Reaping the Aurora

by Joshua Palmatier

  When it surged to life again, Morrell snagged it and held on tight, allowing herself to merge completely with Hanter’s body. She gasped at the agony, but flooded the wound with the aurora, let it suffuse her skin, sink deeper into the tissue, into muscle, into bone. The firefly in her grasp flickered and she grappled with it, drew it closer, stared into its yellow-green vibrancy.

  Emotions and images washed through her, a scattering of disjointed, intense memories: profound grief as she gathered her eight-year-old son’s pale body up into her arms and clutched him to her chest, her wife’s hands resting lightly on her hunched shoulders, the healer standing awkwardly to one side; a wild burst of laughter exploding from her gut as she danced madly with a beautiful young girl with flaxen hair, the world beyond a blur of music and a smear of color; her heart thundering through her entire body with raw panic as she raced through the streets of Erenthrall, her wife’s hand clenched tight in her own, the distortion an ear-piercing shriek overhead, threatening to quicken, men and women screaming to either side as the entire world shuddered around them.

  The memories began to die, fading in clarity, in focus. The firefly began to die. Morrell reached for it, even as she began healing Hanter’s wounds, starting with the heart. But as soon as she drew on the essence of the aurora, as soon as the heart began to knit back together, the firefly began fading even faster. She could no longer hold it close. The memories leached from her, stretching and pulling free with painful snaps.

  Before she’d even begun, the firefly sputtered out.

  A darkness began to close in, smothering, implacable, a darkness she remembered from healing Cory when his leg was trapped beneath the boulder in the caves at the Hollow. His foot had begun to die, the blood flow cut off.

  That darkness began to suffuse Hanter’s body—her body. She was still entangled in it, down to her core.

  She lurched away, the darkness dragging at her, pulling her down, sinking into her own flesh. Someone was bellowing at the top of their lungs, but she could barely hear them. With the darkness came ice, a frisson of cold that lacerated her muscles with a delectable, shivering pain before all sensation ended. Part of her leaned into that pain, even as she struggled to free herself.

  Then hands gripped her shoulders and yanked her backward, her fingers ripping away from Hanter’s face, her essence sucked up and out of Hanter’s body like boots from thick mud. Boskell threw her onto her back, straddled her. Lightning flared and thunder growled, rain lashing down from the sky. Boskell slapped her. But she couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel anything. All sensation—dead. She’d brought death with her. Its ice bit into her, seeped deeper as Boskell hit her again.

  She could let it claim her. Its touch wasn’t unpleasant. An aching pain, followed by exquisite numbness.

  But then it touched her lungs and her breathing hitched. With effort, she reached for the aurora. It answered as swiftly as it had for Hanter, slammed into her with a heated fire to counter the ice. Boskell barked a curse and leaped off her as it enfolded her in shimmering light. Morrell arched her back as the fire seared the ice from her, then collapsed back to the soaked grass. The auroral lights faded.

  She reached up to touch her face. “I can feel the rain again.”

  Drayden appeared. “Are you all right?” he growled. He searched her from head to foot, nostrils flared as if he could scent death, grunting with each exhale.

  Morrell sat up. “I couldn’t save him.” She sucked in a steadying breath, recalled what Freesia had said about how healing drained the healer and the victim alike. “I think . . . I think my attempt to heal him actually killed him.”

  “He would never have survived the wound,” Boskell said.

  From the shadows of the storm, Okata arrived with the horses and Sesali, her arm cradled at her side. “We must leave. Now. This was not a scouting party, it was a patrol. There’s a Gorrani encampment close by. The patrol will be missed.”

  Drayden’s hand clenched protectively on Morrell’s arm. “She’s not recovered yet.”

  “Can you ride?” Boskell asked.

  “I can.”

  “Then let’s ride.”

  Drayden snorted in disapproval, but Morrell ignored him. “What about Hanter? We can’t just leave him here, out in the open!”

  “We don’t have a choice. The Gorrani are too close.”

  “At least let me try to heal Sesali’s arm first.”

  Boskell hesitated, then nodded.

  Sesali hissed as Morrell gripped her arm, the guardsman’s blood slick beneath Morrell’s fingers, but when she tried to call forth the aurora it merely spluttered. A wave of dizziness enfolded Morrell, and Drayden barked once as she began to fall, then caught her.

  “I’m sorry,” Morrell murmured, the words slurred.

  Sesali looked disappointed, but ripped her sleeve off and wound it tight around the wound. “It’s not that deep,” she said, then motioned to Boskell.

  But Morrell had connected with her enough to know she lied. She’d have to try to heal it as soon as she could.

  She tried to tell Sesali, but Drayden had already handed her off to Okata, who seated her before him in the saddle and took the reins of both his own horse and hers. Then Boskell and Sesali mounted, Sesali taking control of Hanter’s horse, and they took off into the storm.

  Morrell clung to the pommel, the world a tattered cloth of biting wind, chill rain, lightning and thunder. She couldn’t shake the sensation of ice—it clung to her skin like a shroud—nor Hanter, who she’d hardly known. She clutched the memories she’d lived to her, afraid they would slip away as the firefly had. She forced herself to experience them again and again as they rode, so she would never forget. The tears she shed were lost to the rain, but she knew she cried. Her entire body ached with the grief.

  An hour later—maybe more, time had ceased to exist for Morrell—the intensity of the storm faded and Okata slowed. The rain slackened and the winds died. The clouds tore and sunlight lanced down onto the plains.

  “What’s that?” Sesali asked, pointing.

  A short distance away, the grassland ended and shattered earth began, shards of rock jutting up into the air in all directions, some with edges as sharp as a blade, others towering overhead. It looked like a field of broken glass, except it was stone. At various places, auroral storms danced and flickered, encompassing acres of land.

  “That’s what’s left of Tumbor,” Okata said. “We’re at the outer edge of where the distortion sat.”

  Morrell stared in mute horror. There was nothing recognizable left, the landscape completely altered, unfamiliar, and utterly foreign.

  Okata didn’t slow.

  An hour later, they entered the shattered land. They had ten days left to reach the heart of Tumbor.

  Eighteen

  KARA SAT ON A BOULDER at the top of a small rise beneath the brittle stars and stared at the far northern skyline. The stars there were swallowed by a churning mass of clouds lit almost constantly by internal lightning and ethereal flares of purple-and-blue light. They made the horizon appear bruised. But brighter than even that were the Three Sisters, the three distortions over Ikanth, Severen, and Dunmara. Severen’s pulsed the brightest, the other two mere echoes. But it wasn’t its brightness that troubled Kara, it was its heartbeat.

  She chewed on her lower lip, contemplating the distortions, the maelstrom that surrounded them, and the shudders of the earth that had continued as they traveled northeast in an arc toward Erenthrall. Her palms ground into the rough stone beneath her, grit gouging into her skin. The pain was remote, her attention fixated on the Three Sisters, on the steady flash of their lights, on counting the interval between each one.

  She didn’t hear Allan’s approach until he was at the rock. She spun with a curse, lurching away before she recognized him.

  “Allan!” She pressed a hand to her chest, the sc
rapes from the stone finally registering as her hands began to burn. “You startled me.”

  “Obviously.” He waved a hand at the stone for her to sit back down, Allan settling in beside her.

  She brushed her hands together, picked a fleck of lichen from one palm with a grimace. “What are you doing up? Your watch ended hours ago.”

  “I woke during that last quake, couldn’t fall back to sleep.” He lifted his chin toward the north. “What are you watching?”

  “The Three Sisters. Their heartbeats. They’re speeding up. The one over Severen is the fastest. It’s doubled since we left the Needle. It will be the first to quicken, but it will likely trigger the others when it goes.”

  “Will it quicken before we reach Erenthrall?”

  “How much longer do we have?”

  “Eight days. We’ll reach the city tomorrow, perhaps the day after.”

  “So I could start work early.”

  “I didn’t say we’d reach the Nexus tomorrow. Once we hit the city, we’ll have to find a way to the Nexus. That won’t be easy.”

  Kara considered that in silence, then said, “I can’t tell when it will quicken. The pulse is accelerating. It might even be exponential. But it doesn’t matter whether it quickens or not before we reach the Nexus. This isn’t about one distortion, or three. This is about the entire world. We broke the world, Allan. We’ve damaged reality itself.” Tears burned her eyes, and she rubbed them with her fingers.

  Allan grabbed her hands, holding them tightly before he caught her wince. He turned them over, so he could see where she’d scraped them raw. He looked up into her eyes. “You didn’t break the world,” he said, his voice angry. “You healed the distortion over Erenthrall.”

  “Yes, I healed Erenthrall, and because of that I thought I could heal Tumbor. I risked everyone’s lives because I was too arrogant to back off when Dalton pressed me, when the Kormanley pressed me. I knew the Nexus at the Needle wasn’t strong enough! I knew the distortion over Tumbor was too large! Yet I tried to heal it anyway. And look!” She stood, pulling free of Allan’s loose grasp so she could wave to the north, to the east, to the southeast. “The Three Sisters are on the verge of quickening, the Reaches and the Steppe are covered with unnatural storms! Erenthrall has erupted into a geyser of ley! And where Tumbor used to stand, there’s nothing but auroral lights! It all started when the distortion over Tumbor collapsed. I caused it all!”

  “The Kormanley—”

  “Stop it! Just stop it! It wasn’t the Kormanley. It never was. We caused this all, Allan. Us. The Wielders, the Barons, the people in Erenthrall, everyone who demanded access to the ley lines. We all want to blame the Kormanley for the Shattering because it’s convenient, but the truth is that we all brought it upon ourselves. Prime Wielder Augustus created the Nexus and subverted the ley, all at Baron Arent’s command. But Baron Arent wouldn’t have risen to power, wouldn’t have controlled all the Baronies and beyond, without us. We gave him power, because we wanted the ley. We wanted heat and light, all of which we had before, but using the ley made it easier. We created this problem. Everyone who used the ley in their everyday lives.”

  “But Marcus—”

  Kara cut him off with a slice of her hand. “He had nothing to do with the Shattering. Neither did the Kormanley nor Baron Leethe. The blackouts and distortions were already appearing in Erenthrall, were already escalating in strength. I think even without the Kormanley’s interference—or Baron Leethe—the Nexus would have Shattered eventually. Reality was already being torn, even before they began to meddle with it. If anything, they brought the Shattering on earlier, perhaps made it worse.”

  “Or perhaps they lessened it, made it more manageable, gave us a chance to fix it. Left on its own, maybe the Nexus would have collapsed all of the ley lines simultaneously and ended everything all at once.”

  Kara simply stared at him from a few paces away, her wild anger cut short. “I suppose we’ll never know.”

  A Wolf padded up to the stone, snout lifted to scent the air. It ignored them both. Grant came up behind it.

  “Are Devin’s men close?” Allan asked, rising.

  “If they were, they’d have heard you and attacked by now.” The Wolf at his feet swung its head toward him, ears back at the reprimand. It whined, but Grant reached down to ruffle the fur on its head in reassurance. “They’re where they’ve been for the last five days—marching toward the Needle. After today, we won’t be able to track them. They’ll be too far away.”

  “So we managed to evade them,” Kara said.

  Grant’s glare shifted to her. “They’re too intent on the Needle. They didn’t even send out scouts to watch their flank.”

  “How long until they reach the Needle?”

  “Five days.”

  Allan shot a glance at Kara. “Let’s hope Dalton and the others can hold it for at least five days after that, otherwise Marcus won’t have a chance to seize the Nexus there.”

  “You worry about too many things,” Grant growled. “It is out of your control. Worry about Erenthrall and what we will find there. Everything else is meaningless.”

  He’d addressed the comment to Kara. She stiffened in response.

  But then a low rumble came out of the west. Kara braced for a quake, the others doing the same, but the earth remained stationary. Yet the rumble grew louder, the sound like stone grinding against stone. The Wolf at Grant’s feet sank to its haunches, lifted its head, and howled into the night sky, the two others in their group doing the same from different points on the plains around them, joined by other animals—their own horses hobbled a short distance away, coyotes, the screech of hunting night birds, the baying of bison. And still the noise escalated, until it drowned out the Wolves, until Kara was forced to clap her hands to her ears, the grinding now like mountains colliding and crumbling into dust. A pressure built, deep inside her head, and she screamed, but she couldn’t even hear herself. She squeezed her eyes tight against the pain—

  Then the wall of sound surged past them. The pressure dropped off sharply, Kara’s ears popping. She opened her eyes in time to catch the grass flattening to the ground in a ripple that sped away from them into the distance. The grinding sound faded as swiftly as the pressure.

  Kara tentatively pulled her hands away from her ears and worked her jaw until her hearing returned to normal, a faint ringing in the background. She was surprised there was no blood.

  She stood, uncertain when she’d fallen to her knees. “What in hells was that?” Her own words sounded flat and dull to her, but the ringing had begun to fade.

  The Wolf lay on the ground, whimpering, Grant stroking its side in comfort. “Something has happened to the west,” he said. “Something . . . terrible.”

  Allan stood slowly, shaking his head as he stuck a finger in his own ears as if to dislodge something. In a voice that was too loud for general conversation, he said, “It sounded as if the earth itself cracked.”

  As if Kara needed any further incentive.

  “We need to get to Erenthrall,” she said. “We need to get to the Nexus.”

  The grinding sound of stone jerked Dalton from ragged dreams of the white fire of the ley and the howl of dogs. He sat up abruptly, then clapped his hands to his ears, momentarily disoriented as the baying of dogs continued. He’d already stumbled from his bed when guards slammed through his door.

  “Father!”

  “Find Darius!” Dalton shouted, not certain he’d been heard. But the captain of his guard snapped his fingers at those behind and two guards ran off. Dalton dragged on a robe over his sleeping clothes.

  The captain ripped his helm off and covered his own ears with his hands. “What is it?”

  “Take me to the orrery!”

  The captain led him from the room, through corridors mostly empty. Everyone they ran into had their ears covered,
leaning against the wall or crouched down, cowering against its base. One or two were bleeding from the ears or nose as the noise escalated.

  They were outside the orrery doors when it suddenly ended. Dalton staggered against the nearest wall and leaned against it for support before tentatively uncovering his ears. His head throbbed, and a wave of nausea swept through him. He choked it back, but one of the guards succumbed and vomited in a corner. In irritation, Dalton motioned to the captain to open the door as the stench of bile filled the corridor.

  Dalton moved immediately to the table, the captain closing the door behind himself and two other guards, who took up their position on either side of the door. The captain joined him.

  “That wasn’t a quake,” the man said.

  “No.” Dalton glanced up, noticed a bead of dark blood beneath the captain’s nostril. “You’re bleeding.”

  The captain touched the blood with a finger, then wiped at it with the back of his hand, leaving a smear across his upper lip. “It’s nothing.”

  The far door to the chamber opened and Darius stepped inside. “What was that?” he asked as he crossed the room to Dalton’s side. “The Needle is in chaos. The animals went berserk, and half of the people I ran into on the way here are bleeding from the nose or ears. A few passed out.”

  “I haven’t had a chance to look,” Dalton said. “Give me a moment.”

  He stepped up to the map, as the captain said, “I think it came from the west.”

  Focusing his attention toward the Demesnes, Dalton let his strange vision play across the landscape. The few pieces placed on the map shifted and danced, but he ignored them. This hadn’t come from a person. This had been more fundamental.

  Then he caught sight of a fracture in the map. He leaned forward, part of the map risen out of the surface of the table in his vision. He traced the crack, unease growing in the pit of his stomach as he edged around the table to see it all. Then he remembered the scale of the map and he stood up straight, staring at nothing.