The Grimoire of Yule (The Shadows of Legend Book 1)

by Adam Golden

  Nicholas reached out with his senses, probing for the incredible waves of power he’d felt before. The twisting, writhing currents of force that had nearly carried him away before the din brought him down. He could sense the dueling swirls of power still churning around each other, whipping each other into a frenzy, but they were lessened. The skittering explosive charge that he’d taken for the First Force was draining away, diminishing.

  “What is happening?” the sorcerer demanded, his voice cracking with strain. He needed that power.

  “You are happening. Your influence, your blindness,” Elphame spat with unrestrained bitterness. Her voice softened slightly before she added, “And the price of our crimes. My people suffer and die, the Dokkalfar give themselves over to slaughter, torment, and an orgy of destruction. The balance on the mountain, already shattered, is now obliterated.”

  A visible shudder passed through her slender body before she drew herself up, regal and rigid in an instant. “It does not matter now,” she said. “You waste too much time, too much effort. Do you not feel it? It approaches even now.”

  The sorcerer opened his mouth to reply and was waved off with a sharp negating chop.

  “Magic will not help you, Nicholas!” she exclaimed. “This bestial alter ego will not help you. No army of demons, no hidden power will help you. For a thousand years the balance has been neglected, the scales have tipped, the old boundaries are shredded. Chaos is loose. Now there must be a reckoning. The balance must be restored.”

  “How?” The word came out raw and desperate, both pleading and demanding. “You say I must do this. ‘Restore the balance’ you say, but you tell me my strength is meaningless, and my plans are folly. If my power is an illusion, and I am nothing but a blind and bumbling fool, how am I to do what you demand?”

  A small shard of a smile creased the elf’s lips. There was none of the stiff dangerous superiority in this, this wasn’t the animal, this was the man. She’d finally broken through to Nicholas. The human was, at best, a marginal improvement on the beast, but was this not a time of small mercies and fractional hopes?

  “There was a young man once,” the elf queen said looking steadily into the worn, suddenly aged face of the man before her. “An earnest young priest who learned of a young girl beset by a great evil. It had corrupted her body, stolen her mind, it made her do terrible things. Animals were mutilated, fires were set, and people had begun to disappear. The people in the villages around her home were terrified of her, of the atrocities she’d committed. A strong party of them finally managed to capture the girl and shut her away. They’d sent to the young priest to preside over the burning that they believed was their only hope.”

  There were tears in Nicholas’ eyes as Elphame continued the story. The memories flashed before his eyes as she spoke. Six men died before the others finally brought the girl down, they’d closed her inside an isolated wooden shed and were already building the pyre when he’d arrived. He was so young, still new to the priesthood, but already well versed in his occult studies thanks to Fulvia. He’d felt the creature as soon as he neared. The girl was a week past her seventh birthday, but the creature . . . the thing inside her, was old, ancient, unspeakably vicious, and with a hunger for bloodshed and terror like nothing Nicholas had ever heard of before.

  “You convinced those people to let you try to help that girl,” Elphame said softly. “You went into that building knowing the thing that held her would kill you if it could. You’ve always been powerful, Nicholas, since the day you were born, but the monster was stronger then. Yet you went in anyway.”

  Nicholas nodded dumbly. He could still see the animal snarling at him through that little girl’s face as he began to chant, trying ritual after ritual and charm after charm to exorcise the demon. He remembered how it laughed, taunting him as it made her tear at her own flesh until her undeveloped chest was naked and flensed, no more than a mass of bloody tears and ragged meat.

  “There was no Blood Claw then, Nicholas, no rampaging hoard of cutthroats to do your bidding,” Elphame said, her voice a gentle hymn flowing around the tableau of memory that washed over him. “There was no black dagger, no rivers of blood, no driving need for more power. There was just you, one man, standing against a monster he couldn’t hope to defeat, because it was right. That was the first time they called you Wonderworker. Do you recall?”

  He did, it was nearly dawn of the next day when he’d staggered out of that woodshed with the tiny exhausted bundle of shredded cloth and bloody flesh in his arms. The monster had nearly cleaved his soul away a dozen times. He didn’t speak for almost a week after, could barely be roused from his bed. Tulio had been beside himself with worry. It was only after he’d finally made it back to his feet and he was going through the things he’d taken to the woodshed that he discovered something odd among his instruments. A curling bit of black horn, a little longer than the palm of his hand and broken jaggedly at one end, as though it had been snapped off. At first, he couldn’t even touch it, the sense of corruption was so intense that he’d actually been sick but there was a strange pull to it as well, a charge, a power.

  “Nicholas the Wonderworker,” Elphame breathed, “demon slayer, child saver. A man, imperfect and overmatched who nonetheless stood before a monster and said ‘no more’, even if it cost him his own life.”

  Nicholas shook his head in negation, his heavy frame quivering with emotions as he pulled in on himself seeming to shrink before her.

  “I am not that any longer. So much death . . .”

  Elphame stepped toward him and then whirled away. “Noooo . . .” she shrieked.

  The word was drawn out into a terrible screeching wail of agony, and then she was gone. The empty blue nimbus Nicholas inhabited shuddered and collapsed. The wizard staggered, lost his balance and tumbled down the half-dozen rocky steps of the Anvil’s dais.

  His head struck the rock of the cavern floor and his vision swam and twisted madly. There was a grinding sound in his ears. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but couldn’t. The sound was the grating of stone on stone, like two great boulders grinding against east other. Crashes sounded all around him as bits of the ceiling vault high above were shaken loose. His vision was clouded but it was the mountain that was twisting, screaming as it was wrenched by some incredible invisible force. A cold dread seized Nicholas by the throat.

  Maelstrom. The avatar of chaos had come.

  The wizard tried to rise to his feet and failed, falling back to the rocky ground. A terrified blurt of noise burst from his lips, but he bit down on it and forced himself up again. He might not be the man he had been all those decades past, but he was his father’s son. He would remember. He would be brave as he’d been told.

  He gained his feet and staggered toward the winding stair, only to be halted by an inky glint in the wildly shifting torch light. There, in the midst of the broken rock, debris, and dust, was his knife. The ominous black dagger lay untouched by the destruction around it, expectant, thrumming with its own power and need. Beside it, half buried in debris, Nicholas could just make out the multi-hued shimmer of the tongs of Eitri. The wizard stopped dead, awash in dread and indecision.

  With a frustrated growl, he scooped up both items and dashed up the stairs. As he ran, his shadow stretched before him, eager, grasping, at once leading him and wrapping tightly about him. He screamed, whether in dread or elation he no longer had the presence of mind to know for sure. Was he hurtling toward destiny or doom? Was there a difference? Did it matter anymore? He let the questions fall away and kept on running.

  Fog of War, Light of Hope

  The land thrashed like a body under torture as Maelstrom passed. Where his fractured and confused attention landed, the earth changed, shifted and reformed as though trying to escape his notice. Mountains of frozen granite flashed to dust and were caught up in screaming swirls of wind. A curling breaker of snow and ice churned before the approaching host, gathering ferocity as it gathered materia
l. Jagged vents spider-webbed through the crust as the contortions and contractions in the earth grew. Violent geysers of ice and steam, magma and snow exploded upward, throwing plumes of ash into a sky already dark with churning angry clouds.

  A phalanx of lumbering monstrosities groaned and jerked their way forward, seeming to sprout up out of the earth, already marching. They were faceless, thoughtless, vaguely man-shaped creatures and monsters roughhewn from jagged slabs of living ice. Scores of them dragged arms too long for their wide squat frames along the ground as they moved. These dug boulders of rock and snow as big as horses from the earth as they plodded forward, launching wave after wave of devastating projectiles at the slopes of the lone mountain. Others sprinted forward on long crystalline stilts, all jagged blade-like edges and points of ice hard as iron. These blended with the wave at their van, straining to clash with the host of cerulean phantasms that rushed down the sheer slopes of the elven home toward them.

  Maelstrom sneered at the army of blue fire manifestations the elves threw up to block his way. So tiny, so limited in their perceptions. They still thought to halt his emancipation of their ‘reality’. The futility of their scrambling saddened, thrilled, and utterly bored him. It would be ended soon. It had to be ended soon.

  The incarnation of anarchy stretched and shifted within a skin that bound him like bands of steel. The fluidity and mutability of form he craved was denied. He looked out at the field through a set and finite number of eyes, and could have wailed at the constraints hemming him around.

  The chains of reality laid heavy in this place, pressing around him tightly. The effort it took to change the forms and remake the matter on this frozen bit of rock was incredible. He couldn’t afford the added concentration it would have required to keep his form in the constant state of change he would have preferred. Glaring up at the spike of blue flame-wreathed rock, he hurled the force of his will toward it like a catapult, only to have it rebound again and again. Somehow this place defied his efforts to free it from its bonds.

  There was power here, a solidity that both repelled and fascinated him. His will, which was bending probabilities like wet clay throughout the endless honeycombs of planes and places everywhere, was stopped in its tracks in this single location. That mountain was a linchpin of structure, a focus for the forces of form and symmetry that he somehow couldn’t break. At least not directly, not yet.

  Maelstrom stood rooted to nothing, hanging in the air above the quickly joining battlefield. He seethed with anarchic energy, boiling with frustrated impatience and thrilled with anticipation. His curling wave of snow, ice, and rock slammed into the front ranks of the enemy’s ethereal host of flame-formed creatures, and threw them back. Packs of cobalt wolves, herds of azure stags, and clutches of a hundred other forms were tossed into the air and exploded into showers of cerulean sparks that rained down on the gloomy field.

  An eerie blue haze hung over everything. A gang of elf-shaped indigo ghosts swarmed around the legs of one of his lead giants, swinging great war hammers and keen looking axes which fell with the force of thunderclaps. The frost-formed monster staggered even as it batted them into oblivion with great sweeps of its long ape-like arms.

  A final blow behind the rough-shaped hinge of the giant’s knee separated its left leg and the creature teetered. It swayed drunkenly, bellowing a cry like the grinding of a pair of passing glaciers. The crippled monster careened sideways into one of its fellows, and both went down hard.

  Organized lines of otherworldly combatants devolved into a frenzied melee. Boulders of ice and rock exploded in the midst of fierce fighting. Lances of white-hot lightning rained down, blasting smoking craters into knots of snow-formed abominations. The earth itself bucked and writhed like a wounded animal. Pandemonium ruled on the plains below the Mountain of Blue Fire and Maelstrom, the personification of disorder, thrilled with an almost sexual hunger as it spread.

  A spasm of transformation, like a nest of insects skittering this way and that beneath his skin, ran through Maelstrom’s knotted, lumpy, only vaguely human-shaped form. The creature shuddered with ecstasy. He breathed in the snarl and turmoil below like a connoisseur sniffing at a fine vintage, and felt his strength surge. His will hammered at the vaporous screen around the mountain again and was rebuffed again, but this time not as immediately as before, and he felt a thinning that hadn’t been there before.

  A rush of ecstatic disappointment roiled through the conflicted creature. Its power surged, and a rent formed in the empty air, like a wound cut into existence itself. From this jagged crack in reality bled a host of the tortured, twisted forms that Maelstrom made everywhere he went. His beautiful grotesqueries tumbled out the sky with undulating screams of maddened frenzies, a hail of meat and stone and plant and teeth that fell on the creatures of the mountain and his own with an equally savage, desperate abandon. Where the flesh of his mutated legion met turquoise flame, torches of smoking fat burst alight and went screaming madly through the crush.

  Ice and snow melted, pooled, and reformed into twisted hulks that pushed closer to the base of the mountain without a missed step. Stags of fire gored and swatted with spreads of antlers as broad as a tall man’s reach driving them back time and time again. Packs of flame-wrought wolves as large as horses leapt into existence out of empty air—a barrage of mystical muscle and teeth that clamped about throats and legs, driving giants and mutants to the ground with equal ease. Twisting serpentine forms of sapphire dragons wheeled and dove in the air around the mountain, blasting columns of white-hot flame at anything that drew too close, while desperately fighting off the maddened beaks and claws of clouds from deranged seabirds that fell on them from every side.

  Through it all, Maelstrom hung immobile on his perch of empty air, undulating with the waves of anarchy and unrule that crested around him. A maw of broken teeth yawned open on his tumorous chest. A lolling tongue of moss-riddled stone licked lasciviously at the air as the demigod of madness fired his resolve against the barrier that held him from his prize with the constant staccato of a rapid jab. Embers of azure light flaked away, falling down the mountain like luminescent snow as he chipped away at the flaring elven buffer. The death rattle of permanence sounded in clusters of ears dotted around his disparate, heinous form.

  Close, he was so close now.

  A net of crimson lightning streaked through the cloud cover above the mountain’s ragged peak. The furious clash below was bathed in an ominous bloody light and spears of ruby fire stabbed down into the swarming fighters by the dozen, blasting hosts of combatants to shreds and ruins. Lances of gore-hued force ripped toward Maelstrom’s tenuous perch, sizzling through the air with naked malevolence. The herald of discord watched with a sort of fatalistic glee as twin javelins of killing fire streaked in toward him. The fractured, spasmodic shield of his will met the attack and shattered it, leaving vermillion threads of spent power to twist around him in impotent serpentine spirals. A nearly forgotten speck of personality buried deep in the cobbled together psyche of chaos’s foot soldier screamed in recognition at the taste of this assault. This was different, familiar. He knew the rage, the hunger that drove this power . . . Nicholas!

  A smear of impenetrable gloom arced outward from the mountain’s summit, racing toward the general of insanity with the sure certainty of iron pulled toward a lodestone. An expectant snarl ripped from the gnashing maw on Maelstrom’s chest.

  Yes! Let there be an end to it!

  —

  Columns of greasy black smoke poured up into the boiling murk of the sky. Ash blew and swirled everywhere, streaking the once white cityscape with muddy grey filth. Gardens, which had bloomed in tranquil pastel perfection for uncountable centuries, now stood trampled, mires of red-tinged mud. Fires burned wherever she turned her eyes. The debris of looted property, smashed statuary, and broken bodies littered streets that had never known anything but lovingly maintained cleanliness. The ring of metal on metal and the groaning cries of the stricken a
ttested to the knots of fighting still raging through the eternal city, but anyone could see the raid of the Dokkalfar had been devastatingly successful. The strength of Alfheim was shattered. The desolation of the once celebrated elven nations was now complete. Elphame stood slumped against one of the great pillars of the Dawn Temple, eyes clouded by the hot tears that streamed down her cheeks.

  Look what has become of us, she lamented silently. Look what our sins have wrought.

  A spasm of pain shivered through the elven queen’s slight crumpled body. The assault on the shield she maintained around the mountain was ferocious, and each blow was becoming more and more difficult to repulse. Elphame felt as though she were trying to hold together bits of shredded silk with hands coated in oil, and to make matters worse she’d failed with the human wizard. She’d been on the cusp of success. She knew it, but that first assault was so furious, so unexpectedly savage, that it was all she’d been able to do to hold herself together.

  The demon magic reasserted itself now she could feel it like a skein of slime coating her skin. Two monsters more alike than different warred above her mountain, and she greatly feared that no matter which was victorious, an end was coming. Not just an end for her people, or even the people of this world, but an end for all of the peoples of all the worlds on every plane of creation.

  Bloody red lightning shivered across the sky and a bestial howl split of clamor of fighting that even Alfheim’s great height couldn’t dim. The elfshivered at the sound. All at once the assault on the barrier was gone, not just lessened, but completely abandoned. A grateful sigh slipped from her lips. The demons had engaged each other. The elf queen’s eyes drooped, lids heavy with the strain of so much effort and sorrow. If only she could rest . . .

  The skittered shuffling steps of several sets of feet sounded in the square below the temple steps, and Elphame’s eyes snapped wide. A trio of stunted, bent, and emaciated Dark Elves were stalking a wild-eyed elven female, prodding her with the broken hafts of looted Ljosalfar spears, and jeering in the fast chittering tongue of the deep tunnels.