Trials of the Twiceborn (The Songreaver's Tale Book 6)

by Andrew Hunter

  She panicked, reaching up to tear the flap of her mask open with one hand. She gasped a lungful of air. She felt the radiant heat of the island’s false sunlight blazing against her exposed face for an instant before the wave crashed over her, driving her under again. Her eyes went wide as she saw a jagged crystal of blazing moonshard rushing up from the reef below as the wave pushed her down. She crossed her arms over her face, curling into a ball as the weight of the water above her slammed her into the rocks below.

  Marla’s breath burst from her lungs in a scream of bubbles as the moonshard crunched into her ribs, just beneath her left arm. Then another wave dragged her skyward again, trailing a billowing cloud of red in the water behind her as she tumbled toward the island’s shore.

  Marla’s mind escaped into a detached place of clarity, as though she were watching herself from afar. She saw the submerged rocks rising up again as the wave crashed, and she twisted her legs beneath her, preparing for the impact.

  Marla kicked out with both feet, launching herself upward from the reef, gasping as she shot up into the burning light of the sunlit island again. She ignored the blistering pain on her cheeks as she used the moment to get her bearings, spotting a large shard of white-hot stone protruding from the surf nearby. As she fell back into the cooling depths of the lake once again, she swam toward the rock with all her strength.

  She dug her fingertips into the fractured surface of the moon rock, pulling herself out of the water as she gritted her teeth against the pain of her exposed face. She scrambled atop her blazing perch, clear of the pounding surf at last, and took a moment to button her soaking facemask closed again over her sun-chapped lips. She clung to the rock, panting as she waited for the pain in her ribs to subside enough to consider her next move.

  “Marla!” Claude’s voice cried out from somewhere nearby.

  She looked up to see Claude clinging to a clumpy mass of seaweed between two sun-bright rocks nearby. He had his arm around Alyss who seemed to be struggling just to maintain consciousness as the waves pounded them against the rocks.

  “Here!” Marla called out, lifting her hand to wave weakly at the other vampires. She saw no sign of the boat or of anyone else. She scanned the fog surrounding the island’s shore but saw no trace of the thing that had attacked their vessel.

  Marla felt the singeing heat of sunlight compounding the pain of the injury in her side, and she covered the torn leather with her free hand as she clung to her slippery perch and searched for a way to safety... if there could be any safety for a group of vampires marooned on an island made of sunlight.

  “You have to get to the shore!” Claude yelled between wave crashes, his voice exhausted.

  “I think we can make it,” Marla shouted back as she squinted against the light of the crystalline mountain, judging the distance to its rocky beach.

  “I can’t swim any more!” Claude cried.

  “I thought you couldn’t swim at all!” Marla shouted back.

  “I had a lot of...” Claude shouted, pausing to duck his head as a wave broke over him, “... motivation to try!”

  “I’ll help you,” Marla shouted as she shifted her body, preparing to launch herself into the frothy water once again.

  “No!” Claude cried, “Just get to shore and look for the others!”

  Marla ignored him as she jumped into the water again. The current buffeted her aching body as she swam toward her friends. Grabbing a handful of seaweed, she pulled hard and dragged herself through the swirling waters to their side.

  Claude released his grip on the seaweed momentarily to pull Marla in, and he and Alyss went under for a moment.

  Alyss came up sputtering and flailing her arms.

  “Alyss!” Marla cried, helping Claude to pull her up again.

  Alyss gurgled, clawing frantically at her water-logged mask, and Marla sheltered the girl’s face with her chest as Alyss tore her mask open, gasping for breath.

  “Aahh!” Alyss cried as the indirect light of the moon isle burned her cheeks and lips. Marla helped her pull the mask flap closed again, protecting her from further injury.

  “Can you get her to the shore?” Claude panted.

  “We’re all going,” Marla insisted.

  “I can’t,” Claude huffed, “I can’t make it that far!”

  “Yes you will!” Marla snapped.

  “You have to go without me,” Claude groaned before another wave washed over them.

  “We need you!” Marla shouted, her voice reverberating with draconic power.

  Claude stared back at her, stunned, his wide eyes dimly visible through his water-beaded goggles.

  “None of us are going to survive if we don’t help each other, Claude!” Marla said, “If you don’t help us, we’re all going to die here!”

  Claude ducked against another crashing wave and then nodded his head sharply. “I’m with you,” he rasped.

  Marla took hold of Alyss’s belt with her left hand, using her right arm to swim as they pushed off of the submerged rocks below. Claude bobbed up and down in the water on the other side of the half-conscious girl, using his legs to push himself off the reef between waves.

  Marla braced for the impact as the surf pushed them toward the rock beach, but, at the last moment, the force of the wave carrying them abated, and she was able to pull her friends with her into a shallow tide pool between two large protrusions of crystalline rock. Exhausted, they dragged themselves up onto a beach of shining, pearlescent sand where they lay, wheezing and coughing, nearly overcome by sun-sickness.

  Marla recovered first, pushing herself up on her elbows to look around as the foaming surf splashed over her body, half-buried in the blazing sand. The wound in her side throbbed incessantly now, but dull enough that she could ignore it for a while yet.

  “There,” Marla gasped, pushing herself to her hands and knees.

  Claude pushed himself up as well, following the direction of her gaze toward a seaweed-choked hollow between the rocks a little farther up the shore.

  “Come on, Alyss,” Claude said, nudging the girl awake.

  “Where... are we?” Alyss whispered, reaching for her mask again.

  Marla gently pulled Alyss’s hand away. “We found the island,” she said.

  “Where are the others?” Alyss asked, her voice regaining something of its usual confidence as the girl began to make sense of her surroundings.

  “I don’t know,” Marla said, “They were inside the boat when it went down. I don’t know if any of them made it out.”

  “The other boatman was on the deck with us,” Claude said, “He might still be alive.”

  “No,” Marla said, feeling a little shiver of revulsion as she remembered the man’s voice.

  “We have to look for him,” Claude said, “He could be hurt.”

  “No!” Marla cried, “He wasn’t one of us!”

  Her friends stared at her in disbelief.

  “He was a Volgrem,” she whispered, hanging her head in shame, “and I led him here.”

  Chapter Six

  Claude and Alyss huddled together in the back of the little cave, their bodies draped with seaweed. Both of her friends had succumbed to exhaustion, falling asleep well before the rising of the sun outside. Now the dark sky beyond the mouth of the cave took on the hazy glow of dawn. Marla watched her friends sleep and wondered why she wasn’t even tired.

  She stood at the mouth of the cave, watching as the light of the fallen moon blended seamlessly with the growing radiance of dawn, her enchanted goggles giving her the gift of seeing that which had nearly blinded her before. Still, it was a muted glory that filtered through her dark lenses, a shadowy retelling of the beauty she knew the dawn held. Her heart ached to tear off the goggles and face once again the fiery majesty of true daylight. She turned and looked at her friends again, and knew that she could not afford to risk herself so foolishly.

  The lenses only hinted at the vibrant shade of blue that now spilled across the hea
vens above, and Marla felt its warmth through her damp leathers and the distant pain of heat, seeping through the plastered binding of weeds that covered her injured rib. Steeling her nerves, Marla stepped from the cave into the naked light of dawn and looked up toward the starless spread of the sky above.

  She heard now the faint whistling trill of the strange sun-song that swept across the earth. Was this the Song of Creation that Nerrys had spoken of? Was this the voice that spoke to the soul of the dragon within her? She closed her eyes as the song became a chorus of harmonious chords, weaving together like a tapestry of light in the shadows of her mind. She tilted her head back until she could feel the burning sensation of light beginning to leak through the thin gap between her goggles and facemask, but she ignored the distant pain. This song filled her troubled soul with a sense of warmth and contentment that she had never felt before.

  And then another voice cried out in answer to the dawn.

  Marla’s heart throbbed in anguish as a great cry of unspeakable misery shook the island. It could be only the voice of a dragon.

  Marla fell to her knees in the burning sand, clutching at her chest as she sobbed uncontrollably. The dragon’s voice rent asunder the foundations of Marla’s world, plunging her into a bottomless abyss of despair and regret.

  Marla wailed in absolute misery as the dragon’s lament drowned out the song of the newborn sun. She clawed at her facemask, almost ripping it open before covering her ears with her hands and screaming again and again.

  She was only distantly aware of the sound of mighty footsteps and the tremors of shock that followed every titanic footfall, erasing her own footprints from the sand around her.

  Marla looked up to see a vast, mist-shrouded shape emerging from the foggy lake, as the golden-eyed dragon returned to its island home. Fiery streams of molten tears ran from the dragon’s eyes as it sang out words of white flame that fell from its jaws like sheets of living sorrow.

  In that moment, Marla knew what her father had felt when he first tasted the tears of the Dragon Queen, and her mind reeled on the very brink of madness. Still she watched, somehow unafraid, for she knew the sorrow of this song. She was born of it.

  As the light of the rising sun fell across the mist, the Dragon Queen’s body seemed to fade into insubstantiality. Only her burning golden eyes still shone clearly through the sunlit haze, still dripping with remorse for the world she had lost. The great shadow of the fallen queen now moved inland, farther up the beach and would soon be out of sight. Her song of infinite grief faded as well as the dawn’s singing radiance overcame her wavering voice.

  Marla staggered to her feet again and stumbled up the beach after the mother of dragonkind.

  “Wait!” Marla cried, running through the whispering dunes of moonsand, “Don’t leave me!”

  The booming footsteps of the fading queen now softened to silence as her misty form swirled and dispersed into the morning air. Marla panted for breath as she abandoned her mad pursuit of the phantasm. She paused to recover with her hands on her knees, groaning at the renewed throbbing in her side.

  “You’ll never catch her like that, you know,” a chilling, almost girlish voice spoke from nearby.

  Marla turned to see the body of Simms the boatman sitting cross-legged on a nearby rock. His head was cocked to the side at an impossible angle, his neck obviously broken and his cracked goggles staring blankly at Marla.

  “Who are you?” Marla gasped, straightening her back as she turned to face the Volgrem.

  “I won’t say that I am a friend,” the Volgrem chuckled, “We both know that would be a lie... Nevertheless, I do not consider myself your enemy.”

  “You killed my friend,” Marla said.

  “I will kill you all... eventually,” the Volgrem mused.

  “And you think I’m not your enemy?”

  “What we think of one another is irrelevant,” the Volgrem said, “A doctor harbors no personal grudge against the disease it intends to purge from its patient... Do you understand?”

  “You think we are a disease?” Marla scoffed.

  “Yes.”

  “Because we are vampires?” she demanded.

  “Because you are alive!” the Volgrem answered.

  “You intend to kill all living things?” Marla asked, clutching at the pain in her side.

  “I simply intend to return you all to your natural state of being... a state that you would refer to as non-living.”

  “Why?”

  The Volgrem tilted its broken neck slightly as it considered her question. “To prevent the spread of your disease,” it said.

  “You’re afraid of the portals, aren’t you?” she asked.

  “A doctor is not afraid of disease, it simply takes the necessary steps to prevent its spread.”

  “And where would we spread?” Marla asked.

  “Beyond the infected patient,” the Volgrem answered matter-of-factly.

  “You fear we are a danger to your people then?” Marla asked, taking a step toward the possessed body of the dead boatman.

  “I have no people to fear for,” the Volgrem answered.

  “But there are more than one of you,” she said.

  “You have more than one...” the Volgrem paused, holding up its hand to study it a moment before continuing, “... finger... yes, that’s the word... yet there is still only one of you.”

  “But you are alive,” Marla said, “How can you hate all life?”

  “Again, I do not hate. A doctor does not hate the disease, and yet I can understand your confusion, as, to you, I must appear to be alive, though I assure you I am not.”

  “What are you then?”

  The bones in Simms’s neck ground together as the Volgrem tilted its shoulders to flop its head over the other way. “I am... a natural reaction to your unnatural existence.”

  “So you say that life is... unnatural?”

  “Precisely.”

  “And you have no hatred toward us... just a desire to... end our unnatural existence?” Marla said with a disbelieving snort.

  “No hatred at all.”

  “Then why did you attack us?” she demanded, “Why did you kill my friend and the others?”

  The Volgrem remained silent for a moment. “Because I needed to provoke your action in this matter,” it said.

  “You wanted me to lead you here?” Marla whispered, her heart sick with the revelation that she had brought the Betrayer to this sacred island, the same way that the Dragon Queen had carried him to the fabled island of her birth long ago.

  “Yes.”

  “Why?” she shouted, her voice trembling with rage.

  “Because only the Queen could find this place,” the Volgrem answered.

  “Or one who had been touched by her...” Marla reasoned bitterly.

  “Only the Queen herself,” the Volgrem spoke softly.

  Marla narrowed her eyes as she studied the sunbaked corpse of the dead boatman.

  “You think that wretched shadow you saw in the harbor was your Queen?” the Volgrem laughed, “You saw only your own reflection in the mist. You’re chasing your own shadow, you silly thing.”

  “Why did you come here?” Marla demanded, taking another step toward the Volgrem’s body.

  “I had to tie up a loose end here,” the Volgrem said, lifting its hands, “I was beginning to despair of ever finding the place, but then... there you were to show me the way.”

  “Be gone from here!” Marla raged, her voice throbbing with draconic force.

  Simms’s body swayed slightly, buffeted by the raw power of Marla’s rage. Then the Volgrem chuckled. “I’m afraid I’m not one of your subjects, Your Majesty,” it said, “I don’t take orders from you... or anyone else for that matter.”

  “You aren’t welcome here!” Marla hissed, tensing like a cat ready to spring.

  “I won’t be staying long, I assure you,” the Volgrem chuckled.

  Marla leapt upon the dead man, tearing the head
from his body with a savage shout of fury. She kicked at the headless body, knocking Simms’s corpse from atop the rock as gray smoke began to billow from the open flap of his facemask still buttoned to the collar of his jacket. Simms’s goggled head bounced against a nearby rock, his fanged skull smoldering, and its skin already charred to ash by the light of the sun.

  Marla screamed in rage as the Volgrem’s laughter echoed from the towering bluffs of sun-bright rocks.

  Chapter Seven

  The Astorran Border

  “How’s he doing?” Garrett asked as he lifted the tent flap and stepped through.

  Ghausse thumped his tail on the loose straw bedding where he lay and tried to rise before Terrick soothed him into lying down again with whispered words that Garrett could not quite make out. The Neshite shaman nodded at Garrett as he sat back down beside the bandaged wolf on the dirt floor of the tent.

  “He’s doing much better, Garrett,” Lady Ymowyn said as she looked up from her green-stained mortar and pestle at the nearby table. She wiped her hands clean on a cloth and then set it aside as she moved around the table. “Now let’s see how our black knight is faring today.”

  “I’m fine,” Garrett said, lifting his hands in what he knew would be a vain protest.

  “Wrist first,” she ordered.

  Garrett resigned himself to the inspection, lifting his splinted wrist for her to look over. He grimaced slightly as she pressed her finger against the break.

  “Well, you didn’t scream this time,” Ymowyn mused.

  “Can I take the splint off now?” he asked hopefully, but Ymowyn only chuckled weakly as though he had made a rather tasteless joke.

  “Shirt off,” she said, sounding a bit tired as she pointed a dainty claw at Garrett’s chest.

  Garrett sighed and pulled off his hood and his robe afterward. He gritted his teeth as he lifted his arms, hoping that the fox woman would not notice.

  “It still hurts?” she asked, gently probing the bandages wrapped around Garrett’s ribs.