“Would you like to see a magick trick?” Hali casually drew her dagger, a thin length of steel worked into curved waves, and slid it across her palm. Instead of red, her blood oozed out a pale orange, the color of tree resin. She sheathed her knife, reached into a sleeve and pulled out a small packet of white paper the size of a small coin. She broke it open with a fingernail and seeds spilled out, falling into the open, amber wound. Hali clenched her fist, and Tyrissa felt that slight tug in her head again, stronger than before, like an invisible thread between the two of them. Hali reopened her hand with a flash of showmanship and the wound was gone. Three creeper vines emerged from her sleeve, twisting around her hand, enveloping it in fresh-grown green.
So the tugs were a warning, a sense of nearby pact magicks at work. The mental admission was liberating.
“Eyes up, Tyrissa,” Hali said. “They’re coming. Try to put that staff of yours to work.”
The dead plain was moving. Numerous fires burst into being and the ground rolled toward the caravan, an avalanche moving uphill. Fiery orange threads ran through the tumbling chaos, a vast web of flame binding the animated stones together. The flow coalesced into dozens of rolling balls of rock and charred debris, each burning from the core with a harsh, evil fire. They spread out to attack the length of the caravan, trails of smoke in their wake. Above, the emberhawks screeched and flared alight, diving towards the caravan like a meteor shower.
A wedge of six mounted caravan guards rode to meet the rock swarm. Kexal rode at the front with a war hammer held high and a grin splitting his face. The elementals moved as a cascade, some with legs, other a constant roll, their cores pulsing. A cluster rolled to meet the riders and they met in a cacophony of shouts, cracks, and horses’ screams. Others elementals split away and bounded into the air, crashing down among the wagons and setting them aflame like the tinderboxes they were. A thin haze returned as the attack engulfed the caravan.
A nearby screech brought Tyrissa’s attention to the mastodon as an emberhawk landed at the rear of the platform. The creature was an uneven collection of bones and slivers of stone in the shape of a bird. It hopped about the saddle, clawing away and leaving smoldering streaks of char and setting small fires. Tyrissa twisted in place to bring her staff down on the bird and felt the crunch of brittle bones as the creature splintered to pieces, flames winking out in an instant. They were even more fragile than they appeared. A strange chill washed over her, a fleeting cold wind in the stilled air. Tyrissa scrambled to stomp out the flames created by the bird, and kicked its corpse over the side of the mastodon.
The platform shook as one of the elementals crashed atop it between Grefan and Hali. The elemental wore a slender, nearly human form, and flames licked out from its feet. Ropes began to smolder, threatening to loosen the entire harness. Grefan was focused more on control of the mastodon than the creature of rock and flame at his back, and the world swung left as Roth lurched to the side, swinging his tusks at an unseen foe on the ground.
The elemental swung a limb of smoldering rock at Hali. She made no move to dodge, letting the blow slam into her. The vines surged out from the impact, smoldering as they entwined the elemental’s arm. The cord of flame at the center of the limb was snuffed out, and the rocks fell away in a tumble of smoking plant life. Hali pushed ahead, ignoring the burns on her skin and flames licking at her robe, to reach into the center of the elemental. The vines surged outward, burning and coiling through the web of fire and stone. The elemental tried to lurch away, but the two were entwined. Hali then threw herself off the mastodon, pulling the elemental with her down to the stones of the Heartroad, twenty feet below. Through it all Hali uttered not one cry or gasp of pain.
Tyrissa helped Grefan put out the scattered flames before looking over the side. Below, Hali stood amid a pile of smoldering stones and vines. She moved as if unharmed by the fall and ignored the blacked patches of skin on her vine-less arm.
A cluster of burning debris rolled toward the fore of the North Wind, a jumble of limbs and joints. The elemental began crawling up the hull, setting small fires as it climbed near where Roth’s harness connected to the land barge. Tyrissa glanced around the mastodon, seeing that Roth was clear and Grefan had his aged hammer out, ready to hold the defense up top.
Tyrissa went to the rear of the platform where the rope lines that lead to the North Wind connected to the harness and platform. The lines were pulled taut. Just right.
I’ve always wanted to do this.
Uttering a quick prayer Tyrissa jumped between the lines, hooked her staff above them and held on for dear life as she slid toward the North Wind. The buzz of the rope announced her as she crashed feet first into the elemental. Fragments of the creature went flying, the thin cords of flame severing with angry hisses. Both of them tumbled down the hull to the ground.
Tyrissa rolled away as she hit the ground, thankful for the practice from sliding out of her cabin. Bits of the creature stuck to her clothes and skin, little isles of heat, like the embers of a campfire blown by a sudden wind. She brushed away any stuck coals and sprang to her feet, hands smeared with ash. The heat too was easy to ignore. Tyrissa could swear she felt… cold, as if shielded from the flames. She dismissed it as the chaos playing tricks on her mind, and snatched up her staff, dropping into a defensive posture.
The creature rebuilt itself into a web of smoldering coals and rock four feet tall, cords of orange flame connecting each piece. No face, no limbs, only an animate pile of shifting debris fueled by fire magick. It contorted and rambled toward her, extending out a branch of hot stone. Tyrissa leapt aside, staff whirling to attack what passed for a joint among the stones, sending a cloud of embers into the air and severing the limb.
Another attack emerged from the mass, catching her in the thigh and searing through her trousers. Her skin was unharmed. She felt no burn, only another wash of icy chill that raced through the bones of her leg. The cord of flame running along that limb sputtered out as if doused. The elemental drew back, as uncertain as a pile of rock can look as part of its body fell away. The confusion was mutual.
What’s happening? Why am I so cold?
The day’s heat fell away from her and the cold intensified. It felt like she was running naked through a Morgale winter, frigid and yet fluid, a partially frozen river flowing over rapids.
Tyrissa pulled the water skin off her belt, thumbed off the stopper and swung it in a wide arc. Water sprayed across the elemental, flashing to steam. She could swear she saw shards of ice mixed in. More fiery links faded and pieces of the creature fell away. Tyrissa dropped the water skin and swung her staff through the elemental, breaking it in two. The bottom half crumbled away, while the top coiled into a ball and sprang at her, a net of stone and fire thrown across her face and chest. She fell backwards, suddenly pinned as the creature tried to smother her in cinders.
Again, her clothes burned away where the creature made contact but Tyrissa felt nothing but a surging embrace of frost. Flakes of ash fell on her face, but she had nothing to fear from the fire.
‘Touch the flames and you get burned,’ Hali had said.
Not me.
Tyrissa reached up and grabbed the largest rock at the back of the creature where a lattice of flaming cords sprouted, the closest thing it had to a heart. Her hands, nimble and fluid, only grew colder as she ripped the heart away, cords fraying and twisting in the air. She tossed it aside and the creature collapsed atop her, inert and lifeless.
She climbed to her feet, the stones falling away to leave her coated in ash and char. Where she had thrown the elemental’s heart, a snaking line of fire a few inches long tried to worm back toward the domain to the west. Tyrissa walked over and stepped on the creeping flames. Wisps of smoke coiled up from below her boot, and the elemental stirred no more.
The world around her emerged from the blind and deaf bubble of battle and the cries of combat were now calls for aid and the wails of the wounded. The fight was over. Tyrissa picke
d up her staff, drew in that first calming breath, and looked around. Behind her, Hali stood under Roth, her hands pressed against the mastodon’s leg. Her robe was a patchwork of torn fabric and burned holes, but the flesh underneath was unblemished save for a few streaks of char and ash. She’d read tales of Lifepacts being tough, their regenerative powers unnerving and bottomless, but Hali seemed invincible.
Approaching hoofs on Heartroad stone announced Kexal riding in atop his horse, a black stallion bigger than even the Khalan draft breeds.
“Hali! There’s wounded at the rear of the caravan,” he called, sliding off the warhorse and holding the reins out. Hali strode over, unhurried and murmured to Kexal before accepting a hand up into the saddle.
Kexal gave Tyrissa a nod and went through the motion of a respectful tip of a nonexistent hat.
“Good to see you’re in one piece,” he said.
“Y-Yeah. Can’t say the same for these fire elementals.” Tyrissa kicked a spherical rock that used to be part of the creature. She was so cold and had to keep moving, keep talking, just to stop the shivering. It wasn’t going away, though she could distantly feel the broiling heat of the Wastes around her.
“Elementals? No, these were flamekin, smaller fellas that have to bind to something to be any use or danger. But I’ll tell you what, a true elemental would have been a lot more fun, though we’d be in a worse way after it was all over.”
Though he was tearing across a battlefield not three minutes ago, Kexal was back to his normal buoyancy. If anything, he seemed to be even more jovial than normal, as if fighting the flamekin caused his spirit to lift higher.
“You’re shakin’ there, kid. This your first taste of real action?”
Tyrissa was unable to keep it controlled. She was bitterly cold, as if her bones contained cores of pure winter. Her mind slowed like a stream in the first deep frost of the year. Tyrissa nodded and forced a weak smile through clamped teeth just as Kexal began to look at her askance. She possessed neither the will nor the trust to correct him.
“I should find my brother,” she said, making an excuse to leave.
Tyrissa shivered to sleep underneath every blanket and coat available in their cabin as the frigid presence in her bones slowly leeched away. Her mind drifted in and out of dreams, all the typical and inconsequential mental ramblings of the unconscious mind. Heat and cold featured heavily, as did the sense of being lost. Nothing surprising there. They were fleeting images, nothing more. It wasn’t until she felt herself near waking, balanced on that delicate fringe between awake and asleep that the chaos of her mind focused on a single scene. It was only natural that it was another dream of ice.
A vast blanket of snow smothered an expanse of rolling hills that gradually rose to the foot of a mountain range. It was night but a further layer of abyssal darkness clung to the indistinct peaks like a protective cloak of rippling shadow. The snow looked wrong, unnatural. It was too pure and uniform, even for freshly fallen drifts. The bare branches of scattered trees clawed out through the snow like skeletons bursting from their graves. A blue aurora blazed over it all, the one source of comfort in the scene, though the color was off, a deeper blue than the azure ribbons that floated above Morgale.
A lone figure walked through waist-high banks of snow without resistance. The snows melted in a tight ring around her, the rising mist and steam shrouding her in a frozen fog. A serrated, crystalline trail of ice refroze in her wake. Zephyrs blew a dusting of snow over her trail to bury the element’s shame of defeat.
Tyrissa followed from behind as a disembodied observer. She knew it was a woman, though the figure was so heavily wrapped against the cold that all defining features were as obscured as the snowbound landscape. Here and there, she saw bits of armor glinting beneath the furs, catching and amplifying the blue glow from above, the aurora granting an aura. Tied atop the bulky pack slung across the woman’s back was a round shield of black wood, rimmed in fine polished steel. Small icicles clung to the bottom of the rim, dripping from the heat. At the center of the shield was a metal disc emblazoned with a silver shield divided into quadrants, winged by five feathers to a side. It was the same as Tsellien’s cloak clasp.
The woman paused and tilted her head, as if straining to hear a distant cry. Then she shook her head, dismissing an idle fancy. She was wholly alone and continued her journey toward the mountains of frost and shadow, her destination blazing with a harsh, secret power. She strode into the unknown with the weight of duty across her shoulders, unbowed and unafraid, like an Archangel marching off to war.
The vision ended and Tyrissa fully woke, blinking up at the wooden ceiling of the cramped cabin. Unlike most dreams the details didn’t wash away upon waking like cheap dye. It felt real, like she stood in the snows herself. The symbol on the shield meant she wasn’t alone. There was another, somewhere. Like Tsellien. Like Tyrissa. It was a meager taste of solace, but she would take it.
The bold and bright daylight of morning leaked around the edges of the cabin door, unfiltered by yesterday’s oppressive haze. Their cabin was on the east side of the caravan; it must be some hours after dawn. She had slept for damn near a day. The strange chill within her was long gone, replaced by the warmth and sweat of sleeping beneath far too many layers. Tyrissa threw off the copious covers and rose.
Liran was already out and about the caravan, but he had left a bowl of now-cool porridge covered with a cloth and a full water skin atop his desk built of crates. She remembered stumbling into the cabin after the attack and waving away Liran when he returned, insisting she just needed to sleep it off, whatever ‘it’ was. The memory between the attack and sleep was so vague it could have been part of her dreams. Tyrissa wolfed down the porridge and moistened the cloth to scrub away the remnants of yesterday’s fight, leaving the cloth streaked with ash and grime. She then set to digging up clothes that smelled the least like mastodon, a near-impossible feat in the Wastes with no opportunity to wash the stink from her clothes.
Once ready to go, Tyrissa paused with a hand on the door. Hali’s words before the attack came back to her: ‘Embrace it.’
After the enduring chill from fighting the flamekin and emberhawks, and how she could sense Hali’s own magicks, she couldn’t ignore it anymore. Tyrissa drew her knife and held out her left arm. The caravan had lurched into motion some minutes ago, and Tyrissa swayed with the gentle rocking of the land barge over the ancient Heartroad. She pressed the tip of the knife to her forearm and made a quick, light cut about an inch long. It was little more than the scratch you’d get from an irate housecat, but she inhaled sharply all the same at the tiny flash of pain. Blood oozed out of the cut and then she felt the knife across her skin again, this time a slower drag running along the wound, a shadow, phantom cut.
Tyrissa rubbed away the blood with her thumb and watched with wide eyes as the cut closed, first leaving a pink line of new skin, before deepening into her normal tone. She sheathed her knife and interlaced hands on the door, leaning against them with her forehead, eyes shutting out the light creeping along the floor at her feet.
She’d received minor scrapes since the caravan left Morgale, rope burns or little cuts from minor falls, to say nothing of the welts she received training with Kexal. She ignored them when they vanished overnight, wrapping herself in denial. This was different. This was right in front of her eyes and by her own hand. This was a gift, an advantage. She should be pleased, but her stomach sank with dread.
What will be their price?
Tyrissa took a few steadying breaths, opened the door, and stepped into a new day’s light.
Part Two
Two Sides of the Coin
Chapter Fourteen
Though the Vordeum Wastes continued for two days after the attack, the caravan’s exit from those charred lands was uneventful. Fire’s grip on the land loosened, the air cooled, and color returned. Their route rose to meet a range of short mountains that ran west to east and formed the border between empty Vor
deum and the thriving south. The shift was staggering. At the peak of the pass through the mountains one could see that ahead lay a verdant realm of fields and forests while behind there was only desolation, as if the rules of nature were reignited like a lantern.
The Heartroad continued to cut south like a knife but sprouted frequent thin branches that rambled away into the countryside. They were now in the lands of the Khalan Federation and the caravan’s progress slowed with the return of civilization. Every day brought another town and another stop to exchange goods and accept more cargo bound for Khalanheim. The caravan’s numbers waxed and waned at each stop and for every merchant that departed down a side road to their homes, another joined for the final leg of the journey to Khalanheim. This was not only Khalan territory, but Khalan North’s territory, with each town flying the guild’s black and blue flag from the peaked gables of the guildhalls and inns that lined the Heartroad.
Lirveer, the northernmost Khalan state, bore a striking similarity to what Tyrissa saw of southern Morgale, though here the fields weren’t split by crevasses and the forests were tangles of broadleaved trees, some already becoming yellow or orange with the shifting season. Tyrissa, in a nod to her self-taught ranger ways, made an effort to learn the different tree species. She received many a strange look when asking what this or that tree was called, but could soon identify pale-barked birch, stout maples, and white leaved willows.
The last day of their journey snuck up on her. One morning, she awoke to a persistent screeching. It was a rare day where she was not expected at the mastodons until the afternoon and could sleep in. Noise was common in the caravan: creaking wood, shouting workers, and the constant rumble when the North Wind was in motion. She had grown accustomed to those. Even Liran bustling about the tiny cabin and checking the fragrant crates of Morgwood herbs for the hundredth time was ignorable. He had been at this frenzy of sorting and filing for days now. But this keening sliced through any attempt to muffle her ears or deny it. After many torturous minutes of trying to recapture sleep Tyrissa surrendered and sat up on the narrow cabin bed.
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