Air

by Rosie Scott

  I shot both spells at the creature's bleeding eye sockets, hoping to reach its brain and kill it for good. The serpent dodged the spells with a violent shake of its head, whipping its tail forward into the nearest soldiers. The brittle breaking of bones echoed off of the cave walls, just before many of them started screaming, reaching fruitlessly at their shattered shins.

  “Pin it!” Uriel screamed, standing at the serpent's head with his spear. He was using the weapon to block the creature's hits, but it was powerful, and the shield he'd generated around himself was already flickering.

  Emerald green energy was above my palm a moment later, but the same spell flew to the creature from one of the soldiers before I could use it. The flying serpent stilled, and the army rushed forward to do as the Sentinel commanded.

  Cerin and Anto both went to work trying to pin the creature with their weapons, though they weren't having much luck. Cerin's scythe sliced through the entire body of the monstrosity just to clink off of the solid stone beneath.

  I rose both hands to the stone cavern ceiling. La terra te sinka!

  The ceiling trembled, pieces of broken rock falling to the creature below in clouds of dust. When the magic finally finished separating earth from earth, a block of solid stone the size of a dinner table crashed down above the serpent's back and wings, immediately casting the nearby soldiers in hot blood spray. Another paralyze spell was thrown to the creature a second later, adding to its many problems.

  “Now, Uriel!” Cyrus backed off from where he'd been cutting through the creature with his two katars. The weapons were beautifully unique, and he was an expert at wielding them, but the blades were too short for the task at hand.

  Uriel rushed forward with both hands holding his weapon steady, the tip of his spear pointing directly at the serpent's right eye socket. As the foe lay helpless and paralyzed, he forced the blade through already injured flesh, the pointed ends of the weapon sinking deep into the skull and splitting the brain. The Sentinel wasn't finished, however. It was apparent they had fought creatures like this before, and perhaps a previous serpent had proven hard to kill. Uriel readjusted his grip on the weapon and thrust even further, sinking the spear so far into the skull that the back of the serpent's head started to swell with the internal trauma.

  The alteration spell's effects faded a moment later, and the creature went slack with death. Finally satisfied, Uriel jerked his weapon back, chuckling when it barely budged.

  “Now you've done it,” Cyrus teased him, his voice rough with battle fatigue. “I'll get your weapon, Uriel. Heal our men.”

  Uriel agreed, leaving the handle of the spear stuck outward in the air before hurrying to the soldiers with broken legs. Cerin and I joined him. Healing such injuries reminded me of the time I'd been able to save Theron near Whispermere. It'd been so long since I'd thought of the memory, and I was thankful for the chance to remember it. In the years since Theron's death, I'd often only repeated memories of my failure to save him during the Battle of the Dead. For being such an optimistic person, I certainly reminded myself of my own shortcomings often enough. Perhaps because those were what mattered most. Saving Theron had only allowed him to live for a while longer; failing to protect him meant he was gone for good.

  Life was unpredictable, and often so finite. With a glance to Cerin, I reminded myself that we had a chance to change that.

  Eighteen

  The walls were all below us. Our path had led up through a final incline before it opened up to the very top of the Pedr Crags. Miles upon miles of dirt and stone highlands were laid out before us like a challenge. While the landscape up here was rocky and uneven, no further barriers were keeping us from viewing what seemed like all of Eteri. The ocean was endless to the west, and the Cleves rose high in the east from across the valley we'd initially come through. In strict contrast with our current location, the top of the Cleves were rolling grasslands, the beautiful grasses appearing almost lime green in the bright early afternoon sun.

  Our path had deposited us a little while away from the northern crags, so to check for Aleyah's cave, we still needed to move north and find where we could see Esen from. There was a chance these were the wrong highlands entirely, but I didn't want to entertain that notion. We'd been doing nothing but walking uphill for four days, so the fact we had even conquered the Pedr Crags was enough for me.

  “Happy birthday,” I offered to Cerin, patting him on the back as I breathed hard with my efforts of walking up the last hill.

  The necromancer laughed. Perhaps he'd forgotten what day it was given all of our traveling. But it was the 73rd of Red Moon and his twenty-sixth birthday. He finally grinned over at me charmingly and teased, “I bought you a ring. And this is your idea of a good present? Bringing me out to the middle of nowhere?”

  “You bought me a ring two years ago,” I retorted. “I got nothing from you this year.”

  Cerin looked me over teasingly. “I wouldn't say nothing.”

  “Three inches doesn't count,” Jakan piped up, coming to stand on the other side of me. We chuckled together at his joke like two juveniles.

  “Don't worry, friend,” Anto said, as calmly as anything else. He put one muscular green arm around his lover's shoulders before he told Cerin, “Jakan's only speaking from experience.”

  “Hey!” Jakan ducked out of Anto's grasp, just to playfully hit him. I shook my head in humor as the two men had a fun-loving spat.

  I turned to Cerin, just to stand up on my tip-toes and kiss him on the cheek. “I'll go run to the store and get you a present,” I told him.

  He chuckled, before reaching over and grabbing me in a spontaneous, loving embrace. “Okay. I'll see you in a few days,” he jested.

  “You guys are all over each other no matter where we go.” I separated from Cerin just to find Uriel watching us with a friendly smile.

  “Does it offend you?” I replied in jest.

  “Not a bit.” Uriel waved a finger over to Jakan and Anto, where the two were being ridiculously affectionate and playful with one another. “This is new to me. Eteri's armies don't usually act like this.” His light gray eyes came back to mine. “I like it.”

  “I'd hope Eteri's entire armies didn't act like this,” Cerin mused, which made me snort a laugh. “Then they'd be known for orgies, not wars.”

  Uriel chuckled. “Well, to be fair, I think Nyx has been trying to get all of us to make the switch.”

  I exhaled slowly, my eyes finding my best friend amongst a group of soldiers yards away. “Don't be afraid to say no to her.”

  “Oh, I did,” Uriel replied. “I like Nyx a lot, but the equipment's all wrong for me.” He wiggled his eyebrows knowingly.

  “Well, your soldiers like the equipment a lot,” Cerin replied.

  I laughed again. “You are full of wit today.”

  The necromancer shrugged. “I'm in a good mood. It's my birthday.”

  Uriel grinned at that and pointed off to the north. “Well, it'll be a good one, because I have a feeling we'll reach Aleyah's hideout in a few hours. If these are the right highlands.”

  “Ha! They better be!” Jakan reappeared to my right, with Anto hanging over his shoulders in a lazy cuddle. “I'm tired of walking uphill. The Cleves were so much prettier and easier to travel.”

  “Is that Welkin?” Anto questioned, lifting up one muscular green arm to point off to the east. I followed his direction, squinting until I finally saw what he spoke of. The grasslands of the upper Cleves split, and a town was built between the two walls of rock, buildings carved straight out of the exterior stone. The cliffs were surrounded by hanging walkways made of imported wood. The town spilled out onto the grasslands above as well, where fields of crops glistened in the direct afternoon sunlight.

  “That's it!” Jakan twisted in his lover's grasp to make sure Cerin and I could see it. “That's Welkin!”

  “How architecturally unique,” I commented.

  “I should've known you'd like that!” Ja
kan pointed to his hometown across the valley as if he'd be able to point things out at such a distance. “It's very vertical. The farmers and service workers live on top, while others live in the rock. The town itself is a few levels deep.”

  “You lived in the rocky part, right?” Anto questioned, remembering from a time Jakan must have told him in the past.

  “Yeah. There was a temple to Vertun there, where my mom worked. My dad was a tax collector.”

  I chuckled at that new fact. “Your dad was a tax collector, and you turned out to be a thief.”

  Jakan laughed. “Yeah, well, every time he ever said anything about it, I just told him we worked the same job.”

  Anto snickered at that. “What'd he say when you told him that?”

  “Oh, you know how he was. He'd sigh, roll his eyes, and let Mom deal with me instead.”

  Uriel took this information in with new interest. “Your surname is Yair, correct?”

  “Yeah.” Jakan glanced back to the Sentinel. “Did you know my parents?”

  “I'm pretty sure I remember them, yes. Good people.” Uriel hesitated. “Were they the ones who moved to Nahara to spread their religion a few decades ago?”

  “They were.” Jakan straightened up as he talked with Uriel. “How in the world could you remember that?”

  Uriel chuckled awkwardly. “Well, that was back when Vertun was a Sentinel. He'd often go to Welkin to visit his temple and take his gold.”

  “Seriously?” Jakan's jaw went slack. “Gods, they would have loved to have known that.”

  Uriel shrugged. “Well, they weren't missing much by never officially meeting him, if you ask me. They probably would have been disappointed. Vertun was a notoriously hard person to get to know. Besides, once your parents moved to Nahara, he didn't have particularly nice things to say about them.”

  “Why?” Jakan frowned, hurt by that. Uriel hadn't yet had the chance to hear about the fate of the Yairs, so I doubted he could have known how his story could affect their son.

  “Well, they went to start temples to all three gods of the air trinity,” Uriel explained. “And that included his brother.”

  “Oh, cry me a river,” Cerin muttered.

  “That was what they did for years,” Jakan replied somberly. “And they built a temple to him. The nicest one, in fact!”

  “I'm sorry if that bothers you,” Uriel apologized. “I just figured I'd share that fact about Vertun with you. I know you all have come across him before, but you don't know him like I do. If we end up going to Glacia to kill him, you should have no qualms.”

  “I wouldn't have had any qualms, anyway,” Jakan replied. “He already nearly killed us all the first and only time we ever saw him.”

  I took an extra interest in Uriel's previous words. Even though I'd been told of Vertun's involvement with the Eteri army, I'd never really thought to ask about the god himself before. “You don't seem like you were as friendly with Vertun as you are with Cyrus and the others,” I mused. It was mostly an invitation to get the Sentinel to talk openly about it.

  “I wasn't. Vertun wasn't friendly with any of us, even the queen.” Uriel looked off over the crags, where the skies were endless. A rumbling sounded in the distance as if the ever-finicky weather of Eteri was preparing to unleash a storm overhead. “The way you see me and Cyrus joking around with each other never happened with Vertun. We didn't fight with him often, anyway. Vertun was a defensive Sentinel, much like Naolin. He did not care for us; it was Eteri he cared for. He refused to fight outside the country for the entire time he worked with us. Most of the time, then, we simply weren't around him. But when we were, he was humorless and arrogant. It was clear he was only part of the Sentinels because it suited him. He had no concern for anything other than himself and what he considered his land.”

  “Was Vertun different from his brother?” Anto questioned curiously. “Bhaskar has only been with you for a little while yet, but you all seem to be old friends.”

  “Bhaskar is arrogant and petty like his brother, but he does not hold himself above us,” Uriel replied. “He has his flaws, but he recognizes them. That is what makes the two different. Bhaskar reminds me a lot of you, Kai.” The Sentinel turned to watch me with his two light gray eyes. “Your race may help define you, but you don't let it rule you. You have mentioned before that you find it odd Bhaskar shows concern for us mortals, but you do the same. I think it says a lot of Bhaskar that he has lived for nearly three thousand years without letting his ego take over completely.”

  “It would get boring at the top of that pedestal,” I mused.

  Uriel chuckled at my wording. “It would. Perhaps that is what made Vertun so impersonal.”

  “Perhaps that's why Queen Tilda is such a raging c—” Jakan began.

  “Jakan,” Anto scolded, chuckling despite himself.

  Uriel grinned widely as he shook his head in humor. “She's been called worse.” The Sentinel looked over our resting army before he made eye contact with Cyrus and nodded shortly. “I think our little break is over. Let's get this done, shall we?”

  As we headed north along the tops of the Pedr Crags, the sky finally relieved its burden upon us. Our armor and belongings became heavier with the added weight of the rains, and the rock we walked over was slippery with fresh puddles. The chill of late Red Moon only served as a further discomfort. Anto and I were the most uncomfortable since we were both used to the warmer weather of Chairel. Nyx, Azazel, and Cerin were all perfectly happy, and Azazel even pulled his hood down for the first time in a while since the sun was hiding bashfully behind a layer of clouds.

  I caught up to Azazel, walking beside him as he led our army north. It was odd to be beside him while I was the only one wearing a hood. The archer smiled over at me as he noticed my approach. Azazel would always get extremely happy whenever I sought him out for anything, and I found that quite adorable. The times where he would be ignored and shoved to the side were over. He'd grown quite a bit since leaving the underground. I felt little bitterness from him anymore, and with Calder and I separated by time and distance, his envy over our relationship was mostly non-existent. Azazel's confusion and awkwardness over my offers of friendship in the underground had evolved into open acceptance of it, and I couldn't have been happier with that result.

  “You are envious that I am leading the army rather than you?” Azazel finally jested, when I'd said nothing yet.

  “No, I'm happy you are. I'm more envious of your ability to know one rock from another.” I motioned to the brown cliff-tops around us.

  “I am not tracking the rocks, I am tracking the god,” Azazel replied, with a side-smile. “If you only look at the stone, that's all you'll see.”

  “That's all there is,” I retorted playfully, wiping my eyes clear of the moisture that had sneaked beneath my hood as we walked.

  Azazel pointed one periwinkle blue finger ahead and to the right, where a few tiny dead fish were lined up on a rock with a flat-top. “There's that,” he said.

  I stared at the fish for a moment, before asking, “Why are there fish all the way up here?”

  “Our godly friend was attempting to dry them for a snack before becoming distracted,” Azazel replied. “I came across the same types of things further down the cliffs, too. Didn't understand it myself until Cyrus explained the process of sun-drying to me. It's something we didn't have underground for obvious reasons.”

  “So...how do you know it was the same god who summoned the serpent?” I questioned.

  “He smelled like dried fish,” Azazel replied. “Not only that, but if he's drying fish all the way up here, he has quicker ways than us of getting up and down these cliffs.”

  “It's a wonder we haven't come across him again,” I mused.

  “It makes sense if you think about it. He didn't attempt to hurt us. He attempted to stall us using the powers of another. This god is a protector of Aleyah, but he can only do what he can do. Given his powers, perhaps she uses him as a
way to quicken the spread of her messages. We're already pretty sure Aleyah doesn't leave her cave, right?”

  “From what little we know,” I agreed. All of us had been racking our minds for the last two days trying to figure out which god we were dealing with. His swift reflexes and teleportation skills made the most sense for a god of travel, but Aleyah was the only god that came to mind with such a thing. It was possible that new gods had been birthed in the Mortal Era that myth and legend had not yet claimed.

  “I figure that after he left that day, he went to warn Aleyah and any others. Cicero mentioned this cave has protectors. Perhaps he will rally them, much like he tried with the serpent.”

  “The serpent had killed thousands,” I said softly, remembering the crevasse filled with bones. “I'm not sure that any pursuers of Aleyah have ever gotten as far as we have.”

  “Right. So they'll throw anything they have left at us.” Azazel's black eyes glared ahead as if fixated on something I could not yet see. “And the northern edges of the cliffs are nearing, so I would get prepared for a fight.”

  As if on cue, the echoes of rock crumbling billowed out from the rough stone ahead. The Pedr Crags sloped down a bit here, before dropping off into their northern wall. The land on the cliff-tops was quite leveled here, save for a part which jutted out from the decline. I figured that the mouth of the cave fit snugly beneath the rock there, just out of our view and facing north. If that were the case, then Cicero's directions about it being in sight of Esen would have been correct.

  Azazel stopped in his tracks and started to string his bow as I sought life with alteration magic. Despite the sounds of movement, no energy showed above my hand. I threw my head around to the army.