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The Frostfire Sage
Copyright © 2018 by Steven Kelliher
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Table of Contents
Title Page
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Copyright
Chapter 1: Trail of Ash and Snow
Chapter 2: Hunting
Chapter 3: Homecoming
Chapter 4: The Stonebacks
Chapter 5: Heart of Hearth
Chapter 6: Ember Gone
Chapter 7: The Blue Knight
Chapter 8: Hotwine
Chapter 9: Caught
Chapter 10: The Shadow Kings
Chapter 11: The Eastern Woods
Chapter 12: The Witch of the North
Chapter 13: Duels at Dusk
Chapter 14: Bright Moss
Chapter 15: The Quartz Tower
Chapter 16: The Fallen Queen
Chapter 17: Dark Revelations
Chapter 18: Senafaey
Chapter 19: Summons
Chapter 20: Sword and Spear
Chapter 21: Limits
Chapter 22: Unweaver
Chapter 23: Kin of Faeyr
Chapter 24: Fear in All Its Forms
Chapter 25: Among the Frozen Waves
Chapter 26: Tricks and Traps
Chapter 27: Champions
Chapter 28: Even if it Ends
Chapter 29: Control
Chapter 30: Bargain
Chapter 31: Wounds
Chapter 32: The Dead Prince
Chapter 33: The Last God
Chapter 34: King of Ember
Chapter 35: The World, Apart
About the Author
Dear Reader
There was a chill to the air that Shadow didn’t feel.
She saw it in the way the leaves cracked despite the damp, and the way the mist along the ground settled and did not rise above the waist. She heard it in the crunch as the thin film of frost gave way to the sinking, sodden ground of Center.
Still Center.
They were more than days from the Emerald Road and less than weeks. The ground had spilled them sharply down until they came to another seemingly endless tangle of questing vines and soaked grasslands. The chutes were engorged, and the green of the land was painful to look upon. There were few of the white-and-purple flowers that had crept among the lattice to the south. Now, there was only murky brown and blue-veined gray.
Her companion needed rest. The Eastern Dark whose name was Ray Valour. The man who looked like T’Alon Rane, though there was no mistaking him for the same. Not now. He swept the clustered creepers away from his dark bangs and she saw them curl and twist under the heat of his skin.
She couldn’t quite feel that. Shadow couldn’t quite feel anything. But she could see it, like a vibration held very close to his form. When she looked in the low light of the drenched canopy or the embattled moon when dusk fell, she thought she could see tiny wisps of black fire creeping out of invisible seams in his skin. Drips of inky smoke sliding from each armored crevice and mixing with the mist that collected on the red-tipped black metal.
“You’re not carrying it well,” Shadow said. She half expected the Sage wearing the Ember’s skin to burn her up on the spot. She often expected that.
Instead, he pushed a moss-covered tree out of his path, pressed against its bark until the mush on the outside fell away to reveal the rot beneath. She heard the timber split, and the once-great trunk sagged more than snapped.
Ray Valour kept on moving, his boots sucking as the ground grew even less solid than it had been before. Shadow skirted the dead tree and winced at a little sting in her ankle that had her darting through a gap and curling within the shadows of a nearby copse. She hissed like a cat as she dug her black fingers and toes into the slick bark, searching the ground below for the thing that had pricked her sharp enough to make her notice.
There was nothing. Shadow was about to give it up as a trick of a land that was strange to her and had only grown stranger the farther north they had gone. And then she saw a hint of flickering movement along the black-and-green skin of a branch. At first, she took it for a swarm of ants coming to pick off whatever had been high enough or deep enough to escape their notice before. And then she heard the crackle and knew the black wings, fins and spines to be fire. Black fire. Shadowfire.
How deep must it burn to continue eating at whatever dryness it could find amidst a swamp of wet? Shadow felt a shiver greet her spine. It wasn’t often she felt fear, but she knew to heed it when it cropped up.
With a parting hiss at the fallen tree, she slipped into the darkness that was her namesake and stepped between worlds, catching up to the Sage ahead in less than a blink. He was moving across a shallow, rock-strewn stream.
“You think it’s bad for you,” he said in something close to Rane’s voice, but gravely and cold. “Try weighing something.”
“Not my fault you folk are all so …” she screwed up her face, “solid.”
He waved away her words without turning toward her. “Come, Shadow,” he said. “Come down from there. Walk with me. Walk with the rest of us. You’ll feel better.”
She frowned at the strangeness of the command and the words that followed it, but dropped from her latest perch—the armpit of a tree covered as much in web as hanging detritus—and landed with nary a sound on the other side of the stream.
“Getting colder,” she said. He grunted his dismissal. “Ground’s beginning to harden. We’re near the end?”
He laughed. A short, bitter sound that seemed to carry a note of pain beneath it—either Valour’s or Rane’s.
“What does it matter?” he asked, sounding at once sarcastic and genuinely curious. “One land is the same as any other to you. I took away those worldly fears when I made you. You’ll never feel the kiss of the sun. No.” He paused, standing straight as he entered a moonlit clearing. “No.” He almost sounded sorrowful, as if he regretted doing what he’d done in making Shadow—or unmaking whatever she had been before. “But,” he continued with a heavier step that crunched the dry stuff beneath, “nor will you know the bite of the cold, or the hunger a frozen, dead crop leaves in its wake.”
He stopped again at the clearing’s edge, where the blue light met the shadowed curtain of the thousandth trail they had taken since entering the realm of the late Brega Cohr, and she saw his eyes burning. They were the lavender of the Sage she knew—a purple that matched her own—but there was a fire beneath that could only be Ember-born. She didn’t like what she saw in those eyes.
“Go on and hate me, Shadow,” he said, “but you’ll only know my true gift to you when you watch the rest of us die. And you’ll only earn that fate when you’re alone on a dark and broken World.”
She moved past him as if she didn’t have a care. She felt his purple fire boring into her temple as she passed and climbed the next horizontal stair of too-thick roots. “I forgot how little you say when you speak,” she tossed back. “Rane wasn’t much of a talker, but he always said something when he did.”
An image flashed against the back of her inky lids: her body pinned against the underside of a narrow gray slab as blue lightning struck in the distance, illuminating the chasm below her and the dark currents making their complaints within.
She shook her head, blinked, and the vision was gone. She did not want to turn to see whatever look the Sage wore. Shadow liked to live in her fancies.
They continued on for some time, and Shadow began to see that the lands they crossed were near as strange as her. They reminded her of the southeast and its troublesome ways, where her master had broken pieces of the World and put them back together without care. Patches of black grew longer, reaching farther than they had any right to. Birds and beasts were silent, and Shadow did not think it was because of their passing. There was a faint buzzing to the air in places, as if pockets of the World Apart were brushing by, all whispers and deceit.
“The Dark Months should be a ways off,” Valour said, guessing or knowing the direction of her thoughts, as he knew everything else about her.
“But …?”
“But they’re here. Almost. And this time, they’re not going to fade away. It’s close now.” He moved faster through undergrowth that was beginning to grow more sparse. “The World Apart is close.”
“The battle in the deserts,” Shadow said, “it changed you. The Red Fox. He took something from you.” She did not try to make it sound any less teasing. “You dipped too far into your power.”
“This is not my doing,” he said, short and clipped and—she thought—honest. “The Witch is the only beacon left. She’s drawing it in, and fast.”
Shadow smiled to herself. He hadn’t denied the claim. The Red Fox had done something to her master, or had caused him to do something to himself.
If not him, then …
“The archer,” Shadow said, the thought coming sudden to her. “She had a look like recognition when you mentioned the deserts. There were Landkist with your brother, weren’t there? Landkist of the Valley.”
No answer, which was answer enough.
An Ember powerful enough might have been able to coax out the Eastern Dark’s full power. At least, the power he borrowed from their neighboring world. Still, Valour claimed he had not. And why would he, if he feared its coming? What Ember could stand up to one of the Sages apart from T’Alon Rane himself? Perhaps Kole Reyna, but he had been at Center.
No. It must have been one of the other Landkist of the Valley. One of the green-eyed healers. Shadow knew an old woman had lived there before. She had been powerful enough to wound the White Crest. She had died.
Who, then? Who had driven the great Ray Valour to such desperate lengths as to merge his being with that of the man who had once tried to kill him?
They moved through the shadows of the moonlit night, and none of the birds or beasts in the north of Center came against them. They were larger than those to the south; she caught glimpses of them in their burrows and caves. There was more stone among the trees, now. More deep earth and less shallow. Creatures like these did not get so large by being foolish. No violence to satiate her boredom, then. No blood to paint a red sheen on the lengthening black.
Eventually, her thoughts came back to T’Alon Rane. She watched his body stalk through the forested lands, same as her. She saw the way the bark cracked and the stones bristled at his passing. She watched his black hair sway and thought she caught traces of that black wisping stuff that had infected him to the marrow years before, and which he had burned out by aching degrees in the years and through the trials that followed.
The Eastern Dark had lost his grip on him … or so Rane had thought. But he had left a nugget of dark—a tight-wrapped coil nesting in the shadows of the Ember’s heart for safekeeping. A piece of him whose call the great King of Ember could not resist.
Shadow tried pity on for size and came up wanting. She had no love for Rane, she told herself. Less for Brega Cohr, whom she had seen buried in the lands that made him. Still, there was something tragic in seeing a figure so mighty rendered to a vessel.
She knew he was there. Knew Valour kept him stoked like a low-burning coal in a musty hearth, lest his fire burn out completely. She wondered if that might be the Sage’s latest mistake, and his last.
They stopped in a shallow bowl of red-brown nettles and twisted pine. There were white boulders half-buried in earth that was too hard for worms to burrow. Shadow thought Valour might strike a fire in the center. She wasn’t any colder than she was at any other time, but she liked to watch the flames dance in the night. Liked the shadows they cast and the stories she could fill into the spaces in between.
Instead, the Sage sat cross-legged. He settled with a heaviness that had nothing to do with the fatigue of travel and everything to do with the war he fought with the man whose skin he wore. He closed his lavender eyes, but Shadow hated being alone almost as much as she hated being in company.
“You’re troubled,” she said, sliding down the black beneath one trunk and coming up on the underside of another. His eyes remained squeezed tightly shut, but she saw the frown and the grimace and felt a flutter for it. That tingle of fear and excitement. She loved that feeling.
“Of course I’m troubled, Shadow,” he said, condescension incarnate. “We should all be troubled. Trouble is on the way.”
“Always has been,” she said.
“Not always,” he said, that faint regret nesting in his words. Regret for what he had done, or for the consequences it was set to mete out.
“You’ve said there’s no stopping it,” Shadow said. “Why try? Why go after the Witch when it’s already too late?”
His frown deepened and his eyelids fluttered, as if he meant to open them. He did not.
“We began this,” he said. “We should end with it.”
Shadow felt a momentary surprise. It was the first she had heard such an admission from the Sage. “I never took you for the honorable type.”
A mirthless laugh.
“What’s in a name, Shadow?” he asked, but she didn’t know what he meant by it.
She was silent for a time and settled in the deepest black she could find. It wasn’t warm, but it always felt like a blanket to her when the moon was through painting her black skin with silver streaks. She hated the moon more than the sun. She thought it a traitor to the night. A false star, burning with the memory of that high fire, lighting things in the dark that did not wish to be lit.
“There is something else,” Valour said, shaking her from her private reverie that was as close as she ever came to sleep. “Something I’ve missed.”
Her eyes drifted lazily toward him in his sitting place. His hadn’t opened, only squeezed tighter, and she knew he was plying roads best left untouched—roads that had started this whole business in the first place. Roads she might like to walk one day, should the worst happen for this World.
“You?” She drew it out, razor-sharp and cynical. “Miss something? With all your age and wisdom?”
He didn’t rise to snatch the bait, and Shadow knew he wasn’t really speaking to her, even if his words were aimed in her direction.
“I’ve thought us beacons for so long,” he said. “But now, with my own severed and two more Sages’ threads cut …” He drifted off.
“Sages’ threads?” she asked, bored but more interested in the Sage’s rambling than her own thoughts. “The Sage of Center, you mean? And the Red Fox? You snuffed them out, but their lights still burn?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head. “They are doused. And yet, the World Apart draws closer, unerring and with speed unchecked.”
“Perhaps the beacons that remain glow the brighter when the others fade,” she offered, settling back against the crunching nettles and cones. His eyes flashed open and he quirked his head, and Shadow thought perhaps she had stumbled upon a bit of truth.
“Perhaps,” was all he said for a time, his thoughts turning on paths she couldn’t fathom and didn’t much care to.
The Sage turned his dark hand over, examining the lines in his palm and the scars around his knuckles. Shadow watched him. There was the barest hint of that strange fire that held the opposite of light. It framed the edges of his hand and stood out against the ridged armor on his forearm.
�
�There is something I’ve missed,” Valour said again. “Rane knows it, or else he’d have burned his way out by now.”
Shadow perked up at that.
“He lives?” she asked, only realizing after she said it how much it sounded as if she cared. Valour caught it. How could he not? He fixed his gaze on her and she felt like squirming beneath it.
“In a manner of speaking,” the Sage said. He ignited, and Shadow fell back into the shade of the earthen bowl and peeked out from a nearby tree. A deep amber glow formed a sphere above the Sage’s palm, and around it, swirling like a vaporous mist, was that same black fire that was likely still eating at the trunk of the tree they’d left in the swamps.
He turned his hand over, clutching the ball of deep fire as if it were a mighty thing he feared. His eyes widened in silent fascination. He surprised himself, Shadow could see. He was both afraid and intoxicated by the power this new form possessed, and she knew not all of it came from the Sage, and not half of it from the Ember whose form he had taken.
“Shadowfire,” he said. He whispered it as if awed and amused. “Something to be used against what’s to come. Something made of the magics of both worlds. Rane knows it may be the key. He knows I may be the key to stopping it. To stopping her.”
Shadow slipped down from her latest perch and slithered along the ground, a macabre mix of playful child and stalking snake. She came up a pace from the Sage’s knees, feeling the threatening buzz as the dark heat met her brow and caused the black nightskin she wore to bubble and split. She hissed and retreated, and he smirked at her display.
“Did you know—”
“I suspected,” Valour said. He snuffed out the ball of blackfire and the whole of the surrounding woods seemed to exhale. “Rane was always a last resort. But I knew our … union,” he tasted the word and Shadow thought perhaps it was Rane who grimaced beneath it, “might result in something special.”
“The power of two worlds,” Shadow said, unable to keep the wonder from her own voice. “You said you had severed your connection. You said your beacon was no longer lit.”
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