Circle of Reign

by Jacob Cooper

  I should have been here.

  Rushing to Kerr’s side, he hoped against hope to be wrong in what he saw, to change the reality so plainly before him. But it did not change and his rage started to rise to the surface.

  He moved to place his hand on Thannuel’s chest, to cover his wound, but his hand began to quiver and he retracted it.

  “You can’t leave,” he pleaded softly. “Not yet, not now.” His head pulsed with pain. “Where are they?” he asked aloud, knowing there was no answer. “Who did this?” He was so distracted that he did not feel the arrival of other hold guards, and then of Lady Kerr herself.

  “No!” Moira Kerr’s shrill cry sounded in the night. “No, no, oh no!” She was hysterical. “Thannuel, please! Thannuel, no!”

  Aiden’s training took over as he regained himself and drew his steel.

  “Get her out of here!” he commanded the other guards. Aiden was not being cruel, but protective. His duties were to House Kerr. Lord Kerr was dead and Reign still missing, maybe worse. This could be a prelude to a larger plot. His focus turned to protecting those who still lived, and there was no telling if danger was still present.

  He hoped it was.

  Where was the enemy? Where had they fled? He was tense and looking for a fight, for some target upon which to release his anger.

  Calm yourself, Blasted Night!

  The pulsing in his ears from his blood pumping hot and fast had masked the heavy footfall he had been feeling but too distracted to separate in his mind. He caught it now. A horse at full gallop running south and another’s stride, a human, heading east. The second was moving heavier and faster than the horse, faster than a wood-dweller.

  Aiden surmised the horse had no rider by the animal’s stride, its footfall lighter than it would normally be otherwise. He ignored it and returned his focus east. Noticing a Triarch leafling in Lord Kerr’s hand, under his sword’s hilt, he reached down and retrieved it. It would increase his sensitivity. He started to stand back up, but hesitated, fixing his sight on Thannuel’s sword. He dared not touch such a valuable possession. A small fortune, more krenshell than Aiden had seen in his entire life, was the cost to construct such a blade. The mastery of skill to mold the ore from the Jarwyn mines into such a refined state was held by very few. Thannuel would have paid dearly for its creation. No, he dared not touch it.

  The guards were struggling with Moira, trying to get her back to the hold and secure her. The entire hold would be locked down and placed on high alert.

  She screamed at the guards. “Let me go! Release me!”

  Aiden looked up and saw that she was not crazed but determined. She had seen him hesitating and obviously could tell what he was thinking.

  She inhaled deeply and more calmly said, “Release me. Now.” The guards looked at Master Aiden for direction. He nodded. Lady Kerr came to Thannuel’s right side, opposite Aiden, and took the sword from her dead husband’s limp hand. Rigor mortis had not yet set in. The lines in her forehead cut deep motes of pain in her skin, conveying more than words could of her internal feelings. Holding the weapon by its hilt, Moira extended it to Aiden and said, “Go. This sword’s duty is not done tonight. Take it. Go.”

  Aiden resisted for only a moment.

  “Go,” she insisted.

  He sheathed his own blade, nodded and said gravely, “Aye, my Lady.” Taking the weapon forged of Jarwynian steel, he arose and hefted it. The sword felt lighter and more lethal than any other he had ever held, much more so than his own blade on his hip. The rage swelled larger within him. With every second, the assassin was gaining valuable distance. The hurried sprint he felt through the ground was amplified by the Triarch leafling he held. He did not know if he could catch this enigma, but he was going to try. He thought he heard a faint, low humming of some create but it faded. He dismissed this; time was fleeting.

  With grim determination he withdrew his own sword and handed it to Moira, then sheathed Thannuel’s sword.

  “All of you stay here.”

  Aiden ran. Fiercely ran. The rain slammed against his face and felt like sleet, such was his velocity, as if a hurricane was blowing frozen rain horizontally. The wood-dweller guard, however, was the storm itself as he bolted through the forest. It was he who blew into the rain. He abandoned all concern for sure footing and pressed himself forward. When his muscles burned in protest, he canceled the feeling. No, not canceled, but rejected it? He felt it leave him. Almost sucked out of him. Physically extracted. A feeling came into him like a wave of power surging through him, renewing his energy, as if he were borrowing strength. It was strange but quickening and he tried not to fixate upon it, but to rather just use it.

  Friction, he recalled. Was he actually capturing it? Recycling it? The lessons Thannuel had tried to teach him were mostly lost on him, seeming so esoteric. He was never able to experience what Thannuel described. But now, he did feel something.

  The man was inexplicably fast. It was inhuman, unlike anything Aiden had ever before sensed or encountered. Faster! he inwardly chided himself, but no matter how much he coaxed himself or how determined he remained, the man was still widening his lead.

  Opting for a higher path, Aiden jumped and bounced off one tree, caroming into another, repeating the move and propelling himself higher each time until he crested the treetops and began to launch himself great distances, from one treetop to the next. He hoped his new vantage point would give him at least a glimpse of his quarry once the man broke free from the forest’s covering. Aiden realized he was not going to catch this perpetrator within the forest and would have to take his chances on the open fields of the rolling hills that marked the border of the Eastern Province.

  He gained upon the man, making up ground as he glided through the air. Sensing that he would shortly come face to face with this foe, he drew his sword. No, Lord Kerr’s sword. He felt a slight vibration coursing through the sword like a current and thought perhaps it was the vibration lingering from the force with which he drew the blade from the scabbard, but then he again caught the sound of a low hum that he swore was emanating from the blade itself.

  He barely touched the apex of each tree before launching himself forward again, the length of dozens of men each time. At the eastern most part of the forest’s edge he landed at the top of a giant, thick Ayzish tree that stood like a sentinel at the forest’s entrance. Over one hundred paces below him, the enemy darted forth from the forest as a bolt shot from a crossbow. Against belief, Aiden felt the gait of his prey increase as he broke free from the forest into open ground. Notwithstanding the rain marring the amber moonlight of the second moon, the wood-dweller thought he saw—yes he did see it. The man he was chasing, clad in a thick garment of some kind that revealed nothing underneath, was carrying another man over a shoulder. The man being carried was gnarled, twisted, and broken. Obviously dead. He could not make out any other details.

  Backing up roughly twenty paces from the edge of the trees, he began a dash back toward the edge. Right before he hurled himself forward into the open night air, he felt another surge of strength tear through him, enhancing his jump’s height and distance. The blessing turned to a curse, however, as Aiden lost control sailing through the air and began to tumble wildly. Just before the ground met him, he righted himself to at least land on his hands and feet. The velocity of the fall was too great and he felt both his shoulders rip free from their sockets as he hit the wet grass that might as well have been a boulder. The pain was incredible, sapping his strength. He lay on the wet ground, grimacing with discomfort and heaving for breath, trying to calm himself. He felt the heavy footfall become fainter as he drifted to unconsciousness with the realization that he had failed in his duty so completely, a crushing weight upon his chest.

  THREE

  Reign

  Day 18 of 4th Dimming 406 A.U.

  REIGN’S HEART SHOULD HAVE BEEN RACING, but it was calm as a currentless stream. She sat soundless and perfectly still. The taste of wet air
filled her mouth as she breathed slow and steady. Emotion found no purchase within her and disbelief muted any normal feeling that might have been conjured up from deep inside, holding it at bay.

  How can I feel absolutely nothing? It was easy, she knew, when your heart had been emotionally petrified. Not even the haunting screams of her mother reverberating within the small cavity of the Triarch tree she hid within affected her.

  “No! Thannuel, no!” she heard her mother scream, but the sound was dampened, as if she were underwater. The vibrations of others searching through the forest clamored amongst her senses. Hold guards shouted, hounds barked and howled, but she barely registered them. The man—the scarred monster that had touched her briefly—now ran east at the pulse of a stampede. How could one man’s run sound so thunderous? In one part of her mind that still registered reality, she felt Master Aiden in pursuit at the treetops. Her shoulder tingled slightly where the monster had touched her, the only sensation she consciously recognized besides occasional orange flickers of light that interrupted the scene of black night before her; but even these were translucent at best, appearing as smeared images through beveled glass. The night was not just black—it was cruel. It had taken her father and left her alone and scared, seemingly shackled and forced to watch her world shatter before her.

  But he’s too strong to die! she reasoned with herself. It’s a trick!

  She could not believe, could not accept, that her father, the Lord of the West, had been defeated. It was impossible.

  Why won’t you get up? Please! Get up!

  “I’ll always be here,” she remembered him saying as he held her. She had believed him. He had never lied.

  “You have nothing to fear,” he would tell her after a nightmare. “All Darkness fears the Light. I will never leave you—not until you are ready for this world.”

  He’ll come back for me. I just need to wait. He’ll come back. He’ll come back. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. He’s not dead. Not dead. Can’t be. Cannot be dead. He wouldn’t leave me. He wouldn’t leave. Won’t leave me. Just wait. You’ll see, just wait.

  But he did leave her—long before she was ready. And she knew now there were things to fear. These thoughts in her mind battled the part of her heart that still believed, still had faith, that her father would save her.

  He promised! He wouldn’t lie…wouldn’t leave—

  The reality of what she had witnessed could not be expunged from her mind, slamming against all the certainties she held so firmly in her life like a massive flaming battering ram against the doors to her heart.

  He’s too strong! He won’t leave me! He will come back and—

  The doors of her heart splintered, then cracked. The next blow from the emotional battering ram destroyed them, unable to withstand the blows from what she knew but could not accept. As the cruel reality flooded through her, forcing her to face a reality that was opposite of what she always believed—that she was safe upon the foundation of her father’s perceived immortality, that foundation now crumbling—Reign could do only one thing in defense. She galvanized her heart against the storm raging inside her, hardening to an emotionally fallow state that denied place to any emotion, much like the trees she had witnessed earlier. Gray. Cold. Dead.

  Through a dark translucent gaze, she saw Hedron peer in to where she lay recessed. Torchlight came through the opening and illuminated her twin brother’s face. His hair was even more auburn in the amber glow of the second moon, auburn like her father’s. The light danced through it as the wind gently teased it. She looked away.

  Hedron found her hidden deep in the cavity of a tree not far from where his father lay slain in the mud and rain. He had placed his palm flush against the same Triarch she was secluded within before calling out both vocally and through the forest to alert the others who were searching. He had never successfully sent out a message through the forest, though he knew it was possible. He had seen his father do it.

  I have to try.

  But when his hand made the connection in the way he had been taught, he was immediately seized by a strong voice that he felt in his mind.

  No, you must not.

  The boy recoiled, startled. The voice was calm, full, but stern.

  Do not reveal her.

  Hedron pulled back his hand from the bark of the Triarch and looked back to Reign, puzzled.

  “Did you hear that?” Reign didn’t answer, but remained still as stone, staring out into the darkness but seemingly focusing on nothing. Hedron looked around to try and discover the source of the voice. A few of the hold guards were within sight, dogs were heard howling in the distance. At his periphery he saw the body of his father, yet to be moved. He would not cast a full gaze upon it. He was still numb to the events happening and didn’t want to force his mind into dealing with them squarely just yet.

  Extending his palm again to the bark of the Triarch, Hedron established the connection once more.

  For her life’s sake, you must not reveal her.

  He did not pull away this time but kept his hand firmly pressed. He felt much of the activity in the forest, but cast it aside and tried desperately to hear more of this voice, to feel it again. Nothing came. After many long moments with no further communication, Hedron broke the connection. Now it was Hedron who wore an almost expressionless gaze as he considered this experience. Trees did not actually speak, or so he had been taught. They were a channel for sensing things with increased sensitivity and across increased distances, but that was all. Wasn’t it? He could not consider this now and finally came to a decision.

  “Stay here,” he whispered to Reign. “I’ll return as soon as I can. Do not make a sound.” His sister did not respond but he knew she understood.

  And then he was gone, and the living nightmare eventually shifted again, as all dreams. Daylight broke and with it came the sounds of life around her, a jarring juxtaposition to the previous night’s episode. The joy of it should have mocked her loss, angering her, but Reign was emotionally immovable, placid as the Glaciers of Gonfrey.

  Hedron was there eventually again, in her waking nightmare, calling her name, but she did not respond. He looked helpless and lost by her unresponsive state. When he reached forth and touched her hand, Reign recoiled as if she had just been bitten. Hedron fell back and she saw the surprise on his face, almost hurt. A satchel was placed inside the tree next to Reign’s feet and then her brother was gone again. She did not remember when he had actually left.

  When night was again falling, Reign’s need for nourishment finally took hold of her and roused her from her fugue-like state. For the first time in more than a day, she took in what her eyes saw through the opening. It was like a portal to a different world. Nothing but the forest before her. Trees, soil, rocks, a hollow roughly a stone’s cast from her. The body of her father was gone, just as he was. Why then did she still feel him? She shuddered from the sensation, revolted by it.

  It’s only in my mind, she convinced herself and shook her head as if to dislodge the feeling.

  Her stomach growled and twisted inside her. A ravenous feeling took over as the pain lanced through her abdomen. It was almost like lightning.

  Hedron, she recalled. The satchel.

  She tore open the leather pouch and found a quarter loaf of honey acorn bread wrapped in a small cloth. Three strips of dried meat and an apricot were also present and a short blade. She recognized the knife as belonging to one of the hold servants.

  Reign ripped free a piece of meat and shoved it into her mouth. Its savory, salty taste made her salivate greedily and she sucked the flavor from the parcel before chewing and swallowing it. More meat and then a fist of bread followed. She saved the apricot for last. Its sweet and tender flesh eked juices as she bit into it. In less than three bites, nothing but the pit remained. This she also put into her mouth to suck all the remaining fruit from, working it from side to side in her mouth with her tongue.

  With her hunger sated, she gradually a
llowed herself to fall asleep, cradling into a ball. As consciousness fled, she prayed the Ancient Heavens would keep all dreams from her and let her forget. Everything, if possible, but at least her father and the monster.

  She slept.

  When she awoke the next day, a new satchel was at her side with a small piece of parchment. Her brother’s handwriting was scrawled on it.

  I’ll be back tonight and sneak you in.

  The thought of returning to the hold was foreign to Reign. Strange that it seemed so, she knew, but things were completely different now. This tree she sheltered within had protected her. Somehow the hooded man was not able to find her here after killing—no, don’t think of him. Though Aiden had approached the scene at speed, there had been plenty of time for the monster to easily drag her from this wooden cave and finish her; but he could not find her though she sat merely paces from him—completely vulnerable and helpless. How the man could sightlessly track her as two nights past still sent ice through her limbs. But, sequestered in this Triarch tree, the beastly figure somehow missed her.

  This is my hold now, she told herself.

  She opened the satchel and again consumed the food her brother had supplied. Her actions seemed contrived as she went through the motions, her mind and heart numb. She had not shed a tear for her father, but how could she?

  He left me! she screamed in her mind and suddenly became nauseous at the thought of her father. Every memory that came to her of him caused her stomach to contract. She spit out the bolus of food she had been chewing without trying to swallow it for fear of retching as it went down.