Bloodraven

by Nunn, PL

  “Unhand me,” she spat, turning a narrow glare upon him and attempting to wrench her arm free of him. He tightened his grip, shoving her a step backwards against the cool stone of the wall.

  “You did this. You took that man’s will and made it your own.”

  She laughed in his face. “You have no proof.”

  “You did the same thing to Bloodraven.”

  “Your word. Do you think our fine knight captain will believe the ravings of a forest-bred whore? He has more difficult problems to deal with.”

  He ground his teeth and ignored her slurs. “Problems of your making. Why? What benefit to you?”

  She leaned forward, digging the nails of her free hand into the back of Yhalen’s hand upon her arm.

  “If I’d done such a thing…and I make no such admission…perhaps it was simply to see what he’d do.”

  He took a breath, then another, and released her suddenly as if she were scalding. Curiosity.

  Curiosity had killed a man.

  “Don’t you wonder what he is?” she asked, low-voice and sibilant. “To wield such power? To maintain such youth, when he’s ancient?”

  This last was said with such longing that he saw the real cause of her rancor. Envy. She was a human woman who practiced witchery, and she had come across something so much more than she herself could ever hope to be.

  It occurred to him in some unguarded corner of his mind, that it was not beyond him, and he shuddered, feeling a little stab of nausea at even thinking such a thing. He gave her a look of utter loathing and stalked away.

  He walked blind for a while, mind filled with anger towards the lady and disgust at himself for a simple stray thought. He lost his way in the passages and wandered for a time after, chilled to the bone at the ominous feel that seeped from behind many of the heavy closed doors, that sometimes seemed to emanate from the dark stone of the walls themselves. He found his way eventually back to a hall where windows let in healthy sunlight and then to a passage that seemed familiar.

  He knew his way then, and retraced his steps back to his and Bloodraven’s guest chambers. He slouched down in the chair before the embers of the fire and stared moodily into the smoke blackened alcove where only the bravest spots of glowing orange remained in the charred ashes of the night’s fire.

  “Did I appall you?”

  Yhalen started, heart thudding in his throat at the unexpected closeness of the voice. He pushed himself out of the chair, putting his back to the fire and glaring into the room. Elvardo stood at the end of the bed, having made no sound whatsoever of entry.

  “What do you want?” Yhalen grated out, clenching his fingers into fists to hide a trembling that he couldn’t control. He couldn’t tear his eyes away from the tiny slash of red on Elvardo’s smooth cheek.

  “You flee from me as if I’m a monster,” the dark lord said, and idly laid his fingertips against the carved foot of the bed, tracing the patterns along the rim. “Perhaps I am. But how will you know for sure, unless you understand the true nature of magic?”

  “I don’t care. I don’t need to know anymore about it than it is abhorrent to use the Goddess’ gift to take a life she created.”

  “Goddess!” Elvardo spat. “Spar me the religious babble. I grew weary of hearing it decades ago. It’s all the same rhetoric anyway, drilled into the minds of children by superstitious adults with no room for leeway or supposition. The Goddess did this. She made that. She wishes us to live our lives this way, observing this place as sacred, humbling ourselves on this day or that in reverence of her all powerful, but never seen self. Rubbish. You’d think if she were so overwhelming in her power she’d hold a place outside the Forest. That the men outside would have her face graven into the walls of their temples alongside their innumerable petty gods.”

  “Shut up,” Yhalen cried, taking a step forward.

  “Your grandfather and I theorized about just such things when we were green youths—younger than you even—and headstrong with the vigor of oncoming manhood. We dabbled in the ways of power that have always come to naturally to our people.”

  “He did not! He’s a shaman of the people.”

  “Now.” Elvardo smiled slyly. “Not always. What do you think it was that turned him so adamantly towards the path of the goddess?”

  Yhalen didn’t want to hear it. He swept past Elvardo towards the door and the dubious freedom of this keep. The handle would not turn, seemingly welded in place. Had he Bloodraven’s strength, he could have wrenched it open regardless, defying hinges and lock. As it was he stood there, forehead to the smooth wood, Elvardo’s words insidious and inescapable.

  “We rather preferred each other’s company over that of the young maidens, and would trek deep into the woods for many days—on the pretense of honing our tracking skills when all we were really doing was escaping the eyes of our elders to fuck each other’s brains out. Yhalor could suck cock with a skill that belied his years. I’ve yet to find an equal, but perhaps he only stands out so vibrantly because he was the first to do it with any finesse.”

  “Why are you doing this to me?” Yhalen whispered between clenched teeth. It almost made him nauseous to think of his venerable, wise grandfather, the most ancient of the elders of his village, on his knees before this eternally young creature. But then his grandfather had not always been an old man.

  He shut his eyes and drove the images away.

  Elvardo brought them back with a few words.

  “For a summer we were lovers, until my father caught us rutting like pigs in a place we should have known better than to dally. They wanted to send me away, to a village on the far side of the great forest with a branch of the people that were stricter in their methods of teaching their young men. Of course they’d send me away and not him, for the sons of your family, as far back as records go, have always been chieftains and shamans. It seemed unfair to us, and it was…so we chose our own path and fled, knowing very well there was a wide world beyond the forest, even if we’d never seen it.

  “They pursued us—for our own good, of course. And ended up chasing us far up into the eastern mountains. To this day, I don’t recall what actually started the fight. They caught up with us, and one of them—my own father, perhaps—might have hit me. I was tired and scared and desperate, and I reacted in a way that shamans throughout the generations feared. I struck back with the magic that came naturally to me as breath. Fire sprang up like a wall, protecting us, and without thought or the knowledge of how to control it once conjured, we ran. I honestly don’t know if my father and the other men survived it, but the forest, dry from a long summer, burned for days. Yhalor left me that night. I suppose he was horrified at the magnitude of what we—what I—had wrought. I don’t think he was ever as serious about his conjecture of the existence of the Goddess as he was about fucking me. He couldn’t take the guilt. So he fled back to the people, to take his punishment and no doubt condemn me as penance. Little wonder he devoted himself to the ways of the shaman, after having had a hand in burning down half the great forest.”

  “I don’t want to hear this…I don’t care. Just go away.”

  “But if I go away without telling you the things you need to know, how will you survive when he takes you deep into the heart of the northern mountains, among the true-blooded viciousness of his people?”

  Yhalen swung around to stare at Elvardo, wide-eyed and shuddering.

  “What will you do when he’s not there to protect you—if he even can against the strength of a full-blooded ogre? You’ve tasted their maliciousness before, haven’t you? Endured their hatred and their fascination with human flesh?”

  “Stop it. Shut up!”

  “If it wasn’t for magic that your grandfather would be so appalled at the usage of—you’d be dead now, wouldn’t you?”

  “Better dead than exiled,” Yhalen cried and Elvardo laughed.

  “Oh, no. Not in the least, believe me. You don’t believe it either.”

  �
��Leave me alone!”

  Elvardo tilted his head and said thoughtfully. “On one condition.”

  Yhalen stared, warily waiting.

  “Use that portion of your magic that the most pious of your people would not object to. Heal this small cut and I’ll leave you in peace to do as you will.”

  “Why?” Yhalen asked suspiciously. “Why not do it yourself?”

  Elvardo shrugged. “Perhaps the most benign of our arts are beyond me. Perhaps I want to see if you can. Perhaps I simply wish to exert my will over yours, descendent of Yhalor.”

  Yhalen lifted his chin stubbornly and Elvardo chuckled.

  “If you can do it, I’ll do you one better. I’ll see the halfling takes this trip without you. See that you’re free of him once and for all, to go and do what you will. Return home if you like.”

  Yhalen took an uncertain breath, tempted beyond all reason by that offer. “I don’t know if I can,” he said, but that was a lie to buy time. He had done more than what Elvardo asked, much more, when he’d healed Bloodraven’s wounds. He remembered how.

  It was worth the effort. He took a step forward, then another, steeling his will and reaching out with fingers that only trembled a little to touch Elvardo’s cheek. Skin that was cool and smooth, except around the edges of the cut. Yhalen felt the heat of life’s blood escaping, of flesh with a mission to reknit itself. It would repair itself eventually, after days and days of tireless effort, if left to its own devices. It was simply a matter of lending his own strength, his own life energy to hurry the process along. A melding of his magic with Elvardo’s flesh…like he had done with Bloodraven weeks past.

  And like with Bloodraven he let a little of his own life energy seep into Elvardo. Unlike with Bloodraven, that tenuous bond was snatched and yanked and Yhalen found himself tumbling headfirst into an enveloping wash of darkness. He was lost in it, floundering, pulled in past the mundane physicality of flesh and into something more…sinister. It rushed at him from all sides, darkness cloaking other things. Flares of energy. Of impulse. Of magic.

  He struggled to find his way back as something bored past his defenses with ease. A high-pitched pain that wasn’t exactly pain, that filled his ethereal body to the point of bursting and then he did burst, tumbling with a soundless scream as bits and pieces of him fluttered off, melting into the darkness.

  He saw things in the blackness then. Spots of color hiding in the shadows. Things that had not been apparent before. The darkness was illusion, a convenient facade to hide the truer nature of Elvardo’s soul. Or, at the very least, his intentions. He flung himself at those slim beacons in the darkness, for they seemed to be the only way out—a sparrow pecking at the heavy windows of a fortress. And perhaps he found a crack in the sill, the tiniest little weakness in Elvardo’s armor, for more light rushed in and he fled towards it—quite suddenly finding himself blinded by it.

  His knees hit the thick padding of carpet hard enough to jar his bones. He clutched sightlessly at cloth, his head spinning beyond his capacity to calm. It seemed like something inside him had torn.

  Indefinable little trickles of… something…leaked inside his awareness.

  Vision cleared. Thoughts did to an extent. Enough at least to realize that what he clutched at was Elvardo’s trouser leg and that Elvardo himself stood staring down with some mild interest on his face.

  The cut was still on his cheek.

  It had been a trap. Yhalen knew not what Elvardo had hoped to gain from it, or even how he’d gone about it, other than initiating that melding touch of magic from Yhalen…but he’d been pulled in at the onset of it, then chewed up and spat out.

  He hissed, pushing himself off Elvardo’s support, falling backwards to sprawl inelegantly on the carpet between the dark lord and the fireplace. He glared up, at the moment lacking capacity to form adequate words.

  Elvardo stepped around him, settling in the chair before the hearth. He ran a thumb over his own cheek and the cut disappeared under the brush of his skin.

  “Let me tell you something about magic—”

  “Don’t!” Yhalen growled, pushing himself onto his knees and crouching there, glaring in mistrust.

  “I’ve heard all I want to from you—about anything.”

  “I don’t think you have.” Elvardo lifted a finely arched brow. “In fact, you need a hint or two now more than you ever did before.” There was a subtle sense of radiant coolness that seemed surround Elvardo that Yhalen had not truly noticed before.

  “What did you do?”

  “Nothing that would not have happened on its own…in a decade or two…if you stayed true to yourself and used the powers that you were born with. You need to know things for this fool’s mission that I’ve taken an interest in to succeed. He can’t do it all by himself, determined though he is.”

  Yhalen stared, a slow chill of horror seeping over him.

  “What did you do to me?” he repeated, forcing a calm he in no wise felt into his voice.

  “I unblocked the dam that nature, in all its wisdom, places in all young creatures with power such as ours. Or at least I removed a few stones that were loosened already by your own forays into magic.”

  “You had no right.”

  “Hmm. Right and wrong were never high on my agenda. Moral distinctions tend to get in the way of one’s goals, so they’re better off discarded, I’ve always found.”

  Yhalen curled his fingers in the carpet, seething.

  “If you’re angry, strike back at me,” Elvardo said lightly, and without warning Yhalen found himself knocked backwards, slammed against the foot of the bed by an invisible force that came and went with no more than a sigh of displaced air. He lay there, gasping, realizing with a faint sense of surprise that he had felt the brief gathering of energy before he’d been struck. Had felt the coiling energy of the air itself as a crafty Ydregi will had forced it to his will.

  He did strike back. With the one skill that Elvardo had shown him that he had already felt an affinity for. Fire. He could already feel the dying embers of it in the hearth, and it was easy enough to draw on the flavor of that weak spark of life and create his own vibrant version of it, casting it to feed on the fine cloth of Elvardo’s tunic.

  The dark lord’s arm caught fire, flames licking up from the dark material of his sleeve and spreading greedily to his torso. Yhalen blinked, shocked out of his rage by the success of a moment’s thoughtless revenge. Elvardo’s laughter shocked him more.

  “Do you think to hurt me with the magic that comes most naturally to me?”

  He shook his arm and the flames sprang off like droplets of water, falling to the carpet and greedily feeding upon the wool, then spreading across it to the tapestries and bed skirts.

  Yhalen scrambled away, staring in horror at the growing conflagration.

  “So, don’t you think that if you have the ability to start such blaze, it would not be wise to learn how to stop it? It’d be lamentable if you inadvertently created a catastrophe that ended up…say, burning a forest down…because no one had bothered to teach you how to control the monster you conjured.”

  Elvardo had not moved from the chair, one knee still casually crossed across the other.

  “Stop it.”

  Yhalen had gained his feet. He couldn’t do it himself. He hadn’t the time to figure it out. Elvardo shrugged and the flames shrunk in upon themselves, flickering out and leaving charred cloth and an acrid, choking smell in their wake.

  Elvardo rose, brushing a fleck of soot from a sleeve entirely untouched by flame. “Come to me in the garden tonight, after your ogr’ron has fallen asleep, and the next, and I’ll teach you the basics upon which you’ll build your own understanding of the powers within your grasp.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The sun was well past its noon zenith when Bloodraven reached the outcropping of rock that jutted out from amidst the trees high on the valley slope and opposite the soot-gray walls of the dark lord’s keep. It had taken the
morning hours to cross the considerable distance of the vale on foot, but it was a journey he’d preferred to make under his own power—at his own pace.

  The further away he walked from Elvardo’s keep, the more pleasant the day had become. The lighter the air, and subsequently the elevation of his spirits. The earth of the valley itself was dark and fertile, cloaked in knee-high grasses that swayed with the winds coming down from the heights beyond.

  But the winds were muted in comparison to those of the high reaches, blocked by the walls of the vale.

  Closer to the northeastern end where the dark fringe of a well established forest melted into the grasses of the valley, there would be even more shelter against the elements. And protection, as well, against other threats.

  He’d skimmed the edges of the valley on his way towards that destination, often detouring up into the forest that clung to the ascending slopes. Following well-worn game trails, he discovered traces of the things that made their homes here. He’d seen the rock during one of his forays up the forested slopes. He’d paused in a clearing, looked out over the vale and seen the slab of gray sitting half way up the far end. Massive and steady, it had called to him and he had made his way towards it. The gentle slopes of this vale were no challenge to a mountain-bred ogr’ron and he chose the more secluded path along the wooded side.

  He was well aware of the man that dogged his heels. One of the knight’s men who trailed far enough behind not to be an overt agitation. Only the occasional nicker from the horse he rode or the jangle of gear reminded Bloodraven he was there at all. The man did not choose to dismount and attempt to follow him onto the wooded slope. A lucky thing, since Bloodraven found the solitude of the trees a balm for his unease.

  It made it easier for him to put what he’d seen inside the keep today in a place that didn’t threaten so badly to shake him to his core. It allowed him to distance himself from that alarming dark magic that even the most ferocious of ogre warriors would find frightening. He could face an enemy twice his size in battle and feel nothing but grim determination, but the insidious touch of magic couldn’t be defended against, couldn’t be fought off with honest steel and physical prowess. It could seep into a body and taint mind and spirit without a warrior ever seeing hide nor hair of his enemy.