptied body. Focusing in her empty vessel and twisting into one stream of energy, with a second stream of wild power coursing through Therel. Twin channels for the vastness of the world’s wyrria and every living heart upon it, Elyasin and her King combined that rushing, annihilating flow – pouring it down into Ghrenna upon the white altar.
Elyasin cried out; Therel did the same, sundering to that rush of wyrria pouring in from the world and through her body. Their inkings flared with blue-white light as Elyasin came again upon the tide of that terrible, wild power, shuddering as Therel hardened inside her and erupted also, roaring in exhausted bliss. But the wyrria flooding in now from the entirety of the world and all its people didn’t release them, only used their twisting glory as fuel – pouring through them faster, snaring them harder into the river’s rush and cascading all of that power like a waterfall down into Ghrenna, writhing with ecstasy upon the white altar.
Caught in the passion and fury, Elyasin couldn’t even cry out as the next climax hit her, and the next, and the next. Her consciousness expanded in annihilation, Therel surging atop her as they twisted together, their bodies lost to the river of wyrria as dawn’s light lifted in the rose-gold sky, brightening the thunderous underbellies of the clouds.
At last, the tower rung like a struck bell from all the raw power resonating through it, and Ghrenna screamed in a terrible bliss below upon the altar. That peal of power rang out in the heavy morning, shivering the air and calling to the world. Its sundering knell shook the snowcapped highmountains as it banished clouds from the sky in a wide ring around the tower.
Calling the Rennkavi – as dawn’s first light flooded over the mountains at last.
CHAPTER 46 – ELOHL
Beyond the Valenghian guard-wall, Elohl held the line in the depths of the night. Cavalry stretched to either side of him and behind, filling the Aphellian Way, foot soldiers and pikemen behind, ready for the forces that were coming. Shadows moved far out along the western Way, dotted with thousands of points of fire. Thunder pummeled the dry air as a lance of lightning slit the heavy crimson clouds. Elohl glanced up but felt no stir of rain as he watched heat-lightning flicker again, tingeing the roiling cloudmass red.
“Yours?” He glanced to Fenton, sitting tall upon a black warhorse beside him.
“My tension’s got to go somewhere, Elohl,” Fenton nodded tersely. “I can’t spark my hands right now. It scares horses.”
A low rumble of thunder rolled over the plain as blossoms of light flickered above. Tension filled Elohl, too, as he watched the dark mass creep closer. Lanterns of green-yellow fire twisted at intervals among the Menderian army, shedding an eerie light on the black sea of men and horses approaching. Watchtowers in the Valenghian fortifications blazed behind Elohl, enormous signal-fires lit to give those who battled at least a slanting light in the heavy dark. Dawn was near, but the night was still dark as a sharp ozone scent slit Elohl’s nostrils, dry dust swirling in the wind. Fenton was containing himself, all in all. A hard readiness set Elohl’s jaw, anticipating what Fenton could do when he finally unleashed that energy in battle.
Elohl’s Goldenmarks cast a flickering glow, muted in his simmering tension. The light shivered over the recently returned Merkhenos del’Ilio to his left. Merkhenos said not a word, but watched the Menderian host approach with narrowed eyes. With the rumble and chunk of tens of thousands of soldiers and horses stopping all at once, the Menderian force halted at last.
Thunder rippled the air. Branch lightning lanced the heavy clouds, illuminating the battlefield in a flickering light. Watchtower fires and Menderian lanterns cast an upward luminosity on that roiling black mass, haloing the night like fresh blood and bruised flesh. Elohl inhaled, knowing the stones of the Way would run far more crimson than the sky tonight. In the punctured darkness, he saw a group of riders form at the front of the Menderian army.
“Parlay,” Merkhenos spoke curtly, flicking his fingers to Elohl and Fenton and summoning them as he stepped his horse forward. Five of Merkhenos’ top Generals plus Ghirano moved forward with the group, silence swaddling their hoof-falls as thunder rippled above.
Tension filled Elohl’s neck and shoulders. A battle-ready, fierce tension he knew all too well. Breathing deeply, he fed that sensation through his body, allowing it to spread into his limbs. For the first time, that hackle-high readiness had somewhere to go, rushing through his veins and into his Goldenmarks – the conflict of impending battle flaming them luminous in the crimson night.
Suddenly, Fenton stiffened at his side, then swore. Reaching out, he gripped Elohl’s reins. “I feel Kreth-Hakir. Merkhenos! Stop your Generals. They can’t come into the parlay. I can hold off a cadre of mind-benders from you and Elohl, but I can’t do it for your entire leadership.”
Me
rkhenos halted his warhorse. But to Elohl’s surprise, the battle-readiness upon the man’s face hadn’t changed, as if he expected this. “Take them back, Ghirano.” Ghirano opened his mouth to protest, but Merkhenos waved a hand at him and he went, wheeling his horse and making the other Generals retreat with a sharp whistle.
“No need to block the Kreth-Hakir for me, Scion of Khehem,” Merkhenos spoke again. “I have my own protection against mind-benders. Save your strength for battle.”
Fenton paused in the saddle, narrowing his eyes upon Merkhenos as the darkness flickered, before a wry smile lifted his lips. “Illianti bastard. More tricks up your sleeve than a whore of Tellurium. You’ll have to share that mind-blocking recipe of yours with me someday.”
“The Illianti have many surprises against many foes. But we never share them.” Merkhenos gave a renegade smile, but his hard copper eyes never left the men that had halted a hundred paces distant. He nodded to Elohl. “Shall we?”
Elohl moved his horse onward, taking the lead. Though Merkhenos was the High General of this army, it was Elohl’s power that would turn the tides tonight. Lightning rippled above as the trio closed the distance, Elohl’s Goldenmarks searing with a slightly stronger blue-white light as he moved into the familiar rhythms of impending battle.
A lantern slung from the pommel of a horse ahead, lighting their destination and the four men who waited. But a dark space gaped in the middle of the line, as if the night had swallowed the center of the group who had come to parlay. Then, the air wavered before Elohl’s eyes. Like a leviathan rising, a massive scorpion appeared, its diamond-black chitinous plates glittering in the lantern’s light as sheet-lighting raced through the clouds above. Its arched tail rose high, a searing barb longer than a man’s arm shining with venom in the red night. Enormous claws cluttered and clacked as it gave a restless sidestep – as if it couldn’t wait to slice horses apart.
Goldenmark Page 69