‘I shall defend you from the trap they’ve laid. I will get you to them, but I can only do so much. When you have the chance, you must pierce their armaments with your grace. You must give them back their charms and fear no Power.’ He slowed his strides, looking taxed again.
‘I will try.’ She managed, looking down from his enveloping gaze.
‘No!’ He whispered a shout, holding her chin up.
‘You must not merely try, milady. You must be strong!’ He held her eyes as she shied away, but beneath his strength she finally saw it. Deh was hoping she wouldn’t fail, and that meant he feared she might. Shannon bit her lower lip, and tried to strengthen her resolve. If Deh wanted her to succeed and be strong, then so be it. She would work to be as strong as she could.
‘What of the others?’ She asked to overcome the desperate fidgeting that came along with anticipation.
‘The Bahthalamuts are by far the more dangerous. Combined though, their net will be all but impenetrable. What you call a hurricane, greater by many times the greatest, will stand gaping -even greater than the pool. They will force the scourge in the sea to swell enough to swallow mountains. Lightning will pour with rain and the fiery feather-falls of their plumage, and a thousand cyclones shall scour the land.’ He trailed off.
‘So, where’s the luck you spoke of?’ She asked, incredulous that luck could exist at all in the face of such extreme adversity on such a grand scale as to be inconceivable.
‘The luck, milady.’ He grinned deviously, as though seeing something she couldn’t. ‘…is that you are the White Leaves! And I… am 21 strong!’
‘Um… and where’s the luck?’ She asked, doubtful. Being what they were wasn’t enough to make sheer luck of any situation.
‘In their foolishness! They are gathered together in one place! If we can so much as manage to get through the net, then they will have no choice but to meet their charms!’ He smiled fully, upending his whole demeanor.
In a hammer-stroke of revelation, Shannon understood. Deh had said precious little time existed to prevent the Reclaimers from finding Addl’laen and the Heart of the Veil of the Leaf’s Edge. With the nearness of the conflicted brothers, they might just have enough time to rest the four at war, and return to prevent the coming of Traemin and Gane. That was of course, if they could get close the four at war.
Shannon saw hope then, and used it to force her as far as her feet would carry her, until Deh noticed the faltering in her confidence, believed her weakened, and offered to carry her.
* * *
She now rode his bounds across the countryside like some magnificent steed and watched the blackening of the world ahead.
The rains began as they reached the cloud-cover. Its torrents screened away what lay beyond the darkness of the abysmal arctic horizon, but from within the Veil’s fringe they went unaffected by the drenching. The droplets could not reach through the dimensional gate they traversed. It was miraculous, beautiful, all but frozen in time, but the tranquility brought by the time trickle of the Veil could not mask the full fury of the rush Deh now carried her into.
Thunder finally called, distant still, but unchecked and as menacing as the snoring of a dragon in its den. She could almost feel it in her bones, and the anticipation mounted arms within her.
Then at last the screen of rain peeled back before her eyes. Deh skidded to a halt. Little peaks of land still clinging to the air struck her as earthen children desperately clutching at nothing to resist a drowning –vastly sickening. Siberian Russia still passed northward for a far unfurling, she realized. It had been overcome by the monstrous new tide.
“Behold! The battles!” Deh shouted to be heard over the slowed commotion of it all. Even beyond the Veil’s fringe, the sound was deafening. The decibels were so high they overwhelmed themselves -waves distorting to a dull roar of sheer chaos.
Shannon clutched desperately to the Black Leaf, eyes screaming over the distant scene.
It wasn’t distant at all, she realized. She was consumed by it. She was here, and she gasped disbelief, realizing the immensity of the eye of this storm for what it was. They were at its fringe, but they were already inside.
Like a bowl, a cloud-wall of rain and hail climbed into the sky, reaching up to thick, puffy, illumine clouds cresting wide beneath the waxing moon. It was miles and miles across, unfathomable by her count -a hurricane monsoon the likes of which human kind had never seen.
Lightning draped the walls like tapestry sheets, crawling over everything in sporadic bursts and violet chains, lighting it all with flickers and flares and allowing her to make out the dark shapes of uncounted water spouts that crawled over the polar ocean’s discontent. It was one giant roiling mass from the foot of her vantage unto a great mountain of water, concentric within the swirling of the cloud-wall -the sucking swell wrought by the storm. But it was not solely a product of the sky. It was the scourge of the Powers in the seas, given away by the behavior of the waters -rising up and swirling on such a vast scale as to be nowhere short of impossible. And yet, there it was.
The fury of it all was staggering, even from beyond the Veil. Even Deh stared for a long time. He seemed hesitant to make a move. There was just too much of it all. Calculating a way through took great consideration as the sheer chaos of lightning and count of spouts were not the average sort.
These tornados over the sea rose up to and beyond the sky, and they were innumerable, filling the vast space with their dueling, as they piled upon and crawled over the mountain of sea water. The lightning spewed between them like webs at random, just as it sheeted the walls like too much tinsel on a Christmas tree.
Finally, Deh took a step forward. Shannon cringed. Every fiber of her being was screaming and clawing at the Black Leaf’s persistence. Her voice came out all of its own accord, and her tongue ran out of control.
“Deh!” She screamed, quailing just as he’d feared.
“Deh! Stop! Stop!” She kept sputtering, but he’d frozen on her first word.
“Put me down! Take me back! We cannot go in there! We cannot!” And she was right. There wasn’t a single clearing or marginally safe path through any of it. Even if she could walk on water, climbing a swirling mountain of waves would be impossible and take days. If she could fly, swerving through an electric-lighted net beneath devastating, high-velocity winds looked even worse. It was utterly impassible -a gauntlet.
There was no way she could go in -certainly not of her volition. He couldn’t force her if she resisted. But even as she clawed at him to release her, a realization settled down upon her. She had no choice. All of mankind depended upon her ability to go forward and meet this doom. At long last, she found it odd she should even care. She’d always hated the majority of mankind for their wanton, wasteful ways. Why should she have changed her mind just because she was now the Lady White Leaves?
Furthermore, she felt like a Black Leaf.
Choice? Had she any real control over her destiny anymore? Did choice even matter? She dug for any excuse she could muster not to continue on, but repeatedly came back. There was no other option.
She was about to accept that when the crackle of thunder, the rumble of the raging sea, and the roar of the dueling gales abruptly fell away beneath a single monstrous act. Even Shannon’s thoughts were drowned out as one of the Powers rose up before her eyes, dwarfing Enfaeri and leaving Miqael forgotten.
“It’s Lleviathan!” Deh shrieked, but she barely noticed, absorbed by a mammoth set of thin caiman-like jaws jutting forth from a streamlined face to an absurd length like a marlin’s sword. They parted wide, beseeching the heavens with a terrible mangled wail.
Its massive girth trailed down into the bowl of the whirlpool’s mighty swell, to where its attention shifted down upon its unseen foe. The sheer movement of its body and the seas it parted joined that deafening cry, shaking the earth to her core.
Shannon had thought the wolf and the dragon massive, but they were merely a lizard and a pupp
y in the wake of Lleviathan’s rising. Slowly, she came to grips with herself. Choice didn’t matter anymore. Choice was like the comparison of sizes. There was no comparison. There was no choice. She was the Lady White Leaves, and she acknowledged the futility of resisting. She simply couldn’t let everything in the world perish.
The serpent could never notice them, as minuscule as they were, and especially not while locked in eternal, immortal combat with Kraqen of seven tongues. They could be taken, she realized, for they would make no move to escape.
Lleviathan reared up trying to gain leverage on his counterpart, and dragged Kraqen into view. Though smaller, it was latched all about Lleviathan’s throat, jaws splayed wide like a four-pointed starfish as its mighty teeth dug in. The gargantuan coils of its seven tongues wrapped all about the immensity of Lleviathan’s girth in a terrible stranglehold.
That was the reason for Lleviathan’s garbled cry. He was choking, Shannon realized, as they crashed back down, sending their swirling mountain of sea pouring outward as an indeterminably towering wall. It would consume every shore that it came into contact with, and beyond, and it bored its way toward the Leaves with its growing wrath. Fear rose up within her at the onslaught as she realized Deh was talking, urging her to be strong. She quailed anew.
“You cannot be serious, Deh! Even if I wanted to! There’s no way in! I can’t go in there!” But before she finished expressing her inability, the Black Leaf was shouting back at her.
“You must, Milady! There is no other White Leaves! You are their Lady! They are powerless for all their power! If you should so much as decree that it should be!” His reassurance did nothing for her strength, but he didn’t have the luxury of letting her down.
“Hold On!” He howled, catapulting forward even as she screamed for him to put her down and take her back and safely away.
They were off and away, bounding down to the waters before the fury of the coming wall, and then onto the jagged, ever-changing surface of the East Siberian Sea. Deh whisked her out over the water, and there was no going back. She could only cling to him for the ride as he skipped along like a tiny tossed stone. She wanted to scream the whole way through, but she couldn’t. She could do nothing but gape in terror as the Black Leaf scored a dangerous path, charging over the wildly unpredictable terrain.
Once past the first cyclone, lightning poured down all round, crisscrossing their path as the great wave came calling. It killed the cyclones and drowned lightning with sheer volume, but before Deh’s furies it parted like a canyon, letting them slip through by a daunting series of long leaps. The waters here were not like the raindrops on their journey. These were the waters of the Powers, like the lightning and the winds. They disrupted even the Veil like the fires of Enfaeri, for the Powers were beyond the constraints of their world.
Shannon laid eyes upon the swirling mountain beyond the canyon in the seawall, re-forged by the duel, and already crawling with new spouts as the lightning roamed unchecked. Not even the mega-tsunami had disrupted the net of the four at war.
So harrowed, Shannon was too stunned by it all to discover she was crying so hysterically she’d gone entirely silent.
As they emerged from the canyon of the wave, Deh veered abruptly and frequently, zig-zagging amidst the uncountable cyclones. Shannon could feel the fury of the wind. It buffeted the Black Leaf’s form despite the Veil, but her amazement was insurmountable. She stared endlessly, cringed open-mouthed, and held her breath as he reached and climbed to the heights of the sea, picking up speed. He capped its peak only to go bounding into the sky.
Deh hoped to leap to the moon, it seemed. His vaulting momentum almost ripped Shannon clear off his backside. He rocketed toward the clear night sky, and the three-quarter moon stared back at her, beckoning her to freedom whilst prompting her to look down.
Far below she could see the earth at the bottom of the sea, for the whirlpool’s vastness was like the hurricane itself. The swirl was so fully gargantuan as to leave a gaping hole in the ocean miles across and clear to the seabed. In the swell, she could see the figures of Lleviathan and Kraqen locked in combat. Now the serpent had the upper hand over its smaller brother, trying to devour its entire head that it might at long last have a tail of its own.
In her awe, she all but forgot the great Rocs, but Deh Leccend was scanning the heavens. They were nowhere to be seen. As the sea was left behind, Shannon turned to looking up with the Black Leaf’s godly leap. It was not nearly finished, but she’d only just begun to look to the stars when the cloud wall to the south abruptly lit up like fire.
Thunder pounded down upon the ceiling as if the dueling monsters had been rushing across its bed, and tripped and fallen together into a wild tumble. Like God gone bowling, the booming of their approach was staggering and swift. It lit up the underside of the cloud cover like a series of scatter-bombs, pulsing and pounding and racing toward the lip of the cyclone’s eye, and at once they appeared. Rolling and then falling into the net they’d woven in a brutal display of power and hatred for one another, the Rocs plummeted toward earth even as they tore each other to shreds.
The Bahthalamuts were out of control, and there was little hope of changing course while rocketing upward against them. There was so little time between them Shannon couldn’t catch much more than a glimpse of them, but that was all she would ever need to breed nightmares for the rest of her days.
The first was only vaguely birdlike. Jet black feathering sprouted in violent-looking tufts all about its body. It had a long crane-like neck, and unusually huge beak, or perhaps a set of jaws, for it had teeth despite being bony and rigid. It trailed tremendous lightning and a serpentine tail, and reminded her of an impossibly huge, fabled cockatrice.
Its talons were locked upon those the second, Fafnir, which was a fair bit more attractive for its fiery coloration and lengthy plumes of feathers coming from everywhere. But it was hideous regardless, and even larger. It had nine corded tails blended into the mass of its tail plumage, and they were all bound like cables of fire around the throat of its brother.
Deh didn’t even try to veer aside since there was no avoiding their immensity. Instead, his sword came out, and he mustered his furies. The duo plummeted down upon them, preceded by shards and ribbons of hungry, clinging lightning. A bolt sizzled down upon them, but it shattered like watery light off a barrier of his magic -barely slowing him, if at all.
“Hold on!” He cried, howling over the cataclysmic sound, and lowered his shoulder. It was a foolish choice, but the only one left to him at this sudden confrontation.
In a terrifying crunch, the opposing forces collided upon the back of Onix. To all amazement, the Black Leaf shouldered it aside despite his diminutive size, using the Roc’s own tumbling momentum to guide their direction change. Fafnir pitched over Onix at the crush, beginning an end-over-end tumble into the sea below, and with a mighty heave of that tremendous sword, the Black Leaf flung Onix away. But in doing so, the forces against him were so great, that he spun away as if the follow through of his stroke caught him off balance and wheeled him about.
Shannon was instantly ripped from his backside, and he careened away alone like an eight ball before a blazing cue. The impact jarred her bones to dust, and set her heart to skipping. Numbed completely, she thought she’d died, and so sapped of all strength and hope the Lady White Leaves couldn’t hold on. She began to fall from the sky as Deh was ripped from her clutches.
The Rocs plummeted below her, but she was only vaguely aware that she was falling. She felt like she had after receiving the bite of Miqael’s sword, and the fright consumed her. She barely noticed the bumbling of the birds was unusual.
Locked together, one of them wasn’t moving. She had the vague impression it was dead, or perhaps sleeping, for it fell like a rag-doll. She hadn’t time to grasp more than that, for Fafnir broke free, struggling to right himself. All too soon his mighty wings snapped wide, halting his fall with mastery.
‘Oh no!’
Shannon’s thoughts cried futilely. The monster below her was as terrifying as the earth, coming up screaming swift beneath her. She cringed as if she’d gone sky diving and her parachute had failed. Suddenly, the unsuspecting Power was there. She hammered down upon its outstretched wing, a delicate little thing, and her body and rolled and bounced her own ragdoll tumbled along the massive plane of it. Unconscious, her body quickly began to fall again as her impact may as well have been a bone-breaking blow. Fafnir crumbled beneath her touch, unable to hinder her.
The Black Leaf was helpless to watch. He righted himself with a considerable effort, but only after the White Leaves had struck down Fafnir as well. He was shattered in more ways than one, but was about to break in another way.
Gasping, Deh watched the trio tumble to the scourge.
Onix struck down upon the mountainous whirlpool, a devastating breakneck impact upon the seabed. Its mighty wings fell upon the swirl and swell, disrupting its flow and forcing it to crash down -a feat that was only doubled by Fafnir beside him.
E.L.F. - White Leaves Page 36