He opened the door and started up the stairs at a slow pace. As they went higher, the stairs seemed to narrow, and he slowed down, still afraid that he might slip and slide back down.
“What kind of construction team from beyond the Black Gates orchestrated this?” Angelica panted halfway up the stairs. Jovian laughed at her.
Before long they were able to see the dim light filtering down the top of the stairs, and the path became easier. In moments they were standing before the dusty door. Jovian pushed it open and motioned for Angelica to step in before him.
She stopped, holding her hands up as the floor swayed beneath her feet. “Alright, can’t we just bring the orb back to the room?”
Jovian laughed. “It’s really not that bad once you get to the box.”
“Am I going to make it to the box?” Angelica wondered aloud.
“Follow me,” Jovian said.
Jovian tip-toed across the floor, following his earlier footprints in the dust. He wasn’t sure why he was tip-toeing, it wasn’t like it made him any lighter, but when he reached the edge of the box, he finally relaxed and stood normally.
Angelica skirted around him, coming to stand at his side.
“Now what?” she asked.
Jovian sat before the box, and she sat beside him. He could see her visibly relax once she was fully sitting on the floor and hadn’t plummeted to her death.
Jovian sat staring at the orb for a moment, seeing the white depths swirling like wyrd within it. He waited to see if the familiar eyes of his sister, Amber, would look back out at him. Nothing happened.
“Jove, what is it?” Angelica asked, leaning down a little so she could get a better look into her brother’s green eyes. He blinked and shook his head.
“The last time I was here, I touched it, and I was pulled into the orb.”
“And you saw the Turquoise Tower?”
“Yeah,” he responded.
“That’s not very useful, but maybe we can direct it to show us something else?” Angelica reached forward and took the orb into her hands. She shifted the orb from hand to hand, then suddenly, like a lodestone to metal, her hands became fastened to it. Her fingers stiffened into claws, and she clutched at the orb. Jovian saw rivers of purple wyrd seeping down her arms and draining into it. Purple light dripped into the swirling whiteness of the orb like ink dropping into water.
Angelica slumped forward, the orb once more cradled in the box, with her hands fastened tight to it, as if they were made of one substance.
Jovian shrugged. The same thing had happened to him. He reached forward as well, and clasped his hands to the orb. He felt the orb slip into him, calling to his power. His back arched, his eyes flew open, and his fingers froze in their grip of the orb.
He was plunged into the white surface of the Orb of Aldaras.
Jovian was surrounded by fog. Everywhere he looked there was nothing but milk-white fog. Then a shifting breeze billowed his clothes, and like a curtain, the fog parted and receded. He stood there beside Angelica, looking around the white expanse. Now it was less like they were standing in white fog and more like they were within a white room. From somewhere overhead a light shone, though they couldn’t see its source.
It was a soft light, and they took the time to survey the room. It was round. In fact, it might even have been an orb they stood in, since they saw no seam of wall meeting floor, or wall greeting ceiling.
There was a humming noise, and the wall before them slipped open. Inside there was a darkness, and the darkness formed the familiar shape of the egrigor, with its spindly arms and its elongated head.
“I see you followed my lead,” the shadow said in an oddly hollow voice. It stepped from the opening in the wall, and suddenly the wall hushed shut behind him, locking with a reverberation of air.
“Why did you bring us here?” Jovian asked.
“What are you?” it asked, stepping closer to them. It tilted its head, as if sampling their wyrd from afar.
“Why is it always that question?” Angelica asked Jovian.
“I can’t harm you, and I should be able to,” Wyrders’ Bane said, clasping its hands behind its back. “So I must wonder, what are you?”
“I’m Jovian, and you are?” Jovian said.
The shadow must not have liked his glib response, because it flew at him, its arm outstretched, and caught Jovian around the neck. It lifted him off his feet, and Jovian felt a swell of power pulse down the arm and into the hand which held him. Where the creature gripped his neck, smoke began to rise, and the smell of burning flesh came to his nose.
Jovian screamed out and retaliated with a pulse of his own wyrd. There was a flash of red wyrd where the hand held his throat, and the egrigor was blasted backward. The shadow slammed into the wall and burst along the surface. The shadow was like black ink in water, shifting and drifting. It slipped along the floor like sludge, where it pooled just a few feet from Angelica and Jovian. Then the puddle of blackness took shape, and up rose the egrigor from the surface.
“Since I can’t harm you with the intention placed in me upon my forming, we will have to do things a little differently.”
The egrigor lashed forward with his arms, and each finger elongated into individual, pulsating ropes. They flew at Angelica and Jovian. Angelica was faster than Jovian, darting out of the way, while the rope-fingers slithered around Jovian’s legs, knocking him to the floor.
Angelica dove at the egrigor, forming her wyrd into a purple lance of power. She thrust it at the shadow, but it batted her aside. Where her wyrd touched the egrigor, however, a cut formed, and from within the cut they saw a bloom of light, like the sun bursting forth its illumination from the depths of a storm cloud.
Angelica rolled to her feet, holding the lance of her purple wyrd in her hands as she would a quarter staff.
Meanwhile, the black wyrd of the egrigor burned through the legs of Jovian’s pants, licking pain at his ankles and smoldering his flesh where it touched.
Jovian held up his hands and willed his wyrd to take shape. He blasted out with a pillar of light, taking the egrigor by surprise even as Angelica attacked from behind. She beat at the egrigor with her wyrded weapon, and the column of red wyrd Jovian shot forth pushed the shadow back.
It vanished, and the pain in his ankle abated.
Jovian pushed to his feet. Angelica came to his side. She lifted the quarter staff, and made a motion as if she were going to recall the weapon into the folds of her wyrd, but Jovian held up his hand.
“Not yet,” he said. He pointed at the ground not far from where they stood, and there she saw the haze of a shadow lilting across the ground. Jovian struck out with an arch of red lightning, but it did nothing more than scatter the shadow.
It slipped around behind them, and Jovian took the time to call forth a weapon much like Angelica’s, but his was in the shape of a sword.
When they turned it was to see the egrigor fully formed and lancing out black lightning at them. Jovian and Angelica dove in opposite directions, and where the black lightning struck, the floor darkened and smoked.
Jovian came to his feet and leaped at the egrigor. With a powerful downward arc, he drove his wyrded blade deep into its neck. Angelica had mirrored Jovian’s attack and struck at the egrigor’s head.
Their weapons were like some fire from the Ever After, wounding the egrigor wherever they struck. Light burst forth, and the egrigor stumbled. As he fell back, their weapons went with him, held fast in his now illuminating body.
“Strike at the light!” Angelica said, and Jovian didn’t waste any time. He lashed out with his wyrd and his mind, and so did Angelica. They struck as one, their wyrd burying deep in the egrigor. When they felt their wyrd take root, they pulled. The seams of light etched by their weapons in the body of the egrigor gave a loud roar, shuddered, and then split.
They didn’t stop pulling. They jerked their minds back, and the rifts in his form tore wider. They were repelled by a flash of light,
and when they landed, they watched the egrigor shudder and then burst into a thousand shimmering shards. Like fragments of charred paper, the bits of the egrigor fell to the floor of the round room.
From the center of where the egrigor landed, a bright light blossomed, and they were transported.
They were standing in the middle of the field where the two sides of the angelic war faced off. They were looking directly at the black-robed figure, so elegant, so powerful. The figure reached a hand up and laid it on the mane of the Pale Horse, and the steed seemed to calm at the touch.
Without knowing how he knew it, Jovian understood that the figure robed in black was the master of the horse.
Again a glint of gold issued forth from the depths of the hood, and as the figure reached up to pull back the hood, Angelica and Jovian were torn from their vision.
They were cast out of the orb with a sizzling pop. The noise sobered Jovian immediately, and when his vision cleared he saw a great rift had shattered along the top of the Orb of Aldaras, laying it open as if it were nothing more than a geode, filled with crystalline teeth.
Angelica scrambled away from it with a cry on her lips. Jovian stood, his hands clenched at his sides, waiting for yet another attack from the egrigor. When nothing happened, and Angelica had made her reluctant way across the shifting floor to his side, Jovian relaxed.
“You’re the one who’s telling her it broke,” Angelica said. “I didn’t have anything to do with this.” A look of horror contorted her face. The Orb of Aldaras lay in its blue cushioned box, a crack split the surface from which iridescent smoke flowed out like a nimbus of fog, wreathing the bottom reaches of the box.
“Maybe we can get her another one?” Jovian wondered in a panic.
“Where, Jove?!?” Angelica tossed her hands in the air. “I doubt they make ancient artifacts in Underwood!”
Jovian chuckled, and then laughed. Angelica stared at him for a moment in horror, and then her mask melted and she started laughing too.
All their laughter was cut short as the fog coming from the orb pooled larger around the stone, spilling out of the box to puddle on the floor around it. They retreated a step as the puddle of smoke got larger. And then it rippled from the outer edges toward the center. As each ripple reached the orb, the dim light of the ball glowed brighter and brighter until it was lit like a lamp. Jovian couldn’t look directly at it, and averted his eyes.
He watched the ripples until a gasp came from Angelica, and she stepped back further. Jovian looked up to see the fog shaping itself into a familiar form of the egrigor they knew as Wyrders’ Bane.
It stood before them, no taller than a large child. Its head was domed, elongated in a way. Its arms hung limply just below its knees. It stepped toward them, this time no longer a shadow, but a glowing being of radiant light.
Masters, it whispered. You’ve beat me in wyrded battle. I am yours to command.
“What do you mean?” Angelica asked.
You have driven out the wyrded command of my previous masters. Now I am just a vessel for you to fill with your desires.
“Like, if we asked you to grant us a boon?” Jovian said.
A ripple of response reached their minds. It was a feeling of confusion, of not understanding what Jovian meant.
“If we asked you to strengthen the wyrd of those within this keep, instead of harming them, could you do that?” Angelica asked.
This I can do for my masters, the egrigor responded. Is that what you command?
Angelica looked at Jovian and he shrugged. “It’s as good a command as any.”
And where would you have my energy rest? the egrigor asked.
“In the Orb of Aldaras,” Angelica told him.
The egrigor nodded. From now on, I shall be known as Wyrders’ Boon. Thank you for my new direction, masters.
And then the alien form of Wyrders’ Boon began to drip apart, globs of the foggy light sloughing from his form to puddle back up in the fog around the box. As he did so, the fog retreated into the crack of the orb.
When it was all gone, the orb shimmered and the sound Jovian equated with ice freezing reached their ears. When the shimmering stopped, the Orb of Aldaras was once more whole.
“What do we do with it now?” Jovian asked.
Angelica stepped closer to the orb, bent at the waist, her faded blue gown pooling around the box like the smoke had. She reached tentative fingers toward the opalescent glass and traced them over the surface.
“Can you feel it?” she asked in a breathy whisper. “Can you feel the egrigor inside now?”
Jovian stepped forward, knelt before the box, and laid a hand on the surface. There was a vibration underneath, a whisper of consciousness. He felt the power of the being respond to his touch, unfurling and infusing him with power. He shivered.
“I feel it,” he told her.
“We need to get this to Sara,” Angelica said.
Jovian nodded.
He gathered the orb to himself, and they made their slow progress down the stairs. From the second floor they had to go down two flights of stairs to the entrance hall, across the hall and up the left-hand set of stairs all the way to the top of the keep to Sarah’s office.
“You’d think they’d have a better way of getting to the top of the keep,” Angelica complained as they climbed the staircase. “I mean, honestly, we’ve seen some pretty amazing things done with wyrd, why can’t they put in some kind of lift?”
“Like in the Spire of Night,” Jovian said, nodding.
“Jovian,” Angelica said after a time. “That figure in black at the tower bothers me. I feel as though I know it.”
Jovian didn’t say anything for several steps, and then he nodded. “I agree.”
“Who do you think it is?” Angelica asked.
“I suspect that we were right before. It’s probably Arael, and whatever is left over inside of us from mother’s memories recognizes him.”
“Maybe,” Angelica said.
“You think it could be someone else?” Jovian cast a glance over his shoulder.
“I don’t know, I just don’t feel like it’s Arael.”
His legs were on fire, and the normal fatigue and wobbly knees were afflicting him by the time they crested the top. He stopped for a moment, shifting the weight of the box with the stone to his side.
Once they had caught their breath and looked like normal people once more, not like fish out of water, Jovian knocked on the door.
“Come in,” they heard Sara’s muffled welcome from beyond the heavy door.
Jovian pushed the door open and walked in. Sara sat in her wheelchair. She had more color today, and was able to hold her head up with a little more strength. She was looking down at a map. Annbell leaned over her shoulder, looking at the map as well.
“What are you looking at?” Angelica asked.
“Wondering how long it will take for Joya’s reinforcements to get here. We’ve been able to push the dwarves back from the wall, and now they’re just standing in the center of their camp, not doing much of anything.” Sara looked up at them, smiled, and then her eyes found the box, and her smile melted.
“I don’t think there’s anything to fear now,” Jovian said, halting his progress.
“We’ve used it, and something rather . . . interesting happened,” Angelica continued.
“We didn’t see the Beast. There was another useless vision of the Turquoise Tower, but this time we fought something.” Jovian set the box on the desk. Sara leaned back in her chair, folding her fingers together. She didn’t want to be close to it, but she didn’t precisely act afraid of it either.
“The egrigor, Wyrders’ Bane,” Angelica said.
“You fought it?” Annbell asked, crossing her arms over her chest.
“Yes, and we beat it,” Jovian said, looking up at the Realm Guardian in her normal black fur cloak.
“But how?” Annbell wondered.
Angelica shrugged. “We aren’t really su
re.”
“No human is able to best the egrigor,” Annbell argued. She closed her eyes and shook her head. “No wyrd in all the realms, human or nephilim, is able to best that stone.”
“Well, we did,” Jovian shrugged.
“Because their wyrd isn’t anything the Realms has ever seen before,” Sara said. All eyes turned to her. “Grace has told me you are the Two.”
“What does that mean, precisely?” Annbell wondered aloud.
“It means that when Mother sacrificed herself so that we could live, she changed our wyrd,” Angelica tried to explain. “When Aunt Pharoh taught us through the medallion, we found that our wyrd doesn’t come from the Well of Wyrding, but instead directly from the earth around us.”
“Ah,” Annbell said, tilting her head back slightly. “So, your wyrd comes from a different place, and therefore Wyrders’ Bane can’t effect you.”
“What about what you just went through? When Shelara washed your wound, Wyrders’ Bane affected you,” Sara pointed out.
“We think something else was happening then,” Jovian said.
“We had a vision that we have yet to share with Grace and Joya, something that’s happened in the past.”
“We think the vision was waiting for a way to slip in, and when Angelica was rendered unconscious, it worked its will.”
Sara shook her head. “I’m completely confused, but I won’t ask for you to explain further. What happened with the egrigor once you defeated him?”
“Let’s just say, you won’t ever have to worry about Wyrders’ Bane again,” Jovian told them.
“When you defeat an egrigor,” Annbell said, “their essence isn’t destroyed. They stick around, awaiting new direction from their new masters.”
“We recreated it as the direct opposite of what it was before.” Angelica motioned to the box. Jovian worked the hook clasp, and then tilted back the lid. The opalescent orb shimmered in the depths of the blue velvet box, casting filtered light around the inside of its confinements and painting Sara’s face in rainbow relief. “It required a new home, so we placed it in the Orb of Aldaras.”
On Wings of Chaos (Revenant Wyrd Book 5) Page 15