Song of Sundering

by A. R. Clinton

  They all went for Shara, ignoring James. He stepped in closer to Shara and swung low at the legs of the first Xenai that reached them. It took a leap over the blade. Shara caught it mid-air, tossing it back into its charging allies. Three of them tumbled into a pile behind the three who were still charging.

  Shara took one by his embedded source crystal, lifting him into the air by the gem that glittered faintly in his upper chest. He screamed. The grating Xenai scream was thick with pain. It faded into a low growl that ended with a yelp as she yanked it forward again, towards James. It could not dodge the blade that slammed into its torso when Shara released it from her grip. The blade sliced into the soldier from one side of his chest to the other. James shifted his weight so he could pull the sword out to the side, deepening the slice in the Xenai’s chest as he pulled his sword out of its body. It went limp and tumbled to the side.

  Shara had impaled another Xenai on a branch of a nearby tree.

  One remained standing, but had stopped its charge. It fell back into a defensive stance. Behind it, one of the three Xenai that had been crumpled together was trying to get to its feet.

  Shara took slow steps toward the standing Xenai, arms open. James knew she was baiting it and it seemed to know as well. It mirrored each of Shara’s steps, slowly inching away from her. James lay his sword, pointed outward, across his forearm and began to circle around to the right of the retreating figure. To his right, the other living Xenai regained its feet. James felt a rush of heat across his body on that side, but it didn’t hurt. He glanced over with a side-long look toward the other Xenai. The pile and the Xenai standing in front of it were burning. The burning Xenai ran, the flames trailing behind it. Disoriented, it ran along the edge of the cliff, where the rocks had stopped falling.

  The ground below him heaved slightly. He stepped toward Shara and the remaining Xenai just before large sections of the dirt and leaves he had been standing on exploded into the air. The giant tree floated out of its resting spot, Xenai corpse still attached to one branch. Shara held it with one hand. She picked up the flaming Xenai that was beginning to collapse. Tree and Xenai met just over the edge of the cliff as Shara brought her hands together. The Xenai ignited the tree and corpse. She held them there, suspended in the air. The flames crawled across the surface of the tree then began to work itself deeper into the core of the trunk. Large burning embers fell from it.

  The remaining Xenai flew backwards, as if pushed by a large, invisible hand. Its legs and hands flailed, fighting the force against it as it also collided with the tree, which was now simply a suspended campfire. A branch burst through the chest of the last Xenai.

  James watched the Xenai continue to struggle as the flames worked up over its body. He could hear the sizzle of the fire hitting the thick rivers of blood that were flowing from the Xenai’s chest, down the branch, into the flames. It kept reaching out to Shara. After a few long moments of struggling, it finally went limp. The remaining fire and branches plummeted into the ravine.

  Shara and James moved quickly to help the other team at the final site. Their second site had also been reinforced. The battle there was over equally quickly once Shara joined it. They had lost one of their own to the Xenai source users at that second site, but all four sites were down. The Xenai’s only protection against the Pact’s own source users was out of the equation, for now.

  The small band retreated down the hill to the cover of the trees to plot where to strike in the thick Xenai line below them. As they moved to the bottom of the path, where there were several small inlets to the ravine, groups of a few Xenai kept finding them. After the third skirmish, James realized Shara and Taeri were not with the team anymore.

  39

  Shara

  The four vital Source casting points were now bristling with Pact soldiers. The Xenai were painfully aware of the loss and as she ran with her team to return to the Pact army, Shara could feel the hunt for her. Whenever any Xenai got a glimpse of her, she could sense the ice pick of alarm jabbing through it and spreading out from it throughout the rest of their army. Taeri sensed it, too, keeping a firm hold on her waist as they dodged through trees and troops, heading back to their own lines.

  Shara glanced behind them for the others, for James, when Taeri gave her a soft push, “We can’t wait.”

  She kept moving. The lightly worn trail they had taken up to the ledges was impossible to pick out while they ran, but she trusted Taeri’s guiding pushes and kept following the way he directed her to go. They left behind the immediate skirmishes of the paths around the ravine and entered an area thicker in underbrush. The battle sounds still rose to her left, but over the battle, she could hear their own movements through the woods and the incredible stillness to their right, as if all other living things had fled.

  “Do you know where we are?”

  “Roughly. We oughta be able to circle back soon and be close to our vantage points for you—behind our troops.”

  She nodded, her lungs burning from the exchange. She marveled at how easily Taeri seemed to move and talk, as if he did this all the time. He gave her a gentle push to the left, and they veered back toward the sound of the battle.

  After several more minutes of travel through the woods, the path appeared again, and the trees thinned to nearly nothing. Taeri leaped past her, motioning for her to stay behind him as he checked out where they were. She followed him closely. He crossed the path and walked out on the outcropping of rocks, peering down. He looked back and nodded to her. She stepped out and looked down. They had come out a little early, but were still behind their lines, but barely. They stood twenty feet above the men below, a dozen feet back from the very front where the two armies met.

  She instantly spied James’ distinctive shield in the fray below. He was harder to make out, but the white triangular shape popped into view, smeared with black and red, before vanishing again. She pointed it out to Taeri as the sense of being hunted washed over her again. He grabbed her arm and tugged slightly, indicating they needed to be farther back. She looked around; the path was clear and no Xenai could sneak up on them here.

  As she turned to tell Taeri they should stay a moment to help the front, Taeri let go of her arm and rushed to the forward edge of the rocks. She followed his gaze to find what he was watching. Past the rocky walls of the ravine where they stood and where the side paths met the gaps in the cliff face, the floor of the ravine was filled with Xenai. The thick sprawl of the Xenai was growing darker and, somehow, taller. Shara realized that the Xenai were rushing toward the Pact army with such force that they were climbing over each other in order to move forward. As the wall of Xenai grew closer, they could see that the Xenai were was so close together that when they ran over each other, they were creating waves of Xenai—crashing and tumbling toward the Pact army. When that hit, the front lines would be devastated. They would wipe the entire Pact army out.

  Shara planted her feet. She touched the shimmering blue stone on her amulet. Taeri’s own amulet carried the less powerful orange moonstone in it: they needed all the help they could get for this. She grabbed Taeri’s hand, placing it on her amulet. She formed the image in her mind and heard Taeri chanting a support spell beside her, turning himself into a conduit for her to use. Using her Intuition, she felt out for the rocks that had fallen from the source points she had attacked and any other loose rocks in the ravine. She found everything she could and she pulled with all the force in her mind. With her Intuition, she watched them fly towards her army and felt the resistance when the stones collided with Xenai, splattering them. At least, she hoped they were all Xenai. The rocks drew close to the Pact lines, but before they hit her men, she Mooncast on them, ripping them apart into dust and redirecting the momentum of the rocks up into the air.

  The stone dust billowed out and upward, accumulating into a wall made of red cloud. Still, it wasn’t enough. She needed more rocks and she needed them quickly. The charge of Xenai was almost to her men.


  She extended the spell to pull more rocks from the cliff walls, hurtling them toward her wall, where they burst and joined the dust. The front portion of the Xenai charge burst through the cloud. The shouts, wails and sounds of men dying amplified below. Shara took in a trembling breath. She couldn’t get distracted, now.

  The cloud finally stood a dozen feet thick and forty feet high. The top curved away from the Pact troops and toward the Xenai army. She closed her eyes and focused. The wall snapped back into solid rock, shrinking down to half the thickness and height, but blocking the passage from the rest of the charging Xenai. Hundreds of Xenai passing through the barrier of dust during the snap were squished, leaving half their bodies behind the wall and half in front of it.

  With nowhere else to go, the waves of Xenai flowed into the openings onto the path below where she stood. The thick stream of Xenai was already visible on the path fifty feet below their vantage point, their only available heading was straight up the path to where she stood. She felt their focus switch to her as they pieced together what she had done. The swarm of Xenai surged toward her.

  Shit!

  Taeri dropped his hand from her amulet, immediately grabbing her hand and running. Her mind flew through her options while they ran—using the trees, creating a fire, destroying the path with a Mooncast—but everything would slow her down to cast more than it would slow the Xenai down, so she let Taeri drag her up the path. She could feel the Xenai and how much they were gaining. They had to jump the ravine.

  She jerked Taeri’s hand to the left and headed to the ledge. He followed. She didn’t have the strength to ferry them both across the ravine to the other side, but she might be able to give them a soft landing into the middle of their own troops below, putting them safely behind the wall she had created. She wrapped her hand around his waist and he wrapped both his hands under her arms and they let themselves tip off the side as she conjured up a breeze. A single Xenai grabbed for them as they fell, missing her leg by inches before it tumbled off the edge behind them. She pulled on the rocks on each side of the ravine, slowing their fall and pushing her and Taeri into the center of the ravine as they fell. She closed her eyes, pushing as hard as she could on the rocks below.

  She sensed the single unlucky Xenai plummet past them, but they were still hurtling toward the ground.

  I have to do more!

  She felt Taeri let go with one of his arms and then felt his hand on her amulet. Their bodies jerked around from his sudden movement.

  “Use me!”

  She reached out again and pushed as hard as she could. Using Taeri, the rocks around them and the air, she might manage. But multi-element casting was unpredictable. She focused, imagining three strands in her mind, one for each cast. The first thread pulled from Taeri, the second pushed them away from the ground, the third created a circular wind current, pushing up from the ground into them and then circling around again. She had to keep the casts separated or they would die.

  They slowed down a little more.

  She let go of Taeri and waved her hands in the air, managing each imaginary string in her mind. Pulling on this one and then another as each cast got weaker when she lost focus on it.

  Taeri yelped and crumpled as they hit the ground. Shara hit a soldier behind her as she felt her legs collapse, which bounced her into Taeri, knocking him onto his back before she fell ontop of him.

  The surrounding men in the ravine were retreating. Shara laid still, waiting for a gap in the movement of the troops that would give her space to jump up. Finally, the only men left retreating from the front were the slow moving injured, allowing her to scramble to her feet. She grabbed Taeri’s hand and helped him up. He yelped again as he put weight on his left leg. “Pretty sure it’s broke.”

  “Damn. Sorry, Taeri, I tried.”

  “Well, we ain’t dead, so you didn’t fail us, yet.”

  She slid her shoulder under his arm, and they followed the rest of the men. Their progress was slow. By the time they made it all the way back to the medics, they were told that the battle was over and the Xenai had retreated.

  “How’d that happen? Whole herd of those fuckers were coming over the hill when the girl tried to kill me.” Taeri asked the boy, shooting a barbed look and then a wink at Shara before wincing when the boy started tight wrapping his broken leg into a splint.

  “They tried to flank us, but when the General saw that wall go up, he expected that. He put men on the pass over this side and bottlenecked them hard. A few at a time would poke their heads in and then lose them.”

  Taeri laughed, “Just like I taught ‘im.”

  The boy looked at Taeri, confused. Shara patted his shoulder, “I’m going to see if I can find the rest of the team.”

  “Go see if that boy lived, sweet.”

  40

  Hafi

  Hafi felt pride welling up in his chest as he watched the pile of Xenai bodies that choked the entrance to the ravine going up in flames. Some things are worth breaking promises for. Now, he needed to find out how broken his promise to Ayna was. He turned to the gaggle of officers standing behind him, “Go find Shara and bring her to me.”

  With a chorus of “Yes, sir,” they scattered to find her and he made his way to the medic station to get the count of how many troops were lost or wounded as quickly as possible.

  As he made his way, he noticed the tone of the soldiers. The change from the previous battles was impossible to miss. There was laughing and joking. Stories were being told of near misses. The somber atmosphere of impending death had vanished. Part of Hafi wondered what the Xenai did after a battle.

  He saw Taeri sitting on a medic cart.

  “Hey, Old Man, I see you made it.”

  Taeri grinned, “Lived, but my leg ain’t too happy.”

  “Have you seen Shara?”

  “She’s ‘round. Scampered off to find the rest of the group. We got separated after we got reinforcements, so she went to check on them.”

  “I see.”

  Taeri shook his head, “She’s crazy, that one.”

  “You have no idea.”

  “I’m happy to be on her side. If she ever changes sides, I am going with her.”

  “Who would change sides?”

  Taeri shrugged, “Ain’t nobody know what they want. They could be awful convincing if we did.”

  “Right. I’m sure its nothing so mundane as food and land. I’m going to go plan the rest of this war thing that we are in. Feel better, Old Man.”

  “I ain’t much older than you, youngun’.”

  Hafi smiled and turned to find the chief medical officer.

  Not far from the battle was a valley up against the mountains, with natural fortifications on three sides, and open sight lines on the other. It was not an easy path for the medic carts with wounded men, but by nightfall they had gotten the men settled and Hafi was pondering the map. No matter how much he stared at it, he kept thinking of the pile of Xenai bodies. It reminded him of Ceafield. When he was young, another settlement had attacked Ceafield. Then, Ceafield had not been as strong and Elston figured, as the larger settlement, they could have the resources and the land. They had been wrong.

  A pile of Elston fighters outside of Ceafield were stripped of their blood-soaked clothes, which were turned into the flags the Ceafield soldiers planted whenever they hit an Elston outpost. They hit their patrols, their outposts and the edges of their small army so hard and fast that Elston couldn’t even resupply, let alone send more men. They whittled them down to nothing, leaving their brutal calling cards and taking more with every hit.

  How else could a smaller force like theirs win against the Xenai?

  He glared at the map.

  “James!” He roared to the boy on guard duty.

  “Yes, Sir?”

  “Get me Taeri and Shara!”

  “Yes, Sir.”

  Taeri hobbled in, Shara under his arm and helping him hobble along, holding a jug that sloshed with clear l
iquid in his other hand. Hafi knew it wasn’t water.

  “Found your way to the still on the way here?”

  “The girl was kind enough to drop by for me before she brought me. Would have been a greater kindness to have been able to enjoy it without having to come all this way. But the Mighty Gen’ral had us summoned, so I hopped on over.” He groaned as he lowered himself into a chair next to the war table. He looked up at Shara, and smiled a gapped smile with an elderly innocence, “Would you?” And pointed to the chair next to him. She pulled it out and turned it and helped him prop his broken leg up on it. “Thank ye, sweet.”

  Hafi sighed, “Are you all settled or do you want a pillow for your ass?”

  Taeri shifted from side to side in the seat, “It is a bit hard…”

  Shara giggled and started pouring the liquor into cups for the three of them, “What can we do for you, Hafi?”

  “Taeri, tell her about when Elston attacked Ceafield.”

  Taeri’s eyes lit up with understanding, and he recalled the story. He had been older than Hafi, old enough to fight on the offensive. He filled in details that Hafi didn’t have and talked about how one team would hit their army and run while the others would pick off the slow and wounded or those that stayed behind at the camp. They would set up a series of traps and the runners would lead the army into them. Shara listened to each word, forgetting the cup of alcohol she had poured for herself.

  As Taeri finished the story, Hafi jumped in, “We pushed them back because we had an excellent position. But, we won’t be able to keep pulling them into bottlenecks. There are only a few places like this between us and Prin, and after today, they’re going to be a lot more wary of the terrain. Plus, this win didn’t diminish their massive advantage in numbers over us at all.” He paused and looked at Taeri and Shara. They both looked for him to go on, “I want to go on the offensive as long as we can and do as much damage as we can. Whittle them down before we get to those few passes we have left, where we can use the terrain to our advantage. We have quite a few men we evacuated from the hill tribes, they know this area of the mountains. They can serve as guides. I want to form as many teams as we can, each one mixed with a Source-caster, a guide, and four other fighters.”