Shattered

by Stef M Ensing

  “Why should I?”

  “Because if you don’t he’ll die.”

  “I hate being the bigger man.”

  “You can’t be the bigger man while vocalizing that fact. Doesn’t work that way.”

  “Why not? I’m the one wasting supplies on a moron who won’t let me heal him because—”

  “You’re the one wasting time while a man is dying. Respect his wishes and bloody help him or I’ll let everyone know that you stood around pissing about your pride while a man died.”

  Atherly exhaled, a flicker of guilt flashing across his face. He gave a sharp nod and followed her back into the tent.

  The next half hour was incredibly nerve-wrecking as Atherly examined and then reexamined Jarrett’s wounds. It got to the point that the warrior looked about ready to kill him if it were not the fact that every breath seemed harder and harder for him. Theories were tossed back and forth before finally Atherly and Payton settled on a potential solution for Jarrett.

  Each second that ticked by made Payton more and more anxious. Aloeroot, froststalk, witch-hazel, and agrimony combined to make a salve for his physical wounds and a liquid to boil for his lungs. It was a wild shot in the dark combining the healing herbs and salves but they had no other options besides forced magical healing.

  Ducking back into the tent she knelt beside the barely breathing man. Creators, she hoped she was doing the right thing. “Jarrett,” she whispered, coming up alongside him. She turned him onto his back. “Breathe this in.”

  She pressed the mug of steaming liquid to him. He reached up and fumbled, his hand grasping around hers to hold the cup as well. He struggled to support himself and she quickly slid behind his arched back to offer aid. He leaned against her, twitching and shuddering in her arms as he inhaled the steam. She waited, biting her lip. She and Atherly had debated how immediate the effects would be and reasoned that she should hear the difference in Jarrett’s breathing within minutes.

  Tears began to burn in her eyes as the seconds ticked by and he was still struggling to breathe. It wasn’t working. If she called Atherly in here would there still be time to heal Jarrett? Would Jarrett ever forgive her if she did such a thing? Her grip on him tightened as she began to notice his breathing slow. Was he dying? Was she too late? Her lips parted but her voice would not come.

  “Payton?” the voice that came from her arms startled her so much she jumped.

  “Jarrett?” She looked down at him comprehending for the first time that his breathing hadn’t stopped, it had improved. “You fucking bastard!”

  Jarrett stiffened as she pulled him into a hug, uncertain if she was angry with him and why she was holding him.

  “I thought you were dead.” She pulled away, blinking rapidly to hide the glassiness of her eyes. “You asshole. I could kill you for that.”

  “That… would defeat the purpose,” he replied before carefully shifting out of her reach.

  She exhaled in a breathy laugh of exasperation. “Don’t ever do that to me again, you hear?”

  “Become injured?”

  “No. Well, yes that too,” she huffed. “I meant almost dying. Or actually dying. Just anything to do with dying, you’re not allowed to do. Okay?”

  A faint smile tugged on his lips. “As you wish.”

  Chapter Fifty-One

  The two deaths of the Echo attack were difficult to deal with but in the wake of Jarrett’s survival, Payton was simply grateful they had not added a third to the list. The shipmate – Aimar – and the refugee fighter she had brought along – Orn – had both been set on pyres shortly after Jarrett’s recovery. And it was a far more solemn group that continued the journey into Kydessa. Even so, nothing would ever compare to the sight that stretched before them.

  At a distance, the city had looked impressive but up close… it was awe inspiring. It was as if the entire city had been frozen in time. The eternal winter of the tundra had coated the once thriving port city in a blanket of ice and snow. Icicles, thick as tree trunks, ran the length of buildings, their tips formed into a swell on the ground creating giant columns of ice along the sides of the structures. In some cases, ice had encapsulated the entirety of a building, the cascade of the artic waterfall managing to get nearly a foot thick.

  Like on the outskirts, beneath the icy frames, Payton could see damage on many of the buildings they were passing, weather-worn and worse: battle. More than one structure had crumbled in on itself, whether it was from the weight of the snow and ice or from the horrors that had come before, she could not tell.

  “Look at this place,” Nyla said in amazement.

  “I can’t believe so much of it is intact. I thought it’d be rubble,” Miles commented as they passed another frozen solid building.

  “The Great War had only just breached the border when the cataclysm happened,” Ioannu said quietly. “There wasn’t time to cause the destruction you’d see in other parts of Calaphine.”

  “Still…” Miles shrugged dismissively.

  “How can you be sure the place wasn’t looted already?” Captain Marrett growled. “This place looks like crap.”

  “Even if scavengers did make it here and past the Echoes, they didn’t have the maps we do. They would have been searching blindly for the tunnels that lead to the deep Vaults,” Payton said impatiently. “The first expedition to try and recover the frost lands didn’t happen for nearly thirty years. By then everything was just a vague memory passed down from the elder generation who barely managed to escape to cataclysm.”

  “And no one came back from that trip,” Isiah said grimly.

  “That doesn’t set a good precedent,” Kathleen muttered.

  “Well that’s just what’s going to make us special,” Atherly said with a broad grin. “Besides, we’ve got a lucky charm.”

  “Please don’t say it’s you or any appendage that is a part of you,” Samuel said dryly.

  Atherly let out a barking laugh. “I like the way you think.”

  “I don’t think that way. I just know you do.”

  Payton cast a glance skyward as if to search for divine help before shaking her head. “Alright, before we dissolve into a discussion about who has the best man parts when one of those men happen to be my younger brother,” she shuddered at the thought, “we need to find a good campground. I think—”

  “Divide into teams and spread out,” the captain interrupted.

  She frowned continuing: “Yes. We’re searching for—”

  “A spot with coverage to protect from wind, accessibility for the carts, and we ought to make sure there are no beasts who have taken up homes in the city to attack at night.”

  “Do you have a problem with me giving commands, Captain?” Payton asked.

  The man raked his eyes over her and then sniffed. “No. Just want it done right, is all.”

  “Then perhaps you ought to stay silent and let the woman who is paying you sort it out. To ensure it’s “done right”,” Jarrett said in a silky tone from behind her.

  The Captain scowled. “I want to make sure we get outta this alive and not let some emotion-driven woman get us all killed with some shit decision.”

  “This shit decision-making woman pays you and your men. You really want to test me?”

  His mouth pressed into a firm line, opting to say nothing.

  Good enough. “Divide and conquer people. We want a camp up and ready before nightfall but we need to do a sweep of the city to make sure there are no surprises. Keep a sharp eye out. I want a mage on every team in case more Echoes make an appearance.” Nyla clapped her hands and skipped off to make a team of her own. “Nyla, I meant a competent mage!”

  “Hey!” Atherly objected.

  “Jolene go with them. Make sure they don’t get killed.”

  The woman saluted and joined the small group Nyla was amassing –which apparently included Isiah if the way she had dragged him over meant anything.

  Shaking her head Payton turned to sort out h
er team only to find that hers had formed by default. The three Wyverns had migrated toward each other and – after a glare from Captain Marrett who had divided his four shipmates into two, a pair to search and a pair to remain with the carts – the Captain and his mates joined Ioannu’s group Which left her with the two Black Foxes, Jarrett, … and Samuel.

  Exhaling, she refused to meet her brother’s gaze as she brushed by him. The three teams each picked a direction and began walking.

  Frozen building, frozen cart, frozen corpses, frozen building. Payton scanned the area around her, noting that the corpses at the very least looked as though they had been there for a long time. Perhaps some of the original inhabitants of the city when the frost happened. Some claimed the initial cataclysm was so sudden it froze people where they stood.

  “Payton?”

  “Not now, Sam.” She had no desire to get into yet another argument about the validity of him being here.

  “No, it’s not… not about that. I…” her brother stumbled over his words. She looked at him and saw his brow was furrowed and he was looking to the left. “There’s something that way.”

  “Something? Want to be a little more specific?”

  “Something,” he stressed. “If I knew what it was I’d have said but I don’t. It just feels weird. Like… an itch but on my magic. Like something is pulling at it.”

  “Something pulling on your magic?” She had never heard of such a thing. In all likelihood neither had her brother, which explained his lack of original description and the face he was making.

  Directing her team to the left, she slid her daggers from their sheaths. She did not know how dangerous this “something” had to be to cause a magical disturbance but her gut said big and potentially bad. A few more bends in the would-be street with her brother awkwardly directing before he frantically pointed at the edge of the path. Moment of truth. Pressing her back to the frozen building, she tilted her blade around the corner, to catch a reflection of what was to come.

  There was nothing there.

  Or at least nothing dangerous.

  Maybe something annoying.

  Dropping her arm down, she stepped out. “Let me guess: you felt something weird.”

  “Yeah…” Atherly did not even look at her, distracted as he was.

  “Creators…” Samuel breathed as he came to a stop, his hand hovering out in front of him just the same as Atherly’s was. “Do you feel that?”

  Payton watched as a spark of magic was lifted from her brother’s fingertips, drawn toward what had captivated their attention.

  It was an Absorbe stone. The biggest she had ever seen. It stood as tall as a building and just as thick, the square and pointed crystalline growths stretching out and upward. But it was different than the other stones she had seen.

  The natural color of an Absorbe when inactive was a beautiful shade of deep blue with a shimmering rainbow shining throughout whenever the stone would catch the light. It was never any other color unless a mage was firing spells at it and then the crystal was absorbing the magic with vibrant blue, green, and purple lines of light shocked through it before fading into nothingness.

  This stone… this stone was not like that. It was black. Dark and metallic in shade. What was even stranger was the faint but vivid lines of iridescent blue and green that were flickering beneath that sickly black. It was wrong. The entire stone gave off a feeling of wrong and she did not know why.

  That was when she realized that snow and ice would not touch it.

  Piles of snow and jagged chunks of ice surrounded the Absorbe stone but not a single speck would stay on the crystal itself.

  “It was rumored that this one was never mined. That when they carved Kydessa out of the hill and mountainside they just came across it. They flattened the land around but just… left it where it stood. Never disconnected it from the underlying vein or moved it.” There was a distracted quality to Samuel’s voice. “What happened to it?”

  “It must have become corrupted in the war,” Ioannu’s voice came from the other side of the stone. He obviously was drawn here like the other mages.

  “I did not know you could corrupt an Absorbe stone,” Samuel said quietly.

  “Not much is known about the stones themselves. Their power has never truly been understood, merely harnessed for our own purposes,” Ioannu rambled.

  “Maybe it just rotted out here because of the weather?” Jolene supplied unhelpfully.

  Payton shifted, frowning at the stone. “I don’t like it,” she stated as she watched another strand of magic get pulled from the mages that had approached it. “I want everyone to stay away from it?”

  Atherly finally looked away from the stone and gave her a smile. “Don’t go near the creepy rock that calls to us.”

  She rolled her eyes at him. “Come on, we still need to clear the city.”

  The city was much larger than Imeryn and Payton was beginning to wonder if they would ever find the end of it. Streets upon streets of an endless maze. It wasn’t until they had passed a collapsed structure that might have been the guards’ barracks that Payton realized she knew where they were.

  “We’re close to the Vaults.”

  “How can you possibly know that?” David asked in disbelief.

  “You spend enough time staring at the map you learn your way around.” She pointed to the horizon where the mountains loomed over the city. “The Vaults in Kydessa were some of the most secure in the world because they boasted a network of tunnels that go as far as the Kiylarn Mountains.”

  It was one of the reasons why any scavengers could not loot Kydessa’s wealth and the main reason she had bought into Nyla’s mad scheme. The maps the tavern owner had gotten her hands on were of the intricate tunnels and vault doors. They were all taking a chance, a risk, that those maps were true.

  Curious to see what the building they would be essentially robbing was, Payton took them down the path she recalled from the map, only having to backtrack once due to a snowbank.

  The Vaults’ outer structure was grand, even coated in ice. Clearly built in white marble, it had pillars and columns that gave it an imposing face. That coupled with the rearing dragon statues on the front steps and a massively huge one perched on the roof – how the one on the roof did not collapse the structure she did not know – all in all, it was very impressive. Or would have been if half the building wasn’t collapsed.

  The double doors that should have been there were broken, one hanging and frosted over the other in splinters on the ground – the damage clearly having been done a long time ago. An entire chunk of the building was missing, leaving a gaping hole that led into pitch darkness. How sturdy would the structure be?

  “P-Payton?” her brother said in a wary tone.

  Would it be safe enough to travel inside without reinforcing the building?

  “Payton?”

  It would take them significantly longer to make the building structurally sound but it was better than having it collapse on them when they were trying to make it to the lower levels.

  “Payton!” her brother hissed grabbing her by the arm.

  “What?” she demanded looking at him sharply but his eyes were not on her.

  His face had gone completely white and he was staring at the roof of the Vaults building. She followed his gaze to the large dragon statue. What was the big dea—fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

  The statue moved.

  “Back away,” she said very quietly. “Slowly.”

  As the members of her team carefully began to move, the large head of the dragon lifted and it expelled air out its nostrils, frost misting in front of it. A crystal blue eye blinked open. Go back to sleep. Go back to sleep. Go back to sleep. She chanted silently, her heart pounding madly in her chest. The dragon was shifting, moving atop the building, not caring that it was causing snow and ice and bricks to fall as it stretched. Suddenly it stopped. Payton froze in her spot, her eyes locked with the beast.

  A monst
rous roar deafened the area.

  “Run!” she shouted.

  They all took off, sprinting down the street as Payton heard the sound of wings unfurl behind her. Her mind worked in overtime as she ran. She had to find the others. She had to warn them. She had to plan how to take down something that sacked full cities with whole armies. She had to—Payton abruptly threw herself to the side, slipping and crashing into a building as she narrowly avoided the stream of ice and light that impacted the ground where she had been, the screech having been her only warning to move out of the way.

  Scrambling to her feet, Payton stared up at the beast that was hovering above her. The awning she was under was her only protection at the moment, shield her from its line of sight. But it also left her trapped. Shit.

  That was when she saw a ball of fire hit the dragon across the snout. It roared in distaste, flying higher only to swoop down and take a snap at Ioannu. Taking advantage of the moment of its lowered altitude, the melee fighters charged at the beast.

  “Should have brought a bow,” Payton muttered before racing out to join the attack.

  Her daggers made a glancing blow off the blue-silver hide of the dragon’s back feet. Little more than a papercut to a beast of this size. Nevertheless, she hacked at it again, driving her blade at the bend of its knee, hoping to slice through its tendons or even an artery.

  The dragon snarled and flapped its wings, the closest fighters to it getting dragged forward in the undertow. Payton narrowly missed getting skewered by a claw as the dragon took off. It circled around, objecting in its deafening way to being pelted with magical attacks. The icy breath shot out, ripping a path of destruction through the street, toppling part of a building as it went. She heard a scream of alarm. Someone had been too slow.

  Running past the frozen corpse of Kathleen, the warrior caught in mid-escape, her expression of pain and terror forever encased in ice, Payton skidded to a stop next to her twin. She joined the other melee fighters as they hid from the dragon’s attacks from the air.

  “Found you a dragon to slay,” she said glibly.

  “Thank you, sister, you’re too kind,” he said sarcastically.