The Frostfire Sage

by Steven Kelliher

  “Get your people gone,” he heard the Eastern Dark say without turning, and he saw Fennick cast one last long look at the eastern sky, his eyes so overcome with the sight that his mouth hung open. He turned and helped to guide Gwenithil back down into the courtyard, and they were lost from sight.

  Kole came to a skidding halt just behind Linn, the others settling a short ways behind them. As he neared her, he felt the aura of wind she kept close by, like a swirling, invisible suit of armor. It picked up stones and chips of Nevermelt and held them tumbling in its pull.

  The prince who was not a prince stood before them. He had ceased his silent scream and watched them with an unreadable expression. His skin, though fair, bore black streaks where the veins should be. He looked sick. He looked deadly. He was tall and sturdy, but he stood with a slight hunch in his back, like an animal might, or a beast unused to human form.

  “Who are you?” Linn yelled over the chaos the east had become. The sounds seemed to emanate from the curtain of the sky, as Kole did not see splits or racking quakes in the frozen sea that might explain it. “What are you? Why have you come?”

  The beast smiled.

  “Older than ancient, I am,” it said. It spoke in a calm, steady voice, but the sound seemed to come from all around them, not from the chest of the one who gave birth to it. “The first and the last, I am. Ruin and wrath, I am. And all the wicked things men made me.”

  “Well,” Kole heard Jenk say, “that explains … nothing.”

  The beast looked beyond them, its smile dropping into a grimace, as if it was disgusted by their presence and annoyed at their interference.

  “Why have you come?” Linn persisted. The red eyes turned back toward her and then changed, going blue like the deepest ocean. The figure stood up taller, its face going blank, as if it no longer held some impossible weight. As if it no longer thirsted for their blood.

  “I was called,” it said, or sneered. “Called by one of your magicians. Charlatans who thought themselves above the rest. I was called, and here I am, the blessing and the consequence.”

  “You tricked them,” Kole said. “You tricked the Sages by promising them power—”

  “I gave them power,” came the quick reply. “I showed them where it nested. I showed them how to bend the will of being itself to their ends. Some listened. Others … did not.” Kole thought of the Emerald Blade. He thought of the stories he had heard about the Red Waste, and he thought of the fear he had seen on the Sage of Balon Rael’s face when the Eastern Dark came for him.

  “You speak in riddles,” Linn said. Kole could see her shaking. She was as drained as any of them were. Perhaps more so. Kole felt heat in his veins, but a good part of it seemed contained in his right arm, nesting around the cause of the constant throbbing, burning pain he felt in the place where his hand had been. He felt his long Everwood blade pulsing, calling to him, hoping to be ignited, but he didn’t know how much he had. Judging by the slumped, determined demeanors of Jenk, Misha and Baas, they were in a similar state, if not worse.

  “So I do,” the beast said, suddenly calm. Completely in control. “So do all old things, I imagine.”

  “You mean us harm,” Kole said. “You mean to bring ruin to our World.”

  “I do.”

  Kole swallowed. “Why?”

  “What is the worth of power if not to test it?”

  “To protect,” Kole said. “To uphold.”

  The beast tilted its chin, as if considering what he had said. It gave a single nod, but Kole did not think it truly agreed.

  “Landkist, you call yourselves,” it said. Kole slid back into a fighting stance. He raised his left hand, fingers twitching toward the black hilt that jutted out behind his shoulder. His eyes kept switching between the red-black curtain the sky had become and the figure before them.

  The beast breathed in, deeply. Kole felt as if it had taken in their scents, and all that they were. He felt unclean and judged.

  “She is strong, to have birthed you.”

  Kole’s heart nearly stopped. In the rush, he forgot his stance, and let his fire ebb. He stood up straight and stepped forward, feeling the wash of the icy wind Linn had gathered about her like a cloak. She reached for him, but he brushed past her. The beast or the god—whatever it was—watched him approach, entirely unconcerned.

  “What?” Kole asked. “Speak, demon. Who is strong? Who do you speak of?”

  The stranger seemed confused. Kole saw its eyes trace the contours of his face and then shift to those behind him. His eyebrows rose as he saw something he liked. At least, something familiar to him.

  “Brave Myriel,” he said.

  Kole turned to see the blue warrior standing transfixed. Her face was split into a pained expression that had nothing to do with the burns she had received from the Embers who stood a short distance from her. She disregarded them. Alistair limped up behind her and settled down on a leaning slab of blue-white Nevermelt. He looked like he might die then and there, but still his back moved and his lungs filled him with a few more precious breaths.

  “Beast,” Myriel said, her eyes watering. “Monster.”

  “Do these truly not know?” the stranger said, pointing at Kole. “Do they not know from where their power comes? Have they forgotten, as you have forgotten? As the Night Lords had forgotten?” He emphasized the last, his tone turning subtly from playful and curious to deadly.

  “Our power,” Kole said, “comes from the World.”

  “From Her,” the stranger said. “Your power comes from Her, and she is a mighty thing to have spread it so freely. A mighty thing, and a foolish thing. Surely she knew I was close. Surely she knew that, one way or another, in one eon or the next, I would arrive to claim my next kingdom. And this …” He swept his hand out to take them in, all those who had gathered to oppose him. “This is all that stands to challenge me? This is all She can muster?”

  Kole shook his head. Thoughts of his mother fled his mind, and he returned to the task at hand.

  “I don’t know who you are,” he said. “I don’t know your history with the Sages, or your quarrel with us. But you aren’t the first to underestimate the Landkist, and I daresay you won’t be the last.” He reached back, took the hilt of his blade in his grip and flared it to life. The fire was pitiful, the edges of flame barely reaching an inch beyond the hilt. Still, if this thing had a heart, Kole figured he could spit it just as easy. He had enough energy for a charge.

  Those deep blue eyes without centers took in the glow of his burning blade and then moved away, disinterested.

  “You stand in the presence of a god, child of fire,” the beast said. It seemed truly stunned. Stunned at his defiance, and stunned that he meant it. “Not a Sage. Not a king or an emperor. Not even a Night Lord. A god. I have seen stars born and die. I have seen—”

  There was a popping sound that Kole knew as familiar before he had time to register what had happened. He leapt back, thinking the beast had tricked him, and nearly collided with Linn, who reached out to steady him, the flames of his blade whipping up into a frenzy as they came into contact with her wall of wind.

  The air went dark just above the stranger’s golden head, and a blade streaked through the pocket of midnight faster than a diving hawk. A black hand pushed it through, and a head and shoulders followed as the Shadow girl, fierce hunter’s smile plastered to her face, made for the prattling god.

  He stepped aside in a blink, moving his chest at an angle just wide enough to avoid the blade. The Shadow girl’s violet eyes flashed and widened, and Kole saw her form beginning to grow indistinct as she attempted to disappear once more.

  The god lanced his hand out without taking his eyes from the rest of them. He caught her by the throat, and held her there, kicking at his armored chest and pounding away at his black-veined wrist like a child in the midst of a tantrum. She squee
zed her eyes shut tightly in pain and tried to pop, but nothing happened. Through some power Kole couldn’t begin to guess at, the stranger held her in bondage.

  Kole itched to strike, but his warrior’s instincts held him back. He glanced sidelong at Linn and saw her swallow, and when he looked back at the others, he saw that they were similarly cowed. Even Baas, who set his feet and raised his shield.

  Myriel shook in abject terror, or possibly rage. Either way, she didn’t look willing to intervene, or able. The only figure who moved among them was the Eastern Dark, who had made his slow, deliberate way down from the ruins to the west, where this tower had once threatened the lowest clouds in the sky. He wore the same black and red-tipped armor as the King of Ember, but his eyes were not the same.

  Jenk and Misha stepped aside to watch him pass, and even Shifa didn’t so much as nip at him as he passed her by. Kole stepped to the side, and Ray Valour moved between him and Linn, his hands held down at his sides.

  Kole knew he had used the bulk of his power in the fight against the Frostfire Sage. He only hoped Rane had given him something of worth.

  The Eastern Dark observed the scene before him with intense concentration, as if he expected the stranger to make for him at any moment. The self-proclaimed god was turning the Shadow girl in his grip, examining her as if she were a trophy, or some unknown beast he thought to study.

  “What is this?” he asked. He looked toward the Sage on a delay and lowered the choking Shadow so that the tips of her black toes scraped along the rough ice and stone underfoot.

  “Mine,” Valour said. “She is mine.”

  “You made her?”

  “In a manner of speaking.”

  The Shadow girl’s violet eyes looked from one dark master to the other like a frightened mouse. Kole wouldn’t have thought it possible before then, but he did feel pity for her.

  “Clever,” the stranger said. He squeezed a little tighter, and Kole saw the Shadow’s legs churn faster until it all slowed down. Her eyes lost some of their light, and her grip on the monster’s wrist began to slacken. “At least you were able to manage something with the power you stole from me.”

  Kole and Linn both looked to the Sage, measuring his response. He looked as if he might say something. Instead, he watched the Shadow squirming in the grip of a god, and held his hands out to his sides. He flexed his palms, and they were lit with bright orbs of fire. As Kole watched, shadows streaked in, hands of blackness coating the flame and bolstering it.

  The Eastern Dark raised his hands, coated in shadowfire, and stared his challenge at the god, who finally took slow, aching notice.

  He did not look concerned, which had Kole worried.

  The Shadow girl took advantage of her captor’s lapse in attention. She ripped her head away from him, her throat slipping free from his grasp, and slid into a pocket of blackness that opened up beneath her. She crawled up out of a gap in the rubble just behind Kole and Linn, clutching her neck and staring with hate-filled eyes at the beast who had nearly slain her.

  If the stranger was perturbed by it, he made no move to show it, and Kole had the distinct impression that he had simply grown bored with the Shadow and had allowed her to slip away. Now, as the Eastern Dark stood before him, calling forth the power of the King of Ember, he looked more curious than afraid.

  Kole could feel the heat, and the strange black energy that surrounded it. There was more of it than there had been before, in the blue cave. T’Alon was granting him more of his power, if not all of it.

  “Step back,” Kole said to Linn. She did so, or started to, but the stranger’s gaze found her and held her.

  “No need for that.”

  He reached out toward the Eastern Dark, who thrust both his burning hands forward before the god could hold him in the grip of some spell. Kole expected a river of shadowfire to spew forth from the Sage’s palms. Instead, the orbs in his hands winked out, the shadows trailing away like mist on the wind.

  He dropped to the broken ground, striking his head hard enough to draw blood, and began to writhe and scream in abject agony.

  Kole tensed to leap over him, but the Sage’s screaming soon took on a new pitch, as if he screamed with two voices. Kole could hear T’Alon Rane in that scream, and it had everyone frozen, unsure how to proceed.

  All but one of them.

  Myriel let out a scream of her own, but one filled with anger rather than pain. Kole saw a blue flash light the sky. He turned and saw her glowing, sparking with power that leapt from her fingers. She stared at the stranger with bright eyes and a hateful look.

  “You destroyed the Worldheart,” she said, letting her arms drop to her sides. She twitched with raw energy, like lightning held in human form. Kole stepped out of her way and pulled Linn back with him, clearing a path. “You killed the World.”

  “Children, children,” the god said, looking at her steadily as the sky warped and changed rapidly behind him, the black-and-red shadows playing out their private war. A war Kole did not wish to see spill into their World. “My children have forgotten me.”

  His eyes shifted. It was difficult to see without a black center to orient them, but Kole caught it. “But not all have.”

  Kole spun, bringing his burning blade around. He started toward Myriel, but the other was already there. Alistair impaled her from behind, a length of sharpened gray bone splitting her chest and breaking her spine. On contact, Alistair was caught in the backlash of her power unleashed. The blue sparks shot in all directions. One hit Kole and sent him tumbling off the northern side of the spire. He hit the ground hard, but managed to keep hold of his blade. Linn leapt skyward, hovering there as the storm of Myriel’s dying played itself out atop the ruins. Kole saw Jenk and Misha ducking behind Baas, who had dug his shield into the loose Nevermelt blocks.

  The light faded, and Kole gritted his teeth and leapt up, grabbing handholds in the cracked side of the fallen tower. He doused and sheathed his blade in the harness across his back on the way up, and when he got there, he saw no sign of Myriel and Alistair. Shadow was peering over the edge on the opposite side, where they had fallen, and Linn landed in a crouch, the wind that followed her nearly bowling Kole over once more.

  “Who are you, to challenge me?” the god railed. He stepped forward, placing a booted foot atop the Eastern Dark’s writhing chest. The Sage screamed like a trapped animal, as if he were being torn apart from the inside. Kole cringed as he saw his eyes shift from purple to amber to white and back again. Spittle and blood flew from his mouth and red coated the ruins beneath him, leaking from his split skull.

  The Shadow girl turned and crouched, Shifa coming up on her other side, looking to do the same.

  “No!” Kole yelled, reaching out toward Shifa. The hound heard him and held her place. The Shadow girl seemed less inclined, but she feared what the stranger would do to her if he caught her again.

  “If he dies,” she growled, nodding at the writhing Sage, “you’re more doomed than you already were before.”

  Misha and Jenk ignited their weapons, and Kole could tell by the sorry heat they gave off that the two were nearly spent. They moved over to stand beside Kole and Linn, and Baas came up behind, his stony presence, usually so reassuring, now seeming pitiful.

  The god—and surely he must be, given how easily he had laid the Eastern Dark low—ground the twisting, twitching Sage into the rubble of the fallen tower. “You think yourself righteous, Ray Valour,” he spat. “And yet, you sought out the same power as foolish Elanil, who called me here. You did it in secret. You did it more cleverly, trawling my World like a fisherman, taking what you would. You even helped me, without my knowing, by leading those Night Lords through. The only souls with the power to stand up to me, ancients I blessed long ago, who outgrew their fear of the one who made them. I should thank you for that, but I know you better.”

  He sneered
. “This one had memories of you. Memories that stretch back far, by the reckoning of these children you’ve gathered about you. Handsome Galeveth and cunning Ray, and fair Elanil between them. I’m sure that is a story to fill a ballad in any realm.”

  He leaned forward, bending so his face was only a foot from the struggling, foaming Sage’s. “But Galeveth tells me you are changed. He said this form belongs to another. Another that he knows well. The one who killed him. You are not yourself, mighty Sage, and that is no way to approach a god.”

  He straightened and removed his foot. The Eastern Dark let out a horrible, racking scream that split the sky as the god reached out to him. Kole thought he would crush the life from him without touching him, or cause him to burst. Instead, he split. Not down the middle and not at the waist with some expulsion of blood and gore, but rather like a shadow ripping free from its host. One figure went tumbling down to the flats, while the other lay curled and shaking.

  The sorry figure who lay before the stranger coughed and hacked into the cracks of the broken tower, his pale hands scrambling, twitching as he tried to push himself up. He had long, dark hair and an angular face, with ears that recalled the Valley Faey. He wore a rich black cloak that covered light, form-fitting armor that looked to be purple. His fingers were bedecked in jewels and sharp iron signets. There was a black hilt of a rich sword at his belt.

  It was as if he had been made from nothing, as if he had been conjured or summoned. He struggled up to his hands and knees, and the prince watched him coldly.

  Kole wanted to run to the opposite side, to peer over the edge and confirm what his heart knew to be the case. He looked to Linn, who was standing closer.

  “It’s him,” she said, seeming too shocked to believe it. But then, what was left to disbelieve? “It’s Rane.”

  “Is he alive?” Kole asked.

  She swallowed.

  “Yes.”