The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “How do you think we found it?”

  T’Alon watched him.

  “I was meant to find it,” Valour said, his voice changing, his eyes taking on a rapturous intent. “It was not I who did the calling, T’Alon. Do you not see? It is I who was called. I heard a bell tolling. The histories won’t tell of it. My fallen brethren would never admit it, but we were chosen. Not us. Not me. This place. This land. This world. It was chosen by Him, to serve as a refuge. The sight of his next great conquest.”

  “The Shadow Kings said he was defeated once before, and by the very Night Lords you have held in your sway before. How powerful can He be, even if He’s real?”

  “Power turns in many ways,” Valour said. “You should know that it isn’t always the strongest who wins the war, no matter what may come of the battle.” T’Alon grimaced. “He is cunning. He is clever. Most of all, he has been patient. It could be that the two worlds—ours and theirs—were always meant to clash, to merge. Or perhaps it is some cosmic rendezvous, happening once every million eons—every trillion lives of man. But I don’t think so. This realm couldn’t survive a thing like that, and I promise you it won’t, nor will anything in it. Not the way it exists now.”

  T’Alon shook his head. The Sage had lost some modicum of his former composure. The veneer had split and was near to the point of shattering.

  “It could be that the Night Lords were not unlike us,” Valour said, his voice smoothing over some. “Powers who stumbled upon something greater. Something older, and something that saw them back. It could be that they managed to overthrow him, but they were changed. The Shadow Kings say the Night Lords were not how they are now, mindless and full of rage. They were great kings and conquerors. Oracles. Beings of wisdom and titans of nature. Something changed them, T’Alon.”

  He looked at T’Alon as if he needed him to respond, which was the only reason why he did not. The Sage seemed to remember himself after a time. He leaned back and smoothed the imagined wrinkles in his fine clothes that weren’t really there.

  “I can stop it, T’Alon,” Valour said. He forced the calm that had been missing from his tone before. “No matter the reason for it, I can stop the World Apart from coming, or minimize the damage if it does. You know I can.”

  “Then why don’t you?”

  “I need your power.”

  “You have it,” T’Alon said, his tone flat and without emotion. He felt his blood beginning to boil once more. “You stole it, or don’t you remember?”

  “I have part of it,” Valour said. “A small part. And even that, I have all but spent.”

  “It’s all you’ll get from me,” T’Alon said. Valour made as if to speak, but something in T’Alon’s look gave him pause. T’Alon meant what he had said. He would sooner die than give up the last of his fire. He’d sooner die, it seemed, than watch the Sage save the world he loved.

  “Then help me.”

  It took a moment for the words to sink in, and for T’Alon to believe them. Even then, he didn’t know how to respond.

  “There’s enough fire in you to burn the Frostfire Sage away, T’Alon,” Valour said. “There’s enough fire in you to burn away whatever comes through the rift she opens—the black scar in the wall between worlds—should it come to that. And there’s enough of that place in me, no matter what I’ve lost, to close it. I need your help, T’Alon, and you need mine. Whether we like it or not, they need us working together, these children. They are bright candles burning in winds that will snuff them out. New things in a war that goes beyond any of them, and any of their ancestors. One I should have seen coming long before I did. One I should have stopped.”

  T’Alon looked from one of the Sage’s burning eyes to the other. There was no deception there, nor was there much of what T’Alon hoped to see. A flicker of regret, perhaps. A smoldering core of guilt. Maybe Ray Valour believed it himself. Maybe he did want to be redeemed. Maybe he had made mistakes, and not all of them out of hubris and greed. Maybe he did want to save the world, but T’Alon doubted if it was for any reason other than his own.

  “I suppose that’s as close to a confession as I’ll ever hear from you, Sage,” T’Alon said.

  The Eastern Dark smiled, and not in a wicked way, as he stretched his hand out. It was a gesture between men, and T’Alon had to swallow the bitterness it called up in him.

  He took the Sage’s hand and squeezed, putting more fire than he needed to into the embrace. The Sage, to his credit, did not pull away, nor did he wince. Instead, T’Alon felt a tickle on the back of his hand and looked down to see black flames sprouting alongside his orange.

  “What a pair we make,” T’Alon said.

  “Had we met under different circumstances, in a different age,” Valour said, “I dare say we might not have hated one another.”

  T’Alon’s smile was tight and the Eastern Dark saw it.

  “I have taken much from you, Rane,” he said. He didn’t sound like he was gloating, nor did he sound apologetic. “Just as you would have taken it from me, had you and Uhtren succeeded that day. And if you had, the world would surely have ended under the folly of Elanil.”

  “So much blame to spread around,” T’Alon said, sardonic, “and yet, so little of it remains with you.”

  Valour’s smile dropped. He pulled his black fire back and T’Alon released his hold.

  “We are joined, now, you and I,” Valour said. The words sounded like poison to T’Alon’s ears. He could almost taste it. “If you take the time to look, you will see that mine is the only path forward. The only one where the world is left standing in the end, and perhaps some of those in it. When the time comes, lend me your power. All of it. Do this, and no matter what happens to me, I will release you.”

  T’Alon meant to ask him how. He meant to ask him how he could possibly release him without dooming himself. They shared more than a mind, now. They shared a body, and near as T’Alon could tell, the form was his. As he searched the Sage’s eyes, he thought that perhaps that was the point. There was no mystery. If the Sage wasn’t lying, T’Alon would get his life back, whatever was left of it. Whether the Eastern Dark had some final trick to play, T’Alon couldn’t know.

  “How?” T’Alon asked, the word sounding like a sigh.

  “When the time comes, let your fire run.”

  “If I could have done that,” T’Alon said, “I’d have lit myself from the inside and burned you out like the infection you are.”

  “Your chains have been lifted.”

  T’Alon looked around them. He didn’t feel different. He looked down at his body, his glowing hands. He looked at the Sage standing before him. He sensed that he was telling the truth.

  “When I leave this place, you will see as I see,” Valour said. He kept his voice steady enough, but T’Alon could sense a hint of fear in it. “You will feel as I feel.”

  “And still I will be a prisoner.”

  The Sage’s gaze was unmoving. Not a blink and not a moment of pity. “I suggest you prepare for the battle to come. The last one. The one you’ve been waiting for.”

  As T’Alon watched him, the Sage began to melt away, his form seeming to grow indistinct, like fog.

  “You fought her once before,” Valour said, though his lips no longer moved. T’Alon closed his eyes and let the images play out on the backs of them, images the Eastern Dark supplied. “You’ve been to this land, fought among its black cliffs and its icy crags. But there was another. And you may meet him again.”

  T’Alon saw it like it was yesterday. He saw the princess fighting with Shadow, Brega and the other Landkist who would not survive the day. Closer, he saw the fair-haired and brightly armored form of Prince Galeveth, the man who would kill his beloved, and the man he would kill.

  Or so he thought.

  Much as he was loath to, T’Alon had to admit that there was a part of h
im that looked forward to the coming clash. He felt guilty for it, given what was at stake.

  But then he thought of Resh, her hair waving in the wind, her body soaring higher than any should have. He saw the blur that came over her, felt the push she had given him that had sent him up and her down. And he remembered the golden-haired, blue-eyed face that had met him at the top of the rise, in a burning land of frost.

  T’Alon opened his eyes and the effect was jarring. Instead of an endless pit of blackness illuminated with that ghostly light, he was in a cave. He tried to look down at his hands, but could not, and the eyes through which he saw blinked in separate time from his own.

  The cave had blue walls that flickered in the light of the low-burning fire at its center. There was a blue-skinned, bone-armored woman sleeping against the far wall. She had a jagged, raw scar running from the top of one shoulder up to the hollow beneath her eye. As she shifted in her sleep, T’Alon saw that her other half was badly burned, raw in places and pink where the flesh had been broken.

  There was another figure lying close by, and Valour turned his head to look at him. T’Alon saw Kole lying on his side. He didn’t notice it at first, but when he took in the bound stump where his right hand had been, T’Alon felt his heart sink. The Ember had been maimed, and badly. He would still be trouble in a fight, if for his fire alone, but he was not whole, and T’Alon knew he couldn’t stand against the Frostfire Sages as he was, never mind whatever would come when the Convergence was at hand.

  Behind Kole, Shadow detached herself from a melted alcove. Her violet eyes searched Valour’s. She adopted a strange expression, as if she recognized T’Alon beneath him.

  “You found him agreeable, I take it?” she purred, not trying to hide the smile.

  T’Alon left them to it. It was too much to be bound such. He let himself drift back, floating into the warmth and the dark. But he didn’t go too far. He had work to do if he was to make a worthy end of things, and do what he had set out to so long ago.

  The Sages would die, after all. And maybe, just maybe, he would live, and his people with him.

  Kole slept too deeply to dream. As he swam toward the surface of his waking mind, he remembered bits and pieces from the fight among the frozen waves. He remembered his hand. More so, he remembered Shifa, bleeding and limping about the frosted bowl. He pushed the rest to the side, relegating his budding, rebuilding pain to the back of his mind, and the anger it called up in him.

  When he woke, he managed to do so without stirring. He was curled on his side, still clothed in his armor. He had clutched the wrapped stump of his wounded hand to his chest and gripped it with its smoldering brother. He was in a cave made of ice, the floor and walls sweating around him.

  There were others in the chamber with him. One breathed with the rhythm of sleep, and he could make out another across from him as he peered through his lashes. There was a presence directly behind him, and he didn’t have to think on it long to guess who it was.

  His mind went to the strange warrior who had maimed him. Kole had pulled as much heat as possible out of him. He had held him aloft, kicking and gurgling, the bone-armored warrior’s skin bubbling around his burning hand. If he wasn’t dead, surely he was close to it.

  As Kole struggled to keep his breath from giving him away, he heard the shallow pool beneath his cheek begin to simmer. Steam rose from the surface in lazy, swirling patterns, but now it rose faster and higher as his blood warmed. He shifted slightly, surprised to feel the flat side of an Everwood blade pressing against his back. Just the one. They were fools for leaving it with him, or else he was in a more sorry state than he thought.

  “I suggest you keep from running that fever any higher.”

  The voice came from the armored figure sitting against the far wall. Kole saw the red markings that betrayed T’Alon Rane’s armor, but the voice did not belong to him. This was the other. The one Kole had hunted since before he had given thought to hunt him.

  This was the Eastern Dark, masquerading in flesh not his own.

  “I’d listen to him, Ember …”

  Kole knew the Shadow’s voice well, now. The voice that had led him, Jenk, Shifa and the Blue Knights into the hall of mirrors where the red demon had resided. The thought brought with it all the concerns that should have flooded his mind before.

  Where were the others? Where were Linn, Jenk, Misha and Baas? Had they lost? Had they been killed?

  “Reyna …”

  The shallow pool betrayed him before he could put his body fully into motion. The water burst, the bubbles of heat expanding and coating the chamber in a thick blanket of steam. Not the worst thing that could have happened.

  Kole came up to his knees, reached back behind his shoulders with both hands out of instinct, though he only came away with one Everwood blade clutched in his left. He lit it, the blade igniting yellow. It hissed in the murk, and when Kole tried to put more heat into it, his head began to ache and his right arm throbbed where the red bandages clung. He stopped. The fire he had would be enough. Enough for what? He didn’t know. To make an end of it, he supposed.

  He heard the Shadow girl giggling, and saw the outline of the other figure that had been resting against the far wall. They were moving on the edges of the fog, waiting to attack, or to repel him when he came for them. Kole was a cornered wolf and they were his prodding hunters. His tormenters.

  The Eastern Dark spoke again.

  “Are you dead, Ember pup?”

  Kole didn’t answer, only turned, sliding on the balls of his feet in a low crouch, waiting for one of the wraiths to make for him. Let him spit one on the end of his last bit of flame before he fell. Let him kill one, and show them how it felt to die by an Ember’s hand.

  “Are you—”

  Kole flared and whirled, his head pounding fiercely as he turned and nearly went down in the wet. He sent a spear of flame toward the place where the Sage had been sitting, the fog lighting like a firestorm. The droplets in the air were only a fine mist, each one too weak to withstand the heat. They dissipated, leaving Kole standing in the center of the cave in a shallow depression in the ice, his aura having bowed in the floor.

  The Sage stood before him. Though he wore the skin and the armor of T’Alon Rane, he could not have been mistaken for the same. It was the eyes. And not just their color—purple bordering on black—but their persuasion. Kole looked down at the Sage’s hand, which handled a ball of yellow flame as easily as Kole might lift a cup. He turned it over, showing Kole the futility of his attempt.

  The Shadow girl was standing behind Kole. He could feel her eyes on the back of his head, and didn’t doubt that she held that black blade of hers. He half expected it to be plunged into one of the open scales of his armor.

  To his right, the blue-skinned, bone-armored warrior stood, watching the exchange between Ember and Sage tensely. Kole didn’t turn to look at her fully, but he could see that she was wounded. Burned, judging by the smell, and a smirk came to his lips as he thought of how it had happened.

  “You ran afoul of the Third Keeper of Hearth, I presume?” Kole turned to look at her, straightening as he did. The stranger only watched him, her eyes alert, showing no signs of the pain that must be racking her. She had a jagged black scar running from her right eye down to the same shoulder, and though she bore no weapons, she held her hands with poise and stood with confidence.

  “Just as you ran afoul of Alistair the Cordial,” she said after a brief delay. “His name, suffice to say, was not earned because of the truth it tells of the man.”

  “Beast,” Kole said. “He was a beast, just like you.” He twisted around and saw the Shadow girl leaning against the back wall as if nothing were amiss. “Just like the lot of you.” She did not hold a black blade, nor did she crouch on all fours, fangs bared, ready to strike. She only watched him with that knowing smile, and that cold threat behind her
eyes. It jogged a memory of the golden pools at Center, and the sunlit beds of crumbling soil and moss where he and the others had first met her, and had come to meet Maro and his Willows.

  “That is Myriel,” the Eastern Dark said.

  “Where is he, then?” Kole asked, ignoring him. The Sage’s voice felt cold and lifeless. It crawled beneath Kole’s skin and nested there, putting down sharp and stinging roots. “Where is the rest of your company?” He focused on the one called Myriel. “How have the champions of the World Apart fared against ours?”

  She grimaced, and Kole showed her a smile. He heard the Shadow girl giggling again, and couldn’t help but rise to it. He turned around, but she had flitted to a darker corner of the cave. A low corner, where the stalactites dripped their salted wash into the tiny pits beneath.

  Behind the dancing, twirling Shadow, there was another figure he had missed before, and Kole felt his heart quicken as he met those hungry eyes. Eyes full of hate. The warrior known as Alistair lay crumbled with his back to the wall. His throat was raw, and Kole thought he could see bits of gray and white bone beneath the open wounds. When he breathed, there was a faint rattling, like the tail of an angry desert snake.

  “Do you think he’ll survive the night?” Shadow cooed. “Do you think it, Ember?”

  Alistair’s eyes never left Kole’s. Kole didn’t feel guilty looking at the state of him. If anything, with his throbbing hand and his burning blade—however yellow, however soft—Kole thought of turning him to ash. A mercy, and one he likely didn’t deserve.

  “You call this one an ally?” Kole shook his head. “Given what I saw, I think you’ve chosen wrong. He tried to kill me.”

  “He was to bring you here,” the Sage said, his eyes sliding toward the back of the cave. “If at all possible. And besides,” he regarded Kole, “I don’t think you were in a merciful mood yourself.”

  “He killed his fellows,” Kole said. He looked at Myriel. She frowned at the accusation, testing it. “The siblings,” he continued. “They approached with an offer of peace.” He shrugged. “They seemed to mean it.” He met Alistair’s hateful gaze again. “He didn’t.”