“We were supposed to be with you for the whole campaign, my friend. I’m so sorry to abandon you now like this, but at least you are still alive. Now listen,” she started to say.
“But you’re so strong! This can’t happen to you,” Grange pleaded.
“We can’t be destroyed; we’re similar to the demons in that way. We simply are going to return to the nature we came from, and at some future date, perhaps the gods and the fates will pull our energies together and reconstitute us. But don’t you worry about us now,” Ariana squeezed his hand.
“You are now the one who has to carry out the mission we were supposed to share with you. You have to help the gods; they’ve made their two choices – the mortal and the immortal who will fight to preserve the light and the life – you are the mortal, and hopefully you’ll meet the immortal soon. You must go across the land to Southgar,” she insisted.
“Then what? How far is it?” Grange asked.
“It is a long and perilous journey. The demon not only used your wand to destroy us, but it also disabled you as well, more critically – you’ll not be able to recover your ability to control the power until a god grants you a boon, or until something extraordinary happens,” Ariana said. “And I’m sure that will happen in Southgar or beyond, but until then, be careful in your journey east. It is long and dangerous.”
She closed her eyes and winced in pain.
“Ariana? How can I help you?” Grange asked.
There was a sudden popping noise, and the body of the woman who had been the white jewel, a woman Grange had never really known or interacted with, suddenly disappeared. As Grange stared at the spot where a small cloud of mist was dissipating, Rigan also metamorphosed into a cloud.
Ariana opened her eyes.
“Kiss me Grange,” she said.
He bent down, trembling and looked into her cloudy eyes. For a moment the cloudiness disappeared, and they were the shining, jewel-blue eyes he had known and loved. Their lips touched, and he felt tears welling in his eyes, as he felt how cool her lips were, while life drained away from her flesh. There was the sound of another one of the jeweled personifications evaporating somewhere nearby.
“Be careful dear, and beware of the water in the springs; you’ll have to drink them, but you’ll suffer. It’s unfair, but life isn’t always fair, I guess it’s fair to say,” she smiled weakly. “Then eventually, you’ll be yourself again, or something close to.”
“And most importantly, please follow your heart, when all of this is over,” she told him.
“Ariana,” he said, then gasped, as she too dissipated into a wispy cloud of nothingness, and disappeared.
Chapter 22
Grange knelt in the middle of the empty camp, at last alone with only the dead body of Monton. The sun was already setting, he was startled to see – the battle with the demon had lasted longer than he realized. He was feeling cold, there were virtually no supplies at hand, he was wounded and in pain.
He called upon the power to bring an envelope of warmth around him.
There was no response to his murmured request. He saw no glow of power, felt no energy begin to protect him from the chill. The meaning of Ariana’s final warning struck him fully, as he grasped what she had meant. The demon had not only killed the jewels, but it had destroyed his own ability as well. It had wrought the death and destruction using his own wand against him. It was his own fault. Grace had warned him not to use the wand, not to restore power to it until he had visited Brieed once again, so that the master wizard could teach him to implant controls on the amulet. But Grange had ignored the advice, refilled the energy in the powerful tool, and now the jewels were dead, and he was stranded in the wilderness.
He gingerly approached Monton’s dead body. Grange had killed the man; it had perhaps been necessary. The demon had cared not at all about Monton’s fate, and so the man had probably been doomed to die from whatever moment the demon lord had seized control of him. But Grange has directed the blade that had committed the fatal act.
Now Monton was dead, and the demon was banished, while Grange was stranded and powerless in the near-arctic wilderness. Casting aside his misgivings, Grange removed Monton’s pack from the dead body, and opened it, searching for supplies that might be useful. The camp was growing darker, too dark to really see what was in the pack, but Grange was certain that he had found a piece of dried meat, and he carried it in one hand as he walked to the entrance to the mine.
He took a deep breath. The interior of the mine would be his best potential protection against the nighttime chill that was descending upon the camp, but he dreaded the thought of entering the mine once again, especially if his powers were no longer functioning. He tried again to call upon the energy to provide light, but no power coalesced, no light glowed.
Grange had no appetite. He dropped the chunk of meat back into the pack, then resolutely walked into the mine. He took the first step, then the second, then the next and the next. The pressure of the wind dissipated, and then the chill slowly released its grip on him as he walked further into the mine.
When he thought he had gone as far as he dared to go, he stopped and put down Monton’s pack, then he unslung his own pack, and put his knife down as well, before sitting down with his sword in his hand. He was exhausted, and he was in pain, both physically and spiritually. The loss of Ariana and the other jewels, was devastating. He had kept an idealized vision of Ariana alive – Ariana the girl who had accompanied him as a virtually intimate partner during his long journey towards Palmland. She had taken him and trained him, given him confidence, shown him affection, and even after her time as a human ended, she had been the spirit in his sword, making it lighter and faster than nature intended.
He felt an ache in his heart over the loss of all the jewels. And he also felt aches all over his body. The attack by the lion, and the wounds from the battle with the demon in Monton, on top of the strain of climbing up and down the mountain, made every muscle ache. Yet despite the pain, despite the anguish, despite the sense of loss and loneliness and the fear, Grange fell asleep in a matter of minutes.
When he awoke, he could clearly see the sunlight that was visible out of the not-too-distant tunnel entrance, and he could clearly see that nothing had attacked or harmed him during the night. He gingerly picked up his belongings and limped to the front of the mine, then crouched down in the brighter light, and repacked the belongings from the two packs into one pack, keeping the most useful items and discarding the rest. He paused when he was finished, and looked outward. Monton’s body lay where it had fallen during the battle the day before. He had to do something respectful towards the body he knew.
Grange moved the body to a nearby flat section of ground, and hauled a variety of stones to cover it in a primitive cairn that he thought would protect it from whatever scavengers inhabited the desolate land. His work was slowed by his injured legs and arms, so that he only finished at midday, and finally had to face up to the next big decision awaiting him – where to go.
A part of him said to simply follow the mule track and retrace his steps along the path to Trade Harbor, but a bigger part told him to remember Ariana’s cryptic message about heading across the land to Southgar. He had no idea how far the journey would stretch, but in the wintery conditions he suspected it would feel unreachably far. He would face danger and terrible discomfort, but he had heard Ariana say it was the way to go. And he suspected that he needed to go – there had to be a next chapter in his story, and it was unlikely to truly include a return to the idyllic land of Kilau, or Shaylee. The tropical warmth and the lovely girl seemed like long-ago and far-away fairy tales, as he stood and looked out over the frosty valley below.
Ariana had told him to go to Southgar. The gods alone knew how far that journey would be; he didn’t. He was a few days inland from the coast, but he had no idea how far inland Southgar was. To the extent he had ever thought about the distant land at all – other than as the home of the pale
race that he seemingly resembled – he had heard of it as a land that was far upstream of Fortune on the Great River, a distant place where the river’s headwaters were located. It was reputed to be a less refined culture than Fortune – a place where the weather was cooler, life was more tenuous and less precious, and violence used easily to settle disputes. The courtiers of Fortune had looked down on the reputation of Southgar, as a crude, vulgar land.
And the people there – or from there – were pale. Grange knew that, given the hundreds of times he had been asked if he was from Southgar. His heritage might be from Southgar – it probably was, he admitted. But as an orphan raised in an orphanage in Verdant, he had no idea whatsoever.
He was going to make the effort to carry our Ariana’s request. He knew that was what his heart had decided. The decision had been made as soon as the dying jewel had asked. He hitched his pack up onto his shoulder, bent one last time to pick up the empty, now useless, wand that had changed the course of the battle with the demon and changed his life, and tucked it into his waistband, then he started hiking away from the scene of such pain and horror.
He limped and walked slowly, descending from the mountainside at the best pace he could manage, but by the time darkness fell he was still in the center of the valley. He finally ate the piece of dried meat he had pulled from Monton’s pack earlier, chewing mechanically as his mind descended into a numb state of depression. He slept uneasily. He no longer feared the evil of the valley; he felt sure that his victory over the demon had banished away the curse that had made the mining venture so profitless. But the memory of the dramatic deaths of the jewels haunted him, and his own role in making their destruction possible – because of his decision to load energy into his immature wand – was like a terrible, open sore that he couldn’t stop examining, as he relived it over and over again.
The next day he followed the trail out of the mouth of the valley, leaving as soon as the first light of dawn made the trail visible. Once he was beyond the roughest terrain, he left the trail, turning to the east, and began his determined journey to go to Southgar, or to die trying.
He nearly did die trying. The wounded, despondent boy spent the next fortnight stumbling across the bleak and untamed landscape. He pressed forward relentlessly, beginning each day’s journey as soon as the sun rose, and continuing until darkness had fallen. He sparingly ate the small supply of food he carried as he climbed and walked and crawled across the rugged landscape. But he had little water with him, and found little along the way. His only solace was the time when he played music on his faithful flute. He managed to focus on the instrument and the sounds, to the exclusion of his pain and sense of loss.
On a few occasions, he found liquid water in puddles on the north sides of hills warmed by sun light. On other occasions he found shards of ice he could melt for a few precious drops of moisture. But mostly he suffered. The dehydration, the pain of his injuries, and the continuing depression all combined to sap away his strength and his will.
He no longer had his command of the energy – he could no longer wrap himself in a blanket of warmth. His cloak and clothes were inadequate to keep him warm, leaving him shivering whenever he wasn’t exerting himself to walk across the rugged land.
On the thirteenth day of his journey away from the mine, he grew confident that he was going to die soon. He was into his third day without water, and his fifth day without food. He began to see Rigan and Brielle, urging him forward, though he knew they were dead.
He saw a small cloud, or possibly a patch of fog, hanging beyond a ridge that he was slowly, aimlessly, approaching. Or perhaps it was a hallucination, just as the women were, he suspected.
An hour after he saw the cloud, and hours after he hallucinated that he saw the ghosts of his jewel spirits, he crested the ridge, and stopped, wavering with weakness as he surveyed the scene in front of him. There was a small pothole of a valley, no more than two or three acres in size, with steep banks on all sides. Inside, there was greenery growing profusely, growing right to the edge of the banks of the small pool at the center of the depression in the earth.
The water in the pool was bright yellow.
And they valley was warm – he could feel heat rising up from the valley and spilling out over the lip, rolling past him to quickly dissipate in the chilly ambient air that surrounded the thermal spring for hundreds of miles in all directions.
Grange stepped forward, feeling the warmth immediately penetrate his layers of ragged clothes as he stepped down into the valley, his feet crushing the vibrant undergrowth beneath each placement of his boots as he descended the steep side of the bank and dropped closer to the strange water. The air felt moist, making his skin seem to expand and breath with relief.
Grange unwrapped the covers around his head, before he reached the edge of the yellow water and dropped to his knees. Something in his memories told him that drinking the water would have consequences, but he didn’t care. He plunged his hands into the water, cupped them together, and brought the captured liquid up to his lips. He drank greedily, careless of the slight, metallic tang to the water, and repeated the drink, again and again and again. The water was lifegiving, and lifesaving. He felt relief overtake his desperation, as he continued to recklessly drink the bright water, up until he suddenly felt so full of water that he turned and vomited a large volume onto the land.
Then he sat back and looked at the valley, and wondered why he was there.
His memories were jumbled, confused, and growing hazier by the moment. The water coursed through his veins and to his brain, wreaking havoc as its properties began to hide his memories and diminish his emotions, both good and bad. He simply sat and closed his eyes and unknowingly lost his identity.
Hours later, he opened his eyes, confused, but aware that he was hungry in the extreme. He browsed among the plants he found, and ate a few that appeared safe, or that untouched parts of his mind recognized as edible. Then he laid down on the slopes of his own personal spot of salvation, and fell into a deep sleep.
Chapter 23
“Beth yn enw duw rhyfel sydd gennym yma?” he heard a voice speak. He didn’t know the voice, and he didn’t know the language. He didn’t know how there could be another person within a thousand miles to even speak to him as he lay in his state of purgatory by the thermal spring.
He opened his eyes and looked up.
There were four heads on top of tall bodies looking down at him. They all wore scarves and hoods that were pushed back and hanging down; the warmth of the thermal spring had caused them to unwrap a portion of their protection against the frigid world outside of the tiny valley. The removal of the protective material revealed the features of the four visitors. They had thin faces, pale complexions, and a variety of hair colors that ranged from yellow to white. They were from Southgar, he knew, and he wondered what that meant.
“Pwy ydych chi? Sut wnaethoch chi gyrraedd yma?” one of them spoke. The voice was feminine, and the features were as well, he realized as he looked at her specifically.
“I don’t understand,” he spoke in his own language.
The four visitors looked at each other.
“Who are you? How did you get here?” the woman asked again, speaking in his own language, using the measured cadence of a non-native tongue.
“My name,” he paused as he ransacked his memories. The things he knew and remembered seemed to be scattered and incomplete. He had to dig and search to find an answer. “My name is Grange,” he replied. “I’ve been traveling from the west,” he knew that answer. He tried to remember more. “I was at a mine, and we had trouble, so I had to walk away.” That much was true, he was sure, but he couldn’t explain any more.
“He walked into this valley from the wilderness? Not from the homeland?” one of the others asked incredulously. That speaker was a male. Grange studied the others. There was just the one woman, and the others were all males, he decided. He pushed his hands and elbows against the ground, and le
vered himself into a sitting position.
“Did you drink this water?” the woman asked, motioning towards the pool of bright yellow spring water.
“I did. I had to,” Grange answered. He remembered the bitter taste, but he remembered the relief of finally having moisture restored to his body as well.
“There’s your answer, or part of an answer,” another man said. “His brain is addled from the water. We won’t get much out of him.”
“But who is he? How did he get here?” the fourth person asked. “He couldn’t have really come from the west. There’s nothing out there. And the Challenge hasn’t sent anyone else out nearly this far from Southgar. So who is he, and where’s he from?”
“I don’t know Trensen,” the woman said. “You don’t know much do you?” she spoke to Grange directly.
He shook his head.
“So we don’t know if you’re on your own god walk, or just a criminal on the run,” she said.
“Do we leave him here?” Trensen asked.
“Yes,” one of the other men said.
There was a silent pause.
“We’ll take him with us,” the woman said.
“Why?” one of the men asked.
“If he’s a criminal, we’ll take him back to justice. If he’s on a god walk, we’ll take him back to the god,” she said.
“What if he’s just stupid, out here on his way to dying in the wilderness?” the man challenged.
“We’ll give him a second chance to die, but we’ll know it’s by his choice, not ours,” the woman said with finality.
“Besides, there’s something about him,” she added. “Look at that scar,” she stooped and ran a finger along the side of his face. “He’s got a story to tell. Maybe we’ll get to hear it. If we get him away from the yellow water, he may recover his mind.
“Get up you. You can come with us. We’ll take you home,” she motioned for him to stand.
Perilous Travels (The Southern Continent Series Book 2) Page 28