The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3)

by Travis Simmons

  Through the next few days the tension between Uthia and Jovian grew more and more, until he was picking still-living pieces of wood just to spite her. That didn’t last long when he realized he wasn’t only irritating her, but also creating more work for himself.

  Not only did the tension grow between them, but also the feeling of a presence hunting them. Day in and day out they could feel whatever it was stalking them grow closer and closer until they half expected to look behind them and find the thing looming up out of the earth.

  It had reached a point where Uthia finally stopped settling at night and instead stood constant vigil. The Germinant Gob began feeling as though his presence was required at night as well, and while he and Tegaris didn’t get along, the three fey creatures created a barrier around the camp at night so that the LaFaye youths could sleep in peace.

  It was a strange sight to see the Germinant Gob, all leaves and branches sprouting from his body, standing menacingly. Gob stood only a little over two feet, somewhat tall for gnomes. Tegaris hovered in the air, lighting the night a third of the way around camp. Uthia was the one they counted on to really protect them, her large frame standing loosely with her wooden sword in hand.

  Jovian had asked her about that sword once, for where he came from wooden swords were only ever used for practice. Uthia had let him hold the sword, which they all imagined was somewhat hard for her to do and informed him that her sword, Cataresh, was sharper than any metal sword and could cut nearly everything except other wood. In fact Uthia told him that the dryad who tried to cut wood with it would die instantly.

  The next day Uthia informed them that they would be traveling through the village of Greenwood. Angelica was happy that they would finally get to spend some time among humans.

  Little did they realize then that spending time with humans now, while the Well of Wyrding was corrupted, was not precisely what they wanted to do.

  “So what’re we looking at?” Mag, the Senator of Montaria, asked, leaning forward, her elbows perched on the dark wood surface of the table behind which the other senators sat. The bodies of Congress all seemed to be perched, ready for the words from their Realm Guardian which would inform them of the current situation of unease.

  “I’ve been informed that a group ventures into the Well of Wyrding to correct the illness there,” Sara informed them. Today she was alone, sitting on one of the two thrones upon the raised dais in the center of the circular chamber.

  “That’s a relief,” the older Senator of Brashenar said, leaning back in his chair. The wood made an audible groan under his massive frame and Sara looked around at all of them wondering if maybe today she should tell them of her concerns regarding the chaos dwarves. She drummed her fingers against the arm of her throne and watched as each and every one of them began talking. Those of the provinces which resided within the Sacred Forest would soon be able to go home, their people returning to the homes and lives they had left behind. Finally there was a little light at the end of the tunnel for them.

  “Yes, it’s fortunate,” Sara said, her thoughts turned inward. She was beginning to feel ill, something that reoccurred, it seemed, every day about this time. She could feel the beginnings of a headache, and rubbed her temples with the tips of her finger. Her robes of state, dark hunter green, were beginning to stifle her, so she undid the top few buttons which felt like a vise around her neck, choking her around the jaw line.

  She wanted to tell the senators about the development with the chaos dwarves, and knew that she would have to soon. Sara looked across the room, toward the open door which led out upon the sunlit halls of the iron tower, draped with sashes, curtains and carpeting so that the material which made up the Guardians Keep would not seem so harsh to the eye.

  Sara saw her assistant there, and Vanparaness smiled back at her. She nodded her head and he looked grave. He knew what that meant, that she was not feeling well again. There was something in his eye, something which troubled him, and she knew that it was the illness she felt every day. He worried for her health. He nodded once and strode off down the hall toward the stairs which climbed up to her tower apartments.

  She cleared her throat and shook her head, hoping to clear it of the fog growing somewhere in her mind. Today was as good a day as any, and she raised the scepter in her lap for silence.

  Quickly the noise of the previous discussion drew to a close and Congress stared back at her from their raised benches which lined the walls, climbing halfway up like the council hall was an amphitheater. She looked around at the heads of state, the advocates, the constables, the judges, and the other advisors and officials from various boards which made up Congress. The silence was growing, and soon the room was alive with the ringing of noiselessness. High above, wind blew through the open windows and rustled the pinions and banners of the various provinces that made up the seat of Sara’s and Annbell’s shared power.

  “There’s other news, news that is more important than the Well of Wyrding, or at least news that will soon outshadow the threat of the well.” The delegates looked at one another, beginning to mumble again. Nothing, they thought, could be as horrible as the Well of Wyrding.

  “An ancient enemy of my throne arises, and seeks to reclaim what was once theirs,” Sara told them, and they all fell silent. There was a brief moment before the ensuing uproar in which silence once more reigned supreme as Congress tried to understand what Sara was telling them. “The chaos dwarves, even now, gather en masse around a powerful weapon, which will allow them to usurp the power of our delicate Congress.”

  “That’s absurd!” The chief constable yelled, and many other voices followed his. Sara looked to the senators, and while some of them had joined the melee, two didn’t: Mag, and Trevon, the Senator of Greenwood. Both of them were wyrders of some power, only recently elevated to the status of senators in a way that sorcerers had not been in some time. They understood, for they remembered the stories of the ferocity of the chaos dwarves in a way that no others gathered did.

  Sara raised her scepter, and eventually the din hushed to a buzz, and then vanished all together. “This weapon, I’m told by one who has experienced its affects, has the ability to strip wyrd from the body in a most painful way. It is worse than the corruption of the well, for it takes away even the ability to wield wyrd. More than that I don’t know. Fortunately the person who was in contact with the item, dubbed Wyrders’ Bane, wasn’t in its presence long, and retained her ability to touch her wyrd.”

  Slowly they were all beginning to see the weight of her words, though fear wouldn’t let them completely see her reasoning. Arguing ensued, and that was not what Sara needed at this point. She closed her eyes and thought of willing them all to silence, but that was strictly prohibited in council; she could not use her wyrd on others, no matter how she desired to.

  Instead she sat and listened to the debates, slowly realizing she was not going to like the outcome.

  That night, her belly warm with the soothing tea Vanparaness made her, Sara dreamt in the way that Realm Guardians sometimes did. The Realms would often speak to the Guardians in their sleep. It was the one true time that the will of the Realm could be heard without the mindless babble of the day cutting off the message. She might have felt this coming if she hadn’t been faced with other issues today. Often Sara would know that something was going on, something that needed her attention. During the day she would sometimes feel that she was missing something, or find her mind wandering from the normal course of events. Today she hadn’t been able even to do that, she hadn’t felt that the Realm had sought communion.

  The Realm didn’t speak as one person to another, nor did it speak with a voice as such. It spoke, as often happens with the mind, in images and urges. It was easier to get across its message while the Guardian slept, for then the Guardian could actually be part of what the Realm was trying to show it.

  So it was that Sara found herself in a moonlit grove, walking through the various scented trees in a
utumn relief, her bare feet crunching on fallen leaves. She gathered her cloak about her, for she felt as though she should be cold, even if she couldn’t actually feel it. Such things, oddities in the dream where she thought something should be where it wasn’t, told her that this was no ordinary dream. That and the sense that she was being led. Sara was, after all, one of the only dream-weavers alive, which meant that she was not only able to weave her wyrd within the dark recesses of sleep, and make the dreams of herself and others manifest in the waking world, but also that she always remained lucid in her nightly wanderings. Except when the Realm of Earth needed to show her something.

  Sara had the sense that she had forgotten something, or rather that something vital had been forgotten at the destination she voyaged to. Pushing aside branches and briar bushes, she trudged on, a light blooming ahead of her, one that pulsed and throbbed in time with the moon above. Truth be told it looked as if the moon itself had come to rest on the earth just ahead.

  She didn’t need to see the place she ventured to know what it was. Sara knew from her past and seeing this place several times in the same light that she was traveling to the Mirror of the Moon.

  She stood at the edge of the clearing now, hiding behind a bush, for there was a darkness about, lurking in the clearing of the Mirror of the Moon. She didn’t know what the darkness was, only that there was danger here, and that there was something vital to the survival of all the realms within the religious structure.

  Sara knew that within was the Well of Wyrding; she also knew that within was her sister. Even if she was not within the Mirror of the Moon in the physical sense, Grace was still held within the etheric space of the lunar temple.

  She stood to walk forward, hoping that the Realm of Earth would show her more if she chose to go forward, but her gaining lucidity within the dream shattered the vision like glass, and the picture of the Mirror of the Moon and the darkness within tumbled away from her sight.

  Sara came gasping to wakefulness, and tossed aside the bed coverings. She didn’t bother dressing, instead throwing her voluminous white dressing gown over her shift and slipping on a pair of slippers, though she knew they would not hold up in the Sacred Forest.

  She tossed her raven hair behind her shoulders, where it fell in wavy lengths to her waist, and she was out the door into her office. Sara made quick work of the doors and stairs that led down to the courtyard, and before long she was standing in the cold, everything appearing unnaturally gray in the night. Her breath came out in frozen vapor, and she shivered.

  Holding up her arms Sara closed her eyes and mentally prepared herself for the suffocating feeling of traveling through the earth. She clenched her fists and forced her will down, and in a green flash Sara vanished from the courtyard.

  Eyes watched her leave — malicious eyes, black eyes. Slowly the Looker turned back to the shadowy charge standing behind her. She thumped her gnarled staff on the ground angrily.

  “She does not appear weaker,” the Looker announced. “What I gave you,” she gestured to the pouch at the figure’s waist. “The shavings of our saving rock should be working on her by now.”

  “But it is,” the quivering voice announced. “Every day she grows weaker, she suffers headaches and distractions which are worsening every day, soon not even the tea she begs her assistant for will help her.”

  “Good,” the Looker said, not sure she could trust this person any longer. “That will be just fine.”

  Grace’s time within the Well of Wyrding was not going as she had hoped it would. There was not one specific moment that defined that things were going unwell, unless it was stumbling upon the Norns within the well where they should not have been. No, instead it was a feeling pervading the whole well experience that had Grace on edge. Given the circumstances, however, Grace could understand how one would feel on edge, immersed in green noxiousness and having your gift of wyrd corrupted even as you tried to purify it. That didn’t bode well.

  The meeting with the Norns had set her on edge more than anything. She had the constant feeling that they were being watched. She felt that the Norns were watching her threads of wyrd, her present and future mostly, to see what was going to happen, where they were going to go. The Norns didn’t trust that Grace, Rosalee, and Dalah would come back. They had a right to think that, and the knowledge that they weren’t going to come back was not well hidden to the Norns, who could see the future.

  Grace wanted nothing more than to flee the Well or Wyrding, but knew she must go on. Several times she felt her mind pulling her back to the surface of the well, while she tried to swim forward. Often when this happened she would grab hold of a root to hold herself in place, though she didn’t like doing that for the corrupted fates burned her like fire when she touched them. Now she realized that she had to propel herself through the wyrd much like she was swimming, and not like Dalah who just floated through the green murk gracefully.

  It had been a while since they had seen new fates written on the roots. Eventually the blue light of the old fates vanished and there was something else written in the light of new fate. This new fate, this new wyrd crawled its way up the roots, slowly making its way toward the top of the tree. Grace figured that once it reached the surface of the Well of Wyrding the fate would come to fruition, but she wasn’t sure why this fate was different than those others that needed nothing more than to be written in order to be.

  Looking at the language was almost like hearing what was written there instead of reading it. Grace tried to make her mind understand the strange perverted symbols, tried to make her ears hear what the symbols were saying, but she just couldn’t. She could understand the inflection on the words but she could not understand the words themselves.

  “It is the language of Chaos,” Rosalee told her.

  Grace understood then. “So these must be the words, the fate which Porillon inscribed on the roots?”

  She could almost picture the insane Porillon at the base of the tree, throwing her arms wide as she spewed verbal abomination toward the thriving roots. She could see the green plague of the Well of Wyrding gathering about the silver-haired woman as she cackled obscenities to the tree, and the green wyrd had responded in turn, painting poison upon the roots. Grace had to shake the image from her mind and at once knew that it had been real. She looked to Rose, but the redhead’s lips were pursed; it seemed she had seen the same.

  “She took much joy in it,” Dalah said with sorrow. “What happened to our once good friend?”

  “She has fallen into darkness, sister,” Rosalee said. “She has fallen into disease for which the only cure is the perjury of her soul.”

  “May the Goddess bear witness to your words,” Grace said.

  “I still love her,” Dalah said quietly as they passed through the poisonous roots toward the base, the image of Porillon’s glowing, blue-lined face screaming in their minds at the tree.

  “As do I,” Rosalee said.

  “I love who she once was,” Grace said. “Not this beast she’s become.” But it wasn’t completely true, for Porillon’s treachery was not one that should have happened; instead she had fallen to a darkness that any of them could have fallen into. None of them would have withstood the power of the grigori, but it was Porillon, for her strength of wyrd, who was picked. Grace shook her head.

  “It’s a pity,” she told the other two.

  “If only there were a way we could bring her back from the grips of alarism,” Rosalee whispered, but they heard it like an echo through the haunted roots they drifted through.

  Looking at the roots, hearing the perverted language written thereon, Grace shook her head, all thoughts of the Norns and wyr gone. “I don’t think there’s any saving her, Rose.” Grace thought then of the way Porillon had relished killing one of Sylvie’s children, how she had shrieked with joy until Lockelayter shot an arrow into her chest. She knew that Porillon was too far gone for help. “I think you were right before when you said the only saving we
can give her is in death.”

  “Even then her salvation lies not within the Ever After but deep beyond the Black Gates of the Otherworld.” Dalah said, and looked around them at the limp roots that shifted in the eddies of wyrd about them, as if they were in a bed of weeds within a deep lake.

  All around them stood the testament of the roots. They clogged the green wyrd, their inscriptions winking at them, wavering like green fire lighting their way into the Otherworld that lay at the base of the Evyndelle.

  “This is what she created,” Grace said. “This was her doing. It has gone much further than simply exacting revenge on Sylvie’s line. She wants to pick up where Arael left off, I think.”

  “Arael wanted Chaos to rise again,” Rosalee said. “To drive out all good in the world, and dethrone the Goddess.”

  “Don’t you think this is proof she wants the same?” Grace asked, gesturing around at the chaotic whispering roots. “How exactly does one learn this language anyway?” Grace wondered aloud after a few minutes of silence.

  “We’re nearly there.” Dalah pointed to a clearing up ahead that looked like rock jutting out from somewhere in the tangle of roots. As they approached Grace saw that the roots framed a rocky platform, cradled it, as it were. The slab of rock was huge and round, and hundreds of thick roots looped down under it, sheltering it and holding it. Grace could barely see within the roots for they were so thick, and it gave the appearance of an audience hall in the center of the Well of Wyrding, right within the last of the heavy roots of Evyndelle.

  As the root-room came into view Grace knew that what they were to face inside could not be anything good. For a moment she wanted to go back, and the words were on her lips. However, she was not a weak person, neither were the other two women with her. She held back her plight, bit her tongue and felt the tears burning in her eyes. She would be relatively safe, but she had pressed Dalah into this service. If anyone was going to suffer from what was in the room, it was Dalah.