Betrayer's Bane

by Michael G. Manning

  As their skin came into contact he felt a cold wind blow through his soul. The world dimmed and it felt as though he had ice in his veins. What little energy he had left quickly faded. Helpless he stared into the eyes of the man he had hated and feared for so long.

  He was going to die.

  “After you’re gone, I’ll release Lyralliantha and remake this world,” said Thillmarius. “I want you to know that. Whatever you think you accomplished, with all this meaningless destruction, it was for naught. You suffered, your family suffered, your children died, for nothing but your stupid animalistic pride. No one will mourn your passing, betrayer.”

  Tyrion gasped, his chest growing too weak to even draw breath.

  “You lost before we even started, Tyrion,” the She’Har informed him. “I can’t die.”

  “Watch me, Father,” Brigid had told him. “Watch me bleed, watch me burn!” In his mind’s eye Tyrion saw her bones falling into dust once more, as her energy faded away. And then his eye noticed the flames on the ground behind Thillmarius. The dry grass there had caught fire when the She’Har’s burning spellweave had been around him.

  He can’t die, thought Tyrion, but that body can burn, and if there’s nothing left… The cold emptiness almost made it easier for him as he let his mind slip away, expanding and encompassing not the earth or wind, but the tiny flame burning a few feet away.

  Tyrion became the flame, and the fire became his rage.

  A pillar of fire blossomed, roaring skyward and Thillmarius released his neck, turning around to see what had happened. Tyrion fell on him and this time the fire didn’t die, for this fire was not born of magic, of deliberately molded aythar.

  This was a natural flame, imbued with the will and murderous rage of Tyrion Illeniel. It caught the unnatural body of the lore-warden within it and then it began to burn ever brighter, becoming scathing white column of incandescent fury.

  Thillmarius screamed, a hideous cry of impotent despair as his body was reduced to ash. Then he was gone. Tyrion almost thought he could still see him, like a spirit left behind once his body was gone, but then even that faded away.

  With nothing left to burn and no will to do more, the fire began to die and Tyrion collapsed inward, until at last, he was just a man, cold and broken on the ground beside his home.

  He could hardly move, something had broken, probably his collarbone, but he still felt a strange sense of contentment. He had been disappointed by his failure to reach Thillmarius before. As brutal as the fight had been, it gave him a sense of closure.

  “I won, asshole,” he whispered.

  ***

  Tyrion managed, painfully, to drag himself into the house. Otherwise he would have frozen to death. He passed out after that and whether it was one day or three before he woke again he was never able to figure out. It didn’t matter. He lived.

  When he did come around he spent a long time sorting out his injuries, fixing his broken collarbone and mending several other less serious fractures. The bruises he could do little about, and the blisters from his burns were hard to deal with as well.

  Some things simply took time.

  Eventually, he was able to walk, and after that he took care of his other needs. There was still food in the kitchen and while his cooking was awful compared to Kate’s, he wouldn’t starve. After a week had passed he realized his food wouldn’t last forever.

  He hadn’t planned well for this part. The townsfolk, frozen in stasis, didn’t need to eat, but he did, and so would they when they were eventually brought back. The winter had turned bitterly cold and ice was everywhere.

  The livestock in Colne were probably still alive, but when the winter failed to abate after a few months most of the animals would die. Tyrion had nothing but time, though.

  After a second week of recovering he went back to his parent’s home. It was a relief to find them gone. He had never checked to make sure that they had relocated with the other villagers and he had been afraid he might find their bodies there.

  The sheep were alright, so he herded them slowly back to Albamarl. Over the following months he crafted new stasis boxes to keep them in, one by one, along with the horses and other animals he found in Colne. The people would need them when they returned.

  He had worried about food, but the entire world had become a freezer. The food left behind in the abandoned homes of Colne was hard frozen when he recovered it for his larder. Some of it he stored, some of it he ate.

  He spent the rest of the year slowly gathering everything of value, food, tools, and animals. What he didn’t use for himself, he put into stasis.

  Alone, he had nothing but time.

  The year turned, but winter never faded. He had considered waking Lyra to keep him company; the threat of the krytek he had created was long past, but that was impossible. He decided not to bother waking any of his children either, since there was nothing for them. The world was dark, cold, and bleak.

  Tyrion waited, and watched, eating food that had lost all flavor from being frozen too long. The entire world seemed a perfect reflection of his soul.

  Epilogue

  He was shocked when Abby walked into the house. He had been alone for so long he had begun to talk to himself and he frequently thought that he heard his children’s voices, but he knew they were just his imagination.

  Tyrion stared at her carefully, trying to determine whether she was real or just a dream. He had lost track of time. Had it been a year? That was when she was supposed to awaken.

  She stared back at him, a look of pity on her face. “You look terrible, Father.”

  He reached up, scratching his face through the long beard he had grown. “I’ve been worse,” he replied. He jumped when a second figure stepped through the door, a man he didn’t recognize. “Who’s that?” he asked suspiciously.

  “Relax,” she said, holding out a hand placatingly. “This is Davor, one of the Mordan we preserved. I woke him to help me get here sooner. It would have taken a week on foot.”

  “Oh.” He spotted the tattoos around the man’s throat, it was one of the slave mages. “Are you hungry?” he asked. It was the only conversation he could think of.

  Abby shook her head, “No. I ate not long before we went into stasis. It feels like I just left the kitchen. What do you have in there?”

  “Some meat,” he told her. “Beef I think, it’s hard to remember. There’s turnips and carrots too.”

  She walked into the kitchen to inspect his provisions and what she saw appalled her. When she returned, she glared at him, “Have you been cooking any of it?” The vegetables were frozen and appeared to be partially gnawed. The beef was raw and it looked as though he had simply been tearing pieces from it when he got hungry. None of the dishes looked to have been used in recent history.

  He had been alone so long that he felt like a child as he looked into her angry face. “No,” he whispered, his voice cracking. And then he began to cry.

  His reaction startled her, and her native compassion immediately rose to the fore. “Shhh, it’s alright. What’s wrong? What happened?” He flinched when she put her hand on his shoulders and it took her several awkward minutes to finally get him to relax so she could hug him.

  He cried brokenly for a while, and then he began to talk. He told her of Lyralliantha’s predicament, and Brigid’s end. He told her about Thillmarius, and then he talked of the winter. Through it all he ached, from his heart outward, because he knew that in a few days she would be gone again, back to stasis, while he remained, to watch and wait.

  Abby listened without commenting much, and when he had finally run out of words, she rubbed her hands on her skirt and stood up. “Let me see what I can do about that kitchen. You need a hot meal.”

  She worked in there for several hours, lighting a fire in the long dead hearth and cleaning several pots. After she had located some vegetables in a stasis box that looked like they wouldn’t turn to mush once they were thawed, she began to cook. She disca
rded the frozen lump of beef and recovered a fresh-looking piece of mutton from another stasis box. When she finished the pot was bubbling and a heavenly aroma filled the house.

  Tyrion stood in the doorway, his eyes red and his face pale. “What’s that?”

  “Mutton stew, one of your favorites,” she replied. “Kate taught me to make it, and while it’s probably not as good as hers, I think you’ll find it an improvement over what you’ve been having.”

  They ate, and Tyrion couldn’t have said if it was better or worse than Kate’s. It had been so long that it tasted like heaven to him, and he ate so much that when he finally stopped his stomach began to churn. Rushing outside he vomited onto the frozen ground.

  Abby stroked his back while he heaved, “You at too much, too fast. Your body couldn’t handle it.”

  He looked up at her, “I want some more.”

  So, he ate again, this time more modestly, and Abby began to give him her news.

  “Emma and Ryan didn’t make it back,” she said bluntly. “Davor and I checked the sites she was supposed to go to. It appears they never got to the seventh one, I think they died at the sixth, the one near the Gaelyn Grove.”

  “Did you see any sign of the She’Har?” he asked. “Did any of the Elders survive?” He had never found one living during his wandering, but he wanted to be sure.

  “Nothing but the dead,” she answered. “Even the She’Har, the children, their bodies are all still out there, frozen.”

  He had seen as much in the areas of the Illeniel and Prathion Groves.

  “Would you like to see where she died?” asked Abby. “Davor and I could take you.”

  There was an odd tone in her voice, but Tyrion’s mind was too disorganized to take note of it. The warmth of the food in his belly, the warmth of her presence, the presence of another human being, it all made him dizzy. He couldn’t bear the thought of her leaving again.

  Anything to keep her with him a little longer. The loneliness was unbearable. He doubted he could survive it again. “Sure.”

  “We’ll go in the morning,” she decided. “Tonight you need a proper rest.”

  She made him sleep in Layla’s room, after she had cleaned it. He had been sleeping in his own bedroom, wrapped in a blanket of magical warmth while Kate and Garlin’s frozen corpses lay nearby, but Abby wouldn’t allow that.

  ***

  The air felt warmer there, despite the altitude. Perhaps it was because they were closer to the sun, or perhaps it was his imagination. The region where the Gaelyn Grove had been was drastically different.

  Emma’s handiwork had caused the land to sink, except for the mountain that had risen where they stood. The ocean had rushed in, filling the area around it to create a new sea. The site of Emma’s fall was now a large rocking island with long slopes that stretched down to the water.

  It seemed fitting.

  Whatever had happened to her and Ryan’s bodies, they never found them. They had probably been buried, or incinerated. Massive flows of hardened lava covered much of the island landscape, and some of it was still hot. That might explain the warmer temperature here, thought Tyrion.

  Abby and Tyrion stood in a flat depression, high up on one side of the new mountain. They were alone, having left Davor to wait near the shoreline. Reaching out she took his hand.

  “You did it, Father,” she told him, “you and Emma.”

  “Yeah,” he replied, his voice toneless and empty, “with your help too.”

  “I’m not proud of that,” she answered. “I never really wanted this. All the death, it was too much.”

  “Too late to lament that now.”

  “What will you do now?” she asked.

  “In a few years, or a decade, when this winter finally ends, we can wake everyone up,” he said flatly.

  “And then?”

  “Then we raise the children, train them to fight, rebuild the world,” he finished.

  She raised an eyebrow, “Train them to fight? Like you did with us? Why? There are no enemies left.”

  How little she knew. The She’Har were gone, but they hadn’t come from nowhere. Reality was much larger than the world that humanity knew. Someday others might come, crossing the void between dimensions, as the She’Har had. He intended to make certain that humankind was strong and ready, for when that day came.

  “There is always a need for fighting,” he told her, his voice gaining some of its former steel. “We will never be weak again. I won’t allow it.” His hand tightened until she pulled hers away to prevent him from crushing it. “Our race once had power almost too great to believe, and the She’Har crushed them. They were naïve. Now we have the power that the She’Har brought with them, and I have some of the knowledge our ancestors possessed.

  “I will rebuild the world. We can resurrect our technology and perfect the power we have taken from the She’Har, build ourselves into a force too great for any enemy to ever challenge again,” he finished with conviction.

  Abby looked up at him, her face sad. A solitary tear tracked its way down one cheek. “You can’t let it go, can you?”

  “Let what go?” he asked, staring at her in confusion.

  “Never mind,” she said, wrapping her arms around him and burying her face against his chest.

  Too late he noticed the blade in her hand. He had trusted her completely and solitude had made his instincts dull. By the time his magesight took note of it, it had already started sliding into his back, finding its way neatly between two vertebrae and severing his spinal cord.

  It went in high, between his shoulder blades, causing his arms and legs to jerk and then go limp instantly. Falling he never felt the ground when he landed. Abby knelt over him, her face wet with tears, the bloody knife still in her hand.

  “Why?” he mouthed, unable to exhale. His body could feel nothing, except the burning ember of fiery pain between his shoulders. Pressing outward he tried to use his aythar, to push her away, but Abby fought back, measuring her power against his.

  In the end, it wasn’t enough, the pain was too great and his body was weak from a year of solitude and bad food. She smothered his power with her own, pinning him down, trapping him within the only part of him that worked, his mind.

  “I’m sorry, Father,” she whispered, looking down on him, her face only inches away. “None of us want the world you dream of. We want a new beginning, a place people can be happy. We can’t do that by bringing the old hatreds with us. We can’t bring you with us.”

  “Lyra,” he gasped.

  She nodded, “We’ll try to free her. Someday we will figure out a way.”

  “Promise…”

  Abby kissed his forehead, still crying. “I promise.” Then she stood. Looking down she saw the light in his eyes had gone out and the aythar that defined his existence had almost faded.

  Dropping the knife she walked away, toward a sea that beat mercilessly against rocky shores.

  She was too far away to notice the transformation. There was no flash of aythar when it happened and she was keeping her magesight focused firmly on the world in front of her, rather than the patricide that lay behind. It was all she could do to keep walking.

  A sapling grew where Tyrion’s body had fallen, and in time it would become a mighty tree.

  ***

  “She killed him?!” exclaimed Moira. “Her own father? That’s awful!”

  I nodded, “And it was probably for the best.”

  “That’s the worst story I ever heard,” she complained, disgust on her face.

  “The problem is the word ‘father’,” I told her. “When you think of it, you think of me, Mordecai, the man who raised you, who loved you. That’s not what Tyrion was to her.”

  “He was a monster!” declared Moira. Then she looked at Lynaralla, realizing she was speaking of her friend’s actual parent. “Sorry Lynn, I shouldn’t have said that.”

  Lynaralla shrugged, unaffected as usual, “I never knew him as a man. That’s
why they sent me here, to understand what being human is.”

  Matthew spoke then, “What I don’t get, is how did Mom get the other part of it?”

  “The other part of what?” asked Moira.

  “Well, the loshti, that was passed down, from Layla to one of her children and so on, until now, with Dad and me, but Mom has the other thing, the Illeniel gift, right?” He looked to Mordecai, hoping for an answer.

  I nodded, “That’s my theory. She’s no wizard, but she must have inherited something to cause her to have her visions.”

  “But how? They killed Lyra’s baby, Garlin,” said Matthew.

  I gave my son a sympathetic look, “I’m not sure. I suspect they did the same thing Tyrion did, creating a human child and then hiding it away protected by a stasis weaving, but that information isn’t within the scope of my knowledge, or yours. The Illeniels were playing the long game.”

  “And now it has come full circle,” said Lynaralla, “with me.”

  It was an obvious conclusion, since she was the first true She’Har child to be born in two thousand years, the beginning of the rebirth of the Illeniel She’Har. But I wasn’t so sure, looking at Matthew I had a different suspicion, but I didn’t voice it.

  Penny stuck her head in through the doorway, “Enough dark stories, come eat!”

  “What is it?” asked Matthew with sudden interest.

  “If it’s mutton stew I’m not eating it,” stated Moira. “I don’t think I could ever eat that again, not after what we just heard.”

  I laughed and hugged her, grateful that my relationship with my children was as close as it was. Reaching out I tried to snag Matthew with my other arm but he ducked away.

  “Let’s not get too touchy old man,” he said with a grin.

  We went and found our dinner, and thankfully, it was not mutton stew.