A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4)

by Travis Simmons

He was very tired, but he knew there was folly in sleeping in such cold temperatures. He figured inner reflection and some of the meditation he was taught as a votary wouldn’t harm such a situation, though.

  He took another pull off the flask of liquor and tried to find a comfortable spot on the hard rock of the shallow cave. Despite his near-freezing body, with some trained breathing he was able to slip into the meditation easily enough.

  He matched his breathing with his heart and slowly relaxed his body from head to toe, feeling as though hot water was running over his head, easing the cramps and pain from every muscle as it made its way languidly down his body.

  He slowed his mind, cleared it of all thought and worry, even tried to expunge from it the feeling of extreme cold. As he blanked his mind, the numbness seemed to abate.

  With one giant exhale, he pushed his mind away from his physical form and deeper into his subconscious.

  He was flying. Maeven had never flown before, but he knew he was flying. Out of the cave entrance and down the white peaks of the Barrier Mountains. He could see the Guardian’s Keep, warm and welcoming, with its honeyed lights illuminating the falling snow.

  He felt the currents of air in his feathers. His wings held still, gliding through the updrafts, carrying him on his way further through the realm. He could taste meat in his mouth, the coppery taste of blood and the old rot of flesh in his throat. It was enough to make him gag as he got used to this new form.

  There was something he sought, but he wasn’t precisely sure what it was. The form he resided in knew, however, and it carried him ever on.

  Before long the creature had found what it sought, wheeling back toward the Guardian’s Keep. It perched on a window and looked in. The eyes of the bird he resided in were better than his eyes, and he looked in to Sara’s chamber as she slept, huddled in a ball under the red velvet covers. The bed seemed impossibly large for her, and he noted the fire was nearly out.

  But that wasn’t what he was there to see. Inside of her he knew the realm existed. He wasn’t sure how he knew this, but the Realm of Earth was linked to the Realm Guardian even as he was linked to this new body.

  There was a darkness surrounding Sara, illness of a wyrd kind, not anything natural at all. He watched as the darkness ebbed and flowed around her body. Whatever was making her sick was also making the realm sick.

  Distantly he was aware that Annbell had said something about this, had said something about the realm being sick and being unsure how it was becoming ill. Now he knew.

  With a gasp Maeven came to himself, the coldness of the cave chilling him once more in a way that was more startling than the discovery of what was making the Realm of Earth ill. He shivered, closed his eyes and willed his body and mind to meld once more.

  There was another crunch of snow outside, but Maeven could hardly care at that point. Again he practiced his breathing. He focused on his breath, in and out, and each thump of his heart, until his mind felt comfortable inside his own skin again, instead of the figure of the creature he had just flown inside.

  Distantly he was aware of a high-pitched squeak. Almost like the sound a puppy would make, but more avian than that.

  He tried to push it from his mind, but it kept intruding, demanding attention.

  Maeven’s eyes fluttered open, and with a cry, he pushed back against the wall of the cave.

  The beast on the other side of the fire was the largest bird he had ever seen. In fact, Maeven didn’t even know birds could get as large as the golden eagle that stared at him from across the tendril of sage smoke twisting into the air.

  And it was gorgeous. When he thought of eagles he never thought of something as beautiful as the bird before him. In fact, he didn’t even think the name bird could apply to this creature.

  Its feathers were a dazzling mix of brown and gold, seamlessly blended so that a shift of lighting would chase away the brown and make the bird glow golden, as if carved from the metal. Words couldn’t describe what he felt when he saw the creature.

  Maeven stared into its honey-colored eyes and felt an awareness inside himself that he had never known before, as though he had unlocked a door that had been there all along without him noticing it.

  As he looked into the eyes of the eagle, he became aware of another vision overlaying his own. Oddly, he could see the eagle through his eyes, and see himself through the eyes of the eagle. They felt like kindred, he and the eagle; one in a way that Maeven couldn’t explain.

  He knew that when he’d traveled as the eagle moments before that he hadn’t borrowed a body, but had stretched his own into his second shape, a form he had been born with but hadn’t known existed until the sage and caracaff unlocked it.

  If only he could figure out how to do it again. But then, as he thought it, the eagle wavered like smoke, and vanished in a glowing spiral of fog out the entrance of the cave, lost to the snow.

  He gathered his things, stamped out the fire, and on tired, aching legs, made his way from the cave.

  “Here,” Annbell said, pressing the mug of hot cocoa into Maeven’s hands. He would always feel like a child drinking the brew, but never complained. The way the druidess made it, it was some of the best he’d ever had — a somewhat spicy recipe she told him she had picked up while visiting the Guardian of the Realm of Fire. “Tell me again what you saw.” She folded herself into the chair across from Maeven, wrapping herself in her heavy green dressing gown.

  Maeven told her again what he had seen and experienced, from the beginning to the very end, though she seemed most interested in the information about Sara.

  “Now, forgive me for a moment, but what you’re telling me about my sister is more important than lessons right now, for it concerns realm security.”

  He told her everything he had seen, and the impressions he’d gotten. “She is linked to the realm; both of you are. I can’t help feeling that this sickness could even spread to you if the realm gets much worse.”

  Annbell looked out the window at the falling snow. The small sitting room in Maeven’s suite was decorated in a mishmash of colors and fabrics, nothing fine and swanky like the rest of the keep.

  “I fear you’re right. I never considered that a Realm Guardian could affect the land so. It would make more sense that Sara was getting ill because the land was sick, but then why wouldn’t I get sick as well?” She was thinking out loud, so Maeven didn’t bother answering.

  “Alright.” She took a deep breath, rubbed her eyes and sat up straighter. “You found a totem animal then?”

  “More than found a totem animal. Honestly Annbell, it felt like I was one with this being. It felt like the eagle was me, and I was the eagle. How is such a thing possible?” Maeven asked.

  “Well, normally it doesn’t happen this soon, but I guess it could be different for each druid. Druids have the ability to change shape into another creature.”

  “I can’t really say I’m surprised,” Maeven said. “It makes sense, after being inside the form, and feeling what I felt there.” But still, he was stunned. He had expected that Annbell would tell him that, but it was so much to take in. Another shape.

  “When can I learn to change at will?” Maeven asked.

  “You can do that on your own, with no official training. It just takes some deep meditation at first, once you’ve been granted the initial change, as you were. Once you’re more used to it, it will take only a change of thought. Much like slipping into clothes, you will desire to change, and slip your mind into the mind of the creature. Spend time with your second shape; once you know it better, you will change faster.”

  “Can only druids shape change? Can’t Sara change too?” Maeven asked.

  “Sara can only change because we are linked together. No, druids aren’t the only ones that can change shape, but it is extremely rare for non-druid people to be able to shape-change.”

  “So that’s it then. What happens now?” Maeven asked.

  “What do you mean?” Annbell won
dered.

  “With Sara. How will we help her?”

  “Well, now that we know she is making the realm sick, we can focus all of our efforts on one issue, getting her better. We have to know what is making her sick first, so we can make her better. You might still be able to help with that, but until we have a clear direction, we are all useless.”

  Cianna had seen this ivory woman before, gliding forward on the wind through the darkness of her dreamscape. Last time she had dreamed of the child necromancer, as if being called onward toward the destination where the girl was. Cianna stood up out of her physical body and nodded to the white woman with the tall golden top hat and white sequined dress.

  This time there was no traveling. The woman pushed forth her delicate hand, tipped with golden fingernails, and separated the night like a curtain.

  Cianna gazed out of the darkness at the ruins of a city and heard faint crying. She was standing inside a smoldering, shredded skeleton of a city which she didn’t recognize. But Cianna knew from the strange suddenness of the town, the haphazard way it seemed to have just been established with colorful tents among sand dunes, that she was within an encampment inside the Realm of Fire.

  Though the fires crackled with life among the pinions and flags of the tents, that was about the only life Cianna could feel about her. There was a coldness to the air that had her rubbing her arms and shuddering in the night, despite the fires consuming homes and dead bodies. Cianna knew that the coldness she was feeling was the chill of death.

  Then she lost all control she’d had of the dream, and slipped back into its embrace.

  A sudden pop of fire and crackle of wood as a tent collapsed made Cianna jump. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath before moving on.

  Again she heard a faint crying, and ambled her way through makeshift streets, the sand hardened to a road of sorts, to where she could hear the weeping clearest. The noise she heard, so full of despair, so longing for life, came from a little girl who immediately reminded Cianna much of herself when she was a youth.

  The little girl was dressed in a simple burlap robe. She carried in her hands a hijab, which Cianna knew instinctively was the garb women were forced to enshroud their heads with here in the Realm of Fire.

  The little girl turned her caramel-colored face to Cianna, and she could see the tear tracks down her cheeks. The girl could not be any older than eleven, though she was rather short and chubby for her age. Cianna looked at her coffee-colored hair with its honeyed highlights and thought that they could almost be related, their features were so similar.

  The little girl held out her pudgy, dirt-smeared hand to Cianna, and for the first time in what Cianna could tell was a long time she smiled, and Cianna’s wyrd reflected in the child. Impossibly, this little girl was a necromancer.

  “How?” Cianna asked, but the little girl only smiled. It was a sad curving of the lips that seemed to be the first joy she had had in weeks. Cianna found herself wondering how long this little girl had been here among all the dead. She also wondered what had happened to kill everyone here so assuredly.

  The thought chased her out of sleep and into wakefulness.

  She sat up straight in her bedroll, looking around at the rest of her group, sleeping in the wee hours before morning. That little girl was out there somewhere, that necromancer that shouldn’t be because Cianna was the necromancer, and there was only one alive at a time.

  A lich? Cianna wondered. She had read of the necromancers that had kept themselves alive past their normal life by trapping bits of their souls in trinkets they carried with them. But that didn’t feel right for this little girl. Certainly she was too young to manage such wyrdings.

  She could feel the energy of the girl out there like a beacon drawing her on, even as the Necromancers’ Mosque was calling to her. Cianna needed to find her, and now she had a name to accompany the dream: Ava.

  There was no possible way she was going to get back to sleep now; her mind was racing with too many questions, too many things she had to do. Cianna wished there was a way she could just hurry to the mosque and then back to the Realm Guardians, but the group were her friends now, and she couldn’t just leave them behind. The trouble was, with Clara being in her trials, travel was much slower.

  Maybe if we can find a horse for her. Cianna wondered if a horse would be able to come in contact with the sorceress without harming them. Devenstar had carried her, but that was dangerous, because they never knew when she would slip into one of the wyrded trances that had protected them from the kelpies. What happened if she sensed that Deven was a threat, and then killed him as effectively as she had the kelpies?

  No, in this Cianna trusted Flora. They would continue to drag her on the makeshift litter they’d created.

  Cianna busied herself with stoking the fire and preparing breakfast for the group so that when they woke they wouldn’t have to waste time with that.

  They had been in the Realm of Fire for nearly a week at that point, and Cianna didn't think there could exist a more unforgiving land in all the world. The Realm of Fire was a vast desert with very little real settlements that Cianna knew of. She had always loved the idea of the Realm of Fire when she read about it in books, with the fanciful towers and castles open to the elements, with very few real windows and doors, but instead cloth draped over openings. The way the people were darker than normal, with hair like shadowy silken sheets. Even the way they dressed and painted their faces. Eyes dark with dramatic makeup, clothing long, free flowing, and of vibrant colors.

  But now that she was here, she wasn't sure how anyone could actually live here. Traveling caravans created temporary towns and villages wherever they set down for a week, a month, a year. As far as Cianna could tell there was no real way of determining the amount of time they stayed in one place. She thought maybe it had to do with water and other resources, but that wasn't anything she could truly test.

  They had come across two caravans in the first week. Flora said it was rare to come across one, and was truly surprised to come across two. The first she wouldn't let them go anywhere near because the tents were of dark colors.

  “The colors of the tents tell you what kind of caravan they are. Dark colors will tell us they are not friendly, and don't like strangers. Light, faded colors mean they are friendly, and encourage visitors. Vibrant colors mean they are traders; you can stay with them for a time, as long as you buy something.”

  “What would happen to us if we went into the dark caravan?” Cianna wondered.

  “Killing is strictly prohibited in the Realm of Fire, but the desert is vast and people go missing all the time.”

  They steered clear of the dark caravan.

  As Cianna was finishing up breakfast Devenstar began to stir from sleep. He woke without a word, barely a smile, and started helping her with the finishing touches. Once he had his cup of coffee in hand he seemed more human and willing to talk.

  Before long the rest of them rose.

  They were on the road nearly an hour earlier than normal, and all the while they traveled Cianna felt the energy of the little girl drawing her on. She knew if they kept their current pace they would come across the burned-out caravan before nightfall, though they would probably want to make camp somewhere different, instead of among the smoldering dead.

  “I think we are going the wrong way,” Flora told her. She looked back at the old teacher, the heat of the day raising off the sandy dunes in waves, making Flora appear more like a vision rather than substantial.

  They had taken all of their extra clothing out to cover their flesh and protect it from the sun. It had taken a lot of searching for Cianna to find something that wasn’t black, but at last she had.

  “There’s something I want to check out first,” Cianna said.

  “That dream?” Flora asked. Cianna had told her about it before, on Kelpie Way. She was surprised the old lady remembered.

  Cianna nodded.

  “Alright, and then we must
see my aunt, so you can be free of us,” Flora joked. Cianna smiled back at her, and they started out again, the going slow with the sand shifting beneath their feet the way it did. Cianna would never get used to the way the ground moved. In the Realm of Earth there weren’t any sandy dunes.

  It was approaching dusk when she saw the first telltale signs of smoke drifting up into the air. As if seeing it awoke her other senses, Cianna could suddenly smell burning wood and flesh.

  “Dear Goddess, you’re right. There it is,” Flora whispered.

  “Stay behind and make camp,” Cianna suggested. “I feel this is something I need to do alone.”

  No one argued. Cianna had pushed them hard that day and they were more than happy for the reprieve.

  As she neared the burned tents, the tall white lady stepped out from behind an overturned wagon affixed with sled blades instead of wheels.

  She was tall, and beautiful. What Cianna thought before were her bones showing through flesh were really tattoos covering every inch of her exposed skin, giving the appearance of a skeleton. Her fingers were tipped in golden nails, and her white dress wasn’t made of sequins after all, but some opalescent material Cianna never knew existed. It shimmered and winked at her like light reflecting off water.

  On her head sat a golden top hat, pulled low over the front of her skeleton-tattooed face. All Cianna could see of the woman’s face was her long nose and her lush full lips curved in a half smile.

  The entity motioned for Cianna to follow, and Cianna was powerless to refuse her.

  The sand gave way to hardened ground. Cianna could tell this caravan had been a more permanent one, equipped with roads hardened from many people walking over it. The tents that weren't completely burned-out sported light colors — this had been a friendly, welcoming caravan. Cianna wasn't sure why it had come to such ruin.

  “What happened here?” Cianna asked the white lady. The lady stopped, turned to Cianna, and held one finger to her lips. A sense of peace came over Cianna. She suddenly felt sorry that she had spoken and interrupted the restful dead.