by A. Evermore
The Shadow Demon looked concerned. ‘Maybe. I can take you to him a better, safer way. Look if you…’
‘But I need to enter the Storm Holt, regardless of what this king wants. That is what is expected of me, that is the test I have agreed to undertake. The wizards will know if I don’t enter. I have already decided, I must undertake the Wizard’s Reckoning.’
The demon swallowed audibly. ‘No gate to the Murk, whether closed or open, is safe anymore. The greater demons are opening all the demon gates. They are doing something dangerous with them. Maybe this gate will get you to the Murk, maybe it will take you to… beyond the Pit.’
‘Sounds bad,’ she murmured, suddenly wishing she hadn’t foolishly agreed to take the test. ‘Still, it can’t be that bad. If I don’t do it I’ll never have the opportunity to take the Reckoning again. Besides, it sounds like this, er, king, is waiting for me.’ The demon could be lying, it could all be a trick. The wizards would know, the gate had to go where they said it went. Maybe this was all part of the ‘test’ anyway.
‘Who are you? Do you have a name?’ she said.
‘Maggot,’ he replied.
‘That’s not a name, that’s… that’s disgusting.’ She wrinkled up her nose.
‘Thank you,’ Maggot beamed.
She frowned at him. It had to be part of the Reckoning. Maybe it started easy and got harder.
‘Well, Maggot, I’m Issa, and I have to enter that gate.’ She said it decisively, her mind made up.
‘Issstha, Ithy, Issy,’ he struggled over her name. ‘But it’s not safe…’
‘It’s never been safe, Maggot, that’s the point. That’s why wizards enter it. Tell your King Gedrock to meet me there when I get there. Now, if you’ll excuse me.’ She began untying her boots and set them down in the grass. Next were her belt and tunic dress. She set these down by the boots and hesitated at her underwear. Did she need to be completely naked? It all seemed so wrong. She glanced back at Maggot who was flapping nervously in the air.
‘It’s not safe,’ he shook his head and flapped his wings. Confusion twisted his face. Perhaps he was having trouble with whatever orders he had been given now she refused to follow him. ‘King will be cross if you die, and I shall be punished.’
She took a deep breath. At least he was honest, something she had not expected from a demon. Actually a lot of things she had not expected from demons had just happened.
‘Well, you can come with me. No need to shake you’re head, it’s up to you. I’m wasting valuable time here. Now, do you mind? I need you to turn around so I can undress.’ She wafted her hand at him. The demon looked even more confused.
She sighed, what did the thing care if she was naked or not. She slipped off her underwear and shivered, suddenly feeling horribly vulnerable. A glance at Maggot told her he was still struggling with what to do now. She stepped forwards and reached a hand tentatively towards the swirling gate. Immediately she felt it pull on her and drew her hand back. Her heart was pounding and sweat beaded her brow.
‘The greater demons will kill you in there, you’ll never get out,’ Maggot suddenly wailed beside her.
He seemed quite pitiful and a desire to pet him almost overwhelmed her. He really wasn’t helping her resolve to enter the gate. Never trust a demon, she reminded herself as he continued.
‘I can take you another way. I’ll be in trouble if you don’t come back, I know it.’ He had come close enough to lay a small clawed hand on her knee. He looked up at her with pleading yellow eyes.
‘Isthy, it’s not safe.’
‘My mother used to call me that; Issy.’ She smiled at him, a sad smile. ‘You see, Maggot, I have to go, I don’t have a choice. Not now. When I’m there, I will meet your King.’
She turned back to the Storm Holt, closed her eyes stepped forward into the maelstrom. Maggot wailed her name as she fell and then was whipped up into the storm. She didn’t know if he followed or not.
Chapter 33
The Wizard's Reckoning
ISSA spun over and over. She couldn’t breathe for the panic that ripped through her, and the terrifying energies that shuddered around her. Where the Storm Holt entrance had been silent before, now the roar of energy filled her ears. The world was a blur of flashing lightning, howling noise, and spinning energy. Every cell in her body vibrated and screamed in pain. She began to feel herself fragment, just like she had when she transported to the Wizard’s Circle, only this was violent and painful. She thought she was going to die.
The spinning slowed and the deafening noise dimmed a little. Her body pulled itself together and felt more solid. The air turned hot and heavy as she struggled to drag it into her lungs. She couldn’t do anything to slow her movement in the flaring maelstrom of blue and white, she was trapped in the rapids of a flow of energy. Beyond the tunnel in which she was hurtling, she saw a sky filled with green-tinged clouds and a huge emerald pockmarked moon. The green moon of the Murk.
A face formed in the clouds, a demon face, the same demon she had seen in her dream. Red eyes with black-slitted pupils watched her endless tumble through the Storm Holt. Its mouth moved as if it was trying to speak to her. She tried to slow her fall, but it was like trying to grasp at the wind. All she could do was focus on dragging air into her lungs and endure the forces battering her. She struggled to stay conscious.
‘Raven Queen,’ the demon’s voice boomed around her.
‘Help me,’ she screamed. ‘I cannot stop it.’
Far below she glimpsed the ground, a wide plain and a huge black rock that stabbed into the sky. She’d seen that before, in the sacred mound. That was where the demon horde had flooded from. To her horror she realised the Storm Holt was taking her straight to it. She grappled for the Flow, but it wasn’t there. There was magic and energy in the Murk, but it was unavailable to her. She was not of this place, she could not use the energy here. How could she be tested as a wizard if there was no magic that she could use? Nothing made any sense. Her mind began to scatter.
The spire loomed close at a rapid rate. She covered her head and screamed as she tumbled towards the rock, only to find that she passed right through it unhurt. Darkness engulfed her. She blinked, trying to understand. Solid stone could not break her fall whilst her physical body was pure energy in the Storm Holt.
She was still being carried by the maelstrom though. Now she spun through darkness flecked through with the blue and white energy. She burst into great caverns lit by flaming braziers. Things moved on ledges in the walls. Demons, thousands of them. Some were small and brown, like the demon she’d met at the gate entrance, but others were the size of dragons with enormous black wings made of the shadows themselves. They began to shriek at her presence, screaming and howling for her blood and soul.
‘Get it,’ they screamed.
‘Fresh blood…’
‘A living soul…’
Those with wings leapt into the air and flew towards her. She was soon followed by legions of demons following her downward plummet. Their claws flashed in the light, they gnashed their teeth, and their eyes… She tried not to look into their eyes. Faster, she begged. At first she’d wanted to the Storm Holt to slow, but now she prayed it carried her faster. There was nothing she could do to fight them or run away, she was stuck in the maelstrom that drew her ever downwards.
Long black faces, more terrifying than the demons she had seen in her dreams, made her soul shrivel. Those faces were the length of her entire body, and their black fangs the size of her arms as they snapped at her. Though their fangs could not seem to hurt her physical body in this state, she felt their teeth and claws tear at her energy and rip into her soul.
The flying demons followed her through rock and stone, they seemed to be made of energy just like she was. For a moment she was thankful that the tunnel did not stop, and her fall was fast enough to keep most of the demons from reaching her. She curled up in a ball to keep from seeing their horrific faces, and prayed to Zanufey to end
it.
Bright light on her eyelids forced her eyes open. She was falling through a cavern filled with light. She turned and saw the white spear directly beneath her, the source of the light. She reached to grab it as she tumbled past, but her hands were not solid and she could grasp at nothing. The spear passed harmlessly through her body, but its energy was like a breath of fresh air to her soul. She could feel the spear’s power and it gave her strength. Could she feel the spear’s magic because it was originally from Maioria?
The demons that had followed now fled in horror at the sight of the spear. The spear disappeared as she plunged through the rock floor and into a dark sea of nothingness.
So complete and empty was the nothingness that Issa neither knew if she fell or was still. The utter darkness was more terrifying than the demons that had chased her. Had she fallen beyond the Murk? How would she ever get back out? How would anyone find her? Cold fear spread through her. She wondered if this was what it was like to be buried alive, to die alone trapped in the darkness.
Red lightning flared, lighting up a sky filled with black clouds. It was a blessing to the nothingness. Lightning torched the sky again and again, and the scene brightened. Now she could see the tunnel of energy, only it was much weaker than before. The barest hint of blue and white swirled around her, and she could see through it clearly into the world beyond.
She appeared to be falling slowly through a red sky. Magenta clouds boiled around her, and it was hotter than any place she had ever experienced. Sweat soon rolled down her skin, draining the strength from her spent body. The air was thick as soup in her lungs, and she felt crushed by the pressure of the place. Her descent slowed so that she floated rather than fell through a world filled with boiling clouds. Her thoughts were slow too, she couldn’t seem to think straight and strange noises came and went.
Then the madness came.
It came in the sound of voices whispering around her. Voices of friends she’d known came and went, snippets of conversations she’d had in the past talked around her as if she were having them now. Faces of people she’d once known formed in the clouds. They seemed to be able to see her, they were talking to her. She blinked, were they real or was she making them up? She shook her head, trying hang on to her sanity.
‘Issy? Is that you?’ a soft voice came.
‘Ma?’ she called out, desperately needing something familiar to cling on to.
‘Issy, why did you leave me to die?’
‘Ma? I did not. I came for you. I…’ she gasped as Fraya’s pale sunken face formed before her. The unfathomable sadness in her eyes sent shivers through her body. Then her mother’s eyes turned black and she scowled in a demonic way, her face a snarl of hatred. Issa slammed her eyes shut and clutched at her temples. The voices crowded around her.
‘Why did you kill me, Issa?’ a voice cut through the others.
‘Rance?’ She turned to see his handsome face smiling back at her in the clouds. There was sadness in his eyes. ‘Rance, I did not. Keteth came.’ His face disappeared and instead she looked upon his body, all bruised bloodied and bloated. Cirosa was weeping over him. She looked up at Issa with a hate filled snarl.
‘You did this,’ Cirosa screamed, her blue eyes flared into red with slitted pupils like a demon’s. ‘You murdered him.’
Issa shook her head and tried to back away.
Keteth appeared from behind a cloud. Not the man, but the beast. He was huge in the sky, his great white bloated mass snaking towards her. He was as real now as he had been when she last saw the beast. She tried to move away from him, but had no way to control her inexorable descent or any movement. He opened his mouth in a grin, revealing thousands of needle sharp teeth.
‘None of this is real,’ she screamed at him, at the voices. How can this be a wizard’s testing when I cannot fight and use the Flow?
She shut her eyes and clamped her hands over her ears, but the voices came into her mind. She screamed again and again trying to drown them out. She couldn’t fight them but she could refuse to listen to them. She had never before felt so helpless and pitiful. She understood then why no wizard spoke of their cowardly useless existence in the horrors of the Storm Holt.
What caused the voices to end she did not know, but when she stopped screaming there was only silence. When she opened her eyes there was black nothingness again. She could sense no movement, no Storm Holt tunnel. Nothing. It seemed to be like that for a long time, hours at least. Hour after hour of nothing.
With no detectable boundaries of any sort, she began to lose all sense of self, and with it time and space became meaningless concepts. It could be said that, without her self-consciousness, she actually ceased to exist. She could not tell where she and the nothingness were separated, they seemed one and the same.
Slowly her world began fill with memories of the past, as if her dissipating mind was scrabbling furiously to gather the parts of itself together. It seemed as if everything she had ever been and done was trying to arrange itself into some sensible linear pattern that made up her life, but the connections between events had been lost. Right now, everything she had ever experienced appeared to have happened at the same time. She latched onto a memory and focused on it.
Just like opening one’s eyes after a long sleep, her awareness returned and with it the rest of the world. Or at least a world. When she blinked open her eyes she found herself sitting on her mother’s bed, dressed in her usual sage coloured trousers and a white shirt. She touched her clothes, feeling a sense of normality return. She took a deep breath and let it out in relief. This was where she was supposed to be. She’d made it home where she belonged.
‘Ma?’ she said. Fraya was propped up by cushions.
‘I’m sorry to tell you the truth, Issy,’ she croaked, carrying on with the conversation they had clearly been having, ‘but you must know before I’m gone.’
‘Know what?’ she asked, her head was pounding with everything she was trying to piece together. ‘It’s all right Ma, I understand everything. You need to rest and not worry,’ she soothed.
Being here didn’t quite seem right. She had been here before, so she shouldn’t be here now, but she couldn’t work out why. Everything she had been and done before this point was a mess in her mind. Her memory was like a puzzle all broken up and left on the floor. No two memories connected, no two memories made sense. All she knew was that she should not be here, and yet it all seemed so natural and… normal. This was her home.
‘Your mother just didn’t want you,’ Fraya sighed sadly.
‘What?’ She frowned in confusion. This wasn’t quite how she remembered it.
‘I’m so sorry. After your father left her, she didn’t want to be reminded of him. Said he’d near as well forced himself upon her. In an act of mercy she tried to end her pregnancy, but nothing worked. She couldn’t afford to keep you, she was so poor herself. She said that, for your own sake, you should never have been born.’
Issa listened in numb silence. Somehow what she was hearing was not right, or was it? She was sure Ma had said something different. Or had she remembered it wrong? Why couldn’t she remember what happened? Her mother continued, her voice weak and rasping.
‘I couldn’t bear to watch her let you drift away in the ocean, so I took you in. It was hard, I’ll admit that. I suffered much in the early days… But now you’re a full grown woman, and you can make of your life what you will with all that I have left. Leave me now Issy, I need to rest.’ She sighed, rolled over and closed her eyes. Her breath rattled in her chest
Issa stood up and walked out the door in a daze. My mother had been a seer, a seer damn it. But maybe she’d remembered it all wrong. Maybe she’d made it all up in her head. What in hell was going on?
‘Where am I? How did I get here,’ she whispered as she took in their familiar kitchen, her home on Little Kammy. The same painted yellow plates on the table, the comfy old chair with the rip in the cushion that was her favourite, the flowers
on the window from Farmer Ged. ‘It’s all as I remember it, and yet something is different and I… I should not be here.’
She looked down and noticed her shirt and trousers were faded and patched. She smoothed her hair and found it was tied back, but cut short and limp. Her hands were covered with callouses and bitten nails from worry and hard work. She pulled down her shirt and gasped in horror. There was no raven mark upon her chest. She remembered it clearly, but now it wasn’t there. Where was she? This couldn’t be home, things just weren’t right. What was happening?
A deafening roar came from outside and rumbled the floor. She screamed and covered her ears. Fire flared against all the windows, from the kitchen through to the adjoining sitting room, as if the whole house had been plunged into a sea of flame. The glass suddenly exploded inwards from the heat spraying her with shards. The roof began to lift up, wooden beams splintered and stone walls cracked. The entire wall in front of her collapsed as the roof supporting it was flung away.
She found herself staring back into the enormous eyes of a Dread Dragon. It breathed in. She collapsed onto the floor as dragon fear stole the strength from her legs. Fire exploded around her. Her clothes and hair burst into flame. She screamed as the burning agony scoured her body and drove all thoughts from her mind.
“You should never have been born,” the words hurt her like physical blows as she floated in nothingness.
“Your mother just didn’t want you.”
‘I had a life, it was different to this,’ she said aloud, but doubt crept in. She was unwanted there too. She wished she’d never been born. Edarna’s face came into her memory.
‘Edarna,’ she reached out to the witch. ‘Is that you? Can you reach me? Are you scrying for me?’
She blinked and found herself sat with the old witch at her kitchen table, a mug of tea held between both their hands.
‘It’s all in your head, girl.’ The old witch shook her head and sighed.