by James Somers
The implications of the situation described by them that night nearly paralyzed her with fear. She knew that everything she loved—her beloved Galidel—was about to be utterly destroyed by angelic beings she could barely fathom existing at all.
“What’s happened?” Redwyn cried out in the dark.
“The cherubim must have been released in the Underworld,” she answered. That was all she said. She hadn’t moved yet.
Redwyn came to his senses instantly, hovering over the shifting floor of their bedchamber. “Luxana?” he asked. “Are you ready? We must lead our people to safety.”
She still didn’t move, despite another sizeable tremor rocking their home, shifting the tree further off balance. The few possessions they had on shelves and in cabinets began to fall and flow across the floor in a wave of debris. Redwyn came to her in the dark, caught her by the shoulders and shook her once.
“We must leave!” he shouted.
She looked at him for the first time, her sprite eyes able to easily make out his face in the night. Already, screams emanated from the trees around them. Galidel’s citizens had been warned of this possibility already. Still, the actual experience was another matter. No one had been able to truly prepare themselves for this eventuality. Everything they cherished was about to collapse.
The cries of her people drew Luxana back to the now. She rose with Redwyn, flying out through the front door with him. Hundreds of sprites hovering over the jungle, as trees shifted and fell with the ground beneath them, quickly became thousands. The ability to fly was an asset in this situation, but it didn’t make the loss of their homes any easier to bear.
Mournful cries filled the night in Galidel. Children clinging to their parents in despair, the elderly doing their best to maintain altitude. All of them naked in the night.
“We must go to the human world, as I warned might be the case!” Luxana commanded.
Instructions had been relayed over the past day and a half. The sprites were as ready as they would ever be. Most of them had visited the mortal world, though few ever remained there for long.
After all, the civilizations of humans could never meet the liking of sprites used to dwelling so casually in their jungle homes. To them this was a paradise, while human cities reeked of refuse and filth in comparison. Still, they now had little choice.
However, unlike other Descendants preparing to escape to the human world, Luxana and Redwyn had chosen to lead their people away from the densely populated areas. The lush and largely undiscovered Madagascar rainforest presented the closest approximation to the home they were leaving in Galidel.
Thousands of sprites watched hopelessly as the ground beneath their jungle gave way to fissures opening beneath. Great sections of rainforest fell into gaping chasms all at once. Even the very air seemed to vibrate, as though it to was going to revert back to some earlier state when no realm existed on the spiritual plane. Sprites teleported away from Galidel in groups—lights appearing momentarily and winking out in the night like fireflies. They left behind the only home they had ever known for one on the mortal plane, knowing that this night the magic and wonder of their lives was lost with Galidel.
Anai woke with Adolf’s hand on her shoulder. He was there at her side, his eyes filled with terror. She was about to ask him what was wrong, when she felt the tremors rocking their baobab tree. Could it be? Lucifer had warned them, yet they had delayed their leaving.
The tree shifted thirty degrees, throwing her from her bed. Adolf dodged several chairs, leaping away to land on the wall which now lay at a slant. He went back to Anai, helping her up in the darkness.
“We must escape,” he said.
The tremors grew worse, more violent. Their baobab tree sank down into the earth. The ground fell away beneath it.
Adolf grabbed his mother’s hand, running toward the nearest window. He leaped through it, pulling her along with him. Briefly, they fell, as gravity sucked everything down. The entire jungle they knew as home was collapsing around them.
Anai, being a sprite, naturally had the power of flight. Adolf had been born the son of Grayson Stone. However, while he had inherited his father’s persuasive abilities, he had also inherited his mother’s power to resist gravity.
Anai and Adolf hovered over the jungle, watching as their baobab tree and their home built among its branches dropped hopelessly into a rift widening in the earth below. Lightning lit up the sky above, but this was no storm. The world they knew was coming apart at the seams.
Anai and her son stared at one another. They both knew now that Lucifer had told them truth. The spiritual realm was undergoing ruin.
Possessing the ability to teleport, they joined hands. Around them, the sky boiled. Matter shifted and dissolved. Anai and her son vanished. They would take the opportunity Lucifer had arranged for them. Austria would be their new home.
Grim
Breck watched the village of Grim Hope warily. The sword in his hand quivered as his hand shook with fury. His people had all but perished at the hands of Redclaw and the trolls of Grim Hope.
It was true that Breck and his goblins had struck first years ago. However, rather than come right back and have their war—trolls against goblins—Redclaw had waited. Gradually, King Dirgen and his goblin warriors began to realize that there would be no war. They had gotten away with their attack. There would be no retribution.
Even Breck, who had lived with the paranoia of troll retribution for several years, had been lulled by their inaction. He had been forced to concede, after five years, that no one was coming. But they had all been wrong.
Redclaw and his warriors had come. How he had kept them back so long, Breck could not fathom. They had come secretly during the day when goblins usually sleep.
Hundreds had been slaughtered before anyone knew what was happening. Nearly two thousand had died by the end of their raid. The trolls had established portals into the mountain. The Superomancers had helped them.
Now, Breck had come for revenge. Not to be outdone, he had used the same methods. A helix portal near the Veil that kept them out. However, his scouts had noticed that this barrier had failed over the past week. Now was the time to strike.
Hiding in the amber waves of Grim Hope’s wheat fields, Breck and his five hundred goblin warriors crawled closer and closer to the homes of the troll families they had come to kill. Breck’s own wife and children had died in Redclaw’s attack. He intended to have his vengeance today.
He surveyed the town again. An hour earlier, he had seen women and children along with some of their warriors. Everyone had gone into their homes at that point. Odd behavior for the middle of the day. Still, no one knew they were coming, so they couldn’t have been reacting to any expectation of Breck’s attack.
Wind blew at their faces, carrying the scent of trolls to the fields. This was ideal. Had it been at their backs, the trolls would have smelled them coming.
Breck motioned with his hands for his men to break up. They would approach each home and then storm through the doors, killing everyone inside. The final signal Breck held up indicated invisibility. Like a sheet drawn over their visible forms, every goblin, from Breck to the last, vanished from sight.
Creeping ever closer, the only sign of the invading goblins was slight dustups on the hard packed earth of the village street. Breck took notice of cook fires trailing smoke from stone chimneys. The smell of roasting meat was a sweet savor. He and his warriors would not only exact a terrible revenge today, they would also enjoy a hardy meal prepared by troll women unaware of their fates.
Coming to the door of one of the troll’s stone houses, Breck listened and waited. He could hear only the crackling of a fire within. The others made their way to the homes in groups. Breck had gone alone to Redclaw’s domicile. He would enjoy this immensely.
With his goblin warriors in place, Breck held onto the memory of his wife and children. This would be for them. He turned and kicked in the door, rushing inside, eve
n as the other warriors performed the same maneuver at every home in the village.
His blade went before him, but there was no one in the main living room. Only the fire greeted him. A roast remained on the spit, burnt on its underside where it had not been turned. Breck went quickly to the next room and the next. However, Redclaw was not home.
He paused, his ferocity now deflated by the lack of a target. Walking back toward the front door, he examined the room more closely. There were signs that Redclaw had been here recently. A half empty cup, a plate with leftover bits of roast cut from the larger piece still sitting over the fire.
Breck walked back outside, standing before Redclaw’s home. He dropped his invisibility once he saw his warriors returning to the street with no blood on their weapons and perplexed expressions on their faces. None of the trolls had been in their homes. However, it didn’t make any sense that they would completely abandon their village.
Then Breck noticed the tremor coursing through the ground beneath his bare feet. Something was happening. Something was coming toward the village. The noise of thunder grew steadily louder. His goblin warriors came back to him, assembling their group in the street where Redclaw’s home stood.
Brightly colored birds shot by overhead. Following in their wake, a terrible wind surged through the street knocking some of the goblins off of their feet. Breck called for his men to reassemble. The birds flew on, and the wind began to dissipate quickly with their passing.
Breck noticed lights flickering in the distance among the trees beyond the wheat fields. They grew in abundance and intensity. His first thought was torches. The trolls had somehow gotten behind them.
“Ready yourselves!” Breck called. “They’ve come for a fight, and we’ll give them one.
He had no intentions of backing down now. He had come too far and waited too long for vengeance. Even if he and his entire group lost their lives today, he would exact blood from the trolls before he died.
“They’ll have to funnel into this street to reach us,” Breck said. “That takes away their ability to flank us.”
To his surprise, it was not the trolls that ultimately emerged from the wood beyond the fields. In fact, Breck could hardly believe what had come. Fiery horses ran toward the village. At first, he wondered if Redclaw had actually set a herd of horses ablaze as some of sort of sick tactic against his goblin warriors.
However, the closer the horses came to the village, the more he realized that this was, somehow, their natural state. Some magic was at work. Only at the last did he realize his men were in danger from this stampede.
“Take cover!” he shouted.
Goblins ran back into the stone houses, off of the street, as flaming horses thundered down Grim Hope’s main avenue. From the woods where they had come from, all the way through Grim Hope, a trail of fire blazed. It consumed the trees, the ripe wheat of the troll fields and the stubbly grass of the main street.
Breck watched through a front window in Redclaw’s home as the spectacle passed. The heat from the horses was uncanny. How could they survive in that state? The stench of fire began to fill the house as ambient heat ignited wooden objects near the front of the home.
Breck backed as far away as possible, until the final horse passed through. Cautiously, the goblin warriors began to emerge from the troll houses again. The grass was so packed down on the road that there had been little to burn. Still, everything outside was either smoldering or, farther away, on fire.
Bewildered by what had happened, Breck turned his attention back to the fire in the forest. This was the way they had come. Their helix portal lay in those woods. How could they get back to it with a forest fire in progress?
Then the unexpected happened.
“Look, my lord,” one of Breck’s warrior’s said, pointing past the blazing wheat.
Breck saw fires going out spontaneously. Here and there, patches of flame simply dimmed and winked out completely. However, in place of the fire, he saw ice and snow forming on trees and covering the land. This phenomena continued, growing closer and closer to the village.
Breck laughed when the cause became apparent. White rabbits, perhaps thousands of them, were hopping through the burnt fields toward Grim Hope. Where they plodded, the fires were extinguished. Ice and snow took their place.
“I don’t know how,” Breck said, “but our way back to the portal has been cleared.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this,” others were saying when the rabbits hopped up the street.
“It’s bunnies for dinner, boys!” another shouted happily.
Breck considered the cook fires in the abandoned homes. Why not make use of them? After all, they had come all of this way. His warriors were hungry, and a meal fit for many kings was hopping right into their laps.
He drew his sword again. “Fill up lads and we’ll take the leftovers home with us after!”
But these were the last words Breck ever said.
A wave of white rabbits passed through Grim Hope. The goblins scrambled to get their share. The rabbits, surprisingly, had no fear of them. In fact, they hopped right into their arms.
When the rabbits passed Grim Hope, they left fires extinguished in the forest, the fields and the village. Ice and snow covered the land. And the village of Grim Hope was filled with hundreds of goblins entombed in ice.
Tidus
Laish stood with Redclaw, as the last few hundred Lycans and trolls made their way to an enormous portal the elf wizard had established in the square before the royal palace. Lycan families passed through side by side with the trolls who had come from Grim Hope to Tidus over the past few days. Since their meeting with Donatus in
Greystone, it had been decided to evacuate early for fear that any destruction coming to the spiritual realms might overtake them as they attempted to leave.
“You’ve really outdone yourself,” Redclaw commented, admiring the enormous portal Laish had devised. “We might have even managed with less time.”
“Not a risk I would be willing to take,” Laish said. “I knew what my brother was thinking by calling that assembly. He’s confident, from his visions, that the cherubim will be released.”
“Just from a vision?”
“I grew up with him, Redclaw,” Laish said. “Even then, he would see things prior to their happening. It’s an uncanny gift.”
“Well, truth be told, I’m always in favor of preparedness. If nothing happens, then we can always return. It doesn’t work so well the other way around.”
Laish looked back over the palace and the city surrounding it. “Ten years ago, I never would have thought I would miss this place,” he said. “It’s funny how you get used to things. I imagine you felt the same having to leave Grim Hope behind.”
“Yes, I’ll miss it,” Redclaw admitted. “I’ve never been one to enjoy the company of humans. But I’ve gotten used to new surroundings before, like when I came to be Sophia’s Master at Arms. And, I didn’t leave Grim Hope completely alone.”
“What do you mean?”
Redclaw chuckled to himself. “The goblins have been spying on us for quite some time, looking for their opportunity to get back at us for the raid we conducted with Oliver’s help.”
“And you gave them this opportunity?” Laish asked.
“I used a spell key Oliver left for me to have some control over the Veil,” Redclaw said. “I shut it down, so Breck and his goblins could come at us.”
“Even though you’re not there?”
“Especially because none of us are there,” Redclaw said, grinning. “With any luck they’ll be invading our homes when everything goes under.”
Laish continued to survey the city. Its monuments to former kings. The grandeur of a civilization, lost in the mortal world but preserved here, would soon perish altogether.
There were no slight tremors to forewarn of events to come. All at once a towering sandstone edifice behind the palace complex dropped out of sight. At the same time,
Laish and Redclaw had their feet thrown out from under them when the ground shifted.
Rents in the earth parted the valley and columns of rock drove up through the forest beyond. Trees were uprooted and tossed aside as a mountainous slab pushed its way through the surface. The river, which had flowed peacefully through the valley, was now diverted.
Tidus’s defensive wall was shattered instantly in several places at once. A deafening roar drowned out almost every voice screaming in terror near the portal below. The time had come for Tidus and the realm of the Lycans, and not everyone had left the city.
“Up on your feet, old man,” Redclaw shouted as he hoisted Laish by his arm.
Monuments of sandstone and marble, ten stories high, began to topple all across the city. Like dominos they smashed into the structures around them, causing a chain reaction of destruction. Plumes of dust and debris were thrown up everywhere, creating a cloud that threatened to choke them.
Across the wall, the river raged, its water overflowing its banks. The mountain of rock continued to transform the forest beyond. Then the river’s course diverted toward Tidus.
A wall of water hit Tidus’s fractured defensive wall. The stone was flattened in its wake. Now, the water came for those assembled before the palace attempting to get through the portal into London.
“We must help them!” Redclaw shouted.
But Laish was already reacting to the danger. He took control of his portal. Like a net capturing fish, the portal envelope spread across the remaining Lycans and trolls, forcing them through the energy barrier. Seconds later, the flood waters swept across the courtyard.
Redclaw hopped up and down, pumping his fist. “Fantastic!” he shouted. “I knew you had it in you, old man.”
“Yes, yes. Blah, blah. We’re not out of this yet, you great oaf.”
The water rose in height, flowing with greater intensity, as the city and the surrounding land and sky became a cauldron of destruction. Statues of Lycan kings toppled into the swelling tide. The waters filled the palace, sweeping away vast treasures. All was ruined.