Bloodraven

by Nunn, PL

  He stepped close to the thick shoulder of Elvardo’s black mount and lifted Yhalen up into the dark mage’s grasp.

  “He should have died from what they did to him,” Bloodraven said softly, feeling that Elvardo should know the root of the problem. “My people are cruel and creative in their tortures.”

  “An interesting trait, yes.” Elvardo adjusted Yhalen’s dead weight against him.

  Bloodraven curled his fingers around loosely dangling reins and stared narrowly into Elvardo’s glittering eyes.

  “Take care.”

  It was no pleasant parting and Elvardo knew it. He lifted an eyebrow, then inclined his head as he accepted the threat, before jerking the reins out of Bloodraven’s grasp. The black horse spun on its heel, kicking up snow, and trotted into the wood. They should have been able to watch its retreat for some distance, so vividly did its coat and the apparel of its rider stand out against the snow, but within a dozen strides it was as if Elvardo rode into a thick fog, for he and the horse faded from view. Not even the muffled sound of hoof falls or the jangle of tack hinted that they were still there.

  The hovering ball of light remained, patient and unwavering. Bloodraven stood there, a heavier weight upon him now than before he’d given his human away. Frustration washed over him, an easier emotion to handle by far than fear and he turned with a snarl at the touch by an uncertain halfling on his arm. Kredja pulled back, eyes wide, babe clutched to her breast.

  He curbed the need for violence, clenching his fists instead of striking out as instinct and upbringing demanded. Instead, he stared at the frightened faces of his people. No few of them still gazed at the incandescent ‘guide’ that Elvardo had left for them. To expect a superstitious people to trust in such a thing, without him to urge them on—only a fool would trust that they reached their destination. Or a desperate half-ogre, half-man who had parted with a thing more valuable to him than his own people—only to regret it now, when it was beyond correcting.

  “What’s happened? What’s this magic he left behind?” Kredja asked, having no understanding of the human tongue.

  None of them did, which made the prospect of following Elvardo’s suggestion and venturing out to gather the stragglers an even more dubious one. When they reached the vale and most likely a contingent of the king’s men—if cooperating with the human king still amused the dark lord—the halflings would be at a loss. Confused and wary, and most likely prone to violence.

  “That human hales from Fah’nak Gol.” Which was only truth, but Bloodraven thought it wise to neglect the fact that it had been the dark lord of tribal legend himself in their midst. “This thing he left will guide you there.”

  “Guide ‘ us’?” Fruhk asked, bow clutched in his hands. “Will you not lead us yourself?”

  Bloodraven looked at the woods where Elvardo had disappeared and slowly shook his head.

  “I won’t. I’ll go back to see what other of our folk managed to follow. To see yet if word has spread among the clans and if halflings other than those of our own tribe have ventured forth.”

  A cry went up of fear and protest, and he listened to it for a while. Not thinking of the people before him, but of Yhalen, clutched in the arms of the dark lord and disappearing into a mist that came and went with the passage of that unearthly black horse. Perhaps they took his silence for indifference to their fears, for they stilled eventually to stare at him sullenly.

  “There’ll be humans there with whom I’ve made pact. The vale’s long—at one end the castle of the dark lord and at the far end, distant from that keep and distant from human magicks, is the place I’d have us make our home. There are rocks that form a shelf—like so—and rich forests with ample water that will suit us well. Settle there and the dark lord won’t find issue with you. Take wisely from his forests and he won’t take issue. Avoid conflict with the king’s men, for they’ll most likely be there, waiting my return.”

  They stared at him, aghast, and he turned to find Vorjd at the back of the gathering.

  “I offered you freedom,” he said in the human tongue, making his way through the halflings towards the man. “Now I ask that you use your knowledge of two tongues to ease confusion should problems arise between us and the humans who wait in Fah’nak Gol.”

  Vorjd stared at him solemnly in his mismatched furs and ragged leathers. Haggard and illused by ogres, he had little reason to lend his help now—other than that he, like them, had nowhere else to go.

  No home to return to, or tribe willing to take him. But there was strength in his pale eyes, and an endurance that Bloodraven wondered that he’d never noticed before. He was a man that under different circumstances would have been proud and steadfast and honest.

  He turned back to the halflings. “You are no easy prey, no weak creatures—no matter what the warriors in their pride and their ego have made you believe. Do not fear the journey without me. No common predator will harass you, and the uncommon ones are easy to avoid. Treat Vorjd as you would treat one another, for he has value to you if you wish to deal with other humans—which you must.”

  He took a breath, rather proud of the scope of his patience. He’d never have wasted so much breath directing the members of a war party. A few words, and if they had issue, it would have been solved physically. Yhalen had taught him that, drawing out conversation where before silence would have sufficed. He’d wanted to treat with humans for years—plotted and dreamed of taking refuge with the people of his unknown father—but had never actually looked upon humans as anything but a weak, frail race that bred like winter rabbits and gathered in great numbers in the fertile lands of the west.

  From Yhalen he’d gained a different view on this as well. A vital understanding if they were to live among human men as equals and not adversaries.

  But he needed more than a shared understanding of words and more than a handful of frightened refugees to make a place among humankind, or they might end up treated no better than they had among full-blooded ogres. They needed the numbers to back his boasts, or at the very least to put on a convincing bluff. Therefore he’d go against the yearnings of his heart and follow Elvardo’s advice, leaving his people to find their own way to the vale and trusting his own human to the dark lord’s curious mercy. He’d take Vorja and delve back into ogre territories. Like a thief in the night, hoping he could steal away enough halflings to make it worth his while. Only this time, word would have spread and any ogre who recognized him would not welcome him warmly.

  “Fruhk,” he said. “You know the ways of the forest better than any other here. Their charge I leave to you.”

  The small halfling lifted his head, his posture straightening marginally as Bloodraven passed to him what had never been passed before—the responsibility of command. It was an honor that very few halflings knew.

  “You won’t camp with us?” Kredja asked.

  He shook his head once. He was well used to hard travel with little sleep. Alone, he could make the distance the party had traveled in half the time. And he had good reason to be fleet in his task. He had a people to see to and property to reclaim from the dark lord.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  Clawing, ripping, tearing. Pain that ate at him like liquid fire in his veins. Pain that ran behind his eyes like shards of glass raking tender flesh. The flittering of shadowy death, that came out of the sky with dull black eyes and gleaming feathers. Rending, pecking. Wrenching pieces of him away, in little excruciating bits at a time.

  He screamed and fought back, his mind swelling with seething warmth that came eagerly, drawn by his need, and he flung that frenetic power outwards to make the earth tremble. And it did for a few moments, his body peripherally aware of the quaking of earth and stone. Then, unexpectedly, something heavy and impenetrable slammed down upon him, inside him, castrating the flow of power as savagely as the black-feathered demons castrated his flesh.

  He clawed against the wall, but it was unbreakable, so he fell backwards, to drift in
the muted chaos of his own mind and eventually fall into darkness.

  He came awake again, blind to the world, the visions of his mind overcoming the world of reality.

  His body quivered with pain as the images came, one on the heels of another and another and another.

  He couldn’t make coherent sense, other than they all led to his destruction. He saw a hundred jeering, inhuman faces and felt the sting of small malicious blows. Felt again the scrape of ground as he was dragged, the cut of the ropes around his limbs, and he knew the birds would come soon enough.

  The birds were his greatest fear. Dead-eyed scavengers more fearsome than wolves when live prey was at stake. Hot hunger did not flow through their tiny minds, not like the instincts of honest predators. No, their hunger was cold and focused, and their thoughts as narrow as they were. Thoughts that skittered away when he tried to sway them, just as the birds themselves would flap away when startled, only to drop back down to resume their relentless feeding moments later. He couldn’t control them, couldn’t sway their purpose, so he made the world around him tremble. And the earth did, as it had so many times before, the mountains splitting with the depths of his desperation….

  Glass shattered.

  It was an oddity. A bright tinkling of sound that was foreign to the nightmare. Power came down and coiled around him, constricting the flow of his energy like a snake strangling a rodent. Like bonds restricting him, holding him immobile while the black death flapped down around him to pluck pieces of him away.

  He fought against it, stealing power from the ever-present source of the earth and surging outward.

  The coils gave, tearing, and he struggled frantically to find a way though the rents. But soon enough, the bonds reintegrated, a web of sinuous netting that trapped him within himself, wedging itself between him and the eager surge of earth power that filled his mind.

  Agony ate at him. He jerked, clutching at gaping tears in his flesh. Clutching at the terrible, terrible pits in his body where flesh and muscle and organs had been. He screamed, reduced to that outlet and no other, and the screams ate into his brain, white and mindless in their intensity.

  Stopitstopitstopit STOP IT! It got through to him, insistent and relentless and powerful.

  No pain. No wounds. No pain. No wounds. The words echoed in his head, worming their way through the tight-clenched armor of his consciousness. Ghost wounds. Ghost pain.

  And that last was repeated until there was enough clarity in his head to tentatively take stock and see if that was truth.

  Yhalen opened his eyes and stared down the length of his curled body. Saw pale flesh, pimply with cold, but whole and clean and naked on rumpled cloth. There was sky, that glared down grey and ominous through a jagged opening of shattered glass. A window. What was left of a window, with stress fractured stone clinging to the edges of its broken frame. He didn’t understand. Sneers and threats, the raised hands of ogres crowded in around the edges of his vision, and beyond them the shadows writhed with the flapping of wings.

  Take my home down with your madness and I’ll give you something to scream about.

  The threat whispered in his mind. He glanced around the room and saw a shadow that was more real and solid somehow than the shifting facade of birds…and he fell into placid darkness.

  It was like a nightmare that kept repeating itself—round and round like a snake eating its own tail.

  Sometimes, for brief moments Yhalen was aware that the torments were only in his head, but for the most part he sank under the influence of the terror, swept away by the ever-changing currents of energies that swirled around him like flies to a corpse.

  He was aware on some low level that something was broken, ripped and shattered beyond his capacity to repair. Perhaps it was the part of him that instinctively harnessed and dammed the overwhelming spiritual energies always so abundant in the natural world, those energies that ignored most folk but were drawn uncontrollably to others. Or perhaps the voice that came and went in his head told him that.

  The voice, the presence, was a burning darkness at the edge of his awareness—a source of power different than the wild, endless energies that came from the earth and the air and the various indefinables that drifted in between. The voice was oft times cruel and relentless in its entry into his mind, battering aside protective shields in its effort to get at the core of him. But most times it chased off the birds, so it was the lesser of two evils and he thought he recalled murmured assurances that it was trying to mend tears, if only he’d let it. If only the recurring nightmares of pain would go away, he might be inclined to let it. But even the voice at its most strident couldn’t always fend off the torments memory wrought upon his body.

  Sometimes, the voice wasn’t alone. Sometimes there were vague, inhuman presences working alongside it—sinuous, alluring minds to calm him and hold him at bay while the voice moved with freedom inside his head. Sometimes, during fleeting moments of lucidity, he’d see the shapely outlines of women above him—but not quite women, only creatures that wore the shape but churned on the inside with the fires of something else entirely. And sometimes he’d see the starkly beautiful face of a fellow Ydregi, frowning at him or leaning over him with intensity, his body hot upon Yhalen’s own, his power slipping out of him like the retreat of a spent sexual organ.

  The sane part of him, the part not caught up in pain and madness, responded eagerly to that Ydregi face, falling back upon old memories and old treasured faces. He saw Yherji in his mind’s eye. Felt the heat of Yherji’s mouth and the pleasure of Yherji’s body. It was a dream more pleasant by far to fall back upon than the field of crows, and he let himself drift into the clutches of times gone by as he surrendered to Yherji and Y’drah and Yhuja—his closest cronies in the great forest. All of them closer than their parents suspected. All of them eager to explore the pleasures of the body.

  Periods of darkness interspersed the dream of home, with fewer moments where the birds flapped down to torment him appearing. Yherji bent over him, urging his legs apart, and he willingly spread his thighs and made room for Yherji’s hard, smooth body. Lifting his hips when Yherji urged and falling into pleasure when Yherji entered, his mind lazy and open as Yherji slowly set up a rhythm, hands and mouth busy upon other parts of his body.

  There was always a subtle presence in his head of crafty fingers plying the depths of his mind, but with his body shrouded in the pleasures of the flesh, it wasn’t so much of an intrusion. Not like before.

  Things became clearer, the nightmares fewer, and when they came, there was awareness that the horrors they held were figments of times past.

  He awoke in shrouded shadow, aware for the first time in what seemed a very long time of the here and now. Of the weight of windowless stone walls and the coolness of a room nestled below the surface of the earth. Of a vast but simple hearth, in which a low fire danced. Of a bed with four large posters, and him sprawled naked in twisted sheets. He couldn’t fathom where or why, his mind too newly cohesive to deduce such mundane things. There was a shadow by the hearth that moved towards him when he took note of it, and he thought immediately that it was Yherji.

  Only Yherji was shorter and stouter, and Yherji had a head full of curly hair more yellow than bronze—and Yherji had never in all his short life possessed so striking a face….

  Yherji was dead. Yherji was struck down, because Yhalen had been too unpracticed in the ways of real battle to stay and fend off their attackers. He drew breath, the claws of panic beginning to set in and bringing with them harsh reality. The Ydregi who was not Yherji put hands on his shoulders and pushed him into the pillows, fingers digging into his flesh.

  “You will not fall back into that again.”

  Yhalen blinked up into a stern, beautiful face, recalling similar features, recalling a name in the back of his mind to go with the voice.

  “Understand?” Fingers moved to grasp his jaw and Yhalen stared and breathed, unable to do more.

  The g
rip let up and the fingers stroked his cheek, moved across his lips and down the column of his throat.

  “I—I know you?” Yhalen’s voice came out hoarse, as if he’d not had reason to use it in a great while.

  It was exhausting uttering those few words.

  “You do.”

  The man settled onto the bed beside him, dark robe falling open to reveal bare skin beneath. A thumb circled Yhalen’s nipple and though he felt some indignity at the presumption, he couldn’t quite raise a hand to brush it away.

  The man took his shoulder and turned him over onto his belly, turning his cheek to the pillow, as if Yhalen hadn’t the wherewithal to keep himself from smothering. Perhaps he didn’t. He certainly didn’t have the energy to protest when the man swung a leg over to straddle his thighs. Yhalen felt the heat of soft testicles resting against the crevice of his upper thighs, felt the touch of fingers gathering his hair and twisting it to lie above his shoulder on the pillow, baring the back of his neck and his back.

  He lay there, shuddering, under the weight of a stranger, who wasn’t so strange.

  “One more time, before I trust you in the real world.” A whisper against his neck before lips touched skin, causing a ripple of goose bumps that spread out from the source of ticklish pleasure.

  Hands trailed down his ribs, trailing bliss in their wake. Utter bliss lanced into his flesh from the mere touch of fingertips. He moaned, sinking into the morass of sensation and pushing back against the weight with his hips. Pressure edged inside him, a comfortable length of heat that touched that wonderful spot, yet did not seem to fill his body to the capacity that he truly longed for. There was no edge of pain to the pleasure to drive him over the verge, no feeling of his guts stretched thin even when the body over his pressed in to the fullest. Nothing to make him lose himself to the utter sensation of being possessed. Of being owned.