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

by Travis Simmons

  The Fey Forest stretched up into the clouds, dark against the morning sun. It was the first time Leona had noticed that leaves were falling from the trees. Branches stood bare, like skeletal fingers reaching for the blue morning sky. A recent storm had blown through, showering the surrounding snow with green needles and branches torn from larger, older trees.

  A cloud of malaise hung over the forest.

  It was silent.

  Leona studied a trail of boot prints that cut a path before her, through the fallen greenery and into the forest ruled by darklings. Already the army was taking to the forest, weapons drawn, wyrd clutched, ready to attack.

  Leona followed, her hammer gripped effortlessly in one hand, nearly weightless with just enough heft that she could feel where she swung it.

  “Ah, Rowan,” a male voice said from ahead of them. Fen stepped out of the shadows of a tall oak, riding the darkness like only a darkling could. “I thought you’d be back, but not with such a large army. Bravo!” He clapped. His aqua eyes seemed to glow in the darkness of the cold forest.

  “What have you done?” Rowan asked. She wasn’t looking for an answer. Fire wreathed her hands and with a grand gesture, she let it fly true, like a geyser showering Fen. More fire joined hers. All around them arrows leveled at Fen, fire from the harbingers ringed the leader of Haven.

  And then it stopped. A gesture from Fen saw the fire, the arrows, the throwing knives, all of them pushed back. The projectiles fell harmless to his feet. The fire quenched from harbinger’s hands.

  “Why, I’m doing what harbingers should do,” Fen said. A sly smile ghosted across his lips. “Don’t you know? I want nothing but all darklings gone from the nine worlds.”

  “You’re a darkling! What do you gain from this?” Rowan asked. The fire may have left her hand, but not her voice.

  “The end,” Leona said. She could see it now, the threads of fate connecting all of them, one to another. “Opening the scepters won’t kill off the darklings.” She glanced at her mother. “It will bring about the end.”

  “Ragnarok!” Fen said. He spread his hands wide and turned his face up to the heavens. A peaceful smile rested on his face, his eyes closed in reverence. As if he had conjured it, silver light flared to life behind him.

  The tide of silver light came for them. In a deafening roar, trees bowed before its might, splintering and shattering into dust. A great concussion of air thundered around them. The light came for them. It flared bright enough that Leona could see nothing around her but the liquid warmth of the light. It tore through her mind, pulling at her skin. The light unmade her until there was nothing left of her that hadn’t been completely consumed by the light.

  Abagail bent at the waist, her hands on her knees. She gasped for air.

  Before her, through the darkness of the Void, she could see the cobbles of Eget Row collapsing through the darklings. Stones plummeted through the cosmos as the rainbow bridge was unmade. The way home; the way to Agaranth . . . gone.

  The road flickered, its light fading like a mist rising off a warm lake in a cold morning. The rainbow light drifted higher into the Void, fading as it rose until there was no trace of the light any longer.

  The road lay cold before the island.

  With a great, thundering crack that shivered the air, the road lurched. With a heavy ripple all of the rainbow bridge fell out of sight and into the eternal fires that raged beneath it. The flames rose higher. With a deafening crackle, the flames raged around the island in greeting to the fallen road.

  In the distance, the last lone light of a distant star winked out of existence. Though it made no noise, the mere sight of the fading light raged louder in Abagail’s mind than the flames around her, or the memory of the crumbling roadway.

  Abagail stumbled away from the edge of the island, away from the darkness, away from the streaming shadows of darklings that couldn’t make it into the only remaining part of Eget Row. There was part of her that knew, in time, that same darkness would come for the tree at Eget Row. It would strip bare the branches of the World Tree and leave it barren as it had left the Void, without life.

  Ages passed before the sound of the crumbling road drifted from her memory and the raging furnace around them ebbed to its normal glow at the edge of her vision.

  Abagail turned to her father.

  “Why are you here?” She wondered. It wasn’t an accusation; it was just a question.

  “For this,” he said, gesturing around them to the darkness beyond all that remained of Eget Row. “I came to do this. It seems as though Hilda beat me to it.”

  “You’re working for them?” Abagail asked. She took a step closer to her father. “All this time? You’ve been working with them?”

  “No!” Dolan held up his hands. “No. The only way to stop what was coming, to stop the darkling gods from making it to Eget Row and releasing Anthros was to destroy the road, destroy their way to the tree at Eget Row.”

  “But you didn’t make it,” Skye said.

  Daphne rested on his shoulder. Her light was dim as if she were in mourning of all that had been lost.

  I will never see Leona again. The thought washed all the fight from her.

  “You were going to kill Heimdall?” Skye asked.

  “If it came to that. I’d hoped I would be able to reason wi—”

  His words were cut short by a bright bloom of silver light on the horizon.

  They all turned toward the light. A column of pure white brilliance stretched up in the distance, its apex unfurling into a canopy. It was like a great mushroom of light, a tree of unmaking where the tree of life was the creator.

  Light spread out from the base of the column, rushing across the Void. Where the light touched darkling wyrd, the malignant creatures turned to silver dust, adding their brilliance, adding their cleansed power to the rushing ocean of light.

  Dust kicked up before the wave of light that rushed for them. In moments, Abagail was consumed with light. It pulled at her body, pulled at her hair. She could see nothing. She was nothing. She felt the light infuse her being.

  Then Abagail was no more.

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  Abagail existed in light.

  Her ears still rang with the roar of the rainbow road crumbling as the mortar between the bricks loosened and tumbled into the fiery expanse beneath the road. She could see the opalescent light of the road shimmer, flicker, and go out leaving nothing but a darkened trail behind.

  The darkling gods—Hilda and Gorjugan—had crossed the road, killed Heimdall, and brought their plague to Eget Row. Abagail hadn’t made it to the road in time. She hadn’t been able to stop Hilda and Gorjugan before they’d released the monstrous wolf, Anthros. That had been her quest, right? To stop the darkling gods from bringing about the Twilight of the Gods? Stop them from starting the cosmic war to end all wars?

  A great tide of light had rippled through the Void, shattering worlds and stars as it came. Moments before the tide of light had claimed her, Abagail saw dust where the cosmos had been before. Dust where planets and stars should have been. All of those lives, lost. All of those hopes and dreams, all the love and despair, gone. No stories left to write, no songs left to sing, no potential harbingers left that would discover the joy and the terror their wyrd could bring them. Nothing left of humanity, only dust.

  Now there wasn’t even dust. Now there was only light.

  Abagail was without form. Without a thought of her own. Instead, she held many thoughts, many voices that she could hear in the light like a chorus of insects chirping at the warmth of spring. A ripple of heat shivered through the light, and she felt it scatter the last remnants of what used to be her body. She floated in the abyss, and she was one with it.

  Scattered images joined the thoughts. She saw the Fey Forest stretched up before her, its branch
es barren from the long winter it had endured. A place where all creatures of the fey had once lived had grown cold and became home to something else, something . . . dark. It had become the home of the darkling tide, and its evil had threatened to consume them all.

  And then she saw a staff unlike any other staff. It was slender, clear, as if made of glass though resilient as any blade. It stood in the ground, the tip of the staff opening like a flower, silver light glimmering from within as if the moon itself had come to rest at the apex and shown through the forest.

  The elven staves had been opened. They’d been opened to chase back the darkling tide, and their power had ripped through the worlds, sundering them and destroying all that had lived before.

  She’d been told before that the Fey Forest was one of many places where the veil between worlds was thinnest, allowing darklings to slip between worlds without having to use the Rainbow Bridge, and therefore free of Heimdall’s blade. Because it was a place where darklings could slip through, it was a place where the energy to destroy the darklings could transition through all the worlds. The elves had wanted to cleanse the nine worlds of the darkling tide, and they’d set their sight on the Fey Forest to do it.

  There was much opposition to opening the scepters, because there was no telling if it would only destroy the darklings, or if it would destroy everything as it went.

  They’d done it anyway, and now there was only the light of the staves making.

  As Abagail took stock of what had happened, she became aware of a tingling sensation. It was as if her arms and her legs were feeling again after a long slumber. Pain prickled through her as her mind became aware once more of her form.

  She relished in the pain because it meant she wasn’t dead. It wasn’t until that very moment that Abagail realized she wasn’t ready for this. She wasn’t ready for everything to end. She wasn’t ready for Ragnarok.

  And then, all at once, the light was gone. She crumpled to the velvety grass of Eget Row, her ears picking up the sound of water rushing nearby; the sound of birds starting their morning call to the sun; the yip of wolves in the distance as they readied to bed down for the day.

  She was aware of the pain too—the pain of being physical once more. After having been nothing but light for however long it had been, Abagail didn’t realize that being physical actually hurt. But the noises were too loud, the sights too harsh, and her body too constricting. She gasped for air, and felt it burn through her body as her lungs throbbed open. A tear trickled down her cheek, sorrow at the loss of the light.

  “Abagail?” Skye said, kneeling down beside her. His hand touched her back, soothing against the pain she felt. With his touch, the aches and pains of muscles strengthening against the onslaught of sensation, began to ease. “Abagail, are you okay?” His voice was soft, as if he understood the pain she felt, and why wouldn’t he? The elves were able to merge with the light of their staves at will. He likely had experienced this same pain every time he reemerged from the light of his sun scepter, and into the physical world once more.

  “Did you feel it?” she asked. “Did you see the light?”

  “Yes,” he answered. His hand stilled on her back. It no longer felt like a reassuring presence, but more like he needed her comfort as well. It was likely they were the last living people in all of the Void. It was a thought that made Abagail’s stomach rumble, and she had to take several shallow breaths before she got sick all over the ground.

  “They did it, didn’t they?” Abagail looked up to the Void, hoping it was all a mistake, that it had just been a vision and hadn’t been real at all. She hoped that she would still have time to find the God Slayer and lay waste to the darkling gods before they could bring about the end.

  “The staves have been opened,” Skye confirmed.

  He hadn’t needed to confirm it. When Abagail looked into the Void, she was greeted by the destruction of the staves. Before the Void had shown with the light of stars, of worlds too numerous to count, some of which were too far away to be connected to the rainbow road. If they still existed out there, she couldn’t see their light through the haze of dust that clouded the Void.

  A movement in the debris caught her eye. It was a shadow, a cloud of blackness deeper than the Void could ever be, even without light. The cloud billowed through the dust, streaming toward Eget Row, careening right for her.

  “Darkling,” she said, pushing herself away from the edge of land that looked off into the Void. The darkling came on, dust of planets swirling in its wake, stardust scattering in billows of clouds, like curtains blown before a heavy breeze.

  When the shadow reached the limits of Eget Row, it didn’t rebound against a shield, as she expected, but came on, through the shield that had kept them out before, and straight on past her. She turned to watch the cloud stream higher. It was then that she noticed all of the shadows she’d missed before. They converged at the top of the Tree at Eget Row, gathering to the light of the Ever After. Thousands of darklings swirled around the orb.

  One darkling streaked forward, crashing into the light. It shivered, puffed into gray mist, and rained down like ash to patter against the leaves of the great tree. Where the remnants of its body touched, leaves discolored and crumbled beneath the toxic power of the dead darkling. The mass of darklings churned like a vortex, eddying around the Ever After, looking for a way in.

  “What are they doing?” Abagail asked.

  “I don’t know,” Skye said. “But whatever it is, it’s not looking successful.”

  Abagail looked to her father for an answer, but Dolan wasn’t there. “Where did he go?” A moment of panic seized Abagail. What if the pure blaze of white light had killed him? He was a birth golem—an entity formed from the afterbirth of a god. What if the light had saw the darkness in him and burned it away? But that didn’t make sense, not when there were darklings storming the Ever After. If they hadn’t been destroyed, then why would Dolan have been?

  Besides, it was said the only thing that could kill a god—even a darkling god—was one of the legendary weapons known as the God Slayer. Abagail had one, but she’d lost it to Hilda. She let out a relieved breath knowing her father was still alive, but where was he?

  “Abbie,” Skye said. His hand gripped her arm, turning her to look at something new appearing on the ground at their feet. “What is that?”

  Abagail shook her head. She couldn’t be sure—at the moment it only looked like red mist trailing over the ground to gather before their feet. There was a feeling about it that this mist wasn’t just mist. The color was off, for one thing, and for another she could almost feel another consciousness floating with the mist, brushing against her mind . . . warning her of something.

  The mist halted before them, and as the trails of fog gathered together, a form took shape.

  “It’s . . . a rooster,” Skye said, an incredulous look on his face. He itched the back of his head.

  The mist had finally resolved into the crests, feathers, and wattle of a rooster. But it wasn’t like any rooster Abagail had ever seen before. This rooster was scarlet from the tips of his toes to the crest on his head. Even his eyes glowed a dark pink.

  “Darklings storm the Ever After, and we are greeted with a rooster?” Skye wondered.

  Abagail couldn’t find any humor in his words, however, because the rooster filled her with a dread she couldn’t explain. It cocked its head to look at her with one pink eye, shot through with veins of white, and it opened its beak.

  But instead of a trumpet, the noise that came forth was like a chorus of women singing a lilting, mournful song. It closed its eyes, straightened its neck out, turned its head to the dust-strewn void, and its song drifted away from them, over the hills of Eget Row, through the rivers and trees and over the banks of Elivigar.

  Tears filled Abagail’s eye. She dashed them away, but more came. The song was filled with such sadness, such weight of prophecy that she could barely breathe through the revelation of what was about
to happen.

  No, the crying didn’t strike her as odd until she realized tears only came from her right eye instead of both.

  “What the—” Skye gave a start and held up his hand that clasped the horn of winter. From where she stood, Abagail could see the curved, bronze horn shivering with the rooster’s song. When the vibration became too great, Skye dropped the horn. But it didn’t fall. It drifted through the air to hover inches above the rooster.

  And then its doleful tone filled the air, shaking Abagail to the marrow of her bones. She felt the call of the trumpet through her, quivering over her mind, calling to an ancient place that had existed long before she’d been born. It called to the part of her mind that was the All Father.

  “Ragnarok,” Abagail breathed.

  Helvegr, a voice whispered from the Void at her back, and then fire raged from the deep spaces of the Void to crackle along the edges of Eget Row. She turned to watch the fire tower higher and higher, like waves crashing against the edge of the land. Where the flames licked, the grass blackened and smoked. Something was coming, she could feel the weight of power riding the fire. Something was coming, and Abagail was terrified to know what it was.

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