by Jim Galford
Oria cheered as Atall began running, headed for the grating, while Arturis struggled to stay out of the reach of the mists, keeping his good hand on the bloodied stump that had been his other arm.
With a sudden burst of speed, Arturis ran after Atall, catching him within a few steps. Clamping his remaining hand on Atall’s neck, making Oria’s brother choke and try to pull away, Arturis lifted him off the ground.
In the few seconds between the mists striking him and reaching Atall, Arturis’ arm had already begun to reform, the new left arm bloody and withered, hanging at his side. Each second, a little more of the flesh filled in.
“Magic like that hasn’t been seen in a thousand years,” Arturis told the young fox, turning him around so that the two were looking into each other’s eyes. “In my youth, the followers of Turess would have removed your shackles and invited you to learn among the elders.”
A distant rumble of explosions shook the floor and sent cracks through the ceiling.
Looking up at the crumbling ceiling and then toward the rapidly-approaching mists, Arturis put his mouth near Atall’s ear, though his voice still carried. He then asked, “How fast are you, boy?”
Saying nothing, Atall just looked toward the grating, where Estin was still shouting and fighting against Sirella, and Feanne roared and shook the grating until the ceiling above it looked ready to collapse.
“Let’s find out.”
Swinging him by his neck, Arturis pulled Atall off his feet and threw him more than twenty feet. With a thump and a pained grunt, Atall hit the floor near the grating, just as a second explosion collapsed part of the roof above the mists.
“Atall, hurry!” Oria called to her brother and could hear similar cries from the others, but he was barely moving. She put her arm through the grating, trying to reach him. “Atall!”
Slowly rolling onto his side, Atall looked up at them with one eye, as the other had been forced closed by rapid swelling from his landing. With great effort, he got his hands under himself and pushed off of the floor onto all fours.
Another explosion—this time far closer—dropped huge stones all around Arturis, but the man seemed entirely relaxed as he walked around them, heading straight for Atall. Already, his entire arm had regrown and he flexed his hand experimentally as he walked. The only indication he had even been touched by the mists was the missing sleeve of his robe.
“Now, we will see what value all of you have to me,” Arturis told the group as he reached Atall’s side.
Arturis dug his fingers into Atall’s side, picking him up by his clothing, fur, and skin. As though the boy weighed nothing, Arturis put him on his feet, while Atall screamed, trying to pull the man’s fingers away.
“You,” Arturis said, pointing at Estin with his freshly-healed hand, “are a healer. You have only a short span of time after death to get a body to a circle and attempt to bring the spirit back into its body. I know of no circle, but maybe you do.”
With a twist, Arturis drove his hand into Atall’s lower ribs, cracking bone as he picked Atall off the ground. Blood poured down his arm and Oria caught a glimpse of bone and muscle, before nausea made her look away.
“Your hourglass has begun,” said Arturis, pulling his bloodied hand free. “Give me a circle, or lose your son. If you have nothing to give me, I still have lost nothing.”
Atall collapsed limply on the spot. As his arm flopped to his side, the oversized ring—the match for the one Oria still wore, given to them by their grandmother—bounced free and rolled to the grating.
Smiling as though among friends, Arturis leaned close to where Estin stood, asking, “Do I need to skin him to get the point across, or will that be enough? I could always use a fur cowl for when I return to Altis. I hear fox fur is quite fashionable among the few living in the region.”
Another explosion shook the room, making Arturis look around as rubble fell all around him. He gave Oria and her parents one more dark glance, before kicking Atall toward the mists that were no more than five feet from him.
“We will be seeing each other again soon,” Arturis said pleasantly, as he flicked blood off of his hand. Silently, he turned and walked away from the grating and the mist, disappearing into the less-lit section of the collapsing room, likely headed toward one of the other tunnels.
Oria was in shock, staring numbly at the blood pooling around her brother’s body. He lay in a position that could have easily been confused for sleeping, were it not for the stench of death and the blood and the mists closing over him.
All Oria could see was the blood, even as she picked up her brother’s ring and slid it onto her finger. The mists, the cavern, it was all gone. Even when she closed her eyes, it was either just a red wash over her vision, or flashes of Arturis ripping the life from her brother.
Slowly, feeling began to creep back into Oria and she realized she was walking with the help of others. They were no longer in the cave, but she had no memory of leaving. It was still night, but she had no idea how long they might have been walking.
As Oria stumbled along, her weight almost entirely on Phaesys, she began to take stock of those around her.
Estin was nearly as bad off as she was, his tail dragging in the sand as he staggered behind the others, staring straight ahead. His muzzle and cheeks were soaked, as if he had been crying. Where he had been burned by the mists, his tail continued to bleed, leaving a long trail of blood on the sand that he seemed unaware of.
His face carefully masked against emotion, Phaesys nonetheless appeared shaken. Though wildlings could not look “green in the face” as Finth once put it, Phaesys appeared on the verge of vomiting. He still kept his right hand tucked against his chest, using his left arm to support Oria.
Looking the other way, Oria first saw Sirella, whose dour demeanor had shattered, leaving in its place the look of a woman who was seeing her own mortality for the first time.
Behind Sirella was Feanne, who appeared the least bothered on the outside. She marched along through the sand—now in her normal appearance, having changed back while Oria was unaware—her jaw set and her left hand clenched into a fist, while her right hung limply at her side. Had Oria not known what to look for, she might have thought her mother was too cold to care, but that was simply not who she was. Oria could see the occasional drip of blood from Feanne’s hands, where her claws dug into her palms.
Out of reflex, Oria started to look around for her brother, but the realization that he really was gone made her wince. There would be no miraculous last moment save, no heroic use of magic, nothing at all that could bring him back. The mists had taken him and without the body, there was no chance of saving him.
Weeping openly, Oria let Phaesys half-carry her across the desert, no longer caring about how weak she might look. All she cared about was how deeply she already missed her brother.
Chapter Thirteen
“Escalation”
The first time you lose someone close to you, it will force you to begin reevaluating everything about yourself. It destroys many people, as the grief and obsession with that loss slowly consumes their life.
The first person I lost was my mother, closely followed by my father. I think I mentioned that in my earlier notes. I watched them die when I was still a child.
For years, that put me on the run, fearing anyone not like myself, which meant everyone. I hid, I stole to survive, and I ran every time someone found me. In all honesty, I should have run when I met Feanne, but in her I saw a strength I did not possess. That drew me to her and ultimately made me a whole male and a father.
I have lost so many others over the years, but none affected me nearly as greatly as the loss of my parents. I even killed people familiar to me. People I knew.
Please don’t take this to mean I am a callous person, but I have forgotten the names of some of those who’ve died. There were just so many. I remember those deaths vividly, but they did not leave me a weeping mess of a person like the mere thought of m
y parents’ deaths still does.
Losing my family for a time did much the same to me as losing my parents. I spent the whole time in anxious fear of finding out that they were dead, or worse, having their animated remains find me. I could not grieve until I knew they were dead, but the images that floated in my head of what I would find haunted me each day.
I dreamt of morbid things each night and lied to Sirella about why she would catch me curled in the corner of the basement, whimpering or screaming in my sleep. She never asked for more of an explanation, but she never did believe that I was just seeing the undead armies from back home. Bless her for not making me tell what those dreams were about.
When Lorne traveled with me, it was harder to hide. Waking sobbing for those who I thought were dead to me was met with concerned demands for what those dreams held.
Unlike Sirella, who knew not to ask too much, Lorne pushed and pushed, wanting to know why I could keep calm in the face of certain death, but cry like a child when I woke. Lies were not enough for her, so I had to resort to simply refusing to talk about it.
The dreams were what every parent and spouse fears.
I saw Feanne, bloodied and killed by the armies of the dead, pulled down by their greedy hands. I watched the life ripped from her body and those bright eyes fade until she was still. Then, I would see her rise again, all that made her independent and majestic torn from her, leaving only an empty shell that sought to kill others.
My eldest children I saw dragged away by the same undead, though in some dreams, their own mother killed them as a zombie. In a few dreams, the children were the zombies and the ones that killed Feanne.
The kits were butchered a thousand ways, unable to defend themselves. In a handful of dreams, they were not yet born and were torn from their mother’s belly by the very creatures seeking to kill her. Every time, I was just a little too late to save them.
In every dream, I was the last to die, being forced to watch my family butchered.
With Atall’s brutal death, I was left with a lingering new nightmare: did my own father wish that he had died first so that he could have avoided watching my mother die, or would he have wanted to die last, knowing the fate of his child?
I wonder at that a lot now. With Atall gone, I cannot help but question whether it would have been better to die with him watching, or whether it was better for him not to know the pain left behind.
Sitting alone in the middle of his healing circle, Estin stared numbly at the stones that made up the intricate ring. He had sat that way for hours, memorizing each and every rock as he sought meaning in himself for what had happened.
The circle had been meant to save the fallen using the skills of a healer, but here he was, one of the more gifted healers his people had ever seen, and there had been nothing he could do. His own son had been torn apart close enough that Estin had heard the wet sounds and horrible cracking of his bones. He could still smell the blood.
What use was there to being a healer if he could not save his own family?
Blinking slowly, Estin lay face-down on the cold floor and waited for the voices of the spirits to come to him, to mock him for sending another to join them. The whispers were there, but distant, giving him space when he wanted someone to blame him, to scream at him for failing Atall.
“Are you going to stay there until nightfall again?” asked Feanne, somewhere outside his field of view. “You have been in here without sleep for almost a full day.”
Not moving, Estin said mostly to himself, “I failed him.”
“We all did,” said Feanne. Estin felt the warmth of her sit down close to his side. “There is no shame in that.”
“I’m his…” Estin bit down the word ‘father’ and instead said, “…healer.”
“Be that as it may, we lost him. There is no way to change that.”
Turning over to face his mate, Estin saw that despite her calm words, Feanne’s face was deeply lined. She looked as though she had aged years in that one day. If she was aware, she gave no indication, sitting on her folded legs with her injured arm resting in her lap.
“Let me fix that,” Estin told her, sitting up slowly.
Feanne lifted her right arm, moving it gingerly before letting it lay across her legs again. Though she was cautious about moving it and doing so appeared painful, it no longer looked to be broken.
“It is fine,” she answered, motioning him away with her other hand. “I had mostly mended before changing back. Only the pain lingers. By tomorrow or the next day, I will be able to fight again. You forget how quickly I heal.”
Estin sat back down, feeling at a loss for what to do. Healing her would have at least given him a few seconds of purpose.
Sliding herself closer, Feanne reached past Estin and pulled his long tail onto his lap. Burning agony leapt to his attention as she moved the limb, reminding him that he was as badly injured as she had been.
Looking down, Estin saw that the foot-long section of his tail that had brushed against the mists was sliced lengthwise, as though a sharp blade had skimmed the fur and flesh from that section. A long clotted section of bloody meat marred the middle of the tail and more dried blood covered the remainder of the fur out to the tip.
“Who needs taking care of right now?” asked Feanne, frowning at the injury. “You are of no use to anyone if you allow your own injuries to fester and become infected. You of all people should know better.”
Estin tried to find the strength to call on his magic to heal the wound, but he was so very tired. Nothing would come. “I can’t. Please just let me be alone for a while longer.”
Feanne’s eyes glittered in the dark room, just before she dug her claw into Estin’s tail, making him yelp in pain.
“There will be no giving up,” she warned him, stroking the uninjured section of his tail affectionately, in contrast to the pain she had just inflicted. “You still have four more children who need you to be strong.”
“When I needed to be strong, I was useless,” he lamented.
“Estin…”
“No. I failed all of you back there,” Estin snapped, rubbing at his eyes out of exhaustion and frustration. “I just stood there, trying to change into…whatever it is that your parents gave me. I couldn’t.”
“You don’t need to change, Estin.”
“Feanne, our son died because I wasn’t strong enough to protect him.”
“He died because a mad Turessian killed him.”
“I can’t just forget…”
“I am not asking you to,” Feanne answered quickly. “The day you find a wildling who hasn’t lost someone close to them is the day you find a wildling who has no idea who or what they are. I am as hurt to my spirit as you, but I intend to return agony to Arturis for every second that I felt that way. I will not blame you or myself, only him.”
“No one will be forgotten until we are all long dead,” she continued, brushing Estin’s face with her other hand. “You will find the strength and we will avenge our child. Our flesh and blood died today and we will use that anger against Arturis and his kind.”
“He may not even be mine,” Estin muttered, not thinking about what he was saying. The words had barely left his mouth when Feanne struck him across the jaw hard enough to lay him flat on his back.
“That child only knew you as a father,” she growled at him, getting to her feet. “You can attempt to avoid your pain all you wish, but you lost a son. Deal with that how you want, but never claim anything but the truth that he was your child. Now, you will find us a way to strike at Arturis, or you will rot in this cave. Take your pick, my mate.”
Turning sharply, Feanne stormed from the room, leaving Estin rubbing his jaw in dismay, wishing he could take back the foolish words.
Estin lay there a while longer, savoring the pain in his jaw. It gave him some degree of focus beyond his emotional misery. Finally, he sat up and looked around the small room with new eyes, realizing there were things he really could do. H
e was not as helpless as most who lost their loved ones.
“Feanne!” he called out, digging out his notebook. He could hear her approaching, but he hurried to find the page he had used to contact Asrahn several days earlier. “Sit down.”
Feanne’s toes tapped at the floor impatiently, but she soon sat down beside him. Even without looking up, Estin could feel her glare if only from her posture and sense of tension.
“What would you give to speak to him one more time?” asked Estin, finding the page.
“Wishes do not change our world, Estin. Do not taunt me.”
Without thinking, Estin held the scribbled page up to Feanne, who just stared blankly at it. She likely had no clue what he was showing her.
“This is a spell I used to speak with your mother a few days ago,” he explained, setting the book down between them in the circle. “The person who wrote this does say that it isn’t always going to work and the spirit can refuse, but I know it sometimes does work.”
Feanne’s eyes narrowed suspiciously. “If this is in any way similar to what the Turessians do to bind the living energy of the dead to their rotting bodies, I will kill you myself, Estin.”
“Not at all. They harness the chaos inherent in magic to prevent the spirit from fully escaping the body. This merely asks the departed spirit for a moment of their time…and allows them to answer.”
Tapping a sharp claw on the pages of the book, Feanne told him, “Then do it. Immediately.”
As he had done the last time, Estin concentrated on the voices that thrummed through his mind, calling out with his magic to one in particular. At his beckoning, several other voices whispered loudly—some he recognized as Ulra and even Finth—but he stayed focused on calling to Atall.
Soon, the voices subsided, as though letting one come to the forefront. Then came the same chill he had felt when Asrahn had come.
“You called me?” asked a soft male voice, somewhere in the room.