The Call of Winter (The Harbingers of Light Book 6)

by Travis Simmons

  “All right.” Abagail took a deep breath. “This is what I’ve been considering. He’s making a circuit around that structure. If we go to orb, we ca travel around the outside until we are on him. Then we surprise him when he comes around the corner.”

  “You’d rather fight him than just go up to the top there?” Skye pointed at the open door that oozed green light down the side of the pyramid.

  “What if there’s something inside he controls? I think it’s best to kill him first, and then go in so we know he can’t send reinforcements after us. Plus, if we kill him first, then if he controls anything inside, we won’t have to fight that.”

  Skye nodded. “Do you think it will work?”

  “We don’t have a choice,” Abagail said. “If he’s able to control the dead, it probably won’t take much for him to sense the living.”

  “But will he be looking for that?” Skye wondered. “I’m thinking that he will sense some kind of wyrd when it’s worked, but might not feel two living people unless he’s specifically looking for us. Sure, he’s here to guard, but will he constantly be open to living entities, or just scanning once and a while?”

  “You’re right,” Abagail said. “Then what do you propose? The skeletons will see us coming and they won’t let us just follow him. Once we are out of our hiding spot, they will likely be right on us.”

  “They’re just bones,” Skye shrugged. “We will take them out easily. Follow me.”

  There was no more arguing the issue. Skye was up and slinking across the ground as low as he could crouch. Thankfully the fog and the frozen mist hid most of their movements. Around the pyramid the snow had been blown away and packed down so they didn’t have to push through feet of snow. It also meant that they were exposed and out in the open.

  Skye eased both swords out of their sheaths and slowed to a halt. “They haven’t noticed us yet,” he said.

  The skeletons weren’t far away now. In fact, they were so close to the skeletons that Abagail worried any moment one might leer up out of the fog to their side and stumble across them. More than once Abagail held her breath as a skeletal shape materialized out of the fog before them, afraid they’d be notice due to their proximity to the animated beings.

  They should have been spotted by now.

  She tore her gaze from the skeletons and followed the darkling as it vanished around a corner of the pyramid.

  “Do you think they are only aware of what he’s aware of?” Abagail drew her sword as well, and unhitched the axe from her hip. It felt awkward in her grip, but any kind of weapon was better than nothing just then. It made her feel safer having it in her grip, even if she didn’t know how to use it. She refused to reach for her wyrd yet. She knew if she touched the wyrd, the darkling would know.

  “Possibly,” Skye said. “He must also have some kind of sense through them also. They don’t see us, but that doesn’t mean attacking them wouldn’t alert the darkling that we are here.”

  “Like a spider,” Abagail said. She shivered at the thought.

  “Yep, he will likely only feel us when we pluck at part of his web.” Skye gestured to a passing skeleton.

  “So careful is the name of the game?”

  Skye nodded. “Follow my lead and don’t touch any of them. We are heading there.” He pointed at the corner of the pyramid to her left, the farthest corner from where they’d just seen the darkling vanish.

  Skye headed off at a crouch, and Abagail followed him. The skeletons weren’t so close together that they had to worry about slipping between them, but they were ambling about in a pattern that Abagail couldn’t decipher now that she was closer. Vaguely she wished she’d sat back and learned their route before agreeing to a course of action. Now that she was upon the skeletons, there was no real way to tell if there was a pattern to their shambling, of if they were just going at random around the pyramid and she’d only thought she’d seen a pattern before.

  Some of the skeletons looked very old to her, their bones browning and flaking away in some spots. Now that she was closer, it was easier for Abagail to see the green wyrd that held their bones together like glue. She could see the glowing green wyrd gleam from behind closed teeth and the dull shimmer within the empty sockets of their eyes. Their bones clacked as they moved, like dry branches slapping together in a strong wind.

  She followed Skye, slithering their way through the mass of skeletons until they reached the edge of the pyramid. The power that permeated the monolith was enough to raise the hair on the back of her neck. Abagail knew a bit of the power before she’d gotten close, but being within the shadow of the pyramid was another story altogether. It filled her with a kind of sickness; a cramping in her stomach that churned her guts and made her want to vomit. The wyrd of the pyramid slipped over her flesh like oil on water.

  “I don’t like this,” Abagail whispered.

  Skye frowned but didn’t answer. He gripped his sword tighter and peaked around the corner of the pyramid. He leaned back against the wall, turning his attention to Abagail. He shook his head. “Not coming yet.”

  She eased her grip on the sword, willing the shaking in her hands to stop.

  After what seemed like hours of watching skeletons amble by, their green wyrd illuminating the fog around them like ghost lights, Skye leaned back and nodded. The darkling was coming.

  “I will go first. I don’t have wyrd, so I will distract him while you do what you can, okay?”

  Abagail nodded. In that moment, she didn’t trust her voice not to betray her anxiety. Abagail backed farther away from Skye and kept an eye on the skeletons. If the darkling was controlling them, then it was likely once he was aware of their presence, the skeletons would swarm.

  The moment Abagail saw the darkling round the corner and noticed them, the skeletons shivered, drew to a halt, and as one entity, turned toward her and Skye. Abagail called to her wyrd. The wyrd answered, swarming up her spine and connecting with the call within her mind. She charged forward, her sword ready. The blade smashed through the first skeleton, it’s bones scattering, it’s wyrd vanishing in a puff of green cloud. The green wyrd melted to the ground as the bones rained down on the hard-packed snow.

  Behind her, she heard Skye engage the darkling. The element of surprise hadn’t done her much good. The skeletons were converging on them. Abagail stumbled, closer to Skye so that the skeletons couldn’t get between them. She released a pulse of silver wyrd from her hand, and the skeleton closest to her stumbled, shattering on the force of her wyrd. It crumbled to the ground, it’s wyrd lost in a haze of fog that drifted up to the heavens.

  Wind swirled around them, kicked up from out of nowhere, or from the wyrd of the darkling, Abagail wasn’t sure. Embraced within her own wyrd, it was hard for her to tell if this was a wyrded attack or not; every part of her body was infused with wyrd. The wind lanced ice crystals across her face and drew blood across her knuckles. Still she swung on. Dimly she noticed that Skye had vanished. In fact, she didn’t even realize he had gone until she saw the golden orb slicing its way through the throngs of skeletons.

  Pain shot through her right shoulder. Abagail screamed and yanked away, the force of her movement pulling the dagger from the hands of the skeleton who’d stabbed her from behind. She swung around in a circle, her sword and wyrd cutting a swath through the horde converging on her. Skeletons fell in heaps of bones wherever her weapons cut. She called on her own wind then, a wind from within her that surrounded her body like a protective shield. The wind pushed the skeletons back, but it wasn’t strong enough. It was just enough to keep them from her immediate area.

  This isn’t working, she thought. We have to kill the darkling. There was no way she could convey the message to Skye. She could only hope he would see her and understand what she intended to do.

  Abagail turned toward the darkling, but the skeletons were already surrounding him. He stood near the corner where he’d first appeared, but the throng of skeletons were too dense for her to
make it through. Abagail sheathed her sword and held out her hand, calling upon the power of the All Father’s waking eye. It answered her, filling her up with warmth and golden light. Her skin glowed with the power, something she’d never had happen before, but she didn’t question it. She could use every advantage available to her just then. The skeletons stumbled back away from her. She pressed forward, swinging with her axe to keep skeletons at bay, and releasing bursts of wyrd as she went, driving the skeletons back.

  Skye noticed where she was headed, and his golden orb flashed before her, blasting a trail through the skeletons. A trail of bones lay before her, and she struggled forth, blasting her wyrd at skeletons on her right that got too close while her axe kept those to her left at bay.

  When Abagail drew close enough to the darkling, he attacked. Arms rose high in the air, fingers clawing at the sky. A sneer formed on his smooth, clammy face. The wind shifted, blowing back the hood of his robe to show a smooth, white scalp. The skeletons began to shake and to shiver and then they blasted apart, their bones showering Abagail, knocking her back step by step as she tried to protect her body from the shards of bones that could do her serious harm.

  The wyrded wind she’d conjured around herself did nothing to protect her from the barrage of bones.

  Hundreds, possibly thousands, of bones swirled around her like a tempest. Her arms rose over her head, her axe swinging ineffectually at the bones, trying to drive them back. It was all in vain. The bones battered at her, bruised her and cut deep into her flesh, heedless of her axe.

  She clenched her hands closed, letting the wyrd build up within the confines of her flesh. With no way out, the wyrd flowed endlessly around inside of her, welling up behind her skin. When she felt that at any moment she might burst with the contained wyrd, she opened her palm and let the golden light blast from her.

  The bones burst away from her. As they shuttled back, the power of her wyrd overrode whatever wyrded control the darkling had over the projectiles. They fell around the pyramid like stones raining around the field of battle.

  The bones had barely fallen when Abagail charged the darkling. But he was ready with another conjuring. Snow and ice swirled up around his shadowy form creating a web of frozen wyrd around him. The darkling leveled one crooked finger at Abagail, and released the wyrd.

  She was in the grips of another maelstrom. Snow and ice consumed her until she could see nothing around her. The wind howled deafeningly about her, and Abagail stumbled forth through the storm with hopes that she was headed in the right direction. She hoped that at any moment she would stumble into the darkling, and he would be just as blinded by his accursed blizzard as she was.

  And then suddenly it stopped. The snow and ice fell to the ground, covering the bones as if they’d never even been there. When she could see through the deluge, she saw Skye standing behind the darkling, his bloody sword hung at his side from his limp hand. The darkling lay at his feet on the ice in a puddle of his own blood. His head lay beside the elf’s foot.

  “That wasn’t too hard,” Skye said. He sagged to the snow with a smile on his lips. All energy seemingly oozed from him. “Not hard at all. I only need about a week long nap now.”

  “Pfft, nap? After that? It was a walk in the park,” Abagail said. She let the wyrd slip from her grasp. It worked its way back down her spine, grudgingly. She let her eyes slide over the bloody mess of the darkling and to the mountain of bones that had turned the ice field to a graveyard. “Can’t wait to see what the pyramid holds for us.”

  Though the pyramid was made up of ascending tiers, they were too great a span to climb. Abagail and Skye found the actual stairs recessed in the side of the pyramid. This close to the pyramid, Abagail could see the stone was so dark that the lines and features within the stone faded into one another. It took a couple passes, struggling through the bones of skeletons and ice before they actually found the stairs at all. When they did, it was only to notice the stairs didn’t climb to the very top of the pyramid where the green light glowed, but instead to a doorway recessed in the side of the pyramid. This doorway also glowed a soft green.

  The first couple times they passed by the doorway, they didn’t see it. It wasn’t until the third time around the wall that Skye noticed the bottom of the stairs didn’t line up with the pyramid. After they found the stairs, it was hard for Abagail not to see the doorway that was their destination.

  “Ladies first,” Skye said, gesturing to the stairs with a wry grin.

  “Gee, thanks,” Abagail grumped. She flexed her grip on her sword and began to climb the stairs. She wasn’t completely convinced that killing the darkling had resulted in making the pyramid safe. Even if he controlled things within the pyramid, darklings could come and go through the portal at will. Chances were good that there was something else waiting for them.

  Silently they ascended the stairs. The farther they traveled, the colder the stairs became. The moist air clung to them, seeping out what little warmth Abagail thought remained within her body. It felt as though they were walking on ice rather than stone. The stairs were slick and they radiated a cold that crawled into her bones and refused to leave no matter how much wyrd she tried to warm her body with.

  The green glow of the doorway came into view sooner than Abagail had hoped. As long as she was on the stairs, she knew she was okay. There was only one way for darklings to come at her while she traversed the path, and that was from ahead. Now that she reached the top and stared down a long hallway past the door, there was no telling where an attack could come from or in what shape it might come.

  Inside, the hallway pulsed green as if fueled by a giant, malignant heart.

  “And you’re sure this place wasn’t here before?” Abagail asked, taking a moment to catch her breath.

  “Positive,” Skye said, coming to stand beside her. Like always, he acted as if physical exertion didn’t bother him in the least. The green glow oozing out the door only seemed to make the elf paler. The green light made him shimmer, as if the wyrd within was calling out to the wyrd that made up all fey, and his wyrd couldn’t help but answer.

  “Do you feel alright?” Abagail asked, furrowing her eyebrows.

  “Why wouldn’t I?” Skye asked.

  “You’re . . . glowing.”

  Skye looked down at his open palm. “Huh,” he said. “I don’t feel like I’m glowing.”

  Abagail reached over with her empty hand and clasped his in hers. He smiled at her and squeezed, playfully tugging her closer to him. She didn’t resist. “Do you think I feel different.”

  Abagail shook her head. “Feel fine to me.”

  “Oh, I bet I do,” he said with a wink.

  “Stop that,” she said with a chuckle and detached herself from him. She punched him in the shoulder and turned toward the open doorway.

  Abagail stepped into the doorway, expecting that it would somehow feel different, but it didn’t. It was a simple hallway with no doors along its walls. It was just an opening, a portal of sorts into the pyramid. As they neared, a cold wind billowed past them from the opening. The inside radiated cold like it radiated the green light.

  Abagail shrugged past the cold and into the entrance. The green light emanated from green lamps sat on black marble tables to either side of the entrance. Though the lamps were small and looked delicate, the wyrded light that glowed from them was enough to hurt Abagail’s eyes if she looked directly into them.

  They weren’t like any lamps she’d seen before. They were cylinders of glass that had no fuel for the fire . . . it was as if the entire shard of lamp was a wyrded stone.

  Abagail relaxed slightly when she realized there was nowhere for a darkling to hide within the hallways.

  Across from the entrance stood another doorway, this opening led to a staircase that descended in a straight line down into darkness.

  “Should we take a light with us?” Abagail asked, turning to the lamps on the low tables. When she did, her gaze flickered across
the doorway to the outside world. Nothingness stood beyond the doorway, there was no trace that Agaranth existed. Outside, all Abagail could see was an endless expanse of blackness, like the space around Eget Row, but this place was dark. There weren’t any stars or nimbus of light in this darkness.

  “I don’t think there’s a need,” Skye said, pulling her attention back to the staircase leading into the darkness. But now the stairs glowed a soft green of their own. Gazing down into the stone of the stairs, Abagail could see green fog dancing across the surface of the stairs. Where it touched, the black rock bloomed with frost that reflected the light around the tunnel.

  “Where are we?” Abagail asked. She crossed to the opening and peered outside. She hoped she would find something, anything that would tell her where they were, but there was nothing there. She looked down thinking she might see where they’d come from, but there were no stairs, there wasn’t any frozen ground and no dismantled skeletons. It seemed as if the doorway she stood in floated freely in the nothingness.

  Skye came to stand beside her, gazing over her shoulder out into the abyss. He placed a hand on her waist, as if he thought she might fall out of the doorway at any moment, and he would have to save her from the death that waited. But Abagail couldn’t see a ground, so she didn’t know if falling out of the doorway would kill her or not. What if she just kept falling forever?

  “I don’t know,” Skye told her. “But I don’t like it.”

  “But this is the way to the portal?” Abagail asked.

  “That’s what Daphne said.” Skye said, gesturing to the neck of his shirt where Abagail could see the pixie peeking out. She’d almost forgot about the fey.

  “Well, there’s only one way to go now,” Abagail said, crossing to the head of the stairs once more. She thought about taking one of the lamps just in case, but decided not to.

  “Here goes nothing.” She set one foot onto the steps, afraid that something dreadful would happen the moment she set foot to stone. Nothing happened. She placed another foot down and the walls around her flared to life with green light, dim enough not to hurt her eyes, but bright enough that it gave the entire tunnel a malignant feel.