Life Giver

by Lisa Lowell

  Rashel lifted her head to the dark. Oh, for a fairy now, to show her a spark of hope and light. She wished, with all her might, for a fairy to come to light her way.

  A flash of white light stunned her. It flickered, doubling itself in the reflection it left on the water’s surface. A fairy had granted her wish. It flitted frantically away from the water, squealing in alarm at its surroundings, but Rashel could have wept in joy at something existing beyond the dark.

  “You have called me,” it said into Rashel’s mind. “How may I serve you in this horrid place, so far away from my home trees, oh Lady of the Green?”

  Rashel rose to her feet to address the light that had begun to race in circles around her head, leaving afterimages of a comet’s tail behind her. “I was called here by the grass above, and now there is something in the dark with us, and I am trapped underneath. Can you help me learn what I must do?”

  The fairy did not hesitate, and its tinny little voice cheeped in alarm. “Shield yourself. There is demon-dust here.”

  “Shield myself…how?”

  The growl of the demon-dust in the dark rattled the crystalline ceiling of the chamber, and Rashel felt as if something crawled down her spine. Without instruction, raging with nervous energy, she wove her thoughts into an ivy tangled shield. Whatever stalked her would hopefully become pinned and never actually reach her. Unfortunately, this bound her as well. She sensed the vines creeping up her body and hemming her in. She felt trapped, even with the great yawning cavern echoing around her. In a fit, she again used her wishes for light.

  And the light came. This time, an entire flock of fairies stabbed the cave with bright flickering, blinding her to all else. Gradually, as her vision cleared, Rashel finally saw the entire chamber she had discovered and gasped in awe.

  The cave glittered with the spangled fairy-light glancing of a myriad of glossy crystals embedded in a ceiling of dark glass. These, in turn, reflected off the black water below, doubling the light and filling the shoreline with illumination. Rashel found she stood on a black rock shoreline, and other than an abandoned blanket, a pair of boots, and a long-dead fire ring, she could see nothing to witness any other life had been here.

  She laughed at the irony. This was Yeolani’s place before it was hers. She had found where he had left his boots. This cavern was the spot where he had learned about the muddy crystals and been given Elin as the name of the person he would marry. She wasn’t the first one here…or even the second. The angry presence of an unknown thing cringed away from the light of the fairies. Rashel squinted into the well of darkness beyond the frantic efforts of fairies flitting above her head. The demon dust could not be seen.

  “You!” she called and then had to wait until her echoes settled. “You must leave this place.”

  Laughter, wicked and jarring, rippled the water and air back at her. The ivy protecting her filtered the fear a bit, and Rashel was not intimidated by it. How had Yeolani battled the Siren? No, he had not defeated her, and this was a creature of the dark, not the burning, searing light as Yeolani had described. How about the sorcerer demons at East? Yeolani had forced them into a tornado and swept them out to sea. What could the Queen of Growing Things do to battle demon dust?

  An idea, out of nowhere, came to Rashel’s fertile mind. Wise One inspiration? She was not sure, but she would act on it. She thought of a tree, growing here in the dark. She would feed it with her magic, rooting it in the water and pushing it up into the light above. The cavern ceiling wasn’t particularly high. She could almost brush her hands against the ceiling here at the shoreline. She could do this, bringing light permanently to the cave. And the tree she would craft would drink the demon dust from the crystals, from the bitter water, and grow stronger with it. The tree would act as a filter and a well, siphoning up the demon dust and expelling it from the cistern.

  Rashel eagerly put the idea into action. She sat back down within her armor of ivy and began to concentrate. The fairies and their light encouraged her. Her mind slipped under the water, to the roots of the well, so cold and dark. Deeper still, she found in the stone the energy she sought. She must ground this tree beyond any on earth. She imagined a seed that sprouted and drank from the magic of the Land. It reached out roots as vast as the cavern itself.

  Then Rashel grew it up, widening the stalk, swelling and drinking in the demon dust that lurked within the cavern. As the vast tree rose, it pierced the water, sending ripples to her shoreline. It’s diamond-hardened bark glowed green and blue in the fairy light. She pushed it toward the ceiling where she had fallen and then let it burst through. The reaching boughs sought the remains of Yeolani’s original hole and scraped through it, seeking the sunlight.

  As her massive creation broke through the surface, onto the plains, her connection to Yeolani returned. “Rashel! Where are you?” his voice reverberated in her skull, urgently and louder than the now drowned demon dust.

  “I’m here,” she reassured him, but her concentration focused more on the finishing touches of her grand tree. She launched it high into the air, stretching toward the nourishing sun. Next, she allowed it branches, worthy of the trunk that now spanned so wide it would take ten men to girth it. Finally, as the crowning glory, she encouraged glossy leaves to erupt, like a layer of snow cascading over a mountainside. An entire village could shelter under the shade of this magical tree that now drank away the demon dust.

  21

  Tree in a Storm

  Yeolani froze in horror. His wife had disappeared out of his mind, untrained and far away. He couldn’t follow her, not with a baby to take care of. Yeolani strained to resist his impulse to turn into a tornado and rip across the countryside toward her, but there was no way to keep Nevai safe with him at the same time. Whom could he find to tend him?

  Yeolani’s mind switched to a different search. He debated whether to call Honiea and ask her for childcare. However, something in him knew Honiea would chide him for not teaching Rashel before she left him and make him deal with the consequences. No, that would not work. What about someone in town? The only person he knew by name was the neighbor, Norton, who was laid up in bed with deadly wounds still to heal. That would not work either.

  Restlessly, Yeolani went to the door and used a little magic to tug the door free from the insistent ivy. His focus spun far away, using the clouds scudding across the sky to see across the plains, so he failed to sense closer to home.

  To his surprise, the entire village, armed with torches and pitchforks, stood lined up around the fence. All across the barnyard, ivy and roses choked the path to the gate. The barn had completely succumbed to the forest which now had pushed its way to within an arm’s reach of the door. The cows had escaped their prison when the trees had pushed through the walls and now ran freely in the just sprouting wheat. Yeolani stood on the stoop with Nevai in his arms and knew he could not go look for Rashel. He had his own battle to fight.

  “Good morning,” he called weakly.

  Hodge, the old man who had bid on Rashel’s farm, stood with a torch in his fist and a suspicious snarl on his face. “You ain’t left, I see.”

  The mayor, also in the crowd but farther back, called out. “I just married you. Why would you do this….this black magic? And where’s Rashel?”

  Shouts from the frightened villagers of Edgewood rang through the trees. They feared for Rashel’s safety and blamed him for the abrupt changes to the farm.

  “I can pull back the forest,” Yeolani promised, “but I need someone to watch my baby. Rashel’s in danger elsewhere, and I need to go help her.”

  “Burn back the forest!” shouted one of the mob, and the rest of them murmured agreement. “Burn them out!” “Witches!” “Save the town before we’re swallowed whole.”

  The rabble surged forward. Yeolani instinctively froze the mob, as he had done before. He needed to think. Rashel was on her own. Yeolani’s problem was how to solve this impasse without magic, as that would simply frighten these peop
le more. He’d not wanted to push away the forest and wild ivy growth, wanting to leave that to train Rashel. Not now. She was hopefully learning self-control elsewhere. With a wave of his hand, Yeolani made the trees disappear and the ivy withered to dust.

  Now, how to deal with the mob that wanted him killed. Nothing flashy. Could he make them forget what they’d seen? Would he have to do each person individually? Resigned, Yeolani marched over to confront the frozen citizens of Edgewood. He reached Hodge and placed his hand against the old man’s forehead. He was about to wipe the man’s memory when he was faced with a wall, as Vamilion would have built. Something in the old man blocked Yeolani’s touch.

  Yeolani pulled back his magic and looked at the frozen man. To his horror, Hodge reanimated, snarling viciously, and threw his torch past Yeolani at the cabin. The poor building burst into flame. Hodge cackled in a fearfully familiar way. Demon possessed.

  “Yes, King of the Plains,” Hodge roared with more power than the feeble man should be able to muster. “I promised I would return.”

  “Roach,” Yeolani snarled and wished fervently that there was somewhere to send Nevai so he would not be in danger in this battle. Before he could think of what to do, the other villagers also began moving again, demon-driven and throwing their torches at the barn and other buildings.

  How had they found him?

  The answers did not come, only the reactions. Yeolani shielded himself into his royal clothing and wove an invisibility over Nevai before he sent the baby into the forest with a thought. May the fairies watch over you, my boy. Next, Yeolani drew his bow and began firing into the surging crowd of raging townsfolk, all the while backing away from the flames that encroached on him. Those people struck by his arrows continued to stomp forward, unaware of the shafts sticking out of their bodies.

  The cabin and barn went up with alarming speed. Even the stones of the well burned with a strange purple and green flame. There was nothing to save, Yeolani realized and gave up trying to simply stop these people. He needed to learn quickly how to battle demons, not humans. He had to save himself and not the farm.

  Tornadoes. They came so easily to him. He felt his body torn from the earth and lifted gently into the sky. He swept through the village, leaving devastation in his wake. The shrieks of the demons blended with the roar of the wind as Yeolani sucked the fires up. The clouds he had invoked would put out any remaining flames, but there was nothing left now of Edgewood for him to want. Instead, Yeolani raced across the plains with his cargo of demons striking lightning across the whirlwind. He flew to the southwest, hoping to find Rashel.

  “Stop!” the demons wailed. “Stop!”

  “Why? You came back when I warned you not to come. I told you that we would always fight you if you returned.”

  “Stop,” demon voices plead. “We will teach you how to know us, how to thwart us next time, if you will only stop.”

  Yeolani’s mind was elsewhere, thinking of his wife and where she might have been lost. With his body phased into the essence of a tornado, it was difficult to think about negotiations with lightning-struck demons that simply would not die.

  “That’s right, we cannot die once we have formed,” the voices screamed over the winds. “But we can be harnessed. The one named Owailion knows us. He will bind us to one shape, to serve. You carry one with you now, a demon dissolved into mastered magic. We will not return if you will let us go into a form.”

  Yeolani could not concentrate on the inane babbling of legions of demons when he only wanted to hear the winds and Rashel’s voice. He raced across the open plains, refusing to listen. If Owailion knew how to bind a demon, perhaps he would explain later, but not until Yeolani found Rashel.

  With his mind’s eye, he surveyed the prairie below, basking in the waves of grass torn and flattened in his passing. He would rip the world open until he found the hole into which his new bride had fallen. He could not remember where his well shaft had been, but it was reasonable to think she had gone into the ground as he had and landed in the cistern. He could think of no more fitting place than there to house the Roach.

  The tornado named Yeolani scanned far and wide for a landing place and found nothing until something emerged like the largest mole he could imagine. It began mounding up just a mile or so beyond him, and he willed his storm closer. Yeolani hovered around it as it grew, and his storm swept aside much of the dirt, adding a darker cast to the green and gray of the wind and its debris. Then something broke through the surface and rose above the massive molehill.

  A tree grew through the prairie surface. This had to be Rashel’s doing.

  “Rashel! Where are you?” the tornado called.

  In relief, Yeolani heard the words he longed to hear. “I’m coming.”

  Yeolani watched and waited impatiently for Rashel to appear, but instead, all he got was more tree. The thing was massive, lifting up to the cloud height he maintained. He didn’t dare go near Rashel’s creation, but he also did not trust the demons he still had bound in his grip. Their lightning and repeated stabs at escape lashed out now at the tree they too saw emerging.

  “Where are you?” Yeolani asked again, “And what on God’s green earth is this you’re making? It’s never going to survive out here in the middle of nowhere.”

  “Oh, yes, it is because you are going to protect it, my dear.” Rashel’s mental tone made that an order. “This is my tree to suck up demon dust. Last winter, when you dug that hole, something fell down inside and absorbed magic. It was about to become a demon. It was demon dust. This tree is grounded in the water of the earth below, in your cavern, and it will absorb the dust and make it powerless.”

  “But where are you?” he begged in a voice driven by the winds. He could not see her, despite the spectacular view of her tree, now branching and budding out in silver and green leaves.

  “Up…er…down here, in the tree.”

  Yeolani lowered his awareness perspective, while not once dropping his demon passengers. He dared not. He now saw Rashel standing amid the still expanding branches of her glorious tree. From head to toe, she glittered and gleamed in a royal gown of green silk embroidered with leaves of silver and gold. Her walnut dark hair trailed with ivy and camellia flowers, held together with gold twine. She waved as her tree lifted her into the sky, higher than any tree in the Land.

  “Where’s the baby?” she called, smiling at the tornado as he spun around her. “We need to talk.”

  Yeolani was almost speechless at her beauty, but he gathered himself, nonetheless. “Talk, that’s an understatement. I have some demons in here with me. Will your tree make them demon dust too?”

  Rashel finally halted the growth of the tree and considered what Yeolani had asked. “I really don’t know. The fairies told me that what I found there was demon dust, not a demon in itself. I know nothing about them.”

  “Owailion does,” Yeolani replied, “but I’m afraid to ask him.”

  “Who? Oh, why don’t we just try? Send them to the cistern and see if my tree will trap them there. The only way out now is through the veins of the tree, purified in its waters.”

  Yeolani’s instincts warred within him. He recognized Rashel’s penchant for reckless experimentation. That’s what got them here in the first place, but the little he knew of Owailion led him to believe they would not get an answer from that quarter.

  “Yes,” cried the demons trapped in his tornado. “Put us there and see if we can corrupt the tree. You have no alternative.”

  “Who was that?” Rashel asked in bewilderment. “It sounded like…”

  “Demons,” Yeolani affirmed. “They aren’t demon dust, and I’ll trust a demon when the world splits in two. We do have an alternative. We could call Honiea and Vamilion.”

  Rashel did the work of calling, with Yeolani’s patient explanation, conjuring a candle, holding it high into the tree and thinking of Honiea’s arrival.

  The Queen of Healing arrived at the base of the tree and lo
oked up at the tornado in alarm. She never noticed Rashel above her head in the branches.

  “What…?” Honiea began.

  “Don’t ask,” Yeolani warned. “We’ve got a problem. I’m swirling around here holding some demons and need to know how to handle them. Rashel has mastered what she says was demon dust – a not-quite-yet demon. She did it by sealing it under this magical tree. Will this work for a few fully formed demons like I’m holding?”

  Honiea turned to look up into the tree’s impressive leaves as Rashel hopped off her branch and used magic to buffer her landing. “Thank you for coming,” she smiled at the Queen’s surprise. “It’s a long story. Let’s just say Rashel is a nickname.”

  Honiea gave a delighted smile and gathered Rashel into her arms. “That’s a relief. I don’t know why, but broken hearts do not make for good magic. Yeolani loved you the moment he met you. I’m so delighted you’ve joined us. Queen of….?”

  “Growing Things,” Yeolani supplied. “Can we solve this problem now and save the small talk for later? I’m very tired.”

  “Well, I’m not the one who knows how to deal with demons. Vamilion has had some dealings. And Owailion of course.” Honiea stretched out her hand, conjured her candle, and drew for her husband. The King of the Mountains arrived as startled as Honiea had moments before. He pulled his pick that sparked lightning, ready to fight a tornado, but Yeolani stopped him.

  “It’s me, old man. We need some help.”

  They briefly explained the situation with a mental conversation because of the tornado’s roaring. Unfortunately, Rashel learned of the destruction of her farm and village that way.

  “All the villagers? And Marit? Taken over? Will they survive?” she grieved, and ivy began growing up over her, trying to protect and comfort her distress. In disgust, she huffed, and they withered back into the ground before they could bind her completely.