A Guardian of Shadows (Revenant Wyrd Book 4)
Page 13
Jovian saw a purple orb of wyrd surround them, and felt Angelica’s power wreath them. They were so new to this wyrd business that there was no telling if her shield would hold against this alarist's attack.
But Joya wasn’t done. She let blast forks of lightning time and time again. The alarist was slightly faster than the Guardian, dancing away just in time as her pink lightning blasted holes in the floor where he’d been moments before. She stalked down the stairs, flinging bolt after bolt.
Finally, at the base of the stairs she stopped and let blast from both of her hands a torrent of pink fire that smothered out the green flames wreathing the hall. Her fire coalesced on the alarist.
A filmy green orb surrounded him and the man laughed as the pink flames sizzled out against his warding.
“Is that all you’ve got?” he asked.
Jovian felt the channeling of darker wyrd moments before the man’s hands started glowing black. He wasn’t sure what the wyrding was, but he’d seen it before and knew it wasn’t good. Joya could protect against it, he knew that, but if it struck her there was no doubt she would be finished, no matter how immortal she was.
As the man let the bolt of black lightning blast from his hands, Jovian drew his shin-buto and dove in front of Joya. He raised the sword, taking the full blast of the bolt along the blade. The sword seemed to scream inside Jovian’s head, but it neutralized the wyrd, showering the air around them with sparks of glowing black. Where the wyrd struck, objects vanished out of thin air, and holes were bored into the floor with its touch.
Then the dark lightning vanished as a loud crack sounded in the hall, and a hole was blasted in the alarist’s head, showering the floor before the man with blood. Jovian jumped back at the thunderous sound, and the alarist toppled forward.
Behind him Calnaron was standing with a smoking weapon.
Joya grabbed a sword from a nearby guard and stalked forward as the alarist stood, the hole in his head mending even as they watched.
He was off his guard, still disorientated and listing to the side as his brain patched itself together. Before he could gather the force of his wyrd about him, Joya swung, cleaving his head from his shoulders. It toppled to the floor, where it rolled to a stop before her feet. The alarist slumped over, dead, blood spurting from the stump of his neck.
People still trapped in the hall pressed further back from the spreading pool, as if the blood were more deadly than the wyrd that had been running rampant moments before.
Calnaron knelt, bowing his head.
"Guardian, I hope this proves to you our loyalty," he whispered, his voice a deep rumble in the now quiet hall.
Joya nodded. "It does. Thank you for your service frement. You are welcome in my halls." She took a moment to catch her breath before speaking again. “What is that contraption?”
“This?” Calnaron lifted the cylindrical weapon. “We call this a gun. We pack it with powder, a ball, and this hammer here sparks the flammable powder. The ball comes out with some force, and kills.”
“Like a crossbow?” Joya asked, cleaning the sword on the alarists tunic before handing the blade back to the stunned guard she’d torn it from.
“Much like a crossbow,” Calnaron nodded.
Now that Jovian looked closely, he could see the gun was built very similarly to a crossbow.
Joya turned to the waiting citizens, fear plain in their eyes.
“I have met with the frement, and tomorrow the council will draft a peace agreement between their race and the humans of the Shadow Realm. They are to leave us in peace, as we are them.”
There was an uproar, and Joya held her hands up. “I will hear none of it. They are a race in this land, and they will be treated as our equals until such a time as they prove themselves otherwise.”
And with that she turned her back on the people, and the three of them rode the lift back up to the tip of the spire and their waiting rooms.
Jovian's room on the Guardian's floor was much larger than his one on the fourth floor. He had no issue staying on the fourth floor, there hadn't been anything wrong with his room, but he did enjoy a much more lavish bedroom to rest in after being on the road for so long.
The bathroom was attached to his room again, paneled in the same black wood and decorated in a muted blue, which he enjoyed a lot more than the purple and gold in the hall beyond his doors.
The tub was on a pedestal and made out of the same kind of geometric granite that had formed the hallway from the Guardian's Tomb in the Haunted Graveyard. It was equipped with a linen closet, a sink, and some other cupboards Jovian hadn't gone through because he had found his soap in the first one he looked in.
The ceiling above him was glass, and sloped up toward the tip of the Spire. Just above the slanted glass he watched the bright clouds race against the velvety black backdrop of the sky. Jovian had seen the Spire of Night from far away, and he knew how impossibly tall it had seemed, so he didn't want to think how high up he really was, or how thin the building grew at the tip. If he did, he would likely get sick.
He closed his eyes and relaxed into the tub. His Aunt Pharoh had wanted him to practice touching his wyrd. But the truth was, ever since she taught him how to tap into it, and how to disconnect from it, Jovian had felt a bit of the energy still within him. He wasn't sure if it was a residue he was supposed to use up, or if it was a store of wyrd within him like sorcerers had from the Well of Wyrding.
He reached out for that bit of residual energy now, and the moment he came in contact with it he felt the channel to the earthen energy open. He had the sense of the Well of Wyrding, and his attention went to it then. He observed it, tried to figure out what, if anything, linked him to the well. Why were he and Angelica so different that they could cast wyrd, but unlike every other person that had come before them, they drew from a source other than the well? It gave him little consolation that he was still drawing from an energy attached to the tree, that being the final station along the path of the soul.
The tree looked fine to him; of course, there was no telling if he was actually seeing the tree or just imagining it. But he wished more than anything that his wyrd came from the same source as everyone else’s, because then it would mean that they were just a little different from everyone else, and not a lot different.
With a sigh, he latched on to the energy inside of him and channeled it into his desire. He tightened his hold on it as he had been told, waiting for the time when his thoughts were at their peak, imagining the water swirling and eddying in the tub, and then opened up to the source of wyrd.
The moment that he did the tub started bubbling and sloshing around him. He laughed at the sensation of the bubbles working their way up his legs and his sides. This time the lack of control he had at opening up to the wyrd was less dangerous than the roaring fire, so when he tightened his mental grip again, he was able to do so much more easily than with the fire. The water calmed from bubbles and sloshing to eddy against his legs.
He opened his eyes, keeping the channel open and the wyrd flowing to the degree he had calmed it to. The water rippled on the surface, slight waves slapping against the granite of the tub and against his chest.
Then he wondered if maybe he could do other things at the same time. He thought of warming the water, but then decided against that; the last thing he needed to do was boil himself alive.
He worked on calming the water and then making it bubble as it had been before. Several times he worked through the exercise, until he thought he might fall asleep in the tub from the exhaustion concentration brought on him.
Jovian finished washing, dried himself off, and made his way to the iron sleigh bed in the bedroom. Someone had come in while he bathed and put a bed warmer under the covers. He removed it, dumped the coals back into the fireplace, and climbed in.
The ceiling was glass as it had been in his bathroom, and he stared up through the panes into the night sky above. Someone had been crafty enough to fashion points of
light inside the glass to give the impression of stars above, and he enjoyed that. More than anything right now Jovian missed the natural lights that came with morning and night. He would be happy to get out of his sister's realm and back to a place where he could see the vast, bright expanse of sky above him.
In the Shadow Realm he felt closed in, like it wasn't a blanket of wyrded darkness surrounding them, but instead the lid of a box closing him in and cutting him off from the rest of the world. He wanted to see the blue sky, skirting clouds, and the moon and stars above.
As he drifted off to sleep, he wondered again if Joya would come with them from this realm. Surely she would want to see to this peace treaty between the frement and the humans. But what then? Would the ooslebed still continue to hate the frement? Was that even a concern of Joya's if they weren't harming the humans?
When he drifted off to sleep it was anything but peaceful.
He and Angelica stood before the giant stone well, watching as the wyrd dripped down the tree and off the leaves in silver patters against the wyrd within the monument. Unlike before they didn't want to walk near it, fear that the wyrd would start coming to them like a lodestone drawing flint.
Jovian tried backing away from the well, trying to put distance between himself and it, but there was no use. He felt the first cool drop of wyrd slap against his cheek and absorb into his skin. He tried to brush it away, but it didn't work. Before long Angelica and Jovian were standing in a light rain of wyrd falling horizontally at them from the Evyndelle.
More than any of the dreams they had had, this dream bothered them the most. The Evyndelle was not harmful; it was the world tree, the stations of life set among it, and their mere existence was killing it.
But there was something there with them. This time they weren't alone. They felt the presence like a shadow, skirting the edges of their vision along the darkness the distance created of the horizon.
It was a shadow of a shape that they couldn't see, that they couldn't follow. Each time they thought they saw it, the shadow would slip away.
“I don't like this, Jovian,” Angelica said.
“Not anything I can do about it,” Jovian told her. The wyrd sinking into his skin was a distraction, and he lost sight of the shadow.
He was aware of something behind him, and Angelica must have been as well, because they both straightened at the feel of the being behind them, and slowly turned around. There it was, a gray being, human in shape but with webbed hands, slits for a nose, finned ears, and long tentacles in place of hair.
“Leave this place, wyr! You aren't welcome here!” The being yelled into their mind, because it didn’t have a mouth to speak with.
Jovian backed away from the creature, and bumped into something else. He turned to see another of the creature behind him.
“You are not supposed to exist,” this one said.
“You were dead,” yet a third said from behind Angelica.
“Please, we don't want this,” Jovian said.
“Show us the way out and we will leave,” Angelica said to the one behind her.
“That isn't enough! As long as you live, the well will die, and us with it,” the first creature said. At the mention of the well Angelica and Jovian looked to the Evyndelle and a sob escaped his sister’s mouth.
Where once had been a startlingly beautiful tree there was nothing but a dried-out husk. It stood out of a jagged hole in the ground, the well nothing more than dust crumbled around the base of the tree and into the hole where wyrd had once flowed.
Above the tree the purple light of the Goddess glowed as if nothing had happened, but shadows stood all around the courtyard. It was now a wasteland.
There was noise from within the hole. Jovian and Angelica didn't want to look, but they found their feet drawing them closer to the hole. Before they reached the opening, hands caked with mud reached up, and two people pulled their way out of the hole as if it were a grave.
They watched the figures climb higher and higher until they found places to sit on the ruined tree. When they turned to face them, Angelica and Jovian saw it was themselves.
Jovian gasped and stepped back.
“But just tell us how to stop it and we will!” Angelica said.
“You can't stop it! You were never meant to be! The two humans that can't be charted by fate.”
“The two humans born of angelic blood!”
“The two humans in which all fate resides.”
“The wyr!”
“The Sacred Repository!”
“The Aksalah!”
“What are you talking about?” Jovian asked.
“You are the Two. You are the beings prophecy speaks of, and those that break prophecy.”
“The Two,” Angelica breathed. She had wanted her mother to tell her what the Two were, what they could do, but Sylvie obviously hadn’t known that they would lead to the ruination of the Well of Wyrding and the Evyndelle.
Jovian shook his head.
“But why is the tree dying? How are we killing it?”
But the Norns vanished, and when they did a new shadow emerged, on the back of the Pale Horse, riding out from behind the tree. With its coming, they felt the loss of everything they had ever held dear.
Tears flowed down Jovian's face, and he couldn't explain even to himself the sense of dread, the fear of loss that came over him at that moment, but it felt as though everything had changed in this one night. Nothing was ever going to be the same, that he already knew, but now he knew there was never going to be any hope of returning to the life he had once known.
The black-cloaked figure drew its black shin-buto and rode toward them.
Jovian came awake in his bed, gasping for air, with tears still flowing from his eyes. It took him several moments to calm the sobs that followed him out of the nightmare.
Over the next few days they saw Joya less and less. More and more Angelica felt the need to leave. After their shared dream of the well Angelica had felt a consuming need to be free of this realm and on their way home. The darkness was weighing in on her, and she felt at any moment she might scream. Angelica didn't know how these people did it day in and day out, but maybe it was because they were used to it.
And there's no escape, because all of the other realms think they are vile and evil. If there were any of the races Angelica wouldn't trust, it would be the frement, but only because of their past uprising. She figured it was possible they truly were trying to acclimate into society in some way — Calnaron made her feel at ease enough — but as long as her sister was the Realm Guardian, she wouldn't feel comfortable with the cat-people.
She could tell Joya was ready to be on their way also. Angelica could see it in the slump of her sister's shoulders when she passed them in the halls. Joya also felt the pressing need to be home, and to tend to things there.
Maybe the overwhelming need to be home was nothing more than the amount of time they had spent away from the plantation, but Angelica thought it felt like more than that.
Uthia started showing her face more then too, and she told them how she had slipped away to see her sister dryads of the Haunted Forest. They could tell from the way she spoke that the dryads here were nearly as alien to her as the humans were to them.
Finally, nearly a week after the dreams, Joya was able to sit down with them for dinner. Uthia didn't eat with them, but she sat with them all the same.
“We’ll be leaving tomorrow,” Joya told them. “I've arranged everything, and while people aren't happy about it, I have someone who will take over for me until I can return.”
“Can you trust them?” Angelica asked.
“They won't cross me. Besides, I have to take a telfetch with me, and this gem.” She held up a length of emerald. “Apparently it’s connected to one in the council hall, and it will allow me audience with them if there is an emergency that requires my attention.”
“We need to hurry,” Jovian said, pushing his plate aside untouched.
“I feel that too,” Joya said.
“Is everything alright?” Uthia asked.
“I don't know,” Angelica said. “I just have this feeling of dread. I can't explain it.”
Joya and Jovian nodded.
“Something isn't right,” Joya agreed.
“Then we should arrange horses,” Uthia said. “We are about two weeks from the border on foot; if we have mounts we can almost cut that time in half.”
“We have been granted an escort of ooslebed,” Joya said. “I would travel with the frement, but they haven't been on good standing with everyone for as long as the dark elves.”
“We travel on back of the hecklin?” Jovian asked. Angelica's stomach churned at the thought.
Joya nodded.
“Then the time might be even less.” Uthia sat forward. “What time do we leave?”
“As early as we can. You should all pack tonight.”
“Once we are in the Holy Realm, you can make us travel faster,” Uthia said.
“How?” Joya asked.
“By your wyrd. Some people are able to make their traveling speed faster — you should try it.”
Joya nodded. “The feeling that we need to get home is great. We will do that.”
Despite Joya's words, one frement accompanied them. He was almost completely black, with the exception of his white hands. Angelica expected to see paws, but his hands looked human enough, to her slight dismay. His name was Caldamron, and Angelica realized the clan name went at the front of their actual names. He told them they could call him Damron. Angelica had thought he would prefer Caldamron, since it was his actual full name.
For all the negativity surrounding the hecklin, the ones they mounted acted like nothing more than playful dogs. Angelica had expected a hassle trying to mount them, and maybe the potential loss of a leg. But when she approached, the hecklin lay down on the ground, allowing her to easily mount it before it shuffled to its feet in a rocking way that made Angelica feel uneasy.