A little farther south, Slee located the one it sought. The Karigan sat before a fire with another woman. Others kept watch nearby, but they were of no concern. She smelled of blood and wounds, and a darkness surrounded her. The guards carried the accursed steel, but she did not. She was weak. Slee was pleased.
The air felt potent, crackled with energy. Slee collected itself as it prepared to take revenge. Hurting the Karigan would hurt the Zachary in a most pleasing way. Slee prepared to descend. It would snatch the Karigan, torture her, turn the snow beneath her red. Slee imagined the Zachary’s anguish with much anticipation. It began to drift down, but the atmosphere abruptly changed, and Slee paused. The air currents of the north carried to it a foulness that it could not ignore, a sensation of great impending horror.
Down below, its prey stood. Slee roiled into itself when it sensed a god-being approaching her. The Karigan, it now saw, served the gods, and Slee would not interfere. Doing so would only end badly. So it would wait and observe, investigate the foulness on the air. After the Karigan had attended to her duty for the gods would be soon enough for Slee to satisfy its thirst for revenge.
THE DEATH GOD’S OWN
Karigan was up and down in an attempt to ease her back. She’d taken to leaning on the bonewood to steady herself. The muscles in her back were just too injured, and she was not accustomed to being up and about for such a long stretch. Estral, she observed, tried to write by the fire, but mostly she stared into the flames. Connly periodically paced out to check on their guards.
“Don’t you think you should go lie down?” Estral asked.
Karigan was exhausted. She knew she should, but how could she? “Maybe in a little while.”
It was past midnight, and it would be hours before they had any word of the assault on the Lone Forest. The night was deceptively quiet but for the restive moan of the wind. She thrust her hands into her pockets against the cold. Yes, she should try to sleep, but she knew anxiety would leave her unable to even close her eyes.
Clouds had moved across the field of stars like a low, oppressive ceiling. It reminded her of winter, the night gravid with uncertainty. More than that, the world felt thin, as though it chafed against others, other layers. Ghostly presences stepped through the thin places to make themselves known.
It began to snow.
Estral shut her book with a thump and hastily slipped it into its oilskin cover. “I can’t believe it’s snowing.”
Snowflakes tapped on Karigan’s shoulders like a drumbeat, lightly at first, then harder, thicker.
“This is just what they need for battle,” Estral said, her voice despairing.
Karigan put her hand out and caught snowflakes on her palm. The flurries showered down harder and harder, walling them off, confining them to the glow and hiss of their fire. Did she hear voices in the wind?
Her gaze was drawn across the campsite as she detected the approach of . . . She peered through the snow. A large dark shape advanced through the curtain of white, becoming darker and blacker as it neared them. Estral was oblivious to it, and Karigan said nothing, just waited, for a knowing came upon her. She knew who sought her as though she’d been expecting him all along. The shape solidified into a horse as she knew it would, an impossible black like a horse-shaped hole to the heavens. No snow alighted on him. He halted before her and gazed at her from beneath his long forelock. Firelight did not touch his liquid black eyes.
“Karigan?” Estral said. “What do you see?”
Death and gods and duty, she thought.
Salvistar, god-being, the harbinger of strife and battle, and steed of the death god, blew gently through his nostrils, and there was memory. Memory of herself as Westrion’s avatar.
“You need me,” she murmured. She could not demur. Westrion had already laid his claim on her.
“Who are you talking to?” Estral asked.
Karigan did not acknowledge her. “I cannot ride,” she told the stallion. “I am injured, weak.”
Ride, Green Rider, breathy ghost voices told her. Ride.
With the knowing that had come upon her, she understood she would not feel the pain, the weakness, the exhaustion while she worked on Westrion’s behalf. She knew his steed would not have come to her without great need. It was her duty as avatar. He knelt before her.
Ride, ride, ride, came the ghost voices.
Karigan sat upon Salvistar’s back. By the time he rose, she was armored in star steel, a winged helm upon her head. She held a shining lance and a shield with the device of the crescent moon glowing in an ethereal pearlescence. She was cradled in a war horse’s saddle, and though a chafron of star steel protected his face, he wore no bridle, for no bit would he tolerate.
“Karigan!” Estral cried, but her voice was lost upon the wind as Salvistar turned on his haunches and sprang into the shroud of snow.
“Karigan, what do you see?” Estral asked.
Her friend stared intently into space, standing stock still, snow crowned on her head and blanketed her shoulders.
“You need me,” Karigan murmured to someone whom Estral could not see.
What in damnation? “Who are you talking to?” Estral demanded.
“I cannot ride,” Karigan said. “I am injured, weak.”
And hallucinating? Estral stood, took a step forward, but suddenly Karigan was gone and in her place was a knight clad in gleaming armor, sitting atop an astonishing horse. Estral rubbed her eyes to make sure she was not the one hallucinating.
“Karigan?” she whispered.
The stallion pawed the ground with a massive hoof. He gazed at her, and she knew she’d met death.
“Karigan!” she cried, but then they were gone.
Estral dropped to her knees, and snow soaked through her trousers. “Oh, gods, oh, gods . . .”
Connly dashed into the campsite, his hair gone gray with the snow. “Lady Estral, what is it?”
“Karigan. She’s gone.”
“What? What do you mean she’s gone?”
“I—she . . .” Estral’s memory of a conversation with Enver came back to her. Karigan had inhaled the spirits of the dead from the pyre they’d burned at the old lumber camp. He had explained that because of Karigan’s ability to step across the thresholds of other worlds, she was able to communicate with the dead, and that there was an entity that acted through her. “Who is this entity?” Estral had asked. “Your god of death,” he replied. It had been too incredible to believe, but Estral had seen her command the ghosts of the lumber camp. There was so much about her friend she did not understand, and now this, the truth before her, incredible or not.
She rose and crossed over to where she’d last seen Karigan standing. Already her footprints were filling in with snow. Estral reached down and picked up Karigan’s bonewood staff. It was like she had vanished from all existence.
Connly stood beside her and touched her arm. “Lady Estral, what do you mean she is gone?”
“She is the death god’s own.”
STELLAR FIRE
The landscape blurred by as the stallion ran like an arrow driving through the falling snow. In a leap, they were across the rocky plain and into the woods, his hoofbeats silent upon the ground. New spirits rose from fresh corpses along the way, and she might have paused to aid them on their journey beyond the living world, but as avatar, she knew the Aeon Iire was broken and that there was no time to waste.
The stallion flew through the woods. Mundane concerns of everyday existence, of who she was and what her life meant, were as nothing. She was only the avatar, Westrion’s servant. The rest did not matter and remained some forgotten memory.
Deeper into the forest were more corpses and more spirits. Some swung swords as though they were still in the midst of combat and did not realize they were dead. The number of corpses half-buried in the snow increased as they went on. To the
avatar, it did not matter which side the spirits had fought on, or why they fought, or even that they had died. The matters of the living were of no interest. However, the darkness that threatened the dead—their corpses and their souls—did.
The avatar encountered the first of the escaped hovering over corpses of those who looked to have been fleeing. The dark spirits balked at her arrival, and the stallion trampled them. There were many more throughout the woods. Some attacked, but she repelled them with her shield or ran them through with her lance.
“Come,” she called to them. “You must return to your prison.”
The dark ones, whether winged, scaled, or incorporeal, resisted, but hers was the voice of command overlain by that of a god, and she drew them along with her, willing or not.
She arrived at the edge of the forest where there was a clearing around the Ifel Aeon, collecting more of the demons as she went. The clearing was full of the living combating the dark spirits, and they were losing badly.
Zachary’s inner fire turned to desperation. He screamed at his soldiers to hold their ground, to focus on killing the entities. He raised his sword, now coated in black gore, to slay a scaled creature, when there was a break in the onslaught, an easing. He sensed the creatures recoiling, like an inhalation.
The snowfall changed course again, away from another who came from the woods. He blinked sweat or blood from his eyes in an attempt to see clearly. There was nothing, but something . . . The demons scattered before it.
Again the world slowed, individual snowflakes of intricate design and prismatic dimension hovering in space. For a moment that stretched infinitely, everything else vanished from existence except for the snow and an armored figure on a magnificent stallion. The stallion was black, but not the black coal of the burning hells that were the demons. No, the stallion encompassed the cosmos, the brilliant light of stars, the amorphous tints of celestial clouds and colorful planetary bodies. Like his rider, he was armored, a chafron upon his face. His mane and tail flowed in no natural breeze, and snow did not touch him.
The knight sat erect, slender, the form of a woman, he thought. The armor was some strange steel he’d never seen before, and its surface rippled in his vision. She held a lance, which changed into a greatsword in her hands. She dispatched demon beings in effortless, sweeping blows. The stallion reared to crush others under its front hooves. With one hand she seemed to beckon, command, the rest of the entities as they trailed reluctantly behind, as if caught in some invisible net.
Westrion’s avatar, Zachary thought. She had come, and she was saving them. Then he remembered that it was what Grandmother wanted. Grandmother intended to trap the avatar. He must warn her.
His movements, however, were sluggish as if he were mired in deep mud. He was barely able to take a single step forward. He tried to shout his warning, but she had vanished. He had blinked and she was just gone. Battle surged and he was once more aware of all those around him. They were still hacking and stabbing at demon creatures, but there were fewer now and they appeared to be drawing away.
The avatar saw that one of the living stood out from all the others. A bright flame, was he, like stellar fire. He stared back at her, and some distant memory that came from the part of her that was human sparked recognition. The flame of him warmed her. And he could see her? Not many could.
She changed her lance into a greatsword and continued on her mission to end the invasion of the dark ones, the image of the stellar fire lingering pleasantly in her mind.
• • •
She rode the stallion toward the entrance of the passage that led to the chamber of the Aeon Iire. An old woman concealed herself nearby, behind a rock, shielded by etherea to protect herself from the dark ones. It was plain she could not see the avatar. She was the one who had broken the iire, the avatar knew, but the star steel sword was not for touching the living, and so she rode on.
The dark ones tried to disgorge themselves from the passage into the open, but the avatar raised her shield and pushed them back. Claws scrabbled at her armor. The ones she had dragged along with her continued to resist, but they could not escape.
“You will return to the deep,” she commanded, and her sword’s blade easily cut through a clump of them. Their bodies leaked black rot and steamed in the snow.
Some retreated, others attacked. She cleaved into them, the stallion trampling those before him, and slowly they forced their way into the torchlit passage. Healing the iire and stemming the tide of the dark was the only way to halt their invasion.
More claws scraped at her. Some dripped with an acidic venom on her. Her armor shielded her, but she felt the protections of it straining. As they made their way, she left mounds of their corpses behind her.
At last they reached the chamber and she dismounted, for the chamber held some barrier to the stallion. She could not feel it, she did not know what it was, but he knew and would go no farther. Within, a group of the living stood chained together. Many others were dead. She swept away the dark ones that threatened those still alive and feasted on the corpses. She ignored the screams and sobs of the living and went to the iire. It had been cracked and twisted and torn. Great magic had been used in its mutilation.
Dark ones swarmed at the breach trying to gain freedom, but she pushed them back, commanded those she had pulled in with her to return to the hell they had crawled out of. She slew those who disobeyed; then she touched the tip of the sword to the iire.
“Steel of the stars, the fire of Belasser, heal. Be whole.”
The torn edges of the iire uncurled with fluid ease. Burred edges joined one another, melded together until the iire was once more whole and uncorrupted, and gleamed with renewed strength. She brought the protections back to life until they flowed across the steel with vigor. The dark ones howled and shrieked in frustration from their prison.
The avatar had cleansed the living realm of the dark ones, and the iire would not be easily broken again. She turned at the stallion’s sharp whinny of warning. Had she missed something?
Living, burning, constricting tendrils of magic woven into a net fell from above and trapped her.
AUREAS SLEE
Slee had watched the dread denizens of the hells issuing out of the maw of a hill, and streaming among the mortals in their battle. It marked the Zachary’s presence, and Slee found itself impressed by his prowess against human enemies and dark ones alike. Slee would get back to the Zachary later, providing he survived the onslaught, for Slee scented magic that carried a familiar tang that it could not ignore.
The avatar, it found, had entered the passage from which the dark ones had emanated, leaving a trail of carnage behind her. A mortal who had hidden herself near the entrance appeared and took mincing steps down the passage. Slee knew her, knew her scent of magic. This was the necromancer that had forced Slee from its domain, had roused it from its slumber. This wielder of magic had brought great woe upon Slee. Slee would make this person suffer for its many wounds and all it had lost—its cave palace, its collections, its pets.
Slee drifted quickly down the passage in pursuit of the necromancer, the necromancer who had summoned it and forced it to serve, the source of its great misery.
DARK ANGEL
The avatar had not been visible to Grandmother, but when the outpouring of the dark ones stopped, and in fact reversed, she knew it could only be the avatar’s work. She’d remained safe within her magical shielding, or perhaps the bloodshed of battle had proven more alluring to the ravening dead than one boney old woman. In any case, she’d been left alone, and now she abandoned her hiding place and entered the passageway.
She stepped carefully among the splattered remains of the dark ones the avatar had left in her wake. Suppurating flesh and gelatinous entrails lay in thick puddles of black blood that boiled and hissed, and produced a caustic steam that burned her nostrils and made her eyes water. She hastened her step.
Near the entrance to the chamber, she detected an indistinct blur of motion, an otherworldly presence that worried back and forth. Salvistar, she thought, well pleased. There were the barely perceived hoofbeats, the ripple upon the air like a horse tossing its head in agitation, the angry squeal of a stallion. Her spell had succeeded in holding him in check.
As she approached, her perception of motion at the chamber’s mouth ceased. Did the stallion watch her?
“I know you are there,” she told him. “What is wrong? Is your avatar in trouble?”
A distant whinny of rage.
She clucked her tongue at him. “You do not frighten me, Salvistar. You cannot hurt me, for I honor the one true God. You are just an aberration.”
She continued past him and entered the chamber as erratic air currents—not those of the passage, but those coming from the heavens—buffeted her, though they could do her no harm. The chamber was strewn with more destroyed demons. More than half the slaves, she observed, were dead, the others wounded and moaning. She caught those details in swift glimpses, for her attention was only for the figure kneeling in the center of the chamber beside the seal. Unlike the stallion, her spells had rendered the avatar visible, or mostly visible. She faded in and out, was translucent on the edges.
Grandmother was elated. Her great work draped and entangled the avatar like a net. It writhed across the armor, the knots seeking to burrow into it, and sparks flew where the knots fell across symbols of protection. The avatar struggled to throw the net off her, but the strands only shrank and tightened.
Grandmother stood before the avatar, almost giddy with anticipation. “I have you,” she said. “You may be favored by one of your gods, but you are only human.”
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