An Unexpected Deity (Book 7)

by Jeffrey Quyle

  “That water skin is the key to restoring life to our world,” the Skye god pronounced. “Take it please, Kestrel,” he said as Stillwater held the skin towards Kestrel.

  “My lord,” Lark approached him. “Thank you for protecting us, and for promising to return to us.

  “I want to apologize,” she said in a suddenly hurried speech pattern. “I told you once that you were not a real human. I know now that whether that was right or wrong isn’t important. You’re a good person, period, to do all that you’ve done. To have such power as you have, and to make the promises and commitments that you make, shows the goodness that you are.”

  She leaned forward, placed her hands on his shoulders suddenly, and kissed him on the cheek, then backed away, blushing.

  Kestrel felt his skin seemingly burn where her lips had touched him, and he wanted to seize the moment, to kiss her in return, but already the next member of the party was pressing forward to say farewell.

  “My lord,” Stuart spoke next. “You’re a great one. If you return to us, it’ll be better than a score of new heroes coming to join the Duke. I just want you to know I’d be honored to fight by your side, or for you, as the case may be.”

  “This grows maudlin,” Krusima complained. “Our world awaits us.”

  “Farewell, my lord,” Woven grasped Kestrel’s hand and shook it firmly.

  Morph stepped up to Kestrel and grasped both of his hands silently. He said no words, but he projected his thoughts through their contact. He was thankful, and appreciative, and not just for the act of being rescued. There was an acknowledgement of his relationship to Kestrel, and a host of emotions – sympathy, understanding, still a portion of regret and anger, but now a sense of something that was not quite closeness, and not quite a feeling of familial love, but an affectionate acceptance that the two of them shared a bond. With a smile, the god stepped away and rejoined the others who were edging down the passageway, eager to head home.

  “I’ll wait here while you escort them,” Kestrel told Tullamore.

  “I shall go no further either,” the Skye’s god told him. “They have two healthy gods of their own for the short journey ahead. They’ll not need us along.”

  The humans, imp, gnome, and elvish travelers turned and began to walk away behind Morph and Krusima.

  I will await your return, and we shall converse, Morph told him silently.

  I look forward to that, Kestrel replied. And then they were soon gone, out of sight down the passage, on their way back to the world where they belonged.

  Chapter 18

  Kestrel stood in place as the friends from his long journey disappeared, and he remained in place as the Skyes turned and began to travel back to the entryway that would return them to the surface of their parched land. He felt extremely lonely, acutely away that he no longer had Wren or Stillwater, two very close friends and companions, to talk to or commiserate with. He no longer had the sturdy presence of Woven, or the comradeship of Stuart and Gates, men who knew and excelled in battle.

  Lark was no longer with him, the girl who was a nuisance and immature, but also passionate and wonderfully loyal to those she cared about. And she was a pretty girl; her hair had been cut short when their groups had first encountered each other in the mountains south of Uniontown, making her look even younger than Kestrel believed she was, but during the extended period of their travels together her hair had grown longer, giving her an appearance of maturity.

  He missed them all.

  The Skyes were well on their way back to the cavern entrance, and so Kestrel took one last look into the empty passageway to the Inner Seas, then began walking in the middle of his own circle of illumination to catch up with his new companions. Kestrel walked slowly as he let his mind wander and wool-gather, considering how the return to the Inner Seas would fare. He knew it would depend on two crucial issues: the location of their portal, and the steadiness of Morph.

  The location of the portal at the Inner Seas end was unpredictable. The two portals Kestrel knew of were widely separated – the one at the lake in the mountains that was now blocked was hundreds of miles away from the portal in the Water Mountains that had led to the land of the Albanuns. The third portal could be as widely distant from both, or it might be clustered near one of them. The humans wanted, and would feel they needed, a location close to Uniontown, so that they might quickly return to the Duke Listay. Kestrel’s mind detoured to wonder what the Duke would think when he was suddenly confronted with the return of his daughter and two trusted lieutenants; Kestrel had never considered how the duke must have felt during all the weeks that Lark and Stuart and Gates had disappeared from their domain.

  The second issue that Kestrel paused to think about was the hope that Morph would lend his powers and support to make sure that all the companions had safe trips home from the portal. Kestrel discounted any value that Krusima might provide – the human god clearly was going to focus immediately on his own selfish satisfaction, leaving no crumb of attention for the others. Morph had promised to help them, but he was an elven god who would have to deal with humans, a gnome, and an imp, among others, in a time of the Rishiare Estelle. And Kestrel was not convinced that Morph was a particularly steadfast divinity, despite the leadership and reliability he had shown in the land of the Skyes.

  Please Kai and Kere, help them all, he prayed, then laughed as he realized the ludicrousness of the idea that he was virtually a divine being himself, yet he was saying prayers to other goddesses, in another land, hoping they would cover the shortcomings of yet other gods.

  He was far behind Tullamore and the Skyes, he suddenly realized as he awoke from his walking reverie. He saw, not far ahead, the spot where the cavern ceiling dropped precipitously. He was nearly out of the cavern, and this time, he told himself, he was going to use the same method of traveling that Morph and Krusima had used, rather than crawling and adding another layer of dusty filth to his already tattered clothing.

  And that’s when the attack began.

  Kestrel had a sudden sense of danger, and then of hatred. He began to turn in alarm, when he felt pain and fear suddenly permeate his very being. His legs became wooden and cold, losing all sensation and causing him to topple to the ground. His energy began to drain away, and the glow that he emanated began to fade.

  Kestrel rolled over and looked down at his feet, to see a darkness enveloping them.

  “You left me, and you lied to me, and you are working for my enemies,” the black mist hissed.

  It was the strange, frightening, dangerous mist that he and his fellow travelers had met before, the mist that had guided them, but been no friend.

  The pain in his left foot grew intense, and Kestrel instinctively pointed at the mist as he released a bolt of his power. The energy shot down at the mist, and passed through it with no seeming impact, as the bright streak of Kestrel’s power flew across the chamber and shattered the stony wall on the far side.

  But despite its apparent harmless passage, the power did injure the mist, for it recoiled away from Kestrel, circling itself into a whirling cylinder of darkness that rotated and throbbed just a few feet away.

  “You are different!” the mist shrieked. “You should not have such power!”

  Kestrel tried to stand, to prepare himself to face another attack, but his wounded foot would not bear his weight. He rose to his knees, and as the mist launched itself at him, he waved his arms and threw up a shield around himself. The mist struck the blue glow and moaned in pain as it withdrew to heal itself.

  “I am different,” Kestrel finally spoke, to agree with the creature. He lifted his blue dome and flipped it quickly, trapping the mist with it, then sealing it off into an energy shell that enveloped the mist.

  “You cannot maintain this for very long,” the mist said confidently. “ And when you weaken and this puny shell falters, I will spring loose and I will overwhelm you.” Its voice had turned into a snarl.

  “Not necessarily,” Kestre
l replied, dropping back down into a sitting position as he rested and considered a way to defeat the misty entity.

  He didn’t understand the mist as an entity, how it could live without a body. But he could imagine a way to permanently defeat it. He formed in his mind the image of a fiery explosion, then pulled the vision apart into two elemental causes. They were the primordial elements of the universe’s origins; from them had come the combinations that had resulted in all energy and matter. It was an abstract Exercise, yet it revealed lessons he hadn’t considered.

  He studied his vision. Satisfied that it was possible to re-create the long-lost material, he used his divine powers to turn his imaginary vision of the two floating balls of the raw energy elements into reality, then enclosed each with a cover, similar to the shield he relied on to encase the mist, though stronger, far stronger, than the casing around the mist.

  He took a deep breath, paused and considered. Despite his newly enhanced powers, doing so many things while feeling the pain in his foot was stretching his abilities beyond endurance, and the task he had in mind was going to make it even harder.

  He studied the two balls of elemental energy, two containers with such volatile contents that he felt the impact of the churning, pure potential power. The glow of the two containers was an alluring temptation; he felt the desire to open the two containers and allow the contents to flow into himself.

  And maintaining the strength of the two small containers that held the elements was a tremendous use of his capacity. He felt the untamed efforts of the elements seeking to break free, challenging the power he exerted to restrain them. The energies sought freedom.

  “What do you seek to do?” the mist asked suspiciously.

  “You’re about to have company,” Kestrel grunted. He felt his forehead starting to bead with sweat from his exertions. He began to force the two balls to move towards the caged mist, keeping the two elements widely separated, so that there was no opportunity for an accidental mixing of the two in their current forms, not at too early a moment.

  The containers floated as he intended, so that they came to stop at either end of the egg-shaped energy field that contained the dangerous mist. Kestrel prepared to try his next trick, to momentarily open the mist’s cage simultaneously at each end to allow the two small packages of the elements to slip in, without allowing the mist to slip out. Once all three were contained within the single sphere, he would release the two elements, and simultaneously strengthen the outer shield.

  The result, he expected, would be a cataclysmic explosion inside the container, a reaction of the two pure elements meeting and counteracting one another in an encounter that would be so fierce it would destroy them both, and the mist with them, while staying safely entrapped in his energy shell. Then, he expected, he could release his energies, and crawl and hobble on his wounded foot to exit from the cave and rejoin the Skyes. They would be able to tell him about the mist, what it was, and where it came from, after it was destroyed.

  Kestrel watched the container around the mist. He needed to hurry, to engulf the elements of energy within the container quickly, as the stress of multiple actions continued to wear him down. But he needed a moment when the mist would not be close to either end, so that he would be assured it would not escape through the opening he created for the entry of the elements. To his annoyance, the mist did not cooperate, as it wildly gyrated and swirled within its cage, frantically testing for any weakness through which it could escape.

  There was going to be no perfect time, he decided, and the next, best opportunity would have to suffice. He saw the chance, and he opened small holes in the ends, as he simultaneously propelled the balls of elements inside the larger container.

  To his horror, he saw a tendril of the mist shoot out of the opening on the left, then immediately turn and fly towards him, even as he shut the container and separated the fragment of vapor from the main body.

  Everything happened at once after that. The mist struck him in the center of his chest, and it unleashed unbearable pain upon him. He released the containers around the elements, partly according to plan, and partly in panic from the attack he suffered. Kestrel felt his container around the main body of the mist start to collapse as his focus slipped away.

  He felt the psychic foretelling of the mixing of the two elements, and in another hurriedly panicked moment, he projected his body out of the cave and towards the first safe place he could think of, the bottom of the wide, dry valley where Tullamore had rid Gates of the murderous insect infestation. Kestrel sensed the explosion occurring at the spot he was fleeing, and the mighty power of the elemental annihilation ripping outward, destroying the cavern passage just as he left it behind.

  He sensed that he was still alive, and he thought he saw the blue sun overhead in the sky, just before he blacked out, unconscious from the trauma of the attack by the mist and the exhaustion of his powers and the explosion in the cave.

  Chapter 19

  Kestrel awoke with a start, looking up at a green sky overhead. He felt a momentary confusion, and a sense of pain and anger, until he remembered that he was in the land of the Skyes, and the green sky overhead meant that it was either dusk or dawn.

  ”Kestrel? Power? Godhead?” a voice spoke nearby, clattering and clicking its words.

  He was pleased to hear the voice, and to know that he was not alone. Then he wanted to snarl with hatred for the odious creature. Then he berated himself for such a thought, and he felt confused.

  He sat up, looked around, and saw that Tullamore was there, with dozens of Skyes sitting in the vicinity, while a pair of Skyes were close to and apparently watching over him. As he sat up, Tullamore stopped speaking to the crowd, and came over to see him.

  “How do you feel, my fearsome, fortunate, unfortunate friend?” the god of the Skyes asked.

  “I feel pain,” Kestrel replied. He studied Tullamore, who he thought of as both a friend and an enemy now.

  “You are in perilous danger, Kestrel,” Tullamore said. “Here, have a drink of this water,” the god advised, as it lifted the waterskin high and suddenly began to pour a stream of liquid down upon Kestrel’s face, drops of it splashing upon his clothes and face, as well as into his open mouth.

  He felt indignant at the insulting treatment, and he began to reach for his power, to teach the Skye god a lesson, as he instinctively swallowed the water that fell into his mouth.

  Suddenly his mood lightened, and he wondered where his anger had come from.

  “Do you feel better?” Tullamore asked.

  Kestrel nodded his head.

  “Here, take a good drink,” Tullamore advised. “Drink heartily,” he emphasized, as he dropped the water skin down into Kestrel’s hands.

  Puzzled by the advice, Kestrel obediently drank the water. It tasted good, and it felt extraordinarily refreshing.

  “You feel better now, do you?” Tullamore asked, as Kestrel pulled the skin away from his mouth.

  “Yes, strangely, much better,” Kestrel agreed.

  “You are in mortal danger, Kestrel friend,” Tullamore told him. “You have been attacked by the Kovell.”

  The name triggered an alarm in Kestrel’s soul momentarily.

  “The mist,” he said slowly.

  “Yes, it is a mist. A most dangerous entity – a poisoner of souls, a destroyer of love, a killer of all life – it is the worst threat this land ever faced. I had it sealed away once, in a dark prison cell where it could not reach anyone or do any harm,” Tullamore said, and Kestrel distantly heard a snarl of hatred,

  “But in my weakened state, as the Viathins killed my people, destroyed my land, and weakened me, my power was not sufficient to keep the Kovell and the other dangers I had locked away in their cells. Those dangers have escaped, and you have run into two of them already, the Kovell and the Kinst,” Tullamore said.

  “It is imperative that we seek to remove the infection in you; a portion of the Kovell managed to attach itself to you; I
can feel its anger and hatred within you. The water from the skin helps to temporarily tamp it down, but soon it will begin to rise again, to attempt to control you.

  “So we must begin to do our work fast, before you start to go through your internal battle once again,” Tullamore explained.

  Kestrel looked inside himself. He closed his eyes, and let his senses penetrate within his own soul. To his horror he found the fragmentary black vapor intertwined with the elements of his own essence; it had penetrated and clinched a tight grip on his ability to reason and love and react. The calming energy of the enchanted water from the skin had shrunk the size of the vapor, and made it pull back within itself, but as he observed, Kestrel could see it starting to reassert itself, tiny tendril by tiny tendril.

  “Can it be removed?” he asked Tullamore.

  “Yes,” the god said hesitantly. “Eventually. But it will take some effort, and we must do something else first.”

  “What do you want to do first?” Kestrel asked.

  “I want to give life back to my people and my world,” Tullamore said simply. “Come, help me.”

  The god turned away from Kestrel and strode back over to the spot where he had stood when he had addressed the crowd of Skyes. “Come and join me here,” he told Kestrel.

  Kestrel stood, and found that his left foot remained injured, still weakened by the attack of the Kovell mist in the cave. He dragged the foot behind him as he walked over to where Tullamore stood. The Skyes parted to open a path for him, and all spoke encouragingly as he arrived.

  “We thank you, lord Kestrel,” many said. “We praise you, god of two legs,” others chanted, while others made different comments and references.

  “From here,” Tullamore explained, “you can see the two sides of this valley. This is where two rivers once came together to make a mighty stream that flowed to one of the seas.

  “You and I are going to raise a dam across this valley mouth, so that we can start the formation of a might lake behind the dam, and then the water will be able to flow steadily down to the empty sea,” the god continued.