by J. F. Lewis
Root Guard gasped when she passed them, stepping through the delicately patterned exterior portal into the trunk of Hashan, wending up the stair. One of the guards on duty outside the sacred chamber raised a hand in greeting, then drew a sword, stepping to block her path.
“I am Gromma’s,” Malli said. “Step aside.”
“The queen—” the young Vael began.
Malli breathed her dark, heavy breath, filling the air with black and brown spores. She felt the mass of them in the air, grouped and aimed them with her new magic, covering the young Vael in spores that found purchase in unblighted bark. The Root Guard fell, still clutching her sword, free hand grabbing at her throat as her air bladder stilled with fungal bloom, her bark splitting and bursting with dark-red mushroom caps.
Inside the grass-carpeted chamber, Kari and her Vael attendants worked what healing they could. An Aern and an elf stood, attention focused on the scarred king. Unseen by most of those assembled, the spirits of the Root Trees looked on, too. A sting of poison struck the spirit of Warrune, turning his tainted heart bitter, dark, and alien.
The blow struck the very instant Malli’s foot hit the sacred grass and her bark felt the twinned light filtered by the crystallized sap overhead.
Gromma’s timing, she wondered, or Uled’s?
A dark and evil thing touched Warrune. The Root Tree howled in pain, a sound only heard by his brother, their Root Wife, and Malli herself.
Kari’s shock locked an image of the queen in Malli’s memory, beautiful beyond words, her flowing head petals askew in a way that increased her loveliness. In a race of beings designed and bred to be desirous, Kari’s features held the perfect balance of angle and curve.
Lips parted in the beginning of a moue of distaste that would in a flutter of heartbeats become abject horror, Kari’s gown of diaphanous white clung to her form, pulled tight by the torsion as she looked away from the king and up toward the amber sap above.
Why, Malli thought, did her eyes turn upward when the wash of pain and fear came from below them, in the heart of Warrune?
Peering into the monocolored eyes of her queen, Malli wanted to explain, but the elf king was dying despite the efforts of the queen and her assistants. An Aern stood nearby, looking out-of-place and unsure. If Warrune lived, Uled would gain a foothold in the very soul of the Parliament of Ages, tainting the forest, its people, and their magic.
For Warrune to die, Hashan and Kari had to die with him. The three were inextricably linked. For Uled to die, the elf king had to live.
The pure logistics of it made sense to the part of her who was a Root Guard, who would have died for Kholburran without question. She had no thought of what would happen to her after it was done.
“I’m sorry, my queen,” Malli said. “Stand back, Aern, I can save him.”
The Aern stood back, and she knelt over the king. He was hot, his blood poisoned, his whole system overtaxed by a magic she had never known, but she knew how to fix him.
“How?” the Aern asked.
“It’s the simplest thing in the world,” Malli said. Her fingers glistened with new thorn-like nails sprouted just for the occasion. She sank one hand into the king’s chest, the other into the bark of the queen’s exposed leg.
Kari screamed as healing magic, growth magic, flowed from Malli into Rivvek. Rivvek gasped as hurt, in the form of rot, left him in dribs and drabs, then in a torrent of relief as all the wounds he had endured over the last few hours (Days? Months? Years, perhaps?) abandoned him like parasites before a mystical cleansing.
*
Layers of skin sloughed off in sheets of lightening shades until Rivvek was pink and unmarred except for his oldest scars, those from his first encounter with the Ghaiattri and those on his back, but even they were softened, smoother. He would never be handsome again, but less monstrous? Yes, he sensed that he had become a newer thing.
He wiped what he took to be tears from his eyes, his hands coming away thick with detached masses of yellow and brown and red. His scalp itched; he touched it absently to scratch, stopping at the sensation of new hair, silky and soft, surging beneath his fingertips.
The many elemental foci the various Artificers had implanted in his back popped free in a light patter upon the grass. An odor hit him, of waste and dead, wet grass the day after the scythes had done their work.
An unrecognizable thing jerked and thrashed near him, parts of it flying free and spattering the grass. A second mass lay still beside it, and a Vael lay dead with a warpick in her skull that Vodayr jerked free again even as Rivvek watched.
“Don’t look, Elf King,” said a Vael, her hand on his chest. “I am almost finished and then you have your own work to do.”
“Thank you,” he said, before he truly understood what had happened.
“This is as much a curse as a gift,” Malli said, the scent of her breath at once intoxicating and repellant. “You have your own work to do, and you will do it or my sacrifice and Kari’s will have been for nothing.”
His heart sank as he turned to face the pile of refuse and death that had been Queen Kari, her screams a low gurgle as she slumped and spread into a mass of beetles and effluvia around a core that no longer resembled a living being.
Rot and regrowth, Rivvek thought. Magic from Gromma’s realm? His lips curled into a snarl. The Vael’s beauty, the mixed scent of her, the fungal growth. A Justicar of the goddess then.
“Reverse this,” Rivvek snapped, trying to pull away from Malli, forgetting in his shock his own comprehension of Uled’s contingency and what he must do. “You may think I am important, but I am finished. My work is done. I am not worth her.”
“You are needed more than any of us for the next candlemark.” Malli tightened her grip. “Worth more than half the lives on the Last World, because only you can drive Uled where he must be driven.”
Uled! Realization and remembrance threaded Rivvek’s mind with a cord of duty, sewing thought to action.
Rivvek pushed her away again, and this time, she let him go, the white skin of his chest marred only by the five marks her thorn-tipped fingers had left behind.
Unbidden, Rivvek felt the flow of heated water splashing over and around him, washing away the debris of his renewal.
Kyland, no doubt.
General Kyland emerged from a nearby stairs. His eyes pinioned Malli, weapons at the ready even as he worked his elemancy. Would Kyland and the Aern present be enough to subdue the Justicar? Rivvek thought they might be, but she was as trapped as he was, by the need to defeat Uled, to drive him toward the dead end the Aern had engineered to trap him and stop him with finality.
“Very well.” Rivvek closed his eyes, breathing deeply in way he had presumed he never would again. “But this is the last harm I will ever do. Do you understand?”
“It is not harm to cut away the rot or to cull that which can be saved.” Malli’s voice, resolute, matched the determination in her eyes.
“Tell yourself that lie.” Rivvek stood. Kyland rushed to support him in case he fell.
“Would you mind assisting the Vael in the evacuation?” he asked the Aern, Vodayr. “Kyland,” Rivvek continued, “have my army assist the evacuation, but leave behind one of each elemental path to assist me, should I require them.”
“Is there no way to separate the trees?” Rivvek asked as his subjects and his ally left to carry out his instructions.
“No,” Malli said. “Would that there were.”
“Then may my name be forever remembered in the Litany of the Vael.” Picking his armor from the grass, he donned the reflective dragon scale. Taking in the whole of what needed to be done, he ran it all through the calculus of his personal Great Destiny Machine. In his mind’s eye, the trignom tiles were cracked and charred, but he knew how to place them. His blessing was to know that which must be done; his curse was to be willing to see it through.
He saw many possible endings, but the paths leading to the most palatable of outcomes for th
e Last World ensured one more kingdom of its people would hate him. If all went well, the Vael would recite his Litany through the future generations, remembering the names of those he had wronged, but not what he’d done, whom he’d saved, or how.
“Leave me,” he commanded, feeling the magic of the trees reaching out to quell his power, knowing they lacked the experience to prevent his use of the Ghaiattric flame.
They left him, as instructed, Malli studying his face for signs of he knew not what. His own resolve? Finding that which she sought, she too departed.
Though the trees had been stunned or unable to attack Gromma’s champion, they now struck out at Rivvek, the crystallized sap overhead shattering as limbs twisted to reach him, to crush or strangle him. It did not matter which. He wanted to apologize, to explain, but knew it would not matter. Roots sprang up from the grass, clods of black soil falling from them in clumps.
Let Torgrimm take me and be done with it? If he wanted, he could stand there and wait for the Root Trees to kill him. It was that or commit one more horrendous act to protect his people from Uled. To stop the monster, one must occasionally become a monster. Had he read that somewhere, or had Sargus said it to him?
Speeding up with each beat of his heart, the tendrils of wood moved with greater agility, writing in the air like the fingers of an elf whose arm had fallen asleep, wriggling them to spur the flow of the blood and the return of sensation. Give them a few hundred more heartbeats and we might die together. A few hundred more and they might be able to stop me.
He imagined his people, fallen, overrun with various creations at Uled’s command. Bhaeshal broken before the mad elf. Fort Sunder fallen. Sargus slain at the hands of his own father.
No, that could not be allowed.
A monster . . .
“Very well,” he whispered, “I know how to be a monster.” Rivvek held out a gauntleted hand and let the Ghaiattric flame come forth.
*
Beneath the wreck her body had become, Kari’s core continued to regenerate. As long as her Root Trees stood, she would continue. Torgrimm frowned inside his warsuit.
We could . . . Harvester did not complete the thought.
Torgrimm ached to help Kari, to reap her or to ease her pain, but those moments, even at the end of the physical body were points of experience, life experience.
It was such a shame, too. Given time, Kari could recover, would be whole and fresh and hale. She would not have that time. Torgrimm felt that truth like a law of the universe . . . and so . . . he watched.
*
Outside, in the many rooms and walkways of the Twin Trees, elf, Vael, and Aern worked together to evacuate a city that was not yet burning. They shunned the fungus-ridden champion of Gromma, obeying the Aern without question or hesitation. Sap beaded and ran from the walls, as if a great forest fire were approaching, but Vander doubted Rivvek had any intention of burning the city.
A few of Vander’s watch discs overflew the Parliament of Ages, noting Root Trees beginning to sap in other portions of the forest as far away as Little Tree, along the Southwestern border where Vael territory ended and touched, 000 by 127, the nearest of the Gnomish Universities, and to the far west at Overlook, where the Root Tree named Fambran balanced in what looked like a precarious perch forever leaning toward the Cerrullic Ocean he had so loved.
Along the foothills of the Sri’Zauran Mountains to the northwest, scarcely separated from Zaliz, a hardy group of Vael who had founded Shade Tree with the Root Tree Gumblin, the Shadow Rider, lived together with their shadebeast mounts (Animal allies, Vander corrected himself) calmed their companions who howled in the day and snapped at the ground.
Birds chattered madly, flying about in confused patterns. Deer ran into trees, and animals of all sizes bolted for their dens and barrows to wait out a storm they sensed but could not see or smell. All of this commotion in the Parliament of Ages announced the calamitous touch of Uled’s soul to the dark seed within Warrune.
Elves, Aern, and Vael fled, not looking back. Only one mortal being did. Malli stood at the edge of the city, needing to see what she had wrought.
Malli wept.
Hashan, Warrune, and Kari screamed.
Uled laughed.
Rivvek burned the latter four of them together from soul to seed to soil until there was nothing left of the glorious Twin Trees than dead wood, dry moss, and rich soil without a touch of magic inside to nourish a new Root Tree, leaving nothing for even Torgrimm to reap.
*
“Queen Kari would have . . .” Malli let the words die.
Kari would have been happy to die so that Uled could be defeated? Malli thought. Perhaps, but I did not give you a choice, did I?
Uled’s defeat weighed against the life of two Root Trees and their queen, but Malli could not feel good about the math. She looked down at the wash of fungus upon her breast and frowned. Her eyes went hot, but they did not sap.
Come to my continent, Justicar. The voice of her goddess filled her thoughts, seeming to echo through her core. There are great works that await you.
Great works.
Malli took one last look at the dead space where her queen had died and tried to feel triumph at the victory that had been won. In its place, she felt only despair. Without any further interaction, she walked deeper into the Parliament of Ages. She had no need of maps. The pull of Gromma was a hook in her soul, and she felt she knew what it was like to be a fish on a hook.
It was worth it, she thought. It has to have been worth it.
*
At the center of a jun empty of spirits, Rivvek stood, his dragon scale glimmering, caught his breath, and walked down the hollow stairs toward to the spiritually barren ground. The stairs creaked and groaned, holding strong but sounding like human- or elf-made things fashioned decades before and ill-maintained.
Outside, the air smelled dry and dusty, grass brittle, crunching under his boots. He followed the trail of bone-steel-laden wagons to where his army stood with the homeless Vael and the Aern of the Lost Command.
The air felt alive there, the humidity welcome, the earth ready and . . . Rivvek stifled a laugh, letting tears come in its stead. Let them think they were other than tears of joy. They should have been. Yet even grief has a bottom to it and from that lowest point, any glimmer of hope, any unexpected bright spot, any gift, whether it was a reward from the gods or simple happenstance, held the power to amaze.
He had doubted, in the moment of his final murders, if he would ever laugh again. Resignation had become his cloak, to surrender to the needs of the mission over all else, his shield. He imagined the names they would call him, the Vael, no different than what his own people had said when he’d helped the Aern divide the elves into Aiannai and Eldrennai. He expected to hear them begin jeering him at once.
Instead, he heard a call to which he had long been deaf. A sorcerous pulse thrummed alongside the more familiar tone, music from another sphere tickling a range he had not known he possessed. Dimensional magic, but not Uled’s malformed work: Hasimak’s.
Rivvek turned to face it, recognizing the Vael with Wylant’s features, though he did not believe they had exchanged more than a word or two since she’d joined his brother in the Grand Conjunction.
I just killed your mother. The words blazed through his mind so plainly he feared Yavi might read them in his eyes. He considered explaining. Reconsidered. Did not.
“You are Queen of the Vael, now.” Rivvek did not bow, did not greet her in any of the formal fashions. “Uled infected Warrune, and I had to destroy all three to stop him from spreading.”
He expected a snarl, an attack, but Yavi, bred for peace by the mad elf who created the Vael, only frowned and cocked her head as if listening to some voice that was hers alone to hear.
“Your brother died helping me track Uled to the Sisters, where he’d erected three new Port Gates. I destroyed one. Dolvek another.” Her voice wavered, lips drawing tight before continuing. “I would have de
stroyed the third Port Gate, but even in death, his ghost rescued me and carried me Betwixt.”
Dolvek had died a hero, then. Rivvek sighed. That must have made him happy.
“Do you have anything you wish to say to him,” Yavi asked, “before I exile you?”
Exile? Rivvek’s heart swelled with relief’s ugly opposite. I would have preferred your rage.
“He is here?” Rivvek asked.
“Bound to me in death.” Yavi gestured and the elemental plane of fire yawned, lighting Dolvek’s ghost to the eyes of any experienced elemancer.
“Your servant?” Rivvek regretted the question even as it left his lips.
“The Vael have no slaves, King Rivvek.” She ran the end of one sentence into the next, giving him no natural break into which he could interject. “Until I understand what happened, your name will be added to the Litany.”
His army murmured, even the Aern ready to take his side. Had an Aern ever wanted to take the side of an elven king before? Rivvek silenced the murmurs with a raised palm.
“Tell him I love him.” Rivvek spoke over her. “Tell him I am proud. Tell him our father would be proud.”
Yavi began to speak, but he cut her off this time. “If it is of any aid to the relationship between our kingdoms, there was no other way for me to stop Uled. You have my oath on that.”
“The word of an Oathbreaker?” she asked.
“There are none left among my people,” Rivvek said. “Those the Aern would not accept as Aiannai and insisted upon killing, I ordered slain. Those the Aern did not want to kill, but could not accept as Aiannai, I led into the Never Dark to retrieve the Lost Command in exchange for their lives and a new name for our people.”
“What do you hope they will name you?”
“Kholster’s scars are on my back,” Rivvek said, “placed there by Bloodmane while Kholster was still First. I am already Aiannai, so when I give you my Oath, understand that it means something.”
Yavi spoke again, but Rivvek was not listening, did not need to hear. Even if the Vael welcomed him back to the Parliament of Ages, absolved him of his Litany, what he had been forced to do stole all pleasure he might have taken in visiting. He was trying to stack the trignoms in his mind, to determine what he needed to do to best support his people, but the tiles crumbled beneath his touch, the fragments impossible to find or reassemble.