Goldenmark

by Jean Lowe Carlson

  A call, generated by their twinned wyrria.

  Ghrenna’s cerulean gaze hit Elohl like an ocean wave. Sucked into their blue depths, he was drowning in her. He heard Fenton’s shout, as a barrier of wyrric vapor blossomed to life all around. As Fenton raced near, Elohl was wrenched sideways through space and time; ripped from the battlefield and dumped onto a white platform ringed with three towering archways.

  Elohl’s wyrria flashed out as he hit the stones of the white tower with a hard grunt. Lhaurent’s wyrria did the same, and he rolled onto his back, coughing from the impact. He heard Fenton cry out, heaved to a far cloverleaf. Black sigils cleared from Elohl’s skin as he pushed up fast, knowing where he was. The White Tower rushed with wyrria, obliterating, and the center of all that might was Ghrenna. Ghrenna, her pale beauty pristine as she writhed with ecstasy upon a low stone altar in the middle of the tower. Ghrenna, her beautiful waves tumbling free as she heaved and gasped in a surging wind of ether, as if she made love to the entire world.

  Power poured down into her, in a torrent of white wyrric fire that arched in from the golden dawn and flooded the highmountains. A barrier of wyrric fire surrounded the center of the platform between the archways, Fenton trapped upon the other side. But Elohl had no mind for the Scion of Khehem as he moved, rushing to Ghrenna’s side, his hand clasping hers upon the altar. As her eyes opened, burning with cerulean fire, Elohl felt all that wyrric power from the dawn go roaring through her body – straight into his. With a cry, she arched up as he lowered, power swirling out from her heart and up through her throat, exhaling into him as their lips touched and kissed. Bliss filled Elohl, as the entire wyrria of the world filled him, cascading to the dawn in ripples as endless as the rising sky.

  Suddenly, a sharp pain hit him like an avalanche. Stabbed into Elohl’s back; ripped into his kidneys like daggers of fire, again and again. He screamed, torn backward by a hand of black ether and flung to the tower’s stones. He heard Fenton’s roar, saw blasts of lightning hitting the barrier in a wretched fury. But Elohl couldn’t breathe; couldn’t move. He didn’t know how many times he’d been stabbed, but blood pooled beneath him upon the pristine stones, vivid red upon the white, Lhaurent’s sickled silver-white knife laying beside it. Rolling his eyes, Elohl saw Lhaurent seized by the flooding power as he took Elohl’s place over Ghrenna, caught in the unification rather than Elohl. As Lhaurent caressed Ghrenna’s cheek with his writhing black hand, he gasped, flooded with power – and then thrust that hand of darkness deep into her chest.

  Ghrenna screamed, arching like she was on fire. Fenton screamed, hammering the barrier with lightning as Lhaurent leaned in, his wyrric hand gripping inside Ghrenna, pulling all the power of the world through her heart and into his swirling darkness as the first rays of dawn smote the tower. Black sigils of ether began to write through the air as Ghrenna’s body fell slack, her fingers trailing over the edge of the altar and into Elohl’s blood. His heart wailing, his world collapsing and Fenton screaming as that black fire curled out, Elohl willed the last of his fleeting strength into the tips of his fingers. They twitched, moved – and with a final tingle of his sensate sphere, his fingertips found Ghrenna’s.

  Elohl gripped her fingers; she gripped him back. And Elohl felt Ghrenna divert that massive wealth of power, all the world’s wyrria, away from her violated heart and through her fingertips – straight into him. For one endless moment, all the wyrria of the world flooded Elohl as he and Ghrenna kissed through their touch.

  And then Lhaurent’s boot stomped down, crushing Elohl’s fingers to the bloody stones and breaking their hands apart.

  Their connection snapped out; the power faded. And Elohl faded with it, lost to the Void.

  CHAPTER 47 – JHERRICK

  Pain raged through Jherrick. Crimson light seared his vision. He couldn’t move, couldn’t think. There was only pain, and red, and the sensation of laying upon hard ripples of sand. Jherrick knew he was still alive, his body twitching like a spider in death throes, while his mind roamed the Void, fleeing to the safety of space. The wrenching of coming through the crystal arch from the Sanctuary of the Noldarum had been agonizing, and Jherrick saw others who truly were dead move by upon the Void’s etheric currents.

  Phantasms brushed him as they sped away to their ultimate homecoming, and Jherrick’s wyrria began to turn – seeing the dead, feeling them. The stalwart honor of a warrior, the scheming precision of a money-lender, the slippery consciousness of a thief. The true dead passed by, luminous in their satisfaction with their life and eager to move on. They took no note of Jherrick; just another untethered soul. Some lingered, however, hovering around dying bodies. While some yearned for bodies already gone, burning upon a pyre in the cold northlands or being sealed into a tomb underground.

  Hungry spirits of tundra-wights, barrow-vampires, and other unfinished dead turned in the Void to gaze upon Jherrick. Curious, wondering if he could be a way for them to re-enter the world. Tendrils seeped into Jherrick’s shuddering flesh, trying to wrest his body from him. Like spiderwebs, Jherrick’s wyrria burned them from his etheric body – their dark, writhing energies taking up a vigil at their death-haunts once more.

  But there were others in the Void, also. Ancient energies deep in stasis, minds that twisted and roiled, caught between this world and the next. Locked in place, subjugated and shackled, they were trapped by wyrria that held them like ghastly chains. Visions flashed in Jherrick’s mind – rose quartz columns, smoky crystal pillars, Byrunstone Plinths, obsidian tombs. Alranstones. Shock filled Jherrick as he saw complicated glyphs in the Void, locks that shifted and re-formed. The work of an adept jailor who had created ferocious sigildry to bind these souls for all time – the minds within these prisons gone to a place even Jherrick could not touch. They were not dead, but un-released – and that torment had forced them into places so dark and mad, that Jherrick could not feel anything human left in their terrible silence.

  Shuddering away from the bound ones, Jherrick reached out, feeling for people who had come and gone in his life. Currents of ether moved his violet-crimson aura through the Void, as he searched for constellations of memories that had been a friend, a foe, or a comrade. The tortured souls Lhaurent had killed came back first. As if summoned by Jherrick’s guilt-ridden consciousness, they slipped out of the Void, surrounding him with faces of torment. Blame seared from their eyes. Hate surged from them, attacking Jherrick’s Void-body. With nasty fingers, the wrathful dead bit at his energy, crowing with glee to damage a man they blamed for their end. Jherrick issued a cry in the Void, unable to halt their fury with his untutored wyrria – drowning in a sea of vengeance.

  Suddenly, a strong pulse shocked them back. A blessed light swirled in, pushing back the menacing dead. Olea’s face rose in Jherrick’s mind, smiting the darkness with hot longknives of light. A furious battle-cry echoed in Jherrick’s ears. As if he’d called her soul, Jherrick felt Olea’s energy flood into his with luminous tendrils. Olea’s honey-leather scent was in his nose. The way her eyes flashed when she was disrespected; the way she laughed in the Guardhouse. The feel of her, calm and tired after a long day of training as she sat in a chair with her boots up on her desk, rifling through lists. Her sudden smile when he bumbled his spectacles, just so she would pick them up and offer them back.

  Olea’s glow surrounded Jherrick, slipping into his mind and heart with sweet fingers. Her grey eyes shone like fire-opals, commanding as she slit knives of fury through the wraiths, dissipating them. She was a dervish of purpose as she annihilated Jherrick’s foes and seized his wrist in a grip so hot it burned.

  Come with me, Olea’s strong alto commanded, pummeling Jherrick’s ears in the Void. You must save him. Quickly.

  Save who? Jherrick’s voice was a disembodied nothing as he was hauled by Olea over leagues of desert and mountains, rivers and oceans, taken far from his body upon the hard sand. Dawn broke below, over a long expanse of blistering land between two thick grey bogs. Searing
down like a falling star to a thinner space, Jherrick was drawn to chaos and confusion. The press of expired souls hit him like a tidal wave – a battlefield choked with the new dead. He staggered in the Void; his barely-living body convulsed upon the sand. War-torn souls screamed around him, disoriented. Confused, betrayed by battle, trying to shake their sword-maimed corpses awake. A sea of carnage – tens of thousands of dead howling, the winds of the Void churning in a vast and terrible whirlpool.

  And still, the battle raged in the world of the living. Jherrick could not make out the factions, the ripped pennants of at least five armies trampled among the dead. A churning mess of men fought each other, dying. Jherrick fixed upon Olea’s energy, willing her to move on through the madness.

  Fast as thought, Jherrick was whisked away, high over the bloody plain and up into the highmountains. His etheric body was sucked close to a white tower of alabaster agate, that rose from the depths of a cerulean lake ringed in glacial peaks. A glorious citadel with spires and arches and high doorways led into thin air – their pinnacle tower piercing high into the luminous sky, dawn already broken over the eastern horizon.

  Jherrick could feel the vibration of the White Tower swirling in the Void. It was a lodestone; a place to harness power, to gather it from the universe and transmit it back in works of glory. As Jherrick’s etheric form rose to the topmost spire, he felt the soaring energy within the tower’s ancient agate-stone. It vibrated and swirled with the same opalescent light that moved within the archways of the Noldarum’s realm, writhing glyphs in an endless dance through the Void.

  Bound power; pure wyrria of the cosmos. A citadel built upon an ancient upwelling, a structure that captured the earth’s own incredible flow. Jherrick felt its vast music, waiting to be harnessed – to be tuned – just like he felt other wyrric geysers bound with tight caps waiting to erupt all through the world.

  But only one of these wyrric founts had been harnessed into a lodestone, ready for some magnificent event. Jherrick shivered, feeling the enormity of the tower’s vibration in the Void, fearing what it could do. A vast power, he felt innately that it could destroy or create, depending upon its use. Depending upon the nature of the soul that set that power free, that harnessed it into concordance. One mighty tuning, that caused it to strike like a bell over the entire world. And Jherrick knew, that this power could Undo all the caps on the wyrric founts; could release all the mad souls trapped inside their prisons. This power could wake it all – magnificently, terribly. As Jherrick’s etheric body flew to the tower’s highest pinnacle, up through the ring of clouds, his heart seized in his chest to feel someone at the very top.

  Someones. Already commanding that terrible flow.

  Energy raced toward the pinnacle from all over the earth. Jherrick could see it, a vast umbrella of opalescent light in the Void being sucked toward the peak of the spire by whatever wyrria was being worked high above. As he gained the tower’s height, he saw that vast energy coalescing like a fevered star in the center of three tremendous archways. Ten feet up, Jherrick saw two bodies trapped in the ether, intertwined in glory. A man and a woman converging and channeling all the power of the world into a spiraling stream that flooded down to the center of the tower’s white dais.

  But down below, in the center of the archways, was horror.

  At the convergence of the three-petaled white platform lay a woman, her soul blazing in the Void like a tundra-wight. She screamed, rapturous and in pain – channeling all that immense power into a man writ through with blazing golden marks, his black wyrric hand thrust right through her chest and gripping her heart. She was coming unraveled, sundering with Undoing. Black fire was writing though the air upon terrible wyrric currents as Jherrick could feel her soul shredding from the immensity of what she channeled, and the pain being gripped by the man’s black hand. Caught in the flow, being devoured by the man who held her, she was lost – unable to halt his taking.

  Jherrick quailed in the Void – to see that the man was no other than Lhaurent den’Karthus.

  Lhaurent was the sun. He was horror. He was the convergence of the world, of all wyrria and every soul. He was ultimate darkness, taking every last thread of that energy into himself and binding it into his Goldenmarks. Binding the heart and essence of the woman beneath him and her channeling into a vast and terrible unity that shook the Void with a thundering howl.

  In his eyes burned crimson – the crimson of a thousand exploding suns; the crimson of a world of blood. The crimson of upheavals devouring the earth, killing every living thing upon it, and Jherrick suddenly knew him for what he was. A manifestation of the Undoer. A soul taken so long ago he may never have known it, taken during his birth by the Utrus with red eyes. A soul who had so long ago succumbed to the Undoer inside himself that it had lain hidden, unknown by any who had ever touched that dark energy, though all had felt it.

  Here, was the demon of time.

  Here, taking what it wanted – so it could Undo whatever it liked.

  Revulsion surged through Jherrick. Rage devoured him. Something rose inside his body with a roar of flame, furious at Lhaurent’s terrible works by the Undoer’s hands. Like Jherrick had suddenly grown a thousandfold in the Void, energy surged into him, filling him, expanding him, making his aura of violet and crimson sear like a night on fire.

  As his gaze strayed to the side of the altar, he spied a disembodied soul who watched it all from his knees in a pool of blood. Though Jherrick had only met Elohl den’Alrahel once, the day he’d come to the Guardhouse to receive his pension, he’d seen how much Olea’s twin had been just like her. Tall, sword-honed, commanding but sober in a way that had made the Alrahel twins seem like two sides of an inseparable unity – two sides of the same incredible light.

  Ravaged, Elohl’s soul watched with a tortured heart, kneeling inside the ring of arches. His fallen body had poured out the last of its life in a pool of fresh crimson, though Elohl’s knees left no imprint in the blood-pool as he watched in horror while Lhaurent sundered the woman upon the bier. First-Lieutenant Fenton den’Kharel stood upon one cloverleaf of the tower, a slender young man beside him that Jherrick recognized as a scribe from Roushenn. A wrath of motion, Fenton lanced lightning at the dais, at Lhaurent. But none of Fenton’s fury could touch the Castellan, protected by a wyrric barrier that flowed between the archways, wrought with white and gold sigils.

  Only Elohl was inside the barrier, watching helplessly as Lhaurent drained his beloved with his ghastly black hand – draining away all the power of the world that had collected in the depths of her heart.

  To the Undoer’s delight.

  Help him!!

  Olea’s scream was wretched in Jherrick’s ears. Jherrick was pure instinct as he flung his etheric body to the fallen soul of Elohl. He was the talons of the Void as he seized Elohl den’Alrahel in his grip. Jherrick was pure motion, his wyrria flaring, ravenous as he connected to Elohl’s mind. Before his energy concussed in the Void with a tremendous thunderclap, slamming Elohl den’Alrahel’s soul back into his body. It was not a nice reunion. It was not a gentle homecoming, this thing Jherrick had done upon wrath and instinct. His wyrria was the fury of a fell demon as it thrust Elohl’s soul back into his cooling body. Elohl’s flesh jerked upon the stone, shuddering the blood-pool – re-ensouled, but not yet alive.

  Gripping his talons into the Void, Jherrick seized anything nearby. Any power, any life. Any mystery, any light, any vibration, any music. Anything he could find to restore Elohl, to return him to life so he could punish Lhaurent den’Karthus and halt the Undoer’s rise. Stars dimmed. Galaxies shuddered. Jherrick heard souls scream from the battle far away. A cacophony of voices cried out as Jherrick seized any available vibration and poured it into Elohl’s body.

  But the largest source was the flooding power that raged into Lhaurent from the dying woman, and Jherrick seized that, too – diverting the entirety of its thundering flow and thrusting it all into Elohl den’Alrahel.

&nbs
p; Vicious, grotesque, the flood of that tremendous power awakened Elohl’s body with a sudden fury. Elohl’s flesh rode that power, lancing and rolling through the Goldenmarks like lightning. Sinews knit in a rush. Bones popped back with a wrenching grind. Elohl’s blood surged back from the blood-pool until it filled his veins. And then Elohl came up from the stones with a devouring gasp and a scream like a dragon as his heart hammered its first beat – his Goldenmarks on fire with the light of the dawn.

  The white tower rang like a bell, exploding the Rennkavi’s power out into the world. Jherrick felt it, concussing open places in the earth that had been capped for centuries. Places that had once run raw with the carnal essence that hammered through his veins, places where the world had been bound into slumber. Those places exploded open to the shock of the Rennkavi’s awakening. Alranstones sundered, all eyes upon them cracked, souls flooding out, released. Fountain-heads of wyrria that had been subsumed burst open in torrential rivers, flooding the land. Where magic had only simmered before, arrested for a reason Jherrick couldn’t fathom, it was now unbound – its fury and bliss magnificent.

  Jherrick stood in rapture, feeling the world come alive. Feeling it wake. Feeling the Rise of the Dawn, where unity yoked the world as one and every heart awoke to that magic. Feeling every head turn. Feeling every battle and devastation cease as all turned to the White Tower and beheld with cries upon their lips – the return of wyrria to the world.

  For a moment, all hearts beat as one. For a moment, all breaths came and went in the same tide. For a moment, a vast bliss spread out from Elohl den’Alrahel, his Goldenmarks blazing like a fallen star in the dawn – devouring Jherrick and all the world as it sang Elohl’s bliss in one united moment.

  And then his rage, as he glanced upon Lhaurent.

  Jherrick felt it – like a scream through all that bliss. Suddenly, all that light and rage transformed Elohl’s wyrria. From a man speared by bliss, his wyrria became a beast in the Void, expanding, twisting with a sudden rise. In the Void, Jherrick saw an enormous energy expand out from Elohl’s shoulders and spine, spreading out muscled white coils through the black. Engulfing the dawn, swallowing all that power being funneled from the world, the creature that arose behind Elohl den’Alrahel was magnificent, and terrible. Like the power of red and gold Jherrick had seen behind Leith Alodwine in the Albrenni realm, he saw the truth of Elohl’s essence now – a white dragon made of pure wyrric fire, dwarfing the arches, the tower, and the brightening sky.