“Yes… mosenweeds are plentiful there. The machines’ fuel…” Dinsch said, his eyes round with horror.
Everyone knew it was useless to try to stop Dinsch as he sped off in the direction of his birthplace. He was completely out of sight within minutes.
Rienna was cursing her lack of foresight now. Not much escaped her but this was a big something that had. She had been too distracted by too many things. Why hadn’t she thought of studying the maps herself? Why were they always learning things a little too late? One thing was poking at her mind that Pierait had said and she had no intention of keeping it to herself now as they hurried in the direction of their panicked friend.
“I think I should tell you now something that is very important, all of you should know. With Melchior holding onto one of the elementals, it’s possible that we weren’t simply spared to be vessels for their power. It’s a distinct possibility that… that even Sea Star may have been wrong about that. It doesn’t change anything other than one of us may be more vulnerable,” Rienna told them firmly.
“Just my luck,” she heard Ashe grumble from beside her.
Rienna turned to see that despite the tone, Ashe was smirking as if it were some secret joke. Rienna knew from his expression that his fatalistic views of luck were crossing his mind again. She wanted to tell him that he was being foolish and it couldn’t possibly be his element but she couldn’t know for sure. She had suspected that, like Melchior, he had dual affinities as well. She wasn’t sure if that meant he was dark and fire like his brother simply because of their shared tribe or if it worked that simply so she kept her suspicions to herself for now. The elementals alone seem to know which were under their influence and which ones were not. She wondered if Sea Star might tell her anything but decided to hold off on that. It wasn’t entirely true that elementals were the only ones who could tell anyway, but the only other option was to be able to use magic, which none of them could. The only ones they had access to were Sea Star, Girdinus, and Erised; it would not be until they met the others that they would know for sure. They really had no way of knowing beyond that. At this point, Rienna knew Freesia was to be tested by the Luminas, but the wind elemental left only Ashe or Krose. If Suleika was limited to fire and dark, it very much left Ashe out.
“Don’t count yourself out yet, Ashe. We are still united in our cause and it would only mean that whoever is without must rely on other means. I am still not sold that being chosen is the boon it seems and there is no telling what price is to be paid for the choice,” Rienna explained, the others frowning.
“Look, there are a lot of things we have to adjust to as we go along; this isn’t any different,” she tried again by way of assurance.
Rienna suddenly felt foolish and the others remained silent.
“Well, that’s one part of the puzzle then. We still don’t know which of us it falls to, IF it falls to any. There are two elements other than fire left: wind and light. None of us have foreknowledge of which is our element,” Night piped up, saving Rienna from further embarrassment. “It’s as she said though; it may not be the prize it seems and it would be valuable to have allies who aren’t tied to the wills of the elementals.”
“This doesn’t make sense, if I may say so. There are many elementals. They do not always operate in a way that makes sense. Couldn’t another one of us still be favored by a fire elemental? Melchior is certainly not our ally and even the elementals wouldn’t make that mistake…” Krose asked in his confusion.
“That’s true. What if one of us were meant to kill Melchior even, to release the elemental?” Freesia added hopefully.
Pierait shook his head.
“Nuriel is no lesser elemental. None of the elementals whom have appeared to the others have been either. No, Rienna is correct. There is a reason Melchior was chosen and one of you will not be. The elementals have never had clear reasons for their choice, but it suits their own ends regardless,” Pierait said and it left no room for argument.
Ashe smiled again and it irritated Rienna, as it usually did.
“Fire. Sounds like me; fire, ash,” Ashe quipped, and then shrugged. “Let’s hope it is. I’m better equipped to deal with disappointment.”
But Rienna frowned at him, chastising his cynicism with a reproachful look. When she spoke again, she turned away from him to address the others.
“We’re going to have to split up now, in any case. Krose and Freesia should come with me to the Bryfolk hole. Night, Ashe, and Pierait, you should go on ahead to the port city,” Rienna decided now. It was selfish of her, she knew, making sure Ashe would be away from her, because it separated Night and Freesia too. She doubted those two were ever really apart though and it might make the heart grow fonder. She knew Krose would be adamant about chasing Dinsch and she might need Freesia’s skill with acrobatics if they needed to scout these warrens Krose had mentioned. Rienna did not want to risk the Bryfolk Hole becoming a Mycean stronghold if they didn’t plan to move on and felt responsible for Dinsch. Maybe her obligation to Krose was fulfilled, but she didn’t want to see Dinsch come to harm. Pierait and Night each had their own powers. Ashe was at a disadvantage with either choice, so it had been a personal choice rather a strategic one. She could say it was to even out their numbers if it came down to it.
“Come on now, I really get stuck with the sausage fest?” Night asked, teasing but unhappily. Leaving Freesia did not sit well with him, as Rienna suspected.
Ashe patted Night’s shoulder and winked playfully.
“Aw, come on, you can be separated from Miss Freesia for a short time, can’t you? Krose is hardly competition!” Ashe added, laughing at Krose’s venomous glare.
“It’s not that!” Night was quick to respond, holding up his hands in a sort of surrender. “I’d rather travel with the ladies, is all…”
“Actually, it’s better as Miss Rienna says,” Pierait asserted shyly. “It’s a mission needing more delicacy and they have the right skills for it.”
Rienna was grateful for the reinforcement and nodded with authority and shot Night a chiding look. “There are only two women anyway, Night, and we’re not arm candy.”
A curious look spread across the group as they let the decision sink in. Since no objections were raised, nods were exchanged and they silently shuffled onto different forks in the path ahead. Night threw a wink at Freesia; she squinted her eyes and stuck out her tongue. Krose felt a strange pain in his gut and thought maybe he ate something too fast. Rienna glanced at Ashe one last time and was the first to turn and lead her companions away. She felt strangeness in her core as well, but it was a woman’s intuition that told her it wasn’t something she ate.
Chapter 7: Whispers on the Wind
Ashe, Pierait, and Night seemed perfect companions in Ashe’s eyes. A void, darkness, and an unlucky bastard. It seemed to cheer him that his lot was the group that no one would really miss. Rienna and Freesia might have made a protest against this but Ashe knew that there would be no great mourning for his passing. He harbored no illusion that his effect on Rienna was that profound. He would have pressed for this group stubbornly no matter how hard they had tried to make it otherwise because something in his gut had told him that this path was where he would next find his brother and he would need cooler heads to prevail if he were right. Pierait had no dogs in this fight and Night was not terribly impulsive. Without Freesia to heighten his protective instincts, he would be even more biddable. The Bryfolk were small potatoes to most tyrants and no place presented a bigger opportunity for mayhem than the massive port city of Xanias. Maybe the Bryfolk Hole was too perfect a place to guess at, with the mosenweeds and good hiding places. Something felt wrong about all of it and there was a shift in the balance of things that made him feel sick in his gut.
Xanias was hardly close but these lands were pitted with unscalable mountains and bald plains. To the west there used to be a mountain manor town that had since been abandoned and although the mountains there looked like
the edge of Vieres, there was a strip of land on the other side where the Kitfolk (the foxhuman hybrids) lived in secrecy. They were extremely distrustful of humans and it was even more rare to see them than the Felisfolk (big cats) who were mostly all on a whole other continent east of Vieres. The area around Xanias eased into lightly forested areas, a host of underwater sea caverns and a dimpled shoreline that would be a great place to hide things that weren’t meant to be seen until they just were. It would take them a day and a half and it would be no easy feat to traverse the land-due to those impassable mountains, there were many places where highway robbers made unsuspecting travelers pay tolls. Some were not so gracious and simply took the lives of a few unlucky souls. Ashe pitied the group foolish enough to oppose them. Trying to go around the mountains would set back their arrival a week (sending them in the same direction the others had taken, making splitting up unnecessary) and time was not something they had a lot of. If Ashe’s skills weren’t enough to go against some bandits, surely dark-clad Night or the abyssal Pierait gave them an unfair advantage here. Let’s be honest, though; Ashe was fully confident he could take a group of bandits blindfolded. The dying art he shared with Night was nothing to be trifled with.
What were the machines that his brother commanded and what was his purpose? Ashe wondered now just how much Rienna had known about Melchior; a dear friend of her late husband, she had said. Why had Melchior left and what had happened when he did? There were too many questions coming to him and none to help answer them at the moment. Getting conversation out of Night or Pierait was as easy as drawing blood from a stone.
Ashe had wondered about that too. For all the physical darkness of Night, he had been a flirty, chipper companion in some ways and only somber when he thought no one was looking. Several times along the way, he had seen how Night tried to cheer up Freesia, how his entire expression softened when he spoke to her. It hadn’t just changed with Freesia leaving them either; it had changed with the encounter of the Shade, Erised. Night seemed to turn in on himself with introspection more often. His eyes seemed larger but squinted more in suspicion, his aura on constant agitation. The dark violet of his eyes was very near to black now.
As they spent hours climbing craggy paths and scouting ahead (mostly a point Ashe had taken on; Night had seemed reluctant to climb in the increasingly forceful winds that they were ascending into), none seemed willing to break the silence. In fact, it went from awkward to acceptable as the hours pressed on. Evening was creeping in on them and the winds whipped around them mercilessly. There would be no camping until they could descend to a safer area.
“Wait here,” Ashe croaked out a bit, his throat hoarse from lack of use and drying winds. Ashe began his usual ascent to a higher ledge but something was very off here. The wind increased in ferocity but the noise of it was dying away, leaving a hollow hum rather than a whistling roar. Without thinking twice, Ashe kept climbing past the point he had intended. He did not hear the nervous shouts of Night and Pierait telling him he had gone far enough. He reached a place where the outcropping of rock abruptly ended. His foot had started to slip, sending sprays of dust and rock from his unlucky foot and in trying not to pitch backward and plummet towards his friends, he overcorrected and pitched forward and over that bit of rock towards a chasm that had to be thousands of feet below.
Ashe had never felt a feeling like it, this plummeting to sure death. In that minute he had to think before his remains painted the floor of that canyon, he had time to wonder at the feeling of falling, the blood rushing to his head, the feeling of weightlessness in his core and the flapping of his limbs as the wind pushed at them. He scoffed a bit at people’s definition of luck and could only think that he was sorry he would never again get to see Rienna’s attempt at a stoic face hiding an endless cascade of emotions. This was truly a pathetic yet exhilarating way to go and he now wondered what had possessed him to climb so far. As the ground that had once seemed so far was sneaking up more rapidly, Ashe felt the oppression of that surface more fiercely.
Yet as he neared the ground there was a strange slowing of the fall and the sensation of the tension of an elastic rope as suddenly he was being yanked forcefully upwards. It was as if he had been in a giant hourglass and the gods had inverted the ground and the sky because now he was gaining speed as he sped into the sky in much the same way he had been in the fall. He had not closed his eyes or lost consciousness even as his death approached but a new fear was creeping in. What if he was about to fall UP forever? The gods have played crueler games.
When Ashe was able to open his eyes, the only thing he was sure of was the sickening lurch of vertigo ripping at him and he began to vomit in great heaves, gasping futilely for air. He could tell he was no longer moving but he did not feel as if he was actually on anything at all. There was no pressure on his hands and knees, as if he were floating and the expelled stomach contents even had not landed anywhere around him, no sickening splat, no stinking puddle of evidence. His eyes were starting to work but the colors swooned like the constant swing and fade of eyes affected too strongly by alcohol poisoning. Ashe had begun to wonder if he had drunk too much the night before, before any of them had even split off. How much of that HAD he dreamed?
His eyes were not making sense of anything he was seeing; he seemed to be surrounded by a thick white fog. As it started to clear a bit he saw what appeared to be endless sky. He looked down and regretted it instantly. The quick movement paired with the absolute lack of substantial footing made him swoon and crumple into a ball. Many thousands of feet below, that enormous mountain he had been climbing was little more than an anthill. He groaned miserably. He must be dead then, but why the hell did death feel like an awful hangover? A low, quick laugh reached his ears with amusement at his struggles.
“Humans…” the voice purred out breathily, a robust flirty female voice. “Only you’re not quite as irrational as most of the ones I have brought here. The whispers on the wind always summon humans to fall. Mostly I let them greet the canyon floor to feed the wildlife. But if I scoop them up, they are usually babbling about death or sickness or let madness take them in. You are simply unsure. You will not die here, boy, so rise to your feet and thank me.”
Ashe was in no mood to humor this sadistic woman. He looked to his hands directly, not focusing on anything below that, trying to imagine how he was supposed to stand. However, she had said he could rise unharmed. You just never knew with the fickleness of magical creatures. He closed his eyes and set his jaw, not trusting his eyes and he pushed himself to his feet using feeling and memory and opened his eyes slowly towards the laughing woman.
A sylph. She was a beautiful insubstantial form, solid yet her skin’s color and texture shifted in transparencies, whites, blues, and grays. He swore he could even see flashes of lightning glinting under that skin. Her eyes were crystalline pools of stormy gray and her hair floated about her like she was floating in a pool of water. Her feet did not touch the clouds and her knees bent as she obviously hovered. She had a wide full mouth brimming with humor and she smirked at his observation. She was entirely naked but for that curtain of hair unintentionally concealing and revealing. He marveled at her taut marbled nipples tipping the peaks of her generous breasts. He hadn’t touched a woman since Guileford and this wasn’t quite the time to be tempted. She giggled a bit, her shoulders shaking like a schoolgirl as she spun swiftly like a tornado, destroying the illusion of floating in water. She was certainly cut from the fabric of the winds.
Ashe found his voice although it was deeper and huskier from the ordeal. He started to speak but it died as a harsh rasp, so he cleared his throat and tried again.
“You’re a sylph…” Ashe was able to breathe out, realizing it was taking great effort to do so. It didn’t look as if a lot of time had passed here; the sun was still in the warm hover of evening and not yet approaching night, as odd as it looked from this drastic height. Yet, an entire night and day may have passed for all he knew. Did
his companions look for him or leave him for dead?
She laughed again. “And humans think the winds are transparent! I can see everything you’re thinking on that handsome face of yours. Of course, I am a sylph and you interest me, human. I was right to let them call for you.”
“Them…” Ashe mumbled, trying to recall something the sylph had said. “The whispers in the wind? Did Krose or Freesia find you? You’re an elemental, so they must have sent you.”
The sylph looked unamused quite suddenly. Ashe had a feeling this one’s fading interest might leave him falling to a more permanent death if he were not careful.
“We do not go about BAILING out the human companions of our chosen ones. Our powers are for our chosen alone. What element do you think governs you, quick one? The fires might have chosen you, but the dark? You were certainly spared that affinity!” the sylph countered haughtily, her voice mellowing to a purr at her explanation. It seemed he was not quite out of her favor yet. But he was feeling queasier by the moment.
“But it can’t be me. It would mean Krose or Freesia are not chosen. It just makes more sense that I would be looked over. I can handle it…” Ashe frowned at this. He had accepted that Fate liked to leave him with the short stick. He was not happy that one of Rienna’s party was the unguarded one, if this sylph was being true.
“Zephyra, my wind caller. My name is Zephyra in the human tongues,” she announced, glossing over his conversation he started with himself. “And I have chosen you. I am thoroughly sick of that brother of yours and those machinations, so I was waiting for you to find me as you heroes always do so I could give you my favor. You will accept a lady’s favor, won’t you?”
Zephyra spoke words of innocence but her eyes flashed lustily with the sky-fire. She placed her feet as if on a surface and sauntered over to him with undulating hips and laid her arms on his shoulders. Despite his height, this thin being was easily a head taller. She drew him along the length of her and he couldn’t help but wonder where she would hide her “favors” if not in that curtain of hair or somewhere inside of her being. He didn’t entirely mind if he would need to be inventive to fish it out.
The Truth about Heroes: Complete Trilogy (Heroes Trilogy) Page 10