“I am a friend!” Lauro shouted down to them. A large, hard ball of ice soared up at him from the group, turning off its course and getting flung with a crack into the east wall of the Shrine. Chunks of ice and stone fell in a small avalanche; Lauro’s cushion had shielded him. The prince cursed. His clever bit of striding was rapidly weakening and wouldn’t stand another hit. It appeared there were more Frost Striders among the nymph soldiers, and evidently they hadn’t heard him. “I AM A FRIEND!!!!” he shouted above the roaring wind. The storm above him flashed again, and as he ducked in surprise at the sound, another ball of ice broke through the air-cushion and clipped his leg.
He yelped in pain and fell the last hundred feet. He missed the edge of the broken wall by a mere foot and slammed unceremoniously into its side, throwing up a small explosion of snowflakes and rock shards. His heels scraped the hard packed surface and he fell like a rock to the top of a large pile of debris. WHUMP. The breath was knocked out of him and he tumbled down the snowy side, bouncing from boulder to icy boulder like a rubber ball rolling and bounding down cold, rough stairs.
Finally he crashed to the ground. Snow blurred his vision and melted in his mouth. He choked and spat, rolling painfully over. The sky was gray as ever, and the snow just as cold. Nothing about his situation had changed, other than it hurt more now. The Frost Strider who had blown him from the sky ran up warily and stopped a few feet from him, hands forward in a defiant stance.
“Do not move, Strider. I will kill you before you can fly again.” The man’s voice was heavily accented, but at least he spoke the commontongue. “Sit up. Slowly. Do not try to stride.”
Lauro obeyed. He was too breathless to argue and too tired to fight- besides, he had come here to help these people, not attack them!
He scrutinized the Frost Strider from half-lidded eyes. The man was muscular and pale-skinned, of middling height, and he wore a warm white tunic underneath curious, silver-plated armor. His boots were tough and shod with iron, and his under-cloak had a great, fur-lined hood that was thrown back from his head. He had a short beard and mustache of jet shot through with silver, but his skull was shaven clean. The only other hair on his face were his bushy eyebrows; the same color as his beard. His ears were large and pointed like every nymph’s.
Lauro Vale knew a warrior when he saw one. This was most definitely such a man, even if he bore no weapons that the prince could see.
“Do not rise,” the Frost Strider commanded. “State your intent. Why have you appeared in this dark hour? Are you in league with the Lek… the Demon?”
“Of course not!” the prince snorted. “I am here to help! My companions and I have traveled far to warn you of war… though I see that it is unnecessary now. If you’d be kind enough to not smother me in ice and snow, I may be able to help you.”
“I see no companions,” was the simple reply. The Frost Strider kept one eye on Lauro and used the other to glance at the sky. The weird half-gaze disturbed him, but something else had occurred to him as well. Something about this nymph’s speech… he was royalty of some kind, or Lauro didn’t know what was! The prince began to speak, using the superior tone and proud demeanor he had almost-unconsciously suppressed since meeting Gribly.
“My companions are not able to fly, as I am. They are not wind Striders. One is a nymph like your noble self: a Wave Strider of the Treele tribe. The other is a human boy, a Sand Strider and… and a prophet.” The description of Gribly came unbidden to his mind, from what the boy had told him earlier. It evidently startled the nymph, whose hostility instantly lessened.
“You… I see.” He shifted his stance to be more welcoming, even reaching out a hand to help Lauro up. “I have mistaken you. You are a friend, I see. Welcome to the Shrine of Mythigrad, stranger. I am Karmidigan, Frost Strider and Sworn Warrior of the House of the One.”
Chapter Twelve: Winter's Warriors
Gribly and Elia encountered three more footprints of the Ice Demon. They avoided each, though it took them longer to reach the Reethe fortress because of it. The time was eaten up by Gribly’s thoughts as he berated himself. Shouldn’t have told her all that. Should have kept it hidden. But his mind was conflicted. She didn’t mind. Just brush it off. You’ve got worse things to worry about. In short, it was driving him crazy.
“I wish there was sand somewhere in this forsaken city,” he grumbled to Elia. “I feel like useless baggage in every battle, with you and Lauro doing daring deeds all the time while I sit around with no sand and no striding.” It was a joke, almost, and the nymph girl caught it. She smiled, and it encouraged him. “I hope we’ll be on land soon,” he added. “If I don’t feel solid earth under my feet soon, I think I’ll turn into a fish!” To that she actually laughed, throwing her head back as the pair passed under a broken arch of white stone. Anything to break the suffocating silence of death that hung about the hollow buildings and thin, dripping alleyways.
“Humans have never been at great peace with the land,” Elia commented. “But they have ever been the stronger race. I don’t know why, but I suppose it’s meant to be. As are all things.”
“Everything?” Gribly sounded incredulous even to himself. They turned a corner and headed down a long, wide white street strewn with wreckage. There were spots of dark nymphish blood on the snowy pavement, but no bodies could be seen. “Even this?” he asked.
Elia’s smile disappeared. “Yes. This, too. I can’t explain why… no one can… but there’s a purpose. I believe it.”
“I’m not sure I do,” he answered. Instead of running around a fallen pillar of the strange, icy-hard substance so common in the Reethe dwellings, he vaulted over it. Behind him, Elia simply summoned a jet of water to carry her up and over it effortlessly.
“Your loss. But I think you will, one day. Everyone does, eventually, even if it’s on the last day of their life. That second before you pass into the nether, I think everyone really does believe in a purpose. In the Aura. In the One.”
Gribly shrugged noncommittally and kept running. He didn’t have time for this, either, even if his heart was becoming more and more accustomed to the living legends that seemed to drive the world forward.
They made it to the end of the street and turned left, according to the directions the nymph woman had given them. Shuffling through a winding alley, Gribly followed Elia out onto an open, circular space, at the end of which stood the mighty walls of the Reethe fortress. They were cracked and broken, melted in places and frozen into dripping, plunging shapes like a giant candle that had melted into an ungainly wall of bubbly wax. Before their demise they should have been at least a hundred feet high- now they were two-thirds that.
“Will you take a look at that!” Gribly gasped, pointing. Part of the wall- probably one of the main gates and the guardhouses beyond- had been melted into a runny gray slag by whatever black spells the Ice Demon had attacked with. “How much heat would it take to raze this fortress? Haven’t the Reethe ever been attacked before?”
“Not like this, I’d think,” Elia groaned. “I do hope we haven’t come too late to do something!”
“Wait! WAIT! Ha ha! Hah!” Gribly couldn’t help but laugh for joy. Impossible!
“What’s so funny?” Elia inquired, frowning at his unexpected outburst.
“Look!” he cried, starting forward over the open clearing, “The stone’s turning colors! It’s throbbing like it’s alive!”
“I don’t understand,” she protested, running up beside him. “There’s nothing there. Are you feeling all right?”
“All right? I feel better than ever! I can feel the stone again! The melting’s made it almost sand-like! Look- I think I can stride it!”
By now he had crossed most of the distance. The heap of crumbling, lumpy stone stretched up like a grim hill in front of him, and he leaped straight at its sheer side, kicking out with his feet. The stone, or sand, or whatever-it-was-now, obeyed him! The wall morphed and followed his hands as they swept back, jutting out on
to the ice and shaping themselves into a rough ramp, which he ran up. It was exactly as steep as he wanted, and just as smooth. As he landed, the soft-stone formed a flat shelf for his feet.
Gribly bent his knees to absorb the shock, landed, then thrust his palms outward at the imposing face of melted rock ahead. It shook and cracked, trembling under his harsh command. But at last it yielded, flattening and parting like water under a strong wind, forming a sort of slanting U-shaped path up to the top of the hill and down beyond. The bottom of the path was smooth and straight.
“AHA!” he yelled, then jump-turned and glanced back down at Elia, who stood dumbfounded at the bottom of the wall.
Gribly stood nearly thirty feet above her on the path he’d made, which stretched up another thirty feet before dipping down out of sight. The fortress was almost as thick as it was wide.
“By-Aura,” the Wave Strider breathed, swaying to look up at him. She gaped and shook her head. “I never would have guessed it. You can stride stone just as well as sand!”
Timidly, almost fearfully, she walked slowly up the slanted path, keeping her hands on the sides as if she feared it would give way under her like it had to Gribly. But it wouldn’t, he knew now. The stone obeyed him!
“I guess I can, now, can’t I?” he grinned, the feeling of helplessness diminishing within him until he easily quashed it. “I must be getting stronger, just like you and Lauro. Though I must say, Fire and Water seem much more useful than-”
BOOM! CRASH! He was cut off by a bone-shaking tremor that rocked the walls and fortress and most of the city. No lightning flashed, but off beyond the huddled buildings an enormous jet of water leaped high in the Reethe bay, so tall they could both see it where they stood nearly a half-mile inland.
“The Demon!” Elia gasped. “We’re out of time! Come on!”
It was a deadly and simple race. Gribly turned and ran up his gently sloping path, over the rounded top, and down the other side. He hadn’t done the job perfectly; the path dropped off the sluggish soft-stone at about ten feet. No matter- he flipped off the edge and landed lightly on his feet, slipping to one knee and crouching low, looking quickly around for any possible threats. Elia leaped a few seconds after him, but water from a pool to one side leaped into the air and formed a glittering slide for her to descend upon.
“Show-off,” Gribly grumbled at her, but he was smiling and saw she knew he didn’t mean it.
“There!” she called, pointing ahead. “There’s only one part of the fortress left standing!”
“By Halla,” Gribly murmured, then a grin split his face. “It’s the Shrine!”
The Shrine’s roof had collapsed, but two of its four towers and most of the ice-stone and soft-stone sculptures ringing its circular walls had survived. There was an entrance at each point of the compass; Gribly and Elia entered by the East doors, which were made of a beautiful blue-white stone and would have opened outward. They were thrown off their hinges and shattered on the wide flight of stairs that led up to the entrance.
At the top of the stairs the two young Striders passed under a tall arch and came into the bleak interior of the Reethe Shrine. Lauro was there to greet them, along with the only remaining host of Reethe warriors still resisting the Demon’s attack.
“Stay your attack, Karmidigan,” he advised the gruff-looking nymph beside him. “These are the companions of whom I spoke. They may be our only hope of defeating the Sea Demon.”
Gribly noticed instantly the change in Lauro’s tone and demeanor. He was cold and noble again. Blast. All that progress gone to waste. Unless… Lauro nodded ever so slightly, spreading his hands to keep back the horde of nymphs that clustered behind him with pikes and axes at the ready. Ah. He’s pulling rank on these people. They respect his strength. Smart move.
The prince turned to the warrior beside him, grunting something about ‘gear’ and ‘position.’ The nymph seemed to be a ringleader among the Reethe: he nodded and began issuing orders to his soldiers. Gribly found himself and Elia surrounded and helped speedily down into the Shrine and behind the protection of a large pile of snowy boulders. Only then did it occur to him how utterly exhausted he was.
“Let’s get you ready to fight,” Lauro said. His face almost smiled, but not quite. “While Karmidigan and his men find appropriate adornment for you, I will tell you their story. You’ll most certainly want to hear this...”
~
The elusive figure of the Pit Strider was haunting Gribly’s life. According to Lauro, the hooded man had arrived at the Reethe city a day before, demanding an audience with Varstis, the city’s Raitharch, or Snow-King.
“Mythigrad is a proud city. We are a proud people,” Karmidigan interjected. “But even we were unsure of this stranger. He had a Dark Power, but he was weak and weary. The Raitharch is a compassionate man, but he is not a warrior. He allowed the Black Man an audience, and it was his undoing. I was not there, or I could have stopped it.”
What exactly the Karmidigan thought he could have stopped was unclear. Lauro explained what the Frost Strider had told him as well as he could: that the Pit Strider had made outrageous demands of the Raitharch. He had claimed to have lost the trail of several desperate criminals, sorcerers who pretended to be ordinary Striders.
“It seems that when the Raitharch wouldn’t agree to detain us if we came,” Lauro went on, “The Pit Strider threatened to summon a Sea Demon. The Raitharch laughed in his face, so the Pit Strider attacked him. Karmidigan tells me it was a brief, violent struggle. The Raitharch didn’t die, but he’s wounded badly. The city was in an uproar when it found out. The Pit Strider escaped on some sort of flying steed.”
“Like the one you saw?”
“Exactly like. Anyway, today the bloody Sea Demon itself appeared, hours before we got here, and started smashing everything it could find. The thing’s blasted huge, if Karmidigan tells me right.”
“He does,” Elia grimaced, “We saw some of its tracks on the way here.”
“In any case, it suddenly stopped attacking just under an hour ago: right about when we arrived. The smoke-shroud that follows it around is still here, but other than the occasional earthquake there’s been no sign of the Sea Demon.”
“Wait…” Gribly interrupted, “Sea Demon? Is that somehow different than an Ice Demon? I thought that’s what it was.”
Lauro looked confused. “I’m not sure.”
“I can explain,” Elia said. “My people have more knowledge about the devils of the sea than most. I should have figured it out before now, actually. Sea Demons are just Ice Demons or Foam Demons from the bay or deep ocean that are bigger than normal. Since the monsters don’t die of old age, they just keep growing until they’re killed. The longer a Demon lives, the bigger and stronger it gets. The oldest can control the whole sea, not just ice or water. That’s why they’re called Sea Demons.”
“Um… what?”
“Big devils live on ice and waves. Bigger devils live in the sea. This one’s bigger than bigger. Got it?”
“I think so,” Gribly said. “At least enough to know how horribly dead we’re going to be when this thing attacks again. What confuses me is why it doesn’t just crush us all right now. It seemed pretty powerful when it talked to me.”
“It spoke to you?” exclaimed Karmidigan in surprise. “But… but Demons do not speak! Unless… unless you are…”
“A prophet, maybe?” Gribly saw in the nymph’s face that he was right. “Yeah. That’s what they all keep telling me.”
He fidgeted uncomfortably in the warm skins Karmidigan’s men had brought him. All the Reethe who’d heard him were all staring, so he quickly became interested in the subtle makeup of the suit: slick trousers and coat with matching boots, comfortable without restricting movement. Lauro was clad in the same manner, and Elia had been given a light hooded cloak that went over her dress. She barely seemed to mind the cold.
“I… I am honored to meet one such as you, Prophet Gribly,” said Karmidig
an, bowing low. Lauro and Elia looked shocked when all the nearby Reethe imitated their captain.
“Oh please,” Gribly snorted, “I’m not a prophet. I don’t have visions or anything, I’m just a…” but he had had visions, hadn’t he? Suddenly he wasn’t so sure he even knew who he was. Karmidigan looked up from his bow, confused.
Then the Sea Demon attacked.
Chapter Thirteen: Hellthunder
The first tremor threw Lauro flat on his face before popping him upright and flipping him on his back like grease beads on a hot pan. How many times will this happen to me? The prince struggled to his feet and stumbled first right, then left, then in a circle as the snow-laden ground heaved beneath him. All around him, his friends and the Reethe warriors were faring little better, tumbling over themselves and falling as if they had no bones in their legs.
Winter Warrior (Song of the Aura, Book Two) Page 10