The Path of the Fallen

by Dan O'Brien

Tears pooled as her mouth moved.

  “E’Malkai,” she whispered.

  Arile turned and moved to her side. Elcites turned, but did not stand, the wound at his side still painful. The white hunter touched her face, brushing away her sweat-matted hair.

  “Can you hear me, T’elen? Can you see my face?” he called.

  His mouth was drawn into a thin line.

  T’elen blinked and smiled, swallowing hard enough to draw tears. “Arile, proud white hunter of the north,” she responded.

  Arile’s gaze softened and he allowed the line of his mouth to widen into a small smile. “You gave us quite a scare sleeping for so long.”

  She gulped again and lifted her body so that she was in a sitting position. “How long has it been?”

  “Days,” he answered. Walking over to where Elcites sat, he kicked at a Culouth helmet. The metallic armament scuttled across the wooden floors and out into the open air outside the building. “Much has happened.”

  As she looked across the room and saw the near comatose stare in Xi’iom’s eyes and the wrapped form at the center of the room, she could not hide her shock. “What has happened here, Arile?”

  Arile watched as morning broke the horizon. The orange of the morning sun filtered through a crimson haze. Dark gray clouds hung beside the great star as if threatening the land with more rain.

  “Leane is dead. M’iordi killed her in cold blood on those steps.”

  He pointed toward a pile of the dead.

  A pyre had been lit beneath them. The poignant smell of burnt flesh washed over him. He turned and pointed to the blackened stain that had been M’iordi. “And there is where Fe’rein incinerated him.”

  T’elen pushed herself to her feet with a grunt; feeling the weight of her blade on her back was a waking comfort. “Why would Fe’rein kill a Culouth councilman?”

  Arile shrugged his shoulders. “E’Malkai came. He carried his mother into this room and that was when Fe’rein ended the life of the late councilman. There was rage in E’Malkai’s eyes.”

  Elcites grunted and shifted, holding his hands to his bandages.

  T’elen looked his way and smiled sadly for reassurance. She moved to where Arile stood and looked out over the chaos of Illigard. The outpost had been her charge, and much more than that: her home. The walls had remained mostly intact, but the buildings within were burned and broken.

  “Where are they now, E’Malkai and Fe’rein?”

  Arile sighed and scratched at his shoulder.

  “He said that I was to honor his mother as we would on the tundra. He placed her before me and said those words. He said no goodbyes, nor did I wish him to. He sped off after the false Creator and I imagine they dance with death as we speak.”

  T’elen had never in her adult life cried.

  She had on occasion as a child wept when the time was right or when a situation called for it. Tears sprang to her eyes and she knew that this was both the time and the situation to let in sadness.

  “This was the Final War indeed,” she muttered between sobs.

  Arile looked at her and then out onto the outpost once more. He saw as she did. He saw the end of an era, the passing of a time. “We can only hope that E’Malkai comes out the victor.”

  T’elen shook her head.

  “There is nothing left here for him anymore.”

  Arile nodded and looked back to the others. “The ritual of passing requires the body to be burned. Those who were the closest to the deceased then sing the hymn of passing. It is a somber melody that brings even the bravest warrior to tears.”

  “Do you wish to journey back to the tundra with her?”

  Arile shook his head.

  “There are so many dead, so many who had called the tundra their home. We could not burn one in the north and not the others. We will mourn them and build their monument upon the place of their death in the mountains west of Illigard. That is where I believe E’Malkai would have wanted her honored, among those who loved her,” he answered with a somber tone.

  T’elen stepped out into the chilled air, wrapping her arms around herself as she looked back at the mountain. It was misty, the warmer air beneath it creating a fog that hung over its peaks menacingly. The fire, though quelled, spewed smoke into the air from its former glory and it, too, found its way to the mountains above. A war had ended as abruptly as it had begun. She shook her head as she continued to watch the distance where a sun might rise upon a better day than the last.

  ⱷ

  E’Malkai

  They curved back over top land once more. They collided against one another. Rings of power and fire burned from them as they fought against each other above where Duirin had once stood. Fe’rein seemed far deadlier now. His anger supplemented the powerful aura that surrounded him. They traded blows, speed for power and skill for inexperience.

  The youth parried and felt the impact as Fe’rein struck him across the face with his doubled-up fists. Bright lights flashed across his vision as he, along with the trail of his energy, exploded into the snow beneath. His body slid across the surface, falling on one of the few sections of stone wall that had remained standing in Duirin.

  E’Malkai stood among the tattered stone, throwing pieces free with a swipe of his arm. Fe’rein hovered overhead and the youth watched him. His white eyes poured back across his skull. Though his hair was raven black, it seemed more the part of white marble when consumed by the flame of the Original Creator.

  He breathed out, the power that had laid claim over his body still searching for its place. The words of the Shaman echoed like thunder in his mind: to strip away the power of the Dark Creator as it had been done eons before. He jumped forward, the energy taking him over as he climbed in a controlled ascent toward Fe’rein.

  The Dark Creator regarded him as a bear regards a bug. He reached his arms behind his back and yawned as E’Malkai drew close. Stopping in front of him, E’Malkai hovered miles above the terrain below. “Is this the power of the Original Creator?” he mocked.

  E’Malkai’s entire frame was tensed. His muscles, had they not been infused with the power of the Original Creator, would have snapped like drawn cords. “It is your power that is at its fullest, uncle. Mine is just beginning.”

  E’Malkai flashed forward, a current of wind passing by where he had been, and then reappeared behind Fe’rein. He crashed his fist down hard upon the back of his foe. Fe’rein doubled forward, his face aghast as he felt the pain wash over him.

  He turned to face the youth and as he did so, E’Malkai teleported once more. He came around with his knee, driving it into Fe’rein’s back, just below where he had struck him a second before. And then carrying through, E’Malkai spun back around and drove his foot into the Dark Creator’s lower back, driving Fe’rein toward the ground.

  Spinning, Fe’rein could see the white snow of the tundra. As he looked back to the sky again, his eyes went wide as the youth crashed into him. Together, they collided into the snow-drenched lands below.

  A cloud of cold and ice erupted around them, crystals floating on the gentle wind that caressed the tundra hundreds of miles to the north. Fe’rein flung his arms out from his sides as he tried to see in the fog of uprooted snow, but instead felt E’Malkai coming. Bringing his hands up to block, he was pushed back. His feet dug a trench in the ground as he remained upright.

  He opened his eyes as he realized that he had shut them.

  Again, he saw the youth come forward. The thick pulsing vein of crimson that infected his aura grew with each blow, with each surge of anger and hatred that he felt for the Dark Creator. He opened his anger as well, but found that it had long since been spent.

  The youth’s words had not been lost on Fe’rein.

  The awakening that surged within him could not contend with the rising power that billowed from E’Malkai like smoke. Fe’rein passed his hands in front him as a mime would run his hand over an invisible wall in the air. E’Malkai came forward again
and slammed into the makeshift barrier, bouncing back.

  Ramming against it once more, E’Malkai landed in the snow; its depth crawled very nearly to his knees. He cocked his head to the side and reached out with his arm, emerald energy leaping from within and striking out at the barrier.

  Fe’rein smiled tightly.

  The barrier remained as long as the Dark Creator could hold it, extending like a straight wall through reality. E’Malkai rose and tried to fly over top, but found that he could not and landed once more. His smoldering gaze was fixed upon his wayward uncle.

  “You cannot breach the barrier as long as I maintain it.”

  “Parlor tricks,” muttered the youth as he closed his eyes.

  The storms had begun once again.

  The distant light of the clouds breaking was hundreds of miles away to the south. Upon their battlefield, there was only the blowing snow. E’Malkai reached out with both hands. Palms facing out, he pushed up against the barrier that the Dark Creator had erected. His eyes moved beneath his closed lids, his mouth mumbling.

  Fe’rein shifted uncomfortably as he felt the intrusion of the youth’s energy. Reaching into his mind, it pushed back the limits of control Fe’rein had on the barrier. “E’Malkai, you must listen to me,” was all that he could say before the youth’s eyes snapped open and his hands burst through the energy barrier. Fe’rein was lifted from the ground and flung back, burying him in the snow.

  He could feel the cold all around him.

  The barrier had been an act of desperation.

  He had felt the youth’s power long before the battle had begun.

  Yet, he could not stand down.

  That was not his way.

  E’Malkai stepped past and loomed over top of the fallen Dark Creator. The spike and sphere of his energy glowed about him like magnificent thorny circles that radiated and changed directions, seemingly, with the wind.

  “This is where it ends. You have taken everything from me: my mother, with your hatred and lust for war; and my father, by your own hands, as you bled him of his life––a life that he should have shared with me,” E’Malkai screamed as he reached down and grasped the weakened Fe’rein and lifted him from his coffin in the snow.

  Fe’rein could feel the waning of his own power. He tried to free himself, struggling against the youth’s hold, but could not. He looked down at E’Malkai, as he was several feet from the ground in his grasp.

  “There are no words that I can say that will heal what I have done,” he began, but he could see the hatred in the youth’s eyes, the uncompromising glare that he knew well. There was a time when others feared that same look, but upon the Dark Creator’s face. “Nor would I wish to. I cannot repent or atone for what I have done.”

  “There is only one thing that I can take from you.” Fe’rein looked at the youth, trying to contain his rising fear. E’Malkai pulled the Dark Creator close to his face. “I will take the power that should have been my father’s, the power that you killed him for. The very essence that infected those closest to you. That resulted in my mother’s death. I take from you your charge.”

  Fe’rein swallowed hard.

  He had never heard of such a thing. “How?”

  E’Malkai reached forward, his movement not his own, but that of the Original Creator. The youth drove his hand into his uncle’s chest, a bright light surrounding it. The Dark Creator gasped as he felt E’Malkai’s presence within his own mind, pulling at the shards of his fractured power. He reeled forward against the hand and felt his power drain from him like sand through the slender neck of an hourglass.

  “I bleed you of your power as you bled my father of his life.”

  Fe’rein’s mouth opened like a fish gasping for its life.

  His flesh withered, as did his mind, as he felt the layers of his energy ebb and then flow outward from his body into the vast essence that was E’Malkai, the Ai’mun’hereun, the Original Creator. He felt the warmth of his tears as the pain flooded over him, years of pain and anguish, physical and mental. The last of the taint of the Gagnion’Fe’rein flowed free from his body.

  E’Malkai let loose the fragile shell called Ryan Armen.

  He looked up to the youth with glassy eyes, the dark power receded. His once powerful figure seemed weak and frail beneath the gale of the tundra and looming presence of E’Malkai. Ryan Armen could feel the horror that he had caused, each blow, each death as if it had been lashed across his skin with a stick of thorns.

  “I am sorry,” spoke the man beneath the monster. His breath and voice had been taken from him as if he had run miles farther than his body was capable. He coughed.

  E’Malkai looked down at his uncle, his true family beneath the guise of shadow, and nodded sadly. “Your sorrow is justified, Ryan, son of Evan. A lifetime more could not cleanse your hands of the horror that has been caused by them.”

  Ryan knelt and then rolled forward, his face in his hands. A sob seeped through the opening of his hands. He was now far older than the familiar face of Fe’rein had been.

  He looked the part of the old man who dwelled within.

  “My brother, Seth.” he mumbled.

  E’Malkai tilted his head.

  Looking into the distance, into the welcoming arms of the tundra that had once awaited the children of the Fallen and of all the tribes that called the frozen wasteland home, he knew what would come next. “When you pass you will find yourself in a place of perdition. In this place, an eternity will await you.”

  Tears streamed down Ryan’s face, the icy winds stinging his skin. “Summer.”

  E’Malkai had not known Summer.

  She had been a demi, but to Ryan Armen, youngest son of Evan Armen, she was his first and only love. Her life was the very string that had snapped to make him relinquish his humanity for the shadow.

  “You will pass on soon. The shadow that had claimed you has been forsaken and the shell that is left can no longer carry your essence. You must cross over Ryan, son of Evan. Fear not, I have done what you could not to embrace this power. I have watched my people plowed into the earth, turned to ash in the wind. Pass on, uncle.”

  Ryan tried to get to his feet, but stumbled and fell forward into the snow. E’Malkai flinched ever so slightly to help him, but thought better of it and instead let the man lie as he must. He had caused too much pain, more than half his life devoted to hatred and the destruction of others.

  One moment of humanity did not condone a near lifetime of violence and hate. Ryan Armen, son of Evan, the once proud warrior and brother, was very still as the frozen winds blew over top him.

  He accepted death, for his path had now ended.

  The path of the Fallen had come full circle, a line of family destroyed and a people annihilated from existence. Minutes passed into hours as the youth, the boy once called E’Malkai, watched the snow build around his uncle.

  He lowered his head, his somber blue eyes not bothering to take one last look at humanity. And E’Malkai, the last son of the Fallen, journeyed into the tundra of his forbearers.

  Alone.