“Yes,” said the Watcher in a soft voice. “Yes, you are starting to remember.”
“I…” Calliande stared at him, her throat growing dry. “I…remember you. I think…”
“Go on,” said the Watcher.
“You were a Magistrius,” said Calliande. “One of my teachers. One of the best healers in the Order. You…you taught me how to use the magic of the Well to heal wounds.” She clawed the knowledge from her damaged mind with pain, like lifting iron weights with only her fingernails, but bits and pieces came. “Then…you followed me. Your name. I know your name. Your name is Marius!”
The Watcher, once the Magistrius named Marius, inclined his head. “Yes. You have come to Dragonfall at last, and your memory is returning.”
Calliande felt tears in her eyes. “How could I have forgotten you? You taught me so much. You looked after me after my father…my father…” She swallowed.
“I do not wish to make light of your pain,” said Marius, “but you must hurry. The malophage will restore itself, and once it feels strong enough, it will come after you again.”
“Yes,” said Calliande. She took a deep breath, pulling herself together. “At least the others will be safe.”
“What?” said Marius.
“Ridmark and the others,” said Calliande. “If the Devourer followed me in here, it cannot hurt them. I expect it is trapped in here with me, and will not be able to leave unless it kills me and takes my power.”
Marius managed a faint smile. “As ever, you feel more fear for others than you do for yourself.”
“They are in danger because of me,” said Calliande.
“They are in danger because of the Frostborn and Shadowbearer,” said Marius. “You must hasten. I would answer all your questions, but you shall have all the answers you want once your memory is restored to you.”
“How?” said Calliande.
Marius gestured at the plinth. “The crystals contain pieces of your memory. Touch them and the portions of your memory that they contain shall be restored to you at once.”
“Where is my staff?” said Calliande. “I suspect I need that more urgently.” A flicker of motion caught her eye. She turned, raising her hand, but it was only the undulation of the mist.
Or so she thought.
“It is locked away by your memories,” said Marius.
“That doesn’t make any sense,” said Calliande.
“As you have likely guessed, we are no longer in Andomhaim proper,” said Marius. “Instead, we are in the threshold. The high elves built Dragonfall long ago, soon after the schism that sundered the elven kindred into the high elves and the dark elves. Ardrhythain and the other archmages of the high elves feared that the skulls of the departed dragons would fall into the hands of the dark elves, who could use the power bound within them to work terrible evils. When the dwarves came to this world, Ardrhythain convinced some of them to settle here, and Khald Azalar was built to protect Dragonfall.”
“I guessed as much,” said Calliande. “What does that have to do with my staff?”
“The laws of reality do not work the same here as they do in the material world,” said Marius. “You concealed your staff with a spell of great power, and it will only reveal itself to someone who possesses all of your memories.”
“I see,” said Calliande, thinking it over. “Part of my memories? You mean there are more than one of these crystals?”
“Yes,” said Marius. “I do not know how many. Only Kalomarus the Dragon Knight accompanied you to Dragonfall, and other than you, he is the only one who knows its secrets.”
“All right,” said Calliande, risking another look around the chamber. There was still no sign of the Devourer. It must have retreated to recover its strength, and once it had recovered, it would try to overwhelm and kill her before she could bring her magic to bear. “Then let us begin.”
“I must warn you,” said Marius. “This experience will likely be…painful.”
“From the spell?” said Calliande.
“No,” said Marius. “You have endured many losses, Calliande. They made you the woman you are today. To recover your memory, you shall have to relive them.”
Calliande hesitated, staring at the crystal sphere upon its plinth. All her doubts and fears flooded through her anew. She had told Caius once that memories shaped a man’s or a woman’s character, that their experiences defined them. Calliande had forgotten all of her experiences, but she knew that those experiences had transformed her into the Keeper, that they had made her into a woman who could forsake everything she had ever known.
Did she really want those memories back?
In the end, it didn’t matter. The Frostborn would return. Her friends would die when the Mhorites or the Anathgrimm caught up to them. More immediately, if she did not take up the Keeper’s staff the Devourer was going to kill her.
So she strode to the plinth and placed her right hand upon the sphere.
For a moment nothing happened.
And then a decade exploded inside of Calliande’s head.
She let out a sound halfway between a gasp and a scream, every muscle in her body going rigid at once, her fingers gripping the crystal.
A storm of memories ripped through her mind, piling upon themselves one after another, years flashing before her eyes in an instant. It should have been too much to process, too much to handle. Yet Calliande had lived all these memories before.
She knew them already.
The cottage where she had been born on the western bank of the River Moradel, the soaring towers and spires of Tarlion and the High King’s citadel rising upon the far bank across the river.
Helping her mother to clean and sew, helping her father to repair his nets and clean his catch for the day.
Names. She remembered her parents’ names. Her father had been Joachim, a fisherman as his father and his father’s father had been before him, a lean, strong man with leathery skin and kindly eyes. Her mother had been named Joanna, and she had looked a great deal like Calliande, with blue eyes and long blond hair that hung to her hips.
More memories ripped into Calliande’s mind.
She remembered learning to read, the kindly old priest teaching her.
She remembered cooking with her mother, making cakes in their stove.
She remembered sitting upon the dock, eating stoneberries with her father.
And then…the fever, Joanna’s racking cough. A Magistrius had been summoned, but too late, too late. Calliande had prayed for days, begging for her mother to live.
She hadn’t.
Then one day Joachim had been caught in a sudden storm, and his boat capsized. He washed to shore, and Calliande pounded on his chest, screaming for him to breathe, and the magic had risen up in her like a storm for the first time…
It hadn’t been enough to save him, though, and Marius came to take her to the Order of the Magistri for training.
The memories swallowed her.
Later Calliande came back to herself.
She was sitting against the plinth, her legs drawn up against her chest, her arms wrapped around her knees. She realized that she was weeping, that she was rocking back and forth. Part of her mind screamed at her to get up, that the Devourer was coming for her, but the pain and the grief were too raw, too new. Her mother and father had been dead for almost two hundred and forty years, yet it had just happened before her eyes…
“They’re dead,” said Calliande. “They’re dead and I couldn’t save them.”
“I know,” said Marius in a quiet voice. “I remember the day we met. The praefectus of your village sent for a Magistrius, said that one of the children had manifested magical power.”
“I was ten years old,” whispered Calliande, the old grief flooding through her in a black wave once more. “Ten years old and already an orphan. I…I didn’t have any other family. Mother and Father had no other children, no siblings. I…I was alone…”
“I said you wou
ld have to come with me,” said Marius, “to be trained as a Magistria in the Order. The war against the Frostborn in the Northerland had been raging for decades, and it was turning against the High Kingdom. Every Magistria and Magistrius was needed.”
“I didn’t care about that,” said Calliande, shivering as she hugged her knees to her chest. “The war was so far away. All I wanted…all I wanted…”
“You asked me,” said Marius, “if you could learn to use magic to heal. To save people who would have perished the way your father had drowned.”
“You promised me,” whispered Calliande. “You promised me I could learn to heal.”
And he had kept his word, hadn’t he? Again and again she had healed wounds. She had healed the defenders at Dun Licinia, the orcish warriors and mercenaries at the Iron Tower, the wounds of Ridmark and the others again and again.
“I did,” said Marius. “I told you there would be a cost, that you would have to take the pain of the wounds into yourself. But you did it without flinching. We had never seen an initiate take to healing as you did. That was what drew the eye of the Keeper.”
“The Keeper?” said Calliande.
“Yes,” said Marius. “The staff of the Keeper had been handed down from bearer to bearer for centuries. Always the old Keeper chose a new apprentice. It was her right and her duty. She returned to Tarlion, to counsel the High King in the war against the Frostborn, and you…”
His head snapped around, his eyes narrowing as he stared into the mist.
“Beware!” he said. “The creature returns!”
But Calliande was already moving.
She threw herself to the side as the malophage flung itself from the mist, hurtling towards the stone plinth like a black arrow. The Devourer struck the plinth and rebounded, and as it did, the creature changed shape, abandoning its ape form for something that looked like a hairless lion covered in jagged black scales, a scorpion’s tail rising from its haunches. As the malophage wheeled, Calliande drew upon all her power and called white fire from her palms. The blast slammed into the malophage, and the creature stumbled back with a hideous scream. Yet her fire did not seem to harm the malophage as it had done before.
The Devourer, just as Marius had predicted, was getting stronger.
Calliande gritted her teeth, drawing upon all her power, and hit the Devourer with another spell. The lance of white fire drilled into the Devourer’s side with enough force to flip the creature over and send it tumbling into the mist. Calliande held her magic ready to strike again, but the Devourer did not reappear.
Her shoulders slumped, and she staggered upright, her bare feet slapping against the cold stone floor. A wave of exhaustion rolled through her. Her magic might have been more powerful in this strange place, yet it still demanded a price in stamina. The raging emotions churning through her mind were draining, sapping at the focus and concentration magic required.
“You must hurry, Keeper,” said Marius. Calliande realized that was the first time he had ever called her that. “Your current strength is not enough to defeat the malophage. You must find the staff before it is too late.”
Calliande nodded, pushing away a few loose strands of hair from her face. “You’re right. I…”
“Run as you wish, Keeper of Andomhaim.” The Devourer spoke with Calliande’s voice, the words bouncing and echoing so Calliande could not pinpoint their source. “Listen to your tattered spirit guardian. Seek your power. It matters not. You are mine. I am the predator, and you are my prey. And when at last I have you, when at last I feast upon your flesh and your magic, your despair shall make the feast all the more…”
“Shut up,” said Calliande. “Marius. Which way?”
“Into the mist,” said Marius. “You make the path. It molds itself to your will and thoughts…and the rest of your memories await.”
Calliande shuddered. Reliving the deaths of her mother and father had been terrible…and the recovered memories only went to her tenth year.
What other horrors had she seen?
Like it or not, she was going to find out.
Calliande walked into the mists of Dragonfall, the spirit of Marius the Watcher following her.
Chapter 17: Fires and Shadows
The damned coins were becoming a nuisance.
Ridmark jumped back, avoiding a spilled pile of coins, blood dripping into his eyes from the cut over his brow. One of the Anathgrimm pursued him with grim determination, a massive shield upon the warrior’s left arm and a heavy mace in his right fist. The warrior’s bone armor and heavy chain mail made him all but impervious to normal blades.
Fortunately, Ridmark wasn’t fighting with a blade.
He dodged a blow from the mace and swung his staff, the impact landing on the Anathgrimm warrior’s cuirass. His staff couldn’t penetrate the warrior’s armor, but that hardly mattered. The force of the staff’s blows communicated through the armor, and already the Anathgrimm warrior limped. Again the warrior swung, and Ridmark jumped back, luring the warrior across a pile of spilled coins.
The Anathgrimm warrior pursued, the coins rasping beneath his boots, and Ridmark struck. The end of his staff went into the warrior’s right knee, and the Anathgrimm lost his footing upon the coins. The warrior fell to one knee with a grunt, and Ridmark drove his staff into the orc’s neck before the warrior could recover.
The Anathgrimm fell over, choking, and Ridmark felt a brief pang of regret. The Traveler’s mutated orcs were fine soldiers, disciplined and dogged and skilled. They were wasted in this kind of fight, and would have been formidable with proper lines and formations. If Ridmark had commanded a thousand Anathgrimm at Black Mountain, Mhalek might never have had the chance to escape the battlefield.
As it was, Ridmark suspected that no one might leave this battlefield alive.
He stepped back, joining his companions as the battle raged around them.
One of the Traveler’s spells had rebounded from Mournacht’s wards with such force that it had blasted into the wall, shattering the ancient dwarven stonework around the archway leading to the golden doors of Dragonfall. Ridmark had feared the entire hall would collapse, burying them alive and sealing the entrance to Dragonfall behind thousands of tons of broken stone, but the wall had remained intact, albeit with a huge smoking crater. The Traveler and Mournacht’s duel had stumbled into the central Vault, along with the battle between the Mhorites and the Anathgrimm.
Ridmark and his companions had been pulled along with it.
Now the central Vault had become a battlefield, with Anathgrimm warriors striving against the Mhorites, the floor becoming slick with orcish blood and carpeted with corpses. The Traveler and Mournacht continued their titanic duel, flinging blasts of dark magic at each other, the air between them crackling with baleful energy. Both the dark elven lord and the orcish shaman had ordered their warriors to kill Ridmark and his companions, but both armies were occupied with trying to kill each other. If a troop of Anathgrimm tried to attack Ridmark and his friends, a band of Mhorites seized the opportunity to attack the Anathgrimm from behind.
So far that was the only thing that had kept Ridmark and his companions alive. Ridmark bled from half a dozen minor wounds, and all the others had taken blows as well. Gavin and Arandar had used their soulblades to heal what they could, but they were not nearly as effective as Calliande.
There was no way to escape, not with the battling armies filling the Vault and the throne room and the assembly chamber beyond. They had to hold out until Calliande reemerged from Dragonfall with her staff. Though Ridmark wondered if even the power of the Keeper could stand against the dark magic Mournacht and the Traveler flung at each other. Perhaps they would succeed in restoring Calliande only for her to die here, and the soulstone would fall into Shadowbearer’s hands anyway.
Regardless of what might happen, there was nothing left to do but to fight, so Ridmark fought.
“Mhorites!” shouted Arandar, pointing with Heartwarden. A band of Mhori
tes had broken free of the melee and sprinted towards Ridmark, axes and swords in hand.
“Morigna,” Ridmark said, but she was already moving, her staff sputtering with purple fire. Her face was tight and drawn, smudged with soot and blood, dark shadows gathered under her black eyes. Yet despite their peril, she had not yet used dark magic in the fight.
As far as he knew, anyway.
She thrust her staff, and the floor beneath the charging Mhorites rippled and folded, knocking many of them from their feet. Antenora was already casting another spell, a fist-sized ball of fire whirling over the end of her staff. She gestured, and the fireball soared from the end of her staff to land in the midst of the Mhorites. The explosion wasn’t nearly as large as some of the others she had unleashed, but it was enough to kill two of the Mhorites and set several of them ablaze, and their attack faltered in confusion as they fought to put out the flames.
In that moment of confusion, Ridmark and the others attacked.
He killed a burning Mhorite as the orcish warrior struggled to put out the flames chewing at his trousers. One of the uninjured Mhorites came at Ridmark with a sword, and he parried the blow, shoved, and whirled his staff in a circle, driving one end into the Mhorite’s belly. The Mhorite warrior stumbled with a groan, and Ridmark brought the staff down upon the Mhorite’s head. The warrior wasn’t wearing a helmet, and Ridmark heard the crack of shattering bone even over the roaring chaos of the battle. Another Mhorite came at Ridmark, and he tried to dodge, and the edge of the Mhorite’s sword bounced off his armored chest. Ridmark stumbled, and before the Mhorite landed a second blow, Caius swung his mace. The mace of dwarven steel shattered the Mhorite’s elbow with a vicious crunch, and Ridmark recovered his balance and killed the Mhorite.
Gavin and Arandar tore into the orcs, their soulblades blazing with white fire in reaction to the dark magic snarling through the Vault. Kharlacht hewed his way through the Mhorites, his massive greatsword a blur of blue steel.
Yet still Mhorite warriors charged at them, even as blasts of bloody fire and writhing shadow snapped back and forth between Mournacht and the Traveler.
Frostborn: The Broken Mage Page 24