The Last Larnaeradee

by Shelley Cass

I sank into sleep for the night, and Dalin must have soon done the same, because neither of us heard Kiana leave.

  We didn’t feel the blast of wind or the spray of rain that flashed upon us for a moment as she opened and slipped through the door; quietly closing herself out into the loneliness of what had been Bwintam.

  Chapter Fifty Seven

  Kiana

  I couldn’t sleep through the storm howling around me and inside of me at the same time. And I couldn’t sleep … because I had a growing sensation that something was calling to me.

  My leg muscles bunched in restless frustration, wanting to carry me away. My heart seemed to be lifting in my chest, as if invisible fingers were pulling it upwards to make me rise. My teeth gritted on edge and I bunched my hands in agitation until I could stand the odd feeling no longer. I felt compelled to move.

  I wrapped my hair into a tight bun, laced my boots and fastened the tie of my cloak about my neck. Each of my weapons felt as if they had returned home; part of me, as I secured them all in place.

  I hushed Amala when she lifted her head to eye me mournfully, and I subdued a strange feeling that I wouldn’t see her for a while as I swept past the sleeping forms of Noal and Dalin. They wouldn’t understand this. I couldn’t wake them.

  I felt as if a spirit was tugging at my collar, beckoning for me to go out into the storm. Beseeching me.

  I quietly opened the door and the fire whipped about as the moaning wind gushed inwards. Then I closed the warmth in behind me and I was alone again in the graveyard that had been my home, already saturated to the bone once more.

  The rain seemed almost spiteful and the stars were veiled by rags of black rain clouds that dragged moodily across the sky. But, following the deep urge to move onward, I started to fight my way against the wind through what had been the village square. I struggled across the dark grounds, tangling and untangling myself in grass and weeds, moving ever forward in a sure, straight line. And as soon as I saw the Willow I knew that it was to there that I was being drawn.

  I forgot the raging storm and the effort it took to claw through the wild growth, continuing intently until I stopped at the Willow’s familiar roots and gazed up at those protective boughs. I felt removed from myself, as though I were watching from afar and had been wiped blank.

  Numb, empty, calm – I ran cold fingers over the wet, knotted trunk, feeling the rough, gnarled surface. And I remained completely unmoved even when the surface before me began to shift, to take on the tough features of a wisened wooden face.

  I had somehow known all along that the Willow was more than she had seemed, and I was not afraid.

  Kiana. Heavy wooden lips formed creaking, whispering words, and a smile of relief grew upon my lips.

  “What are you?” I breathed the words, not registering the chill or the fury of the storm at all anymore.

  I am a Dryad, and friend ever of your kind. Each word seemed to rustle and to come from far away. But each word was filled entirely with kindness and warmth.

  “Why have you not revealed yourself before?” I asked wonderingly. “I grew up playing in your branches and beneath your shade.”

  Your time for knowing such things had not yet come. Your own mind and magic were not ready. Now, your time and need has come. You must heed my advice.

  “What advice would you give me?”

  Flee at once from this place, for it is marked by evil. Make haste to Sylthanryn and find yourself truly. Then you can be the One to end the darkness.

  “We are to leave for the Great Forest tomorrow,” I told her. My voice, my mind, was so steady.

  You must leave this night. Already the Witch recovers. Even now she approaches. You cannot yet face her in earnest. You are not ready to match her darkness.

  “I must go back to get us ready to leave,” I replied, and at once I felt a warm rush of energy burst around and through me. Suddenly our packs had materialised at my feet.

  “What about my companions and the mares?” I asked.

  Call, and they will hear and come forth.

  “I am not magical as you are, Willow. I cannot send out my power.”

  You are the One oft told of. In Sylthanryn, you will learn this.

  “I’ll bring our group back here for our belongings,” I promised. “Then we’ll risk our journey to the Great Forest once more.”

  But as I turned to leave, a shudder ran from every root to branch tip of the Willow. Her leaves fluttered and a groaning creak ran through her trunk as if she were suddenly in pain.

  Abruptly the serenity that had blanketed me suddenly broke and I felt with sick realisation that darkness was approaching, just as the Willow had warned.

  You must leave now, the Willow’s voice groaned.

  “It’s too late,” I murmured, and grimly drew my sword.

  Agrona was coming, I could feel it.

  An odd prickling feeling rippled over my dripping body, becoming sparks of agony in my shoulder.

  Then I blinked, and found her standing quite still, just feet away.

  “Well met once more. My friend.” The words curled from poisonous lips, radiating malice and foul intent.

  I realised that somehow the storm wasn’t touching Agrona and she stood poised in the darkness, watching with glittering, evaluating eyes like a snake coiled to strike.

  “Did you enjoy the arrow, friend?” I asked, my world spinning as I faced her squarely.

  “You did not play nicely, Kiana,” she almost purred, and advanced with a slight step forward.

  I had to force myself not to step backward in response. “I did not follow fair rules,” I agreed stoutly. “But you, yourself, follow none.”

  Agrona tilted her lovely chin to look down at me. “No. I make the rules. And you have followed my rules so well until now. Lost and alone. For so long.” She stepped closer again. “But now that you’ve found solace with others, I’ll have to take them from you too, because my rules are sweet and absolute.” Closer.

  I lifted my sword.

  “That won’t do much good,” she smiled, and at once my shoulder seemed to explode. As if she had plunged her own hand into my flesh to pull the grisly bone and socket out in that white fist.

  The sword dropped from my grip and I collapsed to the ground.

  “Hold still,” the Witch crooned, advancing until she could press her hand to my forehead. “This may hurt.”

  Agrona’s touch sent me into a writhing fit and the red magic flowed cruelly into me like water rushing in to suffocate a drowning victim. It surged through her fingers, through my flesh, through my skull, and in, in to darken my mind. Madness, vapours in my head, in my brain, like disease.

  And she toyed with my memory until my eyes filled with the vision of a small boy screaming.

  Tommy was so beautiful. But he was screaming.

  He looked at me as he screamed. Then he wasn’t screaming anymore.

  He was laying in the dirt. His eyes were still open. But he wasn’t moving.

  Blood was gushing from a slit made in his tiny neck and his face was turning blue.

  Suddenly he sat up, blood still pouring from his throat, down his ragdoll body. He gazed at me with his beautiful, innocent face. And his eyes were so sad.

  “Why didn’t you help me?” he asked, in his high tearful voice. And I groaned out loud as my patched heart began re-breaking.

  The Witch’s fingers dug more deeply into my temples and my little Tommy reached his arms out to me. He had a hole in his belly, and punctures littering his small chest.

  “Why?”

  Something inside me broke with a physical snapping sensation as I began to convulse. And a scream of anguish louder than the storm rose high and terrible from the pit of my stomach to flood out of my mouth.

  It was a scream of grief that rang right from my soul.

  Chapter Fifty Eight

  Dalin

  Noal and I both woke with a start to the scream, looking wildly about the cottage.

&nbs
p; Kiana wasn’t sleeping across from us anymore.

  “The packs are gone!” hissed Noal.

  Only our swords and the travel stained clothes we had worn that day remained in a heap next to the nervous looking mares.

  The scream had stopped and I had an awful feeling, as though I were about to lose something important. I jumped up and dressed frantically.

  “What do you think has happened?” Noal gasped as he did the same.

  “I don’t know,” I grunted. “There’s no time to saddle the horses, they’ll have to stay.”

  He belted his sword around his waist and rushed with me to the door, which nearly tore out of my hands when I pushed it free, before we both stumbled out of the safe light of the cottage and into the storm.

  “Kiana!” Noal and I shouted over the gale, but we could barely hear our own voices or see through the sleeting rain.

  Our progress around the ruins was agonising until we paused at the heart of what had been the village square. Then I nearly fell forward as, in an unexpected and abrupt instant, the storm abated.

  I stopped in my tracks to hold my head, wondering if I had been struck deaf.

  Noal slapped wetly at his own ears, and shivered with wide eyes. “That can’t be natural, and can’t be good,” he whispered through what was now just a soft mist of rain.

  I peered through the darkness desperately. “Let’s try this way,” I croaked, and began to move off before I was tugged back by Noal’s vice-like grip tightening around my wrist.

  “What?” I hissed.

  “Over there,” he groaned back.

  I followed his horrified stare with a sickening sinking feeling that took over the little gap in my abdomen where my stomach should be.

  At the end of the grassy lane, surrounded in the collapsed forms of what had once been the homes of those now dead, was a little girl.

  Her hand rested upon a broken fence and her feet stood perfectly sure inches above the weeds and grass. An ethereal light illuminated outward from her glowing hair, skin and dress. Despite the light giving shape to her features, I could see right through her translucent body, and I could see that there was a hole in her back.

  Dread swamped me as her colourless eyes regarded us without emotion.

  “What do we do?” Noal whispered desperately as the little girl stared.

  “Ignore it. We have to find Kiana,” my voice wavered. I started to back away, dragging Noal after me.

  “I think I’m lost,” the little ghost suddenly sighed through colourless lips.

  “Why did this happen to us?” groaned another voice, echoing, but close at the same time.

  Noal and I whirled around and drew our swords simultaneously.

  A beautiful woman pulled herself up out of the grass but a yard away from us. She glowed as hauntingly as the little girl did behind us. A split tore her flesh from navel to chin and her limbs were at odd angles. “Won’t you save me?” she asked, broken arms bending awkwardly out to us.

  We both dodged away, but our escape was cut off as another form gripped his way up from the earth to float in our path. A broad, strong young man. Dead.

  “Am I going to die?” he asked, looking down at his gruesome injuries. “I don’t want to die.”

  “Where is my son?” begged an elderly woman who was missing half of her head.

  “Where is my mama?” sobbed a toddler, an arrow sticking out of his throat.

  “Help us!” a large man groaned.

  “Will I be alright?” cried a woman as she clutched at a split in her side.

  The night was suddenly filled with slain, glowing figures as more and more deformed shapes floated up from the ground. The air was torn by cries, shrieks, sobs and pleas for aid as the beings surrounded us, pressing in. The dead of Bwintam.

  I grabbed Noal’s wrist in one hand and swung my sword into a man without any legs floating closer to me. He shrieked and burst into a thousand pieces of cracked light before dissipating.

  I dragged Noal behind me, swinging my sword crazily in front to keep the freakish ghouls back, and we burst away from the forms in a sprint. We pounded together toward the dark mass of trees near the border of the village and I looked back only once.

  I didn’t stop as I saw more ghostly forms floating up to join the sea of others massed and following us. Their cries of torment and fear rose, with their voices joining so that we were followed by a heart wrenching orchestra of gibbering yowls.

  I pushed Noal in front of me and we sprinted across the open plains in terror until I saw the majestic Willow from Kiana’s story. Barely thinking, I swerved us toward it as the pale, ghostly light grew and the dead kept following.

  But as we drew desperately closer, and the emanating light of the spirits illuminated the Willow, I was suddenly struck by the sight of a female figure beneath that tree. And it wasn’t Kiana.

  “Oh Gods!” Noal gasped in shock as he made out the dark figure watching us now too.

  Noal and I tried to skid to a stop with wheeling arms, no longer caring that there were ghosts behind us. Because, though we had never seen the woman under the tree in human form, we knew immediately who she was. And, even more confusing, we could see the face in the tree behind her.

  We yelped helplessly as, before we could change our course, the Witch raised her hand and gestured as if asking for us to join her. At once an incredible force seemed to sweep around us, invisible fists of the Witch’s magic that threw us up into the sky and pulled us forward through the air.

  I roared in horror as we flew rapidly in an arc, kicking and struggling uselessly across the distance toward the Witch. We rushed in a blur right up to her, yelling and fighting – only to be brought to an abrupt stop, caught rigidly like insects in a web.

  We had touched down, jerking to a standstill, but it felt as though my legs had been encased in stone, and the air around my arms was so heavy that they couldn’t budge. I cursed and struggled madly, hearing Noal gasp and curse too.

  You will not harm the Three! a strange whispery voice demanded, and I registered that it was the great Willow that spoke.

  “Your companions have joined us, Kiana,” Darziates’ creature smiled wickedly, and I saw Kiana’s slumped, unmoving figure behind the Witch’s feet. “It won’t be long now.”

  Agrona gestured to us then. “Don’t struggle. I’ve got you.”

  Then the Witch held up her hand towards the glow of the advancing dead, so that the yowling crowd stopped approaching immediately to wait. But in their light I saw Agrona stoop to stroke Kiana’s face.

  “It looks like this could turn out to be quite the reunion for you,” the Witch trilled, and at her slight touch, Kiana’s back arched unnaturally, as if her body was controlled by a marionette master.

  I gritted my teeth in fury and started to struggle against the invisible power holding me back once more.

  “I’ll let you join your people, just as you once wanted,” Agrona promised Kiana soothingly, and she reached out a skeletal hand – pressing it into Kiana’s shoulder.

  Kiana’s body jerked and she let out a horrible, pain filled cry. Her back arched again and she thrashed desperately in agonised convulsions.

  “Leave her!” I shouted in outrage, straining so hard to reach Kiana that I managed to move forward a step.

  “Why?” the Witch asked. “She wanted this.”

  Agrona stood and Kiana immediately fell back into the grass.

  “She doesn’t anymore,” Noal growled beside me.

  “Hmmmmm,” Agrona smiled slowly, the sharp edges of her painted lips curling dreadfully upward as she left Kiana to stalk toward him.

  “Kiana’s got us now,” I quickly added, trying to draw her away from Noal.

  “She had you,” Agrona asserted, reaching for me instead.

  I swallowed nervously, feeling invisible, churning waves seeming to ripple through the air about her, stealing my breath and dazzling my mind. Her fingers rose to hold my face for a moment and I flinched
under even that quick touch, dazed by an overwhelming vision of decay.

  I could hear Noal thrashing beside me, and I could also dimly hear the inexplicable creaking voice of the Willow, but all I could do was try to blink my vision clear and focus on more than just the icy burn searing across my cheek from where her fingers had briefly rested. I could taste the rottenness of her power on the back of my tongue, like sick bubbling on my tastebuds.

  I felt her face draw close to mine, and my skin bristled and stung as her breath brushed against my lips, as if next she wanted to kiss and end me. I shuddered with revulsion, unable to recoil.

  Then there was the distinct song of a blade being drawn.

  The Witch hissed and I felt the relief of her face drawing back from mine as her eyes widened in shock and she whirled to face the threat.

  Somehow Kiana was standing, sword in hand. And she lunged suddenly for the Witch with her blade.

  Agrona was caught off guard, but spun hastily out of the way and threw a flash of burning red light in Kiana’s direction. Kiana easily lifted her sword and sliced through the magic, letting it explode in sparks over her blade.

  Agrona laughed with self-assurance. “You will die.”

  Kiana inclined her head. “It just proves that you were mistaken not to kill me two years ago,” she reasoned, circling around so that the Witch moved unconsciously too – away from us.

  “It proves only that I kill!” Agrona shrieked, her mask of calm breaking with fury. “Your entire village is evidence of that! Your world is full of the ones I’ve killed!”

  Agrona waved her hand in a whirlwind gesture, and at once the glow of the ghosts started to grow again, and their voices grew louder.

  Kiana turned, horrified as she became aware of her people, her dead, sweeping in like the tides. They flooded about us in moments, reaching out pleadingly and pressing in – one little ghost boy’s translucent, glowing hand now nearly touching Kiana’s cheek.

  Kiana was transfixed as Agrona started to sweep toward her again with wolfish delight, but I vaguely noticed the wavering voice of the Willow trying to break through the noise of the surging figures.

  Look closely, Kiana! The voice was crying. See clearly the truth!