“There’s been an intrusion! Sound the alarm. And call for a healer.”
The guard was stupefied, and tried to look past Roakore into the room. Roakore took him by the collar and shook him. “That be a godsdamned order!”
The soldier snapped to quickly, and rushed off down the hall calling out to sound the alarm. Roakore returned to the room and knocked over furniture and toppled bookcases. He would tell everyone that he had found the room the way it was, and that he had seen a dark elf scurrying through the window just as he entered.
It was the only way to save Nah’Zed’s name—he owed her that much.
Soon the deep, mournful warning horn bellowed in the deep, followed by other, more distant horns. The chorus spread through the mountain kingdom, and the search for the phantom dark elf began.
A healer arrived and confirmed that Nah’Zed had passed on, and a priest came to offer a prayer to guide her to the mountain of the gods.
Roakore told his story to the head of the guard and left the chamber, wanting to be alone. He hurried to his study, afraid that the tears would fall before he made it. He passed startled-looking guards on the way, avoiding eye-contact with the dwarves as they stopped to slam their chests.
He finally reached his study and closed the door behind him. With his back to it, he finally let the tears fall.
Staggering to the bar through blurred vision, Roakore grabbed a bottle of whiskey, yanked the cork free, and drank down a fourth of the bottle. Sorrow turned to rage, and he smashed the bottle in the fireplace, causing a great plume of fire bursting from the hearth. He cried to the gods, furious with them and himself. He reached out with his mind and pulled the armor and weapons from the wall and smashed them into a bookcase across the room. With powerful hands he grabbed ahold of the wood and leather chair beside the fire and smashed it on the stone floor until it was reduced to tinder.
“Blasted book!” Roakore cried.
He turned his wild eyes to the desk. Suddenly he realized just how dangerous the ancient tome really was. The knowledge had killed Nah’Zed, it had to be destroyed.
Roakore ripped the desk drawer free and took the ancient Book of Ky’Dren in his shaking hands and ripped it in two. He tore at the pages, sputtering, spitting and cursing all the while. He found his translated version and tore it apart as well. With a force of will he lifted the hundreds of pieces of paper and binding and shot them into the fire across the room.
He then fell to his knees, tears streaming down his face.
“Forgive me, Ky’Dren. Forgive me, Nah’Zed.”
Chapter 35
Bound to Serve
The fire at the center of the village burned bright against the encroaching darkness. Gretzen tossed in the last of her ingredients and raised her arms to the flaring blue pyre. The elder women, and even some of the young girls, stood in a circle, chanting with hands locked and heads tossed back in their appeal to the gods. Gretzen was attempting to save Aurora from the hells, and while her summoning was a powerful one, it was up to Aurora in the end.
She raised the bone carving high and cried out, “Thodin! Father of the gods, release your daughter to me so that she might repent for her evil ways.”
Aurora thrashed and screamed against the all-consuming pain. She was deaf and blind, without taste or touch. All that existed was the looming darkness of depression and the terrible mental agony. During those times when her sight and hearing were restored, it was only so that she might stand in judgement of those who she had led to certain death. None affected her more than the spirit of her father and his pained look of disappointment.
“Please, Father, please forgive me!” she had cried out to him.
He said not a word, but turned away, and left her to the darkness.
She begged Thodin for an end to the pain, but no one answered her prayers.
One after another the thousands of barbarians who had fallen because of her betrayal stood before her. Aurora was given form once more, so that the spirits might exact their revenge. Her body was ravished and torn, only to be restored and destroyed once again.
Aurora floated in darkness, cold and afraid. The berating of the spirits, and maddening whispers of the gods had ceased for a time. She prayed for an end, chanting her plea over and over. Soon the spirits would return. Once more her torture would begin.
A pinpoint of light suddenly appeared in the darkness, and Aurora reeled away from it, thinking that her torturers had returned.
Aurora Snowfell, I summon thee…
She recognized the voice, but she didn’t trust it, thinking it to be the gods toying with her again.
The light became brighter, and a dozen barbarian voices echoed through the void.
Aurora focused on the light, urging herself forward, hoping beyond hope that it was real. The words grew louder and the light grew brighter as she approached.
Gretzen beckoned to Aurora, offering her retribution and peace. A hand reached through the blinding light, and Aurora desperately reached for it.
There was a flash of brilliant light and all pain left her.
When she dared, she opened her eyes.
Gretzen stood before her on the tall stone. The other villagers stood in a circle around them and the fire. Aurora gave a shriek when she saw the burning flames below her and instinctively flew toward the witch.
“It is all right, child. Gretzen has you now.”
Aurora looked down at her body, which floated and shimmered in the air. Wonderment and terror washed through her. She put a wispy hand out in front of her and inspected it.
“What is this? What have you done?”
Gretzen held up a carving that looked surprisingly like Aurora. “I have rescued your spirit from the hells. Through this portal I can summon you at will. You need not remain in spirit form. Make yourself whole. You will find that you can do it quite easily if you try.”
Aurora stared at her in disbelief. She looked back at her glowing hand and thought of the body she had once possessed. To her astonishment, her body, clothes and armor began to form out of the swirling mist.
“I will teach you how to fight in both the physical and spiritual form. Soon you will be able to use both to devastating effect,” said Gretzen.
“Fight?” Aurora asked.
Gretzen nodded gravely. “You have done terrible things. You have led our people astray. I have brought you back so that you might redeem yourself.”
“I’m no longer a lich?”
“You are free from the dark-elf necromancer.”
Aurora was overjoyed. She dropped to her knees and clutched the woman’s robes. “I do not deserve your holy grace.”
“The gods would agree. Do you wish to prove them wrong?”
“I wish only for a chance to undo the terrible things that I have done.”
Gretzen nodded. “Nothing can be undone, child. All we can do is try to mend and make anew.”
Aurora felt as though she had been made anew. The filth of the necromantic power no longer coursed through her body. The dark thoughts and dark moods had abated for the time being, and she glowed with an inner warmth that reminded her of her mother’s hearth.
Her Modir.
She didn’t know how she could possibly face her again. It was all she could do to withstand the gaze of the curious villagers. She could hear their whispers. They called her Daudr Kellr—spirit of death.
“I will do whatever is needed of me. I will watch over the children for all time. If I must stand guard on the shores of this island forever, I shall do it.”
Gretzen offered her approving nod. “Good, then we begin to mend.”
Chapter 36
The Princess and the Lich
The rain poured for two days straight as Raene and Azzeal traveled north along the deserted road. The incessant fog hung in thick patches, haunting the low-lying valleys and bogs. It flowed through the forests in wispy currents of searching tendrils. Those reaching phantoms seemed to be aware, waiting, and wat
ching.
Raene and Azzeal had spent the night in an old rundown farmhouse. And while they dared not start a fire, they had at least gotten out of the constant pounding rain for a time.
She fretted over the timber-wolf figurine the entire time, fingering the two pieces in her pocket. She worried about Dirk and Krentz, and wondered if they were now truly dead.
Azzeal had no answers for her, saying only that Gretzen would know what to do.
“Stop.” Azzeal lifted a hand out behind him. Raene, in her deep thoughts, nearly ran into it.
“What ye see, elf?”
“Quiet.”
She waited, eyeing the surroundings for movement. The land rolled off to the south down the long hill they had been climbing. On either side, hills rose and fell, dotted here and there with bushes and copses of birch and maple trees. Nothing appeared to be on the road up ahead, but then again, visibility was low.
After a time, Azzeal shook his head and continued on. Raene followed warily. She didn’t know the elf from a stone on the ground, and she didn’t trust people she didn’t know—much less his kind. But for the time being he was her only hope. She had made a terrible mistake trying to take on Zander by herself, and now Dirk and Krentz might be lost because of her stupidity.
“How did you come to possess Chief?” Azzeal asked over his shoulder.
“I told ye, I found the figurine.”
“One does not find the figurine and know how to use it, or the names of those to be summoned,” he retorted matter-of-factly.
“What’s it to ye, anyways?”
“I was there when Chief was created. His original master and I were good friends.”
“Who that be?”
Azzeal turned to regard her with a smile. “Talon Windwalker. Have you ever heard of him?”
She shook her head, though she remembered the name Krentz used for the spirit who told her about Gretzen.
He smiled with reminiscence. “He was a great man. One of the bravest souls I have ever met. He was a barbarian, one of the Skomm.”
Raene spat. “Barbarians be bloodthirsty devils.”
Azzeal chuckled, which only irritated her more. He was in high spirits, which she found odd. Then again, his eyes no longer glowed green, and whatever happened in that tower seemed to have given him his freedom from the necromancer.
“Many of them would say the same thing about the dwarves.”
“Bah!” She waved him off. “I know me damned history.”
“Excellent,” said Azzeal. “Then you are aware that the dwarves and the humans of Eldalon and Shierdon started the war with the barbarians, and mercilessly drove them out of their lands.”
“You elves don’t know nothin’ ‘bout our goin’s on. Stick to yer tree-huggin’ and Orna Ca-whatsit.”
Azzeal became quiet after that, for which Raene was thankful. They were nearing the coast now. She could smell it on the air blowing in from the north. The scent reminded her of the underground lakes of her home mountain. She missed Ky’Dren and being around other dwarves. Her recent failure had begun to chip away at her once steely resolve, and she was becoming quite homesick. Out here above ground, everything was too bright, too wide open. She found herself constantly looking over her shoulder and wondering what was beyond the next bend in the road. Had her father been right all along? Were dwarven women not cut out to be warriors? She had spent the last hundred years training to be as good as her brothers. And now she had failed.
Raene drew farther from Zander and her revenge with every stride. She had seen herself returning to the halls of her father a hero, and changing the view of a women’s worth. Now she knew that she could only return in shame.
Her anger had been growing the entire miserable journey from the tower. What was she even doing? She should just give Azzeal the figurine and be done with it. There was no hope for Dirk or Krentz. The figurine was broken.
And it was all her fault.
They had saved her life in the battle of the Ky’Dren Pass, and she had stubbornly dragged them after the one foe that they could not defeat.
Just like your stubborn father! Her mother always said.
It was true, but it seemed that, in the end, she wasn’t enough like him. Given the chance, the king of Ky’Dren would have destroyed Zander and his minions.
Azzeal stopped and crouched low behind a fallen tree, overlooking a stretch of marsh. Raene tried to get up next to him to see, but he pushed her shoulder down and waved her off. She stared at him, fuming.
“There’s something out there,” he whispered.
“And so? Let’s have at ‘em.”
Azzeal grinned. “You are a lively one, aren’t you?”
“What yer elfy senses tellin’ you, anyway?” she said, peeking over the rotted log.
“I’m afraid my senses are quite a bit duller than they used to be. But I can smell it riding on the wind.”
Raene sniffed at the air and scowled. How had she missed it before? It was faint, but it was there—the putrid stink of rotten flesh.
Get yer head out o’ yer arse, Raene! She told herself.
“Well, then, let’s say hello.” She took her shield off her back and began to get up.
Azzeal grabbed her arm. “Wait, we don’t know how many there are. We need a plan to get by them.”
“Get by ‘em…I says we go through ‘em.”
“Of course you do, but isn’t that the kind of thinking that got you into this mess?”
She offered him a level scowl and grit her teeth. “What’s yer plan, then?”
Raene and Azzeal shuffled up the bank on elbows and knees, and slowly peered through the cluster of cattails at the small village. Fires had recently claimed most of the buildings. Despite the state of ruin, villagers were gathered near the center of town and seemed to be waiting. Their postures suggested that they were sleepwalking, but Raene knew the truth of it.
“They’ve done converted the entire village,” she whispered.
Azzeal nodded gravely, his intense feline eyes staring sympathetically at the crowd. “We should go. There’s nothing we can do here.”
“We can send them off to the afterlife,” she retorted.
“Indeed, or they could send us off before we’ve found Gretzen.”
“I ain’t afraid o’ death.”
“Neither am I, but I would rather live to see the fall of Zander. I would rather help your friends and restore Chief’s portal to the spirit world. If there is a necromancer among them, which by all indications there is, then we cannot win this fight.”
Raene knew that his words made sense, and it was with grudging animosity that she finally nodded and conceded the point.
They followed Chief’s lead and traveled wide of the smoldering village. With each step, Raene had to fight her inner voice telling her to turn around and face the devils. Soon, she told herself, have patience, soon we will have our revenge.
Zander shuddered as he drained power from the skull. He felt the dark lord’s spirit stir, calling to him from the abyss. He ignored those pathetic pleadings. The skull was his, as was the power of the dark lord’s spirit. Zander had waited patiently for decades under the command of lesser minds. Now was his time.
With his strength replenished, he looked to his hordes of undead lying in the mud. Somehow the barbarian witch had attacked him through one of his gems—Aurora’s gem.
She had failed.
It was of no concern to Zander. There were other, less troublesome, lichs at his disposal. Azzeal was lost to him as well, somehow freed from his necromantic control.
Only a small part of Zander’s army had been affected by the barbarian witch’s curse—those who were closest to him when the attack came.
He sent twenty undead north with instructions to bring the meddlesome dwarf and the elf back alive. He intended on keeping his promise to the dwarf woman that she would lead his undead armies into the mountains.
When he had regained his strength, he would set his sig
hts on Belldon Island. Ainamaf still sat on the throne, imitating the late human king. Soon Zander would add the dark elf to his undead ranks. Then he would move south into Uthen-Arden—the last vestige of hope for the defeated humans.
Raene and Azzeal came upon the beach at midday. It appeared that a great number of undead had gathered here, and by all appearances they had been building boats. Scrap wood was strewn about the place, and one of the crafts seemed to have been destroyed by fire. Its charred remains shifted with the ebb and flow of the ocean.
“Someone tried to stop them,” Raene noted.
“Aurora,” said Azzeal with a grin.
“How we goin’ to get across?” She had never been on the water before, and wasn’t looking forward to it.
“There are enough scraps and tools leftover to build a small raft. Don’t worry. The strait is only twenty or so miles across.”
“Who’s worried?” said Raene with an indignant glower. “Just wonderin’, is all.”
Azzeal smiled at her knowingly. “Come. Let’s set to work.”
They gathered the best pieces they could find and laid them out in a row. There was no material lying around to be used for sails, so they fashioned what oars they could from the flatter pieces. With leather straps and rope salvaged from the work site, they fashioned a raft in only a few hours.
When their work was done, the two stood over the finished product.
“Well, she’s not pretty, but she’ll do the trick, I think,” said Azzeal.
Raene’s attention had shifted. There was a strange sound coming from farther inland. “Ye hear that, elf?”
Azzeal stopped and listened. The sound became louder, and was soon unmistakable as the footfalls of charging soldiers.
“They’ve found us,” said Raene, taking up her shield and mace.
“Come, let us be swift. It won’t be easy getting beyond the breakers.”
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