The War of Stardeon (The Bowl of Souls)

by Cooley, Trevor H.

  Jhonate burned the last vestiges of darkness from the scroll and set it aside with the other one. How long had the witch been trapped? Who was she really?

  “Jhonate!”

  She ignored Locksher’s voice and reached for the next scroll.

  Centuries have passed. Her persistence has paid off. The tree sags and rots. Its branches are dying, but that core of spirit magic that powers it still holds her captive. Unfortunately, her body has also weakened. It is now but a withered husk, barely living at all and she knows her mind will soon fade. Her presence now clings mainly to the talisman they buried with her; her token; her link to the dark voice.

  She comes up with a desperate solution. She seizes control of the insects within her limited but growing range and begins the process of transferring her mind, her very thoughts and memories to their tiny and primitive brains. Unfortunately, their minds are so small, so ineffective that her powers remain limited. She continues to spread her rot, calling in more insects, inviting them to feast on the decay, transferring more and more of herself before her body fails completely.

  Jhonate placed the scroll down with the others. The white fire blazed bright in her hands. She reached for more, ignoring Locksher’s concerned voice.

  Time has passed once more. One day the dark voice speaks to her again.

  “I have slipped my confinement, dear one. The tribes of the mountains worship me once again. I gather them together now.” She wanted to reply to him but her thoughts were too scattered now. Only the strength of the talisman allowed her to keep her mind from simply blowing apart. “I know you have been weakened, but fear not, I still have use for you. You will be freed.”

  This emboldens her. She sends out her swarms to search her limited range for the mind of a superior creature. They come upon a tree rat. She attacks and seizes its mind. Its brain is small, only capable of shallow thoughts and instincts, but far superior to the insects nonetheless. She has the rat return to its hole where it has suckling young. She seizes their tiny minds as well, planting bits of herself within them. They grow swiftly, as does her control over them.

  She overpowers more rats and breeds them together. Their gestation period is brief, which she uses to her advantage, discarding those that are weak, and focusing on those with favorable traits. She learns to take control of them early, while still in the womb so that she can use the small traces of her old power that remain to make changes to their bodies as they develop.

  The more minds she controls, the more her thoughts expand and the more her abilities grow. Her mind becomes vast, spread out within hundreds of the beasts. Their eyes are weak, but their other senses are acute and she can now process incoming information from all the creatures simultaneously.

  She uses them with efficiency, breeding them while they are young. When they reach their prime, she uses them as soldiers to drive away predators from her land. If they live long enough to become old or feeble, she simply feeds them to the others or lets them fall where they are and rot, adding to the decay of the forest.

  “Jhonate!”

  “Just a moment! I am nearly finished!” There were only two scrolls left. The flames in her hand didn’t burn quite as brightly as before, but she reached for the next one anyway.

  The Dark Prophet doesn’t come to save her. His body is destroyed, his voice extinguished. She does not mourn him. She sees little use in it. Instead, she increases her work.

  She continues to breed certain traits within her children, for that is what they are to her now. She makes them bigger, stronger, smarter. She grows their eyes, hoping to make them better able to see in the dark, but instead of enhancing their sight, these changes have an unforeseen effect. Some of her children are born with eyes that glow a dull yellow in the dark. She finds that she can reach out through the eyes of these children and touch other minds. The signal is weak but true and she is spurred to breed them faster.

  Time passes. Traces of her old magic have begun to reappear. It is evident in the voice of her children. They know her pain. They know her loneliness. They know her hunger. It is in their very genes and it can be heard in their chittering moan. The locals begin calling her children moonrats. The world can hear her sorrow through her children and it makes them shudder in fear. This brings her great pleasure.

  The tree is all but dead. The tiny core of power within it can no longer constrain her. Unfortunately she has no physical body to inhabit. It rotted away decades ago. Her spirit stays near the tree, bound to her talisman, yet her mind is free; free to roam as she spreads her children’s territory further into the forest.

  She has a new breed of children now. Their eyes are green and they can control lesser minds. She comes up with a new goal. She will continue to breed her children until their eyes become powerful enough to control the minds of humanoids. Then she will spread her rot throughout the land. Then she will dominate the world.

  Jhonate placed the purified scroll down beside her. There was only one left. She noticed that the nails on the fingers of her hand had turned black. She quickly regained her focus, burning the black away.

  She peered back into the chest and saw that the last of the darkness had pooled around the final scroll.

  “You are marked!” the voice cried in protest. “Death! Death! Death!”

  “This is the last time you speak to me,” she snarled. Flames roared from her fingers, filling the interior of the chest with white hot energy. As she grasped the last scroll, the chest itself burned away.

  Elves have moved into her forest. Elves! Their minds are large and their blood is full of magic. How she craves them. Oh the things she could do with them under her power. But they are stubborn and cruel. They combat her rot with their blood magic and kill her children. That is unacceptable. She strikes back and there is war.

  Time passes. The war is at a stalemate. Her children die as fast as she can breed them and the elves’ magic grows at the same pace as her rot.

  Then one day she becomes aware of a presence in her section of the forest. It is a man. Young, weary, and vulnerable. She sends her children to surround him. One of her favorites, a member of her new breed goes with them. As she is about to command the man’s destruction, she hears a voice at the back of her mind for the first time in two hundred years.

  “Do not kill him,” the dark voice says. “He is important. He is worth a sacrifice.”

  She obeys, taking her precious child and pushing all of its thoughts and abilities into its eyes. Its life is extinguished. When it falls from the trees and lands before the man, an eye pops free and rolls to his feet. The young man is startled, but bursts into laughter. She reaches through the eye, sending every amount of power she can at him.

  Pick it up, she commands.

  The man cocks his head, his eyes burning with curiosity. He slowly reaches towards the eye, fingers trembling softly. As he grasps the eye, she sends her thoughts through his, grasping his nature. She sees at once what the dark voice likes in this one.

  He has a raw talent, though relatively untrained and he has noble blood, which gives him connections. Even better, his soul has already been twisted. He is fertile ground.

  He nearly drops the eye when she speaks to him, putting all the sultry seduction she can manage into her words.

  “Hello, Ewzad Vriil.”

  “I did it!” Jhonate opened her eyes in excitement, only to find a set of blue eyes glaring right back at her. “What do you want . . . Mage Vannya?”

  “Sometimes I wonder about you,” Vannya said.

  Jhonate glanced around. She was still in Locksher’s tent, but sunlight was streaming in from the tent flap. “How long have I been here?”

  Vannya snorted. “I wondered where you had gone last night. This morning I woke and saw that you never came to bed. When I headed to the infirmary, I heard rumors of moans coming from Professor Locksher’s tent.”

  “Moans?” Jhonate frowned and noticed that for some reason her face hurt. “Ridiculous, I never
moan.” Vannya’s eyebrows rose and Jhonate added, “I came to Wizard Locksher for advice. . . who is this person spreading rumors?”

  The mage shrugged. “Who can blame the women for talking? If I didn’t know the professor better, I might have believed them myself. Some might think you were out to take all the good men.”

  Jhonate’s frown turned to a glower. Why did her face hurt? She reached up to find her cheeks flushed and tender.

  “At any rate, the professor found me and said that you were in a deep trance. He asked me to watch over you and make sure that you didn’t get worse.”

  “Have you been slapping me?” Jhonate asked.

  Vannya’s face reddened, but she didn’t shy away. “I tried many things to wake you, as is my duty as a healer.”

  But how could the mage’s blows have hurt her unless . . . Jhonate looked down at her hand and gasped. “Where is my ring?”

  “Oh,” Vannya said. She reached into her pocket and held it out to her. “When my attempts to wake you failed, I removed it to see if that would help.”

  Jhonate calmly took the ring from the mage’s dainty white hand. She suppressed a sigh as the ring nestled back in its rightful place on her index finger. Then her hand shot out and delivered an ear-ringing slap to the mage’s face.

  Vannya cried out in surprise and pain, her hand shooting to her face. “Why, how dare yo-!”

  Jhonate’s other hand whipped out, slapping the woman’s other cheek so hard that it stung her palm. Her voice was deadly serious. “You had no right to remove that ring, Mage Vannya. If you handle my possessions again without my permission, your next punishment will be much worse!

  “Now tell me, girl. Where are Locksher and Faldon the Fierce? I have urgent information to give them.” She stood and winced as her legs cried out in protest, stiff from the way she had been sitting all night. They were also partially numb, which was why she didn’t dive out of the way in time.

  Vannya’s air blast spell caught Jhonate square in the chest, hurling her out the open tent flap. She landed on her back in the wet leaves of the forest floor and tumbled a couple times, barely avoiding a tree trunk. She rolled to her feet and turned, her staff at the ready as the mage exited the tent after her.

  Vannya’s teeth were clenched in fury and two welts in the shape of hand prints stood out angrily on her fair face. Her robe flapped as wind gusted around her. Tiny arcs of electricity crackled around her fists.

  Jhonate gathered every bit of information she had on how to battle a magic user. She spun her staff. This would have to be quick, before Vannya was able to summon a more powerful spell. She started towards the mage, trying to make sure a tree trunk was between them at all times. It would be difficult to knock the woman unconscious without doing permanent damage, but perhaps a disfiguring blow to the face would teach her some humility.

  “Stop it, you two!” shouted Faldon the Fierce as he and Locksher ran towards them.

  “She slapped me!” Vannya shouted indignantly.

  “Sir!” Jhonate said, standing at attention. “She slapped me first.”

  “You let her slap you?” Faldon said in amusement.

  “I was meditating at the time,” she explained.

  “She wouldn’t wake up!” Vannya exclaimed.

  “Enough, Mage Vannya,” Locksher commanded, his face uncharacteristically stern. “Return to the infirmary. You and I will discuss this later.”

  Vannya glowered and stormed away. With a shake of his head, Locksher turned his gaze on Jhonate. “Since you have awoken, I assume you fixed your little problem?”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, regaining her composure. “I have retrieved vital information that was hidden to me before.”

  She related what she had learned from the witch’s hidden memories.

  “This is fascinating! But what is she? Who was she?” Locksher wondered. “Someone so powerful that they required a binding of that magnitude should be well known. Why haven’t I heard of her before?”

  “All I know is that she must be destroyed,” Jhonate said.

  “You are right. If it is possible it must be done,” Faldon said thoughtfully.

  “We should seek the advice of the High Council before attempting anything,” Locksher said. “We need to find out more about her.”

  “One thing for sure,” said Faldon the Fierce. “This information does no one any good if we continue to hide in the mountains. It is time we took a more direct approach.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “There are so many, Mistresss,” Talon said. Her quarry had joined up with a large number of humans traveling along the riverbank.

  “How many?” her mistress asked absently. The female’s voice had seemed preoccupied lately, dealing with her army’s problems. Talon didn’t like being ignored, but she also didn’t like being punished so she said nothing.

  “It’ss . . .” She hissed in uncertainty. Numbers were hard for Talon to express. Ewwie had taught her how to speak and how to kill, but how to count had not been a priority for him. Instead, she sent the female a vague image of wagons and carts and horses and fire sites where the humans had stopped to cook. This seemed to get the female’s attention.

  “How long ago were they here?”

  “A day or lesss,” Talon hissed.

  “Find them.”

  Talon trotted along the tracks left by the humans, absorbing the smells and flavors of their passing. They were a diverse group, both old and young. They were so numerous that they overpowered the scent she found most interesting.

  As she had followed the trail of the bandham killers, she had been surprised to discover Deathclaw’s scent and tracks all around, mainly in the trees around their camping places. She wondered why he was watching them. What was it about these creatures he found so interesting?

  “Why do you move so slowly?” the female said and the right half of Talon’s face went numb. “Faster. Now!”

  Talon ran. Her new mistress was far more cruel and randomly tempered than sweet Ewwie. The moonrat mother prodded Talon’s every move, numbing portions of her body as punishments. Talon had learned to obey her without hesitation, her mind fueled by fear and hatred and yearning, hoping the moonrat mother would offer pain or pleasure as a reward.

  She ran throughout the day and into the night and soon began to grow frustrated with the lack of food. The humans had been efficient in their advance, stripping the land of all edible game along the way, leaving behind only discarded bones and scraps of fur and skin. These did little to satiate her hunger and finally Talon was forced to stop and dig up the grave of one of the human elderly that had died on the way. It had taken Talon a while to develop a taste for the flesh of humans, but Ewwie had fed her on it enough that she had come to like it. Unfortunately this one was old and stringy.

  Her feast ended when the moonrat mother noticed her lack of movement. Talon ran forward again, this time with a numbed tail. It was a greatly disturbing sensation and Talon would have cried if she had the capability.

  She caught up with the tail end of the human group before morning. There, bedrolls tightly grouped with the river at their backs, were human men huddled around a central fire. Two more stood watch, pacing the edges of the camp with wary eyes.

  “I have found them, Mistress,” she said quietly.

  “Good girl,” the female said and Talon was rewarded by a return of sensation to her tail and face along with a pleasant tingling sensation that ran up her back and along her scalp.

  “Sshall I killss them?” she asked, suppressing a gurgle of pleasure. She could take the watchful ones and half the sleepers before any of them noticed.

  “They are nothing,” the female said. “Just hurry and find those that killed Ewzad’s bandham so that I can stop wasting my attention with you.”

  “Yess, Mistress,” Talon replied in disappointment. She had not been allowed to kill in such a long time.

  She traveled down the length of the human encampment. These were not jus
t soldiers. There were women and children as well. Their numbers were too many for her mind to process, but she did realize something important. The humans were all armed. Even the children had weapons at their side. Talon smiled. She liked it when her prey fought back.

  The sky had started to lighten when she heard the chase. By the sounds, there were two runners breathing heavily. The moonrat mother was not watching, so Talon let her curiosity guide her. She followed.

  The two scents caused her heart to race. One of them was her Deathclaw and the other one smelled of the magic that destroyed Ewwie’s Kenn. They ran so fast that she could not tell who was chasing whom. Perhaps her Deathclaw was chasing the man. What if she could arrive and help him kill it and then they could kill the rest together? Ewwie would be so happy.