All of the Anima walking toward me lift their right arm in singular slow motion.
I feel energy building in the space between us.
I clench my fists to hide my shaking hands. I take a deep breath.
And then that fire behind them flares—no longer steadily growing but erupting into flames that burn through them and create a blazing wall between us.
I throw my arm up to guard against the light and heat that stops mere feet away from me. Once I dare to peer over my sleeve, I see a figure emerging from the flames, his body black against the burning light. He’s holding two identical swords in his hand, and he offers one of them to me.
“I found this,” Soren says, “and I had a feeling you’d want it back.”
“You know me so well.”
“Sorry I’m late, by the way.”
“Were you waiting for the perfect opportunity to make that dramatic entrance, or what?”
“Actually, I was considering leaving you and saving myself. The debate took me awhile.”
“And then you grew a conscious?”
“Apparently.” He smiles as I snatch the sword from him.
“Lucky me. And lucky the fire decided to help us out.”
“Well, that wasn’t really luck, because…” He casts a wary look back out the fiery wall.
“It’s not real?” I guess, realizing immediately that—of course—it’s an illusion.
He starts to walk, grabbing my arm and pulling me with him. “Right. So we should probably run. Now.”
“Liam and Carys—”
“Ran the other way already. We’ll catch up.”
I would insist on making sure, but at that moment the first of the Anima figure us out and emerge—unscathed and burn-free—through the fire.
So we run.
We run way too slowly, thanks to the magic that’s taken a toll on both our bodies, and also the fact that we apparently chose the thickest part of the forest to attempt our escape into. It’s too thick for my beloved sword to hack quickly through.
The Anima, on the other hand, are protected by their armor and are strong enough to simply rip their way through without any hesitation. Soon a group of them has ripped its way some thirty feet in front of us.
“They’re trying to surround us,” I call.
But it’s too late to do anything about it.
We try to veer in another direction, but no matter where we turn, there’s another group of monsters there to meet us. We slow to a stop. I’m starting to lose the feeling in my legs anyway, and I’m convinced this forest has no end.
So we might as well stand and fight.
The Anima converge, ripping branches and the occasional entire, small tree out of their way as they come. Soren and I stand back-to-back, swords at the ready. But we’re outnumbered ten to one. We’re out of energy, out of tricks, and for all I know Liam and Carys are in even worse shape, and…
Yeah, even I don’t see how I’m going to get myself out of this particular mess.
“This is what I get for growing a conscious,” Soren jokes.
I feel a stab of guilt at the thought of him never finding his family—and all because he came back to help me.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He reaches back and takes hold of my hand. “Probably too late to try and convince them that ‘we come in peace’, huh?”
“Probably.”
“We could try surrendering to them?” he suggests. “But I’m guessing you’d rather die.”
“Again: you know me so well.”
He tilts his head toward me enough to let me see his bemused smile.
The Anima circle tighter, lifting their hands. One of them separates from the rest of the crowd—another one with that curled dragon on its armor—and it starts toward us.
I squeeze Soren’s hand, close my eyes and try to push the images of Liam being tortured out of my mind. Those images are yet another reason that I would rather they just kill us and get it over with; he withstood their cruelty a lot better than I think I could.
When I open my eyes and look up, the Anima’s mask is lifted, and his twisted gaze is full of torturous intent.
Trembling a bit, I lift my sword.
If I’m going down, I’m going to take as many as I can with me.
That’s the plan—but the Anima reaches forward and grabs the blade, wrenches it from my grasp and flings it aside. Then he stomps back a few steps, throws his head toward the sky and lets out a terrible, triumphant-sounding roar. The others follow its example.
The ground shakes, throwing the Anima off-balance.
Then that ground splits and swallows the creature whole.
Chapter Eight
Soren and I scramble back from the newly-opened chasm.
“Elle, how did you…”
“That wasn’t me,” I breathe.
He doesn’t look like he believes me at first. But then we turn away from each other and we both see…her.
A woman in white armor is walking toward us, carrying an ash-colored staff in her hands. Her hip-length, blueish-grey hair flutters in a wind that she seems to be commanding without any obvious effort. That same wind pushes the overgrown trees from her path and makes even the Anima shrink back, holding tightly to those blood-red masks that protect their disfigured faces.
I can’t decide whether I should be terrified of this woman or not.
Then I see a black lycan padding along behind her, and relief drowns out any chance of fear.
Carys stays close to the woman in white as they make their way toward us. She doesn’t seem afraid of this woman; the only cautious looks she’s giving are reserved for the Anima, who look as though they’re thinking about trying their luck against said woman—though none of them ever gets brave enough to actually do it.
She walks all the way to the small canyon she created, leaps it effortlessly, and crouches down next to Soren and me. She seems oblivious to the small army taking aim at her back. Up close she looks much older than I would have guessed, based on the light and graceful way she moved. There are fine lines around her eyes that look as though they’ve been formed from a long life full of serious stares like the ones she’s fixed on us now.
Carys leaps and lands next to her a moment later, and she rushes immediately to me and drops her head into my arms for an enthusiastic, balance-threatening nuzzle. I cling to her for a moment before I manage to think: (Where is Liam?)
(She said she would save him if I came with her to help you. I—)
“Your other friend is safe,” says the woman, interrupting our thoughtspeech conversation. “I’ll take you to him.” She glances back at the beasts edging toward the cracked ground, and she frowns as if she’s just realized how vastly outnumbered we are. “Can you shift?” she asks me.
And something in her tone—something magically soothing and commanding—makes me believe I can.
“I’ll try,” I reply.
She nods. “The two of you can outrun them.”
“And go where?” Soren interjects.
She turns and fixes that no-nonsense look on him.
And then she promptly grabs him and tosses him onto Carys’s back, ignoring his protests.
I stare, somewhat amused but mostly freaked out. I try not to jump when she turns back to me.
“The shifting, Worldkeeper?”
“I—Wait. What did you just call me?”
“The shifting,” she repeats patiently.
The first Anima jumps across the chasm.
She turns, lifts that gray staff of hers, and fires a blast of energy that knocks it backward. It takes out two more with its crash landing. The rest hesitate, their feet shuffling, armor rattling, mouths hissing.
Carys scampers instinctually away, pausing to look back at me only once Soren shouts at her to stop. They’re nearly out of sight. I don’t blame her for running; I’ve seen enough to decide that I’m going to do as this woman says, too.
She holds my sword fo
r me as I do my best to settle my mind, and I let the wolf side of it slip in and overtake me. Guide me. The instability is still there—I feel it with the first patch of fur that sprouts along my arm. My bones rattle with it, and I have the morbid fear that they’re going to end up unfixed, neither wolf nor human but just a mess of mismatched things floating in whatever mess of skin I end up in.
Focus, Elle.
You can do this.
I don’t actually believe that, but I repeat it enough times that it actually comes true, and soon I’m standing on four legs instead of two—even if those four legs feel like they might buckle beneath me if I’m not careful. The world seems like it’s shifting beneath me; the wind swirling, rising and falling in patterns that don’t make sense.
But then that woman fixes her sharp gaze on me, and somehow I manage to get it together enough to straighten up to my full height and hold still.
“Well done, Worldkeeper.”
There’s that name again.
I didn’t imagine it the first time.
Before I can demand her to explain, the Anima finally manage to muster up enough bravado to start leaping the cracked earth in sets of twos and threes.
The woman shoots them a glare—like she’s considering taking them all on—but then she thinks better of it, and instead lowers her staff, sprints to my side, and hoists herself onto my back. She aims that staff behind us as I start to run, and we leave a trail of destruction in our wake, making it impossible for our enemies to follow us.
I run until I can’t see straight anymore. Until the forest gradually begins to thin, and then the ground slopes upward into rockier terrain that soon forms a proper mountain. Until we climb a narrow trail to what feels like the very top of that mountain, my legs protesting every step, and eventually we break out of the trail and onto a bald, mostly flat summit that overlooks a valley dotted with things that are mostly too small to make out. It’s all bathed in that red moonlight, the ominous glow that refuses to go away no matter how far we travel or how long we stay in this world.
And then the woman in white finally says: “I told them to bring your friend here.”
“Them?”
She slides from my back and walks toward one of the few steep places on the wide summit—toward an overhang that looks like it forms a shallow cave underneath. Her movements are still graceful, with no sign of discomfort from riding what had to have been at least twenty miles.
I, on the other hand, am the definition of discomforted.
The combination of shifting and trying to contain this latest instability heralded by the new mark on my skin has left me weak and shaking, and basically I want to lay down and die.
The only reason I don’t do that immediately is because I’m determined to see Liam and make sure he’s alive before I do; so I join Carys in dragging myself to the overhang that the woman is crouched down next to.
Liam is there, sleeping peacefully.
He’s shirtless, but there are so many bandages covering his burns that hardly any of his tan skin is visible.
“Your kind heal remarkably fast—faster than I’d even been led to believe.”
I turn at the sound of the new voice, and see another person walking our direction; he looks to be human. Or as human as the woman who rescued us, anyway. But like her, there’s something slightly… off. Something about his violet eyes and his wind-chime voice. Something in the way he moves is wrong, too. Like his feet aren’t quite touching the ground; I’m sure of that until the moment I try to look closer, at which point they promptly touch back down. He seems younger than that woman at first—not much older than me, maybe—until I meet his eyes, and I get the odd, uncomfortable sensation that he’s seen more things than I could ever hope to.
“The bandages are mostly to keep things clean and ward off infection.” He carries a staff in his hands, too, but it’s much smaller than the woman’s, and it’s a deep shade of purplish black that almost perfectly matches his hair.
Soren hops down from Carys’s back. Still looking a little battle weary, he braces a hand against her side as he asks, “Who are you people? Why did you save us?”
“Elric Cirdan,” offers the dark-haired man as he holds the staff above the worst of Liam’s burns, as though using it to inspect them. Nothing really surprises me at this point, but I can’t help but stare as that stick leaves his hands and floats on its own above Liam’s body, while Elric busies himself with loosening a few of of the bandages to get a closer look.
“And how typical that Casandra didn’t offer you her name during the entire ride here,” he adds in a gently reproachful voice. “You’ll have to forgive her. She’s not as cold as she seems.”
Casandra bristles at that, like maybe she’s thinking about proving him wrong. But she just turns away, walks to the edge of the summit, and keeps her back to us instead.
“And my second question?” Soren presses.
“We save everyone that finds themselves at the mercy of the Dusk Queen’s minions.”
“Don’t lie to them, Elric,” calls Casandra.
“It’s not a lie,” he calls back with a good-natured smile. “We do try to save them all. But…”
“But?”
His smile wilts a bit. “The queen’s forces outnumber ours. And here lately we lose more than we win.” He shrugs, as if trying to slide the weight of their defeats from his shoulders.
We’re silent for a moment, and then Carys begins to transform—she’s dying to interrogate him further, I’m sure. I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did; her human mouth is hardly finished forming when she blurts out: “Who is this Dusk Queen?”
Elric stares at her for a moment, obviously mesmerized by her transformation, before he manages to speak again. “I don’t know her true name. We call her Dusk Queen because her ascension started this never-ending twilight that surrounds us. She’s the one responsible for the armies of Anima that now march across these lands,” he says. “Their creator and commander. She rules over this country in particular—Turon—which is one of the few inhabitable places in the world of Canath.”
“The Anima’s creator and commander?”
He nods.
“But what exactly are those nasty things?”
“The Animaclepta are rehoused souls of those who were killed by the supernatural, magical creatures of your world, and of others—including this one. They were once a rare, but naturally occurring thing before the Queen began her reign. But she has found a way to essentially manufacture them.
“She’s built an army of bodies like the ones you saw. Shells, essentially. And souls that might have passed peacefully are instead being forcibly collected and breathed into those shells. Once animated, they are kept ‘alive’ and strong by energy stolen from other supernatural creatures such as yourselves. Because of their fierce desire for that energy and strength, it doesn’t take much to convince the Anima to kill for it; which makes them a useful army for someone like the Queen, who we believe is attempting to overthrow all others who possess even a tiny bit of magical ability.”
“Souls…” Carys looks like she might faint.
I move a bit closer, just in case I need to provide a soft landing place.
“That’s horrible. Why on earth would the queen need that kind of army?”
Elric falls silent.
The silence lasts for almost a full minute before Casandra slams her staff hard against the stone and then looks back at our group with an impatient sigh.
Elric averts his eyes.
“You started the story, Elric,” she says, walking back to us. “So you might as well finish it.”
Her voice is cold enough to make me wonder why no one has started building a fire in our little campsite. Elric cowers away from it, all traces of his earlier smile gone. And she might have saved us in a rather badass fashion, but I decide right then that I don’t particularly like her.
I like her even less when she levels her gaze with mine and says: “Are y
ou going to stay like that?”
I growl in response.
“You can’t hide in that form forever.”
I’m not hiding, I think to myself.
Except I kind of am; I’m hiding from the fact that I’m not sure I can successfully shift back to a human without embarrassing myself or accidently destroying something.
She lowers her voice, as if she might be able to keep her next words between just the two of us. “You need to be able to control your powers better. All of them.”
“Leave her alone,” Soren warns.
“And answer my question,” Carys adds, “Since Elric doesn’t want to.”
She purses her lips, and I swear the air around us grows even colder before she pulls away and fixes her icy gaze on Carys. “Canath is not a particularly lovely place, as you might have noticed,” she says. “This country is one of the better, inhabitable ones, as Elric mentioned—but essentially, this entire world is a shadow of other, more beautiful realms. She doesn’t want to stay here. Most of the creatures here likely wouldn’t if given a choice—but most are not as smart as her, either. They don’t realize there even is a choice: that with the right combination of stolen magic and power, one might be able to escape this realm of their own accord.”
“So she wants an army to take over another world,” Soren says. “So that she can call that other world home sweet home instead.”
“Yes. And it seems she has her sights set on one world in particular.”
Please don’t say Earth.
Why am I almost positive this ice-queen is about to say Earth?
“It’s no coincidence that you ended up here,” she says, and I hang my head in a combination of frustration and defeat.
“Elle followed Soren,” Carys insists. “And we followed her. We chose to come here, so I don’t understand how…” She trails off as both Elric and Casandra’s gazes drift to Soren.
“How did you know how to get into this world?” Casandra asks him, in a tone that suggests she already knows the answer.
Soren doesn’t reply.
Silver and Shadow (The Canath Chronicles Book 2) Page 8