A Child of Two Worlds
Page 18
“Thank you, Nexus. You have saved us several more hours of tedious work. If you have need of us, we shall be at the academy,” Maestro Dervin said, taking his leave. The five dwarves boarded a gondola headed northwest.
“Shall we?” she asked Alex, leading him to a gondola that ran west to the Adorac Falls.
“Sure,” he said. “That was nice of you.”
Terra nodded. “The Maestro taught me after my mother died. He is a good person.”
Alex smiled at her. Feelings of his happiness and love flowed across the link. “What are you thinking, Husband?” It feels good to say that.
“Just that he isn’t the only good person,” he said as they got onto the gondola. They were the only ones on it. She kissed him on the cheek as it descended to the Adorac Falls.
The air near the falls was on the verge of being painfully hot. Alex began to fan himself. When it didn’t help at all, he stopped. Terra snickered behind her hand. “What?” he asked.
“Were you expecting it to be cool over here? It is a waterfall into a lake of molten lava.”
Alex laughed. “I wasn’t quite sure what I was expecting.” The lava poured from a cave opening two-hundred feet wide high above their heads. A white bridge of a material he couldn’t identify spanned the massive lake of molten stone. He walked a few steps closer and put a foot on the bridge. The air was hotter above the lake, but the bridge didn’t feel any warmer through his boot than the stone had.
“Why did you want to come here?” Terra asked.
“I’m not sure,” Alex said. “I just wanted to see it from closer up.” Terra watched as he lowered his hand to the Guardian’s Blade.
“What are you doing?” she asked as Alex walked toward the falls. He didn’t answer or look back. He kept walking over the lake of fire.
“Alex!” she shouted. She tried to pull him back to her with a mesh of Air, but the spell dissipated when it touched him. He was almost to the lavafall.
“Alex, stop! This isn’t ordinary lava. I can’t divert the flow. You’ll die!” She threw all she had at the flowing magma, but it absorbed everything. She tried to run to him on the bridge, but the heat pushed her back.
Terra felt white hot anger on the link. Alex was holding The Wrathblade out to his side. He swung it up, and the flow parted. He walked through the gap, and it closed behind him. She felt the anger fade as he released The Wrathblade.
Alex floated in absolute darkness. He tried to get his bearings, but he was afloat in a sea of nothing, void of all sensation. “Where am I?” he shouted. His voice sounded flat in the emptiness.
That’s no help, he thought. “What place?”
“Who are you?”
This isn’t making any sense, Alex thought. He could feel Terra’s fear and concern for him, but he couldn’t place her location relative to himself. “Where is Terra?” he demanded. “What did you do with her?”
“What are you?” Alex asked.
A glowing orange crystal, no bigger than his little finger, floated in front of his eyes.
“Waited for what?”
The crystal spun around him in a tight circle.
“Why have you been waiting for me?”
Alex swallowed. “My father had never been here. He would have told me.”
Alex was beginning to make sense of how the mental communication worked. It wasn’t sending him words, but images, and his brain was working to decipher them, change them to speech. “What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
Alex shook his head. He didn’t like the implications of either image. “How?”
Alex began to feel frustrated. “I’m already fighting Azreal. I’m doing those things. Did you bring me here to tell me to do the things I’m already doing?”
“Then tell me what I should do!”
“That doesn’t make any sense! What am I not seeing?”
“But you didn’t tell me anything!”
He bent over and picked it up. The crystal was warm to the touch but no longer glowed with an inner light. “I don’t understand,” he said quietly to the dead stone. Using the link, he felt Terra far behind him. He turned to look that way, but the sheet of lava blocked her from his sight.
“Where am I, and how do I get out of here?” Alex muttered. I can’t get out that way. I’ll have to find another. He studied his surroundings and saw a metal rod with a bulb of glass on the ground near his feet. He picked it up and the bulb began to glow.
He didn’t see any exit in the small cave. There was a dwarven suit of plate mail made from a glossy black metal he was unfamiliar with. It had a golden inlaid border around every piece. The black metal felt strange, cool to the touch despite the heat and slick under his fingers.
Next to the suit of armor was a massive war hammer of the same black metal. Maybe this is unrefined thorium. He reached out to it, but before his hand touched, a blast of hot wind issued into the shallow cave.
He turned to see Terra and Brahm rush across the last few steps of the bridge. The Dwarf wore his plate mail and carried a large two-handed axe. “It didn’t take you long to save me,” Alex said with a smile as he walked to them. He felt her concern mixed with anger.
“Why did you walk across the bridge?” Terra demanded. “You could have died.”
“Walk across the bridge?” he echoed. “Last I remember I was telling you I wasn’t sure why I wanted to come here, then I’m talking to this thing.” He held up the dead crystal.
“Ye were talkin’ to a rock?” Brahm asked. Alex felt Terra’s curiosity as she held out her hand.
She held the small crystal up to her eyes and looked at it closely. “What did the Life Warden tell you?”
Brahm stifled a gasp and walked to the back of the cave.
“The crystal called itself The One Who Waits. It said it had been waiting a long time for me and that the destruction of everything approaches, and I must stop the one who brings the end. To look beneath the surface. None of it made any
sense. And, what is a Life Warden?”
Terra handed The One Who Waits back to him. “A Life Warden is what exists on Aria, the Realm of Life. They gather souls to be born again in the Soul Forge. At least, that’s all anyone knows about them. You can’t go there. No one has been to Aria and returned. Not that I’ve ever heard.”
“Boy, do ye have any idea what it is ye’ve found here?”
Alex turned to look at the Dwarf. Brahm faced the suit of armor and the war hammer. “No, but it looks like it would fit you better than me.”
“This do be the Hammer o’ Kings, wielded by the Brahm, first o’ me Stone name. An’ this’s his armor.”
Terra sensed Alex’s confusion. “I’ll explain how dwarves get their names later.” He nodded. “We have to take those artifacts with us,” she said. “Do you need help carrying them?”
“No,” the Dwarf said. “Watch.” He touched the hammer to the suit of armor and said something Alex didn’t understand. For a moment the armor seemed to quiver, then it folded in on itself into a circular amulet. The whole process took less than two seconds. The Dwarf reverently lifted the amulet and placed it in his pocket, under his armor. He cradled the massive war hammer in his arms as if it were a baby. “I’m ready.”
They walked out of the cave and Terra parted the lavafall. “You are lucky, Alex,” she said. “I don’t know what happened, but no one has ever been able to affect this lava with magic before.”
“I think The One Who Waits was keeping people from doing anything to it.”
“Well, I tried for hours before going to find help. I ran into Brahm at the citadel. He said he would come with me to the academy, but I decided to come back and try again first. You’ve been gone for hours. It is past sunset outside the volcano.”
Alex shrugged. “I don’t know, Terra. Not much of this is making any sense to me. I could have sworn I was talking to the crystal guy for only a few minutes.”
“I understand,” she said. “Let’s get back to the Citadel. I’m sure Brahm will want to meet with King Harbronn now. He won’t object to us going to his rooms and getting some rest.”
Brahm nodded, still wrapped up in his examination of the war hammer as they walked to the gondola.
The night Alex and Terra had returned from the falls they found that their things had been moved to a room with a larger bed and a smaller sitting area for just the two of them.
The next two days passed in relative bliss. The newlywed couple enjoyed a longer honeymoon than they thought possible. They were stolen days of happiness in the midst of turmoil.
The two awoke early the morning they were to meet with King Harbronn. “You should wear your armor,” Terra said. “It is customary for men to wear battle regalia when meeting with the king of the dwarves.”
“You never did tell me how dwarves get their names,” Alex said as he began strapping the greaves on over his boots.
Terra sat in front of the small mirror they had in the bedroom and brushed her red hair. She wore a white silk dress trimmed in green. “Dwarves don’t have children like the rest of the races here on Dae. They are born from the stone in the Temple of the Mother, just south of the falls.”
“Born from the stone?” he asked, clearly confused.
“That’s all I’ve heard. The dwarves don’t let anyone that isn’t a Dwarf observe the ceremony. When the baby dwarves are born, they are assigned to one of the nine clans, given that clan’s name as their surname, and given a birth name. It is by this name they are addressed until they are deemed old enough to choose a Stone name.
“Engraved on the walls of the Temple of the Mother, are thousands upon thousands of Stone names. When a Dwarf dies, he is given to the stone,” Terra continued as she set down the brush. “The Clerics of the Mother, the dwarven priestesses, then fill the engraved name with red paint. After a young Dwarf is deemed mature enough by the patron of his clan, he goes to the temple and chooses his Stone name, the name he will be called until he is given back to the stone.
“Some names are considered more honorable to hold than others because of the history of the dwarves who held it before. The only other thing I really know about it is that when every name is taken there are no more dwarven children born of the stone,” she finished as she stood and helped Alex put on his chest plates.
“Why do dwarves get married if they can’t have children?” Alex asked.
“Only married couples are given children to raise, so that if one of the parents should fall in battle, the young Dwarf would not be left an orphan,” she said as he picked up his helmet. “You can leave that here, it is not considered polite to enter the Hall of Kings with your head covered.”
“Anything else I should know?” Alex asked irritably.
“More than I could have fit into three days, and definitely more than I could fit into an hour,” Terra said with a smile. “Only address King Harbronn as King while in the throne room, not ‘my King,’ ‘King Harbronn,’ or anything other than simply ‘King.’ It would be a severe breach of custom.”
“Why?” he asked. “That sounds foolish.”
Terra laughed. She felt his consternation become more acute. “I’m not laughing at you, Alex. I think it is foolish too, but some customs are stronger than law, and Dwarves have more customs than most. If humans lived for five hundred years at a time, you would likely develop some strange customs too.”
He shrugged as he slid the Guardian’s Blade into its scabbard. “I guess.” He spun in a circle. “How do I look?”
Terra smiled at him. “Handsome, my knight in shining armor.” She ran her hands through his hair and pulled him down for a kiss. She never thought she would be able to feel this way again. In all her years, Terra had never thought she would be able to find love once, much less twice.
They parted when someone knocked on the door. Terra grabbed the pouch with the Eyes of the Stars and stood by the bedroom door. Alex walked from the bedroom and opened the door to the hallway. “Morning Caitlyn,” he said. “How are you?”
The changeling was in her human form and wearing the green dress she favored. Her long black hair was back in a braid. “Morning. I thought I would accompany the two of you when you meet with Harbronn,” she said.
“All right,” Alex said. “We were just about to meet with Brahm outside the throne room. We haven’t seen you since you left us at the market. Where have you been?”
Caitlyn’s fair cheeks blushed slightly. “I’ve been giving the two of you some time alone. It wouldn’t be right, me being around all the time right after you were married.”
“Oh,” Alex said. “Well, thank you. How’s Lord Bahamut?” he asked.
“He’s well. Still confined to his rooms, but dragons heal quickly.”
“That’s good,” Alex said. “He saved our lives with his charge.”
They met Brahm outside the throne room. The massive gold doors were embossed with the nine gemmed crown of the dwarven kings. The Dwarf looked Alex up and down and nodded his head. “Ye’re ready?” he asked Terra.
She nodded, and Brahm pushed open the heavy golden doors. They walked into the throne room.
Larger than life stone statues of past kings lined either side of the cavernous room. Three massive chandeliers of glowing white crystal gave the room bright illumination. Alex’s and Brahm’s armor clanked as the four walked the distance to where King Harbronn sat on the Stone Throne.
The king wore his thorium and gold armor. The Crown of Dwarven Kings sat on his head with the ruby of his clan facing forward. The elder Dwarf had a pensive look on his face as they drew near. The Stone Throne looked to have been carved from the floor. It was all sharp right angles with no padding or adornment at all. Four wooden chairs stood around the king, one at his side, the others in front of him.
“King,” Brahm said in official tones, “it do be me honor to bring before ye, Terra Duval, The Nexus, Alex Zane, The Guardian, and Caitlyn Shadowpaw, Warden o’ the Forest, sister o’ Silvia Shadowpa
w, leader o’ the Changelings o’ the Fang.” The king studied the three of them as the captain of the guard took his seat.
After Brahm sat, Harbronn beckoned for the three of them to be seated. Terra took the center seat with Alex to her right and Caitlyn to her left. “King,” she said, “I would like to start by thanking you for allowing us time to rest and enjoy a short honeymoon.”
The dwarven king nodded. “Ye’re welcome, Nexus. It do me heart well to see ye this day. As the Guardian said, it do be a mighty blow we have struck against the shadow. With many more to come. What is it ye need o’ me?”
She opened the cloth sack and handed one of the orange spheres to the dwarven king. “This is an Eye of the Stars,” she said. “It is a replacement to the Crystals of Davinir that were destroyed before the Arcane City fell. If I may attune you?”
The dwarven king nodded again. Terra placed a hand on the Dwarf’s head and one over the Eye in his hand. The air thrummed with power. A few seconds passed then the sound stopped. She removed her hands and sat back down. Alex flinched. The Eye had changed to a blood-red color. “So now what?” King Harbronn asked. His voice also came from the small bag that held the three remaining Eyes.
“Now we talk,” Silvia said through the Eye.
Harbronn’s grey eyebrows rose. “Mistress Shadowpaw, it’s been a very long time since we’ve talked,” the king said.
“Indeed it has, King. As you can see, the Nexus has returned with the Guardian. The Changelings of the Fang, and the elven nation march to war alongside them. How do you stand?”
King Harbronn roared with laughter. “Blunt as ever, Silvia,” he said after a moment. “I can no’ speak fer the Changeling o’ the Scale, but the dwarves’ll march with ye. I’m confident Bahamut’ll fly with us,” he said. “How soon, Nexus?”
Terra smiled. “Very. A couple months at most. We travel next to the Pillars of Dawn to summon the pixies and The Wing to our side.”
“After we see if the sprites can be called to war,” Alex said. King Harbronn and Brahm both looked at him as if he were daft.