Voices of Blaze (Volume 5 of The Fireblade Array)

by H. O. Charles

  you – you make me feel as ifI have a reason to exist. Without you, the world is empty. Do you think you could... ever feel the same for me?”

  Her thin brows drew together. “I am not supposed to love, Kalad. Not in a way that comes before my duties.”

  He nodded slowly and withdrew his hand from hers. “I understand.” Blazes, he had heard enough of duty from his mother over the years! The

  Daisain had been wrong, she had told him when he was still a boy. How could such a perfect marriage to your father and the handsome family that came with it ever be wrong? she had said. And now that he thought on it, how could his love for Mirel ever be wrong? He had never felt such happiness with any of the other women that he had bedded, and he had bedded more than a few.

  To save himself embarrassment and hide his

  flushed cheeks, he went to gaze out ofthe window. There was no wolf moping in the gardens now.

  “I do like you, husband,” Mirel called to him from her bed, and Kalad turned to hear her speak the rest. “I do like you very deeply indeed,” she said.

  ***

  “Is your wife not here? I had been looking forward to meeting

  her.” Kalad knew his mother well enough to recognise that the smile she wore was false, but he beckoned her to sit in one of the armchairs. Really, she could have given him far more notice ofthis visit. As she sat down, he noticed there was something altered about her. True, she had spent this life in Sunidara, but it wasn’t that she was more obviously freckled. It was... something was different about her body.

  “That is not really why

  you’re here,” Kalad said.

  She pressed her lips together and sighed softly. “I do want to meet her, Kal. But there is something more important. Mirel is free. You are the first person she will target to punish me. She will use you, torture you and break you. I need you to come back to Gialdin with me where I can keep you safe until she is captured again.”

  “I’ll take my chances here.”

  “No. She will – blazes, Kal – please, do this for me. Listen to me. I have lost one son and can never get him back. I will not lose another. Your wife can come with you – if you will not think of yourself, then think of her. Mirel will kill her too, without so much as a second thought. She is callous enough to end the lives of anyone who stands in her way. Four thousand of Calidell’s soldiers meant nothing to her... one wife-”

  “We stay here.” His mother

  thought she knew Mirel, but she was so very, very mistaken about her character. Kalad was the only one who had seen far enough into Mirel’s heart to know that what she did was always for the greater good. She was far from a danger to him; she was his strength, and that strength would see the world through. “My wife was injured recently. She needs to rest rather than travel across the country. My answer is no.” “Well, I can wield something to make her heal faster. She will feel better for it.”

  Kalad shook his head. “She’s to have no visitors. We will not leave here – I’d rather we both lived a few more days in this paradise than years locked up in that white prison. I grew to despise that place and everything it represented, and I will not go back to it.”

  His mother looked to the floor as if defeated, which was unusually soon for her. Kalad

  recalled disagreements with her that had lasted for days. And the questions – she would have questioned and probed every blazed thing she could poke her nose into, but this time she did not.

  “Where is my father?”

  She looked up suddenly, as if a noise had startled her. “He... I think... your father...”

  “My father...?”

  “He needs your help.”

  Kalad blinked rapidly. “Is he alright?”

  His mother shook her head with sadness, and a single tear made its escape down her cheek. “No. No, he is not.”

  “Well, what’s wrong? What can I do?”

  She inhaled a lengthy breath and rose from her chair. “Come with me.”

  Kalad followed her obediently from the sitting room and out into the open air. It was a woefully humid day for the

  height of summer, but he had come to realise that such weather was common in this place at the foot ofthe mountains. Where the countries met, so did the clouds and the cold air that made them sink.

  “Your father told me that you came to an accord of sorts during the peace talks,” his mother said in a voice that trembled slightly. “I was so glad to hear of it.”

  He smiled thinly and placed

  a hand at her back to comfort her. “We did. He adores you so much. I’d never have believed it, but his dedication to you was something I had not witnessed before. It changed my perspective utterly.”

  His mother glanced at him with an expression he could not interpret, and then looked away quickly. Before long, they had reached a rocky outcrop some several hundred yards from the manor.

  “Is he here-” Kalad began, but his sentence was cut short when a great beast of smoke and flame emerged from behind the rock. “What is-?”

  “Tyshar. He underwent something of a change recently. He’s harmless, I promise.”

  Kalad nodded as if he understood, but he was certainly not about to touch the animal to find out. “And father?”

  His mother’s eyes darted about a bit, and she scanned the horizon to make sure no one was nearby. “Morghiad,” she whispered.

  At first, Kalad was not sure what he was supposed to be looking at. He could see something dark and slimy slithering about in the shadows, but he could not quite make out what it was. He took a step closer. It looked like there was a leg, and was that an arm? He tilted his head to see better, but as he did so, the thing stepped out.

  “Oh...” Kalad cursed loudly.

  “I’m sorry, Kalad,” his mother said in a mournful voice. “I’m so sorry.”

  “I suppose I can guess how this happened,” he said quietly. Great fires of Achellon and all its skies! There was almost nothing recognisable about him. His body was so wasted, and his teeth so warped. Not even the green of his eyes had survived the transformation.

  “It was an accident,” she

  protested weakly. “I was quenched and... and I couldn’t – it wasn’t-”

  Kalad frowned as he put an arm across her shoulders. He could feel that the Blazes still emanated their heat into his mother’s hair and clothing, which must have meant she had managed to un-quench herself since the event. “Hush, it’s alright. What is it that I can do?”

  “I cannot bring myself to kill him. I tried, but I cannot. He is

  still in there. But your blood there has to be answer in it.” Kalad turned to his mother. “You want to gut me like a fish and let him eat my innards?!” “No! There will be no gutting or eating-” she broke off as the eisiel made an odd sort of rasping noise. “But a few drops of blood... it’s worth a try, isn’t it?” Her eyes looked so pleadingly at him, and Kalad could feel his chest aching. He had never seen his mother feeble like this. Never. He nodded rapidly. “I’ll do everything I can. Of course I will.” It was quite a leap to think his blood would help his father at all, and as far as he knew, he had not given his ability to anyone else through the years he had lived. But it was worth a try. He could not imagine what it would be like to have to kill Mirel had they been in the same situation, even if it was to save her.

  “Who is that?” his mother asked, nodding to a slender figure who shambled toward them. Follocks! “Ah... just a moment.” Kalad jogged back down the hillside, trying to remain in his mother’s line of sight and in the way of his wife. “What are you doing out of bed?” he asked when he reached her. Mirel was clutching her injury, but it did not appear to be bleeding through her fingers. “Who is that?” she asked. Kalad looked back to the figures by the outcrop. His

  mother was no longer visible, but Tyshar’s coal-filled and burning muzzle was. “It’s my parents. Listen, you need to get back to the house before they see you. The last thing I want is a fight
over nothing.”

  “Kalad-” His mother’s voice, and it was close. Oh... blazes, no...

  When he turned to her, and the identity of his wife was revealed, his mother’s eyes widened to perfect, white-lined circles. “Kalad, move out ofthe

  way!” she yelled.

  He felt and saw the heat build up within her, and knew that she was preparing to wield. Kalad stepped in front of Mirel. “She is no danger to me. And she’s quenched. Please, leave her.”

  His mother looked at them both out of the sides of her eyes. “Move, Kalad. She cannot be trusted.”

  “I will not. She’s different;

  she no longer has any quarrel

  with you.”

  There was a moment where his mother seemed to lower her hands, but that moment of reprieve was gone in a blink. The air about him turned as scorching hot as an oven, and it started to scream. Kalad tried to push his wife to the ground to protect her, but she was whisked out of his hands before he could do anything to prevent it.

  His eyes searched frantically about for her, and they soon

  found her suspended in the air above him. Her back was arched and her face screwed up in pain. Her clothing was already blistering and withering, and it would not be long before her whole body burned to nothing. “No!” Kalad yelled, trying desperately to unravel the forms as rapidly as he could. “She’s injured! Stop!”

  But his words fell upon ears that would not hear him, and her millennia of practice at wielding

  dwarfed his mere decades. His mother continued to wield horrible, painful things into his wife. She would not kill her, he told himself. She would not risk that!

  Mirel let out a terrible, blood-curdling howl then, and Kalad could not bear to remain where he was. He thrust himself to his feet, and hurled all of his bodyweight at his mother. She emitted a noise of surprise, but did not relinquish her hold on

  Mirel.

  “Let go, let g-!” he yelled at her, but she kicked him off before he could finish. Great spirals of white and blue fire still surged out of her body, and Kalad’s efforts at undoing them failed each time. “Stop!” he cried at her, and leapt at her again. This time he would make his beautiful wife’s suffering cease. Kalad grabbed his mother by the throat, and began to dig.

  There was a sudden hiss and a crack in the air, and Morghiad’s skin began to itch. No, it was far worse than an itch; it felt as if he were burning from the inside out all over again. Someone was wielding nearby. He leapt out from the safety of the

  shadows, forcing aside his desire to howl at the agony ofthe heat he felt from the wielding, and sprinted toward the area where it was even hotter. He had to find the fire; he had to snuff it out! His vision had become too cloudy to pick out the red-gold of Artemi’s hair, or the fine features of herface, but he had other ways of seeing now. He could feel the energy that sizzled in the plants and the rocks and the bones of every man, and he could smell the scents that oozed from their skins. Morghiad sniffed the air for Artemi’s perfume as he loped forward on legs that throbbed with pain when he used them, but that desired to move him faster than his old legs could possibly have done.

  He could hear the sounds of yelling and screaming as he drew nearer, and the burning he felt inside his skin had intensified tenfold. “Artemi!” he tried to call, but it came out as a coarse croak.

  He did not need to sniff for her, as a great surge of Blaze drew what remained of his eyes right to her. She glowed in his dim sight, and Morghiad ran to that glow in spite of the searing heat he felt from her. Her power drew him; she drew him, and combined with her scent, the mixture made his head spin and his mouth water.

  But when Morghiad approached, he realised someone was holding her to the ground

  with their hand around her neck. Her attacker was dark against the background of Blaze Energy that howled through everything else, and that had to mean he was kanaala. “Kalad?”

  Kalad did not release his mother, and Morghiad could see that he was draining her of all her fires. Her glow was fading, and soon she would match the light of the stones and the trees. Soon she would be as cold as the ice in the Kemeni Mountains, and after

  that she would die. No, no, no! He leapt at his son with his teeth bared and his claws out as wide as they would go. It was almost no effort at all to extract him from Artemi, and still less to pin the man to the ground. Morghiad roared as he reached into Kalad’s chest as if it were made of soft butter, and tore out the heart that beat within it. He ate it greedily, and then went after the lungs. They were full of Artemi’s fire; lots of beautiful,

  perfect fire.

  Abruptly, he noticed the sensation of intense heat had left his skin, and the worst of his pain subsided. The wielding had ceased.

  “What... what have you done?” he heard Artemi say. His Artemi.

  “You must always come first,” Morghiad said with his burned throat. “I put others first before, and I was wrong to do so. It should always be you, my love.

  Fire ofmy life.”

  “Our son... he-”

  Morghiad cocked his head to one side. His lips felt moistened after a hundred years spent in the desert, and the hard skin of his hands softened by the balm of a yarn plant. It was Kalad’s blood, he realised. “I chose rightly.”

  “No.” Artemi backed away from him slowly at first. But her breath was coming raggedly, and her throat made strange noises.

  She turned then, and ran.

  It was the right choice. Morghiad could see that more clearly than anything he had seen in any of his lives before. He could see how his actions ofthe past had been just small expressions of his power - just tentative grasps at what was possible. Old Gialdin had not simply fallen to Acher and his army; it had been broken from the inside by a young boy, a boy who became too afraid and too

  ashamed of his own abilities to truly test them in the years afterward. But now... now he was not afraid. It filled his heart with strength; it calmed his breathing and eased every one of his senses. This was his redemption and his renewal. It was the truth ofthe fires.

  What fuelled them? What drove them? Who was master of it all? He saw. He saw.

  With a quiet crackling, Morghiad’s charred outer shell

  turned from cinders, husk and flake to smooth, unmarred skin. His raven hair swept out through the cracks of his burned scalp and his blackened, twisted teeth fell away to a perfect ivory bite. He drew a long, pure breath into his new lungs, and his milk-white eyes darkened rapidly. From their colourlessness emerged a brilliant hue - it was green. The darkest, coldest and most brilliant green.

  Glossary of Terms

  Achellon – A mythical place inhabited by the all-powerful fire gods. It is believed that Achellon is composed entirely of Blaze Energy and that it is the true source of such power. It is often described as a place devoid of pain or suffering. In reality, Achellon is likely to be derived from legends based upon The Crux.

  Benay-gosa – An unmarried, female attendant of male royalty. Her primary duty is to provide an heir, though she is more commonly viewed as a provider of pleasures for her mate. Benaygosa are chosen by their sponsors, and considered to be royal property. They are similar to concubines, though they can be selected from any level of society.

  Blaze Energy – A fiery power that can be manipulated into weapons, shields, sources of light

  and even used to construct buildings. It is usually described as blue light in its basic form, but to most people it is not visible.

  Blazes, The – The fires from which Blaze Energy is extracted. Only wielders (directly) and kanaala (indirectly) have access to these fires.

  Crux, The – A world that exists at the centre of all worlds. It is the most energy-rich plane of existence, and all other worlds draw their power from it.

  Cave of Light (Gialdin) –The gateway from the Darkworld to The Crux, and a place filled with latent energy.

  Do-koor–A Hirrahan custom lasting two months whereby, following the birth of a child, a
family will open doors to friends and enemies in order to celebrate the arrival of a new life. All weapons must be dispensed with whilst do-koor is in place and visitors must refrain from drinking alcohol in the

  household.

  Eisiel – A creature so burned by The Blazes that it is half-dead. Described as charred, oily skinned and wasted in appearance, eisiels kill without remorse. They usually hunt for a specific target, selected by their maker. It has been observed that they are former lovers of wielders, whose fires burned them during love-making. They are immune to weapons made with Blaze Energy.