by Kim Wedlock
"An encasing spell?" Anthis murmured, still immensely distracted, this time by the contents of a neighbouring display. "Mm. A handful did that from time to time... Quite clever. Most would try to...uh...untangle the spells, piece by piece, and inevitably...trigger something... But who has the patience for that? Not a thief, nor a rightful owner..."
"The thief would snatch and stumble," Rathen nodded, "and the owner would have the release..." He ignored Anthis as he began mumbling about another relic nearby and returned to searching the chains. He breathed and slowed his hurried mind. He paid no attention to any one spell that had previously distracted him, as was all part of its design; instead he drew backwards, moving himself steadily away from the web to view it as a whole, and soon found a quilt where a moment before there had been hundreds of knotted threads.
There was little order to the string-ball-spells, but something bound them together. He could sense it. Something thin, like a skin over porridge, unnoticed until disturbed...and just as disgustingly simple.
A distant crash unsettled the air and snapped his brittle tensions. Pursuers or a collapse, his alarm jumped, but he steadied himself before he could trip over his thoughts. His eyes locked onto the golden-onyx trinket. He had what he needed to form a counterspell; there was no purpose in hesitating, and no time to try anything as advanced as the others seemed to expect of him. He had only moments, if that. Cancelling out the shroud as a whole was his only option.
And he had elven magic. That had to count for something.
His bearing shifted. His back straightened, drawing him to his full height, and he loomed over the unassuming pyramid, reflecting back its domination. He raised his hands, felt the thrum of magic coursing through his veins, heating his blood, and began twisting his fingers into a series of nimble and intricate signs. The blanket spell was no obstacle - any elf could have gotten around it. Its strength lay in its weakness; it was so subtle he had missed it, as certainly would any hasty thief. But now it had been revealed, now he'd found the lock and dislodged its catch with a hammer, it would remain no obstacle.
Finally, it was his turn to be useful.
His heart raced. He released his spell.
And his burning blood froze.
The air shook, filled with a cacophony of crashes, bangs and strange pops and jingles too loud and chaotic to process. It would have physically stunned them had the ground beneath their feet not turned to fluid, undulating like waves and forcing them to abandon all else and concentrate on maintaining their balance. But even that matter was more difficult than it should have been. The feeling of their own weight having doubled increased once again, and it seemed the heaving floor equally sought to drag them down if it couldn't trip them.
Rathen rooted himself against it, forcing his weight into the soles of his feet, and the others struggled in their own time to do the same. A window, huge and mosaicked in coloured glass, shattered beside them, sending fragments bursting both inwards and out, only to freeze suddenly in the air before striking anyone as though a pocket of time had stopped. The outside took immediate advantage; tree roots, creeping flowers and tamed streams spilled inside, quickly overrunning the crumbling atrium and transforming it into a sight more suited to Turunda's Wildlands.
"What did you do?!" Garon demanded, his voice sharp and furious over the clamour of destruction, and Rathen suspected in the moment he took to notice the alarm on his and Petra's faces that they were finally shaking off the atmospheric spells. But though he could make a guess, he couldn't find the courage to admit fault.
"This place is ancient," he shouted back instead, breaking the glass casing and snatching the small, inconspicuous and successfully disarmed pyramid, "it's been coming down for centuries!"
"Point blame later! We need to get out of here!" Petra adjusted her grip on the silent and delirious tribal and looked around desperately for any suggestion of safety. But no sooner had her eyes thundered onto the doors than they were covered by the wall above, which had slumped and melted down over them. It settled immediately; their exit was lost.
She spun back to Rathen, then to Garon, shooting them both fevered, helpless looks. Neither met her eyes; both held the same fatalism as they searched silently for an alternative.
As if in answer, another wall suddenly tore itself away, exposing the shifting world beyond as midnight spilled in - but it was not the cratered, silver moon that hung in the black sky, but the blinding and smooth-skinned sun, impossible to look at despite having been robbed of its strength. And among the darkness they began picking out pockets of deeper blackness, small voids like the door in Dolunokh, but no larger than a dinner plate.
With the dead light, more naked and faceless arcane beings came rushing in towards them, untroubled by the destruction and focused instead on wanton entertainment. But while before their bodies had been mostly intact, now they were missing limbs or whole chunks of their torsos, and their previously licentious giggling had become muffled, resonant bellows.
A few tripped and, like the first, didn't rise again, while the clumsy grasps of the rest were easily evaded. Fighting against the writhing ground, the group made their escape, only to stall again at the threshold. The air abruptly thinned and breathing came harder, but they were each still certain that the world outside wasn't as it had been when they'd reached the tower. The square that had stood before it had now become a lake, at the centre of which was not a grand fountain, but a single ornate dressing table. Around it, half of the parlours and carnal houses had been replaced by a myriad of irrelevancies - statues, dress mannequins, bird cages, lone doors, piles of throw pillows and even an ice sculpture - some standing upright, others upside down, and a few jutted sideways from trees and other impossible anchors. And the thick forest that encircled the city had moved up alongside to the right, despite the tower having stood a moment ago at its heart.
The tremors in the ground and air continued, shaking and shattering the illusory world. It melted and seeped, ballooned and burst; crumpled and expanded. Reformed and rearranged.
A terrible thought struck Rathen like the kick of a horse, but he didn't dare speak for fear of encouraging it.
Fortunately - perhaps - the shaping elements heard his mind's voice and provided both answer and solution. A short, splintered and yet oddly familiar path appeared at their feet, headed by dense, fencing trees, while another abyssal window ripped itself into existence between them.
The door.
There was no time to question their changing luck, and fortunately he didn't need to give Garon the urging glance. The inquisitor reached out and grasped Petra by the shoulder, and though she looked back at him with fierce doubt in her hazel eyes, she didn't hesitate for long. With a deep breath, straightening of her back and a short, resolute nod, she hurried towards it, trampling the debris of the tower walls and dragging Eyila along beside her.
They leapt inside, and were gone.
Garon turned to Rathen and gestured sharply for him to do the same, but as something pulled his gaze beyond him, his already severe expression worsened and a rich curse fell from his tongue. Rathen followed his sight. Anthis was still inside, lingering beneath the paintings and standing over another golden case. His entrancement, it seemed, hadn't broken.
Garon started towards him, but was stopped by a hand thrust firmly against his chest, hard enough to shove him backwards towards the void. "I'll get him," Rathen growled. "If the doorway closes, I can open it again."
Only the inquisitor's overbearing responsibility made him hesitate, but a single, dark look from the mage silenced it. He gave him Petra's same, resolute nod then turned and obeyed, saving himself with the cold comfort of logic.
Rathen turned his snarl onto the historian and rushed back inside. The heaving of the ground intensified, the roar in the air deafened, and the floor panels began to shatter and float. He ignored it, snatching up the bags they'd left in their haste along his way, just as he ignored the things that began to disintegrate around
him - the walls, the decor, the women and the encroaching wild - that which disappeared into nothing as Khry's Glory began its final collapse.
He didn't dare look back to discover if the door was still there.
A sharp, piercing heat cut through Garon's leg. He was sure, for a moment, that he'd lost his foot, and so his priority in the instant he struck the writhing ground was not to protect himself from the jagged rock that only narrowly missed impaling him, but to grasp his ankle and make certain that his limb was still whole. It was; the matter was forgotten.
The tumultuous earth bucked, tossing him up and wrenching his attention at last onto his near-black surroundings. He twisted in the air, landing hard on his hands and knees, and spotted Petra close by, struggling to drag herself and her charge away from the epicentre. He was quick to follow.
The night sky was vast and alight with violet. Its characteristic darkness had been eradicated, as though the cataclysm ensuing around them had rewritten even fundamental physics, and the shifting, exploding light threw such maddened shadows that the landscape changed six times before they could blink.
But the charge and the rocks that hung in the air told them they had returned to Dolunokh. Not where they had left it, for the ground beneath them, though tearing and quaking, was not rent and crumpled, but if the door could move within that senseless place, then there was no reason it couldn't out here.
But the region was in a far worse state than when they'd left it, and after only three paces the ground under their feet disintegrated into fine dirt and pebbles, spread like water and rose quickly into a wave far larger than mathematically possible. It towered above and crashed upon them, lacerating their hands and faces like a sand-laden wind, and tried with all its might to sweep them away.
The turmoil of the magic, it seemed, had followed them out.
They managed, half-swimming, to escape the false and never-ending swell, and a moment later the land rumbled to a suspicious halt. Dubiously, they seized the opportunity to find their breath - but that opportunity was fleeting. They pressed themselves immediately against the dishevelled earth at the sound of frantic voices, and Garon dared a swift and artful peek around an upthrust clump of meadow. His jaw knotted at the sight of five obscure figures charging in their direction. "They're still here."
"But Rathen and Anthis aren't." Petra spared a look towards the pocket of air the three of them had just passed through, but stared instead directly up to the moon. Her eyes widened. There was no hole of nothingness to be found.
"He can open it again," Garon quickly assured her. "We'll find somewhere safe and wait for them."
But her eyes dropped to his ankle, which he clutched despite ignoring it. She saw the shred of his trouser leg, the blood that coated his skin, and the shard of ebon paving that he ripped free from his flesh and disintegrated quickly in his hand.
Then she recalled the dreadful, thundering boom that had followed the inquisitor's landing.
Her eyes tracked up to his with terrible comprehension, but he didn't meet them. "We'll wait for them," he said again, but the betraying wildness of his eyes was already confirming her fears.
"Koraaz!"
The sudden voice of fury itself resounded through the air, rivalling the cracks of thunder, and shocked them both to stillness. Garon snarled and pushed through it to his feet. "We have to move, now."
Petra eyed him in conflict, until the advancing cry howled again. He gave her no moment to hesitate. Keeping low, he bolted away, catching her in his shadow and dragging her along behind him. They spared no moment to hide from the relentless flashes of lightning, relying on its confusion to conceal them instead, and fixed their sights rigidly to the distance while the maddened cries continued to shake the riven night air.
"I will protect Turunda with my own two hands! I don't need the Zi'veyn to stop you! But the Order will not have it!"
They didn't dare a glance behind them into the flashing darkness, even as the cries grew distant.
"I will find you, Koraaz!"
Epilogue
A light knock came at the door. A timid knock, one that hesitated for a few long seconds after the ponderous footsteps had drawn to a stop outside. She'd heard them; she'd been listening for them. They came by every hour, no less often, paused just outside, then, usually, left again. But sometimes there was a knock, and softly spoken words. They'd only made her angry at first, even though she hadn't understood them through her sobs, but she'd never once responded.
"A-Aria," the frail, anxious voice finally followed. She didn't answer it, but she listened while glaring into the wooden door from across the room. "I...there's some...I've made you something to eat. I don't know if you'll like it...but..." He fell quiet, and for the second time she felt a curious pang of sympathy for the old man. But she held her tongue, and a short clatter of wood and clay soon interrupted the silence. "I'll leave it out here for you. Whenever you're ready... Aria, you must eat..." It sounded as though he was going to say more, and she found herself holding out for it. But he didn't. A slow and heavy retreat followed as hesitantly as his initial knock, and she listened to the footsteps cross the short hallway and carefully descend the staircase.
Aria hugged her knees. She hadn't left the room since she'd arrived - her father's from when he was her age, the old man had said in a bid to comfort her through the door - so he'd brought her meals to her. But she never opened the door to them, and the smell of porridge, toast, eggs, stew - even a fruit tart - it all made her feel sick.
She felt a stronger wave of nausea pass over her as the aroma of another late fish supper drifted towards her little nose, but this time, punctuated by a deep, empty rumble, she knew for sure that it was hunger. But she still didn't want it.
She turned her head away in defiance and looked about the room instead.
It was enormous. Four beds could have been squashed into it, filling it from wall to wall. Her own could fit one and a half, she reckoned, and that had always been more than enough. And there were so many toys - a ball, a few blocks, a hobby horse and a wooden sword, the latter of which she kept close to her side for comfort. But there were no dolls. She found that strange. He played with dolls all the time with her.
She smiled to herself in amusement for a displaced moment, but her heart quickly plummeted. She sighed mournfully as her eyes drifted out through the dark window and watched a moth bump against the glass, hypnotised by the candle.
Two days had passed like weeks. Her eyes were raw and puffy, but she'd not cried for hours. She'd run out of tears, and instead a peculiar thoughtfulness had set in; she felt as if she was standing beside herself and watching her thoughts roll by. She wondered if that was what it was like to be grown up: to never have emotions get in her way and to consider things with perfect clearness, and for things to always make sense, and to always know exactly what to do, and to do it no matter how it might make people feel, if it really had to be done.
She still didn't understand why she was taken away, but it didn't matter anymore. Her father had given her something so important to do, and she'd been behaving like a silly little child instead of doing it and proving how useful she could be. Because, like him, like Anthis, like Garon and Petra, her job was important, and it was something only she could do. And her father would need it if he was going to save the world. And he would save the world. And she would have helped.
She straightened, dropping her knees to the blanket, and pursed her lips in resolution as she looked over the open book, knife and wood that were laid out in front of her. But her determination quickly slackened. The wood. She'd wanted something nicer than what she had for this arty-fact of hers, something special...something from home. Something to make her father happy.
Her dry eyes drifted back towards the window. Kienza hadn't been in yet. But surely she would be soon...Kienza wouldn't have forgotten about her. And when she arrived, she would ask her to fetch her some wood. And she would make something beautiful, something incredible, so
mething not even the elves could have made. And she would do her father proud.
...Yes. Yes, she would wait. She would wait and make something glorious. And when she was finished, her daddy would come back for her, and they would be together again, and he would be proud, and he would save the world. And once he'd saved the world, she would never, ever have to leave his side again.
And in the mean time, she would eat. Because her job was so very important.
Other Works
The Archguardians of Laceria
It is a monarch's task to lead and protect their people, and few take this responsibility as seriously as Queen Rysana Vokun. Since ascending to the throne almost twenty years ago, she has fought a war against violent beasts of stone beneath her people's feet and without their knowledge, holding at bay the aggressors who would seek only chaotic destruction.
But while the gargoyles' predictable attack is usually held off with ease, their recently increasing aggression has given Laceria's five Archguardians the push to bring the matter to a swift and final end.
Queen Rysana, only the latest in the 400 year old line of Archguardians, along with the help of three others set out to do just that, but when a storm leads them to discover the gargoyles' true intentions, their plan is tipped upside down.
As a war of men is waged in her name and a battle between gods overshadows them all, Rysana must descend into the maze of tunnels and caverns that lie beneath Laceria's entirety to save the creatures she sought to destroy if she is to protect her people.