by Jason Denzel
Shevia tried to imagine a world ruled by massive dragons, where the fay and humans were inseparable. The serpent tattoo on her shoulder burned with energy.
“What was the Old World like?” Pomella asked.
Faywong stared into the fire and spoke in a low voice. “Very different, yet still familiar. I once saw it in dream, and walked beneath its skies. Beautiful, tranquil, calm. But its time ended, just as this world will someday, and give rise a new.”
Shevia wondered at the kind of power Grandmaster must possess to dream of such places and travel there. But she had heard that Faywong had given up his command of the Myst, and wondered when and how he had accomplished such extraordinary feats.
Nobody spoke for a long minute. It was Tevon that broke the silence. “The dragons killed each other off?” He sat closer to the fire than her other two brothers and seemed captivated by the Grandmaster’s tale.
“Nobody know for sure,” Faywong said. “But dragons are tied to land in deep, profound ways. A dragon is the land. The land is the dragon. Destroy world, destroy dragon.”
“What did they look like?” Vivianna asked.
“Wings,” Shevia said before she could stop herself. “Scales, and fire.”
They all looked at her in surprise. Scented smoke from their cook fire obscured the air between her and everyone else. Only Sim watched her with a calm expression. An overwhelming urge to wilt beneath everyone’s eyes came over her. But she refused to cower. She was not a little girl suffering her mother’s scorn, nor was she Bhairatonix’s broken apprentice. She sat tall, and let everyone’s judgments roll off her.
“Yes,” Faywong said, “all tales agree they were large, like mountains.”
They ate in silence after that, but Shevia hardly tasted her spiced food. Her tattoo, with its twisted black and red shape coiled across her shoulder and topped with the head of a snake and the wings of a bat, Bhairatonix’s matching tattoo, and the image scrawled on the floor of the High Mystic’s laboratory all danced in her mind.
Scales, wings, and fire.
Dragons.
EIGHTEEN
THE VELTEN
Vlenar lead the party north through the Mystwood for another day and a half before arriving at the velten. The ranger often roamed far ahead, leaving markers for the Minam brothers to find. Tibron was usually the one to find these signs, and after some time Pomella began to sense a division among the brothers. Each time Tibron found a small cairn marking Vlenar’s route, a dark cloud would gather around Tevon and he’d stomp away.
Sim spent a good deal of his time apart from the group as well, much, Pomella had to admit, to her relief. She needed more time to assess how she felt. A part of her wanted to drag him away and make him tell his story, but life was more complicated now. She was a Mystic, and both Lal and Yarina had made it clear that her focus should continue to be on releasing worldly attachments and connecting to the Myst.
Perhaps Sim sensed some of her hesitation, or perhaps he had his own concerns, but the result was that he rarely spoke to her or anybody else, not even making eye contact. Fortunately, there was plenty to distract Pomella from having to dwell on Sim and his return. She was content to give him space and to focus on the remainder of their journey. Lal’s presence was a continuous reminder to remain grounded.
Like Sim, Shevia remained mostly quiet through the journey. Almost immediately after their joining together, Vivianna had made an effort to approach the younger woman and befriend her. From what Pomella could see, Shevia didn’t exactly rebuff Vivianna’s polite attempts to talk, but she made it clear through her short answers and her body language that she preferred to be on her own. But each night, Pomella heard her and Lal conversing in Qina. Pomella’s jaw tightened when she saw Lal more animated than normal when he spoke to Shevia, but she let the emotions go.
These thoughts lingered with Pomella until she sensed a shift in the air as they emerged into the valley they sought. They arrived from the western passage that cut across the northern ridge of the Ironlows. The air weighed heavier on this side of the range. A subtle odor tainted the air. No wind swept across the grassy expanse below them. An eerie silence blanketed everything.
Pomella gazed across the plain, and Lal stepped beside her. “Hmm. Do you feel it, Pomella?” he said.
“Yes,” she replied. “What is it?”
Lal scratched his unshaven chin. “Nothing good,” he muttered, and gestured for them to continue.
Vlenar went ahead as usual, leading them through overgrown switchbacks that snaked down the mountain. Pomella led Quercus, who had recently begun expressing his frustration with being a pack animal. “I know,” she told the gelding as he balked at a sharp turn in the trail. She used a soothing tone, but her frustration with him, and horses in general, tended to be short when he got this way. “I’d also rather be running free right now, but everybody has to help however they can, and that includes you!”
Quercus glared at her but allowed her to lead him down the slope.
As they descended the rest of the mountain, Pomella gazed west across the wide valley. Wild grass stretched as far as she could see, presumably stretching all the way to Enttlelund and the Mothic Sea. The grass was tall and heavy, ungrazed and baked under the season’s scorching heat. A handful of barren scrub trees rose above the grass, each appearing like scraggly farmers standing alone in their field.
In the distance, floating as if it were an archipelago of islands in an ocean of grass, was a large assortment of boulders. Hundreds of rocks lay scattered like they were the remains of a shattered fortress. It took Pomella and her party over an hour to walk from the base of the mountains, through the grass and beneath the sun, to the first of the stones. As they approached, a dreadful sense of heaviness fell upon Pomella. Nothing stirred whatsoever. Vivianna appeared cool and expressionless, but Pomella saw her knuckles whiten as they tightened on her Mystic staff. Vlenar and the Qin rangers drew their swords. Sim and Shevia lingered back.
“Is this the velten?” Pomella said, sweeping a sweaty tangle of hair off her forehead.
Vlenar arrived at the first boulder and peered around it. “Yesss!” he hissed.
Pomella looped Quercus’ reins around the branch of a nearby scrub tree and followed the rangers. Vivianna walked beside her, as did Lal with a somber expression on his face.
They entered the middle of the rock formations, and Pomella saw that most of the boulders had been hollowed out to act as entrances leading to underground locations. The scattered stones must, she realized, be doorways to laghart dwellings. One particularly large formation was shaped from a cluster of boulders piled together. Atop it stood a carved statue of a human woman with long flowing hair sitting cross-legged with her arms spread and palms facing up. Her downcast eyes, although roughly rendered, were closed in meditative peace.
The statue of whatever Saint that was didn’t command Pomella’s attention long, but she noticed Sim lingering near it. She lowered her gaze to the base of the monument where a swarm of flies buzzed above three mangled corpses lying in the tall grass. She stifled a gasp. Blood-splattered scales revealed them as lagharts. A weak, dry wind lifted, filling her nose with the rancid odor of death.
Beyond the three bodies, stretching deeper into the velten, more than a hundred other laghart remains lay scattered. Even if Pomella had wanted to count the dead, she wasn’t certain she could’ve because many of the bodies had been torn apart. Blackened, sun-baked bloodstains caked the surrounding grass and rocks as flies buzzed everywhere.
“Sweet Brigid,” she whispered.
“Spread out!” Tevon commanded.
The three brothers and Vlenar spread away from Pomella, Vivianna, and Lal while Sim approached Pomella. He had his two strange walking sticks in his hands.
“They’re still here,” Sim said, dragging his gaze across the massacred community.
Pomella stared at him. Before she could ask him how he knew that, Lal grunted.
“Yes, som
ething stirs,” Lal said.
Suddenly Pomella realized what was contributing to her sense of unease. It wasn’t the corpses or the lack of sound that made the velten and the valley so eerie.
“Where are the fay?” Pomella said. Since leaving Kelt Apar, they’d encountered the fay almost everywhere. But Pomella had yet to see any in the velten.
Vlenar bent over one of the corpses that had mostly avoided dismemberment. His tongue zipped quickly in and out of his mouth while his slitted eyes narrowed.
Sim was staring again at the monument of the Saint and the particularly large stone entrance below it. “What is it?” she asked.
“In there,” he said, not looking at her.
Pomella gazed into the dark entrance, seeing past the roughly hewn threshold. The ground sloped downward on the far side of the doorway, descending into blackness.
Vlenar began descending before Pomella could take a step toward it.
“No,” Lal said to the ranger.
Vlenar stopped and glanced back over his shoulder at Lal. His tongue snapped the air. Pomella saw pain in his expression.
“A Mystic go first,” Lal said.
Steeling herself, Pomella stepped forward. “I’ll go.” A part of her screamed that she was being a reckless dunder, but she knew her role. If there was danger ahead, she was not about to allow her master to walk headlong into it first. Instead, like a blathering fool, she would take that risk herself.
Vivianna stepped beside her. Pomella gave her a frail smile.
“Stay here and keep watch,” Sim said to the ranger brothers.
“We go where our sister goes,” Tibron, the youngest of the triplets, said in his thick accent.
“Sim is right,” Shevia said in the same accent. “Guard the entrance.”
Tibron frowned but nodded his head. His brother Tevon looked as though he wanted to reply but chose not to. He turned his back to the entrance and assumed an attentive stance. Typhos, the third brother, readied his sword in a single lithe motion.
Pomella stepped past Vlenar. His forked tongue flicked out as he watched her descend into the darkness of the underground laghart dwelling. Pomella saw respect in his slitted eyes.
The tunnel below the monument sloped downward. Pomella summoned the Myst and breathed a smooth ball of light into existence and willed it to float in front of her. Her foot found solid stepping-stones. Vivianna, Lal, and Shevia walked behind her.
Memory came to her of the time she and Sim had explored a similar tunnel on her way to Kelt Apar for the apprentice Trials. They’d found a ruined chamber at the end of that tunnel, along with an enclave of Unclaimed living in secret. She now suspected that the chamber had been an abandoned laghart velten, but whatever it had been, she feared that this one would contain much worse than some terrified people living in squalor.
The tunnel leveled out and came to an intersection. Wide hallways ran to either side of Pomella, but her attention was on the door standing slightly ajar in front of her, which had been attached to the stone wall. Pomella’s ball of light shone evenly across its wooden surface, revealing a smooth surface marred only by a long gouge that had been torn across it. Beyond the doorway, silver light flickered and indistinct animal noises could be heard. Pomella felt the Myst stir.
“Be careful,” Vivianna whispered. Behind her, Shevia and Lal waited with grim expressions.
Pomella steadied her nerves and stepped into the room beyond.
A feast hall of fay greeted her. Hundreds of strange silver creatures sat, climbed, or flew around the massive room she entered. Two long tables stretched away from her, laden with both silver fay food and foul meat from the human realm. A third table at the far end of the hall ran perpendicular to the others, connecting them. The creatures appeared to be celebrating, raising goblets and laughing in a perverse sort of merriment. Smoky translucent banners and decorations covered the ones the lagharts had hung in what must’ve been their central temple or community center. It appeared to Pomella as if one feast hall from Fayün had somehow been overlaid on top of the one here in the laghart’s chamber.
A cold chill made Pomella shiver. She’d never seen fay like the ones before her now. Most of the creatures were shorter than her but were an odd melding of animal and human. Some had faces that looked like hyenas, and others had those of cats or rodents. Some had tails, and most appeared to walk on hind legs, but a handful hovered and flew in the air with fast-beating wings like her hummingbirds.
“Axthos,” Vivianna whispered in awe from behind her. “Wild denizens of Fayün.”
“But what are they eat—” Pomella’s question died on her lips as she saw the scales on what the creatures feasted on. Chunks of laghart meat were being passed around on platters. Pomella watched as a hyena-like axthos buried its snout into a thick hindquarter.
Before she could gasp or retch, an owl-faced axthos with buzzing wings pointed at her and squawked. The commotion in the hall died.
“Shite,” Pomella muttered.
A massive figure near the third table at the far end of the hall rose. At first glance it looked like a brown bear from her world, and indeed it was mostly flesh and blood. But much like the hall itself, something else had been merged on top of it, another presence that augmented it and made it more vicious. The fay within the bear was wolflike, and when it moved the bear’s body shifted with it. Silver eyes shone within its sockets. Two rows of sharp teeth snarled at her. The great beast growled something unintelligible.
Pomella pulled a calming breath into her chest. She had faced the fay before, and returned them to Fayün. The ones here might be stranger and greater in number than she’d encountered before, but the concept was probably the same.
She hoped, anyway.
Another figure beside the bear rose. If the giant wolf-bear filled Pomella with fear, this one put a death grip on her heart. It was a laghart, or had been at one point. Gashes and ragged claw marks scarred every portion of its body. Dried blood caked the edges of its many wounds. The laghart lurched as it moved, and Pomella saw it wore shredded robes and carried a Mystic staff. Like the wolf-bear, the laghart had merged with another creature, although Pomella could not quite place what it was. Silver eyes stared out of otherwise-dead sockets. Long, luminous silver hair spilled down its face, looking strange on that non-human face.
The laghart Mystic placed a hand on the wolf-bear to settle it. It hissed, and Pomella realized it must’ve spoken.
“A wivan,” Vivianna breathed.
“That creature is dangerous,” Sim said. “It will try to kill us all.” He held two long blades in his hand, which Pomella now saw had come from his walking sticks. His face was like stone, chiseled in a way Pomella didn’t recognize.
The hall waited.
Pomella planted her staff firmly in the ground. “I am Pomella AnDone, a Mystic of this land. You are not welcome here.”
The laghart snarled and spit, snapping at the air as if struggling to form sounds with a physical throat. Gradually the sounds it made became more familiar. Pomella realized it was trying to speak her language.
“Agh. Ahg … Ouhrg,” the laghart Mystic guzzled.
“It’s ensnared,” Vivianna said, her eyes wide. “A fay is acting through a laghart.” Despite the odd surroundings, Pomella could hear the academic interest in Vivianna’s voice.
Pomella summoned the Myst, feeling it quick to rise around her. She checked her rage and disgust, not letting it overwhelm her, but letting it fuel her words. “These were the chambers of lagharts who lived in peace. How dare you decimate them?”
“Our lahhand,” the laghart said.
“This is not your land!” Pomella snapped.
The wolf-bear roared and leaped onto the table, scattering silver dishes and a cluster of axthos who’d been stupid enough to roam across the table. Another howl exploded from it, filling the chamber with its rage.
Vlenar leaped to Pomella’s side, sword raised and long tongue hissing.
Lal
placed a hand on Pomella’s shoulder. But before he could speak Shevia stepped forward, back straight, radiating with the Myst and an imperious expression. The younger woman’s hair rippled as though an otherwise unseen and unfelt wind swirled around her.
Shevia spoke in Qina, her tone firm and angry. In response, the wolf-bear swiped the air with its claw.
Pomella grabbed Shevia’s upper arm. “What are you—ouch, shite!”
Pain raced through Pomella’s arm and across her entire body. With it came flashing images and sensations. Terror. Anger. Sadness. Pomella saw a cluster of thornbushes build high like a dome over a crack in the ground. It vanished and was replaced by a flurry of other images she didn’t understand. A strange outdoor shrine. A magnificent manor filled with shadows. A dank cavern with bookshelves and a large table filled with books and candles.
Quicker than a heartbeat, the images vanished, leaving Pomella with a blistering hand. Silvery light glowed through the twisted-serpent tattoo on Shevia’s skin and the clothing covering it. It was the same shape as the one depicted on the walls around the hall.
Pomella snatched her hand back, staring in amazement and horror at Shevia, who glared at her. But before Pomella could open her mouth to ask what that was, the tide of fay rushed to attack like a swollen river bursting across an embankment.
Shevia moved faster than Pomella could believe. She spun once and jabbed her hand outward. Silver fire roared from it, tearing through the nearest axthos.
Pomella had no time to continue watching. Her experience dealing with the slavers across Moth had somewhat helped prepare her for these dangerous situations. She didn’t consider herself a warrior by any means, but when someone or something charged at you there was no time to think.
Pomella punched her staff at the nearest hyena creature, forcing it back to Fayün. The axthos vanished in a cloud of silvery smoke. She struck another one as quickly as she could, banishing it as well.