“Pharoh said that three people must enter the Well of Wyrding,” Grace had told the other two women around dinner the night before. “Three people to embody the three fates of the lives of men; preferably these three would be women, but that is not necessary.”
“Who do you think Porillon took with her?” Rosalee asked.
“That’s something I have been considering as well,” Dalah said.
“I’m sure one would have been Amber,” Grace said.
“The other one was Astanel,” Rosalee said. “Well, it only makes sense doesn’t it? She captured them, and they are both wyrders.” Rosalee held her hands out, inviting another explanation.
“I guess, I mean who else did she have with her?” Dalah asked.
“A verax-acis,” Rosalee replied. “A verax-acis and a snake.”
“A snake?” Dalah asked, perplexed. Rosalee merely nodded and sipped her wine.
“At any rate,” Grace brought the conversation back to the issue of the Well of Wyrding. “It’s said that three must enter, it doesn’t say that those three have to work wyrd.”
“Right,” Dalah agreed, not really seeing where Grace was going with this. “Pharoh only said that the one that alters the Well of Wyrding had to be a sorcerer, for only through sorcery was the well able to be swayed.”
“So, it’s agreed that, while Rosalee and I have wyrd, we will be of little use other than embodying two of the three fates.”
“That sounds about right,” Dalah agreed around a bite of her stew. Goddess, how she was getting sick of stew night after night, but with little other meat than the dried varieties, stew was their main meal.
“Then if we give you our wyrd you will have more power in which to do the swaying,” Grace threw that on the table quickly.
“What? No!” Dalah said. “What if something happens there and you need it?”
“Like what?” Grace asked. “And where would I use my ability to sway the earth?”
“Isn’t Evyndelle a giant tree? I think you will find some wood to use your powers on,” Dalah insisted, deciding that she most certainly couldn’t stomach her stew at the moment.
“That’s true.” Rosalee conceded.
“But the fact remains that Porillon is the sorceress who swayed the Evyndelle this time, and she’s second in power only to Pharoh, which would make her the most powerful sorceress alive today.” Grace was definitely heated about this topic. “Think, Dalah! Use your head and not your heart!”
“Easy for you to say!” Dalah said. “You’re not the one being asked to take the power of your two best friends to leave them defenseless and possibly dead on the floor of the Well of Wyrding.”
“That’s enough,” Rosalee said, her tone lethal. It did something that had not been seen in many ages — it shut Grace up mid-tangent. “We are going into the Well of Wyrding tomorrow, all of us. The fact remains that even if only one of us comes out alive and victorious, then all the wyrders the realms over will be safe.”
Dalah was still fuming, and both women knew it because she was licking her teeth under her lips, a sign of danger just as much as Grace’s flaring nostrils.
“If we do not take upon us this task we are all lost, and the three of us might as well lie down now and die.” Rosalee said, feigning serenity, though her quivering voice betrayed her true emotions. “The fact is, Dalah, you’re old, and while you are stronger now than you were before, Porillon is stronger still. Your power now doesn’t even match hers then, which does not bode well. Giving you our strength is the best chance we have at overcoming the current flux of the well.”
Dalah didn’t say anything, nor would she look at them.
“We’re giving you our strength. Willingly or unwillingly, you will take it,” Grace said.
“Shut up,” Dalah told her and left the room.
Grace had never been without her wyrd before. She didn’t imagine she was going to care for the feeling, but it was something she was resigned to do.
Grace was very frugal with her wyrd and she didn’t like using it unless there was no other choice. The fact remained that there was every chance that she would have to use it while in the Well of Wyrding and it wouldn’t be available to her.
She sighed as they reached the temple room. Grace hated doing this as much as Dalah hated her for making her do it. It was as if Grace was losing a part of her to Dalah, as if the part that made her Grace and other than normal humans would no longer be in attendance. It made her slightly less than comfortable.
“This is it,” Grace said.
“So it is,” Dalah agreed.
The silver thrones had not been salvaged, but the cushions had been removed and placed where the thrones once stood. They had systematically removed all the twisted and melted lamps along the walls, and only a couple remained at the entrance end of the temple room to provide light where the lamps at the feet of the Goddess statue could not shine.
The statue of the Goddess at the opposite end stood serene and welcoming as she always had. The naolyn oil lamps that rested at her feet flickered and cast their perpetual light into the room, and the basin of water ringing her feet rippled with the wyrd of the room.
The floors had been scrubbed and polished in the last few days, and only a few scorch marks remained; a permanent sign of the triumph of good over evil at the very feet of the Goddess. The glass they had not been able to replace, but they cleaned what they could, and removed the broken panes from the windows. None of the windows were completely smashed out, but there were a few religious icons missing a pane of stained glass somewhere within their anatomy.
The ceiling was the most amazing, for after Dalah replaced it one would never be able to tell that it had been pulled down. Grace still marveled at the strength of wyrd it must have taken for Joya to pull it down.
Grace set down her bag beside the engraving on the floor, of the great tree Evyndelle supported within the stone well. In times past the engraving had been hidden by many spells and a large Balageshian rug. But just as time affects everything, the rug and the wards had faded.
“I have to say one thing,” Grace said around a growing lump in her throat. “I love you both. If anything happens to us in there I want you to know that while with you I have been the happiest since before Pharoh and Sylvie died.”
“It’s their memories that sustain us,” Rosalee nodded. “I had forgotten how much I loved life before the Splitting of the World until I came back here and got lost in memories of a happier time.”
“Even if that happier time led to the current malaise,” Dalah agreed. “Maybe what happened is a statement against happiness. Do you think things would have been different if we had not been so happy and jubilant then?”
“I don’t think so,” Grace told her. “I think we would have been blindsided either way. People we thought we knew back then were not the people they turned out to be — no amount of stoicism could have prepared us for that.”
“I think that as long as we were happy, then Pharoh and Sylvie managed what the Goddess sent them to do. It’s in happiness that true communion lies.” Rosalee smiled. “And what a state of communion I have been in since venturing here.”
Grace nodded her understanding even as tears burned her cheeks.
“We may all die,” Dalah told them, trying to fight back the emotion of the present.
“Which makes the times past all the more precious,” Rosalee said, grabbing both their hands.
Together they linked hands, forming a triangle between them.
It was then, while they were all distracted, that Dalah did what had been bidden of her. The voiding of their stores of power tore from them like a foot being forcefully torn from mud, with a similar internal squelching that took both Grace and Rosalee to their knees.
“I know you don’t like dealing with emotions, Dalah, but damn,” Grace complained as Dalah helped her to stand.
“Sorry, I figured it would be better to do it before you expected it,” she told them.
“How do you feel?”
“Strangely the same. I thought it would feel odd, I thought I would feel different without the strength to work my wyrd, but I only feel tired.” Grace said.
“I only expected to feel tired,” Rosalee said, taking off her shoes. It was near-religious doctrine that ritual was to be done without any shoes to restrict the contact from the soles of the feet to the Goddess in the earth below them. Grace and Dalah followed Rose’s movements and laid their shoes beside hers a little distance away.
All of the materials for the Opening had been brought with them: sage for cleansing, three white candles for the opening, a black candle for the center, red copal, and a silver bowl for consecrated water. The main ritual they remembered Pharoh leading them through was a cleansing ritual, and so Dalah and Rosalee laid out the white candles in the prescribed spots while Grace filled the silver bowl from the basin at the feet of the Goddess.
She couldn’t help looking up at the statue while she kneeled before her. A quick prayer and clasped hands to the head solidified her postulation. In that very act she felt once more the child of the Goddess that Grace knew she was. She felt loved and cared for, and while she knew that nothing was promised to her about the future, Grace knew that no matter what that future held she would be alright. Grace rejoined the group just as Rosalee was lighting the white candles, feeling slightly better for her prayer.
“We three come to open the way,” Rosalee intoned, lighting the first candle.
“The way is opened,” Dalah and Grace intoned. From the first lit candle Dalah set fire to the sage bundle with which she would cleanse the space. The marble floor instantly felt colder under their bare feet. The floor was preparing for what was to occur, preparing to transport them to another world. Rosalee had experienced this cold several times in the Spirit Flight. One would often become colder before being transported to the other world. She couldn’t explain why, but it seemed the cold was almost like a conductor for inter-dimensional transportation.
“We three ask the Norns to see us,” Rosalee said, lighting the second candle.
“We are seen and recognized,” Grace and Dalah intoned, following behind her, Grace scattering drops of water from her fingers around the circle in which they would stand, Dalah smudging the area with the sage to rid it of all unwanted emotions, energies, and thoughts.
The last candle was lit with the proclamation: “We three seek balance within the Chaos of the Well of Wyrding.”
“Balance is observed and restored,” Grace and Dalah finished their intoning and closed the circle by ending their rotation where it had started, in the west.
The black candle was then placed in the very center of the circle and lit with a touch of sorcery from Dalah, the spark of wyrd that would allow them entry into the cloistered hall of the Norns. The bowl of water and still-smoking sage bundle were laid there as well.
Again they clasped hands and closed their eyes. The first part was done, and now the second was upon them: the calling of the powers of each realm to solidify their protection.
Onto the floor they placed a brick of coal, heated red hot in the flame of the black candle. It was onto this that Grace placed a generous portion of the sacred red copal. Instantly a red plume of smoke issued into the air.
As Dalah was from the Realm of Air, and she was the one in which their hope lay, they thought it prudent she start the summoning. And so she raised her hands from their clasped triangle and intoned forcefully into the darkness:
“Shift the wind from here to there
Call the gale and sylphids fair.
Your power and thought I seek to share
And lend me wyrd from the air!”
As she beckoned, so they came. They could not see the sylphids, nor would they have, for at the time they were all concentrating on keeping a mental portal open in the eastern quarter of the circle through which the elemental rulers of the air could travel. It was a slight touch on their minds that let them know the sylphids had heard and responded, and with the coming of the first elementals so came the protection to cast wyrd in their presence and not feel the side effects of the Well of Wyrding. It was a benefit they were not sure would extend to the cloistered hall.
Rosalee had the closest connection with fire, her mother having been from the Realm of Fire, and so she raised her hands next, even as Dalah took Grace’s hand again and intoned:
“Living spark that has no shame
Call salamanders from within the flame.
Your power given to me inspires,
And weave my wyrd in your fire!”
The salamanders came then, as unpredictable and fierce as could be expected of the elemental rulers of fire. They came not only from the flame, which shot higher in greeting of its spiritual masters, but also through the mental door which the three women held open in the southern quarter of the circle for them.
Rosalee didn’t wait for any other signal that the salamanders were there before she invoked the next elemental ruler. She was given two chants because more than any of them, she had spent the most time in another world, another state of mind. It gave her a quicker response from such entities, for they recognized her.
“Quenching rain the mind allure
Call undines, my thoughts be pure.
Within me now your power be,
And lend me wyrd from the sea!”
The basin at the foot of the Goddess statue bubbled and frothed, and a heavy wave lifted out of it, splashing onto the marble floor. The flood rushed toward them and around their feet, revivifying them and quelling their nerves. Outside it began to rain, and if they had been looking they would have noticed the chubby, finned blue women within the water surrounding them, their hypnotic blue eyes staring from the surface of the water at the wyrd being wrought within the air.
Thunder crackled and lightning lit the temple room as Rose took their hands again, and Grace dislodged herself from them. She raised her hands and took a deep breath, for she had never been the best at this sort of thing. Nervously she intoned:
“Shifting leaves from tree limbs bound,
Call the gnomes from underground.
Your power I call to bring new birth
And weave my wyrd from your earth!”
The gnomes, or rather gnome, responded grumpily, not using the mental gate they held open for him, but instead popping into reality in the northern portion of the temple room, plodding cantankerously toward the circle, and heaving himself into a cross-legged seat in his designated post in the north. He gnashed his teeth furiously at being summoned by ones so beneath him as humans.
The opening was almost complete; with one final invocation their protective circle was cast and the portal to the Well of Wyrding thrown open:
“So it starts with sacred will
The turning of the wyrding mill.
On this day our oath fulfill,
Praise the Goddess, our hearts be still!”
The night seemed to take on a different feel. They felt, as the smoke of the red copal rose higher and higher, that they had stepped into the ancient past, and strode in the footsteps of Aaridnay as she had come here, seeking entry to the Well of Wyrding to undo what Artarias had done, and failing. But unlike the founder of the Great Realms, they were to be granted access to the cloistered hall of the Norns. It was also more wyrd now than it had been, and the perpetual breeze that could be felt in the temple room slightly across the floor grew heavier with the coming of the elementals.
As the smoke rose higher and higher, something happened that none of them had ever witnessed before: the four bells in the four directional towers began to toll in a cacophony that vied for attention with the thunder raging outside. As if the bells had summoned it, a fog began to rise around them. One last step had to be completed, and they withdrew their blades for the bloodletting.
“One comes with the knowledge of the Past,” Grace said, slicing her palm and letting some of her blood leak onto the surface of the engraving at thei
r bare feet.
“One comes with a vision of the Future,” Rosalee said, copying Grace’s motions.
“One comes with the plight of the Present,” Dalah intoned, following suit. The blood of all three mingled in the center, changing color to match the current malaise within the Well of Wyrding. All the elementals turned and watched as the green luminescent fluid that their blood had become slithered through the water and the cracks and lines of the engraving to light the image of the Evyndelle and the well with perfection, as if the engraving were a living image of the tree and well itself, brought to life in green brilliance.
And then the fog which had been growing around them intruded, and removed them from the Mirror of the Moon. Where the three ladies had once stood there was now only a green glowing door. As the last of Grace’s gray hair whipped through the opening, the door slammed shut and the green brilliance collapsed in on itself back into the engraving in the center of the circle.
The copal burned on in their absence.
Lush green gardens stood all around them. In the hallway it was nighttime, the roof opened to alien stars above in a wide, purple night sky. The last time she had been here, Grace tried to find familiar constellations, and failed. Even the stars looked different, somehow closer and larger than on the Great Realms. Grace looked around her at the beauty she had only witnessed once before. Evergreen trees of all shapes, sizes, and kinds grew all around the yard beyond the hall, spilling their beauty and rich scent into the air.
Grace felt as though she had stepped into a fairytale setting, with the trees nearly black in the night soaring to heights no human should be able to see, yet she was able to see them. The trees were rounded in the darkness, none of their lines sharp or jutting, but almost as if they were well-manicured into a flowing work of art, their limbs and leaves all creating gentle bends and curves that the eye followed serenely.
Grace closed her eyes, and could feel her inner being moving with the currents and ebbing of the power within this setting. In that moment Grace knew that this was where all inspiration and creativity lay. It was a thought more real than any she had ever had, but Grace was almost certain that if she were to look at the trees and the columns of the hall that she would be able to see songs and writing, stories both epic and short being created right out of the matter that made this place.
The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3) Page 8