The Well of Wyrding (Revenant Wyrd Book 3)

by Travis Simmons

  The attack halted, and she dropped the water, which once summoned could not be vanquished. The water fell to the floor, wetting the stone, and running over her feet and the egrigors cloven hooves.

  It laughed.

  She barely had time to breathe before lightning was flying from the beast’s mouth; the same way he had breathed fire, he was breathing lightning.

  The power responded in her before she thought of it. This was an element with which she was proficient, and the lightning tore up her back, gathering briefly at the base of her neck before tearing down her arms and flying from her fingers which were even now healing from the icicle attack.

  The thunder that sounded from their joint attacks meeting and colliding in midair was violent, heavy, and continuous. It sounded for all the world as if a thunderstorm were raging under the Well of Wyrding, rolling out of the Otherworld to consume the Fate of Man inscribed therein.

  The lightning from the beast was black, the lightning from Dalah yellow — when they met it was like red fireworks flared to life, igniting the walls of the root-room where the bolts reflected briefly before going out.

  Dalah screamed with the effort of holding such an attack, and the black shuck was gaining every instant. She held out her other hand, adding the strength of her passive hand to the dominant, and her combined lightning attacks began driving back his onslaught.

  She felt herself sliding backwards as she shot bolt after bolt at him. If the roots penetrating the arena made the structure sway, it was nothing to what their lightning attacks did. The complex literally heaved, rocking back and forth in the grips of the roots as if it were a swing.

  Eventually the shuck broke off his attack, and her lightning penetrated him, blasting a hole in the wall behind him, giving her a glimpse of gray flesh and webbed feet as something swam past.

  She didn’t stop to think about it, and instead summoned air to bear on her victim. As proficient as she was with air she had expected something, but when she enveloped him with it, hardening the air into a stiff, imprisoning ball around him, he merely walked through it instead of being held fast as most would.

  Now she conjured fire down her arms, and the searing heat of her intentions followed suit. She brought the ball of fire out of each palm and launched it at the beast even as it circled her. Dalah turned to watch the black shuck, ball after ball being heaved from her hands incessantly. She scowled; nothing was working.

  He caught a stray fireball in his mouth, and seemed to swallow it. He turned then and kicked out his back feet the way a horse would buck. The stone that was torn up by his kick began to roll her way, expanding and enlarging as it went. Not only was it growing bigger, but as it hovered slightly off the ground, it began to sprout spikes.

  It took nearly all her effort to control Grace’s wyrd in a way that allowed her to stop the stone ball as it bounced directly over her head. She held it in place, a few inches from impact with her skull, and began to transmute it. Soon it was no longer a ball, but as she pulled and tugged with her wyrd at its edges and sides it became like a blanket. She tossed it back at the Shuck spiked side down, and it covered him like the blanket she had formed it into.

  If it had been a corporeal form that would have harmed it, but it obviously was not, and in a puff of smoke it disappeared, only to reappear beside her, breathing yet more fire.

  Dalah could not react in time, and the first bit of fire burned into her shoulder. She sidestepped with an agility she didn’t know she still possessed, and this time when she summoned the icy water down her wyrded veins she didn’t throw it up before her but instead straight into the face of the Shuck, snuffing out the fire as she did so.

  Then Dalah had an idea. Egrigors were similar to golems in the aspect that they had to be created. However, the difference was that egrigors were of thoughts. He was able to disappear and then reappear because he was fashioned of thoughts, which meant that he was not really real at all.

  Water ruled emotions, thoughts, psychism, all things mental. Dalah knew that the power Rosalee had given her would not be able to affect a thought form, but it would strengthen any wyrd to that end. Dalah thought long and hard, conjuring all the wyrd she could muster, tapping into the water wyrd Rosalee had given her. In an attempt to halt the egrigor, she used the roots which she had previously brought through the root-wall.

  At the same time she cast out the earth wyrd, she cast out the water wyrd, and as she manipulated the roots to form around the egrigor she also infused it with the will to become physical and substantial. The effort to make it physical took both earth and water wyrd, but she managed it at long last. Before long the black shuck was bound by the roots and could not move. Its cloven hooves scraped on the stone floor, kicking up sparks as it squealed and flailed like a caught hog.

  Dalah blocked out the sound and closed her eyes, for what she was about to attempt was more powerful than she thought she was able to accomplish. It wasn’t that she was trying to stop what Porillon had done, but instead she was trying to destroy it, which was something she could do, killing it by removing it from the world.

  She fashioned a web of wyrd with her fingers, nimbly moving them here and there as if she were physically weaving a tapestry. The threads of wyrd fashioned together like a glimmering blanket of blue, green, and silver light. Dalah wove with skill, putting in all of her intentions.

  First she had to block it from the wyrd which poured through the well, for she figured that was how it was sustained, not by the mind of the caster as most egrigor were. Then she had to slowly purge the thoughts that made it. She had to kill the egrigor by taking it apart, thought by thought. It was not an easy thing to do, or something she could explain, but Dalah knew without a doubt that the tapestry she was weaving in the air before her was going to work, was going to kill the thought that made the egrigor, and hence kill the egrigor.

  When it was done Dalah stepped back and appraised it with a hand to her chin. Perfect. She loosened the roots which held the black shuck, and instantly it dove for her, its teeth bared. She threw the glimmering web at it with a sharp gesture of her arm as if she were literally throwing a blanket over the beast.

  At the last moment she began to un-work the earth wyrd which made it substantial. The wyrd fell away a moment too late, and the claws of the black shuck, the claws she had made physical, tore through her midsection.

  Dalah fell to the ground, blood pouring out of her, and watched the now incorporeal form of the black shuck writhing on the ground as it was un-worked, as it came to an end. As the web vanished, so did the shuck, but the power of the original egrigor remained. That she couldn’t destroy, and their wishes at the repository would build a new egrigor that anyone in the future who wished to sway wyrd would have to fight.

  It was all Dalah could do to drag herself to the opening between the battle arena and the Room of Requisition, but eventually she made it, falling half in the arena, half into the room.

  The walls thundered as yet another attack began, one that had nothing to do with Dalah, the black shuck, or their reverberating wyrd.

  Grace had been seeing glimmers of movement outside the Repository of Wyrd for some time now. The thundering and swaying of the complex had put her on edge, and put her on unstable ground, tossing her this way and that as the egrigor and Dalah fought within the battle arena.

  On one such moment, when she was thrown against the wall by what she imagined was a lightning exchange from the sulfurous smell, she had looked through the crack in the roots and saw something gray flit by.

  She cleaved to the side of the wall as the room swayed to and fro, tossing a protesting Rosalee around. Grace looked through the crack, and to her fright something heavy and large hit the wall, a dead white, cataract-clotted eye staring back through the crack at her. Grace yelped and in fright let go of the wall. At that moment the room had swayed in such a way that she tumbled clear across the stone floor, rolling underneath the skin orb of the repository, and hit the wall so hard that
she heard something crack.

  Without her earth wyrd Grace’s bones were not as strong as they normally were, and so she wasn’t surprised when she stood and had to limp on one foot for she had managed to crack something in there that caused her a lot of pain.

  Grace didn’t bother getting back to her feet, and instead clung to the wall and the floor, closing her eyes against the swaying, the repository, and the Otherworld she currently found herself in. From the arena Grace kept hearing cries from Dalah, and she imagined the worst.

  Tears bloomed to her eyes as she thought that she had consigned her friend to the death that was most certainly facing her within the arena. Grace cried silently, the thundering coming louder and louder. She gasped every time she heard a noise from the other room, afraid that at any moment they would hear the final cry of Dalah being plunged from the world.

  She wasn’t sure, however, if the thundering and shuddering was due to the wyrded battle being waged in the next room, or if it was due to the gray figures hammering into the Room of Requisition.

  In time the battle inside the arena ended and the thundering noise halted. The hammering on the outside of the root-room didn’t end, though. The battering on the outside was so intense that the actual roots of the wall were bowing in with each concussion.

  “Why don’t they just use the doorway?” Rosalee asked Grace. Grace, however, was too busy praying that Dalah came back through the door to worry about the etiquette of the Norns.

  When Dalah did come back into the Room of Requisition, Grace raced to her side, fearing the worst. Dalah fell to the ground, blood spilling from an open wound at her gut which she kept her hand pressed tightly to. It was clear to Grace that she would not be able to make it to the top by herself.

  “Help her!” Grace yelled at Rosalee, and the redhead obeyed as Grace went to the door to see what was happening outside.

  The Norns flew about the complex as if they were a pack of angry bees and the Repository of Wyrd were the hive. She didn’t know how they were going to escape the onslaught of them, but they would have to find a way.

  As Grace turned back she saw the orb change colors. The black and purple smoke was slowly replaced by white and silver, shining in time to a new, healthy beating of the heart they had come to associate with wyrd. The thumping was no longer out of tune and erratic, but instead healthy and full of purpose and order.

  Grace watched as white and silver smoke drifted from the orb to alight on the floor and spread across it like opalescent fog, transcribing a new fate upon the walls which quickly went to work consuming the other fates that had previously been there. Before long the walls and floor and even the ceiling had changed to a healthy white color.

  Grace ran past the repository and noticed fleetingly that it no longer looked like a skin orb, but instead like an orb of the most radiant moonstone held within the loving embrace of moss-covered roots.

  She helped Rose gather Dalah and together they walked to the door, watching the Norns whiz by. Another ramming happened in which they nearly lost Dalah, but in a moment the repository flared with light, driving the Norns back, for they were consumed of that which the repository was trying to purge the well of.

  Grace nodded to Rose, and they leapt out of the Room of Requisition, their need, their fear, and their concern for Dalah speeding them ever onward.

  A blast of force came hurtling at them from below, and the three of them were blasted apart. Dalah began to fall, and Rosalee flew off out of sight to the right. Grace wanted to help them, but her fear of the Norns, of what they would do to her, and what they would do to Sylvie’s children, spurred her on.

  A few times Grace thought that she was going to get hung up on roots, but they seemed to part for her and close back up as the Norn was about to break through to grab her. The tree seemed to be working in her favor, and when Grace began feeling her wyrd return to her she mourned what that could mean, but also understood then why the tree was helping her.

  She drew her dhast and began launching wyrd over her shoulder, creating a wall of roots, and influencing others to wrap the Norn up. The Norn would normally only be detained for a moment before blasting the opposing earth with her own wyrd.

  Grace thought she would be fleeing through the roots forever, and as she launched yet more wyrd behind her she wondered what had happened to her friends. She had no time to think about that, however, for she was finally breaching the top of the well, and found herself gasping as she pulled herself out.

  She didn’t wait for the Norn to gain on her, and with her dhast still clutched in her hand Grace heaved herself up on the wall of the well, forgetting that she had hurt herself. She fell over the other side when she tried to put pressure on that foot.

  Grace cursed her clumsiness, but was soon up and hopping toward the fogbank she could see swirling and pulsating at the end of the Cloistered Hall.

  She heard the Norn reach the top in a shriek and a spraying of wyrd. Grace had no mind for her, because she was soon nearing the fogbank that would take her back to the Mirror of the Moon.

  She felt her feet slapping the stone floor, felt the acute pain in her one foot shooting up her leg, but tried her best to ignore it as she continued running. Grace panted in fear and exertion and kept running, her heart beating double time.

  Grace was aware of her heart more than anything else, and knew she would have to take a break soon. However, her running was soon halted as something sharp and vile pierced her back. She stopped with a gasp, and gripped her chest where she could see a tentacle piercing through from her back.

  She tried to turn, but the tentacle held her in place, and slowly began lifting her off the ground. Grace felt her heart slow and then stop, before she collapsed to the ground mere feet from the fog bank, the swirling mist toying with her hair which now existed part in the Cloistered Hall, and part in the Mirror of the Moon.

  Tesla knelt before the altar in the academy's chapel. She prayed for forgiveness. The headmistress didn't know what the Goddess was punishing them for this time, but she intended to make amends with her soul while she could, to ensure entry to the Ever After, and resist a fate beyond the Black Gates.

  Shouting arose outside, but she tried to block it out. Another mob. She prayed harder. If this was to be the last day Tesla was alive, the Goddess would know that she died in communion.

  "Headmistress Tesla?" Novice Jenna said, peeking her head into the chapel.

  Tesla didn't look up from her silent prayer, studying the yellow stigmata on the palms of her upturned hands.

  "There are hunters here," Jenna said, trying to rouse the headmistress.

  "Let them come. The Goddess is purging the lands of us," Tesla whispered.

  "But—,"

  "Jenna, come here, please."

  Jenna cast an eye back down the stone hall toward the front door, hoping it would hold against the battering. Even now the wooden logs thundered into the metal door. She scowled and closed the door of the simple chapel behind her, shutting herself inside with the headmistress. It wouldn't keep them safe if the hunters made it in, but it muffled the sound of their vengeance.

  Jenna crossed the cold stone floor between the wooden pews of the small chapel. Her eyes never strayed from the statue of the veiled and pregnant Goddess where Tesla knelt. The statue's eyes were closed, and in her belly Jenna knew rested the world on which they lived. She knelt before the Goddess, made the sacred symbol of the five pointed star over her body, and whispered a word of reverence.

  Tesla grabbed Jenna's hands, and the girl protested, but she couldn't pull them out of the iron grip of her headmistress. She struggled for a moment before giving up. Jenna looked into the crazed eyes of Tesla. She hadn't been this way a week ago. The students and teachers tried to get her to stop using her wyrd, but she wouldn't listen to them.

  Then, a week ago, she had come into the chapel, raving about Goddess’s vengeance.

  "Do you remember why we got these?" Tesla asked, smearing at Jenna's sti
gmata with her thumbs. Tesla had been around at the time of the Splitting of the World, but Jenna, who was only twenty summers old and not yet through her elemental trials, had not.

  "The Goddess punished the Great Realms for killing Pharoh LaFaye, and tore the Realm of Spirit in half," Jenna repeated the history lesson.

  Tesla was nodding. "Do you feel the corruption inside of you?" The headmistress asked, placing her hand on Jenna's belly. It made the novice uncomfortable.

  She shook her head that she didn't. Looking into Tesla’s clear blue eyes, Jenna couldn’t imagine the headmistress was so old. Her eyes did hold an intelligence far beyond her years, but the rest of Tesla was frozen in time, looking no older than Jenna.

  "You will," Tesla said cryptically, tucking a stray strand of her golden hair under the habit she had taken to wearing in the last week.

  The pounding on the outside door grew louder, and Jenna gave a start.

  "Headmistress," Jenna said, pulling away. "The hunters are going to make their way in."

  "The building won't let them," Tesla mumbled, and started rocking once more, studying the stigmata in her palms, her lips forming a silent prayer that only the Goddess could hear.

  Jenna shook her head. Headmistress Tesla made no sense lately. Quietly the novice crossed to the wooden door and lifted the latch. She stepped out into the hall, glancing left to where the hunters were banging at the door. Jenna considered following the halls to the right and to the basement. Many other of the staff and students were waiting there for her; hers was the last group to leave through the escape tunnel.

  But there was something about what the headmistress said. Jenna followed the halls, but didn't go down the stairs to the cellar; instead she took a right and found the ladder to the roof. She pushed open the hatch and crawled up into the cold evening. On hands and knees, so she wouldn't be spotted from below, Jenna crawled around to the front, watching the hunters on the ground, yelling and heaving a log against the metal door.