by BJ Hanlon
Then as it fell backward, Edin went with it. He landed hard on the chest and rolled over it. He felt a tooth snag his tunic.
As he landed on unsteady feet he dropped to a knee. He quickly ripped off the tunic and fell to the ground beside the beast.
A drip of the mucus splattered the ground next to him but Edin just laid there. He could barely move.
“Up you damned fool,” Berka screamed.
Edin blinked and took a moment to see what was happening. There were two dead beasts near him. Only one more to go.
“Could use some help,” Berka yelled.
Edin spotted him, it was difficult in the shadow-filled room. He looked to be hobbled a bit and he wasn’t holding that spear anymore. The last was the largest of the beasts. Even from there, he saw the enormity of it. Fifteen feet long, its head was the size of a fully-grown hog.
It was somehow crawling on the wall behind Berka. It clung to it like a spider and seemed to be moving slowly. He got the feeling the thing was playing with Berka despite its two dead mates.
Edin stood and felt vertigo for a moment. He saw more thin strands of the smoke rising from the ground like fumes in a particularly heinous marsh.
He fell again to the side, as much from the vertigo as the fact that his leg was nearly numb with pain.
It must’ve been the fumes. They were messing with his thoughts, with his concentration. He had to get away from them. He had to clear his head.
“I cannot concentrate,” Edin called out as Berka ran behind a particularly large column that had a triangle carved in it about head height.
He used a bit of the collapsed column to stand and started to hobble around the dead bodies of the two beasts. He spotted the altar.
Black and with the same feeling and weirdness that he’d gotten from the one in the Great Cliffs; at least there were no magical arrows piercing him.
For now.
Edin hobbled and stumbled closer toward it while the last large lizard-like beast chased his friend. It wasn’t the curiosity of what the altar held; it was the fact that he could see no puddles of the fuming spit over there. Maybe the air was cleaner.
Quick hands caught him as he stumbled.
“Hurry, do something!”
Then Edin got a breath of air. Clean, un-fumy air. He almost fell just thinking about that single near-clear breath. But that didn’t stop the pounding, thudding, and somehow still piercing headache ripping into him.
Berka yelled something as Edin moved further away from the two. They were coming around the far side of the hall about fifty yards away.
Edin reached the altar and put a hand on it. Unlike the last time, his body didn’t immediately cure itself of wounds. A different spell maybe.
But he turned and felt a little more clarity. To his right he spotted another of those metal knights. This one hand a horsehead knife. It was exactly like the dematians, though the armor was clearly human.
He moved to it and yanked the weapon out with a snap. “Come this way,” Edin yelled.
Berka was already heading that way. Though he wasn’t sprinting directly toward him. Berka was dodging in and out of columns. Zigzagging between them, over the crumbled one and around the bodies. He leapt the large ball-like tail of one of the dead ones.
“Here,” Edin yelled and threw the weapon at Berka. The weapon clattered onto the ground with a loud clang that echoed through the room. Berka picked it up and spun as the beast was coming at him.
Berka thrust the weapon. It struck and stuck.
Right into the shoulder though that didn’t seem to stop the thing. It didn’t even seem to hurt it. The beast snapped at Berka. A moment later, Edin saw something coming from behind its back. It was sneaky and almost invisible.
It was that boulder-tail.
“Berka look out,” Edin screamed as the huge ball like tail wrapped over the shoulder like a scorpion striking its prey.
Berka tried to spin out of the way but the thing caught him in the side. It flung Berka into the wall with a devastating force.
Edin cried out and took a deep breath clearing his head of pain. With it, he felt rage. Edin felt power, energy bolstering him, running through him, not a lot but enough and he saw the glint of the metal of the haft in the beast’s shoulder.
Edin shot out a hand. Lightning erupted from his hand and hit the shaft. Apparently, it was deep enough that the electricity got past the thick skin and turned it into a red and yellow glowing bit of skeleton and muscles.
Edin could see blood. Then its eyes burst and the thing dropped from the wall like someone had snipped the strings that were holding it there. It crashed to the ground with a splat and blood began to pour from its mouth, its eyes, and nose.
The same happened to Edin, without the blood. He fell, his body giving out nearly completely from the pain and the drain. For a moment, he felt like he couldn’t breathe. He hiccupped and got a whiff of the death as he saw the beginnings of sunlight coming through the small hole.
12
Raising the Swamps of Old
He blinked around the room after he caught his breath. The ceiling was grand like the monastery above and the place looked to have been some sort of ancient king’s hall. There were carved statues, gargoyles, and men and demons. Then he looked at his leg. The one that had been burnt by the creature’s spit, had a slash in the foot and his knee had doubled in size. Then he looked to Berka twenty feet away and unmoving.
His eyes widened with the memory of the strike. Edin stood, though he was as unsteady as a rickety ladder against a listing shed from a hundred centuries ago. He hobbled slowly to Berka. All three of the creatures were dead within about two yards of each other. He inched closer and looked at him.
“Berka?” he whispered as panic began to crawl up him like an ant on the calf. Edin bent down and reached for his friend’s neck. Please… please… please, went through his head as he felt for the pulse.
There was a terrifying moment when he didn’t feel it.
But then he did. It was faint. Very faint. Edin bent over and felt for the broken bones. He’d always known where the injuries were when he’d healed before. A lot of times it’d been obvious. A cut on the arm, a joint the wrong way, but now, he could tell only a few and they weren’t life threatening.
A cut to the head, not deep and it had already stopped bleeding, his arm was twisted in a way that seemed extremely painful and a hand was crumbled like it’d been smashed to pieces under a massive hammer. A leg was out of position as if the hip had cracked. But nothing looked fatal.
Edin rolled him over to his back.
When Edin finally heard the breath, he knew it was labored and something was wrong with his lungs.
If he even had the energy to help, he couldn’t. He didn’t know where to start, the injuries were everywhere.
The enormity of it overwhelmed him. Edin felt the weight of these injuries. They were like the avalanche that had almost taken over them in the Northlands. Like being hit by a wave that was three-hundred feet tall or being smashed into the side of the mountain.
He’d lost Arianne in some tunnel, his mother and Kes to a mob, Horston to mage hunters, Dorset, who knew. Hopefully he was okay.
Edin wasn’t going to lose Berka too.
His breathing became hurried and painful and his head began to swim as he tried to focus. Berka was two, then three in his eyes.
“No,” he said and slapped his forehead with an open palm. It stung but he didn’t notice. He was barely thinking as he did it. Edin tried to calm himself. “You’ll live,” he whispered, “I got this.” The words were clipped and rushed but he was sure he was saying them. They weren’t just in his head. They were somewhere within the rational part of his mind that stayed above all of this emotional panic and weakness.
Edin gritted his teeth and spotted a small yellow dot on the wall. It looked like a single ray of sunlight piercing the darkness. It was a dot. A target on the gray granite wall. Around it, the stone was smo
oth and cold but in it, he saw the fire.
He could almost feel that heat despite being quite a few feet away.
I can do this; he thought and closed his eyes. He’d remembered Dorset searching for the injuries and trying to take some sort of inventory of them like he was an accountant looking at product.
“Accounting stinks.” Edin hissed and put his hands over Berka. With the talent, he tried to reach out with his senses. He didn’t want to touch Berka in case it made something worse. He probably shouldn’t have rolled him to his back.
Despite his own pain and weakness, Edin pictured the body in his mind and tried to somehow see inside it. He was never any good at spells and healing; he had friends for that. But now he was alone and he couldn’t rely on them. He could only rely on himself.
Edin took a deep breath again, the fumes were dissipating but he got a whiff of dying lizard-like creatures. It made him almost puke. But he didn’t.
Then he felt a sort of connection to Berka’s body. It was like he could feel the pain inside his own body. Though thankfully, not as intense.
A headache pounded in his skull. He felt the breaks, small ones, fractures in bones, blood vessels ruptured, and the blood rushing out. The left lung was punctured by a rib, an arm was snapped, the kneecap and hand seemed utterly demolished.
Edin took a breath and held his hands out toward the rib and lung.
Breathing was a bigger priority then broken bones, though he had to stop the internal bleeding also.
He spoke the word, eletanto. He felt his palms warm like they were above a flame after a few moments. The rib started moving, pulling back like a snail retreating into its shell. The lung’s tissue began knitting itself and after a few minutes, both were healed.
Berka’s wheezing stopped.
He felt the internal bleeding. The worst was in the gut area and hadn’t stopped yet. Edin reached for it.
Sweat was coming down, burning his eyes and nostrils but he couldn’t stop. Edin felt the body healing. He was growing tired and his arms were heavy, Edin concentrated on what he needed to do.
Then he felt a breeze hit him and heard a sort of whoosh. It came from behind and was rather near to him. Edin was dizzy on his knees and was about to fall when something touched his shoulder.
A hand, Edin thought before he fell.
When he woke, he was still in the chamber and next to him Berka was sleeping soundlessly.
The beasts were dead and the place smelled horribly of their rotting corpses. He tried to remember what’d happened, to replay what had happened in his head. He was healing the body, then he passed out.
That had to be it.
Edin stood on unsteady legs and looked around the room. It was still daytime. Around noon probably, though the light wasn’t as strong. But he could feel a connection to the talents and that was stronger than it had been.
Taking a breath, Edin’s eyes moved to the small dot on the wall. The light wasn’t as intense as before. It was a bit more misshapen as well, closer to an oval than a circle. In that light, he saw small black lines. Shadows almost like a spiderweb.
Where was that coming from? Edin wondered and looked up and around. The openings above were open and the sun was almost directly overhead now and shining big spots on the ground.
Edin blinked and looked around trying to find whatever it was that reflected onto the wall. It was probably just some metal sword or something, though he felt the need to find it.
But he couldn’t. When he looked at the windows, it was too bright to see through. Then he thought of his geometry lessons with Horston. Something he’d said emphatically, ‘I’ll never use this!’
He guessed where the sun was, not directly overhead but close. It gave the room and the shape a blurred look. Then he remembered when it looked circular with clean lines in the stone. Where was the sun then? About sunrise, right? He asked himself.
Edin began to guess, to figure it out by finding the reflective spot where the sunlight came in and, his eyes went up. Not directly to the windows but to the buttresses below them. The sun was rising higher in the sky as winter ended.
He’d remembered that from more of Horston’s useless classes. Edin backed up, still limping from the pain in his leg.
He looked up at the buttresses and tried to spot whatever it was that made the reflection. The light now looked almost like a small egg against the wall.
As he was hobbling backward, he felt something hit his butt and turned.
The altar. Edin touched it. The thing was solid stone and Edin guessed it was heavy. But as he touched it, the place where his hand touched grew warm. He felt a rush of air from somewhere to the right and looked that way only to see nothing but darkness, but then not.
A small glowing light moved forward. It came at him as if from a mousehole that was navel height.
Then it was there. A ghostly outline of a shape. One that was human; much like the flames of his mother and Kes back in the great cliffs.
But Edin didn’t know this person. It was a man. The man appeared before the altar and bowed as if Edin were the king. A voice spoke in his ear.
“My lord Vestor. All has been done. We have hidden the Blossom Stones. All but the Ballast that was taken by our enemies.”
“I know Master Lorno,” Vestor said. He didn’t exactly look like the old man Edin had met before. Though he wasn’t young either. The god was of an indistinct age that Edin could neither guess nor think of.
“And you have shielded the Isle?”
“All is as you have requested, but I do not know why—”
“It was what we must do to prevent the destruction that is to come.”
“But the kingdom. My king, the man I swore to protect. He will die, will he not?”
Vestor said nothing. He stared at Lorno with what Edin could only describe as iron set eyes. Somehow, that worked.
“If the kingdom falls and as you say evil will rise, wouldn’t we as a people be fractured and less able to fight it?”
“It is how it must be. There will be one who can unite the kingdom and fight the monster that will rise from the depths. He could save the world or destroy it. That is up to him.”
A sunken feeling came over him.
“And what of me? I know of where the stones are. I could go and tell someone.”
“It would be too soon, my loyal servant.”
“But master, my lord, my god; I do not want the king to die. If someone in the future has all of the talents as you say he will, and he is meant to reunite the kingdom then why not reunite it before—”
Then the two men suddenly disappeared and Edin was blanketed by darkness for a moment. Then he blinked and had realized that he was seeing that scene in his mind. His eyes dropped and he saw a pile of dust with bits of cloth near the wall. Near the spot Lorno had stood. Maybe the exact spot.
A second thing he realized was that there was something beneath his hand. The hand that was pressed to the altar. Edin closed his fingers around it and felt the contours and the hard lines and knew what it was.
A gemstone.
Then he could sense the stone and the rocks and the earth around them. There were great mounds, giant mountains and stone as far as Edin could tell. He could sense the world around them in a way he’d never felt before. The land, sea, air; he looked toward the broken column and held out a hand. He felt the stone of the column as if it were a part of him and he lifted.
It wasn’t as heavy as he’d imagined it’d be. It was rather light actually and it rolled toward the base that was still attached to the ground. Then it cartwheeled onto one end and stood on the base. Edin felt another and another as the bits and chunks of the stone column began to come together and reform.
Then there was a glow around it, a green glow that reminded him of the emerald eyes of the lizards of the deep.
The glow disappeared and the column was whole. It looked newly carved.
Behind it, moving slowly was Berka. His mouth was open
and he looked as if he was heading to his own funeral. One leg was dragging and he was breathing poorly but he was alive and on his feet. “You do that?” Berka asked.
Edin looked at the gemstone in his palm. An emerald, the exact same shape and weight as the others. He nodded.
“So, you’re the Ecta Mastrino now?” Berka said. “You have all of the talents?”
Edin wanted to say yes… he was about to as well, but something held him back. It felt as if there was a part that was missing from that statement. Like an arch without the capstone.
“How are you?” Edin said instead.
“Feel like I’ve been run over by a herd of buffalo.”
“Let’s get out of here.”
They hobbled together out of the room and down the stairs. Edin hoped there’d be no more of those so-called Heavenly Guardians.
They didn’t encounter any others and at the bottom, the ethereal lights were on. He looked down at the canal and knew it was part of that giant, peaceful lake. And he felt that it wasn’t too far.
“We could move quicker and the cold will help with the pain,” Edin said.
Berka nodded. Slowly, they dipped into the water. Edin held onto the wall as they moved. He used the talent only slightly to keep them more buoyant then they’d normally be. Especially Berka who was as dense as some of the rocks around them.
The channel continued for some time. The water was cold but it felt fresh. Soon the lights of the tunnel began to grow dimmer until they disappeared and Edin summoned an ethereal ball.
But he didn’t need to for long. Up ahead, he saw the light of day beginning to shine and then the tunnel suddenly disappeared.
He was blinded for a moment and then looked around. He saw animals drinking from the lake, a crillio was next to what looked like a deer, but that couldn’t be.
There were dire wolves near elk. One of them glared deep yellow eyes at Edin with a curious look. Then howled.
“Over here,” someone shouted. Edin turned to look over his shoulder and he saw a few of the monks running into the lake not worrying about their robes and sandals.